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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Materialism: more than just one flavor

The Maverick Philosopher, aka Dr. William Vallicella, (he likely will be of my faovrite sources when I don't have a topic off the top of my head) has recently written concerning the topic of eliminative materialism, and a topic thus presented itself. Vallicella is certainly an intelligent and deep thinker, but not without his bias and, as all humans are, prone to insufficient contemplation regarding ideas that seem to support that bias.

Without going into the level of detail in the post, Vallicella describes the difference between eliminative materialism (which says that mental states don't exist) and identative materialism (the idea that mental states are equivalent to specific physical configurations in the brain, he did not use this exact term). After casting a jibe at the sanity of the eliminativists, he then proceeds to try to equate the two positions. Apparently he finds the identitarian position too difficult to rebut standing alone, so it must be tied to the more radical position.

On the face of it, there is a difference between saying that X does not exist and saying that X = Y. For the latter claim seems to presuppose that X does exist. But when X and Y belong to disparate categories, the difference appears to vanish. For example, is there any difference between saying that God does not exist and taking the Feuerbachian line that God is identical to a unconscious anthropomorphic projection? Suppose someone says, "God exists all right — it is just that God is an anthropomorphic projection." The proper response to such a person is to dismiss such obfuscatory rhetoric as tantamount to the claim that God does not exist. For God is not the sort of thing that could be a projection. Whether or not God exists, the concept of God is the concept of something that is a se, from itself, whence it follows that God cannot have the status of an anthropomorphic projection. So a claim that God does have this status is a claim that God does not exist.

Similarly, is there any difference between saying that mental state M is token-identical to physical state P, and saying that M does not exist? If M reduces to P, and M has all and only the properties possessed by P, then all there is is P, and the reduction is tantamount to an elimination.

The first paragraph is a poor analogy, simply because Vallicella must create an opponent who confuses whether God exists with whether the concept of God exists in order to make Vallicella's point. A putative God would be external to the mind of the opponent, and the mistake of equating it to an internal construct seems a little too elementary for the usual sphere of discussion Vallicella finds himself in.

As for the second paragraph, this is a very poor equivocation. Certainly, the identity theorist does eliminate facets of the ontological status of mental states with respect to the position of the dualist, so an elimination has occurred. However, not all eliminations are equal,and the identitarian position does specifically say our mental states are exactly that. Eliminative materialists would argue that almost all of our understanding of the mind will need to be re-worked, while identity theorists don't see the need for that sort of overhaul. It's one thing to say that happiness is the equivalent of a specific cascade of neural interactions, it's quite another to say that happiness is a false understanding of the workings of the brain.

On a personal level, I tend to accept identitarianism. I believe that when I am happy, angry, thirsty, etc., this is saying something real about me.
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Titan Day approaches

Sure, in previous years it was known as Christmas, as it will be known in future years. This year, it's Titan Day.

For the old-time boardgames, who remember Avalon Hill, Titan was one of the classic games to play. It plays differently, but very well, with 2-6 players as long as you don't mind the knock-out feature. I had my rear handed to me several times by some very good gamers. Old copies were selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

Well, Titan is being re-printed by Valley games, and I will be getting a brand new copy in 2 days. Except for 1856 and 1870, I have not bought a serious board game above the level of India Rails/Munchkin in about 20 years. Yes, I have been maried almost 20 years, how did you know?

Son#2 has been getting bored with Munchkin and Yu-Gi-Oh lately, so I am hoping this will be something for us to play together, perhaps with CharityBrow joining in every now and then. I expect Son#1 will be disinterested, as usual, and the younger three will not be up to the game for a while. Hopefully this will give him a taste for more interesting games.

Edited to add: we did in fact start of game of Titan, and he caught on better than I expected. Here's to many more in the future.
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Confederacy denialism

Denialism seems to always come from political motivations. For one example, back in the 1960s, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Republicans saw an opportunity to take the South out of the hands of Democrats, the infamous "Southern Strategy". Naturally, part of the Republican rhetoric became the partial rehabilitation of the Confederacy. After all, there is no honor in fighting for the right to enslave and/or oppress. Thus, new reasons for the rebellion/secession must be produced and defended.

This takes us to a comment by Martin Cothran, spokesperson for Focus on the Family in Kentucky and author of vere loqui, in particular of this comment:

I may not have explicitly disagreed before about slavery being the primary aim of the Confederacy, but I'll do it now. The issue was state's rights primarily, with slavery being an aggravating factor. Lincoln said several times that he would not order an end to slavery in the South. The issue was only newer states, so it was unnecessary for the South to secede in order to maintain slavery.

Slavery did become the primary justification of the war on both sides later in the war when Lincoln used the Emancipation Proclamation as a means to provide the North with a moral reason for he war. He needed a moral crusade to inform the Northern psyche, and slavery was ready at hand for the purpose. The Southern newspapers bit on it, and began to offer rationales for slavery.

But the idea that slavery was what the Civil War was about is, as I said, an oversimplification.

Well, any war has multiple justifications, and the Civil War is not an exception. However, the primary reason was certainly slavery, and to claim otherwise can only be denialism. All we need to look at are the documents produced by both sides in between the first secession (South Carolina, 1860-DEC-20) to the outbreak of hostilities (1861-APR-12).

We can start by looking at the proposal of people who were tryingto avert the war. Our first stop is the Critenden Compromise. This was a Constitutional amendment of six items and four proposed Congressional resolutions. Every single one of these items directly concerns slavery. Next, the Corwin amendment specifically calls out the institution of slavery. It was passed by Congress, signed by Buchanan (which had no formal significance),and passed by two states, says "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State." There was even a three-week Peace Conference, which proposed an amendment of seven sections, each section specifically addressing slavery, and the last sentence of the last section only addressing the rights of citizens (but not states). So clearly, in eyes of the people trying to preserve the Union and avoid war, slavery was the main issue.

How about the people leading the fight for secession? Well, we can start with the Cornerstone speech, delivered by Alexander H. Stevens, the first Vice-President of the Confederacy. He says, "The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution." Years later, when trying to correct some of the supposed misstatements of the recorded version of his speech, he reiterates this claim, "Slavery was without doubt the occasion of secession;". Of course, the best source of all is the reasons the states themselves give for secession, which we have for South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. All four of them refer to slavery generally, and the status of fugitive slaves in particular, while only one mentions economic reasons. So, we see from both sides that slavery really was the principle casue, not an afterthought or aggravating issue.

The argument concerning fugitive slaves is particularly ironic, because it amounts to an argument against the rights of Northern states to decide when people should be considered free. In that regard, the secessionists were anti-states-rights.

I don't expect the conservative Christian Republicans to give up this brand of denialism any time soon. It's no coincidence that every time a major party candidate has ties to a white-power organization, it's a Republican. They need these votes to win elections.
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Skeptic's Circle #102

The 102nd edition of the Skeptic's Circle is at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes, and instead trying to convince us we are religious, he's trying to convince a currently notorious politician to mend his ways. Bing can certainly be acerbic from time to time, but he also seems to be devoted to lost causes (which explains his being acerbic).
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Santa and Algebra I

On Sunday two my kids (Daughter2, aged 7 and Son3, aged 5) were treated to "Shop with a Cop" at the local Wal-Mart. I greatly appreciate my home town for taking the time and spending the money like that, my kids had a rough summer. The kids even got a picture on Santa’s lap. Daughter2 asked me out of the blue if that was really Santa. So in the custom in which I was raised, I said it was a person who was helping Santa. I believed in Santa until I was 12, so I certainly don’t see the hurry of changing her belief.

Actually, of my other three (Son1 at 16 with PDD-NOS. Son2 at 15, Daughter1 at 12 with ADHD), only Son2 has figured out that when I talk about the "Santa Clause Game", it really is a game not based on an actual person. I’ve been calling it a game since my kids could talk, so that has allowed him to make a transition from believer to game-player with no remorse at losing his beliefs (at least that I can see). It’s nice to think I’ve had a couple of good ideas as a father.

We also recently gat a report on Son1’s progress in his Pre-algebra class, which the teacher says is probably too easy for him. Next year he might well be in a regular Algebra 1 class in high school. It’s hard to describe how pleased and relieved you can be to see a son go from wearing diapers at age 7 to being partially mainstreamed less than ten years later. He owes it all to good teachers and his own hard work; his mother and I did almost nothing to direct him; we just let him become himself.

So, what does it mean for humans when you can perform algebra and still believe in Santa? Is the answer to that question "President George W. Bush"?
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Russell's teapot -- not grandiose enough?

I visited the Maverick Philosopher, who also responds to comments under the name Bill Vallicella, about a week ago, as I like to do from time to time. He had the most interesting post on Russell's teapot and why he felt it was not a persuasive example, which seems to be a reprint of an earlier post.

Let's start things off with his quote of Russell:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Vallicella first acknowledges the obvious points that just because there is no evidence A does not exist, we can not conclude A exists. However, he then seems to go into a third point that strikes me as not only being irrelevant to Russell's main point, but also completely avoids Russell's actual third point: belief in God, or the magic teapot, is not sustained based upon the evidence, but upon the inherited traditions and the tremendous amount of social pressure to be a believer. The number of believers who come to believe in God because of arguments like the Cosmological argument is very small, indeed. However, instead of addressing this point of Russell, Vallicella takes a turn which seems to take the analogy and discard it because Russell's teapot doesn't have a history of belief.

But the real appeal to atheists and agnostics of the Teapot passage rests on a third move Russell makes. He is clearly suggesting that belief in God (i.e., belief that God exists) is epistemically on a par with believing in a celestial teapot. Just as we have no reason to believe in celestial teapots, irate lunar unicorns (lunicorns?), flying spaghetti monsters, and the like, we have no reason to believe in God.

Sticking with Russell's teapot for the moment, why don't we have any reason to believe it exists? I'm drinking tea right now, and typically drink 2-4 quarts of iced tea each day. On the days where I don't drink it, I get headaches. I can certainly interpret that as a the divine retribution of Russell's teapot to my failure to offer an appropriate worship for the day.

But perhaps we should distinguish between a strong and a weak reading of Russell's suggestion:


S. Just as we cannot have any reason to believe that an empirically undetectable celestial teapot exists, we cannot have any reason to believe that God exists.


W. Just as we do not have any reason to believe that a celestial teapot exists, we do not have any reason to believe that God exists.

Vallicella does not provide a reason for making this distinction. It's just as well, because (S) is not a valid interpretation of Russell's proposition. Unlike the teapot, any putative omnipotent God certainly could offer us any manner of reasons to accept Their existence, of essentially any possible level of reliability. Of course, that such proof has not been offered is not proof of Their non-existence, but that is very different from saying we can not have proof.

Now it seems to me that both (S) and (W) are plainly false: we have all sorts of reasons for believing that God exists. Here Alvin Plantinga sketches about two dozen theistic arguments. Atheists will not find them compelling, of course, but that is irrelevant. The issue is whether a reasoned case can be made for theism, and the answer is in the affirmative. Belief in God and in Russell's teapot are therefore not on a par since there are no empirical or theoretical reasons for believing in his teapot.

This is an interesting standard of evidence: it doesn't matter if the arguments are compelling or not, they just have to exist and be made into a reasoned case. It occurs to me that this is not a difficult thing to accomplish for the Russell's teapot (the Teapot); I can make a reasoned case, that almost no one will find compelling, for it's existence. First is the evidence I have already presented, which we might call the Argument from Compulsion: when I stop performing acts of worship to the Teapot, I have physical symptoms. Then there is the Argument from Dominant Language: of all the Western European countries, it is England whose language has become the commercial language of the world, because they are known for drinking tea, and the Teapot has rewarded them for it. I will end this list with the Argument from Antioxidants: the Teapot wishes to encourage our worship, and so has made our worship healthy for us.

Another suggestion embedded in the Russell passage is the notion that if God existed, he would be just another physical thing in the physical universe. But of course this has nothing to do with anything maintained by any sophisticated theist. God is a purely spiritual being.

Here in the USA, for most theists, their putative God at one time or another had a very physical incarnation, and many of them believe He still has that incarnation. Now, if you are a Jehovah's Witness (JW), or some other sect who believes that Jesus was not God, then you might accept a purely spiritual God (as the JWs do). If Vallicella belonged to such a belief system, I do not believe he would enjoy the positive reputation he has among a variety of Trinitarian bloggers, so I will venture that he does accept some sort of physical part of God at some point in God's existence,and so does not himself believe God is purely spiritual.

Also, there is nothing in Russell's logic or analogy that relies on the Teapot being a physical thing. The analogy works perfectly well with objects that have no physical instantiation, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). I am curious how Vallicella can specifically note the FSM earlier in his post, and yet forget here that the FSM meets his criteria here for being a purely spiritual being.

Another problem with the teapot analogy is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being.

That's a pretty remarkable jump, from simply being a purely spiritual being to being the grounding of the universe. More to the point, it seems to be saying that the analogy is invalid because this putative God has a good story behind it. Perhaps Vallicella is unaware of how easy it is to compose such background stories for the Teapot. For example: the Teapot did create the universe just to put our planet in the perfect position to grow tea and have a species to worship it through drinking that tea. That the universe is perfectly suited for the drinking of tea is all the proof you should need for the Teapot.

This is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.

That Vallicella fails to see how much these arguments favor to the Teapot jut as much as his putative God seems to be due to some blindness or lack of imagination on the subject.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

The interpretation of the evidence to provide inductive support for a putative God fails to account for the lack of specificity: the same arguments can be used to support any such construct, including the Teapot or the FSM.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

I am quite at a loss to explain why anyone should think the Teapot analogy any good. It leaks like a sieve

To sum up, each of Vallicella points can be applied equally easily to the Teapot, much less the FSM. His own critique of the argument fails under the weight of the expectations he feels the need to employ for his God.
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101st Skeptics Circle

The 101st Skeptics Circle is up at Ionian Enchantment, with an African flavor.
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What a game!

I'm too cheap to get both cable and satellite dish, and I refuse to give up cable remarkable on-demand library (as much formy families sake as mine). In my area, thismeans I don't even get an option to buy NBA League Pass, so I watched my first Jazz game ofthe season last night. It was not exactly thre\illing watching Toronto lose by 27, but I really enjoyed it. If that's how good we are without Boozer, how good will we be with him back?
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