A commenter on one of my posts wrote that whether evolution is true is “one of a gazillion subjects that make zero difference to most people.” While knowledge of evolution is not of overwhelming importance to most it is still useful information, value greater than zero, in part because it makes some factual claims less plausible, some more, alters the priors to be applied to evaluating uncertain information.
That sounds like something I might have said, but if it was me, I meant it in practical terms: not believing evolution (which does not necessarily mean disbelieving it) just doesn't make any difference in most people's lives. Flat Earth is the same; airline pilots and ship navigators can get to where they're going even if they don't think the Earth is round. Just follow the GPS directions.
As Sherlock Homes said to Dr. Watson, it really makes little difference to most people whether the Earth revolves around the moon or the sun. We say the sun and moon rise and set, which is errant nonsense but doesn't matter, whether we realize it or not.
It was your comment, but, as I think I have just shown, it was not true. Knowing about evolution does not have a huge effect on most people's lives but it is useful information in a variety of ways. Having an accurate picture of the world is useful, and knowing what living creatures are as if designed for is more relevant to most of us than knowing that the Earth goes round the sun.
"Zero difference" and "not essential' are not close to equivalent; lots of things matter that are not essential. Economists and lawyers are not, in my experience, the only people who care whether what they say is true.
Here’s an example of how even economists take shortcuts with language. When I explain trade deficits to friends, I say dollars in have to equal dollars out. But dollars in can be broken down into dollars earned from exports and dollars of foreign investment, which is where Trump shows his ignorance by insisting he can raise foreign investments at the same time he reduces the trade deficit, and that’s ignoring the difference between goods and services. My experience reading blogs and books for laymen is that this is not the whole story, that to be more accurate, you have to allow for dollars which foreigners lose, dollars which foreigners spend with other foreigners, exports and imports paid for in other currencies or bartered, time lags for all these, and no doubt many other piddly little factors.
I’m sure even that short description is riddled with errors to an economist, but they don’t change the basic “dollars in == dollars out”. And that’s all that matters to my non-economist brain.
They were plenty equivalent to me when I wrote it, and I know other people who use the same style. Call it hyperbole, exaggeration for effect, whatever you want, it is how a lot of people speak.
Understanding evolution has made a huge impact on my life. It was the first physical system I ever fully abstracted, as a teenager, and I've been able to use those same principles in understanding capitalism and information markets in general
It made a huge impact on me too, I’m sure it’s part of why I believe so much in free markets, spontaneous organization, and freedom from outside meddling. Whether I would have come to the same conclusions or not is impossible to guess.
Yeah, we can't know whether we would have reached the same conclusions with or without this knowledge - but to me it strongly feels like I would not have. Daniel Dennett actually describes the meta-concept as a "universal acid" in his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"
It's one of those things which seems so obvious in hindsight. What took Darwin so long? Why did he not just accept Lamarck? And it took another century to find the mechanism. Darwin must have been some kind of genius, but it's hard to imagine the leap he took with all our hindsight.
It's on my wish list. I've got an entire bookcase of books to read, so $17 for an eBook puts it on the wish list. It's 11 years old, so it will probably show up on one-day specials sooner or later.
Pilots, flat earth, and GPS was probably not the best example to choose. I would not ever like to travel with a pilot who did not understand the full intricacies of navigating over the surface of a sphere, regardless of the technical aids he might usually have available.
How do you know you haven't already flown with such a pilot? How would you have ever known? Far as I'm concerned, flat Earth is obvious nonsense the first time you see or read about ship masts being the first/last thing seen from a distance. People still believe it. It's what I mean by just not being necessary to day to day life.
I doubt very many pilots or other GPS users know how GPS works as far as atomic clocks and calculating everything so precisely, any more than they know how a pencil is made. I chose that example precisely because the shape of the Earth matters so little to pilots in the practical sense.
To be fair, you can do an awful lot of practical engineering approximating the earth as a plane. Legend was that the Verrazano Narrows bridge needed to take into account the curvature of the Earth, but in practice that amounts to a few extra feet of cable.
How would believing in a round Earth change that? Has he got a sextant with him and all the appropriate navigational books and charts and the appropriate experience?
In reality, I suspect that if GPS failed, pilots would listen to ATC who rely on radar, not knowledge that the Earth is not flat.
Surprisingly enough, dead reckoning (with appropriate spherical corrections) and celestial navigation are still a basic requirement for anyone in charge of vessels and aircraft in/over international waters.
Ded(uced) reckoning requires knowing your starting position. Where would this pilot get that if GPS is not working?
He'd probably follow a compass heading given by ATC or follow ground features. Knowing the Earth is round has nothing to do with following coastlines, highways, and railroads.
I challenge you to read any book by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. and see if you're still skeptical about nutritional advice. It seems to me that your skepticism about nutrition is the same as skepticism about science in general. Nutritional studies are a rapidly evolving science. But if you don't want to read Furhman's books, perhaps look up salt on NutritionFacts.org, or better yet, get either or both of these books by Michael Greger, M.D.: "How Not to Die" or "How Not to Age." I'll be surprised if nutrition doesn't become a new interest for you. I quoted you yesterday at a political gathering. I enjoy your blog very much, despite this criticism.
Salt is a real example. As best I can tell, the current evidence is that consuming more salt increases the risk from some causes of death but reduces overall mortality, which doesn't prevent authoritative sources from making an unqualified claim that you should consume less based on the former observation.
The widely supported advice to switch from butter to margarine, back when margarine was hydrogenated vegetable oil, meant shifting from saturated fat to transfats, probably killed a lot of people.
> The widely supported advice to switch from butter to margarine, back when margarine was hydrogenated vegetable oil, meant shifting from saturated fat to transfats, probably killed a lot of people.
And if polyunsaturated fats themselves are bad news, as I am coming to believe they are, the damage has been catastrophic. Most of the 'diseases of modernity', I think.
I'd be most interested to know what you think of that very complicated and nuanced argument!
“Salt is a real example. As best I can tell, the current evidence is that consuming more salt increases the risk from some causes of death but reduces overall mortality…”
I have read - and indeed believe - exactly this about moderate alcohol consumption (I.e. 1-2 drinks daily), but never about salt.
Can you post a link suggesting that more salt actually reduces mortality? The most I have ever seen is the U-shaped curve suggestion that too little salt may indeed be associated with increased mortality, but no across the board suggestion that consuming more reduces mortality, surely not in modern western diets.
Like you, I do very little to rescue my salt intake (though I have blood pressure medicine which keeps my blood pressure well under control, or perhaps I would act differently), as given that one important control, I’m unconvinced that salt intake is a problem worth addressing, but I have never read that *more* salt is actually beneficial.
Here's a partial transcript of the "Eat to Live" podcast with Joel Fuhrman MD and his daughter Jenna. The transcript was done by Copilot AI:
0:17 Jenna: Today we are talking about a very hot topic… salt, sodium, high blood pressure, and strokes.
Jenna: People get really touchy about salt and sodium… it’s a big part of culture and even ancient civilizations.
1:11 Jenna: Humans have been adding salt to their diets for over 5,000 years… but we’ve been around for 5 million years.
1:49 Dr. Fuhrman: For 99% of human existence, there’s been no added sodium… primitive man and other primates don’t salt their food.
2:28 Dr. Fuhrman: Salt raises blood pressure…which increases risk of heart attack and stroke.
3:33 Dr. Fuhrman: Salt damages the endothelial lining of blood vessels… accelerates aging and increases inflammation.
4:48 Dr. Fuhrman: Populations like the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon don’t salt their food… their blood pressure stays stable from childhood to old age.
Dr. Fuhrman: Lifetime exposure to sodium correlates with stroke and heart attack risk… even childhood intake matters.
6:35 Dr. Fuhrman: The average blood pressure in the Yanomamo tribe is 95/63… compared to 110–120 in U.S. children.
10:02 Dr. Fuhrman: The American Heart Association recommends 1,500 mg/day for heart patients… but that’s like telling a smoker to cut back after getting lung cancer.
13:02 Dr. Fuhrman: WHO recommends reducing sodium intake by 30% by 2025… to save 7 million lives.
14:15 Jenna: Sodium is addictive… early exposure in kids leads to lifelong cravings.
Dr. Fuhrman: Sodium causes obesity ...stimulates appetite and fat retention.
17:01 Dr. Fuhrman: Salt withdrawal causes fatigue… but the body acclimates in 1–2 weeks.
21:01 Dr. Fuhrman: Natural foods provide 400–700 mg of sodium… a couple hundred extra is okay, but it adds up fast.
25:00 Dr. Fuhrman: Aging doesn’t raise blood pressure… years of excess salt do.
28:00 Dr. Fuhrman: In Asia, high-sodium diets lead to hemorrhagic strokes… in the West, high-fat diets lead to ischemic strokes.
31:00 Dr. Fuhrman: Vegan diets with high salt increase risk of hemorrhagic stroke… meat eaters are more prone to ischemic stroke.
Here's a transcript from one of the hundreds of 3 minute videos on NutritionFacts.org from Michael Greger, MD, see also the link below it:
If you put people on a low-salt diet (meaning only getting twice as much sodium as they need), as opposed to a usual salt diet (where they’re getting five times more), you get a significant improvement in arterial function. Lower salt, better arterial function, suggesting heart-protective effects beyond just blood pressure reduction.
Now, this was after dropping people’s salt intake by about a teaspoon a day for two weeks. What if you only dropped salt intake by like a half teaspoon a day? You still get a significant improvement in arterial function, and it happens within just two days of reducing one’s salt intake. Or, even after a single meal.
A high-salt meal, which is to say just a typical amount of salt consumed in a commonly eaten meal, can significantly suppress artery function within 30 minutes. Here’s what happens 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes after a meal with just a pinch of salt in it. Here’s what happens after the same meal, but with a quarter teaspoon of salt in it. A significant suppression of arterial function. Now, is this in addition to the spike in blood pressure from salt, or because of the spike in blood pressure?
If you take people with normal blood pressure, and give them a bowl of soup containing how much salt a regular meal might contain, their blood pressure goes up over the next three hours, compared to the same soup with no added salt. Now, this doesn’t happen to everyone; this is just the average response.
Some people are resistant to the effects of salt on their blood pressure. So, what if you repeated the artery function experiment on them? Unfortunately, the title kind of ruins the suspense and gives it away, but as you can see, even in people whose blood pressure is unresponsive to salt intake, they still suffer significant suppression of their artery function. So, even independent of any effects on blood pressure, salt hurts our arteries, and that harm begins within minutes of it going into our mouth, for our major arteries, and even our itty bitty blood vessels.
Using something called laser Doppler flowmetry, you can measure blood flow in tiny vessels in our skin. Here’s blood flow at baseline. Now, to get the blood vessels to open up, they warmed up the skin. The reason we may turn pink when we get into a hot bath is that the blood vessels in our skin are opening up. And that’s what happens, big increase in blood flow with the warming; but that’s on the low-salt diet.
A high-salt diet starts out the same at the beginning, but after the same heating, there’s significantly less blood flow. The arteries just don’t seem to open up as well on a high-salt diet, unless you inject vitamin C into their skin. That seems to reverse the salt-induced suppression of blood vessel function.
So, if an antioxidant reverses the salt effect, then the way salt may be damaging our artery function is through oxidative stress—the formation of free radicals in our bloodstream. But how? Well, there’s an enzyme in our body that can detoxify a million free radicals a second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But compared to a low-salt diet, if we consume a normal salt diet, we suppress the activity of this detoxifying powerhouse of an enzyme.
That may help explain why “this is your artery function; this is your artery function on salt.” With our antioxidant enzymes crippled by the salt, all the excess free radicals may be crippling our arteries. But mop up those extra free radicals by infusing vitamin C into the bloodstream, and artery function returns to normal. Whereas, on a low-salt diet, if you drip vitamin C into people’s veins, nothing happens, because our antioxidant enzymes are already taking care of business, and haven’t been shackled by the sodium of a normal-salt diet.
Whereas potassium, concentrated in fruits and vegetables, softens the cells that line our arteries, and increases the release of nitric oxide that allows our arteries to relax, sodium in our blood stiffens the cells lining our arteries within minutes, and reduces nitric oxide release. The more salt, the less nitric oxide is produced.
One salty meal, and not only does our blood pressure go up, but our arteries literally stiffen. That’s why we could figure out that too much salt was bad for us 4,000 years ago. Maybe we don’t need a double-blind trial, maybe we don’t need to follow people for a decade; you may just have to feed someone a bag of potato chips, and take their pulse.
Thanks. That convinces me that he is not a good source of information, for two reasons.
1. " but we’ve been around for 5 million years" sounds like a confident statement of fact. But if "we" means our species it is false and if it means "our or an ancestral species" it is meaningless, since it depends how far up the evolutionary tree you go. It's a statement designed to impress not inform.
2. He told me what I already knew, that salt increased blood pressure. It did not rebut the evidence that it lengthens life expectancy, presumably by reducing other problems. I plan to discuss that case in my next post.
"High blood pressure is one of the most common diseases affecting the world today. In the U.S., it is estimated that approximately one third of adults have hypertension1 and another one third who have pre-hypertension. In response to this, many are given medications to help control their blood pressure, which has led to approximately 70% of adults age 65 or older in the U.S. to be taking one or more of these medications.1
High blood pressure is a concern because it not only can be directly harmful on organs such as our heart and kidneys but also is often a sign of an underlying process affecting the arteries (atherosclerosis) and is associated with a higher risk of getting a heart attack or a stroke. Hypertension is often called “the silent killer” because, most typically, there are no symptoms noticed, but sometimes, very high blood pressure can cause dizziness or headaches.
Uncommon but significant causes of high blood pressure include problems such as kidney failure, heart failure, liver failure, sleep apnea, insomnia, and anemia. The most common category of high blood pressure, however, is called “essential hypertension,” which basically means that it is related to a high sodium/salt diet, being overweight, being sedentary, and having unhealthy arteries. Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, typically advances with aging, and high blood pressure may be the only sign that this is developing. This means that most persons who have high blood pressure will see dramatic improvements in their health if they diligently modify their lifestyle, particularly their diet, to improve and even resolve high blood pressure as well as reduce the burden of atherosclerosis to lower their risk of a heart attack, premature disability, and death without resorting to medications." - Joel Fuhrman, M.D.
By the way, I'm sure you've heard of the "Blue Zones," where people live decades longer. Many have them have adopted our Western way of eating and thus start dying off at the same rates we do. But the best part of a good diet is not spending your last years or decades fighting off some disease off and on in a hospital. Of course, you won the genetic lottery, with two parents who lived into their 90s, so I can see why you aren't as concerned. But you can take identical twins and they can have very different outcomes based on what they eat.
I knew you'd react to the "5 million years" comment which was by his young daughter, not Dr. Fuhrman. I should have edited the AI summary because it misses a lot. Dr. laughs off his daughter's comment (in this live show) by saying "or something like that," clearly correcting her in a loving way. As you know, modern humans (Homo sapiens) have been on Earth for about 300,000 years. The broader human lineage, including earlier hominin ancestors, goes back around 6 million years to our split from the lineage that led to chimpanzees and gorillas. As for lengthening life expectancy, if you reduce stroke and heart attack risk, you lengthen life expectancy. I notice you didn't refute Dr. Greger, only Dr. Furhman's daughter.
Conclusion: Our observation of sodium intake correlating positively with life expectancy and inversely with all-cause mortality worldwide and in high-income countries argues against dietary sodium intake being a culprit of curtailing life span or a risk factor for premature death. (“Sodium intake, life expectancy, and all-cause mortality,” NIH)
His conclusion might be correct, but an honest source should discuss the evidence against his claim as well as the evidence for.
" if you reduce stroke and heart attack risk, you lengthen life expectancy." Not if, at the same time, you increase the risk from other sources of mortality. That's the obvious implication of the conflict of evidence and he doesn't discuss it.
I sat on this post for a while, rather than responding, because it rather firmly pressed some of my buttons.
If I had a dollar for every person who goes from "there is a statistical difference between groups" to "I should treat individuals based on their group average" I'd be exceedingly rich, and even more so if I got a dollar each time they acted on that fallacy.
I don't think you need to know about evolution to notice differences in male and female averages on a whole host of variables. Knowledge of evolution may help in devising "just so" stories for what those differences are, and why they absolutely must be both universal and uninfluenced by upbringing. But you'd be better served by looking at the actual data than guesstimating its value based on theory.
"Evolution tells us not only that males and females are likely to differ but also why, from which one can form at least plausible guesses of how. That is particularly useful information in courtship, which is, for evolutionarily obvious reasons, an activity humans devote a lot of time and energy to."
It seems to me that courting a specific individual as if he or she matched the average of their gender (or class, or nationality, or anything else) is going to get you rejected for obviously not paying attention to the particular person themselves.
Then there's the problem of whether you'd be happy with an average group member, if you managed to attract one. Even if the average male preference in some sense matches the average female reality, both parties to a courtship are individuals, with their own traits. (And most likely, the average male wants an ideal female, which is in short supply, and the average female wants an ideal male, equally uncommon. At least, that's what my evolutionary understanding suggests.)
In my own experience, I found that as a female nerd, I practically had to beat off male nerds with a club. They didn't want an average female - they wanted someone they could empathize with, share concerns and interests, and generally enjoy being around. They didn't want someone whose interests ran to kinder, kirche and kuche, or whatever you take to be the average female position. Because there are rather more male nerds than females, and a fair proportion wanted a self-similar mate, I was a very hot commodity.
That's not to say they all wanted a fellow nerd. I know at least two that have a more-or-less "traditional" 1950s relationship - male breadwinner, female homemaker. (Being computer nerds, they could afford to raise children on a single income, unlike many these days.)
Now what you are saying can easily be read as more nuanced than simply seeking the average. And you are right that if your choice is "assume everyone is just like you" and "assume other people are less like you and more like the average of their group(s)," you'll probably do a wee bit better - though still pretty badly at a personal level. (Assuming people are averages will however most likely help you at numbers games, like raising the click rate on your ads.)
But it can also be read as advising non-average men to court non-average women as if they were average, treat coworkers, bosses and subordinates as averages of their types, etc. etc.
Given my buttons, that's how I read it on my first and second past, before noticing the ambiguity.
I'm not sure that moral realism is neccessarily contradicted by evolution. One could argue that there are moral facts that humans perceive, and that the reason we evolved to perceive them is because that perception enhances our evolutionary fitness. Perceiving colors also enhances our fitness, but that doesn't mean that colors are not based on real perception of the properties of light.
Those properties relevant to our fitness. Your argument implies that our moral perceptions should be biased in favor of those moral truths that enhance fitness, against those that decrease it.
One version that might work is that perceptions of moral truths is a coordination mechanism. We all perceive the same truths so are better able to predict behavior by others to coordinate with them.
“The fact that males are likely to differ from females in behavioral patterns and abilities as well as in the obvious physical differences means that observations of male behavior are better evidence of how other males will behave than how females will behave and similarly, mutadis mutandis, for female.”
Interesting.
On the one hand I have long believed exactly as you do here. And still do.
But… as you have phrased this, it is perilously close to the “lived experience” logic of today’s intersectionality leftists, where unless you share the same identity characteristics you have no valid right to speak about truth related to them.
It also would seem to validate that identitarian politics and policies are appropriate.
I *do* understand that it is not exactly the same, but it’s a whole lot closer than I’d previously thought.
Perhaps worthy of a future post to explain the differences and how some might view such woke intersectionality arguments as “of course” valid.
I once set about trying to define animal cruelty, not in a lawyer-legal sense, but in a layman-legal sense. The best I could come up with was that any cruelty worse than life in the wild was too cruel. Die by being eaten alive? Good to go. Die from starvation due to injuries? Good to go. Freeze to death from lack of food? Good to go.
It was especially weird trying to define slavery as PETA sees it. If the cruelty of farms stems from humans enslaving and slaughtering other species, what are we to make of wolves killing sheep? Does that mean that ranchers who kill homicidal wolves are heroes?
Then I got off into the weeds of ants enslaving aphids and mama bears and lions enslaving prey to train their cubs on how to hunt, err, murder.
It was an interesting exercise, but I eventually left it at any cruelty less than being eaten alive was about the best I could do. I know it wouldn't satisfy PETA.
There was a big kerfuffle in San Francisco many years ago. Angel Island was overrun with deer who had no natural predators on the isolated island. So along comes winter and starving deer, and their solution was to let deer hunters pay for the privilege of thinning the herd and donating the meat to soup kitchens. PETA went ballistic! So they proposed bringing in solves. PETA went ballistic! They eventually settled on helicopters dropping feed to the poor starving deer. Poor starving humans didn't rate high enough.
I am not seeing the link you suggest. Why does the notion that the observed behaviors of one group do not generalize to a group that acts differently on average then imply that if you don't share identity characteristics you cannot speak truth related to them?
If males behave differently than females, then males think differently from females.
Basically, it is all based on the rationale that ”people differ”
Since males think differently than females, they are not allowed to pass judgement on females’ actions or behaviors.
Because they don’t share females’ lived experience.
Since a straight white Christian capitalist male does not share the same lived experience of a black queer Latinx female (or trans, or non-binary, or…), they have no right to comment on the latter’s actions or even speak any truth about the latter.
The “observed behaviors” cannot be observed in the same way, because you are not observing the same thing.
Moral relativism, taken one step further.
Again, I am not *defending* this explication.
[At best - at best! - there is a kernel of truth behind intersectionality, that gets warped with faulty illogic to the extreme place I describe above.]
To be clear, I think all 3 of the extremes based on the reality of individuals and groups differing are wrong:
- “Sterotypes are awful, and so we can make no judgements whatsoever about any one in any group on the basis of a stereotype”
- “We can and should fully judge and treat people primarily based on their group identity”
- “You can have no valid judgement or speak truth of another person with whom you don’t share group identity. Most especially if you are a straight white Christian (or Jewish) male.”
"Since males think differently than females, they are not allowed to pass judgement on females’ actions or behaviors."
That doesn't follow. The implication is only that they are less able to predict or judge the actions or behaviors of females than of males. You are treating the difference as all or none instead of more or less.
I am trying to somewhat faithfully repeat an argument that I don’t believe in.
Even if reworded as less, the point is the same. Intersectionality theory says that you are less able to comment on truth on any topic regarding human behavior the fewer group identity traits you share in common.
Remember, my claim was that these two things *sound* an awful lot alike to the ‘naked ear’:
Your
“The fact that males are likely to differ from females in behavioral patterns and abilities …means that observations of male behavior are better evidence of how other males will behave…”
And the Intersectionality crowd’s claim that
“The fact that straight white Christian males differ from black queer LatinX females in behavioral patterns and abilities … means that observations of the latter’s behavior by the former are poor/invalid claims of how the latter do or should behave”.
It’s not for its “own” sake; it’s for the sake of the people I care about whom globalism threatens. Which in my case is not just Ashkenazim like David and my mother’s side of the family, but my father’s family, nation, and race, which is of full european ancestry.
Because of the human animal’s distinguishing trait of reason, global competition among humans necessitates robust protection of property rights that allow us to exercise that faculty. Uncontrolled diversification of nations is inherently damaging to property, both in physical integrity and value.
My argument does imply that we should find fitness enhancing moral truths easier to perceive, and that (since evolution is not forward-looking) we should find moral truths that enhance short-term fitness easier to perceive than those that enhance long-term fitness. Isn't that sometimes what we do see in life? For instance, humans seem to find it more intuitively obvious that we are obligated to cooperate with people near to them than far to them. Both acts have fitness gains and function as coordination mechanisms, but the gains from cooperating with far off people are more long term and can involve making short term sacrifices for long term gains.
The basic alternatives in metaethics are realism and anti-realism, each of which consists of several varieties. All varieties of realism claim that some moral statements are objectively true, while all varieties of anti-realism deny that claim. Versions of anti-realism that come closest to realism assert that some moral claims are true for some people or for members of some societies but not for others. That amounts to saying that moral “truths” are subjective. It's like saying it's true for Smith but not for Jones that chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla. The position that no moral claims are objectively true is called moral nihilism, which leads to political nihilism. The latter implies that there's no objective justification for laws that prohibit various acts most people regard as unjust, such as murder, assault, slavery, theft, and fraud.
Apparently, the basic reason for accepting moral nihilism is that moral statements don't correspond with objective reality. That reason presupposes the monist correspondence theory of truth, according to which there's only one way for a proposition to be true, viz., any given proposition is true if and only if it corresponds with objective facts in the world, which are or were, in principle, observable or scientifically detectable. Any proposition that does not so correspond with reality is said to be false, or at least not objectively true. However, a proposition that doesn't correspond with reality but accords with some personal viewpoint may be said to be subjectively true. For example, the proposition “Snow is white” can be seen to be objectively true by observing snow under white light. But the sentence, “It's wrong to torture infants,” can't be verified similarly. One could observe infants being tortured, but one couldn't see the wrongness of the act in the way one could see the whiteness of snow. Similarly, if Smith says chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla, an unbiased, independent observer could not verify that statement. This may lead one to assume that the statement about torturing infants and the statement about ice cream are both subjective.
However, a plausible objection to the monist correspondence theory of truth could save moral realism. There exists such an objection. If to say that a proposition, p, is objectively true is to say that p is true independent of whether anyone accepts p as true, then p can be true even if p doesn't correspond with reality. Being in correspondence with reality can be a sufficient condition, but not a necessary condition, for a proposition to be true. There are true propositions that don't fit the correspondence model. Some examples follow:
The correspondence theory itself doesn't correspond with anything in reality, which on its own terms implies that it isn't objectively true. Any proposition, p, that says some other proposition, q, is true or false isn't about reality itself, but is, at most, about q's relation to reality. “This statement doesn't correspond with reality” appears to be objectively true in the sense that it accurately describes its relation to reality. Even if one assumes that, in general, numbers exist in reality, some mathematical propositions appear to be objectively true even though they contain numbers that clearly don't exist in reality, such as negative numbers, irrational numbers, and the square root of minus one. A distinction is drawn between subjective and objective probability. The former represents someone's degree of confidence in an event. The latter is objectively quantifiable, e.g., statistical or mathematical probability. Either mathematical statements that express probability don't correspond with reality, or what actually obtains in the world is merely probable, and that includes probabilistic statements about what occurred in the past. Certain propositions of logic are said to be true even though they don't correspond with reality and are not merely a matter of opinion, e.g., “If 2 + 2 = 5, then the moon is made of cheese” is true according to the material conditional rule in propositional logic which states that a conditional proposition is true unless its antecedent is true and its consequent is false. Necessarily true a priori knowledge, such as “nothing can both exist and not exist at the same time,” is independent of experience, can be known through reason alone, and, hence, doesn't depend on correspondence with observable reality. Scientific principles, such as the principle of induction (the future will resemble the past), don't necessarily correspond with reality, yet don't appear to be either false or merely subjectively true. Negative sentences, such as “The moon is not made of cheese,” can be objectively true even though there are no negative facts to which such a sentence can correspond. Propositions about the internal (psychological) world, such as about someone's mental states, instead of the external (physical) world of reality, can be objectively true even though they don't correspond with reality. It's not clear that propositions about the future can correspond with reality, but who can doubt “The universe will still exist tomorrow”?
An alternative to the monist correspondence theory is alethic pluralism (aka truth pluralism), according to which there is more than one way for a proposition to be true. The way a proposition can be true depends on the subject matter under consideration. For instance, a proposition about empirical facts can be true in the correspondence sense, while the coherence theory of truth may apply to propositions of logic and mathematics. Similarly, moral claims may be true if they fit within coherent moral frameworks.
If there existed an omniscient, infallible being, X, for every proposition, p, X would believe that p if and only if p is true. X's set of beliefs would consist of an unimaginably huge system of propositions, each of which would be consistent with all the other propositions in the system (called a valid system), because no two true propositions can contradict each other. The system could be divided into various fields of knowledge, such as physics, astronomy, psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, mathematics, logic, etc. Each field would be internally consistent, and all its propositions would be consistent with all true propositions in all other fields of knowledge. Suppose those fields of knowledge included moral and political philosophy. In that case, there could be only one moral philosophy and political philosophy that is both internally consistent and consistent with all true propositions in all other fields of knowledge. On a pluralist theory of truth, all the propositions of that moral and that political philosophy would be objectively true.
Evolution allows group differences which liberals find uncongenial. Liberal concepts such as human dignity and equality find no basis in evolution. So in practice, the liberals utterly ignore evolution and all its works.
Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms explained bourgeois revolution through spread of bourgeois genes. Steven Pinker stressed upon adverse selection on genes for impulsive behavior leading to low homicide rates in modern states which made market liberalism possible in countries that had long tradition of strong states.
This is, of course, anathema for libertarians for whom the state can do no good. Curiously, for a people that harp on spontaneous order, the universal existence of states in civilized countries makes no impression.
Not all decentralized orders produce desirable results, so the fact that the political market produces states does not imply that states are desirable. I don't know if you are familiar with public choice theory, economics applied to politics, but some implications are predictable undesirable outcomes.
Evolution and markets are both evidence that a decentralized order is possible but the fact that markets produce desirable outcomes depend on specific characteristics which may not always hold. Evolution produces a predictable outcome but not always a desirable one from our point of view.
Depends on the libertarian. Anarchists have always been a minority of the movement. And the anarchist position does not require that the state does no useful things, only that the negative effects from things it ought not do outweigh the positive.
There is Hobbesian argument now reinforced with anthropological data on homicide rates in uncivilized people. And still reinforced with evolutionary arguments how human behavior itself was evolved through in civilized states.
Human dignity and equality have a fairly obvious basis in evolution. Evolving to care about human dignity and equality will make you more trustworthy to other people. Humans are social animals, so being trusted by other people is correlated with reproductive success.
The idea that there are differences between groups of people has no more bearing on human dignity and equality than the existence of differences between individuals. The moral concept of equality does not require all human beings to be equally in their talents. Anyone who rejects differences on account of equality is extremely confused.
There are currently more than 8 billion humans on Earth. We would never have been able to get such high numbers without being able to cooperate with members of outgroups and fargroups. Only our vast international economy could produce the neccessary resources to expand that much. Human dignity and equality provide a crucial common coordinating mechanism between seperate groups It's a winning evolutionary fitness strategy, if you want to talk about reproductive success. If humans didn't respect the rights of outgroups and far groups, there'd probably be a couple hundred thousand humans on Earth trying to eke out a life hunting deer with spears.
All of what you write is fine, and even a good description for how we became rich, but you give no explanation of how evolution was designed to accomplish that.
And getting to 8 billion humans is not the “goal” of evolution.
You show - and I see - no evidence that humans became dominant on this earth based on their ability to interact well with the outgroup or the far group. I also am aware of little if any research that shows humans particularly good at that prior to the last few thousand years (and not all that great at it until the last few hundred).
It seems important here to distinguish here between natural selection and evolution. One has been directly observed, and the other extrapolated from those observations. It's possible, if unusual, to take insights from fields like evolutionary psychology, or to contemplate the emergence of sexual differentiation among hominids, while remaining skeptical of the proposition that not all of our ancestors were mammals.
Natural selection has been directly observed, in species that have much shorter lifespans than humans. For example, in the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Also, *artificial* selection, where the selection pressure is intentionally imposed by humans to breed for a particular result, had been observed for thousands of years before Darwin used it to piggyback his own understanding of natural selection. As far as the organisms and their genes are concerned, the two are the same thing; and scientifically speaking, they're the same thing as well. Artificial selection is basically a multi-millennium natural experiment in evolutionary biology.
I don't necessarily disagree, but it's a question-begging assertion, presupposing the broader idea of evolution. Which, if correct, leaves your comment entirely true, but what I'm saying is that other possibilities exist. I think it's similar to the Big Bang. We have these observations, leading to the concept of an expanding universe, which we can extrapolate back in time to a very plausible origin story, which is currently the dominant theory of cosmogeny. But other explanations for these observations do exist, and and might be true, and this extrapolation is ultimately unfalsifiable and therefore subject to skepticism. The same is true of evolution, even given the undeniable observations of natural selection.
Can you name some of those other possibilities, along with a brief description? Please, testable falsifiable possibilities only; don't bring in religion.
I'm not talking about religion, but almost by definition no such hypothesis is falsifiable. Not the dominant ones, and not the alternatives. We can't test the past. Best we can do is make falsifiable predictions based on these hypotheses, and to the best of my knowledge these results have been mixed, both in evolution and cosmology. It's also true that we don't need alternative theories to be skeptical of the existing ones - they could be false, or we can be skeptical of them, even if we don't know what might replace them.
> it's a question-begging assertion, presupposing the broader idea of evolution
What "broader idea of evolution" is being presuuposed? Natural selection is genetic change in a population in response to selection pressure. In the case of antibiotic resistant bacteria, that's exactly what we have observed.
If by "the broader idea of evolution" you mean the claim that all living things on Earth today descend from a common ancestor in the far past, we have DNA evidence for that. It's not just being presupposed.
> other possibilities exist
I'm not sure what "other possibilities" you are referring to, either for evolution or for the universe as a whole.
> this extrapolation is ultimately unfalsifiable
No, it's not, either for evolution or for cosmology.
The biologist J. B. S. Haldane was once asked for an example of evidence that would falsify evolution. His answer: "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." Our overall theory of evolution by natural selection makes tons of falsifiable predictions. The fact that we can't go back in a time machine a few billion years and take samples of the Earth's biosphere back then doesn't mean we have no way at all of testing those predictions.
The same is true for our model of the universe in cosmology. It makes plenty of testable predictions about things we can observe today; we're not helpless just because we can't go back in a time machine and sample the universe 13 billion years ago.
It's true that both hypotheses give us falsifiable predictions, and that we have confirming observations for both, but also disconfirming ones. In cosmology we have things like superluminal quasars and a failure to find dark matter. In evolution we have the persistent failure, which Darwin observed, to find "intermediate forms", though there is some evidence of their existence.
My point is not that we have no evidence for either theory - we do. My point is that it's important to distinguish between our direct observations of natural selection and our theoretical extrapolation from those observations, whether or not they are correct, because it's possible to believe in the observable phenomena, and adopt beliefs relevant to them as described in OP, while remaining skeptical of the extrapolations. I don't disbelieve in evolution or the Big Bang, but I do find both less well supported by the evidence than the observations from which they've been extrapolated. I don't have alternative theories for either of them, but I also don't think that's a good reason to assume they're correct.
This isn't evidence against the general claim that there was a Big Bang. It's evidence that either our theoretical model of particle physics or our theoretical model of gravity is incomplete. But everyone in the field already believed both of those things anyway. In other words, this isn't a theory being disconfirmed; it's an open area of research, where there are multiple alternative hypotheses still being tested. But *none* of those alternatives are "there was no Big Bang".
> the persistent failure, which Darwin observed, to find "intermediate forms"
Darwin's observations in this respect are getting close to being two centuries old--and they are way out of date. There's been a lot of work done and a lot more knowledge accumulated since Darwin's day.
Although I normally describe myself as an Agnostic, as I approach the outer edge of the abyss as an 80 YO, I question whether I should believe in God.
The argument between a Creator and the Theory of Evolution, to me, however, is nonsensical. There can be both.
If God as a Creator is all powerful, then at the moment of the Big Bang (presumably at His insistence) some 13.7 Billion years ago, all He had to do was to say that the 4 Laws of Thermodynamics and of Electromagnetism etc shall apply.
Those laws then apply equally on Earth and throughout the Universe. So evolution also applies throughout the Universe.
Consequently, according to the formula established by Him, ultimately when the conditions were 'right' Life sprang into being as we know it. Evolution and asteroids took care of the rest.
It can be rightly assumed that around some of the 200-400 Billion stars in the Milky Way, there are planets capable of sustaining life. We perhaps should not be arrogant to presume that an Earth-like planet is necessary but short of other evidence to the contrary, it is the best bet.
We could of course be really arrogant and say that we on Earth were chosen by God and therefore the only life in the Galaxy and even the Universe.
In that case we should shake hands and start jaw jawing rather than war warring in case He has to start again somewhere else creating the 'right' conditions and then letting evolution do its thing.
“I am not a religious believer but am a moral realist, a position I have sometimes described as Catholicism without God. Evolution is an argument against my position as well, although a different one.”
My views on religion and morality have long mapped to the one you espouse here. That evolution is an argument against moral realism is one I’d not really considered before. But you explain it quite well.
Libertarians aside, the correlation between moral relativism and atheism seems quite strong today. In your view is this coincidence, and if not which way do you think the causation runs?
It is an argument I have encountered and have as yet no adequate rebuttal to.
Most religions are moral realist, which gives you one side of the correlation. It also means that one way of rejecting a religion is by rejecting moral claims.
I think both moral relativism and atheism (in the militant sense, not just being agnostic but being actively opposed to belief in God--a good example is Dawkins' book on the subject) are products of a particular more general ideology that one might call "Enlightenment run amok". The basic idea of the Enlightenment was that we humans are capable of producing things of value on our own, without having to be helped or inspired by a god. But there's a particular strain of that line of thought that took it to the extreme of saying that *only* we humans can produce things of value--that anything humans didn't build or construct or obtain through reason has no value. Of course such a viewpoint is going to reject belief in a God that's a source of value outside humans, or moral principles with the same property, wherever they are believed to come from. In that sense, evolution is just as much an enemy of this strain of Enlightenment thought, which might be one reason why so many self-styled liberals who say they believe in the Enlightenment have such problems accepting what evolution tells them.
That sounds like something I might have said, but if it was me, I meant it in practical terms: not believing evolution (which does not necessarily mean disbelieving it) just doesn't make any difference in most people's lives. Flat Earth is the same; airline pilots and ship navigators can get to where they're going even if they don't think the Earth is round. Just follow the GPS directions.
As Sherlock Homes said to Dr. Watson, it really makes little difference to most people whether the Earth revolves around the moon or the sun. We say the sun and moon rise and set, which is errant nonsense but doesn't matter, whether we realize it or not.
It was your comment, but, as I think I have just shown, it was not true. Knowing about evolution does not have a huge effect on most people's lives but it is useful information in a variety of ways. Having an accurate picture of the world is useful, and knowing what living creatures are as if designed for is more relevant to most of us than knowing that the Earth goes round the sun.
Useful, yes, but not necessary. That was my point.
What you wrote, however, was that it makes "zero difference," which you have just agreed was not true.
Well, OK, you got me on a technicality. I’m not used to talking with economists and lawyers. To me, the way my brain works, that was close enough.
"Zero difference" and "not essential' are not close to equivalent; lots of things matter that are not essential. Economists and lawyers are not, in my experience, the only people who care whether what they say is true.
Here’s an example of how even economists take shortcuts with language. When I explain trade deficits to friends, I say dollars in have to equal dollars out. But dollars in can be broken down into dollars earned from exports and dollars of foreign investment, which is where Trump shows his ignorance by insisting he can raise foreign investments at the same time he reduces the trade deficit, and that’s ignoring the difference between goods and services. My experience reading blogs and books for laymen is that this is not the whole story, that to be more accurate, you have to allow for dollars which foreigners lose, dollars which foreigners spend with other foreigners, exports and imports paid for in other currencies or bartered, time lags for all these, and no doubt many other piddly little factors.
I’m sure even that short description is riddled with errors to an economist, but they don’t change the basic “dollars in == dollars out”. And that’s all that matters to my non-economist brain.
They were plenty equivalent to me when I wrote it, and I know other people who use the same style. Call it hyperbole, exaggeration for effect, whatever you want, it is how a lot of people speak.
Understanding evolution has made a huge impact on my life. It was the first physical system I ever fully abstracted, as a teenager, and I've been able to use those same principles in understanding capitalism and information markets in general
It made a huge impact on me too, I’m sure it’s part of why I believe so much in free markets, spontaneous organization, and freedom from outside meddling. Whether I would have come to the same conclusions or not is impossible to guess.
Yeah, we can't know whether we would have reached the same conclusions with or without this knowledge - but to me it strongly feels like I would not have. Daniel Dennett actually describes the meta-concept as a "universal acid" in his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"
It's one of those things which seems so obvious in hindsight. What took Darwin so long? Why did he not just accept Lamarck? And it took another century to find the mechanism. Darwin must have been some kind of genius, but it's hard to imagine the leap he took with all our hindsight.
You should read Dennett's books if you haven't yet!!!
It's on my wish list. I've got an entire bookcase of books to read, so $17 for an eBook puts it on the wish list. It's 11 years old, so it will probably show up on one-day specials sooner or later.
Pilots, flat earth, and GPS was probably not the best example to choose. I would not ever like to travel with a pilot who did not understand the full intricacies of navigating over the surface of a sphere, regardless of the technical aids he might usually have available.
How do you know you haven't already flown with such a pilot? How would you have ever known? Far as I'm concerned, flat Earth is obvious nonsense the first time you see or read about ship masts being the first/last thing seen from a distance. People still believe it. It's what I mean by just not being necessary to day to day life.
I doubt very many pilots or other GPS users know how GPS works as far as atomic clocks and calculating everything so precisely, any more than they know how a pencil is made. I chose that example precisely because the shape of the Earth matters so little to pilots in the practical sense.
To be fair, you can do an awful lot of practical engineering approximating the earth as a plane. Legend was that the Verrazano Narrows bridge needed to take into account the curvature of the Earth, but in practice that amounts to a few extra feet of cable.
And I object, precisely because the day GPS is not working my pilot will miss the United States and end up in Mexico.
How would believing in a round Earth change that? Has he got a sextant with him and all the appropriate navigational books and charts and the appropriate experience?
In reality, I suspect that if GPS failed, pilots would listen to ATC who rely on radar, not knowledge that the Earth is not flat.
Surprisingly enough, dead reckoning (with appropriate spherical corrections) and celestial navigation are still a basic requirement for anyone in charge of vessels and aircraft in/over international waters.
Ded(uced) reckoning requires knowing your starting position. Where would this pilot get that if GPS is not working?
He'd probably follow a compass heading given by ATC or follow ground features. Knowing the Earth is round has nothing to do with following coastlines, highways, and railroads.
I challenge you to read any book by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. and see if you're still skeptical about nutritional advice. It seems to me that your skepticism about nutrition is the same as skepticism about science in general. Nutritional studies are a rapidly evolving science. But if you don't want to read Furhman's books, perhaps look up salt on NutritionFacts.org, or better yet, get either or both of these books by Michael Greger, M.D.: "How Not to Die" or "How Not to Age." I'll be surprised if nutrition doesn't become a new interest for you. I quoted you yesterday at a political gathering. I enjoy your blog very much, despite this criticism.
I act on some nutritional advice, ignore some.
Salt is a real example. As best I can tell, the current evidence is that consuming more salt increases the risk from some causes of death but reduces overall mortality, which doesn't prevent authoritative sources from making an unqualified claim that you should consume less based on the former observation.
The widely supported advice to switch from butter to margarine, back when margarine was hydrogenated vegetable oil, meant shifting from saturated fat to transfats, probably killed a lot of people.
> The widely supported advice to switch from butter to margarine, back when margarine was hydrogenated vegetable oil, meant shifting from saturated fat to transfats, probably killed a lot of people.
And if polyunsaturated fats themselves are bad news, as I am coming to believe they are, the damage has been catastrophic. Most of the 'diseases of modernity', I think.
I'd be most interested to know what you think of that very complicated and nuanced argument!
I don’t know enough about that question to have an opinion.
“Salt is a real example. As best I can tell, the current evidence is that consuming more salt increases the risk from some causes of death but reduces overall mortality…”
I have read - and indeed believe - exactly this about moderate alcohol consumption (I.e. 1-2 drinks daily), but never about salt.
Can you post a link suggesting that more salt actually reduces mortality? The most I have ever seen is the U-shaped curve suggestion that too little salt may indeed be associated with increased mortality, but no across the board suggestion that consuming more reduces mortality, surely not in modern western diets.
Like you, I do very little to rescue my salt intake (though I have blood pressure medicine which keeps my blood pressure well under control, or perhaps I would act differently), as given that one important control, I’m unconvinced that salt intake is a problem worth addressing, but I have never read that *more* salt is actually beneficial.
My next post contains the cite.
Take a look at this: https://youtu.be/rNlEx39iDtU?si=k7CZCioE-BUkyPNE
Here's a partial transcript of the "Eat to Live" podcast with Joel Fuhrman MD and his daughter Jenna. The transcript was done by Copilot AI:
0:17 Jenna: Today we are talking about a very hot topic… salt, sodium, high blood pressure, and strokes.
Jenna: People get really touchy about salt and sodium… it’s a big part of culture and even ancient civilizations.
1:11 Jenna: Humans have been adding salt to their diets for over 5,000 years… but we’ve been around for 5 million years.
1:49 Dr. Fuhrman: For 99% of human existence, there’s been no added sodium… primitive man and other primates don’t salt their food.
2:28 Dr. Fuhrman: Salt raises blood pressure…which increases risk of heart attack and stroke.
3:33 Dr. Fuhrman: Salt damages the endothelial lining of blood vessels… accelerates aging and increases inflammation.
4:48 Dr. Fuhrman: Populations like the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon don’t salt their food… their blood pressure stays stable from childhood to old age.
Dr. Fuhrman: Lifetime exposure to sodium correlates with stroke and heart attack risk… even childhood intake matters.
6:35 Dr. Fuhrman: The average blood pressure in the Yanomamo tribe is 95/63… compared to 110–120 in U.S. children.
10:02 Dr. Fuhrman: The American Heart Association recommends 1,500 mg/day for heart patients… but that’s like telling a smoker to cut back after getting lung cancer.
13:02 Dr. Fuhrman: WHO recommends reducing sodium intake by 30% by 2025… to save 7 million lives.
14:15 Jenna: Sodium is addictive… early exposure in kids leads to lifelong cravings.
Dr. Fuhrman: Sodium causes obesity ...stimulates appetite and fat retention.
17:01 Dr. Fuhrman: Salt withdrawal causes fatigue… but the body acclimates in 1–2 weeks.
21:01 Dr. Fuhrman: Natural foods provide 400–700 mg of sodium… a couple hundred extra is okay, but it adds up fast.
25:00 Dr. Fuhrman: Aging doesn’t raise blood pressure… years of excess salt do.
28:00 Dr. Fuhrman: In Asia, high-sodium diets lead to hemorrhagic strokes… in the West, high-fat diets lead to ischemic strokes.
31:00 Dr. Fuhrman: Vegan diets with high salt increase risk of hemorrhagic stroke… meat eaters are more prone to ischemic stroke.
Here's a transcript from one of the hundreds of 3 minute videos on NutritionFacts.org from Michael Greger, MD, see also the link below it:
If you put people on a low-salt diet (meaning only getting twice as much sodium as they need), as opposed to a usual salt diet (where they’re getting five times more), you get a significant improvement in arterial function. Lower salt, better arterial function, suggesting heart-protective effects beyond just blood pressure reduction.
Now, this was after dropping people’s salt intake by about a teaspoon a day for two weeks. What if you only dropped salt intake by like a half teaspoon a day? You still get a significant improvement in arterial function, and it happens within just two days of reducing one’s salt intake. Or, even after a single meal.
A high-salt meal, which is to say just a typical amount of salt consumed in a commonly eaten meal, can significantly suppress artery function within 30 minutes. Here’s what happens 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes after a meal with just a pinch of salt in it. Here’s what happens after the same meal, but with a quarter teaspoon of salt in it. A significant suppression of arterial function. Now, is this in addition to the spike in blood pressure from salt, or because of the spike in blood pressure?
If you take people with normal blood pressure, and give them a bowl of soup containing how much salt a regular meal might contain, their blood pressure goes up over the next three hours, compared to the same soup with no added salt. Now, this doesn’t happen to everyone; this is just the average response.
Some people are resistant to the effects of salt on their blood pressure. So, what if you repeated the artery function experiment on them? Unfortunately, the title kind of ruins the suspense and gives it away, but as you can see, even in people whose blood pressure is unresponsive to salt intake, they still suffer significant suppression of their artery function. So, even independent of any effects on blood pressure, salt hurts our arteries, and that harm begins within minutes of it going into our mouth, for our major arteries, and even our itty bitty blood vessels.
Using something called laser Doppler flowmetry, you can measure blood flow in tiny vessels in our skin. Here’s blood flow at baseline. Now, to get the blood vessels to open up, they warmed up the skin. The reason we may turn pink when we get into a hot bath is that the blood vessels in our skin are opening up. And that’s what happens, big increase in blood flow with the warming; but that’s on the low-salt diet.
A high-salt diet starts out the same at the beginning, but after the same heating, there’s significantly less blood flow. The arteries just don’t seem to open up as well on a high-salt diet, unless you inject vitamin C into their skin. That seems to reverse the salt-induced suppression of blood vessel function.
So, if an antioxidant reverses the salt effect, then the way salt may be damaging our artery function is through oxidative stress—the formation of free radicals in our bloodstream. But how? Well, there’s an enzyme in our body that can detoxify a million free radicals a second, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But compared to a low-salt diet, if we consume a normal salt diet, we suppress the activity of this detoxifying powerhouse of an enzyme.
That may help explain why “this is your artery function; this is your artery function on salt.” With our antioxidant enzymes crippled by the salt, all the excess free radicals may be crippling our arteries. But mop up those extra free radicals by infusing vitamin C into the bloodstream, and artery function returns to normal. Whereas, on a low-salt diet, if you drip vitamin C into people’s veins, nothing happens, because our antioxidant enzymes are already taking care of business, and haven’t been shackled by the sodium of a normal-salt diet.
Whereas potassium, concentrated in fruits and vegetables, softens the cells that line our arteries, and increases the release of nitric oxide that allows our arteries to relax, sodium in our blood stiffens the cells lining our arteries within minutes, and reduces nitric oxide release. The more salt, the less nitric oxide is produced.
One salty meal, and not only does our blood pressure go up, but our arteries literally stiffen. That’s why we could figure out that too much salt was bad for us 4,000 years ago. Maybe we don’t need a double-blind trial, maybe we don’t need to follow people for a decade; you may just have to feed someone a bag of potato chips, and take their pulse.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/fewer-than-1-in-5000-meet-sodium-and-potassium-recommended-intakes/
Thanks. That convinces me that he is not a good source of information, for two reasons.
1. " but we’ve been around for 5 million years" sounds like a confident statement of fact. But if "we" means our species it is false and if it means "our or an ancestral species" it is meaningless, since it depends how far up the evolutionary tree you go. It's a statement designed to impress not inform.
2. He told me what I already knew, that salt increased blood pressure. It did not rebut the evidence that it lengthens life expectancy, presumably by reducing other problems. I plan to discuss that case in my next post.
"High blood pressure is one of the most common diseases affecting the world today. In the U.S., it is estimated that approximately one third of adults have hypertension1 and another one third who have pre-hypertension. In response to this, many are given medications to help control their blood pressure, which has led to approximately 70% of adults age 65 or older in the U.S. to be taking one or more of these medications.1
High blood pressure is a concern because it not only can be directly harmful on organs such as our heart and kidneys but also is often a sign of an underlying process affecting the arteries (atherosclerosis) and is associated with a higher risk of getting a heart attack or a stroke. Hypertension is often called “the silent killer” because, most typically, there are no symptoms noticed, but sometimes, very high blood pressure can cause dizziness or headaches.
Uncommon but significant causes of high blood pressure include problems such as kidney failure, heart failure, liver failure, sleep apnea, insomnia, and anemia. The most common category of high blood pressure, however, is called “essential hypertension,” which basically means that it is related to a high sodium/salt diet, being overweight, being sedentary, and having unhealthy arteries. Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, typically advances with aging, and high blood pressure may be the only sign that this is developing. This means that most persons who have high blood pressure will see dramatic improvements in their health if they diligently modify their lifestyle, particularly their diet, to improve and even resolve high blood pressure as well as reduce the burden of atherosclerosis to lower their risk of a heart attack, premature disability, and death without resorting to medications." - Joel Fuhrman, M.D.
By the way, I'm sure you've heard of the "Blue Zones," where people live decades longer. Many have them have adopted our Western way of eating and thus start dying off at the same rates we do. But the best part of a good diet is not spending your last years or decades fighting off some disease off and on in a hospital. Of course, you won the genetic lottery, with two parents who lived into their 90s, so I can see why you aren't as concerned. But you can take identical twins and they can have very different outcomes based on what they eat.
I knew you'd react to the "5 million years" comment which was by his young daughter, not Dr. Fuhrman. I should have edited the AI summary because it misses a lot. Dr. laughs off his daughter's comment (in this live show) by saying "or something like that," clearly correcting her in a loving way. As you know, modern humans (Homo sapiens) have been on Earth for about 300,000 years. The broader human lineage, including earlier hominin ancestors, goes back around 6 million years to our split from the lineage that led to chimpanzees and gorillas. As for lengthening life expectancy, if you reduce stroke and heart attack risk, you lengthen life expectancy. I notice you didn't refute Dr. Greger, only Dr. Furhman's daughter.
from the National Institute of Health:
Conclusion: Our observation of sodium intake correlating positively with life expectancy and inversely with all-cause mortality worldwide and in high-income countries argues against dietary sodium intake being a culprit of curtailing life span or a risk factor for premature death. (“Sodium intake, life expectancy, and all-cause mortality,” NIH)
His conclusion might be correct, but an honest source should discuss the evidence against his claim as well as the evidence for.
" if you reduce stroke and heart attack risk, you lengthen life expectancy." Not if, at the same time, you increase the risk from other sources of mortality. That's the obvious implication of the conflict of evidence and he doesn't discuss it.
I sat on this post for a while, rather than responding, because it rather firmly pressed some of my buttons.
If I had a dollar for every person who goes from "there is a statistical difference between groups" to "I should treat individuals based on their group average" I'd be exceedingly rich, and even more so if I got a dollar each time they acted on that fallacy.
I don't think you need to know about evolution to notice differences in male and female averages on a whole host of variables. Knowledge of evolution may help in devising "just so" stories for what those differences are, and why they absolutely must be both universal and uninfluenced by upbringing. But you'd be better served by looking at the actual data than guesstimating its value based on theory.
"Evolution tells us not only that males and females are likely to differ but also why, from which one can form at least plausible guesses of how. That is particularly useful information in courtship, which is, for evolutionarily obvious reasons, an activity humans devote a lot of time and energy to."
It seems to me that courting a specific individual as if he or she matched the average of their gender (or class, or nationality, or anything else) is going to get you rejected for obviously not paying attention to the particular person themselves.
Then there's the problem of whether you'd be happy with an average group member, if you managed to attract one. Even if the average male preference in some sense matches the average female reality, both parties to a courtship are individuals, with their own traits. (And most likely, the average male wants an ideal female, which is in short supply, and the average female wants an ideal male, equally uncommon. At least, that's what my evolutionary understanding suggests.)
In my own experience, I found that as a female nerd, I practically had to beat off male nerds with a club. They didn't want an average female - they wanted someone they could empathize with, share concerns and interests, and generally enjoy being around. They didn't want someone whose interests ran to kinder, kirche and kuche, or whatever you take to be the average female position. Because there are rather more male nerds than females, and a fair proportion wanted a self-similar mate, I was a very hot commodity.
That's not to say they all wanted a fellow nerd. I know at least two that have a more-or-less "traditional" 1950s relationship - male breadwinner, female homemaker. (Being computer nerds, they could afford to raise children on a single income, unlike many these days.)
Now what you are saying can easily be read as more nuanced than simply seeking the average. And you are right that if your choice is "assume everyone is just like you" and "assume other people are less like you and more like the average of their group(s)," you'll probably do a wee bit better - though still pretty badly at a personal level. (Assuming people are averages will however most likely help you at numbers games, like raising the click rate on your ads.)
But it can also be read as advising non-average men to court non-average women as if they were average, treat coworkers, bosses and subordinates as averages of their types, etc. etc.
Given my buttons, that's how I read it on my first and second past, before noticing the ambiguity.
I can find very little connection to anything I wrote in your response to having buttons pressed.
I'm not sure that moral realism is neccessarily contradicted by evolution. One could argue that there are moral facts that humans perceive, and that the reason we evolved to perceive them is because that perception enhances our evolutionary fitness. Perceiving colors also enhances our fitness, but that doesn't mean that colors are not based on real perception of the properties of light.
Those properties relevant to our fitness. Your argument implies that our moral perceptions should be biased in favor of those moral truths that enhance fitness, against those that decrease it.
One version that might work is that perceptions of moral truths is a coordination mechanism. We all perceive the same truths so are better able to predict behavior by others to coordinate with them.
“The fact that males are likely to differ from females in behavioral patterns and abilities as well as in the obvious physical differences means that observations of male behavior are better evidence of how other males will behave than how females will behave and similarly, mutadis mutandis, for female.”
Interesting.
On the one hand I have long believed exactly as you do here. And still do.
But… as you have phrased this, it is perilously close to the “lived experience” logic of today’s intersectionality leftists, where unless you share the same identity characteristics you have no valid right to speak about truth related to them.
It also would seem to validate that identitarian politics and policies are appropriate.
I *do* understand that it is not exactly the same, but it’s a whole lot closer than I’d previously thought.
Perhaps worthy of a future post to explain the differences and how some might view such woke intersectionality arguments as “of course” valid.
We can extend that argument to individuals. Each person is different - different genes, different live experiences, etc.
Does that mean "we have no valid right to speak about truth related to" others?
Seems a weak argument. We speak truth about animals, even tho we are not animals.
I didn’t say it was a strong argument.
But it is at least somewhat similar since it springs from the logic of ”people differ.”
That's why animals should be able to vote, own property, and exercise their own self-ownership.
Fine with me. Provided of course they respect the equal rights of others.
I once set about trying to define animal cruelty, not in a lawyer-legal sense, but in a layman-legal sense. The best I could come up with was that any cruelty worse than life in the wild was too cruel. Die by being eaten alive? Good to go. Die from starvation due to injuries? Good to go. Freeze to death from lack of food? Good to go.
It was especially weird trying to define slavery as PETA sees it. If the cruelty of farms stems from humans enslaving and slaughtering other species, what are we to make of wolves killing sheep? Does that mean that ranchers who kill homicidal wolves are heroes?
Then I got off into the weeds of ants enslaving aphids and mama bears and lions enslaving prey to train their cubs on how to hunt, err, murder.
It was an interesting exercise, but I eventually left it at any cruelty less than being eaten alive was about the best I could do. I know it wouldn't satisfy PETA.
There was a big kerfuffle in San Francisco many years ago. Angel Island was overrun with deer who had no natural predators on the isolated island. So along comes winter and starving deer, and their solution was to let deer hunters pay for the privilege of thinning the herd and donating the meat to soup kitchens. PETA went ballistic! So they proposed bringing in solves. PETA went ballistic! They eventually settled on helicopters dropping feed to the poor starving deer. Poor starving humans didn't rate high enough.
I am not seeing the link you suggest. Why does the notion that the observed behaviors of one group do not generalize to a group that acts differently on average then imply that if you don't share identity characteristics you cannot speak truth related to them?
If males behave differently than females, then males think differently from females.
Basically, it is all based on the rationale that ”people differ”
Since males think differently than females, they are not allowed to pass judgement on females’ actions or behaviors.
Because they don’t share females’ lived experience.
Since a straight white Christian capitalist male does not share the same lived experience of a black queer Latinx female (or trans, or non-binary, or…), they have no right to comment on the latter’s actions or even speak any truth about the latter.
The “observed behaviors” cannot be observed in the same way, because you are not observing the same thing.
Moral relativism, taken one step further.
Again, I am not *defending* this explication.
[At best - at best! - there is a kernel of truth behind intersectionality, that gets warped with faulty illogic to the extreme place I describe above.]
To be clear, I think all 3 of the extremes based on the reality of individuals and groups differing are wrong:
- “Sterotypes are awful, and so we can make no judgements whatsoever about any one in any group on the basis of a stereotype”
- “We can and should fully judge and treat people primarily based on their group identity”
- “You can have no valid judgement or speak truth of another person with whom you don’t share group identity. Most especially if you are a straight white Christian (or Jewish) male.”
"Since males think differently than females, they are not allowed to pass judgement on females’ actions or behaviors."
That doesn't follow. The implication is only that they are less able to predict or judge the actions or behaviors of females than of males. You are treating the difference as all or none instead of more or less.
I am trying to somewhat faithfully repeat an argument that I don’t believe in.
Even if reworded as less, the point is the same. Intersectionality theory says that you are less able to comment on truth on any topic regarding human behavior the fewer group identity traits you share in common.
Remember, my claim was that these two things *sound* an awful lot alike to the ‘naked ear’:
Your
“The fact that males are likely to differ from females in behavioral patterns and abilities …means that observations of male behavior are better evidence of how other males will behave…”
And the Intersectionality crowd’s claim that
“The fact that straight white Christian males differ from black queer LatinX females in behavioral patterns and abilities … means that observations of the latter’s behavior by the former are poor/invalid claims of how the latter do or should behave”.
"they are less able to predict or judge the actions or behaviors of females than of males"
One could equally suppose that evolution would make females susceptible to male manipulation, something one sees daily, and vice versa.
If evolution truly mattered to you would oppose open borders to protect the biodiversity that human evolution has produced.
Why is biodiversity for its own sake a good thing? If a phenotype can't survive global competition, why preserve it in a sheltered reserve?
It’s not for its “own” sake; it’s for the sake of the people I care about whom globalism threatens. Which in my case is not just Ashkenazim like David and my mother’s side of the family, but my father’s family, nation, and race, which is of full european ancestry.
Because of the human animal’s distinguishing trait of reason, global competition among humans necessitates robust protection of property rights that allow us to exercise that faculty. Uncontrolled diversification of nations is inherently damaging to property, both in physical integrity and value.
My argument does imply that we should find fitness enhancing moral truths easier to perceive, and that (since evolution is not forward-looking) we should find moral truths that enhance short-term fitness easier to perceive than those that enhance long-term fitness. Isn't that sometimes what we do see in life? For instance, humans seem to find it more intuitively obvious that we are obligated to cooperate with people near to them than far to them. Both acts have fitness gains and function as coordination mechanisms, but the gains from cooperating with far off people are more long term and can involve making short term sacrifices for long term gains.
Individual people are often very certain about their banal pronouncements for all of humanity past, present, and future.
The basic alternatives in metaethics are realism and anti-realism, each of which consists of several varieties. All varieties of realism claim that some moral statements are objectively true, while all varieties of anti-realism deny that claim. Versions of anti-realism that come closest to realism assert that some moral claims are true for some people or for members of some societies but not for others. That amounts to saying that moral “truths” are subjective. It's like saying it's true for Smith but not for Jones that chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla. The position that no moral claims are objectively true is called moral nihilism, which leads to political nihilism. The latter implies that there's no objective justification for laws that prohibit various acts most people regard as unjust, such as murder, assault, slavery, theft, and fraud.
Apparently, the basic reason for accepting moral nihilism is that moral statements don't correspond with objective reality. That reason presupposes the monist correspondence theory of truth, according to which there's only one way for a proposition to be true, viz., any given proposition is true if and only if it corresponds with objective facts in the world, which are or were, in principle, observable or scientifically detectable. Any proposition that does not so correspond with reality is said to be false, or at least not objectively true. However, a proposition that doesn't correspond with reality but accords with some personal viewpoint may be said to be subjectively true. For example, the proposition “Snow is white” can be seen to be objectively true by observing snow under white light. But the sentence, “It's wrong to torture infants,” can't be verified similarly. One could observe infants being tortured, but one couldn't see the wrongness of the act in the way one could see the whiteness of snow. Similarly, if Smith says chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla, an unbiased, independent observer could not verify that statement. This may lead one to assume that the statement about torturing infants and the statement about ice cream are both subjective.
However, a plausible objection to the monist correspondence theory of truth could save moral realism. There exists such an objection. If to say that a proposition, p, is objectively true is to say that p is true independent of whether anyone accepts p as true, then p can be true even if p doesn't correspond with reality. Being in correspondence with reality can be a sufficient condition, but not a necessary condition, for a proposition to be true. There are true propositions that don't fit the correspondence model. Some examples follow:
The correspondence theory itself doesn't correspond with anything in reality, which on its own terms implies that it isn't objectively true. Any proposition, p, that says some other proposition, q, is true or false isn't about reality itself, but is, at most, about q's relation to reality. “This statement doesn't correspond with reality” appears to be objectively true in the sense that it accurately describes its relation to reality. Even if one assumes that, in general, numbers exist in reality, some mathematical propositions appear to be objectively true even though they contain numbers that clearly don't exist in reality, such as negative numbers, irrational numbers, and the square root of minus one. A distinction is drawn between subjective and objective probability. The former represents someone's degree of confidence in an event. The latter is objectively quantifiable, e.g., statistical or mathematical probability. Either mathematical statements that express probability don't correspond with reality, or what actually obtains in the world is merely probable, and that includes probabilistic statements about what occurred in the past. Certain propositions of logic are said to be true even though they don't correspond with reality and are not merely a matter of opinion, e.g., “If 2 + 2 = 5, then the moon is made of cheese” is true according to the material conditional rule in propositional logic which states that a conditional proposition is true unless its antecedent is true and its consequent is false. Necessarily true a priori knowledge, such as “nothing can both exist and not exist at the same time,” is independent of experience, can be known through reason alone, and, hence, doesn't depend on correspondence with observable reality. Scientific principles, such as the principle of induction (the future will resemble the past), don't necessarily correspond with reality, yet don't appear to be either false or merely subjectively true. Negative sentences, such as “The moon is not made of cheese,” can be objectively true even though there are no negative facts to which such a sentence can correspond. Propositions about the internal (psychological) world, such as about someone's mental states, instead of the external (physical) world of reality, can be objectively true even though they don't correspond with reality. It's not clear that propositions about the future can correspond with reality, but who can doubt “The universe will still exist tomorrow”?
An alternative to the monist correspondence theory is alethic pluralism (aka truth pluralism), according to which there is more than one way for a proposition to be true. The way a proposition can be true depends on the subject matter under consideration. For instance, a proposition about empirical facts can be true in the correspondence sense, while the coherence theory of truth may apply to propositions of logic and mathematics. Similarly, moral claims may be true if they fit within coherent moral frameworks.
If there existed an omniscient, infallible being, X, for every proposition, p, X would believe that p if and only if p is true. X's set of beliefs would consist of an unimaginably huge system of propositions, each of which would be consistent with all the other propositions in the system (called a valid system), because no two true propositions can contradict each other. The system could be divided into various fields of knowledge, such as physics, astronomy, psychology, metaphysics, epistemology, mathematics, logic, etc. Each field would be internally consistent, and all its propositions would be consistent with all true propositions in all other fields of knowledge. Suppose those fields of knowledge included moral and political philosophy. In that case, there could be only one moral philosophy and political philosophy that is both internally consistent and consistent with all true propositions in all other fields of knowledge. On a pluralist theory of truth, all the propositions of that moral and that political philosophy would be objectively true.
Evolution allows group differences which liberals find uncongenial. Liberal concepts such as human dignity and equality find no basis in evolution. So in practice, the liberals utterly ignore evolution and all its works.
Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms explained bourgeois revolution through spread of bourgeois genes. Steven Pinker stressed upon adverse selection on genes for impulsive behavior leading to low homicide rates in modern states which made market liberalism possible in countries that had long tradition of strong states.
This is, of course, anathema for libertarians for whom the state can do no good. Curiously, for a people that harp on spontaneous order, the universal existence of states in civilized countries makes no impression.
Not all decentralized orders produce desirable results, so the fact that the political market produces states does not imply that states are desirable. I don't know if you are familiar with public choice theory, economics applied to politics, but some implications are predictable undesirable outcomes.
Evolution and markets are both evidence that a decentralized order is possible but the fact that markets produce desirable outcomes depend on specific characteristics which may not always hold. Evolution produces a predictable outcome but not always a desirable one from our point of view.
Well, abuse of a thing doesn't rule out the use. And people have always known that their rulers are as self-interested as they themselves,
Yet, libertarians can not be brought around to admit a single useful thing state does.
Depends on the libertarian. Anarchists have always been a minority of the movement. And the anarchist position does not require that the state does no useful things, only that the negative effects from things it ought not do outweigh the positive.
What if state is indispensable for certain indispensable functions?
That states do things they ought not to do is heritage of ameliorist tendency of Enlightenment.
What is one such function such that no society has ever survived without having a state doing it?
Do you think that no premodern stated did anything it shouldn’t have?
It is a question of scale. Modern states do things orders of magnitude more than anything attempted by premodern states.
For example, Indian government provides free grain to hundreds of million people.
There is Hobbesian argument now reinforced with anthropological data on homicide rates in uncivilized people. And still reinforced with evolutionary arguments how human behavior itself was evolved through in civilized states.
Human dignity and equality have a fairly obvious basis in evolution. Evolving to care about human dignity and equality will make you more trustworthy to other people. Humans are social animals, so being trusted by other people is correlated with reproductive success.
The idea that there are differences between groups of people has no more bearing on human dignity and equality than the existence of differences between individuals. The moral concept of equality does not require all human beings to be equally in their talents. Anyone who rejects differences on account of equality is extremely confused.
“Human dignity and equality have a fairly obvious basis in evolution.”
Re: the in-group, I think your claim is likely generally correct.
Re: the out-group or the far-group- anyone else but the in-group - I don’t think there is such an obvious basis. Or perhaps any basis at all.
There are currently more than 8 billion humans on Earth. We would never have been able to get such high numbers without being able to cooperate with members of outgroups and fargroups. Only our vast international economy could produce the neccessary resources to expand that much. Human dignity and equality provide a crucial common coordinating mechanism between seperate groups It's a winning evolutionary fitness strategy, if you want to talk about reproductive success. If humans didn't respect the rights of outgroups and far groups, there'd probably be a couple hundred thousand humans on Earth trying to eke out a life hunting deer with spears.
All of what you write is fine, and even a good description for how we became rich, but you give no explanation of how evolution was designed to accomplish that.
And getting to 8 billion humans is not the “goal” of evolution.
You show - and I see - no evidence that humans became dominant on this earth based on their ability to interact well with the outgroup or the far group. I also am aware of little if any research that shows humans particularly good at that prior to the last few thousand years (and not all that great at it until the last few hundred).
It seems important here to distinguish here between natural selection and evolution. One has been directly observed, and the other extrapolated from those observations. It's possible, if unusual, to take insights from fields like evolutionary psychology, or to contemplate the emergence of sexual differentiation among hominids, while remaining skeptical of the proposition that not all of our ancestors were mammals.
Natural selection has been directly observed, in species that have much shorter lifespans than humans. For example, in the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Also, *artificial* selection, where the selection pressure is intentionally imposed by humans to breed for a particular result, had been observed for thousands of years before Darwin used it to piggyback his own understanding of natural selection. As far as the organisms and their genes are concerned, the two are the same thing; and scientifically speaking, they're the same thing as well. Artificial selection is basically a multi-millennium natural experiment in evolutionary biology.
I don't necessarily disagree, but it's a question-begging assertion, presupposing the broader idea of evolution. Which, if correct, leaves your comment entirely true, but what I'm saying is that other possibilities exist. I think it's similar to the Big Bang. We have these observations, leading to the concept of an expanding universe, which we can extrapolate back in time to a very plausible origin story, which is currently the dominant theory of cosmogeny. But other explanations for these observations do exist, and and might be true, and this extrapolation is ultimately unfalsifiable and therefore subject to skepticism. The same is true of evolution, even given the undeniable observations of natural selection.
Can you name some of those other possibilities, along with a brief description? Please, testable falsifiable possibilities only; don't bring in religion.
I'm not talking about religion, but almost by definition no such hypothesis is falsifiable. Not the dominant ones, and not the alternatives. We can't test the past. Best we can do is make falsifiable predictions based on these hypotheses, and to the best of my knowledge these results have been mixed, both in evolution and cosmology. It's also true that we don't need alternative theories to be skeptical of the existing ones - they could be false, or we can be skeptical of them, even if we don't know what might replace them.
> it's a question-begging assertion, presupposing the broader idea of evolution
What "broader idea of evolution" is being presuuposed? Natural selection is genetic change in a population in response to selection pressure. In the case of antibiotic resistant bacteria, that's exactly what we have observed.
If by "the broader idea of evolution" you mean the claim that all living things on Earth today descend from a common ancestor in the far past, we have DNA evidence for that. It's not just being presupposed.
> other possibilities exist
I'm not sure what "other possibilities" you are referring to, either for evolution or for the universe as a whole.
> this extrapolation is ultimately unfalsifiable
No, it's not, either for evolution or for cosmology.
The biologist J. B. S. Haldane was once asked for an example of evidence that would falsify evolution. His answer: "fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." Our overall theory of evolution by natural selection makes tons of falsifiable predictions. The fact that we can't go back in a time machine a few billion years and take samples of the Earth's biosphere back then doesn't mean we have no way at all of testing those predictions.
The same is true for our model of the universe in cosmology. It makes plenty of testable predictions about things we can observe today; we're not helpless just because we can't go back in a time machine and sample the universe 13 billion years ago.
It's true that both hypotheses give us falsifiable predictions, and that we have confirming observations for both, but also disconfirming ones. In cosmology we have things like superluminal quasars and a failure to find dark matter. In evolution we have the persistent failure, which Darwin observed, to find "intermediate forms", though there is some evidence of their existence.
My point is not that we have no evidence for either theory - we do. My point is that it's important to distinguish between our direct observations of natural selection and our theoretical extrapolation from those observations, whether or not they are correct, because it's possible to believe in the observable phenomena, and adopt beliefs relevant to them as described in OP, while remaining skeptical of the extrapolations. I don't disbelieve in evolution or the Big Bang, but I do find both less well supported by the evidence than the observations from which they've been extrapolated. I don't have alternative theories for either of them, but I also don't think that's a good reason to assume they're correct.
> superluminal quasars
I don't know what you're referring to here.
> a failure to find dark matter
This isn't evidence against the general claim that there was a Big Bang. It's evidence that either our theoretical model of particle physics or our theoretical model of gravity is incomplete. But everyone in the field already believed both of those things anyway. In other words, this isn't a theory being disconfirmed; it's an open area of research, where there are multiple alternative hypotheses still being tested. But *none* of those alternatives are "there was no Big Bang".
> the persistent failure, which Darwin observed, to find "intermediate forms"
Darwin's observations in this respect are getting close to being two centuries old--and they are way out of date. There's been a lot of work done and a lot more knowledge accumulated since Darwin's day.
Although I normally describe myself as an Agnostic, as I approach the outer edge of the abyss as an 80 YO, I question whether I should believe in God.
The argument between a Creator and the Theory of Evolution, to me, however, is nonsensical. There can be both.
If God as a Creator is all powerful, then at the moment of the Big Bang (presumably at His insistence) some 13.7 Billion years ago, all He had to do was to say that the 4 Laws of Thermodynamics and of Electromagnetism etc shall apply.
Those laws then apply equally on Earth and throughout the Universe. So evolution also applies throughout the Universe.
Consequently, according to the formula established by Him, ultimately when the conditions were 'right' Life sprang into being as we know it. Evolution and asteroids took care of the rest.
It can be rightly assumed that around some of the 200-400 Billion stars in the Milky Way, there are planets capable of sustaining life. We perhaps should not be arrogant to presume that an Earth-like planet is necessary but short of other evidence to the contrary, it is the best bet.
We could of course be really arrogant and say that we on Earth were chosen by God and therefore the only life in the Galaxy and even the Universe.
In that case we should shake hands and start jaw jawing rather than war warring in case He has to start again somewhere else creating the 'right' conditions and then letting evolution do its thing.
I didn't say that evolution disproved theism, only that it eliminated one strong argument for it.
Hi David
No, I accepted that. Just thought I would put my 2 Bobs worth into your discussion.
“I am not a religious believer but am a moral realist, a position I have sometimes described as Catholicism without God. Evolution is an argument against my position as well, although a different one.”
My views on religion and morality have long mapped to the one you espouse here. That evolution is an argument against moral realism is one I’d not really considered before. But you explain it quite well.
Libertarians aside, the correlation between moral relativism and atheism seems quite strong today. In your view is this coincidence, and if not which way do you think the causation runs?
It is an argument I have encountered and have as yet no adequate rebuttal to.
Most religions are moral realist, which gives you one side of the correlation. It also means that one way of rejecting a religion is by rejecting moral claims.
I think both moral relativism and atheism (in the militant sense, not just being agnostic but being actively opposed to belief in God--a good example is Dawkins' book on the subject) are products of a particular more general ideology that one might call "Enlightenment run amok". The basic idea of the Enlightenment was that we humans are capable of producing things of value on our own, without having to be helped or inspired by a god. But there's a particular strain of that line of thought that took it to the extreme of saying that *only* we humans can produce things of value--that anything humans didn't build or construct or obtain through reason has no value. Of course such a viewpoint is going to reject belief in a God that's a source of value outside humans, or moral principles with the same property, wherever they are believed to come from. In that sense, evolution is just as much an enemy of this strain of Enlightenment thought, which might be one reason why so many self-styled liberals who say they believe in the Enlightenment have such problems accepting what evolution tells them.