Weekend Humor #14

From this New Yorker cartoon we learn to keep design inferences tentative, and don't jump to conclusions about the identity of the designer.

Darwinian Theory and Nihilistic Teenagers

There is an interesting article by Dennis Sewell, the author of a new book, The Political Gene: How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics, in the Times Online. Some excerpts:

The Darwin double anniversary (2009 marks both the bicentenary of his birth and 150 years since the first publication of On the Origin of Species) has featured much vanilla hoopla: the Royal Mail issued commemorative stamps; Damien Hirst designed the dust jacket for a special edition of Darwin’s masterpiece; Bristol Zoo offered free admission to men with beards, and the Natural History Museum served pea soup made to a recipe devised by Darwin’s wife, Emma. The conclusion of dozens of lectures, articles and education packs for schools has been that Darwin wasn’t just a brilliant scientist, but a thoroughly good egg.

With hardly a mention that his name has been associated with some of the most infamous crimes of modern history, it is as if there has been an unspoken agreement to accentuate the positive. Certainly, the milquetoast Darwin played by Paul Bettany in the recent film Creation provided little hint that there might be a dark side to the great man’s bequest to posterity.

. . .

In April, 1,000 people gathered at sunset in Littleton, Colorado, to commemorate the victims of the Columbine high school massacre, 10 years on. Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was the first of the 13 children to be murdered, and whose son Craig narrowly escaped being shot, cannot understand why so little attention has been paid to the motivation of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their interest in Charles Darwin’s ideas. “Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

Darwinian theory helps us to understand the actions of Harris and Klebold in another way, as explained by Richard Dawkins:

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

In response to that, I observed:

Dawkins says we should not blame people, but "we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing." But given his contention that our mental constructs of good and evil are just useful fictions, what is the basis for identifying the units (persons) that are working from those that need "fixing or replacing"? Aren't they all working just as they "should" according to his "scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system," and his purely materialistic view of the origin of all life?

Finally, according to how Dawkins sees things, is not Cho Seung-Hui's evaluation of the moral significance of his own behavior closer to "that level of enlightenment" of which Dawkins speaks?

Every time I comment on such effects of Darwinism, I feel that I have to anticipate a misunderstanding. Please note: the ramifications of Darwinism do not undermine the truth of the theory. But they should inform our public policy, including how zealously we preach it to high school kids and whether we ban the evidence that does undermine the theory.

HT: Uncommon Descent

Transcript of the Interview of Richard Dawkins By Ben Stein in the Film Expelled

This is a partial text of the interview of Richard Dawkins by Ben Stein in the film Expelled. This is the key section in which Richard Dawkins acknowledges that it is possible to find evidence of design in biology, and that it could have been seeded here by a "higher intelligence" from elsewhere in the universe.

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BEN STEIN: How did it get created?

DAWKINS: By a very slow process.

BEN STEIN: Well, how did it start?

DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.

BEN STEIN: And what was that?

DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.

BEN STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?

DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.

. . .

BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution.

DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

. . .

And that Designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.


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The interview can be found on YouTube here.

Links to Background Posts

If you would like to read more, but don't feel like randomly clicking through archives, you can find a summary of some of my favorite previous posts, with links, here. These posts also give you a good idea of what this blog is all about.

For a discussion of what Darwinian Fundamentalism is, go here.

For a post with links regarding Challenges to Macroevolutionary Theory, go here.

For a post with links to other blogs that deal with the issues of evolution and intelligent design either from a position of skepticism toward macroevolutionary theory or open-mindedness toward intelligent design, or both, go here.

Intelligent Design

What is the single best site for learning about Intelligent Design? No question: IntelligentDesign.org. I am happy to say that this is now the second site listed in search results for Intelligent Design. I think it should be first.

The Wikipedia article on ID used to be a complete hatchet job. It is better than it used to be, but it still appears to be a vehicle for people to attack Intelligent Design. It contains much misleading infomation of dubious relevance. If a person wants to understand what intelligent design is all about, there is no better place to look than intelligentdesign.org.

I encourage other bloggers and web sites to link to the intelligentdesign.org site, and not the Wikipedia page, whenever you mention Intelligent Design. I also encourage you to help make the Wikipedia page better.