In Defense of Robert Wright against Jerry Coyne
Jerry Coyne has a fairly scathing review of Robert Wright’s book Evolution of God in The New Republic. Coyne is an eminent evolutionary biologist, but in his review makes an enormous claim about the philosophical implications of science: that evolution through natural selection demonstrates that there is no divine plan for the universe. I think this claim is, in fact, a gigantic leap of faith unsupported by any scientific findings.
Over at the Daily Dish I try to explain why.
Jim,
Thanks for the interesting post over at the Dish (although I was under the impression there would be no math). In case you haven’t seen it, Edward Feser has a fine reconsideration of the question of purpose in nature in The Last Superstition, arguing that the early modern rejection of Aristotelian teleology was a major philosophical mistake. (By my lights, Feser’s book and David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions ought to put the “New Atheists” out of business.) Keep up the good work!
— Jeff Peterson · Sep 2, 08:37 PM · #
Our goal may be to optimize the plant’s function, but that’s not the goal of evolution. As it is famously said, I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you. Evolution doesn’t optimize; it seeks local advantage not global supremacy.
The fact that evolution doesn’t optimize – that it has no particular “interest”, in fact, of evolving the All-Around All-Star Superior Being – is the reason why 99.9% of the Earth’s total biomass has always been, and will continue to be, unicellular life. The reason that Coyne is right, the reason that evolution does shatter the idea of a divine superiority of humanity, is because we’re not superior, we’re not the apex of evolution. We (and all the rest of the metazoans) are a kind of evolutionary corner-case, a lab curiosity, a rare but ultimately short-lived mutation.
Unicellular life is and has always been the real apex of evolution.
Ultimately what you’re saying is that we live in a deterministic universe and that God, therefore, can do the math and set up the Ultimate 8-Ball In the Corner Pocket Trick Shot (as He cues up on a single neutron with a very tiny stick) and have predetermined the course of the universe and therefore evolution, all in advance.
I don’t see that this view of the universe is supportable in light of quantum mechanics. It’s a random universe, truly; not just one that appears to be so. (This is Bell’s Inequality and is irrefutable.)
— Chet · Sep 2, 09:31 PM · #
“Ultimately what you’re saying is that we live in a deterministic universe”
lawls
That is what will be known as the Manzi Paradox to future generations.
The non-determinism of the selfish genes (complexity!!!!) in a deterministic non-random universe (IDT!!!!!).
This is just another one of Manzi’s “show” arguments….it is Type A vs. Type B error.
But both sides are errors.
And Dr. Riddick isn’t really committed to either side…..he is just showing off.
— matoko_chan · Sep 2, 10:05 PM · #
While I agree with the ‘uncaused cause’ portion of your argument, I believe there to be a significant difference between your factory analogy and evolution, a difference which causes your argument to break down when extended to evolution.
In the factory analogy, the goal is to improve output and the reproduction cycle is guided by what conditions improve output. In evolution the goal is only to improve ability to reproduce. There is no fitness other than reproductive fitness. And reproductive fitness is relative to current local conditions. Thus while evolution has a ‘goal’ similar to the factory analogy, it is a local (in space-time) ‘goal’ of being more fit to reproduce rather than a ‘global’ goal.
— stein · Sep 2, 10:07 PM · #
Right. Evolution is contingent on present conditions. It can never look ahead to future conditions – which means it can’t be teleological.
— Chet · Sep 2, 10:52 PM · #
stein:
Thanks for the comment. I tried to address exactly this concern in this paragraph of the post:
— Jim Manzi · Sep 3, 02:34 AM · #
Ultimately what you’re saying is that we live in a deterministic universe and that God, therefore, can do the math and set up the Ultimate 8-Ball In the Corner Pocket Trick Shot (as He cues up on a single neutron with a very tiny stick) and have predetermined the course of the universe and therefore evolution, all in advance.
Ultimately what you’re saying, Chet, is that you have to brush up on your reading comprehension.
Ultimately (and I mean that ultimately quite literally in this case) what Dr. Manzi is saying is the following:
The theory of evolution, then, has not eliminated the problems of ultimate origins and ultimate purpose with respect to the development of organisms; it has ignored them. These problems are defined as non-scientific questions, not because we don’t care about the answers, but because attempting to solve them would impede practical progress. Accepting evolution, therefore, requires neither the denial of a Creator nor the loss of the idea of ultimate purpose. It resolves neither issue for us one way or the other. The field of philosophical speculation that does not contradict any valid scientific findings is much wider open to Wright than Coyne is willing to accept.
That seems to me a far cry from the cute caricature you made of Dr. Manzi’s point. As Matoko seems to have understood, Dr. Manzi’s argument is “not committed to either side.” Arguing against the leap of faith that Coyne makes with his claim is not the same thing as arguing for any of Wright’s particular claims or for a “deterministic” view of the universe.
— Kate Marie · Sep 3, 02:37 AM · #
In the factory analogy, the goal is to improve output and the reproduction cycle is guided by what conditions improve output. In evolution the goal is only to improve ability to reproduce.
Seems to me that this is a faulty comparison — you’re comparing the goal of the entire system on the one hand with the “goal” of individual elements in the other. The only reason you know the goal of the factory experiment is that you were explicitly told the intent of the creator. If you were merely a single (sentient) strand that appeared sometime during the course of the experiment, would you have any awareness of the system’s overall goal? Would you as an individual strand care about anything other than not getting filtered out in the next cycle?
— kenB · Sep 3, 03:06 AM · #
Or you do, maybe? Here’s Manzi:
In other words – exactly what I said he said, which is exactly wrong. It’s not, in principle, calculable, because the universe is non-deterministic at the most basic level. God does play dice with the universe; random events truly do occur.
Further:
Again, exactly wrong. Scientists can, and do, work on the problem of the origins of the universe. It’s not “defined as a non-scientific question”, that’s a category error. It is a scientific question, very much so, and while the answers are not hard and fast we’ve long since ruled out any room for God.
— Chet · Sep 3, 03:54 AM · #
Yours is a useful reply to Coyne—thank you. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that neither you nor Coyne bothers to accurately represent Wright’s position concerning the divine. What he has in mind is definitely not anything with much resemblance to most traditional religion; it is rather an evolutionary process with certain features that he chooses at the end to call by the name of “God“—probably with the precise intention that people stop using that word to describe anything more supernatural or personal or interventionist. (Hear my interview with Wright, in which we discuss his concept of God at the beginning, over at Killing the Buddha.)
— Nathan Schneider · Sep 3, 12:27 PM · #
nonono, Honorable Chinese goldfarmer sweatshop!
The bourgie conservatives have plenty of gold!
They need memetic welfare epics!
lawls!
— matoko_chan · Sep 3, 12:28 PM · #
good comment Nathan.
I predict that as we learn more about Social Brain Theory …… Wright’s formulation of god as an evolved strategy, an evolutionary fitness enhancer will become the industry standard.
— matoko_chan · Sep 3, 01:36 PM · #
Nathan:
Thanks for the comment. I was only trying to defend Wright against this specific assertion by Coyne (which I think is central to COyne’s whole argument). I was not trying to defend Wright’s whole book.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 3, 01:47 PM · #
Great post, Jim. It might be useful to refer to Wright’s own take on Coyne’s review, which is as bone-crunching a smackdown as I’ve seen in a long while.
— PEG · Sep 3, 02:02 PM · #
If the Many Worlds interpretation holds, then determinism is restored, right? Further, even if we must support some probabilistic collapse theory, the optimal factory settings across all of Hilbert space would still be a fact about the world. I would object to the idea that it’s necessarily calculable, the Halting problem would arise pretty quickly.
I’m not really sure this actually addresses stein’s difference between local and global goals, but Wright has written at least two prominent books addressing exactly that so there we are.
— Consumatopia · Sep 3, 02:12 PM · #
Chet, Bell’s Inequality isn’t what you think it is. But the absence of teleology (as Kuhn pointed out at the end of Structure) is, yeah, part of Darwin’s formulation. It’s not a necessary part, as Manzi gets to.
Mr. Manzi, I’ve argued this point a bit with you here before and I still think your argument is strectched beyond usefulness. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s lots of other ways to argue that Coyne is just plain wrong, I just don’t think you’ve hit one of them. I have my own, other, ways of reconciling my religious understanding with science.
I’ve only tinkered with genetic algorithms — but I have been knee-deep in directed evolution work, with actual DNA and organisms. That’s a pretty developed field now, too, with actual companies working hard to evolve, say, xylases. I’m preplexed by your use of the genetic algorithm as an example because every step of the process you describe has an exact analogy (multiple ones even, since there are rather different ways of playing this game) in the directed evolution of biochemicals, and my bet is you’re at least a little acquainted with that field, enough to have written the article that way. You’d then have the advantage that you’d be speaking in the exact terms and system that Coyne is doing: no worries that “something is different” in the programming analogy.
The problem is that if you did that, people who actually do directed evolution would laugh, because you run into a couple nasty problems that show why the programming analogy really is different. Evolution is a bitch. It finds all kinds of clever “solutions” to challenges because it’s prone to deciding to play a different game instead of the one you’re trying to get it better at. So if you’re trying to evolve an enzyme that, say, catalyses the production of an essential resource with good efficiency out of one that has terrible efficiency at the same catalysis, you run into problems because the cell is a grotesquely more complicated system, with more interesting options available to it even in the constraints of a Petri plate in a lab (let alone the real world). So the art of doing the experiment is figuring out how to get rid of the vast, vast numbers of cells you get that decide instead to stop using that resource altogether or to change their genomic structure so as to just make a hell of a lot more of the same crappy enzyme instead of the same amount of a better one or screw around with some other system altogether or God knows what. The difference between working in the cell and the genetic algorithm is you build the algorithm and its environment from scratch and can make them very, very simple, whereas in the cell you’re acutely aware of the fact that you’re tweaking one part of a much bigger system and you can’t really shape the coordinate along which it’s going to respond to a challenge without obsessive, baroque manipulation of the selection process and heavy-handed intervention.
Note that this complexity is relevant because in the kind of evolution Coyne and the Intelligent Designers are talking about, what you’re actually interested in is not the optimizers but the game-changers: so again the genetic algorithm analogy is irrelevant because this is actually something you genetic algorithm guys can’t do well. What I mean is: there’s a kind of incremental evolution where the hummingbird’s beak gets longer and narrower so it can fit down into the flower, and that’s what you’re talking about. There’s an even more complicated evolution, where as the beak changes the flower also changes, and amazingly the coders are even pretty good at that. But the kind of complexity I’m talking about above is a first glimpse at the problem that Coyne and the creationists are really arguing over, which is when you make a hummingbird from a stegosaurus from a flounder: and that kind of evolution is based on exactly the kind of game-changers that plague in-lab directed evolution efforts: the “fuck it, I’m not going to optimize my solution to your challenge, instead I’m going to change so as to work on another kind of problem entirely” solution. You don’t have a good model for it. Actually, nobody does: it’s the subject of a lot of holy wars in biology too. I know you think you’ve gotten at this point when you concede that the genome is potentially much bigger and more complex: you haven’t. It’s not just that the sample space is so much much bigger, it’s that the constraints and the functional you’re trying to minimize can change —abruptly! The “fitness landscape” of which you speak does not exist — calculable or otherwise.
And then there is something in there that strengthens Coyne’s argument. The system is incredibly, un-modelably complex, and can respond along a vast number of coordinates. Again, you fumble at this when you concede that the shaping of evolutionary constraints is unimaginably demanding in terms of variables to control to shape the “fitness landscape”: you write “determining this goal would be so impossibly hard that in practice it falls into the realm of philosophy rather than science.” Well, yeah, and it’s harder than that, and requires a heavy, constant, intricate massaging of results and conditions and a continual and exquisite sifting of results. Which, as you point out, is logically possible — God ain’t GM — but it is a pretty heavy constraint on what kinds of God, or what kinds of relationship between God and the universe, you can work with. I submit that there are a lot of common Christian understandings of the universe, in terms of the freedom of action of living beings or of non-God supernatural agencies, that would have a hard time reconciling themselves to the kind of deterministic, intimate micromanagement that your evolution toward a known goal would demand (Chet’s wrong that quantum prohibits that, I think you know that). So Coyne would be OK if he limits himself to saying, look, accepting the science means throwing out or revising some ideas of God. And even then the amount of manipulation of the system is so immense that I don’t think it makes sense to talk about evolution at all: you can just throw the whole thing out.
Again, that seems academic but is actually relevant, since I don’t think that in general the creationists are trying to simply establish the point you’re arguing, that one could envision God setting in motion evolution towards a (human) goal and still accept the bulk of the evolutionary story. For example, a few of my daughter’s friends are fine, pleasant people who happen to be creationists. So play dates/parties at my house are a nightmare, because inevitably a couple of them will just keep turning the Intelligent Design screw like a thumb in my back trying to get a concession out of me: I’ll be trying to duck the subject and change the conversation while they make meaningful gestures at the Roche “Biochemical Pathways” charts my wife and I have up with the art in the living room (so we’re nerds. Sue us.) Much of this discussion is driven by the assertion that, look, you can’t argue with the Bible (which is a funny assertion: my guests know I’m not Christian.) And so when they’re talking about creationism, they mean the whole nine yards: not just that things unfolded according to God’s plan, but, say, that they did so in six literal days, as we understand days. And that — that’s wrong, or much of testable science is. You can’t have both, period (not that I’m boorish enough to say so at my dinner parties). So Coyne does have a strong point if he limits himself to saying that science sharply constrains our view of the evolutionary history of the universe, and that acceptance of science (or at least of its useful, predictive part) places boundaries on how the relationship of God and the creation can be conceived — and that is the real battleground.
— Sanjay · Sep 3, 02:26 PM · #
What I think it is is this:
No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.
In other words, the universe doesn’t simply appear random because there’s hidden determinism we can’t figure out yet; it actually is random. Unless there’s a reason to believe Bell’s is wrong – and to my understanding there is not – that, to me, basically settles the “determinism” question.
There’s too much randomness in the universe to support Manzi’s teleology, even for a god.
Distasteful. If that’s what he’s really doing, then the purpose of his book is not to inform but to obfuscate. Nobody who believes in God means that by the word “God”. He’s simply employing the term so as not to be accused of atheism.
Shouldn’t words mean things? Shouldn’t they be used as if they do? Isn’t it a bit of a convenient shell game to define the word “God” as “whatever hasn’t been ruled out by science, these days”?
— Chet · Sep 3, 03:56 PM · #
A few points:
1) People really throw around words like determinism and randomness without truly understanding them. For one thing, as anyone who has studied theory of computation will tell you, there’s a lot of behavior in between determinism and randomness. I’d like someone to explain Bell’s theorem who understands Chiatin and Church-Turing (I have some understanding of the latter two, but none of the former).
2) Multiple universes which are unreachable is just as much of a stretch as a sentient superbeing. For that matter, we’ve all seen arguments that we can eventually create our own universes, perhaps in the lab. And as was pointed out in a dialog between Tyler Cowen and Richart Wright, if we can theoretically create a universe, why can’t someone have created ours?
3) Unless you can prove time goes backwards infinitely, first cause is first cause is First Cause. No matter how much Coyne (or Dawkins) I don’t see how evolutionary biologists have very much interesting to say about that.
— A Berman · Sep 3, 04:21 PM · #
That confirms that it’s not what you think it is.
— Sanjay · Sep 3, 04:22 PM · #
So Coyne does have a strong point if he limits himself to saying that science sharply constrains our view of the evolutionary history of the universe, and that acceptance of science (or at least of its useful, predictive part) places boundaries on how the relationship of God and the creation can be conceived — and that is the real battleground.
Sanjay, I completely don’t understand why it is a battlefield.
Evolution happens…..DNA exists.
Eventually we will get good enough with mesopores and zeolites that we can reverse engineer it.
If something happens we can eventually reverse engineer it.
Eventually we will get down to modelling quantum events at the microtubule level and figure out if freewill exists…so what?
maybe at that point we meet the god of the gaps…..who can say?
How we think about god will evolve until we figure it out.
Wrights point in the Evolution of God is that perceptions of god evolve, I don’t think anyone can argue against that.
Manzi is arguing contra a specific point of Coynes.
I don’t understand why people get so hot about this.
— matoko_chan · Sep 3, 04:37 PM · #
I think you’ve just confirmed that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone has seen through your attempt to play the Silent Authority.
Time is linear causality. Time not going backwards infinitely means that there’s no need for a First Cause. You can’t cause time because causes must precede effects, but outside of time there’s no meaningful way to precede anything.
At any rate, the universe is known to exist. God is not. Why propose God as the First Cause, when there’s a perfectly adequate universe sitting right here instead? Why can gods be uncaused but universes cannot?
— Chet · Sep 3, 05:06 PM · #
Yes, Chet, that’s right, my physics Ph.D. and I bow before the awesome might of Wikipedia.
— Sanjay · Sep 3, 05:24 PM · #
I am wondering …..Dr. Manzi….why your excellent postings don’t appear to be cross-linked at the NRO Corner on Madness….is it that they don’t meet the publishing standards?
ie, something someone with an 8th grade education could….and would….read?
— matoko_chan · Sep 3, 06:19 PM · #
Sanjay:
As always, great comments. I can’t respond to all in detail, but here are I think the big themes, focusing on what I see as the crucial paragraph of your reply.
I agree that we don’t have the ability to model the evolutionary pathway. And not in the “if we could just solve these 7 really hard problemss, then we might get in the ballpark” way, but in the “this is not something a serious scientist would even spend time talking about while sober” way. Check. When you say:
This is a restatement of what I was (trying to) say in the relevant part of my post.
You sentence continues:
I agree entirely. This is why (or is one of the reasons why) I’m not a creationist.
You next say:
I agree that there are many commonly-held understandings by many (maybe most) Christians that are inconsistent with the findings of science. As an aside, I think there are many commonly-held understandings of science held by many (maybe most) people in the world that are inconsistent with the findings of science. But when you reference “the kind of deterministic, intimate micromanagement that your evolution toward a known goal would demand”, I don’t accept this premise. I don;t have any idea what kind of micromanagement evolution toward a known goal would or would not demand. I made (or tried to make) a much, much narrower point in my post: that evolution through natural selection does not tell us whether a goal is presenet or not.
You then continue:
Yes, I agree. The implications of QM / Bell’s Inequality for determinism vs. non-determinism are complex and unresolved. I assume, but don’t know, that he’s unaware of the so-called “causal interpretation”.
Finally, you have the sentence:
I agree. But this isn’t what Coyne limited himself to, and it was his reach beyond this to which I was reacting.
BTW, awesome story about having the Roche charts on the wall.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 3, 06:30 PM · #
Pfft….i agree with Sanjay that the problem is overparameterized and may be intransigent under current methodolgies, but Riddick, please….aren’t you all just field mice hiding in the current unharvested swath of grain?
If a process occurs in nature we can eventually reproduce it.
If we can’t, there is your god of the gaps.
— matoko_chan · Sep 3, 07:01 PM · #
Mr. Manzi:
Thanks. So stop using this analogy!
You write, _Yes, I agree. The implications of QM / Bell’s Inequality for determinism vs. non-determinism are complex and unresolved. I assume, but don’t know, that he’s unaware of the so-called “causal interpretation”. _
Well, no, it’s not that they’re complex and unresolved, it’s that they’re irrelevant. Forgetting that even if they were applicable, you want to think of hidden variables (and let’s those of us with a clue at least talk sense here: the issue is hidden variables, not Bell’s inequality, which doesn’t apply with the generality you might need here) operationally for these purposes: whether there’s something you can measure now which predicts something you will measure later.
This thinking doesn’t make any sense for God at least in most conceptions for at least two reasons. The significant one is that time (and hence causality) doesn’t apply: God knows the future, right? Or else this whole idea of guiding natural selection toward a goal is pointless. So screw it; there’s no need to talk about a prior measurement, I don’t even know what that means. And the second is that I guess you figure omniscient means God knows the thing, without measuring it. I don’t really know how to make quantum arguments apply to that.
All of which is a diversion and sort of obvious, I know. But it’s why I don’t want to get into this goofy quantum thing in any depth.
— Sanjay · Sep 3, 07:42 PM · #
Wow, I’m super-impressed by the credentials you’ve chosen to pseudonymously claim on the internet!
— Chet · Sep 4, 12:17 AM · #
Chet: yep. But I’ve used the thing rightly, you wrongly, and the people who know the difference — which are my colleagues and therefore the people whose opinion I give a fuck about — will be able to tell which one of us has some credentials, and which a loudmouth. But then again I have the fortune of having better fora in which to communicate under my own name, with other professionals in my areas of interest.
As usual you don’t even know what you don’t know. You dumbass, when something is called “Bell’s Inequality,” and you try to write what it is — figure at the very least that what you write should be, you know, an inequality.
— Sanjay · Sep 4, 12:33 AM · #
Re: Evolution is contingent on present conditions. It can never look ahead to future conditions – which means it can’t be teleological.
This is an unproven axiom however: you are assuming something about the way the universe works that may not be true. In fact, at the quantum level it’s not true: there really is a degree of teleology at work whereby systems evolve toward globally preferred ends (better known as “attractor states”).
— Jon · Sep 4, 01:56 AM · #
Where does Coyne claim that “that evolution through natural selection demonstrates that there is no divine plan for the universe?” It seems to me he claims only that unguided natural selection can produce the world as we see it, turning a divine plan into an unnecessary hypothesis. Whether you believe this falsifies the teleological notion depends on how serious you are about Occam’s razor and scientific naturalism. Manzi’s point seems to be: there might still be a plan, but we don’t know it. That seems to be just another version of “prove to me there is no god” “argument.”
— phasearth · Sep 4, 10:46 AM · #
phasearth:
Where does Coyne claim that “that evolution through natural selection demonstrates that there is no divine plan for the universe?”
From my post, here is the thrid sentence of his review:
— Jim Manzi · Sep 4, 01:07 PM · #
Jim Manzi: I don’t read the passage as you do. I think your translation of “demolish” into “demonstrate” is unwarranted, though I suppose understandable given your predilection for mathematical and logical rigor. Coyne is talking about the twin blows Galileo and Darwin delivered to the Judeo-Christian worldview. Darwin provided a theory by which scientific naturalism could be expanded to the biological and human spheres, without the need for teleology or divine purpose. Basic elements of the J-C worldview, such as the metaphysical separation of human and animal realms, were demolished by Darwin. I am not an expert on Coyne, but even the most polemical atheists don’t make the strong claim that science “demonstrates” absolutely there is no god or a divine plan. The claim is that science provides a sufficient theory of the world without god, and therefore there is “no need for this hypothesis.” I would guess to Coyne this constitutes a demolishing of the hypothesis, and if he is making a stronger claim, then he is a weak target. Again, your argument seems to be a long version of “I can’t prove there is a divine, but you can’t prove there isn’t!” Which is a pretty weak point in the scheme of things…
— phasearth · Sep 4, 02:27 PM · #
This is a typical “conservative” ploy anymore.
When the J/C worldview gets attacked on specifics (like phasearth’s metaphysical separation of human and animal realms and the “divine life spark”) the Noble Defenders of “Conservatism”, (which is, let us admit, practically and entirely judeo-xian in this county), the defenders of conservative failmemes immediately reframe the particular attack into the general……
There is nothing in Coyne’s attack targetting other belief possibilities, like Stu Hamerhoff’s platonic substrate or Ibn Arabi’s wujat al -wujud ….just a targetted beatdown of the specific judeo-xian concept of god-the-intelligent-designer.
— matoko_chan · Sep 4, 03:00 PM · #
But Wright clearly doesn’t believe in a traditional intelligent designer. He believes Yahweh evolved out of a Caananite battle god for reasons of first millenium BC Middle Eastern politics. Then, in the last chapter, he speculates that this mythological figure may nonetheless be pointing to something emergent in the material world.
— Pithlord · Sep 4, 04:01 PM · #
Well, Pithlord…..just what is Manzi attacking Coyne on?
The second—and more severe—landed in 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, demolishing, in 545 pages of closely reasoned prose, the comforting notion that we are unique among all species — the supreme object of God’s creation, and the only creature whose earthly travails could be cashed in for a comfortable afterlife.
I read this as that whole judeo-xian God’s “creation” IDT anti-ToE memecomplex.
It’s like the sell-by date has passed on all conservative memes at once.
— matoko_chan · Sep 4, 05:51 PM · #
C’mon Dr. Manzi.
It the Abrahamaic god’s followers that object to ToE.
White evangelical christians.
Coyne isn’t attacking my beliefs, or Dr. Hamerhoffs.
This isn’t about whether god exists, but about whether the judeo-xian god of white evangelical ‘merican xians exists.
Are you just an apologist for your low information base anymore?
— matoko_chan · Sep 4, 06:08 PM · #
Uh-huh. Tell me – should it be about bells, too?
— Chet · Sep 4, 09:09 PM · #
Matoko, have you read Wright’s book? He was born into a white Southern Baptist tradition, but he’s clearly now a materialist with a tendency to speculate about some Tillich-style immanent god.
What really bugs Coyne is that Wright won’t just say Muslims and flyover people are evil and stupid.
— Pithlord · Sep 4, 11:35 PM · #
I have read excerpts, Pith.
It frankly doesn’t interest me enuff to read the whole thing.
Right now my personal aspergers geas is forcing me to read and reread social brain hypothesis stuff and exotic particle theory for some reason….
My point remains…..Coyne’s narrow target is the judeo-xian god….. the anti-ToE god of IDT.
Manzi is trying desperately to reframe the convo to “does ANY god exist?”….who cares?
If a process exists in nature we will eventually be able to reverse engineer it with nanotech…..or picotech or fermitech, w/e.
No matter how how many interaction parameters and hidden variable there are Sanjay …..if it exists in nature we will be able to copy it given time.
And if we reach the halt point, there you go, theres the god of the gaps.
But pleeeez….the Real Most High isn’t mucking around with cell biology at the molecular level.
Give it up Manzi.
— matoko_chan · Sep 5, 01:12 AM · #
He was born into a white Southern Baptist tradition
Your point is? My family had an Infant of Prague under a glass bell in the foyer.
It had changes of vestments for the different liturgical seasons, like gorgeous doll clothes.
The Carmelite nuns gave it to my dad for providing all their medical for freebies.
IQ can overcome a multitude of ills.
— matoko_chan · Sep 5, 01:20 AM · #
makoto_chan: I can think of no reason why that’s obviously true. No, really, I can’t, except that I’d like to think we keep getting better at stuff but even that I’m never quite sure of. I’d like to think we might be able to model anything but even that I’m not sure of, and very very smart people have thought we’re never going to get real good at it even for macroscopic phenomena driven by relatively simple equations, because some things are just so damn nonlinear. You’re just stating something like a religious belief.
— Sanjay · Sep 5, 01:45 AM · #
I didn’t say model sanjay, cher, I said reverse engineer it.
— matoko_chan · Sep 5, 02:29 AM · #
And I said I couldn’t think of any reason why you’d think that, yes, we’ve established that. I guess I’m assuming building shit’s even harder than explaining it, but I think that’s usually a good assumption. You’re like my neighbors clinging to Genesis.
— Sanjay · Sep 5, 03:44 AM · #
But reverse engineering is not “building shit”, it is unbuilding it.
The “shit” already exists.
We use nano-assemblers as nano-deassemblers, say.
I’m Sufi, Sanjay…..could you please say I cling to wajat al-wujud or maarifa instead?
I think Genesis is sillie.
— matoko_chan · Sep 5, 01:53 PM · #
Sully’s readers are saying the same thing I am……Coyne is not attacking the possibility god exists….he is attacking the specific conservative white evangelical xian god that is oppositionary to ToE.
Evolution is authentic ….you have lost that memewar, Manzi.
You need to move your battleground into Sanjay’s domain.
The problem is, your troops don’t have the substrate to fight in the invisble world, and you can’t explain it to them, and that battleground is universities instead of highschools, where force amplification by yelling doesn’t work, and you have almost no reinforcements.
— matoko_chan · Sep 5, 02:07 PM · #
My neighbors don’t cling to wajat-al-wujud. I think Pete Schulz would quibble with your reverse engineering idea too.
— Sanjay · Sep 5, 02:31 PM · #
makoto, lecturing Manzi that in universites “force amplification by yelling doesn’t work” is not only wrong — I, and he, have kicked around a couple elite ones and I’m quite happy to tell you, yes it does — but also symptomatic of your most irritating (which is saying something) posture, which is that stupid is a characteristic of the right. Look at this very discussion, where Chet and Consumatopia up there have, I think you’ll agree, no idea what the fuck they are talking about (No, Chet, I’m talking to makoto), but that doesn’t keep him from digging in thinking that wins. Stupid is like hydrogen.
— Sanjay · Sep 5, 02:38 PM · #
Dude, it is a characteristic of YOUR BASE.
Like, ppl that can be scammed into believing medicare is not a singlepayer government plan.
Your intellectual elites are powerful, but increasingly rare in the Palin Party.
The right has been being disenfranchised from universities for a decade.
6% of scientists are republicans, 65% of postbaccs are democrats.
Who teaches at universities?
Teaching research scientists and postbaccs.
Where do replacements come from for your intellectual class?
Is a 6% scientist class survivable for the GOP?
Stupid is like hydrogen.
But given that the GOP cast out a lot of intellectual elites, and seems to be poorly adapted to attracting or breeding new ones, I think the within-party hydrogen concentration may be approaching toxic levels.
I think you are talking about proof by volume, which is different than force amplification by yelling….that paradigm is extant in the Teabagger Demographic’s domination of the healthcare reform debate in the media.
Like I said…. I don’t know …practically it seems if a process occurs, we can deconstruct and/or reconstruct it….I certainly could be wrong.
But if I’m wrong that would mean there IS a god of the gaps.
Certainly there can be that sort of god…there just isn’t the anti-ToE one Manzi is pimping with his factory analogy.
I think that would be cool too.
— matoko_chan · Sep 5, 03:09 PM · #
It’s funny, then, that everybody thinks the reverse – that you have no idea what you’re talking about, that your claimed expertise is entirely bogus, and that you made yourself look like a complete ass with your argument “dur, you’re stupid, if you’re going to say what Bell’s Inequality is it should be about bells and things being unequal to each other.”
Oh, but you’re not talking to me. Somehow that’s supposed to enjoin me from replying, I guess. Is “blog master of the world” your next feigned authority?
Manzi, you’ve been well-rogered by the replies on Sully’s blog, by people much smarter than any of us here. Maybe instead of your mutual admiration-fest with know-nothing Sanjay, you could address some of these replies?
— Chet · Sep 5, 04:35 PM · #
I don’t have a “base”, makoto, and I probably have a longer, more credible “liberal” activist record than most people commenting here. Hey, I campaigned for Kennedy. Multiple times.
Actually you have asserted pretty hard that we’d be able to reverse engineer something. The assertion that if we can’t it proved some kind of “god of the gaps” is sort of prima facie stupid. No, it proves we’re doing something wrong or aren’t understanding something. It’s hard to prove a negative! When do you call time and say, we know everything about this system so we know we’re trying to build it right? In fact here you are arguing against science, because we know that for sufficiently complex systems (see, here’s an inequality) we can’t fully understand them nor even know when we’re spinning our wheels: QED, we can’t do what you say.
Manzi isn’t arguing aginst the theory of evolution, nor does the putative God he lays out. You’re failing reading comprehension. Repeatedly.
— Sanjay · Sep 5, 04:54 PM · #
Interesting that Chet regards intellectual discussion on the model of rape.
The people writing on Sully’s blog clearly did not read the original controversy. My own physics is limited to a few undergraduate courses two decades ago, but Sanjay’s right of course. QM does not necessarily mean the universe isn’t deterministic, and whether the universe is deterministic is irrelevant to the truth of theism.
— Pithlord · Sep 5, 09:56 PM · #
Manzi isn’t arguing aginst the theory of evolution
Relly? I got the strong impression that he is arguing against genetic determinism.
Please, do correct meh.
;)
If DNA is the unification theorem of biology, could Social Brain Hypothesis be the unification theorem of philosophy?
Ah but the commenters on Sully’s blog got one thing right.
Manzi’s beloved factory example is supposed to demonstrate non-determinism in genetics, and thus the existance of free will, which is a core theme of conservatism…..that is n/e one with a good work ethic and a love of Jesus can bootstrap themselves out of poverty.
Fail.
And the origin of the universe question is physics, not biology.
Sanjay, what is the difference between an emergent process and a directed process?
Still, you might be right.
For me it is intuitive that we can deconstruct a natural process, given time and tools.
Ima a Turing Heretic, afterall.
If the supernatural intervenes at some point, eureka.
I don’t expect you to agree with me…..I’m not trying to evangelize you (heh).
Evangelism is one of the world’s great evils.
— matoko_chan · Sep 5, 10:39 PM · #
Did you? What you’ve put forth has nothing to do with the original controversy. The long as the short of it is – Coyne is right, as usual. You can’t say that evolution’s optimum outcomes represent a possible teleology for the very simple reason that evolution doesn’t optimize.
— Chet · Sep 5, 11:54 PM · #
Makoto, then you’re worse off than I thought. There is no “god of the gaps.” There can’t be. Because we don’t know, and will never know, where the gaps are, and as Godel showed, math forces that. No, given time and tools you cannot deconstruct any system. That’s interesting because Manzi and I were discussing how science may not rule out God but it rules out some Gods: well, science appears to rule out yours. And note that you’re much worse off than the creationists. Evolution by natural selection, after all, has some quirks and holes: for example, bacteria under some circumstances appear to undergo something very like Lamarckian evolution. But your talking is flying in the face of math. You have to throw out everything from science, or your worldview. Pick. I’d not have made that error but I’m not flat-out ignorant enough to find the book of Genesis “sillie” (though I don’t use it as scripture, and I think people who read it like some kind of unartistic Roomba manual are a bit goofy).
You’re also showing makoto’s second most annoying characteristic: escalating everything into a holy war. I don’t think Manzi’s saying anything remotely like what you’re reading. In fact he’s agreeing with me up there that a role for God in organism design either plays hell with a lot of free action, or God’s intent, or something. Youre also making a left/right war — which you always do — of something that’s not left or right except to the extent that folks who read the Bible literally tend to be conservative (but not always) and atheists are more often liberal.
What went on was, Manzi said, you can have a process whose historical record resembles something natural selection would’ve done, but subtly tweaked or set into motion by God: I don’t find that idea remarkable. He tried to justify that by using a directed evolution example from coding, which example was goofy, and when I pointed out that it was exactly goofy in a way that was relevant he conceded that point. Then again I can do directed evolution with DNA, and use natural selection to make the shit I want. It’s just real real hard and there are nonlinearities Manzi blew off.
There is a holy war here, but it’s not left/right. Manzi’s an engineer, and a good one by all accounts, whereas I’m a scientist. I’m related to many engineers and I married another Ph.D. physicist who happened to get her undergrad degree at the same vocational school as Manzi (physics, not engineering, but it doesn’t matter, all those people are a bit benighted). When a Manzi post makes me want to scream it’s because I strongly believe he has a tendency to grossly overextend models and overgeneralize. Which I imagine he’d agree he does: it’s what engineers do and it’s how he makes his money. I am by very long habit very, very careful about what I can do with a model, and I take tiny little steps but am very very sure of my shit, and that’s how I make my money. There are worldview splits beyond conservative/liberal. Some are more interesting even.
Pithlord: well yeah, quantum is deterministic but that’s neither here nor there and anyway, determinism means different things in physics and philosophy so you have makoto telling me Manzi’s wrong because of determinism and Chet trying somehow to use indeterminacy to make Manzi wrong.
Where I think all those guys are trying to use quantum is that, as I said, to shape a process like evolution, which has a random or quasi-random component, over long times and in real situations in real time requires exquisite control over data and so some folks want to invoke rules about how precisely you can measure data. For which all you need, rilly, is Heisenberg, but that’s not blinged-out enough or something. So instead they’re playing games with indirect arguments against arguments against (I know, I know) Heisenberg.
One such is this Bell’s inequality thing. It’s a trick which enables you, for very specific types of particles in a very specific type of relation to each other, to make a measurement (of phase) and use that to establish a lower bound (it’s an inequality, remember) on how fast information passed between the two particles. It can be powerful — maybe half a year ago a group in Switzerland published a paper in Nature where they played this trick with may miles (and a lake!) between the particles and showed the information goes many, many times the speed of light. WHich to Einstein, actually would’ve proved the very opposite of what Chet says above it shows — but basically if you accept relativistic limits on information travel it makes it impossible to talk about preexisting information shared by the particles.
It’s being invoked here from ignorance but understanding why it’s not applicable helps illustrate your point about the relevance of science to God. For one thing, Bell is way not general. Few useful things are. On the other hand, people have shown problems with hidden vectors in systems Bell doesn’t cover, too (I think five or six weeks past in Science? is a good example). But for another, try to use Bell’s inequality and I just shrug and say, so, God moves faster than light. And you’re shit out of luck. Besides, I believe it’s true. I kind of figure God knows what’s going on right now on, say, Jupiter. If you don’t think that then I think you’re going to half to say every star and so on is going to have to have its own God because they’re just so damn far away from each other — and frankly that’s going to punch holes in theology that make these evolution ones look podunk. God gets weird because as far as I know, people think he has a special and different raltionship with time, as I mentioned above. So the rules don’t really apply. Whatever He does he knows how it turns out, so presumably He can set conditions however He has to make what He wants by Darwinian means. This is neither an “emergent” nor a “directed” process — makoto’s just goofy — because time isn’t something the relevant theologies regard as restrictive on its maker. Not even Sufism thinks that, actually.
And it gets worse. Hardcore physicists work with “operational definitions,” an idea that got boosted up by Percy Bridgman. So they shy away from deeply what is; physical law is about what we measure. God doesn’t, presumably, use a ruler, or He’s not real impressive: He’s just me with a great budget. So I don’t know how to apply any kind of mechanics. Omniscience is a bitch to model.
OK, I’m off to the Outer Banks for a few days. Just got home from te world’s longest, worst business trip.
— Sanjay · Sep 6, 04:20 AM · #
I should add — I don’t think that’s how Creation works. I find the idea that God spends His energy fine-tuning the length of peacock tails a bit dreary. But I think it’s a defensible idea of how Creation works, which physics and biology can’t upset.
— Sanjay · Sep 6, 10:40 AM · #
Nah, it is not a defensible idea.
Evolution simply doesn’t work that way.
And that is what Coyne is saying.
That is quite riddickulous…..the Real Most High mucking around with molecular biology?
And the forever war is the war of Kylon and Pythagoras, not left and right.
Manzi is better than Kylon though…. defending populist failmenes not because he thinks he thinks they are correct, but because he believes the peasants deserve representation too, inspite of their pitchforks and torches.
Conor’s parasitic conservative elites(Beck, Rush, Levin) are exactly like Kylon though, promoting populist falsehoods and inflaming the passions of low information citizens for power and money.
Godellian Incompleteness doesn’t deny the god of the gaps.
That is exactly where such a god could dwell.
Manzi and I were discussing how science may not rule out God but it rules out some Gods
‘zactly, but not the god of the gaps….science rules out your evolution-tweaker white xian god.
Or any god that does “directed evolution”.
Dig Stu Hamerhoff , a much more distinguished quantum theorist than i. I realized that consciousness may be a specific process on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. Roger and I teamed up to develop a theory of consciousness based on quantum computation in microtubules within neurons. Roger’s mechanism for an objective threshold for quantum state reduction connects us to the most basic, “funda-mental” level of the universe at the Planck scale, and is called objective reduction (OR). Our suggestion for biological feedback to microtubule quantum states is orchestration (Orch), hence our model is called orchestrated objective reduction, Orch OR.
In recent years I have considered that such a connection to the basic proto-conscious level of reality where Platonic values are embedded is strikingly similar to Buddhist and other spiritual concepts.
Science is pretty close to making test tube life.
Would you call that “directed evolution”?
Will you and Dr. Manzi shut up then?
DNA is simply the unification theorem of biology.
It doesn’t need “tweaking”.
— matoko_chan · Sep 6, 01:41 PM · #
And the reason we can argue about quantum physics is because we don’t have a unification theorem ……yet.
But we will soon.
Like Hawking says, we will be able to put it on a t-shirt.
It seems like conservatism is the act of desperately hanging on to the status-quo until forced to let go, even when the supporting meme-complexes have passed their use-by-date.
The anti-ToE arguments have all expired.
Sanjay and Manzi should just acknowledge that, and move on to the realms of quantum physics and cosmology and social brain research.
the undiscover’d countries, imho.
;)
— matoko_chan · Sep 6, 03:05 PM · #
Don’t come in here, tell me I have Bell’s Inequality all wrong, and then offer this absurd, strained, mistaken application of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
Let’s skip past a couple cycles of reply and response and get to the basic question – can God do things that are nonsensical? Illogical?
If something can’t be known, by definition, can God know it? I think there’s basically two schools of thought, here – one is that God is limitless, so God can do anything at all, even things that would be nonsensical, illogical, inconsistent, impossible, and so on. God can both make a stone so large he can’t lift it, and then he can lift that stone, too.
The other school of thought is that even God is limited by meaning, and therefore he can either lift all stones, or create stones so large he can’t lift them – but not both.
I think that the second conception of God creates a God that we can disprove by various means, and that the first creates a God about whom nothing can be known, believed, or trusted with any degree of confidence whatsoever, and is therefore not topologically different than agnostic atheism.
The God that is limited by meaning and logic is the one Coyne is correct about – his divine plan for creation, with humanity at its apex, is disproven by the contingent and random nature of evolution. There’s no way to predict the results, not even for God. The God that is not so limited is more defensible, but only in the abstract – there’s no practical meaning to the worship of, or belief in, such a figure, and the way such a deity affects the universe can’t be known because it can’t be distinguished from what was going to happen anyway.
— Chet · Sep 6, 07:31 PM · #
FWIW, I have just put up replies to each of the commenters at The Daily Dish.
Coyne has just posted a reply to me on his blog, and I hope to put up a reply to that over at the Dish by tomorrow.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 6, 09:06 PM · #
I think Dr. Manzi, you deliberately misread Coyne. [i just read your responses]
You misinterpret Coyne as addressing ALL of Creation….when he is only talking about this part….
the comforting notion that we are unique among all species—the supreme object of God’s creation …
homosapiens sapiens.
Coyne is talking about the creation and evolution of LIFE, biological life.
That is his domain.
This does not map onto …..
I argued that Coyne’s argument that evolution through natural selection has shown that there is no divine plan for the universe should not be given credence.
Coyne is not arguing against a divine plan for the universe….only against a divine plan for human life, and for biological life.
Are you deliberately dishonest or confused Dr. Manzi?
Your argument about “environment for evolution” should be moved into the domain of physics and cosmology.
DNA is simply the unification theorem for biological life.
no god required.
— matoko_chan · Sep 6, 09:29 PM · #
Here is Coyne.
the argument against god-the-evolution-tweaker.
;)
what she said…
— matoko_chan · Sep 6, 09:37 PM · #
1. I agree with Manzi that Biological evolution itself is no evidence for or against an Ultimate Purpose (except, of course, that evolution does not require an Ultimate Purpose), but I wonder why he suggests that First Cause or Ultimate Purpose is beyond scientific study. If one can devise theories and ideas for these phenomena and develop observations and experiments to test them, then they are valid subjects for scientific discovery. We may not become sufficiently sophisticated to address these questions for another thousand years, but questions we are addressing today are beyond the imagination of most even 100 years ago.
2. The Genetic Algorithm concept – variations (random, pseudorandom, non-random) test a fitness landscape, maximizing fitness drives change – works at many levels. At the physical and chemical level the “fitness” function is Entropy. Physical and chemical reactions (e.g. H2 + O2 -> H2O + heat under certain conditions) go from initial to final products to maximize entropy (through “random” interactions between the constituents). This work all the way from interactions of quarks to the creation of DNA and the enfolding of proteins. At the biological level, the fitness function becomes survivability. At higher levels (e.g. psychological, social) other maximized “utility” functions become pertinent. Note that the utility functions depend on local conditions (e.g. temperature, pressure, etc.). As functions of, typically, many variables, these utility functions display many local maxima across the variable landscape; the maxima constitute the landscape of possible worlds.
3. It may be that the maxima of all relevant utility functions (Entropy, survivability, social good, etc.) are, in principle, fully pretermined and calculable as functions of all possible conditions. In this sense, Ultimate Purpose(s) are completely predefined by the functions and variables. However, conditions that actually arise in our world are contingent, so that the target configuration (the Ultimate Purpose) might be different depending on the path from past to future.
4. It may also be that, despite the seemingly uncountable number of paths through the Utility landscapes, that, in fact, the paths are not contigent but limited and fully determined. In this case there would be only one (or a few) possible Ultimate Goal(s). However, there is no reason that the paths and the Ultimate Goal(s) would be beyond scientific analysis.
— Harry · Sep 7, 05:14 PM · #
Harry:
Thanks for the very thoughtful comments. My position is (4), ie, that this may be correct. I think that the purpose is scientifically addressable in the sense that I assume we will eventualy resolve “why do these evolutionary rules exists as they do” to yet-more fundamental physcial principles (e.g., the follwoing combination of spin and so forth in these sub-atomic particles combine in this way to produce these higher-order particles that combine according to evolutionary laws). These more-fundamental physical laws will then be resolved to some yet-more fundamental laws and so on, indefinitely. But like the horizon receeding in front of us, this chain of scientific reasoning will never come to an end. The problems of origin and final cause will bever be laid to rest.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 7, 06:10 PM · #
Sanjay, you’re a good explainer of natural selection and evolution. Thank you.
— The Reticulator · Sep 7, 08:37 PM · #
Why indefinitely?
— Chet · Sep 7, 08:43 PM · #
this chain of scientific reasoning will never come to an end. The problems of origin and final cause will bever be laid to rest.
Again, that is simply incorrect…….for biology at least….unless “bever” has some meaning that I am unaware of…
We are currently what….2 codons away from creating RNA in a test tube?
DNA is the unification theorem of biology.
Now we don’t have a unification theorem for physics yet…..so……
Take your origins and cause argument into the domains of quantum physics and cosmology and I can agree with you that the jury is still out.
But, Dr. Manzi, you are moving the goalposts. That is unlike you.
I suppose you will now say that your original factory analogy was really applied to twistors and electrotweeks instead of chromosome loci.
I’m not buying, and no one else should.
;)
Sanjay, you’re a good explainer of natural selection and evolution. Thank you.
lulz…..Reticulator forgot his /sarc tag.
This is one of the things killing the GOP…there is not conservative science and liberal science……there is only science.
— matoko_chan · Sep 7, 09:37 PM · #