Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubting,
I like your pithy (tho erroneous) characterization of my position:
Sounds like a paraphrase of Forrest Gump’s: “Stupid is as stupid does.”

The corrected version of your expression that accurately expresses my thought is: The idea that natural IS, is equal to ALL that is. “Ought” has nothing to do with it. If Nature is responsible for our species, what business does our species have being morally responsible?

It makes us feel good? It’s how your mommy raised you? It furthers our species’ success? I don’t get it. None of these answers are meaningful.

Like it or not, our species is programmed for meaning, not for success. Thus, if I succeed in winning a game of chess against you by cheating, it would have no meaning to me nor make me a success to myself or to anyone who knew that I cheated. Likewise, evolutionary success has no meaning, no significance to us as human beings, for random mutations and the brute fact of natural selection are autonomous processes that are the antithesis of meaningfulness. They constitute success only in the unmeaningful sense of that word, like someone being successful at winning the lotto.

Ergo, if you choose to be moral independent of a meaningful context supplied by a religion or your notion of something other than Nature (which demonstrates no morality) you are, of course, free to do so, but do so irrationally. Caged in by an exclusively natural world, you must admit that you have no meaningful (i.e., rational) justification for morality. That is, the morality of an atheistic evolutionist is properly perceived as sentimentality.

You claim I’m committing a logical fallacy that can be described as:
Unstuffing that stray man, allow me to rivet together my tin man syllogism modeled after your effort:
1) E (evolution) is not M (moral).
2) E wrought every aspect of H (humans)
3) But some H (humans) seem M (moral).
4) Ergo, appearances are deceiving.

In short, unless you want to fall back on the Mediaeval notion of spontaneous generation, you must accept that what passes as morality -- since it is not operative in Nature -- is not real and may be dispensed with.

How is the logic of my argument any different than the logic of your appeal to Occam’s razor to sever my unrealistic notion of God’s existence? Since God along with orbiting pink unicorns cannot be found in this universe, we have no logical right to believe in them. Right? Likewise, since morality cannot be detected as an evolutionary process and evolution is responsible for us, we are being irresponsible when pretending to believe in morality.

Of course morality may have some evolutionary value in the survival of our species, but so what? The survival of our species is neither good nor bad, as Nietzsche would say, it along with everything else is “beyond good and evil.” -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Doubting Didymus

Albert, matey.

Although I'm not entirely convinced that I was attacking a strawman, I am going to give you the benifit of the doubt and attempt your restated argument.

Your new argument appears to be that a thing can not have properties that its creator does not have.

I'm not certain what your conclusion means, so I am assuming here that you mean to say that therefore humans can not have been created by evolution, or alternatively that they cannot have obtained this ability from evolution.

Let us once more apply your argument to some other situations:

1: humans are not able to lift ten thousand kilograms
2: Humans wrought every aspect of industrial cranes
3: but some industrial cranes are able to lift ten thousand kilograms
Conclusion: Cranes were not made by humans, or they did not get their lifting abilities from humans.

I like to analogise human brains with vastly complicated computers, so here is a more pertinent example:

1: The programmers of DeepBlue (the Supercomputer) are not able to beat the world finest chess players.
2: These programmers wrought every aspect of DeepBlue.
3: But deepblue IS able to beat the worlds finest chess players.
Conclusion: Deepblue was not made by deepblues programmers, or did not obtain its incredible chessplaying ability from said programmers.

The same works for natural forces:

1: The washing of waves on a creek bank is not inherently ordered.
2: the washing of said waves are entirely responsible for the positions of the pebbles on the bank. (assume a peaceful creek, undisturbed by other forces)
3: But the positions of the pebbles on the bank DO display order: they find themselves organised into a gradient from small to large.
Conclusion: Appearances are decieving?

The message you should be taking from these examples is that the product of a creative force can and does display attributes that the force itself does not have.

Finally you ask:
Because it makes the world a better place, without morality the world would be an abomination. That alone is reason enough.

Tell me, if you give to charity is it to buy favour with god? Is his love to be bartered for, the prize of some sport? I sincerely hope not! I suspect that the reason most people give to charity is because they want to improve the world. This same basic good exists in atheists and theists alike, and it stems from the desire to see the worlds wrongs righted.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubting,
Your syllogism goes wrong at #2.:
All humans do is move pre-existing materials into the shape of cranes. We do not generate iron ore nor the crystalline structure of steel. We are responsible for gathering iron ore that other processes are responsible for generating. We are merely responsible for creating the conditions whereby iron ore is smelted into steel, not the chemical and thermal processes whereby those processes forge steel. From start to finish, most of the processes involved in our having wrought industrial cranes are processes in which we may be likened to innocent by-standers.

Evolution is not like that. It is responsible for every aspect of our life down to the molecular level and beyond. And the process called evolution extends to the fusion of the heavier atoms in supernovas without which biological evolution could not get off the ground.

So when I said that Evolution wrought EVERY ASSPECT of humans, I meant it. Whereas, when you claim that humans have wrought every aspect of industrial cranes, you were being facetious.

However, you eloquently and succinctly express the crux of our dispute with:
The examples you give in support of this actually support my contrary position. Programmers programmed DeepBlue to play chess better than they themselves can play chess. Guess what? DeepBlue doesn’t build industrial cranes! It plays chess better than the world’s reigning chess master. That demonstrates my principal, which, expressed in your terminology, is: the product of a force MUST display attributes of that force.

Evolution is a force whose only “moral” principal is replication. Life for life’s sake is a meaningless tautology. But that is the only meaning that can be derived from an analysis of evolutionary processes. And it is life for life’s sake at the expense of other life. Nothing principled about that. Nothing that remotely resembles our notions of morality in that.

So the question stands: “Morality, Morality, why art thou Morality?” (My apologies to Shakespeare, a la Romeo and Juliet.) You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Either atheistic evolution fully describes this amoral world, or this moral world is not fully described by atheistic evolution. Choose wisely. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Doubting Didymus

Totally false. If this is your contention, then it is just as false to say that humans were wrought in every aspect by evolution as it is to say the same about humans and cranes. Evolution did NOT bring our molecules into being, other forces are responsible for that. Just as humans are bystanders to smelting, evolution often takes a backseat to other forces.

I don't see how this is relevant, however.

You ask: wherefore art thou morality? Why are we moral if we were not created moral? The answer is quite simple: we have minds. We are able to plot cause and effect, we have empathy and we know and understand both love and joy as well as pain and suffering. All these three things are good adaptations, and evolution can therefore explain their presence. Morality arises when we use our empathy to understand the pain, joy, suffering, love, of another person. We compare their feelings to our own preferences. We then plot cause and effect to bring about the state we ourselves desire in the other. The golden rule is an emergent property of our human biological features. It requires no external injector.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubting,
You disappoint me. As someone who loves science, I expected something more rational from you than this:
You are begging the question. Fine. If you think empathy answers the question of morality, allow me a follow-up. Wherefore does our empathy arise? And please, don’t extend your circular reasoning to the brain, saying that our empathy comes from the frontal lobes of our brain. The human brain is on the table. It is what we are philosophically dissecting. You cannot argue it itself as an explanation of itself.

Remember, evolution is a theory that supposedly explains -- strictly in terms of survival -- how our brains developed. So we should be able to reverse engineer our brains, noting how its developments went hand in hand with our survival.

You and I have brains that empathize, which is the modus operandi of morality. Ergo, you and I should be able to see how the “empathy” gene or the “altruistic” gene furthered our species’ survival. I can’t imagine this.

Here’s what I imagine: the first fool cursed with the empathy gene is the first to be enslaved and made into a eunuch to guard the harems of those without such a mal-adaptation. Ditto for every unlikely recurrence of this lightening strike: every poor soul unlucky enough to be given a brain with the capacity to care about others more than himself would be doomed to extinction by those who took advantage of them.

You assert,
How could the golden rule emerge from the evolutionary process that only rewards selfish replication with more selfish replication? How could such an amoral process coddle mutants that express the selfless moral antithesis of the evolutionary process? I know this is your ideology, but please, try to provide some semblance of intellectual justification. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Doubting Didymus

Albert, you are utterly uncanny. At every turn you ask the most superb questions.

My argument for the origin of morality was that it is a natural consequence of two faculties, though you have only focused on one.

We are able to plot cause and effect,
we have empathy

Because of these, we know, understand, and are able to express a preference for the human emotions that are part of our lives not only in ourselves, but in others. Thus: we are able to predict the emotional effect of an action on another human, and are capable of bringing that state to be. Hence altruism is made possible.

I suggest that these two things are evolutionary gold, and that not only having the capacity for altruism, but also having a tendancy to use it, is a good selective strategy. Counterintuitive? possibly.

Naturally, you demand that I support my assertions. It appears you have more of a scientific mind than you thought!

This is an ongoing discussion that has come quite far off topic. I'm going to take the last few posts off this thread and begin a new one.

Doubting Didymus

... And here it is. I'm not certain what happened there, exactly, but we appear to have the thread I wanted.

I know that the evolution of altruism and hence morality in general is a topic that there is a lot of material on. I thought I'd create this thread to get the perspectives of the E/C community in general. Everyone: your thoughts please! How can altruism arise from evolution, red in tooth and claw?

lpetrich

There are two main mechanisms: reciprocal altruism and kin selection. I will discuss reciprocal altruism here and save kin selection for my next posting.

Reciprocal altruism is "I'll scratch your back and you'll scratch mine". This explains many of the symbiotic/cooperative relationships that one sees.

Many flowering plants are pollinated with the help of various pollen carriers -- bees, flies, butterflies, moths, birds, bats, etc.; they often have some juice (nectar) for the pollinators to drink.

But why would a plant do something self-sacrificing like that? It is actually not self-sacrificing, since it lures the pollinators to the flowers, where they get dusted by pollen and where earlier pollen can come off.

Likewise, some species of ants maintain fungus gardens, which the ants supply with leaves for food -- and which the ants eat. The fungus benefits by getting to live and grow.

And some species of ants protect aphids. However, the ants "milk" aphids for their honeydew, so they gain something for their sacrifice.

Lichens are associations of algae and fungi; the algae feed the fungi, and the fungi can extract nutrients and protect the algae.

Eukaryotic cells are cellular-scale lichen equivalents. Mitochondria are most closely related to certain oxygen-using alpha-proteobacteria like Rickettsia prowazekii, chloroplasts and other plastids to cyanobacteria, and the rest of the cell has its informational subsystem most like that of the prokaryotic branch Archaea (the others are from the other major branch, Eubacteria or Bacteria). In this case, they become interdependent enough to partially lose their separate identities -- mitochondria and chloroplasts have lost many of their genes to the nucleus, though they continue to maintain transcription and translation systems.

Eukaryote endosymbiosis has happened repeatedly; though mitochondria almost certainly originated only once and chloroplasts likely originated only once, there are some cases where some protist has made some photosynthetic protist into a sort-of chloroplast. How many times this "secondary endosymbiosis" has happened is still unclear, and dinoflagellates have evidence of multiple acquisitions and losses of photosynthetic symbiotes.

Doubting Didymus

Who's going to mention vampire bats?

lpetrich

I won't pull a Water ReMine on kin selection; here goes:

Self-sacrificing behavior can be selected if the self-sacrifice benefits a fellow possessor of one's genes; it can work even if that fellow possessor has only some of one's genes.

Kin selection can explain why the large majority of the cells of multicellular organisms do not try to survive the death of the organism; the cell's genes are shared with the organism's gametes / spores, which do the surviving.

In fact, there are numerous cells that die before organism death:

Surface cells: of skin, digestive-system and other internal-plumbing linings, bark
Wood cells of woody plants
Cells in leaves of deciduous plants
Many blood cells

There is even a mechanism called apoptosis or Programmed Cell Death. Any of various triggers will cause a cell to commit hara-kiri. Triggers include being no longer necessary in an organism's growth and having serious genetic defects.

We now go to organism-scale examples. One good example of kin selection of parental care. Big eggs, big seeds, feeding the babies, ...

However, kin selection also works among "eusocial" insects, whose communities often have only a few or only one reproducers. The non-reproducers (workers), however, are all offspring of the reproducers, and their labors thus help the reproducers, and their genes, reproduce.

A dramatic example of this can be seen in honeybee stingers. Worker honeybees have barbed stingers that stick in their victims and continue to deliver venom. However, their attempts to flee will cause the stingers to be pulled out of them, and they will die in a matter of hours. Thus making them kamikaze stingers.

Queen honeybees, however, have smooth stingers -- and they only sting rival queens.

Furtheremore, there is evidence that queen and worker venoms are optimized for their respective targets; worker venom is twice as lethal to mice than queen venom -- and it is the workers who sting threats to the hive like predatory vertebrates.

All this correlates remarkably well with the degree of expendability of workers and queens. Workers are relatively expendable, since they are not the ones doing the reproducing; a sacrifice of a few workers is a reasonable tradeoff for improved stinging efficiency. However, queens must stay alive in order to reproduce, and thus must survive their stinging. They sting only rival queens, because that gets rid of their competition, and because stinging a threat to the hive can be risky.