Logic of Kindness

Evolutionary skepticism

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Post 572 Mar 9 JDN 2460744

In the last two posts I talked about ways that evolutionary theory could influence our understanding of morality, including the dangerous views of naive moral Darwinism as well as some more reasonable approaches; yet there are other senses of the phrase “morality evolves” that we haven’t considered. One of these is actually quite troubling; were it true, the entire project of morality would be in jeopardy. I’ll call it “evolutionary skepticism”; it says that yes, morality has evolved—and this is reason to doubt that morality is true. Richard Joyce, author of The Evolution of Morality, is of such a persuasion, and he makes a quite compelling case. Joyce’s central point is that evolution selects for fitness, not accuracy; we had reason to evolve in ways that would maximize the survival of our genes, not reasons to evolve in ways that would maximize the accuracy of our moral claims.

This is of course absolutely correct, and it is troubling precisely because we can all see that the two are not necessarily the same thing. It’s easy to imagine many ways that beliefs could evolve that had nothing to do with the accuracy of those beliefs.

But note that word: necessarily. Accuracy and fitness aren’t necessarily aligned—but it could still be that they are, in fact, aligned rather well. Yes, we can imagine ways a brain could evolve that would benefit its fitness without improving its accuracy; but is that actually what happened to our ancestors? Do we live on instinct, merely playing out by rote the lifestyles of our forebears, thinking and living the same way we have for hundreds of millennia?

Clearly not! Behold, you are reading a blog post! It was written on a laptop computer! While these facts may seem perfectly banal to you, they represent an unprecedented level of behavioral novelty, one achieved only by one animal species among millions, and even then only very recently. Human beings are incredibly flexible, incredibly creative, and incredibly intelligent. Yes, we evolved to be this way, of course we did; but so what? We are this way. We are capable of learning new things about the world, gaining in a few short centuries knowledge our forebears could never have imagined. Evolution does not always make animals into powerful epistemic engines—indeed, 99.99999\% of the time it does not—but once in awhile it does, and we are the result.

Natural selection is quite frugal; it tends to evolve things the easiest way. The way the world is laid out, it seems to be that the easiest way to evolve a brain that survives really well in a wide variety of ecological and social environments is to evolve a brain that is capable of learning to expand its own knowledge and understanding. After all, no other organism has ever been or is ever likely to be as evolutionarily fit as we are; we span the globe, cover a wide variety of ecological niches, and number in the billions and counting. We’ve even expanded beyond the planet Earth, something no other organism could even contemplate. We are successful because we are smart; is it really so hard to believe that we are smart because it made our ancestors successful?

Indeed, it must be this way, or we wouldn’t be able to make sense of the fact that our human brains, evolved for the African savannah a million years ago with minor tweaks since then, are capable of figuring out chess, calculus, writing, quantum mechanics, special relativity, television broadcasting, space travel, and for that matter Darwinian evolution and meta-ethics. None of these things could possibly have been adaptive in our ancestral ecology. They must be spandrels, fitness-neutral side-effects of evolved traits. And just like the original pendentives of San Marco that motivated Gould’s metaphor, what glorious spandrels they are!

Our genes made us better at gathering information and processing that information into correct beliefs, and calculus and quantum mechanics came along for the ride. Our greatest adaptation is to be adaptable; our niche is to need no niche, for we can carve our own.

This is not to abandon evolutionary psychology, for evolution does have a great deal to tell us about psychology. We do have instincts; preprocessing systems built into our sensory organs, innate emotions that motivate us to action, evolved heuristics that we use to respond quickly under pressure. Steven Pinker argues convincingly that language is an evolved instinct—and where would we be without language? Our instincts are essential for not only our survival, but indeed for our rationality.

Staring at a blinking cursor on the blank white page of a word processor, imagining the infinity of texts that could be written upon that page, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at a blank slate. Yet in fact you are staring at the pinnacle of high technology, an extremely complex interlocking system of hardware and software with dozens of components and billions of subcomponents, all precision-engineered for maximum efficiency. The possibilities are endless not because the system is simple and impinged upon by its environment, but because it is complex, and capable of engaging with that environment in order to convert subtle differences in input into vast differences in output. If this is true of a word processor, how much more true it must be of an organism capable of designing and using word processors! It is the very instincts that seem to limit our rationality which have made that rationality possible in the first place. Witness the eternal wisdom of Immanuel Kant:

Misled by such a proof of the power of reason, the demand for the extension of knowledge recognises no limits. The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

The analogy is even stronger than he knew—for brains, like wings, are an evolutionary adaptation! (What would Kant have made of Darwin?) But because our instincts are so powerful, they are self-correcting; they allow us to do science.

Richard Joyce agrees that we are right to think our evolved brains are reasonably reliable when it comes to scientific facts. He has to, otherwise his whole argument would be incoherent. Joyce agrees that we evolved to think 2+2=4 precisely because 2+2=4, and we evolved to think space is 3-dimensional precisely because space is 3-dimensional. Indeed, he must agree that we evolved to think that we evolved because we evolved! Yet, for some reason Joyce thinks that this same line of reasoning doesn’t apply to ethics.

But why wouldn’t it? In fact, I think we have more reason to trust our evolved capacities in ethics than we do in other domains of science, because the subject matter of morality—human behavior and social dynamics—is something that we have been familiar with even all the way back to the savannah. If we evolved to think that theft and murder are bad, why would that happen? I submit it would happen precisely because theft and murder are Pareto-suboptimal unsustainable strategies—that is, precisely because theft and murder are bad. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what I mean by “Pareto-suboptimal” and “unsustainable strategy”; I’ll get to those in later posts.) Once you realize that “bad” is a concept that can ultimately be unpacked to naturalistic facts, all reason to think it is inaccessible to natural selection drops away; natural selection could well have chosen brains that didn’t like murder precisely because murder is bad. Indeed, because morality is ultimately scientific, part of how natural selection could evolve us to be more moral is by evolving us to be more scientific. We are more scientific than apes, and vastly more scientific than cockroaches; we are, indeed, the most scientific animal that has ever lived on Earth.

I do think that our evolved moral instincts are to some degree mistaken or incomplete; but I can make sense of this, in the same way I make sense of the fact that other evolved instincts don’t quite fit what we have discovered in other sciences. For instance, humans have an innate concept of linear momentum that doesn’t quite fit with what we’ve discovered in physics. We tend to presume that objects have an inherent tendency toward rest, though in fact they do not—this is because in our natural environment, friction makes most objects act as if they had such a tendency. Roll a rock along the ground, and it will eventually stop. Run a few miles, and eventually you’ll have to stop too. Most things in our everyday life really do behave as if they had an inherent tendency toward rest. It’s only once we realized that friction is itself a force, not present everywhere, that we came to see that linear momentum is conserved in the absence of external forces. (Throw a rock in space, and it will not ever stop. Nor will you, by Newton’s Third Law.) This casts no doubt upon our intuitions about rocks rolled along the ground, which do indeed behave exactly as our intuition predicts.

Similarly, our intuition that animals don’t deserve rights could well be an evolutionary consequence of the fact that we sometimes had to eat animals in order to survive, and so would do better not thinking about it too much; but now that we don’t need to do this anymore, we can reflect upon the deeper issues involved in eating meat. This is no reason to doubt our intuitions that parents should care for their children and murder is bad.

The real source of the evolution debate, part 2

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As I discussed in my last post, the propositions that people really object to are not evolution per se. They are distinct but conceptually related ideas, such as adaptationism, common descent, animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism.

In my last post I dealt with adaptationism and common descent; now its time for animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism.

Animalism

Next we must consider animalism, the proposition that humans are not “special”, that we are animals like any other. I’d like to distinguish two forms of animalism which are quite different but often confused; I will call them weak animalism and strong animalism. The former is definitely true, but the latter doesn’t make any sense. Weak animalism is the observation that human beings have the same biological structure as other animals, and share a common ancestry and many common traits—in short, that humans are in fact animals. We are all born, we all die; we all breathe, we all eat, we all sleep; we all love, we all suffer. This seems to me a completely unassailable observation; of course these things are true, they are essential to human nature, and they are a direct consequence of our kinship with the rest of the animal domain. Humans are not rocks or plants or empty space; humans are animals.

On the other hand, strong animalism is the claim that because humans are animals, we may (or should) “act like animals”, stealing, raping, murdering, and so on. It is true that all these behaviors, or very close analogues, can be observed in the animal domain; but at the same time, so can friendship (e.g. in chimpanzees), affection (e.g. in penguins), monogamy (e.g. in gerbils), and many other behaviors. The diversity of behaviors in the animal domain is mind-bogglingly huge. There are animals that can sever and regrow limbs and animals that can infest and control other animals’ minds.

In the only sense in which we are “just animals”, the fact justifies no moral claims about our behavior. This matter is not a trivial quibble, but a major factor in the evolution debate: Intelligent Design proponents made a similar complaint when they objected to Bloodhound Gang’s song “The Bad Touch” which includes the line, “You and me baby we ain’t nothin’ but mammals // So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”. This may make for entertaining music (and I’ve no objection to sex or even promiscuity and seduction per se), but it is highly fallacious reasoning, and it’s clearly hurting the public understanding of science. If you insist on saying that humans are “just animals”, you should be very clear about what this means; I much prefer to remove the condescending “just” and say “humans are animals”. For to say humans are just animals would be like saying the Earth is just a planet, or love is just a chemical reaction. If all you mean is that the example is an instance of a category, you don’t need the “just”; by saying “just”, you clearly are trying to assert some sort of equivalence between members of the category, one that would deflate the status of the particular example. Yet if you have to say it, it probably isn’t true; no one would point at a random rock and say “this is just a rock”—instead you point to the Earth and say “this is just a rock”, when in fact it is a very special rock. Humans are a very special animals, the Earth is a very special planet, and love is a very special chemical reaction (closely tied to that most mysterious of chemical reactions, consciousness). We are members of one vast animal family—indeed, one vast family of life—but we are most definitely the wisest and most powerful member.

I’m honestly not sure what I would do if I tried to “act like an animal”; I suppose I would be born, breathe, eat, sleep, love, suffer and die—but I was going to do these things anyway, whether I wanted to or not. Indeed, by weak animalism, humans are animals, and so by acting like human beings we are in fact acting like animals—the animal Homo sapiens.

Abiogenesis

Next comes abiogenesis, the proposition that living things came from nonliving things. Well, where else would they come from? The only way to deny this proposition is to say that living things always existed. (If God made life, he would have done so by being a living thing that always existed.) The problem with this idea is that it doesn’t really explain where life comes from, it only pushes its origin back into the infinite past. Scientists are making progress in using nonliving chemicals to produce replicating entities that are very similar to life, and inn 2010 scientists created the first all-synthetic bacterium, but to do it they had to use pre-existing bacteria to set up the reactions. This lends credibility to the idea that life came from nonlife, but in fact even this wouldn’t conclusively demonstrate abiogenesis; it would prove that life can arise from nonlife, but that doesn’t mean it did originally. The truth is, we really don’t understand much about the origin of life, and even less about the origin of the universe; but this does nothing to undermine evolution or even common descent. No one doubts the existence of gravity simply because we don’t know what caused the Big Bang!

Atheism

Finally, and most controversially, there is atheism. Theism is belief in a superhuman being that responds to prayers and performs miracles; atheism is the negation of theism. This is all atheism means; if you think it means something more than this—absolute knowledge that there cannot be a creator being, or no ultimate foundation for morality, or no meaning to existence, or whatever else—that isn’t atheism. An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in a personal divinity, someone who says that there are no superhuman beings that intervene in our lives. This is a fairly strong claim in itself, since if correct, atheism implies that religion as we know it—prayer, rituals, miracles, holy books—is utterly false. Deep philosophical religion, like that practiced by Einstein or Kant, remains intact; but the religion of churches, mosques and temples is completely undermined.

Evolution doesn’t imply atheism, but it does support it, in the following sense: Evolution answers the question of “Where did we come from?” without requiring God. Even before we knew about evolution, religion wasn’t a very convincing answer to that question; but we didn’t really have a better one—and now we do.

Yet atheism is clearly correct. This is something we can infer directly from a large body of scientific evidence. I’ve already addressed this topic in previous posts, so I’ll be brief this time around.

Maybe there is a kind of religion that could be reconciled with science; but it’s not a theistic religion. Perhaps there is a God who made the whole of the universe, set it running in perfect harmony to achieve some divine plan. This is called deism, and it’s a scientifically respectable position. But then, it is senseless to pray, since God isn’t going to change the divine plan on behalf of tiny creatures on a backwater planet of a backwater star in a backwater galaxy. It is plainly wrong to call such a being “he” or even “He”, since no being so vast and powerful could ever be properly described in the petty terms of a biological male—it would be like saying that gravity has testicles, energy conservation has a beard, or causality has a Y chromosome. I’m not sure we can even fairly say that God is a conscious being, for consciousness as we know it seems too vulgar a trait to assign to an entity of such vastness. In fact, the theologian Paul Tillich thought even existence a concept insufficient to describe the divine. It is foolish to look to ancient books to understand God, for its work is written from horizon to horizon in the fabric of the universe, and these ancient books are but pale shadows of its grandeur. It is naive to suppose that we are special beings created in God’s image, for God has made many millions of species on this planet, and probably countless more on other distant planets; furthermore, God’s process of production favors insects and bacteria and requires massive systematic death and suffering.

And even once we have removed everything we knew of religion, even this truncated theology suffers from an egregious flaw: Such a creator offers us no evidence of its existence. A deistic God is indistinguishable from the universe itself, definitely in practice and perhaps even in principle. I don’t really see the point in using the word “God” when the word “nature” captures what we mean much better. Saying “God is vaster than we can imagine, and of course by `God’ I mean the universe” strikes me as like saying “The Sun is powered by magical unicorn love, and of course by `magical unicorn love’ I mean nuclear fusion.”

And theism, religion as we know it, is philosophically and scientifically bankrupt. Imagine an airline pilot who lets go of the controls and prays to God to fly the plane; imagine a surgeon who puts down the scalpel and prays to God for the patients to be healed. That’s the sort of thing we would do if theism were true. It would make sense to do these things—it would be rational to do these things—under the presumption that there is a God who answers our prayers. You can’t escape this; if it makes sense to pray for your sick grandmother, then it doesn’t make sense for her to take medicine—because if God is in control, then chemistry isn’t. The fact that hardly anyone really would resort to prayer when an obvious and effective scientific alternative is available (and the fact that people who do are considered fanatical or even insane) clearly shows that theism is bankrupt, and that hardly anyone believes it confidently enough to actually live by it. No one except the craziest fanatics believes in God the way they believe in gravity.

I’m sure this book will be perceived as yet another “angry atheist” “attacking” “religious people”; on the contrary, I am a respectful and reflective atheist criticizing theistic religion. I respect religious people; I do not respect theistic religion. Indeed, I respect religious people too much to let them go on believing such ridiculous things. What glorious powers of human reason are wasted on such nonsense! If you believe in the subtle, abstract, inscrutable God of Einstein or Spinoza, very well. We disagree only about the most abstract matters, almost at the level of semantics (what you call “God” I prefer to call “nature”). Our beliefs and values are not only reconcilable but nearly identical.

On the other hand if you believe in a magical personal God, a God who writes books and answers prayers, then my criticism is indeed directed at your beliefs; I think you are mistaken, gravely, dangerously mistaken.

Atheism is a scientific fact.

Conclusion

Evolution is a fact. The Modern Synthesis of genetics and natural selection is among the most certain scientific theories ever devised; it is the unified field theory of life on Earth. The following claims may be controversial in our society, but they are also scientific facts: Living things are adapted to their environment by natural selection; all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor; humans are animals; life arose by natural processes; and theistic religion is false. You can accept these facts, or else you can live in denial.

Yes, in principle evolution is a theory that can be doubted, but in principle everything in science is a theory that can be doubted. If you want certain, undeniable truths, you will need to stay with logic and mathematics—and even then, you’ll need to be careful about your axioms. Otherwise, you must always be open to a thin sliver of uncertainty, a sliver that should be no larger for evolution than for gravity or photosynthesis. (Of the three, gravity is by far the least-understood.)

The convergence of scientific evidence in favor of evolution, a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, genetics, natural selection, common descent, adaptationism, weak animalism, and yes, even atheism, is so incredibly massive that we’d have to give up half of science to abandon these things. Any revisions we do make in the future will necessarily be minor, leaving the core of truth intact.

To doubt that rubidium decays into strontium at the same rate now it did a million years ago, you must explain how the fundamental laws of nuclear physics that we have verified to twelve decimal places are incorrect.

To doubt that cetaceans evolved from land mammals, you must explain why they breathe air instead of water and swim vertically rather than horizontally, unlike nearly everything else in the sea.

To believe in microevolution but not macroevolution, you must think that there is some mysterious force that prevents what has happened 100 times from happening an additional 100,000 times for the same reasons—for, if repeated many times, a 0.01% systematic change per century, a darwin of evolution (lowercase for a unit of measure, like the newton of force or the weber of magnetic flux), is more than enough to account for the transition from archaea to eukaryotes over 3 billion years, and vastly more than is needed to account for the transition from apes to humans over 5 million years. In fact, observed rates of evolution in the short term have reached the level of kilodarwins, thousands of darwins.

To doubt that life on Earth has changed and diverged over time you must ignore the most obvious facts about a remarkably rich and well-organized fossil record. There are no rabbits in Precambrian layers. There are no trilobites in Mesozoic layers. There are no primates in the Jurassic, and no sauropods in the Tertiary. There have never been a human fossil and a dinosaur fossil found in the same rock. Creationists like to claim that the fossil record sorted itself by size and lifestyle (as here), but in fact there are large and small, land and sea, in pretty much every layer of the fossil record—just not the same ones, because the organisms in lower layers died off and were replaced by the organisms in higher layers. Pterodactyls look a lot like a birds, come in roughly the same size ranges as birds, and seemed to live similar lifestyles, but you’ll never find the two buried together. Looking at the fossils, you can’t help but infer evolution; if God made the fossils, he must have wanted us to believe in evolution.

The real source of the evolution debate, part 1

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Feb 9 JDN 2460716

The last few posts have been about evolution; but everything I’ve said in them has been very technical and scientific, and I imagine it is not very controversial or offensive to anyone. In fact, I would guess that anyone who believes in Creationism, upon reading my definition of evolution as “change in allele distribution in a population”, was thinking, “Of course we believe in that. But that’s not evolution.” Actually it is; evolution is change in allele distribution in a population. What people are objecting to isn’t really evolution.

There are however several propositions that people do object to, which are conceptually related, but not strictly implied by evolution. They are adaptationism, common descent, animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism respectively. They are all true—and in what follows I will offer a defense of each—but they are not necessarily entailed by evolution or the Modern Synthesis, and so they should be considered separately on their own merits. This post will deal with adaptationism and common descent, and I’ll save the others for a later post.

Adaptationism

Adaptationism is the principle that living organisms have the traits they do because these traits are adaptive, that is, that they are beneficial to fitness. It’s obvious that this isn’t completely true in every case; whales have hipbones despite having no apparent use for them, and the human appendix seems mostly useful for collecting toxins and occasionally exploding. There are also limits to how much an organism can change given its current structure; the emerging field of developmental evolutionary biology, or evo-devo, seeks to characterize these limits more precisely.

But in general, adaptationism is an incredibly powerful principle, one which makes sense of the diversity and complexity of life on Earth in a way no other theory can. Natural selection predicts that organisms will become more and more adapted over time; adaptationism is based on the fact that we have had plenty of time to adapt really, really well. In fact, it can be argued that adaptationism is really what evolutionary theory is about, that all this business about changes in allele distributions is useful but not really the point of the enterprise.

When we look at the world, we see that living things are extremely complex and well-suited to their environments; theologians used to say (in fact some still do) that this was evidence that living things were designed by a perfect God.

The problem with this argument was exposed almost immediately by David Hume: If complex things need designers, aren’t designers even more complex than what they design? But then, the designer needs a designer-designer, and the designer-designer needs a designer-designer-designer, and so on into an infinite regress! Another problem with this sort of Intelligent Design thinking is that it cannot explain the cases when adaptationism fails—in particular, why do so many species go extinct? Recently a theory of “Intelligent Recall” was proposed for this purpose; but this forces us to think of our designer as no more intelligent than a financial analyst or an automobile engineer! What kind of God would make mistakes in design?

And now we know better: The remarkable complexity and fitness of living organisms can be entirely explained by adaptationism. When we ask why dolphins have fins, why birds have wings, why centipedes have so many legs, why snakes are so long, or why humans have such enormous brains, adaptationism gives us the answer: organisms have these traits because having these traits benefited their ancestors. In some cases it’s pretty obvious how this would work (having fins lets dolphins swim faster, swimming faster has obvious benefits in catching fish and escaping sharks, so dolphin ancestors with more fin-like limbs survived better); in others we’re still working on the specifics (there is as yet no consensus on how humans got so incredibly smart compared to other animals); but in general adaptationism has explained a huge body of data that we couldn’t account for any other way.

Common descent

Common descent is the proposition that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor. This implies, in particular, that human beings share a common ancestor with other animals. The former is strictly stronger, and not quite as certain; at least in principle it could be that some broad classes of organism do not share a common ancestor, but nonetheless it would still be quite clear that humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. In practice nearly all biologists agree with the strongest form of common descent, that all living organisms on Earth share a common ancestor. Recently the biochemist Douglas Theobald mathematically compared this strongest form of common descent (universal common descent) with several other models of phylogenetic history, finding that universal common descent was the most probable result by a factor of at least 102000—a 2001-digit number. That is, scientists are 99.999,999,999,999,999,999… (on with 1,980 more nines!) percent sure that universal common descent is right. This is not hyperbole; it is mathematically precise. At this point any sliver of uncertainty left in universal common descent needs to apply to all of our fundamental knowledge of physics and chemistry; in order to be wrong about this, we’d need to be wrong about everything.

How are we so sure? Nature presents us with a very consistent pattern of observations that simply make no sense any other way. Traits in living things (and, we are increasingly finding, genes) have distinct patterns, structural similarities that exist between species irrespective of their lifestyle; we call these similiarities homologues. (Similarities that are due to lifestyle—e.g., both dolphins and fish have fins—are called analogues.) Dolphin skeletons are more like dog skeletons than they are like fish skeletons, even though dolphins live more like fish. Bat skin is more like human skin than like bird skin, even though bats live more like birds. The most parsimonious explanation is that these traits were passed on from some common ancestor—that dolphins and dogs have similar skeletons because dolphins and dogs are actually genetically related somehow, and they differ from fish because they are more distantly related.

Once we began to understand DNA, we became able to detect even more compelling homologues. Many kinds of mutation are completely ineffectual; some involve a change to DNA that doesn’t do anything, others swap out two amino acids that are essentially the same; in fact because of the way genes code for amino acids, it’s possible to have a change in a gene that isn’t reflected in the resulting protein at all. All of these changes have no effect on the organism, but they are still passed on to offspring. When you find two organisms that have the same trait (e.g. bats and birds both have wings), if that trait does something important (lets you fly), then maybe it’s just a similarity in lifestyle; if that happens we call it convergent evolution. But when we’re looking at a DNA sequence that doesn’t do anything, lifestyle can’t be the reason—it must be either common ancestry or pure coincidence. Statistical analysis can rule out pure coincidence, and then we are left with only one possibility: common descent. A third option often proposed by Creationists simply doesn’t work: A common designer of sharks and dolphins would not give one a cartilaginous skeleton and gills and the other a bony mammalian skeleton and lungs. There is no reason for dolphin skeletons to be more like dog skeletons than shark skeletons—except that dogs and dolphins share closer common ancestry to each other than they do to sharks.

There are thousands of traits and genes that we can use to assess these relationships. When we do this, we find a remarkably consistent organizational structure, a pattern of a few common ancestors diversifying into a wide variety of descendants—it looks a bit like a tree, so we call it a phylogenetic tree. In some cases there is ambiguity about which species are more closely related, and we need to gather more evidence. This is a normal part of evolutionary biology research.

One thing is not disputed: Humans share a common ancestor with apes. This is simply too obvious from the morphological and genetic homologues. Human and chimp DNA coincides 95-98\%, depending on how you count insertions and deletions.

A standard measure of genetic distance is the Nei distance; a larger Nei distance implies more genetic differences, which in turn suggests that the common ancestor was further in the past. (Exactly how it’s calculated is a bit too technical for this post.)

Humans and chimps have a Nei distance of 0.45. This similarity between humans and chimps represents a closer similarity than that between dogs and foxes, who differ by a Nei distance of 1.1. Almost anyone can see that dogs and foxes are related animals; so why is it so hard to believe that humans and chimps are related too?

Creationists often claim that we never find the transitional forms predicted by evolutionary theory, but this is simply not true. We do in fact see many transitional forms; feathered dinosaurs mark the transition from reptiles to birds, ambulocetids mark the transition from land mammals to cetaceans, therapsids mark the transition from reptiles to mammals, and a huge variety of hominids marks the transition from apes to humans. It’s important to understand what this means: transitional forms are not bizarre combinations of their descendant organisms, but fully-functional lifeforms in their own right that have descendants very different from one another. Just as your grandparents are not a combination of half of you and half of your first cousin, common ancestors are not simply half-and-half combinations of their descendant organisms. Ambulocetids are not half-deer/half-dolphin, they are somewhat deer-like yet somewhat dolphin-like mammals whose ancestors were on average slightly more deer-like and whose descendants were on average slightly more dolphin-like. Different traits changed at different times, generations apart: Ambulocetids began to swim before they lost their legs, and even modern dolphins haven’t lost their lungs or hipbones.


This is such a deep, marvelous truth that Creationists are missing out on: All life on Earth is part of one family. We are kin with the dogs and the cats and the elephants, with the snakes and the lizards and the birds, with the beetles and the flies and the bees, even with the flowers and the bushes and the trees.

Defining evolution

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Feb 2 JDN 2460709

In the last post I said I’d explain the basics of evolution, then went into a bunch of detail about genetics. Why all this stuff about DNA? Weren’t we supposed to be talking about evolution? Yes—but it’s impossible to truly understand evolution without understanding DNA. This unity between genetics and evolution is called the Modern Synthesis, and it is the unified field theory of the life sciences. It’s quite different from what Darwin invented in 1859, but the fundamental insights were his; the Modern Synthesis is a body of flesh over the skeleton of Darwinian evolution. Now that I have explained the basics of DNA, it is time to discuss evolution itself.

The fundamental unit of evolution is the gene. (Darwin, among others, insisted that the fundamental unit of evolution is the organism, because it is organisms that are born and die. There is some truth to this, but given the presence of phenomena like kin selection and genetic drift, we also need to consider genes themselves. Richard Dawkins makes a distinction between “replicators” (genes) and “vehicles” (organisms) that makes a great deal of sense to me—both are necessary parts of the same system, and it’s a little silly to ask which is “more fundamental”.) The fundamental unit of evolution is not the population or the species; it is populations that evolve, but they evolve by natural selection acting upon individuals and genes. Natural selection is not sensitive to “the good of the species”; it is only sensitive to the good of the organism and the good of the gene.

A gene is a section of DNA that, when processed by the appropriate proteins, produces a particular protein. Most DNA is not in the form of genes. The majority of DNA has no effect—you can change it without affecting the organism—and most of the rest is involved in regulating the genes, not in producing proteins. Yet, genes are the recipes by which we are made. Human beings have genes for hemoglobin that oxygenates our blood, genes for melanin that pigments our skin, genes for serotonin that transmits signals in our brains, genes for keratin that makes up our hair, and about 46,000 other genes that produce other proteins (the Human Genome Project is still working on the exact number). An allele is a particular variant of a gene which produces a particular variant of the resulting protein. Alleles in melanin genes give different people different colors of skin; a particular allele in a hemoglobin gene gives some people sickle-cell anaemia.

When the distribution of alleles in a population changes, that is evolution. Yes, that’s all “evolution” means: Changes of distribution in alleles in a population. When a baby is born, that’s evolution. When a person dies, that’s evolution. This is what we mean when we say that evolution is a fact; it is a fact that alleles do change distribution in populations. Individuals do not evolve, populations evolve. You will never see a dog turn into a cat, nor an ape to a human. You could see, if you were watching for millions of years, a population of animals that started very dog-like and got increasingly cat-like with each generation, or a population of animals that started very ape-like and got increasingly human-like with each generation. Even these latter are not necessary occurrences; under different environmental circumstances, the same genes can evolve in completely different directions.

Fitness is the expected number of copies that an allele is likely to produce in the next generation.(There are a few subtly different ways of defining fitness; the one I prefer is the expected value of the number of copies of a given allele in the next generation. The fitness f of an allele a at generation t is given by the expectation of the number n of copies of that allele in that population at generation t+1: f(a,t) = E[n(a,t+1)]This is an \inclusive fitness measure, which accounts for kin selection better than exclusive fitness measures like “predicted grandchildren” or “expected number of reproductively-viable offspring”. In practical terms these generally give the same results; but when they don’t, the inclusive measure is to be preferred.)

Fitness is a probabilistic notion—alleles with high fitness are likely to be passed on, but this is not guaranteed. “Survival of the fittest” ultimately just means that genes that are likely to make many copies are likely to have many copies. It has been said that this is a tautology, and indeed it is; but so is the Pythagorean Theorem. Some tautologies are useful, and all tautologies are undeniably true.

What causes evolution? Organisms are born, reproduce, and die. Any time this happens, it changes the distribution of alleles in the population—it is evolution. If there was a reason why the ones who lived lived and the ones who died died, then the actual number of copies of each allele in the population will reflect the fitness of those alleles; this is called natural selection. On the other hand, if it just happened by chance, then the distribution of alleles won’t match the fitness; this is called genetic drift. Examples of each: Trees are tall, giraffes eat leaves, so giraffes with longer necks get more food and live longer—that’s natural selection. A flood rips through the savannah and kills half of the giraffes, and it just happens that more long-necked than short-necked giraffes die—that’s genetic drift. The difference can be subtle, since sometimes we don’t know what the reasons are; if it turned out that there was some reason why floods are more likely to kill long-necked giraffes (they can’t swim as well?), then in fact what we thought was genetic drift was really natural selection. But notice: Natural selection is not chance. Natural selection is the opposite of chance. If evolution happens by chance, that’s genetic drift. Natural selection is evolution that happens for a reason.

Natural selection changes populations, but what causes them to separate into distinct species? Well, a species is really a breeding population—it is a group of organisms that regularly interbreeds within the group and does not regularly interbreed outside the group. In most cases, breeding between species is actually impossible; but in many cases it is simply rare. Indeed, there is a particularly interesting case called a ring species, in which interbreeding possibilities rest on a continuum rather than being sharply delineated. In a ring species, there are several distinct populations for which some can interbreed easily, others can interbreed with difficulty, and others can’t inbreed at all. A classic case is the Ensatina salamanders who live in the Central Valley in California. There are nineteen populations, and each can interbreed with its adjacent populations—but the two populations at the far ends cannot interbreed. Ensatina eschscholtzii eschscholtzii can interbreed with E.e. croceater, which can interbreed with E.e. oregonensis, and so on all the way to E.e. klauberi—but E.e. eschscholzii on one end can’t interbreed with E.e. klauberi on the other end. Are they different “species”? It’s difficult to say. If all the intermediates died out, we would call them different species, Ensatina escholzii and Ensatina klauberi; but in fact genes do sometimes pass between them, because they can both interbreed with the intermediates. Really, the concept “species” fails to capture the true complexity of the situation.

This is not a problem for evolutionary theory—it is a prediction of evolutionary theory. We should expect to see new species occasionally forming, and while they are in the process of forming there should be many intermediates that aren’t yet distinct species. Evolution predicts gradual divergence, and sometimes we are lucky enough to see that divergence in process.

Natural selection can only act upon alleles that already exist; it chooses the best out of what’s available, not the best that could possibly exist. This is why dolphins breathe air instead of water; breathing water would be much better for their lifestyle, but no dolphin has yet been born who can breathe water. The alleles aren’t there, so natural selection cannot act upon them. If a mutant dolphin is someday born who can breathe water, as long as they don’t suffer from other problems as a result of their mutation, they are likely to live a long time and have lots of offspring; in a hundred generations perhaps water-breathing dolphins would form a new species, or even replace air-breathing dolphins. And notice how short a time that is: 100 generations of dolphins is only about 1000 years. We could watch this happening in historical time. If it had happened a million years ago, the fossil record would probably never show the intermediate forms. This is why we don’t see transitional forms between closely-related species; because the differences are so subtle, the necessary changes can occur very rapidly, in too few generations to ensure fossilization.

Indeed, monogenic traits—those that can be changed by a single mutation—never produce transitional forms. There is a single gene for sickle-cell anaemia in humans; we should not expect to see people with “30\% sickle-cell anaemia”, because there are only three options: you either have no copies of the sickle-cell allele (normal), you have one copy (sickle-cell trait), or you have two copies (sickle-cell anaemia). In fact, in this particular case, the one-copy variant isn’t even mild anaemia; it is a generally healthy non-anaemic state that offers protection against malaria. There is a single gene for six fingers in humans. Two copies gives you six fingers; one copy doesn’t do anything. Even if we had access to every individual organism that ever lived, we still wouldn’t see transitional forms for monogenic traits. Given that we actually have fossils of less than one in ten billion organisms that ever lived, it’s not surprising that most evolutionary changes leave no mark in the fossil record.

Furthermore, it’s important to understand that natural selection, even when there is plenty of variation to act on, does not produce perfectly-adapted organisms. It only produces organisms that are good enough to survive and pass on their alleles. In fact, there can be multiple fit alleles of the same gene in a population—all different, perhaps even some better than others, but each good enough to keep on surviving.

Indeed, the fitness of one allele can increase the fitness of another allele, in a number of different ways. The most morally-relevant ones only make sense in terms of game theory, so I will wait until later posts to get into them, but there are a few worth mentioning here. The first is co-evolution. Organisms evolve to suit their environments—but part of an organism’s environment consists of other organisms. Bees would not function if there were no flowers—but nor would flowers function without bees. So which came first, the bee or the flower? Neither. Ancient ancestors of each evolved together, co-evolved, the proto-flowers growing more flower-like as the proto-bees grew more bee-like, until finally an equilibrium was reached at the bees and flowers we see today.

Another way that organisms can affect the evolution of other organisms is through frequency-dependent selection, in which the fitness of a given allele depends upon the distribution of other alleles of the same gene. The most important case of frequency-dependent selection is in sex dimorphism, the differences between sexes within a species. If there are more males than females, the fitness of females goes up—it pays to be female; you’ll get your choice of males. Conversely, if there are more females than males, it pays to be male. Hence, over time, sex distributions reach an equilibrium at 50% male and 50% female, which has happened in almost every species (eusocial insects are the only major exception, and it’s due to their weird genetics). There are other cases of frequency-dependent selection as well; for instance, in stag beetles (Lucanidae), there are three kinds of males, called “alpha”, “beta”, and “gamma”. Alpha males have large horns and fight heavily with other alpha males; they risk being killed in the process, but if they win the fight, they get all the best females. Beta males have short horns and only fight other beta males; this limits their mating pool, but prevents them from being killed by alpha males. Finally, gamma males look just like females and will occasionally sneak past an alpha male and mate with his females. This is frequency-dependent selection because the success of each strategy depends on the other strategies in a fashion similar to rock-paper-scissors. If gamma males become very common, beta males will become more successful, because they won’t get cheated the way alpha males do. If beta males become common, alpha males will become more successful, because they can beat beta males in fights. If alpha males become common, gamma males will become more successful, because they can cheat alpha males. In the long run, the system settles into an equilibrium with a certain fraction of all three types.

A third way alleles affect other alleles is in sexual selection; in sexual selection, the alleles of one sex affect the alleles of the other sex, because sexual compatibility has obvious advantages. For instance, when there are lots of alleles in peahens that make them attracted to big, colorful tails, there is a fitness advantage to being a peacock with a big, colorful tail. Hence, alleles for big, colorful tails in peacocks will be selected. But then, if all the males have big, colorful tails, there is a fitness advantage to being a female who prefers big, colorful tails, and so a positive feedback loop forms; the end result is peacocks with ridiculously huge, ridiculously colorful tails and peahens who love them for it.

Everything above is very technical and scientific, and I imagine it is not very controversial or offensive to anyone. In future posts, I’ll get into the stuff that really upsets people, the true source of controversy on evolution.

Evolution: Foundations of Genetics

PNRJ Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Jan 26 JDN 2460702

It frustrates me that in American society, evolutionary biology is considered a controversial topic. When I use knowledge from quantum physics or from organic chemistry, all I need to do is cite a credible source; I don’t need to preface it with a defense of the entire scientific field. Yet in the United States today, even basic statements of facts observed in evolutionary biology are met with incredulity. The consensus in the scientific community about evolution is greater than the consensus about quantum physics, and comparable to the consensus about organic chemistry. 95% of scientists agree that evolution happens, that Darwinian natural selection is the primary cause, and that human beings share a common ancestor with every other life form on Earth. Polls of scientists have consistently made this clear, and the wild success of Project Steve continues to vividly demonstrate it.

But I would rather defend evolution than have to tiptoe around it, or worse have my conclusions ignored because I use it. So, here goes.

You may think you understand evolution, but especially if you doubt that evolution is true, odds are good that you really don’t. Even most people who have taken college courses in evolutionary biology have difficulty understanding evolution.

Evolution is a very rich and complicated science, and I don’t have room to do it justice here. I merely hope that I can give you enough background to make sense of the core concepts, and convince you that evolution is real and important.

Foundations of genetics

So let us start at the beginning. DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—is a macromolecular (very big and complicated) organic (carbon-based) acid (chemical that can give up hydrogen ions in solution) that is produced by all living cells. More properly, it is a class of macromolecular organic acids, because differences between DNA strands are actually chemical differences in the molecule. The structure of DNA consists of two long chains of constituent molecules called nucleotides; for chemical reasons nucleotides usually bond in pairs, adenine (A) with thymine (T), guanine (G) with cytosine (C). Pairs of nucleotides are called base pairs. We call it a “double-helix” because the two chains are normally wrapped around each other in a helix shape.

Because of this base-pair correspondence, the two strands of a DNA molecule are complementary; if one half is GATTACA, the other half will be CTAATGT. This process is reversible. Either strand can be reproduced from the other; this is how DNA replicates. A DNA strand GATTACA/CTAATGT can split into its GATTACA half and its CTAATGT half, and then the original GATTACA half will acquire new nucleotides and make a new CTAATGT for itself; similarly the original CTAATGT half will make a new GATTACA. At the end of this process, two precise copies of the original GATTACA/CTAATGT strand will result. This process can be repeated as necessary.

DNA molecules can vary in size from a few base-pairs (like the sequence GATTACA), to the 16,000 base-pairs of Carsonella bacteria, up to the 3 billion base-pairs of humans and beyond. While complexity of DNA and complexity of organism are surely related (it’s impossible to make a really complicated organism with very simple DNA), more base pairs does not necessarily imply a more complex organism. The single-celled amoeboid Polychaos dubium has 670 billion base-pairs. Amoeboids are relatively complex, all things considered; but they’re hardly 200 times more complex than we are!

The copying of DNA is exceedingly precise, but like anything in real life, not perfect. Cells have many physical and chemical mechanisms to correct bad copying, but sometimes—about 1 in 1 million base-pairs copied—something goes wrong. Sometimes, one nucleotide gets switched for another; perhaps what should have been a T becomes an A, or what should have been an A becomes a G. Other times, a whole sequence of DNA gets duplicated and inserted in a new place; still other times entire pieces of DNA are lost, never to be copied again. In some cases a sequence is flipped around backwards. All of these things (a single-nucleotide substitution, an insertion, a deletion, and an inversion, respectively) are forms of mutation. Mutation is always happening, but it can be increased by the presence of radiation, toxins, and other stresses. Usually cells with mutant DNA are killed by the immune system; if not, mutant body cells can cause cancer or other health problems. Usually it’s only mutations in gametes—the sperm and egg cells that carry DNA to the next generation—that actually have a long-term effect on future generations. Most mutations do not have any significant effect, and most of those that do have bad effects. It is only the rare minority of mutations that actually produces something useful to an organism’s survival.

What does DNA do? It makes proteins. Technically, proteins make other proteins (enzymes called transcriptases and polymerases and so on), but which protein is produced by such a process is dependent upon the order of base pairs in a DNA strand. DNA has been likened to a “code” or a “message”, but this is a little misleading. It’s definitely a sequence that contains information, but the “code” is less like a cryptographer’s cipher and more like a computer’s machine code; it interacts directly with the hardware to produce an output. And it’s important to understand that when DNA is “read” and “decoded”, it’s all happening purely by chemical reactions, and there is no conscious being doing the reading. While metaphorically we might say that DNA is a “code” or a “language”, we must not take these metaphors too literally; DNA is not a language in the same sense as English, nor is it a code in the same sense as the Enigma cipher.

Genotype and phenotype

DNA is also not a “blueprint”, as it is sometimes described. There is a one-to-one correspondence between a house and its blueprint: given a house, it would be easy to draw a blueprint much like the original blueprint; given a blueprint, one can construct basically the same house. DNA is not like this. There is no one-to-one correspondence between DNA and a living organism’s structure. Given the traits of an organism, it is impossible to reconstruct its DNA—and purely from the DNA, it is impossible to reconstruct the organism. A better analogy is to a recipe, which offers a general guide as to what to make and how to make it, but depending on the cook and the ingredients, may give quite different results. The ingredients in this case are nutrients, and the “cook” is the whole of our experience and interaction with the environment. No experience or environment can act upon us unless we have the right genes and nutrients to make it effective. No matter how long you let it sit, bread with no yeast will never rise—and no matter how hard you try to teach him, your dog will never be able to speak in fluent sentences.

Furthermore, genes rarely do only one thing in an organism; much as drugs have side effects, so do genes, a phenomenon called pleiotropy. Some genes are more pleiotropic than others, but really, all genes are pleiotropic. In any complex organism, genes will have complex effects. The genes of an organism are its genotype; the actual traits that it has are its phenotype. We have these two different words precisely because they are different things; genotype influences phenotype, but many other things influence phenotype besides genotype. The answer to the question “Nature or Nurture?” is always—always—“Both”. There are much more useful questions to ask, like “How much of the variation of this trait within this population is attributable to genetic differences?”, “How do environmental conditions trigger this phenotype in the presence of this genotype?”, and “Under what ecological circumstances would this genotype evolve?”

This is why it’s a bit misleading to talk about the “the gene for homosexuality” or “the gene for religiosity”; taken literally this would be like saying “the ingredient for chocolate cake” or “the beam for the Empire State Building”. At best we can distinguish certain genes that might, in the context of many other genes and environmental contributions, make a difference between particular states—much as removing the cocoa from chocolate cake makes some other kind of cake, it could be that removing a particular gene from someone strongly homosexual might make them nearer to heterosexual. It’s not that genes can be mapped one-to-one to traits of an organism; but rather that in many cases a genetic difference corresponds to a difference in traits that is ecologically significant. This is what geneticists mean when they say “the gene for X”; it’s a very useful concept in evolutionary theory, but I don’t think it’s one most laypeople understand. As usual, Richard Dawkins explains this matter brilliantly:

Probably the first point to make is that whenever a geneticist speaks of a gene `for’ such and such a characteristic, say brown eyes, he never means that this gene affects nothing else, nor that it is the only gene contributing to the brown pigmentation. Most genes have many distantly ramified and apparently unconnected effects. A vast number of genes are necessary for the development of eyes and their pigment. When a geneticist talks about a single gene effect, he is always talking about a difference between individuals. A gene `for brown eyes’ is not a gene that, alone and unaided, manufactures brown pigment. It is a gene that, when compared with its alleles (alternatives at the same chromosomal locus), in a normal environment, is responsible for the difference in eye colour between individuals possessing the gene and individuals not possessing the gene. The statement `G1 is a gene for phenotypic characteristic P1‘ is always a shorthand. It always implies the existence, or potential existence, of at least one alternative gene G2, and at least one alternative characteristic P2. It also implies a normal developmental environment, including the presence of the other genes which are common in the gene pool as a whole, and therefore likely to be in the same body. If all individuals had two copies of the gene `for’ brown eyes and if no other eye colour ever occurred, the `gene for brown eyes’ would strictly be a meaningless concept. It can only be defined by reference to at least one potential alternative. Of course any gene exists physically in the sense of being a length of DNA; but it is only properly called a gene `for X’ if there is at least one alternative gene at the same chromosomal locus, which leads to not X.

It follows that there is no clear limit to the complexity of the `X’ which we may substitute in the phrase `a gene for X’. Reading, for example, is a learned skill of immense and subtle complexity. A gene for reading would, to naive common sense, be an absurd notion. Yet, if we follow genetic terminological convention to its logical conclusion, all that would be necessary in order to establish the existence of a gene for reading is the existence of a gene for not reading. If a gene G2 could be found which infallibly caused in its possessors the particular brain lesion necessary to induce specific dyslexia, it would follow that G1, the gene which all the rest of us have in double dose at that chromosomal locus, would by definition have to be called a gene for reading.

It’s important to keep this in mind when interpreting any new ideas or evidence from biology. Just as cocoa by itself is not chocolate cake because one also needs all the other ingredients that make it cake in the first place, “the gay gene” cannot exist in isolation because in order to be gay one needs all the other biological and neurological structures that make one a human being in the first place. Moreover, just as cocoa changes the consistency of a cake so that other ingredients may need to be changed to compensate, so a hypothetical“gay gene” might have other biological or neurological effects that would be inseparable from its contribution to sexual orientation.

It’s also important to point out that hereditary is not the same thing as genetic. By comparing pedigrees, it is relatively straightforward to determine the heritability of a trait within a population—but this is not the same as determining whether the trait is genetic. A great many traits are systematically inherited from parents that have nothing to do with DNA—like language, culture, and wealth. (These too can evolve, but it’s a different kind of evolution.) In the United States, IQ is about 80% heritable; but so is height, and yet nutrition has large, well-documented effects on height (The simplest case: malnourished people never grow very tall). If, as is almost certainly the case, there are many environmental influences such as culture and education that can affect IQ scores, then the heritability of IQ tells us very little.

In fact, some traits are genetic but not hereditary! Certain rare genetic diseases can appear by what is called de novo mutation; the genes that cause them can randomly appear in an individual without having been present in their parents. Neurofibromatosis occurs in as many people with no family history as it does in people with family history; and yet, neurofibromatosis is definitely a genetic disorder, for it can be traced to particular sections of defective DNA.

Honestly, most of the debate about nature versus nurture in human behavior is really quite pointless. Even if you ignore the general facts that phenotype is always an interaction between genes and environment, and feedback occurs between genes and environment over evolutionary time, human beings are the species for which the “Nature or nurture?” question reaches its most meaningless. It is human nature to be nurtured; it is written within our genes that we should be flexible, intelligent beings capable of learning and training far beyond our congenital capacities. An ant’s genes are not written that way; ants play out essentially the same program in every place and time, because that program is hard-wired within them. Humans have an enormous variety of behaviors—far outstripping the variety in any other species—despite having genetic variation of only about 0.1%; clearly most of the differences between humans are environmental. Yet, it is precisely the genes that code for being Homo sapiens that make this possible; if we’d had the genes of an ant or an earthworm, we wouldn’t have this enormous behavioral plasticity. So each person is who they are largely because of their environment—but that itself would not be true without the genes we all share.

Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy”

PNRJ ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 12 JDN 2460688

In last week’s post I talked about some of the arguments against ethical naturalism, which have sometimes been called “the naturalistic fallacy”.

The “naturalistic fallacy” that G.E. Moore actually wrote about is somewhat subtler; it says that there is something philosophically suspect about defining something non-natural in terms of natural things—and furthermore, it says that “good” is not a natural thing and so cannot be defined in terms of natural things. For Moore, “good” is not something that can be defined with recourse to facts about psychology, biology or mathematics; “good” is simply an indefinable atomic concept that exists independent of all other concepts. As such Moore was criticizing moral theories like utilitarianism and hedonism that seek to define “good” in terms of “pleasure” or “lack of pain”; for Moore, good cannot have a definition in terms of anything except itself.

My greatest problem with this position is less philosophical than linguistic; how does one go about learning a concept that is so atomic and indefinable? When I was a child, I acquired an understanding of the word “good” that has since expanded as I grew in knowledge and maturity. I need not have called it “good”: had I been raised in Madrid, I would have called it bueno; in Beijing, hao; in Kyoto, ii; in Cairo, jaiid; and so on.

I’m not even sure if all these words really mean exactly the same thing, since each word comes with its own cultural and linguistic connotations. A vast range of possible sounds could be used to express this concept and related concepts—and somehow I had to learn which sounds were meant to symbolize which concepts, and what relations were meant to hold between them. This learning process was highly automatic, and occurred when I was very young, so I do not have great insight into its specifics; but nonetheless it seems clear to me that in some sense I learned to define “good” in terms of things that I could perceive. No doubt this definition was tentative, and changed with time and experience; indeed, I think all definitions are like this. Perhaps my knowledge of other concepts, like “pleasure”, “happiness”, “hope” and “justice”, is interconnected with “good” in such a way that none can be defined separately from the others—indeed perhaps language itself is best considered a network of mutually-reinforcing concepts, each with some independent justification and some connection to other concepts, not a straightforward derivation from more basic atomic notions. If you wish, call me a “foundherentist” in the tradition of Susan Haack; I certainly do think that all beliefs have some degree of independent justification by direct evidence and some degree of mutual justification by coherence. Haack uses the metaphor of a crossword puzzle, but I prefer Alison Gopnik’s mathematical model of a Bayes net. In any case, I had to learn about “good” somehow. Even if I had some innate atomic concept of good, we are left to explain two things: First, how I managed to associate that innate atomic concept with my sense experiences, and second, how that innate atomic concept got in my brain in the first place. If it was genetic, it must have evolved; but it could only have evolved by phenotypic interaction with the external environment—that is, with natural things. We are natural beings, made of natural material, evolved by natural selection. If there is a concept of “good” encoded into my brain either by learning or instinct or whatever combination, it had to get there by some natural mechanism.

The classic argument Moore used to support this position is now called the Open Question Argument; it says, essentially, that we could take any natural property that would be proposed as the definition of “good” and call it X, and we could ask: “Sure, that’s X, but is it good?” The idea is that since we can ask this question and it seems to make sense, then X cannot be the definition of “good”. If someone asked, “I know he is an unmarried man, but is he a bachelor?” or “I know that has three sides, but is it a triangle?” we would think that they didn’t understand what they were talking about; but Moore argues that for any natural property, “I know that is X, but is it good?” is still a meaningful question. Moore uses two particular examples, X = “pleasant” and X = “what we desire to desire”; and indeed those fit what he is saying. But are these really very good examples?

One subtle point that many philosophers make about this argument is that science can discover identities between things and properties that are not immediately apparent. We now know that water is H2O, but until the 19th century we did not know this. So we could perfectly well imagine someone asking, “I know that’s H2O, but is it water?” even though in fact water is H2O and we know this. I think this sort of argument would work for some very complicated moral claims, like the claim that constitutional democracy is good; I can imagine someone who was quite ignorant of international affairs asking: “I know that it’s constitutional democracy, but is that good?” and be making sense. This is because the goodness of constitutional democracy isn’t something conceptually necessary, it is an empirical result based on the fact that constitutional democracies are more peaceful, fair, egalitarian, and prosperous than other governmental systems. In fact, it may even be only true relative to other systems we know of; perhaps there is an as-yet-unimagined governmental system that is better still. No one thinks that constitutional democracy is a definition of moral goodness. And indeed, I think few would argue that H2O is the definition of water; instead the definition of water is something like “that wet stuff we need to drink to survive” and it just so happens that this turns out to be H2O. If someone asked “is that wet stuff we need to drink to survive really water?” he would rightly be thought talking nonsense; that’s just what water means.

But if instead of the silly examples Moore uses, we take a serious proposal that real moral philosophers have suggested, it’s not nearly so obvious that the question is open. From Kant: “Yes, that is our duty as rational beings, but is it good?” From Mill: “Yes, that increases the amount of happiness and decreases the amount of suffering in the world, but is it good?” From Aristotle: “Yes, that is kind, just, and fair, but is it good?” These do sound dangerously close to talking nonsense! If someone asked these questions, I would immediately expect an explanation of what they were getting at. And if no such explanation was forthcoming, I would, in fact, be led to conclude that they literally don’t understand what they’re talking about.

I can imagine making sense of “I know that has three sides, but is it a triangle?”in some bizarre curved multi-dimensional geometry. Even “I know he is an unmarried man, but is he a bachelor?” makes sense if you are talking about a celibate priest. Very rarely do perfect synonyms exist in natural languages, and even when they do they are often unstable due to the effects of connotations. None of this changes the fact that bachelors are unmarried men, triangles have three sides, and yes, goodness involves fulfilling rational duties, alleviating suffering, and being kind and just (Deontology, consequentialism, and virtue theory are often thought to be distinct and incompatible; I’m convinced they amount to the same thing, which I’ll say more about in later posts.).

This line of reasoning has led some philosophers (notably Willard Quine) to deny the existence of analytic truths altogether; on Quine’s view even “2+2=4” isn’t something we can deduce directly from the meaning of the symbols. This is clearly much too strong; no empirical observation could ever lead us to deny 2+2=4. In fact, I am convinced that all mathematical truths are ultimately reducible to tautologies; even “the Fourier transform of a Gaussian is Gaussian” is ultimately a way of saying in compact jargon some very complicated statement that amounts to A=A. This is not to deny that mathematics is useful; of course mathematics is tremendously useful, because this sort of compact symbolic jargon allows us to make innumerable inferences about the world and at the same time guarantee that these inferences are correct. Whenever you see a Gaussian and you need its Fourier transform (I know, it happens a lot, right?), you can immediately know that the result will be a Gaussian; you don’t have to go through the whole derivation yourself. We are wrong to think that “ultimately reducible to a tautology” is the same as “worthless and trivial”; on the contrary, to realize that mathematics is reducible to tautology is to say that mathematics is undeniable, literally impossible to coherently deny. At least the way I use the words, the statement “Happiness is good and suffering is bad” is pretty close to that same sort of claim; if you don’t agree with it, I sense that you honestly don’t understand what I mean.

In any case, I see no more fundamental difficulty in defining “good” than I do in defining any concept, like “man”, “tree”, “multiplication”, “green” or “refrigerator”; and nor do I see any point in arguing about the semantics of definition as an approach to understanding moral truth. It seems to me that Moore has confused the map with the territory, and later authors have confused him with Hume, to all of our detriment.

What’s fallacious about naturalism?

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Jan 5 JDN 2460681

There is another line of attack against a scientific approach to morality, one which threatens all the more because it comes from fellow scientists. Even though they generally agree that morality is real and important, many scientists have suggested that morality is completely inaccessible to science. There are a few different ways that this claim can be articulated; the most common are Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA), David Hume’s “is-ought problem”, and G.E. Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy”. As I will show, none of these pose serious threats to a scientific understanding of morality.

NOMA

Stephen Jay Gould, though a scientist, an agnostic, and a morally upright person, did not think that morality could be justified in scientific or naturalistic terms. He seemed convinced that moral truth could only be understood through religion, and indeed seemed to use the words “religion” and “morality” almost interchangeably:

The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).

If we take Gould to be using a very circumscribed definition of “science” to just mean the so-called “natural sciences” like physics and chemistry, then the claim is trivial. Of course we cannot resolve moral questions about stem cell research entirely in terms of quantum physics or even entirely in terms of cellular biology; no one ever supposed that we could. Yes, it’s obvious that we need to understand the way people think and the way they interact in social structures. But that’s precisely what the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, and political science are designed to do. It would be like saying that quantum physics cannot by itself explain the evolution of life on Earth. This is surely true, but it’s hardly relevant.

Conversely, if we define science broadly to include all rational and empirical methods: physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, sociology, astronomy, logic, mathematics, philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, economics, political science, and so on, then Gould’s claim would mean that there is no rational reason for thinking that rape and genocide are immoral.

And even if we suppose there is something wrong with using science to study morality, the alternative Gould offers us—religion—is far worse. As I’ve already shown in previous posts, religion is a very poor source of moral understanding. If morality is defined by religious tradition, then it is arbitrary and capricious, and real moral truth disintegrates.

Fortunately, we have no reason to think so. The entire history of ethical philosophy speaks against such notions, and had Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill alive been alive to read them, they would have scoffed at Gould’s claims. I suspect Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge would scoff similarly today. Religion doesn’t offer any deep insights into morality, and reason often does; NOMA is simply wrong.

What’s the problem with “ought” and “is”?

The next common objection to a scientific approach to morality is the remark, after David Hume, that “one cannot derive an ought from an is”; due to a conflation with a loosely-related argument that G.E. Moore made later, the attempt to derive moral statements from empirical facts has become called the “naturalistic fallacy” (this is clearly not what Moore intended; I will address Moore’s actual point in a later post). But in truth, I do not really see where the fallacy is meant to lie; there is little difference in principle between deriving “ought” from “is” than there is from deriving anything from anything else.

First, let’s put aside direct inferences from “X is true” to “X ought to be true”; these are obviously fallacious. If that’s all Hume was saying, then he is of course correct; but this does little to undermine any serious scientific theory of morality. You can’t infer from “there are genocides” to “there ought to be genocides”; nor can you infer from “there ought to be happy people” to “there are happy people”; but nor would I or any other scientist seek to do so. This is a strawman of naturalistic morality.

It’s true that some people do attempt to draw similar inferences, usually stated in a slightly different form—but these are not moral scientists, they are invariably laypeople with little understanding of the subject. Arguments based on the claim that “homosexuality is unnatural” (therefore wrong) or “violence is natural” (therefore right) are guilty of this sort of fallacy, but I’ve never heard any credible philosopher or scientist support such arguments. (And by the way, homosexuality is nearly as common among animals as violence.)

A subtler way of reasoning from “is” to “ought” that is still problematic is the common practice of surveying people about their moral attitudes and experimentally testing their moral behaviors, sometimes called experimental philosophy. I do think this kind of research is useful and relevant, but it doesn’t get us as far as some people seem to think. Even if we were to prove that 100% of humans who have ever lived believe that cannibalism is wrong, it does not follow that cannibalism is in fact wrong. It is indeed evidence that there is something wrong with cannibalism—perhaps it is maladaptive to the point of being evolutionarily unstable, or it is so obviously wrong that even the most morally-blind individuals can detect its wrongness. But this extra step of explanation is necessary; it simply doesn’t follow from the fact that “everyone believes X is wrong” that in fact “X is wrong”. (Before 1900 just about everyone quite reasonably believed that the passage of time is the same everywhere regardless of location, speed or gravity; Einstein proved everyone wrong.) Moral realism demands that we admit people can be mistaken about their moral beliefs, just as they can be mistaken about other beliefs.

But these are not the only way to infer from “is” to “ought”, and there are many ways to make such inferences that are in fact perfectly valid. For instance, I know at least two ways to validly prove moral claims from nonmoral claims. The first is by conjunctive addition: “2+2=4, therefore 2+2=4 or genocide is wrong”. The second is by contradictory explosion: “2+2=5, therefore genocide is wrong”. Both of these arguments are logically valid. Obviously they are also quite trivial; “genocide is wrong” could be replaced by any other conceivable proposition (even a contradiction!), leaving an equally valid argument. Still, we have validly derived a moral statement from nonmoral statements, while obeying the laws of logic.

Moreover, it is clearly rational to infer a certain kind of “ought” from statements that entirely involve facts. For instance, it is rational to reason, “If you are cold, you ought to close the window”. This is an instrumental “ought” (it says what it is useful to do, given the goals that you have), not a moral “ought” (which would say what goals you should have in the first place). Hence, this is not really inferring moral claims from non-moral claims, since the “ought” isn’t really a moral “ought” at all; if the ends are immoral the means will be immoral too. (It would be equally rational in this instrumental sense to say, “If you want to destroy the world, you ought to get control of the nuclear launch codes”.) In fact this kind of instrumental rationality—doing what accomplishes our goals—actually gets us quite far in defining moral norms for real human beings; but clearly it does not get us far enough.

Finally, and most importantly, epistemic normativity, which any rational being must accept, is itself an inference from “is” to “ought”; it involves inferences like “Is it raining, therefore you ought to believe it is raining.”

With these considerations in mind, we must carefully rephrase Hume’s remark, to something like this:

One cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive moral statements from entirely nonmoral statements.

This is indeed correct; but here the word “moral” carries no weight and could be replaced by almost anything. One cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive physical statements from entirely nonphysical statements, nor nontrivially with logical certainty derive statements about fish from statements that are entirely not about fish. For all X, one cannot nontrivially with logical certainty derive statements about X from statements entirely unrelated to X. This is an extremely general truth. We could very well make it a logical axiom. In fact, if we do so, we pretty much get relevance logic, which takes the idea of “nontrivial” proofs to the extreme of actually considering trivial proofs invalid. Most logicians don’t go so far—they say that “2+2=5, therefore genocide is wrong” is technically a valid argument—but everyone agrees that such arguments are pointless and silly. In any case the word “moral” carries no weight here; it is no harder to derive an “ought” from an “is” than it is to derive a “fish” from a “molecule”.

Moreover, the claim that nonmoral propositions can never validly influence moral propositions is clearly false; the argument “Killing is wrong, shooting someone will kill them, therefore shooting someone is wrong” is entirely valid, and the moral proposition “shooting someone is wrong” is derived in large part from the nonmoral proposition “shooting someone will kill them”. In fact, the entire Frege-Geach argument against expressivism hinges upon the fact that we all realize that moral propositions function logically the same way as nonmoral propositions, and can interact with nonmoral propositions in all the usual ways. Even expressivists usually do not deny this; they simply try to come up with ways of rescuing expressivism despite this observation.

There are also ways of validly deriving moral propositions from entirely nonmoral propositions, in an approximate or probabilistic fashion. “Genocide causes a great deal of suffering and death, and almost everyone who has ever lived has agreed that suffering and death are bad and that genocide is wrong, therefore genocide is probably wrong” is a reasonably sound probabilistic argument that infers a moral conclusion based on entirely nonmoral premises, though it lacks the certainty of a logical proof.

We could furthermore take as axiom some definition of moral concepts in terms of nonmoral concepts, and then derive consequences of this definition with logical certainty. “A morally right action maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain. Genocide fails to maximize pleasure or minimize pain. Therefore genocide is not morally right.” Obviously one is free to challenge the definition, but that’s true of many different types of philosophical arguments, not a specific problem in arguments about morality.

So what exactly was Hume trying to say? I’m really not sure. Maybe he has in mind the sort of naive arguments that infer from “unnatural” to “wrong”; if so, he’s surely correct, but the argument does little to undermine any serious naturalistic theories of morality.

Moral progress and moral authority

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Dec 8 JDN 2460653

In previous posts I’ve written about why religion is a poor source of morality. But it’s worse than that. Religion actually holds us back morally. It is because of religion that our society grants the greatest moral authority to precisely the people and ideas which have most resisted moral progress. Most religious people are good, well-intentioned people—but religious authorities are typically selfish, manipulative, Machiavellian leaders who will say or do just about anything to maintain power. They have trained us to respect and obey them without question; they even call themselves “shepherds” and us the “flock”, as if we were not autonomous humans but obedient ungulates.

I’m sure that most of my readers are shocked that I would assert such a thing; surely priests and imams are great, holy men who deserve our honor and respect? The evidence against such claims is obvious. We only believe such things because the psychopaths have told us to believe them.

I am not saying that these evil practices are inherent to religion—they aren’t. Other zealous, authoritarian ideologies, like Communism and fascism, have been just as harmful for many of the same reasons. Rather, I am saying that religion gives authority and respect to people who would otherwise not have it, people who have long histories of evil, selfish, and exploitative behavior. For a particularly striking example, Catholicism as an idea is false and harmful, but not nearly as harmful as the Catholic Church as an institution, which has harbored some of the worst criminals in history.

The Catholic Church hierarchy is quite literally composed of a cadre of men who use tradition and rhetoric to extort billions of dollars from the poor and who have gone to great lengths to defend men who rape children—a category of human being that normally is so morally reviled that even thieves and murderers consider them beyond the pale of human society. Pope Ratzinger himself, formerly the most powerful religious leader in the world, has been connected with the coverup based on a letter he wrote in 1985. The Catholic Church was also closely tied to Nazi Germany and publicly celebrated Hitler’s birthday for many years; there is evidence that the Vatican actively assisted in the exodus of Nazi leaders along “ratlines” to South America. More recently the Church once again abetted genocide, when in Rwanda it turned away refugees and refused to allow prosecution against any of the perpetrators who were affiliated with the Catholic Church. Yes, that’s right; the Vatican has quite literally been complicit in the worst moral crimes human beings have ever committed. Embezzlement of donations and banning of life-saving condoms seem rather beside the point once we realize that these men and their institutions have harbored genocidaires and child rapists. I can scarcely imagine a more terrible source of moral authority.

Most people respect evangelical preachers, like Jerry Falwell who blamed 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on feminists, gays, and secularists, then retracted the statement about 9/11 when he realized how much it had offended people. These people have concepts of morality that were antiquated in the 19th century; they base their ethical norms on books that were written by ignorant and cultish nomads thousands of years ago. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 indeed condemn homosexuality, but Leviticus 19:27 condemns shaving and Leviticus 11:9-12 says that eating fish is fine but eating shrimp is evil. By the way, Leviticus 11:21-22 seems to say that locusts have only four legs, when they very definitely have six and you can see this by looking at one. (I cannot emphasize this enough: Don’t listen to what people say about the book, read the book.)

But we plainly don’t respect scientists or philosophers to make moral and political decisions. If we did, we would have enacted equal rights for LGBT people sometime around 1898 when the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded or at least by 1948 when Alfred Kinsey showed how common, normal, and healthy homosexuality is. Democracy and universal suffrage (for men at least) would have been the norm shortly after 1689 when Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government. Women would have been granted the right to vote in 1792 upon the publication of Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, instead of in 1920 after a long and painful political battle. Animal rights would have become law in 1789 with the publication of Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. We should have been suspicious of slavery since at least Kant if not Socrates, but instead it took until the 19th century for slavery to finally be banned. We owe the free world to moral science; but nonetheless we rarely listen to the arguments of moral scientists. As a species we fight for our old traditions even in the face of obvious and compelling evidence to the contrary, and this holds us back—far back. If they haven’t sunk in yet, read these dates again: Society is literally about 200 years behind the cutting edge of moral science. Imagine being 200 years behind in technology; you would be riding horses instead of flying in jet airliners and writing letters with quills instead of texting on your iPhone. Imagine being 200 years behind in ecology; you would be considering the environmental impact of not photovoltaic panels or ethanol but whale oil. This is how far behind we are in moral science.

One subfield of moral science has done somewhat better: The economics of theory and the economics of practice differ by only about 100 years. Capitalism really was instituted on a large scale only a few decades after Adam Smith argued for it, and socialism (while horrifyingly abused in the Communism of Lenin and Stalin) has nonetheless been implemented on a wide scale only a century after Marx. Keynesian stimulus was international policy (despite its numerous detractors) in 2008 and 2020, and Keynes himself died in only 1946. This process is still slower than it probably should be, but at least we aren’t completely ignoring new advances the way we do in ethics. 100 years behind in technology we would have cars and electricity at least.

Except perhaps in economics, in general we entrust our moral claims to the authority of men in tall hats and ornate robes who merely assert their superiority and ties to higher knowledge, while ignoring the thousands of others who actually apply their reason and demonstrate knowledge and expertise. A criminal in pretty robes who calls himself a moral leader might as well be a moral leader, as far as we’re concerned; a genuinely wise teacher of morality who isn’t arrogant enough to assert special revelation from the divine is instead ignored. Why do we do this? Religion. Religion is holding us back.

We need to move beyond religion in order to make real and lasting moral progress.

More on religion

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Dec 8 JDN 2460653

Reward and punishment

In previous posts I’ve argued that religion can make people do evil and that religious beliefs simply aren’t true.

But there is another reason to doubt religion as a source of morality: There is no reason to think that obeying God is a particularly good way of behaving, even if God is in fact good. If you are obeying God because he will reward you, you aren’t really being moral at all; you are being selfish, and just by accident doing good things. If everyone acted that way, good things would get done; but it clearly misses what we mean when we talk about morality. To be moral is to do good because it is good, not because you will be rewarded for doing it. This becomes even clearer when we consider the following question: If you weren’t rewarded, would you still do good? If not, then you aren’t really a good person.

In fact, it’s ironic that proponents of naturalistic and evolutionary accounts of morality are often accused of cheapening morality because we explain it using selfish genes and memes; traditional religious accounts of morality are directly based on selfishness, not for my genes or my memes, but for me myself! It’s legitimate to question whether someone who acts out of a sense of empathy that ultimately evolved to benefit their ancestors’ genes is really being moral (why I think so requires essentially the rest of this book to argue); but clearly someone who acts out of the desire to be rewarded later isn’t! Selfish genes may or may not make good people; but selfish people clearly aren’t good people.

Even if religion makes people act more morally (and the evidence on that is quite mixed), that doesn’t make it true. If I could convince everyone that John Stuart Mill was a prophet of God, this world would be a paradise; but that would be a lie, because John Stuart Mill was a brilliant man and nothing more. The belief that Santa Claus is watching no doubt makes some children behave better around Christmas, but this is not evidence for flying reindeer. In fact, the children who behave just fine without the threat of coal in their stockings are better children, aren’t they? For the same reason, people who do good for the sake of goodness are better people than those who do it out of hope for Heaven and fear of Hell.

There are cases in which false beliefs might make people do more good, because the false beliefs provide a more obvious, but wrong reason for doing something that is actually good for less obvious, but actually correct reasons. Believing that God requires you to give to charity might motivate you to give more to charity; but charity is good not because God demands it, but because there are billions of innocent people suffering around the world. Maybe we should for this reason be careful about changing people’s beliefs; someone who believes a lie but does the right thing is still better than someone who believes the truth but acts wrongly. If people think that without God there is no morality, then telling them that there is no God may make them abandon morality. This is precisely why I’m not simply telling readers that there is no God: I am also spending this entire chapter explaining why we don’t need God for morality. I’d much rather you be a moral theist than an immoral atheist; but I’m trying to make you a moral atheist.

The problem with holy texts

Even if God actually existed, and were actually good, and commanded us to do things, we do not have direct access to God’s commandments. If you are not outright psychotic, you must acknowledge this; God does not speak to us directly. If anything, he has written or inspired particular books, which have then been translated and interpreted over centuries by many different people and institutions. There is a fundamental problem in deciding which books have been written or inspired by God; not only does the Bible differ from the Qur’an, which differs from the Bhagavad-Gita, which differs from other holy texts; worse, particular chapters and passages within each book differ from one another on significant moral questions, sometimes on the foundational principles of morality itself.

For instance, let’s consider the Bible, because this is the holy book in greatest favor in modern Western culture. Should we use a law of retribution, a lex talionis, as in Exodus 21? Or should we instead forgive our enemies, as in Matthew 5? Perhaps we should treat others as we would like to be treated, as in Luke 6? Are rape and genocide commanded by God, as in 1 Samuel 15, Numbers 31, and Deuteronomy 20-21, or is murder always a grave crime, as in Exodus 20? Is even anger a grave sin, as in Matthew 5? Is it a crime to engage in male-male sex, as in Leviticus 18? Then, is it then also a crime to shave beards and wear mixed-fiber clothing, as in Leviticus 19? Is it just to punish descendants for the crimes of their ancestors, as in Genesis 9, or is it only fair to punish the specific perpetrators, as in Deuteronomy 24? Is adultery always immoral, as in Exodus 20, or does God sometimes command it, as in Hosea 1? Must homosexual men be killed, as in Leviticus 20, or is it enough to exile them, as in 1 Kings 15? A thorough reading of the Bible shows hundreds of moral contradictions and thousands of moral absurdities. (This is not even to mention the factual contradictions and absurdities.)

Similar contradictions and absurdities can be found in the Qur’an and other texts. Since most of my readers will come from Christian cultures, for my purposes I think brief examples will suffice. The Qur’an at times says that Christians are deserving of the same rights as Muslims, and at other times declares Christians so evil that they ought to be put to the sword. (Most of the time it says something in between, that “People of the Book”, ahl al-Kitab, as Jews and Christians are known, are inferior to Muslims but nonetheless deserving of rights.) The Bhagavad-Gita at times argues for absolute nonviolence, and at times declares an obligation to fight in war. The Dharmas and the Dao De Jing are full of contradictions, about everything from meaning to justice to reincarnation (in fact, many Buddhists and Taoists freely admit this, and try to claim that non-contradiction is overrated—which is literally talking nonsense). The Book of Mormon claims the canonicity of texts that it explicitly contradicts.

And above all, we have no theological basis for deciding which parts of which holy books we should follow, and which we should reject—for they all have many sects with many followers, and they all declare with the same intensity of clamor and absence of credibility that they are the absolute truth of a perfect God. To decide which books to trust and which to ignore, we have only a rational basis, founded upon reason and science—but then, we can’t help but take a rational approach to morality in general. If it were glaringly obvious which holy text was written by God, and its message were clear and coherent, perhaps we could follow such a book—but given the multitude of religions and sects and denominations in the world, all mutually-contradictory and most even self-contradictory, each believed with just as much fervor as the last, how obvious can the answer truly be?

One option would be to look for the things that are not contradicted, the things that are universal across religions and texts. In truth these things are few and far between; one sect’s monstrous genocide is another’s holy duty. But it is true that certain principles appear in numerous places and times, a signal of universality amidst the noise of cultural difference: Fairness and reciprocity, as in the Golden Rule; honesty and fidelity; forbiddance of theft and murder. There are examples of religious beliefs and holy texts that violate these rules—including the Bible and the Qur’an—but the vast majority of people hold to these propositions, suggesting that there is some universal truth that has been recognized here. In fact, the consensus in favor of these values is far stronger than the consensus in favor of recognized scientific facts like the shape of the Earth and the force of gravity. While for most of history most people had no idea how old the Earth was and many people still seem to think it is a mere 6,000 years old, there has never been a human culture on record that thought it acceptable to murder people arbitrarily.

But notice how these propositions are not tied to any particular religion or belief; indeed, nearly all atheists, including me, also accept these ideas. Moreover, it is possible to find these principles contradicted in the very books that religious people claim as the foundation of their beliefs. This is strong evidence that religion has nothing to do with it—these principles are part of a universal human nature, or better yet, they may even be necessary truths that would hold for any rational beings in any possible universe. If Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists all agree that murder is wrong, then it must not be necessary to hold any specific religion—or any at all—in order to agree that murder is wrong.

Indeed, holy texts are so full of absurdities and atrocities that the right thing to do is to completely and utterly repudiate holy texts—especially the Bible and the Qur’an.

If you say you believe in one of these holy texts, you’re either a good person but a hypocrite because you aren’t following the book; or you can be consistent in following the book, but you’ll end up being a despicable human being. Obviously I much prefer the former—but why not just give up the damn book!? Why is it so important to you to say that you believe in this particular book? You can still believe in God if you want! If God truly exists and is benevolent, it should be patently obvious that he couldn’t possibly have written a book as terrible as the Bible or the Qur’an. Obviously those were written by madmen who had no idea what God is truly like.

The afterlife

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Dec 1 JDN 2460646

Super-human beings aren’t that strange a thing to posit, but they are the sort of thing we’d expect to see clear evidence of if they existed. Without them, prayer is a muddled concept that is difficult to distinguish from simply “things that don’t work”. That leaves the afterlife. Could there be an existence for human consciousness after death?

No. There isn’t. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s really that unequivocal. It is customary in most discussions of this matter to hedge and fret and be “agnostic” about what might lie beyond the grave—but in fact the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.

Everything we know about neuroscience—literally everything—would have to be abandoned in order for an afterlife to make sense. The core of neuroscience, the foundation from which the entire field is built, is what I call the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: you are your brain. It is your brain that feels, your brain that thinks, your brain that dreams, your brain that remembers. We do not yet understand most of these processes in detail—though some we actually do, such as the processing of visual images. But it doesn’t take an expert mechanic to know that removing the engine makes the car stop running. It doesn’t take a brilliant electrical engineer to know that smashing the CPU makes the computer stop working. Saying that your mind continues to work without your brain is like saying that you can continue to digest without having a stomach or intestines.

This fundamental truth underlies everything we know about the science of consciousness. It can even be directly verified in a piecemeal form: There are specific areas of your brain that, when damaged, will cause you to become blind, or unable to understand language, or unable to speak grammatically (those are two distinct areas), or destroy your ability to form new memories or recall old ones, or even eliminate your ability to recognize faces. Most terrifying of all—yet by no means surprising to anyone who really appreciates the Basic Fact—is the fact that damage to certain parts of your brain will even change your personality, often making you impulsive, paranoid or cruel, literally making you a worse person. More surprising and baffling is the fact that cutting your brain down the middle into left and right halves can split you into two people, each of whom operates half of your body (the opposite half, oddly enough), who mostly agree on things and work together but occasionally don’t. All of these are people we can actually interact with in laboratories, and (except for language deficits of course) talk to them about their experiences. It’s true that we can’t ask people what it’s like when their whole brain is dead, but of course not; there’s nobody left to ask.

This means that if you take away all the functions that experiments have shown require certain brain parts to function, whatever “soul” is left that survives brain death cannot do any of the following: See, hear, speak, understand, remember, recognize faces, or make moral decisions. In what sense is that worth calling a “soul”? In what sense is that you? Those are just the ones we know for sure; as our repertoire expands, more and more cognitive functions will be mapped to specific brain regions. And of course there’s no evidence that anything survives whatsoever.

Nor are near-death experiences any kind of evidence of an afterlife. Yes, some people who were close to dying or briefly technically dead (“He’s only mostly dead!”) have had very strange experiences during that time. Of course they did! Of course you’d have weird experiences as your brain is shutting down or struggling to keep itself online. Think about a computer that has had a magnet run over its hard drive; all sorts of weird glitches and errors are going to occur. (In fact, powerful magnets can have an effect on humans not all that dissimilar from what weaker magnets can do to computers! Certain sections of the brain can be disrupted or triggered in this way; it’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation and it’s actually a promising therapy for some neurological and psychological disorders.) People also have a tendency to over-interpret these experiences as supporting their particular religion, when in fact it’s usually something no more complicated than “a bright light” or “a long tunnel” (another popular item is “positive feelings”). If you stop and think about all the different ways you might come to see “a bright light” and have “positive feelings”, it should be pretty obvious that this isn’t evidence of St. Paul and the Pearly Gates.

The evidence against an afterlife is totally overwhelming. The fact that when we die, we are gone, is among the most certain facts in science. So why do people cling to this belief? Probably because it’s comforting—or rather because the truth that death is permanent and irrevocable is terrifying. You’re damn right it is; it’s basically the source of all other terror, in fact. But guess what? “Terrifying” does not mean “false”. The idea of an afterlife may be comforting, but it’s still obviously not true.

While I was in the process of writing this book, my father died of a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. The event was sudden and unexpected, and by the time I was able to fly from California to Michigan to see him, he had already lost consciousness—for what would turn out to be forever. This event caused me enormous grief, grief from which I may never fully recover. Nothing would make me happier than knowing that he was not truly gone, that he lives on somewhere watching over me. But alas, I know it is not true. He is gone. Forever.

However, I do have a couple of things to say that might offer some degree of consolation:

First, because human minds are software, pieces of our loved ones do go on—in us. Our memories of those we have lost are tiny shards of their souls. When we tell stories about them to others, we make copies of those shards; or to use a more modern metaphor, we back up their data in the cloud. Were we to somehow reassemble all these shards together, we could not rebuild the whole person—there are always missing pieces. But it is also not true that nothing remains. What we have left is how they touched our lives. And when we die, we will remain in how we touch the lives of others. And so on, and so on, as the ramifications of our deeds in life and the generations after us ripple out through the universe at the speed of light, until the end of time.

Moreover, if there’s no afterlife there can be no Hell, and Hell is literally the worst thing imaginable. To subject even a single person—even the most horrible person who ever lived, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, whomever—to the experience of maximum possible suffering forever is an atrocity of incomparable magnitude. Hitler may have deserved a million years of suffering for what he did—but I’m not so sure about maximum suffering, and forever is an awful lot longer than a million years. Indeed, forever is so much longer than a million years that if your sentence is forever, then after serving a million years you still have as much left to go as when you began. But the Bible doesn’t even just say that the most horrible mass murderers will go to Hell; no, it says everyone will go to Hell by default, and deserve it, and can only be forgiven if we believe. No amount of good works will save us from this fate, only God’s grace.

If you believe this—or even suspect it—religion has caused you deep psychological damage. This is the theology of an abusive father—“You must do exactly as I say, or you are worthless and undeserving of love and I will hurt you and it will be all your fault.” No human being, no matter what they have done or failed to do, could ever possibly deserve a punishment as terrible as maximum possible suffering forever. Even if you’re a serial rapist and murderer—and odds are, you’re not—you still don’t deserve to suffer forever. You have lived upon this planet for only a finite time; you can therefore only have committed finitely many crimes and you can only deserve at most finite suffering. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population is comprised of good, decent people who deserve joy, not suffering.

Indeed, many ethicists would say that nobody deserves suffering, it is simply a necessary evil that we use as a deterrent from greater harms. I’m actually not sure I buy this—if you say that punishment is all about deterrence and not about desert, then you end up with the result that anything which deters someone could count as a fair punishment, even if it’s inflicted upon someone else who did nothing wrong. But no ethicist worthy of the name believes that anybody deserves eternal punishment—yet this is what Jesus says we all deserve in the Bible. And Muhammad says similar things in the Qur’an, about lakes of eternal burning (4:56) and eternal boiling water to drink (47:15) and so on. It’s entirely understandable that such things would motivate you—indeed, they should motivate you completely to do just about anything—if you believed they were true. What I don’t get is why anybody would believe they are true. And I certainly don’t get why anyone would be willing to traumatize their children with these horrific lies.

Then there is Pascal’s Wager: An infinite punishment can motivate you if it has any finite probability, right? Theoretically, yes… but here’s the problem with that line of reasoning: Anybody can just threaten you with infinite punishment to make you do anything. Clearly something is wrong with your decision theory if any psychopath can just make you do whatever he wants because you’re afraid of what might happen just in case what he says might possibly be true. Beware of plausible-seeming theories that lead to such absurd conclusions; it may not be obvious what’s wrong with the argument, but it should be obvious that something is.