Tag: science

The end of the evolution debate

It’s always very telling when the so-called scientists resort to wishful thinking and ideological propaganda:

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself. Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that “even the skeptics can accept it. If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive,” Leakey says, “then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges.”

Any hope for mankind’s future, he insists, rests on accepting existing scientific evidence of its past…. Leakey, who clearly cherishes investigating the past, is less optimistic about the future. “We may be on the cusp of some very real disasters that have nothing to do with whether the elephant survives, or a cheetah survives, but if we survive.”

Leakey is letting the atheist evolutionary cat out of the bag here. Unlike the likes of Harris, whose revolutionary Enlightenment 2.0 globalism is never advertised and can only be confirmed by carefully reading through his books, Leakey is quite willing to draw the connection between evolution, atheism, multiculturalism, all intended to lead towards the long-term utopian fantasy of rule by a scientific and technocratic global oligarchy.

My prediction is quite the opposite. I am increasingly convinced that genetic science will render the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis scientifically unviable in the same manner it previously required the development of the synthesis by rendering untenable classic fossil-based Darwinian evolution by natural selection. One thing that has escaped most professional biologists, who are neither historians of science nor logicians, is that the increasing complexity of the DNA/RNA interplay along with growing understanding of mutations renders the present evolutionary timelines increasingly improbable. Whereas the decoding of the human and other genomes was supposed to provide not only answers, but even conclusive proof of macroevolution, it has instead raised considerably more questions. And while the growing number of proposed evolutionary mechanisms are not necessarily proof that macroevolution has not happened in the past and is not happening in the present, they do show the need to develop epicycles that is always indicative of a theory that is in trouble and on its way to being falsified and ultimately jettisoned.

Could I be incorrect? Of course. That is why I describe myself as an evolutionary skeptic rather than an anti-evolutionist. But once again, we see a conflict between pattern recognition and scientific consensus, and I expect that as has usually happened before, pattern recognition will win out because scientific consensus is not always science, it is often logical conclusions drawn from science by scientists. And the history of science shows that scientists are, for the most part, inept logicians, which is why they tend to keep making the same type of mistakes with each new generation of scientist. So, I am quite comfortable asserting, contra Leakey, that in 15 years, skepticism over evolution will not only not be history, but will be both more popular and more scientifically credible than it is now.

A scientist beats up PZ

As if the Fowl Atheist didn’t have enough trouble with all the religious people methodically exposing his rank idiocy whenever he opens his mouth, now even atheist scientists are calling him out on his clueless nonsense. David Sloan Wilson points out the obvious, which is that PZ Myers doesn’t act or think in a scientific manner where religion is concerned.

In the spirit of science as a process of constructive disagreement, Evolution: This View of Life is pleased to feature a critique of my previous article “The New Atheism and Evolutionary Religious Studies: Clarifying Their Relationship” by evolutionist and prolific blogger PZ Myers, titled “You Want Evidence that Religion is Bad for Our Species? OPEN YOUR EYES.” Unfortunately, Myer’s critique raises the issue of whether he is functioning as a scientist at all on the subject of religion.

Imagine Myers teaching a class on his academic specialty — evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) — and telling his students that all they must do to understand the topic is to open their eyes. This would be absurd. The whole point of science is to understand topics that are too complex to be self-evident. I have written about the problem of scientists who use their reputation in one topic area to hold forth on other topic areas without doing the same homework that a good science journalist would do, and even without functioning as a scientist in any way at all. PZ Myers has a fine reputation as an evolutionary developmental biologist, but on the topic of religion he is defrocked.

As longtime readers here know, it’s not just the subject of religion concerning which PZ is hapless, but pretty much every subject he attempts to address outside of his own professional specialty. He’s equally incompetent with regards to philosophy, politics, and economics, just to name three more. And even with regards to his scientific specialty, he hasn’t mastered it sufficiently to be confident of winning a debate on evolution by natural selection with me. But for the purposes of both amusement and edification, consider PZ’s inept response to Wilson, especially the specific questions he poses:

Rather than condescendingly telling us about evolutionary dynamics, I’d like Wilson to get specific.

1. How does depriving girls of an education benefit women?

2. How does raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children benefit women?

3. How does throwing acid in their faces when they demand independence from men benefit women?

4. How do honor killings benefit women?

5. How does stoning rape victims benefit women?

6. How does female genital mutilation benefit women?

7. How does letting women die rather than giving them an abortion benefit women?

What is amusing here is the way that PZ throws out these questions as if they are at all difficult to answer, as if he is making some sort of cogent point simply by asking them. Now, I’m sure Wilson would come up with some different answers, but as will be seen by the answers I provide, by asking some of them, Myers is doing little more than demonstrating the very unscientific attitude of which he is accused! It’s important to understand that one need not find these answers to be absolutely conclusive or even convincing to recognize that they are scientifically valid answers, which is to say that they can be used to generate hypotheses and then subsequently put to the scientific test, at least to the extent that social science can reasonably be considered science.

1. Because educating women is strongly correlated with reducing their disposition and ability to reproduce themselves. Educating them tends to make them evolutionary dead ends. “Germany now has the highest number of childless women in the world. This trend has been going on since at least the 90s. What we also know is that the higher the level of education, the more likely a woman is to remain childless.” -Professor Norbert Schneider, Mainz University. 40% of German women with college degrees are childless. Does PZ seriously wish to claim that not reproducing is intrinsically beneficial to women? Does he really find it hard to understand how not reproducing is evolutionary disadvantageous?

2. Because raising girls with the expectation that their purpose in life is to bear children allows them to pursue marriage at the age of their peak fertility, increase the wage rates of their prospective marital partners, and live in stable, low-crime, homogenous societies that are not demographically dying. It also grants them privileged status, as they alone are able to ensure the continued survival of the society and the species alike. Women are not needed in any profession or occupation except that of child-bearer and child-rearer, and even in the case of the latter, they are only superior, they are not absolutely required.

3. Because female independence is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills. Using the utilitarian metric favored by most atheists, a few acid-burned faces is a small price to pay for lasting marriages, stable families, legitimate children, low levels of debt, strong currencies, affordable housing, homogenous populations, low levels of crime, and demographic stability. If PZ has turned against utilitarianism or the concept of the collective welfare trumping the interests of the individual, I should be fascinated to hear it.

4. Because female promiscuity and divorce are strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills, from low birth and marriage rates to high levels of illegitimacy.

5. I don’t see how this benefits women in any way. The effect in dramatically reducing the number of false rape accusations would, of course, benefit men, but since there is no reliable penalty for false rape accusations in modern society, reducing it would be of little benefit to them.

6. By reducing female promiscuity, which is strongly correlated with a whole host of social ills, from low birth and marriage rates to high levels of illegitimacy. But it may not even do so, in which case there wouldn’t appear to be any case for it, since female genital mutilation tends to make health matters worse, unlike male genital mutilation, which appears to improve health matters somewhat.

7. Because far more women are aborted than die as a result of their pregnancies going awry. The very idea that letting a few women die is worse than killing literally millions of unborn women shows that PZ not only isn’t thinking like a scientist, he’s quite clearly not thinking rationally at all. If PZ is going to be intellectually consistent here, then he should be quite willing to support the abortion of all black fetuses, since blacks disproportionately commit murder and 17x more people could be saved by aborting black fetuses than permitting the use of abortion to save the life of a mother. 466 American women die in pregnancy every year whereas 8,012 people died at the hands of black murderers in 2010.

The scientific attitude would be to develop a hypothesis and test it as best one is able. But it’s quite clear that PZ doesn’t want to consider the possibility of anything beyond his philosophical commitment to the unicorn of so-called “equality”. Wilson is right to observe that PZ’s behavior with regards to these matters is entirely unscientific, indeed, one might even surmise that it is outright anti-scientific.

WND column

Sudden Vaccine Death Syndrome

Vaccine advocates – although propagandists would be a more accurate term – often correctly claim that there is no scientific evidence proving that vaccines have ever killed anyone or caused autism. Therefore, they claim vaccines can be considered the cause of nothing but a cure for cancer, an end to war and the elimination of all human disease except that caused by dirty, unvaccinated children who are homeschooled by religious bigots. To even consider the mere possibility of questioning the intrinsic and perfect goodness of vaccines, any vaccine given for any reason, is to be not only anti-science, but personally responsible for murdering anyone who died of a disease that would have been prevented by vaccination.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, please note that there is a site called “The Jenny McCarthy Bodycount,” which claims that the blonde actress is responsible for 888 deaths since June 3, 2007, which makes her the second most lethal American after Chuck Norris.

Additional vaccine info

After yesterday’s post on the potential link between the vaccine schedule and the twin VAERS and SIDS death spikes at 2-4 months, I spent a little time playing around with the VAERS database myself. Here are some of the things I found interesting:

1. In the last five years, from 2007 through the end of 2011, 28.5 percent of ALL reported vaccine-related deaths for ALL AGES occurred between the ages of 2-4 months. It is truly remarkable that a two-month period that represents one-fifth of one percent of a person’s expected lifespan should account for nearly a third of the reported vaccine-related deaths, especially because the death rate is much higher than in the two months that immediately follow childbirth. That percentage is 13,500 percent higher than would be statistically indicated. The pattern continues in 2012 as 55 percent of the 20 vaccine-related deaths reported so far this year took place in that same two-month window.

2. I was too conservative in my estimates yesterday. During that same five year period, 60 PERCENT of all reported vaccine-related deaths under the age of one occurred between 2-4 months. The period from 2-3 months alone accounted for the previously estimated 40 percent.

3. The 2-4 month death spike appears consistently even if one goes all the way back to 1990, the earliest date available. The situation appears to have improved consideraby, as the worst years were 1991 through 1994, so it would be informative to learn if there was a change in the vaccine schedule between 1994 and 1995. It is also interesting to note that SIDS deaths are reported to have declined from 1993 to 2004, and by a proportion similar to the decline in VAERS-reported deaths. Of course, it’s also theoretically possible that the anti-SIDS sleep campaign which began in 1994 is responsible for decline in vaccine deaths, as perhaps stomach sleeping somehow exacerbates the problem of receiving a vaccine overload.

None of this can be considered conclusive yet. Perhaps it is just a 22-year coincidence that parents and doctors are more likely to report the deaths of 2-4 month old children than those of 8-10 month old children, or any other age, for that matter. But the statistical evidence is unusually consistent and the growing number of correlations does appear to indicate that there is a causal factor involved, most likely concerning the size of the child and the amount of the vaccines administered, which suggests that simply delaying the current schedule by six months or more would significantly reduce the risk of fatal vaccine damage to a child.

Lethal lies and the vaccine schedule

It is not at all difficult to conclusively demonstrate the deceitful tendencies of the vaccine propagandists. For example, yesterday Instapundit linked to the Jenny McCarthy Bodycount, on which it is claimed that the former Playmate is responsible for 888 preventable deaths over the course of the last five years. Furthermore, it claims that there are 0 “autism diagnoses scientifically linked to vaccinations”. That makes it look as if vaccines are much safer, infinitely safer, in fact, than not getting vaccinated.

However, the statement is only true because there has never been a genuine scientific study of vaccines and autism. Or of vaccine safety in general. There have only been statistical surveys, which are not, by any reasonable definition, actual use of the scientific method, nor can they even be considered very statistically reliable given the reporting methods. Regardless, statistical review is no more science than astrology or playmatology, even when it is done by credentialed scientists. But the real deceit is the way in which reference to actual VAERS-reported deaths were omitted. Despite being underreported by a factor estimated to be as much as 100x, there have been more than 5,310 deaths directly caused by vaccines registered in the system since 1992. Using the most conservative under-reporting estimate, 10x, because one can assume that a death is more likely to go unreported than a minor adverse reaction, that means vaccines are known to be directly killing about 2,665 people per year, compared to the 178 putatively committed per year by the homicidal blonde. And this doesn’t take into account the much larger number of people who have been damaged by them in some way.

Even worse, the vast majority of these deaths are not only children, but children of a very specific age. A more detailed chart of all 5,310 deaths shows that more than a third of them, nearly 40 percent, occurred in between the ages of 2 and 4 months, which just happens to be when the US vaccine schedule calls for children to receive no less than 10 shots, including 2xRV, 2xDTaP, 2xHib, 2xPCV, and 2xIPV. They may also receive an eleventh shot, for Hepatitis B, as well.

Looking at the VAERS data and comparing it with the schedule quite clearly implies that children are being fatally overloaded with doses that their bodies cannot handle.  While it is theoretically possible that this massive spike in vaccine-caused deaths is only coincidental with the largest number of vaccine doses that a child will ever receive in its life at a time when it is very small, that seems unlikely.  Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that one of the easiest ways to reduce the likelihood of vaccine death, and presumably non-fatal vaccine damage as well, is to simply push back the vaccine schedule by at least three months, or better yet, one year, when the child’s body will be bigger and therefore more capable of dealing with the foreign substances being injected into it.  Of course, there is always the option of not vaccinating the child for the less dangerous diseases; the spike in 65+ deaths is almost certainly the result of adverse reactions to the various flu vaccines.

One needn’t be a rabid opponent of vaccines to find this death spike at 3 months to be troubling and indicative of a need to rethink the current vaccine schedule.  And everyone, pro- and anti-vaccine, should be concerned about the shameless vaccine safety propaganda that is so easily shown to be false.  Laws are passed and governments engage in ad campaigns to help reduce the 200 children’s bicycle deaths each year, so clearly it is worthwhile to look more closely and scientifically into the issue of vaccine safety when an estimated 1,060 children are dying between 2 and 4 months of age each year from the vaccines being injected into them.

Sam Harris and the epic self-evisceration

My original intent upon finishing Sam Harris’s latest book was to write a detailed critique of it. However, in reading it, I realized that it actually contained something much more interesting than the expected collection of conventional Harrisian errors, as it amounted to a rebuttal of the man’s previous work! So, although I intend to critique Free Will in the near future, I thought it would be more important to look at how Harris’s latest arguments affect his earlier ones. In The Irrational Atheist, I noted that Christopher Hitchens had committed a marvelous exercise in self-evisceration when he declared that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”, then proceeded to pronounce no fewer than 52 different declarations, each of which was presented completely without evidence. However, it would appear that Sam Harris is more than worthy of filling the late Mr. Hitchens giant clown shoes, as he has effortlessly surpassed that feat of self-defeating logic with his latest adventure in science-flavored polemic. However, to fully appreciate the full scope of Harris’s unique achievement, it is necessary to return to his most popular work, The End of Faith, and revisit that book’s central thesis.

The basic concept at the heart of The End of Faith is that belief is the root of all human action. From this core postulate, Harris then concludes that because belief causes action – he actually goes so far as to state that “beliefs are action” – that some actions are so potentially dangerous that they justify pre-emptively killing people who possess the beliefs that cause them. He then attempts to show that those causal beliefs are generally religious in nature; the end of faith to which he refers in the title is the violent elimination of faith by, (or on behalf of), a one-world government justified by the religious faithful’s opposition to global government as well as faith’s potential danger to the human race as per the extinction equation, in which Religious Faith + Science and Technology = Human Extinction.

This encapsulation of Harris’s argument will likely sound outrageous until one considers the evidence taken directly from The End of Faith:

“A BELIEF is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings.”

“As a man believes, so he will act.”

“It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia. The belief that it will rain puts an umbrella in the hand of every man or woman who owns one.”

“Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene…. Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences.”

“There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.”

“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others.”

“We can say it even more simply: we need a world government…. The diversity of our religious beliefs constitutes a primary obstacle here…. World government does seem a long way off—so long that we may not survive the trip.”

Now, Harris’s argument is as fallacious as it is dangerous, for as I showed in TIA, even if one accepts the logic of the extinction equation, a perusal of history shows that the danger purportedly posed by religion is a second-order one at most, and furthermore, is not supported by the historical evidence, whereas the first-order danger stems directly from science. In 116 centuries filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of diverse religions, all competing for mind share, resources and dominance, the species has not merely survived, but has thrived, while a mere four centuries of modern science has created multiple clear and present dangers to the continued existence of the human race. Even if one accepts the general thrust of Harris’s argument in The End of Faith and believes that the danger to the species demands immediate action, it is obvious that Harris’s target is the wrong one and he should have been advocating the end of science rather than faith.

However, instead of either retracting or revising his argument, Harris has taken the surprising approach of undermining it by destroying its very foundation in his most recent book, Free Will. I suspect, however, that he has done this unintentionally and in complete ignorance of having done so, as he happens to be one of the laziest and most careless intellectuals to ever be embraced by the public. For in Free Will, he completely disassociates action from belief, in fact, he disassociates it from conscious thought altogether. Consider the following quotes from Free Will:

“The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false.”

“The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.”

“The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it…. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it.”

“The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature—and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions.”

“Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.”

“Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware.”

“People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is illusory.”

As he declares that the illusory nature of free will erodes the concepts of moral responsibility, punishment, and the religious concept of sin, Harris appears to be completely unaware of how he has also destroyed his previous case against faith and religion. Being either the product or the resident of the conscious mind, belief can no longer be equated with action or serve as its causal factor, indeed, we are informed that the very possibility that belief can even be linked with action is nothing more than an illusion. He not only abandons, but actively attacks the basic concept upon which all the arguments in his previous book rest, the idea that belief is the root of all human action. Now he insists that a man will not act according to his beliefs for the obvious reason that he cannot; at most, his beliefs can only be seen as consequences that run more or less in parallel with his actions and therefore cannot serve as indicators of his future actions. This severing of the link between belief and action completely eliminates the viability of Harris’s claim that religious beliefs are intrinsically dangerous as well as any justification for the sort of lethal pre-emptive action he previously declared to be ethical.

Therefore, in light of the new material, one of his previous declarations quoted above must be rephrased thusly: “Given the absence of the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs as well as diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene…. Even apparently deadly beliefs, whether they are justified or not, cannot lead to harmful consequences.”

One imagines that one of his more intelligent fans will eventually notice the way in which Mr. Harris’s latest arguments have rendered his older ones incorrect and bring it to Mr. Harris’s attention, so I’m sure we can all anticipate a retraction of the various anti-religious claims presented in The End of Faith in the reasonably near future.

Free will and the utilitarian objective

Sam Harris disagrees with Daniel Dennett concerning the existence of free will:

Dan seems to think that free will is like color: People might have some erroneous beliefs about it, but the experience of freedom and its attendant moral responsibilities can be understood in a similarly straightforward way through science. I think that free will is an illusion and that analogies to phenomena like color do not run through. A better analogy, also taken from the domain of vision, would liken free will to the sense that most of us have of visual continuity.

Take a moment to survey your immediate surroundings. Your experience of seeing will probably seem unified—a single field in which everything appears all at once and seamlessly. But the act of seeing is not quite what it seems. The first thing to notice is that most of what you see in every instant is a blur, because you have only a narrow region of sharp focus in the center of your visual field. This area of foveal vision is also where you perceive colors most clearly; your ability to distinguish one color from another falls away completely as you reach the periphery in each eye. You continuously compensate for these limitations by allowing your gaze to lurch from point to point (executing what are known as “saccades”), but you tend not to notice these movements. Nor are you aware that your visual perception appears interrupted while your eyes are moving (otherwise you would see a continuous blurring of the scene). It was once believed that saccades caused the active suppression of vision, but recent experiments suggest that the post-saccadic image (i.e. whatever you next focus on) probably just masks the preceding blur.

There is also a region in each visual field where you receive no input at all, because the optic nerve creates a blind spot where it passes through the retina. Many of us learned to perceive the subjective consequences of this unintelligent design as children, by marking a piece of paper, closing one eye, and then moving the paper into a position where the mark disappeared. Close one eye now and look out at the world: You will probably not notice your blind spot—and yet, if you are in a crowded room, someone could well be missing his head. Most people are surely unaware that the optic blind spot exists, and even those of us who know about it can go for decades without noticing it.

While color vision survives close inspection, our conventional sense of visual continuity does not. The impression we have of seeing everything all at once, clearly, and without interruption is based on our not paying close attention to what it is like to see. I argue that the illusory nature of free will can also be noticed in this way. As with the illusion of visual continuity, the evidence of our confusion is neither far away nor deep within; rather, it is right on the surface of experience, almost too near to us to be seen.

Of course, we could take Dan’s approach and adjust the notion of “continuity” so that it better reflected the properties of human vision, giving us a new concept of seamless visual perception that is “worth wanting.” But if erroneous beliefs about visual continuity caused drivers to regularly mow down pedestrians and police sharpshooters to accidentally kill hostages, merely changing the meaning of “continuity” would not do. I believe that this is the situation we are in with the illusion of free will: False beliefs about human freedom skew our moral intuitions and anchor our system of criminal justice to a primitive ethic of retribution. And as we continue to make advances in understanding the human mind through science, our current practices will come to seem even less enlightened.

Ordinary people want to feel philosophically justified in hating evildoers and viewing them as the ultimate authors of their evil. This moral attitude has always been vulnerable to our learning more about the causes of human behavior—and in situations where the origins of a person’s actions become absolutely clear, our feelings about his responsibility begin to change. What is more, they should change. We should admit that a person is unlucky to inherit the genes and life experience that will doom him to psychopathy. That doesn’t mean we can’t lock him up, or kill him in self-defense, but hating him is not rational, given a complete understanding of how he came to be who he is. Natural, yes; rational, no. Feeling compassion for him would be rational, however—or so I have argued.

We can acknowledge the difference between voluntary and involuntary action, the responsibilities of an adult and those of a child, sanity and insanity, a troubled conscience and a clear one, without indulging the illusion of free will. We can also admit that in certain contexts, punishment might be the best way to motivate people to behave themselves. The utility of punishment is an empirical question that is well worth answering—and nothing in my account of free will requires that I deny this.

How can we ask that other people behave themselves (and even punish them for not behaving) when they are not the ultimate cause of their actions? We can (and should) make such demands when doing so has the desired effect—namely, increasing the well-being of all concerned.

Given his intellectual track record, one of the more powerful arguments for the existence of free will is that Sam Harris believes it does not exist. One could easily go through life with far less effective guides than simply assuming the precise opposite of what Sam Harris asserts to be true. Harris has always been intellectually careless and lazy, but his latest foray into free will appears to border on barely bothering to show up. His new “book” is all of 66 pages and apparently those are generously-margined pages filled with large type as it’s only 13,000 words; a trade paperback has 410 words per page, a mass-market paperback 310; Free Will has only 196. I haven’t read it yet, but I will soon, if the deterministic processes that wholly dictate my actions regardless of my perception of control happen to permit me to do so. Since we are reliably informed that our notions concerning our future actions are illusory, it is entirely possible that I will instead move to Albania and devote myself to writing homosexual love poetry in their guttural, but hauntingly beautiful language.

Isn’t it fascinating how what passes for the thinking of the most popular atheists so closely resembles that of the omniderigent Christians? The sovereign God of the hyper-Calvinist and the nonexistent God of the atheist lead the adherent to the same conclusion: Man is not responsible for his actions.

Harris’s analogy is a poor one because free will is more analogous to vision than to visual continuity. We fail to understand our own motivations and even our actions in much the same way that we cannot simultaneously focus on everything in our field of view. And yet, accurately or inaccurately, we still see something. Regardless of whether our brains light up before our finger moves or afterwards, our finger moves and something connected to our conscious minds made it move. Harris completely fails to realize that the Libet experiment is at least as indicative of a trialist Body-Mind-Soul construction consistent with free will as the mechanistic singular one consistent with its absence.

Harris’s real purpose in attacking free will is no different than his real purpose in attacking both the existence of God as well as Christianity. He’s a pan-global utilitarian and his books are neither philosophy nor science, they are political polemics intended to provide intellectual cover for the global, macro-societal restructuring he envisions. This is not readily apparent, but it is the one clearly identifiable theme besides intellectual laziness that is woven into all his works.

UPDATE: I haven’t finished the book yet, but I got through about three-quarters it in between sets at the gym. It’s that short and it’s that fluffy; the contrast with the Popper I’ve been reading over the last week or so is rather glaring. Anyhow, I’ve already identified the core error in his reasoning and will explicate it tomorrow. The short summary: Harris believes he is his feelings. This goes a surprisingly long way towards explaining the man’s oft-demonstrated intellectual shortcomings.

Mailvox: understanding the exotic

TPB-01 postulates an inability to understand the mental exotics of Voxkind in a series of comments I have abbreviated for focus:

”I mean, sure, I see someone on the street, I have no idea whats going on in their minds. Yet there is the possibility of recognition, of understanding through communication.”

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is a common human illusion of believing they do indeed have a lot in common with a random other “human”

You see someone on the street. He has a wiring not unlike that of Bundy (naturally so), and what then ? You don’t have the benefit of understanding – you will never understand each other. If you’re lucky, you’re just a boring bit of scenery to him. If not, you’re fresh meat. You can communicate with him alright – but what possible understanding could you achieve ?

Or maybe it’s someone like Vox, living in his very own private reality which is besieged by demons (and not some fancy-shmancy metaphor demons, the real shit – supernatural evil and all that jazz). Unless you also have a worldview that includes invisible horned douchebags, what possible understanding could communication bring?

Well, *some* degree of mutual understanding is possible with distinctly inhuman agents, like say, wolves, and human “mental exotics” like Vox (We have painstakingly established that Vox’s model of reality includes exotic paranormal entities and a constant low-intensity conflict with said entities, and I am reasonably sure that Vox understands that I find such a world model, as well as agents who sincerely subscribe to it, highly comical.)

The same understanding that is possible between an individual who is aware of the existence and purpose of x-rays and one who does not. Or, to take a more extreme example, between blind and sighted individuals. Communication might be difficult, though not impossible, concerning certain matters, but that leaves the vast realm of human reason, emotion, and behavior still on the table. I have no problem understanding either your attitude or your belief system; you don’t actually have any problem understanding me, your problem is accepting the possibility of my belief system.

Which is fortunate for you. Once you find yourself in the presence of sufficiently naked evil, you will likely find yourself more open to the possibility.

Actually, I do have a problem understanding you, since your peculiar belief goes well beyond anyone’s ability to demonstrate/prove .
A sighted person could contrive numerous means to demonstrate existence of light-based detection systems to the blind (much like sighted humans have managed to build systems for detecting neutrinos, a task for which human sensory system is radically unfit).

Yes, we do have a “degree” of understanding – you “understand” that I happen to have a grievously inaccurate model of “reality” that is characterized by an absence of “demons”. I happen to “understand” that you happen to have a grievously inaccurate model of “reality” that is characterized by a presence of “demons”. Unless I invent a way to somehow “disprove” unfalsifiable entities 😉 , or you invent a demon detector I can replicate and use to go find some horned invisible doucheroos, there is no way we could advance understanding beyond this boundary.

I strongly doubt that you would bother to demonstrate a protocol that would reliably permit me to detect demons, though of course I am quite eager to listen if you do.

“Why not? Surely your imaginations are not so limited as to make it impossible for you to postulate how your thinking would be modified by personal experience of some aspect of the religious supernatural! Whereas you see Vox-kind as crazy, Vox-kind merely sees you as something akin to colorblind.”

I can totally imagine living in your Lovecraft County – after all, I called it “Cool Lovecraft county”.

Now, I doubt you can actually “argue me into your Lovecraft County” (unless there’s a demon detector in your pocket, or something) and thus there is a fundamental limit to how well I can understand your position, let alone predict your further activities.

Imagination can only go so far in modeling the behavior of someone who faces a radically divergent “reality”.

I am pretty sure both you and me would have a lot of trouble really understanding someone who sincerely believes that Republican party is actually lead by disguised space aliens hellbent on conquest, while Democrats are time-travelling cyborgs from a dystopian future.

“Actually, I do have a problem understanding you, since your peculiar belief goes well beyond anyone’s ability to demonstrate/prove.

Why? We all harbor peculiar beliefs that go well beyond anyone’s ability to demonstrate or prove. Perhaps you believe your dead grandmother loved you. Perhaps I believe my brother is the nicest person in the world. Perhaps we both believe in human equality. None of these things can be demonstrated or proved any more than the existence of demons and none of them need inhibit understanding.

You might point to a letter that your grandmother wrote. I claim that it’s a forgery. I might point to the behavior of the dead Miami face-eating cannibal. You claim “cocaine psychosis”. Repeat as needed.

In any event, your conclusion simply doesn’t follow from the premises. And the existence of a working demon-detector would not make my position more intelligible, it would make it correct. The concept is perfectly intelligible already and has been understood for thousands of years. Nor is the claim of demonic unfalsifiability correct any more than the rings of Saturn were unfalsifiable prior to the invention of the first telescope powerful enough to see them; even setting aside the fact that there is considerable evidence for the existence of demons, TPB-01 has presented a temporally limited technological argument that is intrinsically invalid from the perspective of proper Popperian falsifiability. This is hardly uncommon, as I previously pointed out the flaws of such arguments in TIA.

TPB-01 responds:

Well, I find it kind of remarkable that when you proceed to illustrate possible exchange between two agents disagreeing in regards to allegations of a poorly documented deceased person, you kind of make my point for me.

There is a distinct “understanding horizon” at work here, running along a number of allegations regarding the deceased relative, and claims related to those. Same goes for allegations regarding “human equality” (whatever the fuck that is…)

Consider the case of nice fellow who thinks that both US parties are run by “Secret Inhumans”, specifically conquest-crazy space aliens for Republicans and creepy cyborgs from the future for Democrats. We can establish *some* degree of understanding (at least, we can find out hypothetical person’s weird beliefs and establish an understanding in regards to the fact that we disagree with him and he disagrees with us), but there’s only so far we could go. When imagining ourselves in his shoes we will only muster a distorted projection reflecting neither his actual state nor our own (kind of like imagining yourself as participating in a battle and actually participating in a very real fucking battle are two different things), and same would be true for him (assuming he ever bothers to try imagining what our worldview feels like).

Same of course goes for unverifiable and unfalsifiable assertions regarding dead relatives.

Human equality… well, for starters it would be nice to define it in a way that does not summon Captain Obvious 😉 then see if anything approaching a framework for pragmatically assessing various such “claims”. I find it entirely plausible that there is as little chance of understanding between you and hypothetical “equality fellow” in regards to this vague “equality” thingamajig as between you and me in regards to the existence of supernatural intelligent forces scheming to affect the world in some manner.

Vaccines do cause autism

At least, they do in monkeys. It’s going to be harder and harder for the vaccine apologists to continue denying the vaccine-autism link now that there is empirical evidence supporting the theory:

If vaccines play absolutely no role in the development of childhood autism, a claim made by many medical authorities today, then why are some of the most popular vaccines commonly administered to children demonstrably causing autism in animal primates? This is the question many people are now asking after a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh (UP) in Pennsylvania revealed that many of the infant monkeys given standard doses of childhood vaccines as part of the new research developed autism symptoms.

For their analysis, Laura Hewitson and her colleagues at UP conducted the type of proper safety research on typical childhood vaccination schedules that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should have conducted — but never has — for such regimens. And what this brave team discovered was groundbreaking, as it completely deconstructs the mainstream myth that vaccines are safe and pose no risk of autism. Presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in London, England, the findings revealed that young macaque monkeys given the typical CDC-recommended vaccination schedule from the 1990s, and in appropriate doses for the monkeys’ sizes and ages, tended to develop autism symptoms. Their unvaccinated counterparts, on the other hand, developed no such symptoms, which points to a strong connection between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders.

For decades, vaccine advocates have begged the question by claiming that proper double-blind studies can’t be ethically performed on children. So, while there is still some legitimate question of whether what has been shown to cause symptoms of autism in macaque monkeys will also cause them in human children, it does lend significant more weight to the hypothesis. It should be noted that no one has ever done a proper double-blind study on the potentially harmful effects of a single vaccine, much less the entire recommended vaccine schedule.

No doubt Orac and other devoted vaccine propagandists will attempt to dismiss this study for one reason or another, but eventually, sooner or later, the pro-vaccine hypothesis is going to be put to the scientific test and the results will supercede all of the rhetorical and pseudo-scientific defenses they have been making. We’ll have to wait and see what those results actually entail, and whether they support or destroy the pro-vaccine position, but if the hypothesis of the link does continue to hold up in actual scientific experiments, it will certainly be a pleasure ramming the copious volumes of all their past words down the intellectually dishonest throats of those who comprise the current faux scientific vaccine consensus.

Mailvox: evolutionary ideology

Anonymous Conservative writes of an amusing spin on the “science says conservatives are crazy” theme:

I’ve done a ton of research into the linkage between r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology and political ideology. The short of it is
ideology looks like it’s just an intellectual expression of the underlying psychologies motivating r/K behaviors. Obviously, this likely speaks to the mechanism by which our ideologies evolved. That ideology and r/K behaviors are both related to the same DRD4 gene, and that the brain
structures which govern these behaviors is also the same also raises interesting questions about their evolutionary linkage.

This material is pure gold, if you’ve ever wondered why our species has this psychological divide within it. It even answers where exactly
Liberals came from, given their obvious reduced ability to function in what we often call “the state of nature” (ie a K-selected, competitive
state of nature – they would thrive in an r-selected stated of nature, where competitiveness is disfavored).

I’ve run this work by liberals, and it devastating to them, on a visceral level. They do not want to be the bunny-rabbit people, embodying a prey
species psychology within a highly K-selected, competitive species. I posted for a bit at TED, very benignly on this, just to test my
presentation in a hostile, more Liberal environment. I got the feedback and insight I needed (every liberal abandoned any thread this was posted
to), and then I left for six months. When I went back every one of my postings referencing this had been quietly deleted, despite the fact I
purposely was hyper-civil and cited everything I asserted. I don’t think they’ve ever done that to anyone else. Liberals are horrified by this
work, and the implications which naturally arise from it.

Now, I tend to regard all of this evo-psych as a ludicrous joke, especially since I am a confirmed evolutionary skeptic. Because there is so little scientific evidence in support of evolution by natural selection, I conclude it is unlikely to be the mechanism distinguishing the liberal Bunny People from the conservative Wolf People. And, of course, being a libertarian and rejecting both big government ideologies, I have neither a wolf nor a rabbit in that hunt. That being said, this is certainly a potentially useful rhetorical response to the faux-scientific rhetoric so often presented by liberals in a misguided attempt to somehow shame conservatives out of their psychologically inferior ideological perspective. (The very attempt betrays both the intrinsic intellectual flexibility of liberals as well as their inability to understand the other side.) And it certainly explains the way in which liberals are constantly looking to the government as a way to rein in their more successful competitors; because the Bunny People can’t do anything to control the Wolf People themselves, they need to appeal to the Hunter… never stopping to think that the Hunter is just as pleased to shoot bunnies as wolves… and may in fact prefer eating rabbit meat.

Anyhow, if you happen to find this sort of thing interesting, you can read a related paper on it.