American Theology - Roman Theology

Recently the pastor of a Baptist church in Tempe, AZ, gave a sermon entitle "Why I Hate Barak Obama" (you can find the sermon here, or, if you feel sick to your stomach, you can read a report of it here). Steven Anderson then mentioned, both to his parishoners and to a reporter from Fox, that he regularly prays for Obama's death (maybe God would strike him with a tumor, like Ted Kennedy!). This is obviously pretty crazy, and as far as Christian doctrine goes, heresy. The notion of praying for someone's death is rejected everywhere in Scripture. What is common is to pray for God's judgment on nations and people who are oppressive, exploit the poor, treat the alien as less than human, and who forget widows and orphans.

Of course there is violent imagery in the Bible (how could their not be? Humans are violent). Yet, over and over, God fights for Israel (Ex. 14.13; Ex. 17; Ezra 8.21ff), and punishes those Israelite Kings who presume to fight for themselves (2 Cron 16, 20). The NT is even more emphatic, from Jesus' example of a violent death at the hands of the Romans, to Paul's admonition to accept the authority of the worldly powers. Resistance, in the NT world, is always non-violent, politically marginal (although very political), and focuses on Jesus' Kingship (or Presidentship, or whatever authority figure you can think of) over the entire world, and the church's responsibility of helping to inaugurate this empire throughout the world. This categorically rejects any notion that Christians ought to pray for something like death to a particular person, because that would imply that they, not God, were somehow sovereign in God's empire, that they could somehow mete out judgment over life and death. Nowhere is this "authorized" for disciples of Jesus.

But the real question, in my mind, is this: how is it possible for a pastor like Steven Anderson to say such a thing? This isn't a question of psychological motives (like 'he's mentally deranged'), nor is it a question of argument (like, 'what's his argument?'). It's a question of: how is a thing like that possible to say in 21st century America. The fact that he said it shows that's its possible; his parishoners understood him. Put another way: it would be impossible for someone today to say "a woman's life-force resides in her hair" (a common thing to say in the ancient Greco-Roman world). No one would understand this, because the notions implied in this statement would make no sense. We could imagine what this might mean, but the statement would have lost its associated field (as Foucault calls it), a field that renders it possible to say this statement with force.

Yet Anderson said that he prayed for Barak Obama's death. His parishoners understood it. How? The answer, I think, can be seen from one of the "essays" on the Faithful Word Baptist Church's website. The title of the piece is "Correcting the King James Bible" (as in "don't - it's perfect!"). Anderson makes the absurd claim that the King James Bible is the perfect (as in "complete") word of God, and that finally, in 1611, when Paul says, "For we only know in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end" (1 Cor 13.9-10), this was fulfilled! The absurdity of that interpretation does not need to be commented upon. However, the real "meat" of his argument shows perfectly how this his statement could have been made:

In the Old Testament God chose the nation of Israel to be His tool to bring the gospel and the word of God to the world. This is why he chose to deliver the Old Testament scriptures in the Hebrew language. In the New Testament God chose the Gentiles to be his chosen vessels to carry the gospel to the world, which is why he delivered the New Testament to mankind in the Greek language. Shortly thereafter Antioch and other Syrian-speaking areas became a great hub of the gospel; therefore multitudes of copies of the Bible in the Syrian language were produced.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the nation God was using the most was the nation of England. Over time, the United States of America picked up the torch of the gospel and has been used by God unlike any other nation. The United States has mightily been used by God to take the gospel to the world. English has also become the universal second language of the world. In God’s foresight, he supplied the English-speaking people with a perfect preservation of his word, the King James Bible. Since then, the King James Bible has been translated directly into hundreds of languages and has been the standard for numerous other foreign language translations.

This is a perfect summary of the ground of possibility for Anderson's prayer for Obama's death. What is that ground? Instead of Imperial Theology in the Roman vein - which a very exciting field of NT studies has been documenting for the last 20 years - we have Imperial Theology in the American vein. This has been with us for a long time as Americans. Just as the Imperial Theology of Augustus and Domitian argued, the U.S. has the "torch" of the God(s) (whether Jupiter or some shadow Christian god), which with the god's "foresight" happened to provide for us (in the form of a book). This would seem strange to most people (especially those who are not Christians), but I would argue that this is actually the form of virtually every government that has ever existed - and in this particular form and content, pretty common even for "secular" Americans.

In other words (and I can't fully develop this argument here, but I will later), all powerful countries develop a theology to legitimize their existence, to develop a fantasy that protects them from their actually ethical practices, and to project a sacralized image to justify itself to others. What I mean by "theology" here is a counter-empirical claim that idolizes an abstract quality about a thing, a quality that may (or may not) inhere in the thing, but which makes such a strong claim on the empirical world that one cannot perceive the world without it. Thus, e.g., Americans have a difficult time in general conceiving how someone could be happy in a Muslim country with no democracy. The reason for this is that democracy, in our sense, is a theological claim. Every resistance - say in Iran, or other places - that citizens give toward their government is immediately cast in a western democratic way, whether the participants conceive what they are doing in this way or not (this of course is not to claim they don't want democracy - but to illustrate the point that theological claims of this sort makes one perceive the empirical world in a certain manner).

Here in the U.S., we have many theological concepts - the "American Dream," touting the president as the "leader of the free world," talk of "peace-keeping activities," etc. From the colonist in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to President Obama (and of course every President in between), as a nation we are captured by our theology. Anderson may be an extreme version of this (part of his and his parishoner's disagreement with Obama is that he is betraying our country's ideals in their view), but his heretical statements make sense only within this context.

Dawkins the Atomistic Monist: Selfish Gene, Chap 3

In the third chapter, called "Immortal Coils," we are inserted into a debate about the "unit of selection" in natural selection, which Dawkins is kind enough to spare us the details. Mainly, it seems, we don't need to think about other positions (he's "dispatched" one position - group selection - in the first chapter). However, Dawkins' argument "is an argument which some of my most respected colleagues obstinately refuse to agree with [!], so you must forgive me if I seem to labour it!" (26) Actually, he doesn't really labor his point at all. He spends just a few paragraphs justifying his insistence that "genes" are the unit of selection in natural selection.

Dawkins is an advocate of "gene selectionism" (although in the Extended Phenotype he allow for selection at the level of the ogranism, i.e. that they can be explained at multiple levels). This is the notion that the gene is the thing that natural selection works on. The involves an argument about what genes are, and an argument about what is needed in order for natural selection to be the case. What I will show is that Dawkins really begs the question of the unit of selection, and that his is not the only (or the best view) for the "unit of selection."

First, his definition of a gene: "I am using the word gene to mean a genetic unit which is small enough to last for a large number of generations and to be distributed around in the form of many copies" (34). Second, what is needed for natural selection to work: "Natural selection in its most fundamental form means the differential survival of entities. Some entities live and others die but, in order for this selective death to have any impact on the world, an additional condition must be met. Each entity must exist in the form of lots of copies, and at least some of the entities must be potentially capable of surviving - in the form of copies - for a significant period of evolutionary time" (35). Dawkins does ackowledge that "what I have now done is to define the gene in such a way that I cannot really help being right! (35)," but then he goes right back and says, "what I have done is to define a gene as a unit which, to a high degree, approaches the ideal of indivisible particulateness" (35). This ideal is needed because of his assumption of what is needed for natural selection. In philosophical parlance, you might call this a vicious circle, i.e. using your assumptions to define a thing that confirms your assumptions. The fact that Dawkins admits he's doing something like this, and then going on to some pretty unqualified statements, is just bizarre.

But let's think about his assumption of what's needed for natural selection. I'm gonig to examine this from the more specific to the more general, i.e. what's needed qua Darwin's theory (and other scientist's view of what's needed), to Dawkins' general philosophical presuppositions.

1. What's needed for natural selection?
Dawkins says you need a few things: first is differential survival. A lot of scientists, apparently, use the phrase "differential reproductive success" (an updated version of "survival of the fittest"), but Dawkins' doesn't. Instead of "reproduction" he uses the phrase survival of entities, presubably so this leaves open the idea that "did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication" (46), is really derivative from "straightforward" replication (although, given David Hull's distinction between replicators and interactors, it was never that "straightforward").

Be that as it may, what is needed for natural selection is (a) an entity that displays a variation, (b) the selection of one of these variations, (c) lots of "copies" of the entity. Richard Lewontin calls these three ideas "variation, selection, and transmission" (Sober and Lewontin, 158). This seems like pretty much the same thing, except for (c). Dawkins says that you need something that will replicate itself faithfully, over long generations, something almost "immortal" (which is what he says of genes, 36), instead of individuals, which are "too large and too temporary" to "qualify as a significant unit of natural selection" (36). Genes last a really long time, according to Dawkins, and again, "approaches the ideal of indivisible particulateness" (35). For Dawkins, you need to have some stable substrate underneath all that change, like the Arsitotelean subject, and organisms are too ephermeral.

Now, there are some serious questions with this argument. First of all, why is it that classical Darwinian theory holds that the individual organism is the unit of selection? Clearly this is because despite what the genes do, the organism is what "survives or dies." Selection pressure is on the phenotype, and while the genotype is hugely important, selection just does not happen at that level. What it takes is for an organism to be put out there in an environment, where the pressure is displayed, and this pressure will weed out some individuals and not others (although this is not all - there is random genetic drift, as well as non-adaptive phenotypic traits that eventually get used later on, or not).

Second, Dawkins' claim that genes are "immortal" is not true. If we take genes to be a material entity, they are obviously connected with the life-cycle of the organism. When the organism dies, clearly the genes go with them. Lewontin's definition makes more sense. The "transmission" for him has to do with parents and offspring (and according to Peter Godfrey-Smith, that's really all that's required for transmission - you don't need a stronger "exact-copy" replicator). This makes complete sense. Say you have a population with a certain gene pool. Even though "discrete individuals" (in Dawkins' terminology) are needed for natural selection, as long as there is something that is inherited, there will be enough likeness between the parent and the offspring to "select." Also, remember we're dealing with evolutionary time too - meaning thousands, millions of years. The genes that are passed on, while a hybrid, are finite (since the gene pool is finite), and are even more limited depending on population sizes and locality.

Third, as Stephen Jay Gould says (and he's not the best to bring in here, since the profession row between the two), gene selectionism engages in a "confusion of bookkeeping with causality." Genes certain do record all the changes that selection does, but that doesn't mean genes are the cause of these changes (although they may be - it depends). In other words, there is not necessarily causation when there is correlation.

2. The Monistic Atomist
I haven't really dealt with a lot of substance of this chapter, but what really interests me is Dawkins philosophical perspective. On the one hand, he seems to think that the "ideal" is discrete particulates as the thing that is actually "real," in the sense of what changes. This is an atomist position (even if, as he repeatedly points out, saying what a gene is is a continuum - a unit of genetic material, like a group of DNA on a chromosome, etc), because it sets up what you would need in an explanation as a simple part. In other words, in the order of explanation, Dawkins thinks that we get to a good explanation of what a thing is when we get to its smallest unit.

But inspite of this atomism - which is a form of reductism - Dawkins is also, oddly enough, a monist. This is, in my view, his sense of genes as "immortal coils." The reason they are is because instead of really treating genes as "atoms" (which really do never die - because they always remain the exact same), the material of genes certain does turn over, but it's the "information" that stays the same. This information is a reification - that is, an artifact that is treated as the thing itself. In other words, the "information" (or the coding process) is a result of the material, not the other way around. Dawkins treats it the opposite way. This information because the "one substance," in a strange sense, because its the thing that's hanging around, despite the fact that the material is no longer existence (because the gene is in a hierarchy of the organism) once the organism dies. Genes thus become the one explanation for everything, sort of like other great monistic principles ("Fire" for the Stoics, "Spirit" for vulgarized Hegelians, etc.).

I find both atomism and monist completely problematic. When can you say you've given a full account of a thing? In science, this is when you can give satisfactory explanation for is material and efficient causes, and then predict with relative accuracy (make mathematical models and such) how things would work in the future. The second half I have no idea how to do, and I must rely on scientists to figure out the math (and there has been a lot of criticism on that front against gene selectionism). I do think that, even in my in-expert mind, the Dawkins paradigm would woefully fail the first use of science. In a world as diverse as ours, in the many ways things have to be in the world, reducing them all to the genetic level is such a restriction in one's view of the world it seems laughable. Why would you want to do that? Dawkins this its the "astonishing" truth (ix). But I'm pretty skeptical of thinkers touting their own "discovery" of "astonishing" truths.

Master and Machine: Dawkins, chapter 2

The second chapter of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene gives us an eagle-eye view of the subject matter, and a genealogical speculation. My procedure will be the same as the first post: first a look at his basic thesis, and then a philosophical critique.

Dawkins makes a very important point early in the chapter that Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest” is “really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable” (13). This is surely right, and as Evelyn Fox-Keller has pointed out (in her excellent Century of the Gene), species stability is the real hot topic in genetics and other biological sciences these days. In other words, the real question is not “how do things change” but how, given change, what conditions make it possible for a thing to stay the same – or similar – in other words, to survive. For Dawkins, the history of this emergence of stability can be written in terms of Darwinian natural selection from its earliest conception, that primeval soup after the big bang.

To justify this, Dawkins appeals to the idea of molecule stability. Molecules, like hemoglobin, are extraordinarily stable, and if you have a stable molecule (because of its structure), it “will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones” (14). So, the basic Darwinian concept of natural selection – which, in Darwin, starts mid-stream, in already complex forms of life – for Dawkins can at least be understood in even the earliest forms of life.

I really do wonder what other biologists make of this argument, and Dawkins doesn’t present much evidence beyond this logical construct. Because stability is the goal (Dawkins uses this type of language), things that are more stable tend to stick around, as opposed to less stable stuff. This of course doesn’t account for the complexity of humans, but this complexity is “where Darwin’s theory, in its most general form, comes to the rescue. Darwin’s theory takes over from where the story of the slow building up of molecules leaves off” (15).

And so Dawkins takes on a “necessarily speculative” journey, with the caveat that “the simplified account I shall give is probably not too far from the truth” (15). The beginning of this story is standard. The primeval chemical soup leads to the building blocks of life, and this means molecules. The innovation (I think – Dawkins cites absolutely no one, so it’s really hard to know, as a science outsider, if this is a common view, or who first thought of it. I find this annoying.) comes in the idea of “replicator.”

Now the concept of “replicator,” and indeed the concept of unit of selection, apparently has been debated quite a bit in the scientific literature. I found a few articles describing this debate (see Samir Okasha on this), and it seems that Dawkins doesn’t really take into account other views, like Hull’s replicator/interactor distinction, or Lewontin’s criticism. But in any case, he presents replicators as having essentially two functions: they re-create the structure of the molecule they copy; and transmit the differences or variations (‘errors,’ in Dawkins-talk) to the next generation.

Dawkins’ replicators have three characteristics: (a) longevity (selected for); (b) fecundity (the rate of production); (c) accuracy (18-19). Finally, these three aspects will be selected for in competition. Those molecules that show the least of these attributes will not survival; those that show the most, will (although Dawkins does not talk about possible variations among these three categories).

As far as molecules or bacteria are concerned, it is clearly right that this would be all that we are dealing with. In their cases, the “replicator” will be one to one in the copying processes. But it’s hard to imagine this is possible at much higher levels of complexity. What about the environment? What about the fact that genes, say, depend just as much on the organism as a whole as the organism as a whole on the genes?

This comes to Dawkins’ philosophical assumptions. At the end of the chapter, he has a few zingers. After describing a process of proto-carnivorous behavior (where higher level molecules started increasing their own stability and decreasing other’s stability (20) – nice business model, surely), Dawkins mentions how some molecules must have “discovered how to protect themselves…This may have been how the first living cells appeared” (21). Then we get the result: these protections morph into something else. “The replicators which survived were the ones which built survival machines for themselves to live in” (21). The protective coat becomes the machine that houses the replicator that goes on to a blockbuster role in humans. The replicators did not stay in these small houses of chemical or protein walls; they made colonies, and developed new robots. Eventually they get really complex: “they are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence…they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines” (21).

So here we get the first part of his thesis, that we are survival machines. This is certainly an extraordinary statement, but of course, Dawkins tells us (rather sheepishly) "this is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others" (ix). Well, I for one am astonished. What I am so astonished by is how utterly unbelievable this thesis is. Just think about this notion: a replicator, the gene, is the basic "unit of selection." But what about the rest of the organism? Does Dawkins really expect us to swallow the idea that there is no two-and-fro between the genes and organism, the organism and its group, and the organism/group and its environment? His very explanatory tool for variation - monks transcribing the gospels - is a perfect example of this multi-level unit of selection. Monks mis-transcribed for hundreds of reasons - that one was particularly tired that day; the Carolingian script made the old Latin script even more foreign each time; wars, pestilence, and a whole bunch more stuff. If you said it was all the monk's fault for these errors would just be simplistic.

And so Dawkins seems to be. His entire history may be correct (even if speculative), but I find the entire explanation like a simple just so story - like his use of the idea of "affinity" to explain how molecules originally started to replicate. What is "affinity"? What is the relationship between copy and copies? Did the molecules desire one another? Did they fit like puzzle-pieces? Did some force-field push them together? One or none of these may be the case, but Dawkins doesn't say.

But the central problem I see is his use of the machine metaphor. A machine is a thing that an agent makes in order to increase efficiency in some manner. It can be simple or complex, but the basic principle is that there is an input and an output, and the something outside the machine has to put something inside the machine, the machine itself being an inert thing, like a substrate. Humans "create" these machines like genes "create" humans. But at the same time, even in machines with human masters alter the way humans live, how they relate to their world, what they conceive as worthwhile and what they think is ok to do (think about "push-button war" vs. nomadic, hand-to-hand combat). In Dawkins' hands, this sounds completely one-way, as if molecules are using the "shell" (the Ghost in the Shell, as it were) of humans.

Now, if there were only a metaphor - ok. But then you would enrich this account with other metaphors, and you could delimit your subject by qualifying your assertions. Dawkins never does this (except once - when he says it's a "fallacy...to suppose that genetically inherited traits are by definition fixed and unmodifiable [by human behavior]" (3). Well, he doesn't actually point out which fallacy this is, and he doesn't seem to really back this up - at least not yet). It seems as if Dawkins would have to be using "machine" as a metaphor, but he speaks in a much more literal way, so it's hard to discern.

In the end, I found myself wonder what this is, if not an alteration of the old Platonic notion of the dualism of the soul and body. What is changed is the "soul" - it becomes "replicators," the genes themselves - the subject of his next chapter. But the body stays its old self- a hull, something to be cast off in the eternal life of the gene....

The Free Market Comes to Biology: Reading Richard Dawkins

I've attempted in the past to blog through a particular work as a "commentary", and I've been pretty unsuccessful at it. I've decided that instead of a commentary, I will attempt to do a number of essays as a way of reading a particular work. And so, my inaugural attempt: Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene."

I've only read Dawkins' rather pathetic attempt at religious critique in the "God Delusion," so I thought it would only be fair to actually read his science stuff, very carefully and seriously. I will still be antagonistic to it; that's inevitable with such a character as Dawkins, and I'm not sure he would necessarily mind (at least he reads people that way). So I open up my reading with some thoughts on his first chapter, "Why People."

I shall do this in three movements: first, a discussion of his basic thesis; second, a discussion of his assumptions concerning science and inquiry.

Dawkins, near the beginning of his Preface, says "we are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" (ix.). This is the general thesis of the book, and he specifies this in a few different ways. First, he says, "my purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism" (1). Second, "the argument of this books is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes" (2). How is he justified in this? He has a very simple, and "elegant" argument (as scientists are wont to say when using basic logical principles):

a. All animals have evolved by natural selection.

b. Natural selection always entails selfish behavior.

c. Therefore, all animal behavior is selfish. (4)

For number 2 he uses the subjective "should", so its a bit ambiguous whether he's arguing for this, or whether or not there will be exceptions to this.

But there is an exception! Altruism. As he says, "an entity, such as a baboon, is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity's welfare at the expense of its own" (4). Consider a worker bee who stings a foe. If the bees stings such foe, it will surely die, since vital organs are connected to the barbed stinger. Clearly this is a problem for proposition (a) above, yet Dawkins is not afraid: "this book will show how both individual selfishness and individual altruism are explained by the fundamental law which I am calling gene selfishness" (7). No matter how it looks with these cases of sacrifice, there is another principle at work: altruism depends on selfishness.

How is this possible? Doesn't this seem like a blatant contradiction? Well, here Dawkins gets around this by displacing the unit of selection. In an argument with Robert Ardrey's view of "group selection" instead of "individual" selection (Ardrey was a populizor of sociobiology in the late 60's and 70's) - the view that natural selection selects groups rather than individuals - Dawkins slides the individual from the organism selection (individual) to "gene selection" (8). Group selection is not a part of the "orthodox" of evolutionary theory, and so I won't discuss his response to Ardrey. But his argument for the selfishness of individuals goes like this:

a. In any group of altruists, there will most "certainly" be one "rebel" who puts his interests above the rest.

b. This rebel, since he looks out for his interests, will, "by definition", be more likely to produce offspring.

c. The child of this rebel with then "inherit his selfish traits."

d. Eventually, these "selfish traits" will overrun the group.

So, it appears from this argument that there are selfish traits, and we can assume these are somehow connected with genes. I'm assuming his next couple of chapters will elucidate this, and we'll see how these notions get cashed out.

This thesis seems rather strange but is straightforward, at least in terms of clarify. If Dawkins is anything, he is clear. But I do find this thesis, on the face of it, extrodinarily reductionistic, in the worst possible way. I'll have to read his chapters on genes before I make any judgment, but to even think that there is one universal law for all of these behaviors is rather simplistic. The world is so extraordinarily complicated and pluralistic, it seems rather restrictive to place everything on the shoulders of one principle.

And this leads to the most interesting thing to me so far - since I'm much more a philosopher at heart. Dawkins opens his chapter "why people" with a panegyric to Darwin as the person who "first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist" (1). Because of this, "we no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man" (1). Furthermore, Dawkins quotes G.G. Simpson, who, after posing these questions, says, "the point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that questions before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely" (1). Dawkins doesn't mince words.

Now, from his book "The God Delusion," you get the feeling Dawkins really means what he says (and quotes). But there are two huge problems with his view of Darwin expressed here, one historical, and the other philosophical.

1. Historically speaking, Darwin did not come up with all of this on his own. Not only was there another gentleman, an Alfred Russell Wallace (who Dawkins doesn't mention), but there was a whole host of economic, sociological, and scientific grounds that supported Darwin. He certainly came up with the most coherent vision, but it wasn't done at all in 1859. It was just starting then, and it took a very long time to reach a coherent picture - as all science does. But you cannot forget Darwin's cultural milleau, as if it didn't exist. He was a child of the British Empire during the rise of capitalism - and his theories owe a lot (by Darwin's own admission!) to this.

Now, for Dawkins to talk like this seems a bit crazy to me. I mean, I understand his gross misrepresentation of religion and philosophy in "The God Delusion", since he hates religion anyway (and after that quote from Simpson, I'd be surprise if he actually read anything he critiqued). But here? On his own turf? It seems rather amazing he would be so bombastic and off-kilter about it.

2. Philosophically speaking, its hogwash that Darwin finally gave us an answer to the question "why are there people?" Unless, of course, you mean that in the way one would say "why are their cars," and you talk about the production of a car, from the metals mined to the engine blocks machined, and all in between. But very few people, when they ask the question "why are people," are asking how it happened (although that's bound to be a question often as well). The "why" questions - why "meaning", purpose, and all that, are not scientific questions per se. Science purports to explain causation on the material and efficient levels (i.e., the way something actually moves), not the formal and final levels (the question of meaning and purpose). The last two levels are properly outside that domain, mainly because they aren't testable. And it would just be smuggling teleology back into biology for Dawkins to claim that Darwin allows for that. The "why" question is a teleological question through and through.

Now, the same lack of philosophical IQ Dawkins displayed in "The God Delusion" is displayed precisely here. My real question is why? Why does he have to make claims like this? How can anyone take him serious? Who is he trying to convince? I find it all puzzling.

One last note, and perhaps this explains my question. Dawkins specifically uses the word "orthodox." Most scientists that I've read do not use this word, but rather the phrase "dominant view." This seems to allow for a certain variability in the future, and the possibility that this "view" may not always be dominate. It is interesting then that Dawkins takes a word that means "correct teaching" from religion. It is "correct teaching" that he is advocating. And if that is the case, then it makes sense that he would make such extreme statements about his religion's founder.

Enough for the first chapter. Like I said, I'll be antagonistic. At the same time, there is no reason not to take him seriously.

Aristotle and Modern Science: Common Sense vs. Expert Sense

Recently reading Aristotle's Physics I came across this passage: 

Why not suppose, then, that the same is true of the parts of natural organisms [i.e. that nature acts not for something, i.e. for some final cause, but of necessity]? On this view, it is of necessity that, for example, the front teeth grow sharp and well adapted for biting, and the back ones broad and useful for chewing food; this  result was coincidental, not what they were there for. The same will be true of all the other parts that seem to be for something. On this view, then, whenever all the parts come about coincidentally as though they were for something, these animals survived, since their constitution, though coming about by chance, made them suitable . Other animals, however, were differently constituted and so were destroyed; indeed they are still being destroyed, as Empedocles says of the man-headed calves. (Physics II.8, 198b23-33). 

What we have here is an articulation of the evolution of species by natural selection. Say some animals have some parts well-adapted ("proper") for biting - sharp teeth. These sharp teeth are not there because that's what they are for, but rather coincidentally. What happens is that these parts get there coincidentally (a modern biologists would say this is "random variation"), and the organisms who had these adaptations would survive, while the one's who do not (like Empedocles' man-headed calves) would not. 

This folks, is natural selection in essence. Let's compare it to Darwin's definition: 

 

Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man [in the breeding of animals] have undoubtably occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battles of life, should occur in the course of many successive generations. If such do occur, can we doubt (remember that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating its kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are  injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. (Origin, 107)

Now of course Darwin knew of this Aristotle passage - he quotes it in a footnote on the first page of the second edition - but he didn't think Aristotle understood its significance. The significance, from this passage, is that variation can and does occur, and the principle of "selection" of which variations will be reproduced and what will not is their fittest for survival. Aristotle obviously says the same thing, but with a big difference: Aristotle didn't think chance would work like this. 

In fact, Aristotle rejects this argument precisely that because we speak of "chance" as something hardly ever taking place, while teeth are "normally" or usually there. In other words, animals having teeth is a very normal occurrence. If it is normal, then it is the very opposite of coincidentally or by chance, which by definition is abnormal. Thus we need to look at another cause. For Aristotle this is the "final" cause, i.e. that an animal needs this or that part to become a fully mature animal.

Now, I can imagine Stephen Jay Gould's response to this: if you want to get on board with Darwin, you need to expand how you think about "chance" to include lots and lots of time (thousands, millions, of years), and lots and lots of interactions at the genetic level. If you look at chance events over millions of years, instead of just a couple, or a few hundred, you can imagine how chance variations can come up, and while they seem like chance variations from a certain perspective, they take on a statistical regularity over the long haul. This "regularity" is enough, if looked at in the right perspective, for natural selection by random variation to make sense. Aristotle of course did not entertain this perspective (the reasons for this are not merely historical, but also philosophical). How could you, Aristotle might say, when by definition chance is not something that is regular? Chance by necessity is rare! But then again, as Daniel Dennett says, perhaps this was a case where Aristotle mistook necessity for a lack of imagination. 

So why oh why did it take over 2000 years, from Aristotle to Darwin, for humans to recognize this fact? Was it Aristotle's commitment to "final causes" in nature (an idea that, so far as I've read scientists reading it, is very little understood by most scientists today)? Was it an "essentialism" in Aristotle, Platonism, Islam, and Christianity, modes of thinking that dominated our culture for those thousands of years? Was it that Darwin finally let go the shackles of dogmatism that plagued everyone from Plato to Paley? This is the standard story, no doubt, biologists tell. 

Yet I have an alternative hypothesis, something I have not done enough research on to really defend here. My hypothesis is this: in order to entertain random variation there had to be the historical development of population science. This historical develop only arose with the modern state and notions of managing large populations. The very idea of "population" is something almost completely foreign to Aristotle's time. When you ask a question about a species you ask the question about a typical example of the species, not about the "distribution of attributes across populations," which is what statistics like the birth rate and the death rate do. This only happens with the advent of the modern nation-state, where territory and population take on a completely different sense than it ever had, and where you understand the nation in terms of its population, rather than its ethnicity, or its king, etc. 

One might retort - 'so what. So that's the development. It's no secret that science and ideas develop over time, and that there are antecedents to ideas. So population science was antecedent to Darwinian evolution. Big deal.' The big deal, however, is a question of perception. What type of perception goes into population studies? How has this perception altered our very everyday senses and perceptions of our world? Do we understand, on the whole, more or less about the world now that we see in "populations"? I don't mean expert scientists, but common people. If we are, presumably, "enlightened" individuals, "moderns" who are no longer bound by the shackles of dogma and religion (unless you happen to be one of those creationist fundamentalists), then we should actually know more about the world than people did, say, 300 years ago. But is the case? 

I would say not. In fact, we're probably more ignorant of our world, as a general rule, than people were 300 years ago. Back when people actually engaged with things around them, instead of relying on technology or experts to give them all of their "knowledge" ("giving" here merely means: making things we use, without the slightest idea how they work). I would actually say, even if Aristotle is completely deficient in terms of "scientific" knowledge, he actually does give us something, in terms of common understanding, that really does help us know about our world. 

Asking the question "why", for Aristotle, can be answered almost entirely by your senses. You can ask: "why does this bird build a nest like this"? If you look at the nest, you look at the four ways we speak of "cause": you can find the "material" cause, the "efficient" cause, the "formal" cause, and the "final" cause all with your eyes. Paradoxically, modern science actually takes your eyes out of the equation - and replaces it with an equation - algorithms for variation, models of bird behavior, etc. Your eyes are actually deceptive - 'you think this table looks solid? Well my friend, you must know that it is made up of billions of atoms, and most of the volume of an atom - that space between the electron and the nucleus is complete void, empty space. If it weren't for the electromagnetic force that attracts and repels, friends, we'd fall right through this floor!' This type of explanation, like an evolutionary one might be for a bird nest, is much more "accurate" than Aristotle's four ways of speaking about causes, but at the same time, for our normal interaction with the world, is almost useless. 

Population studies, and most science today, are the sole purview of well-trained, well-funded, policy-arms of national governments. The "knowledge" of populations and the "management" of populations go hand in hand. Today, as Sajay Samuel says polemically, the polis or people are the subjects of experiment by the "experts." And this has been true since the beginning of population studies. Biology is not merely a way of seeing the world, but a way of making the world. 

Now, I'm not saying we go back to Aristotle. What I am saying is that Aristotle's attitude - that we begin with our common sense, our common understanding, is essential. We as modern people have given up our knowledge to a science that has become so obscure that most people have almost no knowledge about their surroundings. Perhaps we need to re-think the value of this common sense? 

Arguments - In and Out of Science

I've just started what I hope will be a really good refresher for me on current science by the New York Times science correspondent, Natalie Angier (The Canon). So far it's pretty interesting, and I'm really excited to learn a bit about new experiments going on, and her writing style, while a bit verbose, is in general really good. 

One thing really annoys me though. Her first chapter is about the scientific "critical thinking" mindset. It is important to start here, because as she points out (and many scientists say), science is not about a set of facts, but about a way of thinking. This is different from other ways of thinking, called "opinion." This of course is a distinction that goes back to Plato, but in her book seems to make this distinction between science and all other types of thinking. E.g., she quotes Andrew Knoll of Harvard: 

"In politics, you can say, I like George Bush, or I don't like George Bush, or I do or don't like Howard Dean or John Kerry or Mr. Magoo... You don't need a principled reason for that political opinion. You don't need evidence that someone else can replicate to justify your opinion. You don't need to think of alternative explanations that would render your opinion invalid..." 

Of course, after this, science comes in with its methods of control and institutional checks and balances, peer review, etc. She then has a few pages on the way science is critical of itself, which culminates in a few pages about the uncertainty of science. Uncertainty is one of the most important aspects of science, because its precisely in uncertainty there is a motivation for searching and working and discovering (incidentely, this is also one of Plato's contributions: the philosopher is precisely that person who desires wisdom, but does not have it, and thus is continually impelled toward it). I would say kudos - the best theories out there are ones that have just a enough certainty to keep working them out, but not enough to shut down debate. Those are normally the most productive theories.

The problem, she and some scientists say, is that this creates a poor public image. "How do you convey the need for uncertainty in science, the crucial role it plays in nudging research forward and keeping standards high, without undermining its credibility?" This is an excellent question, but the real issue has nothing to do with science's uncertainty, but with people's standard for argumentation. If you consider argument to be either mere opinion, or scientific, then you're setting up a false dichotomy. 

In other words, if you go around saying there are two ways of thinking - "critical scientific" thinking and "opinions" that supposedly do not need "evidence" - then you'll always have this problem. Andrew Knoll is just plain wrong that we do not need to justify our views. "Critical scientific" thinking is a species of the "critical thinking" genus. The Greek word krinein, from which we derive "critical," means to divide or cut (our word decision comes from the Latin synonym, caedere), and this is exactly what we do with "critical" thinking: we separate out good reasons from bad, cut certain perspectives while keeping others (winnow, if you like). This is a process that is much broader than modern institutionalized science. It happens in the everyday (should I go to this store or that?), and ought to happen whenever we think politically and in communities (where, sadly, it does not often occur). We separate this from that based on communal standards, principles we hope are true, and a whole bunch of cultural history and knowledge gained through thousands of years of experience as humans. 

The solution to this PR problem is merely to note what science can and cannot do, and what political argument should but does not do. Scientific findings are a basis to make reasoned arguments about what one ought to do. They are not idols we must serve in order to appease the gods of modern style, because ultimately that merely shifts responsibility to an impersonal jumble of information instead of to actual people (like you and me, and our nation's leaders), who have to do the real work of decision. Science ought to keep its standards high, to attain the most certainty it can; then politicians and thinkers, citizens and individuals, must take responsibility for their actions in the light of how they see their lives playing out. The questions "how ought we to be in our world" is clearly helped by critical scientific thinking (although it is not always helped by science in general - atom bomb anyone?), but it is not the whole of that question.

Ultimately what really irks me about both scientific rhetoric on this point, and about people's annoyance at science's uncertainty, is that both seem to have an attitude that one must find authority somewhere else. 

'You can't argue for your opinion, because it's just opinion! You don't have the scientific method to back you up!'  

'We can't trust you scientists, because you guys get it wrong!'

Apparently I have been under the illusion that that little Enlightenment dicta, "think for yourself!" still applies. 

Epistemology and Love: Wendell Berry and "Science"

I've been reading Wendell Berry's fiction as of late, reading a few essays, and have listened to one of his interviews. I am really fascinated by his phrase "the way of ignorance." He and Wes Jackson use this phrase to indicated a certain epistemological humility, on the one hand, and a certain affection for their localities on the other. Berry thinks that one of the major problems with modern techno-science (and this almost always goes together) is that it has no respect for localities, prefers to distance itself from what it studies, generalizes and abstracts to a damaging effect, and loves to reduce and dissect everything it comes in contact with. The effect, Berry thinks, is the destruction of land through the use of methods not suitable to that locality, the destruction of community through the mechinizing labor and conglomerating land, and ultimately the destruction of knowledge through the over-specialization of the scientists themselves, and through the loss of a knowledge-base in farming communities.

Clearly, Berry is against a mainstream understanding of "knowledge" if he thinks science destroys it. But what does he think knowledge is? From reading his short stories and novels so far, I can only say that he believes knowledge to be connected intimately with love. Love is attachment. Love is a focused care, a watching and waiting, a giving of space and a giving of time. Love is when you see yourself in that thing you're studying, you see every consequence of your knowledge as a consequence for your person. I think Berry's epistemology, and indeed an epistemology using love, is best seen in Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet:

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those bows which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such a day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by the black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This though perceive'st, that makes they love more strong:
To love well that which thou must leave ere long.

I think this sonnet typifies Berry's approach, and I must say I'm starting to think of knowledge in this way. The poem, in three quatrains and a couplet, moves like this: first, we hear the poet is in decline. The phrase "bare ruined choirs" is one of the most beautiful in the language for speaking in particular of decline, because we are speaking of seasons, of fall, where soon winter will take over, a sort of death. Next, we meet another sort of death, the death of a day - "death's second self," i.e. night, which gives rest, as much as it "seals up" in a tomb. Yet third we find the most interesting aspect of this: the "glowing" of the poet is actually that thing which leads to his decline, as he is "consumed with that which [he] was nourished by." This has always reminded me of the life cycle: the agent of our growth is the agent of out decline, since on the one hand, as we replace our cells (which takes 7 years for our entire body to be replaced with new cells), and grow, we area also being undone, because cell replication gets worse each time they replicate. This is merely the process of growing old.

But when we get to the couplet, we realize that even as we see this in the world, we still love the world.