Darwin And Hitler

Yeah, you'd think a person either understands complex emergence, or they don't. Application to one field or another shouldn't be an issue.

But the human mind doesn't work like that. One of my best friends has a JD, a PhD in Economics and a MA in Philosophy. He's a hard core fan of Friedman and Hayek and is active in the Federalist Society and works at a Libertarian think tank. He's also a died in the wool fundy Christian and thinks evolution is a hoax. I really don't understand it myself, but there you are.

The human mind if amazingly capable of compartmentalizing itself when it wants to be.

See this related takedown over on ChicagoBoyz. Anti-Darwin people seem to think it's OK to make anything up.

Curiously, we do not hear arguments leveled against Werner Heisenberg for leading the Nazi atom bomb program.

Although I've come to disbelieve darwinism over time (I did indeed used to think mutation and natural selection were responsible for the origin of species, but not so much now), I'd have to say that the way things tend to self-organize is one of the most convincing evidences that life could have arrive spontaneously. I've spent far too much time fooling around with Conway's game of life and other cellular automata. It's amazing what kind of emergent behavior you get with the right set of simple rules. I still think it's wild to set up a completely random life game, and look for the gliders which always appear spontaneously.

Self organization actually is a possible answer to another interesting debate about whether life could come from non-life. The basic idea, not elaborated here for obvious space reasons, is that if our intelligence arose from completely random processes, we have no reason to trust our own intelligence or reason--there's nothing to suggest they make sense at all. Thus anything we reason about the origin of life (without postulating reason behind it) is suspect. However, if there were a self organizing principle at work, it makes sense (to me) to assume that, since our reason appears to work well, there must be some self-organizational principle at work which engenders reason rather than insanity. Of course, the issue of why the universe should happen to have so much in the way of self organization is a separate issue.

However, the side I currently land on is that it's just not enough. I see self organization in Conway's game of life, in whirlpools, in crystal formation, and in all sorts of things. But it's a matter of degree. I am no longer convinced that the amount of self organization evident in the universe proves that life originated spontaneously.

I am no longer convinced that the amount of self organization evident in the universe proves that life originated spontaneously.

This is where you're completely off track. There are no proofs in science. There are only disproofs. That you can write such a sentence indicates a fundamental disconnect with the scientific method.

If you don't want to accept evolution, come up with a better, testable explanation.

I don't have time for an in-depth explanation for a lot of the hostility to evolution, but it seems kind of evident to me that as long as there are people saying that it's the scientific proof for whatever religion-of-the-week they're pedaling under the label "secular humanism" it's going to be subject to hostility by people with pre-existing religions and/or belief systems of their own.

A quick search of this blog turned up this post:

http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/009927.html

There you quoted John Derbyshire:

The Dennett-Dawkins-Hitchens program to sweep away all those musty old cobwebs of faith and deliver humanity into the pure clear light of reason just bears far too close a resemblance to every other millenarian project, from Spartacus's City of the Sun to New Soviet Man. No thanks. Human nature has its unappealing side, but grand projects to overhaul it invariably end with a mountain of corpses. We'll take humanity as it is, religion and all. This attitude is, it seems to me, the essence of a conservative outlook.

"I always have to scratch my head at conservatives who are perfectly comfortable with Adam Smith's invisible hand when it comes to markets, but can't get their heads around the concept of emergent properties in the development of life."

When Michael Shermer (who wrote "The Mind of the Market", which shows the dovetailing between Darwin and Adam Smith) sat down with creationist Ben Stein for the movie Expelled, Stein practically had an aneurysm:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticality/074_skepticality.mp3
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-michael-shermer

"And of course, the opposite is true for liberalsfascists."

Well, I accept that the market is a remarkably successful thing, I'm just not convinced that it's the best way to organize society. Planned design can sometimes outdo organic evolution (for instance, biological evolution never gave any organism the wheel) and likewise, I think an intelligence can sometimes do what a self-interested market cannot. For instance, a single authoritarian intelligence can easily optimize the prisoner's dilemma, while two self-interested agents, no matter how intelligent, cannot. Many Darwinians like Dawkins say that life's purpose is to overcome one's genes.

Missing link so I'm not sure whether you guys are talking about Darwinism or social Darwinism or perhaps mixing the two up (since Hitler is mentioned).

I'd like to make a couple observations about two previous comments.

Brock wrote "He's also a died in the wool fundy Christian and thinks evolution is a hoax. I really don't understand it myself, but there you are."

Jay Manifold worte: "Anti-Darwin people seem to think it's OK to make anything up."

One of the things that got me doubting Darwinism initially was some of the errors that were rampant in textbooks. A simple example was the pepper moth. First, this was sometimes offered as proof of the origination of new species, when all it is really demonstrating is natural selection. More disturbing, apparently to get the photos they wanted, the people doing the photographs were gluing dead or stunned moths to trees when, in fact, they don't hang out on visible sides of tree limbs during the day. Charitably speaking, the people taking the photographs were just demonstrating what they already knew to be true. Uncharitably, they were "hoaxing" the photographs or "making anything up." The piltdown man was made up, and so were some of the "fossils" that people in asia "found" which were later found to be combinations of things. I'll admit that some people in creationism make errors, have incomplete understanding, and perhaps even make things up. But people who believe in Darwinism do the same things.

Now of course the falsifying of pepper moth photographs doesn't disprove descent with modification as the origin of species. But it's those types of errors--perhaps by people who didn't take care because they knew a priori the truth of what they were demonstration--that (partly) got me thinking about the truth of the whole theory.

One of the things that got me doubting Darwinism...

Strike two.

If there is such a thing as "Darwinism," it has nothing to do with the scientific theory of evolution. It is a catch phrase by creationists to try to paint the theory as an ideology or a cult. I, for one, deeply resent it.

And Jeff, I see that you still haven't addressed the issue that scientific theories aren't to be "proven."

And sorry 'bout that, HH. Link is fixed now, but the only additional info it will provide is another link, which may be more enlightening.

Jeff Maudlin is admirably correct about poor textbook quality. The sources of that poor quality, however, are many* and no more related to the concepts they ineptly attempt to convey than any human foible is related to the truths humans have discovered.

Indeed, some years back the Skeptical Inquirer took textbook publishers to task for chronic, unwarranted claims that the origin of life had been solved.

* eg, the de facto control of the American textbook market by state boards in California and Texas, which between them have a way of turning everything to mush

Creative destruction is the master concept of science. It's how science itself works, by disproof. It's how evolution works, by natural selection. It's how economics works (when you substitute planning for bankruptcy, the economy doesn't work so well). It's how electrodynamics and quantum mechanics work (sum over all paths, the observed path is the only one not canceled out by destructive interference).

It's not obvious that creative destruction should work so well, but at this point it's obvious that it does.

But we live in a world where our opinion leaders don't understand fractions and percentages. What hope is there, that they will understand creative destruction? They'll use it where convenient, sure, and notice no inconsistency since they don't understand it.

When taken up by evil people, the theory had evil consequences. Therefore the theory must be false

This is an absolutely correct critique of conservative Christian opposition to evolution. We can't afford to believe it, because it would open the door to tyranny. But this mindset is not very different at all from political opposition to the science of global warming.

But this mindset is not very different at all from political opposition to the science of global warming.

1. Global warming has not been proven to the degree that evolution has.

2. In the evolution debate, there isn't as much at stake economically. There are trillions of dollars of assets at stake with global warming, depending on what is decided.

To the contrary, the consequences of lacking a scientific basis for, say, the development of a bird flu vaccine are orders of magnitude worse than even the silliest alarmist scenarios being whomped up by global warmers.

1. Global warming has not been proven to the degree that evolution has.

Global warming follows pretty directly from well-understood basic physics of radiation transport. The skeptic has to resort to so-far-unseen counterbalancing negative feedbacks in order to avoid warming as greenhouse gas concentrations increase.

Natural selection isn't a direct consequence of well-proven basic physics, so I don't see how you can claim it is better 'proven'. Of course, the fact of evolution itself is supported by mountains of empirical evidence (correspondences in DNA sequences matching the infered patterns of descent, for example).

I'm still trying to figure out what you are saying about liberals (call them fascists if you like). I've never heard of one that denied that there were emergent properties in a free market. I hope you aren't using evolution as an analogy to why a completely free market will tend toward a desirable outcome for the majority of participants. It might indeed, but the tendency for organisms to propagate mutations that help them reproduce doesn't imply that a free market will benefit the majority. So, what are you saying?

That's actually interesting, so I'll jump in. I've never heard a liberal deny that there are emergent properties in a free market, either; they just think that at least some of those properties are really, really bad and have to be suppressed by government intervention to keep the system as a whole from doing more harm than good.

I would also say that the free-market analogy to reproductive success isn't companies getting bigger or spawning offspring in some way, but greater fitness in satisfying and retaining their customers. In this scenario, over time, more and more people get more and more of what they want.

Thanks Rand, I try to keep up with all of NRO but just can't catch it all and sometimes I even get a little peeved at stuff there ^_^; (which is healthy). Anyway it's still an oasis relative to the majority of other newspapers and magazines.

Various points:
- Evolution and global warming have something very unscientific in common; critics are generally viewed and dismissed as "heretics to science". One can't get any more unscientific than that (been there, done that, gotten wiser (hopefully)). Science doesn't need such holy cows and is debased by them but seems to have acquired an awful lot of them, big and small. In my opinion they have more in common but at least the previous should be acceptable to most as plain fact.

- There are people around who call themselves Darwinists (and again others who call themselves social-Darwinists) so it's fair to assume they would be adherents to Darwinism (or social-Darwinism for the other) and that it's a proper "ism" focused on Darwin's ideas regardless of whether or not someone is using it as a "bogeyman word".

- A poor defense of crappy textbooks: almost all textbooks intentionally lie, up to and including lower university studies. I really hate it but I understand why they do it as a pedagogical trick although I think it causes more trouble than benefits (it's rampant in philosophy since just about every university level student is forced through dumbed-down heavily contracted philosophy and philosophy of science either just before or after attending university). The trouble of course is that everyone ends up with at least some general "knowledge" that turns out to be wrong and if further studies and/or experience doesn't correct it then it stays that way.

Rand wrote:
"I always have to scratch my head at conservatives who are perfectly comfortable with Adam Smith's invisible hand when it comes to markets, but can't get their heads around the concept of emergent properties in the development of life."

I agree but as a devil's advocate one could also say that it's confounding how some who are comfortable with the invisible hand of markets recoil at the idea of an invisible influence of God in the universe ^_^

True, Darwin's discovery of the fundamental law of biology echoes Smith's laws of economic organization. But did Smith have moves like this?

Jay, you wrote:

To the contrary, the consequences of lacking a scientific basis for, say, the development of a bird flu vaccine are orders of magnitude worse than even the silliest alarmist scenarios being whomped up by global warmers.

I don't know. We've never seen a virulent flu last very long. The worst case scenario for bird flu aren't likely (at least looking at history). And the more favored solutions for global warming are both costly and permanent. And the silliest scenarios "cooked up" for Earth are the runaway greenhouse effects where all life on Earth dies. That beats bird flu easily. Further, we wouldn't be in the bird flu mess, if it weren't for our knowledge of selection (a subconcept of evolution) and the resulting large population of animals with weak immune systems.

Paul, you wrote:

Global warming follows pretty directly from well-understood basic physics of radiation transport.

That vastly oversimplifies the issue. The basic physics is well understood, how to apply it to Earth's atmosphere is not. We're still missing critical data. For example, we don't know that much about the upper atmosphere. Climate models still are missing significant weather phenomena particularly small scale like hurricanes or thunderstorms.

Karl,

Consciously or not, you have fallen into the same weird intellectual disconnect as a number of partisans who criticize global warming predictions. On the one hand, the climate is all up in the air, it's as complicated as can be and there is all of this missing data. On the other hand, the economics of global warming remedies are clear as a bell, i.e., we can be sure that remedies will be monumentally expensive.

In reality, economics is even less of an exact science than climatology. The warnings that we can't afford to do much about global warming are just as alarmist and subjective as the most politicized accounts of global warming itself. There is no ironclad theorem of economics that we have to choose between greenhouse gases and poverty. In fact, a lot of countries have fewer greenhouse emissions per dollar of GDP than the US does.

The bottom line is that we certainly won't plan rationally for the future if we treat global warming as just a liberal trojan horse. That is the way that that geezer in Washington State, Harry Truman, talked about the predicted eruption of Mount Saint Helens, and you can see what happened to him.

The bottom line is that we certainly won't plan rationally for the future if we treat global warming as just a liberal trojan horse.

The bottom line is that we certainly won't plan rationally for the future if we don't recognize that there will be thousands of years of technological advance, measured by current rates, within the present century.

Where's your global warming problem now?

The bottom line is that we certainly won't plan rationally for the future if we don't recognize that there will be thousands of years of technological advance, measured by current rates, within the present century.

But not by rubbing lamps and waving wands. The only way for humanity to solve problems is to sit down and solve them. Sometimes it means that an amazing new technology comes along and changes everything. But sometimes it means accepting unwelcome advice from scientists and technologists to prepare for the future. Whether the problem is space travel, or lung cancer from smoking, or the flooding of New Orleans, those who just sat there and waited for a miracle didn't get one.

It is true that in a sense the theory of evolution comes first. If you can't even believe that humans evolved from other animals, as scientists established a century ago, then you're not prepared to understand anything else that scientists have said since then.

Consciously or not, you have fallen into the same weird intellectual disconnect as a number of partisans who criticize global warming predictions. On the one hand, the climate is all up in the air, it's as complicated as can be and there is all of this missing data. On the other hand, the economics of global warming remedies are clear as a bell, i.e., we can be sure that remedies will be monumentally expensive.\

Yes, yes. Once again I've fallen into the "trap" of disagreeing with you. But subject to passage through the Jim Harris filter, this is a fair outline of the global warming debate as I see it. Sketchy physical evidence used to justify luddite trojan horses versus our considerable knowledge of economic systems.

Further, I see us as continuing along an acceptable path. We're studying the climate, the carbon cycle, relevant factors like methane clathrate deposits. We're also spending adequate sums on alternate energy and transportation research. Further, if global warming does become a problem, we've already researched carbon emission markets in Europe and can more rationally address the problem.

Sketchy physical evidence used to justify luddite trojan horses versus our considerable knowledge of economic systems.

The point is not that you disagree with me, it's that this characterization of either climate science or economics is woefully off the mark. This physical evidence is not all that sketchy, and there is nothing luddite or trojan about this solution or this one.

And sure, our knowledge of economics systems may be considerable, but it's not good enough to predict the economic future nearly as well as the physical future. Economists did not predict that the price of oil would go up by a factor of 10 in ten years. Maybe some of them thought that it would double or triple, but not a factor of 10. If you can't predict long-term prices to within a factor of 2, then you certainly can't predict the cost of global warming remediation.

Nor is it as if economists have closed ranks behind your view that global warming remediation is an expensive hypothetical. Eric Maskin just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and he thinks that global warming is an important problem. To be sure, there are famous economists on both sides of the fence, but that's because economics, not meteorology, is the dismal science. Physical scientists are much less divided. An outright majority of science Nobel laureates are persuaded by the the scientific findings of climate scientists. The minority of holdouts within science mostly consists of retirees and other out-of-the-loop people.

I note that you have commented in this blog many times, but you have never commented at all at realclimate.org. That is a much better place to learn this subject; it's not about me personally.

The claim that mosts interests me in the Darwin talk is the claim that he was a proponent for eugenics. If so, one must observe certain facts:

1. There will be more open-mindedness toward Belief B if someone famous and widely acclaimed for hawking Belief A publicly supports it.

2. People will try to syncretize their worldviews, even when they conflict.

3. Eugenics, and breeding in general, is an act of creation, not evolution.

Eugenics might have gained some clout through Darwin (assuming he was a eugenicist), but that doesn't mean his alleged eugenics philosophy is a logical extension of his evolutionary philosophy.

Hmmm, that's more useful that usual, Jim. There's a bit of cardhouse building. The heat forcings from the various terms (eg, heat retained in watts per square meter) are dependent on a modern NASA-funded climate model. But that in turn is based on the data that these authors are comparing their forcings to. But it is a definite model that we can test. I'll need to see how this evolves over the next decade or so. I think that should be sufficient. That'll also be enough time to better understand the current oil production situation and to process the recent developments in renewables. It also means we'll be able to consider engineering solutions to global warming, like adding sulfur dioxide to the upper atmosphere (note that the dominate negative forces is from stratospheric aerosols and sulfur dioxide is the primary one of those).

Second, it's worth noting that most people who advocate an immediate response to global warming, aren't friendly to nuclear power. And there's a noisy fraction that are nototiously hostile to an industrial world. This is a trait shared with some academics in some of the hard sciences (basically any field where PhDs don't routinely go into industry). Finally, all these groups are historically bad at economics and risk management.

Finally, RealClimate is a propaganda blog. As I see it, its sole purpose is to propagate a side on global warming. It's not a place for debate. I use it as an occasional information source, but I do not post there.

The claim that mosts interests me in the Darwin talk is the claim that he was a proponent for eugenics.

That claim is false, AFAIK.

RealClimate is a propaganda blog.

That is a ludicrous characterization of what is actually an entirely sober, polite, and highly competent science blog. If RealClimate is a propaganda blog, then evolution textbooks are propaganda books. (Which, in a way, they are. Since global warming and evolution have both been attacked by propagandists, they become a politicized answer to propaganda.)

Your whole post is based on fatuous, loose associations between the beliefs of different groups. It may be true that many environmentalists are against nuclear power, but RealClimate is not against nuclear power. Google the topic of nuclear power at that site and you'll see. It may be true that some environmentalists are anti-industrialist, but neither Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics nor RealClimate are remotely that. How can someone who runs a particle accelerator, or studies NASA data as a career, be against the industrial revolution? It would defy logic. Both physics Nobel laureates and meteorology PhDs are, as a group, logical people. RealClimate is not written by a pack of Ward Churchills. I suspect that if you looked carefully, you would see that there is a lot less propaganda there than here.

You are also free to criticize whatever you view as propaganda all you want at RealClimate and the blog owners won't call you an idiot. They did get a little testy with Dennis Wingo on occasion, but again, not nearly as bad as here. Ever the patient expositors, they never said that he was polluting their site.

I'll need to see how this evolves over the next decade or so.

You certainly won't see it in any meaningful way if you dismiss sources such as RealClimate as propaganda.

But not by rubbing lamps and waving wands. The only way for humanity to solve problems is to sit down and solve them. Sometimes it means that an amazing new technology comes along and changes everything.

The technology of 2030 will seem miraculous by today's standards. Period. The apocalyptic predictions of global warm-ongers are no more meaningful than the late-19th-century notion that the streets of Manhattan would be buried ten feet deep in horse manure by the late 20th ... and for exactly the same reason.

The technology of 2030 will seem miraculous by today's standards.

I'm sure that a lot of it will. But it won't necessarily be the technology that you expect to change --- witness what hasn't happened to space technology in the past 40 years. And especially, if we sit on our hands and wait for some bright boy somewhere to solve a problem with magic, then probably no one will solve it.

The attitude that progress would inevitably save us from greed was common enough in the 19th century, in the days of uncontained hydraulic gold mining in California and unfettered development of New Orleans. Future generations, some reasoned, would invent anything and everything and fix it all. It's a good thing that California did go ahead and ban hydraulic gold mining, and too bad that Louisiana didn't plan for the future with New Orleans. In both cases, even more is at stake now than people thought a century ago.

But it won't necessarily be the technology that you expect to change --- witness what hasn't happened to space technology in the past 40 years.

Well, this analogy might make sense if developing space technology was important...

But as usual, your analogies fall flat on their face.

Well, this analogy might make sense if developing space technology was important

No, I meant what hasn't happened with deploying existing technology, as well as inventing anything new, necessary or not.

Hey Jim Harris, you should be happy then that gas prices are rising, right?

Hey Jim Harris, you should be happy then that gas prices are rising, right?

For several reasons, not especially. First, world gasoline consumption is at a record high. Threats to the oil supply in Iraq and elsewhere have boosted oil prices some, but the main reason for the skyrocketing price is that demand is high.

Second, the current oil market shows that the US didn't plan well for the future in the past 30 years. Motor vehicle transportation is in effect heavily subsidized, because our existing usage fees --- gas taxes and road tolls --- do not remotely cover roadwork. The rest is covered by taxes that you pay whether or not you use the road. Gas taxes should have been much higher all along, not only to pay for roadwork, but also because if we don't tax gasoline, OPEC eventually will.

Third, if the question is to prevent Greenland from melting, then oil is the hard end of the problem. As Sam Dinkin notes, you could price coal entirely out of the electricity market with a gas tax that would only moderately affect gasoline consumption. We can expect that the world will burn up its entire endowment of conventional oil in the next 60 years --- just as the US has burned far more of its own conventional oil than it has left by any measure. The first round to win or lose is coal replacement.

So your question is a little like asking, "Aren't you happy that your hospital copayments skyrocketed? It will help get you to stop smoking."

That is a ludicrous characterization of what is actually an entirely sober, polite, and highly competent science blog.

Which happens to talk mostly about global warming, the politics surrounding global warming (like IPCC), and related effects (hurricane frequency, volcanos, sea ice coverage, etc). This coverage is always one-sided. Further they routinely use connotation inappropriate for a balanced discussion of science. That is sufficient for me to characterize it as a propaganda source. Having said that, I see it more likely than not that the people behind RealClimate will be proven mostly right in the end. that is, just because RealClimate is propaganda, doesn't mean that it isn't also correct. You can continue to be steamed over my characterization of this blog, but it is correct in my humble opinion.

How can someone who runs a particle accelerator, or studies NASA data as a career, be against the industrial revolution?

My words need some clarification. I wasn't saying that these scientific communities were hostile to technology. Instead, I see them as being hostile to industry. That's the trait that they share with groups that are hostile to the technology as well. For example, there's a great deal of resistance to PhDs in astronomy (and to a lesser extent) high energy physics entering the working world. It's considered a waste of their talents, sometimes even a betrayal of the people that the new PhD worked with.

Just because RealClimate is propaganda, doesn't mean that it isn't also correct.

It's one-sided propaganda exactly in the same sense as a textbook on evolution. The "other side" simply has no science to offer. And, propaganda though they may be, there is a lot to learn from them. Semantics aside, I don't know that you and I really disagree about the main content at this site.

The only thing that still sounds strange is your phrase "balanced discussion of science". Which do you want, a balanced discussion, or science? I've been to science conferences, but I have never seen anything get done at roundtable discussions. The best talks are always by people who explain why they think that they're right. It's the same whether or not the evidence of whatever is overwhelming. Don't expect to by enlightened by a session like, "Do omega 3 fatty acids wash your arteries or are they snake oil? We report, you decide!"

I see them as being hostile to industry.

Whatever scientists may say about how their students should use their training has little to do with their advice for how to protect the environment. Again, there is no anti-industry tone at RealClimate.org. Okay they sometimes express irritation of industry propaganda --- but they don't call it that unless it demonstrably does come from industry. Maybe some of the commenters are anti-industry, but certainly the posts don't read that way.

You keep saying vaguely that they have these inappropriate connotations, or that they are biased against industry, but you're not providing any examples.

"biological evolution never gave any organism the wheel"

Thats because legs work much better absent roads. Evolution, biologically speaking, wouldn't contribute to road like formations which would encourage wheel growth despite the fact that some individuals have purported to "shit a brick".