Howling Darwinists

_{Barry Arrington

September 21, 2017

Intelligent Design}

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Several of the usual suspects howled in indignation at my last post, Back to Basics on Whether Truth is Adaptive. Seversky, goodusername, Pindi, Starbuck, critical rationalist, and rvb8 all embarrassed themselves to one degree or another.

This surprised me, because my thesis – that evolutionary theory predicts that belief in the truth is not always adaptive, and, conversely, belief in a falsehood can be adaptive – is a commonplace among evolutionary theorists. It is not the least bit controversial, as I made plain with quotes from Pinker, Baum, Hoffman, Varki, Brower, and even Darwin himself (his famous “horrid doubt” quote).

So I challenged my interlocutors. If you don’t think what I am saying is true, then cite a paper that argues for the opposite proposition: that truth is always adaptive and falsehood is always maladaptive.

The entirely predictable response to the challenge: [crickets]

My interlocutors seemed to be especially flummoxed by the following example I used to illustrate the point:

Oog the caveman thinks Saber Toothed tigers are fun to play with. But he also thinks the best way to play with tigers is to run and hide. Both ideas are contrary to reality. But in combination they result in his survival. Oog is fit under Darwinism’s definition of fit.

For example Goodusername wrote: “Oog doesn’t have long to live.” Why would GUN say that? The example specifically says Oog survived, and why is that surprising? After all, running and hiding when he sees a tiger is one of the best survival behaviors I can imagine.

Nevertheless, GUN insists that Oog’s days are numbered, because he is not thinking straight. THAT IS THE POINT GUN! Natural selection does not care whether Oog is thinking straight. It only cares if his behavior results in his survival. In the example Oog ran and hid and survived. It makes no difference as far as Darwinian fitness is concerned that Oog hid for the wrong reason. The only thing that matters from a fitness perspective is that he hid and therefore survived.

Bottom line: Oog’s false beliefs about playing games with tigers led to a behavior (hiding) that resulted in his survival. Therefore, when Oog acted on the basis of these false beliefs, it increased his fitness (which means nothing more than that he survived to pass along his genes).

Why is this so hard to understand? This is pretty basic stuff. Yet, Rvb8 wrote: “this Oog chap seems to have a parlous grip on his environment and its inhabitants.”

Yes, Rvb8, that is true. And again, that is the point! Oog’s mental grasp on reality is utterly irrelevant to natural selection so long as it leads him to ACT in a way that increases his chances of surviving. And running and hiding from tigers definitely does that for obvious reasons.

Pindi wrote:

Barry, what I am disagreeing with is that a caveman that was so poorly adapted to his environment that be believes sabre tooth tigers are fun to play with is going to survive long enough to breed in comparison to a caveman who recognizes the truth about sabre tooth tigers. Surely that is obvious. I can’t believe you are denying it with a straight face.

*sigh* The point of the example is that Oog IS adapted to his environment. How is he adapted to his environment? Even though he does so for the wrong reason, he runs and hides when he sees a tiger. Maybe another example will help you understand this basic concept:

Scenario one: Oog sees a tiger, and he says to himself, “that tiger wants to play games, and I know his favorite game is hide and seek. I will run into this cave where he can’t find me.” Oog then hides in the cave; the tiger does not find him, and Oog survives.

Scenario two: Ugm sees a tiger, and he says to himself, “that tiger is dangerous. I will run into this cave where he can’t find me.” Ugm then hides in the cave; the tiger does not find him, and Ugm survives.

As between Oog and Ugm, which is more “fit” as far as natural selection is concerned? Trick question. They both survived, and if this one incident is all we know about them, they are equally fit even though Oog acted on false beliefs and Ugm acted on true beliefs. The ONLY way to actually measure relative fitness is to measure relative survival rates. If survival rates are the same, fitness is the same.

I hope our Darwinist friends appreciate the education in Darwinism I am giving them. I doubt they do.

Comments

Seversky, Goodusername
Seversky: Oog’s belief that the tiger just wants to play leads him to run away and hide, which saves him from being eaten – on that occasion. It will also save him on any subsequent occasion. Until, as I wrote before, he decides that the tiger wants a friendly wrestle. That will end Oog’s line of descent in short order.
Where does Oog’s decision, that the tiger wants a friendly wrestle, come from? Was it a mutation? If so, then Oog is simply unlucky, but that’s all in the (evolutionary) game. Or are you perhaps suggesting that Oog has free will, by which he can override his beliefs? Please don’t simply assume a responsible free rational agent to play a part in the story, because it is the explanandum — it is what needs to be explained. Goodusername does the same thing over and over. Sorry guys, you cannot explain A with A.
Goodusername: If you believe (as I’m sure you do) that thinking straight and having a better understanding of one’s environment typically aids in making decisions that results in a better chance at survival – than you will believe that that’s what Natural Selection will typically favor. Period.
Surely a responsible free rational survival expert is exactly what NS will favor, but you cannot have one for free. First you need to explain how evolutionary processes can produce a responsible free rational agent. You see, what we are modestly attempting to do here is to solve one part of that puzzle: ’How can reliable beliefs come into existence, given the modest tools that evolutionary theory has to offer?’ So, you are indeed right that natural selection favors intelligent rational survival experts, but the problem is: first you need to explain their coming into existence by evolutionary means.Origenes_{September 22, 2017
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CR @2
None of our knowledge true justified belief.
I do not know what this means.
And it’s unclear how anyone’s brain can be designed to obtain it.
I fully agree. However well designed, blind chemistry cannot get us to responsible free rationality. The material brain cannot be the whole story. You are finally making some sense CR. Keep it up!Origenes_{September 22, 2017
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CR: “in general, knowledge is unjustified untrue unbelief.” I assume you believe that statement is a justified true belief. Idiot.
Do you really think simply omitting part of an argument (quotemining) is a good strategy? Apparently, you don’t think very much of your readers. Specifically, you omitted very specific criticism of the idea that knowege justified, true belief. And, in doing so, you omitted the answer to what I assume that statement to be. And I’m the idiot? For example, which, of any, do you disagree with?
It is unjustified because of the non-existence of good reasons. It is untrue, because it usually contains errors that sometimes remain unnoticed for hundreds of years. And it is not belief either, because scientific knowledge, or the knowledge needed to build a plane, is contained in no single person’s mind. It is only available as the content of books.
I would also add that all theories are incomplete. Is this something you disagree with? And if justification is imposible, how can knowledge be justified, Wouldn’t this not represent a valid critism of the idea that knowege is true, justified belief? As for the first, lack of good reasons...
"justificationism". Most justificationists do not know that they are justificationists. Justificationism is what Popper called a "subjectivist" view of truth, in which the question of whether some statement is true, is confused with the question of whether it can be justified (established, proven, verified, warranted, made well-founded, made reliable, grounded, supported, legitimated, based on evidence) in some way. According to Bartley, some justificationists are positive about this mistake. They are naïve rationalists, and thinking that their knowledge can indeed be founded, in principle, it may be deemed certain to some degree, and rational. Other justificationists are negative about these mistakes. They are epistemological relativists, and think (rightly, according to the critical rationalist) that you cannot find knowledge, that there is no source of epistemological absolutism. But they conclude (wrongly, according to the critical rationalist) that there is therefore no rationality, and no objective distinction to be made between the true and the false. By dissolving justificationism itself, the critical rationalist regards knowledge and rationality, reason and science, as neither foundational nor infallible, but nevertheless does not think we must therefore all be relativists. Knowledge and truth still exist, just not in the way we thought.
critical rationalist_{September 21, 2017
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Barry, a creature that didn't know a predator was to be avoided to ensure breeding success, would not breed. If it used your rationale, that it was some kind of fun game, then when he lost, he would really lose; the game of life/survival/evolution; he would fail to have offspring, if he thought as your Ooog does. You say Ooog used a different approach, and thought the preator was fun, and he was in a game, therefore producing the same result; survival. This is childish and absurd on the face of it. Every predated creature in the history of nature avoids predation through the twin motivating fctors of, an instinct for survival (not jollity), and an instinct to preserving their DNA. Your Ooog's survival instinct is severely flawed and would be selected against; he and his parents wouldn't survive the stupist predator, let alone a hungry feline. What lawerly word salad will you now produce to refute the plain English of my post?rvb8_{September 21, 2017
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So I challenged my interlocutors. If you don’t think what I am saying is true, then cite a paper that argues for the opposite proposition: that truth is always adaptive and falsehood is always maladaptive. The entirely predictable response to the challenge: [crickets]
Since no one is disagreeing the above statement, that is, indeed, a predictable response.
For example Goodusername wrote: “Oog doesn’t have long to live.” Why would GUN say that? The example specifically says Oog survived, and why is that surprising? After all, running and hiding when he sees a tiger is one of the best survival behaviors I can imagine.
GUN would say that because there’s more to staying alive than surviving tiger encounters.
Nevertheless, GUN insists that Oog’s days are numbered, because he is not thinking straight. THAT IS THE POINT GUN!
And my point is…. there’s more to life than surviving tiger encounters. Oog got comically lucky and managed to survive 30 seconds longer. That’s nice. As I said before, humans don’t have the life span and reproductive cycle of a fruit fly. Ok, Oog’s death perhaps won’t be via tiger. But with a mind like his, it’s a race as to which other million ways to die gets to him first.
Natural selection does not care whether Oog is thinking straight. It only cares if his behavior results in his survival. In the example Oog ran and hid and survived. It makes no difference as far as Darwinian fitness is concerned that Oog hid for the wrong reason. The only thing that matters from a fitness perspective is that he hid and therefore survived.
If you believe (as I’m sure you do) that thinking straight and having a better understanding of one’s environment typically aids in making decisions that results in a better chance at survival - than you will believe that that’s what Natural Selection will typically favor. Period. You’re right. This is pretty basic stuff. There’s no chance that Oog breeds. Perhaps an example used by a couple of the Darwinists that Barry mentions, Ajit Varki and Danny Brower, will help. So let’s take a look at their claims. Their theory is that knowledge of death causes so much anxiety that it prevents species from advancing mentally to the point that they become aware of their death. Thus there’s a barrier to advancing beyond a certain point. But humans, they theorize, got past the barrier by sort-of subconsciously denying death. They are careful to explain the type of “denial” that they are talking about:
It is important at this point to note that the term denial has many different meanings, depending on the context. Standard dictionaries cite many different definitions of the word. There are also diverse colloquial uses, including “self-denial” or “in denial,” as well as various meanings in Freudian psychology. I use the term here not to denote dictionary definitions, such as “disbelief in the existence or reality of a thing” or “a refusal to agree or comply with a statement” (or other variants thereof), but rather to denote the basic definition derived from psychology: An unconscious defense mechanism used to reduce anxiety by denying thoughts, feelings, or facts that are consciously intolerable.
The above begs the question: If knowledge of death is so detrimental, why didn’t we just evolve to not have knowledge of death, or to believe that we never die? Why couldn’t there be, for instance, a caveman who consciously denied death? I haven’t read everything by them so I don’t know if they answer this question themselves, but certainly a major issue is that it would be contradictory to envision such a human. A caveman couldn’t possibly be so stupid, and have such a loose “grasp on reality” as to not be aware of death and, yet, manage to survive. In other words, it would be like proposing an Oog. Whatever benefit the false belief regarding death confers would easily be swamped by the accompanying problems that are opposed to fitness. Just as with Oog.goodusername_{September 21, 2017
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It's pretty obvious from reading responses to Barry's posts that truth is not adaptive.Mung_{September 21, 2017
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> Ooog, is lucky to be alive; ‘luck’ is the most important factor. Genetic drift then?Mung_{September 21, 2017
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-- Ooog, is lucky to be alive; ‘luck’ is the most important factor. This is not the clinical ‘selective’ pressure of evolution. -- RVB8, the example doesn't involve luck. It involves a condition that doesn't make a whit of sense but still works. It's not the same thing as luck. Chance is not involved in Ooog's choice to run away.tribune7_{September 21, 2017
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No 1. I didn't howl, whether in indignation or for any other reason. No 2. All I was doing was pointing out that your Oog example didn't make sense. You're welcomePindi_{September 21, 2017
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Rvb8: “Your Ooog, and his parents would not survive this rigorous ‘selective’ process” That’s right. If logic and evidence don’t support your argument, maybe sheer assertion will get you there. In the example, Oog survived. Your response is to assert, no he didn’t. OK. I can’t refute that. On the other hand, it doesn’t address, much less refute, my argument. CR: “in general, knowledge is unjustified untrue unbelief.” I assume you believe that statement is a justified true belief. Idiot. Seversky: “Until, as I wrote before, he decides that the tiger wants a friendly wrestle.” Sure, if you want to make up scenarios in which Oog doesn’t survive, you are welcome to. Why don’t you just say he read Schopenhauer and committed suicide. That would have as much relevance to the scenarios that are actually on the table as your comment does. Wow. In my last post I gave this challenge: “If you don’t think what I am saying is true, then cite a paper that argues for the opposite proposition: that truth is always adaptive and falsehood is always maladaptive.” As I mentioned above, last time I got [crickets] I make the challenge again. Put up or shut up boys. You little unresponsive tantrums are boring. Meet my actual argument. Or admit I am right.Barry Arrington_{September 21, 2017
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Howling Darwinists
Great name for a group.
Several of the usual suspects howled in indignation at my last post, Back to Basics on Whether Truth is Adaptive. Seversky, goodusername, Pindi, Starbuck, critical rationalist, and rvb8 all embarrassed themselves to one degree or another. This surprised me, because my thesis – that evolutionary theory predicts that belief in the truth is not always adaptive, and, conversely, belief in a falsehood can be adaptive – is a commonplace among evolutionary theorists. It is not the least bit controversial, as I made plain with quotes from Pinker, Baum, Hoffman, Varki, Brower, and even Darwin himself (his famous “horrid doubt” quote).
Who was disagreeing? I wrote:
You can point out that there are many false narratives or beliefs that incidentally that don’t hinder or even aid survival and I will agree.
...and in the previous thread on this topic:
And we can certainly imagine scenarios in which false beliefs are not immediately dangerous to the holder.
Evolution selects on behavior, yes, but behavior is influenced in human beings by belief. Oog's belief that the tiger just wants to play leads him to run away and hide, which saves him from being eaten - on that occasion. It will also save him on any subsequent occasion. Until, as I wrote before, he decides that the tiger wants a friendly wrestle. That will end Oog's line of descent in short order. More importantly, if, as seems likely, Oog contributes to the tiger's survival before he can breed, his false beliefs won't be passed down to any offspring since there won't be any. Moog, on the other hand, survives to have children who are warned sternly that under no circumstances are they to assume that large kitties are just as friendly and harmless as small ones. In this way, maladaptive behavior and beliefs can be filtered out by natural selection.Seversky_{September 21, 2017
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@Barry If I'm flummoxed by your argument, it's because it doesn't seem to make sense. First, you're claimed we *were* designed. Despite that, what you've described actually was the case for most of human history. People's lives were dominated by useful fictions that bared little resemblance to reality. With the exception of fire, the wheel, etc. virtually nothing new was learned for generation after generation. These were people with brains that with effectively the same design as ours and wanted to make progress but didn't. Why? Because they didn't know how. IOW, it’s not about the hardware, but software. Or are you suggesting these people *didn't* have brains "designed" for truth, and then suddenly they did? Second, you're arguing that evolution cannot result in true, justified belief. My response is, "So, what?". None of our knowledge true justified belief. And it's unclear how anyone's brain can be designed to obtain it. So, you cannot even us it in a critical way. From the Wikipedia entry on Critical Rationalism.....
Critical rationalism rejects the classical position that knowledge is justified true belief; it instead holds the exact opposite: That, in general, knowledge is unjustified untrue unbelief. It is unjustified because of the non-existence of good reasons. It is untrue, because it usually contains errors that sometimes remain unnoticed for hundreds of years. And it is not belief either, because scientific knowledge, or the knowledge needed to build a plane, is contained in no single person's mind. It is only available as the content of books.
Since the contents of our theories are not actually "out there" for us to copy into our brains, it's unclear how a brain "designed" for truth could "choose" from one of them, even if that wasn't irrational. Apparently, brains can somehow derive truth from observations, “because that’s just what some designer must have wanted?” Furthermore, in what appears to be a gross misunderstanding / misrepresentation of biological Darwinism, a person who holds the ideas that “Saber Toothed tigers are fun to play with.” and “The best way to play with tigers is to run and hide." does not transmit those ideas via sexual reproduction. This is because those ideas are located in their brain, not their genome. IOW, it would be a meme, not a gene. Neither of those things would be considered more or less fit from a biological evolutionary perspective. Knowledge is information that plays a causal role in being retained when embedded in a storage medium. It doesn't require a knowing subject. An example of this is when a genes contain knowledge that plays a causal role in getting copied into the next generation. This happens even in cases when the result ends up making the organism less fit. There is this book called “The Selfish Gene” You might have heard of it.critical rationalist_{September 21, 2017
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Wow Barry, a little less time impressing us with your lawerly debating skills, (which are parlous:), and a little more laboratory time. You are turning into a Kairofocus, endless opaque posts, on vague topics, where no clear goal is assailable. Ooog, is lucky to be alive; 'luck' is the most important factor. This is not the clinical 'selective' pressure of evolution. Evolution states, 'luck' is in the recombination of genes, how DNA makes mistakes in recombination, due to imperfect chemistry, and the vagueries of subatomic recombination, (which we are far from understanding). Evolution understands this process is unpredictable, producing a wide variety of phenotypes which nature 'selects' from. Your Ooog, and his parents would not survive this rigorous 'selective' process, therefore your mental exercise is moot. And I didn't, 'Howl', I made one comment, enough with the histrionics.rvb8_{September 21, 2017
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