They’ve [biologists] got the science right, but they can be inarticulate and high-handed, torpedoeing their own cause. Their efforts at communication to the public are stiff and a bit arrogant. Meanwhile, intelligent design advocates have hired the PR firm that brought us Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. [Emphasis added.]

Working scientists have to pull triple-duty: teaching, research, and dealing with creationists. The creationists just have to write checks to a consultant.

[It] does not see religious belief as a corruption of rationality, but rather as an over-extension of some of the very mental mechanisms that underlie and make rationality possible. In other words, rather than religion having emerged to serve a social or other purpose, in this view it is seen as an evolutionary accident.

Update: Bitch | Lab points out that dualism is not a new explanation:

The thing is, Mary Douglas, among many others, was already on about this. The whole theory of religion as beginning with the fundamental dualism, and supporting Freudian theoretical frameworks which explore the way this dualism operates and shapes our psyches, this is nothing new. It’s all right there, in anthropological theory, and it’s been developed, too, by feminist theorists.

Yes, but I think what is new and novel here is that Boyer and Bloom are tying this into what we have learned about the structure of the brain:

1. We’ve evolved local optimizations for many behaviors: facial recognition, pattern matching, predicting how animate and inanimate things will behave.
2. But those optimizations bleed over boundaries.

This stark separation of the world into minds and non-minds is what, according to Bloom, makes it eventually possible for us to conceive of minds (or souls) without bodies. This explains beliefs in gods, spirits, an afterlife (we continue without bodies), etc. The other thing that babies are very good at, is ascriptions of intentionality. They are very good at reading desires and intentions in animate objects, and this is necessary for them to function socially. Indeed, they are so sensitive to this that they sometimes overshoot and even ascribe goals and desires to inanimate objects. And it is this tendency which eventually makes us animists and creationists.

It’s a cognitive illusion, one of the same class of effects that make a batter perceive a fastball as rising instead of falling.

If you’re interested in cognitive bias, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds is a good introduction to the subject.

Though, telling someone that they missed a fastball because of how our brains work may not be as shocking as telling them that their religious beliefs are due to local optimizations in our hominid ancestors’ brains, and that the soul is just another rising fastball.

Heh, badgerbag caught a whiff of decay and undigested fish off that movie long before the NYT article.

It was all about an annoying social agenda. And all I [could] think was how people will cite that movie and things like it as “scientific evidence” that “nature” is a certain way, to support their own social agendas or what they think about gender.

Remember folks, if you go looking for morality in nature, you’ll either become disappointed or someone’s dinner!

The editors at Worldchanging found an admonishment to that sentiment in a series of responses that Spiked got when they asked scientists what would be the one thing they’d like to teach the world. Dr. Phillip Ball says he’d like people to grok that science isn’t a smorgasbord either:

To take one little example, someone who does not believe in relativity will need to come up with another explanation for why gold is yellow rather than silvery, as well as why we cannot then calculate the correct trajectory of the planet Mercury. These deep theories of science form a more-or-less integrated whole, even if the structure gets fuzzy around the edges. Science, unlike art, is not ultimately a matter of taste.

Katha Pollitt’s take comes with considerably more snark:

Under the new plan, creationists could continue their efforts to wreck science education and dumb down their kids–but first, they would pledge to abstain from any real-life benefits of evolutionary theory. Flu vaccines, for example, rely for their effectiveness on yearly reformulation to account for the evolution of the influenza virus. No evolution? Achoo for you!

Gwyneth Jones (WisCon 29 GoH) latches on this in her novel Life. In one section, the protagonist has an overseas gig on a former Malaysian island annexed by an Islamic Indonesian government. The rulers enforce the hejab, ban mobile phones and the web, but are happy to pay her firm for in-vitro fertilization and more exotic reproductive technologies

Daz, a human rights lawyer, sets us straight about all this hypocrisy. It’s nothing to do with Islam. It’s about controlling communication, you dorks.

New Scientist has survey on current research into altruism that suggests [a] capacity for true altruism seems to be a part of human nature.

And if Hello Kitty is the apotheosis of perfect organic design, then the oral cavity is an abomination and we commit heresy every time we speak.

I relocated, via a comment on Panda’s Thumb, a 1997 article from Reason, a Libertarian magazine, on the Conservative movement’s endorsement of various creationist doctrines such as ID. The writer suggests that Kristol and company pray in public, snicker about the God of Genesis in private, but think that if the proles reject creationism, then they shall all run about and burn down Civilization.

Wait a minute. The Reason article’s going on about Conservatives venerating Leo Strauss and his arguments for elites, but this has taken a rather Lovecraftian turn. Joe Citizen’s darling little girl reads Steven Jay Gould in school and she’s suddenly lurching off to the South Pacific to raise Cthulhu from his watery tomb. Goodness. Rupert Giles should had kept the John Maynard Smith under the same lock and key that he put the copies of the Necronomicon in the Sunnydale High School library.

But there are folks out there fighting to keep knowledge, that only the initiates of the Heritage Foundation should know, out of the hands of us feeble-minded, and easily turned humans: Bruce Sterling mentioned them at his Long Now Foundation talk, they’re The President’s Council on Bioethics.

Of course, try as you may to keep knowledge hidden, these black arts tend to leak out, like the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb.

Well, I guess the Conservatives should use some proscribed biotech to create some Hobbits, as that race are famous for doing as they are told, even if it means marching off to certain death in Mordor. Or at least put Charlie Stross on the case.

You’ll excuse me, I need to read up on Punctuated Equilibrium and invoke “He Who Shall Not be Named.”

[ The preceding post was found on a PowerBook, covered with ichor, open to the talk.origins archive. ]

Bruce Sterling does not worry about a Vingean Singularity that renders humankind a powerless annoyance to transcendent artificial intelligences. Instead he worries about plain old human-driven technological change and nasty WMDs.

Cynthia and I drove up to the City to hear Bruce Sterling’s lecture for the Long Now Foundation at the Fort Mason Center. We had planned a quiet evening at home, watching Brian DePalma and Robert Altman, but Bruce gives great lectures, and after his recent talk at Microsoft I didn’t want to miss what could be a great talk. Thanks Cyn.

The talk can be found as an audio stream in Ogg and MP3.

Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation introduced Sterling. The topic was The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. Brand observes are discontinuities are potholes for group that’s planning for the next 10,000 years of human history.

The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!

Sterling starts with two definitions of The Singularity:

• Von Neumann to Ulam:

An unpublished speculation on the condition where the rate of change exceeds human control and comprehension.

• Vernor Vinge, a professor of mathematics in San Diego

The 1993 paper on the singularity is the cannonical defintion.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Fred Moulton reminds me that there’s been some philosophical papers in the past few years questioning if an emergent AI would decide to murder us all. Sterling didn’t mention these in his presentation.

However, Sterling’s not impressed with AI’s track record so far. He is not convinced that we’ll see ‘emergent’ AI.

He detours before heading to his next topic and discusses how the idea of the ‘singularity’ is a hard for SF writers to grapple. The technological singularity is impossible to communicate across, and thus the first way to read the title of his talk.

Dismissing Vinge

Sterling then puts up one of Vinge’s slides from his stump speech on the singularity. I can’t find these on Google or on Vinge’s site at San Diego State.

The slides are trend lines for computational power of machines compared to biological entities. A late 1990′s Mac is akin to a nematode. But while the Vax is a museum piece, the bacterium it supposedly superannuates still thrives.

He also has questions about Vinge’s definitions. Vinge talks about machines becoming self-aware, or ‘waking up.’ Biology does not, as of 2004, have a answer to what self-awareness is, so we cannot say if networked computers, ants, or a forest can or will have ‘woken up’.

There’s the matter of enhancing human intelligence, and Sterling’s open to that as being plausible. He then lays out alternatives to being super-smart. For example the psychologist Howard Gardner suggests we have multiple intelligences: cognition, emotional, physical, etc.

So instead of becoming some sort of human computing machine as the Mentats in Dune, enhancements might make us more able to be mindful, empathic, and realize what horribly rude people we are. One would hope they have good Prozac after that singularity.

Previous Singularities

Sterling lists three events that have singularity nature:

1. The Atomic Bomb
2. LSD
3. Computer Viruses

All three have changed the world, but only briefly.

Obsolescese and the Singularity

Sterling suggests the future will be a glut of undigested technical riches.

He continues with a new slide, Gartner Research’s Hype Cycle, a five-phase life-cycle of technology adoption. How ‘grown ups’ think about technology.

Of course, he adds, Gartner won’t tell you your business is dead as long as you have a budget for consultants.

The ‘S’ or logistic curve was the earlier form of Gartner’s hype cycle.

Returning to obsolescence, he asks the audience if we’d bother to pick up a copy of Windows 3.0 we found at the curb.

“The street didn’t pick up on the singularity.”

“There aren’t factions in the singularity movement.”

“The singularity has no end users.”

Schools of Thought

• Just No Way
• Superbian Transhumans
• Rapture of the Nerds
• Apocalypse

Judith Berman

• Singularity Resisters

Bill Joy

Science Fiction and Singularity

It’s a great way to make plot, “we had a singularity blow through”.

Ken McLeod’s Engines of Light novels, The Stone Canal, and The Sky Road are all about people living in the ruins of singularities.

We May be on the Edge of Nothing Important.

But we may be edging towards something important.

Like virus writers, the infrastructure of the singularity makers are well-contained. If you lock-up, bomb them, or take away their funding, they go away long before they produce anything self-sustaining.

There’s a large following for the singularity, but that crowd does not actively try to bring it about. This is the “geek rapture” crowd for whom Vinge is the equivalent of Left Behind.

They don’t imagine that a singularity could be monopolized, like the Biblical Fundamentalist version, or that it may be short lived: “And you have burned so brightly Roy.”

Science doesn’t reward thinking through consequences. We reward scary science that gives us things like hydrogen bombs, even the moral titans of science: Einstein, and Sakorov did their heavy lifting in the WMD area.

Containment

He suggests commercialization and broad patenting might stop a future singularity, but technologies with the biggest threat potential may pay off well in the market.

He suggests that two NGO superpowers may emerge who will attempt to marginalize the “kooks” on either side.

The conservative/religous opposition to stem-cell research may be an example of one of these new ‘superpowers’. The President’s Council on Bioethics’ report Reproduction and Responsiblity, talks about a biological singularity and opposes it.

Then there’s force. Sterling asks why wouldn’t a government ready to wage endless war on terrorism declare endless war on the singularity. The ‘nowhere to hide’ rhetoric of President Bush may extend from caves in Afghanistan to labs in China.

At this point, I must give a shout out to the Global Frequency, the sort of NGO one might want to have in this circumstance.

What Can We Say, Pace the Singularity

1. Posthuman is a soundbite.
2. Not just one singularity.
3. The posthuman condition is banal from a post human’s point of view.
4. Messy, embarassing, reversible singularites are preferable to the alternative.
5. It’s hard to be just a little bit dead.

Going back to Judith Berman, Sterling closes with the observation that the most adept political actors in the world right now are people who blow themselves up.

To get past that, we must go back to treating the future as process and not a destination.

Some evolutionary biology links for your blogroll:

• Read Carl Zimmer’s wonderful weblog, The Loom. Well, except when get starts talking about parasites, then I squirm.
• Zimmer contributed to Berkeley’s website on evolution. A good resource, especially if you’re a teacher.
• Pharyngula teaches biology at the University of Minnesotta, and smacks around the Creationists.
  

  Evolution is compatible with many religions. However, if your religion tells you that the world is six thousand years old, that it was created by fiat over the span of six days, that species are immutable, that all existing species are derived from a select few rescued from a flood in a big boat, and any of a host of other silly stories that are directly contradicted by the world around you, you’re just going to have to accept the fact that the weight of the evidence from physics, geology, and biology all dictates that your religion is wrong. It’s that simple. You are wrong. Wise up. Find a better faith that isn’t so damned stupid. And if you are so inflexibly dogmatic that you can’t do that, you give up the right to dictate how science and education ought to operate.

Anthropologists claim, good judgment aside, evolution has nudged women a bit toward promiscuity and sexual adventure. In all well-studied primates, females exhibit a polyandrous tendency when given the opportunity to stray. Some who cheat appear to be more fertile, and the offspring of most are more likely to survive. Fooling around appears to have helped our ancestral mothers equip their little ones for success — the sexual equivalent of reading to them every night or enrolling them in the after-school chess club.

Corrected from 600,000 years ago.

[ via Laura V. ] New Scientist reports research indicating that black cats have more resistance to disease than other cats. And if you’re a small wild cat in an aboreal environment, then a black coat is great camoflage when you’re hunting. However, the research indicates that the mutation for black fur involves a gene related to immunity. Interesting how those advantages worked off each other.

Of course Elby, that fine example of felinus domesticus, could care less about hunting and immunity. She’s got a human to tend to her every whim.