The Evolution of Morality

The NYT has an interesting article about a theory that I’ve always thought to be true (but now has, you know, evidence).  Actually, I would say my opinion was heavily swayed by Howard Bloom’s book, The Lucifer Principle.

What we think of as good and evil – the basis for the modern understanding of morality – is for a large part decided by natural selection.  There are many reasons why we don’t go around killing each other, not the least of which is that what’s good for the group is generally good for the individual.   This is not because God said so, but because we have learned that the group can help us, protect us – and we should therefore protect it.  Mr. Bloom goes into much greater detail and cites countless scientific studies to back up his claim that what we would call good and evil are in fact the by-products of some evolved trait.  I highly recommend the book.

This also goes to dispute the claim that mankind needs religion to act morally.  We have evolved to who we are because it works – it seems a blatantly obvious thing to say, but it is something that many people (because of their taught reverence for religion) have never considered.

The Death of a President

To my surprise, us Americans actually get the chance to see this movie – I thought for sure that a certain you know who would not allow it – probably classify it as an enemy combatant or something.

 An unknown gunman assassinates George W. Bush. A couple of years later, an investigative documentary is made. It features all the people involved that fateful day: the protestors outside a Chicago hotel; the suspects in the shooting and their families; the Secret Service men who failed to protect their charge; the press; and an array of experts, desperately seeking meaning in this horrible act of violence. We learn, agonizingly, what happened to America after the death of a president.

For those locals among us, it is playing at Tivoli.  For showtimes regardless of your location, follow this link.

The Evolution of Religion

Richard Dawkins discusses applying Darwinism to religion.  He says that religion is not a product of natural selection but a by-product.  He gives the example of a moth who flies into the candle flame and burns to a crisp.  We could ask, ‘why did the moth evolve to commit suicide?  What’s the benefit?’  A closer look at the situation reveals that the moth did not evolve to commit suicide.  The countless moth deaths are a by-product of an evolved trait.  Moths use light from stars and the moon to navigate at night.  If they keep the light from the moon at a 30 degree angle in their eye, they will fly straight.  A candle on the other hand (because of its proximity) forces them into a spiral that inevitably ends in their premature demise.

In this way, Dawkins asserts that religion is not the result of a process of natural selection, but a side effect (those are my words, not his).  He suggests that natural selection has made it so that young children take their elders seriously.  This is because a lot of what humans do is build on the experiences of those that came before us.  As a child you were probably told the iron was hot – and so you didn’t touch it.  You may also have been told that ‘god loves you’.  Since the child brain is equipped so that it learns things from its parents (like not to touch the iron) it is unable to distinguish between useful advice and bullshit.  Hence, religion is a by-product of our intuitive sense to listen to our parents.

 Dawkins sees this as one of many possible explanations for his ‘religion as by-product theory’.  The theory is astounding, the explanation is fascinating. 

But why, you ask, must religion be a by-product?  Why can’t it be a product?  Simply enough, biologically speaking, it has no use.  In fact it is even detrimental at times.  Think of all the time you waste performing ceremonies – valuable time you might use to gather food.  Not to mention martyrs. 

Additionally, Paul Bloom suggests that, “we are innately predisposed to be creationists.”  A child’s mind doesn’t grasp the big picture (a skill which results from intellectual and scientific thinking).  A child assigns a purpose to everything, for example  ‘clouds are for raining’ and ‘pointy rocks are so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy’.  This is called teleology.  One can easily see that someone who suffers from teleology would be easily disposed to religion. 

We are prone to take what is called the intentional stance.  This is something that has arisen because it has the ability to save our lives.  It’s a shortcut to assessing something’s danger.  Instead of looking at a tiger and analyzing what it is capable of doing with its sharp claws and teeth and then deciding on an appropriate course of action, we look at the intention of the tiger.  Its intention is to eat us, so we flee immediately, without having to analyze all the parts individually.  (Dawkins goes through the other orders of stances, physical stance and design stance)

Because we are predisposed to assign intention to objects, we also sometimes find it hard to not look for agents behind things.  An icicle falls from the eve of a house and hits you on the head.  Probably your first instinct is to get mad at the icicle.  The icicle wasn’t acting intentionally, and you know that, but it doesn’t stop you from placing blame.   

These are sort of bastardized, lazy, half-assed explanations of Dawkins’ eloquent text.  But here’s my point –

When speaking of religion, not any specific religion, but religion as a concept – theists like to point out that every society has made a religion, so that it must be something that we need, it must fill some hole in our culture. 

But when you consider the evolutionary forces at work – it is easy to see that perhaps religion is nothing but a by-product of things that have helped us survive as a species.  There is no spiritual hole that we need to find a plug to.  All we are is victims of our own evolutionary waste.

When one understands that religion is not divine in origin, but can be explained using the same theory that explains why we have opposable thumbs – it is far easier to see just how ridiculous individual religions are.

In any case, read the book, it’s better at this than me.

Edgy Eft

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) was released today and it has some great upgrades over Dapper Drake.  You can download it here.

 For those of you not in-the-know, Ubuntu is an operating system for human beings (so they say).  In other words, it is a FREE alternative to Windows.  If you’re used to windows it takes a little getting used to, but if you’re willing to put in the time to understand the differences, I’ve found Ubuntu to be great.

NJ Courts: Same-sex couples should be allowed to marry!

The NJ Courts today ruled that,

same-sex couples are entitled to “the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes.”

In your face, bigotry!  The court leaves it to the legislature whether these unions would actually be called ‘marriages’ but it gives them six months to enact enabling legislation.  There were some that were unhappy with the ruling however,

Steven Goldstein, the chairman of the gay-rights group Garden State Equality, said the court’s decision was disappointing.

“Those who would view today’s ruling as a victory for same sex couples are dead wrong,” he said. “Half-steps short of marriage — like New Jersey’s domestic-partnership law and also civil union laws — don’t work in the real world.”

I don’t know if I feel the same way.  I don’t know if I understand what the point of not calling them ‘marriages’ is – if it is the exact same thing does it really matter what it is called?  I’m not convinced that it does.  If there is no difference – I’m sure it will upset the bigots just as much as it would if it were called marriage.

Anyway, I view this ruling as a step in the right direction.  Here’s a link to the NYT article.

Human Rights, Schmewman Rights

BoingBoing had a couple of interesting tidbits:

Wilkerson, Powell’s old chief of staff, believes that the correct number of victims in secret Bush prisons is 35,000, only %5 of which “may” have to do with terrorism. Link.

If this is true – well, I don’t even know what to say if it is true.  Innocent until proven guilty is, evidently, an old wive’s tale.  They don’t even have the chance to prove their innocence since habeus corpus was defenestrated (thrown out the proverbial window).  The United States should not be above the law.  The military commissions act of 2006 ensures that our illegal behavior is legal in our country – but it can not change the fact that a lot of what we do is illegal under international law.  I wish someone would hold us accountable – because it is obvious that we are not holding ourselves to account.  Oh, and speaking of gross human rights violations –

Here is a link to a blog which posts video of human rights violations.

Firefox 2.0

Firefox 2.0 is now available for download.

It’s free, it’s user friendly, and it’s a hell of a lot better than Internet Explorer.

For Ubuntu users, wait a couple days and the new release of Ubuntu will be available which will come standard with firefox 2.0 – it will automatically update at that time.

This Post has been Censored

Reporters Without Borders has published their 2006 Worldwide Press Freedom Index.  The results are both interesting and disturbing.  Finland ranked the highest in press freedom, followed by Iceland, Ireland, The Netherlands, and Czech Republic.  The bottom of the list included Burma, Cuba, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea. 

The United States, Japan, and France have all fallen since the firstIndex in 2002 (the US was then number 17).  We should all be embarrassed at the rank of the US.  You can see the Index and more analysis here.

And thanks to Stran_ger of Wall of Speech for bringing this to our attention.  I recommend Wall of Speech – very interesting reading and I am now a contributor!

The Progress in Iraq

Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey held a press conference in Baghdad that for a time, was seen by nobody.  That’s right – a power outage shut the whole thing down for a time.

And this was taking place inside the Green Zone.  Wow.  The US has done a great job in Iraq – I’m not sure with what, but if Bush says it, it must be true.  This article points out that,

Residents now receive an average of just 2.4 hours per day, compared to 16-24 hours before the U.S. invasion.

Get Out While the Gett’ns Good

With every passing day the Bush administration is in power, I come that much closer to buying this book.

 It’s a guide to becoming an expatriot.

Violence and the Death of Analytical Thinking

In Darfur, rebels have broken the cease fire and have started attacking the country’s military.  Link to NYT article.

With the two sides apparently bent on all-out war, and millions of displaced people and refugees caught in the middle, the people of Darfur and the aid workers who have been trying to help them await the next, seemingly inevitable onslaught.

With the inevitable bloodshed that will likely result from this – it is comforting to know that there are still places in the world which show hope, where democracy has taken root and is flourishing, where diplomacy is favored over violence – like Iraq for example.  Oh, wait.

The United States and its allies have yet to find a conflict that it can step into and ‘fix’.  Those time when peace is temporarily declared, tensions are high between the two groups, and it is only a matter of time before hostilities begin anew. 

Is there anything you can say or do to dissuade people from killing each other, when they’re hell-bent on killing each other?  I don’t know if there is.  Like most religious people, you can’t win an argument with someone who has already thrown away reason.  This kind of emotional thinking – where one abandons logical reasoning in favor of some predetermined ‘truth’ is the greatest propagator of violence in the world. 

People are too easily swayed by emotional arguments.  Perhaps this is because religion isn’t held to the same standards of logical reasoning as most other ideas.  Because of this, people are less weary about emotional or spiritual arguments.  We’re already used to accepting them without checking the facts.

Now I’m not blaming religion for all the violence in the world (only most of it).  I’m saying that violence is perhaps sometimes a result of the same kind of sloppy thinking that religions encourage.

Jesus Camp – Ignorance is Bliss

I went to see Jesus Camp yesterday.  It reminded me of a discussion I had with a theist once who maintained that it wasn’t fair that I kept picking on the Evangelicals because they were not a fair representative of Christianity.  Jesus Camp made me feel the same way – it shows how backwards and terrifying these people really are.   It’s easy to think of them as extremists – and though their views are extreme,  they’re hardly the minority.  There’s an estimated 40 million of them in the United states – and Evangelicalism is the fastest growing religion in the world.  This is not the fringe element – and they are a fair representation of Christianity in America.  That scares me.

The film also makes you realize how unapologetically illogical these people are.  At one point a youth minister is talking to a radio talk show host.  The host accuses her of indoctrinating children.  She responds that yes, she is indoctrinating them, but it is ok because she is indoctrinating them with the truth.

I think that with a person like this, you can never talk them out of their belief in god.  Their mindset is that they know the truth – so anything contradictory is unquestionably not the truth, no matter how much ‘evidence’ there is that says it is.  You can not win an argument with someone who as a direct result of their faith has rejected rationality.

These children reminded me of parrots, repeating what their guardians spend hours teaching them.  At the beginning of the film a minister is preaching to a group of children and their parents.  She asks how many of them believe that god can do anything.  Cut to shot of mother raising the hand of her toddler, and making sure her 9 year old is raising his.  Levi, a boy featured predominantly in the film, claims he was saved at 5 years old because he ‘wanted more’.

I’ve always thought that one of the most important parts of education is the process.  I.e. discovering how  things work, not just being told that they do.  This is one of the benefits of the natural world and its laws.  You can work things out.  You can go from a state of ignorance to a state of understanding.

With this kind of religion there is no understanding.  There is no way to work-out why homosexuality is evil – it just is.  Anything becomes true if you follow it with the words: because God said so.

And I guess this is one place of similarity between Evangelicals and their toned-down religious counterparts.  If you are religious you by necessity believe in the existence of ‘god’ and believe that he has dictated certain truths.  This means that the bible, Koran, Torah, book of the dead, whatever – has something true in it.  You didn’t invent your religion – you learned it via tradition more than likely.  What I’m getting at is that I find it somewhat disturbing that people can hold something to be true and just have faith that it is.  If religious people are really that gullible, I should open an elephant repellent store – I’d make millions.  God said don’t eat pork.  God said to stone your wife to death if she cheats on you.  Can’t argue – God said it.  It is true.

Fools and Fanatics

Quote of the day:

 The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are so full of doubt.

—Bertrand Russell

The Monkey Files: Darwin Online

Cambridge University is publishing the complete works of one Charles Darwin on-line, and making them freely accessible.  I don’t know who this Charles Darwin character is but he looks like a cross between Santa Claus and Death (see picture below).  I once read about a Darwin character who had the audacity to claim that ‘natural selection’ was responsible for mankind – he claimed that we came from monkeys!  No god I know would allow such a thing.  Monkeys . . .

Link to BBC News.

Because it’s dull you twit, it’ll hurt more!

Here are the results from a BBC poll about torture – and if people think it is sometimes permissible. Kind of scary. In the US for example, apparently 36% of people think it is OK if you torture them to some degree. Link to story.