HUMANS ARE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER ANIMALS
Atheists often point to our DNA similarity with chimpanzees to indicate that we are just another branch on the evolutionary tree; just another animal in the vast kingdom of animals. But the real compelling story centers on the amazing differences between us and chimpanzees… despite the DNA similarity.
To me, the differences far outweigh the similarities, and they are not adequately explained by Darwinian evolution. Here’s an excellent article on this topic by Kenneth Samples:
For many people the distinction between human beings and animals has become increasingly blurred. Exposure to the secular, naturalistic worldview–especially in academia–can leave one wondering whether the differences are simply a matter of degree. In this view, mankind leaped to the top of the evolutionary heap by chance events.
However, philosophers have identified many ways in which human beings differ dramatically from animals. Unique human qualities and traits set man apart from the animals by kind, not just degree. From a Christian worldview perspective, and specifically in light of the imago Dei (see sidebar), one would expect profound differences, including the few that follow.
Click here to read the full article.
December 4th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
It would be a mistake for anyone to think that atheists see humans as little more than evolved chimps.
In fact I have not met an atheist or free-thinker who espouses any such thing. I’m seeing this as a ’straw-man’ tactic.
Yes, it is a scientific fact that we share 95%(?) of our genetic code with modern day chimpanzees. Bone for bone, muscle for muscle there aren’t many physiological differences between humans and chimps.
You’re right though there are VERY striking differences.
A chimpanzee could not:
-compose a piano concerto
-write a poem or a novel
-paint a work of art
-develop semiconductors
-build a machine that can fly
There is also another thing that humanity has that chimps don’t.
A knowlege of his own mortality.
This is a distinction that, to my knowlege, belongs to humanity alone.
This is where our spiritual or religious sense and our longing to to transcend the physical comes from.
Just because we share bio-chemistry with other animal life on our planet doesn’t mean that our fates are the same. No atheist would ever argue any such thing.
Robert
December 5th, 2007 at 3:40 am
I think the important thing to note here is the obvious statement that “I don’t care if the evidence proves that we are related to monkeys and just another animal, I don’t want to believe it because I don’t like it, so I’m going to argue that my feelings are more important than factual reality.”
Science proves that we are related to the great apes etc, and are just another animal in the animal kingdom, evolved in the same way as the rest. Religion on the other hand is still trying to cling to the ancient mythology that we are some magical, divine being created wholly separately from the rest of the animal kingdom.
They only grudgingly, and wholly hypocritically, admit pieces and parts of the truth while still trying to hopelessly cling to the ancient myths.
My frustration with this behavior is such things as teaching Evolution still being outlawed in more socially behind the times areas such as the southern states etc… Creationist mythology being dressed up to pretend that it’s not just religious wishful thinking and pawned off on our children under the false pretense of it being scientific… a claim which has been soundly disproven in courts of law.
This kind of primitive and dishonest thinking is slowly turning our country into an intellectual backwater where scientific research and education is taking a backseat to primitive mythology and superstition. Modern technological and medical advancements are now being made overseas and the United States is losing its place at the forefront of human scientific progress. Our children are left a mockery to more educated industrialized countries, left unable to fully comprehend global scientific, political, social and cultural issues… being blinded by the cognitive dissonance and fog of internally conflicting facts and myths, reality in front of their eyes and heads full of ancient fairytale stories about the world they perceive. When these things inevitably conflict, they are left in a sort of cognitive daze.
It’s not hard to look and see what this religious wishful thinking and desperate denial of reality is doing to our country.
As final food for thought in response to some of the desperate and off-base claims made by the article referred to in the post… consider that dolphins have been shown to understand time, the concept of future rewards in relation to investment etc… and other animals such as elephants and gorillas have been shown to understand the concept of mortality. The dolphins were trained to pick up litter in the pool and return it to the trainers for a reward. The dolphins on their own came up with the idea of hiding a piece of litter at the bottom of the pool and tearing off pieces of it to get more fish at later times.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/23/10551/6579
That’s a good article on this topic…
In short, your wishful thinking, despite the reality around you, is a problem. If you simply started accepting the facts of reality around you, you could open your eyes to the vast and mind boggling wonders of the universe that REALLY EXISTS around you. This is vastly more wondrous and awe inspiring than the small minded myths invented by ignorant and primitive sheep herders thousands and thousands of years ago when people still thought the earth was flat, the sky was a mechanical dome, the sun was a light that orbited the earth, that the world was only a few thousand years old, that knew nothing of other continents, dinosaurs, atomic structures, physics, sickness and health, flight and on and on and on.
Putting that mythology behind us and pursuing real knowledge of the world around us has enabled mankind to fly, to leave the bonds of mother earth and step foot upon other worlds, gazing back at our planet through the vastness of space… to understand the world we cannot see in provable ways which enable us to harness atomic energy, to create the very computer you’re reading and typing on at this very moment, that allowed us to send out probes which have flown far beyond the reaches of our solar system into the vast expanse of interstellar space…
Clinging to primitive myths despite facts and evidence proving otherwise is blasphemous to the very nature of the human mind. Reprehensible to human progress. Such religiously based willful ignorance and defiance of reality would have all of us still living in mud huts, fearful of a vengeful sky god who would smote us with spears from heaven if we were bad, or strike us down with plagues for our sins… sicknesses which we would be ignorantly praying for salvation from rather than harnessing our scientific knowledge to cure them ourselves.
Religion is the ceaseless denial of the greatest accomplishments of mankind, of mankind’s greatest potential. It would have us all remain servile and ignorant sheep and that, to me, is an abomination.
Reading some of the other articles on this blog saddens, frustrates and even angers me with the insult it does to humanity and our own common sense at the very least. Arguing about evil when the bible itself states that God CREATED evil… a vengeful, jealous god that creates good and evil, creates sin, lives in darkness, lies to his creations, creates a flawed angel whom he allows to rebel and take one third of all the angels with him to earth to further torment his less loved creations, angels being held closer to him in both favor and locale, allowing humanity to sin and then punishing them for it when he created that sin to begin with… refusing to forgive the sin or simply remove the sin, but preferring to subject humanity to an eternity of suffering for what HE CREATED… then creating a son to be sent to earth to suffer and die horribly for nothing more than a show… STILL not removing that punishment for sin… leaving humanity no better off than the moments after Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil… the list goes on and on… and what’s worse is that it’s ALL A STORY! A provably ridiculous myth written by primitive people thousands of years ago! And you people still cling to it as FACTUAL REALITY!?
Articles about science not being able to YET fully explain the origin of the universe, or FULLY understand the physical functioning of the human brain… SERIOUSLY!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? Science has taken mankind from believing the ignorance of the bible to being able to travel between planets! To fly through space! Science has allowed us to map the functions of the brain, enabling advanced brain surgery and greater understanding of mental impairments and diseases etc…
Your desperate claims to point to Science not FULLY explaining some of the most profoundly complex problems of our time when you have NO PROOF WHATSOEVER for your beliefs, and not to mention that they are even more ridiculous in light of the MOUNTAINS of scientific PROOF to the contrary… you have the audacity to point to modern astrophysics and call it a fundamental failure that they haven’t PROVEN the creation of the universe when the best your ignorant shepherds millennia ago have come up with is that a man in the sky created everything one day!? LISTEN TO YOURSELF!
If the Universe requires a creator because of its complexity, then how can the creator, being necessarily more complex than the universe, not also require a creator? And if the creator does not require a creator, then the universe, being less complex, would certainly not either and would be more likely to have simply sprung into existence.
The logic behind that simple statement is enough to explain the foolishness of your beliefs to even a child. And fortunately we have mountains and mountains of scientific evidence and proof from centuries of research and understanding and human achievement to bring us, through a preponderance of convergent evidence, to the enlightened understandings we have today of the REAL WORLD AROUND US, an understanding that compels us to leave the ignorant and primitive myths of our ancient ancestors where they belong… by the wayside along with all the other gods and myths man has worshipped, believed and inevitably left behind on the road of human progress.
December 5th, 2007 at 5:59 am
Phreadom, you make some very good (and witty) points, but your put downs are self-defeating. You act as if these issues are beyond debate, and that anyone who disagrees with you is a self-deluded danger to the species. Your attitude is the real danger.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
I don’t understand. Each animal is different from other animals, that’s as much of a given as anything. Our evolution happened to include a larger cerebral cortex, which easily explains why we have these capacities. I don’t understand why any of these things outlined have any special meaning or significance to humans being beyond evolution.
December 6th, 2007 at 2:32 am
EWeb, we don’t have the largest cerebral cortex overall, but we do have the largest cerebral cortex in relation to body weight, which appears to be the determining factor in measuring intelligence. That said, it seems implausible to me that only one creature, out of billions in history, would have evolved the ability to write symphonies, invent mathematics, and harness electricity, while all of the other creatures stay stuck in an apparent evolutionary dead end. Clearly, natural selection has not been good to these creatures. The poor shark has been around for millions of years, and it hasn’t even developed a two number mathematical system yet. We bait and catch it with ease, allowing it to swim around in aquariums for our viewing pleasure. And why are chimpanzees still chimpanzees? Should not the Planet of the Apes be a reality by now?
December 6th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
we share 50% genetic of our structure with a Banana. a 5% genetic difference may not seem like a lot but it is in fact a major difference that can produce staggering effects.
December 7th, 2007 at 1:01 am
John - I think one cause of confusion here is pointing to the things humans do well and suggesting that those are the highest aims any living thing can aspire to. Natural selection cannot be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to lineages–stuff happens, as the phrase goes. Sharks have been around in similar shapes for millions of years because they’re incredibly good at what they do, i.e., eating other animals and making more little sharks.
The poor influenza virus hasn’t developed mathematics either, much less things like thumbs or a cell membrane, but it seems to be holding its own against our best efforts to get rid of it.
Chaung Tzu said it best (and Thomas Merton interpreted the translation):
Have you not heard how a bird from the sea
Was blown inshore and landed
Outside the capital of Lu?
The Prince ordered a solemn reception,
Offered the sea bird wine in the sacred precinct,
Called for musicians
To play the compositions of Shun,
Slaughtered cattle to nourish it:
Dazed with symphonies, the unhappy sea bird
Died of despair.
How should you treat a bird?
As yourself
Or as a bird?
So why doesn’t influenza evolve into something ‘better’? Because it’s just fine at what it does, thanks anyway. Saying that humans are obviously the top of the evolutionary heap is something like me proclaiming that Tobin is obviously the best name anyone could have, the name that all people would aspire to if they could change their name. Since not everyone is named Tobin, I would then conclude that people can’t change their names. Poor people! An objective observer might strongly suspect that my promotion of that name may have something to do with it being mine in the first place.
Evolution by natural selection only requires I.) variation within a breeding population, II.) differences in the number of surviving offspring linked to that variation, and III.) a mechanism for variation to be heritable. The words ‘good,’ ‘refined,’ or ‘cultured’ don’t enter into it. It’s all about what sticks around for the next generation. And seeing as how the fantastic things about humans (symphonies, math, engineering) have only been around for less than a half a million years, and the average mammalian species persists for one and a half to three million years, I’d say it’s a bit premature to say that natural selection agrees that these things are such a hot idea. For myself, I think they’re great, and I thoroughly enjoy being human. But my opinion of what’s good doesn’t have any relationship whatsoever to parts I-III above.
Let the chimpanzees be chimpanzees. They seem to enjoy it. And they’re better at it than us.
December 7th, 2007 at 2:05 am
I like your style, Tobin, and you make good points. What’s your take on the origins of life, specifically, how did the chemical systems that carry out life’s fundamental process come into existence? Also, I’d be interested in learning your take on Michael Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument.
December 8th, 2007 at 8:11 am
I think that the concept of ‘irreducible complexity’ is a trap for the thinking mind. Once we declare a system as irreducibly complex, we’ve basically given up on understanding it as anything but a black box; we invoke a supernatural cause for its presence, and in doing so we rule out the possibility of new understanding. Human cultures used to do the same thing for phenomena like thunder and earthquakes, but now most people are quite satisfied by explanations for how these events are organized by entirely observable causes.
I think that both ‘irreducible complexity’ and your question about the evolution of life’s fundamental processes are built on top of deeper questions that we have to address first: how do we know what life’s fundamental properties are?
If I’m not mistaken, one of Behe’s favorite thought experiments for ‘irreducible complexity’ is a mousetrap. A simple collection of parts; take away one and it can’t catch mice. Behe’s conclusion from this is that all the parts have to come together at once–natural selection cannot conceivably act on a population of half-assembled mousetraps because none of them will be successful at catching mice.
The sticking point in this thought experiment is that we have already constrained the function of the collection of parts: it has to catch mice, or else it’s no good. We begin with the assumption that we *know* the function.
If you were wandering in the hills, like Paley, and you came across a mousetrap without a latch and a trigger, you would be forced to infer the presence of an intelligent designer. How else could the parts of this delightful giant paper clip be arranged so perfectly? Irreducible complexity hinges upon our own assignation of function to a found object. If you require it to function as a paperclip or not at all, it’s suddenly irreducibly complex. If you know that parts of the ugly giant paperclip can function in a mousetrap, voila, you have a transitional fossil in mousetrap evolution. Take the spring off and leave just the wooden block and you have a very capable toy boat that would tickle any Taoist pink. There’s an important distinction between THE function and A function, and indeed, it’s not clear whether or not any honest human being can ever talk about THE function of anything outside of their own actions.
Mousetraps aren’t just about catching mice. To the person that designed it, presumably, part of its function is to make money from its manufacture and sale. Platinum-plated springs may catch more mice, and thus fulfill our first concept of the ‘function’ of a mousetrap, but you’re not likely to see them at the five and dime—they conflict with the ‘profit’ function of the mousetrap. If we’re going to start a sentence with “THE function of a mousetrap is…,” we’re going to have to include a clause about cost-effectiveness. And a clause about ease of manufacturing, and another clause about ease of use, and a clause about safety… these are all factors in mousetrap design. Without these conditions, anything could be a mousetrap, from a hammer to a Buick, as long as it functions in the process of catching mice. It’s hard to picture a hammer as irreducibly complex. A Buick–maybe. But when the relationship of the mousetrap to the contingent setting of its use is taken into account, the idea of a fundamental or ideal function for a mousetrap rapidly becomes an absurd proposition… you can almost see the flickering shadows of the Ideal Mousetrap projected on the back wall of Plato’s allegorical cave.
Behe’s mousetrap and his concept of function are Platonic ideals; holdovers from classical philosophy, where ideas projected onto reality and formed it, as opposed to just about everything that’s happened in Western philosophy since Immanuel Kant, who turned this on its head: our ideas are formed as a projection of reality (roughly, without doing much justice to Kant’s argument, and leaving out Hume altogether). When we talk about mousetraps, our ideas are based on a pool of experiences that we group together under a single heading. The things that you use to form your idea of ‘mousetrap’ are not the same things that I have experienced—different individual examples of mousetraps, different times and places. Together we have a collective sample, in the statistical sense of the word, but we don’t have the entire population of things grouped as mousetraps. So any statements we make about mousetraps are *provisional hypotheses.* With enough sweat, math, and tears we could put an estimate on the probability that, because we haven’t seen every mousetrap in the universe: I. our assertions about mousetraps are false (type I error), or II. we can’t tell whether our assertions about mousetraps are more true than other assertions (type II error). This isn’t the whole story on science as a way of knowing things (information theory and Bayes’ theorem come to mind, but they can be highly frustrating to grasp), but it’s a crash course. Forgive me if it’s a repetition. Bottom line here: as long as we haven’t seen every example of the thing we’re talking about, type I error is never zero, even when it’s 1×10E-17. Our understanding of found things may be darn good, but it’s never perfect or complete.
[Brief aside: This is why scientists gnash their teeth and pull their hair when they hear the phrase ‘just a theory.’ We can’t be totally unflinchingly honest (it’s part of our job description) and say that we know something as a certainty. We are obligated to include the possibility that our ideas may change as we find more information. If you’re like most folks, you’ve ridden in cars in the dark with electric headlights, and taken antibiotics for an illness. You have thus placed your life in the hands of a practitioner’s understanding Electromagnetic Theory and the Germ Theory of Disease! All of this trust in things that are just theories! Sorry. Enough gnashing.]
When people learn things as ideas from other people, they’re often assigning understanding to a concept without requiring a probabilistic statistical framework, or the repetition of all of the experiences from which the first person derives their understanding. This is just fine. It’s economical, and it seems to work for most things. Stop signs mean ‘stop’; you don’t need a protractor, a colorimeter, and a study sample of stop signs to pick this up. But when people use scientific inquiry to learn things about found objects from empirical observation (mousetraps, toucans, all of life including ourselves), our understanding is provisional—it can never be perfect and complete. We can understand common processes in life, or processes that are *probably* necessary for all life, but understanding absolutes and fundamentals is beyond us.
This is especially true because we have to define what we mean when we say ‘life,’ it’s not a category that’s given to us a priori. If we define life as a monolithic thing with a laundry list of properties (self-replication, self-organization, etc.) that separate it from non-life, we’re performing the same task as setting out the function for the mousetrap: all of this, and no less, will satisfy us. It suddenly becomes very difficult to conceive of how ‘life’ could come about by contingency from ‘non-life.’
But in the same way that we have a skewed concept of how great humans are because we’re humans, we have a pretty skewed concept of life: we’re sitting at the downstream end of a historical process, demanding that the beginning look something like what we see now. Here’s a simpler task: precisely define the beginning of any river system. They look pretty simple on the map, right? The blue line’s there, and then it’s not: river, not-river. If we demand that all of the properties of a river are present at its beginning, we’re, ah… we’re up a crick without a paddle. Sorry. Had to go through with that one. But—you can have a flow of water in the ground before you have moving water that’ll get your feet wet. Is that the beginning of a river? It depends on your laundry list of properties.
If you take individual items on the laundry list, they’re not difficult to find at all. Self-organizing lipid bilayers that aren’t already part of a living thing? Check. Amino acids that weren’t synthesized by living things? Check. Groups of ribonucleic acids that function as enzymes on other groups of ribonucleic acids? Check. Pieces of what we think of as life aren’t hard to find at all. Demanding that they all appear at once, not a jot before or after, is understandably pretty hard to swallow, but that’s not what’s required of the ‘origin of life.’ All that’s required is a stepwise accumulation of properties that are already self-organizing. Picking any point in that process and calling it the beginning of life is about as pointless as picking a centimeter of ground in the Pioneer Mountains in Montana and calling it the beginning of the Mississipi River.
Another thought experiment to counter Behe’s mousetrap: picture a waterfall—Angel Falls, for argument’s sake. Freeze the action and place yourself inside one of the drops about halfway down. Begin with the assumption that our drop is special—no other drop is like us, and we occupy a position in the waterfall of immense importance and dignity. Now imagine looking up and trying to calculate the probability that all of the conditions were just right for our drop to end up exactly in this special place. Improbable! The flow of the river, the wind, the temperature, everything had to be just so to get us to this exact spot—we could never replicate it by chance, and in fact, it’s ridiculous to invoke normal natural processes to explain how we ended up here instead of somewhere else. All of this is true. But nowhere in the whole process is there any evidence that the purpose of the waterfall was to have our drop pass though this spot, or even that this spot has any special relevance other than the fact that it’s where we are as observers. Pick any other drop, and begin with the assumption that it is a special drop, and the whole process starts again.
December 8th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Tobin, as usual you make strong points. Here are a few questions for you to ponder.
Why did the wooden block, spring, lever, and latch, assemble themselves so as to create a mousetrap?
Why do you swallow the “understandably difficult idea” that these individual components appeared all at once to make the assembly possible?
Why do you rule out the possibility of a guiding force?
December 8th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Tobin,
I just have to say that I read everything you wrote here and are truly impressed. I had never heard of that waterfall analogy before, and the bit on “Tobin” being the best name was quite humorous. It is an encouragement and quite interesting to read your viewpoints.
December 8th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
John -
We have to keep in mind that the mousetrap is an analogy, and that it only has limited usefulness in helping us understand (or obstructing our understanding of) the much more complicated set of facts that we actually face when we attempt to tackle ideas about the history of life. So as far as mousetraps qua mousetraps go, they don’t assemble themselves. A human being builds the parts, and then assembles the whole thing. If you begin from an object that we know is designed and assembled by external forces, and attempt to shoehorn all of life into it by analogy, it won’t be too surprising if you conclude that all of life is designed and assembled by external forces. To a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Life is not something that we have constructed, like a mousetrap. It’s an immense dynamic thing that we have discovered piece by piece, like a mountain range or a thunderstorm. So let’s ditch the mousetrap, at least for the moment. Instead we’ll ask the same question of a mountain range: how did the alluvial fans, foothills, crests, and boulders assemble themselves to become a mountain range? Through incremental changes and natural processes with probabilistically definable distributions of outcomes, that’s how. Take the fold and thrust belt of western Montana (a lot of beautiful spots, if you ever get the chance): in a nutshell (and a hazily recalled nutshell at that, so please forgive any irregularity), as the Pacific plate subducted way out in BC, Washington, and Oregon, the shear of the subducting plate compressed the continental crust, a lot of low angle faults (thrust faults) propagated, and the surrounding scenery got stacked up on itself like a pile of cards being swept back into the deck. The Madison and Jefferson limestones are more resistant to weathering than the rocks laid down before and after them, so as the Sun River (or the Missouri, or the Madison, or what have you) carts away the rest of the rock in anything from boulder to silt-size chunks, the massive upended stretches of limestone stay behind. When you climb to the top of Ear Mt in the Rocky Mountain Front (worth a look on Google Earth if you can’t get there yourself– 47°49′13.54″N, 112°41′15.56″W—check out the stacked mountains of the Bob Marshall Wilderness to the west, and the dauntingly huge fold across the valley to the south), you can find bryozoan fossils weathering out of the peak – an ancient reef at 8,500 feet.
Did I watch this happen? Obviously not. So to return to the question from my previous post: how do we know?
We know because a giant block of people, stretching back to Steno (1638-1686), Hutton (1726-1797), and Lyell (1797-1875) and sweeping up to include several of my friends, have spent amazing amounts of time and effort observing rocks and every process in which they are involved. We can not go back and watch the whole process of the Sevier orogeny from the beginning, but we can observe component parts occurring today with similar effects. Sea floor spreading? Check. Bonus points if you observe it in Iceland. Crustal movement along faults? Check–double check if you live in Southern California. Rocks weathering and falling apart at different rates? Check. Limestone accretion in reef environments? Check.
Ear Mountain has a contingent history. It is shaped the way it is because of a combination of billions of small-scale events occurring over an immense span of time. If you were to drop in on the beginning of time in the universe and demand that at 12:00:00 June 6th, 2007 CE, Ear Mountain look exactly the way it looked to passing observers at 12:00:00 June 6th, 2007 CE, you’d be asking a lot—it’s improbable that the sequence of events in history would culminate in exactly that picture, and if your order were fulfilled you may start looking around for a guiding force. You’d also be putting the cart entirely before the horse. How would you know what you were supposed to see? Any concept of this mountain at a specific time is derived from an experience of the mountain as it exists, after the fact and the fanfare, after the faulting and weathering have already occurred.
To sum this up one more time: Life has all the appearance of a contingent historical process. If we see ourselves as part of that process (an outcome but not a purpose), our understanding of the mechanisms at work stays intact, and we can proceed to explain and interact with life at a highly sophisticated level. If we *begin with the assumption* that we are a purposeful product, then none of the mechanisms that biologists have spent the last five hundred years describing, perfecting, and reworking are adequate to explain our supposedly improbable existence, and some folks are only too happy to give up at that point and invoke a supernatural cause for our presence. This belief also demands that we suspend our explanation and interaction with life based on scientific understanding. The minute you invoke supernatural cause to explain ‘improbable’ biological phenomena, you have (unwittingly, it seems) invalidated the ground rules on which science decides between hypotheses.
It’s astounding that the very same claim that supporters of intelligent design use to suggest the action of an ‘intelligent agent’ is also a claim that prevents application of science as a way of knowing to *any* problem. It’s improbable, they say, so it must have been designed. They not only choose a hypothesis without any grounds to judge its validity against competing hypotheses—the hypothesis they choose, in concept, *prevents the reasoned comparison of any two other hypotheses about any other observable phenomena.* If a ‘guiding force’ can shape the bacterial flagellum against all probability, how do we know it doesn’t shape our observation of the bacterial flagellum? How do we know that it doesn’t shape every stochastic process such that the most improbable explanation is true? We cannot know. Inscrutable ‘guiding forces’ aren’t a convenient and religiously satisfying way out of a tricky intellectual situation—they’re a short-circuit of our ability to learn anything from experience. They can be very convenient for some folks when they learn things that they don’t want to know.
But since we were on the subject of mousetraps—let’s get back to those, briefly. Sort of briefly.
The way your questions are framed is very important: *why* a mousetrap is assembled is a very different proposition from *how* it was assembled. How involves a set of facts–we can pick out when and where the metals in the latch were mined, smelted, alloyed, rolled, cut and shaped. Why involves a set of intentions on the part of the people making the mousetrap–why is a subjective quality of the manufacturers, not the mousetrap itself. Two people can give you two different answers as to why the same mousetrap was built, and they can both be telling the absolute truth. There can be as many purposes as there are cognizant observers. They cannot give you two different truthful answers of how the mousetrap was built.
This may make life seem a little bleak. But note that we haven’t removed purpose from life–we have instead transferred it to where it belongs, from being an intrinsic quality of observed things to residing within the cognizant observer. Kant’s work was part of this process in the late 1700’s, and most of the kicking and screaming has died down since then. In this view, purpose is no less tangible than it was, but now it has a little more in the way of humility.
So now to your questions directly:
Why was the mousetrap assembled? Ask the assembler. We can assign a purpose and a function, but it’s just that: our assignation, an idea we use to keep cause, effect, and probability in a neat row in our heads.
How would wooden block, spring, lever, and latch assemble themselves, given that the mousetrap is a stand-in for a living system? Name a living system that’s not capable of self assembly. For that matter, name a natural system that does not show organization on some scale. How do salt crystals form cubes? How does the sea form regularly spaced waves? If we perceive the organization as an ideal thing, (Cubes! Waves! Pure geometry!) we’re amazed at how the natural world rises to match it. If we perceive the organization as an outgrowth of the things themselves, the paradox disappears. Life is the thing that self-assembles. Let life equal a mousetrap. How is a mousetrap assembled?
And I don’t swallow the understandably difficult idea that the individual components appeared all at once. To go back to my post: “…that’s not what’s required of the ‘origin of life.’ All that’s required is a stepwise accumulation of properties that are already self-organizing.”
I don’t rule out ‘forces,’ just the idea that they’re guided by a supernatural agent. When you look at the history of science, very often ‘force’ is used to describe something that the researchers of the time were just coming to grips with, without having a clear understanding. At the turn of the twentieth century, folks described ‘forces’ that governed developing embryos in very vague terms. We now talk about the diffusion and reaction of specific regulatory molecules like FGF4 and BMP2. ‘Force,’ unless you’re talking about the F in F=MA, is generally a shorthand for ‘something appears to interact with this system but we don’t know what it is yet.’
But because the logic of learning things from observation *does not permit us to learn anything* if we posit a force outside of observation, I cannot accept a supernatural guiding force and still remain an honest man.
Our experience of life and its history has very little to do with mousetraps. It’s often the other way around: our machines are inspired by solutions that have been present in living systems from long before human societies had any faculty for engineering.
December 8th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
My apologies if this last one is a little dense and heated at points. I really appreciate the chance to discuss this issue (or discourse it, as I’ve done above–I hope my verbosity is useful to someone other than me!) without raised voices and ad hominem attacks, and I must confess that I was beetling my brow a little bit as I wrote some of the above. Mea culpa. Thank you, John and others, for your indulgence of my overlong posts. It is likewise an encouragement to me that this sort of forum is present.
December 9th, 2007 at 4:26 am
I have a few responses to John and Tobin:
First John, I admit that I unfortunately fall to condescension and ad hominem attacks at times. It’s something I work on, although I think that in general my points stand in spite of this.
That said, even though Tobin addressed it rather well, I’d like to also respond to your question about us humans being the pinnacle of evolution etc.
http://andabien.com/html/evolution-timeline.htm
That timeline should give you an idea just how long we’ve actually been in the picture. That should give you a little respect for just how long it took for life to evolve even from single celled organisms to multi celled organisms. About 80% of the entire history of life on earth was spent as simple multicellular organisms and only a sliver in the timeline.
For example, look at the hominid timeline and see just how recently even in our lineage that we gained the ability to perform the feats you refer to; “invent mathematics, write symphonies and harness electricity”. Roughly speaking we’ve only accomplished these things in the last few centuries. We’ve only known how to fly for about a hundred years now. We’ve been around for roughly a few billion years and just now in the last few centuries we’ve gotten around to these feats you praise.
As a humorous side note, we hadn’t really done any of those things beyond more basic mathematics when your religion was invented. Advanced mathematics such as Algebra came along with Islam later on and the numbering system we use today are, no surprise, the Arabic numerals.
As an illustration of how long we’ve been around, consider this example I gave awhile back in an article: “sit down in front of a nice old analog wall clock, and starting at midnight, watch the second hand sweep around… second after second… as it travels around the face of the clock 1,440 times over the next 24 hours… and just before midnight, 24 hours later, as the second hand ticks off that one final second… that single second, in relation to the previous 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, represents more time than cows as we know them, and ourselves, have existed in relation to the age of the universe as we know it.”
Moving on to some of your other points, Behe’s arguments on irreducible complexity were almost laughably shot down in the Dover trial on Intelligent Design in the schools. It was perfectly clearly illustrated that Behe lacked an understanding of the work he was referencing, that he was horribly misrepresenting the work of another scientist who denounced Behe’s ignorant misinterpretation and misrepresentation of his work and who personally illustrated just how easily Behe’s claim of irreducible complexity could be dismissed by showing that the bacilli flagellum “motor” that Behe claimed was irreducibly complex was actually found, minus a few pieces, functioning as a type of hypodermic needle in another bacterium enabling the exchange of material etc.
The claims of Behe and the Dover school board were dismissed as “breathtaking inanity” by the judge after it was clearly shown that Intelligent Design was nothing more than Creationism deceptively and intentionally misrepresented as non-religious and scientific.
Perhaps you could look up a copy of NOVA’s excellent documentary on the subject entitled “Judgement Day - Intelligent Design on Trial“.
Another explanation I used in an old article for the origins of life is as follows:
From these beginnings, fitting the theory of “Survival of the Fittest“, as atoms followed the laws of physics and molecules formed… and proteins etc… and these continually followed the mantra of the best “surviving” and the imperfect ones failing… we grew. “Life” grew. There was no magic moment when Life BeganTM. Things simply progressed… and this progression, from the start… was as a tree with a multitude of branches… ever growing. Not a single chain… but each “offspring” having it’s own offspring… and essentially all of them slightly unique… and as these branches grew… some grew ever further apart from each other as each found different traits beneficial to survival… either through reproductive traits… or survival traits…. depending on geography, habitat, “food”, mate availability etc… any number of different factors… and so we progressed from organic compounds… proteins… single celled organisms… multicellular organisms… towards things like primitive plants and animals as the first “major” branches of the tree of life started diverging in more dramatic ways. (See Wikipedia’s article on “Evolution” for another thourough explanation.)
Many of these branches exist simultaneously, in similar forms. Some reach essentially efficient stable forms and remain unchanged for millions of years, such as Sharks. Some have been merely a twinkle in the eye of time… some have held sway over the earth for millions of years… only to be eventually unseated by a different form… such as the transition from the dinosaurs to mammals as we now know them as the dominant life forms (leaving out insects and such, who ridiculously outnumber us).
But back to what I was saying… as someone earlier said… as much as such a “missing link” is a transitional life form… which essentially all live on earth is… then we must not forget that we are simply a transitional life form between our more ape like ancestors and relatives, and some future “super-human” form. We are a chronospecies… one that will inevitably cease to exist simply due to the passage of time. Any real study of the fossil record will demonstrate innumerable species that have changed so dramatically over the course of time, that if you took the animal now, and one of it’s ancestors from millenia past… they would not be able to interbreed, having changed so dramatically in the interim.
That said, after Tobin’s lengthy explanation, you appear to miss the point which is hopefully more clearly explained in my above quote. The “mousetrap”, ie; something like our eye for instance, didn’t just spontaneously form. It evolved from ever more primitive incarnations of which each necessarily performed some function advantageous to the survival of the individual. Eyes evolved from simple photoreceptive cells that could help detect light and dark, predator shadows, food etc. The ability to better find nourishment and avoid being eaten are basic survival traits. Every stage in the formation of our modern eye can be seen in nature and even multiple paths to ocular development such as the difference between human and cephalopod eyes etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#In_creationism_and_intelligent_design
It is only your religious beliefs that claim that Human Beings or any part of their anatomy simply sprung into being spontaneously, and I find it humorous that someone who would believe that God breathed life into a lump of mud and spontaneously formed the first whole, functional man exactly as we know him today, would argue that we should need vast amounts of scientific data irrefutably proving our case while you simultaneously expect to be allowed to require none whatsoever for yours, or even more so to be allowed to hold your view in spite of our mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Actually doing some research outside of your confirmation bias laden sources, as it would seem, would probably do wonders towards both answering your questions for you before you ask them here and towards disabusing you of your primitive superstitions.
Tobin, I thank you for your eloquent examples and comments.
They were a pleasure to read.
December 9th, 2007 at 4:38 am
Noticed a typo:
“About 80% of the entire history of life on earth was spent as simple multicellular organisms and only a sliver in the timeline.
For example, look at the hominid timeline and see just how recently even in our lineage that we gained the ability to perform the feats you refer to; “invent mathematics, write symphonies and harness electricity”.”
should read
“About 80% of the entire history of life on earth was spent as simple single and then multicellular organisms and only a sliver at the very recent end of the timeline belongs to human life as we know it.
For example, look at the Hominid Timeline and see just how recently even in our lineage that we gained the ability to perform the feats you refer to; “invent mathematics, write symphonies and harness electricity”.
Also, the three paragraphs beginning with “From these beginnings” and ending with “in the interim” should have been italicized to denote their being quoted from my old article. Wordpress appears to have issues with parsing nested tags.
December 9th, 2007 at 6:54 am
Phreadom, you are clearly a mean-spirited and angry human being, which is what I’ve come to expect from many, if not most, atheists. Sad really. That said, there are some level-headed and well-informed atheists who visit this site and contribute meaningfully. For them I am thankful.
December 9th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Tobin, I completely understand your logic and follow your reasoning. But I am more convinced by Fazale Rana’s ideas in “Origins of Life” (2004), and other molecular biology books that I’ve mentioned on this site. Nevertheless, I do enjoy reading your views and learning from your perspective. I certainly don’t think you are delusion, stupid, idiotic, moronic, or a waste of a human mind (just some of the more deprecating things your atheistic brethen call me). Reasonable minds can always disagree.
December 9th, 2007 at 7:43 am
John: Thanks for addressing even a single point I made.
*sarcasm*
Seriously… could you at least attempt to rebut even a single point I made? Or point out what in my previous comment justifies your statement that I’m obviously a mean spirited and angry human being?
I believe I simply laid out a wealth of information illustrating the flaws in your own reasoning.
Your ad hominem attack without addressing even a single point I made is just another illustration of your hypocrisy as you do precisely what you accuse “us atheists” of.
Thank you in advance for your hopefully more enlightening upcoming responses.
December 9th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Might I presume to say that reasonable minds can always disagree, but tolerance does not negate that there is a correct and incorrect view. Despite your objections to Phreadom’s demeanor, I believe in another posting he requested that you begin refuting the claims brought against the religious ideas. Might I suggest you start with the rather well written and clever Tobin, though there are more to the list as well…
December 9th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Ryan, there is indeed a correct and incorrect view. I don’t believe all views are equal. One of us is right and the other wrong. But we shouldn’t put each other down, not in this forum or in the real world. It’s simply not necessary or productive. Like I’ve said before, I think atheists are wrong in their conclusion, but I don’t think they are stupid.
December 9th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
If you believe they are wrong in their conclusions, there should be no problem in critically assessing the methodology used both by yourself and themselves in reaching their conclusions.
For instance, a few important points we should all be very well versed on are as follows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Understanding those 3 points in depth can have a fundamentally dramatic effect on your understanding of how you process information and how you interact with others regarding your beliefs etc.
I highly suggest everyone read them.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:00 am
A short and sweet comment–not so much of an academic point a simply a point of feedback:
Aaaargh! Biochemists!
I think it’s no accident that the ranks of intelligent design ‘theorists’ are swollen with biochemists, with nary a single organismal biologist, physiologist, or ecologist in sight.
Biochemists (as a gross generalization–I know, but it’s for the sake of argument) wouldn’t be able to tell nomothetic and idiographic approaches to knowledge apart if living personifications of the concepts woke them up at 3:00 am with a bucket of cold water. Organismal biologists might demand coffee first, but they’d greet them like the cantankerous friends they are.
Life has a history. The physical interactions of life with its surrounding media, as understood through biochemistry and biomechanics, follow invariant law-like behaviors approximated for all matter through research in chemistry and physics. The *history* of life is a contingent process, and although it shows trends, it does not show invariant law-like behavior.
Testing hypotheses in nomothetic (G. ‘arranging laws’) and idiographic (G. ‘depicting peculiarities’) approaches are fairly different matters; the former is best approached by some variant of Popper’s hypothetico-deductive reasoning, the latter by Peirce’s abductive reasoning.
Anybody who spends their time whipping out p-values for effect is probably deductively testing hypotheses about law-like behaviors–p is the probability that they’re drawing their new and cool data from an old and boring null distribution, so if it’s low (p<0.05, p<0.001, etc.), then their ideas can proceed to be as new and cool as they say they are. Note that they haven’t shown that their results are new and cool, they’ve just shown that it’s reasonable to assume that their results *aren’t* old and boring.
Abductive reasoning has to proceed by comparing likelihoods, either in a straight-up likelihood ratio test or through Bayesian analysis, because it’s acknowledged that we’re not choosing the *necessary* hypothesis, we’re choosing the *best from among competing hypotheses.* These can end up in a p-value, for the brave and foolhardy, but they’re also just fine as likelihood ratios.
My point being, I haven’t known too many biochemists to be keen on much beyond t-tests for their hypotheses for biological effects (although they do use some pretty rockin’ bioinformatics techniques to scan their data), which are generally grossly inappropriate benchmarks for testing ideas about biological systems. They spend a lot of time on the probability of hypotheses, or p(H), which is fine if you’re about to reach into a bag and pull out marbles or jelly beans, but the probability of events that may or may not have already occurred is a moot point–see the waterfall analogy above.
From where we currently stand, it’s much more useful to consider the likelihood, which sketches out as p(D|H), the probability of collecting the data you have, given the assumptions of your competing hypotheses.
The probability of a hypothesis p(H), especially in a complicated system, is a thorny thing. Those that claim to have worked out iron-clad probabilities for events in the history of life are in equal measures brave and naive, and would be well-served with some time tromping around outdoors in real living systems regaining their humility. Likelihood ratio tests are fantastic because p(H) doesn’t need to enter the picture, just p(D|H1) vs. p (D|H2), etc.
The supernatural monkeywrench in this system is that invoking a deity prevents us from calculating a meaningful p(D|H). If a benevolent deity created life and that’s that, then p(D|H)=1, because H does whatever it needs to do (or whatever we need it to do) to generate the pool from whence we got D. I could also claim that my invisible friend Norman created life, also p(D|H)=1 as long as Norman has supernatural powers. How to choose between Norman and any other supernatural explanation? The only way any of these terms can be meaningful is if the models (Hx) are *constrained* to certain behaviors. This ends up being a cleft stick for theology: is a deity omnipotent or abductively testable? They can’t be both.
Alright, so it’s an academic point. I can’t help it, I’m an academic. But in my experience (can’t say if this is true for Rana and Ross, haven’t read it) most arguments about origins from biochemists tend to dwell heavily on the probability of one hypothesis (materialistic origin of life, generally given as p<0.wholelottazeros1) versus their pet hypothesis (a theistic origin of life, by definition for an omnipotent deity who wants us around p=1) and they totally ignore the fact that what they’re doing is not science because their alternative hypothesis is not testable. They’re not even using a meaningful analytical framework for their materialistic hypothesis, fer goodness’ sake.
Enough of the ball being on this side of the court for now. Questions for you, John:
Do Rana and Ross frame the support for their origins hypothesis in terms of relative probabilities? Or relative likelihoods?
Do they acknowledge that studying the history of life is an ideographic pursuit, in so many words or through a different explanation? (Ross should grok this one–I see that he’s trained as an astronomer, and astronomy and paleontology are two of the venerable and frustratingly ideographic fields of science)
If you had to choose between a deity being omnipotent and unavailable to science, or being testable and thus fallible, which would you go for? Note that although this can be construed as a false dichotomy from a personal perspective, it’s a very real dichotomy for the philosophy of science.
Thanks again.
-t
December 12th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Any answers for this skeptic?
December 17th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
Hey!…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Monday
December 18th, 2007 at 12:07 am
Cool.
December 24th, 2007 at 11:03 am
I Googled for Bob Marshall, but found your page about HUMANS ARE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER ANIMALS. Thanks… nice read.