The Free Thinker

An Analogy

Consider the following scenario.

A computer has been set to work on a large series of mathematical optimization problems. Either they are not solvable analytically or the computer does not know how; it solves them (to a specified degree of precision) by means of numeric methods.

An expert mathematician-cum-computer-scientist is told that the computer has been working on the optimization problems for a single day, and he is told that the computer has solved the first x optimizations in the series. He is provided with a cross-section of all the computer's operations for one millisecond. From these he can compile a list of the algorithms that the computer is currently running, but he does not know all the algorithms available to the computer. There may be latent algorithms that are not being implemented at the time.

Having compiled this list, the scientist is then asked: What is the probability that the computer was using only the algorithms observed and recorded in the list to solve the optimization problems?

If, as is common, the algorithms the computer is using involve some amount of random search, the scientist probably cannot determine with certainty whether the listed algorithms would have been sufficient to solve the optimization problems. Even if the algorithms seem radically inadequate to solve x optimizations in one day, the computer might have benefited from a string of lucky guesses.

What the scientist could do, in principle, is assign an ex ante probability to the occurrence of the computer solving x optimizations in one day using the given algorithms. He could deduce a probability distribution for time to solve for each optimization, and then add these distributions to calculate a probability of time to solve x optimizations. In a typical case the scientist might find that the chances of the computer solving at least x optimizations in one day is 99.9999%, or 1E-30%. The scientist might also be able to calculate the odds of the computer solving no more than x optimizations. 

If the scientist assumes that anything that is infinitesimally unlikely did not occur, he may draw one of the following three conclusions: (a) the list of algorithms plausibly explain the computer's degree of success, (b) the computer could not have solved x optimizations in a day with those algorithms and must have used other, more effective ones for part of the time, or been supplied with some answers by an outside source, or (c) the computer would certainly have solved more than x optimizations using the set of algorithms observed, and it must have been interrupted or have been using less effective algorithms for part of the time.

If, on the other hand, the properties of the algorithms or of the optimization problems are not sufficiently well understood, the scientist may profess himself unable to ascertain whether the algorithms are sufficient, or super-sufficient, to explain the computer's success or not.

Evolutionary biology is in a position similar to that of the computer scientist in the example. Life exhibits a certain amount of order. Geology and the fossil record suggest a time scale during which this amount of order is supposed to have emerged. Biologists observe certain processes at work in nature which would tend to alter gene pools over time, and thus to produce order.

But unlike the scientist in the scenario, evolutionary biologists do not understand the properties either of biological order or of the mutation and natural selection processes sufficiently well to estimate the ex ante probability that life as we know it could have emerged in a few billion years. If they did, they might find that it's infinitesimally unlikely that life as we know it could have emerged so quickly, or, on the contrary, that sentient beings would have emerged with near certainty within 100 million years at most. In either case, they would have to conclude that the theory of evolution as taught today can't be true; that some other processes we have not observed or conceived of must account for the existence of life; or perhaps, that some other processes must have been slowing evolution down.

As it is, we're just not in a position to know whether the Darwinist claim that all life on earth emerged through evolution is possible or not. If we did know that it was possible, we still would not know, of course, whether it really occurred that way.

The whole above argument assumes that life is reducible to a material basis. I think we know by the experience of free will that human life, at least, is not. In the past I have also presented a proof of "the necessity of agnosticism about mind-brain supervenience." If the task of a theory of life is not merely to explain its material organization but also how at least one organism, man, possesses a supernatural soul, then it seems clear right away that Darwinian evolution is not a very promising theory. But even if we set that aside, the radically inadequate evidentiary basis for Darwinism makes it, not a bona fide scientific theory, but simply the latest of the creation-myths man has believed in from time to time.

Daniel Dennett, the Oblivious Radical Skeptic

Critics of the theory of evolution-- who may not deny it but who are inclined, at least, to limit its scope-- include some like Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, and Roger Penrose, the eminent physicist and mathematician.  Here is Wikipedia's summary of Penrose's critique:

Penrose has written controversial books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In The Emperor's New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose hints at the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he terms correct quantum gravity, CQG). He claims that the present computer is unable to have intelligence because it is an algorithmically deterministic system. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer—this is in contrast to views, e.g., artificial intelligence, that thought can be simulated. Penrose notes that a process can conceivably be deterministic without being algorithmic. This is based on claims that consciousness transcends formal logic systems because things such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem restrict an algorithmically based logic from traits such as mathematical insight.

In Daniel Dennett's exposition of a Darwinist philosophy-of-everything, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett argues against Penrose's ideas as follows:

Penrose's challenge needs to be answered, even if, as I and others in AI are convinced, he is making a fairly simple mistake...  Mathematicians, Penrose says, use "mathematical insight" to see that a certain proposition follows from the soundness of a certain system.  He then goes to some length to argue that there could be no algorithm, or at any rate no practical algorithm, "for" mathematical insight.  But, in going to all this trouble, he overlooks the possibility that some algorithm-- many different algorithms, in fact-- might yield mathematical insight even though that was no just what it was "for"...  Penrose pays careful attention to what it is like to be a mathematician, but he overlooks a possibility-- indeed, a likelihood-- that is familiar to AI researchers: the possibility that underlying our general capacity to deal with such "ingredients" is a heuristic program of mind-boggling complexity.  Such a complicated algorithm would approximate the competence of the perfect understander, and be "invisible" to its beneficiary.  Whenever we say we solved some problem "by intuition," all that really means is we don't know how we solved it.

I have often entertained various radically skeptical positions, but this is a depth of skepticism I have never plumbed.  We know that the senses can be mistaken.  Hallucinations and optical illusions, mirages in the desert and so on, can be brought in to clinch the point, but I don't think they're really necessary: we know the nature of the senses well enough to know that they are contingent and fallible.  If any further proof were needed scientific descriptions of eyes and ears would quickly reveal that these instruments are capable of being deceived.  If we've read our Hume we're well aware that our habit of induction, of making inferences from patterns, lacks solid epistemic foundations in logic.  This is where I bring in faith in a sense that may or may not be idiosyncratic, what I call a "meta-belief" that cannot be defined-- a phrase like "there is order in the world" is effective enough in summoning to an interlocutor's mind the idea I'm talking about but as a definition is completely question-begging, and could be understood only by one who already shares the meta-belief-- and the belief in which is at once indelible and undeniable yet can atrophy or fail to be applied, and the consistent application of which, e.g., by a revolutionary scientific theorist, is regarded as a virtue.  Yet I accept that the skeptic has in a sense not been honorably answered.  If one were to say "I do not believe there is order in the world," I could easily show that his behavior is inconsistent with his professed belief and call on him to admit that he really does believe in order, but I could not, in the strictest sense, refute him.  To insist on this degree of concession to the skeptic may, indeed, make me appear in some eyes to be guilty of skepticism myself.

Yet all this can be said without for one moment casting the slightest doubt on our purely intellectual faculties of mathematics and logic; and I for one never do cast doubt on them.  I do not even want to class them as examples of faith.  My view is that we can really know, by pure reason, that 2+2=4, or that if p implies q then not-q implies not-p.  With any purely interior phenomenon, it is difficult to police how words are used or to develop a highly subtle and rigorous vocabulary; as a result the word "intuition" is used in quite varied ways, so there is a limited and irrelevant sense in which I would agree with Dennett that at least in some cases people who say they know something "by intuition" mean that they don't know how they know.  But we have a mathematical/logical faculty as well, and when we use it, we do know how we know: by our mathematical/logical faculty.  Dennett wants to ask a further question that he regards as more fundamental, namely, what is the physical mechanism underlying this faculty?  But he is wrong in thinking this question more fundamental.  Relative to our mathematical and logical faculty, the very existence of matter is a highly contingent and conjectural hypothesis.  Far more conjectural still-- indeed, wholly unprovable, and Dennett accepts it, at bottom, as sheer dogma-- is the hypothesis that everything has a material explanation.  Unless one has unwarrantedly embraced this dogma ex ante, there is no reason to think that any material explanation exists.

It is part of our experience of the mathematical and logical faculty that it apprehends the truth.  We can err, but we err by failing to apply it, by taking short cuts or letting mere mental associations interfere with its operation.  For all my fondness for Cartesian questioning, I don't think it is possible to question our logical faculties as one might-- if one is philosophically inclined, one even must-- question the existence of the physical world.  If one denies this ex ante, it is very hard to get back to it.  In particular, if one accepts that the mind and its logical faculties are a bundle of physical algorithms, well, we know that many or most-- and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves, if I understand what I've read about, that all-- physical algorithms are fallible.  Therefore the mind is fallible.  Dennett actually concedes this:

To make the distinction vivid, we can imagine that a space pirate, Rumpelstiltskin by name, is holding the planet hostage, but will release us unharmed if we can answer a thousand true-false questions about sentences of arithmetic. Should we put a human mathematician on the witness stand, or a computer truth-checker devised by the best programmers?  According to Penrose, if we hang our fate on the computer and let Rumpelstiltskin see the computer's program, he can devise an Achilles'-heel proposition that will foil our machine... But Penrose has given us no reason to believe that this isn't just as true of any human mathematicians we might put on the witness stand. None of us is perfect, and even a team of experts no doubt has some weaknesses that Rumpelstiltskin could exploit, given enough information about their brains.

"No doubt," says Dennett, but I not only doubt this, I deny it, and my evidence is simply that I know that the nature of the logical faculty of the mind is to apprehend truth, and that this is an implicit premise of all mathematics.  But let's stop for a moment on what Dennett is saying.  He is not saying-- he cannot be if he is to be consistent-- that a mathematician might take a shortcut out of habit or get distracted by a mental association and err, in a way that he himself would recognize easily enough if his mistake were shown to him.  He is saying that there are some arithmetical propositions that the mathematician would always get wrong, by the nature of his mental algorithm.  Some x * y = z would be false but would seem to this mathematician's fallible logical faculty to be true.  But if there is some proposition that our minds are programmed to get wrong, why shouldn't there be many such propositions -- perhaps some that we use every day?  Of course Dennett would appeal to natural selection, but (a) many many many propositions that we use all the time nowadays would have been useless for our prehistoric ancestors to know, and the time since the dawn of civilization is probably insufficient for evolution to have done much work on our minds, and (b) it is not necessarily the case that knowing the truth is most conducive to the survival of one's selfish genes. 

Dennett is strangely oblivious to the radical skepticism inherent in his argument; strangely, because he is a philosopher of sorts and one might think he would be sensitive to it.  But Dennett is no Descartes.  He is complacent in his materialism.  He questions his world selectively, he doesn't step outside the bounds of his biased version of common sense.  In this case, he thinks he has refuted Penrose, and moves on; he doesn't realize that his refutation of Penrose, if valid, is a refutation of all the truth-claims of mathematics and logic without the whole edifice of human knowledge crumbles. 

Darwin, Aristotle, and Causation

Joyless Moralist asks: "When did you become such an apologist for Darwin? I'm shocked!"

My position on Darwin is this. Darwin developed a very powerful concept, namely, evolution as descent with modification and natural selection, which marks an important departure in the theory of causation, applicable especially to biology but to some extent in economics as well and maybe in other fields. His mistake, which has been prevalent ever since due to man's romantic weakness for coining creation-myths, was to interpret it as a tool for discovering origins. But the Darwinian concept of descent with modification plus natural selection doesn't, strictly speaking, tell you anything at all about origins, still less that all the complexity and variety of life originated that way. Stories about origins can only be developed by combining the Darwinian mode of causation with very non-obvious, debatable, at best intuitive assumptions about the a priori probability of various potential beginning-states. When they are spun out into a comprehensive natural history, so many unwarranted (if we are to credit the reader with a high degree of philosophical maturity we can even say untenable) universal negatives must be assumed that Darwinism degenerates into mere dogmatism or myth.

The real, valid use of the Darwinian concept of causation is as a way of understanding the phenomenon of ecological equilibrium.  Note first of all that ecological equilibrium is something that we actually observe in historical time, unlike evolution, of which can observe very little and only in marginal cases.  Experiment can at best show the existence of Darwinian evolution, which we can deduce from logic alone, and can give us no hint of the power, versatility, creativity, etc. of this mechanism.  No, the real value of Darwinism lies in the false prediction that a naive Darwinism would predict, namely, that descent with modification and natural selection should be causing constant change and biology should be in a state of flux rather than stable order.  Given that descent with modification and natural selection should (be expected to) cause evolution, why do we not observe evolution in historical time, but instead, we observe species and ecosystems continuing century after century and millennium after millennium with very little change, unless they are disrupted by man? The answer to that question, the answer to which one is compelled by seriously facing that question, revolutionizes one's ideas of causation.  It shows why, if the world is not simply to be in flux (as we see it is not) it must be a certain way; it must be one of a subset, large yet vanishingly small compared to the set of all conceivable biological worlds, of equilibrium ecologies in which populations and trait distributions are in a state of delicate yet stable balance.

The following world is an example of one that Darwinian reasoning might rule out.  A species called the "buffalo lion" exists which, looking something like a cross between a buffalo and a lion, can eat both grass and meat, and can even tear down trees and eat wood like a termite, whch has long tunks and sharp teeth and hunts in packs, very effectively, so that it devours everything in sight, with weapons superior to the defenses of any animal. Other than that, the world looks like ours, with similar flora and fauna. A Darwinian can make an educated guess of why this world will not be observed.  A species so potently all-devouring as the buffalo lion would lay waste its environment and cause an ecological catastrophe, and our flora and fauna could not survive its onslaught. The scenario could, in principle, occur briefly, but it would quickly pass away as buffalo lions drove other species to extinction. 

Now, does all this "refute" Aristotelian metaphysics?  On the one hand, it's true that it's not exactly clear how the scientific method, with its hypothesis and experiment, can refute a metaphysical proposition.  Suppose that Aristotle says that an acorn becomes an oak because that is its telos or final cause.  Suppose that we can provide a complete, experimentally supported description of why an acorn becomes an oak which relies entirely on efficient causes and makes no appeal to final causes.  Is Aristotle's claim thereby refuted?  I don't know.  But it does seem to have been shown that it is unnecessary and unhelpful to take final causes into account to explain the acorn becoming an oak.  And since telos was a scientific theory, an effort to explain the world we observe, that does seem to be a reason to abandon the concept.

One thing I've never been able to understand about final cause is: How can one speak of a cause proceeding from the future (final = end) to the past? Surely causation, like time, is one-directional, going only from past to future and not vice versa! But maybe final cause can be consistent with the idea that causes must precede effects if the final cause, as a goal or purpose, pre-existed the effect. And that is easy enough to understand if we're talking about a human being with a plan or purpose: the human being conceives the plan first, then engages in actions to bring it about.  Aristotle sees purposes at work in biology too: a rabbit's long ears have the purpose (i.e. telos, final cause) of hearing predators.  Observation gave abundant reason to think this way; as indeed does casual language.  But how can the "purpose" of a rabbit's ears be the same sort of thing, metaphysically, as a "purpose" conceived in a human mind as a motive for action?  In what mind does the purpose reside (for it certainly does not reside in the rabbit's!)?  It might sound appealing to a partisan of Christianity to say "God," but that is a false move, for we know what "purposes" are from our human experience, and this does not give us the right to extend the concept or purpose to God.  And if He does have purposes, our access to knowing them is limited at best.  If one is forced to ask foolish questions like, "Why does God, when equipping rabbits with long ears, value the rabbit's safety over the wolf's supper? Why does God exhibit the opposite preference when designing the wolf's fangs?", it is a sign one is on the wrong track.

A concept of evolutionary causation dispenses with the need for any concept of "purpose" in biology as something basic or fundamentally causal.  To say that the purpose of an acorn is to become an oak comes to seem merely poetic, even anthropomorphic, as if an acorn wants to become an oak in the way a boy might want to become a priest.  To create a concept of telos by conflating human purposes with "purpose" as exhibited in the way animals and plants are adapted to their environment then appears to be a mere mistake.

Nietzsche, the Manic Muddlehead

This passage from Beyond Good and Evil is typical:

To be sure--to make also the bad counter-reckoning against such religions, and to bring to light their secret dangers--the cost is always excessive and terrible when religions do NOT operate as an educational and disciplinary medium in the hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and PARAMOUNTLY, when they wish to be the final end, and not a means along with other means. Among men, as among all other animals, there is a surplus of defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and necessarily suffering individuals; the successful cases, among men also, are always the exception;

To call men "defective," "diseased," etc. implies a standard compared to which men fall short.  If we apply a commonsense standard Nietzsche's claim is false.  Thus, most men are healthy; disease is the exception.  Or again, most of the obvious, material sufferings of humanity-- infant mortality, say, or hunger-- have been proven by economic growth not to be "necessary," for they have been overcome.   Nietzsche is trying to apply Darwinist biology as a metaphor for mankind, but the effort is misguided, for civilized man has escaped the old Malthusian trap, so that success in the merely biological sense is now the norm, not the exception.  If Nietzsche wants to define success in some other sense he is obliged to tell us what it is and defend it.  But he could not do so.  That's why he writes so cryptically, wrapping his thoughts in darkness; they could not stand up to the light.

and in view of the fact that man is THE ANIMAL NOT YET PROPERLY ADAPTED TO HIS ENVIRONMENT, the rare exception.

The concept of adaptation to an environment is not applicable to man, who has transcended mere dependency on an ecological niche, and makes his own environment.

But worse still. The higher the type a man represents, the greater is the improbability that he will SUCCEED; the accidental, the law of irrationality in the general constitution of mankind, manifests itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine.

What does Nietzsche mean by this physical metaphor, "the higher type?"  The metaphor will seem to some extent meaningful to readers raised in a Christian culture, because Christianity lives in the light of a lofty moral ideal, laid out in the Gospels, and compared to that standard we observe greater and lesser degrees of success which can be called "higher" or "lower."  Nietzsche wants to destroy the Gospels, and in doing so, he renders his own physical metaphor meaningless.  He is forever the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.

What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest religions above-mentioned to the SURPLUS of failures in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep alive whatever can be preserved; in fact, as the religions FOR SUFFERERS, they take the part of these upon principle; they are always in favour of those who suffer from life as from a disease, and they would fain treat every other experience of life as false and impossible.

Here, Nietzsche seems to have some sort of a value standard, but he refuses to tell us what it is (because, I think, he doesn't know).  Apparently, Nietzsche ascribes negative value to the life-experience of most human beings; as he makes no case, there can be no rebuttal.  One of the absurdities here is that Nietzsche is always calling his opponents "dogmatists," as if he were the Cartesian rationalist, yet he is always making emphatic claims like this one that are at best groundless and probably meaningless as well.  But here is a question.  Nietzsche claims that the great religions "treat every other experience of life as false and impossible."  Since the word "other" must "other than" something, and since that something in this case is "suffering from life as a disease," Nietzsche is claiming that religions claim any experience of life other than suffering from it as a disease.  This claim might possibly be true of Buddhism; of Christianity it is wildly false.  If we put this to one side, however, it's true that the great religions do dismiss as "false and impossible" some "experiences of life" that some "free spirits" might aspire to, e.g., free love.  A sober philosopher might ask: Are there, in fact, some experiences of life which we can dimly imagine and can desire, which are, in fact, false and impossible, e.g., free love?  Nietzsche could have presented arguments that some lifestyles forbidden by Christianity as dangerous illusions are actually possible and happy.  But honest argument is a field which he steers clear of, knowing perhaps that he would be unhorsed there at once.

However highly we may esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inasmuch as in applying to others, it has applied, and applies also to the highest and usually the most suffering type of man), the hitherto PARAMOUNT religions--to give a general appreciation of them--are among the principal causes which have kept the type of "man" upon a lower level--they have preserved too much THAT WHICH SHOULD HAVE PERISHED.

Should have, in what sense?  Where are these repugnant value-judgments coming from?  Of course, the link between Nietzsche's thought and Nazi race policy is evident here.

One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that the "spiritual men" of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto!

Well, yes, and this line could have come from Chesterton, but what does Nietzsche mean by it?  To call for gratitude for past achievements of civilization is to appeal to some common standard of good between Nietzsche and the reader; what is that standard?

But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the DETERIORATION OF THE EUROPEAN RACE?

The racism of this claim-via-rhetorical-question is not only repugnant but, I believe, empirically false.  If Nietzsche meant that Europeans would have been superior in objective respects, e.g., in intelligence, strength, courage or whatever, had European civilization been less humanitarian, this theory makes a testable prediction, namely that Europeans should be genetically inferior to Tagalog, Bantu, or Amerindian peoples where the sick and suffering were allowed to die.  I do not think there is any evidence suggesting this is the case.  If there were evidence for this, of course, it would not necessarily follow, and most people nowadays would emphatically reject, the value-judgment that it would have been better to improve the race by letting the weak die.

To REVERSE all estimates of value--THAT is what they had to do!

One can't help but be bemused here.  Nietzsche is advocating that most of mankind be allowed to perish because they are "defective, diseased," etc., and yet he is accusing Christianity of "reversing all estimates of value!"  Christianity is on the side of life for all; Nietzsche, on the side of death for most.  Who is reversing estimates of value here?

And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious--all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of "man"-- into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction;

What is one to answer to a writer who charges the civilization and faith that came to dominate (in the Age of Imperialism during which Nietzsche was writing) most of the world through its military superiority with "shattering the strong?"  That Christianity did not shatter the strong is a lesson of history that cannot be doubted; if anything, it seems to have strengthened and emboldened them.  Nietzsche seems always to start from the claim that 2+2=5.  Of course, the identification of "manly, conquering, and imperious" with "highest and most successful" is merely question-begging and dogmatic; again, no case has been made and no rebuttal can be offered.  But the identity of conscience with self-destruction is a simple falsehood.  Suicide is forbidden by the Christian conscience.

forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things--THAT is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, "unworldliness," "unsensuousness," and "higher man" fused into one sentiment.

Hmm...  Has Nietzsche given us some notion here of the origins of his otherwise mysterious "higher man" concept?  To appropriate and repurpose this notion from Christianity even while he attacks Christianity is another case of the woodcutter cutting off the branch he is sitting on.  Anyway, the charge that Christianity "hates all earthly things" is manifestly false, as is evident both from the writings of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians who affirm the goodness of earthly things (Augustine even argues that evil is only a privation of good) and from the fact that Christian civilization has achieved more in producing and enjoying earthly things than any other, and that monastics in particular have contributed to advances of material civilization out of all proportion to their numbers.  Christianity does, in a sense, "hate" some earthly things-- not all, of course; does the Church hate the bread and wine that are used in its sacraments?-- that are good in themselves, to the extent that they get in the way of heavenly things.  But then, Nietzsche himself really does hate most earthly things, regarding them as "defective," "diseased," etc.  Here, as in many places, Nietzsche's arguments are worthless against their intended targets but cogent against himself.

If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a SUBLIME ABORTION of man?

The absurdity here becomes at once so extreme and so subtle as to be a sort of marvel.  Consider: Abortion causes death.  Christian civilization has given rise to free constitutions, market economies, and technological progress which has made possible a twenty-fold increase in the human population; that is, it has caused a great increase in life.  Nietzsche, on the other hand, is explicitly advocating that most of mankind "should have perished" because it is "defective"; that is, he is advocating death, or, as we might put to do justice to his noble-sounding tone, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man."  As a criticism of Christianity, Nietzsche's claim is so obviously, utterly false that one feels he cannot have failed to understand its falsehood but rather exulted in it.  One feels the need for a new word which, like the words lie, joke, or fiction describes a false utterance, but which has a connotation of joy or exultation in carrying to virtuoso extremes the opposition between one's utterances and the truth, and does not so much deceive one's hearers as invite them to join in the exultation.  Meanwhile, as a criticism of Nietzsche's own philosophy, the claim is extremely astute.  Indeed, "a SUBLIME ABORTION of man" is a good description of that historic climax of Nietzscheanism, WWII.

He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror: "Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done! Was that a work for your hands? How you have hacked and botched my finest stone! What have you presumed to do!"--

This Nietzsche writes, of the civilization and the faith that built the European cathedrals, that produced Dante and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions. Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning MAN; men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to ALLOW, with sublime self- constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail;

Note how Nietzsche bluters that the "law of the thousandfold failures and perishings" is "obvious" to mask his total inability to defend or even to define it.

men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:--SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the present day.

As a minor symptom of the absurdity of this passage, we may observe that the "dwarfed" Europeans of Nietzsche's day and after are, on average, about a foot taller in stature than the prehistoric men of the age before human destinies were shaped by Platonism and Christianity.  This is characteristic.  Nietzsche's ravings are usually meaningless.  When meaning can be ascribed to them they are distinctive for being the opposite of the truth.

Nietzsche's point of departure seems to be an effort to apply a Darwinian paradigm to man and human society.  But the paradigm is inapplicable to civilized man, since modern man has more or less solved the problem of scarcity in the basic biological sense if not in the economic sense, and since in any case civilization replaces biological evolution with cultural evolution as the driving force of human development.  Nietzsche uses the rhetoric of "higher man," a metaphor somewhat useful for capture the advantages, ineffable because of their complexity, of civilization, in order to advocate the opposite of civilization, a return to savagery and the law of the jungle.  This grotesquely perverse wordplay is at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Yet Joyless Moralist says that Nietzsche is a "very great philosopher," "worth taking seriously," who "understands what is really at stake in Western philosophy."  If he's so smart, why does he have all his facts wrong and fail to make valid arguments for any of his claims?  Shouldn't philosophers treat Nietzsche as economists treat Marx, as a thinker to whom some attention must be paid because of his historical influence, and whom it is sometimes fun to refute, but who is understood to have been comprehensively wrong and to have contributed nothing of value to human knowledge?

A Flaw in Dennett's Enterprise

From Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and answer, the question "Why?" Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to this ancient and inescapable question. Here science and philosophy get completely intertwined. Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. (Dennett, 21)

Dennett turns a good phrase there at the end.  But is it true?  Certainly it is true of Darwinist science, as Dennett does a good job of showing in the remainder of the book.  It is less clear that there is any "philosophical baggage" involved in ordinary physics, or chemistry.  A dropped ball falls: we all learn that by experiment/observation, and so does a physicist; and while the physicist learns many more things in the same fashion, his general approach need never depart from common sense.  Of course, a Humean skeptic might regard the inductive process by which this conclusion is arrived at as groundless; and if you want to say that all induction involves the "philosophical baggage," fine: but then it is common sense that takes its philosophical baggage on board without inspection, and science-- or at least, physics or chemistry-- is not distinctive in this regard except in that it travels especially light, and especially far.  That Darwinist theory has to take on far more philosophical baggage than other disciplines is a clue that it is not just another science, entitled to the deference we ordinarily give to Science.  Rather, it combines some brilliant insights with a special kind of ideological enterprise, namely: proving that a materialist worldview is viable, or rather, hinting at a prospectus for such a proof.

Dennett hits on exactly what is so brilliant about Darwin: his theory has contributed to the corpus of human thought a new way of asking and answering the question 'why.'  Aristotle said there were four "causes"; Darwin invented a fifth, and highly interesting and illuminating one.  But while this breakthrough has been understandably exciting for many people, Darwinism as a theory of all life is a case of jumping to conclusions.  There may be arguments-- the argument from reason of C.S. Lewis (Miracles) and others is one, I think-- that prove it is impossible for materialistic, evolutionary processes to have given rise to all life as we know it (ourselves in particular) but at any rate the best that can be justly claimed for the theory is that it might be a possibility.  The epistemology, and therefore the epistemic status, of Darwinian evolution is entirely different from that of physics, chemistry, and other proper sciences.  Not only has it not been exhaustively tested in every detail by experiment; it can probably not even be creditable with being falsifiable in the Popperian sense, or at least, to the extent that any falsification-tests can be proposed, far more parsimonious variations of the theory (making no grand claims about the origins of all life) could probably be framed for which the set of falsifiable predictions made by the theory would be the same.  Unfortunately, we have seen only hints of the needed recognition of the limits of Darwinian theory so far.  Most Darwinism continues to be the combination of brilliant insight and dogmatic table-pounding that is Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Is Evolution Fast Enough? Evidence from Viruses and Parasites

I'm not sure I trust Marvin Olasky on this: with writers who have strong and conservative religious convictions, you always worry that they might be "spinning" the facts to support a conclusion they have ulterior motives for reaching.  And yet the last two paragraphs here seem to provide some real evidence:

New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of "intelligent design": All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization.

Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories -- life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) -- is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse.

I interviewed Michael Behe, author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" and a new book, "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism." This Lehigh University biology professor points out that "Darwin and his contemporaries knew very little about the cell, which is the foundation of life. Microscopes of that era were too crude to see many critical details. So 19th-century scientists thought the cell was simple protoplasm, like a piece of microscopic Jell-O."

Behe explained what has changed: "Now we know that the cell is chock-full of sophisticated nanotechnology, literally machines made from molecules. The same goes for the universe. In Darwin's era, the universe was thought to be pretty simple. Now we know its basic laws are balanced on a razor's edge to allow for life and that our planet may be the only one in the universe that could support intelligent life. The more we know about nature, the more design we see."

We also have data now from a half-century of careful malaria-watching, which -- because malaria reproduce so quickly -- lets us see what happens to thousands of generations of parasites that are under constant attack from man-made drugs. Darwin predicted that random mutation and natural selection would lead to the development of new species, but no new kinds of malaria have emerged, just tiny changes in existing strains.

The mass killer HIV also has provided evidence to disprove Darwin. Behe points out that HIV, like malaria, "is a microbe that occurs in astronomical numbers. What's more, its mutation rate is 10,000 times greater than that of most other organisms. So in just the past few decades, HIV has actually undergone more of certain kinds of mutations than all cells have endured since the beginning of the world. Yet all those mutations, while medically important, have changed the functioning virus very little."

I have no opinions either way about the Intelligent Design school because I don't understand the theory they are offering or what kind of evidence would prove or (more to the point) disprove it.  I do understand the theory of evolution and believe that theory has very severe problems passing the Popperian falsifiability test, at least if we accept that theory in the grand sense that "this is how all life on earth emerged."  I understand the mutation-and-natural-selection mechanism.  Undoubtedly it is a force operative in biology.  But is that mechanism powerful enough to explain the vast diversity and complexity of life, or does it fall short-- perhaps order of magnitude short?

The malaria/AIDS evidence would suggest that my intuition that it falls short is right.  However, malaria/AIDS reproduce asexually; you could argue sexual selection might accelerate the tempo of evolution enough to achieve the much faster pace of evolution needed to explain larger organisms.

Is Darwinian Evolution Falsifiable?

In response to an earlier post, "A Falsifying Counter-Example to Darwinism?", commenter Mark writes:

In any case, I'm familiar with the creationist idea that "evolution isn't falsifiable". That claim is ridiculous. Evolutionists (known as "scientists" to most people), have addressed it long ago:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211.html

For a more in depth explanation of each step in evolution from RNA to complex animals, I suggest Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Christian De Duve's book Vital Dust.
http://www.amazon.com/Vital-Dust-Life-Cosmic-Imperative/dp/0465090451

Just as the theory of gravity has broken down and required refinement in some extreme cases, it wouldn't be surprising if the same happened to the theory of evolution. Intelligent Design nonsense that Kern embraces, on the other hand, really isn't any more falsifiable than the flying spaghetti monster. Once you believe that a giant cosmic being who rampages around the universe, jacking with it as he pleases and has no need for science, is the most logical explanation for life on Earth, you're far beyond the limits of falsifiability.

I'm not going to defend the scientific falsifiability of any form of creationism. I won't dismiss it either, because I don't understand the arguments people make for it, and I don't want to claim an argument is wrong before I've understood it. I'm an evolution-skeptic (again, meaning evolution-as-a-total-theory-of-life; certainly I buy that evolution occurs, but how much work it can actually do is what is in question).

The link Mark gives us argues the following:

Claim CA211:

Any fact can be fit into the theory of evolution. Therefore, evolution is not falsifiable and is not a proper scientific theory.

Source:

Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 6-7.

Response:

1. There are many conceivable lines of evidence that could falsify evolution. For example:
   • a static fossil record;
   • true chimeras, that is, organisms that combined parts from several different and diverse lineages (such as mermaids and centaurs) and which are not explained by lateral gene transfer, which transfers relatively small amounts of DNA between lineages, or symbiosis, where two whole organisms come together;
   • a mechanism that would prevent mutations from accumulating;
   • observations of organisms being created.

Well, this is probably the best list I've seen so far. But. Question: For each of these candidates for falsifying counter-examples, what is the most parsimonious theory that they would falsify? My parsimonious alternative to full-fledged Darwinism, the Darwinian theory of imperfect ecosystemic homeostasis, would be falsified by any of the above observations, and thus is the equal of Darwinism in terms of Popperian falsifiability while being far more modest in its claims. The most interesting of the four is the point made about "true chimeras," but even aside from the DTIEH you could formulate the principles of taxonomy as a theory to which this would be a falsifying counter-example, which would be more parsimonious than either variant of Darwinism.

A couple of points on the level of meta-argument must be made here. First, one can always satisfy the Popperian falsifiability criterion by welding together a myth with a bit of genuine science. Thus, one may frame a "grand theory of love," according to which:

(a) God is love,
(b) Love created the world and infuses everything in it,
(c) Love is all you need,
(d) In the Age of Aquarius, peace will bind the planets and love will steer the stars,
(e) Love attracts all objects to one another with a strength proportional to the masses of the objects over the square of the distance, such that small unencumbered objects at roughly the Earth's surface will accelerate downwards at a speed of 9.8 m/s2.

Thus the "grand theory of love" splices a lot of mysticism and crankism onto the theory of gravity. As a result, it generates falsifiable predictions from part (e). The theory of evolution is the same way: some parts of it are scientific and generate falsifiable predictions, others are myths which do not.

A subtler meta-argumentative issue is that some of the proposed counter-examples to Darwinism constitute a Vanishingly (as Dennett would put it) subset of all possible worlds, whereas with strong Popperian scientific theories it is the confirmations which are a Vanishingly small subset of all possible worlds.

UPDATE: Whatever the merits of it ultimately are, it is certainly not "ridiculous." Unfortunately, this kind of arrogance is par for the course among Darwinists.

Lamarck's Comeback?

A fascinating article in The Economist on a breakthrough in biology concerning the role of RNA. It seems that RNA play a larger and more varied role than previously thought, especially in advanced organisms, which biologists are just realizing how little they understand. And this twist:

What is being proposed is the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual's lifetime, rather than as the result of chance mutations. This was first suggested by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, before Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection swept the board. However, even Darwin did not reject the idea that Lamarckian inheritance had some part to play, and it did not disappear as a serious idea until 20th-century genetic experiments failed to find evidence for it.

The wiggle room for the re-admission of Lamarck's ideas comes from the discovery that small RNAs are active in cells' nuclei as well as in their outer reaches. Greg Hannon, of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, thinks that some of these RNA molecules are helping to direct subtle chemical modifications to DNA. Such modifications make it harder for a cell's code-reading machinery to get at the affected region of the genome. They thus change the effective composition of the genome in a way similar to mutation of the DNA itself (it is such mutations that are the raw material of natural selection). Indeed, they sometimes stimulate actual chemical changes in the DNA—in other words, real mutations.

Even this observation, interesting though it is, does not restore Lamarckism because such changes are not necessarily advantageous. But what Dr Hannon believes is that the changes in question sometimes happen in response to stimuli in the environment. The chances are that even this is still a random process, and that offspring born with such environmentally induced changes are no more likely to benefit than if those changes had been induced by a chemical or a dose of radiation. And yet, it is just possible Dr Hannon is on to something. The idea that the RNA operating system which is emerging into view can, as it were, re-write the DNA hard-drive in a predesigned way, is not completely ridiculous.

This could not result in genuine novelty. That must still come from natural selection. But it might optimise the next generation using the experience of the present one, even though the optimising software is the result of Darwinism. And if that turned out to be commonplace, it would be the paradigm shift to end them all.

If this pans out, don't expect biologists to admit that evolution-skeptics like me, who doubted that mere mutation and natural selection were adequate, even over billions of years, to explain the vast complexity of life on earth, were right all along.  Because that's what this would mean: if there is inheritance of acquired characteristics, then all those decades of biology professors who swore to high heaven that Darwinian evolution is "proven" and pounded the tables with their shoes shouting at creationists that we will bury you, will have been full of baloney.  Of course, this wouldn't really affect the deeper ontological issues.  But it would underline what is evident to careful observers, namely that late-20th-century Darwinian evolution failed to meet the epistemic standards that characterize other scientific theories.

If you think about it, there's a Darwinist argument that inheritance of acquired characteristics should exist.  Suppose there are two species, X and Y, which are similar in most respects, but organisms of species X are able to inherit acquired characteristics, while organisms of species Y can't.  Over a few thousand generations, X's will adapt and optimize more quickly than Y's, and therefore will outbreed and displace them.  This doesn't show that inheritance of acquired characteristics is possible, but rather that, if it is possible, natural selection should favor organisms that inherit acquired characteristics over those that don't, and therefore inheritance of acquired characteristics should predominate among advanced organisms.

Inheritance of acquired characteristics could make the materialist account of the origins of life far more potent and plausible. If we take the famous example of the eye, if an organism, having developed some light-sensory equipment or other eye-features, can learn how to use them, or strengthen its visual capacities, and pass those acquired traits on to its offspring, it's much easier to accumulate the design-functionality of an eye.  If inheritance of acquired characteristics makes the materialist account of the origins of things more plausible, does that make the alternative-- mind-matter dualism, or whatever-- less plausible?  No, because the problem with materialism is not so much gaps in the explanation of aspects of the physical world as the fact that certain aspects of the world-- the not-apparently-physical world, the mind or thought-realm-- cannot be shown to be reducible to a material basis.

A Falsifying Counter-Example to Darwinism?

Val thinks my denial that evolution is falsifiable is itself unfalsifiable.  I replied that what evolution needs is an equivalent of "floating rocks," potential facts which, if observed, would falsify the theory.  In this vein, let me link to this Doug Kern essay: "Denying the Undeniable Design."  Kern is a proponent of Intelligent Design, I'm not; and the essay may look like a polemical fantasy whose only merit is its humor.  But Kern actually gets to the heart of the matter:

"Divine messages etched in cells -- what bosh!" The professor rolled his eyes and drummed his fingers on the table. "It means nothing, nothing at all."

"Professor," said the journalist, "with all due respect, I find that difficult to believe. As you know, earlier this week, researchers applied a powerful new sub-electron microscope to human tissue samples for the first time. They found hitherto-undetected sub-atomic particles on each and every examined human cell, from hundreds of donors. And on each cell, the particles seem to spell out a message in English: I, God, am the designer of this cell. Scientists across the globe have independently verified this discovery."

The scientist shrugged. "I suppose the physics community will find the discovery of the new particles mildly diverting. But I fail to see why those of us in the biological sciences should care."

"But, professor...this discovery appears to be a message from, well, God!"

"'Appears!' 'Appears!' The appearance of design is nothing more than a trick of the mind -- a mote in the eye of the beholder. Abraham Lincoln 'appeared' in my cereal this morning. Was I visited by a ghost -- or an overactive imagination that found patterns amidst random assortments of Corn Flakes? A lump of coal, held under pressure for a million years, will rearrange its molecular structure into the precise pattern of a diamond. Order, yes, but is it design? Only for those who feel compelled to find it. Rivers rush to the sea; the planet spins on its axis; the cycle of life carries on across the globe. Intricately ordered, all of it! But not designed. I assure you, young man, it would not take very many chimpanzees in front of very many typewriters to produce something like I, God, am the designer of this cell. And the chimpanzees in question have been at the typewriters a very long time. Life on this planet is tremendously old, and the mundane laws of physics coupled with mere chance could have produced any number of extraordinary phenomena."

And so on.  Kern's scientist is unfazed even by the discovery of the English phrase "I, God, and the designer of this cell."  Kern takes an extreme case (to the point of amusing absurdity) in order to illustrate a point: that evolutionists would never abandon their theory, no matter what evidence turned up.  I'm not sure the case is quite as bad as Kern suggests.  I think a lot of scientists might question materialistic evolution in a case like this.  (Theologians would be thrown for a loop too.  Why the heck is God writing on cells in English?)

For evolution to qualify as a falsifiable scientific hypothesis, we need to have a clear idea of what kinds of observable facts would disprove the theory.  Probably finding "I, God, am the designer of this cell" in the walls of cells would qualify.  What else?

Evolution, The Inside-Out Scientific Theory

I thought of a simple way of explaining the difference between evolution and the other natural sciences: other natural sciences seek to explain phenomena we observe, whereas evolution seeks to explain phenomena we don't observe.

The theory of gravity is named after something we observe. Gravity is rocks falling, etc. We see it in action all the time. The theory of evolution is named after something that we typically don't observe. We don't see the organisms in the world around us evolving. On the contrary, though day and night, winter and summer alternate in endless rotation; while people are born, grow up, age and die; while nations and civilizations rise and fall; while technology advances and culture changes, we see the set of organisms that populate the world around us basically constant. If the theory of gravity starts by asking, "Why do rocks fall?", the theory of life should start by asking, not, "Why does life evolve?" but "Why does life, mostly, stay the same?" Or to be more precise: "Why, despite being permeated with endless change and motion, does the world of living things exhibit a grand equilibrium, such that for thousands of years, for thousands of generations of organisms, ecosystems sustain a marvellous balance, so that a time-traveler from the time of Socrates would be baffled if he witnessed modern cities, but could wander in today's forests and feel at home?"

Evolution is an inside-out theory. Instead of asking how (contrary to our ordinary observations) living things evolve(d), the emphasis should be on why (as we do observe) living things usually don't evolve. Indeed, it is precisely because it does do so much to answer this question that Darwinism is a worthwhile theory, in spite of the ideologically-driven extrapolations it has given rise to. Unfortunately, the Darwinists couldn't resist the glorious fun of framing a creation-myth.