Wow it has been a chaotic last 2 months!  This post has been in the back of my mind since I got back from my trip and that was a long time ago – a lot longer than I thought actually!

In this post I want to address one of the common arguments about morality against the atheistic position.

One common argument against an atheistic position is the idea that without some external source of moral judgements there should be no morality.  It is not unheard of for people to say they would kill if it wasn’t for religion but more relevantly theists often claim that without some external set of rules, there shouldn’t be any reason not to murder (or replace murder with any “bad” thing you like).

There is a significant problem with this which is that it assumes murder is the default action and that not doing it is somehow actively moral.  I don’t think this notion of default actions can be justified and this takes down the entire argument in one sweep. 

Murdering someone is a deliberate action which requires a decision.  In any society that we know of, murdering another member of that society for no reason has generally been frowned on so it is not a free action either – to murder someone is to deliberately accept the risk of consequences.  The action also takes effort – most people don’t just sit idly by while you try and murder them – so it isn’t something you could ever do lightly even divorced from moral decision making.

Now we know murders do happen so now we need to ask what it would take to overcome these difficulties and actually do it.  Obviously it requires that something else outweighs the perceived consequences of the murder.  That something else could be some sort of emotional push or it could be an external pressure.  Atheists are often accused of not believing in anything so it would seem counterproductive to then claim they are more likely to murder. 

In fact it is this that sits behind Weinberg’s more forceful phrasing of the idea:

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.

Religious people, all else being equal, are surely more likely to murder than atheists for no other reason than they have additional motivations that could potentially push them over the barriers to murder that atheists do not have.   I say this not as a slight against religion but as an point against the moral argument put forward at the start of this post.

In order for the original argument to stand theists need to somehow demonstrate that, all else being equal, atheists have more motivation to murder than theists.  I don’t think this can be done but I think a small case can be made that the exact opposite is true.

Hi all

In a couple of weeks (2nd-6th September) I am heading to Hamilton and/or Auckland for 5-6 days and haven’t really planned anything so if anyone in that part of the world wants to catch up for a coffee or beer then let me know!

In other news I have a few half written posts I must get around to finishing which might be next weeks job!

Cheers
Ian

Jonathan on another blog said:

I am also intrigued to find out what you think the limits of science are, and indeed, how you would even define science. If you have some time and inclination, please share. I am genuinely interested in your view on this.

Since this is an issue which I think is very important, I’m happy to oblige.  What follows is my personal view of what science is and what its limits are.

What is science?

There are many different views of just what exactly science is around the world.  Some people hold that science is reductionism, the art of shrinking things to smaller and smaller elements until you get to a complete view of something.  Others hold that science is the process of inducing theory from observation.  Still others hold that science is the systematic evaluation of knowledge. 

It seems to me there are two different realms for science.  The first is a practical, real world description of the act of doing science.  This includes all the elements of science that a cliche’d into the common view such as experimentation, theories, hypotheses, and so forth.  However it also includes all the elements of politics, funding, personal rivalries and so forth are a very real part of science along with the thinking, experimenting and testing.  This form of science is best thought of as an activity, pastime or job.

However there is another place that science fits in as well which is as a principle of discovery.  Despite the illusion of certainty that is created by society, when we are born we know very little about the world around us.  We find ourselves walking around a spectacular universe with a very narrow view of what is happening and with little or no understanding of how anything works. 

Therefore in my opinion science is the act of matching explanations to observations. 

What is an observation?  Roughly speaking an observation is the claim by an individual that they experienced a certain pattern of behaviour in something.  Now a single observation by a single individual is of limited value but a sequence of similar observations by different individuals becomes useful.  If only one person ever observed something falling and only once then gravity would never have been discovered. 

What is an explanation?  When you get right down to it, explanations are really answers to the question “what patterns are there in observations?”.  They are not answers to “why” questions or even really how questions.  Nowhere is this clearer (to me at least) than in thermodynamics where this mystical quantity of energy is often touted as a reason why things happen.  This is not the case: energy is merely a description of a pattern of observation that has been derived from other patterns of observations.  Energy is what you get when you multiply mass by distance squared and then divide by time squared.  Nothing more and nothing less. 

Based on these definitions it is easy to see that experimentation is the act of testing an explanation to see if it produces the expected observations.

Haven’t you left out the scientific method?

I think the scientific method is actually a wonderful example of science at work.  We have observed a pattern where explanations derived using this particular method seem to be more likely to produce good matches between observation and explanation than explanations derived through other methods.  Over time this method has been refined as patterns of improvement in effectiveness have been observed through following the method.  In other words the method itself is not science but rather an excellent procedure for doing science.  It is not the only one but it works very well.

What are the limits of science?

Since my definition of science is very simple there are only three places that it can have limits. 

Firstly science is limited to what we can observe.  Now it is important to realise this does not automatically limit science to ”the 5 senses only” – anything we experience is an observation so if there is a 6th or 7th or 28th way of sensing things then they count too.  However if no-one observes it somehow then science can’t really contribute.  However I do not really see how anything else can do more than science here – the unobserved necessarily remains a mystery. 

Secondly science is limited to where there are patterns.  If there are truly uncaused entirely random events out there then our ability to explain things goes out the window.  However again I do not see how anything else can contribute here either.  If something actually is without any pattern then we can’t do anything about it.

Finally science is limited to our ability to come up with explanations that match the observations.  It is entirely feasible that there are explanations that are simply beyond our ability to comprehend or that we are simply not neurologically wired to figure out.  Yet again if this is the case then I do not see how anything else can help either.

These are the limits to science, but also the limits to cognition in general.  They are, in my opinion, the only limits to science.

What about religion and spiritualism?

A common claim is that there are things out there which science cannot explain but that other modes of discourse can.  I think this is utterly fallacious.

Let us take the rather heavy example of morality where many religious people argue that science cannot explain absolute morals.  If you set aside the fact that I believe there is no such thing, this is wrong for another very important reason:  the very act of recognising that people all seem to follow a universal morality is actually doing science!  You cannot avoid the fact that this is a pattern matched to observations.  It doesn’t matter what the pattern is or what the observation is. 

The same thing applies to ghosts, revelations, and the rest of it.  They are all observations of one form or another.  What are the patterns in them?  How can we link them to other observations?  These are the questions of science.

Final Remarks

Science is not the way it is today via assumptions made at its inception.  Rather it is the way it is because it matches itself to the patterns in what we observe around us.  Materialism and determinism (for example) appear to the casual observer to be inherent assumptions from which science springs but I think this has it backwards.  Materialism and determinism are simply assumptions from which a pattern of more effective explanations has been observed over time and so have been adopted as “good practice”.  If, as the quantum revolution seems to be suggesting, things like determinism are not that solid a ground to work with then we will soon see it dropped as a basis for good practice in favour of a better pattern. 

Finally the remarkable thing about science is that it has created a wonderful positive feedback loop.  By matching explanations to observations we have also managed to find better ways of obtaining observations, which then lets us get better observations, which reveal more accurate patterns, and so forth.  In my opinion it is this feedback loop that explains why our planet took well over 4 billions years to develop life and under 10,000 years to get to where we are today.

Given the growing trend of educational and otherwise interesting videos on youtube I figured I’d have a go at it to see what I could do after I discovered Windows Movie Maker was included with windows. 

I was curious how easy it was to make a video and upload it to youtube and have had this idea floating around my mind based on a song by Pain of Salvation called Deus Nova where they count up human population since 10,000 BC.

There is no particular point to this video other than to make a video but what is the point of a blog if you can’t show off your creations? Actually I think it came out quite well in the end given how little effort it took but anyway here it is:

Welcome to my relatively direction-less rant about “why”, definitions and language in general…

Why?

There are two uses of the word and they are quite distinct from each other.  Unfortunately in the delightfully woolly way that the English language works they are frequently conflated and this causes problems.

The first use is asking how something works or came to be as it is.  For example asking “why is the sky blue?” in this sense could be reasonably answered by discussing light wavelengths and nitrogen gas. 

The second use is about asking a seemingly deeper question about the motive or purpose of something.  The difference is subtle but important.  For example asking “why am I here?” is not a request for the biological reasons but a plea for someone to indicate a motivational reason for their existence.

It is my contention that this second use of the word is nonsensical.  For starters I do not think there is any satisfactory answer to such a question as “why am I here?” in the second sense from earlier so at the very least it is unanswerable.  There are a couple of reasons for this including the infinite regress of finding a why to each why.

But I think it goes deeper than that.  I don’t think the notion of “why” in that philosophical sense even has a meaning.  When you really press someone about what they mean with why questions they either boil down to a “how” question (which can then be answered, at least in principle) or it turns into looking for someone to “blame” for the way things are.  The latter is simply an evasion of a how question in my opinion.

A key implication of this is that arguing supernatural things must exist because they provide an answer to “why” questions becomes redundant.  You do not need a god to answer the question “why am I here?” when you realise the question itself is meaningless.

Language

One of the curious features of human language is that sentences, claims and ideas are not restricted by logical validity or accuracy.  One can happily talk at length about square circles, the living dead or omnipotence without these terms being even remotely meaningful.  We can even develop remarkably complex ideas that are utterly nonsense but still linguistically perfectly valid. 

The implications of this are profound because it means there is no intrinsic bullshit detector in the primary form of human communication and by extension, human cognition.  Anything is valid as a statement even if its real world application is nonsensical. 

The most important thing is that just because a notion can be said has no bearing on whether that thing is even remotely meaningful.  In my view to ask “why am I here?” in the philosophical sense is indistinguishable from asking “what is a square circle?”. 

One of the biggest traps for religion is, in my opinion, to fail to realise when more subtle examples of this trap are at work.  Some examples include various adjectives used to describe the characteristics of god:

• God is omnipotent(/omnipresent/omniscient)
• God exists outside time
• God is love

All of those statements make as much sense to me as saying “god is a square circle”.

A common tactic to try and wriggle out of this is to redefine terms to mean something slightly different but this is fuzzy thinking.  Specific definitions are crucial for incorporating the meaning of something into all the other bodies of knowledge we have. 

For example a spiritual healer might claim to manipulate the positive and negative energy within a person to achieve healing.  In scientific discourse energy has a specific meaning, which is basically the property of mass times distance squared divided time squared.  In this sense it is like the healer saying they manipulate your positive and negative velocity to heal you.  Now it may well be (although I doubt it) that such healers do manipulate something to heal people but whatever it is, it isn’t energy.

I’ll end that rather direction-less rant here and see what comes of it

Christian creationists claim that genesis trumps science for an explanation of origins.  While the general claims of genesis are well known it has been a while since I sat down and actually read the thing so today I did just that.  All of genesis 1 is repeated below along with my commentary on a verse by verse basis.  Since all the versions of the bible seem to say similar things I chose the King James Version (taken from the bible gateway here) as the version to analyse.  Some scholars say the original texts are the only relevant ones, while others say that the most recent are the closest to gods intention.  The KJV sits right in the middle and seems to be quite commonly referred to.  Not being a biblical scholar I don’t have much more basis for my choice than that but ultimately it shouldn’t make much difference – the story is pretty much the same.

I have tried to approach this from the assumption that it might have validity and have tried to take genesis 1 in isolation to see what it says.  Of course apologists will point out that other parts of the bible add explanation or give more detail but given other parts were written at other times this would make genesis 1 a poorly written document.  Also I have ignored genesis 2 and it’s varying account of creation at this stage although the inconsistencies between the two is something I may look at later.  The purpose of this is simply to take genesis 1 at face value and see what it has to say, with a critical but hopefully not cynical point of view.  Also I don’t claim any of the discussion in this piece are new or innovative, but I made a point of not reading any reference material or criticisms of the bible while doing this so the comments are all mine.

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Firstly there is a curious phrasing here – the beginning of what exactly?  There is no context to decide what this is the beginning of so the entire notion of first creation is cast into doubt – what if it refers to the beginning of the story rather than of everything?  Secondly what is meant by “the heaven” and “the earth”?  It is easy from our point of view to suppose “the heaven” includes the solar system, galaxies and the rest of the universe but we know the writers didn’t mean this because they had no idea these existed at the time. 

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

While obscurely written I presume, referencing verse 9, that the planet was completely covered in water at this time with no land above the water.  The significance of the face of the deep is anyone’s guess given there isn’t any light anywhere yet according to the story so darkness was everywhere anyway.  It does kind of imply the water was deep everywhere though. 

Also the sun and stars either don’t exist yet or there would be light so this also rather strongly suggests “the heaven” of verse one doesn’t refer to the universe at large but more likely the sky.   

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

This is a tricky one because light doesn’t really exist independently of other things – in fact in order for this to be true god would have to make the sun and the rest of it at this point.  I somehow doubt the creator of an entire universe of billions of stars would say nothing of the creation of a massive expanse of galaxies and just mention light.  Anyway it becomes apparent later on that this light has nothing to do with earth just yet. 

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

God doesn’t need to divide light from dark; dark is simply the absence of light.  Seems this was written from a poor understanding of light and probably refers to day and night rather than light and dark. 

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

I am not sure how god planned to account for being inside a closed up room during the day - is that day or night?  Also the phrasing “evening and morning” is either chronologically backwards or we have changed our usage of the word “day”.  Also we now know that evening and morning is a relative term depending on where exactly on the earth you are – so when it is morning in London it is evening in Wellington.  Where was god exactly? 

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

Now we discover in verse 8 that this firmament is called heaven.  It seems that god created heaven again on the second day and this seems a little odd.  

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

So now there is a thing called heaven dividing water above heaven from water below heaven.  This is clearly intended as a physical barrier and strongly suggests heaven is a physical place rather than a spiritual one, and it is one we know today does not exist in the same form. 

8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

So day one he created the earth, the heaven, and light.  Day two he had an easier time of it and just created heaven?

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

What “one place” would that be exactly?  And how would that land appear?  There is no mention of land rising up because the focus is entirely on the water which is “gathered together”.  Of course one could argue that making the land rise is a method of gathering water but that is a rather obscure way of describing a rather significant event.  Gravity means gathering water is not an easy task.

10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.

So to confirm, he creates the earth on the first day, then creates it again on the third day as something quite different?  Remember there was no dry land on the first day so there was no “earth” by this definition on day one.  The use of language here leaves something to be desired. 

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

Firstly this shows no understanding of ecosystems whatsoever – plants need animals to survive, to provide a stable atmosphere, and to decompose dead matter to make soil.  They also need sunlight, and as we are about to discover, the sun doesn’t exist yet (although light apparently does).

12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Also I presume that other plants such as non-fruit trees, cacti, grains, and the rest of it that are not mentioned but make up large chunks of the flora are also made here?

13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

So now we have two different earths, a heaven made twice, light and some (or all) of the plants.  I note there is no mention of plants changing (or not changing) over time.

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

So having divided day from night previously, god decides to do it again.  Repetition is good for the soul I suppose.  It would be logical to assume the lights here are referring to stars (and supposedly the sun) which suggests that the light he created earlier is now superseded…  or we have twice as much light as we did before.  Also it suggests the stars are lights in the firmament and not giant fusion powered fireballs billions of kilometres away.  You’d think the difference would be something worth noting.

15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

The stars are there to give light upon the earth?  What about the light that is already there?

16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

We now know these two “lights” are the same, one direct and the other indirectly reflected off moon.  And also the stars now appear.  How are these different to the lights in the firmament?

17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,

I see, so god created lights in the firmament and then created two greater lights and stars and put them there too.  The chronology here is very mixed up.  It would have made a lot more sense to just say “god made the sun, the moon and the stars and it was good” and be done with it!

18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

The light is already divided from darkness.

19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Now we have light created three times, the stars twice, heaven twice and we have two different earths…

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

Reading between the lines this seems to say that water based life and birds were created on this day.  Incidentally the phrase “open firmament of heaven” is confusing given we have already figured out that the firmament is a physical place that represents separation of the waters above from the waters below.  I guess we take this to mean the “sky”.

21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

“Every living creature that moveth” apparently should say “every creature that moveth in water” or something to that effect considering the 6^th day hasn’t occurred yet.  I am not sure if there is significance in the difference between “their kind” versus “his kind” – does this mean birds are made after god’s kind instead? 

22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

The water creature part makes sense here but the fowl (birds) part seems out of place.  Also the phrasing “in the earth” seems strange to me as well but we can assume it means on land.

23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

Now we have light created three times, the stars twice, heaven twice and two different earths occupied by sea creatures and birds.

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

The living creature here now means earth creatures as opposed to the previous day when it meant something different.  It is interesting that cattle is specifically mentioned – is there a reason for this?  These are all after “his” kind.

25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Now we see the cattle are now after “their” kind but the others are after ”his” kind.  So can we conclude god’s kind is some sort of creeping bird-beast?

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Now suddenly the phrase “our” likeness sneaks into use – to whom does “our” refer to?  We also see here that man is to have dominion over everything else despite the fact that man knew little of his world at the time and that nature was doing a fair job of making life hard for people at the time.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

So we see here that men and women are now created to have dominion.  One would have to assume this meant more than one man/woman was created in the same way that the other creatures were made.  

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The call for man to replenish the earth is an interesting one… replenish what exactly and how? 

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Strange phrasing but that aside, a warning about poisonous fruit for example might have been useful!  I gather “for meat” means “for food” otherwise this is a weird statement.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

This one is also confusing, is this saying using herbs on meat or as food?  Or is it saying that animals should eat plants?  What about the carnivores?

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

And so the creation ends with everything in place. 

Without any other information except genesis 1, we have to admit this is a very short, low on detail, unconvincing description of what took place.  IT is far from a comprehensive technical description and it seems to me to rather closely reflect ancient man’s understanding of the world.  In other words it reads like it was written by men describing an event that they had no way of knowing anything about.  Even if the story is true (which of course I doubt) this account of it is weak and not very convincing or useful.  It reads to me like a poorly thought out pre-science just-so story and basing one’s interpretation of origins literally on it seems to me, for lack of a better word, plain silly.

As an aside, Michael Shermer’s revisitation of Genesis which I originally saw in Why Darwin Matters reads much better than the original (and is quite funny) – check it out here.

One of the peculiar things about religion, and specifically about various descriptions of gods, is the number of paradoxes that seem to pop up when trying to have proper discussions about it.  This post explores some of the ones I have come across in no particular order.  While of course they don’t “prove” anything, they are fascinating to think about and also provide some interesting challenges for theists.

Epicurus famously stated of an omnipotent and benevolent god:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
  Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
  Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
  Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
  Then why call him God?

This is the so-called problem of evil and is usually resolved by references to god’s will, or by trying to explain that how things are are optimal.  Nonetheless one has to wonder why things aren’t even slightly better than they currently are for people on the whole assuming god exists and cares about people.  The mere fact that things could be even slightly better than they are now suggests our imperfection is either deliberate or out of gods control.

Douglas Adams made the following wonderful comment in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy referring to the Babel Fish:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.  The argument goes something like this:

“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED”

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

This seemingly cute little argument hides a deeper paradox.  Faith becomes redundant with evidence and since god demands faith there can be no evidence of gods existence.  One could argue around this by saying god doesn’t really demand faith but then that would cause religion a few other problems.  One could also argue around this by saying everything requires faith but then this rather waters down the notion of faith.

The next paradox is a classic from philosophy (and is often actually called the god paradox) which goes as follows:

God is omnipotent so can god create a stone that god cannot lift?

This is essentially the immovable object versus the irresistible force paradox which is common to all claims of omnipotence.  There are several responses to this but almost all of them trip up.  There are several other problems with omnipotence as well such as the notion that omnipotence means anything that happens was god’s will regardless of how it happened.

If a person is raped, that rape is the will of god.  There is no way around this – if god knows everything and can do anything, the rape occurs either because god made it happen or because god allowed it to happen.

This is essentially a reformation of the problem of evil mentioned earlier.  This also extends to the very notion of free will:

Do I have free will?  If god is omnipotent then I can only the things god wants to allow me to do. 
In other words if god chooses to give me free will then god wants me to do whatever I do so it wasn’t really free will at all.

This one is tricky because it means if I choose to sin, god chose to allow me to sin.

There is also a subtle paradox that works around the notion of god as a causal agent:

Causality is defined as three things:  temporal precedence, covariance and absence of another cause.
If god is outside time then god cannot cause anything.  If god is within time then god cannot cause time.

Of course you may decide that causality is not universal but then this means the universe doesn’t need a cause in the first place rendering the first cause requirement for god redundant. 

This is another excellent video series on youtube by youtube user AronRa along the lines of the Made Easy and Why Do People Laugh at Creationists series I have blogged on earlier.  This video series sets out to highlight fundamental falsehoods underlying creationism rather than addressing the specific claims of individuals. 

There are 15 falsehoods covered by 17 videos in the series and each is linked to and briefly described below.  They are well designed and thought out videos and I reccomend them:

Falsehood 1:  Believing in evolution is the same as being an atheist.  This video also discusses how creationism is really a belief in “magic”. 

Falsehood 2:  Sacred scriptures were written by god rather than humans.

Falsehood 3:  Claims of infallibility and absolute truth.

Falsehood 4:  Really really believing something is the same as knowing it.  This video also discusses the way that belief can come to seem as if it is knowledge.

Fasehood 5:  Evolution/science/atheism is a religion

Falsehood 6:  Evolutionism = all of science and that evolution should explain origins.

Falsehood 7:  Either everything has design or everything is random.

Falsehood 8:  Mutations destroy information.

Falsehood 9:  Transitional fossils don’t exist.

Falsehood 10:  That phylogenetics is imposed order, not real.

Falsehood 11:  Evolution doesn’t produce new species.

Falsehood 12:  Flaws with the scientific method/methodological naturalism

Falsehood 13:  Evolutionary hoaxes discredit evolution.

Falsehood 14 video 1 and video 2:  Creationists have evidence of creationism.

Falsehood 15 video 1 and video 2:  Evolution is just a theory.

Part four of my ongoing series discussing common misconceptions of evolution.  It starts here, and see part I, part II and part III.

This one is an interesting misconception which operates on two levels. The first is the more common statement of the problem which is that dogs give birth to dogs, not giraffes. This is easy to refute since speciation is gradual and that species are not uniform, and I’ll refer the reader to parts II and III of this series for more discussion on this.   However it also reflects a deeper misconception about just what we are talking about when we talk about species and organisms in general.

As modern day thinkers we have built our understanding of biology via taxonomy. We divide all the animals into groups and understand their origins and evolution via their differences. We recognise a cat as being different to a dog because of the distinguishing features of the two species. This is a useful way to see things and is part of how we have come so far with biology to this day. Such differences are also a crucial aspect of why evolution works in the first place as differential survival depends on such variation.

This habit of thinking of the differences has one drawback however.  It tends to make us to overlook the fundamental similarities between organisms.  We think of cats and dogs as fundamentally different organisms and yet their similarities arguably outweigh their differences.  They are based on fundamentally the same DNA (just in a different arrangement), the body plan is very similar, and they exist for much the same purpose – making copies of themselves. 

The fact that all organisms are built around DNA really brings these similarities to light.  In a very real sense all organisms are really just variants of DNA molecules.  We can therefore take the question about organisms only producing their own kind and see that this is in fact exactly what happens: DNA molecules producing more DNA molecules. You don’t see a DNA molecule replicating into another type of molecule (at least not directly).  In this sense the part that matters hasn’t changed since DNA established itself.  Like keeps producing like, just in different arrangements.

I suggest reading The Making of the Fittest by Sean Carroll or River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins for more information.

This is a more obvious misconception but worth covering to continue building the picture.

There are a lot of explanations of evolution around that tend to use the lay language of organisms striving to fit into their environment (i.e. striving to be the fittest) as the basis for evolution.  However organisms have absolutely no control over their evolution whatsoever because they cannot control any of the fundamental drivers of evolution.  The only relevant part of an organism from the point of view of evolution is what genes it has and how likely it is within its environment to pass on those genes to the next generation.  Everything else is essentially filler.  We might think of it as important from a macroscopic point of view but evolution couldn’t care less what we think.

An organism is given its genes from its parents and has no mechanism to change them to the individuals advantage.  The genes it passes on to its offspring are a function of the genes it has plus any copying errors (mutations) that occur.  So the organism clearly has absolutely no control over the genetic side of things.  The other factor is the environment that organism finds itself in which in general the organism also has no control over.  Therefore the organism cannot strive to fit in better, it can only strive to survive.  Whether it does or not, and whether or not its genes live on, is a function of things well outside its control.

In fact it doesn’t take much to see that evolution operates quite happily without any conscious direction, striving, or otherwise.

Part three of my ongoing series discussing common misconceptions of evolution.  It starts here, and see part I and part II.

4.  Mutations drive variation

Mutation is often given the driving seat in discussions about evolution, noting that new features only come about through mutation.  While this is certainly a part of the picture, it neglects the more important source of variation which is that animals of a particular species do not all have the same DNA to start with.  In fact there can be rather large phenotypic differences between individuals of exactly the same species.  This means for example that if a species moves to a colder climate it probably does not require mutations to develop longer coats in response – the potential for this is already in the existing gene pool even if its expression has been suppressed over time due to a warmer climate. 

In fact it is this very reason that we have sexual reproduction as opposed to simple cell division – because it facilitates lots of new combinations of genes and gives the evolutionary process so much more fuel to work with.  Also combining different genes can lead to innovative solutions to problems that are simply new combinations of existing genes but are able to serve some function over and above what the genes originally coded for in the parents. 

Mutations are one off events that have to survive quite a while before they make an impact on the overall species (the organism with the mutation has to survive and then pass on this mutation) whereas natural variation among species members can reoccur several times.

Related to item four is the notion that species are a discrete entity.  We tend to think of a species evolving as a whole entity and then suddenly splitting into two species as if it was a spontaneous event.  However reality is way more fuzzy than that because individuals in a species are still highly varied.  The typical view looks something like:

Here we see a simple line delineating the original species and the two species that it splits into.  While this is a useful image in principle, reality is never this black and white.  The real story would look something more like this:

Here we see a wide variety of variation (each dot might represent an individual) and we see that as they split off there is a messy period where interbreeding still works sometimes and that the change suddenly seems a whole lot less drastic.  The change is also a lot more gradual with the change beginning earlier with a slight increase in overall variation leading to speciation after.

These two points are crucial because they highlight that random chance, while important, is not the only force at work here and that mutations are only part of the picture.