If Richard Dawkins Died and Met His Maker...

Religious apologists have a long history of using the idea of death-bed conversions by skeptics as proof that God is real. Apparently, if you're afraid of one thing, that proves the existence of some other thing. One of the most often cited such conversions was Darwin's. That such conversion never actually took place matters little to charlatans who will lie and deceive in honor of their god, not realizing what an insult that is to the very god they worship... but that's how it goes, I guess.

When it comes to philosophers, it was David Hume's intellectual integrity and courage that shocked the world, and especially the renowned biographer James Boswell, who could not understand for the life of him why his literary mentor didn't think it was at all rational or prudential to bet on Pascal's wager as he was nearing death...

When Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took it one step further, pre-emptively arguing (starting at 7:52 in the video below) that any such possible conversion on his part, were it to happen, would most likely be an indication of his illness, medicine administered by doctors, or some sort of dementia.

Finally, and although he has not kicked the bucket yet, it seems that if Richard Dawkins were to die and find out he was wrong after all, and that there is a god, god who would be the one to end up getting bitch-slapped :)

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Pearls Before Swine on Natural Selection

Well, naturally... it's survival of the fittest :)

Via Pearls Before Swine

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Manuel Lima - The Power of Networks

The art and science of formal classification owes its origin to the great philosopher Aristotle, who conceived of a conceptual tree whose trunk and branches denote different divisions of ontology, hierarchies of being, logical and natural relations, etc. This tree metaphor became ubiquitous until very recently. It's been used to map historical and genealogical changes and hierarchies among subjects ranging from family blood lines to languages, the history of religious evolution, biological taxonomies, scientific branches, corporate maps, etc. Darwin, of course, famously used such a tree to explain his idea of common ancestry.

Helpful as it's been, and given current levels of computational power, the traditional genealogical tree may no longer be the most useful took for mapping out various sorts of relationships. In the following fascinating RSA Animate presentation, Manuel Lima explores the power of network visualization.

That blithely romanticized ending didn't quite do it for me, but the entire presentation did get me thinking about the mathematical explanatory power of fractals...

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Jonathan Haidt - Religion, Evolution and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence

Among my favorite books of all time, Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and "The Extended Phenotype" must be way up there. When it comes to massive and repeated assaults of intellectual stimulation, these books will give you a mindgasm. Hamilton's idea, and popularized by Dawkins, that the gene is the ultimate unit of selection, is an extremely fruitful and elegant way to explain otherwise counter-intuitive biological adaptations.

And yet, I don't think the selfish gene hypothesis captures the entirety of the idea of the unit of selection. I subscribe to multi-level selection theory, which has been spearheaded over the last few decades almost single-handedly by David Sloan Wilson (from whom I actually learned the stuff). As its name suggests, this broader theory argues that natural selection can take place at the level of genes, individual organisms or even groups, provided certain conditions are met.

When it comes to the evolutionary study of religion, there are various sorts of hypotheses. Dennett seems to favor a meme-based approach; Dawkins likes to think that it's either a programming bug or simply a byproduct of some other adaptation; and others think that religion is a legitimate adaptation on its own right. One of the most interesting (and possibly correct) hypotheses about the evolution of religion, you will not be surprised to hear, is Wilson's group selection theory: while competition is not always best within groups (because free-riders will exploit the nice altruistic suckers and drive them to extinction), it is extremely efficient when it comes to competition between groups. So, while religion may not always be all that good for the individual members of a religion, it definitely gives strength, resources, cohesion and power to groups. This might also be why religious people can't shut up about their beliefs :)

Anyway, in this somewhat bizarre TEDTalk presentation, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, while trying to say something profound about religion and self-transcendence, actually has more interesting stuff to say about group selection.

Try explaining massive-scale war on the selfish gene hypothesis... possible, but not entirely convincing.

If you're curious about David Sloan Wilson's approach to the scientific study of religion, you might want to check out this fascinating lecture.

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Born Equal

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection provides a wonderful scientific explanation of biological adaptation and diversity. The theory is wonderful. The process of evolution itself is torturous, blind, indifferent, and cruel.

And when you take a ruthless process, and mix it up with some extreme political and social ideology, what you get is the pseudo-scientific distortion of scientific evolution: social darwinism in its many forms, the most extreme version of which resulted in the infamous movement of eugenics, but don't blame the Nazis for this one. This idea came from the Brits, got instituted by the Americans, and only then did it make it back across the Atlantic to Germany.

Fortunately, as Andrew Marr explains in the second part of the fascinating documentary Darwin's Dangerous Idea, a better understanding of evolution, as well of ethical philosophy, is giving rise to a new, positive sense of eugenics, one in which individual choice and autonomy, without government imposition, is helping create a healthier and more prosperous world.

Wow... we've come full circle :)

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Body & Soul

It took Darwin about twenty years to publish the theory that made him feel like he was confessing to a murder (God's perhaps?), but how did he come to articulate the theory in his own mind? His voyage in the HMS Beagle had a lot to do with it, certainly, but it's not all confined to the Galapagos Islands only, nor was it confined to his observations of non-human animals...

Part of it started with his politically and philosophically liberal views concerning the equality of all human beings, and the logical consequences of such equality: if we're all equal, then slavery, and the exploitation of blacks and other foreigners must be wrong.

In the first part of this truly fascinating documentary, Andrew Marr explores the scientific idea of natural selection as formulated by Darwin, as well as some of the ways in which this description of the living world has taken on a life of its own, with implications that go far beyond the world of science, revolutionizing the way we think about ourselves, challenging the need for a creator, undermining dogma, tradition and authority, and making us question the origin and nature of human morality.

Happy birthday, Chuck!

He's an enthusiastic fellow, isn't he? :)

And yes, I may have failed to mention there would be some remarks about thinkers as wide-ranging as Marx, Nietzsche, Malthus, J.B.S. Haldane, William Hamilton and George Price, but now you know :)

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What Darwin Never Knew

Darwin's idea of evolution through natural and sexual selection has been dubbed by many as perhaps the greatest single idea anyone has ever come up with. In a remarkable stroke of genius, Chuck was able to bridge the gap between the world of inanimate matter with the world of life; he was able to explain the diversity of life on earth, including great transformations, and the mechanism responsible for that diversity; and he provided a single, coherent, testable theory capable of unifying all of the different and previously disparate biological sciences into a single, beautiful and elegant framework whose individual parts provide independent confirmation for the rest.

Relying on the elegance of his theory, Darwin postulated various predictions based on the logical consequences of his theory, but often without any direct evidence. More than a hundred and fifty years after the publication of his magnus opus, most of those predictions are being borne out by empirical experiment and scientific innovations that Darwin could never have dreamed of.

More impressively still, new scientific disciplines (like evo devo and epigenetics, for instance) are finally revealing the mechanisms capable of explaining these incredible phenomena in ways that provide even more astonishing support for Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection.

Check out the NOVA site for more resources, including other videos and interactive features.
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The Genius of Britain - Episode 3

After exploring the birth of the scientific revolution as it took place in England, and tracing the consequences of that revolution as they manifested in and helped fuel the industrial revolution, today's episode of this fascinating documentary series explores the men behind some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 19th century.

First up is the all-too-likable Michael Faraday, that man of humble origins who would rise to scientific fame through his ingenuity and the precision and creativity of his experiments, especially those he conducted on electromagnetism. Without his contributions, the world would be literally dark at night, so he's kind of a big deal.

Richard Dawkins recounts the story of a great neglected hero of his: Alfred Russel Wallace, the man who thought up the theory of evolution through natural selection independently of Darwin, and who would consequently stimulate the latter to finally publish all the work he'd kept secret for about twenty years. Like Faraday, Wallace also turned out to be a super nice guy... unlike that other British dick embroiled in a priority dispute over the invention of the calculus: Newton :)

The next two men in our story dreamed of developing faster communication between Europe and America through what would become the Transatlantic cable. William Thomson (mainly famous for his work on thermodynamics) would develop the theory and the engineering required to produce a workable cable, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel would develop the theory of fluid motion that would then allow him to create the ship capable of carrying and laying said cable. Brunel did not live to see his dream realized, but when the mission finally succeeded, Thomson became Lord Kelvin.

Finally, Jim Al-Khalili introduces the incredible and curious genius of James Clerk Maxwell, arguably the man whose intellectual contributions were the most important contributing factor for inspiring Einstein to develop his theory of special relativity.

If the book of Genesis had said this:


or even "wash your hands," I'd totally be a believer :)
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Irreducible Complexity Cut Down to Size

Unless you live in hillbilly territory, it's difficult nowadays to be a creationist and not get immediately laughed at. So, what do you do if you believe in the half-baked idea that some designer designed biological organisms as they are? You dress it up with sophisticated-sounding technical terms like 'irreducible complexity', and you also make sure to surround its mention with liberal-sounding principles like tolerance of other views, teaching the controversy, keeping an open mind, or even --and this is as ridiculous as it can possibly get-- letting the children decide, as if empirical knowledge were a question of personal preference or popularity...

The fact is, however, that once you strip the intention behind irreducible complexity (lest you commit the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy), the idea, fancy as it may originally sound, is still ultimately nothing more than an argument from personal incredulity: taking your own inability to explain a phenomenon or process, or your lack of imagination, or simply your ignorance of the scientific literature, as the basis upon which to pretend to have found an answer that's just conveniently consistent with your religious beliefs.

And when it comes to evidence, even the examples shown by its proponents turn out, surprise surprise, not to be irreducibly complex...

And just remember that if you want to draw an analogy between a human designer and god as a designer, logical consistency requires that in both cases the designers must be more complex than their designs, in which case you'd be 'explaining' complexity by presupposing even more complexity.

Call me silly, but 'solving' a mystery with a bigger mystery only aggravates the problem, it doesn't solve it...

And if you're interested, here is a description of the self-assembly of the bacterial flagellum.

Update: QualiaSoup, the creator of this and other wonderful animations, has also produced a response to 'objections' creationists have voiced against his portrayal of irreducible complexity:

As one commenter said, you don't fuck with QualiaSoup :)
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