Posted on 12/03/2003 4:53:26 PM PST by Pharmboy
LONDON (Reuters) - Fossils discovered in Ethiopia's highlands are a missing piece in the puzzle of how African mammals evolved, a team of international scientists said on Wednesday.
Little is known about what happened to mammals between 24 million to 32 million years ago, when Africa and Arabia were still joined together in a single continent.
But the remains of ancestors of modern-day elephants and other animals, unearthed by the team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists 27 million years on, provide some answers.
"We show that some of these very primitive forms continue to live through the missing years, and then during that period as well, some new forms evolved -- these would be the ancestors of modern elephants," said Dr John Kappelman, who headed the team.
The find included several types of proboscideans, distant relatives of elephants, and fossils from the arsinoithere, a rhinoceros-like creature that had two huge bony horns on its snout and was about 7 feet high at the shoulder.
"It continues to amaze me that we don't have more from this interval of time. We are talking about an enormous continent," said Kappelman, who is based at the University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists had thought arsinoithere had disappeared much earlier but the discovery showed it managed to survive through the missing years. The fossils from the new species found in Ethiopia are the largest, and at 27 million years old, the youngest discovered so far.
"If this animal was still alive today it would be the central attraction at the zoo," Tab Rasmussen, a paleontologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri who worked on the project, said in a statement.
Many of the major fossil finds in Ethiopia are from the Rift Valley. But Kappelman and colleagues in the United States and at Ethiopia's National Science Foundation (news - web sites) and Addis Ababa University concentrated on a different area in the northwestern part of the country.
Using high-resolution satellite images to scour a remote area where others had not looked before, his team found the remains in sedimentary rocks about 6,600 feet above sea level.
Just lightening the mood.
The best rebuttal I've seen of this is by Steven Pinker: from The Blank Slate p. 173.
"The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to forseeable consequences...You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you. If the most ironclad form of determinism is real, you could not do anything about it anyway, beause your anxiety about determinism, and how you would deal with it, would also be determined. It is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time."
Pinker goes on to quote Dan Dennett (arch-Bright and bete noir number 2) who points out that if we had truly free will, then it would make no sense to punish a terrorist, since external stimuli could not possibly have any role in determining his actions.
(Paraphrasing Pinker), people are confusing explanation with exculpation: to understand is not to forgive. To have both causation and responsibility, we don't have to resolve the question of free-will versus determinism; we just need to figure out why we need the idea of responsibility. And we need responsibility to deter harmful or criminal behavior, by the responsible party and by others. Regardless of causation, the individual himself had the experience of choice, and chose badly.
What you have to abandon here is the feeling of moral superiority over the criminal; it is right and necessary to punish him, but if you believe his beahvior to have been deterministically caused, there is no basis for sanctimony. Oddly enough, many Christians have come to an equivalent conclusion: to quote my mother's favorite phrase 'there but for the grace of God go I". But note that once again Christians are making an unwarranted claim of exclusivity; just as we frequently see the argument made that without a God, there is no basis for ethics, here we have the claim that with determinism, there is no basis for the idea of personal responsibility. That is simply wrong.
Demonstrate.
The other beliefs fail miserably. They don't even attempt to use reason to validate their claims. I posted two well respected western thinkers who painstakingly defended their faith with reason.
Just lightening the mood.
Darkness forbid. :-)
IMHO, Pinker’s worldview is best summarized in his own words that “the mind is what the brain does.”
In the book you cite The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker attempts to debunk three nature v. nurture “myths”: Blank Slate, Noble Savage and Ghost in the Machine.
The Blank Slate is the thought that children are born with a blank slate and can be “programmed”. The Noble Savage is the thought that children are born basically good and corrupted by their environment.
The third, the Ghost in the Machine, is the most problematic to Pinker – that the mind is not what the brain does. IOW, it is the exact opposite of his premise. Pinker’s protests to the Ghost of the Machine sound rebellious, at least to me:
“Why are we here? To pass on our genes. Admittedly, that’s not a very satisfying answer, to a large number of people. There is a fear of nihilism at work here. People on the religious side of this debate seem to believe that if we lose our belief in the soul, all hell will break loose, and we will see the total eclipse of all values.”
But belief in the soul, a ghost in the machine, and in its continued existence after the death of the material body, “is not as benevolent a doctrine as it might appear, because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Think about why we sometimes remind ourselves of the cliché, ‘life is short’. That is an impetus to renew a friendship, to use your time productively, not to squander it. I think one can argue that nothing gives life more meaning than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious gift.”
In addition, “God’s purpose always seems to be conveyed by human beings. I think that belief opens the door to a certain amount of mischief,” Pinker pointedly understated, before referring to the September 11 suicide attacks as an extreme example.
ROSE: “…Let me just pick up a couple of points in Steve's response. He says that our ability has nothing to do with Cartesian dualism. He it is who wrote that if the genes don't like what he does they can go jump in the lake. I didn't say that. He wrote it. Now where did these different parts of the mind that he's talking about and which conflict with one another come from if they're not generated as the result of interaction between genes, the cells and the environment during the wiring or development of the brain? Materialism has to insist that our genes have to do with everything; they have to do with both, if you like the genetic urge to reproduce that he described, and the desire to have sex without reproducing that he described as the advantage of contraception. That's where materialism comes in, and that's where my challenge to him of being a Cartesian endures, because it's precisely where he wants to let the mind, or these different bits of the mind float free, that I won't accept….”
Those who truly believe that the mind is what the brain does, are nevertheless stuck with the physical laws from the beginning as they have manifest in the genetic code.
But to those of us who know of a truth that who we are exists apart from our physical body, the debate is only curious, i.e. the debate of how the mind (which is only what the physical brain does) can have “free will” in the physical world.
The solution you paraphased above sounds like a justification to punish:
This is IMHO just another example of ideology trumping science. As some Christians reject the scientific evidence for evolution because it conflicts with their beliefs, so Rose, Gould and Lewontin reject the genetic basis of behavior because they are wedded to Marx's vision of historic progress and the dialectic.
I loved Pinker's book, BTW. It's determinedly rational, and in essence highly conservative; it insists social policy must be based on human nature as it is, and not as we would like it to be. It insists that human nature is basically immutable. It affirms the necessity of equality before the law, while rejecting the ludicrous ida that humans are born with equal abilities, traits, virtues, etc.
This is a nice discussion of Newton's religious beliefs.
So in other words you seem to say that a human minds can only be implemented in "spirit-stuff" but not in "mere matter".
What we can't deny, is that Newton compared his brilliant understandings of the universe to what is revealed in the Scriptures, and he was not balked.
Thomas Jefferson was brilliant in some ways, but the Founding Fathers chose to finalize the Constitution in Philidelphia while Jefferson was overseas as the American minister to Paris. John Adams doesn't get the press he deserves because he was far more conservative and orthodox in his Christianity. More historical revisionism at work.
For more The American Colonist's Library.
"Under these circumstances, I can no longer in good conscience continue to cooperate with official Israeli institutions, including universities. I will attend no scientific conferences in Israel, and I will not participate as referee in hiring or promotion decisions by Israeli universities, or in the decisions of Israeli funding agencies. I will continue to collaborate with, and host, Israeli scientific colleagues on an individual basis."
Socialism Today: Survival of the surliest
Both sides, in fact, claim to be the true heirs of Darwin, and put up good arguments to this effect. But their quarrels range far more widely than mere historical legitimacy. They encompass not only arguments about scientific fact - these are in some ways the least important - but disagreements about the role and purpose of science, and personal animosities too. These elements mix unpredictably. There are friendships across parties and there have been quarrels within them. But, despite their fuzziness, the contending parties do clearly exist.
Like the original sociobiologists, their opponents form a well-defined group, held together by bonds of friendship and mutual esteem as much as by ideological agreement. The key opponents of adaptationism were Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose, disparate figures from differing areas of biology. Gould was a palaeontologist, Lewontin, a biologist, and Rose, an Englishman now professor of biology at the Open University, started off as a neurologist who was drawn into the field by the controversies over how much of IQ is inherited. It is relevant that all are Jewish and were more or less Marxist: being Jewish gave them a historical reason to be suspicious of anything reminiscent of a traditional eugenic way of thinking. Being Marxist gave them a strong bias against any theory which saw human biological nature as more important than human culture...
To those of us who are not metaphysically naturalist or agnostic, the mind is not what the brain does and thus free will actually exists and therefore punishment is always just for bad conscious decisions.
Substance is perhaps the greatest mystery of physics. On the one hand we have yet to discover the Higgs field/boson which the Standard Model predicts. Even so, standard matter is only some 5% of the total in the universe. Another 25% of the critical density is dark matter which emits no radiation and a huge 70% is dark energy which causes the universe to accelerate and yet is not detectable in laboratory conditions!
The good news may be that gravity is so weak compared to the other forces (electromagnetism, strong and weak atomic) because it is inter-dimensional. If that is the case – since gravity is a duality of space/time geometry, then the dark energy may be a space/time outdent of negative gravity.
But I digress…
The will – or consciousness or mind – may be the reality in which the geometry itself manifests, thus our sensory perception would be quite deceptive indeed.
The question that should be asked is What is Life? It is a significant question to physicists and mathematicians but doesn’t yet capture the imagination of some of the other disciplines.
[RWP:] I loved Pinker's book, BTW. It's determinedly rational, and in essence highly conservative; it insists social policy must be based on human nature as it is, and not as we would like it to be. It insists that human nature is basically immutable. It affirms the necessity of equality before the law, while rejecting the ludicrous idea that humans are born with equal abilities, traits, virtues, etc.
Hi RWP! IMHO, both these guys are barking up the wrong tree. Whoever is or is not a Marxist in this piece, it is clear to me that both Lewontin and Pinker are full-blown Marxian thinkers. And that is the reason why both are thoroughly unintelligible. (To me at least. :^) Pinker’s problem is especially amusing.)
To demonstrate this proposition: RWP, you seemingly invoke the qualities of determined rationality, conservative essence, and social polity based on human nature “as it is, not as we would like it to be.” Thus you abstract from nature, just as the Marxian thinker does.
What I have noticed about Marxian thinkers (HRC is a great example from the “current events” category), however, is a great attraction to perfectly subjective projections of all kinds, “in the name of objectivity.”
RWP, with all respect, it seems to me you beg the critically key question four times. To which one might object:
(1) What good is rationality at all, if it is “determined?”
(2) If we want to speak of conservative essence, don’t we first have to say what it is we feel is essential to conserve?
(3) Whose definition of “human nature” is in play here, RWP? I have noticed that Marxists of all types and stripes tend to have a very low estimation of human nature in general, of its poor native ability to “take care of itself.” (It takes expert guardians to make sure Joe Sixpack can safely live through his next day; that is, without destroying himself and all innocent bystanders from ignorance and bad decisions….)
I think I can reasonably adduce plenty of evidence from the historical record to demonstrate this phenomenon.
But of course a (non-Marxist) Christian like myself will tend to understand human nature, human society, and humanity itself in a radically differently vein….
(4) BONUS QUESTION: What is this immutability business? That which is immutable is something that does not change in the course of time. Which suggests to me you recognize that an immutable thing is a “timeless” thing. But how does immutability – by whatever definition -- fit into your picture of the Universe?
FREEBIE QUESTION (i.e., for extra points): If you could constitute man differently, or recreate him more to your liking, what would you change? What would “Man” look like, as the result of your “supernatural,” creative intervention into the Project for the Progressive Reconstitution of Human Nature? And, beyond that, what would the order of human society look like, after such tender mercies have been performed?
As Plato said, Society is but Man written in larger letters.
It seems to me the fatal defect of the Marxian thought process is that it fundamentally imagines and posits the world as a “closed system.” Unfortunately for its method, human beings are not closed systems, although they are in the world.
To the extent the Marxian thinker wants to think about human beings at all, individually or collectively (i.e., in social modes larger and more complex than the individual), he’s got the “wrong model.”
If we are to debate these points fruitfully, RWP, whose rules do we play by?
Phaedrus and cornelis, you might want to get some cyber-popcorn too.
Lewontin is a Marxist. Pinker is a quintessentially liberal thinker (in the old sense of liberal); his worldview derives from the enlightenment, and not from Hegel; there is nothing dialectical about his writing. As a matter of fact, I thought he did a magnificant job of making the science intelligible; while his social and political observations suffered only because they seemed to be simple common sense.
What good is rationality at all, if it is “determined?”
If we make a picture of a landscape using a digital camera, the result is determined. That does not mean the picture isn't useful. The universe is complex and chaotic; rationality gives us the ability to make predictions about it.
Let me add that while I'm making an argument for determinism here - I liked Pinkers book and was heavily influenced by some of his arguments - I am personally entirely agnostic on whether the universe is deterministic. On the one hand we have found that large parts of it are indeed deterministic, and have no real scientific evidence of anything that is not; on the other it is clear that we perceive ourselves as volitional consciousnesses, and I would be reluctant to write off that primary human experience as an illusion without very hard evidence to the contrary.
(2) If we want to speak of conservative essence, don’t we first have to say what it is we feel is essential to conserve?
Sure. I'd argue we're conserving the political vision of the enlightenment and of the founders of this country; of course, neither the enlightenment nor the founding fathers were conservative in their time. If you read the Federalist papers, it is clear the three authors were thoroughly convinced of the existence of human nature and of its flaws. The founding fathers were rationalists; many of them were men of science; and several of them were quite willing to question established religion where they felt it contravened reason and science.
Whose definition of “human nature” is in play here, RWP? I have noticed that Marxists of all types and stripes tend to have a very low estimation of human nature in general, of its poor native ability to “take care of itself.” (It takes expert guardians to make sure Joe Sixpack can safely live through his next day; that is, without destroying himself and all innocent bystanders from ignorance and bad decisions….)
Pinker's vision is that of behavioral genetics; we can use the tools of that discipline to discover what aspects of human nature are heritable; and we can use the scientific framework of the theory of evolution to analyse why such behaviors evolved.
I disagree that Marxists have a low vision of human nature; in general they dispute that human nature exists at all, except to a very limited degree. You can't construct a New Soviet Man if most of the behavior of the New Soviet Man is determiend by the same genes that created Bourgeois Kulak Man. Rose's book title 'Not in our Genes' should be a clue here. Gould and Lewontin viciously attacked EO Wilson (another conservative, BTW) for Sociobiology . I was actually at Harvard when this was going on, and being a leftist ideologue at the time, I was (to my shame) on their side, though frankly I wasn't interested enough to do much other than have a few drunken arguments with far smarter people who actually understood what Wilson was saying.
(4) BONUS QUESTION: What is this immutability business? That which is immutable is something that does not change in the course of time. Which suggests to me you recognize that an immutable thing is a “timeless” thing. But how does immutability – by whatever definition -- fit into your picture of the Universe?
Nothing in life is immutable, though genetics changes on a much slower time scale than culture. I suppose I'd regard the values of the fundamental constants as effectively immutable.
FREEBIE QUESTION (i.e., for extra points): If you could constitute man differently, or recreate him more to your liking, what would you change? What would “Man” look like, as the result of your “supernatural,” creative intervention into the Project for the Progressive Reconstitution of Human Nature? And, beyond that, what would the order of human society look like, after such tender mercies have been performed?
Physically; a better spine, and better joints. We haven't completely trancended our quadruped ancestors. Also, we live much longer than our ancestors, and many of our bits wear out in various nasty ways before we reach the fullness of our years. Mentally, I'd make people more intelligent. Intelligence is not just a virtue in itself, but it is correlated with other virtues; intelligent people are less likely to steal and commit violent crimes, and by various measures are likely to have a better developed ethical sense. Unfortunately, at present intelligent people also breed less, so there is little evidence evolution is moving us in this direction.
Society needs to be based on the primary principle of human freedom, which I hope is something that conservatives, libertarians, and those in the middle (like myself) can agree on.
I think Pinker would argue that a sense of justice evolved as an adaptive trait, to induce us to perform a socially necessary task of ensuring that 'crime doesn't pay'. In his book, he does a game-theoretical analysis of crime and punishment, and shows that while it is illogical to deter a criminal after the crime has committed, game theory insists that the crime be punished anyway, to give an inevitability to the consequences of bad behavior. This is what a lot of liberals miss when they argue for rehabilitation rather than punishment. If the criminal behavior is largely the result of genetics, then the prospects for rehabilitation are dim (look at Alberto Rodriguez). One needs instead to weight the cost/benefit relationship on the side of cost.
The propensity for bad behavior IMO is in the same category of people who are born beautiful and those who inherit great wealth. To quote maybe the only sensible thing Jimmy Carter ever said, 'life isn't fair'.
In my defense, my family was lefty, and I was brought up thinking conservatives were either stupid or evil. My dad was an avowed Marxist when I was a kid. He changed because he was stationed with UNIDO in Tanzania, and saw a comparatively 'enlightened' Marxist society (enlightened in that there weren't large numbers of executions) in action. For most people, Marxism in practice is an excellent antidote to Marxism in theory.
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