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Theory of Evolution
Topics about the theory of evolution
Book Review – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett
Feb 11th
The four aitia… That is what Aristotle used as tools of mind in order to fully understand all that is understandable about anything in the universe. For example, you want to know what a hammer is? Well, you’ll just have to ask yourself what is the material cause of this object, or what is it made of; that’s an easy answer: it’s made of wood and iron, maybe cured steel or another high rigidity/resistance metal. After this, you’ll have to ask yourself what is the formal cause of this object called hammer, or what is its architecture, its design, how do all its elements hang on to each other, and what are its most inner workings; for a hammer this shouldn’t be a hard question to answer: the wooden rigid stick, which is tailor made for grabbing with one or two hands, is firmly attached to the metallic compact solid mass which represents the hammer head that comes in many forms and sizes depending on what the hammer was designed to do. And here we are at the third question we might ask about this object, and that is what is its efficient cause, who or what natural or artificial industrial process created this object; that’s an easy answer, right?! Yes, a interesting answer for an interesting question, but not as interesting as the last aitia…
What is the final cause of this object? What’s it made for? Well, even though it was designed for a specific purpose like driving nails, forging metal, fitting parts, and breaking up objects, its reason d’etre could be as various as human nature. Who hasn’t heard about Hell’s Angels favorite weapon, the ball pean hammer?! It’s as sexy and dangerous as it can be useful in the house. This reason d’etre, the purpose, the meaning of things stays at the heart of Dennett’s undertaking. Even though we start with hammers and simple things we will finally dodge the most sacred of mysteries… the origin of man, the meaning of life. How will Dennett manage to derive meaning, purpose from nature’s red in tooth and claw, that’s an answer you’ll find by reading the book. Here, we will skim through the ideas of the thinkers that lived before Darwin which laid down the most beautiful but least understood – by friend or foe – scientific theory that ever existed. Beautiful, but what dreadful implications to our human existence it had!
Hell's Angels Ball-Pean Hammer
For reasons easy to understand, much of the answers about the origin and the meaning of life have been bedeviled by naive assumptions and too much irrational wishful thinking. The why questions have been replaced by how questions with the hope that maybe the answer to the latter one would somehow yield a spark of intellectual brilliance that would solve the conundrums of the first… but what a coward way to avoid answering the main problem this treacherous and avoiding road would prove to be!
How did the thinkers before Darwin explain the complexity of nature? John Locke goes at the heart of what many of today’s uneducated users of science and technology still think it’s common sense. Consider for example his following phrase: “So if we will suppose nothing first, or eternal: Matter can never begin to be: If we suppose bare Mater, without Motion, eternal: Motion can never begin to be: If we suppose only Matter and Motion first, or eternal: Thought can never begin to be. For it is impossible to conceive that Matter either with or without Motion could have originally in and from itself Sense, Perception, and Knowledge, as is evident from hence, that then Sense, Perception, and Knowledge, must be a property eternally inseparable from Matter and every particle of it.”
The simple error in logic of the above statement muddled the meme complex of explanations that tried to explain the reason for man’s existence and for the causes of life and complexity. The fact of the matter is that to assume that something complex must derive from something more complex than the thing we’ve started to explain leads of course to a God that has a creator, this assuming we’re not going to throw away the logic in the middle of the argument; that is, the God of God has a God and so on ’till eternity. What is that? Plain bullshit, if you ask me !
So, we needn’t use this kind of recursivity because the scientific evidence proves that nature works the other way around: complex things evolve from things that are not so complex. It’s more like a construction project coordinated by blind and purposeless forces in which cranes build by nature assemble less complex natural systems into more complex ones that have greater degrees of freedom. We don’t have to postulate sky-hooks, that is, god given metaphysical helping hands that defy scientific explanation, because there is a lot that we can explain without taking this road. As Darwin put it, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.
DARWIN’S DANGEROUS IDEA – Check Reviews on Amazon.com
DARWIN’S DANGEROUS IDEA – Check Reviews on Amazon.co.uk
Much of Dennett’s book is directed at explaining the above logic, but don’t worry; things start to get more fiery in the end once we start to reverse engineer the most complex of cranes: the memes and their most intricate and time consuming effects on the human mind : the quest for meaning, purpose and the perfect ethical algorithm. This i think, is the most interesting part of the book. Dennett deconstructs the erroneous assumption/intuition that makes us think there is a real meaning, a real purpose in life, a perfect ethical course of action that anyone can take. The reality is that there is no real meaning just like there is no real self, (see here), there is no real purpose in life just because there are no sky-hooks; there are cranes that serve distinct natural systems that have distinct interests which will more than likely conflict with each other. Just like Richard Dawkins put it, in this battle “blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Do you want to go deep down the rabbit whole? Then read this book !
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Two tips on critical thinking – Always asking questions and how to get the right answers
Oct 9th
Blessed be the evolution of language and the environmental triggers which contrived its architecture! Language made possible the appearance of coherent, highly social, and clever groups of hominids acting as a single intelligent entity which could more easily foresight mother nature’s squeamish evolutionary roadblocks. As an individual that was part of that group you could more than likely increase your chances of survival by communicating complex information with the other members of the tribe; this complexity in the transfer of information could have only be achieved by the knack of language architecture. Tool building skills, hunting skills, food gathering skills, and cultural memes, you could easily have access to by learning to use the already evolved language circuitry of your brain.
Although some may see language just as a tool used in order to communicate to others the already complex thinking dynamics of our brain, conversely, we can easily find reasons to ponder on language’s gift of speeding up and stimulating thinking instead. What if language’s talent was to spark the creativeness, to provide “food for thought”, to create the architecture of thinking? What if real thinking was non-existent before the evolution of complex language? What if the evolution of language was the main cause, the main artificer, for the appearance of highly intelligent hominids and not the other way around? Or could it be that I’m exaggerating by completely reversing the real state of affairs, thus being sucked in another “Chicken or Egg?” evolutionary conundrum? Either way, language still remains a major fuel source for our brain without which brilliant minds and creative thinkers would be as rare as hen’s teeth.
The thoughts we have, the good ideas, the bad ideas, the sometimes wonderful stories we have to tell, they’re all smeared in the voluminous neuronal circuitry of the brain by specialized content fixation mechanisms, that, by the nature of brain’s architecture and wiring, we could rarely get them to coherently coalesce, to fully aggregate with one another using its internally operating mechanisms. The real way they sex each other is by means of language. Say, two ideas belonging to the same mind need to merge with each other but the current neural wiring makes it impossible for them to meet; so, one of those ideas is transferred verbally into someone else’s brain, it is processed, and then the result of that computation, that is, the same idea but slightly altered, easily molded into another format is then returned into the brain of the communication initiator. Now, because the idea is now slightly modified it may more easily find a neural path leading to the idea which it was impossible to reach a few moments ago. (see illustration).
Now, if talking to others helps us gather our thoughts, clear our mind, and spark creativeness, then why shouldn’t talking to oneself achieve the same tactical benefit? In 1960, E.M. Forster cleverly summoned the above : “How can i tell what i think until i see what i say?“. In 1991, in Consciousness Explained, Dennet said that “pushing some information through one’s ears and auditory system may well happen to stimulate just the sorts of connections one is seeking…“; by talking to oneself your thoughts become more coherent, more interconnected, and more importantly they become the artificers of new thoughts, new ideas, sometimes brilliant ones.
So how should one talk to himself in order to bootstrap the all-too-needed creativeness software? More than likely simply mumbling nonsensical words will not spark the plug of any creative thinking, but maybe asking questions relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve will perhaps have this desired effect. Aristotle had four questions that he used to ask about everything there was: the four aitia. He wanted to know the material cause of something, that is, the stuff from which that entity is made of; the efficient cause or what brought about the entity into existence; the formal cause or questions about that entity’s architecture, structure, or shape; and the final cause, that is, what is the purpose of the entity in the world. From so simple questions, forms of inquiring so manifestly complex and lucrative will easily start to evolve in your brain.
If asking questions may be the correct way to get the engines running, how are we to be able to speed up this process and manage not to get stuck unwillingly into a mental cul de sac? If the answers to the questions we address to ourselves are not readily available how are we to appease our mental hunger? As I’ve stated in a recent article, following a sufficient amount of channels of information and at the same time maintaining a good dose of skepticism towards all these dispensers of memes and temes, even though that dose’s measure will have to be tuned to the credibility of the source, will give you the gift of being one step ahead in the race to find out the truth.
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Hardcore exemplification of the Selfish Gene Theory in the world of finance, and why does altruism work only on similar layers of power
Sep 19th
“Half of the world’s wealth is owned by two percent of the population“, and the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and wider. What more evidence do you want in order for you to accept the inherently selfish nature of every human being? We’re not going to abide by the conspiracy theorists’ thesis which states that these wealthy men are evil conspirators set up to destroy the world, are we? So, how are we going to explain this architecture in the distribution of wealth and power that we see nowdays?
Richard Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” taught us a great lesson: Every organism on this planet should and will act only in the interest of its selfish replicators, its genes. Although in the ending of the book Dawkins tries to redeem the faux pas with his chapter on memes, its overall message is blunt and clear: Cooperation between individuals is a characteristic that evolves only if the net payoff of that social contract is greater that the net loss of non-cooperation (defection). That means that you spread more of your selfish genes mostly when you cooperate with and help your close kin, and a little bit when you develop social bonds with individuals that you don’t relate with that much but that may provide you access to resources in the exchange of you providing them also at a later time. Resources may represent food, water, land, females, etc. These are the true motives of cooperation.
With the evolution of complex social systems, specialized social organizations started developing. Tribes, countries, governments, unions, churches, political parties, free trade organizations, and of course corporations. You don’t think all of these societal or economic megaliths work together for the benefit of the whole planet do you? Don’t be fooled by the woulda-coulda-shouldas that took too naive sociology classes in their college. These social constructs are interconnected in a complex network in which the cooperation of two entities means the peril and suffering of another. Energy just flows. It’s neither created, nor destroyed. Why shouldn’t giant corporations make massive profits for themselves and their employees (just like the leader of a tribe would profit from other tribes in order to help his closer kin) at the expense of individuals that are not part of that corporation (i.e. not part of the tribe)? The smart thing each and every corporation should do is to try, at first, to annihilate all the competition located on the same societal strata (other corporations), and if that fails try to cooperate with it. And this exactly what you see: Corporations merging with each other while others file bankruptcy, bank cartels that indebt whole nations, teams of nations going to war with each other for resources. Isn’t the picture already clear enough?
The main point i’m trying to make is that there is no inherently biological good for the species, good for the ecosystem mechanism programmed into our behavior. Group Selection Theory, as stated in The Selfish Gene, is a chimera. Countries, Corporations, Bankers, through the individuals within, will fight or cooperate with each other in order to suck the juice out of as much of the other entities as they can. Arms races develop. Groups of individuals get better and better at defending themselves or profiting from other groups, while the weak ones die along with their constitutive elements, the people.
Evidence for what i’m saying? How can you explain that while the world’s resources are getting depleted at a rate unimaginable in the past, the demand keeps blithely increasing? Growth, growth, growth is on every politician’s lips. Yeah, he has no problem to fool its sheep in order to get an easy vote. And why should he care? By the time the whole world is going to suffer from famine, he’s already dead, he’s already had the party of his life. Peak oil is waiting around the corner. Yet, you don’t see and politician, corporation, or country acknowledge that. Why is that? Again, each entity tries to maximize it’s profits in the short term, never bothering with the energy bereft planet that our children, their children, will inherit in the near future.
Is there any chance any of this will change? Maybe. But, until then let us just face reality. You just watch Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) by James Scurlock, the chronicles of abusive practices in the credit card industry, and you tell me how is this planet going to solve its energy issue when it couldn’t even stop the selfish bank cartels indebt sovereign countries by printing money out of nothing, and lending people’s money to themselves? You may have the answer, i don’t!
Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) is an independent feature-length documentary film which exposes abusive, selfish practices in the credit card industry. Written and directed by James Scurlock, the film uses interviews with creditors, debtors, academics, and others to illustrate its blunt story. The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, USA, in 2006 where it claimed the Special Jury Prize. It went on to several film fests including Bergen, Maui, Seattle, Full Frame Documentary, New Zealand, Milwaukee International, Woodstock, Leeds International, Oxford and IDFA film festivals.
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Terrorism Deception – Why religion’s blinding faithfulness is not the only to be blamed for terrorism’s atrocities
Sep 3rd
Are terrorists just straight out nuts, religious fanatics with only one goal in mind: to destroy every other religion? Or, are they some particular type of people who just so happened to be infected with the wrong kind of meme: RELIGION?
Liberty is the prevention of control by others. Living in a time when Big Brother starts to invade our lives, and some of conspiracy theorists’ “absurd” tales come to be true, addressing the above problem might help us cut its root not doctor its effects. Prevention is better than cure; prevention of terrorism is better than letting Big Brother handle the issue afterwards. We need to know what makes a human being become a terrorist in order to not lose our freedoms.
In a 2009 Paper, and in a 2010 addendum to that paper, Ginges, Hansen, and Norenzayan compared two hypothesis: the religious-belief hypothesis and the coalitional-commitment hypothesis in order to find out the exact reasons that push suicide terrorists to such extreme measures. The religious-belief hypothesis, if we were to quote their paper exactly, is somehow caused by “…devotion to religious belief which encourages suicide attacks, because, for example, religious belief might lead to hatred of non-believers…”; so, simple and outright hatred of non-believers caused by the devotion to religious belief as a whole should be the main artificer (no joke here), the start of the causal chain which leads to suicide terrorism.
On the other hand, if we consider the other hypothesis, the coalitional-commitment hypothesis, which quoted again states that “…frequent attendance in collective religious ritual might facilitate positive attitude towards parochial altruism in general and, in relevant contexts, suicide attacks in particular.“, we find out that suicide terrorism may be simply caused by sheer devotion to the group in which frequent attendance to collective religious rituals take place quite often so that potential suicide terrorists get sucked into what is called “parochial altruism”, that is, an extreme case of altruism where the perpetrator kills himself in order to kill as many individuals of the rival group as he can.
By measuring the frequency of prayer in order to get a hint about the religious devotion of several religious groups, and the frequency of attendance at the synagogue, mosque, and church, the researchers reached a dubious conclusion. No link was found between frequency of prayer and parochial altruism, and more to this, no link was found between frequency of prayer and suicide terrorism. Instead, strong causal relations between frequency of attendance at the synagogue and parochial altruism/suicide terrorism sprouted from their study. To make this more clear, the researchers found no evidence to prove that the more you prayed, that is, the more you were devoted to the religious belief system, the more likely it was you would commit suicide terrorism; nor did it prove that increased prayer frequency breed more cohesion between you and the religious group as a whole so as to make you kill other individuals belonging to rival religious groups. Instead, the sheer frequent attendance to collective religious rituals which increases within-group cooperation, no matter how devoted you were to that religion’s beliefs, fostered and boosted your chances to become a suicide terrorist, and also the chances that you would support suicide terrorism due to increased outer-group hostility.
Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan concluded:
Since frequency of attendance at sites of collective religious ritual always strongly predicted support for suicide attacks but frequency of prayer never did, we concluded that our results strongly supported the coalitional commitment hypothesis, but failed to support the religious belief hypothesis. We also argued that this more broadly implies that any relationship between religion and suicide attacks may be independent of devotion to specific religious creeds and instead is a function of the way religions help to bind people together into communities of parochial altruists.
In the 2010 Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Premature Dismissal of the Religious-Belief Hypothesis paper, Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford thwarted the conclusions of above study by stating that the method used in order to prove that the religion-belief hypothesis is false is in fact flawed, so further studies are needed in order to clarify the issues. Scientists concluded that the premature dismissal of the religious belief hypothesis by only measuring religious devotion in general without actually disproving certain specific religious beliefs makes the inference of the Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan study come too bright and early.
Now, first of all, taking as input only religious motives when one analyzes the complex algorithm of global terrorism has pretty low chances of yielding a practical and working model for this phenomenon. We can easily find examples of extreme terrorism and suicide terrorism which an attentive non-shallow analysis will show us they have no connection with religion at all. The fact of the matter is that a high number of terrorist acts all around the world are caused by the revenge for the abusive actions inflicted by some groups onto others; the Chechen war and Chechen terrorist acts are examples of such events that easily come to anyone’s mind, even though some naive analysts might catalogue them as wars started because of religious motives. Further studies will have to address the above in conjunction with the motives presented by the Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford rebutal study.
And now a little critique only on the Ginges, Hansen and Norenzayan study. Researchers concluded that suicide terrorism may be simply caused by sheer devotion to the group in which frequent attendance to collective religious rituals take place quite often so the suicide terrorist gets sucked into what is called “parochial altruism”. I can’t find this argument as the only plausible reason for suicide terrorism because i can easily give you examples of groups in which frequent attendance to collective rituals also take place and there is no suicide terrorism taking place there, even though we may find evidence for parochial altruism. One example is UK’s soccer hooligans. They attend weekly in collective soccer rituals and they don’t commit suicide, but, and here is the glint, they do engage in public fights quite often thus proving that parochial altruism is caused by the group’s collective rituals. I think this argument can be further developed to support Liddle, Machluf and Shackelford in their attempt to show that the specificity of the religious beliefs must also be of major importance if we are to solve this mystery.
