On the discussion of the language of design in biology

The Maverick Philosopher is examining the notion of design as used by Dawkins in particular, and evolutionary biologists in general, in what seems to be either an argument that design requires a designer, or an objection to the terminology of design being used absent a designer and the assignment of purpose requiring an intention, maybe a little of both. Personally, this seems to me to be trying to force evolutionary biology into creating highly technical jargon for no particularly useful purpose. We have no common English words to describe the overall shaping action that selection places upon living things, but I don't see how abandoning the terminology of design improves the understanding of these actions. Details below the fold.

Our starting point must be ordinary language. As David Stove points out, "it is a fact about the meaning of a common English word, that you cannot say that something was designed, without implying that it was intended; any more than you can say that a person was divorced, without implying that he or she was previously married." (Darwinian Fairytales, p. 190, emphasis added.) In other words, it is an analytic proposition that a designed object is one that was intended in the same way that it is an analytic proposition that a divorced person is one who was previously married. These are two conceptual truths, and anyone who uses designed object and divorced person in a way counter to these truths either does not understand these concepts or else has some serious explaining to do.

We can put aside for the moment that biologists have actually written multiple volumes to do this serious explaining. Perhaps this work is not serious enough for Dr. Vallicella, as most of the work is written for the popular audience. The first step, I think, is to acknowledge that no individual book, no matter how well or carefully written, would suffice to introduce an entirely new vocabulary, one that has no real equivalences into English, as a part of a discussion on a topic that already requires years of post-graduate study and work to understand, and result in something that a person with high-school education, or even a degree in philosophy, will understand. Scientists spend years learning to adjust and adapt their understanding of the English words, any new vocabulary would merely occupy an academic niche that has no need for it.

1. Mayr tells us in the chapter on Natural Selection that "Every species produces vastly more offspring than can survive from generation to generation." (117) Sorry to be such a quibbler, but is this true? 'Every' includes homo s. Does our kind produce vastly more offpsring than can survive from generation to generation?

Yes, we do. This restraint has been lifted in the last 10,000 years or so since the discovery of agriculture, and in that time our population has grown exponentially (which is the alternative when a species is temporarily unable to fill its niche). However, we will at some point exceed the ability of our environment to support our numbers. China is already experiencing a version of this issue, hence their official policy of couple being allowed one child. Eventually every culture will be facing this issue.

Then we read: "All the individuals of a population differ genetically from each other. They are exposed to the adversity of the environment, and almost all of them perish or fail to reproduce." (117) Really? Almost all of the members of our species perish or fail to reproduce?

Again, this was historically true. In pre-industrial times, it was commonplace to lose more children before puberty have children reach puberty.

Quoting Mayr, with interspersed comments, he says:

Selection is not teleological (goal-directed). Indeed, how could an elimination process be teleological? [It can't be, my man!] Selection does not have a long-term goal. [Or a short-term one either!]

This seems to be odd position. As was pointed out twice in the comments, there are several ways to design by elimination.

The following three positions need to be distinguished:

1. There is design in nature, and a complete account of it is impossible without recourse to a cosmic designer such as God.
2. There is intrinsic design in nature, and it is wholly explainable in naturalistic terms.
3. There is no intrinsic design in nature: all features that exhibit design, purpose, function are observer-relative, and the only observers are themselves denizens of the natural world.

Theists who rely on design arguments subscribe to (1), while some naturalist philosophers come out in favor of (2). (2), however, involves the claim that there is intrinsic design in nature, a claim that is far from obvious, and is arguably inconsistent with Darwinism.

...

So it looks as if (3) is the correct view. The following considerations will be based on passages from John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (The Free Press, 1995). We consider the case for the contention that there are no intrinsic design features in nature, equivalently, that biological functions are observer-relative.

Again, we see an example of a trilemma, one that is played subtlety and much more carefully than the ham-fisted approach outlined by Cothran. The very first question I would have regarding these is why the designer must be cosmic and singular, as opposed to highly limited and plural. The other is the restriction of purpose to designers and other external agents.

2. Searle's point about functions is that they are never intrinsic but always observer-relative. Functions are assigned or imposed by us. A burro (my example) is not intrinsically a beast of burden but is susceptible to having that functional role imposed on it. Or else we fabricate a mechanical 'burro' to suit our purposes. Similarly, cats and dogs are not pets intrinsically: the pet role is imposed by us.

There are no functions in the natural world: "nature knows nothing of functions." (14). Hearts occur in nature, and it is an observer-independent fact that they cause blood to course through the bodies that house them. But the function of the heart to pump blood is not intrinsic to nature.

This is a very human-centric position. Does a bird, or even an ant, assign a function to it's own heart? You can make arguments about degrees of consciousness, but I don't think anyone understands consciousness well enough to give a precise degree as to the level needed to say something has a function. Remove the ant's heart, and it is dead. I don't know as much about intention, consciousness, or the philosophical discussions thereof to claim any sort of expertise, but I know enough to be fairly sure that there is no universal position on whether an ant can assign purpose, on some level, to its own survival, and by extension its own heart.

So although one does discover how the heart works -- its mechanism -- one does not discover any teleology. Searle:

It is because we take it for granted in biology that life and survival are values that we can discover that the function of the heart is to pump blood. If we thought that the most important value in the world was to glorify God by making thumping noises, then the function of the heart would be to make a thumping noise, and the noisier heart would be the better heart.

To the organisms involved, survival is a value, at least in the sense that their reactions to stimuli are those that developed to ensure survival. The language confusion here, to the degree it exists at all, is quite small.

4. Compare airplane wings and eagles' wings. The wings of an airplane are designed by human engineers for a purpose: to generate lift so that a heavier-than-air craft can become airborne. They are for flying. Now it might seem that the same is true of eagle's wings: they too are for flying. This is true, but only relative to us. Because we value mobility and survival, we project onto the eagles' wings the function of being for flying and escaping predators. Searle's point, however, is that nothing in nature intrinsically has a function. He is not saying that airplane wings have a purpose while eagles' wings don't: they both have a purpose, but it is observer-relative. In a world without beings like us, bird's wings and birds' nests would exist and have causes and effects but lack functions.

The eagle will likely interpret this differently.
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The limited miracle argument

Sometimes, you will see a person arguing against some religious record by claiming that the events as presented would have lead to disasters not addressed by the texts, and that since the book in question does not address how these disasters were prevented, the record of the book must be wrong. Basically, they are trying to disprove miracles by claiming they would have created too much havoc or damage. The unstated, and probably unrealized, assumption in these arguments is the notion that the extent of a miracle is limited to the scope of the text. I find this to be an ineffective method of argument, because once you posit one or more effectively omniscient beings, miracles no longer have a scope or limitation.

One common example is the global flood myth. It is ineffective to say that certain types of fish would have died due to the mixing of salt and fresh water, various plants would have drowned, etc. Any omnipotent deity can easily create vast pockets of preserved salinity levels, or just recreate them all from scratch, for that matter. Note that this is not to say all arguments are ineffective. Any argument that requires currently observable evidence to be wrong (like geological continuity) require either a trickster deity or just flat-out denial of the reliability of observations, and both lead to nonsense.

Another common example is the story of the sun holding still in Joshua. Any claims of disastrous effects from stopping the rotation of the earth just beg the question of why some putative god can halt the inertia of the earth, but not of a person standing on it, a curious limitation. Such a deity could even lessen the effects of gravity to compensate the loss of acceleration from "centrifugal force". It's much more difficult to explain that there was no notice taken of the stoppage of the sun in other places in the world.

I'm not completely sure why I care so much about topics like this. I just generally hate bad arguments, I suppose.
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A quick thank you

I want to devote a post on Memorial Day to thank the soldiers who have dedicated their lives to our country. I don't think America is perfect, but it is one of the freest countries in the world, and I'm glad I live here.
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The 111th Skeptics' Circle is up

One of the funniest presentations I've seen for a Skeptic's Circle is now up at Action Skeptics, and I have no doubt my regular poster (aintnuthin) will find unintentional irony in the presentation.
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A lesson in overly simple logic

Creationists really like their world simple, it seems to me. A simple interpretation of their holy book, simple ideas of right and wrong, and of course a simple logic to express it all in. Thus, we get a first lesson in logic from Martin Cothran that teaches a couple of ideas which are too simple to be correct.

Examples below the fold.
For example:

Just for fun, I am going to employ the most sophisticated and beautiful of all logical arguments: the dilemma. The dilemma is a way of putting your opponent in a box; it is a way of showing him that, no matter what in fact is the case, his assumption leads to an unacceptable conclusion. Again, there are numerous ways of attacking the truth of a statement—this is only one of them.

If I am making this argument, here’s how I do it: There are only two kinds of rights: those that originate in divine law and those that originate in human law. If the claim is that same-sex marriage is a right originating in divine law, then it must be false, since (if it is addressed at all) it is precluded by the holy books of all major religions. If the claim is that same-sex marriage is a right originating in human law, then it must, again, be false, since the law of the land (at least in the United States) does not acknowledge it. Therefore, in either case—whether the appeal is to divine or human law—the claim is false.

Note the nice clean division of originating in divine law or human law. Only the very naive, inexperienced would not that the argument does not address interactions between divine law and human law, nor the other potential sources of rights. This is not valid argumentation, it is a rhetorical trick. Unfortunately, Cothran seems to think this is some sort of valid method. Maybe this is a matter of necessity. maybe the world of the creationist can't survive in a world of shades and colors.

Then he gives what he imagines to be a lesson in reducito as absurdum, attempting to show that a lack of testability does rule ID out of science:

The best place to look for scientific theories that are not falsifiable is physics. Everyone accepts that physics, and the theories that are included under it, are scientific. But many of them are not falsifiable—at least not now. The most famous of these is superstring theory. Superstring theory is the theory that particles and fundamental forces in the universe can be explained by the vibration of very tiny symmetrical strings. The problem is that the theory is not only not falsifiable, but, as some scientists have pointed out, it isn’t even conceivably falsifiable. Some of Einstein’s thought experiments (many of which he later set forth as full scientific theories), the scientific status of which have never been questioned, are not falsifiable either.

Your opponent could swallow hard and say that these things are not science, but he will know he is on shaky ground—and he will know you know he knows it.

Note how he projects his own limited world-view onto others. In fact, I don't feel that I am at all on shaky ground in saying that any hypothesis which is not testable is not relevent scientifically. However, there are differences between hypotheses that are inherently untestable (Intelligent Design can not be falsified under any conditions) and those that are untestable under current technology, but may eventually prove testable. Neither is a part of science today, but the latter can at least eventually be scientific.
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The responsible one

Son#1 (freshly 17) is 16 months older than Son#2 (15). Normally, with Son#1 being PDD-NOS, you would think this would make Son#2 the better choice for babysitting.

However, Son#1 takes his responsibilities very seriously. When Charity and I are home, h3e gets very sensitive to noise, overreacts to kids complaining, adn the like. However, when we go out for dinner, the rest fo the clan says he stays calm. I dont know how much of this is Son#1 rising to the challenge and how much is the kids changing their behavior when he's in charge. It's getting to the point where we are felling comfortable with Son#2 getting a summer job while Son#1 watched the kids on his own. I never thought I'd see the day,
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On the difference between gradualism and relativism

Going back to Iliocnetrim's take on compromise, there is an interesting tidbit, almost a throwaway, that reveals a sadly limited mindset.

Just as it is impossible for you and me to compromise between my desire to murder you and your desire not to be murdered, it is likewise impossible to compromise between truth and non-truth. To put it bluntly: the world is black-and-white, after all.

It's quite popular these days to sing peans to relativism: to assert either that there is no such thing as objective truth -- especially in regard to morality -- or, that if there is, it cannot be known (and so, is unimportant). I refer to this "All The Pretty Shades Of Grey."

It the typical fashion of Ilion's black-and-white thinking, he confounds the existence of shades of grey with the existence of relativism. Lest the reader think I am judging on the basis of this one small blurb, rest assured that this is a regular feature of his writing. The existence of objectively quantified shades of grey, and of bi-valued relative positions, are so commonplace that such thinking can only be considered a departure from reality.

An example of the former would be the question of taking a shot from the upper elbow on a fast break. You can quantify the value of this shot compared to the standard value of a possession for your team when you reset the offense. There is no absolute true or false answer to taking the elbow shot, but the answer is quantifiable probabilistically, and the means of evaluating those answers are certainly objective. In any area of endeavor that allows you to evaluate outcomes numerically, you wind up weighing costs, benefits, resources, commitments, etc. and generate a large array of variables, very few of which will correspond to 1 or 0. This reasoning can certainly be extended to moral issues. Money spent on the support for underage mothers will cause fewer of them to desire abortions. Saving lives, at need for increased taxation: absolutely good or absolutely evil?

On the other hand, how about kid's programming that is designed around a toy line? I have no trouble conceding that you could say it is good or evil, but how would you show either objectively? This becomes a matter of personal taste, in many respects.

Well, I don't expect this sort of thinking to change Ilion's ideas anytime soon. For him there may always be just two camps, even though the world of black-and-white is itself not black-and-white.
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A man who eats dog dung

It's probably bad form to pick on a person like Ilion, but sometimes a nut just seems to ask to be cracked.

In a discussion on whether or not it would be good for the anti-abortion and pro-choice forces to combine efforts on reducing the need for abortions, Ilion compares this type of compromise to putting dog dung into ice cream and serving. No, I'm not kidding. Then, as mere days later, he offers up this gem on the nature of government.

Victor, that some level of governmnet is necessary does not at all mitigate the fact that government is an evil; nore does it even begin to mitigate the fact that government's sole method of funding itself is indistinguishable from a Mafia protection racket -- "Give us your money and do what we tell you to do or we'll kill you."

I guess we should all be grateful to Ilion for eating his daily dose of feces.
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Discussion on evolution

Below follows a response to a long list of comments in the third post in my series on Nagel's articles. If I have any other regular readers who are bored by this, my apologies.

I decided to move the bulk of the post to the comments.

aintnuthin,

Before a detailed response, let me see if I can correctly summarize our disagreement. You seem to be claiming that the Modern Synthesis of population genetics with natural selection is defunct, out of favor, discredit, or something similar. I have been saying that the many additional mechanisms we are seeing recently are things that will be incorporated into the Modern Synthesis, and that complement it rather than replace it.

On that topic, consider this link (with a hat tip to Panda’s Thumb).

LH: What are the most exciting recent developments in systematics / comparative methods?

JF: The availability of genome-scale information is certainly one. The arrival of a generation of young researchers who are comfortable with statistical and computational approaches is another. But the most important development is reflected in recent work on coalescent trees of gene copies within trees of species. What this does is tie together between-species molecular evolution and within-species population genetics. Those two lines of work have been developing almost independently since the 1960s. But now, with population samples of sequences at multiple loci in multiple related species, they are coming back together. This is not another Modern Synthesis, but it is a major event that needs a name. How about the "Family Reunion"? Long-estranged relatives who have not been in touch are getting together.

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Why some types of "political correctness" are necessary

Someone recently reminded me that I said I would do a post on this topic. As it happens, there was an interesting kerfluffle recently that discussed this topic.

Comrade PhysioProf discusses the appearance of a few sexist comments in the responses to a bog post welcoming a new female scientist to discover blogs, and why the "compliments" are still inappropriate. Now, grown men and women are certainly capable of slapping this sort of nonsense down independently. Teenagers are not as experienced, knowledgeable, nor independent. It is much harder for a teenager to speak out against a community of peers than it is for adults. Also, language guides thought, and teenagers are still learning their thought-patterns. Teaching them not to say such things will mean they all be less inclined to think these things.

A second type of case is when the legislature of a state/nation chooses a symbol that is deeply offensive to a large selection of the populace, when there are many other non-offensive ways to proclaim the same message. An example would be when South Carolina flew the Confederate flag over their statehouse. Many of those same sentiments would have been expressed by flying the "Live free or die" flag, or any one of dozens of other possible flags. It is inappropriate to choose a symbol for black South Carolinians that they hate. Note,that this is different from groups that hate the flag chosen by South Carolina because it is South Carolina.

I agree that many of the reactions of people get overblown (such as the response to "niggardly"), and that no one has a right to keep adults from saying offensive things. However,in the two situations of trying to educate people, and of government speech, I think that considerations teaching what/how to think and of being a government for all the people do make it important keep speech and symbols inoffensive.
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Learning to live a normal life

It's been over a year since I've written about Son#1. A lot of that is because his behavior is getting to be so much closer to that of other kids, there's little to say about how different he is. He goes to football games, basketball games, and plays at the high school. He's taking a pre-Algebra class, and should be taking Algebra 1 next year. He is starting to lose some weight (he has been very heavy for a long time) and even plays with other kids from time to time. All of this without chelation therapy, a special diet, or anything else besides some extra attention at school and lots of love and acceptance at home. He even baby-sits our kids.

Of course, he's still immature emotionally, and is facing some issues because of that. When he was in a splash fight at the pool last week, he got poked in the eye with a noodle, and tried to hit the other kid in retaliation. He was walking home from a tennis game with Son#2 when a few other teens tried to get him to go with them by saying they loved him. We had to have a talk about real fiends and people who say they are your friend for no reason. In some ways he's still less adult than Daughter#2 (who is eight years younger).

So, we continue love, hope, work, and wait.
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A lack of imagination, or how a skeptic thinks

The Maverick Philosopher apparently also has his knickers in a twist over what it means to be "negative atheist", which seems to be the term he uses for what I would call a "weak atheist". He engages in a great deal of categorization about how atheism is a proposition. Still, after all this, he can't seem to find a way to give any other proposition than

If atheism and theism are worth discussing, then atheism is the view that God does not exist and theism is the view that God does exist.

At the end of the post, he queries, "So what's going on here? What am I missing?". I am only too happy to clarify this for Dr. Vallicella.

The proposition for the negative atheist would be, approximately, "There is no sound reasoning that leads to the conclusion God exists". This proposition certainly leads to a wealth of discussion over the topic, as theists and atheist discuss various arguments and why the reasoning is sound or not.

One of the most artificial assumptions in logic is the position that every statement needs to be assigned a value of true or false. Mathematicians,for the most part, are comfortable with this assumption because it is sufficient for mathematics. However, it is certainly not sufficient for reality. One of the features of skeptics is that we are comfortable saying "not enough evidence exists to make a decision". I see no reason to say God does not exist. I also see no reason to say God exists. So, I'm a "negative atheist". I'm not unsure about whether I believe in God, I don't believe in God, just like I don't believe in homeopathy, reiki, or theraputic touch.


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My Pavlovian experience

Daughter #1 (who seems to have a fairly present case of ADHD) just had to miss a week of school from illness. So, we were working on some of the homework yesterday (adding fractions of different denominators), and the usual screaming fit was beginning. Any time she needs to work three or four steps to solve a problem, she loses focus on what to do at first and gets easily confused. This leads to crying fits, etc.

So yesterday, with the second problem of so,I started given her an M&M every time she did a step of the problem correct. This seemed to calm her down, to the point she did the last problem wihtout help.

I have no idea if this is a good long-term idea or not. But with all the work there was to do, I can't say I regret it.

Late addition:

We got a lot morework done today, lots of praise (including before we bagan the homework) but no M&M's.
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Delusion at a high level

Really, that's the only way I can describe this sentence from a recent post at the Maverick Philosopher.

The bolded passage addresses the fundamental and apparently unbridgeable difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives take a sober and realistic (not pessimistic!) view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience.

Just a few utopian, non-reality based schemes of conservatives:

Abstinence-only education
Elimination of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research
Global warming denialism

Liberals and leftists, by contrast, joined by many anarchists and libertarians, labor under the misapprehension that human beings are inherently good, and would achieve an optimal condition either through massive statist intervention, or the elimination of the state altogether. Strange bedfellows these, but lying together in the bed of a common illusion.

Many liberals think that most humans are inherently responsive to their environment, and while there will always be exceptions to that, the best way to reduce negative behavior is to remove the inducements to such behavior.

Oh, and his great example of hypocrisy? Noam Chomsky has the nerve take advantage fop the tax laws in the same was other rich people do! Conservatives don't bother to explain why this is hypocritical, because such explanations would be thoroughly laughable.


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107th meeting of the Skeptics circle

The 107th meeting of the Skeptics Circle is up at the Skeptic's Field Guide. It includes a podcast as well as a link list.
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It turns out homeopathy works, after all

I can't stomach coffee, literally. So, I drink a lot of iced tea. Rather than use an instant, I boil water, brew the tea and ice it. It was in the process of doing this I discovered that water really does have a memory.

At work, I use the company microwave to heat my tea. A pint of water fresh from the tap takes about 4 minutes to boil in it (I make quart of iced tea at a time). Because I don't like standing around doing nothing, I usually go back to my desk while it boils. However, sometimes I get distracted at my desk, and don't get back in time to brew the tea. I have noticed something amazing: it takes less time to boil the water a second time. The water obviously remembers being boiled, an so will boil again in 1 to one-and-one-half minutes.

So far, I have not experimented with different aids to test the length of this memory. Will certain cups aid it? Does water remember being boiled better when the water is uncovered or covered? How about when encased in a gelatin pill? I have some hunches, but not enough time to perform some standardized tests at work. I leave it to all the scientists who work with homeopathic remedies to investigate this further.
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Repost,enhanced: Probability and the 18 19 mechanisms

Every now and then I see bloggers repost someof their favorites. I think I might make this one an annual post, adding additional mechanisms as I learn about them. This post started with 15, and is now up to 18 19.

I'm expanding on a couple of different posts I made at the Skeptic's Annotated Bible Discussion Board, one of my favorite hang-outs. Basically, you see a lot of probability discussions in IDC literature. This is one more reason why they are nonsense. They generally looked at random mutation (that is, the replacement of one "letter" in the DNA with another letter) and natural selection.

There are at least 18 different mechanisms involved in evolution:

Mechanisms that increase diversity in a population
Random replacement mutation in DNA
Gene duplication
Frame shift mutation
Gene flow from other species
Recombination
Symbiosis
Environmentally generated changes to DNA decoding
Protein changes (prions, etc.)

Mechanisms that alter allele proportions in a population
Natural selection
Sexual selection
Sexually antagonistic selection
Random genetic drift
Kin selection
Molecular drive

Mechanisms that operate at a level above populations
Speciation
Punctuated equilibrium
Extinction/competition/invasive species
Mass extinction events
Parasitic/symbiotic relationships (note this is different from the symbiosis that occurs at the genetic/cellular level).

To do a probability calculation, you need to account not only for the probabilities of each of these mechanisms, but also for the independence of every possible subset of these mechanisms. that would be 524,288 (2^19) 262,144 (2^18) possible subsets, so any probability calculation would require you to factor in 524,288 262,144 different probabilities. The next IDC document I see that uses more than 10 factors will be the first.

Just one more way IDC falls short of even it's own goals.
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103rd Skeptics Circle

The 103rd Skeptic's Circle is up at Bug Girl's Blog, along with some of the cutest pictures of insects. Enjoy!
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A Martin Cothran trilogy

Martin Cothran, spokesman for the Discovery Institute and Focus on the Family (at least, so I have heard), presented a trio of posts that I felt a need to correct over the past couple of weeks.

The first contains a very curious understanding of the Constitution.

Now whatever your view of Blagojevich or Burris, there is one thing that we know without a doubt: the Constitution leaves it up to the states. Reid has no business telling Illinois what to do. Blagojevich is still governor (even though most of the rest of us wish he weren't), and has perfect right to make the appointment.

Whether Burris serves as Senator from Illinois is a matter for the people of Illinois to decide, not the U. S. Senate.

However, the people who actually wrote the Constitution seem to have a different opinion on the matter. Quoting from Article 1, Section 5:

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two-thirds, expel a Member.

So, there is certainly an argument that the Senate does indeed reserve the right to decide if a particular appointee has been too tainted by virtue of the person doing the appointing, and is therefore unqualified. The Senate is not able to decide who gets nominated for membership, but it does seem to have the right to turn people away. Strike one for Cothran.

In the second post, we have a vague attempt to define a word that means nothing to people who accept the Theory of Evolution, and something different to each different type of creationist, "Darwinism" (typically, it means whatever parts of the Theory of Evolution the creationist in question does not accept). Cothran's take on the word:

As a prelude to some more posts on the issue of Intelligent Design, I thought I might address a question that has come up on this blog several times, which I have answered in bits and pieces, but never, I think, directly. It is the question of why I use the term 'Darwinism' rather than using the term many Darwinists prefer that I use: 'evolution.'

I use the term 'Darwinism' simply because it is more accurate. By Darwinism I mean the belief, not simply that the complex organic world as we know it evolved from simpler life forms (the definition of 'evolution'), but that that process can sufficiently be explained by completely natural processes--the two reigning explanations, as I understand it, being natural selection and modern genetic theory.

Darwinists themselves seem to use this term when they think the rest of us aren't looking, but they don't seem to want the term to be used publicly because it has acquired a somewhat pejorative sense. To that, all I can say is that that's not my problem.

The distinction is important because there are some of us who don't have any particular problem with evolution, but have their doubts about Darwinism.

Cothran manages to make several mischaracterizations in a very short post. The first is that there is no such thing as a Darwinist, because no one (that I have read, at least) treats the writings of Darwin as being the the final or ultimate authority on biological development and history. Darwin was the not the first to note the history of biological development, and certainly not the first to note that selection can cause morphological change even within a person's lifetime. He took these ideas and put them together, but his works, like many works at the beginning of a scientific revolution, contain their fair share of errors, incorrect hypotheses, and discarded notions. Scientists don't believe anything because Darwin wrote it, they believe what the evidence of the 120+ years since Darwin has confirmed.

Second, knowledge that the natural process involved in evolution are sufficient to have fueled the world's biodiversity is not a belief, it is a fact. We know from decades of experience that the mechanisms of evolution are capable of doing astounding things. Of course, a careless person might confuse being sufficient with being actual, a problem that Cothran seems to have (as will be shown below). If I see a pile of rocks at the face of a cliff, it is a sufficient explanation that they fell of the cliff face due to erosion. This does not rule out the possibility of a person rearranging the rocks after they fell, causing them to fall, etc. It is sufficient, not conclusive.

Third is the common Creationist tactic of taking the 17+ mechanisms of evolution and ignoring at least 11 of them, referring only to natural selection and modern genetic theory

Fourth, the term Darwinism only comes up when discussing ID/Creationism. The reason it has any pejorative sense at all is because it was created to be a pejorative term.

It was nice of Cothran to confirm for us, in the last paragraph, that "Darwinism" is defined by what is rejected. Strike two for Cothran.

Finally, I will quote from the third piece of dreck put out in a four-day span.

This has been said before in different ways, but, put very simply, if you say that the assertion that the universe as a whole or any particular part of it are intelligently designed is by necessity a non-scientific assertion, then have you not also committed yourself to saying that the opposite assertion--that the world or the things in it are not intelligently designed--is equally non-scientific?

If so, then what are the ramifications for Darwinism, since Darwinism necessarily involves the denial of the assertion of Intelligent Design?

Cothran's rhetorical question in the first paragraph is absolutely correct: it is as equally non-scientific to make a positive denial of design (as opposed to an affirmation of the lack of evidence for design) as it is to make an affirmation of design. Going back to my pile of rocks under the cliff: to claim it is a design, all a person has to do is move one rock by any measurable amount, he has then a proper claim to design in the final result. If I come by six hours later, how am I supposed to make a positive claim that no one has designed the rock positions? They could have been designed on one side of the road,not designed on the other side, and there is no way for me to distinguish the two.

Cothran's second paragraph reveals the confusion to which I referred earlier. His very own definition of "Darwinism"refers to the notion that natural mechanisms are are sufficient, but again there is a difference between sufficiency and conclusiveness. The denial of ID has absolutely no ramifications at all for Darwinism under the very definition he provides!

And if so, then what does that say, not only about the anti-Intelligent Design proclamations of some in the scientific community, but about the scientific status of Darwinism insofar as it is a denial of the Intelligent Design assertion?

In his haste, Cothran seems to have forgotten to mention which of the many ID assertions that he's referring to. However, there is a blanket answer: any particular ID assertion that says merely that the mechanisms of the Theory of Evolution are insufficient to explain a particular biological phenomenon has made a scientific statement. It just happens to be a false one. Strike three for Cothran, he is again out of touch with reality.
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The reality of sets

I checked the blog of the Maverick Philosopher, aka Dr. William Vallicella, over the course of the last week, and once again find he has provided material to which I would respond. In fact, in writing two posts about the existence of sets, he has touched on a subject near to my heart. In fact, I discuss this very topic, in a much less formal manner, in every single Geometry class. There is a very real distinction between a formal system, a construct of the mind that we use to generalize reality and draw deductive conclusions, and the underlying reality itself. Mathematics is first and foremost a formal system. I think Vallicella provides an excellent example of how the eagerness that believers have to create these non-materials things of real existence spills over into assigning reality to all sorts of fanciful concoctions, much as we see supporters of one type of woo are often more likely to pickup or support other sorts of woo. Vallicella's comments are italicized.

Set theory can be done either naively or axiomatically. In the standard axiomatic approach to the subject, that of Zermelo-Fraenkel, the existence of the null set is posited in a special axiom.

Two errors in two sentences. One of the primary reasons that set theory was put into an axiomatic format is that, when doing set theory naively, you come across both logical and semantic contradictions that are avoided by the axiomatic process. Also, while Zermelo's original approach had a special axiom for the empty, the standard approach to the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom schema contains no such axiom. Rather, the empty set is the derived result of the axiom schema of replacement, which in the short form says that functions defined on classes will map sets into sets.

Intuitively, the existence of a set depends on the existence of its members. The set consisting of me and my cat cannot exist unless both man and cat exist: if either of us should cease to exist, the set would cease to exist. It exists because we exist, not vice versa. (This is of course not a causal use of 'because.') In the case of the null set, however, there is nothing on which the null set can depend for its existence.

The truth is that sets don't exist, at all. The set of Vallicella and his cat is a mental shortcut that we use, but it has no reality unto itself. When I talk about the red books on my bookshelf, they are a set of books for only as long as any person considers them to be a set of books. There is no ontological status the property of their being a collection. After all, how is the nature of the books changed if I say that I have carefully designed them to be a set, or if I say they are just a bunch of book I have in that place? I can tell Person A the one and Person B the other, they can't compare notes, examine the books, and thereby discern which account is more truthful. So, it seems the nature of being a set has no reality behind it. In particular, why should the empty set have any more reality?

No working mathematician is likely to lose any sleep over this, however. He will tell us that the null set is convenient, computationally useful and ought to be judged by its practical fruits.

Working mathematicians generally seem aware that almost everything they do is based upon assumption that are help arbitrarily, because we have found them useful. The very grammar of mathematics, predicate logic, is based upon the highly arbitrary notion notion that every statement is true or false. The arbitrariness of this decision is shown by the success of the intuitionists and the various alternate logical evaluation schemata in creating perfectly functional mathematical systems. They know that sets exists only to the degree that we think of the collection of various objects as a set, and so one more useful, non-real entity is not going to cause consternation.

From the first post:

So on the one hand, the null set is useful and well-motivated from within the circle of set-theoretical ideas, but on the other hand, it appears philosophically to be a creature of darkness. Is there a way to get rid of the darkness?

By my lights, the philosopher aims at a degree and a type of clarity that the mathematician qua mathematician -- not to mention other nonphilosophers -- does not care about. Of course, I am not saying that he should care about it. He is within his rights in simply dismissing concerns like the one raised in this post as irrelevant to his concerns or unimportant given his goals and priorities. What is intolerable, though, is the mathematician who gives a lousy philosophical answer to a philosophical question, especially if he is only half-aware that it is a philosophical question.

Of course, philosophy itself is also a formal system. When the mathematician chooses to ignore the needs and desires of one formal system in favor of another, they do so 2with the understanding that all formal systems are arbitrarily chosen based upon their perceived usefulness.

He is then like the neuroscientist who, refusing to stick to his subject-matter, says silly things about mind and consciousness, all the while oblivious to the philosophical problems to which he gives silly answers.

Naturally, we see one sort of woo dissolving into another.



From the second post:

A set in the mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sense is a single item 'over and above' its members. If the six shoes in my closet form a mathematical set, and it is not obvious that they do, then that set is a one-over-many: it is one single item despite its having six distinct members each of which is distinct from the set, and all of which, taken collectively, are distinct from the set.

Or, since the very notion of set is in and of itself a mental construct, and not a reality, it is certainly different from the shoes themselves, which presumably are real enough that Vallicella puts them on his feet once in a while.

Vallicella goes on for quite a while being very clear that sets are created as a product of thinking. Yet, somehow he does not seem to understand this means they are just as unreal as Romeo or a modern-day Casanova. Just as we can use the conventions and shortcuts of our understanding of Shakespeare's play or a historical personage to create mental constructs of what it means to be Romeo of a moder-day Casanova, we use conventions and shortcuts to understand what a set of size six means, and assign contents to sets at need.

Your objection does not show that sets cannot be mental constructions; it shows that sets cannot be mental constructions of a finite mind. If there were an infinite, necessarily existent mind, then sets could be the constructs of such a mind. If you maintain that there is no such mind, then you should also maintain that there are no sets. If, however, you hold that there are mathematical sets, and that nothing contradictory can exist, then you should hold that they are the mental constructs of an infinite mind. If you deny that there is an infinite mind, but hold that there are sets, then you owe us an alternative explanation of how a set can be both one and many.

Left unaddressed is the reason we should think sets exist at all.
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