Blinded by Science

Discovery Institute ^ | 6/2/03 | Wesley J. Smith

[Heartlander]

Blinded by Science


Wesley J. Smith
National Review
June 16, 2003

---

Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95)

This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that he wants to shore up genetic determinism as the key factor in understanding human nature and individual behavior.

Genetic determinism is rational materialism's substitute for the religious notion of predestination; taking the place of God as puppet master are the genes, whose actions and interactions control who we are, what we think, and how we act. This reductionist view received a body blow recently when the mappers of the human genome found that we have only about 30,000 genes. Because of their understanding of human complexity, the scientists were expecting at least 100,000 -- and that means there are probably too few genes for strict genetic determinism to be true.

Ridley, a science writer and former U.S. editor of The Economist, tries to ride to the rescue. In doing so, he adds a twist that he hopes will overcome our apparent genetic paucity: Yes, he says, our genes decide who we are, what we do and think, and even with whom we fall in love. But, he posits, our molecular masters are not rigidly preset when we are born. Rather, they change continually in reaction to our biological and emotional experiences.

Hence, 30,000 are more than enough for a soft genetic determinism to be true -- which means that the battle between those who believe we are the product of our biology (nature) versus those who believe we are the result of our environment (nurture) can now end in a truce in which both sides win. We are indeed controlled by our genes, but they in turn are influenced by our experiences. Ridley says that the mapping of the genome "has indeed changed everything, not by closing the argument or winning the [nature versus nurture] battle for one side or the other, but by enriching it from both ends till they meet in the middle." To Ridley, the core of our true selves isn't soul, mind, or even body in the macro sense; we are, in essence, merely the expression of our genes at any given moment.

If this is true, then my perception of Nature via Nurture as so much nonsense was the only reaction I could have had, given my original genetic programming, as later modified by my every experience and emotion from my conception, through the womb, childhood, high school, college, practicing law, the death of my father, indeed up to and including the reading of this book. If that is so – if I was forced by my gene expression of the moment to perceive this book as I have -- what have we really learned that can be of any benefit to humankind? We are all slaves to chemistry and there is no escape.

Even aside from such broader issues, Ridley does not make a persuasive case. Maybe it is my legal training, but I found his evidence very thin. He doesn't present proofs so much as resort to wild leaps of logic predicated on questionably relevant social science and facile analogies based on a few animal studies. These are simply not strong enough to be the sturdy weight-supporting pillars that his thesis requires to be credible. Let's look at just one example. He cites studies of monogamous prairie voles to suggest that humans only think they fall in love, when, in reality, what we call love is merely the expression of genes resulting in the release of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin. Claiming that he is not going to "start extrapolating anthropomorphically from pair-bonding in voles to love in people," he proceeds to do just that. Citing the vole studies and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- in which a love potion makes Titania fall in love with a man with a donkey's head – Ridley writes:

Who would now wager against me that I could not do something like this to a modern Titania? Admittedly, a drop on the eyelids would not suffice. I would have to give her a general anesthetic while I cannulated her medial amygdala and injected oxytocin into it. I doubt even then that I could make her love a donkey. But I might stand a fair chance of making her feel attracted to the first man she sees upon waking. Would you bet against me?

But shouldn't it take far more than measuring the physical effects of oxytocin on prairie voles to prove that something as complex, maddening, unpredictable, and wonderfully and uniquely human as romantic love can, in reality, be reduced to the mere expression of genes leading to chemical secretions? Not, apparently, to Ridley. "Blindly, automatically, and untaught, we bond with whoever is standing nearest when oxytocin receptors in the medial amygdala get tingled." Gee, if he'd known that, Bill Clinton could have purchased fewer copies of Leaves of Grass.

The most fascinating thing about this book is that Ridley inadvertently makes a splendid argument for intelligent design. At this point, I am sure Ridley's "I am utterly appalled" genes are expressing wildly. He is, after all, a scientific materialist in good standing. Yet, throughout the book, in order to make his arguments understandable, he resorts explicitly to the imagery of the guiding hand. He even gives it a name: the "Genome Organizing Device," or "G.O.D." Ridley claims that the G.O.D is "a skillful chef, whose job is to build a souffle," consisting of the various parts of us and all other life on the planet. Note the language of intentionality in his description of the evolution of the human brain:

To build a brain with instinctive abilities, the Genome Organizing Device lays down separate circuits with suitable internal patterns that allow them to carry out suitable computations, then links them with appropriate inputs from the senses. . . . In the case of the human mind, almost all such instinctive modules are designed to be modified by experience. Some adapt continuously throughout life, some change rapidly with experience then set like cement. A few just develop to their own timetable.

But according to my lay understanding, this violates the theory and philosophy of evolution. The hypothesis of natural selection holds that species origination and change are promoted by genetic mutations. Those mutations that change the organism to make it more likely than its unchanged peers to survive long enough to reproduce are likely to be passed down the generations. Eventually, these genetic alterations spread among the entire species and become universal within its genome. It is through this dynamic evolutionary process of modification, the theory holds, that life fills all available niches in nature. It is also the process, although the details are not known, by which the primates now known as homo sapiens became conscious.

The philosophy of Darwinism posits that this evolutionary process is aimless, unintentional, purposeless, and without rhyme or reason. This means it has no biological goal: It just is. Hence, G.O.D. would not want to "build a brain," develop nature via nurture in species, or do any other thing. Yet, throughout the book, Ridley seems able only to describe what he thinks is going on using the language of intention. Could this be because Ridley's theories would require interactions that are so complex and unlikely that they would seem laughable if described as having come together haphazardly, by mere chance?

So what are we to learn from his insights? In terms of how we live our lives, not much beyond what common sense already tells us: Parents matter and should engage with their children; human teenagers enjoy doing what they are good at, and dislike doing what they are bad at; and so on. That much is harmless; but Ridley's deeper point is subversive of human freedom and individual accountability. He denies the existence of free will: Our actions are not causes but effects, "prespecified by, and run by, genes." Indeed, he claims unequivocally, "There is no 'me' inside my brain, there is only an ever-changing set of brain states, a distillation of history, emotion, instinct, experience, and the influence of other people -- not to mention chance."

Ridley asserts this as if it would be a good thing to learn that the complexity and richness of human experience could accurately be reduced to merely the acts of so many slaves obeying the lash of chemical overseers acting under the direction of our experience-influenced gene owners. "Nature versus nurture is dead," Ridley concludes triumphantly. "Long live nature via nurture."

Sorry. Maybe it's my genes, but I just don't buy it.

[Alamo-Girl]

You are always turning up information for me, I'm tickled to have returned the favor! And I'm much looking forward to more wisdom from Dodds. Hugs!

[js1138]

but the concept of deterministic processes behind QM has been gaining a lot of traction lately, mostly because it both makes a lot of sense if done correctly and really cleans up the theoretical landscape.

How would this be different from hidden variables?

[Heartlander]

You omit a critical third option - surely an omniscient and omnipotent god can create any desired outcome merely by setting the proper initial conditions. The watchmaker builds the watch and winds it up - he doesn't have to supervise every single subsequent tick if he did his job properly in the first place.

I did not wax poetic but I stated as much in item two:

2. if there is a God He never intervened in life's history (i.e. practical atheism, naturalism)

Note:
1. A theistic/deistic evolutionist who rejects ID is a 'practical atheist' or 'naturalist' in regard to the emergence of mankind.
2. We are both quite aware of the irony of 'your' watchmaker analogy ; )

Me:

A 'mindless' process 'without purpose or goal' that is responsible for all life is a philosophy or a religious belief.

It is neither of those things - it is a statement of fact, and it is either true or untrue. Your inability to reconcile that fact with your particular worldview does not, however, have any impact at all upon the truth or untruth of it. The fact that you find the mindlessness of gravity to be philosophically incoherent will not save you when you fall off a ladder, I assure you.

Hmmm… "- it is a statement of fact, and it is either true or untrue."
Let's try this:
An intelligent process with purpose and goal is responsible for all life is a statement of fact, and it is either true or untrue. Your inability to reconcile that fact with your particular worldview does not, however, have any impact at all upon the truth or untruth of it.

You have compared living processes to a non-living process i.e. natural selection and gravity. Tell me what natural law I am following if I 'decide' to climb a latter? How is 'my behavior' following natural laws? It seems, to me at least, that life has freedom within natural laws and that's what makes life… well, life.

This is my problem is with the Ridley hypothesis from the article posted. He is stating that life is 'purely' determined by natural causes. Science has been struggling to explain life this way and Ridley has merely extended it to the Platonic logical extreme.

Here is a good example of how science has failed to explain natural selection with 'purely natural' causes:

"I argue in this paper that any evolutionary theory of life that excludes from the living world a primary non-material or transcendent dimension or guiding presence, is no theory at all. The materialist's claim that natural selection supplies this evolutionary 'arrow' but is entirely material in its action, is a fundamentally dishonest claim. If there is no real purposive agenda that natural selection is pursuing then the expression "natural selection" is blatantly misleading and should be deleted from the evolutionary vocabulary. "

"Or if natural selection is nothing but the summation of a set of unguided processes then the materialist's story telling should only use language that reflects this materialism. Neo-Darwinism is riven through with words and expressions that reflect anything but a mindless materialism. Read any modern Darwinian text and the language of purpose, direction, intentionality coupled with the denial of purpose is common currency. This is, in modern parlance, a crude form of biological spin-doctoring. Here are just a few examples of this unavoidable language of intentionality:"-

struggle for survival
adaptive advantage
competition
reproductive success
variants that cope best with the environment heritable features that best suit the organism for making a living
selective advantage
selfish genes
habitat tracking species stasis

"and we could go on adding endlessly to this telling list. They all convey in different ways the operation of a life- promoting, 'a wanting to survive', principle that belongs exclusively to the living organism, a vitalism the materialist so strongly denies. This linguistic contradiction is well illustrated with Daniel Dennett's reference to Darwin's theory of natural selection as "a get-rich-slow scheme" (p. 50), or "a scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind" (p. 50), but again – but we must ask Dennett - Why the need to get rich? Why the need for design?"

"In this paper it is therefore refreshing to be able to refer to the writings of Alister Hardy, no less a Darwinist, but also one who acknowledges that much more than purely material categories are required to describe the living world."

WHAT IS NATURAL SELECTION? A PLEA FOR CLARIFICATION
-Neil Broom

[BMCDA]

That's a bit too crudely put. As we've discussed before, I think you err when you assign all scientiests to the category of philosophical materialists. You know that there are many religious scientists. Yet here you seem to be denying their existence. I'm begining to fear that I can never persuade you that you are worried about a "scientific problem" that doesn't exist.

Again, you say "only natural causes." You keep slipping the philosophy of naturalism into the mind of every scientist. It's quite true that science tries to discover what natural causes exist. And science has been very good at that. But it's only in the minds of science critics that science utterly denies the existence of the spiritual domain. We've gone around on this before, and you haven't changed your mind, so I guess we'll just have to disagree on this one forever. Too bad, because it causes you to misunderstand my motives, and I can't talk you out of it.

What I have observed is that metaphysical supernaturalists (which I think all creationists are) not only have a problem with metaphysical naturalism but also with methodological naturalism as it is practiced in science. It somehow seems to vex them that scientists don't even bother to look for supernatural explanations and that they don't even address supernaturalism in their papers or scientific literature like in form of a disclaimer that states that the described phenomenon might also have a supernatural cause.
However, I don't know what good such a disclaimer would do. Also, I don't know anybody who claims that supernatural explanations are impossible. Their explanatory value may be null but for each phenomenon you can postulate a dozen supernatural scenarios and that for every religion. And this is the problem: once you allow the supernatural in, everything goes and there is no way to verify the different supernatural scenarios or else they would be considered to be natural.

What I also don't understand is the fact that the statement that our minds may only be an epiphenomenon of our brains is considered to be more abominable than the statement that there must be some supernatural component (call it ectoplasm if you will) to our minds. It seems that even the attempt to seek natural explanations for the human mind is seen as blasphemy because it might lead to a point where we simply "don't need this hypothesis" (to cite Laplace).
But even if there is such a supernatural component to our mind then it somehow interacts with our material brain, in other words our brain is a material device that detects/measures/observes the supernatural. This means that we could (at least in principle or in reality if we are technologically advanced enough) build a device that can detect this supernatural component of our minds and how it interacts with its host brain. So in the end this component would also be considered to be natural just like lightning or earthquakes which were also supernatural some time in the past.

Just my rant for the weekend ;)

[js1138]

I think that free will only makes sense in a naturalistic world, regardless of how created. If God can and does change the rules in the middle of the game, like democrats at election time, then there is no rational basis for making decisions. No need for medicine or medical science, since God will provide miracles either to those who deserve them, or for some inscrutable purpose. In either case, health is in the hands of God. Same for self-defense, same for nearly condition of mankind. If the rules are unknowable, human decisions are of no value.

[js1138]

same for nearly every condition of mankind

[cornelis]

Didn't his last words refer to a feather: "Mon Panache!"?

Yes, that's the one. The French in that production is impeccable, par excellence as they would say. The kind that makes you talk it in your sleep or wake up with the same. Words are winged, Homer used to say.

[Alamo-Girl]

Er, I was eavesdropping again and became quite interested in your reaction concerning the mind.

tortoise is an A.I. expert and he has made relevant comments on another thread which might interest you. The discussion begins at post 1179.

[cornelis]

metaphysical supernaturalists (which I think all creationists are)

Plato inclined to a metaphysical supernaturalism, Socrates a religious supernaturalism. Some creationists in early Christianity do both.

[cornelis]

And this is the problem: once you allow the supernatural in, everything goes and there is no way to verify the different supernatural scenarios or else they would be considered to be natural.

This, in part, was my criticism at #219. One must consider the scenarios of human nature when nature is spiritualized ex facto.

[tortoise]

How would this be different from hidden variables?

"Hidden Variable" is a loaded term, so I can't say much about it without a context. What I am referring to is a bit different than the "hidden variable" concept normally applied to QM. In the case I am talking about there is no "hidden" function per se, rather we are viewing the function directly but are modeling it conceptually with stochastic methods rather than discrete deterministic ones. Actually, this is what usually happens if you model any closed finite state process by sampling its state, so this is not surprising. Unfortunately, our measuring/sampling tools are pretty coarse which affects the resolution of the analysis, though this has been getting better with time. With much higher resolution data we might be able to infer or properly guess the deterministic function, but until then we are stuck with stochastic functions and sampling.

[unspun]

Tommy lives!

[tortoise]

Actually, this is what usually happens if you model any closed finite state process by sampling its state, so this is not surprising.

I would add that the fact it can be modeled this way at all suggests that the function is very, very simple. These type of analysis doesn't scale well at all with function complexity.

[spunkets]

" Also, I don't know anybody who claims that supernatural explanations are impossible."

Only the physical, or natural exists. IOWs if it's real, it exists, as you concluded in your final paragraph. There is no such thing as the supernatural.

"However, I don't know what good such a disclaimer would do."

It's a forced confession by those demanding free advertisement.

[PatrickHenry]

What I have observed is that metaphysical supernaturalists (which I think all creationists are) not only have a problem with metaphysical naturalism but also with methodological naturalism as it is practiced in science. It somehow seems to vex them that scientists don't even bother to look for supernatural explanations and that they don't even address supernaturalism in their papers or scientific literature like in form of a disclaimer that states that the described phenomenon might also have a supernatural cause. However, I don't know what good such a disclaimer would do. Also, I don't know anybody who claims that supernatural explanations are impossible.

I agree. There's a big difference between metaphysical naturalism (the philosophy which denies the existence of spiritual phenomena) and methodological naturalism, which science practices of necessity. I wish more people were aware of this.

The usual "disclaimer-of-atheism" certificate is attached, along with consumer warnings, hazzardous contents label, daily nutritional requirements percentages, equal housing logo, the no-smoking symbol, the recycled ingredients listing, instructions for environmentally sensitive disposal, country of origin disclosure, and affirmative action declaration. Your mileage may vary. Look for the union label. An equal opportunity employer.

[cornelis]

methodological naturalism

Methodological naturalism is historically contigent. This puts pressure on the distinction between natural and unnatural--this was the lesson of the 18th and 19th centuries in philosophy, in the 20th century for physics. In other words science ex facto is possible, but it has no pure fact to work with. The implications for politics and or the philosophy of law are profound.

[unspun]

Methodological naturalism is historically contigent. This puts pressure on the distinction between natural and unnatural--this was the lesson of the 18th and 19th centuries in philosophy, in the 20th century for physics. In other words science ex facto is possible, but it has no pure fact to work with. The implications for politics and or the philosophy of law are profound.

What he said.

tortoise this is alludes to what happens when one goes too far with non-axiomatic reasoning,eh?

And of course, a dash of this post goes well with a good gob of these (you have read them haven't you? Oh. O-k, then.):

THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE WITHOUT DUALISM

Science's Big Query: What Can We Know, and What Can't We?

[Ten Megaton Solution]

The philosophy of Darwinism posits that this evolutionary process is aimless, unintentional, purposeless, and without rhyme or reason. This means it has no biological goal: It just is.

No. Darwinism posits that any random changes that happen to enhance survival are passed down to the next generations, and any random changes the don't enhance survival lead to the death of the indivdual, minimizing the number of chances it has to be passed into descendants.

Selection isn't random, and anyone writing a review that doesn't recognize this shouldn't be writing the review.

[Ten Megaton Solution]

but Charles Darwin's take on it was, to Butler, beyond the pale for he considered it hopelessly irrational -- because it relies entirely on Luck; i.e., random chance.

...

I'm still waiting for Darwinists to explain this paradox to me

No paradox. The only element of chance is the mutation. Selection by definition is not a random process. Those not possessing a trait needed for survival, don't.

[Heartlander]

I think that free will only makes sense in a naturalistic world, regardless of how created.

Let’s look at free will from a naturalistic perspective:

From a naturalistic perspective, there are no causally privileged agents, nothing that causes without being caused in turn. Human beings act the way they do because of the various influences that shape them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or environmental. We do not have the capacity to act outside the causal connections that link us in every respect to the rest of the world. This means we do not have what many people call free will, the ability to cause our behavior without being fully caused in turn.

Further, you deny all/any miracles while still leaving the door open as to how everything was created. I would say that if God created anything, at any point, it would constitute a miracle i.e. Big Bang, etc...

If God can and does change the rules in the middle of the game, like democrats at election time, then there is no rational basis for making decisions. No need for medicine or medical science, since God will provide miracles either to those who deserve them, or for some inscrutable purpose. In either case, health is in the hands of God. Same for self-defense, same for nearly condition of mankind. If the rules are unknowable, human decisions are of no value.

Let me get this straight, if miracles happen then I can go to a bar, get drunk, and God will get me home? There is no longer a need to think because God will take care of it all? God was created for our purpose?