Tania Lombrozo on Evolutionary Belief and Cultural Factors

Here I Triumph

When an article begins with the statement that “The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science,” you know the author won’t be defending that claim but rather will be assuming it as a given. You also know the author, in this case psychology professor Tania Lombrozo at the University of California, Berkeley, is sufficiently distant from evolutionary theory such that facts won’t confuse the message. Even committed evolutionists have long since admitted that natural selection, at best, can only be one of several modes of evolutionary change. In fact biological adaptations we can observe are dominated by rapid, directed change in response to environmental challenges, not slow, random change accumulated via natural selection as evolutionary dogma had insisted.

Lombrozo’s article discusses ideas and theories about why some people accept evolution while others do not. Cultural factors and religious beliefs are at play, but there is something more:

But in the last 20 years or so, research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion has increasingly focused on another factor that contributes to evolutionary disbelief: the very cognitive mechanisms underlying human cognition.

So there are cognitive mechanisms underlying human cognition that influence our failure to accept evolution. While that seems to make sense it reminds us of that thorny problem, of which Lombrozo is happily oblivious, that these cognitive mechanisms (as well as everything else for that matter) must have been created by evolution.

In other words, Lombrozo’s belief in evolution is, according to her own account, simply a consequence of mechanistic actions in her head and the resulting molecular states, all of which just happened to arise spontaneously by the blind interplay of chance events and natural law.

How can Lombrozo be confident of any of her Epicurean assertions? Nonetheless she forges ahead:

Researchers have argued that a variety of basic human tendencies conspire to make natural selection especially aversive and difficult to understand, and to make creationism a compelling alternative. For instance, people tend to prefer explanations that offer certainty

Preferences for certainty? Is the Berkeley professor familiar with Rene Descartes and his need for certainty? Is she aware that Thomas Huxley acknowledged the great rationalist as foundational to evolutionary thought because, if not, she should know she’s soaking in it or, in this case, him (please click on video above to understand the full extent of Lombrozo’s predicament).

Lombrozo speaks of cultural factors as though she transcends them. In fact her belief that the world spontaneously arose is drenched in such cultural factors.

In fact, there's evidence that individuals vary in the extent to which they favor purpose and exhibit other relevant cognitive tendencies, and that this variation is related to religious belief — itself a strong predictor of evolutionary belief.

Indeed, evolutionary belief is a religious belief. There is no science behind spontaneous origins, rather it is mandated by our convictions about what a good god would and would not do. From a scientific perspective evolution is absurd. From a religious perspective it is a fact.

Lombrozo is hardly alone in her confusion over evolution’s epistemology, or lack thereof. Darwin himself made the same blunder in his famous July 3rd, 1881 letter to philosopher and political economist, William Graham. With less than a year left to promote his message, the elderly Darwin admitted that Graham made good points against chance but, in classic Petitio Principii style, Darwin turned the obvious evidence on its head:

Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

In other words, while evolution’s chance construction (yes, it is chance, the supposed natural selection merely kills off the bad designs, it does not coax good designs to arise—every mutation must have occurred by chance according to evolution) calls Graham's scientific judgments into question, thus protecting Darwin's modern-day Epicureanism, evolution’s chance construction by no means harms our theological convictions that God never would have created this world. Therefore evolution must be true.

It was a century after Hume and the perfect replay of Philo’s response to Cleanthes’s powerful design argument. Philo admitted the argument was a great challenge for him, but it was neutralized by the evil in the world. “I needed all my skeptical and metaphysical subtlety to elude your grasp,” admitted Philo, but “Here I triumph.”

So there you have it. The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science.

Evolution Professor: There is No True Morality

And You’re Disgraceful For Doubting This Truth

In his New Republic piece from this week Paul Bloom makes the point that evolution explains morality. Evolution co-founder Alfred Wallace was wrong about morality and wrong about God. And similar sentiment today, such as from Francis Collins, is equally flawed. The research is in and human morality is not a divine gift but rather is best explained by secular accounts. “It would be big news indeed,” writes the Yale Psychology Professor, “if it turned out that the enactment of the Moral Law didn't involve the brain, but exists in a special spiritual realm. But, of course, this isn't the case.” It is true that humans have an enhanced morality but it is the product of evolution’s natural selection and of culture. And of course culture itself is ultimately a product of evolution. And as Bloom reminds us, evolution is beyond question. For while design makes for a powerful argument, Darwin changed everything with his mechanistic account for complexity:

The theory of natural selection has been supported by abundant evidence from paleontology, genetics, physiology, and other fields of science, and denying it now is as intellectually disgraceful as denying that the Earth orbits the Sun.

It is not too surprising that Bloom finds morality to be explained by evolutionary mechanisms. After all, he finds evolution itself to be beyond any reasonable doubt.

It is also not too surprising that Bloom is oblivious to the pickle he has put himself into. For evolutionists never quite seem to understand that their relativism doesn’t support their judgments. When evolutionists such as Bloom speak of a moral law, they mean that evolution and culture caused certain molecular arrangements in our heads that induce certain feelings we call “right” and “wrong.” But there is no basis for true “right” and “wrong.” It is all just opinions.

But when Bloom castigates anyone who would so much as doubt evolutionary claims, he means it. This is where evolutionists make the value judgments. These are no mere opinions. Doubt evolution and you are bad and, as Bloom puts it, “disgraceful.”

Such contradictions are common in evolutionary thought. Why should anyone listen to Bloom’s value judgments and castigations if, according to Bloom, they are mere opinions.

Someone else could just as well say that skepticism is virtuous. It is not healthy to question scientific theories? Is it not good for at least some people to doubt even well accepted conclusions?

Such questions seem particularly apropos in this case as what Bloom is claiming to be such an obvious no-brainer is nothing less than the spontaneous origin of the world (yes, that is what evolution claims).

Not only is this not supported by the empirical evidence, as Bloom imagines it to be, but Bloom’s very denial of any true moral law inevitably amounts to a denial of knowledge as well. For if all we have is our brains for reasoning power, and if our brains are nothing more than a collection of molecules luckily assembled by evolution, then it is not just our morality that reduces to relativism. Our reasoning and conclusions are also just a reflection of molecular arrangements in our heads. There need not be any correspondence between those cranial arrangements and facts about the outside world. Bloom would be in no position to make hard and fast conclusions about what certain evidences say about our origins.

Indeed, Bloom seems to be modeling his beliefs rather well as his reasoning and conclusions, in fact, have no such correspondence with the outside world. Paleontology, genetics, physiology, and “other fields of science,” as Bloom puts it, do not provide undeniable evidential support for evolution as he thinks, but rather one after the next evidential challenge. Even the evolution of a single protein is astronomically unlikely.

Bloom’s article is an example of where evolutionary thinking leads. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Oops, Friedman Goes There: Altruism is nth+1 Contradiction

Ball Don’t Lie

Because when William Friedman admits that “Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary,” then its game over and evolutionists everywhere may as well hang it up. Or at least don’t tell Mother Teresa.

Self-Refuting Belief Systems

Relativism states that there are no absolute truths, but if true then that statement is an absolute truth. Likewise the statement that evolution is a fact, if true, means that we cannot know evolution to be a fact. Why? Because with evolution our minds are nothing more than molecules in motion—an accidental biochemistry experiment which has yielded a set of chemicals in a certain configuration. This leads to what Darwin called “the horrid doubt”:

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind.

Today evolutionists agree that while a random collection of chemicals doesn’t know anything, nonetheless over long time periods and under the action of natural selection, phenomena which we refer to as knowledge, will and consciousness will spontaneously emerge. And how do we know this? Because evolution occurred and we know that it occurred. Therefore evolution must have created the phenomena of knowledge. The proof is left to the student.

Evolutionists Are Now Saying Their Thinking is Flawed (But Evolution is Still a Fact)

Morality, as Kant pointed out, hinges neither on success nor on failure. The moral law transcends the material world. The evolutionist’s sophomoric response is that morality evolved and so therefore is not absolute, but rather is relative. That’s like saying water is not wet. And while they’re at it, evolutionists, at least those in the atheist wing, not only deny values, they also deny truth. That’s right, evolutionists—who are constantly making religious truth claims and casting judgments on those who don’t go along with their mandate that evolution is a fact—deny the existence any real morality and truth. You can see the obvious dilemma they have constructed. If there is no morality or truth, then how can evolution be known to be a fact, and how can doubters of this modern mythology be such bad people?

All of this is painfully obvious at the New Scientist which today explains that evolution has bequeathed us with a clouded, flawed thinking process. And just why did we evolve such an apparently flawed instrument? The article explains:

An elegant explanation may have arrived. Hugo Mercier at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Dan Sperber at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, believe that human reasoning evolved to help us to argue. An ability to argue convincingly would have been in our ancestors' interest as they evolved more advanced forms of communication, the researchers propose.

Yes, we know, evolutionists telling just-so stories are not “researchers.” But the point here is that these “researchers” are making an assertion (human reasoning evolved and is flawed) which undermines their very argument. If human reasoning evolved and is flawed, then how can we know that evolution is a fact, much less any particular details of said evolutionary process that they think they understand via their “research”?

The article continues:

Mercier and Sperber are by no means the first to suggest that the human mind evolved to help us manage a complex social life. It has long been recognised that group living is fraught with mental challenges that could drive the evolution of the brain.

But if these particular mental challenges drove the evolution of the brain, then what guarantee do we have that anything we conclude has any truth value? Why do molecules bouncing around in our head correspond to anything true about the world? How can we be sure that what “has long been recognized” by evolutionists has any useful meaning?

The article also notes how the evolution of language would have been an important influence on how our thinking evolved:

The evolution of language a few hundred thousand years ago would have changed the rules of the game.

But again, why should the force of language on the evolutionary process encourage us that, therefore, our thinking has any ultimate validity?

Indeed, evolutionists conclude that fallacies such as confirmation bias corrupt our conclusions:

Consider the confirmation bias. It is surprisingly pervasive, playing a large part in the way we consider the behaviour of different politicians, for instance, so that we will rack up evidence in favour of our chosen candidate while ignoring their competitor's virtues. Yet people rarely have any awareness that they are not being objective. Such a bias looks like a definite bug if we evolved to solve problems: you are not going to get the best solution by considering evidence in such a partisan way.

If evolutionists believe there is such a “definite bug” in our epistemology, then how can they be so sure evolution is a fact? Is that “definite bug” only a problem for people who don’t insist that everything came from nothing? Our confidence is not helped by the evolutionist’s selective use of evidence and, yes, confirmation bias.

But if we evolved to be argumentative apes, then the confirmation bias takes on a much more functional role. "You won't waste time searching out evidence that doesn't support your case, and you'll home in on evidence that does," says Mercier.

Sound familiar? The article which reveals evolution’s circular logic finally comes around to a precise description of evolutionary thought: “You won’t waste time searching out evidence that doesn't support your case, and you'll home in on evidence that does.”

In their value-laden world where they deny the existence of values, evolutionists insist they know the truth which is that, ultimately, we cannot know the truth.

Lawrence Krauss Says He is "Painfully Aware" of Your Hang-Ups

Today’s evolution sermon comes from Lawrence Krauss, Director of the Origins Project at the tax-payer funded Arizona State University. In his Op-Ed piece, which the LA Times saw fit to print, Krauss begins with the usual anti-realism. Yes the world looks designed, but don’t be fooled:

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the world was designed so that we could flourish. The position of the Earth around the sun, the presence of organic materials and water and a warm climate — all make life on our planet possible. 

It is all an illusion because, after all, it had to happen somewhere and, in any case, Darwin and the evolutionists have proved that life can spontaneously arise:

Yet, with perhaps 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, with ubiquitous water, carbon and hydrogen, it isn't surprising that these conditions would arise somewhere. And as to the diversity of life on Earth — as Darwin described more than 150 years ago and experiments ever since have validated — natural selection in evolving life forms can establish both diversity and order without any governing plan.

So don’t be fooled by the world’s apparent design. It is all an illusion coming from your inner psychological needs which, Krauss, because he’s a cosmologist, is painfully aware of:

As a cosmologist, a scientist who studies the origin and evolution of the universe, I am painfully aware that our illusions nonetheless reflect a deep human need to assume that the existence of the Earth, of life and of the universe and the laws that govern it require something more profound. For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.

Krauss, of course, has no such biases as evidence by his brand new conclusion that man is the measure of all things:

Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible. And that possibility need not imply that our own lives are devoid of meaning. Instead of divine purpose, the meaning in our lives can arise from what we make of ourselves, from our relationships and our institutions, from the achievements of the human mind.

That’s just good solid scientific research.

Framing the Debate With Frans de Waal

Frans de Waal’s piece in the New York Times this week examines what he believes are mistakes in past attempts to explain how evolution created altruism. The emphasis, according to de Waal, has been inappropriately focused on selfishness. The result is that altruism is viewed as not genuine, but ultimately hypocritical. In this flawed view morality is, explains de Waal, “just a thin veneer over a cauldron of nasty tendencies.” While he provides plenty of criticism of this “Veneer Theory,” as he dubs it, de Waal fails to provide much detail on just how evolution so cleverly produced the incredible spectrum of behaviors we find in nature (not to mention everything else). Not to worry though, de Waal first ensures the reader is properly intimidated so as not to be in a questioning mood.

Before presenting the meat of his thesis (which apparently isn’t very meaty), de Waal ensures that the reader is properly oriented. Could it be that behavior in general, and altruism in particular, pose any sort of a problem for evolution? Could it be that there are any serious problems for evolution, at all? Of course not. Right up front de Waal writes:

Don’t think for one moment that the current battle lines between biology and fundamentalist Christianity turn around evidence. One has to be pretty immune to data to doubt evolution, which is why books and documentaries aimed at convincing the skeptics are a waste of effort.

There you have it. The battle is between biology and fundamentalist Christianity. These are the battle lines. Those who doubt evolution are religious “fundamentalists,” while evolutionists are merely scientists in white lab coats busy following the data, as Huxley prescribed. There is no religion in evolution, none at all.

And failure to convince skeptics could not be a sign of anything problematic in the theory of evolution. After all, it is undeniably true. The problem, of course, lies with the skeptic, err that is, fundamentalist. Got it.

Euthanasia and the Search for Morality

Virginia Ironside and Bob Brown advocate euthanasia. If Ironside had a child who was in terrible pain, she would hold a pillow over its head, as she would for any living creature that was suffering. Likewise Brown, the Australian Greens leader, explains that abolishing the federal statute that outlawed euthanasia would be his first legislative priority.

Are Ironside and Brown wrong? If evolution is true then isn’t life a game of the survival of the fittest? If so then it would seem Ironside and Brown are merely playing by the rules.

Some evolutionists protest such obvious reasoning. Euthanasia is all wrong, they explain, because evolution has made it wrong. It was the very evolutionary process that created empathy and altruism, virtues that led to improved reproduction rates.

But even this contorted explanation falls short. If the evolutionary process magically rearranged our neurons to produce empathy and altruism, that wouldn’t make them “right” and euthanasia “wrong.”

The most an evolutionist can say is that euthanasia violates evolutionary theory. But in fact euthanasia—the idea and the action—exists and so must have been produced by evolution. So our evolutionist is yet once again incorrect. Euthanasia doesn’t violate evolutionary theory—it was created by evolution.

The evolutionist may disagree with euthanasia, but that wouldn’t make it wrong as he has claimed. It simply means that he disagrees with it. And what he won’t admit is that, with evolution, any other view is just as legitimate.

Evolutionary Explanation for Contradictory Altruism Findings

Last year psychologists planted hundreds of wallets on the streets of Edinburgh to find out what people would do when they found them. Whether the wallet was returned strongly depended on what type of photograph was inside. For instance, almost all the wallets with a baby picture were returned whereas most wallets with no picture were not returned.

This is not exactly an earth-shattering finding. Are we shocked at such a result? Well, evolutionists should be. That is because the evolutionary explanation for altruism is that evolution has trained us favor our close relatives because they share our genes. In reality, we favor the weak, needy and helpless, but that contradicts evolution. Was Mother Theresa confusing those orphans half a world away for her own children?

Evolutionists need better stories to explain Mother Theresa and Edinburgh-ians who return wallets with baby pictures. And so they have made up a new just-so story. As one reporter explains:

According to Dr Wiseman the result reflects a compassionate instinct towards vulnerable infants that people have evolved to ensure the survival of future generations. “The baby kicked off a caring feeling in people, which is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective,” he said.

Scientists argue that it would be difficult to genetically code for feeling empathy exclusively towards your own child and much easier to code for feeling empathy towards all children. If you find a baby alone, there is a good chance it belongs to you, making it an effective evolutionary trait, said Dr Wiseman.

Evolution was supposed to make us favor our genes, but that was too difficult. It is just easier to create genes that make us favor all babies. A complete switch, but now it all makes sense.

It is remarkable that anyone takes this seriously. Perhaps for an encore the evolutionists will explain why we have compassionate towards adults to whom we are not related. By the time they're done it will be one big love fest. The theory that brought us survival-of-the-fittest will switch to the Golden Rule.

How Evolutionists View Francis Collins

President Obama's nomination this week of Francis Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health was politically smart. Collins, an evolutionist and an evangelical Christian, has wide appeal. One day he can be speaking at an international gathering of leading scientists and the next at a suburban mega-church. In fact Collins is quite interested in maintaining the harmony between these two worlds. It is true that many Christians are evolutionists, but many others are not. Collins seeks to remedy the misconceptions he sees as motivating such skepticism.

All of this seems entirely politically correct. Do evolutionists have any grounds for complaint against the long-time NIH scientist and leader of the high-profile Human Genome Project? Yes they do.

Like the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, Collins gets stuck on the moral law within. Can evolution really describe altruism? Indeed the evolutionary explanations are rather silly, and for all of his promotion of evolution Collins cannot go the full distance. The moral law remains an enigma in the twenty first century.

For this breach of faith Collins is attacked by his fellow evolutionists. PZ Myers and others cannot tolerate such skepticism. Doesn't Collins know that evolution has plenty of just-so stories to explain behavior such as altruism?

Furthermore, Myers and other evolutionists point out that Collins' skepticism is a gods-of-the-gaps argument. This is yet another one of evolution's religious arguments. Dating back to certain seventeenth century Anglicans, it is a general-purpose religious argument that can be used to rebuke any and all scientific problems with evolution. The empirical evidence is inconsequential--no matter how contradictory are the data, evolutionists mandate naturalistic explanations. We may not know how altruism evolved, but it must have evolved. To think otherwise is to commit the sin of gap thinking.

So evolutionists such as Myers use non scientific concerns to mute the science. Their scientific "method" overrules the evidence. There is no option for contemplating possibilities; no allowance for tentatively considering alternatives. Evolution is a fact. As one evolutionist typically put it:

If a given problem appears to be merely unsolved, then he'll leave it to the realm of science; if, on the other hand, Collins deems a question to be unsolvable, it's fair game for inclusion in a spiritual interpretation of the universe.

And that's a no-no for evolutionists. They mandate that all phenomena can be accurately explained naturalistically. One need not be a philosopher to see that this claim to completeness, realism and naturalism does not come from science.

But the criticism of Collins ceases when he uses the standard religious arguments for evolution. For instance, appealing to the genetic data he is familiar with, Collins makes the usual "God wouldn't do it that way" arguments:

Most mammals, for example, do not need dietary sources of vitamin C because they can make their own using an enzyme encoded in their genomes. But primates, including humans, require vitamin C in their diet, or they will suffer a disease called scurvy. What happened here? Well, if you search through the human genome, you will find a degenerated copy of the gene for this vitamin C synthesizing enzyme. But it has sustained a knockout blow, losing more than half of its coding sequence. A claim that the human genome was created by God independently rather than being part of descent from a common ancestor would mean God intentionally inserted a nonfunctioning piece of DNA into our genomes to test our faith. Unless you are willing to contemplate the idea of God as a deceiver, this is not a comfortable explanation.

Collins' logic is faulty (common ancestry is not the only naturalistic explanation), but more importantly, as Elliott Sober has pointed out, the strength of the evolutionary argument comes not from its premises about common ancestry, but from its premises about separate ancestry. It always comes down to judgments about God.

This is a standard evolutionary argument and it is no surprise that evolutionists, though harsh in their criticism of Collins' skepticism of evolutionary explanations for altruism, stand mute as Collins promotes the usual religious arguments that mandate evolution.

It is the ultimate display of hypocrisy. Religion drives evolution, and yet evolutionists don the white lab coat and point fingers at anyone who dare make inferences from the data, castigating them as "religiously-driven." As evolutionist Jerry Coyne wrote, "I’d be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was science." Translation: "I’d be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was evolution."

Al Gore Regurgitates Absurdities of Evolutionary Psychology

People are having fun at Al Gore's expense, but his ideas (at least some of them) come right out of evolutionary theory. As Geoff Brumfiel reports, in his talk this week at the close of the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, Gore explained that "evolution had trained us to respond quickly and viscerally to threats. But when humans are confronted with 'a threat to the existence of civilization that can only be perceived in the abstract,' we don't do so well." Sound familiar? This is standard evolutionary psychology, as popularized lately by Nicholas Kristof, for instance. It may sound more silly coming from Al Gore, but he's not the one making this stuff up.