CURRENT READING

It’s very diverse. Woody Allen’s Side Effects, an early collection of his writing, The Two Lives of Errol Flynn. Also David Brinkley’s Memoir and, of course, still plowing through and enjoying the heavy but informative reading in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. If anyone’s interested. I believe I’ll be reading the Handbook far into next year—more than a thousand pages of very detailed information.

THE ENTRY TO THE RIGHT IS SELF EXPLANATORY>>>

I got it from the newspaper the Freedom From Religion Foundation publishes. CLICK ON IT TO ENLARGE.

AUTISM

“According to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 166 children have some form of autism. These cases range from mild to severe, and the prevalence of the disorder among the population has been on the rise since the 1980s.”

By Candace Lombardi

Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: April 4, 2006, 12:20 PM PDT

HERE’S A QUESTION FROM GEO TO YOU: Why do you think autism is on the rise? Is it genetic or cultural? Comment if you please at the end of this post. . . .


SECOND QUESTION: Is this man autistic?

CHECKING INTO MYSPACE

I’ve got a Myspace, you know, but I haven’t done anything with it. Here’s what’s strange. You know. . . ? You go over there and you see people toting up their lists of friends.

Now what is that—when someone claims to have 62 friends or some musician, trying to sell you his songs, claims to have a million friends, claims you to be his friend in order to sell you something? What does that mean? As far as I can tell from my longish life, if a man has a handful of real friends, he’s got all he’ll ever need. What kind of a friend is a blog friend anyway? What do you really know about someone you haven’t sat down over coffee with, across a narrow table, looked in the eye and revealed yourself. I find it infinitely easier to reveal myself on a blog than one on one. Just look at my other blog, Bottoms Up: the autobiography of a nobody. That’s a tell-all, though still less than a third finished, book. Easy to do so far.

Then—isn’t there something awfully sophomoric about collecting friends, adding them up, like kids seeking out cliques in school to belong to? Frankly, I wasn’t much of a belonger in school anyhow and damn proud of it. I’m softer now and like to have friends about me, people I can hug when the conversations over for the day. There is something real sad about people adding up and displaying lists of strangers as friends, isn’t there?

TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

I just made an awesome discovery. I used my Blogspot feature that allows me to get lists of people who list the same profile items as mine. So I went through the list that "Sands of Iwo Jima" came up with and through the list that "La Dolce Vita" came up with. There's the two worlds right there, and I've got a foot smack dab in each of them. The split is hurting my crotch. Is that because I've aged in just the right way, like Limberger cheese?

I CAN FLY. WHO’LL JUMP OFF THIS BUILDING WITH ME?

Kurt Scudder sent this to me. We were having a discussion. His covering comment explains. It's a long one, but well worth your read.

[Hi George,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you after the last Spokane FFRF meeting. We talked about whether truth had selective advantage. I argued that, at least in one narrow sense, it did not. I've attached an HTML copy of a ten-year-old article from Skeptical Inquirer called "The Belief Engine". Give it a read, and let's discuss the idea further.

Best Regards --Kurt Scudder]

The Belief Engine

Our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, a system that evolved to assure not truth, logic, and reason, but survival. The belief engine has seven major components.

The following beliefs are strongly held by large numbers of people. Each of them has been hotly disputed by others:

Through hypnosis, one can access past lives.

Horoscopes provide useful information about the future.

Spiritual healing sometimes succeeds where conventional medicine fails.

A widespread, transgenerational Satanic conspiracy is afoot in society.

Certain gifted people have been able to use their psychic powers to help police solve crimes.

We can sometimes communicate with others via mental telepathy.

Some people have been abducted by UFOs and then returned to earth.

Elvis lives.

Vitamin C can ward off or cure the common cold.

Immigrants are stealing our jobs.

Certain racial groups are intellectually inferior.

Certain racial groups are athletically superior, at least in some specific sports.

Crime and violence are linked to the breakdown of the traditional family.

North Korea's developing nuclear capability poses a threat to world peace.

Despite high confidence on the part of both believers and disbelievers, in most instances, neither side has much—if any—objective evidence to back its position. Some of these beliefs, such as telepathy and astrology, stand in contradiction to the current scientific worldview and are therefore considered by many scientists to be "irrational." Others are not at all inconsistent with science, and whether or not they are based in fact, no one would consider them to be irrational.

Nineteenth-century rationalists predicted that superstition and irrationality would be defeated by universal education. However, this has not happened. High literacy rates and universal education have done little to decrease such belief, and poll after poll indicates that a large majority of the public believe in the reality of "occult" or "paranormal" or "supernatural" phenomena. Why should this be so? Why is it that in this highly scientific and technological age superstition and irrationality abound?

It is because our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, an engine that produces beliefs without any particular respect for what is real or true and what is not. This belief engine selects information from the environment, shapes it, combines it with information from memory, and produces beliefs that are generally consistent with beliefs already held. This system is as capable of generating fallacious beliefs as it is of generating beliefs that are in line with truth. These beliefs guide future actions and, whether correct or erroneous, they may prove functional for the individual who holds them. Whether or not there is really a Heaven for worthy souls does nothing to detract from the usefulness of such a belief for people who are searching for meaning in life.

Nothing is fundamentally different about what we might think of as "irrational" beliefs—they are generated in the same manner as are other beliefs. We may not have an evidential basis for belief in irrational concepts, but neither do we have such a basis for most of our beliefs. For example, you probably believe that brushing your teeth is good for you, but it is unlikely that you have any evidence to back up this belief, unless you are a dentist. You have been taught this, it makes some sense, and you have never been led to question it.

If we were to conceptualize the brain and nervous system as a belief engine, it would need to comprise several components, each reflecting some basic aspect of belief generation. Among the components, the following units figure importantly:

The Learning Unit

The learning unit is the key to understanding the belief engine. It is tied to the physical architecture of the brain and nervous system; and by its very nature, we are condemned to a virtually automatic process of magical thinking. "Magical thinking" is the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link. For example, if you believe that crossing your fingers brought you good fortune, you have associated the act of finger-crossing with the subsequent welcome event and imputed a causal link between the two.

Our brain and nervous system have evolved over millions of years. It is important to recognize that natural selection does not select directly on the basis of reason or truth; it selects for reproductive success. Nothing in our cerebral apparatus gives any particular status to truth. Consider a rabbit in the tall grass, and grant for a moment a modicum of conscious and logical intellect to it. It detects a rustling in the tall grass, and having in the past learned that this occasionally signals the presence of a hungry fox, the rabbit wonders if there really is a fox this time or if a gust of wind caused the grass to rustle. It awaits more conclusive evidence. Although motivated by a search for truth, that rabbit does not live long. Compare the late rabbit to the rabbit that responds to the rustle with a strong autonomic nervous-system reaction and runs away as fast as it can. It is more likely to live and reproduce. So, seeking truth does not always promote survival, and fleeing on the basis of erroneous belief is not always such a bad thing to do. However, while this avoidance strategy may succeed in the forest, it may be quite dangerous to pursue in the nuclear age.

The learning unit is set up in such a way as to learn very quickly from the association of two significant events—such as touching a hot stove and feeling pain. It is set up so that significant pairings produce a lasting effect, while nonpairings of the same two events are not nearly so influential. If a child were to touch a stove once and be burned, then if the child were to touch it again without being burned, the association between pain and stove would not automatically be unlearned. This basic asymmetry—pairing of two stimuli has an important effect, while presenting the stimuli unpaired (that is, individually) has a much lesser effect—is important for survival.

This asymmetry in learning also underlies much of the error that colors our thinking about events that occur together from time to time. Humans are very poor at accurately judging the relationship between events that only sometimes co-occur. For example, if we think of Uncle Harry, and then he telephones us a few minutes later, this might seem to demand some explanation in terms of telepathy or precognition. However, we can only properly evaluate the co-occurrence of these two events if we also consider the number of times that we thought of Harry and he did not call, or we did not think of him but he called anyway. These latter circumstances—these nonpairings—have little impact on our learning system. Because we are overly influenced by pairings of significant events, we can come to infer an association, and even a causal one, between two events even if there is none. Thus, dreams may correspond with subsequent events only every so often by chance, and yet this pairing may have a dramatic effect on belief. Or we feel a cold coming on, take vitamin C, and then when the cold does not get to be too bad we infer a causal link. The world around us abounds with coincidental occurrences, some of which are meaningful but the vast majority of which are not. This provides a fertile ground for the growth of fallacious beliefs. We readily learn that associations exist between events, even when they do not. We are often led by co-occurring events to infer that the one that occurred first somehow caused the one that succeeded it.

We are all even more prone to error when rare or emotionally laden events are involved. We are always looking for causal explanations, and we tend to infer causality even when none exists. You might be puzzled or even distressed if you heard a loud noise in your living room but could find no source for it.

The Critical-Thinking Unit

The critical-thinking unit is the second component of the belief engine, and it is acquired -- acquired through experience and explicit education. Because of the nervous-system architecture that I have described, we are born to magical thinking. The infant who smiles just before a breeze causes a mobile above her head to move will smile again and again, as though the smile had magically caused the desired motion of the mobile. We have to labor to overcome such magical predisposition, and we never do so entirely. It is through experience and direct teaching that we come to understand the limits of our immediate magical intuitive interpretations. We are taught common logic by parents and teachers, and since it often serves us well, we use it where it seems appropriate. Indeed, the cultural parallel of this developmental process is the development of the formal method of logic and scientific inquiry. We come to realize that we cannot trust our automatic inferences about co-occurrence and causality.

We learn to use simple tests of reason to evaluate events around us, but we also learn that certain classes of events are not to be subjected to reason but should be accepted on faith. Every society teaches about transcendental things—ghosts, gods, bogeymen, and so on; and here we are often explicitly taught to ignore logic and accept such things on faith or on the basis of other people's experiences. By the time we are adults, we can respond to an event in either a logical, critical mode or in an experiential, intuitive mode. The events themselves often determine which way we will respond. If I were to tell you that I went home last night and found a cow in my living room, you would be more likely to laugh than to believe me, even though there is certainly nothing impossible about such an event. If, on the other hand, I were to tell you that I went into my living room and was startled by an eerie glow over my late grandfather's armchair, and that the room went cold, you may be less likely to disbelieve and more likely to perk up your ears and listen to the details, possibly suspending the critical acumen that you would bring to the cow story. Sometimes strong emotion interferes with the application of critical thought. Other times we are cleverly gulled.

Rationality is often at a disadvantage to intuitive thought. The late psychologist Graham Reed spoke of the example of the gambler's fallacy: Suppose you are observing a roulette wheel. It has come up black ten times in a row, and a powerful intuitive feeling is growing in you that it must soon come up red. It cannot keep coming up black forever. Yet your rational mind tells you that the wheel has no memory, that each outcome is independent of those that preceded. In such a case, the struggle between intuition and rationality is not always won by rationality.

Note that we can switch this critical thinking unit on or off. As I noted earlier, we may switch it off entirely if dealing with religious or other transcendental matters. Sometimes, we deliberately switch it on: "Hold it a minute, let me think this out," we might say to ourselves when someone tries to extract money from us for an apparently worthy cause.

The Yearning Unit

Learning does not occur in a vacuum. We are not passive receivers of information. We actively seek out information to satisfy our many needs. We may yearn to find meaning in life. We may yearn for a sense of identity. We may yearn for recovery from disease. We may yearn to be in touch with deceased loved ones.

In general we yearn to reduce anxiety. Beliefs, be they correct or false, can assuage these yearnings. Often beliefs that might be categorized as irrational by scientists are the most efficient at reducing these yearnings. Rationality and scientific truth have little to offer for most people as remedies for existential anxiety. However, belief in reincarnation, supernatural intervention, and everlasting life can overcome such anxiety to some extent.

When we are yearning most, when we are in the greatest need, we are even more vulnerable to fallacious beliefs that can serve to satisfy those yearnings.

The Input Unit

Information enters the belief engine sometimes in the form of raw sensory experience and other times in the form of organized, codified information presented through word of mouth, books, or films. We are wonderful pattern detectors, but not all the patterns we detect are meaningful ones. Our perceptual processes work in such a way as to make sense of the environment around us, but they do make sense—perception is not a passive gathering of information but, rather, an active construction of a representation of what is going on in our sensory world. Our perceptual apparatus selects and organizes information from the environment, and this process is subject to many well-known biases that can lead to distorted beliefs. Indeed, we are less likely to be influenced by incoming information if it does not already correspond to deeply held beliefs. Thus, the very spiritual Christian may be quite prepared to see the Virgin Mary; information or perceptual experience that suggests that she has appeared may be more easily accepted without critical scrutiny than it would be by someone who is an atheist. It is similar with regard to experiences that might be considered paranormal in nature.

The Emotional Response Unit

Experiences accompanied by strong emotion may leave an unshakable belief in whatever explanation appealed to the individual at the time. If one is overwhelmed by an apparent case of telepathy, or an ostensible UFO, then later thinking may well be dominated by the awareness that the emotional reaction was intense, leading to the conclusion that something unusual really did happen. And emotion in turn may directly influence both perception and learning. Something may be interpreted as bizarre or unusual because of the emotional responses triggered.

Evidence is accumulating that our emotional responses may be triggered by information from the outside world even before we are consciously aware that something has happened. Take this example, provided by LeDoux (1994) in his recent article in Scientific American (1994, 270, pp. 50-57):

An individual is walking through the woods when she picks up information—either auditory, such as rustling leaves, or visual, such as the sight of a slender curved object on the ground— which triggers a fear response. This information, even before it reaches the cortex, is processed in the amygdala, which arouses the body to an alarm footing. Somewhat later, when the cortex has had enough time to decide whether or not the object really is a snake, this cognitive information processing will either augment the fear response and corresponding evasive behaviour, or will serve to bring that response to a halt.

This is relevant to our understanding of paranormal experience, for very often an emotional experience accompanies the putatively paranormal. A strong coincidence may produce an emotional "zing" that points us toward a paranormal explanation, because normal events would not be expected to produce such emotion.

Our brains are also capable of generating wonderful and fantastic perceptual experiences for which we are rarely prepared. Out-of-body experiences (OBEs), hallucinations, near-death experiences (NDEs), peak experiences—these are all likely to be based, not in some external transcendental reality, but rather in the brain itself. We are not always able to distinguish material originating in the brain from material from the outside world, and thus we can falsely attribute to the external world perceptions and experiences that are created within the brain. We have little training with regard to such experience. As children, we do learn to distrust, for the most part, dreams and nightmares. Our parents and our culture tell us that they are products of our own brains. We are not prepared for more arcane experiences, such as OBEs or hallucinations or NDEs or peak experiences, and may be so unprepared that we are overwhelmed by the emotion and come to see such experience as deeply significant and "real" whether or not it is.

Ray Hyman has always cautioned skeptics not to be surprised should they one day have a very strong emotional experience that seems to cry out for paranormal explanation. Given the ways our brains work, we would expect such experiences from time to time. Unprepared for them, they could become conversion experiences that lead to strong belief. When I was a graduate student, another graduate student who shared my office, and who was equally as skeptical as I was about the paranormal, came to school one day overwhelmed by the realism and clarity of a dream he had had the night before. In it, his uncle in Connecticut had died. It had been a very emotional dream, and was so striking that Jack told me that if his uncle died anytime soon, he would no longer be able to maintain his skepticism about precognition—the dream experience was that powerful. Ten years later, his uncle was still alive, and Jack's skepticism had survived intact.

The Memory Unit

Through our own experience, we come to believe in the reliability of our memories and in our ability to judge whether a given memory is reliable or not. However, memory is a constructive process rather than a literal rendering of past experience, and memories are subject to serious biases and distortions.

Not only does memory involve itself in the processing of incoming information and the shaping of beliefs; it is itself influenced strongly by current perceptions and beliefs. Yet it is very difficult for an individual to reject the products of his or her own memory process, for memory can seem to be so "real."

The Environmental Feedback Unit

Beliefs help us to function. They guide our actions and increase or reduce our anxieties. If we operate on the basis of a belief, and if it "works" for us, even though faulty, why would we be inclined to change it? Feedback from the external world reinforces or weakens our beliefs, but since the beliefs themselves influence how that feedback is perceived, beliefs can become very resistant to contrary information and experience. If you really believe that alien abductions occur, then any evidence against that belief can be rationalized away—in terms of conspiracy theories, other people's ignorance, or whatever.

As mentioned earlier, fallacious beliefs can often be even more functional than those based in truth. For example, Shelley Taylor, in her book Positive Illusions, reports research showing that mildly depressed people are often more realistic about the world than are happy people. Emotionally healthy people live to some extent by erecting false beliefs—illusions—that reduce anxiety and aid well-being, whereas depressed individuals to some degree see the world more accurately. Happy people may underestimate the likelihood of getting cancer or being killed, and may avoid thinking about the ultimate reality of death, while depressed people may be much more accurate with regard to such concerns.

An important way in which to run reality checks on our perceptions and beliefs is to compare them with those of others. If I am the only one who interpreted a strange glow as an apparition, I am more likely to reconsider this interpretation than if several others share the same view. We often seek out people who agree with us, or selectively choose literature supporting our belief. If the majority doubts us, then even if only part of a minority we can collectively work to dispel doubt and find certainty. We can invoke conspiracies and coverups to explain an absence of confirmatory evidence. We may work to inculcate our beliefs in others, especially children. Shared beliefs can promote social solidarity and even a sense of importance for the individual and group.

In Conclusion

Beliefs are generated by the belief engine without any automatic concern for truth. Concern for truth is a higher order acquired cognitive orientation that reflects an underlying philosophy which presupposes an objective reality that is not always perceived by our senses.

The belief engine chugs away, strengthening old beliefs, spewing out new ones, rarely discarding any. We can sometimes see the error or foolishness in other people's beliefs. It is very difficult to see the same in our own. We believe in all sorts of things, abstract and concrete -- in the existence of the solar system, atoms, pizza, and five-star restaurants in Paris. Such beliefs are no different in principle from beliefs in fairies at the end of the garden, in ghosts in some deserted abbey, in werewolves, in satanic conspiracies, in miraculous cures, and so on. Such beliefs are all similar in form, all products of the same process, even though they vary widely in content. They may, however, involve greater or lesser involvement of the critical-thinking and emotional-response units.

Critical thinking, logic, reason, science—these are all terms that apply in one way or another to the deliberate attempt to ferret out truth from the tangle of intuition, distorted perception, and fallible memory. The true critical thinker accepts what few people ever accept—that one cannot routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality. Through teaching and encouraging critical thought our society will move away from irrationality, but we will never succeed in completely abandoning irrational tendencies, again because of the basic nature of the belief engine.

Experience is often a poor guide to reality. Skepticism helps us to question our experience and to avoid being too readily led to believe what is not so. We should try to remember the words of the late P. J. Bailey (in Festus: A Country Town): "Where doubt, there truth is—'tis her shadow."

—James Alcock

LOST IN SPACE

Lately, I've tried to sign up and get a web page with Myspace, the hottest thing going on the American scene. Also, I've been using my profile page on Blogspot to search for people who like the same books, movies, ideas and etcetera that I do.

Here's my conclusion. All this blather and information on the internet will be the death of meaningful language. It's worse than the time I realized that there were thousands of writers vying for spots in the publishing market, that I was just a little blob mixed in the larger blob. On the internet it's even more frustrating. So many people blathering stuff into the internetair. Many useful things, but who has time to stop and read while one is so busy searching a "library" which is chaotically organized and a phone book so full of people one might find.

I came across essays by the famous dead and essays by living nobodies and references to music I ought to hear—on and on ad nauseam. Then, I realized, as I tried to read an essay by John Sturt Mill that someone had pasted onto his blogsite, that I didn't, at the moment, have the patience to stop and read that essay because I had to hurry up and find the next spot, the next interesting picture, the next facile comment, the next, the next, the next . . . . It's addictive in here and the grass in the backyard needs mowing, but I've got to get on with blogging and searching websites and blogging some more and, and and an a ?

HARRY TAYLOR: HERO

This is the guy who confronted Bush at one of Bush's usually scripted performances. He gave his message in concise, telling language, and he got it right, from the transcripts I've come across. He was booed by the audience for what he said, but he continued anyway. Also think of what recently happened at the press conference of Democrat Nick Lampson who's running to replace Tom Delay in Texas. His press conference was attacked and disrupted by Delay partisans. These Christian conservative thugs are just like the Brownshirts in Hitler's Germany, disrupting meetings and brutalizing opponents. Then people try to say that the Nazi's were atheists. You can be a Christian and a thug too. PS: Look at the lady down to the left of the picture. "Whooooboy!" she's saying.

NO CIVIL WAR, SAYS OUR SIDE, BUT. . .

[OPEN QUOTE] Despite the violence, U.S. officials have discounted talk of civil war. However, a senior Iraqi official said Saturday that an "undeclared civil war" had already been raging for more than a year.

"Is there a civil war? Yes, there is an undeclared civil war that has been there for a year or more," Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal told The Associated Press. "All these bodies that are discovered in Baghdad, the slaughter of pilgrims heading to holy sites, the explosions, the destruction, the attacks against the mosques are all part of this."

His comments were echoed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

"Civil war has almost started among Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and those who are coming from Asia. The situation is uneasy and I don't know how would Iraq be brought together," Mubarak said in an interview broadcast Saturday on Al-Arabiya satellite television. [CLOSE QUOTE] Read more.

MORNING BECOMES ELECTRIC LAWNMOWER

It's a beautiful April morning and I look outside my window beside the computer I type upon, and, lo and behold, the lawn needs mowing. Seems only yesterday there was snow out there. PS: I cheated the caption of this entry. I really don't have an electric mower.



SOME PEOPLE NEVER LEARN

And they've had all of history to learn the lesson that when science and religion clash, religion is always proven wrong.

SPEAKING OF FISH: Fossil Called Missing Link From Sea to Land Animals

[OPEN QUOTE] Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land. . . .

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods. . . .

It was not until July 2004, Dr. Shubin said, that "we hit the jackpot." They found several of the fishes in a quarry, their skeletons largely intact and in three dimensions. The large skull had the sharp teeth of a predator. It was attached to a neck, which allowed the fish the unfishlike ability to swivel its head.

If the animal spent any time out of water, said Dr. Jenkins, of Harvard, it needed a true neck that allowed the head to move independently on the body. [CLOSE QUOTE]

Read all By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published in New York Times: April 6, 2006

A NICE LITTLE PLACE IN SPOKANE

I could imagine Jack Kerouac stopping here while he was blowing around the country with Neal Cassidy and Ginsburg. Inside, it's deep and narrow with a coffee counter to the left. . . and here's a buddy inside the Satellite passing out fliers for our local progressive radio station, Thin Air Radio 92.3 on your dial.








VIETNAM, VIETNAM, VIETNAM, VIETNAM, VIETNAM.... QUAGMIRE, QUAGMIRE, QUAGMIRE, QUAGMIRE.... CUT AND RUN, CUT AND RUN, CUT AND RUN, CUT AND RUN.... OIY! MY HEAD HURTS WITH DEJA VU

". . . few members of Congress return from visits to Iraq buoyant about the likelihood of ending the insurgency any time soon without a massive infusion of additional American troops that, according to [Congressman] Murtha, would require the reinstitution of the draft. 'I saw how discouraged these commanders were,' the congressman told Newsweek. 'They say what the White House wants them to say, but they don't have enough troops to secure the border.' " —Newsweek, Nov. 28, p.33

And since this article, the situation has only gotten worse.

UNCERTAINTY'S A GOOD THING, SPECIALLY IF YOU CAN QUANTIFY IT

"There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure it's magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it." —Richard Dawkins

A BIG IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

Awhile back, the local Inlander weekly asked readers to suggest big ideas for the Inland Northwest. I knew this is not what they were looking for, but I sent it off in hopes I might interest them, but....

Subject: A big idea whose time has come....
Date: Friday, January 28, 2005 4:38 PM
From: George Thomas
To: Inlander

Dear Ed.,

Here’s a BIG IDEA not just for the Inland Empire but for all mankind in all places and in future times. This idea is not just a suggestion; it’s an inevitability and just needs the “brights” here and everywhere to get on the bandwagon to get humanity to acceptance of the new reality as quickly as possible:

The course of evolving human nature is irreversibly toward freedom.

We now know that in the distant past human precursors had no language or consciousness and, hence, nothing remotely like “free will”. Slowly, adaptation by adaptation, language and consciousness emerged and, later, cultural adaptation, until human consciousness now begins to wrestle with its more superficial animalistic behaviors.

In early hunter/gatherer groups each individual’s consciousness (what there was of it) was harnessed to group needs. Then came theocratic city-states and medieval kingdoms in which individual freedom was extremely limited by station in religious and royal hierarchies. Prelates, kings, lords and princes were most free. (Many humans are still trapped in those evolutionary, vertical power structures, unable to surrender belief in imaginary heavenly kingdoms and princes. They still unconsciously bow to animal pecking orders.) Eventually, democracies arose in which citizens exercised still more “conscious choice”.

A future of complete human freedom is upon us in the consciousness of atheism which understands that humans can someday be completely free and must accept full responsibility to deal with their animal history. True freedom requires the courage to lay down our eternal lives and pick up our human burden of mortality, consciousness and responsibility, to step out of the darkness of superstition and into the light of consciousness.

That’s a BIG idea!

Sincerely,

Geo

DESIGN AND SELECTION:
BOTH PROGRESS STEP BY STEP

Why didn't the Wright Brothers, in my home town of Dayton, Ohio, just go ahead a design a Concorde rather than the rickety, barely able to fly, flying thing they did design? Dawkins has an answer for that too in The Ancestor's Tale, pages 601-603.

[OPEN QUOTE] And now for an important point. The evolution of any complex designoid organ in an arms race must have come about in a large number of steps of progressive evolution. Such evolution qualifies as progressive by our definition because each change tends to continue the direction of its predecessors. How do we know there are many steps rather than just one or two? By elementary probability theory. The parts of a complex machine, such as a bat's ear, could be rearranged at random in a million ways before you hit another arrangement that could hear as well as the real thing. It is statistically improbable, not just in the boring sense that any particular arrangement of parts is as improbable, with hindsight, as any other. Very few permutations of atoms are precision auditory instruments. A real bat's ear is one in a million. It works. Something so statistically improbable cannot sensibly be explained as the result of a single stroke of luck. It has to be generated by some sort of improbability-generating process, ratcheted up by what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls a crane' (as opposed to a 'skyhook': the analogy is to the man-made lifting machine, not the bird). The only cranes known to science (and I would bet the only cranes there have ever been, or ever will be, in the universe) are design and selection. Design explains the efficient complexity of microphones. Natural selection explains the efficient complexity of bat ears. Ultimately, selection explains microphones and everything designed too because the designers of microphones are themselves evolved engineers generated by natural selection. Ultimately, design cannot explain anything because there is an inevitable regression to the problem of the origin of the designer.

Design and natural selection are both processes of gradual, step-by-step, progressive improvement. Natural selection, at least, could not be anything else. In the case of design it may or may not be a matter of principle, but it is an observed fact. The Wright brothers did not have a blinding flash of inspiration and promptly build a Concorde or a Stealth bomber. They built a creaking, rickety crate that barely lifted off the ground and lurched into a neighboring field. From Kitty Hawk to Cape Canaveral, every step of the way was built on its predecessors. Improvement is gradual, step by step in the same continued direction, fulfilling our definition of progressive. We could, with difficulty, conceive of a Victorian genius designing a sidewinder missile fully formed within his Zeusian, side-whiskered head. The notion defies all common sense and all history, but it does not instantly fall foul of the laws of probability in the way we would have to say of the spontaneous evolution of a flying, echolocating, modern bat.

A single macro-mutational leap from ground-dwelling ancestral shrew to flying, echolocating bat is ruled out just as safely as we can rule out luck when a conjuror successfully guesses the complete order of a shuffled pack of cards. Luck is not literally impossible in either case. But no good scientist would advance such prodigious luck as an explanation. The card-guessing feat has to be a trick—we've all seen tricks that appear just as baffling to the uninitiated. Nature does not set out to fool us, as a conjuror does. But we can still rule out luck, and it was the genius of Darwin to rumble nature's sleight of hand. The echo-ranging bat is the result of an inching series of minor improvements, each adding cumulatively to its predecessors as it propels the evolutionary trend on in the same direction. That is progress, by definition. The argument applies to all complex biological objects that project the illusion of design and are therefore statistically improbable in a specified direction. All must have evolved progressively. [CLOSE QUOTE]

"APRIL FOOL", GOD SAYS

NEW YORK (AP) -- In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery.

In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

Researchers emphasized their work does not address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf. The study can only look for an effect from prayers offered as part of the research, they said.

They also said they had no explanation for the higher complication rate in patients who knew they were being prayed for, in comparison to patients who only knew it was possible prayers were being said for them.

The work, which followed about 1,800 patients at six medical centers, was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion. It will appear in the American Heart Journal.

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

The patients, meanwhile, were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren't prayed for but were told it was a possibility.

The researchers did not ask patients or their families and friends to alter any plans they had for prayer, saying such a step would have been unethical and impractical.

The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who did not take part in the study, said the results did not surprise him.

"There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either," he said.

Science, he said, "is not designed to study the supernatural."

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