Authority and Politics

“Politics makes strange bedfellows” is the non-explanation for peculiar alliances often found in politics. A current example worth considering is between business elites and creationists. At first glance this doesn’t make much sense. Wouldn’t business leaders want a scientifically literate workforce for competitive reasons? A standard explanation is a short-sighted pandering for votes. But why this particular combination? A different understanding can be reached via a longer historical view. Historically the same combinations appear over and over, in diverse places such as the factions in the Spanish Civil War, back to the origins of what we today call “conservatism” and “liberalism”.

The common attractor combining many otherwise disparate interests is the argument from authority plus essentialism. As discussed earlier essentialist arguments about “noble blood” were originally used to defend the authority and property of kings and aristocrats. The church, which supported the “divine right of kings”, justified both its power and theology through argument from authority and an essentialist worldview. American conservatism, while of course not supporting monarchy, has often served to defend the privilege of old and new aristocracy. This then is the commonality between aristocratic business elite and creationists: both see their interests advanced by the more general acceptance of essentialism and argument from authority. In general the “conservative” wing of politics will accumulate all those groups dependent on essentialism and argument from authority. Also note a "strict father" often argues from authority, matching Lakoff's metaphorical model of the family in politics and religion.

The historical tie between conservatism and argument from authority is natural. In the past almost all argument was done via appeal to authority, so an ideology that is trying to preserve systems from the past will naturally be more bound to use this type of argument. In practice this often becomes circular: old authorities are cited to “prove” that old sources and methods are best or authoritative. This type of argument only began to be discarded during the enlightenment, and amusingly some of their progress came from ignoring sources in the recent past and instead going back to older Greek sources. One can also imagine a dark post-apocalyptic future where the scientific method [or constitutional representative democracy?] is nearly forgotten, and the golden past that is surreptitiously cited and preserved is our scientific present. In that scenario I would call myself a “conservative”. For now we use the expression “reality has a liberal bias”, because science has shown that essentialism has no scientific basis and appeal to authority does not prove anything.

David Brin often discusses this in terms of time orientation. Conservatives seek absolute truths in the past, in old books and cultural norms. Liberals seek provisional truths in the future, in new scientific experiments yet to be performed. Evolution as scientific method is a mixture of old and new, preserving what works while trying new experiments.

Appeal to authority is of course not limited to the conservative side. Marxism, while starting from flawed economic/scientific premises, quickly solidified into doctrinaire arguments from authority of a few documents and leaders. On the libertarian side, Ayn Rand’s objectivism also started from flawed essentialist assumptions, and quickly became driven by argument from authority.

Breaking out from the control of the argument from authority is difficult. As discussed, many institutions depend on it, and others question whether most people are capable of functioning civilly without it. And almost by definition this cannot be taught. Every individual must figure it out for themselves. Like the immortal dialog from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”:

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals! 

Crowd: [in unison] Yes! We're all individuals! 

Brian: You're all different! 

Crowd: [in unison] Yes, we are all different! 

Man in crowd: I'm not... 

Crowd: Shhh!

Ayn Rand, Authoritarian

"If the Rand line was totalitarian, encompassing all of one’s life, then, even when all the general premises were agreed upon and Randians checked with headquarters to see who was In or Out, there was still need to have some "judicial" mechanism to resolve concrete issues and to make sure that every member toed the line on that question. No one was ever allowed to be neutral on any issue. The judicial mechanism to resolve such concrete disputes was, as usual in cults, the rank one enjoyed in the Randian hierarchy. By definition, so to speak, the higher-ranking Randian was right, the lower one wrong, and everyone accepted this Argument from Authority that might have seemed not exactly consonant with the explicit Randian devotion to Reason."

Murray N. Rothbard, The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult

Dueling Metaphors

As discussed earlier, much of our advanced, abstract thinking is grounded in the use of metaphors from basic physical experience. George Lakoff has presented two basic alternative moral frameworks, both drawn from the family: the strict father model, and the nurturant parent model. He sees conservative politics and religion as based on the strict father metaphor, and liberal politics and religion as based on the nurturant parent metaphor. Currently another family metaphor is in the news: the family budget. Must a nation, like a family, balance its budget? This dispute is fascinating in the ways it both matches and reverses the Lakoffian metaphorical expectations.

As expected, the "strict father" conservatives insist the nation, like a family, must balance its budget. The liberals are viewed as overly indulgent parents who allow their children to overspend. The interesting part is the second metaphor in the conflict: money. In a world of fiat currency, what is money? Is it a placeholder for a finite, non-renewable resource? Is it a nebulous, re-evaluable abstraction? Liberals insist the current U.S. debt situation is not a cause for concern. Unlike Greece, the U.S. has its own currency. Unlike other wrecked nations from the past, the U.S. debt is in its own currency, which is also the world reserve currency. Liberals insist the conservatives are being thick, not understanding the new economics of the unique U.S. situation.

Now this makes for an interesting reversal. Conservatives, who normally insist on American exceptionalism, say in this case the U.S. is not exceptional. More basically, the members of the conservative "faith based community" don't have faith in a deficit-spending fiat currency, while members of the liberal "reality based community" want everyone to have faith in the long-term stability of a fiat currency of a big deficit spender. The conservative metaphor, of the family with a balanced budget, is easy for everyone to understand. While the liberal idea of continuous deficit spending seems more like magical thinking.

Of course there are many other complexities and Machiavellian motivations behind the current impasse. And it will unfortunately probably be a fair while before the world revisits a core mistake that led to the current economic situation: the idea that bondholders can't be allowed to take a loss.

Geometry and Experience

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Albert Einstein, Geometry and Experience, 1921

The conflict between science and religion

The unrecognized heart of the conflict between science and religion is the appeal to authority.  Science does not recognize an appeal to authority as a valid argument, while most religious argument is ultimately based on appeal to religious authority.  This has left people divided into three basic camps:

1)  Those who believe appeal to religious authority can provide true answers in all areas, not just religion.

2)  Those who believe appeal to authority is never a valid argument, in religion or any other area.

3)  Those who believe appeal to authority is a valid argument in areas traditionally or currently demarcated as "religion", but not a valid argument in areas demarcated as "science".  This demarcation would match Stephen Jay Gould's "Non-overlapping Magisteria", although (at least in his short article) he doesn't rationalize it in terms of validity of argument from authority.  I think camp (1) is actually in a stronger position, in asking why if argument from religious authority is considered valid in the "magisteria" of religion why it is not valid everywhere.  After all, the religious works they are referencing do not contain disclaimers to this effect.

Essentialism and Authority

When disputing game rules, or rules in general, one often hears the phrase "according to Hoyle".  This is an appeal to authority, to a book of game rules first compiled by Edmund Hoyle.  These games, such as chess, existed in earlier forms long before he compiled the rules.   One might argue that there is an "essence" of chess, and a platonic form or ideal of chess, which pre-existed its discovery by humans.   If this were true, how close are we to the ideal?  Does it include a modern powerful queen? Castling?  Of course, this kind of essentialism sounds silly.  We understand the rules of chess were made up by humans, and that appeals to the authority of Hoyle are a matter of convention.  There is no possibility of a science of empirical "discovery" of the rules of chess.  Note observation of games also would not arrive at the rules, since for instance castling may never occur in the set of observed games.  So statements about chess are not provisionally true, pending additional observations.

Geometry can also be viewed as a game played with specified rules.  An initial set of postulates is chosen, and from them new theorems are derived.  Euclid codified the first set of postulates, and for centuries Euclid was cited as the authority.  Geometric figures became key examples in essentialism.  Much later, with the invention of non-Euclidean geometry, it was discovered other starting postulates were possible.

The rules of mathematics are much more closely tied to science than the rules of chess, and seem much less arbitrary.  Mathematical theorems are not provisionally true in the sense that new experimental data could overturn them.  But they are provisionally true in the sense that errors could always be found in the proofs.  And a connection between any particular mathematical system and the physical world is always provisional, pending new observations.  The most prominent dispute, from the theory of general relativity, is whether the large scale geometry of spacetime is flat (Euclidean geometry) or curved (non-Euclidean).   And this contradicts Kant's primary example of synthetic apriori knowledge -- things we know to be true independent of any observation of the world.

Provisional Truth Flowchart

Poor Pluto

The demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet (or planetoid) provides another example of the themes of my previous posts. Like the definition of "species", the definition of "planet" is vague, man-made, and changes over time. Scientific authorities also alter the membership of the category based on new information. These changes make many people (especially children) upset. I suspect changes to the planets also cause cognitive dissonance due to their ancient connections to astrology, mythology, and religion. The unchanging nature of heavenly objects was a bedrock belief: "as sure as the sun will rise." Yes, Pluto was not one of the original planets visible to the naked eye, but like the others on discovery it was given the name of a Roman (formerly Greek) god. Today people don't consciously remember how much of our daily language is based on past mythology. My favorite example (besides the planets) is the English names of the days of the week:

Sunday : Sun
Monday : Moon
Tuesday : Tyr (Norse god)
Wednesday : Woden / Odin (Norse god)
Thursday : Thor (Norse god)
Friday : Freya (Norse goddess)
Saturday : Saturn (Roman god)

Darwinism and Authority

American critics of evolutionary theory often prefer to use the term "Darwinism". In doing so they reveal the philosophical, psychological, and theological underpinnings of their world-view: the argument from authority

Appeal to authority is a fallacy of defective induction, where it is argued that a statement is correct because the statement is made by a person or source that is commonly regarded as authoritative.

Scientists don't believe the theory of evolution is correct because it was originally formulated by Charles Darwin, or because it was presented in his book "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection".

Scientific presentations of new theories consist of two parts: the theory itself, and the gathered data which this theory explains. The availability of the gathered data means other scientists can check its validity and see whether it actually supports the proposed theory, or matches some other theory better. For example, the finches Darwin gathered in the Galapagos islands are actually still stored in the bird collection of the British Natural History Museum. Additionally, future scientists can gather additional data and perform new experiments to confirm, expand on, or refute Darwin's original theories. So far new gathered data has confirmed Darwin's basic theories, and vastly expanded on them (understandable, since Darwin was not even aware of Mendelian genetics, let alone DNA). But this new research is not being done to defend Darwin's legacy. Young scientists would be overjoyed to discover a radical new experimental finding or theory which overturns Darwin, and are feverishly looking for this. This very possibility of being wrong is what makes evolution a scientific theory.

An earlier post quoted Dawkins on how children are natural essentialists. I argue children are also, both by nature and nurture, believers in the argument from authority. Children want all statements to have invariant mappings to the categories "true" or "false". The vague category "as best we can tell right now, pending future information" is confusing and upsetting. Teachers and parents are also natural authority figures, and don't have the time (and often background) to explain the rationale behind all their instructions. Elementary memorization is useful, and a child which questioned everything would be impossible to teach. But for many students this attitude continues to their study of science, so Newton, and Einstein, and Darwin become unquestioned authority figures. They don't go back to see that these scientist's work consisted of the same type of presentation discussed above: theories with supporting evidence.

Critics of "Darwinism" are often actually modeling their critique on their early childhood religious upbringing. Early authority figures in their life (their parents) presented additional authority figures (church leaders) whose authority is ultimately derived from an unquestionable final authority figure (the religion's founder(s)). The founders words are contained in unquestionable texts (the revealed sacred documents), and all necessary truths can be obtained through detailed study of those texts. This technique of finding truths through interpretation of texts written by founders (and later texts written about texts written by founders) can arguably be useful in some fields such as law. But it is of only historical interest in science. The correctness of modern evolutionary theory is not bound up in the life of Darwin or the text of "The Origin of Species."

An amusing collision between intelligent design "science" and argument from religious authority is here. Dembski is at risk of being "Expelled"...

Brin on Rand's Essentialism

"We do need a brief aside about Objectivism, which begins by proposing that reality exists independent of its perception. This contrasts refreshingly against the subjective-relativism offered by today's fashionable neo-leftist philosophers, who claim (in blithe and total ignorance of science) that "truth" can always be textually redefined by any observer - a truly pitiable, easily-disproved, and essentially impotent way of looking at the world.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, any fledgling alliance between Rand's doctrine and actual science breaks down soon after that. For she further holds that objective reality is readily accessible by solitary individuals using words and logic alone. This proposition - rejected by nearly all modern scientists - is essentially a restatement of the Platonic World-view, a fundamental axiom of which is that the universe is made up of ideal essences or "values" (the term Rand preferred) that can be discovered, dispassionately examined, and objectively analyzed by those few bold minds who are able to finally free themselves from the hoary assumptions of the past. Once freed, any truly rational individual must, by simply applying verbal reasoning, independently reach the same set of fundamental conclusions about life, justice, and the universe. (Naturally any mind that fails to do so must, by definition, not yet be free.)"

"The Art of Fiction, by Ayn Rand", a review by David Brin in his Through Stranger Eyes

The Appeal of Fantasy Fiction

I've been thinking about the continued appeal of fantasy fiction, especially in relation to topics I have discussed before such as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Moral Realism, and Essentialism. Science fiction author David Brin has written several essays critical of fantasy fiction, including J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress. His basic theme is:

It's only been 200 years or so -- an eye blink -- that "scientific enlightenment" began waging its rebellion against the nearly universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture. Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men's women and wheat... They then proceeded to announce rules and "traditions" ensuring that their sons would inherit everything.

Brin explains how these actions are ennobled in the literature passed down to us, such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the Bible, Arthurian legends, etc. I've been thinking about how these values were embedded at a more basic level, in the language we still use. Look at the term I used earlier: ennobled. The first online dictionary definition gives:

1. to make noble, honourable, or excellent; dignify; exalt
2. to raise to a noble rank; confer a title of nobility upon

[Middle English *ennoblen, from Old French ennoblir : en-, causative pref.; see en-1 + noble, noble; see noble.]

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ennobled

Here, prior to the emergence of modern English, the concept of honorable behavior was bound up with the concept of the superiority of certain blood-lines of inherited privilege. If you accept some form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, that language influences thought, then the use of the English language itself provides a subconscious favorable disposition to the idea of inherited privilege. Critiques of the past or present nobility will inherently generate a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Also note that the idea of noble blood is "essentialist", and fits with humans natural predisposition towards essentialist thinking.

My hypothesis is that feudal and essentialist thinking are embedded throughout all languages, including English. We aren't living in a feudal society, and science is constantly critiquing essentialist thinking. This creates a constant tension in the minds of readers and speakers of English. Fantasy fiction provides a release for this tension. It is a place where the language fits with the action. Often a magical land where essentialist expectations are reality.

Fantasy fiction is in turn divided into two broad categories: High Fantasy, and Swords and Sorcery. High fantasy, of which Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is the prime example, is centered on an epic struggle between Good and Evil. Swords and Sorcery (think earlier pulp fiction, such as Howard's Conan the Barbarian) is more morally ambiguous. However essentialist expectations, such as the reality of magic and the supernatural, are still met.

Most written Science Fiction today is closer to Swords and Sorcery in terms of moral ambiguity. "Hard" science fiction follows modern science in rejecting essentialism. While the "what ifs" of this type of fiction satisfy some readers, many others yearn for the moral black-and-whites provided by High Fantasy. This demand is satisfied in popular science fiction films, such as Star Wars. Here the heroes turn out to be nobles (like Strider/Aragorn the returning king in LoTR!), matching the essentialist expectations bound up in our language.

Science Fiction Morality

In an earlier post I questioned the existence of atheist essentialist philosophers. I had been looking in the area of Philosophy of Science. Turns out a better place to look is Moral Philosophy. Moral Philosophy presents a moral spectrum, from Moral Nihilism (nothing is moral or immoral), to Moral Relativism (morals are relative to individual, social, cultural, or historic circumstances), to Moral Universalism (applies to "all similarly situated individuals") to Moral Realism (moral statements can be objectively true, and subject to rules of logic). In Moral Realism moral rules are similar to Platonic Forms or Ideals. Moral Realism is often grounded in religion, but is also supported by some atheist philosophers (example: Quentin Smith).

The boundaries between the positions are often fuzzy, with various proponents subtly repositioning other prominent philosophers. A historical stumbling block has been determining how a Universal Morality can be possible without recourse to a deity (and this is the basis of the "argument from morality", a proof of God's existence). More recently, based on research in Evolutionary Psychology, Steven Pinker wrote a great essay on how a human moral sense or instinct may have evolved. He presents many rules which are specific to the evolved nature of humans, and some which may be more universal. He says:

"Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself... One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly... The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner..."

It is interesting to consider how many rules the Moral Realist propose are universal, versus specific to the evolved nature of humans. I wonder how much science fiction Moral Realists read. A common theme in science fiction is the presentation of different alien races, and the different moral imperatives which naturally arise from their different evolutionary heritage. Examples are the K'kree (herbivores) and Hivers (one sex) from Traveller. And aside from other planets, we can similarly consider how morals would differ if radically different earth species (sharks? praying mantis? naked mole rats?) had evolved sentience. The Moral Realists imply that all creatures, regardless of evolutionary heritage, will always converge on the same universal morality (or that creatures which are unable to meet the standard can't achieve sentience). This may be a realistic assumption for a few of the meta-universals proposed by Pinker, but I don't think it applies to the much larger set of rules proposed by the Moral Realists. And without this universality the attempt to use rules of logic falls apart.

What's really wrong with Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was the author of the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and the founder of the philosophy of Objectivism. Recently several humorous articles have made fun of adolescent enthusiasm for Rand, and pointed out the real dangers of retaining this enthusiasm into adulthood [see Alan Greenspan]. But critics often miss the fundamental flaw in Objectivism: the attempt to combine essentialism with atheism. Rand claimed her favorite philosophers were Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, both of whom placed God at the core of their essentialist philosophies. Rand also wanted to be an essentialist, to help her derive axiomatic proofs of her absolutist moral and economic theories. Essentialism (and the related ideas of universals and Platonic forms) was strongly criticized by more recent scientifically-minded philosophers such as Hume, Popper, and Quine. Rand has never gotten much respect in academic philosophy, and I am unable to find an academically respected philosopher who is both an atheist and an essentialist. I suspect the combination just doesn't work.

As implied in the linked articles, this combination of essentialism and atheism is probably also key to Rand's appeal to a very specific type of adolescent: one who has recently left their absolutist religious faith behind.

Dawkins on Essentialism

For the mind encased in Platonic blinkers, a rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit. To suggest that rabbitkind constitutes a kind of shifting cloud of statistical averages, or that today's typical rabbit might be different from the typical rabbit of a million years ago or the typical rabbit of a million years hence, seems to violate an internal taboo. Indeed, psychologists studying the development of language tell us that children are natural essentialists. Maybe they have to be if they are to remain sane while their developing minds divide things into discrete categories each entitled to a unique noun. It is no wonder that Adam's first task, in the Genesis myth, was to give all the animals names.

And it is no wonder, in Mayr's view, that we humans had to wait for our Darwin until well into the nineteenth century. To dramatize how very anti-essentialist evolution is, consider the following. On the 'population-thinking' evolutionary view, every animal is linked to every other animal, say rabbit to leopard, by a chain of intermediates, each so similar to the next that every link could in principle mate with its neighbors in the chain and produce fertile offspring. You can't violate the essentialist taboo more comprehensively than that. And this is not some vague thought experiment confined to the imagination. On the evolutionary view, there really is a series of intermediate animals connecting a rabbit to a leopard, every one of whom lived and breathed, every one of whom would have been placed in exactly the same species as its immediate neighbors on either side in the long, sliding continuum. Indeed, every one of the series was the child of its neighbor on one side and the parent of its neighbor on the other...

Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, p. 23-24.

Pinker Again

In my previous post Sapir-Whorf Revisited I cited Lakoff's theories on metaphor. A much simpler critique of Pinker can be made, based only on Pinker. He says

"...the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers". (The Language Insinct, p. 57)

Now simply substitute "culture" for "language":

"...the Revised S-W hypothesis of cultural determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their culture, and its weaker version, cultural relativity, stating that differences among cultures cause differences in the thoughts of their members."

Sound more reasonable? Most of Pinker's critique in his chapter on "Mentalese" would not apply.

Mentalese also appears to have numerous flaws. On a small scale, what is mentalese for our modern word 'telephone'? On a larger scale, for 'cell doctrine'? For 'plate techtonics'? For 'Standard Social Science Model'? For 'physical symbol system hypothesis / computational theory of mind'? All of these concepts are uniquely made available to us by our culture. They were not hard-wired by evolution. They provide categories which determine (or at least cause differences in) our thoughts.

I also doubt human cognition is based on Predicate Logic. We aren't very good at it, and systems actually based on it normally fall apart on the first inconsistency encountered in the real-world (see Carl Hewitt's heroic attempts to fix this in Common sense for concurrency and strong paraconsistency using unstratified inference and reflection).

Sapir-Whorf Revisited

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis asserts that categories in particular human languages influence or even control our possible thoughts. You have most likely heard this presented in its most (in)famous example, about Eskimos having N different words for "snow". I thought this version was well taken-apart by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct. Recently an Edge essay HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? by Lera Boroditsky has made me reconsider.

Using the terminology of Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh, Pinker's critique is classic first-generation Cognitive Science. Pinker says the brain is the equivalent of a computer or Turing Machine, processing abstract symbols. He asserts that thinking is done in "mentalese", not in a particular human language. Translation to human language is the last step before speaking, so it cannot influence the core of thought.

Lakoff and Johnson's second-generation Cognitive Science can be difficult to grasp, so I'll go slow. It is a big idea, and since you can't see where I'm going, it is easy for me to get too far ahead for you to follow. Simply stated: thinking is largely based on metaphor, and abstract thinking is based on metaphorical analogy to bodily operations in the physical world. Re-read the examples in the first two sentences: "difficult to grasp", "go slow", "big ideas", "see where I'm going", "get too far ahead", "follow". All of these are related to operations or relations in the physical world. Their use in the realm of ideas is much more vague and abstract. It is easy to agree on a measurement for the "bigness" of a tree, but how do you measure bigness for an idea? Works such as Feldman's From Molecule to Metaphor show how evolution started with simple minds able to interact with the physical world, and placed increasing layers of abstraction on top. But abstract thinking still bottoms out at the use of modules originally evolved for physical world manipulation.

So how does this relate to language and Sapir-Whorf? The studies cited by Boroditsky indicate different cultures use different physical-world metaphors for their abstract thinking:

"English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month")."

This is plausible. There is no inherent reason why time should be metaphorically mapped horizontally versus vertically. It can easily be culturally determined rather than hard-wired into the brain. And this puts an interesting new spin on Sapir-Whorf. Thought is not determined by language, but instead both thought and language are determined by culturally transmitted, culturally specific abstract metaphorical mappings. And how is culture transmitted? Primarily through language. So linguistic determinism or linguistic relativity is in a sense correct, but not for the reasons usually proposed.

What I.D. is really about

My earlier post Life is like Javascript, not like Java discussed the conflict between Plato's theory of Forms and evolution of new species [*]. I think this conflict is the real motivator behind Intelligent Design. The idea of Forms is pre-Plato; it is implied in Genesis in the animal Kinds and is actually part of our early cognitive heritage. For Plato the belief in Forms both presupposed and necessitated a deity.

The IDers believe in Platonic Forms (often without realizing it), and view species as Forms. They believe natural processes like evolution cannot produce new Platonic Forms, since the Forms preexist and reside in some other timeless dimension our minds somehow contact. Space aliens (an alternative proposed by the IDers in my earlier post Did the First Giraffe have a Navel?) are also unlikely to be able to add new Platonic Forms. The only viable alternative is a deity, the same one who set the mathematical and physical constants (like Pi, and the speed of light C) before the universe was created. The species Forms would have also all been predefined before the universe started.

[*] Note this summary also slides towards a common trap, not unique to IDers. My linked post also asserts species don't really exist, but are an arbitrary man-made construct. So in an important sense evolution doesn't produce species, only individuals. The IDers are asserting nature is bounded by preexisting species Forms, while I say nature in generating new individuals does not recognize or respect any such boundaries.

Black Swans

"Black Swans", as unlikely or unexpected economic events, are currently in the news. This usage was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It was based on the old European belief that all swans were white, which was contradicted by the discovery of black swans in Australia. But as I discussed earlier genus and species are human-defined categories. There is no logical contradiction inherent in a black swan, and probabilities related to finding one are really probabilities of finding individuals (animal instances) fitting into ill-defined categories.

Note the first black swan was discovered in 1697, over 150 years before publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and over 250 years before Watson and Crick's A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA) (1953). So seventeenth century notions of species would not include modern concepts of evolutionary descent or DNA similarity. Instead they were based on ideas of fixed categories inherited from Aristotle.

Funes el memorioso

AKA "Funes, His Memory", "Funes the Memorious", "Funes the Elephant-Memoried." Borges short story about a man who never forgets.

Funes, we must not forget, was virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol "dog" took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the "dog" of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally.
...
He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars -- and they were virtually immediate particulars.

Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, p. 136.

Life is like JavaScript, not like Java

Today most object-oriented programming languages, such as Java, are based around the class concept. The class describes the properties shared by all instances (objects) of that class; and individual objects are created as instances of a particular class. Class-based object-oriented programming originated with Simula and Smalltalk. An alternative is prototype-based object-oriented programming. This is used in JavaScript, and originated with Self. In prototype-based object-oriented programming there are no classes, only instances. New instances are created by copying the properties of an existing instance (the prototype) and adding new properties.

The difference between class-based and prototype-based programming is a useful metaphor for understanding the complexities of the biological concept of Species. Life consists of instances copied from one another (like JavaScript). Species are a class hierarchy (like Java) we try to impose on the instances after the fact -- we forget species is a man-made construct. Nature just does whatever it does, and we try to simplify it by mapping to categories and rules. Certainly species is a useful concept for living in the world. You don't want to take a child to the zoo and say "see the animal instance?" "see the plant instance?" (or just "see the instance?" !). You want to say "see the giraffe?". However, the usefulness of species (or folk categories) does not mean they always obey our expectations.

The difference between class-based and prototype-based programming is also related to the philosophical Problem of Universals. Do classes exist in the real world, or only instances? The most famous theory of real-world classes is Plato's Theory of Forms. In Platonic Idealism pure archetypes for different objects (such as chairs, or giraffes), and ideas (such as justice, or triangles), actually exist in some other space or dimension our minds can contact. This theory was modified, but not completely rejected, by Aristotle's Theory of Universals. Aristotle thought universals were constructed from the common properties of the instances, rather than existing as pure Forms somewhere else. From these Greeks we inherited the idea of dividing the world up into invariant categories, and performing logical operations on them. That works to a point, and makes science possible. But the simplified model is not the real world -- "the map is not the territory".

The psychology of folk-biology, along with folk-psychology, folk-physics, etc. arose naturally through our evolutionary heritage and individual maturation and learning via interaction with the natural world. Even beliefs in the soul, etc. are understandable in this context. A great book on all this is Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Yes, it is a 624 page slog. In part II some of the examples can be skimmed. But if you make it through it will completely change your understanding of what metaphor is and how we think. You will realize that 99% of philosophy is out of date. That we often just trade one set of absolutes for another, without understanding the real biological reasons why we are wired to search for and believe in absolutes in the first place.