Isotropy
Saturday, August 28, 2004
The Parable of the Astrodome
Let me offer another way of thinking about the religion question: gather a thousand of your closest friends. Crowd them together in the middle of a giant featureless round room. Give everybody a beeper and announce "when the beeper goes off, line up to face the same direction as your neighbor!" One of two things will happen:
A: If there really is nothing to orient by....
When the beepers go off, people will clump together facing the same direction, but there will be breaks - little errors in lining up will accumulate until some folks have to choose between facing one direction and facing another. The crowd will develop regions (called domains) where everybody is lined up, with sharp boundaries between the domains where people aren't able to locally reconcile their decisions.
B: If there is an external focus....
If there are field lines, or home plate, or a scoreboard still sitting on the wall of the stadium, some folks will get the idea to line up facing the external marker. This will dramatically cut down on the number of domains and make lining up easier.
What's my point? If there's an outside authority that helps each individual make a decision, the entire crowd can coordinate itself better. This is not random smacking on my part - it's exactly how iron atoms line themselves up in the presence or absence of a magnetic field. Nothing that I've said here is anything other than mathematics and physics of crowd behavior, but you can make the analogy to the value of religion easily enough.
Notice the question of the validity of the authority is left unanswered - its actually very easy to have this kind of discussion without insulting people. I can't imagine how Dawkins thinks it's fitter to constantly berate and aggravate religious folks. Such extravagant, baroque wastefulness on his part....
"There's More Light Over Here"
Richard Dawkins would be more interesting if he would reach a different conclusion once in a while. He starts with a good question:Can natural selection explain the pervasiveness of religion? But he also starts with this statement:
As a Darwinian, the aspect of religion that catches my attention is its profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness.He reminds me of the man who looks for his keys under the streetlamp, rather than over where he lost them, on the grounds that he can see better in the light.
Dawkins mentions a few intriguing solutions, only to cheat them of proper consideration. Could reassurance against death actually extend life?
"This could be true or it could be false....but I shall not pursue the matter."Could religion be a case where group-selection works, in contradiction of Dawkins' noted hostility toward it?
"This is an interesting line of theory to pursue, but I shall not do so here."He cheats this way because he has limited space and needs to get to the acceptable answer: religion is a pointless sham caused by a malfunctioning aspect of selected behavior - in this case, the "fact" that children "[o]bey without question" what adults tell them, and pass it to their own children. He has a nice explanation of why moths fly into candles on the way to explaining that religious people are also headed for the flames.
Granted, he's writing for Free Inquiry, so he knows his audience wants to hear that religious people are maladapted for long-term survival. It's always a pleasure to read that right thinking folks like yourself are the Chosen People, even if it's only natural selection that's doing the choosing. And it's so frequently the same sermon, no matter who the preacher is - they are wrong, evil, wasteful, and stupid, and we are destined to come out on top in the long run....
Do You Take Sugar?
One lump or two?
If you went to high school in the 80's, this horror show will make you feel like retirement is right around the corner....
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Who's muddled?
Richard Cohen writes in the Post today that Laura Bush is "muddled" in her stem-cell thoughts. But at the end of his column, he writes this of a friend who died of Parkinson's recently:
I recognized life in Milly -- oh, what gusto she once had! -- and I don't see it in the earliest of fetuses.
Promoters of embryonic stem cell research are fond of claiming that science is on their side, while opponents are relying on "faith" or "ideology" or some other synonym for "irrational prejudice." But Cohen gives us a perfect example of how backward that is. He is the one who appeals to our empathy, to our instinctive rejection of another's suffering - he appeals to our hearts, not our heads.
Look at an embryo in a microscope. It doesn't look or act anything like a person you pass on the street. Cohen's right about one thing - you don't see life or humanity in an embryo. There is nothing there to trigger our kinship reaction, our sense of empathy with another like ourselves. It does not look like anything except what it is - a tiny clump of undifferentiated cells. It's even a little unpleasant to look at.
And yet, we know for a scientific fact that we were once embryos. We can't remember it. Nobody directly watched us grow up from that stage. It sounds implausible. And it's irrefutable - you, Reader, were an embryo once, and only science tells us this. Science is how we know that the embryo is our kin, when our gut says "it's just a clump of cells". Scientists may be on Cohen's side, but science is not.
