evilution is good for you

Five facts about 'Darwinism'

2007-11-25T12:51:00.000+01:00

When reading creationist articles, I often get surprised by the extent to, which they get things wrong. Therefore I have here gatherede five central facts about, what Charles Darwin actually wrote, so I have somewhere to refer to, when debating creationists ;-)

Fact #1:

Charles Darwin was building on an already established idea of transformation or evolution.

In Origin of Species, Preface, Darwin writes:

I will here give a brief sketch of the progress of opinion on the Origin of Species. Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, have believed that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life are the descendants by true generation of pre-existing forms. Passing over allusions to the subject in the classical writers, the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon. But as his opinions fluctuated greatly at different periods, and as he does not enter on the causes or means of the transformation of species, I need not here enter on details.
Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his "Philosophie Zoologique,' and subsequently, in 1815, in the Introduction to his "Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertébres.' In these works he upholds the doctrine that species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition. Lamarck seems to have been chiefly led to his conclusion on the gradual change of species, by the difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, by the almost perfect gradation of forms in certain groups, and by the analogy of domestic productions. With respect to the means of modification, he attributed something to the direct action of the physical conditions of life, something to the crossing of already existing forms, and much to use and disuse, that is, to the effects of habit. To this latter agency he seemed to attribute all the beautiful adaptations in nature; -- such as the long neck of the giraffe for browsing on the branches of trees. But he likewise believed in a law of progressive development; and as all the forms of life thus tend to progress, in order to account for the existence at the present day of simple productions, he maintains that such forms are now spontaneously generated.

So, the key to it all was, whether new species were possible or not.

[Remaining four facts will follow]

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

2007-11-11T12:49:00.000+01:00

Antony Flew was until 2004 a rather unknown philosopher, whose earlier claim to fame was a disproof in the 1950s of the possibility of the Christian god. However, in 2004 it was announced thathe had become a deist -- seeing that the complexity of living organisms made abiogenesis unfeasable. The IDists were not slow to celebrate the event, while atheist Richard Carrier tried to downplay the conversion. Carrier's version of the conversion can be found here. Recently, a book, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, listing Antony Flew as author together with the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese. Mark Oppenheimer has written a New York Times article (here), which critically examines the book, the friendship between Flew and various Christians and the correspondence between Carrier and Flew. Several bloggers have addressed the issue, and I will here list the blog entries:

PZ Myers (Pharyngula): Roy Varghese and the exploitation of Antony Flew

Myers mainly quotes Oppenheimer for the mental decline of Antony Flew.

Richard Carrier (RCs Blogs): Antony Flew's Bogus Book
Carrier claims that the book isn't written by Flew -- it is written as comtemporary Christian apologetics.
Mark Perakh (Talk Reason): Flew, Schroeder, Varghese: What a company!
Perakh tones down the conversion; deists are really just a variety of atheists.
William Dembski (Uncommon Descent): I Liked the Old Atheists Better
Dembski prefers the intellectual honesty and civility of an old-school atheist like Antony Flew for the crass and unruly behavior of the newer varietysuch as Richard Dawkins. Add to that the Flew is no longer an atheist.
The article is followed by a message from Flew stating that he stands by the book. It was written by Varghese, because Flew is too old to write, but he has read the book and claims that it is his words.

Review of Lee M. Spetner: Not by chance!

2007-01-02T18:06:00.000+01:00

Quotes and page references are from Dr. Lee M. Spetner: Not by chance! - Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, The Judaica Press, Inc., 1998.

All ends well that begins well, and the very first words in the Preface of the book are (cf. p. vii):

Conventional wisdom holds that life arose spontaneously. In the remote past a simple living organism is supposed to have formed by chance out of inert matter. That organism is then supposed to have reproduced and developed into the life of today through random variation shaped by natural selection.

Oh well, yet another strawman on its way to the stakes, it would seem.

According to Spetner, a few bologists have pointed out that discoveries in biology together with elementary principles of information theory have made this view untenable. His key point is that "[t]he information required for large-scale evolution cannot come from random variations." (ibid.) And for Spetner it is not only evolutionary theory that will fall down, it's the whole modern show. On p. viii, he writes:

Why is randomness important? It is important because it has had a profound influence on the shaping of the Weltanschauung of Western Society. It has led to atheism and to the belief that we human beings are no more than a cosmic accident. This belief serves as a basis for the social values and morals held by Western intellectuals, and for their attitudes toward religion. If the belief is unfounded, then the resulting world view and its implications must be reexamined.

So, everything bad can be attributed to that belief in randomnesss, and Spetner is going to show us that randomness just doesn't cut it, and we'll all realize our delusions and go back to church, right?

Not that Spetner is against evolution as such, but he claims that evolution proceeds through a combination of cues from the environment with information already in the genes; that is, nothing new ever comes around, it is only a question of, which information is used when (cf. p. xi). And if random variation cannot be the mechanism of evolution, we must search for some nonrandom mechanism. A mechanism that could not itself have evolved, so how did it ever arise? A question, Spetner claims, science may never be able to answer – however, he asks, is Creation an option? (ibid.).

The Preface ends with the words (p. xii):

I hope you will read the book with an open and inquisitive mind, that you will follow my arguments and finally agree with my conclusion. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Well, as should be clear, I may be somewhat prejudiced against this book, and I may even have decided beforehand not to enjoy it; but I will try as well as I can to follow Spetner's arguments and check how well they work. I think that's as much as I can promise.

Chapter 1, "Historical Background", is actually well-written and gives, as its name suggests, the historical background from the 18^th century through Darwin's Origin of Species to the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution (cf. pp. 20-21), which combined Darwinian evolution with Mendelian inheritance. While Darwin had rejected randomness as the source of variation, attributing it instead to the influence of the environment and use and disuse of organs, the neo-Darwinians rejected environmental influence on variation, which they attributed to random, genetic variations, mutations. As Spetner mentions, after the rediscovery of Mendel's results around 1900, genetic mutations had been observed, but being generally harmful to organisms, they had been rejected as the source of evolutionary variation, and Darwin's theory of evolution was actually in deep trouble in the early 20^th century.

On pp. 21-22, Spetner sums this development up:

The neo-darwinians then built their theory on random variation culled and directed by natural selection. They identified the heritable variations needed by the theory with the mutations discovered and named by De Vries some forty years earlier. A decade later, Watson and Crick identified the heritable variation with the random errors in DNA replication.

So far, so good, and would even be recommended reading for creationists.

It may be worth noting that in Darwin's time, the ideal in natural science was deterministic laws; but increasingly during the last half of the 19^th century, statistics increased in importance, even within natural sciences. The early 19^th century even introduced quantum mechanics and truly random events, so the neo-Darwinists were in many ways dependent on the acceptance of randomness within the scientific community.

DNA and mutations as random errors in DNA replication is the cue for Chapter 2, "Information and Life", which presents an introduction to DNA.

On pp. 28-29, Spetner introduces the four DNA bases adenine, i>guanine, thymine, and cytosine, and on p. 29 he writes:

There is no chemical restriction on the order of the bases along a strand of DNA; the order can be anything at all. The order of the bases is then free to carry information.

And, according to Spetner, this information is written with the four DNA bases as an alphabet. While what Spetner writes is quite fine, there are a few details of importance left out. The bases are actually read in triplets called codons, which Spetner mentions later (p. 44), and since there are 64 different possible codons, the actual alphabet has 64 letters. The bases in a codon are not like Scrabble blocks with letters painted on them, but otherwise identical. Chemically the bases can be divided into two groups with two bases each: pyrimidines = cytosine and thymine, and purines = adenine and guanine. A codon encodes either an amino acid or functions as a stop code, and since there are only 20 amino acids, some codons have the same translation, and the translation is mostly dependent on the sequence of pyrimidines and purines in the codon, not actually going down to the level of the bases.

For Spetner, the sequence of bases makes up a message, and bottom p. 29 he writes:

How did that message get written in the first place? The standard answer of the biologist is that the message got written by itself, through evolution, and that evolution works the way the neo-Darwinian theory says it does. But I shall show that evolution cannot work that way.

The meaning here being that as DNA is copied, some copy errors may occur and lead to mutations. Spetner's claim is that information theory shows that no new information can be gained this way.

On pp. 31-34, Spetner mentions proteins, including enzymes, that are made up of the amino acids encoded in the DNA, ending with the paragraph:

The information in the genome [= the DNA in the cell] tells the cell what kind of proteins to make. Because proteins play a dominant role in cell function, they play a dominant role in the whole organism. The information in the genome, by controlling the making of protein, fixes the form and function of the entire organism.

So, the organism is basically defined by its DNA.

In Chapter 3, "The Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution", Spetner presents the NDT, and on pp. 68-69 also the theory of punctuated equilibria.

On p. 71, Spetner writes:

According to the NDT, information can be added only through selection. Selection tests if the mutation is positive or negative, preserving it if positive and destroying it if negative. Even the most complicated mutation serves only as grist for the mill of selection.

And a paragraph later:

According to the NDT, the receiver of the information is the genome — not the genome of any one individual, but the average genome of the population. That's where the message is ultimately supposed to be received, and that's where the information is supposed to build up.

What Spetner refers to by "the average genome of the population" would be the gene pool of the population, not actually the avarage genome.

Continuing, Spetner writes:

When a mutation occurs, selection can choose only between the mutant and the rest of the population. It can choose the better from the good, the more adaptive from the less adaptive. In one step, selection can add no more than one bit of information. That's because it makes only a binary choice between yes and no, no matter how complex the two options.

Well, not exactly. Selection does not work in this binary way. The organism with the mutation might reproduce better than any other; but the other organisms don't stop reproducing completely based only on that.

On p. 73, Spetner writes:

If a copying error were to damage a gene so it no longer functioned, the genome will have become less complex, and some of its information will have been lost. You might think the mutation has wiped out all the information in that gene. You might think that after the mutation, the genetic information is as if the gene weren't there. But the damaged gene is still there and nearly intact. The only defect is the one mutated nucleotide.

The meaning here being that either a gene functions or it does not function. In actual practice it is rarely like that; but that is of less importance here. Spetner's point is that just as one tiny mutation can switch off an entire gene, a tiny mutation can switch on an entire gene; but the gene had to be there already. That is, according to Spetner, mutations do not make genes; they only turn them on or off. This indeed is 1 bit of information for a specific genome; but when we talk about evolution, we deal in populations, not in individual organisms.

As in the last quote from p. 73, Spetner is rather equivocative about 'information'. This tendency gets worse in Chapter 4, "Is the Deck Stacked?".

On p. 96, Spetner defines two criteria for cumulative selection. The definitions are reformulated on p. 106:

[The evolutionary steps] must be able to be part of a long series in which the mutation in each step is adaptive.

The mutattions must, on the average, add a little information to the genome.

But what is "a little information"?

Continuing, Spetner writes:

The information a mutation adds in a typical step of cumulative selection must fall within strict limits. On the average. each step must add some information. Yet it cannot be much more than one bit. Each step must add some information on the average so that information can build up over the full chain of steps that make up macroevolution. But if a mutation seems to have much more than one bit it can't be a part of cumulative selection. We would have to interpret that mutation as the switching on of information already in the genome, as I noted in Chapter 3.

This doesn't make it any clearer, does it? We really need to know, how Spetner measures information in a genome.

On pp. 108-109, Spetner compares cumulative evolution to finding a path through a huge tree-like maze starting at the root. Spetner assumes that it takes 500 evolutionary steps to turn one species into another, so there are 500 levels of nodes in the tree, and with a genome of one million nucleotides, there are one million branches from each node.

First, at any time, there will be more than one mutation in the population gene pool at a time, and second, one million choices corresponds to 20 bits of information, if we interpret information as the bits to indicate the choices not taken, so each step would add 20 bits of information, not a maximum of 1 bit.

The title of Chapter 5 is "Can Random Variation Build Information?", and that at least sounds promising. Hopefully, Spetner is going in this chapter to tell us more about, how he measures information.

And we are in luck here. On p. 134, Spetner writes:

Before we enter the subject of mutations and information, let's first see how information is related to specificity. The more specific a gene, the more information it contains. In general, the more specific any message, the more information it contains. The information in a gene is the same as the information in the protein it encodes.

Or, the more possibilities ruled out, the more information.

Spetner's subsequent discussion has a few oddities to it. For example he discusses on pp. 139-142 bacterial resistance to antibiotics such as streptomycin, a drug that attaches to a matching site on a ribosome and interferes with the bacterium's production of proteins. A mutation can change the site so that streptomycin can no longer attach to the site. Bottom p. 141, Spetner sums up:

Although such a mutation can have selective value, it decreases rather than increases the genetic information. It therefore cannot be typical of mutations that are supposed to help form small steps that make up macroevolution. Those steps must, on the average, add information. Even though resistance is gained, it's gained not by adding something, but by losing it. Rather than say that the bacterium gained resistance to the antibiotic, we would be more correct to say that it lost its sensitivity to it. It lost information.

Maybe so, if it wasn't because Spetner is contradicting himself here. On p. 137, he introduces a word-enzyme, that matches to all words that contain a certain string. As an example, Spetner mentions the string "ghtsha", and claims that there is only one english word with that as a substring, the word nightshade. That is, such a word-enzyme would have a high specificity. Spetner then erites (cf. p. 137):

If we reduce the information in the match string by dropping the "a" at the end, and match only to "ghtsh," the match becomes less specific since there are now two more words that match, namely, nightshirt and lightship. These matches, however, would be "weaker" than the previous one because they match to only five letters, whereas the previous match was to six.

Let's reverse this. Assume our word-enzyme starts out with looking for the string "ghtsh" and then changes to "ghtsha", then there would have been an increase in information due to the extra letter and an increase in specificity, because fewer strings match. However, with the logic from the example with resistance to streptomycin, we might as well say that the word-enzyme had lost its sensitivity to nightshirt and lightship and therefore lost information.

As Spetner has it, a loss and a gain in information is only a question of how we look at it. His concluding remarks on p. 143 are therefore somewhat on the comical side:

The NDT is supposed to explain how the information of life has been built up by evolution. The essential biological difference between a human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it.

But since the example of a mutation mentioned by Spetner could be interpreted as an increase in information rather than as a decrease in information, there's really no reason to panic.

Ian Musgrave in the TalkOrigins article Information Theory and Creationism: Spetner and Biological Information goes into much more detail about this.

Chapter 6, "The Watchmaker's Blindness", is a critique of Richard Dawkins' evolution simulations in the book The Blind Watchmaker. There is little to comment on here – Dawkins' point was to illustrate the difference between no selection and selection, and his examples did that quite well. The mutation rates in the examples are unrealistic high, but in return the population sizes are unrealistic small, so Spetner's critique doesn't quite hit.

In Chapter 7, "The Deck is Stacked!", Spetner claims that mutations can be induced by the environment and thus are not 'random' as required by the NDT.

Ian Musgarve also comments on this subject in the above linked TalkOrigins article in the section Spetner and "directed" mutation.

Spetner mentions pp. 187-191 experiments by Barry Hall and John Cairns, where mutations occur that enable bacteria to feed on nutrients they usually cannot feed on. And these experiments indicate that it is the presence of the nutrient that induces the mutations as if the bacteria could choose which genes to enable depending on available nutrients.

On p. 190, Spetner writes:

If the results of these experiments indicate that adaptive mutations are stimulated by the environment, they contradict the basic dogma of neo-Darwinism. According to that dogma, mutations are random, and the kind of mutations that occur are independent of the environment. If mutations are really nonrandom in the sense that the environment can stimulate adaptive mutations, then the paradigm of Darwinian evolution, which has dominated the biological sciences for close to 150 years, must be replaced.

How can something that might disprove a statement about mutations force a replacement of the paradigm of Darwinian evolution, when Darwin knew nothing about mutations? It would be the same as disproving the existence of, say, magnetism by disproving a particular theory about magnetism.

Spetner provides us with an answer in a passage in the last paragraph on p. 191:

Resistance to the nonrandom-variation interpretation stems from a refusal to abandon the Darwinian agenda that evolution must confirm that life arose and developed spontaneously. With that agenda, nonrandom adaptive variation, arising from an environmental signal turning on an already present set of genes, is hard to account for.

The reasoning here is that organisms can only turn genes on or off, if those genes already exist, and if all that mutations can do is to turn genes on or off, mutations cannot explain evolution of the genes in the first round.

In general, this chapter presents a neo-Lamarckian concept of evolution, where new traits are acquired dependent on the environment, inclusive the kind of food eaten, and these new traits are inherited. It is unclear to me, if Spetner's examples are not just, what is called forms of a species, environmentally dependent variations that are not actually new traits.

In Chapter 8, the Epilogue, Spetner sums up his critique of the NDT and proposes a theory called the nonrandom evolutionary hypothesis, NREH, and he concludes with the words (cf. p. 208):

The NREH is a hypothesis that explains many observed phenomena that the NDT does not explain. According to the NREH, adaptive modifications in organisms occur when the environment induces a change in either the phenotype or the genotype. It can account for the environmentally induced adaptive mutations reported in bacteria. It can account for the pervasive convergences found throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. The NREH does not suffer from the contradictions of the NDT, and promises therefore to provide a more consistent picture of life.

And it's even consistent with the Torah.

For the layman, this may all appear very persuasive, and it is beyond my qualiications to give much of an in depth critique. However, even I can see some obvious problems with the NREH as presented by Spetner, such as his inconsistent information metric and what he considers to be different species may simply be different forms of the same species.

Carl Wieland of AnswersInGenesis has written a review of Not By Chance! (first published in Creation 20(1): pp. 50–51, December 1997), which begins with the words:

‘See, speak, or hear no evidence against evolution’ seems to be the golden rule in the academic world—so it will be interesting to see the response to this devastating assault, by a highly qualified author, on the very core of evolutionary theory.

As should be clear from the above, Spetner's 'assault on the very core of evolutionary theory' can hardly be considered devastating, simply because chance is not the very core of evolutionary theory.

Later, Wieland writes:

In a memorable turn of phrase, he says that anyone who thinks that an accumulation of mutations (information-losing processes) can lead to macroevolution (a massive net gain of information) ‘is like the merchant who lost a little money on every sale but thought he could make it up on volume.’

After such a ‘king hit’, Dawkins’ computer simulations of ‘insects’ and literary weasels seem somewhat puerile, and are easily dealt with by the author, who, from reliable information received, is rather keen to debate Dawkins on this whole issue. Why not, when one appears to be equipped with such decisive scientific weapons?

Except that Spetner is somewhat equivocative about that information thing, so let us try to go more into details about Spetner's method of measuring information.

On TalkOrigins, Edward E. Max has posted an article The Evolution of Improved Fitness by Random Mutation Plus Selection, and subsequently a longer exchange between Max and Spetner followed. This exchange is summed up by Spetner in the TrueOrigins article A Scientific Defense of a Creationist Position on Evolution.

In this article, Spetner writes:

The information content of the genome is difficult to evaluate with any precision. Fortunately, for my purposes, I need only consider the change in the information in an enzyme caused by a mutation. The information content of an enzyme is the sum of many parts, among which are:

Level of catalytic activity
Specificity with respect to the substrate
Strength of binding to cell structure
Specificity of binding to cell structure
Specificity of the amino-acid sequence devoted to specifying the enzyme for degradation

These are all difficult to evaluate, but the easiest to get a handle on is the information in the substrate specificity.

This is a more elaborated version of, what Spetner wrote in Chapter 5 of Not By Chance! Information rules out possibilities, so the more specificity we have, the more information we have.

Spetner continues:

To estimate the information in an enzyme I shall assume that the information content of the enzyme itself is at least the maximum information gained in transforming the substrate distribution into the product distribution. (I think this assumption is reasonable, but to be rigorous it should really be proved.)

Who is gaining information here? Are we supposed to think that an enzyme gains information by "transforming the substrate distribution into the product distribution"? What Spetner is refering to is that we can make an experiment involving various substrates and observe the result, if any, of enzymatic activity. So, the one gaining information is the experimenter, not the enzyme. That is, the information content is not something within the enzyme, but something that is generated by the experiment.

But Spetner sees it differently:

We can think of the substrate specificity of the enzyme as a kind of filter. The entropy of the ensemble of substances separated after filtration is less than the entropy of the original ensemble of the mixture. We can therefore say that the filtration process results in an information gain equal to the decrease in entropy. Let’s imagine a uniform distribution of substrates presented to many copies of an enzyme. I choose a uniform distribution of substrates because that will permit the enzyme to express its maximum information gain. …

The products of a substrate on which the enzyme has a higher activity will be more numerous than those of a substrate on which the enzyme has a lower activity. Because of the filtering, the distribution of concentrations of products will have a lower entropy than that of substrates.

That is, for Spetner it is the enzyme that gains information. Are we to think that the enzyme takes a nip of each substrate to figure out which ones are tasty and which ones are not? And even if so, where is the memory of the enzyme, in which it stores the gained information?

The entropy, Spetner refers to, is Shannon entropy (almost defined by Spetner a few paragraphs later), which indeed assumes its maximum for a uniform distribution. However, Shannon's model was a communication system, where the sender can choose among a number of messages to send, where all the messages are possible, but not necessarily equally likely. The entropy measures the receiver's uncertainty about which message was sent, an uncertainty that assumes its maximum, if all messages are equally probable. In Spetner's case the entropy would be the experimenter's uncertainty about, which substrates the enzyme will catalyze. However, that is not related to the substrate distribution, but to the experimenter's prior assumption about, which substrates the enzyme will catalyze. Using equal amounts of the substrates does make calculations easier, but it has nothing to do with entropy.

The word 'ensemble' used by Spetner refers to, what is called a statistical ensemble, the set of possible states of some system, often subject to some conditions. A simple example would be the entire set of sequences of 100 tossings of a coin. Each specific sequence is a member of the ensemble. Tossing a coin 100 times would return a sample from this ensemble; tossing the coin 100 times again would return another sample. If we tossed the coin 1,000 times, there would be be 901 positions, where a sub-sequence of 100 tosses begins, and each such sub-sequence would be a sample from the ensemble of possible sequences of 100 coin tosses. That is, an ensemble only exists conceptually, whereas a sample has real existence. Therefore Spetner's use of the expressions "[t]he entropy of the ensemble of substances separated after filtration" and "the entropy of the original ensemble" is meaningless. What might be meaningfull is to consider the ensemble of samples from these collections, say samples of X ml each.

However, we'll leave this subject and return to Spetner, who defines entropy like this:

The entropy of an ensemble of n elements with fractional concentrations f₁,…,f_n is given by

H = ∑_1≤i≤n f_i log f_i, (1)

and if the base of the logarithm is 2, the units of entropy are bits.

Well, not quite, unless Spetner actually wants to define entropy in that way. What is missing is a minus-sign in front of the ∑-symbol.

However, we'll leave that subject as well and return to Spetner, who first illustrates the formula by assuming that the enzyme is active on only one of the substrates, which he describes as perfect filtering; that is f₁,…,f_n = 1/n. The input entropy in this case is given by Spetner as H_I = log n, which is quite correct, though not according to his formula (1); which would give H_I = n•(1/n log 1/n) = log 1/n = − log n. The output entropy is given by Spetner as H_O = 0. The decrease in entropy is therefore H = H_I − H_O = log n, which equals the gain in information.

Spetner next considers the opposite extreme: an enzyme which does not discriminate between the substrates, it leaves products from all substrates. Here the input entropy and the output entropy are the same, H_I = H_O = log n, and the difference, the decrease in entropy is H = 0.

The problem with all this, even if using the correct formula for Shannon entropy, is that it doesn't make any sense. The number n is chosen by the experimenter, so how can it be encoded in the enzyme? Assume the enzyme does not catalyze any of the substrates, then the output entropy is H_O = n•(0 log 0) = 0, just as in the case where the enzyme catalyzes exactly one substrate. How meaningfull is it to say that an enzyme that can catalyze no substrate has the same information encoded as one that can catalyze exactly one substrate? And not only that; while it would be possible to have a collection of substrates, none of which a given enzym can catalyze, the sum of the f_i's must be 1. That is, the experimenter must make sure that the enzyme is able to catalyze at least one of the substrates. How can that have been encoded in the enzyme?

Assume that we are to guess a number between 1 and n, and that we have no reason not to assume each number to be equally probable. We can guess at random, or more systematically start with 1 and increase our guess by 1 until we hit. The minimum number of guesses needed is 1, if we hit in the first guess, and the maximum number is n-1 (if all those guesses were wrong, we know the answer without having to guess the n^th time), and the average number of guesses needed will be n/2. Even better would be to bisect the remaining candidates in each round. That is, first ask if the number is smaller than or equal to n/2. If that returns a 'yes', then ask, if the number is smaller than or equal to n/4, and if it returns a 'no', then ask , if the number is smaller than or equal to 3n/4. And so on. The minimum number of guesses needed will be log n rounded down, and the maximum number will be log n rounded up, and the average number of guesses needed will be log n.

In a situation such as my example with guessing a number, it would be appropriate to talk about entropy, because there is an initial uncertainty concerning which number is chosen, and the information provided by the answer to each guess reduces the uncertainty. But in Spetner's example, this is not the case. If there is some uncertainty, it would be the experimenter's uncertainty concerning the number of substrates among the chosen substrates the enzyme can catalyze. Without any other prior information, this could be from 0 to n, and assuming equal probability, that would give an entropy of log (n+1), not log n.

In his article, Spetner moves on to giving more details about an example from Chapter 5 of Not By Chance!:

Ribitol is a naturally occurring sugar that some soil bacteria can normally metabolize, and ribitol dehydrogenase is the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in its metabolism. Xylitol is a sugar very similar in structure to ribitol, but does not occur in nature. Bacteria cannot normally live on xylitol, but when a large population of them were cultured on only xylitol, mutants appeared that were able to metabolize it. The wild-type enzyme was found to have a small activity on xylitol, but not large enough for the bacteria to live on xylitol alone. The mutant enzyme had an activity large enough to permit the bacterium to live on xylitol alone.

As Spetner explains, the mutant bacterium had gained an increased activity on xylitol at the expense of a decreased activity on ribitol. But Spetner warns against seeing this as evidence for the neo-Darwinist position:

An evolutionist would be tempted to see here the beginning of a trend. He might be inclined to jump to the conclusion that with a series of many mutations of this kind, one after another, evolution could produce an enzyme that would have a high activity on xylitol and a low, or zero, activity on ribitol. Now wouldn’t that be a useful thing for a bacterium that had only xylitol available and no ribitol? Such a series would produce the kind of evolutionary change NDT calls for. It would be an example of the kind of series that would support NDT. The series would have to consist of mutations that would, step by step, lower the activity of the enzyme on the first substrate while increasing it on the second.

Where is the problem? According to Spetner, the problem is that not enough data is considered. As he explains, experiments indicated that the mutant also had increased catalyzation of L-arabitol relative to the wild bacterium, and:

With the additional data on L-arabitol, a different picture emerges. No longer do we see the mutation just swinging the activity away from ribitol and toward xylitol. We see instead a general lowering of the selectivity of the enzyme over the set of substrates.

That is, the mutant bacterium has a lowered activity on ribitol and an increased activity on both of the other sugars. Concluding, Spetner writes:

In Fig. 1 [comparison of activity on ribitol and xylitol] alone, there appears to be a trend evolving an enzyme with a high activity on xylitol and a low activity on ribitol. But Fig. 2 [activity on L-aribitol added] shows that such an extrapolation is unwarranted. It shows instead a much different trend. An extrapolation of the trend that appears in Fig. 2 would indicate that a series of such mutations could result in an enzyme that had no selectivity at all, but exhibited the same low activity on a wide set of substrates.

And then the punch line:

The point to be made from this example is that conclusion jumping from the observation of an apparent trend is a risky business. From a little data, the mutation appears to add information to the enzyme. From a little more data, the mutation appears to be degrading the enzyme’s specificity and losing information.

Well, not exactly, it is only a consequence of Spetner's way of seeing things. The mutation has increased the ability of the enzyme in the mutant bacterium to catalyze other sugars than ribitol, which certainly is quite usefull, if there is no ribitol around, and one of the other sugars is available. Whether it adds information to the enzyme or not depends on, how we measure information and is not really of relevance for evolution. Evolution is not about adding information.

However, Spetner sees it that way and showa that the the mutant has lost information:

Just as we calculated information in the two special cases above, we can calculate the information in the enzyme acting on a uniform mixture of the three substrates for both the wild type and the mutant enzyme. Using the measured activity values reported by Burleigh et al. we find the information in the specificities of the two enzymes to be 0.74 and 0.38 bits respectively. The information in the wild-type enzyme then turns out to be about twice that of the mutant.

Yes, with Spetner's information metric; but as noted above, that metric is Spetner's own artificial product of the way in which these experiments are carried out and has nothing to do with any intrinsic information in the enzyme.

Spetner quotes from the exchange with Max:

Max: I want to make it clear that I don’t buy your interpretation of certain specific mutations as reflecting a ‘loss of information.’ You state that the ‘information content of an enzyme is the sum of many parts, among which are: level of catalytic activity, specificity with respect to the substrate, strength [and specificity] of binding to cell structure, [and] specificity of the amino-acid sequence devoted to specifying the enzyme for degradation.’ This formulation is vague, non-quantitative, not supported by clear logic, not accepted in the scientific literature (to the best of my knowledge; please educate me if I am wrong), and in my view not useful.

To which Spetner comments:

Ed, the level of your argument here is quite low. You have seen this entire section (above), and you took from the introduction my list of what characteristics can contribute to the information content of an enzyme and criticized it for being non-quantitative (followed by other pejorative epithets). Is that supposed to be some sort of debating tactic? In any case, the tactic is out of place in this discussion. From the context of what I wrote, it should have been clear to you that this partial list of characteristics that can contribute to the information in an enzyme was an introduction to my quantitative estimate of one of the characteristics of specificity of an enzyme. After I showed how one might calculate the information related to a type of specificity, I showed how a mutation that appeared to enhance activity on a new substrate actually reduced the information by about 50%.

The problem here is that Spetner's "quantitative estimate of one of the characteristics of specificity of an enzyme" doesn't work. It is quantitative indeed, but the quanta will vary depending on the number of substrates (the value of n in Spetner's examples) and therefore it can hardly be considered to prove anything.

Back to Spetner:

It is elementary that specificity translates into information and vice versa. Have you ever played 20 questions? With the YES/NO answers to 20 judicious questions, one can discover a previously-chosen number between 1 and a million. If the questions are well chosen, those YES/NO answers can be worth one bit of information each, and 20 bits can specify one object out of a million. Twenty bits of information translates to specificity of one part in a million. Ten bits—to one part in a thousand.

Well, yes and no. Does specificity translate into information and vice versa? As Spetner writes here, it takes more bits (on the average) to specify an object out of a larger collection than out of a smaller collection, but that's exactly the problem: it's relative to collection size. If we were to guess a number between 1 and a million, we would need 20 guesses, even if that number is less than or equal to one thousand. That is, the information required is not related to the number chosen, but to the size of the collection, from which the number is drawn.

Later, Spetner quotes Max for a critique of Spetner's example with streptomycin. Here Spetner comments:

The wild-type S12 proteins that bind to the streptomycin molecule also form a subset of the universe of all possible S12 proteins. The set of S12 proteins that allow bacterial growth in streptomycin (i.e. that do not bind to the antibiotic) form a disparate subset of the universe of S12 proteins. My intuition tells me that the set that binds (the susceptible set) is smaller, and therefore has a smaller entropy, than the set that does not bind (the resistant set). Mutations that appear in the presence of the antibiotic convert one subset to the other. A mutation that transfers the enzyme from a low-entropy set to a higher-entropy set loses information; it does not gain it.

Ok, if we were one day to guess a number between 1 and 1,000, we would have an entropy of 10 bits, and if we were the next day to guess a number between 1,001 and 1,001,000, we would have an entropy of 20 bits, therefore we have lost information from the first day to the second.

(Note: I am aware that 2¹⁰ = 1,024, not 1,000, and I am aware that 2²⁰ = 1,048,576, not 1,000,000. And I am sure that Spetner is aware of this as well.)

An obvious problem with Spetner's argumentation here is that a potential S12 protein need not be a possible S12 protein. If we toss a coin, we generate samples as we toss along. But that's not how S12 proteins are sampled. Of course, if we were to produce them synthetically, the situation might ne more like coin tossing; but synthetically produced S12 proteins would not be of relevance here. However, since I have no idea about how many S12 proteins of any kind there are, I will not pursue that subject any further.

Another problem is that Spetner's use of 'entropy' is rather confusing here. He considers a smaller set to have a smaller entropy, which would be in analogy to the example with guessing numbers.

In Not By Chance!, Spetner uses an example with specification of a room in an apartment in a building to illustrate specificity of addressing; but in the article he uses another example:

The Zip codes in the US also demonstrate that specificity and information are two sides of the same coin and go hand in hand. An address in the United States can be completely specified by the nine-digit zip code. One digit of information will narrow down the address from being anywhere in the United States to being in just a few states. Thus if the first digit is a 6, the address is located somewhere in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, or Nebraska.

A second digit of information will add specificity by narrowing down the address further. A 3, 4, or 5 in the second digit puts the address in Missouri. A 3 in the second digit puts it in the eastern portion of the state. Two digits of information are more specific than one.

A third digit of information is still more specific, narrowing down the address even more, making it still more specific. If the third digit is a 1, the address is specific to St. Louis and its suburbs. The next two digits of information pin down the address to within a few blocks. The last 4 digits of information can locate a specific building. Thus, it is clear that the information contained in the digits of the zip code translate into specificity.

There is no question about it: SPECIFICITY = INFORMATION.

That is, for Spetner, more digits = more specificity = more information. What goes for digits, goes for bits (= binary digits) as well. Assuming there to be 1,000 binding S12 proteins, each of these could be specified with 10 bits, and assuming there to be 1,000,000 non-binding S12 proteins, each of these could be specified with 20 bits. That is, more bits would be required to specify any non-binding protein than to specify any binding protein, and therefore, assuming Spetner's intuition about there being more possible non-binding than binding S12 proteins, then transfering a protein from the binding group to the non-binding group increases information.

I would guess that what goes wrong is that Spetner thinks about it this way: with the Zip code, each additional digit narrows down the area addressed by the Zip code. That is, more information = more digits = smaller area. However, that only works for subsets. St. Louis and its suburbs is not only a smaller area than the eastern part of Missouri, it is a sub-area. But the binding proteins are not a subset of the non-binding proteins, so the analogy doesn't work.

Returning to Wieland's review, Wieland introduces Spetner with these words:

Jewish scientist Dr Lee Spetner’s book aims a death-blow at the heart of this whole Neo-Darwinian story. The crucial battleground has always been the origin of information, and in this field, Spetner is uniquely qualified to comment. With a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, Spetner taught information and communication theory for years at Johns Hopkins University. In 1962 he accepted a fellowship in biophysics at that institution, where he worked on solving problems in signal/noise relationships in DNA electron micrographs. He subsequently became fascinated with evolutionary theory, and published papers concerning theoretical and mathematical biology in prestigious journals such as the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Nature, and the Proceedings of the 2^nd International Congress of Biophysics.

These are fine credentials, and I am certainly not claiming that Lee Spetner doesn't have excellent qualifications. However, for some reason, his use of information theory doesn't quite work. Spetner commits too many simple errors in that use, and considering his qualifications, I would suggest it is because he has let his wish of disproving neo-Darwinism get the better of him. I am quite sure Spetner could have done better than he has.

Wieland ends his review with the words:

To say that Spetner’s book is an absolute ‘must’ for anyone defending Scripture in this increasingly educated age is an understatement. To put it succinctly, it seems that unless evolutionists can pull a brand new rabbit out of the hat, Spetner has just blown the whole evolutionary mechanism out of the water once and for all. The evolutionary/humanist establishment cannot allow this to happen, of course, so it will be interesting to see their reaction and attempts at damage control. I trust that readers of this review will make it as hard as possible for them to ignore this groundbreaking work, by spreading it as far and fast as they can.

Hyperbolic language comes cheap, doesn't it?

To finish off, I must admit that I enjoyed reading Not By Chance!, even if I disagree with Spetner's conclusion. And I must say that the book would have deserved a more thoeough review from the creationist camp than Wieland's review that is little more than standard creationist troop mustering that doesn't even mention the parts of the book that are really good.

Gilder, O'Leary, and lactose

2006-12-05T17:23:00.000+01:00

In Part Four, The hierarchy of information vs. "nothing but", of Denyse O'Leary five part series on George Gilder, there is an interesting little detail.

O'Leary writes:

Regarding the "causes of economic growth," its [sic] worth remembering that - at every stage - "economic growth" is first and foremost an idea in the minds of men. It always begins with an idea of a better life - clean water or public schools, for example. The material advance follows the idea. Without the idea the advance never happens. Ignoring this principle has led to much waste in foreign aid efforts by wealthy countries. Why? Because things have been forced on people as "improvements" before they wanted or cared about them, and they responded by ignoring, subverting, or destroying them.

So, instead of just forcing our things on other people, we also have to force our ideas on them.

O'Leary continues:

Example: My own country (Canada) once exported tins of powdered milk to a poor country where the malnourished people did not normally drink milk after they were weaned. But the recipients threw away the powdered milk and used only the aluminum tins! The people were not stupid. They easily understood the value of the tins in their daily life. But they did not understand the value of the milk. They did not know about the importance of proteins in the diet. So an effort to improve health in that region did not depend on supplying a physical substance such as powdered milk. It depended on getting the people to accept the idea that a higher protein diet would alleviate illness and the idea that the donated powdered milk could help them do so. In that case, only a change at the highest level of the system (the ideas in the minds of men) could change centuries of misery. Indeed, once they accepted the idea, they might seek local sources of milk, and might not end up needing much help from Canada.

See, things are not that simple. To metabolize lactose, an ingredient in milk and other dairy products, you need the enzyme lactase, an enzyme produced, for obvious reasons, by young mammals, but usually not by adult mammals. For humans, the production generally cease between the ages two and five. This is called lactose intolerance (Wikipedia article).

Northern Europeans (and people elsewhere of Northern European origin) with their long tradition of living on dairy products have very few lactose intolerant people, whereas among African Bantus 89% are lactose intolerant, and among Native Americans 100% are lactose intolerant. So, it's not just a question of giving people the idea that milk is healthy, because maybe it isn't.

It is not possible from O'Leary's short story above to see, if the milk was cow milk or plant milk, and if it was cow milk, whether it had been treated with lactose catalysing bacteria or another process with the same purpose. But all in all, it is possible that the milk powder was thrown away, becayúse it really wasn't healthy.

It's not just a question of ideas, lactose intolerance is real, not hysteria, and lactose tolerance is due to a mutation that is most widespread among Northern Europeans. So whether O'Leary likes it or not, she has unknowingly touched upon a subject that favors the evil Darwinists rather than the good IDists.

See also

Gilder, O'Leary, and Dawkins

The ID dilemma

Gilder, O'Leary, and Dawkins

2006-12-04T17:03:00.000+01:00

Denyse O'Leary has on her ARN blog, The ID Report, a five part series on Why is tech guru George Gilder not a Darwinist? The second part, Life as architecture of ideas or information, is particularly interesting.

George Gilder is co-founder of the Discovery Institute, a born-again Christian, and he likes glass-fiber cables, so all in all, he is indeed a tech guru.

O'Leary starts out with:

As Gilder explains in his National Review article, the tormented computer genius Alvin Turing stressed that a computer is not wires and metal but "its architecture of ideas."

We'll ignore that it is 'Alan Turing', and only pick up the notion that it is not the material implementation that matters. It's a funny thing with anti-evolutionists: that they believe that all evolutionists are materialists, and that therefore anyone who is not a materialist must be one of their heroes.

My point in this post is to show that by that reasoning, Richard Dawkins must belong right up there with Allan Turing as an ID hero.

O'Leary continues:

Most writers understand this concept quite easily, actually. A book for which the publisher has forwarded $50 000 advance can be lodged on a computer whose market value is $500 - and whose scrap value is 50 cents. The ideas give value to the computer, not the other way around.

Really, it was no different in the days of pen and paper or clay tablets. It was always the ideas that gave value to the material objects, not the other way round.

Yes, we understand this concept quite easily; but, may we ask, is O'Leary aware that 99% of all clay tablets found deal with economic transactions: so and so much grain is paid in tax, so and so much silver is paid in for some goods, and so on. Transactions describing movements of material objects. And without some material embodyment, the architecture of ideas in a computer is of little use.

But ok, we live in the Age of Information, and we have known that for some time, so what is O'Leary's real point?

Of course, that 'Darwinian materialism' must be provable wrong. To this purpose, O'Leray quotes Gilder for the following:

I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer's materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or "source code" used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence.

What Darwinian materialism? Unfortunately, materialism can refer to quite a gamut of ideas (ironic, ne'est-ce pas?); but usually implies something about the primacy of matter over ideas, whatever happens to be meant by 'ideas'. For instance, in Marxist historical materialism, the word 'materialism' refers to primacy of material production over the ideology; that is, the organization of material production causes ideologies rather than the other way around. This is obviously a very different kind of materialism than Democritus of Abdera's dictum, "There is nothing but atoms and space, everything else is only an opinion".

O'Leary shortly after writes:

Consider Shannon's concept of entropy. "News" or information cannot be described by purely physical or chemical theories. We can easily see why this is so if we think about it. To you, information is what your mind accepts as information. For example, the discovery via an e-mail that someone you love really prefers someone else [!] is information to you. To the computer, the key information was only more bits 'n bytes. As Gilder says, "Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information."

Yes, of course, but who doesn't know this? And anyway, Gilder in the quoted passage gets things wrong. There is quite a difference between whether something is determined and whether it is known to be determined, and even if it is known to be determined, whether the entire causal chain is known. If I flip a coin, I have reason to believe that it is fully determined whether it lands heads up or tails up; there is not some fairy that manipulates it underways. Yet I cannot predict the outcome, except statistically.

If I receive an e-mail, the content of that e-mail is fully determined; it doesn't randomly change just because I open and read it. Whether it is information for me or not is a different matter, so O'Leary and Gilder are confusing knowledge and determination.

Quoting Gilder, O'Leary writes:

in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself one day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John's Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science?

If information is something that can only be picked up by a mind, how can information regulate "the flesh and the world"? And, as for the Gospel of John, it was the Word of God, not just any old word.

And a paragraph later:

I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous "information." In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier

So, it's the word by any other name; but how does that relate to Darwinism?

After having supplied the above quote, O'Leary turns rather mysterious:

But what about DNA?, one might ask. Isn't our DNA a deterministic code that just happened to evolve and create us? Well, the chemistry of DNA is irrelevant to its message. The four DNA code letters - A,C,G,T - do not, in themselves, tell a creature what to be, any more than letters of an alphabet tell you what to write. Additional information does that. For example, the simple nematode worms that survived a recent space shuttle disaster and were returned to their owners have only somewhat fewer genes than humans (20 000 vs. 30 000) - which basically tells you that most of what is really happening is not happening in the genes.

Of course, the letters of an alphabet doesn't tell me, what to write; but the letters in for instance O'Leary's post tell me, what to read, don't they? And how is the 'small' difference between the number of nematode genes and human genes (which is 50% of the number of nematode genes) related to, what is really happening?

Yet another Gilder quote:

Like a sheet of paper or a series of magnetic points on a computer's hard disk or the electrical domains in a random-access memory or indeed all the undulations of the electromagnetic spectrum that bear information through air or wires in telecommunications DNA is a neutral carrier of information, independent of its chemistry and physics. By asserting that the DNA message precedes and regulates the form of the proteins, and that proteins cannot specify a DNA program, Crick's Central Dogma unintentionally recapitulates St. John's assertion of the primacy of the word over the flesh.

It was for some time thought that proteins were the carriers of inheritance, and with the discovery of DNA, it was still discussed, which had which rôle. With Francis Crick's Central Dogma the discussion ended with DNA being the carrier of inheritance, and proteins being encoded in DNA. O'Leary writes that there are four DNA code letters, A,C,G,T. However, these do not encode anything; we need three of them to make, what's called a codon, the actual letter of the DNA code. There are therefore 4*4*4 = 64 different codons, a 64 letter alphabeth. Each codon either encodes an amino acid or is a stop code. There are 20 amino acids, so 64 letter alphabeth of DNA is actually translated to a 21 letter alphabeth, of which the 20 letters, the amino acids, are used in proteins. It is therefore not possible from a protein to reconstruct its gene (the sequence of codons that encoded it), and therefore proteins cannot precede DNA.

So, contrary to O'Leary's statement above, that "what is really happening is not happening in the genes", Gilder follows the general trend by claiming that DNA is the provider of information.

Perhaps O'Leary has misunderstood Gilders statement that "DNA is a neutral carrier of information, independent of its chemistry and physics"? A statement that by the way is not quite right, but let's just ignore that.

O'Leary does not make a distinction between DNA and genes, while Gilder does not mention genes. However, the way he refers to DNA, he clearly means DNA patterns, not the individuals DNA molecules.

This, interestingly, brings Gilder in exact line with the atheist Darwinist materialist Richard Dawkins, who back in 1986 published The Blind Watchmaker.

On p. 127 of said book, Dawkins writes:

DNA gets the best of both worlds. DNA molecules themselves, as physical entities, are like dewdrops. Under the right conditions they come into existence at a great rate, but no one of them has existed for long, and all will be destroyed within a few months. They are not durable like rocks. But the patterns that they bear in their sequences are as durable as the hardest rocks. They have what it takes to exist for millions of years, and that is why they are still here today. The essential difference from dewdrops is that new dewdrops are not begotten by old dewdrops. Dewdrops doubtless resemble other dewdrops, but they don't specifically resemble their own 'parent' dewdrops. Unlike DNA molecules, they don't form lineages, and therefore can't pass on messages. Dewdrops come into existence by spontaneous generation, DNA messages by replication.

That is, while DNA molecules are material, genes = DNA patterns are not, though each concrete instance needs to exist in a material form.

For Dawkins as for Gilder, the DNA molecules are carriers of information, an information that is the DNA pattern, which itself is neither physical nor chemical, but apparently, in a Platonistic sense, an idea. An entire genome must therefore, for Dawkins, not be something physical and chemical, but "its architecture of ideas."

Maybe the ID people should study Darwinists a bit more closely, before they run out and claim to have refuted Darwinist materialism?

See also

Gilder, O'Leary, and lactose

The ID dilemma

The 6,000 years prophecy

2006-11-29T13:46:00.000+01:00

Glenn Morton has on his web-site an article Early Church Fathers on Genesis by John Tobin. The point in this article is that not all the early church fathers didn't believe in a six days creation and a young earth. The article does not deny that some of the ECFs believed in a six times 24 hours creation.

Interestingly, a YEC website, www.creationism.org, has an article named The Early Church Fathers Believed in A Young Earth & Recent Creation, which claims that Origen is the only ECF that maybe interpreted the days of creation as anything but 24 hours days.

And the article begins with a quote from The Epistle of Barnabas:

The Sabbath is mentioned at the beginning of the creation: "And God made in six days the works of His hands, and made an end on the seventh day, and rested on it, and sanctified it." Attend, my children, to the meaning of this expression, "He finished in six days." This implieth that the Lord will finish all things in six thousand years, for a day is with Him a thousand years. And He Himself testifieth, saying, "Behold, to-day will be as a thousand years." Therefore, my children, in six days, that is, in six thousand years, all things will be finished.

The article supplies a few more quotes of similar content.

So, not only did some of the ECFs believe in a literal six days creation, some of them also believed that everything would be finished in 6,000 years; that is, the end of the world would come 6,000 years after the start of the creation.

This is even clearer in a quote given a few paragraphs later. In Against Heresies, Book 5, Irenaeus writes:

For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded. And for this reason the Scripture says: "Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their adornment. And God brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that He had made; and God rested upon the seventh day from all His works." This is an account of the things formerly created, as also it is a prophecy of what is to come. For the day of the Lord is as a thousand years; and in six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year.

So, origins may for YECs simply be a part of eschatology, and that might explain why it is so important for them that the earth not be much older than 6,000 years old. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Gerald Aardsma, who formerly worked with ICR, had to leave, because he accepted to push the upper limit to 12,000 years, so it's not just a question of Genesis 1; there is clearly more at stake.

And that more might well be that the real question for the YECs is not, how long the earth has existed, but how long it will continue to exist.

However, is this idea supported by the Bible? The Bible does operate with longer cycles that are based on shorter cycles, such as the sabbathical cycle of seven years, a week of years, based on the seven days week, and the jubilar cycle, fourtynine years made up of seven sabbathical cycles. But these are cycles, something repeating itself, not something with a final ending. So, this particular YEC idea of the earth lasting for as many thousand years as the creation in Genesis 1 spanned days would seem not to be supported by the Bible.

Dembski's Law of Conservation of Information

2006-11-28T16:27:00.000+01:00

William Dembski provides on p. 8 of the online paper The Conservation of Information- Measuring the Cost of Successful search a definition of his Law of Conservation of Information in the form of a theorem.

However, just to warm us up, we'll do some preliminary definitions first.

Let A and B be two events with probibilty p of A to occur and probability q of B to occur.

The (self-)information or surprisal value of A is defined as

I(A) = − log₂ p

The added information of B to A is defined as

I₊(A : B) = I(A) − I(B) = − log₂ p + log₂ q = log₂ q/p.

Two immediate consequences of the latter definition is

I₊(A : A) = − log₂ p + log₂ p = 0; and

I₊(A : B) = log₂ q/p ≤ log₂ 1/p = − log₂ p = I(A).

The last line implies that the added information of B to A cannot exceed the information of A alone.

What should here be understood is that the information of A is exactly a measure of the surprise of the occurence of A, the smaller the probability, the larger the surprise. Assume you live somewhere, where the probability of rain on any one day is 90%, and the always reliable weather forecast says that it will rain the next day. The weather forecast doesn't really give you much information, since you would anyway expect it to rain, so not much surprise in that case. If instead the weather forecast had said that it would be a clear and sunny day the next day, that would have given you more information, since it would be contrary to expectation, therefore a greater surprise.

What the definition of added information says is basically that you know, what you know, and the more you know, the less will there be to learn.

Dembski's motivation for introducing added information (cf. p. 3) is as follows. During a search, the more samples are taken, the higher will be the probability of a success; but a higher probability corresponds with a lower self-information value, and our intuition says that the more samples taken, the more information generated.

A more efficient search will generate more information per sample; but the problem then is, how to figure out which search is more efficient than a random search, which Dembski uses as the base search strategy.

We can now give Dembski's definition of the Law of Conservation of Information:

Theorem (Conservation of Information). Suppose S and T are searches over a given search space, S being a random search with probability p success in a single query and T being a nonrandom search with probability 1 of success in a single query. Suppose further that U and V are searches over the space of searches in which S and T reside so that U on average locates a search of the original space that with probability no more than p successfully searches the original space and that T with probability 1 locates a search of the original space what with probability 1 successfully searches the original space. Then the information that V adds to U is at least as great as the information that T adds to S, i.e.,

I₊(U : V) ≥ I₊(S : T).

Moreover, by a suitable choice of U, this inequality becomes an equality.

Here U and V are meta-searches; that is, searches for searches. What the theorem therefore says is that is requires at least as much information to figure out how to do a search as to actually do the search itself.

As an illustration, Dembski uses a search for a treasure on an island (cf. p. 6). It may be prohibitive to do a random search for the treasure; but you have a treasure map, so no problem. However, where did you get the treasure map from? You first needed to do a search for that from among all treasure maps. This may have been an even more involved search, which leads to an infinite regress.

In short, information comes at a price, and that price is at least the same amount of information.

Dembski writes p. 9:

According to Douglas Robertson (1999), the defining feature of intelligence is its ability to create information. Yet, if an act of intelligence created the information, where did this intelligence come from? Was information in turn required to create it? Very quickly this line of questioning pushes one to an ultimate intelligence that creates all information and yet is created by none (see Dembski 2004: ch. 19, titled “Information ex Nihilo”).

Here 'Douglas Robertson (1999)' refers to an article "Algorithmic Information Theory, Free Will, and the Turing Test" by Douglas Robertson, and 'Dembski 2004' refers to Dembski's own book The Design Revolution.

The point being that intelligence creates information, which means that intelligence applies some search strategy, and from where does intelligence know about that search strategy? This knowledge is itself information, so there must be an ultimate intelligence.

If not, then, Dembski continues:

On the other hand, if the information is the mechanical outworking of preexisting information, the Conservation of Information Theorem suggests that this preexisting information was at least as great in the past as it is now (this being the information that allows the present search to be successful). But then how do we make sense of the fact (if it is a fact) that the information in the universe was less in the past than it is now? Indeed, our present universe, with everything from star systems to living forms, seems far more information-rich than the universe at the moment of the Big Bang.

The obvious question here is, how do we measure information? If there is more information in the universe today than at the moment of the Big Bang, assuming that to have happened, then we should be able to figure out, what happened all the way back to the Big Bang. The current universe certainly may exhibit more variation than the very early universe; that is, there are more different things to know something about, but is that more information?

All in all, Dembski's main point is that human intelligence might have another source than evolution, which he considers to be a search strategy. Since evolution to produce intelligence must itself have been even more intelligent or guided by something even more intelligent, evolution cannot be a random search. And if evolution is a random search, it cannot have produced intelligence, which must therefore have another source. He does not write this directly; but it's what he is hinting at.

Now, as for Dembski's Law of Conservation of Information, it ignores that we don't always start out with finding an optimal search strategy. Occasional search strategies are made up along the way based on experience. Modern dictionaries are alphabetically ordered, which makes it simple to use relatively efficient searches based on the spelling of a word; in antiquity it was more common to order words by decreasing importance, such that those that corresponded to a more important concept were at the top. However, in antiquity, scrolls were used, so this ordering simply meant that you typically only needed to unscroll a small segment of the scroll. With a book, you can open it anywhere at the same cost. In that way ordering of information and search strategies depend on technology. We simply don't start out with determining the optimal search strategy and then turn everything else around after that.

So, Dembski's theorem may be correct mathematically seen, but he may have wasted his time searching for the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

Decomposing specified complexity

2006-11-26T13:51:00.000+01:00

In the paper Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence (2005), William Dembski has provided his as of this writing latest definition of specified complexity. My purpose with this post is to clarify, what Dembski means by this concept as it is explained in that paper. Of course, my exposition is a personal interpretation, and it may possibly be far from, what William Dembski intended.

Specified complexity
Where's the problem, if anywhere?
Is specified complexity information?
Can specified complexity increase?

The definition of contextdependent specified complexity of a pattern T given a (chance) hypothesis H is given in section 7, "Specified Complexity", p. 21 as:

χ = –log₂[M·N·φ_S (T)·P(T| H)].

We won't worry about the contextindependent version, in which M·N is replaced by 10¹²⁰.

Let T be some observed event, such as the poker hand Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace of the same suite, also known as a Royal Flush.

The hypothesis H here could be the assumption that the deck of cards was thoroughly shuffled, such that each particular position in the deck could be assigned a probability of 1/52 of holding any particular card, and that each partucular position in the deck with the first card removed could be assigned a probability 1/51 of holding any particular of the remaining 51 cards, and so on.

Subject to H, the probability of being dealt Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace in that order of a specific suite is 1/52·1/51·1/50·/49·1/48, or around 1/3·10^-8. Since there are four suites, we multiply by four, and since the order of the cards makes no difference, we additionally multiply by 5! = 120 to get a probabilty of around 1.6·10^-6, somewhat higher than one in a million.

That is, in the case at hand, P(T| H) = 1.6·10^-6, or at least very close to that value.

If there are M = 20 groups of people playing poker, and each group has played N = 10 games, the probability of at least one Royal Flush having been dealt in the first round of a game is therefore M·N·P(T | H) = 3.2·10^-4. That is, M is the number of independent observers, and N is the numbers of times that each observer checks for an event.

Now, say that a hand with Deuce and Five of Hearts, Nine of Spades, King of Diamonds, and Six of Spades had been dealt. The probability of this is actually lower than the probability of a Royal Flush; but even if such a hand had been dealt, no-one would have noticed, since it's not really any remarable poker hand, although it has a lower probability. If any cheating is going on, we would not expect any increase in the occurence hands like that, but rather in the high value hands, such as Royal Flush and Four Aces.

This leads us to the term φ_S(T), the specificational resources associated by S with T. The subscript S denotes a semiotic agent, which is simply anyone/anything that can communicate using some symbolic language. An event such as our T must conform to some pattern P for S to be able to communicate its occurence, and such a pattern can be described using a string of symbols such as "Royal Flush", "Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace of the same suite", or "Ten to Ace of the same suite". The descriptive complexity or semiotic cost φ'_S(P) of a pattern P is the number of symbols used in the shortest description of P available to S. Conceptually, we can think of it as that S has a dictionary of descriptions relevant to the subject area beginning with descriptions of length one, continuing with descriptions of length two, and so on, and S goes through this dictionary until a matching description of P is found. Assuming S has found a description for P, yet continues to go through the dictionary to the last entry of the same length, the number of descriptions checked is the number of all descriptions with a length shorter or equal to the length of the shortest description of P.

The formal definition of φ_S(T) can be found in section 6, "Specificity", p. 17:

φ_S(T) = the number of patterns for which S’s semiotic description of them is at least as simple as S’s semiotic description of T.

So, it's not actually the number of descriptions available, but the number of patterns, whose shortest description is shorter than or of the same length as the shortest description of T, or, put differently, whose descriptive complexity is at most the same as the descriptive complexity of T.

That is, the patterns Four Aces and Royal Flush have the same specificational resources, and the pattern Poker Hand has the same specificational resources; but these three patterns have different probabilities subject to the hypothesis H.

What is the point in the specificational resources? Dembski's claim is that a simple pattern, that is a pattern with a short description, is a stronger indicator for design than is a complex pattern. The 'complexity' in 'specified complexity' refers primarily to low probability of an event to occur by chance (what Dembski calls 'statistically complex'). A pattern such as Poker Hand is as simple as Royal Flush, but, of course, any poker hand is a Poker Hand, so simplicity of the pattern is not sufficient to say that we have a case of design. A pattern such as Deuce and Five of Hearts, Nine of Spades, King of Diamonds, and Six of Spades has a very low probability to occur; but it's nor really a pattern we are concerned about, if by 'design' we mean 'cheating', although someone might claim that it's not every day you see exactly this poker hand. It's the combination of a simple pattern and a low probability that should arise our suspecion, according to Dembski.

Why the subscript S? Because dufferent observers may not have the same descriptions at disposition; for instance, a person unfamiliar with poker might not know, what a "Royal Flush" is, and not know that it has special significance within the game. Therefore, specified complexity is a subjective measure.

If we look at the product φ_S(T)·P(T | H), then it is an upper bound on the probability of S to observe an event that is at most as descriptive complex as T and has at most the same probability (cf. p. 18).

In short, the whole product M·N·φ_S(T)·P(T | H) is an upper bound to the probability subject to H that at least one of M independent observers during one of N observations will report to the semiotic agent S at least one event that is at most as descriptive complex as T and has at most the same probability.

Converting to binary logarithm reverses the scale and turns the product into a number of bits. If M·N·φ_S(T)·P(T | H) < 1/2, then χ > 1. That is, if χ > 1, it can be considered more reasonable to conclude design than to conclude chance.

Where's the problem, if anywhere?

First off, to make specified complexity of any use in a given situation, it is necessary to know the value of P(T | H). We don't always do that, nor necessarily do we have much of a way to estimate the value.

Second, as many critics, for instance Elliott Sober, have pointed out: this one-sided approach is not actually used in design detection. There is always an implicit assumption about the capabilities of a designer, and those capabilities are assumed to be the same as those of humans. Especially in criminal cases, also a motive is required for a design conclusion, and again, what can count as a motive depends on assumptions about the designer.

Third, we are dealing with a moving target: what counts as 'design' varies from context to context. If someone writes a book, that's design, and if someone else later writes a book taht is suspeciously similar to the first book, it may be a case of plagiarizing. We here have two designed objects, no matter what; yet, Dembski wants design here to mean that the second author plagiarized the book of the first author.

Is specified complexity information?

Dembski doesn't anywhere in the Specification paper claim that specified complexity is information – though he has on pp. 11-12 a discussion about Fisher's eliminative approach and algorithmic information theory, also known a Kolmogorov-Chaitin information theory, or simply K-C information theory.

For any event E with probability p, the value I(E) = -log₂(p) can be considered information, by Claude Shannon called the self-information. Not really something much used by Shannon, who instead used the average value of the selfinformation called entropy.

Dembski, however, frequently uses the self-information, so we'll do it here as well.

Now, if M·N·φ_S(T)·P(T | H) < 1/2, then P(T | H) < 1/[2·M·N·φ_S(T)], and therefore

(EQ1) I(T | H) > log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S (T)) + 1.

Let's use a slightly different way than Dembski's to present part of, what he writes pp. 11-12.

A fundamental result in algorithmic information theory is that for any natural number N there exist bit strings of length N that cannot be compressed to a string of length d < N by the same compression algorithm. We can formulate this as

Theorem 1: For any natural number N and any compression algorithm P there exists a string S of length N such that |P(S)| ≥ N.

Proof: For any natural number d the number of strings of length exactly d is 2^d. The number of strings of length at most d is then

Σ_0≤i≤d 2ⁱ = 2⁰ + 2¹ + … + 2^d = 1 + 2 + … + 2^d = 2^d+¹ − 1 < 2^d+¹

If d < N, then 2^d+¹ − 1 < 2^N, the number of strings of length N. There are therefore more strings of length N than strings of length less than N. It is therefore not possible for P to map every string of length N to a string of length less than N.

In EQ1 there is a clear similarity between the term log₂(φ_S(T)) + 1 and log₂(2^d+¹) = d + 1 in the above.

As mentioned, the product φ_S(T)·P(T | H) is an upper bound on the probability of S to observe an event that is at most as descriptive complex as T and has at most the same probability, or, to add some confusion, at most as descriptive complex as T and at least as stastically complex. Let U be any such event. Then we have that

(EQ2) I(U | H) ≥ I(T | H) > log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S(T)) + 1 ≥ log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S(U)) + 1.

To give an intuition for, what this means, consider a communication system with M senders that each sends N messages to a receiver S that in turn uses some compression algorithm φ_S to compress all received messages. Let T be some message and assume S to know the probability of receiving any particular message – just as in Shannon's model. Then S discards all messages with a higher probability than T and all messages whose compressed version is longer than the compressed version of T. If any message is kept, it will have a specified complexity at least the same as T.

That is, if any message U is kept, and it satisfies I(U | H) > log₂(M) + log₂(N) + log₂(φ_S(U)) + 1, then a design inference should be triggered; that message is not generated by chance.

While it may be debatable, whether specified complexity itself can be considered a kind of information, information theoretical concepts do enter into it.

Can specified complexity increase?

Assume M people during N rounds toss a coin 100 times and after each round send a message with the resulting sequence to S, who in turn measures the specified complexity of each sequence. Have we any particular reason to assume any increase in specified complexity over time? Not really, since each round simply starts out the same place as the first round.

Now assume instead that after each round, those K people, 0 ≤ K ≤ M, that scored the highest specified complexity copy their sequence to the next round. If K = 0 we have the same as above, and if K = M, nothing new will come up in the remaining rounds, so we assume 0 < K < M; that is in each round after the first, some people will recast their sequence, and some people will retain their sequence. Then, obviously, we can expect the maximum amount of specified complexity to increase.

This isn't much of a model of evolution, of course, but it does illustrate that natural selection with some variation to work with can increase specified complexity, as long as there is neither complete randomization nor complete stasis.

Sure, it can be said that S as the selector infuses intelligence into the game; but S does not employ any particular purpose or anything, only the per round selection of the sequences with the highest specified complexity.

See also: Dembski vs. Hume

By request: Review of a Chick Tract

2006-11-24T14:20:00.000+01:00

An anonymous commenter to my review of Mere Christianity suggested that reviewing a Chick Tract would be more my level. Not the one to disappoint an honest request, I googled 'Chick Tract', and the first link was to the website of Chick Publications owned by Jack T. Chick.

As the name suggests, Chick Publications is a publishing company; that is, it sells books. However, there were some smaller articles online, and I decided to take one of those out for a ride.

The chosen article is: New Definition of Science? by Thomas Heinze from November/December 2005.

Heinze's first paragraph sums up, what it's about like this:

"Evolution is science, so the schools must teach it. Creationism and Intelligent Design (ID) are religion, so they must not be taught!" We have been hearing this kind of rubbish a lot more since President Bush said he thinks intelligent design should be taught in public schools in addition to evolution so the students can understand what the debate is all about.

Should ID be taught in school? I am not a US citizen, so I am not too concerned about school education in the USA; but the question is relevant enough still. I wouldn't mind that ID be taught in higher grades in primary school and in high school. The question would of course be, what exactly should be taught? The problem here is that ID has become connected with origins. Everybody knows that until the Wright brothers actually managed to get a flying machine into the air, scientists had 'proved' the impossibility of such an enterprise. And everybody knows that according to 19^th century aerodynamic theories, bumblebees were unable to fly; except that the bumblebees didn't know about any such theories, so they flew anyway.

Indeed, teaching ID in school might require a new definition of science. As of today, a scientific theory is a human convention; it isn't true or false, but usable or unusable. Using a formal proof to prove that the bacterial flagellum cannot evolve is about as exciting as a formal proof/disproof of the existence of God; that is, it can have some academic interest – but it just isn't science.

Heinze continues:

Mark Bergin in World Magazine lists some of the criticisms: "The Philadelphia Daily News said widespread acceptance of ID could undermine the scientific method. The Washington Post suggested that the president was 'indulging quackery' for political gain. The Los Angeles Times called the comments 'one more example of the extreme right's attempt to create a Taliban-like society." (Mark Bergin, Mad scientists, World Magazine, 8/05,) Evolutionists, who say that Bush wants religion and what they want is science, use a special definition of science that eliminates creation: "Science is the search for natural solutions." Creation by an intelligent Designer is a supernatural rather than a natural solution. By this contrived definition, to be "scientific," you have to be an atheist.

As indicated above, ID could undermine the scientific method, leading away from a science based on observations to a more formal type of science. And as for the "Taliban-like society", while the Discovery Institute denies any connection with Christian Reconstructionism, the occasional hostile anti-Darwinism does indicate some connection. Also the main funder of the Center for Science and Culture is Howard Ahmanson, who is known for Reconstructionist sympathies.

As for the definition of science reported by Heinze, "[s]cience is the search for natural solutions", what else would Heinze suggest? Science is supposed to support technology, that is human interaction with nature (when we talk about natural science, which isn't all science; though you are advised to not tell a natural scientist that ;-)), including prediction of natural events. If vulcanic eruptions are symptoms of the anger of some god, we of course need not worry about science; but not even IDists believe that. Where do we draw the limit? Science is the search for natural solutions, though maybe not everything has a natural solution. But if we do not first search for natural solutions, but give up and ask God to solve our problems, how do we then know that we wouldn't have found a natural solution around the next corner? And what does that have to do with being an atheist? Do theists explain everything as an act of God? If not, where do they draw the limit? Where that limit might be is not a scientific question, because it is a limit to science, assuming that science is the search for a natural solution. So, no, you don't have to be an atheist to be scientific, you only have to know that certain questions are within the scope of science and others are not.

Back to Heinze:

Consider this: The heads of some of America's most famous presidents have been carved from solid rock at Mount Rushmore. If a visiting evolutionist science professor applied the "search for natural solutions definition to these heads, he would have to conclude that they were formed by something natural like weathering and erosion rather than by intelligent design. If he suggested this, he would be laughed out of the classroom.

In this case we happen to know that the heads were carved by humans, so we have a good case for design. Anyway, did the humans that carved the faces use magic or anything like that? I suppose they used chisels and hammers; nothing supernatural. These humans knew something about rocks, such as what kind of tools would be needed to work with the rock. This is perfectly fine natural science supporting technology, that is human interaction with nature. Assuming that only a supernatural being could have achieved something such wouldn't have been all that helpful, would it?

Back to Heinze:

But he does not hesitate to teach his students that the heads of the real presidents who inspired the statues evolved by accident through the blind forces of nature. Is he right when he claims that the real heads of real presidents had no designer? No! Stone cold, dead wrong!

Well, we here happen to have strong indications that the physical traits of humans depend on those of their parents, since they are inheritable. That is, we have a working natural explanation, and no supernatural one is warranted.

But Heinze continues:

The Rushmore heads only show design on the carved surface. The real heads show incredible design all the way down to the atoms. Human heads are made of billions of cells. Inside each cell, wonderful little machines do much of the work of the cell. Every machine known to mankind had an intelligent designer, but these cell machines are so precise and efficient that manmade machines are crude by comparison. Scientists are studying them, hoping to copy them. For example, a miniature motor that spins at 100,000 RPM with almost perfect efficiency is found in some single celled animals that evolutionists consider "primitive." This is just one of the many kinds of molecular motors and other molecular machines found even in "simple" cells. Moreover, the cell's machines are made of some of the most complex and difficult to produce chemicals in the world, such as protein and RNA. These materials never occur in nature except when made by living cells. Yet, evolutionists claim that lucky accidents brought the parts together and assembled them.

Now, we are moving a bit too fast here, aren't we? It isn't in particular evolutionists that consider single celled organisms to be "primitive", actually IDists and creationists are more into that kind of name calling, since they have more of a vested interest in the impossibility of evolution. Actually, the complexity of single celled organisms support evolution in the sense, that if a single celled organism could evolve, the evolution of humans from simian ancestors is no problem at all in comparison.

That "[t]hese materials never occur in nature except when made by living cells" has a natural explanation: the components react with oxygen, and since 21% of the earth's atmosphere is made up of oxygen, proteins and DNA do not occur outside of special environments. Some single organisms even today do not tolerate much oxygen, whereas most other organisms actually require oxygen, and plants produce oxygen from carbon dioxide as a by-product of photosynthesis, while animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide.

It is true that abiogenesis – the origin of life from non-life – is far from understood today; but unfortunately, we cannot speculate us to everything from the comfort of an armchair. IDists appear to think that we should; but unfortunately, science progresses mostly through a lot of wrong guesses, and the occasional right guess. As Thomas Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." This quote was picked up from Mike Dunford's post Peer Review at The Questionable Authority. – thanks Mike :-).

The promise of ID to deliver a more rapid turn-around for scientific discoveries is questionable; after all, the scientific output of the ID community is this far rather meagre; see e.g. the above linked post by Mike Dunford.

That "evolutionists claim that lucky accidents brought the parts together and assembled them" is made out of pure straw. Evolution can occur everywhere within an organism; the function of a component such as what now is a flagellum can have evolved, and each part can have its own evolutionary history; maybe Heinze shouldn't rely so much on IDists' misrepresentations of evolutionary theory?

But since Heinze has his inspiration from the IDists, he continues completely off track:

Why would they even consider such a dumb idea? Because their definition of science makes intelligent design "unscientific".

As indicated above, evolutionists do not consider such a dumb idea, so there's really no point in Heinze's "Because ..."

Which makes Heinze's following paragraph pathetic:

Hiding the evidence for intelligent design from our students is a horrible, despicable crime against them. How many students would believe in evolution today if the evidence that God was the Designer and Creator had not been hidden from them?

Counter-question: how many students would believe in creation/ID today if a more thorough understanding of science, including evolutionary thery, had been provided by schools? The main problem with ID is that its proponents exploit that people don't know all that much about, how science works. Maybe scientists should do more out of informing the general public about, how science works? This would certainly give the IDists a harder time; they would have to leave their comfortable armchairs and not only to travel around repeating the same old stuff that has been debunked so many times over and over again. The public deserves better than what the IDists have to offer.

Heinze ends with these words:

You can get more information to help students and teachers find the truth in The Vanishing Proofs of Evolution, In the Beginning Soup? and How Life Began published by Chick Publications.

Since Heinze went completely off track a few paragraphs ago, I'd suspect that these Tracts are just leading even further into the wilderness of misconceptions.

In short, if you need to laugh or cry, reading a Chick Tract might be the way to go; otherwise, just stay away from them.

Review of C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity

2006-11-21T14:19:00.000+01:00

Quotes are taken from C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity, Fount 1997 (first edition: Geoffrey Bles, 1952).

Having read much acclamation of C.S. Lewis on Internet sites, I decided last year to read some of his books, and I started with The Abolition of Man from 1943 and was actually rather disappointed. To me it was fairly standard conservative propaganda, and I actually gave up finishing reading the book. It was too predictive – not exactly uniteresting, only too predictive. It should be noted that I had just finished writing a paper on a Danish conservative pastor and politician, and there were simply too many similarities for comfort.

Now I have picked up Mere Christianity, which is based on three radio program series from 1942-44 - that is from pretty much the same time as The Abolition of Man. While it is mostly more of the same, Mere Christianity does have a few advantages in that it has a more concrete topic.

According to the Preface, the book explains the common base of Christianity – therefore the title. Lewis had it reviewed by four clergymen, an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic. In general it was accepted by all four, though the Methodist thought Lewis had said too little about Faith, and the Roman Catholic thought that he had gone to far about the unimportance of theories in explaining Atonement. That is, the book should give a reasonable impression of the common base of standard British Christianity in the 1940s.

As mentioned, Mere Christianity is based on radio programs, so it is addressed to 'ordinary' people, it's not a philosophical treatise, and I am aware that therefore it should not be read as if it were a philosophical treatise. Also it was written during the WW II, and that war is clearly present as a shadow behind the book – in its beginning question whether there really is a difference between good and evil. If there is not, how can we then condemn Nazism?

The book Mere Christianity actually consists of four books:

Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe;
What Christians believe;
Christian Behaviour; and
Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity.

Book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

Here Lewis introduces two different meanings of 'natural law'. The first meaning refers to, what today is usually understood by a natural law: a law such as the law of gravity that is obeyed without volition. If you hold a stone in your hand and let it go, it will fall to the ground – the stone cannot 'choose' whether it will fall or not. The second meaning refers to the idea that most humans recognize certain rules for conduct, rules that at least in earlier times were considered so self-evident that they could be considered an unwritten natural law with the same force as written laws. While the human body is subject to the natural laws – such as the law of gravity – according to the first meaning, it is human behavior that is subject to the second meaning of natural law, and we can choose to obey that law or not in the sense that we do not necessarily follow it.

According to Lewis, this natural law – in the second meaning as a moral law – is not an instinctive behavior, because it is used to arbitrate between instinctive impulses (cf. pp. 8-10) and it can therefore not be one of those impulses itself.

It is this moral law that enables us to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. That is, according to Lewis, moral relativism is factually wrong.

More importantly, the moral laws, since they do not describe actual human behavior, are not derivable as actual facts of human behavior and must therefore be something above and beyond the descriptive laws, it most be an actual law as something given by a lawgiver (cf. p. 18).

On pp. 18-19, Lewis discusses two views about the universe. One view is the materialist, according to which matter and space just happen to exist, and development is driven by chance. The other view is the religious, according to which there is a conscious mind behind the universe, a mind with purposes, one of which has been to produce creatures that have a mind as well. According to Lewis, these two views actually sum up all the possibilities in that any intermediate view really just is a form of either of these two.

Since there is the moral law, and we cannot deduce it from observations of actual human behavior, yet we know it from within ourself, we can conclude that somebody must have made that law and put it into us, and that somebody cannot be part of the universe.

That is, our conscience, which is supposedly universal (as Lewis claims in The Abolition of Man) is a proof of the existence of a transcendental consciousness.

This idea can also be found in Paul's Letter to the Romans:

Rom 2:14 (for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves;

Rom 2:15 in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them);

The law Paul is referring to here is the written law. The Gentiles do not have this law, since it was given only to the Jews; but they are still applying the commandments of the law as witnessed by their conscience. This is the same principle of the universality of the law.

The obvious problem both with Lewis' argumentation and Paul's claim is that this law is something rather fuzzy, it's simply 'the law' without any precise specification of exactly, what the commandments of that law are – though later in Romans 2 it is clear that The Ten Commandments are referred to by Paul. Also, Paul's point is that, while the law was given to the Jews, the descendants of Abraham, to whom also was given the commandment of circumcision, the law is universal, and therefore:

Rom 2:28 For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh:

Rom 2:29 but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.

So, Paul is arguing for a change in the definition of 'Jew' from being applied to a certain ethnicity to being applied universally. Are we therefore to assume that sometime during the first century ce suddenly all non-Jews were supplied with a conscience or what?

How universal are Lewis' moral law? It is diffucult to figure out without more precise knowledge about this law. That all human societies acknowledge some moral law does not on its own prove that it is the same law. Actually Lewis takes this question up half-ways in Book 3, where he mentions the four 'Cardinal' virtues that are common to all civilized cultures, and the three 'Theological' virtues (Charity, Hope, and Faith) that are special to Christianity (cf. p. 63).

Actually, I dare even go as far as to say that within the same society, there can be more than one moral law.

One day, when I was in a supermarket, I - as I always do - first went to the check-out line after having gathered all the (not very many) goods I was to buy. At the back of the line was a shopping cart with goods in it, but no person behind it. However, I placed myself behind the cart, expecting its owner to show up very soon. Customers occasionally leave their carts for a very short term, while fetching the last thing or two on a neighby shelf, and I thought that might be the case here. But no one showed up, and the line in front of the cart moved forward, and of course the cart and I then had to follow. Occasionally shop personnel use carts while putting goods on the shelves and leave them, if they momentarily are called to do something else. Also, occasionally, customers simply abandon their carts and leave the shop, if they get tired of waiting in line. That is, from prior experience I had reason to think that the cart might not be 'standing' in line. Still, I decided to keep my place and see, if the owner of the cart didn't show up. The line in front of the cart then moved one more customer forwards, and since the cart didn't show the least intention to follow, I decided that I had to be an abandoned cart, and I moved to the back of the active part of the check-out line. In that very moment a woman came to the cart and yelled at me: "You were sure quick there!" Apparently, in here mind I was an egocentric exploiting the situation. Since fighting about a place back or forth in a check-out line is very low on my priority list of things I consider worth fighting about, I went back to my old place behind the cart without a word, and the woman pushed the cart up to the back of the line, also without a word.

As this story shows, this woman and I apparently were following very different moral laws. Should I say that the law I followed was superior to hers? Of course, otherwise I wouldn't be following it – but I must assume that the woman also considered her moral law to be superior, so what's the point?

On p. 11, Lewis writes:

We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers - people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

Or maybe you just consider your own moral rules to be the Real Morality and assign to yourself the right to judge other people as if they were subject to your rules. Isn't Lewis here simply claiming that he can overrule everyone else with whatever moral rules he happens to have accepted?

That is, unfortunately it is all just a question of might makes right; if you happen to have the power to coerce other people to play by your rules, you can claim that your rules are universal, otherwise you can't.

In short, I find Lewis' argumentation insufficient to prove anything else than that everyone's a potential dictator; but we hardly need Lewis to tell us that. By the end of the day, morality only serves to justify that some people can use whatever means of force they might have at disposition to control other people. Morality is nothing but power politics. That's the Real World.

In that real world you find out, what is wrong by being punished, and the one that punishes you is therefore morally superior, even if you think it is the other way around. That is, morality is just another name for pecking order. There is in the real world no other crime than to be punished.

Now, Lewis just prior to the above quoted passage from p. 11 writes:

Have any of the changes [in morality] been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.

This is, of course, directed against moral relativism – presumably with 'civilised morality' = 'Christian morality' and 'savage morality' = 'Nazi morality'. But that is from the point of view of a British academic, who with the consent of British clergymen is defining the universal moral law and implying that we either accept that moral law or accept to be considered on the level of the Nazis that are universally considered to be bad guys.

Book 2: What Christians believe

Lewis begins with claiming that "[i]f you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through." (cf. p. 29) This might have been the case for British Christianity; but look to the USA. Such tolerance is not tolerated there: you are either a Christian or completely wrong.

Next Lewis claims that "[i]f you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the world is simply one huge mistake." So, it's the atheists that are intolerant. In my personal experience, there are indeed very intolerant atheists; but maybe Lewis is wrong about, what is the main point in all the religions of the world? I am no expert on religions; but I have taken some courses in the science of religion, and in the course History of Religion, we were told that it was actually a problem to define 'religion', since there was no single thing in common for them, not even the belief in one or more gods. And Buddhism, while acknowledging the existence of (the Hindu) gods, does not assign any significance to them; they are not to be worshipped.

Following the above comments about atheists, Lewis divides humanity into two divisions, the majority that believes in some kind of God or gods, and the minority that does not. Lewis also sees it as Christianity lined up with all other religions against "the modern Western European materialist." The next big division is between those who believe that God is beyond good and evil and those who believe that God is 'good' or 'righteous'. The first view is called Pantheism, the second view is held by "Jews, Mohammedans and Christians."

The obvious problem here is, what kind of sense does it make to say that God is good or righteous? Isn't it merely a definition? If God does it, it is good and righteous? In the Flood story, God almost exterminates all life on earth. That wouldn't be considered a good action, if done by humans; but God isn't measured with the same standard as humans, so the Flood was good, because it was an act of God. A god who is good by definition is a god who is beyond good and evil, isn't it?

However, apparently Lewis sees it differently – but he doesn't tell us, what it means that God is good, so the point appears simply to be that some religions are different from others.

Pantheism, Lewis tells us, also implies that God is part of this world, while the Christian idea is that God is the creator of the universe; like an artist is not part of his products and doesn't die, if they are destroyed. Though God created the world, things have gone wrong in it, and "God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again."

The obvious question here is, how could things have gone wrong, unless God was an incompetent artist? According to Genesis 1, every time God made something, he saw that it was good, and he finished his master piece with creating humans in his own image, leaned back and saw that it was very good, and then he went to take a well-deserved rest – and we know what happened in the mean time. Perhaps God had too high ambitions for his qualifications?

Lewis, while he was an atheist, had asked himself the question, how the world could go wrong, how it could be so cruel and unjust, if it was made by a good god (cf. p. 31). Then he asked himself, from where he had got the idea of just and unjust? Using the idea of just and unjust against God destroys the idea – because if it is only a private idea, the world is not really unjust. That is, by trying to prove that God did not exist, that the whole of relity was senseless, Lewis found one part of reality – his idea of justice – that was full of sense. From this, Lewis concludes that atheism turns out to be too simple.

Well, Descartes did pretty much the same four centuries earlier, so why not? The problem here is that different people may have different ideas about, what is just and unjust, but how many gods are Christians allowed to operate with? During his discussion of Pantheism, Lewis rejects the idea that there could be different moral standards, for example that the older you get, the more you tend to see things from more than one point of view. The Christian idea of just and unjust remains the same and doesn't depend on any personal knowledge – Lewis' idea of just and unjust is absolute, everybody has to bow down to, what Lewis considers to be just and unjust. So Lewis is God? He would have said 'no', I'm sure; but modesty is the true sign of divinity, isn't it?

Not only is atheism too simple for Lewis, but so is, what he calls Christianity-and-water, "the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right" (cf. p. 33). Besides the good God in Heaven there are also "all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption" (ibid.).

Don't we all know it? First there's all the love-bombing to get us inside the church, but when we have come inside, the door is locked, and the whip is pulled out. What else is new?

Lewis proceeds to discuss dualism, whereby he means the idea that there are two powers, one good and the other bad. He dismisses this idea with the obvious reason that to determine which is which, you need a standard from an even higher power, so really there can be only one ultimate power. Not that there isn't a dark power in the world, which is in rebellion against God and has occupied this world. In the last paragraph on p. 37, this imagery becomes even more war-like:

Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.

But who is the devil? The Nazis would have been easy targets for a projection back, when Lewis held his radio talks, and that's what he is playing on here. If Christians are always liberators, only bad people can be against them. Lewis makes it not a choice, whether you want to be Christian or not; you are either a Christian or the agent of the enemy.

Who is the devil? The communists? The Muslims? The Liberals? The Darwinists? You? The Nazis were a real threat to Britain back in 1942-44; but the same logic can be used to whip up fear for just about anything and anyone, and as a Christian you need to project the devil somewhere – to avoid having it projected on yourself; either you or somebody else is the enemy. In short, I find it too easy to mis-use Lewis' image of Christians as part of a secret society to liberate the world; but then again, Lewis is only telling, how Christians view themselves. And what else could he do? By definition, Christianity is beyond critique; anyone who criticizes Christians is part of the evil enemy, the Dark Power.

Next up is, of course, how could this evil power have "made himself for the present the Prince of this World"? (cf. p. 39). Oh, we know – it's that free will, and if something's free to be good, it's also free to be bad. God is so adorably good that he has given us a free will, and therefore it's of our own free will that things are as bad as they are. We have just listened to Lewis tell us that being Christian is cooperating with a liberator, and going to church is listening to the secret radio messages from our friends, so we went to church. And the door was locked behind us. And the love-bombing pastor suddenly pulls out the whip and starts yelling and screamimg at us that it's all our own fault: we are ourself the baddies. We killed the dinosaurs, and so on. Makes you wonder, if supporting the Nazis could have been worse, doesn't it? Except that they of course also said "Gott mit uns" ("God (is) with us").

But God couldn't have made it in any other way, because free will is the only thing that makes "possible any love or goodness or joy worth having." (cf. p. 40). Lewis writes (ibid.):

The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

I warned you against all that love-bombing, didn't I? Anyway, it doesn't work: if there is a 50% chance that a human, given the choice, will sin, even God should have realized it won't work. Have just two humans, and it will go wrong. Anyway, it's not the impression you get from the Bible that God wants us to have "the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other"; the impression is that either you join God or you are killed. And since there's a 50% chance that you won't join God, prospects are dire.

How did the "Dark Power" go wrong? Lewis admits – to his credit – that we cannot give an answer with any certainty to that question; but he can offer a "reasonable (and traditional) guess, based on our own experiences of going wrong" (cf. loc. cit.):

The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race.

This sin is, what Lewis in Book 3 calls 'Pride' (cf. the chapter "The Great Sin", beginning p. 100). However, as the Bible has it, God created humans in his own image. Since God wants to be God, humans therefore want to be God as well – they were created that way. It's not a sin, but a design flaw – blame the designer. During creation week, God did that which looked good in his eyes, so humans, created in his image (and therefore looking very good in his eyes), could do nothing else but what looked good in their eyes. No reason to guess; the biblical text is actually rather clear here.

On p. 41, Lewis writes:

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended – civilisations are built up – excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.

So, Lewis manages to derive an entire world history out of his guess. Running along with this, we might even say that it applies to Christianity, even that must have been corrupted by Satan. The sin of Adam and Eve was that they wanted to become wise as God and know about good and evil – isn't that what any Christian wants to inform us about? That something is good, and something is evil, and which is which. But for some reason, lewis doesn't apply his own guess to Christianity.

Next Lewis gives a small recap of the story of the chosen people, the Jews, up to Jesus, introducing the latter on p. 42 with these words:

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if he was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time.

It's not quite like that, however. As Lewis points out, for the Jews, God meant "the Being outside the world," so how could Jesus talk as if he was God? Let's us read in the Gospel of Markus:

Mar 10:17 And as [Jesus] was going forth into the way, there ran one to him, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

Mar 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good save one, even God.

Of course, the question here could be rhetorical; but the simple explanation would be that Jesus is not claiming to be God, though perhaps acting on God's authority. Lewis is right that it would have been a rather un-Jewish thing for Jesus to claim to be God, even to be considered to be God; after all, wasn't the sin of Adam and Eve that they wanted to be like God? And the gospels go around this tricky bit very carefully, even to the extent that Jesus' rôle as the Messiah (a title for humans) was to be kept a secret. And it isn't Jesus that is going to come and judge the world, it's 'the son of man', whoever that was supposed to be. Sure, Jesus is identified as the Messiah, the son of man, the son of God, and all that – but not as God himself in the gospels.

Lewis mentions that "[a]mong Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it." So, maybe the idea that Jesus was God originated among 'Pantheists'? For a more Hellenized Jew as Paul, the idea of a human as God was less strange. And we even see this in the gospels: it is in general Gentiles that have an easier time acknowledging Jesus.

A religion built up on the idea that no human is God, even that no human is good, isn't exactly the religion, in which it makes too much sense to claim to be God or good. Should we say that it is yet another of God's design flaws?

On p. 43, Lewis writes:

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; ot you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

In a society that only acknowledges God as good, and where God is "the Being outside the world," there is no "Good Teacher" of course, and that's the problem. How can you change that society? It's not possible, because you cannot be good, unless you are God, and God is outside the world, not inside it.

Christians say that we should let Jesus come into our lives; but how can we, if Jesus is God, and God is always outside the world? A lot of speculation has been done to solve that problem. As an aside, being a "Son of God" in the Old Testament doesn't make you a god yourself, this title is used for angels and the kings of the Davidic dynasty; it's simply anyone who serves God and thereby gains divine authority, not someone who's a god himself. Throughout the Old Testament we see these sons of God misuse their divine authority, so it's not as if it's all that promising that Jesus is yet another son of God. Therefore, Jesus must be elevated to be God himself – except that doesn't work, because God is always outside the world. Remember that only a 'Pantheist' can have a god coincide with the world.

Really there is no difference between Christianity and 'Pantheism' – in the eucharist, the believer refuels himself with the god as in all the other mystery cults.

Lewis isn't into speculations either. On p. 46, he treats us to a condensed version of Christianity.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity.

So, death is disabled, and pigs can fly.

Lewis next writes about repentance and atonement; but we'll scroll forwards to p. 50, where he again picks up the theme about death:

Now the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than our trying to follow His teaching.

And luckily we won't have to marry in that new life, because we'll be like angels, right? Apparently, Lewis doesn't refer to a physical death here, but to the death of our old self and having a new life in Jesus put into us. It's just that not all Christians see it this way; they take it to be literal, physical death that has been disabled, once Jesus returns. Obviously, physical death wasn't disabled in the first century ce, and 2 Peter comes up with many excuses for that. Apparently, the first Christians believed that if they transformed themself into the image of Jesus, they would be recognized as the good guys on Doomsday, and be taken to heaven and never die physically.

What is this new life after non-physical death then? On p. 53, Lewis writes:

And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being 'in Christ' or of Christ being 'in them', this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts – that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body.

For Lewis, this earthly body of Christ, through which he operates, is like a secret society with the object of undermining the devil. But that's not the whole story; Lewis writes p. 54:

Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think he is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade.

But we have to prepare the invasion, by doing sabotage actions and so on. This idea of being a secret society preparing for the invasion of the main force has its clear drawbacks, when looking at the world today. It can be used to legitimate Christian subversion of regimes elsewhere, but there is another religion that knows the same secret formula, Islam. And don't forget the feminists; they also want to conquer the world – using the same promises of a return to Paradise. Everybody promises a return to Paradise, and why should the one party be chosen rather than any other? By experience we know that no merchandise lives up to its advertising, so why can't we just say that they are all wrong, and that secret societies are the real Satan?

Lewis ends Book 2 with the words (ibid.):

Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

See, I told you: first the love-bombing, then the whip – and the door is locked behind you. You can avoid this by not entering in the first round.

Book 3: Christian Behaviour

On p. 59, Lewis writes:

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

Ok, so morality really is crowd control; but who is to control the crowd? That is, by the end of the day, morality is nothing but a power struggle. In actual practise, morality certainly has nothing to do we fair play and nothing at all to do with harmony between individuals. Morality serves the purpose of allowing some people to yell and scream at others – of course not officially, but we are here talking about actual practise.

Lewis continues discussing these three parts of morality, and concerning the second part, he writes p. 61:

Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.

Yes, let's reinvent slavery. If we are tenants in our own minds and bodies, then we'll be cast out, if we don't pay the rent. If you have lost your job, so you can't pay the rent, you'll be out of your mind and body, and you are even to consider that a blessing. If God made us, that means that he is responsible for us, not only that he can use us as zombie soldiers in his silly war against himself.

Notice, how things work here: first the love-bombing, then the threat that you'll be whipped, if you don't do as commanded, and now that you'll be thrown out of your mind, if you should get the idea to develop one of your own.

Beginning the next paragraph, Lewis writes that "Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever," and he ends it by writing:

If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

So, a Christian nation should make no sense; but actually some Christians claim that such a thing exists. The problem is, that even if we live forever, it's not here on earth. Actually, our earthly life becomes of no real importance, if it's just a passing moment before the everlasting life in heaven or hell. This is the kind of stuff that makes suicide bombers.

Over the next pages, Lewis discusses Christian virtues. We won't go into that, except have a small peek at a passage from the chapter on Forgiveness. On p. 97, Lewis writes:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of hinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.

Yes, the devil is really a nice guy, once you get to know him, isn't he? Don't believe all those stories that Christians tell about him. Too bad that the bad guys aren't really bad, and the good guys aren't really good. What happens with the absoluteness of good and evil then? Lewis would probably have said that nothing had happened. It's not the moral standards that are changing, only the assumption about whether some party behaves quite as bad as that party should to become the devil incarnate. But what is the practical difference? Many Christians today consequently focus on negative things to say about Muslims and are not really concerned with to what extent these things are true or not. Islam is the incarnation of the Dark Power, so it must be bad through and through, even if you should happen to know some Muslims that aren't. And let's not talk about Darwinists; not even about OECs (Old Earth Creationists); they have all given in to the Dark Power. Once you have the idea that good and evil are absolutes and identifiable, good will be projected onto your own party and evil onto the opposite party, and evidence will be invented to show that it's the plain and simple truth. But Lewis doesn't mention anything about this.

A little later, Lewis writes (pp. 97-98):

Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.

So, the whole point of "love your neighbor" and "love your enemy" is to kill them, whereby you show that you love them. With love like that, who needs hatred? For Christians, apparently, love and hatred is one and the same.

Can you see, what I warned you against? The love-bombing turns into hate-bombing the longer we stay in the church, and remember that the door is locked behind you, once you step into the church.

Christian morality can be used to defend anything – really, literally anything whatsoever.

What's worse is, what Lewis writes a little earlier on p. 96:

Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

But if you kill a person, you kill a person, not an action. If you flog a person, you flog a person, not an action. If you imprison a person, you imprison a person, not an action.

No wonder that Christians appear cold , arrogant and self-righteous to other people. If you have the right to kill your enemies, you can simply declare anybody your enemy and then kill them. Or, certainly you have the right to kill anybody that is an enemy of God, and who isn't an enemy of God? Anybody that doesn't do as you command them to do? Why is that different from killing the enemies of the state or the enemies of the revolution?

Lewis is aware there's a problem. On p. 98-99, he writes:

I imagine somebody will say, 'Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed.

In other words, Christians are people that do things for no other reason than that they are written in a book, and they do it with cold blood.

A few sentences later, Lewis continues:

Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves – to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him; wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying that he is nice when he is not.

Within its own strange world, this, of course, makes sense. The life here on earth if of little importance compared to the eternal life in heaven or hell, so loving someone means wishing that they end up in heaven, not doing anything for them here on earth. Except, what's the point in charity then? Why not kill poor people, so they can go to heaven? Or do they go to hell? For being poor?

Around a year ago I was invited to a local Islamic Culture Center, where I was told about Islam. It was quite interesting, and it was pretty much the same as the above. There was a story about the daughter of an emir; she had stolen something and was sentenced to have her right hand cut off, a sentence that was executed despite the high rank of this woman. I was off course told that this severe punishment depended on that it wasn't out of need that she had stolen, and the thing she had stolen had been in a locked room, so it wasn't because she was tempted by the ease of the theft. She had committed a deliberate, unexcusable theft. But that wasn't all: the severe punishment was to spare her for an even worse punishment in the afterlife, so it was actually to her own advantage. Still I found the punishment wrong, though without saying it.

Sure, within this line of thinking, the Christian and the Muslim (they are really the same religion) are right in thinking as they do. It's just that, if they are wrong, they are the cold-blooded instruments of Satan.

C.S. Lewis was borne in 1898, he served as a soldier during WW I, and Mere Christianity is based on radio talks from WW II. I have never served as a soldier, nor lived in a country involved in a war against it, so I am prepared to accept that Lewis' view is formed by experiences that I do not have. In return, however, I will say that building an absolute morality on personal experiences and something that happens to be written in some book is a very shaky foundation.

Continuing on p. 99, Lewis writes:

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself.

An alternative way to interpret the commandment of loving others like yourself could be as follows. With yourself you have introspection; you judge yourself knowing why, not only what you did. So to love others like yourself would mean to judge them by the why, not the what. If you cannot find anything lovable by a person, just acknowledge that you know too little about what is really going on inside that person; do not judge outside your understanding. This would, in my humble opinion be more compatible with the gospel texts, even if Lewis' version may be more compatible with standard Christianity.

Lewis ends the chapter with:

Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco...

But people have given up beer and/or tobacco. What is wrong in saying that God loves us because he, maybe even better than we self, knows what is inside us? He doesn't love us for our achievements, but for our possibilities that are more likely to come to the surface through love than through hate or neglect. But that is of course based on this life, not the eternal life, so of no interest to Christians.

Book 4: Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

As the title of this book indicates, Lewis is here introducing the trinity. I don't have anything to say to about this introduction except that it leads up to the idea that Jesus was the first new human (or new man, as Lewis writes, but people have become more gender-sensitive since then), and being a Christian means to let Jesus help you become such a new human yourself by establishing a mutual relationship between you and the Father.

Lewis explains, in my humble opinion, this quite well (just to say something positive for a change). On p. 130, he explains the difference between being 'created' and being 'begotten'. According to the Nicene Creed, Jesus, the Son, is begotten, not created. As Lewis explains it, the difference is that since Jesus is begotten, he is of the same kind as the Father, whereas a created thing would have been of a different kind. Humans can make ('create') various things, such as a wireless set, which isn't itself a human; but humans beget humans. Therefore, this new human the Christian is to become as a son of God is actually to become of the same kind as God.

Lewis ends the book with the words:

Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Such as punishment and death penalty. I am not buying, but how about you? Remember that once you step inside that church, the door is locked behind you.

Information in RNA codons

2006-11-21T14:04:00.000+01:00

m-RNA codons (or triplets) consist of three nucleotide bases, usually identified by their first letter: U(racil), C(ytosine), A(denine), and G(uanine). In DNA, T(hymine) replaces U(racil).

The codons code for 20 amino acids, and three codons function as stop codes. The codon ('AUG') that codes for the amino acid methionine also functions as start code. In short, we can say that there are 21 instructions of the codons: 20 amino acids (including methionine/start code).

The total content of information measured in bits in the instructions is log₂(21) = 4,3923. The maximum capacity of information in a single nucleotide is log₂(4) = 2, since there are four different nucleotides, and the maximum capacity of information in a codon is log₂(4³) = 3*log₂(4) = 6. That is, there is close to 1.6 bits of 'unused' information capacity in the codons, almost an entire nucleotide's worth.

If we look at the first nucleotide in codons, we get this table:

U	7	2.8074
C	5	2.3219
A	7	2.8074
G	5	2.3219
	24

The first column indicates the nucleotide, the second column counts the number of instructions with a codon with the corresponding nucleotide as the first, and the third column shows the residual information needed; that is, the information needed in the remaining two nucleotides to resolve which instruction is coded for. Second column, fifth row counts the four preceding rows. Since some amino acids, such as leucine, have codons with different initial nucleotides, the number of instructions is 24 rather than 21.

Looking at the first two nucleotides, we get this table:

UU	2	1
UC	1	0
UA	2	1
UG	3	1.5850
CU	1	0
CC	1	0
CA	2	1
CG	1	0
AU	2	1
AC	1	0
AA	2	1
AG	2	1
GU	1	0
GC	1	0
GA	2	1
GG	1	0
	25

Explanations are analogous to the above.

As can be seen, in only one case, 'UG', is the residual information greater than 1, and in eight cases, that is in half of all cases, the residual information is 0. This means that the third nucleotide actually carries very little information; none at all, where there's a '1' in the second column above (or a '0' in the third column).

To make this somewhat clearer, let's rearrange the table to have it ordered by the second nucleotide:

UU	2
CU	1
AU	2
GU	1
UC	1
CC	1
AC	1
GC	1
UA	2
CA	2
AA	2
GA	2
UG	3
CG	1
AG	2
GG	1

As can be clearly seen here, the codons whose instruction is fully determined by the two first nucleotides (those with a '1' in the second column above) are those codons, who have a 'C' as the second nucleotide or a C or G as the first nucleotide and a 'U' or 'G' as the second nucleotide. Put differently, if a codon has a 'C' as the second nucleotide, or it has a 'C' or 'G' as the first nucleotide and the second nucleotide is not an 'A', the third nucleotide does not add any information.

This suggests that the RNA/DNA codes have themself evolved, from an original two-nucleotide code based on 'C' (a pyrimidine) and 'G' (a purine), or simply only distinguishing between pyrimidines ('C' and 'U'/'T') and purines ('G' and 'A').

Acknowledgements: When I originally wrote this post, I had not noticed that there are two groups of serine, and I therefore counted 21 amino acids. I posted a part of this post at TheologyWeb, and user Roy made me aware of the error.

Non-monotonic Search

2006-11-12T12:02:00.000+01:00

In monotonic logic, the following implication always holds true:

(1) if A Þ B, then A Ù C Þ B

That is, no additional information can invalidate an already established conclusion.

In non-monotonic logic, of which monotonic logic is a special case, implication (1) does not necessarily hold true.

Consider an example: most apples that you know about are red, so if your always reliable friend Bill tells you that he has an apple, you will assume that it is a red apple, that is

(2) Bill has an apple Þ Bill has a red apple

Now, Bill tells you that it is a yellow apple, so you readjust your conclusion from this additional information. That is you get:

(3) Bill has an apple Ù Bill has a yellow apple Þ Bill has a yellow apple

Let us consider a more complicated example. You are driving towards town C, when you come to a crossroad, where the road splits into three, one road leading to town A, the second road leading to town B, and the third road leading to town C. You are running low on gas, and you can't reach town C without refueling. Luckily, you have been told that there is a gas station in one of the towns A and B, and you have enough gas left to reach at least one of these towns. You just can't remember, which of A and B has a gas station.

That is, we have

(4) There is a gas station in town A or in town B, but not in both

Your problem is to pick one of the towns to drive to.

Scenario 1:

You have enough gas to drive to either of the towns, back to the crossroad, and then to the other town. That is, no reason to panic, just pick either of towns A and B. When you arrive there, you'll have the answer to which town has a gas station.

We can formulate this as that your current information allows for two possible worlds: one in which town A, but not town B, has a gas station, and one in which town B, but not town A, has a gas station. Since town A is the nearest, and you want to minimize the minimal distance you have to drive, you pick town A. That is, you apply some rule to prefer one of the possible worlds as the real world.

That is, we have

(5) (4) Ù A is the nearest town Þ there is a gas station in A

However, when you arrive at town A, you find that it does not have a gas station. From this you can safely conclude that there is a gas station in town B. That is, even though you made a wrong guess, you anyway ended up gaining information, which you wouldn't have done, if you hadn't made any guess at all.

We now have

(6) ((4) Ù A is the nearest town) Ù there is not a gas station in A Þ there is a gas station in B

Luckily, a premise for this scenario was that you have gas enough to drive back to the crossroad and then to town B for your refueling.

Scenario 2:

As above, except that you do not have enough gas left to drive to both towns; you need to pick either, and if it's the wrong one, you're stuck. However, notice that even in this case, assuming you go through the same reasonings and actions as above, implication (6) still holds. You cannot get a refuel, but you have gained information through at least making a choice and acting accordingly. Assume you have enough gas left after reaching town A to drive back to the crossroad - though you cannot continue to town B. Then you can draw a gas station symbol on the road sign to town B and thereby make you information available to other drivers that then will not have to go through what you have been through.

The main point here is that in case of a disjunction, monotonic logic is a show-stopper, while non-monotonic logic at least allows you to proceed by making a choice and acting according to that choice, and by that you may gain information to dissolve the disjunction.

Materialism, naturalism, and atheism

2006-11-09T17:21:00.000+01:00

On the blog for The Christian Cadre, contributor BK has written a post, Dawkins' Dilemma, in which BK refers to a post by Pastor Dustin S. Segers on Segers' blog Grace in the Triad, which asks, how a materialist atheist like Richard Dawkins can view the god of the Old Testament as a monster. From where does Dawkins derive his standards?

Now, I am no expert on Dawkins; but while I know that he is a self-declared atheist, I do not know that he has declared himself to be a materialist. Actually from BK's quoting of Segers, I can say that Dawkins doesn't quite fit the bill.

BK quotes Segers for the following two syllogisms:

Syllogism One:

1. Material things are extended in space.
2. Objective moral laws are not extended in space.
3. Therefore, objective moral laws are non-material.
4. Materialism posits that non-material entities do not exist.
5. Therefore, objective moral laws do not exist.

and

Syllogism Two:

1. Objective moral laws are universal entities that apply to all people, places, and times.
2. Materialism holds that only particular entities have ontological existence.
3. No material thing is a universal entity.
4. Objective moral laws are not material things.
5. Therefore, objective moral laws do not exist.

I can positively say that Dawkins does not adhere to the materialism implicitly defined by these two syllogisms.

On p. 127 of The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins writes:

DNA gets the best of both worlds. DNA molecules themselves, as physical entities, are like dewdrops. Under the right conditions they come into existence at a great rate, but no one of them has existed for long, and all will be destroyed within a few months. They are not durable like rocks. But the patterns that they bear in their sequences are as durable as the hardest rocks. They have what it takes to exist for millions of years, and that is why they are still here today. The essential difference from dewdrops is that new dewdrops are not begotten by old dewdrops. Dewdrops doubtless resemble other dewdrops, but they don't specifically resemble their own 'parent' dewdrops. Unlike DNA molecules, they don't form lineages, and therefore can't pass on messages. Dewdrops come into existence by spontaneous generation, DNA messages by replication.

That is, while DNA molecules are material, genes = DNA patterns are not, though each concrete instance needs to exist in a material form. Genes therefore violate premise 2 of Segers' Syllogism Two. DNA molecules are particular entities; but DNA patterns are not.

Therefore, Dawkins is not a materialist, at least not according to Segers' definition.

Materialism should be distinguished from naturalism, according to which no supernatural consciousness is actively operating in the universe. Dawkins uses the word meme in analogy to gene, where a meme is a thought pattern, not some assembly of neurons - two persons can share a meme, but they don't share neurons. A meme can be something like 'you shall not cause suffering', which most people accept. Such memes, while not material, can still be completely natural, because they need not be impressed by direct operation by any supernatural, conscious entity, and they can be 'inherited' by social interaction.

Now, the Sixth Commandment (Deuteronomy 5:17) says "You shall not kill". Assume this to be an objective moral law. Then, according to Segers, it "appl[ies] to all people, places, and times". In 1 Samuel 15:1-3 we have this interesting passage:

1Sa 15:1 And Samuel said unto Saul, Jehovah sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of Jehovah.

1Sa 15:2 Thus saith Jehovah of hosts, I have marked that which Amalek did to Israel, how he set himself against him in the way, when he came up out of Egypt.

1Sa 15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

It is the prophet Samuel telling King Saul to slay — that is, kill — all the Amalekites, "both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." It is even a divine commandment, Samuel is passing on the words of Yahweh, though not an absolute moral law, because it is specifically addressed to Saul. As reason for this commandment is given that Yahweh "ha[s] marked that which Amalek did to Israel".

But if the Sixth Commandment, "You shall not kill", with Segers' words, "appl[ies] to all people, places, and times", then it applies to Saul and can not be circumvented with any excuse, not even revenge.

That is, even (some) theists allow for exceptions to supposedly objective moral laws, so what's the whole point of such laws? Once you allow for a supernatural, conscious entity to intervene with human affairs, you allow for any specific commandment to preempt the supposedly objective moral laws.

Objective moral laws, if such exist, allow for no exceptions, not even exceptions imposed by the lawgiver. Note that Saul doesn't completely follow the instructions in that he doesn't kill the Amalekite king Agag and also keeps the best of the animals. Samuel then kills Agag; but even that doesn't finish off the Amalekites. They pop up again from time to time.

Possibly God has here been caught by his own laws; the Amalekites cannot be killed because of the Sixth Commandment? No matter how much God tries to finish off the Amalekites, not even he can do it.

Reconstructing a murder case

2006-11-07T13:36:00.000+01:00

This post is a follow-up to my previous post The sad, but true story of the Amalekites.

In God’s Law and Society: Foundations in Christian Reconstruction a number of Christian Reconstructionists answer a number of questions about the glorious future that will come when all nations on earth have become Christian. All this is to be accomplished simply by having people obey God's Law, whereby is meant the 10 Commandments. Occasionally it is mentioned that the other Mosaic Commandments - apart from ceremonial and dietary laws - are part of God's law as well. But we are assured that only the 10 Commandments are necessary, no further laws will be needed, and people are even allowed to be non-Christians - in their own homes. But then there are those other Mosaic Commandments that must be obeyed as well, because they are the words of Jesus. So all that's demanded is that you obey the 10 Commandments - and all the others.

But, we ask, what kind of punishments will there be in this glorious society? According to p. 73, there will be capital punishment:

Taking presuppositions that there has been a revival, that the nation has in fact turned to God, that there has been national repentance, that there has been some kind of reformation and return to sola scriptura—it is the final authority in all matters that it addresses. Murder is murder. Coming back to where we are today, it unnecessarily muddies up the water of the debate about abortion. People would say, “If we had a Christian nation, should we execute abortionists?” I believe it will happen. We will have that kind of Revival and Reformation. Then the laws about murder will apply.

So, murder is murder. But where do we enter that circular definition? What is murder?

In 1 samuel 15, God orders the total destruction of the Amalekites, including children and animals, to King Saul. Is God ordering murder here? God is ordering a deliberate killing of people, some of which could hardly have committed a worse crime than belonging to the wrong nation.

On p. 50 we have this interesting paragraph:

So we are not talking about Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. We are not talking about Islamic law. We’re talking about biblical law. If we go back and we look at the Commonwealth of the Hebrew Republic, before the kings, we see a very decentralized system of government. Many people have the notion that Moses was a dictator, but that was only in the initial stages of the Exodus, which was primarily a military operation. Soon after that we see that Moses was going to wear away the people and God not only gave 70 elders, but princes and captains of fifties and tens.

No, I haven't ever heard about the "Commonwealth of the Hebrew Republic" before either. Moses was only a dictator in the beginning, we are told. Does that mean that the author finds it ok to begin a republic with a dictatorship?

But let's look a bit more on that republic before the kings. On p. 42 we read:

No matter how good the system, unless it is under the aegis and covering of God’s Law, any system can revert to tyranny. It can be the tyranny of the majority of paganism, of humanism. Even in Israel, in the Hebrew Commonwealth, when they began to apostatize and fall away from God’s Law, what did they begin to cry out for?—a tyrant, a king “like all he [sic] other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). They paid the price for it in terms of wars, tyrannical suppression and taxation, and ultimately in the division of their nation in two separate entities and then the invasion of foreign pagan powers to bring them under the enslavement of their anti-God ways. So they ultimately paid the price and we will too if we don’t turn back to God’s Law.

As for wars and tyrannical suppression, Judges tells of nothing but that, so no change there in the kingdom. Also there didn't seem to be much of a Commonwealth, the tribes apparently operating independently with only the occasional judge gathering a few tribes together for a battle. As for taxation, if there really was a republic, there also was taxation. The latin word res publica literally means 'the public affairs' such as building and maintaining roads, bridges, and water supplies. Unless there were no public affairs and hence no republic, there was taxation.

And, talking about Judges, what does it say about the kingless period? There is a particularly nasty story in Judges 19-21, where all the other Israelite tribes wage war against the tribe of Benjamin. We won't go into the background here, but skip to, where the tribes apart from Benjamin go to ask God for advise:

Jdg 20:18 And the children of Israel arose, and went up to Beth-el, and asked counsel of God; and they said, Who shall go up for us first to battle against the children of Benjamin? And Jehovah said, Judah shall go up first.

But Judah is beaten, 18,000 men killed.

So they try again:

Jdg 20:23 And the children of Israel went up and wept before Jehovah until even; and they asked of Jehovah, saying, Shall I again draw nigh to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother? And Jehovah said, Go up against him.

But the children of Israel are beaten, 18,000 men killed.

So they try again:

Jdg 20:26 Then all the children of Israel, and all the people, went up, and came unto Beth-el, and wept, and sat there before Jehovah, and fasted that day until even; and they offered burnt-offerings and peace-offerings before Jehovah.

Jdg 20:27 And the children of Israel asked of Jehovah (for the ark of the covenant of God was there in those days,

Jdg 20:28 and Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, stood before it in those days), saying, Shall I yet again go out to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother, or shall I cease? And Jehovah said, Go up; for to-morrow I will deliver him into thy hand.

This time it works, and in the end only 600 Benjaminite men manage to flee to the Rock of Rimmon. Rather than chasing them, the other Israelites go on a massacre in Benjamin's territory:

Jdg 20:48 And the men of Israel turned again upon the children of Benjamin, and smote them with the edge of the sword, both the entire city, and the cattle, and all that they found: moreover all the cities which they found they set on fire.

After that with only the 600 Benjaminite men who fled to the Rock of Rimmon left of the whole tribe, the men of Israel again ask God:

Jdg 21:1 Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpah, saying, There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife.

Jdg 21:2 And the people came to Beth-el, and sat there till even before God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore.

Jdg 21:3 And they said, O Jehovah, the God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to-day one tribe lacking in Israel?

God doesn't answer.

There's more to the story, but we'll skip to the very end:

Jdg 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Apparently the morale is that without a king there will be war, even massacres, and even the high-priest and God himself will take part in this.

This is the kind of things that happen in a "republic" under God's Law.

Let's look at how it all started, not all the details, just a summary as told by one of the main characters:

Jdg 20:1 Then all the children of Israel went out, and the congregation was assembled as one man, from Dan even to Beer-sheba, with the land of Gilead, unto Jehovah at Mizpah.

Jdg 20:2 And the chiefs of all the people, even of all the tribes of Israel, presented themselves in the assembly of the people of God, four hundred thousand footmen that drew sword.

Jdg 20:3 (Now the children of Benjamin heard that the children of Israel were gone up to Mizpah.) And the children of Israel said, Tell us, how was this wickedness brought to pass?

Jdg 20:4 And the Levite, the husband of the woman that was murdered, answered and said, I came into Gibeah that belongeth to Benjamin, I and my concubine, to lodge.

Jdg 20:5 And the men of Gibeah rose against me, and beset the house round about me by night; me they thought to have slain, and my concubine they forced, and she is dead.

Jdg 20:6 And I took my concubine, and cut her in pieces, and sent her throughout all the country of the inheritance of Israel; for they have committed lewdness and folly in Israel.

It all started with one murder that was not ordered by God, but subsequently God was taking part in orders that led to the killing of several thousand people, including the almost extermination of the tribe of Benjamin.

Of course, we can say that the story illustrates that for God one murder is as serious as any number, and that all will be punished for it. But we can also say that the story illustrates that revenge is not a solution to any problems since it simply leads to even more violence, it's just yet another crime.

There is of course a clear difference to the Amalekite case, namely that the Benjaminites were Israelites, and special rules apply to family. The Amalekites were strangers, or were they? As mentioned in the prior post, the Amalekites were actually Edomites since they were descended from Esau and therefore also close relatives that were not to be abhored. Luckily they were descended, not only from Esau, but also from his Hittite wife, which made it more acceptable to wish them dead. There's always a bad excuse, an apologetic, isn't there? If nothing else, there's alway the excuse that God told you to do it, isn't there?

The Sixth Commandment says "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13), where the word used for 'kill' literally means 'shatter in pieces'. That is, there is nothing with "unless God commanded you to kill", not even "except to defend yourself or your family".

That Christian Reconstructionists defend capital punishment under God's Law is just one of many examples that tell that they don't even have a case.

Concerning how to build up this reconstructed Christian society, we find this on p. 78:

You start with a group of serious Christians who are obedient and who are willing to die for the cause—to die for Jesus, the brethren and the Truth. If we don’t have that, we can’t make headway in any century, but particularly at a crisis point in history like we have now—the coming collision course between Christian philosophy and anti-Christian philosophy. We must have people willing for martyrdom and holy living.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler writes:

The Pan-German Movement could hope for success only if the leaders realized from the very first moment that here there was no question so much of a new Party as of a new Weltanschauung. This alone could arouse the inner moral forces that were necessary for such a gigantic struggle. And for this struggle the leaders must be men of first-class brains and indomitable courage. If the struggle on behalf of a Weltanschauung is not conducted by men of heroic spirit who are ready to sacrifice, everything, within a short while it will become impossible to find real fighting followers who are ready to lay down their lives for the cause. A man who fights only for his own existence has not much left over for the service of the community.

Slightly different words, but exactly the same content.

Sure, there is no anti-Semitism Christian Revonstructionism, and everything is to follow democratic rules. But assume the US economy worsens, what then?

Pre-Darwinists (6) Erasmus Darwin

2006-11-06T17:25:00.000+01:00

Erasmus Darwin

Introduction

Zoönomia

The Temple of Nature

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), paternal grandfather of Charles Darwin and maternal grandfather of Francis Galton, had a medical degree from Edingburgh Medical School and practiced as a physician. In the beginning with little success, but later Darwin became quite successful, and King George III even offered him the position as Royal Physician, but he declined.

Darwin wrote extensively about medicine and botany, invented several mechanical devices, including a minute, artificial bird, and he even wrote evolutionary poems.

No wonder that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the Preface to Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) could write:

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.

The gory details about Erasmus Darwin's love life can be read on the Wikipedia page.

Darwin was a member of the Lunar Society, which according to the Wikipedia article was a "discussion club of prominent industrialists, natural philosophers and intellectuals who met regularly between 1765 and 1813 in Birmingham, England". Antoine Lavoisier and Bemjamin Franklin frequently corresponded with members of the society, and all in all, the society was very influental in promoting Enlightenment ideas in England.

While an evolutionist, Darwin maintained God as the first cause, and in the poem The Temple of Nature, Nature is described as the daughter of God and just like God's Wisdom in Proverbs 8, she is the actual creator, an expression of divine Love and Sympathy. More precisely, God had established the natural laws, by which not only nature, but also human society was regulated, and, therefore, by studying nature, we can learn how to improve society.

The same idea was put forth in the earlier work Zoönomia, where Darwin employs an analogy between the development of a living organism from a 'living filament', which grows by absorbing nutrients from its environment, and the origin of life from an original living filament, from which new forms have grown successively and in the process changed their environment; that is Darwin sees geological history as a result of biological history.

Zoönomia

Erasmus Darwin's most important scientific work is Zoönomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794-96), called Zoönomia for short.

It is dedicated to "the candid and ingenious Members of the College of Physicians, of the Royal Philosophical Society, of the Two Universities, and to all those, who study the Operations of the Mind as a Science, or who practice Medicine as a Profession". As this dedication together with the subtitle of the book indicate, psychology was for Darwin part of physiology.

In Section XIV, "Of the Production of Ideas", Darwin writes:

Some philosophers have divided all created beings into material and immaterial: the former including all that part of being, which obeys the mechanic laws of action and reaction, but which can begin no motion of itself; the other is the cause of all motion, and is either termed the power of gravity, or of specific attraction, or the spirit of animation. This immaterial agent is supposed to exist in or with matter, but to be quite distinct from it, and to be equally capable of existence, after the matter, which now possesses it, is decomposed.

Note here the interesting mentioning of the "power of gravity" together with the "spirit of animation", where by the latter is meant, in dualistic metaphysique, the soul that moves the physical body around, but it is also the receiver of sensual impressions. That is, the soul is both moved by and the mover of the body. That the spirit of animation can exist separate from the body is supported by analogy:

Nor is this theory ill supported by analogy, since heat, electricity, and magnetism, can be given to or taken from a piece of iron; and must therefore exist, whether separated from the metal, or combined with it. From a parity of reasoning, the spirit of animation, would appear to be capable of existing as well separately from the body as with it.

Darwin then proceeds to say that all these powers might not be immaterial, but may consist of matter of a finer kind, and that only God, the ultimate cause of all motion, need to be immaterial, so he clarifies:

By the words spirit of animation or sensorial power, I mean only that animal life, which mankind possesses in common with brutes, and in some degree even with ve3getables, and leave the consideration of the immortal part of us, which is the object of religion, to those who treat of revelation.

That is, for Darwin science and religion are, what have come to be known as "non-overlapping magisteria". They are still integrated, though, since the object of science is to discover the natural laws, impressed by God on nature, and therefore, the status of God as the first mover is not questioned.

Material bodies cannot exist at the same time at the same place. Darwin uses the example of pressing an ivory ball between his hands; the ball will resist being compressed. Since the spirit of animation is able to move physical objects, such as limbs of animals, and it is itself moved by matter such as light and odour, the spirit of animation must have the property of solidity, at least be able to assume that property; otherwise it would simply pass through or be passed through:

If the spirit of animation was always necessarily penetrable, it could not influence or be influenced by the solidity of common matter; they would exist together, but could not detrude each other from the part of space, where they exist; that is, they could not communicate motion to each other. No two things can influence or affect each other, which have not some property common to both of them; for to influence or affect another body is to give or communicate some property to it, that it had not before; but how can one body give that to another, which it does not possess itself?—The words imply, that they must agree in having the power or faculty of possessing some common property. Thus if one body removes another from the part of space, that it possesses, it must have the power of occupying that space itself: and if one body communicates heat or motion to another, it follows, that they have alike the property of possessing heat or motion.

That is, if the spirit of animation displaces a physical object, it must itself be able to occupy the now vacant space. By the same principle, Darwin concludes that the spirit of animation must be able to possess other material properties:

Hence the spirit of animation at the time it communicates or receives motion from solid bodies, must itself possess some property of solidity. And in consequence at the time it receives other kinds of motion from light, it must possess that property, which light possesses, to communicate that kind of motion; and for which no language has a name, unless it may be termed Visibility. And at the time it is stimulated into other kinds of animal motion by the particles of sapid and odorous bodies affecting the senses of taste and smell, it must resemble these particles of flavour, and of odour, in possessing some similar or correspondent property; and for which language has no name, unless we may use the words Saporosity and Odorosity for those common properties, which are possessed by our organs of taste and smell, and by the particles of sapid and odorous bodies; as the words Tangibility and Audibility may express the common property possessed by our organs of touch, and of hearing, and by the solid bodies, or their vibrations, which affect those organs.

That is, the spirit of animation must have the ability to take on the properties of the external stimuli. The point here being that our senses do provide a reliable impression of the external world - assuming it exists, that is. Because we can experience all the same impressions without any immediate external stimuli, such as in dreams; however, Darwin states, in our waking hours we can compare the impressions from one sense with that of others:

Thus if the idea of the sweetness of sugar should be excited in our dreams, the whiteness and hardness of it occur at the same time by association; and we believe a material lump of sugar present before us. But if, in our waking hours, the idea of the sweetness of sugar occurs to us, the stimuli of surrounding objects, as the edge of the table, on which we press, or green colour of the grass, on which we tread, prevent the other ideas of the hardness and whiteness of the sugar from being exerted by association. Or if they should occur, we voluntarily compare them with the irritative ideas of the table or grass above mentioned, and detect their fallacy. We can thus distinguish the ideas caused by the stimuli of external objects from those, which are introduced by association, sensation, or volition; and during our waking hours can thus acquire a knowledge of the external world.

That is, when we are awake, an imagined stimulus from one sense will not be combined with associated stimuli from other senses, because there are external stimuli for those sense, and these take precedence. With the example given, we may imagine tasting the sweetness of sugar, but seeing the green grass instead of white sugar tells us that there really is no sugar. Again, this appears to be based on the same argumentation of solidity as above, at least by analogy. The stimulus of the green grass pushes away the associated whiteness of the sugar.

In Section XV, "Of Classes of Ideas", Darwin writes about free will:

In respect to freewill, it is certain, that we cannot will to think of a new train of ideas, without previously thinking of the first link of it; as I cannot will to think of a black swan, without previously thinking of a black swan. But if I now think of a tail, I can voluntarily recollect all animals, which have tails; my will is so far free, that I can pursue the ideas linked to this idea of tail, as far as my knowledge of the subject extends; but to will without motive is to will without desire or aversion; which is as absurd as to feel without pleasure or pain; they are both solecisms in the terms. So far are we governed by the catenations of motions, which affect both the body and the mind of man, and which begin with our irritability, and end with it.

The point here is the analogy between a physical sensation such as feeling pleasure or pain, which must have been excited by the senses, and the will as dependent on desire or aversion; that is, the will is dependent on emotions.

In Section XVI, "Of Instinct", Darwin writes:

But all those actions of men or animals, that are attended with consciousness, and seem neither to have been directed by their appetites, taught by their experience, nor deduced from observation or tradition, have been referred to the power of instinct. And this power has been explained to be a divine something, a kind of inspiration; whilst the poor animal, that possesses it, has been thought little better than a machine!

The irksomeness, that attends a continued attitude of the body, or the pains, that we receive from heat, cold, hunger, or other injurious circumstances, excite us to general locomotion: and our senses are so formed and constituted by the hand of nature, that certain objects present us with pleasure, others with pain, and we are induced to approach and embrace these, to avoid and abhor those, as such sensations direct us.

That is, instinct is not a "divine something" that controls a machine (the body); instinctive behavior is provoked by certain stimuli and consists in certain reactions to them. Just as David Hume, and, for that matter, Aristotle, Darwin operates with the "hand of nature" in a creative rôle without here giving any precise description of, how that hand has operated. With Richard Dawkins we might today say that it is the hand of The Blind Watchmaker; but Darwin doesn't go into any details here. In The Temple of Nature, however, he gives some more details about that hand of nature.

In Section XXXIX, "Of Generation", Darwin writes:

I conceive the primordium, or rudiment of the embryon, as secreted from the blood of the parent, to consist of a simple living filament as a muscular fibre; which I suppose to be an extremity of a nerve of loco-motion, as a fibre of the retina is an extremity of a nerve of sensation; as for instance one of the fibrils, which compose the mouth of an absorbent vessel; I suppose this living filament, of whatever form it may be, whether sphere, cube, or cylinder, to be endued with the capability of being excited into action by certain kinds of stimulus. By the stimulus of the surrounding fluid, in which it is received from the male, it may bend into a ring; and thus form the beginning of a tube. Such moving filaments, and such rings, are described by those, who have attended to microscopic animalcula. This living ring may now embrace or absorb a nutritive particle of the fluid, in which it swims; and by drawing it into its pores, or joining it by compression to its extremities, may increase its own length or crassitude; and by degrees the living ring may become a living tube.

Notice here that this "living filament", as Darwin calls it, is supposed to be an "extremity of a nerve of loco-motion," that is, it obeys the laws of motion described above and is therefore "endued with the capability of being excited into action by certain kinds of stimulus." As the embryon acquires new organs, it also acquires new sensibilities to stimuli and therefore a new mode of action:

With every new change, therefore, of organic form, or addition of organic parts, I suppose a new kind of irritability or of sensibility to be produced; such varieties of irritability or of sensibility exist in our adult state in the glands; every one of which is furnished with an irritability, or a taste, or appetency, and a consequent mode of action peculiar to itself.

That is, this living filament, first produced by the male parent, changes dependent on the nutrive particles in the fluid, wherein it is inserted, thus acquiring new organs that in turn may respond to new stimuli. This leads Darwin to suggest that life might have a similar origin, from such a living filament. It is not quite common descent, since Darwin doesn't assume that there was only one, but maybe a few of them that crossed with each other, and from these hybrids the many species now existing have come.

Darwin mentions other ways for organisms to aquire properties, both before and after their birth, and that even those acquired after the birth are inherited. Adding to that the great age of the earth again leads Darwin to suggest that life might have arisen from a few living filaments, originally endued with the ability to acquire news parts:

From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how minute a portion of time many of the changes of animals above described have been produced; would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!

The Aristotelean idea here of a first cause, when that is thought of as a deity, that had set it all in motion is also called providentionalism referring to that the deity by its providence has set up conditions that would lead to the intended purpose without further intervention from the deity. The opposite idea is thus called interventionalism referring to that the deity directly controls events from time to time.

Darwin refers to David Hume's posthumous book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779):

The late Mr. David Hume, in his posthumous works, places the powers of generation much above those of our boasted reason; and adds, that reason can only make a machine, as a clock or a ship, but the power of generation makes the maker of the machine; and probably from having observed, that the greatest part of the earth has been formed out of organic recrements; as the immense beds of limestone, chalk, marble, from the shells of fish; and the extensive provinces of clay, sandstone, ironstone, coals, from decomposed vegetables; all which have been first produced by generation, or by the secretions of organic life; he concludes that the world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fire.—What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of the Great Architect! the Cause of Causes! Tarent of Parents! Ens Entium!

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume writes:

But what is this vegetation and generation of which you talk? said Demea. Can you explain how they work, and lay out the details of that fine internal structure on which they depend?

I can do that, replied Philo, at least as well as Cleanthes can explain how reason works, or lay out in detail the internal structure on which it depends! But I don’t need to go into all that: it is enough that when I see an animal, I infer that it arose from generation, and am as sure of this as you are when you infer that a house arose from design. The words ‘generation’ and ‘reason’ serve merely to label certain powers and energies in nature. We know the effects of these powers, but have no grasp of their essence; and neither of them has a better claim that the other to be made a standard for the whole of nature.

...

Now it can’t be denied that order in nature is found by experience to come from vegetation and generation, as well as from reason. It is for me to choose whether to base my system of cosmogony on the former rather than on the latter. The choice seems entirely arbitrary. And when Cleanthes asks me what the cause is of my vegetative or generative faculty, I am equally entitled to ask him what causes his reasoning principle. We have agreed to pass up these questions on both sides, and in our present context it is in his interests to stick to this agreement. Judging by our limited and imperfect experience, generation has some privileges over reason: for we see every day reason arise from generation - for example, my reason, which has in its causal ancestry my parent’s begetting of me - but never see generation arise from reason.

Demea and Philo together with Cleanthes are the participants in the dialogues (or trialogues, as they would then more properly be called), where Philo most represents Hume himself. Philo's point here is that our experience cannot tell us whether the universe was caused by reason or by generation; but at least he can claim that his own reason arose by generation, while we never see generation arise from reason.

Also Philo, even if accepting the universe to have come around by divine design, claims that this does not imply the existence of only one god:

And what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove that God is onebeing? A great many men join together to build a house or ship, to found and develop a city, to create a commonwealth; why couldn’t several gods combine in designing and making a world? This would only serve to make divine activities more like human ones. By sharing the work among several gods we can reduce still further the attributes of each one of them; we can get rid of that extensive power and knowledge which we have to suppose the one God to possess (if there is only one) - that extent of power and knowledge which, according to you, serves merely to weaken the argument for God’s existence. And if such foolish, vicious creatures as men can often unite in forming and carrying out one plan, how much could that be done by those gods or semi-gods whom we may suppose to be quite a lot more perfect than we are?

So, Hume might not have been the best choice as a supporter of Darwin's theory. However, Darwin is not concerned with such argumentation and therefore proceeds:

For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves. This idea is analogous to the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation; such as in the progressive increase of the solid or habitable parts of the earth from water; and in the progressive increase of the wisdom and happiness of its inhabitants; and is consonant to the idea of our present situation being a state of probation, which by our exertions we may improve, and are consequently responsible for our actions.

Hume might not have agreed quite with this; but Darwin's idea is that God is made even greater by being "the cause of causes", than if he had created everything directly, and he sees an analogy between this and "the improving excellence observable in every part of the creation", and he even derives personal responsibility from it: "our present situation being a state of probation, which by our exertions we may improve, and are consequently responsible for our actions". That is, evolution for Darwin is also moral evolution, whereby is meant that we have the choice to improve our state of probation and therefore are responsible for that state ourselves.

Recapitulating this section, Darwin writes:

1. A certain quantity of nutritive particles are produced by the female parent before impregnation, which require no further digestion, secretion, or oxygenation. Such are seen in the unimpregnated eggs of birds, and in the unimpregnated seed-vessels of vegetables.

2. A living filament is produced by the male, which being inserted amidst these first nutritive particles, is stimulated into action by them; and in consequence of this action, some of the nutritive particles are embraced, and added to the original living filament; in the same manner as common nutrition is performed in the adult animal.

That is, the nutrition of the "living filament" is produced by the mother, but the filament itself is produced by the father. Therefore, Darwin claims, it is primarily the father that determines the form of the new animal. However, he ackowledges some exceptions from this rule:

5. In some cases by the nutriment originally deposited by the mother the filament acquires parts not exactly similar to those of the father, as in the production of mules and mulattoes. In other cases, the deficiency of this original nutriment causes deficiencies of the extreme parts of the fetus, which are last formed, as the fingers, toes, lips. In other cases, a duplicature of limbs are caused by the superabundance of this original nutritive fluid, as in the double yolks of eggs, and the chickens from them with four legs and four wings. But the production of other monsters, as those with two heads, or with parts placed in wrong situations, seems to arise from the imagination of the father being in some manner imitated by the extreme vessels of the seminal glands; as the colours of the spots on eggs, and the change of the colour of the hair and feathers of animals by domestication, may be caused in the same manner by the imagination of the mother.

Talk about a fertile imagination!

In General, therefore, the living filament begins with the propensities of the father; but these may be modified by the nutrition from the mother:

6. The living filament is a part of the father, and has therefore certain propensities, or appetencies, which belong to him; which may have been gradually acquired during a million of generations, even from the infancy of the habitable earth; and which now possesses such properties, as would render, by the apposition of nutritious particles, the new fetus exactly similar to the father; as occurs in the buds and bulbs of vegetables, and in the polypus, and tænia or tape-worm. But as the first nutriment is supplied by the mother, and therefore resembles such nutritive particles, as have been used for her own nutriment or growth, the progeny takes in part of the likeness of the mother.

Some hereditary propensities can be produced in one or two generations, though Darwin is not here clear about how that comes around:

Other similarity of the excitability, or of the form of the male parent, such as the broad or narrow shoulders, or such as constitute certain hereditary diseases, as scrophula, epilepsy, insanity, have their origin produced in one or perhaps two generations; as in the progeny of those who drink much vinous spirits; and those hereditary propensities cease again, as I have observed, if one or two sober generations succeed; otherwise the family becomes extinct.

And then there's the imagination that can alter the filament:

This living filament from the father is also liable to have its propensities, or appetencies, altered at the time of its production by the imagination of the male parent; the extremities of the seminal glands imitating the motions of the organs of sense; and thus the sex of the embryon is produced; which may be thus made a male or a female by affecting the imagination of the father at the time of impregnation.

In its further development, the filament, as a fetus, may be affected by the nutrients and oxygen supplied by the mother, as it acquires the organs for them:

7. After the fetus is thus completely formed together with its umbilical vessels and placenta, it is now supplied with a different kind of food, as appears by the difference of consistency of the different parts of the white of the egg, and of the liquor amnii, for it has now acquired organs for digestion or secretion, and for oxygenation, though they are as yet feeble; which can in some degree change, as well as select, the nutritive particles, which are now presented to it. But may yet be affected by the deficiency of the quantity of nutrition supplied by the mother, or by the degree of oxygenation supplied to its placenta by the maternal blood.

The point here being that the development of the filament is dependent on the quantity and quality of the available nutrition, including oxygen.

What goes for this filament, goes for life in general:

9. As the habitable parts of the earth have been, and continue to be, perpetually increasing by the production of sea-shells and corallines, and by the recrements of other animals, and vegetables; so from the beginning of the existence of this terraqueous globe, the animals, which inhabit it, have constantly improved, and are still in a state of progressive improvement.

That is, the habitable parts of the earth are increased by life itself, and likewise life inhabiting the earth has improved progressively. Life is here seen as one organism, a first great egg made living by divine love:

This idea of the gradual generation of all things seems to have been as familiar to the ancient philosophers as to the modern ones; and to have given rise to the beautiful hieroglyphic figure of the προτον ωον, or first great egg, produced by NIGHT, that is, whose origin is involved in obscurity, and animated by ερος, that is, by DIVINE LOVE; from whence proceeded all things which exist.

Darwin's Aristotelean way of thinking, of course, pops up again in the Conclusion of the section, where he states that "Cause and effect may be considered as the progression, or successive motions, of the parts of the great system of Nature." This chain of cause and effect leads bavk to God as the first cause:

6. This perpetual chain of causes and effects, whose first link is rivetted to the throne of GOD, divides itself into innumerable diverging branches, which, like the nerves arising from the brain, permeate the most minute and most remote extremities of the system, diffusing motion and sensation to the whole. As every cause is superior in power to the effect, which it has produced, so our idea of the power of the Almighty Creator becomes more elevated and sublime, as we trace the operations of nature from cause to cause, climbing up the links of these chains of being, till we ascend to the Great Source of all things.

Darwin, therefore, is not denying a creator, only that the creator has specially created all species right from the start. This in turn leads him to reject that it is blind chance that has constituted the material world, since the Creator has endowed matter with the properties necessary to form the combinations:

Hence the modern discoveries in chemistry and in geology, by having traced the causes of the combinations of bodies to remoter origins, as well as those in astronomy, which dignify the present age, contribute to enlarge and amplify our ideas of the power of the Great First Cause. And had those ancient philosophers, who contended that the world was formed from atoms, ascribed their combinations to certain immutable properties received from the hand of the Creator, such as general gravitation, chemical affinity, or animal appetency, instead of ascribing them to a blind chance; the doctrine of atoms, as constituting or composing the material world by the variety of their combinations, so far from leading the mind to atheism, would strengthen the demonstration of the existence of a Deity, as the first cause of all things; because the analogy resulting from our perpetual experience of cause and effect would have thus been exemplified through universal nature.

That is, God is indeed designer or architect, but he has designed the world so it will assemble itself without his continous direct intervention.

Darwin ends the section with quoting Psalms 19:1-5 and 104:24:

The heavens declare the glory of GOD, and the firmament sheweth his handywork! One day telleth another, and one night certifieth another; they have neither speech nor language, yet their voice is gone forth into all lands, and their words into the ends of the world. Manifold are thy works, O LORD! in wisdom hast thou made them all. Psal. xix. civ.

For Erasmus Darwin therefore, nature was still seen as the handywork of God, though indirectly: God as the architect or designer and Nature as the implementer of the divine architecture according to God's laws impressed upon Nature.

The Temple of Nature

The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: a Poem, with Philosophical Notes (1802) is a poem in four canta with additional thirteen "philosophical notes".

According to the Preface, the aim of this poem is "simply to amuse by bringing distinctly to the imagination the beautiful and sublime images of the operations of Nature in the order, as the Author believes, in which the progressive course of time presented them". The style of the poem mimics classical Greek poetic style, which the Preface explain by "[i]n the Eleusinian mysteries the philosophy of the works of Nature, with the origin and progress of society, are believed to have been taught by allegoric scenery explained by the Hierophant to the initiated".

Accordingly, Canto I, "Production of Life", starts with:

I. By firm immutable immortal laws
Impress'd on Nature by the Great First Cause,
Say, Muse! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.

Here we again meet the Great First Cause, who has impressed "firm immutable immortal laws" on "Nature" - nature here thought of as a being, a goddess. And we also meet the keywords 'Love' and 'Sympathy'.

A few stanzas later we enter the garden of Eden:

II. Where Eden's sacred bowers triumphant sprung,
By angels guarded, and by prophets sung,
Wav'd o'er the east in purple pride unfurl'd
And rock'd the golden cradle of the World;
Four sparkling currents lav'd with wandering tides
Their velvet avenues, and flowery sides;
On sun-bright lawns unclad the Graces stray'd,
And guiltless Cupids haunted every glade;
Till the fair Bride, forbidden shades among,
Heard unalarm'd the Tempter's serpent-tongue;
Eyed the sweet fruit, the mandate disobey'd,
And her fond Lord with sweeter smiles betray'd.

This mixture of biblical and Greek mythology may certainly not be to the amusement of everybody. Still, the biblical story of the Garden of Eden is certainly not denied, just enhanced with a few embellishments. A note to the fourth line says, "Cradle of the world, l. 36. The nations, which possess Europe and a part of Asia and of Africa, appear to have descended from one family; and to have had their origin near the banks of the Mediterranean, as probably in Syria, the site of Paradise, according to the Mosaic history." Darwin continues saying that this "seems highly probable from the similarity of the structure of the languages of these nations, and from their early possession of similar religions, customs, and arts, as well as from the most ancient histories extant." So, again, Darwin accepts the biblical account.

Two stanzas later begins the description of The Temple of Nature:

Here, high in air, unconscious of the storm
Thy temple, Nature, rears it's mystic form;
From earth to heav'n, unwrought by mortal toil,
Towers the vast fabric on the desert soil;
O'er many a league the ponderous domes extend,
And deep in earth the ribbed vaults descend;
A thousand jasper steps with circling sweep
Lead the slow votary up the winding steep;
Ten thousand piers, now join'd and now aloof,
Bear on their branching arms the fretted roof.

The Temple of Nature is, of course, nature herself, not a part of nature and not something outside of nature. The steps of the temple is the tracing backwards of the progression of Nature, both inorganic matter and life, all the way back to the first cause.

The altar of Nature is set in Eleusis, which is of course neither biblical nor scientific, but part of the poem.

Addressing the muse, the hierofant Urania says:

"First, if you can, celestial Guide! disclose
From what fair fountain mortal life arose,
Whence the fine nerve to move and feel assign'd,
Contractile fibre, and ethereal mind:

"How Love and Sympathy the bosom warm,
Allure with pleasure, and with pain alarm,
With soft affections weave the social plan,
And charm the listening Savage into Man."

That is, she asks the muse to explain how mortal life began, how nerves, muscle fibres, and mind came around, and how "Love and Sympathy" weave the social plan turning savages into civilized humans.

The muse begins her answer with:

"God the First Cause! — in this terrene abode
Young Nature lisps, she is the child of God.
From embryon births her changeful forms improve,
Grow, as they live, and strengthen as they move.

This is the same story as in Zoönomia; but there are a few details worth noticing. In Proverbs 8 we read the story of Wisdom:

Pro 8:23 I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, Before the earth was.

Pro 8:24 When there were no depths, I was brought forth, When there were no fountains abounding with water.

Pro 8:25 Before the mountains were settled, Before the hills was I brought forth;

Pro 8:26 While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, Nor the beginning of the dust of the world.

Pro 8:27 When he established the heavens, I was there: When he set a circle upon the face of the deep,

Pro 8:28 When he made firm the skies above, When the fountains of the deep became strong,

Pro 8:29 When he gave to the sea its bound, That the waters should not transgress his commandment, When he marked out the foundations of the earth;

Pro 8:30 Then I was by him, as a master workman; And I was daily his delight, Rejoicing always before him,

Pro 8:31 Rejoicing in his habitable earth; And my delight was with the sons of men.

The pre-existing Wisdom, possibly the inspiration of the Logos Hymn in the Gospel of John, is also the child of God, and as v. 30 states, she was the "master workman", when God created the world. It's the same idea that Darwin employs, just in a more modern setting - whereby I refer to the evolutionary ideas, not his sensual romanticism.

The priestess continues:

"Ere Time began, from flaming Chaos hurl'd
Rose the bright spheres, which form the circling world;
Earths from each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issued from the first.
Then, whilst the sea at their coeval birth,
Surge over surge, involv'd the shoreless earth;
Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic Life began beneath the waves.

This is also from the beginning, before time began, though else the description is different. Darwin operates with more than one sun, and from each sun "with quick explosions burst[s]", and from that first planet other planets are issued. I don't know, if that was the common cosmogonical theory of the time; but apparently it's what Darwin accepted for some reason. And he has life beginning "[n]urs'd by warm sun-beams" "beneath the waves".

The priestess continues her story:

"First Heat from chemic dissolution springs,
And gives to matter its eccentric wings:
With strong Repulsion parts the exploding mass,
Melts into lymph, or kindles into gas.
Attraction next, as earth or air subsides,
The ponderous atoms from the light divides,
Approaching parts with quick embrace combines,
Swells into spheres, and lengthens into lines.
Last, as fine goads the gluten-threads excite,
Cords grapple cords, and webs with webs unite;
And quick Contraction with ethereal flame
Lights into life the fibre-woven frame. —
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth;
From Nature's womb the plant or insect swims,
And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs.

This is a description of abiogenesis. As elsewhere, Darwin here gives a poetic description of his concepts, such as heat, repulsion, attraction, and contraction. A note to the first line says:

First Heat from chemic, l. 235. The matter of heat is an ethereal fluid, in which all things are immersed, and which constitutes the general power of repulsion; as appears in explosions which are produced by the sudden evolution of combined heat, and by the expansion of all bodies by the slower diffusion of it in its uncombined state. Without heat all the matter of the world would be condensed into a point by the power of attraction; and neither fluidity nor life could exist. There are also particular powers of repulsion, as those of magnetism and electricity, and of chemistry, such as oil and water; which last may be as numerous as the particular attractions which constitute chemical affinities; and may both of them exist as atmospheres round the individual particles of matter; see Botanic Garden, Bol. I. additional note VII. on elementary heat.

Heat is here correctly associated with motion, and all the other concepts are motional concepts, in concert with Darwin's general idea of translation everything into motion.

Darwin's description of abiogenesis isn't quite the current one; but since cells were first discovered in the 1830s, we should not expect too much anyway.

Interestingly, abiogenesis can be considered compatible with Genesis 1:

Gen 1:11 And God said, Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit after their kind, wherein is the seed thereof, upon the earth: and it was so.

...

Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

...

Gen 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after their kind: and it was so.

That is, God tells the earth and the waters to bring forth life. No evolution appears to be implied, though - but neither is it ruled out.

The priestess continues with the development of organs, and Darwin even claims that land is formed by life dimishing the water:

So Life's first powers arrest the winds and floods,
To bones convert them, or to shells, or woods;
Stretch the vast beds of argil, lime, and sand,
And from diminish'd oceans form the land!

A note to the secons line says:

And from diminish'd oceans, l. 268. The increase of the solid parts of the globe by the recrements of organic bodies, as limestone rocks form shells and bones, and the beds of clay, marl, coals, from decomposed woods, is now well known to those who have attended to modern geology; and Dr. Halley, and others, have endeavoured to show, with great probability, that the ocean has decreased in quanitity during the short time which human history has existed. Whence it appears, that the exertions of vegetable and animal life convert the fluid parts of the globe into solid ones; which is probably effected by combining the matter of heat with the other elements, instead of suffering it to remain simply diffused amongst them, which is a curious conjecture, and deserves further investigation.

This is quite interesting - the idea of organisms changing their own environment. This is, of course, still an important point in evolutionary theory; for instance that the atmosphere of the earth originally was oxygen-free, but early bacteria exhaled oxygen, which enabled oxygen-dependent life. It isn't quite this darwin writes about here, only about deology; but still the interaction between organisms and their environment is an important factor in evolution - environments are not established once and for all.

After this, the priestess moves to the mind:

"Next the long nerves unite their silver train,
And young Sensation permeates the brain;
Through each new sense the keen emotions dart,
Flush the young cheek, and swell the throbbing heart.
From pain and pleasure quick Volitions rise,
Lift the strong arm, or point the inquiring eyes;
With Reason's light bewilder'd Man direct,
And right and wrong with balance nice detect.
Last in thick swarms Associations spring,
Thoughts join to thoughts, to motions motions cling;
Whence in long trains of catenation flow
Imagined joy, and voluntary woe.

Again, it is the Zoönomia in poetic form.

The priestess recaps the whole story all the way to man:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

"Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,
Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood;
The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,
The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,
The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,
Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,
Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthly sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

Despite the irony in the last three lines, it should be clear that Darwin's point is not to attack God, only to show that as all organisms, even oaks, whales, lions, eagles and humans, have started out as "[a]n embryon point," so why shouldn't life as such have started out that way?

Pre-Darwinists (5) William Paley

2006-11-04T12:32:00.000+01:00

William Paley

Introduction

Paley's Natural Theology

Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker

William Paley (1743-1805) was an English clergyman and philosopher, best known for his watchmaker analogy in his book Natural Theology. Paley was far form the first to point to nature to prove the divine existence, neither was he even the first to use the watchmaker analogy; however, the Natural Theology has become the seminal work in the Intelligent Design versus evolution controversy, whether this controversy be considered a scientific controversy or not.

Charles Darwin was a convinced Paleyan as he embarked HMS Beagle in 1831, but when he left it, he had his doubts.

Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, acknowledges the relevance of Paley's argumentation in the Natural Theology, its distinction between simple things like a stone and complex things like a watch and an organism.

William Dembski, in his books and his articles, frequently refers to Paley. Interestingly, Dembski claims that it was from reading The Blind Watchmaker that he got the idea that specification and complexity "was the key to eliminating chance and inferring design" (cf. Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence., p. 31).

Paley's Natural Theology

An obligatory part of the curriculum, when Charles Darwin studied theology at Cambridge was Paley's Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). Quotes are from the electronic version of the 12^th edition (1809) published by the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative.

The Natural Theology begins with this famous passage:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e. g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.

Any later work within Intelligent Design and origins is a mere footnote to this passage.

However, we may here notice a minor point; namely that Paley writes "nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer" concerning the answer that "it had lain there for ever" to the question about, how the stone had come to be, where it is. Just as a watch in a heath doesn't simply pop up, a stone doesn't either. Some stones are important in geology for tracing movements of glaciers, and, of course, radiometric dating of stones and rocks are of high importance, even for biology.

We'll ignore this, however, and return to Paley's argumentation:

To reckon up a few of the plainest of these parts, and of their offices, all tending to one result:-- We see a cylindrical box containing a coiled elastic spring, which, by its endeavour to relax itself, turns round the box. We next observe a flexible chain (artificially wrought for the sake of flexure), communicating the action of the spring from the box to the fusee. We then find a series of wheels, the teeth of which catch in, and apply to, each other, conducting the motion from the fusee to the balance, and from the balance to the pointer; and at the same time, by the size and shape of those wheels, so regulating that motion, as to terminate in causing an index, by an equable and measured progression, to pass over a given space in a given time. We take notice that the wheels are made of brass in order to keep them from rust; the springs of steel, no other metal being so elastic; that over the face of the watch there is placed a glass, a material employed in no other part of the work, but in the room of which, if there had been any other than a transparent substance, the hour could not be seen without opening the case. This mechanism being observed (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood), the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

The keyword here is purpose, the parts of the watch are not chosen at random, but each has shape, size, and material chosen for an overall purpose, and, according to Paley, it is from this observation that we conclude that the watch must have had a maker.

Paley follows up with eight comments that can be summed up as follows

Design can be detected based on recognized purpose alone. It is not needed to know, how an object is actually made, certainly not to be able to make it oneself, and neither is it needed to know, where or when the object was made, and most importantly: no assumptions about the nature of the maker are needed.
Design can be detected, even if an object doesn't fulfil its purpose completely.
Design can be detected in an object, even if there are a few parts whose contribution to the overall purpose is not understood, and even if there are part that do not appear to be needed for the overall purpose.
A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the designed object could be merely one out of several possible combinations of the same parts that could have formed naturally.
A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that there exists in the parts "a principle of order" that put them into the form of the designed object.
A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the recognized purpose is not real, only a motive to induce the mind to think so.
A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the designed object is formed by a law of nature, since a law of nature is not an agent and therefore cannot act, only establish the order by which an agent acts.
A design conclusion is not invalidated by the argument that the person making the conclusion doesn't know anything about the matter. As Paley writes: "He knows enough for his argument: he knows the utility of the end: he knows the subserviency and adaptation of the means to the end. These points being known, his ignorance of other points, his doubts concerning other points, affect not the certainty of his reasoning."

As is easy to see, comments 2-8 are really just elaborations on comment 1: Design can be detected based on recognized purpose alone.

This rules apply for recognizing a watch or similar object as designed, where we wouldn't really question a design concluson anyway. The big jump is of course to transfer the logic to apply to organisms.

And for this purpose, Paley begins chapter 2 with:

Suppose, in the next place, that the person who found the watch, should, after some time, discover that, in addition to all the properties which he had hitherto observed in it, it possessed the unexpected property of producing, in the course of its movement, another watch like itself (the thing is conceivable); that it contained within it a mechanism, a system of parts, a mould for instance, or a complex adjustment of lathes, files, and other tools, evidently and separately calculated for this purpose; let us inquire, what effect ought such a discovery to have upon his former conclusion.

This is followed by five comments that boil down to that this second discovery can only enhance the design conclusion, not weaken it. Even if the watch in question might be the direct product of another watch, there must still be a first watch that was designed.

To argue otherwise is, according to Paley, atheism. As he begins chapter 3:

This is atheism: for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtility, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity.

That is, if we accept Paley's design arguments concerning the watch, we cannot deny that there is design in nature.

Paley then proceeds with a comparison between an eye and a telescope:

I know no better method of introducing so large a subject, than that of comparing a single thing with a single thing; an eye, for example, with a telescope. As far as the examination of the instrument goes, there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision, as there is that the telescope was made for assisting it. They are made upon the same principles; both being adjusted to the laws by which the transmission and refraction of rays of light are regulated. I speak not of the origin of the laws themselves; but such laws being fixed, the construction, in both cases, is adapted to them. For instance; these laws require, in order to produce the same effect, that the rays of light, in passing from water into the eye, should be refracted by a more convex surface, than when it passes out of air into the eye. Accordingly we find that the eye of a fish, in that part of it called the crystalline lens, is much rounder than the eye of terrestrial animals. What plainer manifestation of design can there be than this difference? What could a mathematical-instrument-maker have done more, to show his knowledge of his principle, his application of that knowledge, his suiting of his means to his end; I will not say to display the compass or excellence of his skill and art, for in these all comparison is indecorous, but to testify counsel, choice, consideration, purpose?

Paley provides more details about the eye, the ear, and so on; but we'll skip to chapter 12 about astronomy:

My opinion of Astronomy has always been, that it is not the best medium through which to prove the agency of an intelligent Creator; but that, this being proved, it shows, beyond all other sciences, the magnificence of his operations. The mind which is once convinced, it raises to sublimer views of the Deity than any other subject affords; but it is not so well adapted, as some other subjects are, to the purpose of argument. We are destitute of the means of examining the constitution of the heavenly bodies. The very simplicity of their appearance is against them. We see nothing, but bright points, luminous circles, or the phases of spheres reflecting the light which falls upon them. Now we deduce design from relation, aptitude, and correspondence of parts. Some degree therefore of complexity is necessary to render a subject fit for this species of argument. But the heavenly bodies do not, except perhaps in the instance of Saturn's ring, present themselves to our observation as compounded of parts at all. This, which may be a perfection in them, is a disadvantage to us, as inquirers after their nature. They do not come within our mechanics. And what we say of their forms, is true of their motions. Their motions are carried on without any sensible intermediate apparatus; whereby we are cut off from one principal ground of argumentation and analogy. We have nothing wherewith to compare them; no invention, no discovery, no operation or resource of art, which, in this respect, resembles them. Even those things which are made to imitate and represent them, such as orreries, planetaria, cœlestial globes, &c. bear no affinity to them, in the cause and principle by which their motions are actuated. I can assign for this difference a reason of utility, viz. a reason why, though the action of terrestrial bodies upon each other be, in almost all cases, through the intervention of solid or fluid substances, yet central attraction does not operate in this manner. It was necessary that the intervals between the planetary orbs should be devoid of any inert matter either fluid or solid, because such an intervening substance would, by its resistance, destroy those very motions, which attraction is employed to preserve. This may be a final cause of the difference; but still the difference destroys the analogy.

The interesting point here is, of course, that it is the simplicity of cœlestial mechanics that makes Paley reject astronomy as a medium to prove the agency of an intelligent creator, and that an earthly model cannot work by the same mechanics (gravity). Traditionally it was arguments from astronomy that supported the design argument, not references to plants and animals. The idea being that the heaven was perfect, while the earth was not. To be a fallen star, that is, to have fallen from heaven to earth, wasn't a good thing.

Another problem that Paley sees:

Our ignorance, moreover, of the sensitive natures, by which other planets are inhabited, necessarily keeps from us the knowledge of numberless utilities, relations, and subserviences, which we perceive upon our own globe.

That is, Paley assumes the existence of "sensitive natures" on other planets; but since we have no knowledge about them, we cannot use them in any design arguments.

For Paley, therefore, what is admirable in astronomy is the precision of astronomical predictions, and "all this is wonderful, whether we refer our admiration to the constancy of the heavenly motions themselves, or to the perspicacity and precision with which they have been noticed by mankind."

And furthermore:

Nor is this the whole, nor indeed the chief part of what astronomy teaches. By bringing reason to bear upon observation (the acutest reasoning upon the exactest observation), the astronomer has been able, out of the mystic dance,and the confusion (for such it is) under which the motions of the heavenly bodies present themselves to the eye of a mere gazer upon the skies, to elicit their order and their real paths.

That is, the most admirable is that the astronomer has been able to find order in the apparent chaos.

Therefore, the intelligent agency in the cœlestial world is to be seen in choice, determination, and regulation:

Our knowledge therefore of astronomy is admirable, though imperfect: and, amidst the confessed desiderata and desideranda, which impede our investigation of the wisdom of the Deity, in these the grandest of his works, there are to be found, in the phænomena, ascertained circumstances and laws, sufficient to indicate an intellectual agency in three of its principal operations, viz. in choosing, in determining, in regulating; in choosing, out of a boundless variety of suppositions which were equally possible, that which is beneficial; in determining, what, left to itself, had a thousand chances against conveniency, for one in its favour; in regulating subjects, as to quantity and degree, which, by their nature, were unlimited with respect to either.

Paley then continues with examples of this, such as the proof of choice that there is only one sun, and it is placed in the middle.

Basically, all this can be boiled down to that intelligence changes probabilities. If Paley had known anything about DNA, he could have used exactly the same argumentation there.

Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species, chapter 6, "Difficulties on Theory", writes:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.

So, it's not that Darwin rejects Paleyan type argumentations - but the key phrase is changing conditions of life. What Paley assumes in his argumentation is that there is a designed, unchanging order to things; basically that everything stays the same, unless the creator intervenes. However, take away that assumption and see, what happens.

Later in the same chapter, Darwin writes:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.

This is a key paragraph, the first sentence of which has given rise to the irreducible complexity mania. Darwin's gradualism here is not only caused by a lack of a known source of variation, but also caused by arguments such as the one in the beginning of Natural Theology, where Paley stated that any change in size or order of parts would prevent either motion or imply a different motion.

Darwin even co-opts Paley to supply an argument (ibid.):

Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ will be formed, as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing an injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the good and evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole advantageous. After the lapse of time, under changing conditions of life, if any part comes to be injurious, it will be modified; or if it be not so, the being will become extinct, as myriads have become extinct.

That is, for Darwin, extinction is not caused by an catastrophe, but by lack of adaption to a changed environment. Paley himself does not enter the subject of extinction.

Paley writes in Natural Theology, chapter 26, "The Goodness of the Deity":

The same argument may be proposed in different terms; thus: Contrivance proves design: and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer. The world abounds with contrivances: and all the contrivances which we are acquainted with, are directed to beneficial purposes. Evil, no doubt, exists; but is never, that we can perceive, the object of contrivance. Teeth are contrived to eat, not to ache; their aching now and then is incidental to the contrivance, perhaps inseparable from it: or even, if you will, let it be called a defect in the contrivance: but it is not the object of it.

Well, it may be questioned, if Darwin is using Paley's argumentation quite as intended. And if quite as intended, natural selection then becomes "[t]he Goodness of the Deity". Natural selection, as least as used by Darwin, is in analogy to artificial selection such as performed by breeders and cultivators. However, while Darwin operates with a creator, he doesn't believe the creator is concerned about the minutiae of creation. The problem being, if Paley is right, why are there then extinct species? It is, among other factors, this extinction that suggests that things work differently than claimed by Paley. In The Origin of Species, chapter 14, "Recapitulation and Conclusion", Darwin writes:

Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.

That is, while Darwin accepts that the creator has set up natural laws, it is this same that makes him reject that production and extinction of species are due to divine edicts. The natural laws should be sufficient to bring about whatever purpose the creator might have had without additional micro-management.

Darwin continues:

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

While The Origin of Species does not deal with humans, it is certainly possible that these sentences are meant to apply to humans as well. In the "Conclusion" of Natural Theology, Paley writes:

Again; if there be those who think, that the contractedness and debility of the human faculties in our present state, seem ill to accord with the high destinies which the expectations of religion point out to us, I would only ask them, whether any one, who saw a child two hours after its birth, could suppose that it would ever come to understand fluxions (Note: See Search's Light of Nature, passim.); or who then shall say, what farther amplification of intellectual powers, what accession of knowledge, what advance and improvement, the rational faculty, be its constitution what it will, may not admit of, when placed amidst new objects, and endowed with a sensorium adapted, as it undoubtedly will be, and as our present senses are, to the perception of those substances, and of those properties of things, with which our concern may lie.

For Paley, of course, this promise of a grand future is to come true by a divine act; certainly not by evolution. Darwin shares the hope of a grand future, but maybe he thought that the creator had set up laws that would make that future come true without direct intervention.

Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker

In 1986 Richard Dawkins published the first edition of The Blind Watchmaker. This title refers to Paley's analogy between a creator and an unseen watchmaker in Natural Theology with the extension that not only is the watchmaker unseen, he is even blind. In chapter 1, "Explaining the very improbable", Dawkins writes:

Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Unlike Paley and Darwin, Dawkins is an atheist, so while for Darwin, natural selection is a mechanism established by the creator to serve a purpose, Dawkins reifies natural selection to become the creator itself. However, a creator with no purpose, no foresight, not even a mind, in which to have purpose or foresight.

Dawkins follows Paley closely in the distinction between uncomplex things, such as a stone, and complex things, such as a machine or an organism. However, he elevates machines to the status of living things for the sake of argument. Therefore he can write (ibid.):

With the exception of artificial machines, which we have already agreed to count as honorary living things, nonliving things don't work in this sense [actively to maintain disequilibrium]. They accept the forces that tend to bring them into equilibrium with their surroundings. Mont Blanc, to be sure, has existed for a long time, and probably will exist for a while yet, but it does not work to stay in existence. When rock comes to rest under the influence of gravity it just stays there. No work has to be done to keep it there. Mont Blanc exists, and it will go on existing until it wears away or an earthquake knocks it over. It doesn't take steps to repair wear and tear, or to right itself when it is knocked over, the way a living body does. It just obeys the ordinary laws of physics.

The "laws of physics" referred to here are the same as Darwin's natural laws, obeyed by as well organisms as by inorganic matter, since the former are composed of nothing but the latter; only organisms exhibit a higher level of complexity. Therefore, while Paley started out with recognizing purpose before going into the details of interaction of parts, Dawkins turns things the other way around:

Is this to deny that living things obey the laws of physics? Certainly not. There is no reason to think that the laws of physics are violated in living matter. There is nothing supernatural, no 'life force' to rival the fundamental forces of physics. It is just that if you try to use the laws of physics, in a naive way, to understand the behaviour of a whole living body, you will find that you don't get very far. The body is a complex thing with many constituent parts, and to understand its behaviour you must apply the laws of physics to its parts, not to the whole. The behaviour of the body as a whole will then emerge as a consequence of interactions of the parts.

In other words, while the scientific investigation may proceed from the whole to the parts, this is not a retracing of the mental processes of a creator, because what is perceived as an overall purpose only emerges "as a consequence of interactions of the parts". That is, Dawkins replaces Paley's top-down process with a bottom-up process.

Arthur de Gobineau: Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines

2006-11-01T16:55:00.000+01:00

Arthur de Gobineau: Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines, 1^st edition 1854.

Quotes are from the Editions Pierre Belfond version, 1967.

DISCLAIMER: my knowledge of French is basically limited to, what I learned years ago in high school, so I cannot issue any guarantee that my reading of Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines is anywhere near beyond reproach, only that I have attempted as best I can to figure out, what Gobineau meant with the parts of the book I have picked down upon.

The book is dedicated to King George V (1851-66) of Hannover, and Gobineau opens the dedication with these words:

SIRE,

J’ai l’honneur d’offrir ici à Votre Majesté le fruit de longues méditations et d’études favorites, souvent interrompues, toujours reprises.

Les événements considérables, révolutions, guerres sanglantes, renversements de lois, qui, depuis trop d'années, ont agi sur les Etats européens, tournent aisément les imaginations vers l’examen des faits politiques. Tandis que le vulgaire n’en considère que les résultats immédiats et n’admire ou ne réprouve que l’étincelle électrique dont ils frappent les intérêts, les penseurs plus graves cherchent à découvrir les causes cachées de si terribles ébranlements, et, descendant la lampe à la main dans les sentiers obscurs de la philosophie et de l’histoire, ils vont demander à l’analyse du cœur humain ou à l’examen attentif des annales le mot d’une énigme qui trouble si fort et les existences et les consciences.

That is, Gobineau presents to his majesty the fruits of his speculations and studies into the hidden causes of the "revolutions, bloody wars, and lawlessness" that have been going on in Europe through many years. The picturesque language employed here with expressions such as "descendant la lampe à la main dans les sentiers obscurs de la philosophie et de l’histoire" ("descending with the lamp in hand into the dim passages of philosophy and history") sounds more like something from a gothic novel than from a scientific text.

Gobineau wasn’t himself a scientist either, he was a French diplomat; but he does rely on the scientific books of the time to make up his case. But, of course, the idea of white supremacy wasn't Gobineau's invention, neither was the warning against racial mixture, or any other single element. What is unique is the forging of all this into an attempt to make a theory of social renewal.

Later in the dedication, Gobineau writes:

Les hommes d’aujourd’hui seraient même en droit de faire, devant lui, trophée de qulques mérites qui lui manquent. Mais, si, pour repousser leurs accusations, il vient soudain à évoquer les ombres grandioses des périodes héroïques, que diront-ils? ...

That is, in an unheroic time, if you ask the grand shadows of the past heroic times, what will they answer? Gobineau continues:

Rien, sinon que toutes les belles choses, tombées dans le silence, ne sont pas mortes et qu’elles dorment; que tous les âges ont vu des périodes de transition, époques où la souffrance lutte avec la vie et d’où celle-ci se détache, à la fin, victorieuse et resplendissante, et que, puisque, la Chaldée trop vieillie fut remplacée jadis par la Perse jeune et vigoreuse, la Grèce décrépite par Rome virile et la domination abâtardie d’Augustule par les royaumes des nobles princes teutoniques, de même les races modernes obtiendront leur rajeunissement.

That is, you need to make it happen, not hang around and wait for it to happen to you. The young, vigorous, virile, noble races have won over the older races, when these had lost the qualities that had made them winners in the first place.

All in all, Gobineau reaches the conclusion that ethnicity is the most important question in history:

C’est alors que, d’inductions en inductions, j’ai dû me pénétrer de cette évidence, que la question ethnique domine tous les autres problèmes de l’histoire, en tient la clef, et que l’inégalié des races dont le concour forme une nation, suffit à expliquer tout l’enchaînement des destinés des peuples.

That is, the inequality of races that make up a nation are sufficient to explain how the destinies of peoples are linked together.

The rest of that same paragraph shows the diplomat coming to the fore; Gobineau mentions, just as an example, that by the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain a new strength came about that ruled some of the peoples of that island by the sword of the illustrious ancestors of his majesty, and now in one August Person, two branches of the same nation have been united in one royal house, which draws its glorious throne rights from distant sources of a most heroic origin.

In 1714, prince-elector (Kurfürst) George of Hannover becomes king of Great Britain, and the personal union between Hannover and Great Britain remains until the accession of Queen Victoria to the British throne in 1837. Hannover itself is occupied by the French in 1803; but the electorate is restored in 1813, and in 1814 Hannover is made a kingdom. During 1849-50, Prussia proposes a plan to construct a central-European union under Prussian leadership. Hannover first supports the plan, but Austrian pressure makes Hannover join a coalition hostile to the union. The plan is finally abandoned, as the Russian Czar Nicolai supports Austria against the union plan. However, in 1865 Prussia and Austria come to disagree over how to distribute the spoils gained from Denmark in the war of 1864, and in 1866 a war breaks out. Hannover like all the other major German states joins Austria. And with the Prussian victory, Hannover is made a Prussian province.

Back to Gobineau, who proceeds with:

Après avoir reconnu qu’il est des races fortes et qu’il en est de faibles, je me suis attaché à observer de préférences les premières, à démêler leurs aptitudes, et surtout à remonter la chaîne de leurs génálogies. En suivant cette méthode, j’ai fini par me convaincre que tout ce qu’il y a de grand, de noble, de fécond sur la terre, en fait de créations humaines, la science, l'art, la civilisation, ramène l’observateur vers un point unique, n’est issu que d’un même germe, n’a résulté que d’une seule pensée, n’appartient qu’à une seule famille dont les différentes branches ont régné dans toutes les contrèes policées de l’Univers.

That is, Gobineau has found out, which races are strong, and which races are weak, and for the former, traced their genealogies. From this he has convinced himself that all human creations, science, art, civilization, lead to one single point, namely that these are not descended from the same germ, not from the same thought, and not come from a single family which through different branches has ruled all the countries of the Universe.

Now, this is in 1854, where George V supports Austria, the arch-enemy of France. It is a clear possibility that these words in particular refer to the Habsburg dynasty, whose branches once ruled, if not the Universe, then quite a large part of the earth. Now, of course, just as scientists and others in the Renaissance wrote dedications to princes, kings, and popes in order to buy goodwill, or perhaps a well-paid position, we need not necessarily put more into this dedication than that Gobineau clearly wasn't supporting the Habsburg dynasty. That is, we need not assume that Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines was written merely to annoy the Austrian emperor, only that the various events in Europe around 1850 actually did have some importance for the book.

In the preface to the 2^nd edition, Charles Darwin and Darwinism are given a couple of favorable mentions, and the same goes for Henry Thomas Buckle. Apparently Gobineau thinks that Darwin and Buckle are dependent on him:

De là [that social progress and decline are caused by racial mixture] fut tirée la théorie de la sélection devenue si célèbre entre les main de Darwin et plus encore de ses élèves. Il en est r´sulté, entre autres, le système de Buckle, et par l’ecart considérable que les opinions de ce philosophe présent avec les miennes, on peut mesurer l’éloignement relatif des routes que savant se frayer deux pensées hostiles parties d’un point commun.

...

Darwin et Buckle ont créé ainsi les dérivations principales du ruisseau que j’ai ouvert.

Ernst Haeckel, in return, is given a less favorable mention:

A dater de cette réforme indispensable on enlèvera enfin les haches de silex et les couteaux d’obsidienne aux main des anthropoïdes de M. le professeur Haeckel, gens qui en font un si mauvais usage.

(Henry Thomas) Buckle (1821-1862) mentioned together with Darwin was a British historian, who wrote a History of Civilization, volume I published in 1857, and volume II published in 1861. It is true that also Buckle considered society ruled by laws as fixed as those of physics, wherefore he relied on statistics rather than on individual history, and it is also true that Buckle considered Europeans to be the most culturally advanced. However Bockle had been writing on his History before Gobineau published his book. As for Darwin, I fail to see much similarity between anything Darwin wrote and Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines.

The Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines comprises six volumes, the first of which carries the title "Considérations Préliminairies; Définitions, Recherche et Exposition des Lois Naturelles qui Régissent le Monde Social"; that is, "Preliminary Considerations; Definitions, Research and Exposition of the Natural Laws that rule the Social World", quite a positivist title. But unlike Auguste Comte, Gobineau appears not to believe that a common culture can be established. As he writes at the end of the preface:

Aujourd’hui on aime les grandes unités, les vastes amas où les entités isolées disparaissant. C’est ce qu’on suppose être le produit de la science. A chaque époque, celle-ci voudrait dévorer une vérité qui la géne. Il ne faut pas s’en effrayer. Jupiter échappe toujours à la voracité de Saturne, et l’epoux et le fils de Rhée, dieux, l’un comme l’autre, règnent, sans pouvoir s’entredétruire, sur la majesté de l’univers.

That is, it is a never-ending battle, not the final victory of the one over the other, to become the majesty of the universe.

Since I do not have the time and qualifications for a closer examination of the book itself, I will here limit myself to a few points that I have found of particular interest.

In Vol I, chapter 11, "Les différences ethniques sont permantes" ("The ethnic differences are permanent"), Gobineau writes:

Qu’Adam soit l’auteur de notre espèce blanche, il faut l’admettre certainement. Il est bien claire que les Ecritures veulent qu’on l’entendre ainsi, puisque de lui descendent des générations qui incontestablement ont été blanches. Ceci posé, rien ne prouve que, dans la pensée des premiers rédacteurs des généalogies adamites, les créatures qui n’appartenaient pas à la race blanche aient passé pour faire partie de l’espèce.

That is, "Adam is the originator of our white species", and creatures not part of the white race are not part of that species. It should here be understood that Gobineau operates with three main races: white, black, and yellow. The biblical division into Hamites, Semites, and Japhetites is for Gobineau a division within the white race. What should be noticed here, in particular, is that Gobineau considers the Bible to be a reliable source of actual history.

Vol I, chapter 16, the final chapter of that volume, carries the long superscript "Récapitulation; caractères respectifs des trois grandes races; effects sociaux des mélanges; supérorité du type blanc et, dans ce type, de la famille ariane", or, in English, "Recapitulation; respective characters of the three great races; social effects of [racial] mixtures; superiority of the white type, and within that type, of the Aryan family". Gobineau claims that there have been no more tahn ten great civilizations, and that they have all been started by the white race. These civilizations are:

The Indian civilization - built around a branche of the white Aryan nation. Note: actually there was an Indian civilization before the Aryan invasion.
The Egyptian civilization - founded by an Aryan colony from India. Charles Darwin writes in footnote 5 of The Descent of Man, chapter 7, "On the Races of Man" the following:

With respect to the figures in the famous Egyptian caves of Abou-Simbel, M. Pouchet says ('The Plurality of the Human Races,' Eng. translat., 1864, p. 50), that he was far from finding recognisable representations of the dozen or more nations which some authors believe that they can recognise. Even some of the most strongly-marked races cannot be identified with that degree of unanimity which might have been expected from what has been written on the subject. Thus Messrs. Nott and Gliddon ('Types of Mankind,' p. 148), state that Rameses II., or the Great, has features superbly European; whereas Knox, another firm believer in the specific distinctness of the races of man ('Races of Man,' 1850, p. 201), speaking of young Memnon (the same as Rameses II., as I am informed by Mr. Birch), insists in the strongest manner that he is identical in character with the Jews of Antwerp. Again, when I looked at the statue of Amunoph III., I agreed with two officers of the establishment, both competent judges, that he had a strongly-marked negro type of features; but Messrs. Nott and Gliddon (ibid. p. 146, fig. 53), describe him as a hybrid, but not of "negro intermixture."

So, it's not as if it is all that easy to determine the racial status of the ancient Egyptians.
The Assyrians - to which are attached other civilizations such as the Jewish and the Phoenician. According to Gobineau, these are Hamites and Semites. Gobineau places the Iranian civilizations here, but mentions that they are Aryans.
The Greeks - originally Aryans, but with Semitic elements.
The Chinese civilization - like the Egyptian founded by an Aryan colony from India.
The old civilization of the Italian Peninsula - became a mosaic of Celts, Iberians, Aryans, and Semites.
The Germanic races transforme in the 5^th century the western spirit - they were Aryans.
The Alleghanian civilizations in America.
The Mexican civilizations in America.
The Peruvian civilization in America.

In Vol VI, chapter 7, "Les indigènes américans" ("The native Americans"), discusses the racial status of the native Americans and ends up suggesting that at least the royal families of the three American civilization groups mentioned above (8.-10.) were white, even Aryans of Scandinavian origin.

Review of David Stove: Darwinian Fairytales (essay 11)

2006-10-31T15:29:00.000+01:00

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Preface	Essay 1	Essay 2	Essay 3
Essay 4	Essay 5	Essay 6	Essay 7
Essay 8	Essay 9	Essay 10	Essay 11

In Essay XI, "Errors of Heredity or The Irrelevance of Darwinism to Human Life", Stove starts with mentioning that we are all hereditary errors according to Darwinians (p. 212):

Do you realise, reader, that you are an error of heredity, a biological error? Anyway you are, whether you realise it or not. And not only an error, but an error on an enormous scale. At least, Darwinians say you are. And who knows more about biology and heredity, pray, than they do?

Or, at least those who waste their time on reading Darwinian Fairytales are.

A paragraph later Stove tells us, what it's all about:

A biological error, or error of heredity, is an organism which does not have as many descendants as it could have, or a characteristic of an organism which prevents it having as many descendants as it otherwise could.

Stove then gives some examples, such as this one on p. 213:

Here is a famous Darwinian, C.D. Darlington, on the subject of the naturally celibate. 'According to Galton's way of thinking, which all later study confirms, the natural celibate is an individual lying at the end of a curve of errors. He arises, as we may say, by a combination of errors of heredity.' That was, indeed, 'Galton's way of thinking', but not only his: it was 100 years ago, and still is, the way of thinking of all Darwinians.

This is the example Stove is particularly concerned about. According to him, 19th century Darwinists were particularly hostile towards the Roman Catholic clergy for its celibacy. For Stove, this is the "old anti-clericalism, and sexual emancipation" of the Enlightenment (cf. p. 219).

On p. 220, Stove then writes:

One of them is, that a scientific theory cannot possibly reprehend, in any way at all, any actual facts. It can explain them, predict them, describe them, but it cannot condemn as errors. Astronomy cannot criticise certain arrangements of stars or planets as erroneous, and no more can biology criticise certain organisms, or characteristics as erroneous.

This is, of course, correct; but things aren't quite like Stove reports them. While Charles Darwin isn't Francis Galton, I suppose that he can count as equally much a Darwinian. And I have found nine occurences of 'celibacy' in The Descent of Man, of which the following from chapter 5 is representative:

Natural selection follows from the struggle for existence; and this from a rapid rate of increase. It is impossible not to regret bitterly, but whether wisely is another question, the rate at which man tends to increase; for this leads in barbarous tribes to infanticide and many other evils, and in civilised nations to abject poverty, celibacy, and to the late marriages of the prudent.

Celibacy is here considered something negative, but also as a consequence of the "rate at which man tends to increase"; that is, celibacy is explained as a way to avoid the struggle for existence, so it is still explained as a consequence of that struggle. Of course, we can in the quoted passage pick down on the expression 'many other evils' and say that such moral judgments do not belong in a scientific text; but even that doesn't change the fact that Darwin sees celibacy as a civilized aternative to barbarous infanticide - and that independently of whether he sees things right or wrong.

Later on p. 220, Stove writes:

Wherever Darwinism is in error, Darwinians simply call the organisms in question or their characteristics, an error! Wherever there is manifestly something wrong with their theory, they say that there is something wrong with the organisms. Their theory implies that there is no such thing as natural celibacy, contraception, or feticide, and where all other species are concerned, it is true that there is no such thing. But in our species, those and many other anti-reproductive characteristics do exist.

Please hold your horses here, Mr. Stove, will you? Stove in the very best traditions of quote-miners has found a quote that lets him start beating the war drum without bothering to check, whether the quote tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We don't even know in what sense Galton used the word 'error'. Say I made a theory about the number of typing errors people made; would it then be something wrong with my theory if I made a curve of errors and had some individual lying at the one end?

On pp. 222-223, Stove quotes the opening paragraph from The Origin of Species, chapter 4, "Natural Selection", the one containing the statement "... we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed." And bootom p. 223 to top p. 224, Stove writes:

In fact, far from every attribute being rigidly destroyed which is in the least degree injurious, in our species there is precious little except injurious injurious attributes. Nearly everything about us, or at least nearly everything which distinguishes us from flies, fish, or rodents - all the way from practising Abortion to studying Zoology - puts some impediment or other in the way of having as many descendants as we could. From the point of view of Darwinism, just as from the point of view of Calvinism, there is no good in us, or none worth mentioning. We are a mere festering mess of biological errors.

Well, why pick down on Darwinists? There are far more Calvinists and feminists in this world, and they are after all much worse, and no one is allowed to speak against them, in particular not against feminists.

However, Stove has found his tree to bark up, and he continues p. 224:

Which means, of course - once you turn that statement the right way up - that on the subject of our species, Darwinism is a mere festering mass of errors: and of errors in the plain honest sense of that word too, namely, falsities taken for truths. Darwinism can tell you lots of truths about plants, flies, fish, etc., and interesting truths too, to the people who are interested in those things. But the case is different, indeed reversed, where our own species is in question. If it is human life that you would most like to know about and to understand, then a very good library can be begun by leaving out Darwinism, from 1859 to the present hour.

Seeing that Stove claimed that every component of Darwinism - except for an explanation of adaptation - was in place before 1859, this sounds somewhat odd. And turning things around, the problem that Stove apparently sees is that Darwinists makes him feel that he is an error, just as Calvinists do, because he doesn't fit into their rules, or what he considers to be their rules. That is, what Stove objects against is that he is not left the right to make his own choice.

Yet, things are not so simple as that. One day, when I was in a supermarket, I - as I always do - first went to the check-out line after having gathered all the (not very many) goods I was to buy. At the back of the line was a shopping cart with goods in it, but no person behind it. However, I placed myself behind the cart, expecting its owner to show up very soon. Customers occasionally leave their carts for a very short term, while fetching the last thing or two on a neighby shelf, and I thought that might be the case here. But no one showed up, and the line in front of the cart moved forward, and of course the cart and I then had to follow. Occasionally shop personnel use carts while putting goods on the shelves and leave them, if they momentarily are called to do something else. Also, occasionally, customers simply abandon their carts and leave the shop, if they get tired of waiting in line. That is, from prior experience I had reason to think that the cart might not be 'standing' in line. Still, I decided to keep my place and see, if the owner of the cart didn't show up. The line in front of the cart then moved one more customer forwards, and since the cart didn't show the least intention to follow, I decided that I had to be an abandoned cart, and I moved to the back of the active part of the check-out line. In that very moment a woman came to the cart and yelled at me: "You were sure quick there!" Apparently, in here mind I was an egocentric exploiting the situation. Since fighting about a place back or forth in a check-out line is very low on my priority list of things I consider worth fighting about, I went back to my old place behind the cart without a word, and the woman pushed the cart up to the back up the line, also without a word.

My point with this story is that the behavior of the woman could be considered very egocentric. What right did she have to park her shopping cart in the check-out line before she was finished gathering what she was going to buy? She projected her own egocentrism on me, unaware of that my behavior was the result of a longer deliberation and not something about being quick. Since then I have been studying check-out line behavior, and I can tell you that 50% of all women in a check-out line are unable to stand in it for more than one minute without needing to go out and gather more goods. Men only do this, if together with a woman that tells them to do it. Why is this so? Would I find the explanation in a feminist book? Of course not, such books only contain political correct statements that say that everything women do is good, and everything men do is bad. Would I find the explanation in a Calvinist book? Well, there's that story about a fruit that just had to be plucked and eaten, but where does the talking snake fit in? What's left? Darwinist books and David Stove's Darwinian Fairytales! Now, I have read Darwinian Fairytales and not found the explanation there, so ...

Denyse O'Leary's review of chapter XI can be found here.

In her second paragraph, O'Leary writes:

Now, he reasons, among plants or cockroaches, there is no biological error. They do not fail to have as many descendants as they can. Yet humans routinely do so, for a number of reasons, ranging from natural or voluntary celibacy through lifestyle choices that reduce fertility through heroic self-sacrifice.

While Stove does mention heroism, he does not mention it as a 'biological error'. Stove mentions it because he disagrees with R.A. Fisher's claim that heroes are people that themselves bring about the situation that let them display their heroism. Stove might consider heroism to be self-sacrifice, but he doesn't mention any such thing.

Concerning the same subject, O'Leary writes:

In Fisher's world, there is no need for self-sacrifice, not even on 9-11. But heroes do apparently insist on coming along and making trouble. I wonder what he would have made of the two young men who jumped into the pit of the Toronto subway in 2005, to pull out an older woman who had fainted? In what sense can we say that their "hazardous enterprise" was unnecessary? Dangerous, yes, and not at all likely to improve their chances of leaving descendants. Transit officials perform their duty, of course, when they counsel riders against such heroism. But very few of us would admire the young men more for taking the officials' advice.

Actually, 99.999999% of all heroes "insist on coming along and making trouble"; they make the situation that turns them into heroes in their own mind. Such as people yelling and screaming aggressively at other people for no other reason than to mark themselves as heroes. For example, 99.99999999% of all cases of "sexual assaults" by men on women only exist in the minds of people that see a chance of playing heroes. Why are so many men running along with the feminist war against male sexuality? Not because they think their sexuality is a crime, but because it gives them an excuse to push other men away from women.

O'Leary's next paragraph is:

As Stove points out, Fisher is living in a different mental space from most human beings on this point. Most of us, even if we accept religious teachings against artificial contraception, have never attempted to maximize the number of our descendants.

Then "[m]ost of us" are living in sin, because Genesis 1:28 clearly says that, "[a]nd God blessed them [the humans]: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (ASV). So, if we are to do as God has commanded, we are to replenish, that is, completely fill the earth, and I think there's a few empty spots still left vacant.

Also, if most of us accept religious teachings against artificial contraception, why do we then do that, if it isn't in order to maximize the number of our descendants?

A few paragraphs later, we find O'Leary caressing her pet peeve:

One thing his account certainly clarifies for me is why Darwinists today need to entrench their theory in school systems, contrary to public opinion. They must get students to accept it implicitly and uncritically, because it will not withstand common-sense criticism such as Stove supplies. The child must learn that Darwinism is absolutely true and accepted by all scientists before he learns that most adults do not embrace parenthood nearly as readily as a child assumes - before he learns, for example, about the rapidly growing demographic crisis of low birth rates . That way, he won't be tempted to blurt out embarrassing questions in biology class, with the devil to pay later.

But the variety of Darwinism taught in school isn't the one addressed by Stove; it is only concerned with biology, not the more controversial subject of human behavior. O'Leary, for some reason, doesn't bother to mention that as far as purely biological details are concerned, Stove fully endorses Darwinism. By the way, O'Leary is Roman catholic, not Calvinist; but you'll be hard pressed to spot the difference, even if the devil asked you to.

O'Leary ends with the following words:

On the other hand ... the willingness to think clearly cannot be so easily suppressed as the Darwinist supposes. In the end, Stoves [sic] main achievement in Darwinian Fairytales is to show that the theory was always conceptually flawed in important ways. Its status as an ideology is its best protection.

O'Leary is again waving her ID flag without telling that Stove in no way endorses ID; the only thing Stove endorses is that human beings should be allowed to do what pleases them without having to ask a priesthood for permission.

Review of David Stove: Darwinian Fairytales (essay 10)

2006-10-30T16:59:00.000+01:00

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Preface	Essay 1	Essay 2	Essay 3
Essay 4	Essay 5	Essay 6	Essay 7
Essay 8	Essay 9	Essay 10	Essay 11

In Essay X, "Paley's Revenge or Purpose Regained", Stove first mentions G.C. Williams' book Adaptation and Natural Selection from 1966. Stove writes p. 179:

Its subject, however, is not altruism. It is something which lies equally close to the heart of Darwinism, and is far more widespread and prominent in organisms than altruism is: namely, adaptation. Organisms differ from inanimate objects in being, in countless ways, adapted or adjusted or fitted to the circumstances which surround them. Every one of their organs, structures, processes, phases, has a function or purpose: something that it is for. It is in order to explain this great fact of life, and to explain it along the most severely Darwinian lines, that Adaptation and Natural Selection is written.

After that, Stove takes us on a little, historical tour beginning with David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), in which Hume argues against 'the design argument', continuing with William Paley's Natural Theology (1802), in which Paley argues for 'the design argument', and ending with Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859). According to Stove, this book explained the origin of new species by natural selection that progressivly would lead to a new species.

Then Stove writes p. 182:

Such was, in essence, the Darwinian explanation of adaptation. In addition to its intrinsic merits, it had the advantages, over the Paleyan or theistic explanation, of being completely down to earth, and of explaining many other things beside adaptation. After all Darwin, in the Origin, had not been trying to explain adaptation: he had been trying to explain the origin of species! And yet, as Williams observes, the natural selection theory is actually a better explanation of the preservation and accumulation of adaptations, than it is of the origin of species.

Ok, that explains the title of Williams' book.

According to Stove, the explanation of adaptation by natural selection with one blow sent the theistic explanation into "a steep and apparently irreversible decline", and 'Natural theology' which was intended to limit the advance of atheism "found that its principal support had been removed" (ibid.).

However, according to Stove, while Paley by 1960 was considered to be "a fool or hypocrite or both" (ibid.), the situation has changed since then. Ironically, Paley has had his revenge. As Stove writes bootom p. 182:

The explanation of adaptation by reference to the purposes of intelligent and powerful agents has come back into its own. And its reinstatement has turned out to require only some comparatively minor changes to the theology involved.

Now, of course, Stove is not here referring to William Dembski's celebration of Paley. No, it is Richard Dawkins again, who, as Stove correctly mentions, is "full of a proper respect for Paley's explanation of adaptation" (ct. p. 183). For Stove, this is not surprising, since Dawkins is a theist himself. As Stove writes p. 183:

It is not in the least surprising that Dawkins should feel a profound intellectual sympathy with Paley's great book. It would be astounding if the opposite were the case. For he is a theist himself, as I [David Stove] have pointed out in Essay VII and IX. He agrees with Paley, that the adaptations of organisms are due to the purposive agency, (more specifically, the selfish and manipulative agency), of beings far more intelligent and powerful than humans or any other organisms.

This is -almost - true. In The Blind Watchmaker, chapter 1, Dawkins writes:

The watchmaker of my title is borrowed from a famous treatise by the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley. His Natural Theology - or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, published in 1802, is the best-known exposition of the 'Argument from Design', always the most influential of the arguments for the existence of a God. It is a book that I greatly admire, for in his own time its author succeeded in doing what I am struggling to do now. He had a point to make, he passionately believed in it, and he spared no effort to ram it home clearly. He had a proper reverence for the complexity of the living world, and he saw that it demands a very special kind of explanation. The only thing he got wrong - admittedly quite a big thing! - was the explanation itself. He gave the traditional religious answer to the riddle, but he articulated it more clearly and convincingly than anybody had before. The true explanation is utterly different, and it had to wait for one of the most revolutionary thinkers of all time, Charles Darwin.

So, yes, Dawkins indeed feels a profound intellectual sympathy with Paley's great book. But Stove ignores a detail, the word 'Blind' in The Blind Watchmaker. As Dawkins writes, Paley begins his book with this passage:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.

As the story continues, Paley argues that from the complexity of the watch, each part precisely fitted to function together with the other parts, we conclude without hesitation that the watch is designed. That is, we conclude from watch to watchmaker, from the fact of the watch to the necessity of the watchmaker. Dawkins isn't denying this line of reasoning with respect to organisms as well, only that the watchmaker needs to be able to see into the future; that is, the necessity of any conscious purpose.

Therefore, Stove's argumentation doesn't quite hold. Dawkins exactly does not claim that any "purposive agency" is at play.

On p. 184-185, Stove picks up Adaptation and Natural Selection again and supplies a few quotes that should give the impression that Williams just as Paley saw design in organisms. For example bottom p. 184 to top p.185:

'[E]very adaptation is calculated to maximise the reproductive success of the individual, relative to other individuals ...' An adaptation is 'a mechanism designed to promote the success of the individual organism, as measured by the extent to which it contributes genes to later generations of the population of which it is a member.' 'Each part of the animal is organised for some function tributary to the ultimate goal of the survival of its own genes.'

So, according to Stove, little was left for Dawkins to popularize this new religion of genes, and it is all simply paraphrases of Paley

Stove acknowledges that neither Williams nor Dawkins referred to any real purpose or intelligence. As Stove writes p. 186:

Dawkins in order to make clear the great difference between the Paleyan explanation of adaptation and his own Darwinian one, writes (for example) as follows. 'Natural selection ... has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all.'

Continuing, Stove claims that this would be true, even if we substituted 'natural selection' with 'artificial selection', since artificial selection doesn't have a purpose in mind either - it is cattle breeders that have. Yet, no one would claim that "purposeful intelligent agents play no part in bringing about artificial selection!"

This is quite true, but not all that relevant - the word 'artificial' implies human activity. An artifact is something made by humans, and in archaeology it is important to be able to tell the difference between an artifact and a natural object; but that doesn't imply that an artifact has a purpose in mind itself, while a natural object doesn't.

However, Stove's complaint is really about the reification of natural selection, which just as artificial selection cannot have a purpose. It is about the causal agents, the genes, we need to ask, whether they are purposeful. According to Stove, a purpose needs not be conscious. He mentions p. 187:

People quite often realise that they have been, for some time, intending or 'purposing' to bring a certain state of affairs about, without having been conscious at the time of having any such purpose. It cannot be doubted that much of the activity of dogs is purposive; but whether any of it is consciously so, may very reasonably be doubted.

Well, isn't Stove here undermining his own position? This is epiphenomenalism; that is, the idea that the consciousness really plays no role in making decisions, all purposes really only exist in the subconscious and therefore belong to physiology. But our physiology isn't a result of our own intelligent design, it's a result of our genes. So, Stove is apparently a sociobiologist himself!

Anyway, Stove admits that Dawkins "has returned a clear 'no', not only to the question whether natural selection is purposive, but to the question whether genes are so." (ibid.), so where is the problem? However, Stove doesn't accept that denial, because Dawkins, and Williams as well, many more times describe genes as purposeful than they deny that genes are purposeful, ans, as Stove writes later p. 187:

If the writer of a book says a certain thing twice or once or never, but implies the opposite over and over again throughout his book, a rational reader will take it that the writer's real opinion is the one which he constantly implies; not the other one.

Not necessarily so. In The Blind Watchmaker, chapter 1, Dawkins writes:

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design. At first sight, man-made artefacts like computers and cars will seem to provide exceptions. They are complicated and obviously designed for a purpose, yet they are not alive, and they are made of metal and plastic rather than of flesh and blood. In this book they will be firmly treated as biological objects.

That is, Dawkins here writes that "computers and cars" will be treated as biological objects, so obviously he is using words in a non-standard way. Continuing, he writes:

The reader's reaction to this may be to ask, 'Yes, but are they really biological objects?' Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes we find it convenient to use words in different senses. Most cookery books class lobsters as fish. Zoologists can become quite apoplectic about this, pointing out that lobsters could with greater justice call humans fish, since fish are far closer kin to humans than they are to lobsters. And, talking of justice and lobsters, I understand that a court of law recently had to decide whether lobsters were insects or 'animals' (it bore upon whether people should be allowed to boil them alive). Zoologically speaking, lobsters are certainly not insects. They are animals, but then so are insects and so are we. There is little point in getting worked up about the way different people use words (although in my nonprofessional life I am quite prepared to get worked up about people who boil lobsters alive). Cooks and lawyers need to use words in their own special ways, and so do I in this book.

So, consider yourself warned - Dawkins is using words to mean what he wants them to mean, which should be ok, as long as he states in which way he uses words in a deviant sense relative to, what the intended audience would expect.

Unfortunately, Dawkins doesn't directly define how he uses the word 'purpose'. At the beginning of chapter 2, Dawkins writes:

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning. The purpose of this book is to resolve this paradox to the satisfaction of the reader, and the purpose of this chapter is further to impress the reader with the power of the illusion of design.

Note that here Dawkins uses the word purpose three times. First to imply that natural selection has no purpose in view, then to indicate the purpose of the book in general and chapter 2 in particular. Now, a book and a chapter don't have any purposes in view either; but still it is clear that Dawkins' purpose is to describe biological objects in a way so the reader will first be impressed with the illusion of design and then to show that it's only an illusion - in the case of, what's usually understood by 'biological objects'. This may of course be peculiar to The Blind Watchmaker; yet even if so, in the other books, the same idea may apply, although the authors may have been to sloppy to inform the readers; but that's a different problem than that they really meant that genes are purposeful in the same way, e.g., humans are.

But Stove isn't the kind of guy to let linguistic sloppyness simply pass by. On page 189, he writes:

Dawkins told the readers of The Selfish Gene that, if they objected to his describing genes as selfish, he could easily 'translate [that statement] back into respectable language'. Well, I do object to it, and one of the grounds on which I object to it is, that it implies that genes are purposive. So I would like to know what the 'respectable translation' is of 'genes are selfish'.

Since Dawkins, according to Stove, didn't supply that translation, Stove is going to try to work it out for himself. Needless to say, this project doesn't succeed; but Stove kicks back claiming that no one else, including Dawkins, has provided such a translation. While this is certainly a valid objection, the problem is that Stove's claim that 'selfish gene theory', as Stove calls it, is a new religion only holds true in a purely linguistic sense. Of course, Stove is entitled as well to use words according to his own rules.

Anyway, Dawkins' point is that genes, not individual organisms, are the unit of selection. That is, to trace evolution, we need to trace genes. Therefore Dawkins describes genes with words that would usually be used to describe individual organisms. And further, it's not the single instance of the gene that is the unit of selection, it's the gene pattern.

On p. 191, Stove mentions Darwin's book The various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and here he complains about the word 'Contrivances', which also indicates purposeness. Stove writes that everybody understood that Darwin didn't use the word in that meaning, but in which meaning then?

This leads up to this general accusation (ibid.):

Darwinians, then, have never paid, or even acknowledged, the debt they have all along owed the public: a reconciliation of their teleological explanations of particular adaptations, with their non-teleological explanation of adaptation in general.

The problem really is that human language is, well, human language, and we tend to detect purposeness in each other. This is of importance for human cooperation; but unfortunately it also leads to many false accusations for unaccepted purposes. The "you did that on purpose!" warcry always means that you are in trouble, even if the claim is wrong. The teleological explanations are therefore simply due to that are purposefully designed by humans to be understood by humans, and that's all there is to it. Don't let yourself be lured by the contrivances of language, and everything should come out just fine. And we probably shouldn't ignore either that anthropomorphic language spawns some human interest in an area that might otherwise not have spawned that interest.

On p. 194, Stove claims that before 1600 bce, no one thought of using adaptation of organisms as a design argument; in return this argument 'ran riot' in the 17th and 18th century.

For once, Stove is actually making sense; let's see, how well he can keep up the standard. On p. 195, he writes:

By 1800, adaptation had become not merely the main, but virtually the only empirically evidence appealed to, to establish the divine existence and purposes. Paley sufficiently indicates that he himself attached little value to the design argument when it is based on anything other than adaptation. And yet when Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Aquinas had employed a design argument, it had never been from adaptation. It was always from some fact, or supposed fact, of astronomy, or of general or terrestrial physics: from almost anything in the world, in fact, except the adaptations of organisms.

I had hoped that Stove would mention that after it had been accepted that there was no difference between the sub-lunar world and the super-lunar world, astronomical arguments for design simply weren't hard currency anymore. But he doesn't. In return, mid p. 196, he argues for that teleolical arguments should not be translated into non-teleological terms, because

If organisms weree indifferent towards their own survival and reproduction, or if they positively leaned to the Buddhist side of those issues, there would be no struggle for life, hence no natural selection, and hence no evolution, according to the Darwinian theory. So very far is that theory, then from according no causal role in evolution to purpose.

That is, I suppose, to say that there is nothing wrong with purposes. Over the next pages, Stove develops the idea of purposeness, and on pp. 198-199, he even mentions the sexuality of plants, about which he has several interesting things to say. For istance that it was a blow to our anthropocentrism, becaus eit showed that even palnts weren't here merely for "our sustenance, delight, or use: that on the contrary, they had a purpose of their own, an overriding purpose too, and one which they share with all other organisms - to survive and reproduce themselves." Continuing, Stove writes:

But the discovery of the sexuality of plants was not only intellectual dynamite: it was moral and political dynamite as well. For the Christian religion, after all, had waged war from its very start against the sexual impulse in man: not just against its hypertrophy, but against the thing itself. It had always been obvious to every thoughtful person that the sacrement of Christian marriage was no more than an uneasy compromise with the deadly sin of concupiscence. And yet, how could something which not just we and the 'beasts' do, but which wheat and apples and roses and oaks do, be an offense against the divine nature and purpose? The conclusion which was bound to be drawn, and was drawn, was that, in spite of St Paul, sexual intercourse is innocent.

Well, while Paul isn't known to have been much of an admirer of sexuality, I cannot recall that he anywhere says that it's a crime - though, of course, deviant sexual behavior is the sure ticket to hell. However, according to Stove, the "pursuit of happiness" was given a little twist by this discovery.

Stove's main point in these pages is that all the components of Darwinism - that all organisms strive to survive, reproduce and increase in a struggle against each other - were in place long before Darwin was even born; actually they were in place before Paley wrote Natural Theology.

From bottom p. 201 to top p. 203, Stove deals with Arthur Schopenhauer, "the Philosopher of Pessimism", who operated with 'the will to live', an purposive force, which wasn't conscious, but simply a driving force.

On p. 203, Stove treats us to his own version of

The conception of life, then, which we rightly call Darwinian though it owes nothing to Darwin, is this. All organisms strive to the utmost to survive, reproduce, and increase; everything they do, and all their adaptations, are contributory to that end; and it is only (or near enough only) the limitness of their food, and the struggle for life in which it embroils conspecifics, which prevents them increasing without limit.

Not necessarily so - depending on the meaning of 'organisms'. Darwin had no idea of genes, as we know them today, though he entertained the Pangenesis theory. However, Darwin doesn't make an always clear distinction between individual organisms and populations, and indeed theories of society as a single organism are quite common. On the frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan is shown the picture of the Sovereign, whose body is made up of the people; the idea being that with the Sovereign as its head, the people can work as one cooperating body instead of as a number of bodies fighting against each other. This is an important, though not well-integrated, aspect of Darwin's theory of evolution. Think about it, the earliest organisms were single-celled, then came multicellular organisms, then came societies of such organisms. Darwin's idea of common descent was not simply evolution, but to stretch the sympathy between members of a society to all that had the same common descent. Stove, by focusing only on the struggle between individual organisms doesn't catch this aspect.

On p. 204, Stove first mentions that

no effect of that kind [the conception of life above] can ever be brought about by intelligence, or by consciousness. Indeed, according to this conception of this, there could be no greater error than to tjink of intelligence and consciousness as external to the struggle for life, or as a possible source of interference with it. On the contrary, intelligence and even consciousness are just some of the means which have evolved in certain species for use in the struggle of life, and for nothing else; just as, in certain other species, a hard shell, or fleetness of foot, or a certain kind of dentition, has evolved.

So, it's not that Stove disagrees with Darwinists, as long as they don't make a new religion out of it. Against this we might ask, where this purposeness resides? That is, assuming Stove doesn't have it to be some kind of soul. Is Stove a monist or a dualist?

After this, Stove mentions the "ancient philosophical idea: 'the principle of plenitude'", whereby is meant that "the world is full - plenum - in the sense that there are no unrealised possibilities." This is turns means that everything is the only way it possibly can be. According to Stove, a child or an uneducated adult believes that there are many unrealised possibilities, but an educated adult knows better. Also scientific discoveries work this way: informing us that something isn't possible. For Stove, Darwinism is part of this process. As he writes p. 206:

In the same way, Darwinism says, biological science will in the end dispel all illusions of our being free and able to act otherwise than we do. We do not feel the universal striving to increase, or the struggle for life, any more than we feel gravitation, inertia, or air pressure, and yet the former forces really do constrain us just as rigidly as the latter do. The striving to increase, in our species as in every other, never sleeps, never tires, and never neglects an opportunity for reproduction.

This is Darwinism according to Stove; but I'm not fully convinced that all Darwinists will sign this declaration without having a few extra paragraphs in small print on the back of the paper.

Anyway, Stove claims (ibid.):

This conception of life, (as I [David Stove] have pointed out in earlier essays), is not true, because it is not true of human life. Despite Darwin - and despite Hume, Malthus, and Schopenhauer too - human life is not a plenum: it contains countless unrealised possibilities of reproduction.

By this, Stove means that humans don't have all the children they might have had. We have been through all this before, so we won't go through it again.

Stove ends Essay X on p. 207 with:

The basic idea of the new religion, then, that humans and all other organisms are mere means to the ends of more powerfull intelligent agents, is not an innovation of the last few decades. On the contrary, it was present all along, in the conception of life which Darwin shared with Schopenhauer and some others. The purposive gene gods of the new religion are the Life Force of Schopenhauer or the striving to increase of Darwin; only broken up into a multitude of little independent life forces or strivings to increase, in each single organism, and 'given a local habitation' in its body. That is how the new religion came about.

We could go further back; in the Homeric epics and classical Greek dramas, humans are the puppets of the gods, wars betweeb humans are caused by disagreements between the gods, and who's to win and who's to loose a battle is decided by the ever changing moods of the gods. Particularly interesting here is Euripides' play Hippolytos, a description of which can be found at the University of Nottingham, Department of Classics:

Aphrodite is determined to destroy Theseus' son Hippolytos because he will not worship her, preferring Artemis. She has therefore caused his step-mother Phaidra to fall in love with him. Phaidra wishes to keep silent and let herself waste away, but her interfering old nurse prises the secret out of her and approaches Hippolytos. He rejects Phaidra, whom he believes to have set up the approach; she, fearing exposure, hangs herself, leaving a note which claims that Hippolytos had raped her. Theseus believes this note despite Hippolytos' protestations, and curses his son. A terrible bull emerges from the sea, and Hippolytos is mangled trying to control his stampeding horses. Artemis tells Theseus the truth and he is reconciled to his dying son.

So, the idea of humans as victims of forces greater than themselves is even older than the 19th century, something which Stove hasn't denied either. The idea of human free will has never really existed except as a legitimation for punishments, so what's really Stoves's point?

Denyse O'Leary's review of Essay X can be found here.

As usually, O'leary basically follows Stove. But not quite, where she writes:

As many have pointed out, looking only one per cent like a bird dropping will not save a caterpillar from a hungry bird. Probably not even five percent or ten. Some purpose working behind the scenes is required to sustain major projects over the long periods in which they do not appear to pay.

That's where the selfish gene comes in. It attempts to get itself replicated in as many descendants as possible. It will persist through many iterations until it succeeds, and is thus capable of these apparently miraculous transformations.

This is not Stove's claim, but O'leary's imagination.

Later O'Leary writes:

In other words, in attempting to explain complex adaptations, Darwinism transferred purpose from an unselfish God to selfish genes, without giving any clear account of how or why genes should do all that Darwinists need them to do. Nor have Darwinists ever demonstrated that they actually do.

Again not quite Stove's point. It is true that Paley in Natural Theology claimed the creator to be benevolent; but that's not exactly the same as unselfish.

O'Leary ends with her usual complaint:

Because he is not a religious believer, philosopher Stove does not write with the intention of substituting a more conventional theistic explanation for the Darwinian religion of the selfish gene (he describes it as such). He is content to point out that it is a religion, which transfers the debt of purpose to the gene. Indeed, the religious character of Darwinism has often been remarked on by other sources. Dawkins has famously said that Darwinism made him feel fulfilled fulfilled [sic - doubly fulfilled] as an atheist.

That's as may be, but forcing it on the public as the only acceptable explanation for a variety of puzzling life forms is increasingly, and very understandably, controversial.

Again not quite Stove's point, which O'Leary partly omits - by mentioning that Stove doesn't have "the intention of substituting a more conventional theistic explanation for the Darwinian religion". Maybe O'Leary should have paid more attention to what Stove really is saying rather than just try to use him to have ID accepted in public schools.

Review of David Stove: Darwinian Fairytales (essay 9)

2006-10-29T14:16:00.000+01:00

Go to review of
Preface	Essay 1	Essay 2	Essay 3
Essay 4	Essay 5	Essay 6	Essay 7
Essay 8	Essay 9	Essay 10	Essay 11

In Essay IX, "A New Religion", Stove continues his assult on sociobiology, more precisely on its demonology, the genetic determinism. Except that now genes are not demons, but gods. On p. 171, he writes:

A person is certainly a believer in some religion if he thinks, for example, that there are on earth millions of invisible and immortal non-human beings which are far more intelligent and capable than we are.

We must assume that Stove wasn't aware that genes were rejected in the Soviet Union under Stalin with that same argument: they were invisible and could therefore not exist and therefore not have any influence.

Stove continues:

But that is exactly what sociobiologists do think, about genes. Sociobiology, then is a religion: one which has genes as its gods.

Well, I searched through Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and found the following occurences of 'intelligent':

Chapter 2, p. 21:

We may say that a living body or organ is well designed if it has attributes that an intelligent and knowledgeable engineer might have built into it in order to achieve some sensible purpose, such as flying, swimming, seeing, eating, reproducing, or more generally promoting the survival and replication of the organism's genes.

The word 'intelligent' here is an adjective to 'engineer', which apparently denotes a human. Genes are mentioned, but not as intelligent in themselves. The apparent intelligence of the genes would really here be the intelligence of the engineer.
Chapter 5, p. 114:

In the first generation there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes, much superior in average intelligence to the negroes. We might expect the throne for some generations to be occupied by a more or less yellow king; but can any one believe that the whole island will gradually acquire a white, or even a yellow population, or that the islanders would acquire the energy, courage, ingenuity, patience, self-control, endurance, in virtue of which qualities our hero killed so many of their ancestors, and begot so many children, these qualities, in fact, which the struggle for existence would select, if it could select anything?

This is actually part of a quote beginning p. 113. As Dawkins writes, a Scottish engineer Fleeming Jenkins had claimed that blending inheritance (which was the common assumption back then, before Mendel's theory of discrete inheritance became known and accepted) ruled out natural selection as a plausible theory of evolution. Darwin who was worried by Jenkins' argument then wrote a parable about a white man shipwrecked on an island inhabited by 'negroes'. And this, of course, superior white man becomes king of the island. Dawkins tells us to not "be distracted by the racist assumptions of white superiority"; but he has his own reasons for that. Not that I disagree with Dawkins; but I don't even think that we should take those assumptions seriously here - they appear to be driven into the extreme for the sake of argument. Jenkins' point was that blending inheritance would lead to a uniform population over time, and therefore natural selection would have nothing to select from. Darwin - by going into extremes - tries to make that idea look ridicolous.

Anyway, the word 'intelligent' (and 'intelligence') is also here applied to humans.
Chapter 6, p. 141:

But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself.

Here the adverb 'intelligently' is applied to 'designing something', the designer being a god; but apparently not a gene - what is designed (or rather not designed, according to Dawkins) is the "DNA/protein replicating machine", which includes the genes. So same situation as on p. 21.
Chapter 6, p. 145:

Suppose the origin of intelligence is so improbable that it has happened on only one planet in the universe, even though life has started on many planets. Then, since we know we are intelligent enough to discuss the question, we know that Earth must be that one planet.

Here again, the word 'intelligernt' (and 'intelligence') is applied to humans (and possibly animals), not to genes.
Chapter 6, p. 158:

Could it be that one far-off day intelligent computers will speculate about their own lost origins?

Well, here 'intelligent' is an adjective applied to computers, those silicon-based thingies that are on everybody's desktop, not to genes.
Chapter 7, p. 183-184:

But van Valen's evolutionary Red Queen effect is not paradoxical at all. It is entirely in accordance with common sense, so long as common sense is intelligently applied.

We won't worry about the deeper meaning here. The word 'intelligently' is applied to 'applied', and the subject is 'common sense'. Now, who is able to apply common sense? Shall we agree that Dawkins most likely refers to humans?
Chapter 10, p. 263:

Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees!

Here 'intelligent' is an adjective applied to 'adult chimpanzees', not to genes.

So, shall we agree that at least Richard Dawkins doesn't claim that genes are more intelligent than we are?

At page 172, Stove supplies a number of quotes from Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson that are supposed to indicate that these two consider organisms to be only tools used by DNA. The problem here is that the quotes are very short, hardly a full sentence each, so what the authors meant is not necessarily, what Stove wants us to think. Sure, the metaphorical language used by sociobiologists is suggestive; but since we humans are tool-users, our language reflect that.

Stove continues p. 172-173 referencing The Extended Phenotype, in which Dawkins allegedly claims that genes are manipulating and capable of just about everything - through their organisms. I haven't read The Extended Phenotype; but I'd Guess that Dawkins' point is that all this is possible without genes having any conscious purposes. Stove mentions that "beaver genes (not beaver) manipulate logs and water to make a dam". It is well-known that beavers build dams, and apparently they don't need to go to engineering school to learn to do it; it's simply part of being a beaver; that is, the dam-building activity is encoded in the beavers' genes, and that's probably Dawkins' point: an activity, to which we would ascribe conscious purpose, if performed by humans, can be encoded in genes that have no consciousness. A beaver is conscious; but is it conscious about genes?

The rest of Essay IX is just Stove still not getting the point.

Denyse O'Leary's review of Essay IX can be found here.

O'Leary commits the same misunderstanding as Stove:

One problem is that, while sociobiologists (adherents of selfish gene theory) claim on the one hand that genes are not really selfish or consciousness or purposeful, they write as though they in fact are. For example, Dawkins informs us (in The Extended Phenotype) that when the cuckoo lays its egg in the nest of a reed warbler, the cuckoo's genes are manipulating the reed warbler's genes, to the cuckoo's advantage. But manipulation implies intelligence and purpose (though causation as such does not necessarily imply that.

And she ends writing:

It is not really surprising that most people who are drawn to religion prefer traditional monotheism to this stuff.

Such as a religion that tells them that they are created in the image of an invisible, manipulating god?

Pre-Darwinists (4) Edward Blyth

2006-10-27T15:05:00.000+02:00

Introduction
Edward Blyth - a short biography
Varieties of animals
Cuvier's The Animal Kingdom

One of the stranger articles at AnswersInGenesis is Darwin’s illegitimate brainchild by Russell Grigg. What makes it strange is that rather than the standard attack on Darwin's theory of evolution, the article attacks Charles Darwin personally for being unoriginal; that is, in attacking Darwin, the article implicitly admits that there were several precursors, which in turn means that the usual attacks on evolution for being a theory made by an insane atheist loose all their relevance.

Biography One of these precursors is Edward Blyth. The article claims that Darwin knew about Blyth's articles in The Magazine of Natural History from 1835-37, in which natural selection was described, but didn't credit Blyth. This would appear to be an inconsistency on behalf of Grigg, since he mentions that the idea of natural selection was around as early as 1794; that is, long before Blyth wrote his articles.

Grigg asks the question: "Why did [Charles Darwin] not cite Blyth’s papers that dealt directly with natural selection?" and suggests the following two reasons:

Blyth was a Christian and what we would nowadays call a ‘special creationist’. E.g. concerning the seasonal changes in animal colouring (such as the mountain hare becoming white in winter), Blyth said that these were ‘striking instances of design, which so clearly and forcibly attest the existence of an omniscient great First Cause’ [Blyth (1835)]. And he said that animals ‘evince superhuman wisdom, because it is innate, and therefore, instilled by an all-wise Creator’ [Blyth (1837)].
Blyth correctly saw the concept of natural selection as a mechanism by which the sick, old and unfit were removed from a population; that is, as a preserving factor and for the maintenance of the status quo—the created kind [Wieland, C., Muddy waters: Clarifying the confusion about natural selection]. Creationists like Edward Blyth (and English theologian William Paley) saw natural selection as a process of culling; that is, of choosing between several traits, all of which must first be in existence before they can be selected.

Evolutionist Loren Eisely's book Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X from 1979 is Grigg's main source for the claim that Darwin stole his theory from Blyth.

This same book is also the main source for creationist James M. Foard's article The Darwin Papers - Edward Blyth and Natural Selection. This article and Loren Eisely's book is critiqued by evolutionist Roland Watts in a No Answers in Genesis article". Foard's article contains a response to Watt's article.

Edward Blyth - short biography

Edward Blyth (1810-1873) was born as the eldest child of a poor family in London. His father died, when Edward was ten years old, leaving his mother to raise the four children. However, the situation of the family was well enough for Edward to be sent to school, where he excelled in chemistry and natural history, spending his every spare moment at the British Museum.

1832 - Blyth buys a druggist's business in Lower Tooting, London, and worked as a chemist, while still keeping his zoological interest. Blyth is a frequent speaker at naturalist meetings in London, and from 1835 to 1837 he publishes articles on the subject of natural selection in The Magazine of Natural History (Vols. 8, 9, and 10). While there is evidence that Charles Darwin, while in Peru in 1835 during his voyage on the Beagle has read at least the first of Blyth's articles, these very creationist articles have little in common with Darwin's use of natural selection.

1837 - the druggist's business fails, and Blyth moves to Brixton, Surrey.

1838 - Blyth is appointed curator (possibly honorary) of the Ornithological Society of London.

1840 - Blyth translates and edits the 'Mammalia, Birds, and Reptiles' section of the English version, The Animal Kingdom, of Cuvier's Regne animal distribué d'après son organisation (1817). See Cuvier's The Animal Kingdom for details.

1841 - Blyth goes to India as the curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, where he reorganizes the catalogues and is a prolific publisher on behalf of the society; but he is censured in 1947 due to his difficult behavior.

1854 - Blyth marries a young widow, whom he had known previously in England before her first marriage, and who is visiting relatives in India.

1855 - An extensive correspondence between Blyth and Charles Darwin begins.

1857 - The happy marriage ends with the death of Blyth's wife, an event from which he suffers extreme psychological trauma leading to severe illness.

1862 - Blyth leaves Calcutta and returns to England. He formally retires from the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1863; but is made a honorary member in 1865.

Varieties of Animals (1835)

In The Magazine of Natural History, Vol. 8, No. 1., January, 1835, pp. 40-53, we find the article "An Attempt to Classify the 'Varieties' of Animals with Observations on the Marked Seasonal and Other Changes Which Naturally Take Place in Various British Species, and Which Do Not Constitute Varieties", or "Varieties of Animals" for short, by Edward Blyth.

Blyth begins by noting that the word 'variety' is "very commonly misapplied to individuals of a species, which are merely undergoing a regular natural change, either progressing from youth to maturity, or gradually shifting, according to fixed laws, their colours with the seasons". That is, Blyth considers 'variety' only to be applicable to "a departure from the acknowledged type of a species, either in structure, in size, or in colour", where the 'departure' isn't a change of the individual organism due to age or season. Worth noting here is the existence of an "acknowledged type of a species"; that is, there is standard against which the variety can be decided to be a variety. Continuing the sentence, Blyth writes that 'variety' "vague in the degree of being alike used to denote the slightest individual variation, and the most dissimilar breeds which have originated from one common stock." To clear up this vagueness, Blyth proposes a classification of varieties into four classes: "simple variations, acquired variations, breeds, and true varieties."

In more details, these fours classes of varieties are defined as follows:

Simple Variations. About these, Blyth writes: "The first class, which I propose to style simple or slight individual variations, differs only in degree from the last, or true varieties; and consists of mere differences of colour or of stature, unaccompanied by any remarkable structural deviation; also of slight individual peculiarities of any kind, which are more or less observable in all animals, whether wild or tame, and which, having a tendency to perpetuate themselves by generation, may, under particular circumstances, become the origin of true breeds (which constitute my third class of varieties), but which, in a state of nature, are generally lost in the course of two or three generations." That is, simple variations are only in degree different from true varieties, and in a state of nature they are generally lost within few generations. As an example of a simple variation, Blyth mentions albinos.
Acquired Variations. About these, Blyth writes: "The second class of varieties which I would designate thus, comprises the various changes which, in a single individual, or in the course of generations, are gradually brought about by the operation of known causes: such as the greater or less supply of nutriment; the influence of particular sorts of food; or, either of these combined with the various privations consequent upon confinement; which changes would as gradually and certainly disappear if these causes were removed." That is, aquired variations are those that are caused by environmental factors affecting the development of individuals, either a single individual or in the course of generations. Apparently Blyth believed such aquired variations to be hereditary, although dependent on the continuation of the environmental factors. As examples of aquired variations, Blyth mentions that domesticated animals become more "bulky and lazy", because they don't have to seek their own nutrition, and their "muscles of the organs of locomotion" become "rigid and comparatively powerless", because they are not used much and therefore not developed to full size.
Breeds. About these, Blyth writes: "It is a general law of nature for all creatures to propagate the like of themselves: and this extends even to the most trivial minutiae, to the slightest individual peculiarities; and thus, among ourselves, we see a family likeness transmitted from generation to generation. When two animals are matched together, each remarkable for a certain given peculiarity, no matter how trivial, there is also a decided tendency in nature for that peculiarity to increase; and if the produce of these animals be set apart, and only those in which the same peculiarity is most apparent, be selected to breed from, the next generation will possess it in a still more remarkable degree; and so on, till at length the variety I designate a breed, is formed, which may be very unlike the original type." That is, 'peculiarities' are inherited and increased, if both parents have the same 'peculiarity'. As examples of breeds, Blyth mentions "many of the varieties of cattle, and, in all probability, the greater number of those of domestic pigeons".
Blyth further writes that "[t]he original form of a species is unquestionably better adapted to its natural habits than any modification of that form;" and that this adaptation to natural habits is kept up, because "the sexual passions excite to rivalry and conflict, and the stronger must always prevail over the weaker, the latter, in a state of nature, is allowed but few opportunities of continuing its race." Blyth even uses the phrase "the struggle for existence": "In a large herd of cattle, the strongest bull drives from him all the younger and weaker individuals of his own sex, and remains sole master of the herd; so that all the young which are produced must have had their origin from one which possessed the maximum of power and physical strength; and which, consequently, in the struggle for existence, was the best able to maintain his ground, and defend himself from every enemy."
And more of the same: "In like manner, among animals which procure their food by means of their agility, strength, or delicacy of sense, the one best organized must always obtain the greatest quantity; and must, therefore, become physically the strongest, and be thus enabled, by routing its opponents, to transmit its superior qualities to a greater number of offspring." This makes you wonder, why it's called 'social Darwinism' and not 'social Blythism', doesn't it? This struggle for existence, serves, according to Blyth, to keep a species true to its type: "The same law, therefore, which was intended by Providence to keep up the typical qualities of a species, can be easily converted by man into a means of raising different varieties; but it is also clear that, if man did not keep up these breeds by regulating the sexual intercourse, they would all naturally soon revert to the original type." That is, for Blyth, the struggle for existence is a divine commandment, "which causes each race to be chiefly propagated by the most typical and perfect individuals." So, why is everybody yelling at Darwinists?
True Varieties. About these, Blyth writes: "The last of these divisions to which I more peculiarly restrict the term variety, consists of what are, in fact a kind of deformities, or monstrous births, the peculiarities of which, from reasons already mentioned, would very rarely, if ever, be perpetuated in a state of nature; but which, by man's agency, often become the origin of a new race." That is, true varieties are freaks of nature, which in a state of nature would be weeded out. As examples of true varieties, Blyth mentions "the breed of sheep, now common in North America, and known by the name of ancons or otter sheep", "[t]he solidungular variety of swine, tailless cats, back-feathered, five-toed, and rumpless fowls, together with many sorts of dogs, and probably , also the race of fan-tailed pigeons".
Unlike the above, "[t]he deviations of this kind do not appear to have any tendency to revert to the original form". Blyth suggests that such a deviation, that is a true variety, "most probably, could only be restored, in a direct manner, by the way in which the variety was first produced," whereby he would most likely have meant a new deviation to counter the first one.
Of special interest is that Blyth suggests that "[t]o this class may be also referred, with more than probability, some of the more remarkable varieties of the human species."

Blyth continues his discussion under the fourth class by the subject of human skin color to determine, where this feature should go in his classification. Basically, he considers sun-tanning of white people to be an aquired variety, while the color of black people is not, since it is kept even in cold climates. Further, Blyth writes:

There is one fact, however, here to be observed, which is very well worthy of attention; and this is, that coloured varieties appear to have been chiefly produced in hot countries; which seems almost to induce the conclusion that they were originally efforts of nature, to enable the skin to withstand the scorching produced by exposure to the burning rays of a tropical sun.

We may, I suppose, wonder, what Blyth means by "efforts of nature"; it sounds almost as if he attributes consciousness to nature.

Apparently, Blyth considers white skin color to be original:

Wherever a black individual was produced, especially among rude nations, if the breed was continued at all, the natural aversion it would certainly inspire would soon cause it to become isolated, and, before long, would, most probably, compel the race to seek for refuge in emigration. That no example, however, of the first production of a black variety has been recorded, may be ascribed to various causes; it may have only taken place once since the creation of the human race, and that once in a horde of tropical barbarians remote from the then centres of comparative civilisation, where no sort of record would have been preserved. But it is highly probable that analogous-born varieties may have given rise to the Mongolian, Malay, and certain others of the more diverse races of mankind; nay, we may even suppose that, in some cases, the difference, in the first instance, was much greater, and was considerably modified by the intermixture which must have taken place in the first generations.

And maybe non-whites were simply driven away because they deviated from the perfect:

Still, however, it may not be impertinent to remark here, that, as in the brute creation, by a wise provision, the typical characters of a species are, in a state of nature, preserved by those individuals chiefly propagating, whose organisation is the most perfect, and which, consequently, by their superior energy and physical powers, are enabled to vanquish and drive away the weak and sickly, so in the human race degeneration is, in great measure, prevented by the innate and natural preference which, and this is the principal and is always given to the most comely main reason why the varieties which are produced in savage tribes, must generally either become extinct in the first generation, or, if propagated, would most likely be left to themselves, and so become the origin of a new race; and in this we see an adequate cause for the obscurity in which the origin of different races is involved.

Following the discussion of the classification of varieties, Blyth writes:

The above is confessedly a hasty and imperfect sketch, a mere approximation towards an apt classification of "varieties", but if it chance to meet the eye, and be fortunate enough to engage the attention, of any experienced naturalist, who shall think it worth his while to follow up the subject, and produce a better arrangement of these diversities, my object in indicting the present article will be amply recompensed.

So, even if Darwin had some inspiration from this, Blyth would have been "amply recompensed" simply by Darwin's use of that inspiration.

The rest of the article addresses "periodical and other changes of appearance, which naturally take place in various British animals, and which do not constitute varieties." These comprise full or partial shedding of coat and change of coat color.

After having detailed these, Blyth writes:

There has been, strangely enough, a difference of opinion among naturalists, as to whether these seasonal changes of colour were intended by Providence as an adaptation to change of temperature, or as a means of preserving the various species from the observation of their foes, by adapting their hues to the colour of the surface; against which latter opinion it has been plausibly enough argued, that "nature provides for the preyer as well as for the prey." The fact is, they answer both purposes; and they are among those striking instances of design, which so clearly and forcibly attest the existence of an omniscient great First Cause.

What is worth noting here is that creationist naturalists of the time were trying to figure out the rules by which the creator (whether called 'Providence' or 'nature') had designed the species. That the same feature can serve two different purposes is clearly for Blyth a proof of "an omniscient great First Cause".

After this, Blyth writes:

How beautifully do we thus perceive, as in a thousand other instances, the balance of nature preserved: and even here we see another reason why sickly or degenerate animals (those, I mean, which are less able to maintain the necessary vigilance) must soon disappear; and why the slightest deviation from the natural hue must generally prove fatal to the animal. How different, thus, are even simple variations from the seasonal changes of colour which naturally take place! Properly followed up, this subject might lead to some highly interesting and important results.

By this, Blyth refers to that "seasonal changes of colour which naturally take place" serve to keep a balance between predator and prey for the benefit of both, while "even simple variations" disrupt the balance and therefore are usually weeded out quickly.

Blyth ends his article by writing:

It certainly points to the conclusion, that every, even the slightest, tint and marking has some decided use, and is intimately connected with the habits and welfare of the animal; and it also furnishes a satisfactory reason, why closely allied animals (or, in other words, animals of very similar form and habits) should so very commonly nearly resemble each other in their colours and in the general character of their markings.

The point here being that since "even simple variations" usually are weeded out, the species as they are must be perfectly adapted, since otherwise the tints and markings would not have prevailed, which in turn means that they are not mere decorations.

Cuvier's The Animal Kingdom

Georges Baron de Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French statesman and zoologist and is regarded as the father of the modern sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology. He would certainly warrant his own Pre-Darwinist page; but I just don't have enough information about him for that, so therefore just this short notice under Edward Blyth.

Cuvier was against the evolutionary ideas of the time and maintained that all species were specially created by God for a special purpose, and that each organ in the body had been created for a special function, and that it would be impossible for any creature to survive any significant change in its structure, The argumentation for the latter (and against evolution) was based on Cuvier's principle of correlation of parts., which states that "the number, direction, and shape of the bones that compose each part of an animal's body are always in a necessary relation to all the other parts, in such a way that - up to a point - one can infer the whole from any one of them and vice versa". Cuvier, however, did make allowance for variation within certain limits.

In 1817 Cuvier publishes his Regne animal distribué d'après son organisation, which was translated to English with expansions and modifications as The Animal Kingdom several times. As mentioned above, Blyth translates and edits the 'Mammalia, Birds, and Reptiles' section of the English version in 1840

From the Wikipedia article about Blyth I have this quote from an editorial footnote by Blyth in The Animal Kingdom:

However reciprocal...may appear the relations of the preyer and the prey, a little reflection on the observed facts suffices to intimate that the relative adaptations of the former only are special, those of latter being comparatively vague and general; indicating that there having been a superabundance which might serve as nutriment, in the first instance, and which, in many cases, was unattainable by ordinary means, particular species have therefore been so organized (that is to say, modified upon some more or less general type or plan of structure,) to avail themselves of the supply.

That is, predator species are more specialized in their adaptations than are prey species, which Blyth explains by a superabundance of the latter, which was unattainable by "ordinary means" and therefore modifations of the former "upon some more or less general type or plan of structure" so all possible preys had a predator. This is, of course, still not evolution in a Darwinian sense; but keeps with modifications within type/kind.

Review of David Stove: Darwinian Fairytales (essay 8)

2006-10-27T14:49:00.000+02:00

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In Essay VIII, "'He Ain't Heavy, He's my Brother' or Altruism and Shared Genes", Stove deals with 'inclusive fitness' or 'kin selection'. This subject is described by Stove p. 138:

The general principle, in Hamilton's own words, was this. 'The social behaviour of a species evolves in such a way that in each distinct behaviour-evoking situation the individual will seem to value his neighbours' fitness against his own according to the coefficients of relationship appropriate to that situation.' (That is, acoording as the 'neighbour' is an offspring, a sibling, a cousin, or whatever.)

Stove doesn't reject that there is a connection between degree of relatedness and altruism, only that this connection explains much. Also, Stove claims that altruism isn't always directed towards near relatives, where he mentions Mothet Teresa, Florence Nightingale, father Damien, and Albert Schweitzer as examples.

Stove's direct target here is sociobiology, which is based on the synthesis between Mendelian inheritance and Darwinian evolution, which usually goes by the name of 'neo-Darwinism'. Darwin himself saw moral evolution as increasingly altruistic, even in its most developed form being directed towards members of other species.

However, Stove sees things differently. On p. 139, he writes:

Altruism ought to be non-existent, or short-lived whenever it does not occur, if the Darwinian theory of evolution is true. By the very meaning of the word, altruism is an attribute which disposes its possessor to put the interests of others before its own. Disposes it, for example, to defend conspecifics in danger, when it could have simply saved its own skin; disposes it to eat less, or less well, or later, if this helps otherss to eat more or better or earlier; disposes it to mate later or less often, if this helps others to mate sooner or more often; and so on. But ant such behaviour by an organism clearly tends to lessen its own chances of surviving and reproducing; and altruism is therefore an attribute which is injurious to its possessor in the struggle for life. And in that struggle, Darwin says, 'we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed.'

Yes, as long as we are focusing on an individual organism as the unit of selection. But say, an organism sacrifices itself for another organism with the same genes in a situation, where either one of them or both of them will die. Then the altruistic behavior, on the level of genes, actually makes sense. I am not saying that this kind of calculations are performed by the individual exhibiting the altruistic behavior, only that even without such calculations, the result would be the same. After all, an individual that can itself exhibit altruistic behavior is more likely to return the favor.

According to Stove, Darwinism was only concerned with individual survival until the mid-1960s. At p. 140, he writes:

A less starkly individualistic version of Darwinism - the theory of inclusive fitness - was put forward by W.D. hamilton in 1964, though J.B.S. Haldane and R.A. Fischer, decades earlier, had several times stated the germ of the theory. Its general idea is as follows. An organism acts in such a way as to maximise, not its individual fitness or chances of surviving and reproducing, but its inclusive fitness: that is, the fitnesses of a group of conspecifics which includes, first, the organism itself, then those with which the organism shares the highest proportion of its genes, then those with whom it shares the next highest proportion of its genes, and so on.

On the following pages, Stove mocks this idea. Bacteria that multiply by fission and dandelions that nultiply parthenogenically should then be the most altruistic organism; but they are among those organisms that come closest to the Malthusian struggle for existence. And so on. All this mocking may be relevant or not; it is beyond me to say for sure. I am no sociobiologist myself, and I also find that sociobiology appears to be a mess; but then again, I have never really bothered to understand it very well.

On p. 161, Stove sums it all up as that the sociobiologists really reject altruism; what they claim is that the apparent altruism really is the selfishness of genes. For example, Stove writes:

It is this interpretation of the theory, and this one alone, (I need hardly say), which recommends itself to sociobiologists. Alexander, for example, writes that kin altruism, 'by which the phenotype is used to reproduce the genes, may be described as phenotypically (or self-) sacrificing but genotypically selfish.' Dawkins writes that 'a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself which are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism, but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.' It would be easy to multiply quotations to the same effect; but it can hardly be necessary.

Stove then spends the next pages explaining how the inclusive theory of fitness, once accepted, necessarily would lead to the assumption of selfish genes, and that sociobiology yherefore is just yet one more variant of the selfish theory of human and animal behavior.

At the bottom of p. 163, Stove writes:

If a man openly denies the reality of altruism, then, as well as incurring the deserved ridicule of people of common sense, he incurs the moral indignation of people of common decency; as Hobbes, Mandeville, and Machiavelli (among others) found out by experience. He deserves it, too. Now the Darwinian theory of evolution is a theory which logically impels whoever believes it to deny the existence of altruism. But for more than a hundred years, (as we have seen), Darwinians all shrank from that denial: restrained, no doubt, partly by fear of the evil reputation of a Hobbes or Machiavelli, but also by their own decency.

This is too odd, and I have to admit that I fail to see the problem. For Hobbes the problem was not that altruism didn't exist, but that it was contingent on, whether people could feel safe. Therefore, the Sovereign was needed to handle to trouble-makers, so peaceful, law-abiding citizens could do their work for the common benefit. The very word 'altruism' was coined by August Comte, who was an admirer of Napoléon and had a similar idea as Hobbes' - that without law and order everything would be chaos. Now, in what way is that Darwinism? Is it more common for Darwinists to be for a strong state than it is for non-Darwinists? Is it impossible for a Darwinist to believe in self-organization rather than in the necessity of an imposed order? In short, Stove is barking up the wrong tree.

I have found that some people have a weird idea that humans are ever so altruistic - except the few odd ones that don't believe that - even politicians are altruistic - except those from the other party, who anyway are Darwinists/Hobbesians/Machiavellians/Bad-guys-by-any-other-name; and, of course, those from the other party say the same. The worst in this respect are Christians that claim that humans are egoistic, unless of course they accept Jesus, and at the same time claim that it is Satan who claims that humans are egoistic; but then again, when was the last time that anybody considered it worth the effort to ask Christians to be just halfways self-consistent?

However, according to Stove, the selfish gene theory is the Darwinists way out of the dilemma: a way of denying the existence of altruism without being accused as Bad-guys-by-any-other-name. As Stove writes p. 164:

But a denial of the reality of altruism which did not openly offend either common sense or decency: that, by contrast, would be exactly 'what the doctor ordered' for all present day Darwinians. It would give them what no Darwinians had ever had before: freedom to profess their Darwinism fully, without getting a bad name, and with a conscience that, if not quite unclouded, is not in revolt either. A combination 'devoutly to be wished'.

This isn't philosophy, but standard political-religious agitation: Darwinists don't believe that the leader of our party is really working for the common good; but that's because Darwinists are the instruments of Satan and therefore believe that all people are egoistic.

Denyse O'Leary's review of Essay VIII can be found here.

Basically, O'Leary is simply following Stove, and she mentions that Stove's conclusion is that Darwinists are not really scientific - they may be pursuing scientific interests, but they don't provide anything that a rational person can believe in. After this, O'Leary concludes with:

But today, the lay person may well find that Darwinism is by law established, much as if it were an established church, even if it is contradicted by common experience available to anyone.

The obvious problem here is that Darwinism isn't sociobiology - O'Leary needs to learn the difference between a speculative theory based on Darwinism and Darwinism as such.

Review of David Stove: Darwinian Fairytales (essay 7)

2006-10-26T15:19:00.000+02:00

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In Essay VII, "Genetic Calvinism or Demons and Dawkins", things are getting still worse. You'd think that to be impossible, but then I simply ask you to hang on and watch the horror show unfolding.

On p. 119, Stove writes:

For nothing whatever can literally replicate itself. The most that anything could possibly do in that way would be, to produce perfect copies of itself. By contrast, the object or target of selfishness is - by the very meaning og that word - oneself, and nothing else. Superscientist may create in his laboratory an exact replica of me, or I may happen to have an identical twin. But it is not this copy or twin who is the object of my selfishness: it is myself.

Stove is a philosopher, so he should know that it isn't all that easy to define itself or myself. What is a self, an identity? If your self is a certain set of genes in your genome, then any other organism with the same genes in its genome has a share in your self. If you kill such an organism, you have killed a part of your self. In short, Stove had a great opportunity to do some real philosophy for once here; but he missed it.

Sure, Stove is right in saying that genes cannot be selfish; but I suppose that we all know that, so what's the point? And, according to Stove, there's even a geneticist who insists on calling genes 'selfish' (cf. p. 120). Stove continues:

This is Dr Richard Dawkins, of Oxford University, and to say that he insists on talking in this way is to understate the case extremely. He wrote a book which purports to explain evolution as principally due to what he calls the 'ruthless selfishness' of genes. And, as if in order to exclude all charitable misunderstandings, he actually entitled his book The Selfish Gene.

And not only that; a book with such a nonsensical title should have injured Dawkins' scientific reputation. But that didn't happen, as Stove remarks (ibid.):

But in fact the effect was the very reverse. The Selfish Gene not only became a best seller, but at once elevated its author into the very front rank of biological authorities: a position which he enjoys to this day.

Ehh, talking about nonsensicals, how can a book elevate its author into the front rank? You can be pushed into the front rank, and you can be elevated into the top rank, but you cannot be elevated into the front rank. And, even if you could, how could a book accomplish that? Was the book outfitted with some kind of spring mechanism that could elevate Dawkins to the top, or push him to the front?

In short, we do employ metaphorical language, even Stove does that, so where is the problem?

The connection to Calvinism and demons is as follows (ibid.):

One of the pioneers of genetics, William Bateson, was fond of repeating a remark which a Scotch soldier made to him during the 1914-18 war, after listening to one of his lectures: that genetics is 'scientific Calvinism'. Well, what Dawkins did in The Selfish Gene was in effect to embrace this old joke, or three-quarters joke, as being no joke at all, but the sober truth. Genes are to him what demons were to Calvinist theologians in the 16th century, or what 'Zurich gnomes' used to be to socialist demonologists of our own century. That is, they are beings which are hidden, immoral, and invested with immense power over us: power so great, indeed, that we are merely helpless puppets, except insofar as God, or History, or some equally extraordinary causal agent comes in to assist us.

As Stove explains, Calvin claimed that no created things had any real causal power, since God alone is the cause of everything, and all created things are effects. However, demons are exceptional in that they have causal powers, though only within the limits set by God's permission and appointment.

Then, on p. 121, Stove continues:

Dawkins in The Selfish Gene is not, of course, engaged on any mission of cosmic warfare or of moral reformation. But just as Calvin divides created things into potent demons and causally impotent everything else, so Dawkins divides the organic world into potent genes and causally impotent everything else. According to Calvinism, we are pawns in a game, in which the only real players are the demons and God. According to The Selfish Gene, we are pawns in a game in which the only real players are genes.

According to Stove, the popularity of The Selfish Gene is due to it being along the lines of 'The Secret History of the Court of King So-and-So', the general interest of humans in 'wickedness in high places'. And the book didn't add any new knowledge. On p. 122, Stove writes:

Indeed, (except for its last chapter, of which I shall speak later), it did not even claim to do so. It was avowedly a book which expounded, combined, and semi-popularised the main contributions which others had made to evolutionary biology in (roughly) the preceding 40 years: say, since R.A. Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, (1930). But Dawkins had the wit to perceive, as no one had before him, that genes, since they are hidden, powerful, and immoral, furnished the materials for a book of 'Secrets and Scandals of the Court of King Gene'. No power on earth could have prevented such a book from succeeding.

Would Dawkins agree with this characteristic? I would sincerely doubt that. And even Stove mentions that Dawkins didn't use 'selfish' in a moral sense ibid.):

The sense in which he uses the word 'selfish', Dawkins writes, is one which is standard in biology, and which is 'behavioural, not subjective'. It is this. 'An entity, such as a baboon, is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity's welfare at the expense of its own. Selfish behaviour has exactly the opposite effect. "Welfare" is defined as "chances of survival" ... .

So, according to Dawkins, genes are selfish, because they do not behave in a way that increases the chances of survival of other genes, only in ways that increase their own chances of survival. For Stove, this is meaningless: "To justify his calling genes selfish in the behavioural sense, Dawkins would need to show that self-replication increases the self-replicator's chances of survival " (ibid.). The problem in Stove's argumentation is that he things about a gene as the individual, concrete gene; but that's not how Dawkins sees it. Stove is aware of this; as he writes p. 123:

At this point, however, Dawkins would remind me that 'the selfish gene ... is not just one physical bit of DNA ... it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world'. What a gene does by self-replicating, he says, is, to benefit 'itself in the form of copies of itself'. 'The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of many duplicate copies' of itself.

Stove then proceeds to attack this idea; but that attack still doesn't quite get it. However, Stove's main point is that Dawkins anyway links the selfishness of genes to selfishness of their carriers and from there to morality, including teaching morality. On p. 126, Stove writes:

Here is another specimen of Dawkins contradicting his own theory. He says, 'let us try to teach generosity and altruism', but also says that 'altruism [is] something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world'. Well, I wonder where we are, if not 'in nature'?

As Stove describes it, this does sound as if Dawkins, who is known as zealous anti-religious, actually tries to reivent religion, just without a god. This is a common trait with humanists, and they can even find religious backing for it, if they want to. Read for example Matthew 25:

(34) Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

(35) for I was hungry, and ye gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in;

(36) naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

(37) Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? or athirst, and gave thee drink?

(38) And when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

(39) And when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

(40) And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me.

That is, Jesus is here saying that to serve him is to serve the needy among us. But notice here that Jesus says "[i]nasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me"; that is Jesus is benefitted by the benefit of 'one of these [his] brethen', so indeed Dawkins did not provide any new knowledge. But in return, Stove apparently doesn't quite catch the idea either.

In analogy with the word 'gene', Dawkins has coined the word 'meme'. About this, Stove writes p. 129:

A meme is anything which can be transmitted by non-genetic means from one human being to another. Hence all ideas, beliefs, attitudes, styles, customs, fashions - in fact all the elements of culture in the broadest sense - are memes. There is a meme for Pythagoras's Theorem, and another for wearing stiletto heels; a meme for being in favour of capital punishment, and one for the idea of a triangle; a meme for the Mozart Requiem and another for shaving ...

So memes are identifiable pieces of culture that have a sort of a life of their own. Continuing, Stove writes:

Now, Dawkins says, organic evolution is driven by the struggle between one gene and its rival genes for a place on the chromosome, and with that, the chance to self-replicate; and just so, cultural evolution, he says, is driven by the struggle between one meme and its rival memes for a place in our brains. Take, for example, the meme for the belief that the sun is at the centre of the local planetary system. A few brains in classical antiquity had contained this meme, but it then disappeared for nearly thousand years. In the mid 16th century, however, it popped up again in the brain of Copernicus, and a struggle began between this heliocentrism meme and the geocentrism meme. At that time, the latter was settled in almost all brains, but the heliocentrism meme has won this struggle long ago. It has been so successful, in replicating itself from one brain to another, that by now there are hardly any brains left which contain the geocentrism meme.

According to Stove, it is Dawkins' claim that memes, even though they are transmitted by human agents, really themselves are the causal agents, humans only serve as vehicles of transmission. For Stove, this is saying that there are two conspiracies going on, one for biology - the genes - and one for culture - the memes - which for Stove is "demonological" (cf. p. 130); that is, memes in Dawkins' theory are simply renamed demons just as genes are. So, Stove denies that Dawkins has made any new scientific discovery. The same goes for Dawkins' later books, The Extended Phenotype and The Blind Watchmaker. For Stove, it is all "puppetry theory"; that is, Dawkins has just come up with the same old stories about human life being determined by forces stronger than themselves. Stove, however sees some softening of Dawkins' genetic determinism in the later books, though not enough of it. As he writes p. 134:

The overall tendency of these two later books, however, is exactly the reverse: they are actually more puppetry theoretical than the first one was. We read in The Extended Phenotype that 'the fundamental truth [is] that an organism is a tool of DNA', and in The Blind Watchmaker, that 'living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA.' Such statements abound even more in the later books than they did in the first one. In addition, they are not counterbalanced here, as they were in The Selfish Gene, by cheerfully inconsistent statements like the one I quoted earlier: that we have 'the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth'.

So, for Stove, all Dawkins claims is that we are the powerless victims of genes/memes. But let's have a closer look at things, shall we? The piece quoted by Stove from The Blind Watchmaker is part of this:

We have seen that DNA molecules are the centre of a spectacular information technology. They are capable of packing an immense amount of precise, digital information into a very small space; and they are capable of preserving this information - with astonishingly few errors, but still some errors - for a very long time, measured in millions of years. Where are' these facts leading us? They are leading us in the direction of a central truth about life on Earth, the truth that I alluded to in my opening paragraph about willow seeds. This is that living organisms exist for the benefit of DNA rather than the other way around.

Now, for Dawkins, it is a question of longevity: a gene may exist unchanged for millions of years; but how long is the lifespan of an individual organism? Much, much smaller. On the next page, Dawkins writes:

DNA gets the best of both worlds. DNA molecules themselves, as physical entities, are like dewdrops. Under the right conditions they come into existence at a great rate, but no one of them has existed for long, and all will be destroyed within a few months. They are not durable like rocks. But the patterns that they bear in their sequences are as durable as the hardest rocks. They have what it takes to exist for millions of years, and that is why they are still here today. The essential difference from dewdrops is that new dewdrops are not begotten by old dewdrops. Dewdrops doubtless resemble other dewdrops, but they don't specifically resemble their own 'parent' dewdrops. Unlike DNA molecules, they don't form lineages, and therefore can't pass on messages. Dewdrops come into existence by spontaneous generation, DNA messages by replication.

The DNA molecules themselves don't have a long lifespan either; but their patterns can exist for millions of years. The combination of short duration of the instantiation of the pattern and the long duration of the pattern itself, obtained by self-replication, is what enables cumulative selection, because the self-replication occasionally is erroneous. So, things aren't exactly as Stove reports them.

Denyse O'leary's review of Essay VII can be found here.

Basically, O'Leary simply just runs along with Stove, and there's really not much to comment on separately. On detail, though; O'Leary writes:

Stove goes on to suggest that Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is just another instance of fatalism, like astrology, Freudianism, Marxism, and Calvinism. He argues that many people like this sort of thing because it confirms what they feel they have always known, that either they or someone they know is born to lose. They are but puppets, and the selfish gene is a puppet master that suits them well. So anything can be blamed on genes, and genes never defend themselves.

Well, how does O'Leary know for sure that it isn't her genes that make her take up her pen to defend the honor of genes?

The sad, but true story of the Amalekites

2006-10-26T14:33:00.000+02:00

A couple of days ago, a post, Using religion to justify genocide, by Steven Carr took me to this interesting post: CADRE Comment - Focusing on the Trees while Ignoring the Forest.

The background for the latter post is a challenge by The Uncredible Hallq. In short, that challenge was itself a reaction to another Cadre Comment post dealing with Hitler's religious beliefs. I won't go into all that - though it's certainly relevant enough - but the main point is that the Holocaust is frequently used by biblical inerrantists against those who aren't, although the Bible itself has a few nasty stories, where God orders genocide.

One of these stories is in 1 Samuel 15:2-3, where the Israelites "are told to exterminate the Amalekites to the last child" (quote from Hallq's challenge).

BK of the CADRE Comment, who is the author of the CADRE Comment post defends both that Hitler was not a Christian and that the destruction of the the Amalekites was justifiable, in which connection he supplies the following link, A Reasonable Understanding of the Destruction of the Amalekites?

According to a comment by zok:

[Hallq] compares God to Hitler for destroying the Amalekites and other ancient nations, when it was these nations who were basically the Hitlers of the ancient world. Saying that God is evil for attacking the Amalekites is like saying Europe and America were evil for attacking Nazi Germany.

So, the Amalekites were the Hitlers of the ANE, but let's see about that, shall we?.

In the following, all Bible quotes are from the ASV.

First, let's find out, who the Amalekites were. As usual in the OT, a nation descends from only one person, which for the Amalekites is Amalek.

In Genesis 36 we find out, who Amalek was:

Gen 36:2 Esau took his wives of the daughters of Canaan: Adah the daughter of Elon the Hittite, and Oholibamah the daughter of Anah, the daughter of Zibeon the Hivite,

...

Gen 36:10 these are the names of Esau's sons: Eliphaz the son of Adah the wife of Esau, Reuel the son of Basemath the wife of Esau.

Gen 36:11 And the sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Zepho, and Gatam, and Kenaz.

Gen 36:12 And Timna was concubine to Eliphaz Esau's son; and she bare to Eliphaz Amalek: these are the sons of Adah, Esau's wife.

Usually genealogies in the OT trace the male line with the odd woman thrown in for branching. So also in this case, Amalek counts as a son of Adah, Esau's Hittite wife, within the sons of Esau.

Also we see the usual smearing of a nation by its descendancy (racism is certainly no new invention). The Hittites, who had been the friendly, neighborhood natives in the time of Abraham, have suddenly become despised for no clear reason - except not been of the kin; Rebecca sent Jacob to her brother Laban to find a wife among his daughters, because she didn't like the "daughters of Het" (= the Hittite women).

Interestingly, east of the Euphrates the name 'Hatti' was still used for the area west of the Euphrates at least as late as the 3rd century bce, and Laban lived in Harran, east of the Euphrates.

The Edomites supposedly descended from Esau, and it is therefore among Esau's descendants that we find the chiefs of Edom, such as for instance described in:

Gen 36:15 These are the chiefs of the sons of Esau: the sons of Eliphaz the first-born of Esau: chief Teman, chief Omar, chief Zepho, chief Kenaz,

Gen 36:16 chief Korah, chief Gatam, chief Amalek: these are the chiefs that came of Eliphaz in the land of Edom; these are the sons of Adah.

Here we again find Amalek (in v. 16).

And according to Deuteronomy 23, an Edomite should not be abhored:

Deu 23:7 Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian, because thou wast a sojourner in his land.

Deu 23:8 The children of the third generation that are born unto them shall enter into the assembly of Jehovah.

Except, of course, when he is called an Amalekite.

In Exodus 17, the Israelites camp in Rephidim in the Sinai Desert. As in general during the wandering, they complain, this time about the lack of water, as if Yahweh wasn't among them. But of course, Yahweh is among them and sends out Moses to smite a rock with his rod, so water will flow. After that, in v. 8, Amalek comes to fight with the Israelites.

Moses tells Joshua to choose men to go fight with the Amalek. During the battle, Moses is on top of a hill with his rod. When he holds up his hand, the Israelites prevail, and when he lets down his hand, Amalek prevails.

But Moses's hands are heavy, so Aaron and Hur finds Moses a stone to sit on, and each of them holds up one of Moses's hands, so Moses' hands were steady until the going down of the sun (v. 12),

Exo 17:13 And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.

Exo 17:14 And Jehovah said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.

Note that no particular reason is given for Amalek's attack, nor is any description given of him and his people. All we know is that Amalek is supposedly a bad guy, because he is descended from Esau's Hittite wife. Now, wouldn't this be the line of thinking of the Hitlers of the ANE?

The chapter ends with

Exo 17:16 And he said, Jehovah hath sworn: Jehovah will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.

Apparently, it isn't Amalek that is the problem.

In Numbers 13, Moses sends people to spy out the land of Canaan. As the spies return, they tall all the congregation about what they had seen:

Num 13:27 And they told him [= Moses], and said, We came unto the land whither thou sentest us; and surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it.

Num 13:28 Howbeit the people that dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified, and very great: and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.

Num 13:29 Amalek dwelleth in the land of the South: and the Hittite, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, dwell in the hill-country; and the Canaanite dwelleth by the sea, and along by the side of the Jordan.

Again, no particular description of the Amalekites, only that they dwell in the "land of the South"; that is, in Negeb, the Edomite territory.

But the Israelites start to fear the inhabitants of the land of Canaan and murmur against Yahweh. Accordingly, so Yahweh sends the Israelites on a detour:

Num 14:25 Now the Amalekite and the Canaanite dwell in the valley: to-morrow turn ye, and get you into the wilderness by the way to the Red Sea.

Note that agin we are not really told anything about the Amelekites, only where they dwell.

Besides the detour, as should be known, Yahweh condemns the Israelites to wander in the wilderness for 40 years because of their distrust in him, and that all those of the Israelites from 20 years and up that had murmured against him out of fear of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan shall die in the wilderness:

Num 14:28 Say unto them, As I live, saith Jehovah, surely as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you:

Num 14:29 your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward, that have murmured against me,

Num 14:30 surely ye shall not come into the land, concerning which I sware that I would make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun.

Num 14:31 But your little ones, that ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have rejected.

Num 14:32 But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness.

Num 14:33 And your children shall be wanderers in the wilderness forty years, and shall bear your whoredoms, until your dead bodies be consumed in the wilderness.

Num 14:34 After the number of the days in which ye spied out the land, even forty days, for every day a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my alienation.

Num 14:35 I, Jehovah, have spoken, surely this will I do unto all this evil congregation, that are gathered together against me: in this wilderness they shall be consumed, and there they shall die.

Note here v. 31, which says that the Israelites claimed that their little ones would fall prey for the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, including the Amalekites. Apparently Yahweh doesn't believe such a thing.

Those of the spies that had started the murmuring die immediately of a plague; but as for the rest of the Israelites:

Num 14:39 And Moses told these words unto all the children of Israel: and the people mourned greatly.

Num 14:40 And they rose up early in the morning, and gat them up to the top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we are here, and will go up unto the place which Jehovah hath promised: for we have sinned.

Num 14:41 And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of Jehovah, seeing it shall not prosper?

Num 14:42 Go not up, for Jehovah is not among you; that ye be not smitten down before your enemies.

Num 14:43 For there the Amalekite and the Canaanite are before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned back from following Jehovah, therefore Jehovah will not be with you.

Num 14:44 But they presumed to go up to the top of the mountain: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of Jehovah, and Moses, departed not out of the camp.

Num 14:45 Then the Amalekite came down, and the Canaanite who dwelt in that mountain, and smote them and beat them down, even unto Hormah.

This is a confusing text for several reasons. Who are "they" in v. 40? But for our investigation here, the most important part is near the last few three verses. We have been told in v. 25 that the Amalekite and the Canaanite dwell in the valley; but apparently they have started dwelling on a mountain since then. And while the Amalekite and the Canaanite here smite some Israelites, it is rather to be considered as pinishment for their disobedience, first by not trusting Yahweh and then for not accepting to wander in the wilderness.

In Numbers 24, we have some of the prophecies of Balaam, who had been called by the king of Moab to curse the Israelites who were camping in Moab, east of Jordan. However, Balaam being a true prophet can only say, what God tells him to say, so the Israelites are blessed, while the other nations are cursed. In v. 20, Balaam has come to the Amalekites:

Num 24:20 And he looked on Amalek, and took up his parable, and said, Amalek was the first of the nations; But his latter end shall come to destruction.

Here we are told that "Amalek was the first of the nations", but nothing about what that is supposed to mean, and nothing else is said.

In Deuteronomy, while the Israelites are still in Moab, Moses retells the story about the wandering. And in ch. 25, the Amalekites are mentioned:

Deu 25:17 Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way as ye came forth out of Egypt;

Deu 25:18 how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God.

Deu 25:19 Therefore it shall be, when Jehovah thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.

Moses has grown old, and apparently his memory isn't, as he remembered it. This isn't quite the same story as in Exodus; but who cares? Just pick and choose the version that you like the best.

The Moab-Israel thing continues, and occasionally with the Amalekites thrown in for good measure, such as in this story from Judges:

Jdg 3:12 And the children of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah: and Jehovah strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah.

Jdg 3:13 And he gathered unto him the children of Ammon and Amalek; and he went and smote Israel, and they possessed the city of palm-trees.

Note that it is Yahweh who strengthens Eglon in order to punish Israel.

In Judges 5 we have Deborah's Song after she and Barak had freed Israel from Jabin, the king of Canaan. In the song is mentioned who took part in the war and who didn't, and we have this mysterious passage:

Jdg 5:14 Out of Ephraim came down they whose root is in Amalek; After thee, Benjamin, among thy peoples; Out of Machir came down governors, And out of Zebulun they that handle the marshal's staff.

Who are "they whose root is in Amalek"? I have no idea; but it is certainly strange that there should be any such in Ephraim, and that they should have counted as Israelites and have fought against Jabin.

After the victory of Deborah and Barak, things, of course, go wrong again:

Jdg 6:1 And the children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah: and Jehovah delivered them into the hand of Midian seven years.

Jdg 6:2 And the hand of Midian prevailed against Israel; and because of Midian the children of Israel made them the dens which are in the mountains, and the caves, and the strongholds.

Jdg 6:3 And so it was, when Israel had sown, that the Midianites came up, and the Amalekites, and the children of the east; they came up against them;

Jdg 6:4 and they encamped against them, and destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance in Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.

As with the Eglon story, the Amalekites here are just running along with the others to punish Israel, so where's the problem?

It is up to Gideon to deal with the Midianites and the Amalekites:

Jdg 6:33 Then all the Midianites and the Amalekites and the children of the east assembled themselves together; and they passed over, and encamped in the valley of Jezreel.

Jdg 6:34 But the Spirit of Jehovah came upon Gideon; and he blew a trumpet; and Abiezer was gathered together after him.

Jdg 6:35 And he sent messengers throughout all Manasseh; and they also were gathered together after him: and he sent messengers unto Asher, and unto Zebulun, and unto Naphtali; and they came up to meet them.

Somewhat similar to the Deborah and Barak story. And further:

Jdg 7:12 And the Midianites and the Amalekites and all the children of the east lay along in the valley like locusts for multitude; and their camels were without number, as the sand which is upon the sea-shore for multitude.

Jdg 7:13 And when Gideon was come, behold, there was a man telling a dream unto his fellow; and he said, Behold, I dreamed a dream; and, lo, a cake of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian, and came unto the tent, and smote it so that it fell, and turned it upside down, so that the tent lay flat.

Jdg 7:14 And his fellow answered and said, This is nothing else save the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel: into his hand God hath delivered Midian, and all the host.

We here see the strange logic of these things: Yahweh uses the Midianites to punish the Israelites because they have been naughty, and when the time of punishment is over, he selects a hero to smite those people that he first used. Now, if alse he hadn't planted that tree in the Garden of Eden in the first place, all this wouldn't have been needed.

Next time it is Jephtah the Gileadite's turn. The Israelites have worshipped other gods, and the Ammonites cross the Jordan to attack. Then the Israelites cry to Yahweh, and then:

Jdg 10:11 And Jehovah said unto the children of Israel, Did not I save you from the Egyptians, and from the Amorites, from the children of Ammon, and from the Philistines?

Jdg 10:12 The Sidonians also, and the Amalekites, and the Maonites, did oppress you; and ye cried unto me, and I saved you out of their hand.

Jdg 10:13 Yet ye have forsaken me, and served other gods: wherefore I will save you no more.

Well, but he forgets to tell that he first sent these people to punish the Israelites, doesn't he? We won't go into the details of that story, since it anyway doesn't involve the Amalekites apart from the favorable mentioning in v. 12.

In Judges 12 we have this funny detail:

Jdg 12:13 And after him Abdon the son of Hillel the Pirathonite judged Israel.

Jdg 12:14 And he had forty sons and thirty sons' sons, that rode on threescore and ten ass colts: and he judged Israel eight years.

Jdg 12:15 And Abdon the son of Hillel the Pirathonite died, and was buried in Pirathon in the land of Ephraim, in the hill-country of the Amalekites.

Again, things appear to be confused. Did the Amalekites live in valleys or in a hill-country? And did they live in the south or in the land of Ephraim?

After the judges, the Israelite kingdom starts with Saul, and he starts out quite impressively:

1Sa 14:47 Now when Saul had taken the kingdom over Israel, he fought against all his enemies on every side, against Moab, and against the children of Ammon, and against Edom, and against the kings of Zobah, and against the Philistines: and whithersoever he turned himself, he put them to the worse.

1Sa 14:48 And he did valiantly, and smote the Amalekites, and delivered Israel out of the hands of them that despoiled them.

He smites the Amalekites, but that's not enugh: Saul is given the task of fullfilling Balaam's prophesy:

1Sa 15:1 And Samuel said unto Saul, Jehovah sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of Jehovah.

1Sa 15:2 Thus saith Jehovah of hosts, I have marked that which Amalek did to Israel, how he set himself against him in the way, when he came up out of Egypt.

1Sa 15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Note here is only mentioned the old story from Exodus, and that is supposed to be more than 400 years ago by the time of Saul, so the revenge is to be taken out on people who had no part in the original event, and even apart from that, in what way could the animals be said to have had any guilt? Even accepting all these stories, the Amalekites cannot be said to have been worse than the other nations mentioned in Judges, so it's not because of anything they have done since that event more than 400 years ago.

Anyway, Saul does as ordered:

1Sa 15:4 And Saul summoned the people, and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen, and ten thousand men of Judah.

1Sa 15:5 And Saul came to the city of Amalek, and laid wait in the valley.

1Sa 15:6 And Saul said unto the Kenites, Go, depart, get you down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them; for ye showed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.

1Sa 15:7 And Saul smote the Amalekites, from Havilah as thou goest to Shur, that is before Egypt.

1Sa 15:8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.

As ordered - though not quite:

1Sa 15:9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but everything that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.

And Yahweh repented that he had made Saul king, because Saul had turned away from him and did not follow his commandments. It is up to the prophet Samuel to kill Agag:

1Sa 15:33 And Samuel said, As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women. And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before Jehovah in Gilgal.

We only have Samuel's words for it, and nothing mentioned before about Agag or any other Amalekite (except more than 400 years ago) having done anything wrong.

Anyway, after this Samuel goes to Bethlehem to anoint David; but Saul is still king. And interestingly, the Amalekites are still alive; because while David serves the Philistine king Achish, this incident happens:

1Sa 27:8 And David and his men went up, and made a raid upon the Geshurites, and the Girzites, and the Amalekites; for those nations were the inhabitants of the land, who were of old, as thou goest to Shur, even unto the land of Egypt.

1Sa 27:9 And David smote the land, and saved neither man nor woman alive, and took away the sheep, and the oxen, and the asses, and the camels, and the apparel; and he returned, and came to Achish.

If Samuel had killed Agag the last of the Amalekites, how could there then still be Amalekites around?

Later the Philistines gather their armies together to fight with Israel. Samuel is dead, so Saul cannot ask him for advice, but he goes to the witch of En-dor to ask her call forth the spirit of samuel; but it's to no help, because Samuel says:

1Sa 28:17 And Jehovah hath done unto thee, as he spake by me: and Jehovah hath rent the kingdom out of thy hand, and given it to thy neighbor, even to David.

1Sa 28:18 Because thou obeyedst not the voice of Jehovah, and didst not execute his fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath Jehovah done this thing unto thee this day.

1Sa 28:19 Moreover Jehovah will deliver Israel also with thee into the hand of the Philistines; and to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me: Jehovah will deliver the host of Israel also into the hand of the Philistines.

All because Saul did not "execute [Yahweh's] fierce wrath upon Amalek". And notice that not only is Saul going to die, also his sons will die because of the sin of their father, and the wole of israel is going to be under Philistine rule because of the sin of their king.

Now, Samuel killed Agag and that should have been the end of the Amalekites. And even if it wasn't, then David "smote the land, and saved neither man nor woman alive," which should have put things straight. But those Amalekites are tougher than that. Achish had given David the town of Ziklag, and while he is still serving Achish, this incident happens:

1Sa 30:1 And it came to pass, when David and his men were come to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had made a raid upon the South, and upon Ziklag, and had smitten Ziklag, and burned it with fire,

1Sa 30:2 and had taken captive the women and all that were therein, both small and great: they slew not any, but carried them off, and went their way.

Sure, it's not a nice thing to burn down other people's houses; but at least the Amalekites appear to not be killers. Let's see how David treats the Amalekites, when he attacks them:

1Sa 30:17 And David smote them from the twilight even unto the evening of the next day: and there escaped not a man of them, save four hundred young men, who rode upon camels and fled.

1Sa 30:18 And David recovered all that the Amalekites had taken; and David rescued his two wives.

1Sa 30:19 And there was nothing lacking to them, neither small nor great, neither sons nor daughters, neither spoil, nor anything that they had taken to them: David brought back all.

But then again, this is David, so special rules apply.

After this event, we have the following:

2Sa 1:1 And it came to pass after the death of Saul, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Amalekites, and David had abode two days in Ziklag;

2Sa 1:2 it came to pass on the third day, that, behold, a man came out of the camp from Saul, with his clothes rent, and earth upon his head: and so it was, when he came to David, that he fell to the earth, and did obeisance.

Who is this man? you ask. You are granted one guess:

2Sa 1:6 And the young man that told him [that Saul and his sons were dead] said, As I happened by chance upon mount Gilboa, behold, Saul was leaning upon his spear; and, lo, the chariots and the horsemen followed hard after him.

2Sa 1:7 And when he looked behind him, he saw me, and called unto me. And I answered, Here am I.

2Sa 1:8 And he said unto me, Who art thou? And I answered him, I am an Amalekite.

And what a nasty Amalekite he is:

2Sa 1:9 And he said unto me, Stand, I pray thee, beside me, and slay me; for anguish hath taken hold of me, because my life is yet whole in me.

2Sa 1:10 So I stood beside him, and slew him, because I was sure that he could not live after that he was fallen: and I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them hither unto my lord.

So, this young Amalekite slew saul, though upon Saul's own request. But he is no worse than that he brings Saul's crown and bracelet to David and calls David his lord. There are alternate stories about saul's death; but we won't go into that, because it's not the point of this essay.

David knows how to ackowledge this service:

2Sa 1:13 And David said unto the young man that told him, Whence art thou? And he answered, I am the son of a sojourner, an Amalekite.

2Sa 1:14 And David said unto him, How wast thou not afraid to put forth thy hand to destroy Jehovah's anointed?

2Sa 1:15 And David called one of the young men, and said, Go near, and fall upon him. And he smote him, so that he died.

2Sa 1:16 And David said unto him, Thy blood be upon thy head; for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain Jehovah's anointed.

2Sa 1:17 And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his son

That should teach you to be careful with kings.

Now, was this young man the last of the Amalekites? No, not quite so:

2Sa 8:11 these also did king David dedicate unto Jehovah, with the silver and gold that he dedicated of all the nations which he subdued;

2Sa 8:12 of Syria, and of Moab, and of the children of Ammon, and of the Philistines, and of Amalek, and of the spoil of Hadadezer, son of Rehob, king of Zobah.

So, even as king, David subdued Amalek - must have been those four hundred camel riders.

Were the Amalekites never finally done away with? Indeed they were:

1Ch 4:42 And some of them, even of the sons of Simeon, five hundred men, went to mount Seir, having for their captains Pelatiah, and Neariah, and Rephaiah, and Uzziel, the sons of Ishi.

1Ch 4:43 And they smote the remnant of the Amalekites that escaped, and have dwelt there unto this day.

Now, mount Seir is in Edom, down in the south. So did they start there, or did they end there?

But that's not even all; compare vv. 10 and 12 from Genesis 36 quoted above with these verses from 1 Chronicles:

1Ch 1:35 The sons of Esau: Eliphaz, Reuel, and Jeush, and Jalam, and Korah.

1Ch 1:36 The sons of Eliphaz: Teman, and Omar, Zephi, and Gatam, Kenaz, and Timna, and Amalek.

According to Genesis 36:12, Timna was concubine to Eliphaz; but according to 1 Chronicles 1:36, Timna was a son of Eliphaz. No, no, I am not saying that I have caught an error - in ANE culture, a concubine counted as a son in certain circumstances. No, just kidding, a scribal error sneaked itself in at some time in 1 Chronicles 1:36, so the real position of Timna got corrupted. But we still have the absolutely inerrant report in Genesis 36:12, don't we?

1 Chronicles also has the report from 2 Samuel 12:

1Ch 18:11 These also did king David dedicate unto Jehovah, with the silver and the gold that he carried away from all the nations; from Edom, and from Moab, and from the children of Ammon, and from the Philistines, and from Amalek.

And, of course, with the same problem: that Agag was supposed to have been the last of the Amalekites. Of course, Amalek may here refer, not to the Amalekites, but to an area that had been inhabited by Amalekites; but the OT tendency to confuse a supposed ancestor with a place with a people sure doesn't make it easy to figure out who's who when and where.

In Psalm 83, Amalek is mentioned in v. 7 as one of the nations that have made a covenant with each to subdue Israel. The psalm is by Asaph, a descendant of David; but ok, for a poetic text, I suppose we can accept an anachronism.

Talking about anachronisms, we have this little piece from the time of Abraham:

Gen 14:7 And they returned, and came to En-mishpat (the same is Kadesh), and smote all the country of the Amalekites, and also the Amorites, that dwelt in Hazazon-tamar.

Ok, there is an easy way around this: the verse mentions "the country of the Amalekites"; that is it refers to an area known by this designation to the Israelites at the time of Moses, not to Amalekites. But it all just adds to the confusion.

As should be clear from this exposition, even accepting the biblical stories, the Amalekites were no worse than the rest, including the Israelites. These stories are stories about standard tribal warfare, known from just about everywhere, and possibly as exaggerated as elsewhere. We are not given any precise information about them, so we really don't know anything about them. That they should have been descendants of Esau doesn't quite fit in with everything else told about them, and even if they were, would that tell us anything?

In the CADRE Comment post, BK writes that

Don't like the fact that the order of the Amalekites needs to be looked at in the context of pre-Jesus's coming context, and the Amalekite identification with evil? Fine, but then simply acknowledge that you aren't really interested in the truth. The Amalekites were like a weed growing in the garden that needed to be pulled so that the garden could flourish in accordance with God's plan. But to understand that requires reading the entire Bible and understanding the verses in the context of the time and circumstances that were occurring. But then, you [= Hallq] don't want to hear about context.

What should be clear from the Bible quotes that I have supplied here is that BK's premise doesnt quite hold; not even the Bible says that the Amalekites were a threat to the Israelites, and in most cases they were simply a part of God's punishment of the Israelites for their disobedience.