lpetrich

One thing that "Ed" claims in "First Cause Cannot Prove God" over in "Existence of God" is that effects must have the same qualities as their causes, and that in particular, life cannot come from non-life, the personal cannot come from the non-personal, and the moral cannot come from the non-moral.

I cited examples of animal-kingdom "morality", such as bees in a hive not indiscriminately stinging each other and wolves in a pack not trying to have each other for dinner, but that did not impress Ed, who only seems to care if virtuous actions are "freely chosen". But why care about how others succeed in being virtuous?

One thing that is commonly considered virtuous is altruism, acting for the benefit of another, which sometimes extends to self-sacrifice. There are numerous examples of that; I'll survey some of the more interesting examples. Most cells in a multicellular organism ultimately do not reproduce, and die when the overall individual dies.

A blue whale has a mass of around 100 tons, and assuming 10-micron cells, has 10^17 cells. But on average, all but 2 eventually die (2 sperms or 2 eggs, as the case may be). A giant sequoia tree can have a mass of 4000 tons, indicating a total of 4*10^18 cells, again with a total of 2 pollen grains and seeds surviving on average.

In addition to that, many cells may be sacrificed. In the animal kingdom, this is typically the case for surface cells like skin cells and alimentary-canal cells and also blood cells, while in plants, wood cells, bark cells, and deciduous-leaf cells are similarly sacrificed. Male germ cells (sperm, pollen) are typically produced in much greater number than their female counterparts, and almost universally, many more fertilized eggs and spores are produced than can grow to maturity and reproduce. Our species is an extreme case of low overproduction in that regard.

The ultimate sacrifice is, of course, suicide; animal and plant cells have a built-in hara-kiri mechanism called apoptosis or Programmed Cell Death that is activated under various conditions.

Turning to whole organisms, one common example of altruism is assistance to offspring; thus an annual plant will produce big seeds rather than try to survive a winter or a dry season.

Sociality often involves altruistic acts; in "true" sociality or eusociality, only a small fraction of the individuals in a group will reproduce. This seen among insects (termites; several groups of hymenopterans) and Naked Mole Rats. A honeybee hive can contain around 40,000 worker bees -- and only one queen bee, who will sting any rivals. Worker honeybees, however, are kamikaze stingers; they have barbed stings, which stick in their victims, usually getting pulled out of the bee, killing it.

These examples show that much of the biosphere is a Randroid's worst nightmare; and biologists have come up with a reasonably-successful hypothesis: kin selection. Those that self-sacrifice do so because that sacrifice benefits other possessors of copies of their genes, thus perpetuating a genetically-programmed tendency for such self-sacrifice.

This is obvious for the cells of multicelled organisms, which are usually very close to being genetically identical. It also explains self-sacrifice for the benefit of offspring, which carry on an organism's genes. The case of sociality is less obvious, but social groups are generally found to be somewhat inbred, enabling kin selection to work. This is carried to extremes among eusocial insects, where the large majority of individuals are the offspring of a few reproducers.

Returning to honeybees, we can successfully account for stinging strategies by the consideration of who reproduces. Queens must survive to reproduce, and thus must survive their stinging. And being the only queen in the hive helps a queen's reproductive success, thus newly-emerged queens will try to sting each other until only one is left. By comparison, workers do not reproduce, instead assisting the queen's reproduction, making them much more expendable. Thus, it is relatively safe to lose some workers, if doing so enables their stinging to more successfully thwart threats to the hive.

So it's clear that evolutionary biology can account for the emergence of some types of "moral" behavior.

Stabby-

Isn't Memetics a more powerful model to explain altruism?

Evolution is pretty handy, but using it to explain morality? Seems like a bit of a stretch. It seems obvious that the mind, although dependant on genetic information in many ways, is not limited to it. We can't ignore all those neurons now can we?

Stabby----

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Stabby- ]</p>

Dr Rick

The evolved behaviour of honeybees and the differentiation of skin cells increases the probabality that the DNA templates of each will be propagated in the future. Even if one chooses to ignore the lack of conscious thought in their actions, it seems that these organisms are acting for self-benefit and not toward some altruistic goal.

Evolutionary biology hypothesizes that the ultimate goal of any organism is to reproduce its genes. Individual survival is secondary to that cause and only neccessary to the extent that it facilitates reproduction. The "self-sacrifice'" cited is no sacrifice at all if the action helps to accomplish the primary goal of the organisms existence. Shifting the reproduction of the worker bee or skin cell genes to another source does not make their respective actions altruistic.

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

CodeMason

This ludicrous argument annoys me. Like saying babies cannot come from non-babies, hats cannot come from non-hats, 1's cannot come from 0's, etc.

wehappyfew

...friends cannot come from strangers,
spouses cannot be made from non-spouses,
eggs cannot come from chickens,
fire cannot be produced from cold fuel,
illiterate people cannot learn to read,
day cannot follow night,
blue and yellow cannot make green...

What a pointless and trivial viewpoint.

GunnerJ

&lt;ArgumentType:Ed&gt; No, they can come from each other because they have the same "essence." The personal cannot come from the impersonal because they do not share the same "essence." What is "essence," you ask? Why, the definition is as clear as that of the word "kind." And this is backed up by intense documentation from thousands of theologians, for thousands of years. &lt;/Ed&gt;

Should I put a response on "First Cause Cannot Prove God" telling Ed about this post?

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Rimstalker ]</p>

Quetzal

Careful, if your friend Ed is smart enough to read up on current controversies in evolution, he'll throw the Gould/Lowontin conception of the human brain vs Pinker et al evolutionary psychology theory at you. Holistic vs reductionist. Taken mostly out of context, Gould's theories of spandrels could be used to justify the "essence" idea. IOW, thought, consciousness, morality, altruism, etc. as emergent, non-adaptive, properties of the structural complexity of the brain. Which a smart cretinist (may be a contradiction in terms) could use to "prove" evolution is false.

lpetrich

By all means tell Ed about this. And I wonder what Ed means by essence; how does he propose to distinguish essence from non-essence?

GunnerJ

Morpho- Relax. First, Ed isn't (that) smart. Second, that wasn't his actual argument for why persons can't come from the impersonal (actually, he hasn't deigned to make an actual argument...), it was just my impression of his signature bullshit.

LP- I'm making a link now.

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Rimstalker ]</p>

Apikorus

With regard to the evolution of morality, has anyone yet mentioned Axelrod's iterated prisoner's dilemma tourneys?

The prisoner's dilemma (PD) is a classic of game theory. Two individuals - call them Loren and Ethan - are arrested and separately interrogated. Each is told the same thing: We know one or both of you committed a crime. If you rat on your friend and he rats on you, you both go to jail for 10 years. If you rat on him and he doesn't rat on you, then you get off scot free while your friend serves 20 years, and vice versa. If neither of you rats on the other, you both serve five years.

Ethan thinks, "I can't influence what Loren will do, but no matter what he does, things will turn out better for me if I rat him out. If he decides to stay mum, then I serve five years if I also stay mum, while I just go home right now if I rat him out. And if he rats me out, then I serve 20 years if I say nothing, and only 10 if I rat him out as well. Since I only know him from the SecWeb forums, I think I'm going to rat him out." Of course, Loren, being perfectly rational, is going through the exact same reasoning.

The tragedy is that both Ethan and Loren wind up doing a dime at Riker's, whereas if they had both cooperated (despite their impeccable reasoning), they'd only be in for a nickel.

Robert Axelrod, who won a MacArthur prize for his work, endeavored to study the origin of cooperation, modeling it by a competition among strategies in an iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) tournament. The idea is this: two strategies, A and B, face off against each other for 100 (say) rounds of the PD game. Each accumulates points corresponding to the negative of the prison sentence they receive in years. After 100 rounds, the strategies go and play with other opponents.

It is easy to see that an extremely nasty strategy - one that always rats on its opponent (Axelrod called this "defection") - will only do well against a "Christian" strategy which always turns the other cheek and refuses to rat on its opponent (called "cooperation"), i.e. a complete patsy. Against any sensible strategy, though, a pattern of mutual defection will inevitably result, with both players accumulating -10 points per game.

Axelrod solicited strategies in the form of computer programs from a variety of experts in various fields (computer science, mathematics, etc.). Some of the codes were rather complex, and attempted to forecast what the opponent would do based on his previous moves. The winning entry happened to be the shortest code. It was submitted by the psychologist Anatol Rappaport. Rappaport's strategy was tit-for-tat (TFT). TFT starts out by cooperating, but each succeeding game it simply echoes the last move of its opponent. Thus, against the "always defect" strategy, TFT will initially cooperate, but thereafter will defect for every turn. Against the patsy, TFT always cooperates.

If you think about it for a moment, you'll realize the TFT can never win in a head-to-head competition. The best TFT can do in any given round is to tie. But, by the same token, TFT can't lose by more than a single game per round. (Incidentally, "always defect" never loses a head-to-head competition.)

TFT has the following important characteristics: (i) it "assumes the best" by initially cooperating, (ii) it punishes defection with defection and is no patsy, and (iii) it is "forgiving": a defecting opponent who mends his ways and starts cooperating will be rewarded by TFT with cooperation.

Why did TFT win the tournament? In any population of strategies, there will be some nasty ones and some saintly ones. The nasty ones tend to bring out the worst in others, and wind up with lots of mutual defection games. The patsies do nicely when they play each other, but get stomped on by the nasties. TFT, on the other hand, manages to cooperate with the nice guys, and do the pretty much the best it can against the assholes. And while TFT never wins a single round head-to-head, overall it manages to win the tournament.

Admittedly this seems a million miles away from a theory of ethics, but I wonder whether the logic of the IPD problem might somehow be encoded in our DNA. From an evolutionary point of view, there are some clear advantages to cooperation.

<a href="http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PRISDIL.html" target="_blank">Read about the prisoner's dilemma here</a>

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Apikorus ]</p>