|
By Mark Vernon on Tuesday, August 19 2008, 07:59 - Journalism - Permalink
I've a piece on the Guardian's Cif site about the Richard Dawkins' TV series on Darwin, his questionable strategy of giving creationism prime time, and the missed opportunity of being distracted from (prejudiced against?) the truly fascinating latest advances in the science.
Trackback URL : http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?trackback/1009
The blog might be thought of as the first draft of what I've been thinking about, seeing, hearing and reading.
I am an English writer, journalist, and author, used to be a priest in the Church of England, live in South London, and am an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London. I am a founding member of The School of Life.
Do leave comments or contact me.
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Comments
Wow, there's quite a discussion going on over there in the comments section. I'm curious -- do you follow those comments? Do they bother you at all? Do you have a personal policy about commenting yourself, or is there a policy for Guardian writers?
I don't know about you, but some of the things you brought up in your article reminded me of Plato's Forms. An idea/theory that can be easily dismissed, and yet, I found that the more you think about it, the deeper it gets. (And no, it has anything to do with (a) "God.")
Also, have you ever read "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright?
Mark, hi. Thanks for letting me know that your spam system ate the last message.
Here goes again. Let's "rerun the tape" and see if we get a different result. :)
I have written a long response to your Guardian article on my blog.
weblog.xanga.com/tonysida...
Sorry, Mark, I didn't think much of your article at all: gcoupe.spaces.live.com/bl...
Thanks for the comments. I've not had time to get to the responses, on the Guardian site or elsewhere, yet. But I'm not surprised it all seems so controversial: 'tis speculative - but speculative with good reason, I'd argue.
I confess that my feelings on reading it were "Oh no, another guy who wants to drag us unwilllingly back up teleology boulevard".
Yeah, it's speculative. The book probably only exists because of the Templeton Foundation money, but the Templeton Foundation's involvement is enough to ensure that some of the heavy-hitting naturalists won't show up (which is not to run down the caliber of those who did show up, it's just annoying to have a setup that's going to be biased because of the ethical concerns of those who might otherwise turn up). If an idea is that important then it will turn up at secular science conferences. No need to set up a little enclave of theologians and Templeton-friendly scientists.
en.wikipedia.org/w/index....
Personally, having witnessed something of the Templeton Fund close up, I think it is becoming an easy excuse to ignore work it sponsors for those who just don't like the work. But as with anything claiming to be scientific or academic, the work should be taken for what it is, and judged by its content not its branding. And in this case it is a book by a bunch of internationally recognised scientists, philosophers and theologians. Read it. You mightn't agree but you might be surprised
Before I go on, I have to say thanks for reawakening my interest in the "tape of life" issue: radical contingency, inevitability, or something in between. That's one of the msot fascinating issues in evolutionary biology. Though I think the import of the answer is greater for the religious than for the unbeliever (be he agnostic or atheist; I'm a philosophical agnostic and a functional atheist).
I am not decrying the overall value of the John Templeton Foundation's work, but I know that some good scientists won't go near them. I'll discuss that issue in more detail later in this comment.
On the comment area of your Guardian piece I took the trouble to track down the people involved in this particular book,, and it's a very impressive roster by any standards. I'm particularly pleased that Richard Lenski was involved because I'd be particularly interested in his thoughts on Conway Morris's ideas.
In his 2003 book "Life's Solution", Conway Morris used Lenski's Long Term Evolution Experiment to argue that replaying the tape of life leads to convergence, and I think you can take it that way from the data Conway Morris cited (1,000 generations on). However apparently a later study suggests something different. One of the 36 strains (12 sets of identical E. Coli taken independently through 2,000 generations then each split in 3, then fed exclusively on a solution rich in citrate (which they don't metabolise efficiently) and a tiny bit of glucose (which they do)) developed the ability to metabolise citrate efficiently enough to wipe the floor with the mainstream strain in the glucose-starved environment. The cool thing about that experiment is they take daily backups of all 36 cultures, just like a computer system, so they are able to rerun the experiment from any point. Lenski's colleague Blount found by reruns that strains from later samples were far more likely to develop the capacity to metabolise citrate than earlier ones. In the words of the team:
"historical contingency can have a profound and lasting impact under the simplest conditions, in which initially identical populations evolve in identical environments. Even from so simple a beginning, small happenstances of history may lead populations along different evolutionary paths. A potentiated cell took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference."
The Long Term Evolution Experiment's homepage is here:
(https myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/ )
myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/
Freelance writer Ed Yong has blogged about Blount's findings:
( scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/06/history_restricts_and_guides_the_evolution_of_innovations.php )
scienceblogs.com/notrocke...
Of course that doesn't necessarily contradict Conway Morris's view that convergence is inevitable, but it does make the system look a lot less determinate than might be required for his "humans (if you define humans broadly enough) are inevitable" scenario. I might even buy "humans are very likely", but I suspect this would not be enough for Conway Morris because (looking at his Boyle Lecture of 2005 at St. Mary-le-Bow, linked below) he takes his religious belief very seriously and this seems to inform his science. As he says, he regards himself as one of those people who are "legitimate scientists but inspired by faith".
( www.stmarylebow.co.uk/?download=BoyleLecture05.pdf )
www.stmarylebow.co.uk/?do...
There are many more such statements in the lecture, though I accept that most can be discounted as use of poetic language before an audience of the religious, and after al this was the *Robert Boyle* lecture, not a lecture named for Bertrand Russell or Thomas Hobbes.
But it's that kind of statement that worries me. I wonder why Conway Morris revised his opinion of the Burgess Shale fauna, and why he is making so much of a well known feature of evolution, Convergence. From my point of view it's almost as if he looked at Gould's conclusion in Wonderful Life and realised that this view of a nature in which chance plays any significant part endangers the religious enterprise to which he is philosophically wedded, and which is fundamentally based on teleology: God did it.
For the atheist, Gould's universe isn't philosophically unwelcoming. Nor is that of Conway Morris. But Conway Morris cannot philosophically accept Gould's view of evolution, or that of Dawkins and Maynard Smith. It's humanity (or the nearest functional equivalent) or bust. Anything else would not be compatible with Conway Morris's religion.
That sums up my feelings that Conway Morris may be barking up the wrong tree. It's the only tree he wants to bark up. That's pretty much the same reason naturalists feel suspicious about organisations like the John Templeton Foundation. They're openly promoting a specifically spiritual, and perhaps even a particular religious, way of doing science, rather than a secular one.
Intelligent, talented people, particularly exemplified here by Simon Conway Morris, produce excellent science, but I would feel more comfortable if all scientits, including Conway Morris. did so on the same secular basis that we all do.
By the way I notice you gave a talk to Skeptics in the Pub last December. I would really like to have met you, and it makes me sad that I stopped going there regularly a few years ago. I'm a "new atheist" or so people tell me, but I don't bite and I'm agnostic-friendly. I live in London so if you're out and about and want to meet, you know my email address.
Robert Walker said:
" I don't know about you, but some of the things you brought up in your article reminded me of Plato's Forms. An idea/theory that can be easily dismissed, and yet, I found that the more you think about it, the deeper it gets. (And no, it has anything to do with (a) "God.") "
You might like this:
www.taipeitimes.com/News/...
Unfortunately for science, people on both sides of the religious coin manage to find god in any and all evidence that can mean that evolution is guided by some higher force, so any real science gets trampled by the fanatics and their equally zealous counterparts before it ever has a chance to be studied without preconceived ideological bias.
For example, PZ says:
" We are each our own individual engines of purpose, operating in a hostile universe where randomness can shape our fates. There is no grand scheme behind our existence, other than the same function that all our ancestors had: to order our local environment to allow each to survive and to make the world a little better for our progeny. "
PZ doesn't know this, but he knows that his mind is already made up, so it doesn't matter, which means that he's not a self-honest scientist, rather, he uses his position to fight his culture war and score points with radical atheists, but you can easily find his ideological dogma within his stated worldview.
A question that a self-honest scientist might ask that PZ won't ask because he can never get that far: If, for example, teeth are a tool, then what kind of tool are we, and what PRACTICAL purpose might we serve? How can PZ ever hope to approach a question like this when he already *knows* that the universe was created FOR us if he recognizes evidence for higher purpose in nature?
re: Templeton
You cannot get funding for research into these kinds of questions anywhere else, so good scientists like Paul Davies are forced to take money from them. Scientists who are adamantly against Templeton are typically also ideologically anti-predisposed to find god in their motivation, rather than their research.
If scientists don't want people going to Templeton for research money, then they need to get off of their meaningless high-horse and recognize the potential science in evidence that indicates the possibility that there is a higher purpose in nature.
This is a highly relevant link as the problem reaches right to the highest levels of science:
knol.google.com/k/richard...
Mark, I made a derogatory comment about you following one of your articles, and now I'm not sure that I read you right.
So I take it back, and I apologize.
Just a quick reply to a lot of info, for which thanks. Tony - I'm giving a talk at Kant's Cave (aka Philosophy for All) in September, another London-based philosophy pub gathering. Full details on the web. Island - thanks for the apology: there're loads of such comments on the guardian site, so it is good when human kindness makes and appearance too!
Here's to a little more human kindness . . . especially in the "blogosphere" where it is too often passed over in favor of snark and self-righteous vitriol.