Arguing your opponent’s case

Back in 2003, the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris wrote a book called ‘Life’s Solution, Inevitable humans in a lonely universe’. In many ways, this work marked the culmination of the argument between Morris and the late Stephen Jay Gould over the Burgess Shale and the wider question of whether evolution is random and unpredictable or has some kind of inevitable pattern. Gould had used the Burgess Shale to argue that if you were somehow able to run the tape of life again, the result would look vastly different. Conway Morris had done most of the important research on the Burgess shale and felt peeved that Gould had misrepresented his findings in this way. The result was an ill tempered argument between the two, with Conway Morris pointing to the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence and the ability of evolution to navigate to certain solutions under selection pressure. It now looks like the weight of evidence lies with Conway Morris and that biology has become less Gouldian, although recent experiments by Richard Lenski with populations of bacteria showed the importance both of constraint and historical accident in the course of life’s history. The important point about Conway Morris’s arguments is that they are Neo-Darwinian; rather than introducing some alternate mechanism into the picture he is trying to demonstrate how the deceptively simple rules of evolution can produce the complexity and creativity of life, while being constrained to certain outcomes. This is in contrast to the meaningless empire of accident, so often invoked by materialists and metaphysical naturalists, but which doesn’t tie in at all well with the universe we actually observe.

The arguments of Conway Morris were absorbed and carried further by his colleagues in a series of essays published in ‘The Deep Structure of Biology’. Some of those who had contributed had begun to produce computerised maps of ‘biological adaptive space’. It is clear from looking at these that, out of the space of adaptive possibility, almost nothing works. In other words, the convergence of biological systems can be explained by environmental and physical constraints which act on all life. These restrict the boundless creativity of life to a series of ‘optimal solutions’. In the view of Conway Morris and others, evolution acts like a kind of ‘search engine’ to create more complex ecosystems in which different niches are enabled and filled by new species.

Perhaps a bit embarrassed by Conway Morris’s theological leanings, the contributors were keen to stress that their conclusions were firmly in the neo-Darwinian mould. Robert A Foley, one of Cambridge’s leading lights in evolutionary biology and the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, was highly critical of any notions of 'progress'', 'design' and 'purpose' in his contribution, yet he concluded:

'Rather the adaptive process which is driven by selection does have some law like properties that may well - under the right circumstances - lead to more purposive behaviour as a means of increasing or coping with complex adaptive integration and greater complexity and lead to contained directional trends. These characteristics can be said to give evolution a repetitive and, hence, to some extent. inevitable pattern....The final conclusion I would draw is that evolution on other planets - or a rerun of evolution on this one - will lead to many similarities because of the law-like nature of these processes...In a distribution of intelligences in the universe, or on a sample of one, we might speculate that conscious, purpose driven intelligence represents the mode'

On the anniversary of Darwin’s birth, Conway Morris launched into an article criticising the rather dismal atheistic spin which is put on evolution. I suspect he was trying to be provocative and re-instil a sense of wonder but he just attracted a torrent of abuse from the Guardian’s ‘Dawkinsia readership’.

Conway Morris’s rant was picked up by PZ Myers, who penned a scathing review of ‘Life’s solution’ some time ago. Myers's review was particularly dismal, being about 5% science and 95% statement of his personal philosophy. He clearly didn’t read the book as in his post he appears to be arguing on Conway Morris’s side most of the time.

‘I recommend an article in this week's Nature by Shubin, Tabin, and Carroll that argues for an important concept of deep homology. We do see similar structures, such as limbs in insects and invertebrates, that are not at all homologous on a morphological level, but when we examine their molecular genetics, we find similar substrates for both. This is the central idea of deep homology, that we have shared primitives, a set of regulatory networks, that see reuse over and over again in evolution. So while limbs arose independently in insects and vertebrates, when we look more deeply, we find that both use the distal-less developmental pathway. We see convergence because there are common functional demands that channel the solutions of selection, but there are also shared molecular constraints that limit the range of likely solutions.’

Which is exactly what Conway Morris has argued, that certain constraints, be they molecular or environmental , chart the course of evolution. Molecular convergence is one of the most fascinating features of evolution. A good example is provided by Carbonic anhydrases which are zinc enzymes necessary for dealing with carbon dioxide; these accelerate chemical reactions, assist with the construction of bones, allow the storage of carbon dioxide and are used by plants in photosynthesis. Carbonic anhydrases have evolved independently at least 4 times and we can therefore be pretty confident that if there are other organisms in the universe with are dealing with carbon dioxide, they are probably using the same zinc configuration. The appearance of deep regulatory networks seems to fit pretty nicely into the idea of a naturally emerging framework for life. What is not often appreciated is that most of the building blocks we need for more complex features - such as sentience, intelligence and nervous systems - evolved long before these complex organisations emerged. The molecular substrates to make these features all emerged in bacteria and microbes. So for example, the protein for the transparency of the eye's lens has been recruited from bacteria where it was used for a completely different purpose in a different context. Certain things which are optimal for simpler forms of life thereby contrive to provide a building yard for their more complex descendents.

The part of Conway Morris’s article which raised the most derision from the ‘new atheist contingent’ was where he said that:

‘Birds evolved at least twice, maybe four times.’

This was scoffed at by PZ but interestingly Conway Morris has been vigorously defended by Richard Dawkins, who said in a recent comment:

No, he does NOT mean bats, insects and pterosaurs! Of COURSE not. If he had meant that, he would not have said 'maybe' four times but 'at least four times'. He meant BIRDS, the creatures that we all call birds.

His whole book, Life's Solution is a hymn to convergent evolution. His thesis (and it is a very interesting and persuasive thesis, one that I largely agree with until we come to the religious nonsense at the end of the book) is that convergent evolution is far more prevalent than most people realise. In this bird passage, he almost certainly is advancing the thesis that the following statement is false: "Birds are a true clade in that all birds are descended from a single ancestor, and that ancestor would itself have been classified as a bird." There were several groups of feathered dinosaurs. Majority opinion says that only one of these groups has any descendants surviving today, and we call them birds. CM is advancing the interestingly heterodox thesis that some of today's birds are descended from one of those groups of feathered dinosaurs, while others of today's birds are descended from a different group of feathered dinosaurs. He is suggesting that the most recent common ancestor of all today's birds would not have been classified as a bird.

He could be right about that. Among all zoologists, I am probably, along with Conway Morris, the one most sympathetic to that kind of view (now that Arthur Cain is dead). We both love convergent evolution. But I am probably the least sympathetic to Conway Morris's next step, which is to drag God into the story. Convergent evolution, for me, is a wonderful testimony to the power of natural selection. Conway Morris at times seems to agree. But then at other times, he seems to think . . . well, let me put it this way. If you are the betting type, you'd be well advised to put some money on Simon Conway Morris as a future Templeton Prizewinner!

Another critic who unwittingly argues for Conway Morris’s case is Stephen Pinker on Jerry Coynes’s blog who argues:

My own take: 1. Though there’s much we don’t understand about the evolution of human intelligence, nothing about it is especially mysterious. A specific ability to do physics, abstract philosophy, higher math, and the other problems that vexed Wallace never evolved in the first place – they require millennia of accumulated knowledge in a culture, and decades of education and honing in an individual. A more generic ability entertain concepts of number, objects, living things, causality, and so on, and to combine them into lawful generalizations, is patently adaptive, as we see in the ways that all human cultures depend on acquired technological know-how for their survival, outsmarting the fixed defenses of local flora and fauna. While human-level intelligence is species-specific (as are many zoological traits, such as the elephant’s trunk), impressive levels of numerical cognition and cause-and-effect reasoning have evolved several times, including in corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and primates.

2. Nor is morality any mystery. Abstract, universal morality (e.g., a Kantian categorical imperative) never evolved in the first place, but took millennia of debate and cultural experience, and doesn’t characterize the vast majority of humanity. More rudimentary moral sentiments that may have evolved – sympathy, trust, retribution, gratitude, guilt – are stable strategies in cooperation games, and emerge in computer simulations.

3. No feature of consciousness has ever been discovered that does not depend 100% on neurophysiology. Stimulate the brain with chemicals or an electrical current, and the person’s experience changes; let a person’s experience vary, and you can measure the changes in chemistry or electrophysiology. When a brain is damaged, the person’s mental life is diminished accordingly, and when the brain’s activity ceases, the mind goes out of existence – Wallace’s séances notwithstanding, no one has found a way to communicate with the dead. The very existence of a subjective correlate of brain activity may not be understood (if it’s an intellectually coherent problem at all, which some would deny), but positing a “soul” simply renames the problem with no insight, and leaves the perfect correlation between consciousness and neurophysiology unexplained.

Or to summarise, human like intelligence and systems of morality emerge as convergent products of the evolutionary process; all of which was the thrust of Life’s Solution. Coyne argues that our big brained intelligence is a one off and that our colossal increase in brain size which began around about 6 million years ago is a unique evolutionary trajectory. This however, is deceptive. The dolphins and porpoises, experienced a vast increase in brain size before ours and have maintained it. Our brain only overtook theirs at some point around one and a half million years ago. What is remarkable is that they show all sorts of similarities in their cognitive landscape to us, including social play, communication, the ability to recognise themselves in mirror (the mirror test) and tool use; this despite an oceanic habitat rather than an arboreal one. The uniqueness of our intelligence is probably a question of degree rather than of kind. For example, a New Caledonian crow has a similar theory of mind to a chimpanzee despite a vastly different brain structure, research into sperm whales shows that diverse social groups can combine to produce a form of culture; this is remarkably similar to elephant societies which have similar practices, despite being in a very ecosystem. With 100 billion earth like planets in our galaxy alone, and with at least 500 billion galaxies in the universe, its fair to say that Robert Foley is probably right and that conscious-driven intelligence has other footholds elsewhere given the right environment.

Pinker is right with his third point, consciousness appears to be a product of the brain, but a particularly strange one. The ‘hard problem’ , which Pinker has recognised, is why the supposedly indifferent laws of physics and chemistry should contrive to produce a subjective experience from material processes?. Here it is worth recalling that Descartes himself said in the Sixth of his 'Meditations on First Philosophy'.

'I am not present in my body merely as a pilot is present in a ship.... I am most tightly bound to it, and as it were mixed up with it, so that I and it form a unit'.

Reductive explanations of the mind have all failed, the non-reductive physicalism which is in vogue amongst philosophers of mind seems to be the way forward, but as the above quote shows, it is close to what Descartes himself was really arguing; that humans are compounds of mind and body, and it is not natural or proper to them to be anything else.

The howler of the day perhaps comes from P Z Myers. In reaction to Conway Morris’s sense of wonderment - that we, as products of evolution, should be able to do science - he says:

We simply do not hesitate to point out a rational examination of the world of biology does reveal order and pattern! Science wouldn't work if the universe were purely chaotic.

I suppose we might phrase this as the ‘science anthropic principle’. We scientifically observe a universe which has a rational order and beauty to it because that is the only type of universe we could observe scientifically. The mindless Epicurean void the materialist wants to invoke, and which has returned in the guise of the multiverse, is not what we observe. Instead science was built on the expectation that the world is ordered by laws bestowed upon it from the outside by a benevolent creator, and that therefore, if we examine it with a certain scepticism towards both nature and our own intellectual abilities, we are capable of obtaining meaningful facts from it and fitting them into a coherent framework. You can reject the religion but continue with the categories of thinking.


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Craig vs. Hitchens

A few months ago I pointed to a site that has links to nearly all of William Lane Craig's debates, as well as upcoming debates. It looks like he's scheduled to debate Christopher Hitchens on 4 April in Los Angeles. I wish I could go.


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Before it's too late...

I am really worried. I am worried that Britain is failing – not economically (although that is a big problem right now) – but as a civilised polity.

Let me illustrate my concerns with three cases over just the last couple of days.

In the first case, a couple were wrongly accused of abusing one of their three children. The state took all their children away and they were adopted by strangers. However, when the mistake came to light, the children were not returned to their rightful parents. The Court of Appeal said adoptions are final and that was that. Any notions of justice or fairness can go to hell. No politician has picked up this appalling case and the press have gotten bored and moved on.

In the second case, a Dutch MP was barred from the country because a Muslim Labour peer threatened to kick up a fuss. Freedom of speech was trumped by, well, nothing very much. Worse, MPs of all parties acquiesced in this decision. Hardly anyone had the guts to stand up for a cherished and vital right.

In the third case, the Crown Prosecution Service has decided not to prosecute policemen whom a jury had already found lied about their involvement in the killing of Jean de Menezes. The jury, using a civil level of proof, decided after hearing weeks of evidence, that the police had systematically lied under oath to deflect the blame for de Menezes killing from themselves to their victim. The Crown Prosecution Service set aside that verdict rather than ensure that it was tested by a jury in a criminal trial. Again, no politician has ever attempted to support the efforts to hold de Menezes’ killers to account. No one has ever been disciplined or even blamed.

I could multiply cases of arrogant officials never admitting error, incompetent police assaulting the innocent and political correctness used to victimise.

Whose fault is this? Well, partly it’s mine. As a citizen I have failed to make enough fuss as our rights are eroded and justice denied to those who need it. And it’s your fault too.

The press must carry more blame than us peasants. They reported the above instances but then move on. The Daily Mail is often attacked (not least by me) but at least it features stories about ordinary people. The obsession with petty politics (did Gordon Brown order an Obama DVD? Who cares?) is demeaning when there are huge issues that should be given attention. Thank goodness for Camilla Cavendish who single-handedly forced open the family courts.

Judges have also been guilty of defending terrorists but ignoring the plight of ordinary people. They are rapidly bringing the law into disrepute.

Most of all, it is the fault of all our politicians, not just the odious opportunists like Chris Hulne or Keith Vaz, but also Conservatives too busy with their directorships to use the backbenches as a campaigning platform for justice.

I can’t see anything changing in a hurry, but we must stop imagining that simply electing a Conservative government can restore our liberties. On the evidence of this week, it won’t.



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The Anthropic Principle for Misanthropes, part 4

In this series I have left out a lot regarding the Anthropic Principle, because my focus is on its value as a teleological argument for the existence of God. So, for example, I have not gone over the several types of APs that have been proposed, i.e. the Weak (WAP), Strong (SAP), Participatory (PAP), and Final (FAP) -- the latter of which Martin Gardner cleverly called the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP).

Some people think that any teleological argument is invalid in light of Darwin. Such arguments are automatically excluded from consideration, since they also apply to arguments against biological evolution. If some teleological arguments from a particular field are invalid, why doesn't that give us grounds for rejecting those from other fields? My answer is fairly simple: because the arguments against evolution don't work and the arguments from the AP do. It doesn't matter who is presenting the argument or what their motivation is: if it's valid, it's valid; and if it's invalid, it's invalid.

One thing that frustrated me about the AP when I first studied it, however, is that there seem to be examples of fine-tuning that don't serve any purpose. The example that particularly hit home with me was that our location with regards to the sun and the moon make it appear as if they just happen to be the same size in the sky. The AP shows that we have to have a moon a particular size and distance from us, and the earth has to be a particular distance from a particular kind of star during a particular burning phase; but it just seems weird to me that this results in the sun and moon appearing to be the same size in the sky. If someone rigged the game, it looks like they were rigging it to mislead us into thinking that they were the same size. Of course, the ancients were able to study the sun and the moon and determine that they're not even remotely close in terms of size. But it seems like a meaningless coincidence, and this made me suspicious that the examples of alleged fine-tuning that the AP demonstrates were similarly coincidental.

The resolution to this leads to a very interesting corollary to the AP. The surface of the earth is the only place in the solar system where an observer could see a total eclipse, in which one body blocks out the sun, but does so just barely, so that the sun's corona can be observed. For millennia, solar eclipses were one of the primary methods by which humankind could study the sun. Such study would only be possible if the sun and the moon appeared to be the same size in the sky. So the same characteristics that make life possible are also the characteristics that allow us to study and investigate the universe around us.

With the advent of the Mars Rovers, there has been a boon in the last several years on Mars studies. Below, on the left, is a series of pictures taken by one of the Rovers of Phobos, one of Mars' moons, crossing between Mars and the sun. The picture on the right is of Mars' other moon Deimos doing the same. Click here to see a very short video (a couple of seconds long) of it.



The point in showing these is that such "eclipses" (they're actually called transits or occultations) would not allow any observers to study the sun's corona.

Here's another example: the AP says that in order for life to be possible, the solar system must reside in a spiral galaxy, and lie in-between spiral arms. In the same way, we have to be between spiral arms in order to see anything beyond our own galaxy. In any other location in any other type of galaxy, the number of nearby stars and the light they produce would prevent us from seeing very far beyond them. So just as it looks like the universe and Earth have been arranged in order to support life, it looks like the universe and Earth have been arranged in order to allow for scientific discovery. Praise God.

(see also part 1, part 2, and part 3)

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Sex Selection

Last year I decided to pay a visit to Highgate cemetery in London and wandered around the ivy chocked gravestones in search of Karl Marx, Douglas Adams and Herbert Spencer. Karl Marx was easy to find. The poor chap chose a rather modest grave the first time around, but in the fullness of time, as his fame became ever greater, he was dug up by his admirers and given a rather grandiose monument adorned with an oversized bust. In 1970 some Vandals tried to blow it up with a fizzing cocktail of weed-killer and sugar, either as a form of protest or as an expression of artistic taste. Across from Marx’s arresting stare lies the grave of Herbert Spencer who developed Social Darwinism, an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies; he also coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.

The novelist George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) is apparently buried a couple of rows behind Spencer. Unfortunately, cursed by a short attention span and frustrated after about ten minutes of scrabbling and tripping over weeds I was unable to find it. For Eliot, Herbert Spencer was one of a series of men on whom, well into her 30's, she was developing painful, messy crushes. She had a brief, intense emotional involvement with him, which ended in July of 1852 with his rejection of her affections

As their relationship had blossomed Herbert Spencer had described George Eliot as ‘ the most admirable woman, mentally, I have ever met’. He noted in his autobiography that the ‘greatness of her conjoined with her womanly qualities and manner, generally keep by her side most of the morning'. George Eliot for her part reciprocated in gushing terms, saying:

‘I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this –but I am not ashamed of it, for I am concious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me....If you become attracted to someone else, then I must die, but until then, I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything- I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you. But I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions’.

Some historians have argued that Darwinian evolution influenced Herbert Spencer to such a profound degree that it caused him to apply his own theories to his love life. He had rejected Eliot’s advances, reputedly because of his conviction that the natural function of a woman is to be beautiful, which Eliot was not. Spencer later wrote in reference to Eliot that ‘Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traints and the emotional traits were of the highest’. Rather Spencer believed that, ‘nature’s supreme aim is the welfare of prosperity’ and that ‘as far as prosperity is concerned, a cultivated intelligence based on a bad physique is of little worth, seeing that its descendants will die out in a generation or two’. In a subsequent essay, “Physical Training,” Spencer argued that “of the many elements uniting in various proportions to produce in a man’s breast that complex emotion which we call love, the strongest are those produced by the physical attractions; the weakest are those produced by intellectual attractions…". Having rigorously applied this principle till the end of his life he died a bachelor.

Of course if he had consulted Friedrich Nietzsche for advice he would have received some more sage guidance. The cynical German philosopher, not known for his relationship tips, once remarked that:

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

George Eliot for her part went on to enter into a scandalous relationship with Spencer’s acquaintance, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. Perhaps with all that concentration on the ‘survival of the fittest’ Spencer had forgotten that evolution is about what is able to breed and pass its genes into the next generation. Take the wrong attitude and you may end up selecting yourself out of the gene-pool.


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Science and Islam on BBC4

Islamic science was the flavour of the month for January with a three part show on BBC4 called Science and Islam: A History presented by Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Roehampton and an Iraqi émigré. In the same month, two new books have been released. The first, by Ehsan Masood, is based on the BBC series and the second is The House of Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons.

I have not had a chance to read either of the books but have caught up with the TV shows. Generally, I thought they were quite good. The production values were very high, as we expect from the BBC, and Jim Al-Khalili is an enthusiastic and engaging presenter. The factual content was fairly lowbrow but accurate as far as it went (apart from a few infelicities from Al-Khalili himself which I’ll mention below). Laypeople who don’t know much about Islamic science will learn plenty. I learnt something new myself – Arab scholars went a long way towards deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They expected to discover the magical secrets of the Egyptians and abandoned the project when the writings in hieroglyphs turned out to quite mundane.

I would have liked to have seen a few more academic talking heads. The shows made plenty of use of Simon Schaffer from Cambridge, but we heard relatively little from George Saliba. Occasionally, Al-Khalili let his enthusiasm get the better of him. For instance, he kept telling us that Arabic philosophers were following the scientific method when it was obvious that they were doing nothing of the sort. And an expert on the show explained clearly that Avicenna’s canon of medicine ceased to have any influence in the nineteenth century when modern medicine took off. But, in his summary later, Al-Khalili said we had seen how Avicenna was still relevant today, contradicting his own expert. Finally, he seemed to blame the decline of Islamic science on western imperialism even though the decline happened centuries before Muslim countries were colonised in the nineteenth century.

There was also a very subtle mistake that few people will have noticed as it was never mentioned in the script. We see Al-Khalili playing around in an alchemist’s lab and some of the filler film shows a clearly-labelled bottle of nitric acid being used to dissolve gold. This is a neat party trick which caused a lot of excitement in the Middle Ages because Moses appears to dissolve the golden calf at Exodus 32:20 (except he doesn’t really. Alchemists were always looking for scriptural justification for what they were up to). The problem is that nitric acid was first isolated by Christian alchemists in the 13th century and not Muslim ones. For a long time, no one realised this because the Christians wrote up their discoveries under the name of Geber, a mythical Islamic alchemist of the eighth or ninth century. Quite a substantial Latin Geber Corpus survives but it records Christian alchemy. A separate body of Arabic alchemy is also attributed to the same mythical individual, but even that was written a couple of centuries after he supposedly lived. Thus the filler film showing nitric acid is not appropriate as part of a discussion of Islamic alchemy.

Overall, despite a few slips, I enjoyed Science and Islam. It is a good starting point for anyone interested in the subject.



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Boxed in

In the sixth century this theological reasoning was still further developed by Cosmas Indicopleustes. Finding a sanction for the old Egyptian theory of the universe in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, he insisted that the earth is a flat parallelogram and that from its outer edges rise immense walls supporting the firmament…This was accepted by the universal Church as a vast contribution to thought’

Andrew Dickinson White

Cosmas Indicopleustes was a self educated, widely travelled Greek merchant who lived during the 6th century A.D. Having converted to Christianity, he was persuaded by certain biblical passages - which he took a very strict literal interpretation of - that the earth was in fact a flat rectangle covered with a vault containing the stars and planets. His motivation for doing so was his hatred of the heresy of the "spherists" and the antipodists, and he evolved his theory of the universe from the design of the Tabernacle built by Moses in the wilderness. This, he pointed out, Moses himself had declared to be constructed upon the pattern of the visible world. He developed this theory in a book called 'Christian Topography' in which he employed a variety of arguments in support of his hypothesis. In his preface he writes:

'Let me next exhort my readers to examine the sketch of the universe and the stellar motions which we have prepared as a representation of the organic sphere of the pagans, and to study the account of it sent to the pious deacon Homologus, then they with God's help are quite competent, especially with this book and the volume mentioned, to overthrow from the foundation the error of the pagan theories. For if any Christian possesses these three works, and is by divine grace carefully exercised in the divine scriptures, he will easily confute the foolish views of the fable-mongers'

According to Cosmas, the base of the box is formed by the surface of the earth, around which flows the ocean; on the other side of the ocean lies another continent. From this rise walls that support the firmament above. This continent, according to Cosmas, is now altogether inaccessible to man, but used to be the seat of Paradise and the home of the human race up to the time of the great flood; at which point the Ark was swept with its few saved men across to the ‘other Earth’. The stars are then carried by the angels in a circle around the firmament, above which is a vault which separates the heaven from the world beneath.

'All the stars are created….to regulate the days and nights, the months and the years, and they move, not at all by the motion of the heaven itself, but by the action of certain divine Beings, or lampadophores. God made the angels for his service, and He has charged some of them with the motion of the air, others with that of the Sun, or the Moon, or the other stars, and others again with the collecting of clouds, and preparing the rain.'

To the north, the earth rises into a cone-shaped mountain behind which the sun hides during the night. The nights themselves get longer or shorter according to the position of the sun, either near the longer base of the mountain or its shorter summit.

Much of the books consists of a long rant against Cosmas’s critics and their insane belief in a spherical earth, despite their professions to be Christian believers. In book one Cosmas writes:

'Cease, O ye wiseacres! prating worthless nonsense, and learn at last though late to follow the divine oracles and not your own baseless fancies. For, tell us, how ye think that the fixed stars move in an opposite direction to the universe? Is such a motion theirs only or that of the sphere in which they are placed? Then, if it is theirs, how do they traverse unequal orbits in equal time? …But who can imagine a greater absurdity than this? Thus they do their best to prevent anyone surpassing them in their effrontery----or rather, let me say, in impiety, since they do not blush to affirm that there are people who live on the under surface of the earth. What then, should some one question them and say: Is the sun to no purpose carried under the earth? these absurd persons will, on the spur of the moment, without thinking, reply that the people of the Antipodes are there----men carrying their heads downwards, and rivers having a position opposite to the rivers here! thus taking in hand to turn every thing upside down rather than to follow the doctrines of the truth, in which there are no futile sophisms, but which are plain and easy and full of godliness, while they procure salvation for those who reverently consult them.’

In particular he points to the attractiveness, or divine simplicity of his new quadrangular theory because it involves a less complicated model for the earth and the kingdom of heaven. In contrast the spherical model involves a proliferation of heavens to deal with:

‘It is necessary for those who wish to be considered Christians to enquire into which of these eight or nine heavens Christ has ascended, and into which they themselves hope to ascend, and what is the use of the other seven or eight heavens. For having already delineated the world in accordance with the scriptural view, we assert that two places were created, one adapted to the present state of existence, and the other to that which is to come, since we have such a hope, one that is better than the life here. And you, if as Christians you hold such a hope, will of necessity be asked what is the use of the seven or eight other heavens….. But ye advance arguments altogether incredible, and will have it that there is a multitude of spheres, and that there is no final consummation of the world since ye are unable to tell what is the necessity of these things. And in like manner ye will have it that the waters above the spheres rotate----a most ridiculous idea and altogether idiotic, and ye advance arguments which are self-contradictory and opposed to the nature of things. How great is your knowledge! how great your wisdom! how great your intelligence! how great your inconsistency!’

At this point, having worked himself up into a rage Cosmas delivers what I consider to be one of the best retorts in the history of science:

Such then is our reply to your fictitious and false theories and to the conclusions of your reasonings which are capricious, self-contradictory, inconsistent, doomed to be utterly confounded, and to be whirled round and round even more than that unstable and revolving mythical sphere of yours.

Despite Cosmas’s passionate treatise he appears to have had no influence whatsoever; he does deserve an honourable mention however, because later polemicists used him to buttress the manifestly false claim that all (or most) medieval people believed in a flat earth. Cosmas is in fact, the only medieval European known to have defended a flat earth cosmology. It is safe to assume that all educated western Europeans (and all but one educated Byzantine), as well as sailors and travellers, believed in the earth's spherity. The myth of the pre-Columbian flat earth was invented by the essayist Washington Irving in the 1820s and propagated by the notoriously unreliable Dickinson White. Cosmas has proven to be an interesting and reliable guide to the state of the world at the time and his descriptions of his travels in particular have proved invaluable. He remains one of my great heroes, having had the courage to advance an unpopular and highly speculative theory in the teeth of his mocking detractors. He had the spirit of science, but not the education and learning to be able to pull it off. If he were alive today I’m sure he would graciously concede that his detractors were right; but only by accident.

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The Golden Grayling

I am pleased and honoured to announce that the winner of last month's 'Dawkinsia of the month' poll was contestant number two, Mr‘Lazy!’. In honour of this achievement I have decided to bestow the 'Golden Grayling' award for 'the most intellectually inept attack upon religion'. This elegant trophy features the wise sage, A.C Grayling, himself in a characteristic pose, awaiting in contemplation to sally forth once again in the 'war' against the irrational theists in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. Since this is awarded on a meritorious basis I shall not be distributing this monthly, it will only be awarded for outstandingly inane non-contributions to the debate.

Here again is the winner

Flagged up by Al, this member of the Dawkinsia deserves praise for his unyielding faith, both in his own staggering intelligence and the memetic ideas of Dawkins. Also worthy of mention are the use of short punchy sentences such as ‘Thats Sad’ to frame and emphasise the points being made. This goes together to create a devastating writing style which is reminiscent of the late A.J.P Taylor.

Charles Darwin gave us a truly brilliant theory of evolution. It explains beautifully how all the breathtaking life on Earth was developed from nothing. Before you criticise the theory of evolution be sure you really understand it! According to Richard Dawkins many don't understand. That's sad. The explanation of the whole universe and it's existence is perhaps not darwinistic. God is a very bad explanation, lazy. Religion tend to say it's ok not to try to understand things. That's why I hate religion so much. I am far too intelligent for that. I have NEVER believed in God, not even in my childhood. I have always understood how silly the idea of God is (in our age). We know too much to think God's existence makes sense. Yeah, I can't prove God doesn't exist. In my mind the probability of God's existence is a very small number, perhaps 0.00000000001 %. That is a damn good justification for being an atheist! Believing in God is silly. Intelligent people do it because 1) they were indoctrinated in childhood (outracious brainwashing!) and 2) Religion sadly has an insanely strong status in society. Religion is dangerous. Religion is a virus exploiting the malfunctions of brain. All people free of that virus should promote reason and hope for secular tomorrow.

Long live the secular utopia, its thousand year reign by Richard Dawkins, and the long awaited resurrection of tired rationalist arguments from the 18th and 19th centuries. Amen.


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The Sin of Onan

A commenter on my previous article has asked me whether masturbation was considered sinful in the Judeo-Christian tradition before the release of the 'Onania' tract in the 18th century and the mass public hysteria that followed. The answer is yes, but the issue received far less attention than is commonly thought. It was a peripheral issue in a wider moral dialogue about human sexuality and the rights and wrongs of non-procreative sex.

According to the seminal work on the subject, Thomas Laqueur’s’ Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation’, polemics against the practice are nearly impossible to find in the ancient Jewish tradition. This was because the sin of Onan, when read in its original context by the rabbis, was for his refusal to procreate in defiance of his creator. Some commentators, attempting to find a condemnation have pointed to the pronouncement by Rabbi Eliezer (Eliezer ben Hurcanus) that ‘anyone who holds his penis while he urinates is as though he brought the flood into the world’, which looks like a rebuke against the wastage of semen which might otherwise be used for purposes of procreation.

Once we move into medieval theology a clear concept of masturbation as a sin was identified, but it was not one of particularly intense interest. Theologians were more concerned with ‘perversions of sexuality as perversions of social life, not as withdrawal into asocial autarky’; these constituted sins such as incest, bestiality, fornication and adultery. The monastic focus was on sodomy rather than masturbation, although masturbation was sometimes condemned in some texts as a form of sodomy. When theologians commented on Onan, it was for what he refused to do. Thus Saint Augustine speaks of Onan as one who refuses to help those in need. This interpretation was necessary because Augustine was approaching the text from the viewpoint of the Christian tradition which rejected the strict rabbinic obligation to procreate and had adopted monastic chastity and an escape from the whole cycle of intercourse.

Masturbation was not permitted, but as part of a wider attempt to overcome sexuality, not just non-reproductive sexuality, so without any particular focus. There were exceptions such as the fifth century abbot John Cassian and Raymond of Penafort (pictured in the top right). Raymond warned married men against touching themselves but only because arousal would make them want to copulate more with their wives. A solitary early-fifteenth-century text of three pages entitled ‘On the Confession of Masturbation’, attributed to the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean de Gerson, instructed priests on how to elicit confessions of this sin. This does not appear to have been circulated widely and it appears to assume the practice is widespread.

With the appearance of the Reformation the conception of masturbation did not change but it was used in different contexts. Protestants accused Catholics of creating monastic institutions which undermined and denigrated marriage and resulted in prolific masturbation. This was part of the broader argument that sexual pleasure in marriage, provided it was not conduced for sinful purposes, was an acceptable byproduct of the divine purpose of procreation. The masturbation resulting from enforced chastity was condemned for the wastage of seed and the refusal to procreate.

The most infamous example of ‘the unnatural practice’ from the 17th century is that of Samuel Pepys who jotted down in his diaries the times at which he engaged in it; usually documenting the act with the use of a special symbol. What is surprising to the modern eye is that these did not seem to him to be shameful or worthy of self-reproach; instead he seems to have felt triumphant. For example Peypes managed, while in a boat trip up the Thames to have ‘had it complete’ by the strength of his imagination alone. He goes on to descibe how just by thinking about a girl he had seen that day to pass a ‘trial of my strength of fancy.... So to my office and wrote letters’.At High Mass on Christmas Eve in 1666 the sight of the queen and her ladies led Peypes to masturbate in church. This does seem to have bothered him but only a little.

The release of Onania in the 18th century therefore marked a seismic shift in attitudes to masturbation; before this it was decried as sinful but received little attention. The change occurred because the practice was conceived in scientific terms as medically harmful; a thesis which was popular amongst both the intellectual elite and the general populace. Religiously based moral sanctions against non-procreative sex were thereby converted into a secular system that removed the divine and substituted "nature" as its justification. The formerly sinful Onanist was now re-conceptualised as the victim of a process of moral disease, one that created false pleasure and undermined reason. In many ways, it was a disease of the Enlightenment.

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The Unnatural Practice

‘But Onan, knowing that the seed would not count as his, let it go to waste whenever he joined with his brother's wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother. What he did was displeasing to the Lord, and He took his life also.’

Genesis 38:6-10

‘When a boy injures his reproductive powers so that when a man his sexual secretion shall be of inferior quality, his offspring will show it in their physical, mental and moral natures, shaping the history and destiny of the nation.’

Dr. Sylvanus Stall

Before the early eighteenth century, neither the scientific community nor the church had paid very much attention to the private, yet presumably common practise of masturbation. This was to change dramatically in 1712 with the appearance of an anonymous tract entitled ‘Onania; or, the heinous sin of Self Polution, and all its frightful consequences, in both sexes considered, with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice’. The unnamed author was probably an English surgeon called John Martyn, who has been described by later historians as ‘a profit-seeking quack doctor cum pornographer’. Martyn, who had been prosecuted in 1708 for obscenity, linked the sin of ‘wilful self abuse’ to the sin of the biblical Onan who had decided, perhaps understandably, to spill his seed on the ground instead of impregnating his dead brother’s widow. Despite the dubious track record of the author, Onania was written with a strong tone of moral outrage. In the preface Martyn warns his reader that there are:

‘lascivious People of such corrupt Minds, that at no time excepted, they may be rais’d to impure Thoughts by bare Words without Coherence, and the Names of Parts, even when made use of in the Description of Calamitous Cases and Nauseous Diseases..therefore I say, I beg of the Reader to stop here, and not to proceed any further unless he has a Desire to be chast, or at least be apt to consider whether he ought to have it or no’

Having filtered the perverts out of his readership Martyn proceeds to denounce the practice of self defiling in these terms, even going so far as to give guidelines for its elimination in schools.

‘Self-Pollution is that unnatural Practice, by which Persons of either Sex may defile their own Bodies, without the Assistance of others, whilst yielding to filthy Imaginations, they endeavour to imitate and procure to themselves that Sensation, which God has ordered to attend the carnal Commerce of the two Sexes for the Continuance of our Species....Would all Masters of Schools have but a strict Eye over their Scholars, (amongst whom nothing is more common, than the Commission of this vile Sin, the Elder Boys teaching it the Younger) and give suitable Correction to the Offenders therein, and shame them before their School-fellows for it; I am perswaded it would deter them from the Practice, and by that means save them from Ruin’.

The tract then went on to outline the terrible medical consequences of Onanism; this aspect of the work was to have far reaching effects over the course of the next two centuries.

‘In some it has been the Cause of fainting Fits and Epilepsies; in others of Consumptions; and many young Men, who were strong and lusty before they gave themselves over to this Vice, have been worn out by it, and by its robbing the Body of its balmy and vital Moisture, without Cough or Spitting, dry and emaciated, sent to their Graves. In others again, whom it has not kill’d, it has produc’d nightly and excessive Seminal Emissions, a Weakness in the Penis, and Loss of Erection, as if they had been Castrated.’

Onania was to become tremendously successful and enjoy widespread popularity. In his one of his works on the history of sexuality Thomas Laqueur describes it as ‘one of the first books to be extensively advertised in the nascent country press’. The meteoric rise of masturbation ‘to prominence’ wrote Laqueur, ‘constitutes ones of the most spectacular episodes of intellectual upward mobility in literary annals’. In just fifty years, it rose up from an obscure provincial publication to become included in the Encyclopedie of the Philisophes; the enlightenments great compendium of learning.

One of the most important factors in this rise to fame was a book by the famous Swiss physician Samuel Auguste David Tissot, a man described in glowing terms as ‘the physician of the enlightenment’. This work was entitled ‘Onanism; or, a treatise upon the disorders produced by masturbation’, and it was to become a literary sensation throughout Europe. Tissot taught that one of the basic causes of illness and death was the wasting away of the body’s energy and that the most dangerous of the wastes was that brought on by masturbation. Having observed that the body became flushed during and after sexual intercourse, Tissot concluded that all sex was potentially dangerous because it caused the blood to rush to the head, starving the nerves and leaving the person vulnerable to the onset of insanity. Those that performed masturbation, and would therefore ejaculate excessively, would suffer a cloudiness of ideas, a decay of their bodily power, be afflicted with pains in their head and pimples on their face, eventually even losing the ‘power of generation’. Females who indulged would suffer hysterical fits, cramps, ulceration of the matrix and uterine tremors. One man, according to Tissot, was so addicted to self-abuse that his brain dried out and could be heard rattling in his head. Masturbation, he concluded, was more dangerous than smallpox.

Marten, Tissot, and the Encyclopaedists who embraced their ideas were to have a profound cultural impact. Their popularised writings were read and passed on by figures such as, Rousseau and Kant; they also filtered down into the populace and the professions. Over the years, the hysteria multiplied.

In the first American psychiatry textbook, Benjamin Rush claimed that masturbation would inflict upon its victim

“...impotence, ...dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, ...loss of memory, ...fatuity and death.”

By the middle of the 1800s, it was standard to blame masturbation for a bewildering variety of symptoms. If masturbation were widespread in the population, disasters could occur. The brain would wilt, the sex organs would shrivel up and die. Insanity, syphilis, blindness, deafness, cancer, afflictions of the female reproductive organs, nosebleeds, heart murmurs, sterility, acne, undesirable odours of the skin, epilepsy, headaches, infantile paralysis, infantile rheumatism, pederasty, and homosexuality were only a few of the conditions thought to be the direct result of masturbation and the bodily traumas it produced. In publications and popular discourse, lack of cleanliness, nervousness, sitting cross-legged or for long periods, spanking, corsets, straining of the memory, erotic reading, play, pictures, perfumes, solitude, fondling, rocking chairs, pockets, feather beds, horseback riding, and bicycling were all considered to encourage the practice of ‘self pollution’. An illustration from The Silent Friend of 1853 showed a bleary-eyed, slack-jawed, imbecile with his tongue lolling and oozing with drool; this was the grim fate that met the persistent self polluter.

When this phenomenon was documented by later historians, some tended to stress the continuity with earlier patterns of thought in the classical, Jewish or Christian traditions. But this obscures the fact that what had emerged in the early 18th century was radically different and widely popular. The ‘Sin of Onan’s’ rise from obscure biblical passage to cultural phenomenon happened -perhaps could only have happened- because it was backed by the best minds of the age and the most fervent advocates of 'unshackling the chains of unreason'. They conceptualised masturbation in scientific and rational terms, as a vice of individuation, a threat to the enlightenment, a medically reckless pursuit which was in danger of ushering in a world of solipsism; a denial of moderation, real autonomy and reason. In doing so they created a monster which was to haunt the Victorian imagination.

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