A Couple of Bon Mots from Peter Singer

Here’s something from the Times Literary Supplement on environmental ethics from animal liberator Peter Singer. It is a book review of Ethics and the Environment by Dale Jamieson and not as provocative and some of his stuff. It does, though, contain a couple of gems that betray Singer’s agenda.

Firstly, can you spot the mistake in this sentence from the review?

Jamieson begins by showing how ethics can withstand a range of popular challenges posed by theists, amoralists and cultural relativists.

It is quite entertaining to find Singer claiming that theists are challenging ethics in the same way as amoralists and cultural relativists. Perhaps he missed the ‘a-’ from the beginning of ‘theist’, but given his hostility to religion, I doubt it.

Secondly, what about this as an example of declaring victory before battle is even joined?

Jamieson agrees with what now seems to be a near-consensus among philosophers that “species-ism” – the view that we are entitled to take the interests of animals less seriously than we take human interests, simply because humans are members of our species – is not a defensible moral position.

Does Singer seriously believe that “species-ism” is anything other than a game played by ivory tower bound philosophers and the nuttier fringe of the animal rights brigade? To describe it as near-consensus among philosophers can only mean that ‘philosopher’ is defined as someone who sees the world in basically the same terms as Singer does. I suppose that excludes theists, not to mention amoralists and cultural relativists.


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Darwin’s Dangerous Cousin – Part Two

Galton’s astonishing hypothesis was that some people are born smart and others were born stupid and the roots of this reached deep into one’s ancestry. He had come to this belief based on his personal experience, the prejudices of his race and class, the findings of his cousin Charles in evolutionary biology, and what he regarded as his own hereditary genius.

During the late 1800s most naturalists including Charles Darwin, accepted a blending view of inheritance, regarding offspring as a mix of their parents, and additional characteristics acquired during their lifetime in the tradition of Lamarckism. Galton’s key insight was to reject this in favour of hard hereditary, which cannot be changed during your lifetime. As he wrote:

‘Will our children be born more virtuous dispositions if we ourselves shave acquired virtuous habits during our lifetimes or are we merely passive transmitters of a nature we have received and which we have no power to modify?

To which the answer was no, and yes respectively.

‘….. We shall therefore take an approximately correct view of the origins of our life if we consider our own embryos to have sprung immediately from those embryos from whence our parents developed and those from their parents and so on forever.’

This is indeed the picture revealed by the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis and much of the work of later biologists such as R A Fischer was built directly on Galton’s work, including the statistical concept of correlation and regression toward the mean. Galton’s obsession with statistics is perhaps best illustrated by this passage from his novel ‘Kantsaywhere’ when the narrator abruptly breaks off from describing the society he lives in to begin lecturing the reader.

‘the propagation of children by the Unfit is looked upon by the inhabitants of Kantsaywhere as a crime to the State. The people are not misled by the specious argument that there is no certainty whether the anticipations of their unfitness will be verified in any particular case and the individual risk may be faced. They look on the community as a whole and know the results of unfit marriages with statistical certainty, which differs little from absolute certainty whenever large numbers are concerned. For instance, they say 1000 unfit couples will assuredly produce a number of children that can be specified within narrow limits, of each grade of unfitness, though they cannot foretell whether these children will be the offspring of A, B, C or X. .....There are many grades of expected unfitness, ranging from that of the offspring of the idiots, the insane and the feeble-minded, at the lower end of the scale of civic worth, to whom the propagation of offspring is peremptorily forbidden, whether it be by forcible segregation or other strong measures, up to the moderate unfitness expected in the offspring of parents who rank only a little below the average in eugenic worth. The methods of penalizing, taken in the order of their severity, are social disapprobation, fine, excommunication as by boycott, deportation, and life-long segregation.’

It would be easy to write this off as the bizarre ramblings of an elderly eccentric were it not for the fact that this vision came to be seen by many as cutting edge science and was transformed into reality over the course of the Twentieth century.

Galton had adopted the basic idea of Gamules from Darwin but re-christened them germs, maintaining that they guided the bodies development but were never affected by them. They were later to be renamed genes. With the overthrow of blending and a Lamarckian view of inheritance the case for Eugenics were made. With superior and inferior traits now seen as unalterable, Eugenics was to enjoy enormous scientific credibility and was to form part of the curious combination revolutionary ideas and reactionary ideology which transformed 20th century biology.

The word Eugenics was derived for the Greek for ‘well born, and one of Francis Galton’s main pursuits was to looked at the pedigrees of brilliant men, including his own, for sources of natural abilities. His finding was that genius in all its forms runs in families and that all the evidence showed the ‘vast pre-pondering effects of nature over nurture’. The response required by society was clear, ‘Society should encourage men and women of hereditary fitness to marry each other and bear many children’. This principle became known as positive eugenics. Galton wrote:

‘What an extraordinary effect might be produced on our race if its object was to unite in marriage those who possessed the finest and most Suitable natures, mental, moral, and physical…..If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins.’

Towards the end of his life the fitness of the British race, which he felt was fast sliding into ‘feeble-mindedness’, became an overriding obsession. When Lord Halesbury dared to suggest that because of the heroics of Shackleton on the Antarctic ice sheet, it was ‘now impossible to believe in the supposed deterioration of the British race’, Galton wrote indignantly;

‘It is not that deterioration is so general that men of remarkably fine physique have ceased to exist, for they do; thank God, but the bulk of the community is deteriorating, which it is, …Again, the popularity of athletic sports proves little, for it is one thing to acclaim successful athletes, which any mob of weaklings can do, as at a cricket match, it is quite another thing to be an athlete oneself.!’

Considering physical beauty as a possible marker for eugenic fitness, Galton embarked on a mission to collect data for a beauty map of the British Isles, which graphically presented the geographical distribution of attractive females ‘classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent’. Having completed his survey Galton concluded, ‘I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest’!.


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Here's a pretty thing

Meaning of Life TV. It's interviews with (mostly) top scientists and philosophers of science (like Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Owen Gingerich, Arthur Peacocke, Steven Pinker, John Polkinghorne, Edward O. Wilson, etc.) on a myriad of fascinating subjects (like God, consciousness, death, evil, faith and reason, science and religion, the limits of science, the anthropic principle, etc.). I might post highlights from time to time once I've had a chance to peruse it.


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Darwin’s Dangerous Cousin – Part One

In anticipation of Darwin’s bicentenary I have written a short three part series on his less celebrated, but no less important cousin Francis Galton. In addition to furthering our understanding of evolutionary biology substantially he also founded one of the most infamous movements in history. It is a story which is no less pertinent today.

Every age refashions nature in its own image. With the publication of the ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859 the living world was suddenly recast in the image of a competitive, industrial Britain and the worldwide struggle between colonisers and colonised peoples. A new secular order began to proclaim a struggling, progressive and law bound nature to a struggling and improving society. Among them was an extraordinary young man called Francis Galton. Born in 1822, Galton was to become a prolific scientist, a child prodigy, inventor and explorer. He also had the distinction of being a first cousin of Charles Darwin, although to begin with he was far more famous than his illustrious relative. Having been freed from the enormous inconvenience of having to make a living by a sizable inheritance, he was able to channel his considerable talents into a series of intellectual pursuits. These would include critical contributions to the study of genetics, the development of modern statistics, the coining of the phrase ‘nature versus nurture’ and the creation of a new movement to reshape humanity, eugenics. Galton also created a series of inventions, some of which are regrettably lost to posterity. These included a set of underwater reading glasses, forensic fingerprinting, the modern weather map, the silent dog whistle and a self-tipping top hat, which worked by pulling a discreet cord. He also constructed an ingenious device called the ‘gumption-reviver’, which was little more than a mobile dripping tap that soaked the head and shirt of the wearer. This enabled him to work longer hours but probably had an adverse effect on his sanity.

Galton first gained fame in the 1850s as a traveller and explorer to far flung locales like South West Africa. Technical and popular accounts of expeditions made him well known. In one of his accounts he describes taking careful measurements of a naked native woman with enormous breasts:

‘I profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements of her shape; but there was a difficulty ... I did not know a word of Hottentot ... I therefore felt in a dilemma as I gazed at her form……Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant; the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations ….boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place where she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.’

All of this was, of course, performed strictly in the interest of science. Upon his return to Britain from one of these excursions to exotic climes Dalton’s life was to be transformed forever by ‘The Origin of Species’. In a letter to Darwin he wrote:

‘I used to be wretched under the weight of the old fashioned arguments for design, your book drove away the constraints of my old superstition as if it had been a nightmare and was the first to give me freedom of thought.'

In his later memoir Galton noted that:

'The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.'

Released from the perceived limitations of Christian principles, he was free to turn his considerable talents to attempting to further the cause of civilisation by a process of selective breeding. For Galton, this represented the greatest promise of applied biology and the highest mission of a scientific society. The principles of hereditary and natural selection should no longer remain safely inert on the pages of a scientific textbook, they should be put into action as guiding principles for breeding better Britons. Eugenics, Galton wrote ‘must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion’. Towards the end of life he began work on a novel called Kantsaywhere, which described a utopia organized by a eugenic religion, designed to breed fitter and smarter humans. Unfortunately, this work never saw the light of day and the manuscript was burned by Galton’s niece because she was offended by the love scenes; it is not recorded whether the offending passages involved any lustful measurement and trigonometry.


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‘The Kluge’ by a Kluge

Gary Marcus has an intriguing new book out called ‘Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind’. Due to a stiff but well deserved rebuke from my better half who insists that I read my current stack of books before going out and buying any more - I haven’t been able to read it yet. However, in the best tradition of the blogosphere, I am going to review it anyway.

The premise of the book, that the human brain cobbled together by evolution is a clumsy and haphazard mess with multiple defects, seems to contain a grain of truth but also to be inherently self-refuting. In particular Marcus singles out the brain’s capacity for memory, which, by comparison with that of a computer, is unreliable and prone to mistakes. This is undeniable. By way of illustration, as a rather bloodthirsty young lad I took it upon myself to spend hour after hour in my bedroom trying to memorise the dates of wars and battles in British history. I was so successful at this that to this day I am able to recall the exact date of events like D-Day the 1918 armistice and the battle of Agincourt. This has come at a considerable price in evolutionary terms, namely that I am sometimes unable to recall key dates such as my wife’s birthday and my wedding anniversary, thereby decreasing both my chances of survival and my reproductive fitness. Were my brain built on a computer like ‘postcode’ system of memory rather than contextual memory, I would not suffer from any of these difficulties. I would, however, be doomed to remember a whole host of stuff I would rather have banished from my memory. That land law course I took 4 years ago and the time I accidentally locked myself in a toilet cubicle for 3 hours to give but two painful examples. To forget is often as useful as to remember.

Furthermore, as Marcus states, human choice and decision making is often highly irrational. This observation is based on the author’s presupposition that the ideal type of belief is scientific, based on logic and the laws of evidence. The brain’s nature as a roughshod collection of interacting systems means that it often fails to live up to this lofty ideal. Since ‘Kluge’ contains multiple digs at the ‘Intelligent Design’ crowd, it is pretty certain who this last point is aimed at. To me I can think of nothing more horrifying than a world populated by Vulcan-like, logic robots and one has to ask whether such a world is preferable or likely to produce better results than the one we have got.

Throughout history most scientists have maintained a stubborn belief in their theories despite many of them being based on insufficient evidence and anathema to cold logic. The capacity to hold often irrational and counter intuitive beliefs is a major creative force and indispensable to humanity. What seems to be a flaw in some scenarios turns out to be essential in other circumstances. One thinks of heliocentrism which was largely developed by Copernicus for aesthetic reasons and was only proven by observation when the stellar parallax was observed with the greatly improved instruments of the 19th century. The scientific revolution and innumerable later advances were produced by people who believed that a creator God had created an orderly and rational cosmos based on mathematical laws. As Peter Harrison has shown in ‘The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, scientific methods themselves were originally devised as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by human sin and conceptualised as a means of recapturing the knowledge of nature that Adam had once possessed. We are now assured by today’s breed of logical positivist that these beliefs that drove these discoveries are not only absurd and infantile, but also invalidated by those methods of thinking which arose from their foundational metaphysic.

Above all, the book’s premise is refuted by its author, who is merely a kluge like the rest of us. My ageing laptop’s solitary method of self-critique is to present the blue screen of death to me when it suffers a fatal error. A kluge on the other hand can write an entire book an its defects and develop strategies to get around them. Accordingly, I too have been able to defy my irrational and poorly assembled brain by finding a war that started on my wedding anniversary, a role which the Boer War of 1899 fills pretty nicely. By using techniques like these we can become more than the sum of our evolutionary heritage.


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Alot of Creationism in the Papers Today

One Michael Reiss suggested to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that teachers should take a conciliatory attitude towards creationism. If students ask about it in science classes, teachers should be able to deal with it rather than simply refuse to discuss the question.

There’s not much in Reiss’s comments to object to, although they will certainly be ripped out of context by the Dawkinistas. They have generated a lot of comment. An op-ed in the Times by Melanie McDonough and a piece in the Guardian’s comment is free by Adam Rutherford are broadly sympathetic (both writers, as far as I am aware, are atheists). Denis Alexander, an old foe of Dawkins, also chips in at the Guardian aiming his fire at Susan Blackmore. On the other hand, the Times leader, written by Oliver Kamm, takes a more extreme view.

My own view is that creationism, both Intelligent Design and literalistic interpretations of Genesis, is wrong. The former may or may not have something useful to say to science but has no place in science classes because it has not demonstrated anything to the satisfaction of the scientific mainstream. That said, teachers should not be dogmatic and should clearly explain that evolution does not imply, let alone require, atheism. To preach atheism in science classes is an unacceptable as preaching Christianity or Islam.

Of course, Dawkins and his disciples are not really interested in promoting evolution in itself. They just see it as a useful weapon in their real fight against religion. Their constant attempts to set up a false dichotomy between science and religion must be resisted wholeheartedly, not just by religious people but by everyone who believes in liberal values.



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On the Advantage of Inflexible Morality

Rodney Stark, the sociologist of religion, has pointed out in For the Glory of God that the more demanding, high-intensity faiths also give their adherents more benefits, both in terms of self-esteem and spirituality. Vacuous religion, such as the cliché of the trendy Church of England vicar, does not give people what they want. Paradoxically, therefore, most attempts to make religion more accessible or open are likely to drive potential converts away.

It seems that the Catholic Church is beginning to understand this. The Vatican knows Catholicism’s core selling points. As well as standing firm on moral issues, Pope Benedict XVI has promoted the Latin mass and more traditional liturgy. This point was made to the Guardian’s Religious Affairs correspondent when she suggested in Rome that “it was the church's position on issues such as abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia and contraception” that deterred people from being Catholics. On the contrary, she was told, people prefer a religion that takes a firm moral line.

I think there is some truth in this. Although I am very much a liberal on many (but not all) moral issues, it seems to me that the Church should take an idealistic rather than a pragmatic line. Besides, the pressures coming from the other direction are now so strong that a certain amount of uncompromising resistance is a good thing.

To make an uncharitable comparison (uncharitable to the Church, that is), I believe most Greens are as crazy as a bag full of starving ferrets. However, I still think that there is a place for their extreme rhetoric on the environment, if only to keep the rest of us honest. Likewise, you don’t have to agree with all the Catholic Church’s moral teaching to feel that it is a valuable counterweight to the Peter Singers of this world.




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Changing the Blog

Thank you to the volunteers for the new team blog. There has been a great response and I must now declare the invitation for team members closed.

I will be upgrading this page over the next week or so (with the change of appearance the first step) in order to allow the rest of the team to post. We also have a new name: Quodlibeta.



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Monbiot Talks Sense

Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself both agreeing with and inspired by an article in the Guardian by green fanatic George Monbiot today. Rather than spreading doom and gloom, he discussed the simple pleasures of growing fruit. I'm more a vegetable man myself, although in August our garden is awash with plums that my wife turns into delicious jam and we sometimes get the sweetest of peaches from a tree against the wall of the house. I even managed to make a little red currant jelly this year. Last weekend, I found time for homemade tomato ketchup which is really good. It's fruitier and sweeter than Heinz (as well as being orange instead of red). I'll try to make some more as the tomato plants in the greenhouse launch into their end of year burst of ripeness.

But don't worry - the Guardian op-ed pages have not turned into an oasis of intelligent thought. Today, they also had yet another aimless rant against faith schools by uber-atheist Polly Toynbee.




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Labour Pains

There is a persistent myth that, when anaesthesia first became available in the nineteenth century, clerics said it should not be used to lessen the pain of childbirth because God had ordained women's suffering as a punishment for the sin of Eve. Well, perhaps the odd misogynist divine actually did say that, but it is more of a surprise to find quite a sizable number of people today still agree.

Last week, some research was published that showed first-time mothers are willing to accept greater risks for a 'natural' birth than the health professionals who care for them. My conclusion from this was that first-time mothers had no idea what they had let themselves in for, largely because there is a conspiracy of silence about just how difficult giving birth can be. All the literature talks about 'discomfort' or sometimes 'great discomfort'. But that is pure euphemism. For 'great discomfort' read 'red hot poker up your nether regions agony'. For the second child, mothers, who now know of what they speak, are much more likely to opt for an epidural or C-section. That's sensible, especially if they have previously experienced what one friend of my wife called "an all-night screamer."

The trouble is that the editor of the scientific journal in which the research appeared said women were right to take risks for a natural birth. I could hardly believe it. I know there are earth mother types who insist on home birthing and feel all virtuous about it. But for a health professional to take this weird view worried me. No surprise to find she got support from the Guardian's opinion pages.

There is a school of thought that men are not allowed an opinion on giving birth. But when some women are so determined to make their sisters go through severe pain for no particular reason beyond loosely formed ideas of virtue, I think we all need to speak out.



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