In Our Time is 500 next week!

The BBC Radio 4 Blog mentions "In Our Time" coming up to its 500th edition next week.

On 15th October 1998 Melvyn Bragg welcomed listeners to a new Radio 4 programme called In Our Time. "In this series," he said, "I hope we'll look at the ideas and events which have shaped the century." Thirteen years later, on March 10th, IOT will celebrate its 500th edition. The programme has changed quite a bit since those early days. In 2000 it was extended from half an hour to 45 minutes, and the original two guests became three. And the programme's original remit - to look forward to the 21st century by surveying the key ideas of the 20th - seemed a bit passé post-millennium; so Melvyn and his then producer Charlie Taylor came up with the brilliantly simple format that persists, a decade on.

One of the programmes I found interesting was the one on religion and science, where the late Stephen Jay Gould gave a much more nuanced presentation of his Noma idea. Melvin Bragg introduced it:

Melvyn Bragg : Hello, what space should science leave to religion? What ground should religion give to science? Do they need to give ground to each other at all? The American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould tackles the old problem in his latest erudite and - odd adjective perhaps - charming book "Rock of Ages - Science and religion in the fullness of life" . In it he writes: "Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate or explain these facts. Religion on the other hand, operates in the equally important but utterly different realm of human purposes. In other words science studies how the heaven's go, religion how to go to heaven, the rocks of ages and the age of rocks." But do the two realms really exclude each other?

Now Michael Ruse, in his review of "Rock of Ages", thinks that, with NOMA, Gould is restricting religion to a domain of belief that does not have any place for miracles, for example. He writes:

What about miracles, for instance. Many non-Creationist Christians would argue for a literal resurrection, with a truly dead Jesus being lowered from the Cross and then coming alive again and rising on the Third Day. Can the Magisterium of religion as it were push aside the Magisterium of science and argue that this is possible? Such Christians would argue that since God is creator of all, it is up to Him, not us, to decide the limits of science. And if He wants a literal resurrection, then this must be possible. However Gould makes it clear that this is not his position, and essentially he reduces or confines religion to sentiment and feeling and will not allow it to make ontological (that is, existence) claims.

This stemmed from two of Gould's main statements about "Noma", or non-overlapping Magisteria:

Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values -- subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. Similarly, while scientists must operate with ethical principles, some specific to their practice, the validity of these principles can never be inferred from the factual discoveries of science.

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle" -- operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. . . . NOMA does impose this 'limitation' on concepts of God . . .."

But in fact, in this "In Our Time", possibly because of the unique format, Gould showed a much more relaxed attitude, and is able to explain that religion can have a place for miracles, but that may still does not bring it into conflict with science, because some of those miracles are outside of that domain:

Stephen Jay Gould : But at that point I just very say "alright I don't happen to believe in the immaculate conception of Mary for example", but that's not a scientific question I will leave that to you, to debate whether or not Mary was conceived without sin and free of the taint of Adam, because that's not a question that science can adjudicate in any case.

In this respect, he is very close to Chesterton, who wrote:

How could physical science prove that man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall? What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science (not being raving lunatics) never said that there had been "an incessant rise in the scale of being;" for an incessant rise would mean a rise without any relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full of relapse and failure.

But what of the miraculous itself, such as the Christian idea of Jesus' resurrection:

Stephen Jay Gould : But I think that way about the phenomenon of miracles that is I cannot say as a scientist, that miracles defined technically as suspensions of natural law for a moment don't happen. I suspect they don't, but if they did, I couldn't study them anyway, so I'm going to leave that domain aside. They don't seem to make much of an impact on human history anyway.

Hilary Rose : And prayer?

Stephen Jay Gould : Prayer is the placebo effect, that's one of the most powerful (John laughs) ones we know. I have no doubt that prayer is immensely beneficial for many people, it don't think it changes the character of the world, that can be scientifically adjudicated. But again I would say, for those for whom it is necessary to think that it does, it's outside the realm of science, I'll let them be.

Gould seems to be saying that if miracles, defined as suspensions of natural law - or perhaps as singular anomalies in natural law - exist, then science cannot study them, because they are not repeatable events, which can be tested. He also seems to be taking quite a soft line with regard to prayer, that while he doesn't think it is effecting the natural world, he thinks it is not a testable subject, so "I'll let them be", as he says.

Chesterton considered miracles in his play "Magic", where a conjurer uses magic to change the colour of a light, without any special apparatus or tricks. Because this causes an fervent (and almost Dawkinsian) atheist to suffer a breakdown, because he cannot understand how such a thing could happen, the conjurer takes pity on him. Chesterton argues in the play that if a miracle can have a naturalistic explanation that has the same effect, people will generally prefer the naturalistic to the miraculous:

Conjurer. I am going to tell that poor little lad a lie. I have found in the garden what he did not find in the garden. I have managed to think of a natural explanation of that trick.
Smith. It is much more marvelous to explain a miracle than to work a miracle. What was your explanation, by the way?
Conjurer. I shall not tell you.
Smith. [Starting.] Indeed? Why not?
Conjurer. You would believe it as he believed it. You cannot think [pointing to the lamp] how that trick could be done naturally. I alone found out how it could be done-after I had done it by magic. But if I tell you a natural way of doing it....
Smith. Well?...
Conjurer. Half an hour after I have left this house you will be all saying how it was done.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the In Our Time discussion was at its conclusion, in which Gould commented that both religion and science had the same root - the questioning nature of human beings:

Melvyn Bragg : Can I conclude what for me has been an absorbing discussion by asking Stephen Jay Gould, d'you think it's the same impulse that drives physicists to complete string theory as drives theologians to prove the existence of God?

Stephen Jay Gould : In some very broad sense I suspect it is. We're such a crazy curious species, that's why we're so (indistinct) to do the mostly terrible things to each other, and yet there is this substrate that one can only deem admirable. We are, as Sarvay(?) puts it this little creature, wondering why in the vastness of the heavens we're here and what it's all about and we've got this damnedest desire to find out. Science is a way of finding out in a factual sense. What religion seeks may not be factually resolvable, but it's a similar set of questions. "Why are we here? What's it all about? What can we do? How can we make it better?" that is the most noble part of our nature, and I think we should do everything we can to nurture it, because there's some very ignoble parts as well.

Ever Since Darwin

"Ever Since Darwin" by Stephen Jay Gould: A Review
 
This book contains a series of essays on the theme of "reflections in natural history"; it is an exciting book, extremely well written, and will undoubtedly confound anyone who imagines that natural history is not much more than numbering, listing and cataloguing. On the contrary, Stephen Gould demonstrates how evolutionary theory can unify and make sense of masses of disparate data.
 
I found one of the essays particularly fascinating because it shows how blind intellectuals - even scientists - can be to their own prejudices, and how uncritical speculation, in the absence of evidence, tends to follow the guidelines laid down by prejudice, and not portray what it fondly imagines to be "objectivity".
 
Consider the problem: how did man come to walk upright? In the traditional view, he learnt to walk upright just as a child develops from crawling to learning to walk; in this scenario, "upright posture is only the consequence of the higher development of the brain". So wrote von Baer, the great 19th century embryologist. Von Baer went on to remark that "all differences between men and other animals depend upon construction of the brain". Thus we emerge with a story of man's evolution from an ape-like ancestor in which the development of upright posture, tools, skills and speech are all a consequence of an increase in brain size. As he became more intelligent, man began to walk upright, to use his hands to fashioning tools, to develop skills and cunning in hunting, and later farming, and, on the way, developed language into the articulate form it takes today.
 
Unfortunately for this presentation, it is not actually based upon anything more than "intelligent speculation". When the facts began to be discovered they were in plain contradiction to this story. Our African ancestors, or near cousins, were small brained ape-like creatures (Australopithecus) whose anatomy (from skeletal remains) indicate a clear upright posture, no different from our own. Why did this come first, before increased brain size? Gould argues that it was the movement from tree-dwellers to ground animals that initiated the subsequent evolution of our ancestors to an upright posture. Walking upright left the hands free for using tools - the beginnings of our mastery of material surroundings. In turn this initiated the development of the larger brain required for more complex tasks.

However, the idealist tradition, of which Plato was the most eloquent spokesman, "encouraged an emphasis on thought as primary, dominating, and altogether more noble or important that the labour it supervised." It was the subtle and pervasive
influence of this idea that was simply accepted as axiomatic by scientists such as von Baer when presenting the traditional picture.
 
Other essays in this book cover equally interesting and instructive problems. Why did the Irish Elk become extinct? - not, as was claimed, because its antlers were so large that they stuck in the trees! Who was the naturalist on the Beagle when Darwin made his epoch making journey? - it was not Darwin!
 
Stephen Gould also assesses the popular portrait of past thinkers, such as catastrophists, and shows how they have often been misrepresented as cranks in a manner more reminiscent of caricature than proper history. This is indeed a thought-provoking book!

 

http://www.amazon.com/Ever-Since-Darwin-Reflections-Natural/dp/0393308189

 

Idiot Quotient

http://www5.channelonline.tv/news/templates/businessnews2.aspx?articleid=16374&zoneid=1

People in Jersey will be able to find out their IQ score when Mensa head for the island next month. There are currently 23,500 members in The High IQ Society, the only requirement being that your IQ falls in the top two per cent of the population. The IQ tests will be held at the St Paul's Centre in St Helier on Saturday 11th October at 10.30am. It will be £15 to sit the test which takes two and a half hours in exam conditions. John Stevenage, Chief Executive at Mensa, told Channel Online: "Knowing your IQ is useful for university and job applications, it can make your application stand out."

I remember that back in the 1980s, Mensa testing was done locally by the Jersey chairman who would occasionally take time out to go off to Guernsey to give tests there, and at the same time - as was common knowledge - to visit his mistress there. Unfortunately high IQ does not indicate any superior morality, and cheating on your wife is just as common among the clever as the stupid, only the clever are probably too stupid to realise that everyone knows.

Together with my friend Ken Webb, the editor, I was assistant editor of the Channel Island Mensa Magazine "Thinks!" for several years from 1984 onwards. Ken developed the magazine from the photocopied and stapled pages he inherited into a neat little piece of journalism, with a glossy cover, bound and stapled into a small booklet, and produced monthly by means of a photocopier and an Amstrad PCW512 - remember them!

Because contributions were exceedingly thin on the ground from the membership, Ken wrote additional material under his own name and the pseudonym Charles Cabeldu, and I contributed extra essays and reviews under my own name and also the unlikely names of Matthew Shepard, Gideon Fell, Una Nancy Owen and Magnus Riddolf! Mensa people may be supposedly bright, but they were barely literate when it came to any contributions, if they managed to put pen to paper at all. They were best seen at the monthly Mensa dinners, because intelligence and the ability to pontificate correlate very highly.

Regarding intelligence testing, I could never see quite what the value was in something that was so clearly a nonsense - a statistical artifact of cultural prejudices and general knowledge. On the one occasion when I did look at an IQ test paper, I had great fun working alternative answers - and legitimate ones - to all the questions.

For the best historical book to treat the subject, see Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" (revised edition, 1996), in which he looks at "one particular form of quantified claim about the ranking of human groups: the argument that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth" ; it "is a critique of a specific theory of intelligence often supported by particular interpretation of a certain style of mental testing: the theory of unitary, genetically based, unchangeable intelligence". He also demonstrates the statistical basis for IQ (factor analysis) and why it is flawed in its application.

Examples of cultural bias are given in the paper "Cultural Bias in Standardized Intelligence Testing" by Nicolas Bommarito:

Bias in an item on intelligence tests can result from cultural familiarity with one of the objects or words that occur in the question. For example, one item that appears in a form with pictures and in another form with words, gives a set of four instruments, harp, drum, violin, and piano. The test taker is then asked to cross out the one that doesn't belong. (Eells 258). Over half of the lower status children picked the harp, rather than the correct answer of drum, probably because they were unfamiliar with the harp as an instrument from a lack of exposure to it. A similar bias occurred on the WWI alpha IQ test, which contained obviously biased terms requiring knowledge of brand names and baseball players, and also on the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), which calls for knowledge of English weights and measures, literature, and history. (Mensh 1991:50). Questions like these seem far from measuring any type of innate intelligence, instead it appears as if they measure, at least to some degree, knowledge acquired though experience and thus environment. The may seem to be of minor importance in the overall results, but since speed is a requirement this unfamiliarity can be a severe handicap. For example, the WISC picture-completion subset allows only fifteen seconds for picture identification, an amount of time that requires significant familiarity.

Looking at the one test available from the site:

http://www.mensa-test.com/

Intelligence Test, Part 1: You have to work out what the letters mean. See No 0 as an example. It doesn't matter if you write the answers in uppercase or lowercase, but the answers must be exactly as expected (no additional intervals or dashes and the spelling must be correct).

0 24 H in a D = 24 hours in a day
1 26 L of the A
2 7 D of the W
3 7 W of the W
4 12 S of the Z
5 66 B of the B

and it goes on, another page of endless and pretty appalling culturally conditioned testing - try translating it into French, or even transplanting it from America to Scotland. Another blogger notes of this kind of rubbish that their should be a disclaimer saying: "Test results are only accurate for Americans, between the age of 25 - 34, and who had never voted Republican, and have consumed more than 3 beers in the past hour [you must be relaxed]"

And here is another one:

Tennis is to racquet as golf is to:
a. club
b. strike
c. bat
d. swing

This question does not just measure mental skills like insight or creativity; instead, it measures a specific piece of cultural knowledge that must be learned. To the extent that a child's environment does not include such knowledge of tennis or gold, they will not be able to answer the question.

Mensa's own site (http://www.mensa.org.uk/iq-levels/) says that:

IQ or Intelligence Quotient is an attempt to measure intelligence. This means many things to many people but generally the attribute of intelligence refers to quickness of mental comprehension (or mental agility). Intelligence is often confused with knowledge, wisdom, memory, or other attributes and in general has a variety of meanings depending on the context in which it is used. The term IQ usually refers to the attempt to measure a person's mental agility.

This is an incredible idea - that the "mental agility" - whatever that is - can be somehow divorced as a discrete measurable item apart from knowledge, wisdom, memory or other attributes. In theory then, it should be simple to devise an single intelligence test for human beings, cats, ants or spiders. After all, if it does not require the other attributes - which can be screened out of the testing process - then why not? Of course, the ability to read may be helpful - I believe that is called knowledge - which will cause trouble to some spiders.

Language, is of course, encoded in a particular culture, and the choice of words - try toilet, loo, lavatory etc - is also often highly correlated with class. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed demonstrates how choice of language reflects social and cultural bias. Even pictures can reflect bias, for example, those of Robert Yerke's IQ test for immigrants made assumptions about knowledge of American society.


For the pictorial tests, go to:
http://www.understandingrace.com/history/science/race_intel.html

Part Six of the beta IQ test (link above), developed by psychologist Robert M. Yerkes, was given to Army recruits to determine their innate intelligence. Yerkes intelligence exams (alpha, beta and individual) were culturally biased, taken under markedly different conditions and tended to reflect years in the U.S. and familiarity with dominant culture, rather than innate intelligence. Nevertheless, the early 20th century IQ exams have been the basis for standardized tests ever since.

There is a mathematical paper by the Princeton mathematician W. Smith, which looks in detail at the mathematics and logic behind both IQ and Artificial Intelligence. Regarding the founding work of Spearman in establishing IQ, he gives this verdict (which most mathematicians would agree with):

Spearman's 93-page 1904 paper (which Jensen calls "one of the 3 or 4 most important papers in the history of mental testing") in fact was quite shoddy both mathematically, statistically, and methodologically, and to add injury to insult, R.B.Fancher redid Spearman's calculations and found about 50 erroneous results apparently due to wrong arithmetic and with the signs of the errors showing an amazing fortunate tendency to "improve" the validity of his conclusions (Spearman's uncorrected numbers were then reprinted by Jensen [86] p.24). Specifically, Spearman seemed unaware of much of linear algebra, for example never mentioning eigenvalues and eigenvectors in his paper.

It is quite an amazing thing to me as a mathematician, but the psychologists and educationalists who devise IQ tests seem to care remarkably little about whether the "correct" answers on their tests actually are correct. For example, the criteria for the "right answer" to Raven's matrices are pseudo-logical or aesthetic, but there is never any proof any answer is right or wrong. So this test - despite the plentitude of praise heaped upon it by Jensen at every opportunity - is purely a "popularity test" or "conformity test" testing whether your aesthetic preferences (or preferences when employing pseudo-logical argumentation), happen to agree with more or less of society (specifically, the normalization subsample of society) or with the test-creator, and is not a test of how good you are at finding the "right answer."

He concludes that:

Since "intelligence"is about "the ability to solve problems," one might have proposed the naive idea for an IQ test that a problem-task be described (in some language) and then the testee tries to solve it. Bad idea: it is important to be able to solve problems that do not have (or do not have obvious) descriptions and definitions at all - in real life, often a large part of solving the problem first is to find a good problem statement. This whole paper is, in fact, an excellent example of that. In real life, one determines "what the problem is" oneself and then determines "how good the solution is" oneself also, usually with the aid of some disagreeable interaction with the external world.

The advantage of that is to locate "intelligence" within an evolutionary context as something which helps survival, by providing a kind of "mental agility" to solve hitherto unseen problems. This problem solving ability would very likely involve reasoning, but also the ability to deal with real world problems rather than total abstractions, and considerable knowledge may also help. That is why this is the approach being taken by different researchers in Artificial Intelligence. We can program a computer to do a set task, but how do we program it to learn intelligently and solve problems by itself. By divorcing IQ from the evolutionary context, and making it something like a Platonic ideal, as Mensa does, the end result is a set of exercises in trivia.

References:
The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould,
Betrayers of the Truth, William Broad, Nicholas Wade (good on the fraud perpetrated by Cyril Burt)

http://www.nicbommarito.com/writing/nonfiction/anthroiq.pdf
http://www.pineforge.com/newman4study/resources/iqtests.htm
http://www.pipeline.com/%7Erougeforum/freirecriticaledu.htm
http://www.autcom.org/articles%5CIQFallacy2.html
http://www.math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/iq.pdf
http://www.personality-and-aptitude-career-tests.com/iq-test-scales.html
http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/b4241c2.html
http://www.donkeytest.com/history.html
http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/2250_Living_with_our_Genes.html

The Genius of Charles Darwin: A Review

I watched Richard Dawkins' latest offering, "The Genius of Charles Darwin", which was a high speed whistle-stop tour of Darwinism - as understood by Richard Dawkins; at times, I did wonder if "The Genius of Richard Dawkins" might not be a better description. According to Dawkins, you would be forgiven for thinking that Darwin's theory of evolution explained all there is to know about how life came to be on earth. He neatly avoided Darwin's own significant omission - the beginning of life from inanimate matter. Darwin knew full well the limits of his theory, and avoided areas where there was insufficient evidence. Indeed, he wrote in the last (1872) edition of The Origin of Species:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position-namely at the close of the Introduction-the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

Dawkins, alas, was not so modest. Evolution, he proclaimed, was the greatest scientific idea of all time, as if one could somehow take scientific ideas and weigh them in some kind of balance for brilliance. Newton and Einstein were somehow sidelined, as well as the plethora of times we have "Days the universe changed" that James Burke is always so fond of reminding us. Inventions such a printing, which enabled ideas to spread, or advances in optics, which enabled Dawkins to see clearly were not important. It was that James Burke kind of connectivity that was somehow missing from his picture of Darwinism, that for instance ideas about evolution - in terms of change and progress - had become so part of the word itself, that Darwin deliberately chose to write Origin of Species without once using the term that has become synonymous with his ideas. Alfred Russell Wallace also had short shift, just as someone "who had similar ideas".

"Nature red in tooth and claw" quoted Dawkins from Tennyson's "In Memoriam", after which we were treated to night shots and sounds of hunts on the African plains, punctuated by a rather ghoulish green visage of Dawkins himself. In fact, Tennyson was drawing not upon Darwin, but upon Robert Chambers "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" (1844) which had quite different ideas about evolutionary mechanisms, although it did propose - before Darwin - the transmutation of species over time by what its author called evolution. But as I noted, ideas about "evolution" were everywhere at the time. Dawkins mentions Darwin's book selling out at once but in fact Vestiges outsold The Origin of Species up until the early 20th century.

This was one of the weaknesses of the presentation, explaining exactly what Darwin understood by "natural selection". An average viewer would assume it was a fight for survival against competition for limited food resources, and it is true that this element, drawing on the economic ideas of Malthus, plays a significant part, but it is not always such an individualistic struggle as Dawkins makes out. David Attenborough, in "The Living Planet", observes numbers of cases when groups of predators work together co-operatively to hunt their prey. Group selection was not mentioned, and most of the focus was on carnivores hunting ""The total amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation" - herbivores and plant life barely got a mention. Moreover, the random element, as with the Cambrian extinction, or the end of the dinosaurs, in which the changing environment plays a hugely significant part, barely got a mention. Symbiosis had not mention, and yet we (and all mammals) are colonized by multitudes of symbiotic bacteria

Along with the presentation of predation, was mention of "escalation", where predator and prey both evolve in an "arms race". This is a local predictability, and Stephen Jay Gould notes that this is "documented in increasing strength of both crab claws and shells of their gastropod prey through time). But laws of nature do not tell us why we have crabs and snails at all, why insects rule the multicellular world and why vertebrates rather than persistent algal mats exist as the most complex forms of life on the earth." The way in which historical accident plays a role was minimised, and instead evolution was presented as a universal explanation far beyond its capacity.

Dawkins, on the beach with schoolchildren mentioned invertebrates evolving from bacteria, fish evolving from lesser creatures, land animals evolving from them, and human beings evolving from them. This was the worst part of the presentation, giving the impression of a progressive sequence of change, and while Dawkins noted that mankind was like the last string on a piano, in terms of the age of the earth, he did little to alter this image.

Yet, as Gould points out, when this is presented in this way, as a series of pictures: "We never stop to recognize the almost absurd biases coded into this.. No scene ever shows another invertebrate after fishes evolved but invertebrates did not go away or stop evolving! After terrestrial reptiles emerge, no subsequent scene ever shows a fish (later oceanic tableaux depict only such returning reptiles as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs)". The differences are striking: Dawkins in this programme, presents life as a branching tree - Stephen Jay Gould, as a low bush, because as he notes: "The most salient feature of life has been the stability of its bacterial mode from the beginning of the fossil record until today and, with little doubt, into all future time so long as the earth endures. This is truly the "age of bacteria" - as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be."

Dawkins's story on the survival of an HIV woman in Africa, and others like her, is an outcome of evolutionary forces. Her offspring carry the gene, and survive, so over time, those Africans who succumb to HIV will die out, and given long enough (around 1,000 years), mostly the genetic population with the survival gene will predominate. He compares this with survival genes for the Black Death. This was extremely weak - a kind of evolutionary fairy story, which does not take into account either the random factor or the time it takes to breed. For instance those who survived the Black Death may have had a gene which helped their survival, or equally, it could have been luck (a word he is not too keen on), because it had swept through Europe like a bush fire, and those behind the fire zone were simply too few in number and number of contacts for it to continue. What he does not consider is that the HIV population may happily breed before they die, or that the HIV virus may mutate. Historical contingency is not high on his agenda, and yet if he was looking for viral infections, he might note that the influenza outbreak of 1919 did not confer much immunity on those who survived. As Gould notes: "The history of life is not necessarily progressive; it is certainly not predictable. The earth's creatures have evolved through a series of contingent and fortuitous events."

When Dawkins was talking to the school children - and where did he find such a devout lot, because there are
none like that at any schools my sons have attended in Jersey - he noted with amazement that four out of 10 Britons still believe, in some form or another, that God created the world. That (and where is that survey, I've not found it?) is the Dawkins method of "pulling a fast one", and by presenting first people who believe in a literal rendering of Genesis - which Augustine and Jerome did not, for example - he then presents this statistic as a way of saying that this is what the people surveyed thought, which may or may not be true.

As a way of looking at "God created the world", which does not involve any conflict with cosmology or evolution, consider this presentation by C.S. Lewis

"Looking for God -- or Heaven -- by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth, nor is he diffused through the play like a gas. If there were someone who thought plays exist on their own, without an author..., our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying, quite truly, that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them.....To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find him on earth are unlikely to find him in space. (Hang it all, we're in space already; every year we go a huge circular tour in space.) But send up a saint in a spaceship and he'll find God in space as he found God on earth. Much depends on the seeing eye."

How Dawkins fits committed evolutionists and theists like Kenneth Miller (author of "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution") who have fought against creationists and proponents of intelligent design in debates and in the law courts of America into his picture is unclear; I suspect he hopes they would go away because they don't fit his very literal ideas about what belief should be. But then Miller (like Lewis and Augustine) operates with a very different idea of "creation" than the literalists who are Dawkins' bête noire. "Can a Darwinian be a Christian" asked the philosopher and atheist Michael Ruse, and concluded that while some aspects of Christianity - looking at it in all its diversity - caused problems, these need not always be insuperable.

My main gripe is that Dawkins presents evolution as (a) all embracing, which Darwin said it was not (b) extremely simplistically, which may lead people to reject it because it is presented in a flawed manner.

In my opinion, Stephen Jay Gould have a much more nuanced presentation of evolution, and its limits, when he wrote these words:

Natural selection is an immensely powerful yet beautifully simple theory that has held up remarkably well, under intense and unrelenting scrutiny and testing, for 135 years. In essence, natural selection locates the mechanism of evolutionary change in a "struggle" among organisms for reproductive success, leading to improved fit of populations to changing environments. ( Struggle is often a metaphorical description and need not be viewed as overt combat, guns blazing. Tactics for reproductive success include a variety of non-martial activities such as earlier and more frequent mating or better cooperation with partners in raising offspring.) Natural selection is therefore a principle of local adaptation, not of general advance or progress.

Yet powerful though the principle may be, natural selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change (and may, in many cases, be overshadowed by other forces). This point needs emphasis because the standard misapplication of evolutionary theory assumes that biological explanation may be equated with devising accounts, often speculative and conjectural in practice, about the adaptive value of any given feature in its original environment (human aggression as good for hunting, music and religion as good for tribal cohesion, for example). Darwin himself strongly emphasized the multifactorial nature of evolutionary change and warned against too exclusive a reliance on natural selection, by placing the following statement in a maximally conspicuous place at the very end of his introduction: "I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification."


References:

"The Seeing Eye" , C.S. Lewis (1963)

Can a Darwinian be a Christian, Michael Ruse
http://www.amazon.com/Can-Darwinian-Christian-Relationship-Religion/dp/0521631440

Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, Kenneth Miller
http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0060930497

http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/3079/Default.aspx
A review of Finding Darwin's God by Michael Ruse

A gut issue: Bacterial symbiosis shapes a healthy immune response
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7195/edsumm/e080529-01.html


The Evolution of Life, Stephen Jay Gould
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2948/gould.html
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151

Beckwith on Dawkins

The Irrationality of Richard Dawkins
By Francis J. Beckwith

Wednesday, June 20, 2007, 6:47 AM

In his 2006 book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins laments the career path of Kurt Wise, who has, since 2006, held the positions of professor of science and theology and director of the Center for Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Prior to that, Wise had taught for many years at Bryan College, a small evangelical college in Dayton, Tennessee, named after William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and associate counsel in the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial."

According to Dawkins, Wise was at one time a promising young scholar who had earned a degree in geology (from the University of Chicago) and advanced degrees in geology and paleontology from Harvard University, where he studied under the highly acclaimed Stephen Jay Gould. Wise is also a young-earth creationist, which means that he accepts a literal interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis and maintains that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. It is not a position I hold, and for that reason I am sympathetic to Dawkins' bewilderment at why Wise has embraced what appears to many Christians to be a false choice between one controversial interpretation of Scripture (young-earth creationism) and abandoning Christianity altogether.

At one point in his career, Wise began to understand that his reading of Scripture was inconsistent with the dominant scientific understanding of the age of the earth and the cosmos. Instead of abandoning what I believe is a false choice, he continued to embrace it, but this lead to a crisis of faith. Wise writes: "Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible. . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science." So Wise abandoned the possibility of securing a professorship at a prestigious research university or institute.

Dawkins is disturbed by Wise's judgment and its repercussions on his obvious promise as a scholar, researcher, and teacher. Writes Dawkins: "I find that terribly sad . . . the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic—pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. . . . I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed."


Of course, some Christians may be just as troubled as Dawkins. So one need not be an atheist to raise legitimate questions about Professor's Wise's intellectual and spiritual journey. But, given Dawkins' atheism, there is something odd about his lament, for it seems to require that Dawkins accept something about the nature of human beings and the natural moral law that his atheism seems to reject.


Let me explain what I mean. Dawkins harshly criticizes Wise for embracing a religious belief that results in Wise's not treating himself and his talents, intelligence, and abilities in a way appropriate for their full flourishing. That is, given the opportunity to hone and nurture certain gifts—for example, intellectual skill—no one, including Wise, should waste them as a result of accepting a false belief. The person who violates, or helps violate, this norm, according to Dawkins, should be condemned, and we should all bemoan this tragic moral neglect on the part of our fellow(s). But the issuing of that judgment on Wise by Dawkins makes sense only in light of Wise's particular talents and the sort of being Wise is by nature, a being who Dawkins seems to believe possesses certain intrinsic capacities and purposes, the premature disruption of which would be an injustice.

So the human being who wastes his talents is one who does not respect his natural gifts or the basic capacities whose maturation and proper employment make possible the flourishing of many goods. In other words, the notion of "proper function," as Alvin Plantinga puts it, coupled with the observation that certain perfections grounded in basic capacities have been impermissibly obstructed from maturing, is assumed in the very judgment Dawkins makes about Wise and the way by which Wise should treat himself.

But Dawkins, in fact, does not actually believe that living beings, including human beings, have intrinsic purposes or are designed so that one may conclude that violating one's proper function amounts to a violation of one's moral duty to oneself. Dawkins has maintained for decades that the natural world only appears to be designed. He writes in The God Delusion: "Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that—an illusion."


But this means that his lament for Wise is misguided, for Dawkins is lamenting what only appears to be Wise's dereliction of his duty to nurture and employ his gifts in ways that result in his happiness and an acquisition of knowledge that contributes to the common good. Yet because there are no designed natures and no intrinsic purposes, and thus no natural duties that we are obligated to obey, the intuitions that inform Dawkins' judgment of Wise are as illusory as the design he explicitly rejects. But that is precisely one of the grounds by which Dawkins suggests that theists are irrational and ought to abandon their belief in God.

So if the theist is irrational for believing in God based on what turns out to be pseudo-design, Dawkins is irrational in his judgment of Wise and other creationists whom he targets for reprimand and correction. For Dawkins' judgment rests on a premise that—although uncompromisingly maintained throughout his career—only appears to be true.

Francis J. Beckwith is an associate professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies at Baylor University. His most recent book is Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=776

Contrasting Teachers

Contrasting teachers

Interesting how memories of teachers play out into adult life!

Christopher Hitchens, the writer of a new book 'God Is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything' , dismisses all faith as "wish-thinking". The vitriolic and evangelical atheist (his own description) described how he came to lose his beliefs, when his teacher Mrs Watts came out with a really stupid comment:

There came a day when poor, dear Mrs Watts overreached herself. Seeking ambitiously to fuse her two roles as nature instructor and Bible teacher, she said: "So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes. Imagine if instead, the vegetation was all purple, or orange, how awful that would be." However, I was frankly appalled by what she said. My little anklestrap sandals curled with embarrassment for her. At the age of 9 I had not even a conception of the argument from design, or of Darwinian evolution as its rival, or of the relationship between photosynthesis and chlorophyll. I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about.

A stupid teacher meant, for Hitchens, that all religious beliefs must be stupid too. He remembers his teacher as a point of conflict, when he decided that he couldn't go along with stupidy, and that, for him, meant religion rather than science.

Stephen Jay Gould, on the other hand, had a very bright teacher, Mrs McInerney, his third grade teacher, who didn't come out with fanciful explanations, but was in the habit of rapping young knuckles when their owners said or did particularly stupid things. As a consequence, whenever he came across the argument that, for instance, evolution "disproved" God, he would comment:

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God's method of action).

Dawkins Down Under

Interesting to see Dawkins is making waves in Australia. I've just been reading Gould on the Nazi, an essay called "The Most Unkindest Cut of All", in which he shows quite clearly that the Nazi eugenics movement from Mein Kampf onwards to the fateful Wannsee Conference (brilliantly depicted by Branagh in the film "Conspiracy") was dominated by a reading of evolutionary theory, and had in its central statements, no religious motivation (that was Himmler, not Heydrich), but a scientific one throughout, perverting Darwinism.

Incidentally, Gould was taken to task by a reader when his essay appeared in "Natural History" for the bad grammar in the title. An unwise move for anyone to take on such a widely read scholar! It was, as Gould pointed out, a quotation directly from Shakespear's Julius Caesar!

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/despite-what-the-scholars-say-god-isnt-dead-yet/2007/05/20/1179601236487.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Despite what the scholars say, God isn't dead yet

Rachael Kohn
May 21, 2007

A scene from The Root of All Evil?, a two-part television series on religion by Richard Dawkins, shows Dawkins accusing the evangelical pastor the Reverend Ted Haggard of running worship sessions in the way the Nazis ran their rallies.

To the scientist Dawkins, a room full of people waving their hands and singing "Praise Jesus" is evil because it is irrational. By definition, believers obedient to a God which cannot be proved to exist, and whose dictums are based on mythical stories that have no basis in fact, are as dangerous as the Brownshirts.

Comparisons such as this one between a scientific inquiring mind and groups of believers who act collectively are popular at the moment. Especially since some of the collective actions have been taken by Islamic terrorists who have used their religion to justify lethal attacks on civilians.

The cool, rational commentators on the news and the reasoned academics who have penned their socioeconomic and psychological analyses of the global situation seem a world away from the suicide bombers who are convinced their acts of destruction will offer personal redemption while fulfilling the will of Allah.

There is no arguing with the fact that terrorism is the arch example of religious zealotry at its most lethal, but what Dawkins failed to acknowledge in his encounter with Haggard is that the Nazi program of eugenics and extermination was not dictated by an unseen god.

The shrieking little man with his arm outstretched in a Nazi salute was all too human. His plan was not the result of a literalist reading of ancient scriptures or the mad blueprint of a religious revelation, but a methodical scheme calculated to have maximum effect, implemented by a tiered network of bullies from the SS down to the terrorised populace.

But there is more in this that should put the scientist masquerading as a moral philosopher on guard. Nazism's propaganda was written with the help of a legion of scholars from the hard and soft sciences, from anthropologists, philologists, psychologists and economists to biologists, zoologists and doctors.

In short, academics of all description willingly devoted their rational, scientific and disciplined minds to support the Nazi cause of domination and extermination of undesirables, most notably Jews but also Gypsies and gays. It is one of the sorriest periods of scientific history, which many academics tried to forget until historians such as Michael Burleigh (Sacred Causes, 2006) provided detailed studies of their complicity.

The Nazi example is not unique but was repeated elsewhere, such as in Stalinist Eastern Europe and Mao's China. It is no doubt occurring in Iran, where dissidence is virtually impossible. The point is not the political ideology, but the readiness of "rational" scientific types to help mad regimes to deliver untold suffering to millions.

The trouble with the present flight from religion to the welcoming embrace of atheistic scientists and philosophers is that they offer precious little more than a new conviction that religion is the cause of evil in the world. In other words, these scientists deliver a message akin to that of the fire-and-brimstone preachers who bellowed about the dangers of sin, only they warn from their secular pulpits of the dangers of religion.

The latest proponent of this view is Michel Onfray, whose book The Atheist Manifesto reads like a comic-book guide to religion on the skids. Religion is a litany of horrors, from superstitious beliefs to organised oppression, while believers are compelled by infantilism, hallucination and a fear of death, Onfray says.

Apart from the Marxist prejudice that runs through his critique, his caricatures make it hard to imagine that religious organisations could provide the network of socially responsible services to the public that they do or produce the armies of volunteers who lend a hand to the needy. In short, Onfray does not accept the sociological truth that religion has not only accommodated the laws and ethos of a democratic state but in a pervasive way supports it. Nor does his swan song for religion take into account the fact that religion, in its many forms, some of them thriving outside the church, provide personal support for millions of people who find meaning and comfort in the love of God or the divine embrace.

Whatever language is used, it is this poetic dimension of the spiritual life that Dawkins, Onfray and friends have no ear to hear or eye to see. If Germany in 1933 had been invaded by people in prayer singing "Praise Jesus" instead of Nazis in jackboots it would not have presided over the worst mass killing in history.

Rachael Kohn's latest book is Curious Obsessions in the History of Science and Spirituality (ABC Books).

Dawkin's and Domestic Bliss

Just been reading Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays (1995). A few random jottings:

An interesting way of looking at Gould vs Dawkins/Pinker

To talk in terms of metaphor, one set of evolutionists (the Darwinians, the synthetic theorists) regards the organic world in terms of adaptation, which is to say as though it is functioning or designed. The other set of evolutionists, of which Gould is a prime representative, does not. They think of the organic world in terms of form, which means that there are certain basic structures or blueprints according to which organisms are constructed.

Dawkins / Maynard Smith

It is just not the case that the anti-adaptationist movement epitomized by punctuated equilibria has come up with stunning new findings (as in the physics case of super-conductivity) or new models (as with Hamilton)-findings and models which simply compel discussion and agreement. Much of the discussion has been rhetorical and/or philosophical in some broad sense. I ask it also since some people-English adaptationists, in particular - seem not merely to be unreceptive to the attack on adaptation, but incapable of seeing even that there is the slightest force to the attack. (If you do not know what I mean, look at Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker.) For them-intelligent, hard-working, good-quality evolutionists-punctuated equilibria and all that it represents is not so much false but simply time-wasting gobbledegook (see also Maynard Smith 1981).

Dawkins Hidden Prejudices

Evolutionary biology has been used to carry horrible beliefs, and these have been promoted in the name of Darwinism as well as alternative evolutionary theories. Moreover, I would agree that this is a legacy which persists. If we jump to the present, or at least to the immediately past present, we find similar sorts of values alive and well there also. I am certainly not saying that people today are open racists in quite the way that someone like Darwin would be if he were writing today. At least, I am certainly not saying that the bulk of respected evolutionists wear their prejudices in quite the open way that one finds among the Victorians, although around the fringes one can certainly find such thinkers.

Yet I would say that even among the respected and respectable, the sentiments are often unchanged. Consider, for example, Richard Dawkins' well-known book, The Selfish Gene (1976). In talking about the sexual strategies open to females in the course of reproduction, he distinguishes the 'he man' strategy from the 'domestic bliss' strategy. Without commenting on the full extent to which Dawkins is pointing to real aspects of the living world, it surely requires little argument to see that his use of these terms is insulting to women. I for one would not like to be a member of the sex whose options apparently are either attracting Tarzan or staying home with the kids.

Apple Brown Betty

Came across this short piece, and it reminded me of why I find Stephen Jay Gould so inspiring!

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APPLE BROWN BETTY
by Stephen Jay Gould


The patterns of human history mix decency and depravity in equal measure. We often assume, therefore, that such a fine balance of results must emerge from societies made of decent and depraved people in equal numbers. But we need to expose and celebrate the fallacy of this conclusion so that, in this moment of crisis, we may reaffirm an essential truth too easily forgotten, and regain some crucial comfort too readily foregone. Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by ten thousand acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the "ordinary" efforts of a vast majority.

Thus, we face an imperative duty, almost a holy responsibility, to record and honor the victorious weight of these innumerable little kindnesses, when an unprecedented act of evil so threatens to distort our perception of ordinary human behavior. I have stood at Ground Zero, stunned by the twisted ruins of the largest human structure ever destroyed in a catastrophic moment. (I will discount the claims of a few Biblical literalists for the Tower of Babel). And I have contemplated a single day of carnage that our nation has not suffered since battles that still evoke passions and tears, nearly 150 years later: Antietem, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor. The scene is insufferably sad, but not at all depressing. Rather, Ground Zero can only be described, in the lost meaning of a grand old word, as "sublime," in the sense of awe inspired by solemnity.

But, in human terms, Ground Zero is the focal point for a vast web of bustling goodness, channeling uncountable deeds of kindness from an entire planet -- the acts that must be recorded to reaffirm the overwhelming weight of human decency. The rubble of Ground Zero stands mute, while a beehive of human activity churns within, and radiates outward, as everyone makes a selfless contribution, big or tiny according to means and skills, but each of equal worth. My wife and stepdaughter established a depot to collect and ferry needed items in short supply, including respirators and shoe inserts, to the workers at Ground Zero. Word spreads like a fire of goodness, and people stream in, bringing gifts from a pocketful of batteries to a ten thousand dollar purchase of hard hats, made on the spot at a local supply house and delivered right to us.


I will cite but one tiny story, among so many, to begin the count that will overwhelm the power of any terrorist's act. And by such tales, multiplied many millionfold, let these few depraved people finally understand why their vision of inspired fear cannot prevail over ordinary decency. As we left a local restaurant to make a delivery to Ground Zero late one evening, the cook gave us a shopping bag and said: "Here's a dozen apple brown bettys, our best dessert, still warm. Please give them to the rescue workers." How lovely, I thought, but how meaningless, except as an act of solidarity, connecting the cook to the cleanup. Still, we promised that we would make the distribution, and we put the bag of 12 apple brown bettys atop several thousand respirators and shoe pads.

Twelve apple brown bettys into the breach. Twelve apple brown bettys for thousands of workers. And then I learned something important that I should never have forgotten -- and the joke turned on me. Those twelve apple brown betty's went like literal hotcakes. These trivial symbols in my initial judgment turned into little drops of gold within a rainstorm of similar offerings for the stomach and soul, from children's postcards to cheers by the roadside. We gave the last one to a firefighter, an older man in a young crowd, sitting alone in utter exhaustion as he inserted one of our shoe pads. And he said, with a twinkle and a smile restored to his face: "Thank you. This is the most lovely thing I've seen in four days -- and still warm!"

Not so obvious

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."

Stephen Jay Gould
US author, naturalist, paleontologist, & popularizer of science (1941 - 2002)

I like this quote very much, as it sums up much of Stephen's own popular work, looking at all kinds of misconceptions, ranging from the naturalist on the Beagle (not Darwin) to Huxley's bold claim against Samuel Wilberforce about preferring to be descended from an ape than someone who misused his powers of rhetoric (which seems to only appear in Huxley's much later write up; the minutes of the debate show nothing of this) to the flat earth (concocted late in the 17th century as an enlightment "straw man" to shoot down religion on). Most of all I like his essay on Darwin's last work (20 years in completion) which was a study on earthworms, and how they enrich and change the soil in which they move. The person who asked Darwin wanted a grand theory, but all Darwin's theories came from a study of minutae, of little things, and Stephen Jay Gould always brought to light little things, of great interest, but neglected by those evolutionists who want a large grand all encompassing picture (that often loses sight of those humble roots).

I think too of the Goddess myth, and Gimbutas seeing the statuettes as a goddess, whereas that is something read back into the artefact.

Adam Curtis' The Trap, too, also showed how "taking something for granted" is something we often do.

I am sure I have my own presuppositions, some of which are invisible to me. I think I do have a somewhat different outlook on contemporary assumptions (mind body spirit type stuff) because I come at it from a different tradition, which can be used to highlight the weaknesses of that kind of approach. That is not to say that there may not be a place for introspection, but given that modern culture (and reality tv shows especially) have gone overboard on that, I think (being a perverse person) I'd like to go in another direction!

Everest of decency

Stephen Jay Gould wrote:

In an important, little appreciated and utterly tragic principle regulating the structure of nearly all complex systems, building up must be accomplished step by tiny step, whereas destruction need occupy but an instant. In previous essays on the nature of change, I have called this phenomenon the Great Asymmetry (with upper case letters to emphasize the sad generality). Ten thousand acts of kindness done by thousands of people, and slowly building trust and harmony over many years, can be undone by one destructive act of a skilled and committed psychopath. Thus, even if the effects of kindness and evil balance out in the course of history, the Great Asymmetry guarantees that the numbers of kind and evil people could hardly differ more, for thousands of good souls overwhelm each perpetrator of darkness.

I stress this greatly underappreciated point because our error in equating a balance of effects with equality in numbers could lead us to despair about human possibilities, especially at this moment of mourning and questioning; whereas, in reality, the decent multitudes, performing their ten thousand acts of kindness, vastly outnumber the very few depraved people in our midst. Thus, we have every reason to maintain our faith in human kindness, and our hopes for the triumph of human potential, if only we can learn to harness this wellspring of unstinting goodness in nearly all of us.

For this reason, a documentation of the innumerable small acts of kindness, the good deeds that almost always pass beneath our notice for lack of "news value," becomes an imperative duty, a responsibility that might almost be called holy, when we must reaffirm the prevalence of human decency against our preeminent biases for hyping the cataclysmic and ignoring the quotidian. Ordinary kindness trumps paroxysmal evil by at least a million events to one, and we will not grasp this inspiring ratio unless we record the Everest of decency built grain by grain into a mighty fortress taller than any breakable building of mere concrete and steel.

New Year Extinction one Year On

Before Al Gore, Stephen Jay Gould looked at extinction from a paleonontologist point of view, and concluded that we had no cuase to be triumphant, as the history of life showed many mass extinctions, and mankind had only been around for a fraction of the time that species like the dinosaurs had been dominant on the planet.

Al Gore's recent film and DVD promotion shows one politician who takes the environment seriously, and sees how fragile our existence is, how dependent we are upon ranges of temperature, the kind of air we breath, and the living bio-systems with which we co-exist.

What is there to make theologically of this?

If human life becomes extinct, what can be seen of any purpose in mankind? Where is any religious explanation of the sheer waste?

Glib, apocalyptic fundamentalism always has a ready answer in the "end of the world" scenario, variously tailored to culture and history. But if there is a God, I cannot accept that he could work like that.

The free-will defence says we have the freedom to destroy ourselves. That is certainly true. But is it all that can be said? Passive acceptance of a painful truth? And it is so rational, so calm in the face of catastrophe.

There is one other religious response that is acceptable and legitimate: to rage against God, against the misery and suffering and waste. Perhaps we need to be more like Job, if we are to find an answer that is closer to the truth?

Extinction

Stephen Jay Gould wrote on man's extinction by Nuclear War in his "The Flamingo's Smile", written back in the early 1980s, when that was still a spectre hanging over us. But global warming is the new catastrophe, by which we might destroy the whole earth. His words still stand good here about life on earth, and the threat we bring:

I cannot imagine anything more vulgar, more hateful, than the prospect that a tiny twig with one peculiar power might decimate a majestic and ancient tree, whose continuity stretches back to the dawn of earth's time and whose trunk and branches house so many thousand prerequisites to the twig's existence.