Tag Archives: Evolution

Some Spiders Like Group Homes Too

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Scientists have identified about 43,000 species of spiders in the world. Only about 25 of these species are social animals, living in communities like ants and people.

One such species lives in Africa. A group containing from 20 to 300 spiders called Stegodyphus mimosarum weave large communal webs like this:

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What is especially interesting about these little spiders is that the longer they live together, the more specialized they become.

Spiders seem to have personalities of a kind. Some are more shy than others; some are more aggressive. Researchers have discovered that if they put together a small group of these spiders, their individual traits gradually become stronger. The aggressive spiders, for example, become more aggressive.

As their colonies grow, the spiders also take on specialized social roles that seem to depend on their personalities, the shy ones staying inside the web and tending to the young, while the more adventurous ones defend the web and subdue prey (usually insects, but not always). Which roles individual spiders take on also appears to depend on the needs of the colony.

According to the New York Times:

The researchers view the development of strong personalities as the behavioral version of so-called niche partitioning, carving out a specialty in a crowded, competitive world….[One researcher] says the spider work neatly illustrates the mix of plasticity and predilection that underlies personality.

“I think it’s such an appealing idea that social interactions could cause social niches, and it resonates with our own experience as humans,” she said. “When you go into a group, your behavior changes depending on the nature of that group, but it can only change so far.”

It’s remarkable that these tiny spiders, with their even tinier brains, not only react differently to various stimuli but form communities that increase in size as individuals gravitate toward specific social roles, depending on their own proclivities and the needs of the community. Since that sounds a lot like what it takes to grow up and make a living in New Jersey, it’s one more piece of evidence that we too are part of nature and not as uniquely talented as we think we are. 

Why Hell Was Invented (Starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore)

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Why was the idea of hell invented? Wouldn’t the promise of eternal happiness up in heaven be enough to get people to walk the straight and narrow? No, probably not.

As evidence, here’s a scene from Bedazzled, a terrific movie from 1967 that starred the English comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (sorry, couldn’t find a video). 

Both temporarily dressed as London traffic cops, Lucifer (Cook) is explaining to Stanley (Moore) why he got thrown out of heaven and is now stuck making trouble on Earth:

It was pride that got me into this. I used to be an angel, up in heaven.

Oh yeah, you used to be God’s favorite, didn’t you?

That’s right. “I Love Lucifer” it was in those days.

What was it like up in heaven?

Very nice, really. We used to sit around all day and adore him. Believe me, he was adorable, just about the most adorable thing you ever did see. 

Well, what went wrong then?

I’ll show you. (Approaches mail box.) Here we are. Give me a leg up, would you?

(Sitting on mailbox, legs crossed.)  I’m God. This is my throne, see? All around me are the cherubim, seraphim, continually crying “Holy, holy, holy.” The angels, archangels, that sort of thing. Now you be me, Lucifer, the loveliest angel of them all. 

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What do I do? 

Well, sort of dance around praising me really. 

What sort of things do I say? 

Anything that comes into your head that’s nice. How beautiful I am, how wise, how handsome, that sort of thing. Come on, start dancing! 

(Singing and dancing) You’re wise, you’re beautiful, you’re handsome. 

Thank you very much. 

The universe, what a wonderful idea, take my hat off to you. 

Thank you. 

Trees, terrific! Water, another good one. 

That was a good one. Yes.  

Sex, top marks! 

Now make it more personal. A bit more fulsome, please. Come on! 

Immortal, invisible. You’re handsome, you’re, uh, you’re glorious. 

Thank you. More!

You’re the most beautiful person in the world!

(Stops dancing) Here, I’m getting a bit bored with this. Can’t we change places? 

That’s exactly how I felt. I only wanted to be like him and have a few angels adoring me. He didn’t see it like that. Pride, he called it. The sin of pride. Flew into a monumental rage, chucked me out of heaven, gave me this miserable job. Just because I wanted to be loved!

I had no idea. It’s a very sad story. 

I suppose he had his reasons…. He moves in very mysterious ways, you know. 

I mean, apart from the way he moves, what’s God like, really? 

He’s all colors of the rainbow — many-hued. 

But he is English, isn’t he? 

Oh yes, very upper-class.

Peter Cook, who wrote the script, wasn’t the first to suggest that heaven would be boring. It’s hard to even imagine how it could be interesting for more than a while. How could bliss last forever? Would God be so wonderful that being nearby would be eternally pleasurable? It doesn’t seem all that appealing  to me. For one thing, we don’t even know what God is supposed to be like, so it’s hard to imagine why being in the divine presence would be so wonderful. It certainly doesn’t seem that singing God’s praises would be a good way to spend eternity.

Maybe it would help if one’s nearness to God fluctuated. That would introduce anticipation and contrast: “Now I’m further away. If only I were closer! Yes, like that. Excellent!” That way, the whole eternal experience would be pleasurable, but not always equally so. Changing one’s perspective like that would seem to cause emotional ups and downs, however, which sounds rather unheavenly. Plus, cycling between higher and lower pleasures for eternity might still be less than blissful (been there, done that, forever).

In addition, some of the greatest pleasures we know presumably wouldn’t have much of a role in heaven. Being reunited with someone you haven’t seen for a long time, for example. How often could you have the pleasure of seeing someone again? Would you miss them in the meantime (negative emotion again)? Or winning a competition. Are there losers in heaven? For that matter, are there really good discussions in heaven? Do you have to watch what you say, the way you do in church? Can you be yourself in heaven? And how about sex? Are there orgasms in heaven? 

The more I think about heaven, the less heavenly it sounds. And also the less feasible. Hell, on the other hand, is far easier to imagine. Ever see that Star Trek episode with the two guys who are colored black and white, but on opposite sides? They hate each others guts. To the point that when the show ends, they’re sent out into space to wrestle with each other forever. At least that’s the way I remember it. The ending is unsettling. Trapped forever in a very small space fighting someone who wants to destroy you. It sounds terrible.

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So do the various tortures supposedly popular in hell. Sitting in a pool of lava for eternity. Or being eaten alive forever, like Prometheus on his rock. 

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But maybe if you were tortured forever, you’d get used to it. Eventually get bored with the whole thing. Somehow, that doesn’t seem likely. Serious pain doesn’t lose its unpleasantness as time goes by. You can “learn to live with it”, but it still hurts like hell (my point exactly). And it’s so easier to imagine being in constant pain than being in constant pleasure. In fact, the phrase “being in constant pain” is quite common. Have you ever heard of someone “being in constant pleasure”, or, more grammatically, “enjoying constant pleasure”? Outside of heaven anyway, and we know how implausible that is.

As usual, there is probably some evolutionary reason why pain is more intense than pleasure. In order to stay alive and have children, it’s important to avoid painful injuries. Pain is great at getting our attention. Pleasure isn’t really required in order to survive, although mild pleasure helps in various ways and serious pleasure encourages procreation (which, due to the house rules, probably isn’t on the agenda in heaven anyway). 

If you doubt whether physical pain is generally more intense than physical pleasure, consider the greatest pleasure you could have and decide whether you would want that if it required enduring the most intense pain you could have. Most of us would decline the pleasure in order to avoid the pain.

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So that’s probably why the idea of hell was invented. Promising heaven is a good way to control behavior, but threatening hell is probably better, since being rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven is less imaginable and less appealing than avoiding eternal agony in hell. Which, when you think about it, is a disheartening commentary on what we actually have to deal with, life itself.

Note: Why some individuals are willing to endure horrible pain in order to achieve some goal or other is one of life’s mysteries. Giordano Bruno, for example, was burned alive by the Catholic Church in 1600 after refusing to disavow his beliefs. When sentenced to death, he is said to have replied: “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it”. He preferred agony and death over telling a few convincing lies about his beliefs. And, of course, some people (mostly men) march off to war and some people (always women) endure natural childbirth. Pain may be more intense than pleasure, but some things are more important to some people than pain. Go figure.

A Guide to Reality, Part 10

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Chapters 5 and 6 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality are all about morality. In chapter 5, he lays out what he calls the “bad news”: there is no “cosmic value” to human life and moral questions have no correct answers. Rosenberg explicitly endorses ethical nihilism:

Real moral disputes can be ended in lots of ways. by voting, by decree, by fatigue of the disputants, by the force of examples that changes social mores. But they can never really be resolved by finding the correct answers. There are none….All anyone can really find are the answers that they like [96].

To be completely consistent, Rosenberg would probably have to admit that there is no “bad” anything, not even news. Since, on his view, “physics fixes all the facts” and there is nothing truly good or bad in the world at all. After all, one quark is just the same as another.

Rosenberg explains that nihilism isn’t the same as relativism or skepticism. It’s not the case that ethical views can be correct at some times and not at others, or that we can never know for sure which ethical views are right or wrong. Nihilism doesn’t even mean that “everything is permitted”, since nothing is morally “permitted” or “forbidden”:

[All moral judgments] are based on false, groundless presuppositions. Nihilism says that the whole idea of “morally permissible” is untenable nonsense. [Nihilism] can hardly be accused of holding that “everything is morally permissible”. That, too, is untenable nonsense [97].

Nothing at all is morally valuable in itself  (“intrinsically”) or even as a means to something that is.

Notice, however, that Rosenberg isn’t a nihilist about everything. At least, he gives the strong impression that he believes some ideas are true and some are false, and some beliefs are justified and some aren’t. But it’s generally accepted that truth and justification are “normative” concepts just as much as “right” and “wrong”, i.e., they are value-laden. True statements are those which “correctly” describe some state of affairs, while justified beliefs are those that have “good” reasons for believing them. But physics has nothing to say about correct descriptions or good reasons.

In the rest of chapter 5, Rosenberg offers an argument for the truth of ethical nihilism. He begins with a version of the famous question Plato asked in his Euthyphro dialogue: If our favorite moral rule (whatever it happens to be) is both morally correct and favored by God, is it correct because God favors it or does God favor it because it’s correct? Some Christian theologians have tried to deal with the question by invoking the Trinity or by claiming that the question presupposes a misunderstanding of God’s nature, but most people would probably agree that God favors moral rules because they are correct, not the other way around.

Rosenberg, of course, isn’t really interested in a theological version of the question. He brings it up because he thinks it presents an important challenge to his own scientistic position.

He next argues that there is a core set of moral principles common to all cultures. These principles are so common and so obvious, in fact, that they are rarely discussed. For example, we all agree that parents should protect their children; self-interest is acceptable until it becomes selfishness; and it’s wrong to punish people at random. Rosenberg thinks this core morality is the product of millions of years of human evolution (which sounds right to me, too).

He then asks a Euthyphro-like question: did evolution result in our core morality because it’s the correct morality, or is it the correct morality because it resulted from evolution?

Is natural selection so smart that it was able to filter out all the wrong, incorrect, false core moralities and end up with the only one that just happens to be true? Or is it the other way around: Natural selection filtered out all but one core morality, and winning the race is what made the last surviving core morality the right, correct, true one [109].

This question seems more difficult to answer than the theological version. Rosenberg, in fact, argues that the question has no answer. On one hand, evolution is blind, so there was no way for evolution to “know” which morality is correct. Furthermore, evolution has resulted in common views and practices that don’t seem ethical at all, like patriarchy and xenophobia. For that matter, the fact that religion is so common implies that evolution is good at generating false (but useful) beliefs.

On the other hand, just because our core morality resulted from evolution doesn’t make it right. Lots of things have evolved that we’d be better off without (like using the same anatomical feature to eat and breathe). More fundamentally, Rosenberg suggests that there is nothing morally right about having children who tend to survive and have other children, which is the principal thing natural selection makes happen.

But if our core morality isn’t correct because it evolved, and it didn’t evolve because it’s correct, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that our morality isn’t correct at all. In other words, morality isn’t true. It’s merely useful:

Scientism cannot explain the fact that when it comes to the moral core, fitness and correctness seem to go together. But neither can it tolerate the unexplained coincidence. There is only one alternative. We have to give up correctness…

Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts – the facts about us, our psychology and our morality…The biological facts can’t guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true or correct one. If the biological facts can’t do it, then nothing can. No moral core is right, correct, true. That’s nihilism. And we have to accept it [113].

We might immediately object that the biological facts might not justify morality, but the social facts do. Rosenberg claims that lower-level facts, like the biological, determine higher-level facts, like the psychological. That may indeed be true (I think it is anyway), but isn’t it likewise the case that psychological facts determine social facts, which in turn determine ethical facts? If there are ethical facts (if ethical evaluations can have truth values – which is, by the way, a controversial view among philosophers), aren’t those facts determined by lower-level facts as well?

Those who think ethical statements can be true or false would probably argue that evolution has generated morality, but moral disagreement occurs because we simply haven’t figured out what all the ethical facts are. We know some ethical facts (it’s wrong to hurt people at random and other elements of Rosenberg’s core morality) but not others (is paternalism good in some cases? how about euthanasia?). 

I’ll end for now with the comment that philosophical arguments, even interesting ones like Rosenberg’s, hardly ever destroy the opposition. They almost always lead to more arguments. 

In our next installment, we’ll proceed to chapter 6, in which Rosenberg argues that nihilism is nothing to worry about, since nihilism can be nice. 

A Guide to Reality, Part 9

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Alex Rosenberg begins chapter 4 of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by pointing out how wasteful biological processes are. For example, a frog or fish may lay thousands or even millions of eggs and only produce a few offspring. Many organisms go through an entire life cycle without having any offspring at all. In addition, 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, partly as the result of various prehistoric cataclysms (like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs).

Rosenberg says this is what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “a lot of order relentlessly turned into entropy” [75]: 

Can any process produce entropy as fast as natural selection?… Build a lot of complicated devices out of simpler things and then destroy all of them except the few you need to build more such devices… [Adaptations] persistently get more complicated and so use even more energy to build and maintain themselves…. Any process competing with natural selection as the source of adaptations has to produce adaptations from non-adaptations and every one of the adaptations it produces will have to be rare, expensive and wasteful [77].

However, Rosenberg’s main thesis in this chapter is that it’s logically impossible to reconcile God and Darwin (although many have tried). He begins with the traditional idea that God is omniscient and omnipotent (aside from being unable to perform impossible tasks like creating a rock so heavy He or She can’t lift it). Rosenberg also assumes for the sake of argument that God intended to create us or something like us “in His image”.

So, assuming that God knows everything, can do anything, and wanted us to exist, how can we harmonize God and evolution? The common approach is to suggest that God used evolution to make us, either by kicking off the process long ago, knowing it would eventually lead to us, or by manipulating evolution at key points, with the same result. In other words, evolution is part of God’s plan.

A problem with this idea, as Rosenberg explains, is that natural selection is a matter of probabilities. That’s what we should expect from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Mutations just happen. Organisms that might do very well never get the chance because of some random event (like being eaten while still in the nest). There is no guarantee that particular species will evolve. That’s what science tells us.

If God cooked the evolutionary books, therefore, interfering with the randomness of evolution, Darwin got it wrong. We didn’t evolve in the way the theory predicts. On the other hand, if God let evolution take its random course, He or She didn’t know what the result would be. Our evolution wasn’t planned. Either evolution is a random, probabilistic process or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways.

My guess is that a proponent of intelligent design or creationism would say “so much for evolution”. It doesn’t work exactly like the biologists say. So what? Or that God in His infinite wisdom can arrange things any way He wants. It’s all way beyond our understanding.

Personally, I don’t have any religious faith that needs to be reconciled with Darwinism. But what if you’re serious about reconciling your faith and your scientific views? Is there a good response to Rosenberg’s argument?

I think there is. My first reaction to Rosenberg’s argument in chapter 4 is that he seems to be ignoring something he discussed in chapter 2, namely, the “multiverse”. As Rosenberg pointed out, many theoretical physicists, perhaps most of them, think that our universe is just one among many, where “many” could be a truly vast number, even an infinite number. But if there really is a multiverse, it seems beyond question that people like us were certain to evolve in universes here or there, given enough time and randomness. God, being omniscient, could have initiated the multiverse knowing full well that people just like us would eventually exist in some of its parts. If anyone would, God would understand that if you roll the dice often enough, you’ll eventually get all the combinations.

Along with Rosenberg, we can accept the fact that evolution is a truly random process in our universe. It might even be a random process in every universe. But if there are enough universes around, pretty much everything will end up evolving somewhere or other many, many times. If that’s God’s plan, there is no conflict with the Second Law or the theory of evolution. God and Darwin can be reconciled.

My other reaction to Rosenberg’s argument is that he should take into account what physicists and many philosophers say about the nature of time. I have trouble with the idea, but the current scientific view of time is that all moments are equally real. Ours is a “block” universe in which there is no past, present or future; there is merely earlier and later. It isn’t clear to me at all how the universe can be probabilistic and physical events truly random if what’s going to happen is just as real as what did happen, but that’s what physicists believe. I guess it just means the past doesn’t fully determine the future at the quantum level, even though future events are just as real as past events. 

Anyway, if anyone can reconcile quantum indeterminacy and a block universe, it’s God. After all, according to the theologians, God is outside of time (whatever that means). God isn’t sitting around, waiting to see what happens. As Rosenberg says, God is “omnipresent”, which means there is nothing in space or time that is off-limits to God. Being omniscient as well, God knows the whole story. That should be especially easy for God if earlier and later events in the story are equally real.

For that reason, even if evolution is random and inherently unpredictable, God is fully informed. Every event, earlier or later, is right there in the history of the universe for God to know about. If what physics tells us is true, it’s a perfect setup for someone like God, being outside of time, to know how evolution eventually leads to people like us. Randomness prevails, Darwinism is correct and God knows the whole story anyway. If indeterminacy and the supposed nature of time are in harmony, so are physics, Darwin and God. 

Rosenberg ends chapter 4 with some remarks on purpose:

Scientism means that we have to be nihilists about the purpose of things in general, about the purpose of biological life in particular, and the purpose of human life as well….There isn’t any rhyme or reason to the universe. It’s just one damn thing after another. Real purpose has been ruled out by physics [92].

I don’t think he’s right about that, but to avoid repeating myself, we’re going to move on. In our next installment, we’ll consider chapter 5. It’s called “Morality: the Bad News” (the good news supposedly comes later).

A Guide to Reality, Part 8

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Chapter 3 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is called “How Physics Fakes Design”, although Professor Rosenberg would be the first to object that physics isn’t the kind of thing that can fake anything. His point, of course, is that everything that looks like it’s been designed in the natural world (the human eye, for example) is merely the result of activity at the atomic and molecular level, which itself results from subatomic particles doing what they normally do.

In fact, Professor Rosenberg holds that things that really were designed (like your computer) are the result of the very same natural laws. Design, wherever it appears to occur, whether the result of evolution or conscious effort, is just another illusion. 

In this chapter, however, Rosenberg is focused on evolutionary adaptation:

If the physical facts fix all the facts, then the emergence and persistence of adaptations had better result from the laws of physics alone. In fact, they had better be the result of the operation of thermodynamics. Otherwise we will have to admit that there is more going on in the universe than physics tells us there is. Some physicists may be okay with this, but scientism has to reject it. We need to show that the process Darwin discovered starts with zero adaptations and builds them all as the result of the laws of physics alone. (51-52).

Rosenberg begins by offering a statement of the three essential features of the theory of natural selection, as stated by the biologist Richard Lewontin:

  1. There is always variation in the traits of organisms, genes, hives, groups or whatever it is that replicates or reproduces;
  2. The variant traits differ in fitness;
  3. The fitness differences among some of the traits are inherited.

As Rosenberg explains, the replication or reproduction that occurs in nature doesn’t always result in an exact copy being made (mutations occur, for example). He prefers calling this “blind variation” instead of “random variation” to emphasize the point that nature doesn’t cause these variations on purpose. Most such variations yield no benefit. Occasionally, one does. A “beneficial” variation is one that tends to be passed on to the next generation. Given enough time, such variations can result in complex structures like the eye. Evolution occurs.  

Getting back to physics, Rosenberg argues that the second law of thermodynamics (closed systems tend toward disorder) makes natural selection “inevitable” (although at the end of the chapter he says that the second law only makes it “possible”). He admits that the relationship between the second law and natural selection is puzzling, since natural selection seems to increase the amount of order or organization in the world. But he quickly disposes of this objection by pointing out that the second law only requires a “net increase” in disorder over time. Organization will occasionally increase, but almost always at the cost of more disorganization elsewhere (as when organisms grow by digesting food).

Next, in the space of 11 interesting pages, Rosenberg shows how molecular activity, all subject to the second law, results in what he calls “molecular evolution” (69). As he explains it, there is a lot of “thermodynamic noise” in the universe. Molecules are constantly copying themselves, sometimes imperfectly, and forming bonds with each other. These processes result in new molecular forms. Some molecules are more stable than others, meaning that they will tend to last longer in particular chemical environments. As environments change, however, certain molecules become less stable and break apart, while others come together, just as organisms adapt or fail to adapt to changes in their environments. These various processes satisfy the criteria for evolution described above:

Natural selection requires … reproduction, variation and inheritance. It doesn’t really care how any of these three things get done, just so long as each one goes on long enough to get some adaptations. Reproduction doesn’t have to be sexual or asexual or even easily recognized by us to be reproduction. Any kind of replication is enough (59).

The same goes for variation and inheritance. I would add that these processes must occur in an environment filled with enough matter and energy to keep things moving along. Then, through the course of countless such chemical interactions over immense periods of time, complex organic molecules can develop:

Thermodynamic noise constantly makes more and more different environments – different temperatures, different pH, different concentrations of chemicals, different amounts of water or oxygen or nitrogen, or more complicated acids and bases, magnetic fields and radiation. As a result, there will be a corresponding selection for more and more different molecules (69).

And here we are today, each of us a collection of atoms and molecules, each doing its individual thing:

And so on up the ladder of complexity and diversity that produces assemblies of molecules so big they become recognizable as genes, viruses, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms … and us (69).

Not being a scientist myself, I can’t vouch for Rosenberg’s account of how all this works. However, it all sounds plausible to me. If you read the chapter, you will probably feel the same way.

One closing comment: people who don’t accept the fact that natural selection could eventually lead to a particular complex entity usually argue that such a thing couldn’t possibly happen. It’s inconceivable, they might say, that the human eye, which needs a bunch of parts that work together in order to work at all, could have resulted from a long series of evolutionary steps. It was Charles Darwin himself who offered the human eye as the biggest challenge to his theory. Rosenberg mentions this issue near the beginning of this chapter but doesn’t return to it. His goal in chapter 3 is to show how adaptation gets started, not how far it can go. I think, however, that it’s unwise to bet against science in its pursuit of explanations for mysterious things like the human eye or consciousness. Too many phenomena that used to be mysterious have already been explained.

In our next installment (assuming I stay sufficiently motivated): Good design isn’t just an illusion, it’s also rare, expensive and accidental.