Monday, March 18, 2024

The Queen of the Problems

An article by Jonathan McLatchie at Evolution News describes sexual reproduction as "The Queen of the Problems" for evolutionary accounts of biological origins. McLatchie writes:
The origin of sexually reproducing organisms from asexually reproducing ancestors is a profound mystery which has baffled many an evolutionary biologist. The origin and subsequent maintenance of sex and recombination is a phenomenon not easily explained by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, there are several substantive, well-known reasons why the origin of sex presents a serious problem for conventional evolutionary explanations.

There are several reasons why the origin of sex presents a problem. For starters, there is the waste of resources in producing males. Assuming a sexually-reproducing female gives birth to an equal number of male and female offspring, only half of the progeny will be able to go on to have more offspring (in contrast to the asexually reproducing species, all the offspring of which can subsequently reproduce).

Thus, it is to be expected that the asexual female will proliferate, on average, at twice the rate of the sexual species. Given the disadvantage thereby confronting the sexually-reproducing species, one would expect them to be quickly outcompeted by the asexual species.

Moreover, it must be borne in mind that, in contrast to the asexual species, the females of the sexually-reproducing species perpetuate only half of their successful genotype. To transition, therefore, from a state of asexuality to sexual reproduction is, in effect, to gamble with 50% of one’s successful genotype.

Given that the whole purpose of natural selection is the preservation of those organisms which pass on their successful genes, this strikes at the heart of evolutionary rationale.
Since evolution is theorized to proceed as genetic mutations occuring over vast stretches of time confer some sort of advantage on a population of organisms, it's a mystery as to how sexual reproduction would've ever arisen from asexually reproducing organisms. But the problems extend even deeper than this.
There is, of course, the additional conundrum related to the fact that gametes (i.e. sex cells) undergo a fundamentally different type of cell division (i.e. meiosis rather than mitosis). Meiosis entails the copying of only half of the chromosomal material. In similar fashion to mitosis (which occurs in somatic cells), each chromosome is duplicated to yield two chromatids.

In contrast to mitosis, however, the homologous chromosomes are also associated. So, at the start of meiosis, each visible ‘chromosome’ possesses four chromatids. At the first division, these homologous chromosomes are separated such that each daughter nucleus has exactly half the chromosome number.

At this stage, each is present as two copies (chromatids). These chromatids are hence separated at the second division such that each new nucleus only has a single copy.

In order for sexual reproduction to work, it is essential that the process of meiosis evolve to halve the chromosome number. And this ability must also only occur in the gametes and not in the somatic cells. This difficulty is accentuated by the multitude of novel elements which are found in meiosis, rendering it unlikely to be explicable in terms of single mutational steps.
For those who'd like a refresher of their high school biology on cell reproduction here's a relatively brief video on the difference between meiosis and mitosis. And then there is the added problem of male and female complementarity. Many physical and physiological structures as well as many chemical reactions that enable the whole process to work must develop in male and female virtually simultaneously, even though these structures and reactions are completely different in the two sexes.

One example is sperm capacitation. Chemicals in the head of the sperm have to be modified while on the way through the female reproductive tract in order to prepare the sperm for penetration of the ovum.

There are numerous such chemical reactions that occur in the process of sexual reproduction that occur in no other bodily process and which must have all evolved almost simultaneously and in both males and females for sexual reproduction to work.

This video illustrates just a few of them:
One wonders whether Darwin, if he had been aware of all the problems that sexual reproduction entails, would have ever gone ahead with his theory of natural selection as the engine of evolution.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

What Do the Democrats Want from Israel?

Democrat leaders from President Joe Biden to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have been strongly critical recently of Israel's conduct of the war against Hamas.

Mr. Biden has warned Israel not to do what has to be done to eliminate Hamas in their last stronghold in Rafah and Chuck Schumer has called for the Israelis to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Their indictment of the Israelis has to do with what they see as unjustifiable casualty levels among Palestinian civilians. According to Gazan authorities some 30,000 Palestinians have been killed so far by IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) operations, mostly bombings.

There are a number of things wrong with the criticisms leveled by Messrs. Biden and Schumer, however:
  • The Gaza Health Ministry which released these casualty figures is controlled by Hamas, the same organization that launched the murders of over 1200 Israeli civilians on October 7th. It'd be foolish to believe them.
  • The 30,000 dead figure does not distinguish between non-combatants and Hamas militants. As many as 20,000 of the dead could be Hamas fighters.
  • We're told that many of the 30,000 are children, but anyone under 18 is counted as a child. Many of the Hamas fighters are teenagers between 15 and 18 years of age and would be considered to be child casualties.
  • Many civilians either participated in or abetted the atrocities of October 7th or cheered for them, they overwhelmingly voted for the people who carried them out. It's ironic that the critics of Israel are often believers in the notion of the collective guilt of whites when it comes to the history of racism in this country, but draw a sharp distinction between the "innocent" Palestinians who live in Gaza and the terrorists of Hamas whom they've elected to govern them.
  • The ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths in Gaza is historically low for any urban combat. The U.N. calculates that the ratio in modern warfare is 9:1 - nine civilians killed for every soldier who's slain. The ratio in Gaza is 1.5:1.
  • For perspective, during World War II 100,000 civilians were killed in the battle for Manila and nearly 20,000 French citizens were killed by allied bombs in the run-up to the Normandy invasion.
  • Usually absent from the criticisms of Israel is any suggestion as to what the Israelis should do differently from what they actually are doing. The complaints are often very general laments that Israel is just killing too many people, but we're never told what the magic number of acceptable deaths is nor how the IDF is to avoid killing civilians when Hamas uses them as shields to hide among and uses schools hospitals and residences from which to launch their attacks. Unless people can offer constructive recommendations as to how the Israelis should go about destroying Hamas it'd be best if they'd simply not say anything.
  • Nor is there much, if any, pressure put on Hamas to end the killing by surrendering and releasing all Israeli hostages. Much of the world community, however, is demanding that Israel stop fighting. This makes no sense. Why are there so few calls for Hamas to surrender both themselves and the hostages? It is Hamas, after all, who started this war on October 7th when they barbarously slaughtered over 1200 Israeli civilians.
It's neither wise nor charitable to speculate on people's motives but, nevertheless, that so many are placing the onus on the Israelis to impose a cease-fire rather than demanding that Hamas surrender, leads one to wonder whether these folks don't really want Hamas to surrender and don't really want to see the terrorists defeated.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day this weekend. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

Irish scriptoria

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write, and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Racial Realignment

Andrew Stiles at the Washington Free Beacon draws attention to a notable trend among Democrat voters - many non-white Democrats no longer feel they belong in the Democrat party.

Stiles cites an article by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times (paywall) in which Burn-Murdoch "analyzed political polling data to explain why current trends among minority voters are 'bad news for Democrats,' " and notes that,
According to the numbers, the Democratic Party's historical advantage with non-white voters has declined significantly in recent years. A New York Times poll published earlier this month found that President Joe Biden led presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump by just 12 percentage points among non-white voters, a group he won by nearly 50 percentage points in 2020.
Democrats must be deeply alarmed by this statistic. Democrats need minority voters since according to a piece at Axios Democrats comprise only 38% of the white vote.

One reason for the shift...
...is that Democrats have become the party of the rich. They represent the policy views of Ivy League-educated professionals who use terms such as "Latinx" and "people of color," as opposed to the views of working-class voters who happen to be black or Latino.

These voters tend to be far more conservative politically but have supported Democrats in the past based on social pressures that are rapidly eroding, Burn-Murdoch argued.
This is an interesting point. The reason many minorities voted Democrat in in the past is not because the candidates aligned with the voter's own outlook on the world but because there was strong social pressure to do so. As Joe Biden infamously declared in a 2020 interview, if an African-American votes Republican then he or she "ain't black."

Stiles adds that,
In 2012, for example, roughly 80 percent of black voters who described themselves as "conservative" also identified as Democrats. That number is closer to 40 percent in 2024. Latinos and Asians who identify as conservative have also shifted away from the Democratic Party in recent election cycles as their votes become more aligned with their policy preferences.

"The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising [sic] they’ve been voting for the wrong party," Burn-Murdoch wrote.
Democrats can't win presidential elections without the minority vote, and if more blacks and Latinos realize that their conservative worldview is not being reflected in the Democrat party, the political strength of that party is going to be substantially weakened.

There's more on this at the Axios article linked to above.

Whether the realignment of minority voters will proceed to the extent that it affects November's election is unknowable, but perhaps Trump's vice-presidential pick will have considerable bearing on that question.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. II)

Yesterday I laid out an argument to the effect that one is not rational to believe that naturalism, i.e. atheism, is true and finished with some quotes, mostly from naturalists themselves, acknowledging that, in the words of J.B.S. Haldane, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

Nor, if one's mental processes are in fact the result solely of an evolutionary process that selects for survival rather than truth, does one have epistemic justification for believing that naturalism is true.

So how does the naturalist get around this apparent difficulty? Philosopher Jay Richards summarizes one common response:
If [the Darwinian natural selection] story is roughly correct, then there would seem to be a survival advantage in forming true beliefs. Surely our ancestors would have gotten on in the world much better if they came to believe that, say, a saber-tooth tiger, is a dangerous predator. And if they believed that they should run away from dangerous predators, all the better.

In contrast, those early humans who had false beliefs, who believed that saber-tooth tigers were really genies who would give three wishes if they were petted, would tend to get weeded out of the gene pool.

So wouldn’t the Darwinian process select for reliable rational faculties, and so give us faculties that would produce true beliefs?
On this account evolution would produce a propensity for holding true beliefs solely as a coincidental by-product of the process of selecting for behaviors that are likely to increase the chances of surviving. There are several problems with this argument, however.

One is that it assumes as a matter of faith that a non-rational process like natural selection can produce the rational faculties exhibited in human reason. What justifies the belief that rationality can arise from the non-rational?

But the bigger difficulty, as Richards writes, is that:
....there are millions of beliefs, few of which are true in the sense that they correspond with reality, but all compatible with the same behavior. Natural selection could conceivably select for survival-enhancing behavior. But it has no tool for selecting only the behaviors caused by true beliefs, and weeding out all the others.
What Richards is getting at might be illustrated by a hypothetical example: Suppose two prehistoric tribes both encouraged the production of as many children as possible, but tribe A did so because they believed that the gods would reward those who produce many offspring with a wonderful afterlife.

Imagine also that tribe B had no belief in an afterlife but did believe that the more children one has the more likely some would survive to adulthood to care for the parents in their old age.

Natural selection would judge both of these tribes to be equally "fit" since the "goal" of evolution is to maximize reproductive success. Natural selection would only "see" the behavior, it would be blind to the beliefs that produced it. Thus, true beliefs would have no particular survival advantage over false beliefs, and cognitive faculties that produced true beliefs would not be any more likely to be selected for than faculties which produced false beliefs.

Richards concludes,
So if our reasoning faculties came about as most naturalists assume they have, then we have little reason to assume they are reliable in the sense of giving us true beliefs. And that applies to our belief that naturalism is true.
Put differently, the naturalist cannot rationally justify his belief in naturalism. He can only maintain his belief that naturalism is true by an act of blind faith.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. I)

One of the major difficulties with the naturalistic worldview is that it must explain how belief that naturalism is true is not self-refuting. For the purposes of this discussion naturalism, atheism, and materialism may all be considered synonyms. The argument which concludes that naturalism is self-refuting goes something like this:

On atheism there is no God. Thus, our reasoning powers must be the product of a purposeless evolutionary process that was geared to survival, not for discovering truth.

If that's the case, if we can't trust our reasoning powers to lead us to truth, especially the truth about metaphysical questions, then we have no grounds for believing that atheism is in fact true.

So, although atheism may be true, one cannot rationally believe that it is. This is ironic since most atheists argue that atheistic materialism is rational and theism is irrational, but, in fact, the opposite is actually the case.

Theism is a rational worldview since the belief that we are endowed with a trustworthy reasoning faculty which can reliably lead us to truth only makes sense if theism is true. Thus, the theist has grounds for believing that reason is trustworthy and is therefore rational in trusting his reason to lead him to truth, whereas the naturalist is irrational to believe that naturalism is true since she has no grounds for trusting her reason to lead her to truth.

Numerous naturalists have acknowledged in one way or another that this is a problem. To illustrate the point here's a baker's dozen of quotations culled from philosophers and scientists, the majority of whom, so far as I know, are atheistic materialists:
  • "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Steven Pinker
  • Evolution selects for survival and 'Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.' Patricia Churchland
  • "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." John Gray
  • "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." Francis Crick
  • “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Charles Darwin
  • “Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum
  • “According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman
  • "We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin
  • “[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich
  • “We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins
  • “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.” Lisa Feldman Barrett
  • “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” J.B.S. Haldane
  • "Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." C.S. Lewis
So how does the naturalist address this apparent difficulty? We'll look at the most popular counter argument in tomorrow's VP.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Hell

Some thoughts penned by Lance Morrow on the topic of hell appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required). Here's his lede:
Pope Francis was asked earlier this year what he thinks about hell. “It’s difficult to imagine it,” he replied. “What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty. I hope it is.”

It was a pastoral pleasantry, kindly meant but theologically sloppy. It raised interesting questions: Has the traditional hell—fire and brimstone through all eternity—gone out of business, either because, as the pope hopes, there are no longer enough customers, or because hell has become an atavism: medieval, lurid, and not credible to the 21st-century mind? Is the eternal fire a metaphor? If so, what does it mean? Is hell a physical place or a state of mind? Is there such a thing as eternal life—and if God’s verdict goes against you, does that mean a life of everlasting torment? Is it possible to believe in hell if you don’t believe in God, or is hell the terrible solitude of living without God?

Pope Francis himself has defined hell as “eternal solitude.” By contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre, the pontiff of existentialism, wrote that “hell is other people.” Which is it?
Morrow says more, but I'd like to focus this post on the questions he asks above. Does hell exist and, if so, what is it like?

If one accepts that a personal God exists and if one believes that God is both perfectly good and completely just, then there must be a hell or something very much like it. If justice will ultimately prevail then there has to be accountability for how people have treated other people in this life. Otherwise, human life is incomprehensibly absurd.

So, if the God of Christian theism exists then there must be a hell, but what is it like? The writer C.S. Lewis maintains that hell is an existence that people actually choose for themselves. He writes that,
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
He also says this:
Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.
In his novel, The Great Divorce, from which the above quotes were taken, Lewis pictures matters somewhat like this:

Ultimately every person must stand before God, and God will ask them just one question - 'Do you love me.' Each person's whole life will stand as his or her answer. There will be some whose hearts are so blackened by evil and hardened by hate that the prospect of spending an eternity with the source of all goodness and love would be nauseating and repugnant.

They no more wish to be in the presence of God than a person sick with a stomach virus wishes to sit down to a delicious feast. They wish to be delivered from the presence of God and thus God grants their wish.

He forces no one to love Him or to desire to be with Him. They find themselves separated from God. They find themselves isolated from all that's good, an existence devoid of love, only hate, devoid of pleasure, only boredom and pain, devoid of beauty, only ugliness.

And being so depraved and corrupt they actually prefer this to the existence they rejected.

Is this hell eternal? Is there no way out? Maybe the safest response is to say that as long as the individual chooses it they'll remain in it. Whether God's love and grace extends even to the depths of hell and that repentance is possible even there, I can't say.

I can only say that I wouldn't want to put any limitations on God's love and grace.