Posted on 06/02/2003 1:46:54 PM PDT by Heartlander
|
Blinded by Science |
| Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95) This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that he wants to shore up genetic determinism as the key factor in understanding human nature and individual behavior. Genetic determinism is rational materialism's substitute for the religious notion of predestination; taking the place of God as puppet master are the genes, whose actions and interactions control who we are, what we think, and how we act. This reductionist view received a body blow recently when the mappers of the human genome found that we have only about 30,000 genes. Because of their understanding of human complexity, the scientists were expecting at least 100,000 -- and that means there are probably too few genes for strict genetic determinism to be true. Ridley, a science writer and former U.S. editor of The Economist, tries to ride to the rescue. In doing so, he adds a twist that he hopes will overcome our apparent genetic paucity: Yes, he says, our genes decide who we are, what we do and think, and even with whom we fall in love. But, he posits, our molecular masters are not rigidly preset when we are born. Rather, they change continually in reaction to our biological and emotional experiences. Hence, 30,000 are more than enough for a soft genetic determinism to be true -- which means that the battle between those who believe we are the product of our biology (nature) versus those who believe we are the result of our environment (nurture) can now end in a truce in which both sides win. We are indeed controlled by our genes, but they in turn are influenced by our experiences. Ridley says that the mapping of the genome "has indeed changed everything, not by closing the argument or winning the [nature versus nurture] battle for one side or the other, but by enriching it from both ends till they meet in the middle." To Ridley, the core of our true selves isn't soul, mind, or even body in the macro sense; we are, in essence, merely the expression of our genes at any given moment. If this is true, then my perception of Nature via Nurture as so much nonsense was the only reaction I could have had, given my original genetic programming, as later modified by my every experience and emotion from my conception, through the womb, childhood, high school, college, practicing law, the death of my father, indeed up to and including the reading of this book. If that is so – if I was forced by my gene expression of the moment to perceive this book as I have -- what have we really learned that can be of any benefit to humankind? We are all slaves to chemistry and there is no escape. Even aside from such broader issues, Ridley does not make a persuasive case. Maybe it is my legal training, but I found his evidence very thin. He doesn't present proofs so much as resort to wild leaps of logic predicated on questionably relevant social science and facile analogies based on a few animal studies. These are simply not strong enough to be the sturdy weight-supporting pillars that his thesis requires to be credible. Let's look at just one example. He cites studies of monogamous prairie voles to suggest that humans only think they fall in love, when, in reality, what we call love is merely the expression of genes resulting in the release of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Claiming that he is not going to "start extrapolating anthropomorphically from pair-bonding in voles to love in people," he proceeds to do just that. Citing the vole studies and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- in which a love potion makes Titania fall in love with a man with a donkey's head – Ridley writes: Who would now wager against me that I could not do something like this to a modern Titania? Admittedly, a drop on the eyelids would not suffice. I would have to give her a general anesthetic while I cannulated her medial amygdala and injected oxytocin into it. I doubt even then that I could make her love a donkey. But I might stand a fair chance of making her feel attracted to the first man she sees upon waking. Would you bet against me? But shouldn't it take far more than measuring the physical effects of oxytocin on prairie voles to prove that something as complex, maddening, unpredictable, and wonderfully and uniquely human as romantic love can, in reality, be reduced to the mere expression of genes leading to chemical secretions? Not, apparently, to Ridley. "Blindly, automatically, and untaught, we bond with whoever is standing nearest when oxytocin receptors in the medial amygdala get tingled." Gee, if he'd known that, Bill Clinton could have purchased fewer copies of Leaves of Grass. The most fascinating thing about this book is that Ridley inadvertently makes a splendid argument for intelligent design. At this point, I am sure Ridley's "I am utterly appalled" genes are expressing wildly. He is, after all, a scientific materialist in good standing. Yet, throughout the book, in order to make his arguments understandable, he resorts explicitly to the imagery of the guiding hand. He even gives it a name: the "Genome Organizing Device," or "G.O.D." Ridley claims that the G.O.D is "a skillful chef, whose job is to build a souffle," consisting of the various parts of us and all other life on the planet. Note the language of intentionality in his description of the evolution of the human brain: To build a brain with instinctive abilities, the Genome Organizing Device lays down separate circuits with suitable internal patterns that allow them to carry out suitable computations, then links them with appropriate inputs from the senses. . . . In the case of the human mind, almost all such instinctive modules are designed to be modified by experience. Some adapt continuously throughout life, some change rapidly with experience then set like cement. A few just develop to their own timetable. But according to my lay understanding, this violates the theory and philosophy of evolution. The hypothesis of natural selection holds that species origination and change are promoted by genetic mutations. Those mutations that change the organism to make it more likely than its unchanged peers to survive long enough to reproduce are likely to be passed down the generations. Eventually, these genetic alterations spread among the entire species and become universal within its genome. It is through this dynamic evolutionary process of modification, the theory holds, that life fills all available niches in nature. It is also the process, although the details are not known, by which the primates now known as homo sapiens became conscious. The philosophy of Darwinism posits that this evolutionary process is aimless, unintentional, purposeless, and without rhyme or reason. This means it has no biological goal: It just is. Hence, G.O.D. would not want to "build a brain," develop nature via nurture in species, or do any other thing. Yet, throughout the book, Ridley seems able only to describe what he thinks is going on using the language of intention. Could this be because Ridley's theories would require interactions that are so complex and unlikely that they would seem laughable if described as having come together haphazardly, by mere chance? So what are we to learn from his insights? In terms of how we live our lives, not much beyond what common sense already tells us: Parents matter and should engage with their children; human teenagers enjoy doing what they are good at, and dislike doing what they are bad at; and so on. That much is harmless; but Ridley's deeper point is subversive of human freedom and individual accountability. He denies the existence of free will: Our actions are not causes but effects, "prespecified by, and run by, genes." Indeed, he claims unequivocally, "There is no 'me' inside my brain, there is only an ever-changing set of brain states, a distillation of history, emotion, instinct, experience, and the influence of other people -- not to mention chance." Ridley asserts this as if it would be a good thing to learn that the complexity and richness of human experience could accurately be reduced to merely the acts of so many slaves obeying the lash of chemical overseers acting under the direction of our experience-influenced gene owners. "Nature versus nurture is dead," Ridley concludes triumphantly. "Long live nature via nurture." Sorry. Maybe it's my genes, but I just don't buy it. |
So, as I've reread this your post, it seems you try not to be dogmatic about materialism, eh?
I did not see the word random in the quote or the article. I did see it in your review of the article though:
No. Darwinism posits that any random changes that happen to enhance survival are passed down to the next generations, and any random changes the don't enhance survival lead to the death of the indivdual, minimizing the number of chances it has to be passed into descendants.
So let me ask, is the evolutionary process “ aimless, unintentional, purposeless, and without rhyme or reason”?
It never ceases to amaze me how the Darwinian theory is so much like jello. First, all living things die(one might make a case for simple asexual organisms being somewhat exceptional to this but then that would confuse the bad mutation scenario). Second, I have heard that neutral mutations sometimes become fixed.
Do you not consider QM to be naturalistic? Or perhaps you're using "cause" in a nonconventional way?
"Aimless" and "without rhyme or reason" comes close enough to "random" in the conventional sense of these threads that your objection isn't justified. In any case, selection isn't aimless nor without rhyme or reason which is the point the poster was making.
So a person who does not believe that God was personally responsible for the development of man's physical form, but believes that God acts to instill a soul within all men is a "practical atheist"? Huh?
Let's try this: An intelligent process with purpose and goal is responsible for all life is a statement of fact, and it is either true or untrue. Your inability to reconcile that fact with your particular worldview does not, however, have any impact at all upon the truth or untruth of it.
Hey, now you've got it. Now we have two factual propositions which appear to be mutually exclusive, so let's examine them by examining the evidence available in support of both of them - and since they're mutually exclusive, evidence that counts for one also counts against the other. May the best proposition win ;)
You have compared living processes to a non-living process i.e. natural selection and gravity.
You have one of several potential problems with the notion of evolution as a "living process". Either you've committed the fallacy of composition - that's a popular one lately - by characterizing the process as living based on the fact that it contains living entities. IBM is composed of living beings, but it's hardly alive in and of itself, if you see what I mean. Or, alternately, you're characterizing it as a "living process" based on the notion that there is some intelligent actor guiding the process - which is, of course, simply begging the question. Or, cynically speaking, dividing evolution and gravity into "living" and "nonliving" processes is purely an arbitrary decision that happens to support the case you want to make. Either way, calling evolution a "living" process, versus the "nonliving" process of gravitational attraction, is wholly unjustified thus far - if you want to make such a distinction, first you ought to start by demonstrating what exactly that distinction is.
I argue in this paper that any evolutionary theory of life that excludes from the living world a primary non-material or transcendent dimension or guiding presence, is no theory at all.
Ah, what a fascinating thesis - the theory must explain what I demand it explain, or it explains nothing at all. I trust a moment's reflection will reveal the intellectual bankruptcy inherent in such a statement. Not to mention that what follows is mainly a complaint about the limits of conversational English to accurately convey the totality of what is described as the theory of evolution - I am curious as to what exactly the author would point to as an example of where human language did capture the sum total of some thing...
The Saddleback mutation of Budgerigars is an obvious counter example. The parents were known and were known not to have the Saddleback gene. Perhaps you should look at the literature on the subject before posting clearly false statements.
Well, that is also my position. IMO "supernatural" is quite a meaningless concept. It might have been different several centuries ago when strange and unusual phenomena like earthquakes, illnesses, lightnings, comets, epilepsy, etc. were considered to be supernatural. However, today all these things are seen as purely natural.
Nevertheless, this expression exists and even though it might not describe any entities that exist in the real world we can always define beings like demons, leprechauns, gods, fairies, etc. that are responsible for certain observed phenomena. Of course this is just trying to explain the unknown by the unknowable or even worse, the already known by the unknowable (e.g. angels pushing the planets around) but hey, you can do it.
What I also see quite often is the claim that the supernatural simply cannot be investigated by science. However, I think that if a supernatural realm exists and it interacts with our natural world then we can at least in principle use scientific methods to analyze it. But then of course there is always the "danger" that it is no longer considered to be supernatural as it happened so often in the past.
I second that! However, there seems to be the notion among many people that the one inevitably leads to the other. This may be true in some cases but it is not necessarily true in general.
The usual "disclaimer-of-atheism" certificate is attached, along with consumer warnings, hazzardous contents label, daily nutritional requirements percentages, equal housing logo, the no-smoking symbol, the recycled ingredients listing, instructions for environmentally sensitive disposal, country of origin disclosure, and affirmative action declaration. Your mileage may vary. Look for the union label. An equal opportunity employer.
LOL!! A "disclaimer-of-atheism"!
At CARM we have a "standard atheist disclaimer" but that's something completely different ;^D
As an example showing that one wouldn't generally lead to the other, consider a plumber. All day, as he practices his honorable trade, he deals with pipes and joints and such. Nothing spiritual is involved, by which I mean that there is no parts bin in his truck labeled "spirit." The plumber spends his entire working life dealing only with material objects, which objects are sufficient for the accomplishment of his plumbing tasks. Yet I have never known one to be so impressed by the material nature of his work that he will one day toss his wrenches into the air and declare that there are no gods.
general_re has generalized a bit with A is A, "it is what it is, regardless of what we might wish it to be." We don't know what it is. But perhaps we ought to start by demonstrating what exactly that generalization means when A is not A. So must the post explain what I demand it explain?
Anyhow, the distinction Heartlander raises is very interesting. Gravity as nature has nothing in common with human nature, like pipes are to a plumber. On the other hand, there is something common, because both are nature.
Today things are becoming quite absurd because there is no distinction between natural and unnatural. This may be related to the problem of the status of human nature, let alone divine nature.
This introduces naive naturalism. A tool is a tool is a tool.
Just as a slot machine is not a random process. It has rules. And it has outcomes:
Those not possessing a trait needed for survival, don’t.
And thus human life is reduced to whether there is fitness for survival or not, a condition about equally meaningful as whether the gizmos inside the slot machine line-up to trigger a pay-out.
Need I say how pathologically reductionist I think this view of man is. It effectively turns man and all of nature into a machine. There is no life here, no consciousness, no spirit.
Evolutionary theory doesn’t deal with life. And because it doesn’t, it can’t deal with consciousness. And it’s hostile to spirit.
Now, if man weren’t “composed” of precisely these three things, then I wouldn’t have anything to complain about WRT evolutionary theory. But he is; and so I do.
At bottom, man -- as he is in himself, in society, and in nature -- is the very thing that C. Darwin’s evolutionary theory refuses to acknowledge. It can’t; for it commits the reductionist fallacy with a vengeance – it reduces man to status as a mere cog in the evolutionary machine, while implicitly refusing to recognize that it was a man who conceived the evolutionary machine in the first place, as a construct of intentionalist consciousness.
Darwinism does not recognize consciousness: It does not appear in his theory at all. Yet Darwin clearly had it, and that of a strong intentionalist flavor. Cornelis earlier touched on this point, with his observations regarding methodological materialism which, as he noted, wreaked havoc with 18th- and 19th-century philosophy, and so bedeviled the 20th (including in the scientific fields).
What do I mean by intentionalist consciousness, the main driver of methodological materialism (which, I think in its turn is a kind of perversion of it)? What is consciousness?
Well, people have been wondering about that ever since there were people. Myself, I gravitate to Eric Voegelin’s theory of consciousness, for it tends to confirm my own experience and observations.
Very basically, consciousness “expresses” in two modes: intentionality and luminosity. They are not mutually exclusive, but operate together to give us our sense of ourselves and of external reality. The “balance of consciousness” consists in their harmonious mutual relations: To emphasize the one at the expense of the other can lead to problems of psychopathy. In extreme cases, gnosticism (mystical dualism) and methodological materialism are the characteristic results, depending on which way the pendulum predominately swings.
Perhaps it would be useful to try to visualize their relation. But we must bear in mind this can only be a gross simplification, that neither intentionality or luminosity is a physical “object” but describes a mode of consciousness, which is itself nonphysical, “non-objective.”
Having said that, we can visualize them as two “poles” of total consciousness that denote the “limits” of the “processing area” or spectrum of consciousness as traversed by a pendulum. We may say that the pendulum of consciousness “swings” between these two qualitatively different poles. That is, consciousness has a double sense of both “site” (the processing field itself – i.e., the spectrum defined by the two poles) and “sensorium” (the means of sensing movements in the spectrum – i.e., the pendulum).
Intentionality is the mode par excellence of empirical analysis, of the scientific method. It is so called because this mode of consciousness “intends” objects. That is, it selects objects for thought to work on (so to speak). Generally such objects are sense impressions coming from phenomenal reality that the mind converts into mental constructs so that these phenomena will be available to consciousness in “mind-readable” form. It is also intentional in a second sense, in that it wills and chooses: Given any hypothesis, it “intends” an outcome that will then be subject to falsification tests; and it freely chooses what it can qualify as relevant “evidence” in support of its hypothesis. We might say that it is the site of instrumental reason – but not of logic (see below) – of the analytical mode of thought, of active engagement with changeable phenomenal reality. Intentionality is the mode of apperceiving the things of space and time. It is primarily interested in fact.
On the other hand, luminous consciousness is not interested in what and how things change; it is interested in what, in human life and in nature at large, has permanence. Luminosity is the mode of self-reflection, or self-awareness (without which doing science would be impossible). It is the site of the intuitive mind, of the imagination. Operations in this site have led to the “discoveries” of mathematical objects and relations, logic, and the “laws” of nature – for these are not obtained from engagements with physical reality per se (the job of intentionality), but from engagements with noumenal reality (for lack of a better term). It is primarily interested, not in facts, but in meaning. Thus it is the site and sensorium of “intimations of the divine,” of conscious experience as it relates to the life of the soul. One might even go so far as to say that it is the medium in which divine impression can occur; and is also the site of memory. It apperceives what is timeless, enduring, not subject to “evolution” or change. It is meditative, not analytical, in form. It wills to see things “whole,” not merely as the sum of their parts.
Well, I don’t know if that explanation helps at all. In any case, Darwinism flushes both intentionality and luminosity right down the toilet; but it uses the technique of the former to do it.
I just don’t know how Darwinism can be justified as a comprehensive theory if it refuses to comprehend basic facts pertaining to a certain “physical object” that lies within its putative purview – that is, man. This failure, to my mind, discredits whatever else it has to say.
For how can one have a theory of the origin and descent of species if all it can do is regard relevant specimens of same as fossils? And IMHO that’s exactly what Darwinism does: It makes its entire case pretty much on the evidence of fossils – artifacts that have been drained of life and whatever consciousness they may have had when they were alive. And all the rest is considers to be mere cogs in the machine – living fossils, as it were. It’s tantamount to creating a theory of life on the basis of the examination of skeletal remains, whose living form “in the round” cannot possibly be deduced from an examination of the husk left behind at its death.
The default position is to simply regard them all as it they were mere components of some highly complex machine, humming along according to Darwin’s “rules.”
It is a view of Nature as Slot Machine Writ Large.
This theoretical outcome of course bears all the marks of having been ordered and orchestrated by the consciousness of Darwin: It is not so much a description of reality as it is a description of Charles Darwin’s mind.
FWIW.
How amusing. -- Voegelin language never 'explains' much of anything, Betty, as you well know. For example, it --- "flushes both intentionality and luminosity right down the toilet; but it uses the technique of the former to do it." --- Whatever that means..
I just don't know how Darwinism can be justified as a comprehensive theory if it refuses to comprehend basic facts pertaining to a certain "physical object" that lies within its putative purview – that is, man.
Why do you think it "refuses to comprehend basic facts"? Bluntly put that is simply a 'straw man' statement..
This failure, to my mind, discredits whatever else it has to say. For how can one have a theory of the origin and descent of species if all it can do is regard relevant specimens of same as fossils?
There you have it.. You set up your straw man, than knock him down with another one about fossils.. Bizarre effort.
And IMHO that's exactly what Darwinism does: It makes its entire case pretty much on the evidence of fossils – artifacts that have been drained of life and whatever consciousness they may have had when they were alive.
Yep, fossil artifacts are 'drained of life'. So what? Is there a point in your restating of the obvious? None that I can see..
And all the rest is considers to be mere cogs in the machine – living fossils, as it were. It's tantamount to creating a theory of life on the basis of the examination of skeletal remains, whose living form "in the round" cannot possibly be deduced from an examination of the husk left behind at its death. The default position is to simply regard them all as it they were mere components of some highly complex machine, humming along according to Darwin's "rules." It is a view of Nature as Slot Machine Writ Large.
The rational mind boggles at the slot machine revisionists theory..
This theoretical outcome of course bears all the marks of having been ordered and orchestrated by the consciousness of Darwin: It is not so much a description of reality as it is a description of Charles Darwin's mind. FWIW.
Its always worth a lot to me Betty, when you wax poetic using Voegelian 'reasoning'. Great entertainment value. -- Thanks.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.