Re: The root of all evil? - Dawkins Documentary

Art Basaran wrote:
Algis Kuliukas wrote:

I do disagree with Dawkins in a number of areas actually


Well good. I do, however, think that he was right about group
selection not being a very common phenomenon, and in fact most claims
of "group selection" can be reconsidered in light of more established
forms of selection, such as natural selection, sexual selection, kin
selection, and frequency dependent selection. The very nature of how
group selection can occur makes it incredibly rare and unlikely for
humans (it would require that one group entirely wipe out another
without survivors and without interbreeding, and thereby pass down to
the race some trait possessed only by their group and not by the
other).

I think if a group of people have a social system which compells its
members to exhibit some cultural phenomenon, so that defections are
rare. Then that social system itself is in competition with other
groups' social systems. Religious memes are examples of these in my
opinion.

Dawkins himself refers to genes are 'selfish cooperators'. If genes can
cooperate, and get selected on the basis of how well they co-operate, I
don't see a problem in it working at higher levels as long as there are
real mechanisms in place to avoid cheating. Most religions have such
mechanisms.

No. Never heard of him. (It's always best to admit your ignorance, I
have found.) And I'm still waiting to see 'Breaking the Spell' in the
book shops.


I recommend both books very much for everyone to read. "Breaking the
Spell" is available on Amazon and other online book sellers, which is
where I got my copy, but have never seen it in a physical book store or
library, at least yet. Dennet actually quote some sections of the
William James book; James was one of the most famous psychologists in
late 19th/early 20th century America, and one of the most qualified
researchers in any field in fact. But, Dennet concedes that what he
approached with his book was (primarily American) organized religion,
whereas James, admittedly selectively, counted only the positive or
negative psychological experiences associated with 'religion' and
discounted the institutions, as he felt that the institutions were
nearly entirely or entirely detrimental to true religion (this is the
idea of "natural religion"), which idea I agree with. Dennet does make
the case that this selective definition of religion as a means to
achieve desirable psychological states does not capture "religion" as
most people apply it in their lives, since most "religious" people do
consider their institutions important to their faith, so it behooves
one to try to understand the group side of the issue as well. Anyways,
read both is the best advice I can give.

I think it's valid to distinguish between them but one clearly feeds
off the other.

I'll add them to me list, thanks.

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. The 'mystery' I referred to was
what the biochemical nature of life itself and how it might have begun.
Others might well have claimed to have answered this 'mystery' before
but I think that this was really only possible only once the digital,
replicable nature of DNA was fully understood. Scientists before
Dawkins understood this, but in 'The Selfish Gene' Dawkins explained it
to me, for the first time, in a way that made it clear and obvious.
Once we had replicators, we had the start of life. What seemed
impossibly complicated to me, suddenly became easy peasy. Just like
Darwin's explanation for natural selection, a simple concept was
revealed with very powerful consequences.

Therefore anyone claiming to have understood what life was 'all about'
before 1953 really couldn't have been actually right. Of course, it is
possible that other discoveries will be made that render Crick &
Watson's discoveries obsolete, but it would seem increasingly unlikely.
Slight refinements to the model will inevitably happen, adding more
complexity, but the fundamental understanding that life is basically
based on replicator molecules, will surely now stand the test of time.

Before 1953 we didn't have the mechanistic knowledge to understand how
it works, before 1872 we didn't even have a good general concept of
what it was that might be working. Therefore all religious and
philosophical accounts that predate these landmarks just didn't have
all the information at their disposal to make a good guess at what life
was all about. They were whistling in the wind.


Well, biochemically yes, I agree the mystery of 'life' (organic life)
is explained by biochemical science, and that all religious and
philosophical accounts of life should take this knowledge into account,
otherwise to some degree at least they are 'whistling in the wind'.

If you think that, I'm a bit puzzled as to what room is left for any
other force working.

however, many ideas about the meaning or importance of life have stood
fairly well the test of time, at least IMO; reading Gandhi, Buddha,
Jesus, Lao Tzu, or any of the great thinkers on these matters, it is
still possible to learn much about the inner nature of humanity.
Buddha's ideas were so advanced in fact, that today there are strong
intersections between Buddhist philosophy and the scientific study of
mind and consciousness. And yes, I know none of these men except
Gandhi may have factually existed, but whoever wrote these texts knew
some things about the substance of human life that even science itself
has not been able to exceed the wisdom of.

Whatever insight into humanity these religions may have worked out,
without understanding evolution and the way life works, they were
always going to be incomplete. If now, scientists can synthesise our
biological understanding of life with some of these ancient ideas, by
putting them into a modern context, then that is clearly a helpful
thing.

Whatever problems are left unsolved - and new questions are raised - by
claiming the 'big bang solves it' - and I doubt anyone really thinks
that - they are dwarfed a million fold by the claim 'it was a god that
did it'.

Certainly, and I have never gone in for "god did it" explanations, but
if it were proven that some kind of agency or agencies were involved in
the operation of at least some parts of the universe, we would then
have to scientifically study and explain these agencies, so even if
'god did it' that could never be the end of the story unless, in fact,
'god' were truly supernatural and fundamentally unknowable. I cannot
deny this latter possibility, but at the same token I cannot believe in
a god that would make some things 'supernatural' and 'unknowable'; it
is human nature not to accept the unknown as unknowable, at least not
when the means exist to make it knowable.

I think I agree with that too.

Well good for you. I was, of course, not trying to tar everyone who is
in the slightest way religious with this brush. The trends I was
thinking of are ones like: The number of people in the world who would
say they are Islamic is probably at an all time high, and the ones who
other people might label as Islamic fundamentalists are certainly at an
all time high. In the USA, it appears form the outside, that religious
fervour is also at an all time high. Trends like these are not very
progressive, I think.

Those trends are very negative indeed, and I hope as much as you do
that the trends will become more progressive; but I imagine a future
where there are people of all faiths and of course non-faiths (atheism,
etc...) in the world, all respecting each other, subjecting their own
beliefs and institutions to constant scrutiny and evaluation,
encouraging the study of science and all religions, philosophies, and
ways of life, and with science of course allowed to explore and explain
the universe uninhibited by preconceived religious and ideological
ideas.

I do not imagine an "atheist" future in which any and all
religious beliefs and practices and ideas have been 'abandoned', though
I should have no difficult i think should the population of atheists
grow considerably

Me too, but I suspect that the more enlightened people are the more
they will reject the traditional religions. This is not to say they
will not have 'religion', perhaps something more scientifically
palatable will take the place of the mind numbingly dogmatic ones of
today.

(i don't mind atheists as long as they don't try to
lay their beliefs off on me, which few try to do but at least some I
have met have been as guilty of trying to convert others as any
door-to-door Jehovah's Witness) .

I've never met anyone like that, but have had scores of 'God Squads'
knocking on my door trying to save my soul. Considering the
overwhelmingn mass of religious propaganda is being and has been dished
out daily through the media of most countries, I think it only fair
that atheists get some opportunity to try to influence gullible people
to think for themselves.

Peaceful coexistence as well as open
scrutiny and debate of all ideas is, I think, the way the future should
be, and I celebrate the diversity of ideas and beliefs and hope that
nothing, not even science, will ever reduce us to homogeneity.

Atheism is not against diversity of ideas. It is for free thinking.

I don't really see a great deal to celebrate when one bunch of
religious fanatics declares war on another bunch of religious fanatics
because they disagree about the interpretation of some holy text
writtenm thousands of years ago. Diversity is all very well, but left
to its own divices, it leads to schisms and conflict. That is surely
one lesson we must learn from history. A real celebration would be
warranted, I think, if everyone in the world realised that mass
delusions about gods have caused more harm than good. Then everyone
could learn, with curiosity and disbelief, about the nonsense their
ancestors were taught and believed for thousands of years.

I think you are exaggerating Dawkins' view there. I think the meme is a
very useful concept and it doubtless has some manifestations in
reality. Religions have always seemed to me to be rather good examples
of complex memetic systems.

People do have the unique ability to override their insticts and any
memes that might have infected their brains - but I think it is equally
false to pretend that all people actually do so at all times. Clearly,
once again, the truth lies in between.

Certainly the truth lies in-between; as I have said before, any idea
can become "virus like". But I prefer to look at it the way Dennet
does: parasitical is one manner in which a meme can operate, but it can
also be mutual, providing a benefit to the minds in which it exists.
We should not look so much at the idea itself (except for a grossly bad
idea like "some races are innately inferior to others"), we should look
at the output of that meme in terms of behavior, and try not to judge
all individuals but what the actions even of a majority within a group
may do.

Ok but I don't see much of a benefit from the major religions to
humanity. Most of their effects have been negative, in my view.

Individuals might benefit (priests with more power and esteme, the
congregation from delusions of being 'at peace' etc) but the one that
benefits most is the religion itself. That's kind of the point. Like
DNA, it is neither good nor bad. It just "is". If a combination of
nucleotides just happens to code for a gene which is useful to the
individuals in which it lies, it will proliferate. In terms of
religious memes, the more people believe it, the more people will be
taught it.. and so on. Describing it "like a virus" might not sound
nice, but it is, I think, not far from the truth,

See, I don't believe a religion can benefit, meme or no I refuse to
accept the idea that the benefit of religion can be ascribed to the
religion itself, and I assert that we must ALWAYS look at which
INDIVIDUALS benefit the most, and not imagine that an abstract concept
like a religion can "benefit"; for that matter, following your logic,
math itself benefits more from people learning math than the people
benefit from it, but I'm sorry, that logic does not follow.

It follows if you accept the concept of memetic evolution. For modern
Darwinists it is not dificult to think in terms of 'the selfish gene:'
That the individual which transports genes from one generation to the
other is really nothing more than a vessel being shaped by those same
genes, simply to carry out their replication. It is the only way to
understand biology at the lower levels - viruses through to lower
animals. For animals which are sentient beings, and humans clearly
would qualify there appear to be, other, 'higher' levels, of natural
selection operating on top of those 'lower' levels, providing the means
for robotic obedience to the 'will of the genes' to be overriden. But
even these behavioural elements are, themselves, coded into the genome
in gene units, just like everything else is. So, even such behaviours
are favouring the genes that made them possible.

In the same way, even if religions do benefit people (and I'm not
really convinced how they do), their replication is the ultimate
benefactor. If the religion is popular, whether it be because it makes
people happier or because it is so intolerant of apostacy that no-one
dare leave it, then the religion will spread and 'benefit' as a result.

It is not a question of whether maths benefits more than the people who
use it, but whether maths, as a meme, 'benefits' from people learning
it and teaching it. Clearly it does.

Humans
benefit from learning math and using it, math itself does not and
cannot benefit, and the same with religion, some people benefit from
learning and using it, but religion itself being only an abstraction, a
'meme', cannot truly benefit from it.

It depends what you mean by 'benefit', surely. If we mean it in human
terms, then clearly maths , religion or any other meme cannot benefit
from anything. But if we mean it in purely numeric terms, as one would
in population genetics, then the more a meme is copied the more it
'benefits'.

Ideas exist for our benefit, not
their own, even though the process of generation, retaining, and
modifying ideas may follow a course very similar to evolution. While I
know that thinking in terms of "what benefits the meme" makes a lot of
sense, just as it makes a lot of sense to think of "what benefits the
gene", but in any realistic sense these things can only BENEFIT by
benefitting others, and it would take a hell of a lot to convince me
that that was not the case

Memetic 'benefit' just means 'copied more'.

From the point of a religious meme it does not know, or care. The
Christian meme was replicated very successfully in the last 2,000 years
at the expense of a lot of people's well being. Same with Islam. The
disturbing thing is that the most aggresive and intolerant religions
appearv to be the ones which seem to be the most successful and gaining
most converts and losing fewest.

Very true that ideas do not care how they spread. For that matter
neither do genes or psychological mechnaisms, which is why rape exists,
but should we compare all genes and psychological mechanisms with those
which promote a greater likelihood of rape? I think not! We can work
to constrain those things which our humanity tells us are wrong, even
if differential reproduction may favor these 'wrong' things at times.
I fully support trying to eliminate these dangerous memes which have
survived in certain religious ideologies long after they were obsolete,
but let us not place the fault on 'religion', just on some of those
ideas which have survived in some religions.

If we understand those mechanisms better we can better work to
constrain them, that's all I'm saying.

... I expect much of the 'mystery' surrounding sociology, psychology
and the emotional aspects of humanity will ultimately have Darwinian
explanations too. That is not to deny that human spirit exists or that
there is something innate that makes people feel good in helping others
etc. Things that might be broadly labelled spiritualist today.


I don't argue there as well, but I also don't think we should deny that
evolution has created, in the human mind, something that is "more than
the sum of its parts", which is capable of more than just surviving in
some primitive African grassland.

Or African wetland, or coastal niches... (but let's not get into that
here!)

As to something 'innate' which makes
us feel good helping others, even this must surely be evolved, and
there is absolutely no reason why absolute values should not have
evolved, if possessing absolute values (i.e. helping others is innately
good) proved better for our ancestors than a
moral-relativism-free-for-all (i.e. redefining morals whenever and for
whatever purpose desired). There is no need to search for "the
dividing line" between spirituality and our evolved psychologies, in my
opinion; I do believe we have spirits, but do not doubt that all of our
behaviors must still be explainable in terms of our adapted biologies
and psychologies, which in itself impresses me that our evolution drove
us to a state of emergence, where we were no longer bound by the very
factors in nature which shaped us. This ability to "transcend", "rise
above", "overcome", etc... our limitations is, no doubt, one of the
very reasons why we have a spiritual nature as a species.

I agree with all of that. If you think that I am left puzzled as to why
we started arguing in the first place!

Yes humans have something different from the apes. How that somthing
evolved is a very interesting, perhaps the most interesting, problem
left to be solved. But I think it is soluble and I think, ultimately.
it will be solved using good old cranes, and not sky hooks.

Algis Kuliukas

Not exactly sure what I get by the "crane/sky hook" metaphor. Do you
mean you think that our evolution will be explainable by methods
already on hand? If so, I tend to agree.

It was Dan Dennet's analogy in 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea'. Creationists
posit mysterious 'hooks in the sky' to lift us up from the mud to
higher things, Darwinists assume that complexity evolved from
simplicity, from the ground up. Hence Cranes.

But biological evolution,
and even psychological evolution, is an area which we are well capable
of researching and reasoning about, hence why it is one of the best
established areas of scientific research. Not everything that we study
has been or will be so easy to study as biology and psychology, and as
we reach for explanations for everything that exists, I have no doubt
that we will continue to find the bigger picture of our reality is an
even greater mystery than either Priests or Scientists can imagine it
to be (because imagination can stretch only so far beyond current
domains of knowledge before breaking down).

I can't agree with that distinction. Who, if not scientists, do you
think will be looking to find the bigger picture of reality?

I have no disagreement in
principle with the idea that "everything is explainable naturally", but
in practice i doubt if we WILL ever explain everything through science,
or whether it is even possible for our primitive form of being to
achieve such an universal and perhaps even superuniversal goal (since
holding all the information of the universe in an area less than the
universe itself seems, logically, absurd and impossible; the paradox of
universal localization as it has been called, and it applies even more
so if our universe be not the only place that exists).

Well, in the sense that science really cannot prove anything (and I
really think that is true) then I agree. But there is a 'common sense'
level at which normal rational people accept 'laws' of science as
truths - at such levels there is a great deal of hope that one day
humans will understand most of these aspects which are currently still
rather mysterious and consequently evoke tendancies towards
supernatural explanations at the moment.

Good luck.

Algis Kuliukas

.

Relevant Pages

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