Despite the claims of its critics, Intelligent Design is a scientific theory, just one contradicted by evidence such as the human appendix and the inverted construction of the human retina, both bad design with good evolutionary explanations.
My favorite argument against intelligent design is that if there had been intelligent design what makes anybody think the designer would have come up with us?
"...the theory that the universe is run by a single God must be abandoned, and that in place of it we must set up the theory that it is actually run by a board of gods, all of equal puissance and authority..."
I think the Greek Olympic gods were a fine realistic guess for how real gods would behave. It has always annoyed me when there's some horrendous accident and the survivors thank God for surviving; hey, buddy, He was also responsible for killing everyone else in that same accident. Olympic gods, on the other hand, well, it's easy to imagine that millennia of having the powers they had would go to their head and lead to raping every good looking woman they saw, or turning uppity mortals into spiders.
On the third hand, all of them are unfalsifiable, so to each his own.
I find most of the pantheon based religions a little more compelling for much the same reason. Divine providence by committee, a few members of which are kind of ass holes, that meshes a little easier with observational evidence in my mind.
Excellent post. My litmus test for whether an environmentalist is actually serious is "do you support nuclear power?" Yes: An adult who wants to genuinely improve the world. No: An ideologue. Unfortunately the latter vastly outnumber the former.
There are good, non-hypocritical reasons an environmentalist might oppose nuclear power, as long as that environmentalist is not _exclusively_ concerned with climate change. Remember that decades before anybody talked about climate change, environmentalists talked mostly about pollution. And nuclear power generation does raise realistic pollution issues: what do you do with the radioactive (and heavy-metal-toxic) waste?
Nuclear power generation, unlike fossil-fuel power generation, tends to work very well for a long time, but when it goes bad, it goes _very_ bad _very_ quickly. Which is a problem, because the people who built the plant may have long ago retired from building nuclear reactors, so the market can't punish them for doing it badly or cutting corners. The best we can hope for is that, when one plant fails, we can hurry to inspect all other plants built by the same builders and see whether they have the same problem. But it's no longer the builders' problem; the costs have been externalized to the public.
If we had commercially viable (and reasonably safe) fusion reactors, a lot of those pollution concerns would go away, and you could perhaps use support for fusion generation as a litmus test for "improving the world" vs. "ideologue".
I don't think an environmentalist has strong reasons to support nuclear reactors but someone who believes in climate catastrophe, that our present path will result in making Earth nearly uninhabitable, does, since that is a cost much larger than any likely problem with reactors. And that is what the more extreme end of environmentalist rhetoric implies.
Radioactive waste management is a solved problem. Nuclear power has proven itself to be very safe. Few incidents that occurred were hyped out of all proportion.
I call it the dog food test, an old saying I heard related to software companies who don't use their own software. If I truly believed fossil fuels were leading to a Venus-style runaway-greenhouse climate, I would do everything I could to switch to nuclear reactors, even if they spewed radiation and blew up regularly, because that would still be less drastic than turning into Venus.
> contradicted by evidence such as the human appendix and the inverted construction of the human retina, both bad design with good evolutionary explanations.
Maybe I’m not remembering the details of this argument or haven’t engaged deeply enough, but I’ve never quite understood why this was supposed to be such a checkmate against intelligent design. Wouldn’t you need to assume God’s purpose? Some religions believe that man is intended to be born into this fallen world filled with imperfections and infirmities to serve some higher purpose to be tested and tried and/or developed and perfected through suffering which seems perfectly consistent with the human body having these flaws.
That evolution has good explanations for the observed design is still to its credit of course.
I could have sworn that they demonstrated appendix activity spikes after diarrhea (repopulate gut bacteria and all that). And considering diarrhea happens due to tainted food and water and that diarrhea diseases are one of the primary killers of man in nature the appendix becomes more important the more you have to diarrhea. If true the 'appendix dindu nuffin' becomes a strike against anti-creationists simply because it demonstrates a startling lack of imagination substituted for 'proof of non creation'.
This. The worst thing the folks in the ID crowd have done is give folks like David a reason to dismiss it all as faith-based. An open-minded inquiry into the role intelligence has played in the shaping of life is primarily going to come away with the view that anyone speaking with confidence on the topic of it is full of it, Creationist and Darwinist alike, because there's no way to tell the difference between the effects of the two "theories."
Yes, it was a big deal that natural selection was a mostly-plausible explanation for design without a designer, when most of the world took evidence of purpose as evidence of a designer. But in the grand scheme, both views were a wash scientifically; the plausibility of natural selection just means there's an open question here that science can't resolve.
The problem as I see it is that most intelligent people realize ID is a wash scientifically, whereas "evolutionary psychologists" and plenty enough plain old biologists dive into using "natural selection" to explain the shape of life with all the wild speculation of a theologian discussing God's Plan. Insomuch as they examine evidence, it's done in the context of assuming natural selection, not anything that could falsify natural selection. We need more respect for the enormity of the question across the board.
I don't know what you consider a "scientific way." Are you saying that you have no opinion on whether tools you use are well or badly designed? No opinion that you have any reason to hold?
Are you merely saying that there is no way to be certain? That is true of most of the facts you base your actions on.
I'm saying that how well something is designed does not speak to whether or not it was consciously designed, and there's no way to distinguish actual intentional design from "natural selection." It is not a question science is fit to answer. Believe what you want about it, but whatever you believe will be a big old assumption, not a falsifiable fact.
And yes, I think science necessarily requires a lot of assumptions, I'm well aware, but scientists are often not the greatest at keeping track of them.
Intelligent design in a vacuum, perhaps your point is valid,
Intelligent design by a perfect, omniscient God, and it’s really not.
When you switch your argument to “falsifiable fact”, then you are indeed back to absolute certainty, to DF’s point, and most things other than mathematics do not deliver absolute certainty.
People accepted the concept of evolution long before Darwin. The earlier acceptance of evolution came from the "fact" that God's hand pushed evolution. God removed these species and added those species. Because of this, religious leaders used evolution as proof of God.
Darwin's theory was different in that he proposed a way that evolution could work without relying on God. Natural selection didn't need an active God to push things that way or the other. Of course, God could have created the universe and then simply let things develop on their own.
So it was the concept of natural selection, not evolution, that raised the hackles of religious believers. This is the primary reason that Darwin waited so long to publish his work—he could see what was going to happen and he sought to avoid it.
"Evolution," as I and I think most people use the term in the biological context, does not merely mean change. It is shorthand for "evolution by variation and natural selection".
Yes. That's how it is used today. Years ago some people said that it meant change through the actions of God. God created certain species, which later died off and were replaced with other species.
Idk about your first point. Probably not in an absolute sense, likely yes in the practical sense re: politics and personal incentives, but it ain’t easy and few people do it consistently and well.
You cannot much trust psychology as a field, as shown by your second point.
"But the driving force, for a lot of those making those arguments, is the essentially religious belief that natural is good." strikes me as either too kind or meaning the same thing as the driving force behind these arguments is anti-capitalism. As in capitalism ain't natural.
Then, more specifically, behind the anti-capitalism is the acquisitiveness of individuals. If I get research grants because of anti-capitalism, the anti-capitalism spreads and spreads.
That is not what I am talking about. In lots of non-political contexts it is taken for granted that natural is good: Natural food, natural childbirth, back to nature. Botulism toxin and deadly nightshade are both natural, but the presumption is the other way around.
“In lots of non-political contexts it is taken for granted that natural is good:”
It is not just non-political contexts.
Alex Epstein makes this point about Mother Gaia worship quite well in his book “Fossil Future”
But I agree that environmental activists and especially sympathetic journalists and opinion writers take advantage of said sympathy for Mother Gaia worship to advance their political agendas.
What are the hidden motives of environmentalists? It seems to me many of them still drive cars, most still eat meat, they use ChatGPT and fly in airplanes and light fires in their fireplaces and so forth—what behaviors or actions distinguish them?
If environmentalism is viewed as a scientific theory and environmentalists merely as people who believe it there is no reason to expect environmentalists not to do those things. Any individual produces a tiny fraction of world CO2, pollution, or whatever, so even if you believe that more CO2 makes the world worse, the effect on you of CO2 you produce is too small to affect your decisions, perhaps a thousandth or millionth of a cent loss.
It is only if one views environmentalism as a moral theory, the theory that it is wrong to pollute or contribute to climate change however little, and environmentalists as believers in that theory, that the behavior you mention becomes hypocritical.
Other factors like social modeling (“be the change you wish to see in the world”) and psychological well-being (you feel better when you live in alignment with what you believe), neither of which is necessarily rooted in morality, might lead the believer in scientific environmentalism to nevertheless attempt to reduce as much as possible his own negative impact on the environment. So, we should be seeing that behavior not just from moral environmentalists but from at least some scientific environmentalists too.
(You say we don’t see it because of hypocrisy, I say we don’t see it because they are operating from a place of cognitive dissonance most of the time just like everybody else.)
But anyway my main question, which I still have not heard an answer to, is what environmentalists’ hidden motives are. How do they uniquely profit when you lower your carbon footprint?
My conjecture is that people desire certain policies for ideological or self-interested reasons that have nothing to do with climate change, policies which the danger of climate change provides arguments for. That is a reason for them to persuade other people of the dangers of climate change.
(Consolidating my replies to both your comments. Edited to add more paragraph breaks because it resembled a wall (sorry).)
I agree that people desire certain policies for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change, but I don’t see any connection between the *ideology or self-interest* of your typical climate change alarmist and whatever policies they might support.
As I started off saying above, I’d bet the modal climate change alarmist drives a car, eats corn, enjoys air conditioning, uses information processed through big data centers, etc.
(Presumably we are talking about policies that would explicitly, by intent, make driving a car, eating corn, running an air conditioner, and using big data centers more costly because these things are resource-intensive and pollutive, contributing to greenhouse gases and so forth—all the things environmentalists say are accelerating climate change—but it’s possible I’m not thinking of the exact policies you have in mind, because I certainly don’t pay as much attention to this issue as you do.)
As you’ve probably grown sick of hearing me say again and again, I believe people support policies primarily for tribal reasons (not even rising to the level of ideological reasons, because ideology requires at least a coherent value system): they look around and see what their tribe is supporting or opposing, and their opponents as well, and then they fall in line.
If they come up with any arguments or ideology or reasoning at all, these are contrived later as backfill, to reduce or hide cognitive dissonance. This is true of anyone who identifies with a political label like “left” “liberal” “right” “conservative” “centrist” “libertarian” “humanist” “populist” etc. (which is not to say that that such labels can’t also serve a usefully descriptive purpose when applied post-facto, though in most cases they are arbitrary).
Hypothetical people who take certain actions for social modeling reasons likely are not running statistical probability exercises in their minds; if their behavior could inspire even one other person to consider their way of seeing things, it might be considered worthwhile.
They don’t need to persuade a majority or even a large difference-making group all by themselves. If a big difference is the end goal, the idea might be that the behavior spreads from person to person one at a time. This doesn’t even have to make rational sense, it only has to “feel right”.
I see an underlying rationality to it: if I believe X, where X is one side of a political issue, there is approximately nothing I can personally do about whether national policies and culture and so forth are changed to align with X. Instead, what I can do is control my own lifestyle, purchasing decisions, daily activities, etc. and doing that gives me at least a sense of doing all I reasonably can do in alignment with my beliefs. And that seems better than, say, arguing online all day.
But most activists don’t merely want to control their own behavior, they seek to control the behavior of others as well.
Which relates closely to my other answer to you: most environmental activists want leftists to hold political power, to enable them to impose their view of the world on others via state monopoly power over violence.
"most environmental activists want leftists to hold political power, to enable them to impose their view of the world on others via state monopoly power over violence."
Got it, that's clearer. So we agree it is about tribalism.
The one thing that I still disagree with is the bit about "impose their view of the world": there is no coherent view of the world they wish to impose. (The same is true for every other tribal identity.) What they wish to impose is their tribal rule and the subjugation of competing tribes, whatever arbitrary views one might imagine that supports from moment to moment.
Social modeling still has a public good problem, since your example is unlikely to persuade enough people to make a difference. Psychological well-being depends on your believing that you should be living that way, which does not follow from climate change being very bad for the reason I described.
Some people like telling everyone else what to do, whether it's the sibling who rants about which side toilet paper should hang on or the tyrant who hasn't got an entrepreneurial bone in his body but still wants to ape those movie business bozos who shout at underlings.
After WW II, they could rant about Communism. After the USSR fell apart, it was climate catastrophe. As those wheels began going flat, the prescient latched on to wokism. Those victims found populism. You can go backwards too. Prohibition was what happened when the temperance unions got their 15 years of fame. Socialism was a reaction to capitalism lifting so many people out of poverty that a continuum from poor to rich was scarier than the stark divide of lords and peasants.
The common thread in it all is government which is powerful enough to be able to grant wishes, and bureaucrats who enjoy being the real power behind whichever throne is running the current show.
How many delegates to the last IPCC conference arrived in private jets? Clearly one thing the big name environmentalists all have in common is that their rules are not meant to apply to themselves.
Maybe, I don’t pay attention to that stuff. “Their rules aren’t meant to apply to themselves” is something basically all people, not just environmentalists, have in common. Cognitive dissonance is not some weird state we are thrown into when things go wrong; it is the baseline state from which we operate nearly constantly.
What I’m curious to know about environmentalists is, what is their hidden motive supposed to be? How does everyone caring about the environment result in their profiting?
My argument was that there are policies they want, in part for ideological reasons, that are unrelated to climate change. Preventing climate change provides arguments for those policies, which is a reason for them to claim that climate change is a serious problem whether or not it is true.
>“Their rules aren’t meant to apply to themselves” is something basically all people, not just environmentalists, have in common.
That might be the one common defining trait of libertarians, that they do NOT expect to be treated specially, that they expect rules to be applied to themselves as well as everyone else.
This reminds me of this old post warning about “surprising and suspicious convergence”: the idea that it’s usually unlikely the same action will be the best way to advance two very different goals, and if someone is arguing that their preferred action is in fact best on a number of different considerations, you should consider whether they may be biased.
To equate social movements with theories and say they are not scientific is insane. It is like saying "the lack of intellectual depth of libertarians proves that neo-classical economics is'nt a real scientific theory". Neo-classical economics is'nt a real scientific theory for another reason not because its average believer has some the essentially religious beliefs about free market. Such thoughts can only be indicative of a strong cognitive bias.
1. It was considered a science back when people believed in it. I expect that those who still believe in it still consider it a science.
2. Are you saying that something cannot be a science that we now know is wrong?
My answer was regarding "considered a science", not "cannot be a science".
Far as I'm concerned, whether astrology is a science or not, or considered as such, is a silly question, and my answer was in that context, a silly answer. I could be pedantic and say that my answer was compatible with your #1 answer. But that's just getting sillier.
Skeptics of intelligent design operate under the assumption that the goal of the designers was perfection. I operate under the assumption that their goal was entertainment.
That is an inevitable heuristic for humans in the real world, as opposed to homo economicus, who presumably would specialize in one or two topics in depth just to make money.
I've seen the concept of "entropy" defined, loosely, as "surprise". Entropy is related to information theory - one can define entropy and information through similar equations. In that vein, I find that a heuristic related to that one is: it is often promising to pay special attention to individuals or schools of thought whose views are surprising, that is, who don't hold a set of views that can be explained by some unifying ulterior motive. Orwell, for example, had a socialist outlook, but he despised the Soviet Union and was against pacifism.
It's also often useful to apply the first heuristic in the opposite way. That is, some might have an agenda that explains all their views but that is not shadowy or ill intentioned. The agenda might be the spread of an interesting underlying idea (say, anarcho-capitalism) or some profound point which can only be understood by triangulation. For example, Hayek had views on disparate things (economics, epistemology, psychology) but those views were not disparate.
Fair point, homo economicus is the wrong term to use. I meant only that in the real world we humans acquire knowledge and form opinions about topics that are not directly applicable to out daily jobs. For that, heuristics like these become indispensable (and maybe they are indispensable to most jobs as well).
It seemed to me that this kind of modeling should be applicable to other things besides art. In specific, the acquisition of knowledge might deserve special treatment. Acquisition of knowledge can be seen as a type of "leasure" (as you indicate in your book Hidden Order) but we can store and accumulate knowledge for the long haul more directly than we accumulate ephemeral/perishable types of leasure.
Of course, knowledge and information also have utility. We could ask: What does the utility curve for knowledge look like? Or, how does the curve for knowledge about baseball differ from the curve for knowledge about climate change? The fact that this paper about the arts is relatively recent makes me believe that it might still be possible to extend the classical models considerably (or maybe it's just ignorance on my part).
You can consider knowledge both as something that has utility — you like knowing things — and as an input to your production function, part of your human capital, something used to produce things, such as money or health, that have utility.
Economists have been applying economics to things other people don't consider economics for a long time. Becker and Buchanan got Nobel prizes for doing that (Household and crime for Becker, politics for Buchanan). My first econ journal article was a theory of the size and shape of nations.
The fact that there are political inconsistencies from the people who support the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change does not provide us any useful information into whether or not we should accept the hypothesis.
This is the sort of thinking that we should strive to put aside in favor of the scientific process of gathering and analyzing physical evidence.
But all of us are dependent for our beliefs on second-hand information — nobody can gather all of the relevant evidence or check through all of the arguments himself. One is and should be less willing to believe what someone tells you if he has a reason to want you to believe it other than that it is true, a reason that could make it in his interest to tell it to you or to believe it himself even if it was false.
What is your reason to believe the hypothesis? Isn't it that sources of information you trust either tell you it is true or tell you facts from which you deduce its truth?
Ah yes, he moves in mysterious ways. But we can make guesses about his mysterious ways.
I know someone like that. Any argument which comes close to anything religious inevitably ends with him painting himself into a corner and uttering those argument-killing words, "He moves in mysterious ways."
Depends on your religious persuasion. In Orthodox Catholicism for example it's generally a sin to make guesses about his mysterious ways. Trying to anthropomorphize God is a distinctly Western Church concept.
You have the revealed truth, all else is at best, fruitless speculation. God never said anything about evolution either way hence it's not a religious matter to care about. If you like: God exists, God made man, the specific process between those two is irrelevant to spiritual matters because God is in all things. If the process in execution looks like natural selection, that not in opposition to God nor does it diminish him.
My parents were, I believe, socialist atheists who never pushed their political or religious choices on us; thus I say I am not sure. Out of that, they got two born-agains (one angry at the world, the other one of the happiest people I know), one semi-militant atheist, and me, who identifies as "areligious"; when pushed, I call myself an "I-don't-give-a-crap-ist". My experience with others who have thought it important is that there is nothing in common in in the mysterious ways or other details, which I take as a healthy sign that they have not surrendered their minds to the borg.
(I define atheists as those who believe there are no gods, and agnostics as those who care enough to wonder. I frankly don't care how other people define those words, unless they insist on classifying me, and then I go out of my way to make fun of them until they get the message and leave me alone.)
Yeah I meant figurative you, not you you. More just meant "he moves in mysterious ways" isn't always a cop out depending on one's denomination (for lack of a better word). To your point, the Eastern Churches tend to take a similar approach to your "i-dont-give-a-crap-ist" about secular matter such as evolution. The worldly procedures just don't matter practically speaking.
Interesting about religions ignoring worldly procedures. I’m guessing your “Eastern Churches” means Greek and Russian Orthodox, not Buddhism et al. I know very little about most religions other than how they pop up in histories and from what family and friends say in passing. The whole idea of basing so much belief on unfalsifiable faith just whooshes right over my head. The last time someone asked me why I wasn’t religious, I said the real question is why anyone is religious. Surely a baby left alone on a desert island, but somehow able to feed itself and survive, would not grow up inventing any current religion.
My favorite argument against intelligent design is that if there had been intelligent design what makes anybody think the designer would have come up with us?
"...the theory that the universe is run by a single God must be abandoned, and that in place of it we must set up the theory that it is actually run by a board of gods, all of equal puissance and authority..."
I think the Greek Olympic gods were a fine realistic guess for how real gods would behave. It has always annoyed me when there's some horrendous accident and the survivors thank God for surviving; hey, buddy, He was also responsible for killing everyone else in that same accident. Olympic gods, on the other hand, well, it's easy to imagine that millennia of having the powers they had would go to their head and lead to raping every good looking woman they saw, or turning uppity mortals into spiders.
On the third hand, all of them are unfalsifiable, so to each his own.
I find most of the pantheon based religions a little more compelling for much the same reason. Divine providence by committee, a few members of which are kind of ass holes, that meshes a little easier with observational evidence in my mind.
Excellent post. My litmus test for whether an environmentalist is actually serious is "do you support nuclear power?" Yes: An adult who wants to genuinely improve the world. No: An ideologue. Unfortunately the latter vastly outnumber the former.
There are good, non-hypocritical reasons an environmentalist might oppose nuclear power, as long as that environmentalist is not _exclusively_ concerned with climate change. Remember that decades before anybody talked about climate change, environmentalists talked mostly about pollution. And nuclear power generation does raise realistic pollution issues: what do you do with the radioactive (and heavy-metal-toxic) waste?
Nuclear power generation, unlike fossil-fuel power generation, tends to work very well for a long time, but when it goes bad, it goes _very_ bad _very_ quickly. Which is a problem, because the people who built the plant may have long ago retired from building nuclear reactors, so the market can't punish them for doing it badly or cutting corners. The best we can hope for is that, when one plant fails, we can hurry to inspect all other plants built by the same builders and see whether they have the same problem. But it's no longer the builders' problem; the costs have been externalized to the public.
If we had commercially viable (and reasonably safe) fusion reactors, a lot of those pollution concerns would go away, and you could perhaps use support for fusion generation as a litmus test for "improving the world" vs. "ideologue".
I don't think an environmentalist has strong reasons to support nuclear reactors but someone who believes in climate catastrophe, that our present path will result in making Earth nearly uninhabitable, does, since that is a cost much larger than any likely problem with reactors. And that is what the more extreme end of environmentalist rhetoric implies.
Radioactive waste management is a solved problem. Nuclear power has proven itself to be very safe. Few incidents that occurred were hyped out of all proportion.
I call it the dog food test, an old saying I heard related to software companies who don't use their own software. If I truly believed fossil fuels were leading to a Venus-style runaway-greenhouse climate, I would do everything I could to switch to nuclear reactors, even if they spewed radiation and blew up regularly, because that would still be less drastic than turning into Venus.
To be clear: not an “environmentalist”, per se.
But rather a an activist asserting that global warming is a horrible catastrophe that must be averted.
I wholly agree with you on the relative numbers.
> contradicted by evidence such as the human appendix and the inverted construction of the human retina, both bad design with good evolutionary explanations.
Maybe I’m not remembering the details of this argument or haven’t engaged deeply enough, but I’ve never quite understood why this was supposed to be such a checkmate against intelligent design. Wouldn’t you need to assume God’s purpose? Some religions believe that man is intended to be born into this fallen world filled with imperfections and infirmities to serve some higher purpose to be tested and tried and/or developed and perfected through suffering which seems perfectly consistent with the human body having these flaws.
That evolution has good explanations for the observed design is still to its credit of course.
I could have sworn that they demonstrated appendix activity spikes after diarrhea (repopulate gut bacteria and all that). And considering diarrhea happens due to tainted food and water and that diarrhea diseases are one of the primary killers of man in nature the appendix becomes more important the more you have to diarrhea. If true the 'appendix dindu nuffin' becomes a strike against anti-creationists simply because it demonstrates a startling lack of imagination substituted for 'proof of non creation'.
This. The worst thing the folks in the ID crowd have done is give folks like David a reason to dismiss it all as faith-based. An open-minded inquiry into the role intelligence has played in the shaping of life is primarily going to come away with the view that anyone speaking with confidence on the topic of it is full of it, Creationist and Darwinist alike, because there's no way to tell the difference between the effects of the two "theories."
Yes, it was a big deal that natural selection was a mostly-plausible explanation for design without a designer, when most of the world took evidence of purpose as evidence of a designer. But in the grand scheme, both views were a wash scientifically; the plausibility of natural selection just means there's an open question here that science can't resolve.
The problem as I see it is that most intelligent people realize ID is a wash scientifically, whereas "evolutionary psychologists" and plenty enough plain old biologists dive into using "natural selection" to explain the shape of life with all the wild speculation of a theologian discussing God's Plan. Insomuch as they examine evidence, it's done in the context of assuming natural selection, not anything that could falsify natural selection. We need more respect for the enormity of the question across the board.
Natural selection explains things that ID doesn't.
There's no scientific way to determine whether or not something is intelligently designed. Certainly not whether it's well designed!
I don't know what you consider a "scientific way." Are you saying that you have no opinion on whether tools you use are well or badly designed? No opinion that you have any reason to hold?
Are you merely saying that there is no way to be certain? That is true of most of the facts you base your actions on.
I'm saying that how well something is designed does not speak to whether or not it was consciously designed, and there's no way to distinguish actual intentional design from "natural selection." It is not a question science is fit to answer. Believe what you want about it, but whatever you believe will be a big old assumption, not a falsifiable fact.
And yes, I think science necessarily requires a lot of assumptions, I'm well aware, but scientists are often not the greatest at keeping track of them.
Intelligent design in a vacuum, perhaps your point is valid,
Intelligent design by a perfect, omniscient God, and it’s really not.
When you switch your argument to “falsifiable fact”, then you are indeed back to absolute certainty, to DF’s point, and most things other than mathematics do not deliver absolute certainty.
What is the qualifier " intelligent" doing here?
There is no scientific way to determine if planets are not pushed along by superhuman intelligences either.
Science presumes methodological naturalism.
Yeah, I know it's presumption. That's really key to my point, actually.
People accepted the concept of evolution long before Darwin. The earlier acceptance of evolution came from the "fact" that God's hand pushed evolution. God removed these species and added those species. Because of this, religious leaders used evolution as proof of God.
Darwin's theory was different in that he proposed a way that evolution could work without relying on God. Natural selection didn't need an active God to push things that way or the other. Of course, God could have created the universe and then simply let things develop on their own.
So it was the concept of natural selection, not evolution, that raised the hackles of religious believers. This is the primary reason that Darwin waited so long to publish his work—he could see what was going to happen and he sought to avoid it.
"Evolution," as I and I think most people use the term in the biological context, does not merely mean change. It is shorthand for "evolution by variation and natural selection".
Yes. That's how it is used today. Years ago some people said that it meant change through the actions of God. God created certain species, which later died off and were replaced with other species.
Darwinism is consistent with a providential universe. What looks like random to us might be how Providence works.
Psychology makes me wonder if anyone can be unbiased. The replication crisis makes me wonder if I can trust psychology.
Idk about your first point. Probably not in an absolute sense, likely yes in the practical sense re: politics and personal incentives, but it ain’t easy and few people do it consistently and well.
You cannot much trust psychology as a field, as shown by your second point.
Instructive and well stated.
"But the driving force, for a lot of those making those arguments, is the essentially religious belief that natural is good." strikes me as either too kind or meaning the same thing as the driving force behind these arguments is anti-capitalism. As in capitalism ain't natural.
Then, more specifically, behind the anti-capitalism is the acquisitiveness of individuals. If I get research grants because of anti-capitalism, the anti-capitalism spreads and spreads.
That is not what I am talking about. In lots of non-political contexts it is taken for granted that natural is good: Natural food, natural childbirth, back to nature. Botulism toxin and deadly nightshade are both natural, but the presumption is the other way around.
“In lots of non-political contexts it is taken for granted that natural is good:”
It is not just non-political contexts.
Alex Epstein makes this point about Mother Gaia worship quite well in his book “Fossil Future”
But I agree that environmental activists and especially sympathetic journalists and opinion writers take advantage of said sympathy for Mother Gaia worship to advance their political agendas.
What are the hidden motives of environmentalists? It seems to me many of them still drive cars, most still eat meat, they use ChatGPT and fly in airplanes and light fires in their fireplaces and so forth—what behaviors or actions distinguish them?
If environmentalism is viewed as a scientific theory and environmentalists merely as people who believe it there is no reason to expect environmentalists not to do those things. Any individual produces a tiny fraction of world CO2, pollution, or whatever, so even if you believe that more CO2 makes the world worse, the effect on you of CO2 you produce is too small to affect your decisions, perhaps a thousandth or millionth of a cent loss.
It is only if one views environmentalism as a moral theory, the theory that it is wrong to pollute or contribute to climate change however little, and environmentalists as believers in that theory, that the behavior you mention becomes hypocritical.
Other factors like social modeling (“be the change you wish to see in the world”) and psychological well-being (you feel better when you live in alignment with what you believe), neither of which is necessarily rooted in morality, might lead the believer in scientific environmentalism to nevertheless attempt to reduce as much as possible his own negative impact on the environment. So, we should be seeing that behavior not just from moral environmentalists but from at least some scientific environmentalists too.
(You say we don’t see it because of hypocrisy, I say we don’t see it because they are operating from a place of cognitive dissonance most of the time just like everybody else.)
But anyway my main question, which I still have not heard an answer to, is what environmentalists’ hidden motives are. How do they uniquely profit when you lower your carbon footprint?
My conjecture is that people desire certain policies for ideological or self-interested reasons that have nothing to do with climate change, policies which the danger of climate change provides arguments for. That is a reason for them to persuade other people of the dangers of climate change.
(Consolidating my replies to both your comments. Edited to add more paragraph breaks because it resembled a wall (sorry).)
I agree that people desire certain policies for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change, but I don’t see any connection between the *ideology or self-interest* of your typical climate change alarmist and whatever policies they might support.
As I started off saying above, I’d bet the modal climate change alarmist drives a car, eats corn, enjoys air conditioning, uses information processed through big data centers, etc.
(Presumably we are talking about policies that would explicitly, by intent, make driving a car, eating corn, running an air conditioner, and using big data centers more costly because these things are resource-intensive and pollutive, contributing to greenhouse gases and so forth—all the things environmentalists say are accelerating climate change—but it’s possible I’m not thinking of the exact policies you have in mind, because I certainly don’t pay as much attention to this issue as you do.)
As you’ve probably grown sick of hearing me say again and again, I believe people support policies primarily for tribal reasons (not even rising to the level of ideological reasons, because ideology requires at least a coherent value system): they look around and see what their tribe is supporting or opposing, and their opponents as well, and then they fall in line.
If they come up with any arguments or ideology or reasoning at all, these are contrived later as backfill, to reduce or hide cognitive dissonance. This is true of anyone who identifies with a political label like “left” “liberal” “right” “conservative” “centrist” “libertarian” “humanist” “populist” etc. (which is not to say that that such labels can’t also serve a usefully descriptive purpose when applied post-facto, though in most cases they are arbitrary).
Hypothetical people who take certain actions for social modeling reasons likely are not running statistical probability exercises in their minds; if their behavior could inspire even one other person to consider their way of seeing things, it might be considered worthwhile.
They don’t need to persuade a majority or even a large difference-making group all by themselves. If a big difference is the end goal, the idea might be that the behavior spreads from person to person one at a time. This doesn’t even have to make rational sense, it only has to “feel right”.
I see an underlying rationality to it: if I believe X, where X is one side of a political issue, there is approximately nothing I can personally do about whether national policies and culture and so forth are changed to align with X. Instead, what I can do is control my own lifestyle, purchasing decisions, daily activities, etc. and doing that gives me at least a sense of doing all I reasonably can do in alignment with my beliefs. And that seems better than, say, arguing online all day.
But most activists don’t merely want to control their own behavior, they seek to control the behavior of others as well.
Which relates closely to my other answer to you: most environmental activists want leftists to hold political power, to enable them to impose their view of the world on others via state monopoly power over violence.
"most environmental activists want leftists to hold political power, to enable them to impose their view of the world on others via state monopoly power over violence."
Got it, that's clearer. So we agree it is about tribalism.
The one thing that I still disagree with is the bit about "impose their view of the world": there is no coherent view of the world they wish to impose. (The same is true for every other tribal identity.) What they wish to impose is their tribal rule and the subjugation of competing tribes, whatever arbitrary views one might imagine that supports from moment to moment.
Social modeling still has a public good problem, since your example is unlikely to persuade enough people to make a difference. Psychological well-being depends on your believing that you should be living that way, which does not follow from climate change being very bad for the reason I described.
Some people like telling everyone else what to do, whether it's the sibling who rants about which side toilet paper should hang on or the tyrant who hasn't got an entrepreneurial bone in his body but still wants to ape those movie business bozos who shout at underlings.
After WW II, they could rant about Communism. After the USSR fell apart, it was climate catastrophe. As those wheels began going flat, the prescient latched on to wokism. Those victims found populism. You can go backwards too. Prohibition was what happened when the temperance unions got their 15 years of fame. Socialism was a reaction to capitalism lifting so many people out of poverty that a continuum from poor to rich was scarier than the stark divide of lords and peasants.
The common thread in it all is government which is powerful enough to be able to grant wishes, and bureaucrats who enjoy being the real power behind whichever throne is running the current show.
You left out overpopulation.
The major “hidden” motive of most environmental *activists* is the desire for the left to hold political power.
The cartoon DF included suggests as much.
How many delegates to the last IPCC conference arrived in private jets? Clearly one thing the big name environmentalists all have in common is that their rules are not meant to apply to themselves.
Maybe, I don’t pay attention to that stuff. “Their rules aren’t meant to apply to themselves” is something basically all people, not just environmentalists, have in common. Cognitive dissonance is not some weird state we are thrown into when things go wrong; it is the baseline state from which we operate nearly constantly.
What I’m curious to know about environmentalists is, what is their hidden motive supposed to be? How does everyone caring about the environment result in their profiting?
My argument was that there are policies they want, in part for ideological reasons, that are unrelated to climate change. Preventing climate change provides arguments for those policies, which is a reason for them to claim that climate change is a serious problem whether or not it is true.
>“Their rules aren’t meant to apply to themselves” is something basically all people, not just environmentalists, have in common.
That might be the one common defining trait of libertarians, that they do NOT expect to be treated specially, that they expect rules to be applied to themselves as well as everyone else.
This reminds me of this old post warning about “surprising and suspicious convergence”: the idea that it’s usually unlikely the same action will be the best way to advance two very different goals, and if someone is arguing that their preferred action is in fact best on a number of different considerations, you should consider whether they may be biased.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/omoZDu8ScNbot6kXS/beware-surprising-and-suspicious-convergence
To equate social movements with theories and say they are not scientific is insane. It is like saying "the lack of intellectual depth of libertarians proves that neo-classical economics is'nt a real scientific theory". Neo-classical economics is'nt a real scientific theory for another reason not because its average believer has some the essentially religious beliefs about free market. Such thoughts can only be indicative of a strong cognitive bias.
Someone (apparently a follower of Aristotle) defined “man” as “the rational animal.” He might have better defined “man” as “the rationalizing animal.”
I don't understand how Intelligent design is a scientific theory.
Because anything can be a scientific theory. You posit something that explains a natural phenomena therefore you have a scientific theory.
Then the prefix “scientific” is meaningless.
Not really, it means someone thought about something formally and is attempting to explain something in a methodical logical manner.
If you have a theory of something but no concept of why or logical explanation, it's not scientific.
I think you think scientific is a noun here and it's not, it's an adjective.
Why is astrology not generally regarded as science despite it making falsifiable predictions?
It was considered a science back when people believed in it. I expect that those who still believe in it still consider it a science.
Because it lost the PR war.
By making too many falsifiable predictions which were in fact falsified.
Are you saying that something cannot be a science that we now know is wrong?
Ah, you've changed the context.
1. It was considered a science back when people believed in it. I expect that those who still believe in it still consider it a science.
2. Are you saying that something cannot be a science that we now know is wrong?
My answer was regarding "considered a science", not "cannot be a science".
Far as I'm concerned, whether astrology is a science or not, or considered as such, is a silly question, and my answer was in that context, a silly answer. I could be pedantic and say that my answer was compatible with your #1 answer. But that's just getting sillier.
Skeptics of intelligent design operate under the assumption that the goal of the designers was perfection. I operate under the assumption that their goal was entertainment.
Finally, a theory that explains almost everything!
That is an inevitable heuristic for humans in the real world, as opposed to homo economicus, who presumably would specialize in one or two topics in depth just to make money.
I've seen the concept of "entropy" defined, loosely, as "surprise". Entropy is related to information theory - one can define entropy and information through similar equations. In that vein, I find that a heuristic related to that one is: it is often promising to pay special attention to individuals or schools of thought whose views are surprising, that is, who don't hold a set of views that can be explained by some unifying ulterior motive. Orwell, for example, had a socialist outlook, but he despised the Soviet Union and was against pacifism.
It's also often useful to apply the first heuristic in the opposite way. That is, some might have an agenda that explains all their views but that is not shadowy or ill intentioned. The agenda might be the spread of an interesting underlying idea (say, anarcho-capitalism) or some profound point which can only be understood by triangulation. For example, Hayek had views on disparate things (economics, epistemology, psychology) but those views were not disparate.
Homo economicus doesn't maximize wealth or income, he maximizes utility.
Fair point, homo economicus is the wrong term to use. I meant only that in the real world we humans acquire knowledge and form opinions about topics that are not directly applicable to out daily jobs. For that, heuristics like these become indispensable (and maybe they are indispensable to most jobs as well).
On a related note, I recently came across a 2000s paper that attempted to model the economic behavior of artists: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353375815_An_Economic_Theory_of_Avant-Garde_and_Popular_Art_or_High_and_Low_Culture
It seemed to me that this kind of modeling should be applicable to other things besides art. In specific, the acquisition of knowledge might deserve special treatment. Acquisition of knowledge can be seen as a type of "leasure" (as you indicate in your book Hidden Order) but we can store and accumulate knowledge for the long haul more directly than we accumulate ephemeral/perishable types of leasure.
Of course, knowledge and information also have utility. We could ask: What does the utility curve for knowledge look like? Or, how does the curve for knowledge about baseball differ from the curve for knowledge about climate change? The fact that this paper about the arts is relatively recent makes me believe that it might still be possible to extend the classical models considerably (or maybe it's just ignorance on my part).
You can consider knowledge both as something that has utility — you like knowing things — and as an input to your production function, part of your human capital, something used to produce things, such as money or health, that have utility.
Economists have been applying economics to things other people don't consider economics for a long time. Becker and Buchanan got Nobel prizes for doing that (Household and crime for Becker, politics for Buchanan). My first econ journal article was a theory of the size and shape of nations.
I’m not a fan of this line of argument.
The fact that there are political inconsistencies from the people who support the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change does not provide us any useful information into whether or not we should accept the hypothesis.
This is the sort of thinking that we should strive to put aside in favor of the scientific process of gathering and analyzing physical evidence.
I have done a great deal of gathering and analyzing evidence on climate change: See http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate.
But all of us are dependent for our beliefs on second-hand information — nobody can gather all of the relevant evidence or check through all of the arguments himself. One is and should be less willing to believe what someone tells you if he has a reason to want you to believe it other than that it is true, a reason that could make it in his interest to tell it to you or to believe it himself even if it was false.
What is your reason to believe the hypothesis? Isn't it that sources of information you trust either tell you it is true or tell you facts from which you deduce its truth?
Just my opinion but I feel Mencken's and your arguments against intelligent design are weakened if one assumes the Designer has a sense of humor.
Ah yes, he moves in mysterious ways. But we can make guesses about his mysterious ways.
I know someone like that. Any argument which comes close to anything religious inevitably ends with him painting himself into a corner and uttering those argument-killing words, "He moves in mysterious ways."
Depends on your religious persuasion. In Orthodox Catholicism for example it's generally a sin to make guesses about his mysterious ways. Trying to anthropomorphize God is a distinctly Western Church concept.
You have the revealed truth, all else is at best, fruitless speculation. God never said anything about evolution either way hence it's not a religious matter to care about. If you like: God exists, God made man, the specific process between those two is irrelevant to spiritual matters because God is in all things. If the process in execution looks like natural selection, that not in opposition to God nor does it diminish him.
My parents were, I believe, socialist atheists who never pushed their political or religious choices on us; thus I say I am not sure. Out of that, they got two born-agains (one angry at the world, the other one of the happiest people I know), one semi-militant atheist, and me, who identifies as "areligious"; when pushed, I call myself an "I-don't-give-a-crap-ist". My experience with others who have thought it important is that there is nothing in common in in the mysterious ways or other details, which I take as a healthy sign that they have not surrendered their minds to the borg.
(I define atheists as those who believe there are no gods, and agnostics as those who care enough to wonder. I frankly don't care how other people define those words, unless they insist on classifying me, and then I go out of my way to make fun of them until they get the message and leave me alone.)
Yeah I meant figurative you, not you you. More just meant "he moves in mysterious ways" isn't always a cop out depending on one's denomination (for lack of a better word). To your point, the Eastern Churches tend to take a similar approach to your "i-dont-give-a-crap-ist" about secular matter such as evolution. The worldly procedures just don't matter practically speaking.
Interesting about religions ignoring worldly procedures. I’m guessing your “Eastern Churches” means Greek and Russian Orthodox, not Buddhism et al. I know very little about most religions other than how they pop up in histories and from what family and friends say in passing. The whole idea of basing so much belief on unfalsifiable faith just whooshes right over my head. The last time someone asked me why I wasn’t religious, I said the real question is why anyone is religious. Surely a baby left alone on a desert island, but somehow able to feed itself and survive, would not grow up inventing any current religion.
Every theory has unfalsifiable foundations, including the one that says you can explain the world using only falsifiable foundations.