The trio debate Jesse's argument that human behavior is far more culturally determined than evolutionary psychologists would have you believe, and in the process explore the question of where morality comes from and how to distinguish between nature and nurture.
Jesse's pick: "Black God, White Devil"
References: When Is Film Art
I will repeat what I said in response to the podcast. You have a biased and negative view against evolutionary psychoplogy (mosre so by Massimo). Many of the claims you mention that ev psych people hold are simply untrue and the evidence that you cite as countering evolutionary claims is not always accurate or can be interpreted in several ways. Why don't you invite one of the prominent evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker to discuss these issues? I am sure listeners will benefit from hearing all sides of the debate.
ReplyDeletePinker writes stuff like this: ”The core of natural selection is that when replicators arise and make copies of themselves, their numbers will tend, under ideal conditions, to increase exponentially”
ReplyDelete“After many generations of replication, the replicators will show the appearance of design for effective replication, while in reality they have just accumulated the copying errors that had successful replication as their effect.”
Dumb.
really, dumb? That's a very thoughtful comment. I will refrain from saying what i think about your comment but just say that Pinker is one of the smartest people I have ever read.
DeletePinker is very smart, but natural selection operates intelligently, and theories to the contrary are dumb.
DeletePinker goes on to say, “What's satisfying about the theory is that it is so mechanistic. The copying errors (mutations) are random (more accurately, blind to their effects). The outcome of interest is the number of copies in a finite population. The surprising outcome is a product of the cumulative effects of many generations of replication. If the copying errors were not random (that is, if Lamarck had been correct that changes in an organism arise in response to a felt need, or if creationists were right that a superior intelligence directed mutations to be beneficial to the organism), then natural selection would be otiose—the design could come from the mutation stage.”
Dumber. The design COULD come from the mutations stage, just as Lamarck and Baldwin later, have said it does, and many more professional evolutionists say today. They call this Adaptive Mutation.
Which undoubtedly you will say is dumb.
I don't see andthing dumb in what he said adaptive radiation is a flawed idea. In any case, it is hard to create a constructive discussion when you call someone dumb.
DeleteAdaptive radiation? If it were a flawed idea it could be the same as dumb. But you wouldn't mean to call a lot of prominent biologists dumb, now would you.
DeleteI wouldn't call anyone dumb, right or wrong, that the difference between us.
DeleteIn other words a lot of smart people promote a lot of dumb ideas. Take all those who supported libertarianism on the previous post.
DeleteIt's dumb to assume I called Pinker dumb. Although then again, that might be the real problem.
DeleteNature selects whatever survives, and has no known direction towards intelligence. You misunderstand what natural selection means in biology. Bacteria might be selected to survive beyond humans, for example.
ReplyDeleteRelative to the smarter views on the process of selection, that's dumb.
DeleteReference the "smarter views". The only view is that the survival of mindless bacteria over an animal species is a perfect example of "natural selection". Whatever survives is selected. If you have another credible theory, what are you doing here? Go to Yale with it.
DeleteYale already teaches adaptive mutation.
DeleteAlthough I like the classes taught by JAMES A. SHAPIRO
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology - University of Chicago
Gordon Center for Integrative Science W123B
By the way, how far behind the times have you been able to get?
I am familiar with Shapiro and he does not teach that there is a purpose to selection other than to survive, you don't understand the importance of correct references, are you an academic?
DeleteDon't bother replying, I have read Masssimo's comments about your obvious confusions of the meaning of purpose in another thread. It doesn't help your education to quote incorrect references in support of an error few if any academics make.
DeleteDid you read the part where Shapiro has the opposite view of natural selection than yours? Did you read about the arguments he's had with Jerry Coyne about Coyne's devotion to neoDarwinism - similar to your own devotion there (but I won't pretend to speak for Massimo's).
DeleteAnd if you see ourself as an academic, then I'd rather see than be one.
@Keating,
Delete"The only view is that the survival of mindless bacteria over an animal species is a perfect example of "natural selection"
Did you forget to read what Shapiro thinks about "mindless" bacteria? Talk about the incorrectness of citing references, yours takes the prize.
This seems to be a guessing game. Are you saying that bacteria have "minds" as we usually understand the term? If so, I will just disagree and leave it at that.
DeleteAre you saying that they don't have mental processes contrasted with physical action?
DeleteShapiro disagrees. :
Roy,
Deleteyou keep referring to what Shapiro says as if he were the ultimate authority on these matters. He is a brilliant guy, but his views are rather fringe in evolutionary biology.
Massimo,
DeleteAre you then of the opinion that bacteria don't have mental processes contrasted with physical action?
Also it's clear that Shapiro has raised the ire of neoDawinists such as Jerry Coyne.
But the arguments of Shapiro, Jablonka and a host of others on their side, in favor of intelligence as a driver of biological evolution, are, for me, compelling.
No, bacteria don't have mental processes for the simple reason that they don't have minds. Because they don't have brains. Or even a nervous system.
DeleteI'm not a neo-Darwinist myself, as Jerry would readily attest. and I have actually collaborated with Jablonka. That doesn't mean I think everything non-neo-Darwinists say goes...
And yet bacteria make choices, communicate with each other, and learn from experience.
DeleteYou can argue that these are not mental processes, but if they are aware of their environment and experiences, learn from them, communicate with others, strategize such as quorum sensing would indicate, then all of that and more should qualify as mental processing, even if they have no separate brain structures. There are other intelligent species in the world, and especially the oceans, that have no brain structures either.
So to me your objections are simply quibbling, if in the end these creatures calculate and make intelligent choices.
It is of course a mystery as to where they store their memories and operate their algorithmic systems, but obviously they have sensory apparatus and they act and react accordingly. If their choice making processes are not evidence of intelligent capabilities, what is?
In any case I have your answer and you have mine, and neither of us is likely to change. Except that before I came across the likes of Shapiro, I was a lot like the Dawkinsians. So I've already changed, and find it odd when someone who I think should know better doesn't.
So it is a word game at the end of the day. All living things would have minds because they respond in a regular way to stimulation and act upon the environment accordingly. The regular way would be within their phenotypic limits, which are mental for humans and eating for bacteria.
DeleteSimply eating an environment to continue a chemical process, although effective at that, and regular, is not mental by any definition. Being driven by lower energy bonding between compounds for the growth of cells so that the regular chewing continues is not even 'intelligent'.
It's automatic, and carried out in a nearly automatic way by bacteria that just eat, unlike humans who rely on its automatic aspects to do intelligent things. What is intelligent is how humans live, as opposed to bacteria, but nice try anyway. A confusion of term, or a huge exaggeration that lacks a proper context.
The only way I can see bacteria (or any regular living thing) as intelligent is if information storage (as DNA) is intelligent, compared to inanimate things. Non-life has no intelligence whatsoever, so you get half way there, but I would say the information of DNA is a basis for intelligence and not intelligence as such. It gets back to word games when laid out on the table.
DeleteWe evolved from Actinobacteria. Yet Keating claims our intelligence didn't evolve from
Deletethat same earliest ancestor. So at what stage of evolution did it somehow magically kick in?
In any case I'll stick with the various papers and books that show us exactly how clever and creative bacteria are, and let the Keatings hang on tightly to the belief that life's reactive choices are the same as any chemical reactions from rocks, etc. And its true that we've all ascended from some forms of rocks.
I wish he'd make up his mind however if those ancient bacteria were merely automatic or nearly automatic. Nearly automatic sounds a bit like nearly intelligent.
I missed the part where he adds DNA to the mix, implying that it stores information, and somehow that makes bacteria half intelligent, but not fully intelligent. I wonder if half intelligent is more or less than minimally intelligent.
DeleteMore word games. I have no clear idea of what you have said there, but what Shapiro says is that DNA has 'some aspects' of intelligence in its supposed extreme flexibility for adapability. I say a record of regular behaviour of bacteria (their DNA) is not intelligent any more than collating records (a computer) is intelligent. The secure changeable record is the basis for higher orders of life we call intelligent. It's just words games, and the rock example I gave is half way to nowhere (it was a witticism).
DeleteCell Mol Life Sci. 2007 Jul;64(14):1801-4.
DeleteDo cells think? Ramanathan S, Broach JR.
Source, Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA.
Abstract
A microorganism has to adapt to changing environmental conditions in order to survive. Cells could follow one of two basic strategies to address such environmental fluctuations. On the one hand, cells could anticipate a fluctuating environment by spontaneously generating a phenotypically diverse population of cells, with each subpopulation exhibiting different capacities to flourish in the different conditions.
Alternatively, cells could sense changes in the surrounding conditions - such as temperature, nutritional availability or the presence of other individuals - and modify their behavior to provide an appropriate response to that information. As we describe, examples of both strategies abound among different microorganisms.
Moreover, successful application of either strategy requires a level of memory and information processing that has not been normally associated with single cells, suggesting that such organisms do in fact have the capacity to 'think'.
I know what they are saying there, and regularities of living things are special, it's just that the definition of thinking (as a neurological and physical process) is unclear. 'Recorded information', I would be comfortable with. A 'regular mechanism' is ok, but I just wouldn't go so far as the use common terms like thinking or even intelligence, but they are effective mechanisms at surviving and spreading.
DeleteI'll stick with the scientists who actually test these critters and observe the results with objectiveness and open mindedness. If they use the words think and thinking, I'm fairly certain they know when the behaviors fit the definitions.
DeleteYour choice of terms. As long as one identifies what the term is being applied to, laid out on the table, I don't really care, its just convenience in using recognizable concepts. I can work around it.
DeleteGood podcast, but its not nature v nurture, Julia. And its not 50% nature and 50% nurture: biologists prefer to say it is 100% of both. It is a closed relationship, with no distinction between them as a phenotype in action, which is the functional entity that is selected. It is meaningless to identify nature as the genotype, as it is the functional phenotype from that genotype within nature that matters. No secure methodology exists to delimit the potential of a fixed genotype to create cellular functions in a flexible environment. If you know one, post it here, as I would be pleased to read it.
ReplyDeleteA note to Jesse might be to avoid the distinction between biological and cultural until the connection between them is better understood, at least as a strict distinction. Culture might be entirely framed by biological rules and develop loosely within those bounds, as one possibility. The observed psychological differences of gender and so on are not well understood biologically (especially neurologically). Morality goes by the wayside in deprivation and warfare at both a biological and cultural level, for example. Hasten slowly.
DeleteMassive contradiction and bias in this podcast. Loud and clear in denouncing the value of biolgical pair bonding for stable families, and then 30 minutes later clear acceptance of Hume's view of biology as favoring familial relations. Is that Humean bias or anti-ev psych bias? Take your pick, either way it's out of line.
ReplyDeleteMarcus,
DeleteI'm not positive about what the contradiction is here. In the first instance we were talking about the fact that there is cultural variation for pair bonding (true), in the second that kin selection (of which Hume never talked, obviously) is likely to be the base for familiar affective relations (likely according to many biologists). Where's the contradiction? And where the "bias"?
I had another listen, and at 20.00 min, immediate family bonding for the offspring is debunked as a biological factor, and at 37.30 care for immediate family is proposed as a biological factor. I realize that in each case the main interest of the speakers is cultural development, but at 20.00 and 37.30 the references were to biology (as one must consider, to stabilize psychology with that more sound reductive base IF one can). Perhaps you didn't mean for it to sound so extreme a contradiction.
DeleteHume is relevant as he somehow guessed correctly (on the view of biology at 37.30) that immediate family are preferred culturally because that might be a strong biological favoritism, requiring an effort to branch out. I realize he would only have been guessing a view of biology, perhaps as Freud did every step of the way in his biological foundations for psychological testing. I read the bias as pro-Hume. His biological idea is confirmed at 37.30 despite contradicting the view at 20.00. It's anti-Freud and anti-Evo-Psych because their proposed foundations are always more skeptically dealt with (and perhaps appropriately so, as should Hume's if the view at 20.00 holds firm).
Marcus,
DeleteI just re-listened to both segments, you are taking them too far. Both Jesse and I are simply saying that most human behaviors, including pair bonding (what we talk about at 20:00) and kin altruism (what we refer to around 37:30) are a complex mix of biology and culture. Also notice that there is a distinction between pair bonding and altruism toward one's offspring - biologically speaking the latter is much more important.
I heard a definite tendency and a favoritism of Hume, but it's good to read that you would wish to leave the issue more open. Pair bonding and altruism to offspring are not the same, but the chat was also general about altruism, allowing partners to be included, and pair bonding was also broadened by Julia to the issue of offspring preservation. In all, not the clearest podcast I have heard, but thanks for the responses. Keep your chin up anyway, you are doing a reasonable job overall (I might have been scolded by coffee when I wrote it).
Delete