An Inversion Of Reason To Point Out The Obvious

I've got to say I enjoy listening or reading Dan Dennett. Currently I'm pushing myself through Consciousness Explained and I've got to say it feels like he's lead me through the rabbit hole and suddenly a few pages of I've found myself in a strange reality where I have no idea what's gone on. Right or wrong, he really makes it sound so simple as if all it takes is an inversion of reasoning followed to its logical conclusion.

So looking on his university website, I came across a recent paper of his titled: "Darwin's Strange Inversion Of Reasoning". A very interesting paper seeking how Darwin's evolutionary thinking flipped the way we think about agency and structure. A watch without a watchmaker? Structure without agency? Natural selection provides the answer.

And so the argument from design dies another death. To me looking at it in the year 2009, it might now appear obvious. "Well of course it has to be that way" I can say comfortably without having to come up with the idea myself. Well the idea is out now. And no matter how many watches or houses or any other human-designed object, it just doesn't apply to animals. Why?

Think of the relationship between a watch and a watchmaker. The watchmaker puts a number of intricate and complex parts together to perform purpose. In other words, if I want a watch I need one manufactured for me. What if I wanted a puppy though? To get a puppy I go to a puppy-maker; i.e. a bitch that has given birth.

But how could this be? An intelligent agent didn't design and build me a puppy for the purpose of going for walks and throwing a ball to. Agency is involved, but it's by no means intelligent; and certainly not intelligent in the way that a human creating a robopuppy would be. If left to its own devices, the puppy would grow into a dog and then serve to start the cycle all over again. The purpose of a puppy is to make more puppies perhaps?

This argument runs into an ad infinitum, that there must be an infinite sequence of puppies going back. Yet the science shows that both the earth and the universe itself are finite. So there can't be an infinite sequence. So there was created the first dog by a magical being? Design might not have died just yet.

Life is mutable, changing over time. Dogs for example were domesticated some 15,000 years ago, and all forms of dog come from that original domesticated pack of wolves. It seems that my puppy-maker didn't always make puppies of the form I see now. Over 100 breeds and they all come from the same stock a few thousand generations ago.

So my greyhound-maker and my poodle-maker at one stage in their history made neither poodles nor greyhounds. If we follow this back, at another point it no longer made dogs. Or mammals. Or tetrapods. Or vertebrates. Or animals. Follow it back far enough and it becomes parent and eventually there's the starting point of life.


And there you have it. Back some 3.5 billion years to a pre-biotic state. The evolutionary process builds life and by the nature of the process it builds life that is adept at surviving in its environment. To posit a watchmaker is not only unnecessary, it requires a break in the process - and as David Hume would have PHILO argue, to do so on no basis of experience is speculative.

Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning allows us to reconcile the observations of how the natural world works, at the same time as explaining why there was a mismatch between such observation and our intuition to attribute structure to agency. Dawkins isn't exaggerating when he said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Being Dragged Kicking And Screaming Towards Equality

The Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church warns the election of a second openly gay bishop in the US means a split in the worldwide Anglican Communion is inevitable.

The Los Angeles Episcopalian church elected 55-year-old lesbian Reverend Mary Douglas Glasspool as assistant bishop on the weekend, the first lesbian elected to the role.

Despite the appointment, she still needs a majority of the National Episcopal Church to formally approve the position.

The election of Gene Robinson five years ago as the first gay bishop in the US caused deep rifts in the Anglican Church.

The world head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, says the election raises very serious questions for Anglican Communion as a whole.

"The election of Mary Glasspool by the Diocese of Los Angeles as suffragan bishop elect raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole," he said in a statement.

"The process of selection however is only part complete. The election has to be confirmed, or could be rejected, by diocesan bishops and diocesan standing committees.

"That decision will have very important implications."

The Sydney diocese has been vocal in its opposition to the election of gay and lesbian clergy, and Bishop of South Sydney Robert Forsythe says the latest appointment is disappointing.

"I understand that homosexual people are real people who need loving commitment to Christ and helping to live faithful lives," he said.

"But to endorse this as a leader of the church sends in my view entirely the wrong message and is inconsistent with discipleship to Christ.


Split 'inevitable'

The worldwide Anglican Communion had agreed to a freeze on the election of gay clergy to stem a possible major rift within the church, and Bishop Forsythe says a split now seems inevitable.

"The Anglican Communion as a united body is now history, and now we are seeing a complete restructuring of relationships," he said.

"I think that is what the event is showing. Communion as a united body is now history.

"I am not saying this one event changes everything. It just continues to cement the trajectory towards a restructuring of the Anglican Communion in the world.

"I think it (a split) was inevitable before this frankly, but yes, I think it is inevitable now."


'Series of bluffs'

Dr Muriel Porter, an Anglican laywoman and commentator, says she welcomes the election of Mary Glasspool, and says the majority of people within the Anglican church will not have a problem with a lesbian bishop.

"We've had threats of splits going back now over 20 years. I think it is a series of bluffs," she said.

"If the church had to split - and I hope and pray it won't - [but] if it had to split over an issue of principle, in some ways it might be better than us living constantly with our nerves jangling, with the threat of split and the threat of all these terrible things constantly hanging over the church's head.

"We might actually be able to get on with things.

"So I am actually not fazed or frightened. I am actually proud of the Americans for standing by the principle of inclusion both for women and gay people."

Can this notion now that religion and morality go hand in hand die now? It's pathetic that bigotry and persecution are tolerated when they come in the form of religion. It's especially pathetic that at the same time we recognise that there is bigotry in the church, we still look to the church as a bastion for morality. There's a disconnect there, that we can recognise the value call being wrong but because it interferes with the dogma... oh lord, all hell will break loose.

Maybe all seething Anglican churches can put up on their message boards next week "God hates fags". Though this is unfair, this is the 21st century and we have a new enlightened church. "God doesn't hate fags, he just doesn't think them teaching the dogma is appropriate given Romans 1:32"

Really, do those who believe in God think he has nothing more important on his agenda than a female bishop that might have kissed a girl and liked it? It's quite simply absurd, this really should be a non-issue. Religion has shown that in the 21st century that as a whole it is playing catch-up to the moral standards of the age. Dragged kicking and screaming into a state of tolerance.

Awww Damnit

When it's winter and you've got the common cold, do you reach for the vitamin C tablets and drink orange juice? I do. I was under the impression that vitamin C is something that helps the body out. So while I'm sucking down excess vitamin tablets and drinking juice straight from the bottle, it turns out that it wasn't doing anything.

So there you have it, I was wrong. I fell for a sham treatment and didn't even think twice about it. After all, it made me feel better so I had no reason to assume that it didn't actually work. It's things like this that remind me to stop and research things before I act. How hard is it to spend 5 minutes googling anyway?

So thank you SGU, I've learned something today and hopefully it's going to lead to more investigative behaviour in the future.

Explaining Evolutionary Complexity In The Form of Haiku

The basic principle
Complexity that
Aids the survival of genes
Is passed to offspring


A mechanism
Gene duplication
Increases the size of the
Genetic code's length

The genes for smelling
Are dupes of a single gene
Aiding survival


No free lunch
An environment
Where there's an unused resource
Can be exploited

To digest nylon
The bacteria evolved
Gaining a free lunch


Irreducible Complexity
An I.C. system
Means there is no going back
Such systems evolve

A mutation that
Was merely advantageous
Can become vital


What does complexity mean anyway?
Is it more complex
To be born with a tail?
This needs explaining

The Unlocking Of An ACTUAL Conspiracy

I was wrong, pure and simple. Here I was decrying the AGW deniers for their conspiracy-like ravings against anthropogenic climate change. That tens of thousands of scientists were all working together to promote a radical leftist agenda by silencing deniers, deleting contradicting data, colluding together and putting up a non-existent threat in order to serve their political agenda. I used to laugh at those creationist-like devotees of what looked like one big appeal to consequences...

That was until Climategate.

Unlike all other gates; watergate, crackergate, utegate, or the rusty squeaking gate at grandma's house, this gate was real... and it's implications startling! They were right, there was a conspiracy. The leaked emails prove everything that has ever been said about those ideologues in the IPCC and that evangelical arsehole Al Gore. And worst of all I knew it.

I knew it and I let my credulity get the better of me. My inner sceptic was saying "noooooooo" in a Cartmanesque fade to oblivion, but I didn't listen. I trusted science. pfft, I'm not doing that again. For a long time now they've been telling us that we are nothing but glorified monkeys, that we are just matter, and that we really don't matter because matter is just energy condensed. No more of that! Now that the tree ring data and temperature data don't overlap, we can't trust anything any more.

Yet I've brought this on myself before. I remember when I used to believe that man walked on the moon. I truly believed it. But one man had the courage to say something about it, and that conspirator Buzz Aldrin just punched him in the face! If he had nothing to hide, he would have produced the moon cheese that NASA would have found had they really gone to the moon.

And there was that whole period where I attributed alien abductions to hallucinations and false memories - culture infesting the consciousness and causing the sense of patternicity we all share to interpret strange experiences as out of this world. I even attributed my own experiences of sleep paralysis to natural causes. But then why do government reports of UFOs have so much blacked out? What are they trying to protect? I'm fearful for the human / alien hybrid invasion of 2012.

But back to the issue at hand. This is just the tip of the iceberg, which by the way did NOT break from a warming Arctic. There is now evidence of direct conspiracy to stop the free market. Why can't a mining company pollute the streams if it gets us a fuel source? The environmental implications of pollution are overstated, and in any case to reduce toxic pollutants is going to cost jobs. Just as happened a few decades ago, and what did the laws to regulate pollutants do? It destroyed the economy and brought society to its knees. And for what? So those damn evolutionists could show natural selection on the peppered moth.

I'm thankful for those hackers who targeted private email of a few climate scientists, because there was always that gut feeling of guilt when I left my computer on when I wasn't using it, or that I spent too long in the shower. Now I don't need to worry at all. It's all a hoax, it's all a charade, and those emails are the smoking gun that show the level of deception and fraud perpetrated by the IPCC.


But as I write this, I feel my scepticism of my scepticism resurging. Maybe I'm making mountains out of molehills (how else do mountains form except for giant moles?) and that there's not enough in there to completely discount human-induced climate change. It could just be those emails show something minor, it could be that those emails fall within the bounds of the scientific process, and that the evidence still points to us having some effect on the environment.

But then I think to myself, what is more likely. That there are tens of thousands of climate scientists in on a conspiracy. That those who have spent the time and effort to study the climate, to see how human activity affects the environment and what factors there are in how our weather system works. Those who have measured the environment at different times, trying to find patterns, work out cycles, seeing what that will do to sea levels and rain over agricultural areas. That all these people are just faking the data to push a political agenda. Or that there really is grounds to consider that human activity is having some effect on the environment.

Really it should be obvious. As Bush jr. said: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."