Rationally Speaking: Skeptical Essays on Reality as We Think We Know It, 2000—2005
Massimo Pigliucci
Copyright 2009 by Massimo Pigliucci
Smashwords Edition
cover photo: The Death of Socrates,
by Jacques-Louis David, 1787
Introduction
Rationally Speaking originated in 2000 as a monthly online column, eventually to be syndicated on more than 50 web sites worldwide. It was the beginning of a regular online presence, which evolved in 2006 into the more agile and open-ended form of a blog (rationallyspeaking.org). Why? Why would a professional scientist (and now philosopher) who spends most of his time working on fairly specific scholarly puzzles concerning the nature of science spend a considerable amount of time and, frankly, emotional energy, writing electronic “messages in a bottle” to be entrusted to the capricious currents of the Internet?
Because I firmly believe that academics have a duty to society to be public intellectuals. The word “intellectual” has, at best, a dubious reputation in the United States (as opposed to Europe, where it is not uncommon to see philosophers, sociologists and scientists appearing on tv talk shows). Indeed, anti-intellectualism as a phenomenon characteristic of American society almost from its inception, has been the object of much study by sociologists who have identified its various components (from disdain for “theoretical” pursuits because they are not in line with the capitalist ethos to religious fundamentalist attacks on evolution). Nonetheless, and indeed precisely because of the widespread anti-intellectualism, the U.S. desperately needs intellectuals, from the academic world as much from outside of it (artists, journalists, authors, etc.).
Besides, I’m lucky enough to be able to spend most of my active adult life pursuing science and philosophy as a profession, and I owe this privilege to the tax payers who contribute to my salary and, equally important, to the research grants I need to keep my scholarship going. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to give something back in the form of writings and public lectures that attempt to engage that same public, not only to explain why supporting science and philosophy is worthwhile, but more broadly to further the critical thinking abilities of our citizenry. Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is the worst form of government except for every other one. Plato wasn’t a friend of democratic government, especially after he saw the Athenian democracy kill his mentor, Socrates. If we want to have a truly liberal democracy, and not the kind of mob rule that Plato disdained, we need educated people. Education, in turn, is not just an accumulation of factual knowledge, nor is it the acquisition of skills useful to the large corporations who now run the world. It is, at its essence, the ability to think critically about anything that is relevant to our lives. I hope, therefore, that you will enjoy these essays in the spirit they were written. Some are obviously dated by the events (but always make broader points that transcend the specific examples), many are meant to be controversial, all—I hope—will provide good food for thinking and further discussion.
—Massimo Pigliucci
Manhattan, January 2012
Table of Contents
(August 2000)
If you are of the lot who is stubbornly trying to improve critical thinking skills around the world and feels a bit frustrated by the wave of nonsense that regularly hits the airwaves, you are not alone. If you insist in thinking that all you need to do is to explain things just a little bit better and people will see the light, you are committing what is known as the “rationalistic fallacy.”
It is probably true that better knowledge and understanding of science improves one's ability to grasp the real world; if that were not the case the entire education system should be thrown out, a step that only a minority of right wingers is prepared to take in the US at this moment. But it is also undeniably true that explaining science to many people does not make them any less true believers in pseudoscience.
For example, John Moore reports in an article in The Science Teacher (May 2000) that subjects were surveyed for their beliefs in the paranormal, UFOs and astrology before taking a course which dissected the evidential bases for all these pseudosciences. While skepticism had marginally increased toward the end of the course, credulity had returned with a vengeance only a year after the test!
It seems to me that we should try to understand what causes the rationalistic fallacy if we hope to make any progress in fighting the rampant irrationalism that manifests itself in countless forms. It might save us a lot of misdirected efforts and a trip or two to the psychotherapist when the depression hits.
The first thing to realize is that many people who believe in all sorts of weird things are not stupid; at least, not in the generally accepted sense of the term. Sure, if we define intelligence as the ability to grasp the real world, then anybody who does not understand quantum mechanics is an idiot. But remember the immortal words of physicist Richard Feynman: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
No, the fact is that many people who believe in pseudoscience live successful lives. Some are college graduates. They can understand very well the reality of everyday life; sometimes they even successfully make complex decisions such as investing their money or planning a career. The answer must therefore lie elsewhere.
I think the problem is in what we mean by “understanding reality.” Thomas Henry Huxley, the 19th century scientist known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” was very successful in lecturing to the general public, to an extent that neither Richard Dawkins nor Stephen Gould can dream of today. Huxley’s fundamental philosophy was that science is common sense writ large. Since most people are equipped with both an innate curiosity and a moderate dose of common sense, if we explain things appealing to their already existing mental tools they will understand. Indeed, this is the philosophy behind most science documentaries.
The problem is that most modern science is not a matter of common sense at all! On the contrary, from physics to cosmology, from evolutionary to molecular biology, our current scientific understanding of the world is extremely counter-intuitive. The reason for this is that science’s realm of investigation now literally spans the whole of creation, from the beginning of time until now (roughly 20 billion years) and from the subatomic level to the largest aggregates of galaxies. Let us remember that in Huxley’s time most scientists thought the earth was a few million years old, the existence of galaxies was yet to be discovered, and nobody had the foggiest idea of what an atom or a gene was.
Evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker suggest an explanation for this state of affairs. According to the standard Darwinian theory, our brains are at least in part the result of natural selection to improve our fitness; but the question is: to what kind of environment? Obviously, the one that we have inhabited for most of our evolutionary existence: forests and savannahs, where “reality” meant being able to procure food and mates while carefully avoiding predators. Is it any wonder, then, that we simply can’t understand quantum mechanics?
If we add to this mix the fact that people still want answers to the fundamental questions of life (probably an annoying byproduct of being self-aware), it doesn’t take much to understand why evolution and the Big Bang are discarded in favor of all-powerful and all-good imaginary friends who watch over every detail of our lives (especially the sexual scenes). Even the much-touted fact that Europeans accept evolution and are less religiously fundamentalist than Americans has, I would argue, a far less flattering explanation than it is usually assumed. It is not that Europeans are smarter or know more science (this is demonstrably not so); rather, it is probably that through history they have had their fill of religious wars and witch hunts and they are putting their current trust in another category of priests, the scientists (at least until these, too, screw things up in some major way).
So, what do we do about it? Unfortunately, identifying the causes doesn’t necessarily cure the disease. We are in no position to reshape the human brain to bring it up to speed with the current human environment. We can, however, get more familiar with the large literature on human cognitive neuro-sciences; getting to know how the brain works has to be the first step toward designing better tools and arguments to educate people.
We can also be more understanding when we do confront an irrational position, and not dismiss our interlocutor as a simpleton (at least, not too quickly). Demonstrating sympathy and reaching out to the “right brain” may be a better way to get to the left one. But that is subject matter for another column.
(September 2000)
“Science bumps the ceiling of the corporeal plane…. From the metaphysical point of view its arms, lifted toward a zone of freedom that transcends coagulation, form the homing arc of the ‘love loop.’ They are science responding to Eternity’s love for the productions of time.” This grandiose bit of poetical nonsense concludes a chapter of Huston Smith’s Forgotten Truth dedicated to put science in its place. Smith is one of the world’s foremost authorities on religions, and his aim is to demonstrate that science is not an omnipotent force that can answer all questions posed by humanities. That is, science needs to be put in its place.
Fair enough, although I don’t know of any scientist who would claim otherwise. Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain, science is by nature a much more humble enterprise than any religion or other ideology. This must be so given the self-correcting mechanisms that are incorporated into the scientific process, regardless of the occasional failures of individual scientists.
But what is most astounding in Smith’s essay is his attempt to develop a parallel between science and mysticism in order to “demonstrate” that the world’s great religions are capable of insights at least as powerful as science’s because they actually use similar tools. Let us then briefly examine this alleged parallelism and in the process try to understand what the proper place of both science and religion ought to be.
Smith’s first insight is that science and religion both claim that things are not as they seem. For example, you have the perception that the chair on which you are sitting is solid, but modern physics will tell you that it is made of mostly empty space. This, apparently, is analogous to the following bit from C.S. Lewis: “Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see.” Never mind, of course, that physicists can bring sophisticated empirical evidence to support their claim about the emptiness of space, while Christianity is made up of a series of fantastic and contradictory stories backed by no evidence whatsoever.
Second, according to Smith, both science and religion claim that the world is not only different from what we perceive, but that there is “more” than we can see, and that the additional part is “stupendous.” Of course, electrons, quarks and neutrinos are “more” than we can see, although they are stupendous only to those few scientists who spend their lives working on them. Well, this is apparently the same as Shankara’s “notion of the extravagance of his vision of the summum bonum when he says that it cannot be obtained except through the merits of 100 billion well-lived incarnations,” a cornerstone of some Indian sacred text. I hope you are starting to appreciate the depths of the similarities between science and religion. But wait, there is more.
The two quests for truth also share the quality that this “more” that they seek to explore cannot be known in ordinary ways (otherwise, presumably, one would need neither science nor religion to get there). Science’s ways lead to apparent contradictions, such as in the case of some aspects of quantum mechanical theory. To which Smith juxtaposes some gems from the Christian literature that he says uncannily resemble modern notions of quantum physics. For example, did not Nicholas of Cusa (De Visione Dei) write that “the wall of the Paradise in which Thou, Lord, dwellest is built of contradictories,” pretty much like the dual particle-wave nature of light? And did not Dionysius the Areopagite (The Divine Names) say “He is both at rest and in motion, and yet is in neither state,” thus anticipating Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle? I am not making the examples up—these are Smith’s very own.
Fourth, both science and religion have found other ways of knowing this “more” which cannot be accessed by our ordinary senses. The language through which science accomplishes this is mathematics; the one of religion is, of course, mysticism, which Smith describes as a “comparably specialized way of knowing reality’s highest transcorporeal reaches” (whatever that means). This, according to Smith, is “not a state to be achieved but a condition to be recognized, for God has united his divine essence with our inmost being. Tat tvan asi; That thou art. Atman is Brahman; samsara, Nirvana”. Yes, of course.
The fifth parallelism is that in both science and religion these alternative ways of knowing need to be properly cultivated. A scientist needs to dedicate a lifetime to her education and research if she wants to make a contribution. This is apparently similar to the asceticism of saints because, as Bayazid ‘correctly’ pointed out, “The knowledge of God cannot be attained by seeking, but only those who seek it find it.”
Finally, in both science and religion profound knowing requires instruments. In science, these are microscopes, telescopes and particle accelerators. In religion, the equivalent is provided by the Revealed Texts, “Palomar telescopes that disclose the heavens that declare God’s glory.” If gods who dictate texts are not palatable to you, there is an alternative: “Spirit (the divine in man) and the Infinite (the divine in its transpersonal finality) are identical—man’s deepest unconscious is the mountain at the bottom of the lake.” Get it?
I would not have bothered the reader with this mountain of nonsense if it came from the local televangelist screaming bloody hell against the humanists’ corruption of the world. But this is Huston Smith, one of the most respected intellectual exponents of modern religionism, one who is hailed as offering the deepest insights that not just one, but all the world’s religions can offer!
This is a maddening example of what Richard Dawkins (in Unweaving the Rainbow) called “bad poetry.” Metaphors make much of the world’s literature a pleasure to read, but they can also be exceedingly misleading. There is no parallel whatsoever between science and religion. One can practice one or the other or both, but to pretend that they yield common insights into the nature of the world is an intellectual travesty. To go further, as Smith and so many religionists do, and assert that science is arrogant because it claims to provide the best answers to a circumscribed set of questions is astonishing, especially when the alleged alternative is so obviously the result of Pindaric flights of imagination. Now, here is my modest proposal: what if religions would treat themselves to a little dose of humility? Imagine what the world would be like in that case.
Whence natural rights? A dialogue
(October 2000)
HYPATIA: Hello, Simplicia, where are you going in such a hurry so early in the morning?
SIMPLICIA: Hello, my friend! I am to join a demonstration in favor of our fundamental rights we hold as human beings.
H: Oh, and what rights could anybody possibly have that are so indisputable?
S: Surely you are jesting. Have you not heard of the Declaration of Independence? Do you not recall that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?”
H: I also recall that the man who uttered those words made plenty of exceptions for women and men of colors other than his own when it was most convenient for him.
S: Fair enough, but the purity of the principle is more important than the faulty actuation of the same.
H: Let me concede that for a moment. Nevertheless, just because somebody said it, or because it appeals to our sense of poetry, it does not follow that it is true. What arguments can you possibly adduce for the existence of natural rights?
S: As I mentioned a minute ago, are they not self-evident?
H: Not to me, they are not. On the contrary, it is self-evident that people have to struggle everywhere to even approach what you consider obvious. Would it not be the case that if rights were universal and incontestable facts of life, few if any human beings would contest them, in principle, if not in practice? Doesn’t everybody agree on the fact that people have to feed themselves in order to survive? That is because it indeed is a fact of life.
S: Ah, my dear Hypatia, but you know very well of people who allow others to starve, either through inaction or by pernicious withdrawal of the necessary goods.
H: True enough, Simplicia, but not even those people would deny the fact that people have to eat. They will only deny that it is their right to do so, if you see the difference.
S: I do indeed. So, you are saying that universal rights cannot be justified by appeal to agreement among human beings, because such agreement is lacking.
H: My point exactly.
S: But what about other sources of natural rights? Is it not conceivable that they could come from things other than human societies? After all, humans did not invent the necessity of food; it is a thing that comes from nature herself.
H: That is indeed a possibility. However, it seems logical that if one wants to derive rights from nature one should dispassionately observe what happens in nature and then use such observations as guidance to establish an independent foundation for rights, is it not so?
S: That does seem like the logical course of action.
H: And yet, if we were to do so in practice, we would probably come up with a set of principles that do not reflect at all the kinds of rights you seem to have in mind!
S: How so, Hypatia?
H: Because if one looks at nature one can see that animals and plants are certainly not created equal. On the contrary, it is precisely their differences that make it possible for natural selection to shape the face of the organic world, as Mr. Darwin has shown long ago. The negation of the so-called right to life is at the very basis of the struggle for existence that makes evolution possible; as for liberty, it is guaranteed only insofar one animal can defend it against intrusion from competitors or predators; and happiness is too vague of a word to even consider as the proper object of a serious philosophical discussion.
S: Shall I then conclude that you subscribe to the simple notion that nature is red in tooth and claws or that, as Mr. Hobbes put it, life in nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?”
H: I am much too much of an optimist to agree to that, my dear Simplicia. However, I would conclude from even a cursory observation of nature that she is neither moral nor immoral, neither good nor bad, but simply is. I believe it was David Hume who warned against the logical jump from what is to what ought to be, and it seems to me that therefore one cannot defend natural rights by appealing to nature; a rather uncomfortable situation for the promoters of such rights.
S: Even if I grant you that neither humans nor nature can be the sources of universal rights, most people would not be faced in the least by these difficulties, and would simply retort that there are higher authorities than both.
H: Ah, you mean some gods or goddesses!
S: Precisely: wouldn’t a divinity be the ultimate source and guarantor of universal rights?
H: It surely would, if not for any other reason than such divinity would presumably have the power to impose her will on us mere mortals.
S: There, then, do I see your skepticism about the possibility of natural rights beginning to wane?
H: No so fast, my dear friend. Your latest answer to our conundrum begs the question in two ways: how do you know there is such a divinity and, even if we should accept her existence as a matter of hypothesis, how do you know what kinds of rights does she endorse?
S: My dear Hypatia, you know very well that such a line of inquiry would bring us far into an altogether new direction of conversation, and that would definitely mean that I would be late to my protest march.
H: Indeed it would. But it is no matter to brush aside. You might agree at least to the observation that there are many people who have spent a great deal of time thinking about the existence of god and the nature of god’s will, without reaching even a minimal form of agreement. Furthermore, you know that many cogent doubts have been raised and objections construed against all the major arguments in favor of the existence of a deity.
S: Alas, this is all very true.
H: Then you cannot rest your defense of natural rights on the assumption of the existence of a god, because that would be the substitution of one mystery with an even greater mystery.
S: But, Hypatia, surely you see that by rejecting all possible sources of universal rights you are forced in the position that anything goes and that we have no rational motive to fight for anything that is dear to us.
H: Not at all. You seem to assume, Simplicia, that there are only two options: either rights are universal, or they don’t exist.
S: Is there a compromise somewhere that I have missed?
H: Most definitely! Let me explain my position with an example. I know you love the work of the painter Picasso. Surely you will agree that a painting by him cannot last forever, no matter how carefully preserved.
S: Yes, but I don’t see where you could possibly be going with this.
H: Even though you know that one day the painting will be gone forever, you still love to look at it now, to go to the museum every time you can, and even to contribute to its preservation by donating funds to the museum.
S: Yes, and…?
H: Well, Simplicia, is not this an example of something that is not universal, and yet is very precious? If you were to apply your nihilism to art, you wouldn’t care a bit about what happens to Picasso’s work for the simple reason that it is not a universal thing, it won’t last forever.
S: So you are saying that even though there may be no guarantor of universal rights, we are nevertheless justified in defending and caring for them with all our energies because they matter to us!
H: Precisely. It matters not that you cannot justify, for example, your right to freedom by universal laws. Freedom is still something that most human beings want, and we are bound to fight for a society that grants such right simply because we think it is a better society than any other alternative.
S: Thanks, Hypatia. I am not sure that I agree with all your points, but this conversation did throw some interesting light on what I am doing and why. I have to run to the demonstration, now!
H: Until the next time, then, my friend.
Intelligent Design, the classical argument
(November 2000)
“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever. ... But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there.”
These famous words were written in 1831 by the Reverend William Paley (in Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature) and constitute the best-known rendition of the classical argument from design for the existence of god. Essentially, Paley said that nobody would necessarily invoke a supernatural designer in order to account for the existence of simple rocks, but complex and marvelously functional objects such as eyes beg for an explanation that transcends natural laws. If there is a watch, there was a watchmaker; ergo, if there is an eye, there must have been an intelligent designer of that eye.
Unfortunately for Paley, the famous skeptic philosopher David Hume had already refuted his argument, more than 50 years before Paley’s formulation. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume left it to his legendary character, Philo, to concisely explain what is wrong with the argument from design:
“The world plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable than it does a watch or knitting-loom. Its cause, therefore, it is more probable, resembles the cause of the former. The cause of the former is generation or vegetation.”
It is interesting that the argument from design is still the most popularly cited reason for why people believe in god according to a survey by Michael Shermer published in How We Believe (2000). It is therefore important for us to examine more closely the structure of Hume’s critique and understand where exactly the intelligent design argument falls flat. In the exposition below I will add my commentary and examples to clarify each point, given that Hume’s language is at times obscure and obviously not up to date on our current knowledge of the physical universe.
One can discern six objections to the argument from intelligent design in a complete reading of Hume’s Dialogue:
1. The analogy between the universe and human artifacts is not convincing. In the quotation above, Hume does not think that the universe resembles a complex machine at all. While the regularity of the laws of nature may superficially inspire the analogy, human artifacts are always clearly designed for a function. It often takes quite a bit of imagination to see what the purpose of some aspects of the universe really is. Biologist J.B.S. Haldane once answered a reporter who asked what his study of genetics told him about God: “He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles,” referring to the hundreds of thousands of species of these insects existing for no apparent purpose other than their own reproduction.
2. Intelligence is only one of the active causes in the world. Many natural phenomena obviously do not require intelligence to occur. Tides, for example, would hardly make a good choice for Paley, since their explanation in terms of simple gravitational interactions does not require any intelligent design.
3. Even if intelligence is everywhere operative now, it does not follow that we can ascribe to it the origins of the universe. This is logically true, and can be illustrated in modern terms if we imagine that somebody one day demonstrates that life on Earth was seeded by a race of extremely intelligent extraterrestrials. This, of course, would not make them gods, and would not provide an explanation for the origin of the extraterrestrials, nor for the universe as a whole. In fact, humans may someday do something of the sort, without because of this being elevated to divine status (other than perhaps by the simple-minded results of our own experiments).
4. The origin of the universe is a single unique case and so analogies are pointless. This is a subtle but very good point: while we have plenty of natural objects, organisms and human artifacts, we only have one universe. Science can derive meaningful analogies by comparing populations of objects or entities. While we may compare and contrast the attributes of rocks, eyes, tides and watches, to what shall we compare the universe? Anything we might think of would be comparing a part of the whole to the whole itself, and we are unable to find another self-contained whole for comparison. We may conceive of an omnipresent god as an analogy for the universe, but unfortunately the analogy offers no insights of scientific value. It is also unlikely that the analogy would help theology. Is god spherical or doughnut-shaped? Will god expand forever from an explosive beginning, or does god alternate through phases of expansion and contraction?
5. The analogy between human and divine mind is clearly anthropomorphic. Nature resembles a mindless organism rather than a purposeful and intelligent one. This is another way to put objection #1, this time by highlighting the parochialism of a theology that would pretend to understand the mind of god simply as a version of the human mind writ large.
6. The fruit of anthropomorphic thinking is a finite God. Here Hume goes on the counter-attack by showing that if the argument from design is taken seriously, one has to conclude that the god acting in the universe is very different from the Christian variety. Since there is no independent argument for the perfection of the designer, we have to judge its ability and character from what we see of the universe. And to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, if I had millions of years of time and infinite power and had come up with the universe as we know it, I should be ashamed of myself.
Hume was a skeptic, but not a fool. He published his Dialogues on religion posthumously, in 1779. They are still one of the most lucid critiques of the most commonly used argument in favor of theism. And that, my friends, is true immortality.
Intelligent Design, the modern argument
(December 2000)
Let’s face it: creationists don’t have an easy time claiming academic superiority over their opponents. As much as they call themselves “scientific” creationists (essentially an oxymoron), and despite the existence of the Institute for Creation Research (whatever that is), and even of creationist museums, anybody can see that the credentials of most creationists are as good as those of a car salesman. Yet, there is a group of creationists (who don’t actually like being labeled as such) that is trying—with some success—to make headway in the academic world, or at least with the media and some relatively high ranking politicians. Meet the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, perhaps the most sophisticated attack on modern science mounted so far.
Mind you, gaining a sympathetic ear within academia does not necessarily imply intellectual respectability. Post-modernist philosophers and social scientists have been littering college classrooms and wasting a lot of perfectly good trees to spread nonsense about the alleged equal access to truth of any “cultural construction,” putting science and astrology (or, for that matter, creationism) on equal footing. But some ID exponents have legitimate PhDs in science disciplines, they don’t make wild claims about a young earth or a six-day creation, and even manage to get published by major academic presses. So, who are these neo-creationists, and is there anything of substance to their claims about evidence for an intelligent creator of the universe?
Probably the first and most important salvo of the modern ID movement was Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996). Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and clearly says that he accepts a lot of evolution, so much so that he should get in plenty of trouble with “old-time religion” creationists. However, Behe draws the line at the molecular level: while evolutionists might be able to explain how humans descended from other primates, and might even have a good explanation for the evolution of the eye, they can’t tell us how complex biochemical pathways came into existence. Take blood clotting, for example. In order for the blood to coagulate when a cut through the skin is made, several proteins have to act in a precise sequence. Take any of them out, and you bleed to death. Or consider the flagellum of a bacterium (the “tail” that allows some bacteria to swim). It is made of several parts intricately interconnected to each other. Again, take one of them away, and the bacterial cell will be stuck in place forever. But, notices Behe, evolution is supposed to work gradually and to assemble structures that work at every single step (since it cannot predict the future use of something). This creates an apparent paradox whence a mindless natural force is supposed to come up with something that smells terribly of intelligent design. Isn’t this a deathblow to evolution as the explanation of life’s “irreducible” complexity?
Not so fast. There are a few things missing from Behe’s scenario which are worth considering briefly. First, he has not done his homework. Contrary to what he repeatedly claims in his book, biologists have done a bit of research on the evolution of biochemical pathways, and there are several known examples of bacterial flagella that are simpler than the one Behe conveniently uses. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a biochemist) to figure out that in fact these simpler versions could easily represent intermediate steps toward complex flagella. Second, it is not true—again contra Behe—that biochemical pathways are assembled in a way that one cannot take any element away without having the whole system collapsing. In fact, most of genetical research is based on the ability to produce mutations that knock down certain genes (and therefore certain components of biochemical pathways) while still yielding a functional organism to be studied. One of the major discoveries of 20th century molecular biology (which Behe must have somehow missed) is that organisms are not irreducibly complex at all; rather, they show redundant complexity: they are made of several parts that have no unique and irreplaceable function. As biologist Francois Jacob put it, this is exactly what you would expect if natural selection worked like a bricoleur rather than a cunning engineer. A bricoleur is somebody who assembles new things out of old parts that are easily available. The result is bound to be complex, redundant, suboptimal, and not too pretty. Exactly like living organisms, and precisely what you would expect from a natural phenomenon. No intelligent design required.
Behe makes at least two fundamental mistakes in his attack against evolutionary biology (other than neglecting to check the available literature more thoroughly). Perhaps the subtler of the two is that he completely ignores the fact that evolutionary biology deals with historical as well as current events. If one picks a modern organism, say a bacterium of the species Escherichia coli, and tries to imagine how it could have evolved, one is up against a huge problem: what you see today under the microscope is not a “primitive” organism, but the result of (literally) billions of years of change. As we know from organisms that actually leave fossils (contrary to most bacteria), more than 99% of the species that ever existed went extinct. Since most of these don’t leave fossils (especially bacteria), we are lucky if we see a few intermediate links at all, alive or in the fossil record. No wonder that evolution may look like a series of huge jumps that could not possibly have been the result of natural selection. Yet Behe behaves as if we didn’t know anything about extinction and evolution, and bases his argument on an extremely naive picture of biological research and of science in general.
The second fatal mistake is common to all versions of Intelligent Design: the whole approach is essentially based on an argument from ignorance. Let us assume that biologists really don’t have the foggiest about the way a particular biochemical pathway (aerobic respiration in mitochondria, for example) came about. What is that supposed to prove? If Behe were alive at the time of Aristotle, would he be arguing that lightning is clear proof of Zeus’ existence because we have no idea of how a natural phenomenon could possibly provoke such a sudden discharge of energy? And yet this is exactly what the core of Behe’s argument is: since we don’t know how it happened, it must have been God. Sorry, Michael, but science is about working hard to find the answers. Bailing out while invoking a Deus-ex-machina is not the name of the game.
Split brains, paradigm shifts, and why it is so difficult to be a skeptic
(January 2001)
The human brain is a funny machine. Imperfectly designed by natural selection, it finds itself in an environment that has little resemblance with the one it evolved in. Gone is the savannah in which our ancestors had to guard themselves from fierce creatures. Instead, we live in a complex and ever expanding social milieu, our neighborhood now encompassing the whole planet. Is it any wonder that our poor brains are not doing so well in this brave new wired world?
Our brains seem to fail to grasp reality, as demonstrated by the fact that a majority of Americans don't “believe” in evolution (whatever “believing” in a scientific theory means), while a sizable percentage is ready to accept the existence of an imaginary all-powerful god, as well as of the devil, hell, and a slew of angels. Why is it so difficult to be a reasonably skeptical person? What is it that makes so many apparently intelligent people so gullible about things that their brains clearly have the power to master? And-perhaps most importantly for the skeptic-how do we get people to change their minds in an informed way on so wide an array of irrationalities?
Obviously, I am not going to present the reader with the magic bullet that can answer these questions, but a starting point is being provided by recent research in neurobiology. It turns out that lately we have learned a lot about how the brain works and why it makes mistakes while interpreting reality. Since our most powerful tool doesn't come with an owner's manual, it may pay off to spend a little time thinking about how we think.
Perhaps one of the most dramatic ways we are learning about the brain is by studying patients who literally have a split one. The brain is made of two hemispheres, joined by a structure called the corpus callosum which contains nerve fibers that continuously exchange signals between the right and left hemisphere. Some individuals have suffered more or less complete damage to the corpus callosum, either because of a stroke or because of a surgical operation. These subjects are invaluable to neurobiologists because it is possible to interrogate the right and left hemispheres separately, see how differently they think, and then piece this information together to reconstruct the thought patterns of normal individuals. The problem with attempting to “talk” to both hemispheres is that language is controlled by the left one, the only hemisphere that can articulate things. Fortunately, the right side can still “respond” to interrogations by virtue of its control over the motor functions of the left half of the body, including the arm and hand.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing neurobiologists have discovered from split-brain patients is that the left hemisphere, which normally “dominates” the right one, is literally in charge of our view of the world. And it fights hard to preserve it. In a wonderfully elegant experiment, a group of researchers led by Michael Gazzaniga at Dartmouth College showed pictures to the right and left hemispheres of a split-brain patient and then asked each hemisphere to pick another picture to accompany the one originally presented. The right side was shown (through the left half of the visual field) a house with snow and, logically enough, it picked a shovel. The left hemisphere was shown a chicken leg (through the right half of the visual field), and it picked a chicken head-also quite logically. The experimenters then verbally asked the patient to explain his choices. The left hemisphere was the only one that could articulate an answer, but remember-it did not know why his right counterpart had chosen a shovel, since the information about the house with the snow did not cross the severed corpus callosum. The patient's answer was as astounding as illuminating: “Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken [which was true], and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed [which was coherent, but completely false].” In other words, the left hemisphere acted as an interpreter of the worldview of the individual and fabricated a just-so story to fit all the available data!
These sort of experiments have shown that the left hemisphere is in charge of our worldview, of the paradigms we currently hold about a variety of aspects of reality. In normal patients, these paradigms are constantly evaluated against external evidence, gathered by both hemispheres through a suite of sensorial inputs. The left interpreter has the all-important function of making sense of the world, and it does a reasonably good job at it. However, when the incoming data is insufficient, or when some piece of evidence contradicts the currently held view, the left hemisphere either rejects the unfit information or it distorts it so to make sense of it. This process of “rationalizing” the world goes on up to a certain point. If the degree of conflicting information is too high (i.e., there is too much dissonance between what one believes and what one perceives) then that most stupendous phenomenon suddenly occurs: we change our minds (literally)!
The problem that rational people face, then, is twofold. On the one hand, the brain has evolved a powerful mechanism to avoid to change its mind too often, which means that people will stubbornly continue to believe all sorts of nonsense because it is less painful than to radically alter their worldview. On the other hand, we know that the problem is all the more insurmountable when the data fed to the subject is poor, and unfortunately most of what modern human beings are exposed to by the media is pure garbage.
However, there is no need to despair just yet. Understanding the problem is a necessary (though by all means not sufficient) step to solve it. Realizing where people's stubbornness (and sometimes our own) comes from will help not getting unduly irritated or downright nasty when facing patent irrationality in our fellow human beings. And empathy is one important step toward connecting with anybody. The second message of modern neurobiological research is perhaps an old one, but which now comes with the weight of evidence: education is our (slow) way out. What we need to do is to keep educating people, to feed good information to the brain's interpreter. If neurobiologists are correct, most brains will come to understand reality if properly nurtured. It is ignorance which provides the necessity for just-so stories, with all the tragic consequences that follow when people defend a flawed worldview at all costs.
The greatest democracy in the world and the unfairness of American elections
(February 2001)
The United States of America is the self-professed greatest democracy in the world. Besides the obvious offensiveness of such claim to countries that are equally democratic and that can claim a longer history of civil liberties than the US can, the very idea flies in the face of the actual structure of the American electoral system. This has been painfully demonstrated by the recent squabble between George Bush and Al Gore on who really won the election.
Let’s start with democracy 101. Ever since ancient Athens, democracy means the rule of the people (though for a long time the “people” have not included women, economically “lower” classes and slaves). By that simple criterion, the American system is undemocratic because it allows someone to win the presidential election even though she lost the popular vote—as has just happened to Gore and did happen a few other times before. This bizarre situation can occur because in the US the people don’t really vote, electors chosen by each State do. And since each State is guaranteed a certain number of electoral votes which is not commensurate to its population, rural states are over-represented and Mr. Bush won by acreage rather than votes. As a citizen of New Hampshire put it recently during one of many interviews the media broadcasted after the 2000 elections, “If we went to a proportional system, New Hampshire would count for nothing.” As it should, if this were really a democracy.
According to historians, there was originally a good reason for such a peculiar system. The United States were not really united, but rather resembled a loose confederation of largely independent entities, Swiss-style. Under those conditions, it was only natural to give precedence to the abstract entity of a “State” rather than to each of its citizens. Of course, the United States has never really become a nation—witness the harsh debates and court rulings on the limits of State vs. Federal power, but the fact remains that such a system is anything but democratic.
A second major fault with the greatest democracy of the world is that typically a minority of its population bothers to go to the voting booth. Furthermore, Republicans in Congress have strenuously fought to keep it that way, for example opposing bills such as the motor registration act, which would make it easier for people to register to vote. Now, in real democracies, the percentage of people casting their ballots is much higher than the pitiful American average, and people are automatically registered based on their biographical data (they receive the registration at home when they turn 18—but of course this would mean that the Government needs to know who you are and where you live, God forbid).
The situation is so bad that several years ago the Christian coalition devised a tactic to get their favorite people elected, called “the 12% strategy.” Since about 50% of eligible Americans are actually registered to vote, and of these little more than half bother to show up to cast their ballots, you need to get the vote of half of these (roughly 12% of the whole population) to be insured victory. On top of this, add the even stranger primary system, in which only a tiny fraction of really devoted people vote, thereby dramatically influencing the general election by eliminating candidates that might do well with the population at large but don’t fit the opinions of a skewed minority of activists. Here is some food for thought: twenty more millions of people watched the 2001 Super Bowl than cast their vote in the 2000 elections.
One could go even further and suggest that no current voting system is actually democratic, no matter the country in which it is implemented. A recent article by Dana Mackenzie in Discover magazine (November 2000) clearly demonstrates why. It turns out that people have been studying voting systems for quite a while, and better options than the proportional system adopted by most countries have been clearly devised—indeed, they have been historically used by different cultures in different times.
Perhaps the simplest alternative is what is known as approval voting, which dates back to the 13th century, when it was used in Venice to elect magistrates. In this system, a person casts one vote for every candidate that she considers qualified. It works much like an opinion poll, with the difference that the results are added up to determine the winner. One of the advantages of approval voting is that you can vote for a candidate likely to loose—say, Ralph Nader—and don’t feel like you are wasting your vote: he will get a good percentage of points while you can also cast your vote for somebody who is more likely to actually win. If approval voting had been used in the 2000 US elections, John McCain would have won, based on polls conducted in February. Furthermore, approval voting would have spared Minnesota from electing Jesse Ventura, and New Hampshire from handing the State’s primary to Pat Buchanan in 1996.
Another alternative to standard voting systems is the Borda count, named after a French physician and hero of the American Revolution. This system was actually in use in the Roman senate at least since 105 CE. It is similar to the method used to rank football and basketball college teams: each voter ranks all the candidates from top to bottom. If we take a poll by the Sacramento Bee during California’s open primaries in 2000, McCain would have beaten Gore 48 to 43, Gore would have bettered Bush 51 to 43, and McCain would have surpassed Bush 50 to 45. Overall, the final rank would have been McCain 98, Gore 94, and Bush 88. Quite a different outcome from what actually happened!
In both the approval and the Borda systems voters are asked something that is missing from the current system: they need to choose who they will pick if their favorite is eliminated. More powers to the voters, a better democracy.
Of course, neither system is perfect, but the point is that most people in the US don’t even realize that their way is one of the worst among those currently practiced by the world’s democracies, and serious discussion hasn’t begun in any country on how to improve the actual democratic value of our voting systems. Given that we have to live with the results for several years to come, wouldn’t it be worth taking a serious look at the alternatives?
Game theory, rational egoism, and the evolution of fairness
(March 2001)
Is it rational to be ethical? Many philosophers have wrestled with this most fundamental of questions, attempting to clarify whether humans are well served by ethical rules or whether they weigh us down. Would we really be better off if we all gave in to the desire to just watch out for our own interests and take the greatest advantage to ourselves whenever we can? Ayn Rand, for one, thought that the only rational behavior is egoism, and books aiming at increasing personal wealth (presumably at the expense of someone else’s wealth) regularly make the bestsellers list.
Plato, Kant, and John Stuart Mill, to mention a few, have tried to show that there is more to life than selfishness. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates defending his philosophy against the claim that justice and fairness are only whatever rich and powerful people decide they are. But the arguments of his opponents—that we can see plenty of examples of unjust people who have a great life and of just ones who suffer in equally great manner—seem more convincing than the high-mindedness of the father of philosophy.
Kant attempted to reject what he saw as the nihilistic attitude of Christianity, where you are good now because you will get an infinite payoff later, and to establish independent rational foundations for morality. Therefore he suggested that in order to decide if something is ethical or not one has to ask what would happen if everybody were adopting the same behavior. However, Kant never explained why his version of rational ethics is indeed rational. Rand would object that establishing double standards, one for yourself and one for the rest of the universe, makes perfect sense.
Mill also tried to establish ethics on firm rational foundations, in his case improving on Jeremy Bentham’s idea of utilitarianism. In chapter two of his book Utilitarianism, Mill writes: “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” Leaving aside the thorny question of what happiness is and the difficulty of actually making such calculations, one still has to answer the fundamental question of why one should care about increasing the average degree of happiness instead of just one’s own.
Things got worse with the advent of modern evolutionary biology. It seemed for a long time that Darwin’s theory would provide the naturalistic basis for the ultimate selfish universe: nature red in tooth and claw evokes images of “every man for himself,” in pure Randian style. In fact, Herbert Spencer popularized the infamous doctrine of “Social Darwinism” (which Darwin never espoused) well before Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged.
Recently, however, several scientists and philosophers have been taking a second look at evolutionary theory and its relationship with ethics, and are finding new ways of realizing the project of Plato, Kant, and Mill of deriving a fundamentally rational way of being ethical. Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, in their Unto Others: the Psychology and Evolution of Unselfish Behavior, as well as Peter Singer in A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, argue that human beings evolved as social animals, not as lone, self-reliant brutes. In a society, cooperative behavior (or at least, a balance between cooperation and selfishness) will be selected in favor, while looking out exclusively for number one will be ostracized because it reduces the fitness of most individuals and of the group as a whole.
All of this sounds good, but does it actually work? A recent study published in Science by Martin Nowak, Karen Page and Karl Sigmund provides a splendid example of how mathematical evolutionary theory can be applied to ethics, and how in fact social evolution favors fair and cooperative behavior. Nowak and coworkers tackled the problem posed by the so-called “ultimatum game.” In it, two players are offered the possibility of winning a pot of money, but they have to agree on how to divide it. One of the players, the proposer, makes an offer of a split ($90 for me, $10 for you, for example) to the other player; the other player, the responder, has the option of accepting or rejecting. If she rejects, the game is over and neither of them gets any money.
It is easy to demonstrate that the rational strategy is for the proposer to behave egotistically and to suggest a highly uneven split in which she takes most of the money, and for the responder to accept. The alternative is that neither of them gets anything. However, when real human beings from a variety of cultures and using a panoply of rewards play the game the outcome is invariably a fair share of the prize. This would seem prima facie evidence that the human sense of fair play overwhelms mere rationality and thwarts the rationalistic prediction. On the other hand, it would also provide Ayn Rand with an argument that most humans are simply stupid, because they don’t appreciate the math behind the game.
Nowak and colleagues, however, simulated the evolution of the game in a situation in which several players get to interact repeatedly. That is, they considered a social situation rather than isolated encounters. If the players have memory of previous encounters (i.e., each player builds a “reputation” in the group), then the winning strategy is to be fair because people are willing to punish dishonest proposers, which increases their own reputation for fairness and damages the proposer’s reputation for the next round. This means that—given the social environment—it is rational to be less selfish toward your neighbors.
While we are certainly far from a satisfying mathematical and evolutionary theory of morality, it seems that science does, after all, have something to say about optimal ethical rules. And the emerging picture is one of fairness—not egotism—as the smart choice to make.
Red or blue? What kind of life would you choose?
(April 2001)