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The following are unclassified quotes posted in my email messages of May-June 2005. The date format
is dd/mm/yy.
See copyright conditions at end.
[Jan-Feb, Mar, Apr], [May, Jun] [Jul (1), (2); Aug-Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec]
May [top] 1/05/2005 "First, what actually happened. Early press reports tended to say that Kansas had banned evolution from the classroom, had stripped all references to evolution from its curriculum guidelines, and so on. Some reporters thought the school board was bringing creation science and the Bible into the science curriculum. This was all a misunderstanding, which stemmed, in part, from two things. One is that the earliest reports came before the decision was actually announced, and they were clearly from news sources on the science educators' drafting committee. That committee had given the board a strongly pro-evolution draft. Members of the committee were vociferously angry about the action the board had decided on, and they exaggerated the story of the atrocity that was about to be committed. The second source of misunderstanding, I think, is that this was the kind of story that reporters generally treat with a template. They start with Galileo, move on to the Scopes trial, and go through the whole religion-versus-science routine. I think some of them hit the `Bash Creationism' macro on the word processor. Many of the news reports and editorials could almost have been written by the same person. The Kansas school board did not eliminate all references to evolution. In the revised guidelines it accepted there were almost four hundred words on the subject, compared to fewer than a hundred in the previous guidelines and more than seven hundred in the draft that the science educators had proposed. The new guidelines covered natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and all of that. But the educators' draft had essentially said, These processes explain evolution at the micro level that we observe and also evolution at the macro level; they explain how man and his universe came to be. By contrast, the board majority drew a sharp distinction between micro-evolution--e.g., what occurs when insects become resistant to a particular insecticide, or changes are produced in domestic animals through breeding--and the origins story of how living things came to be in the first place. The gist of their final version was that you can't infer the latter from the former. In certain ways, I would say that the board's standards actually beefed up the treatment of the subject rather than watering it down. For example, they added new clauses to the educators' draft saying that natural selection can maintain or deplete genetic variation but does not add new genetic information." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Evolution and the Curriculum: A Conversation with Phillip Johnson and Gregg Easterbrook," Ethics and Public Policy Center, February 2000, No. 4) 1/05/2005 "For our present purpose, it is sufficient to recognize that these are the salient acknowledged elements of the popular view of being scientifically methodical: empirical, pragmatic, open-minded, skeptical, sensitive to possibilities of falsifying; thereby establishing objective facts leading to hypotheses, to laws, to theories; and incessantly reaching out for new knowledge, new discoveries, new facts, and new theories. The burden of the following will be how misleading this view-which I shall call `the myth of the scientific method'-is in many specific directions, how incapable it is of explaining what happens in science, how it is worse than useless as a guide to what society ought to do about science and technology. ... Thus geologists and physicists tend to approach even scientific problems in disparate ways. They learn differently what it is to be scientific, what the scientific method is; and so too do chemists and biologists and other scientists come to different and even contradictory views of what science is. Yet these characteristic differences are but little recognized, and the misconception remains widespread that there exists a single method whose utilization marks the whole of science. In point of fact, as just illustrated, there is not any single thing that one can usefully and globally call science; rather, there are many different sorts of science." (Bauer H.H., "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method," [1992], University of Illinois Press: Urbana & Chicago IL, 1994, reprint, pp.19-20, 28) 1/05/2005 "One reproductive strategy involves an individual alternating between male and female sex so that it does not produce both eggs and sperm at the same time. In some species, there is a single change of sex. An organism may start off as male, converting to female at some later stage, protandry, or as female, with a later conversion to male, protogyny. In salmon, fish start life as males and over several years gradually get bigger until they exceed a threshold size, at which time their gonads transform into ovaries .... There is a clear advantage in this pattern of reproduction. Sperm are small, so even small males can produce sufficient sperm to fertilise vast numbers of eggs. However, because eggs are large and yolky, the larger a female is, the greater the number of eggs she can produce. ... Salmon are protandrous. After reaching a threshold size, they change from male to female and begin producing thousands of yolky eggs ... A coral reef fish, the blue wrasse, provides an example of protogyny. The large dominant male controls a harem of smaller, drab- coloured females. The male alternates his colour between green and blue. About an hour before spawning, the blue colour dominates and he commences mating.... This involves elaborate courtship behaviour followed by spawning with each female in turn. His colour then changes back to green. If the male is lost from a group, the largest female will undergo sex reversal and change colour to become the male with control of the harem. Protogyny in the blue wrasse maximises reproductive output, since all but one of the individuals is female and producing eggs, and the single male is able to fertilise eggs produced by all females in its harem." (Knox B., Ladiges P. & Evans B., eds., "Biology," [1994], McGraw-Hill: Sydney, Australia, 1995, reprint, p.259) 2/05/2005 "Australia's oldest human remains, found at Lake Mungo, include the world's oldest ritual ochre burial (Mungo III) and the first recorded cremation (Mungo I). Until now, the importance of these finds has been constrained by limited chronologies and palaeoenvironmental information. Mungo III, the source of the world's oldest human mitochondrial DNA, has been variously estimated at 30 thousand years (kyr) old, 42- 45 kyr old and 62 ±6 kyr old, while radiocarbon estimates placed the Mungo I cremation near 20-26 kyr ago. Here we report a new series of 25 optical ages showing that both burials occurred at 40±2 kyr ago and that humans were present at Lake Mungo by 50-46 kyr ago, synchronously with, or soon after, initial occupation of northern and western Australia. Stratigraphic evidence indicates fluctuations between lake-full and drier conditions from 50 to 40 kyr ago, simultaneously with increased dust deposition, human arrival and continent-wide extinction of the megafauna. This was followed by sustained aridity between 40 and 30 kyr ago. This new chronology corrects previous estimates for human burials at this important site and provides a new picture of Homo sapiens adapting to deteriorating climate in the world's driest inhabited continent." (Bowler J. M., et al., "New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo, Australia," Nature, 421, 20 February 2003, pp.837-840) 2/05/2005 "Creation scientists teach that all animals ate only plants until Adam and Eve rebelled against God's authority. Because carnivorous activity involves animal death, they presume it must be one of the evil results of human sin. Accordingly, they propose that meat-eating creatures alive now and evident in the fossil record must have evolved in just several hundred years or less, by natural processes alone, from the plant-eating creatures! The size of Noah's ark and the limited number of humans on board (eight) present an equally serious problem for them. Even if all the animals aboard hibernated for the duration of the Flood, the maximum carrying capacity by their estimates for the ark would : be about thirty thousand pairs of land animals? But the fossil record indicates the existence of at least a half billion such species, more than five million of which live on Earth today, and at least two million more lived in the era immediately after the Flood, as they date it. The problem grows worse. Shortly after the Flood, they say, a large proportion of the thirty thousand species on board - dinosaurs, trilobites [sic], and so on-went extinct; so the remaining few thousand species must have evolved by rapid and efficient natural processes alone into seven million or more species. Ironically, creation scientists (quietly) propose an efficiency of natural biological evolution greater than even the most optimistic Darwinist would dare to suggest." (Ross H.N.*, "The Genesis Question: Scientific Advances and the Accuracy of Genesis," NavPress: Colorado Springs CO, 1998, pp.91-92) 2/05/2005 "For all practical purposes, one could say that, at the outside, there was need for no more than 35,000 individual vertebrate animals on the Ark. The total number of so-called species of mammals, birds reptiles and amphibians listed by Mayr is 17,600, but undoubtedly the number of original `kinds' was less than this." (Whitcomb J.C.* & Morris H.M.*, "The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications," [1961], Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 1993, Thirty-Sixth Printing, pp.68-69) 2/05/2005 "And how many species of organisms are there on earth? We don't know, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. The number could be close to 10 million or as high as 100 million. Large numbers of new species continue to turn up every year. And of those already discovered, over 99 percent are known only by a scientific name, a handful of specimens in a museum, and a few scraps of anatomical description in scientific journals. It is a myth that scientists break out champagne when a new species is discovered. Our museums are glutted with new species. We don't have time to describe more than a small fraction of those pouring in each year. With the help of other systematists, I recently estimated the number of known species of organisms, including all plants, animals, microorganisms, to be 1.4 million. This figure could easily be off by a hundred thousand, so poorly defined are species in some groups of organisms and so chaotically organized is the literature on diversity in general. More to the point, evolutionary biologists are generally agreed that this estimate is less than a tenth of the number that actually live on earth." (Wilson E.O., "The Diversity of Life," Belknap/Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 1992, pp.132-133) 3/05/2005 "It is interesting to note that even today pi cannot be calculated precisely-there are no two whole numbers that can make a ratio equal to pi. Mathematicians find a closer approximation every year-in 2002, for example, experts at the University of Tokyo Information Technology Center determined the value of pi to over one trillion decimal places. But this is academic: the value determined by Archimedes over 2,000 years ago is sufficient for most uses today." (Groleau R., "Approximating Pi," Infinite Secrets, PBS NOVA, September 2003) 3/05/2005 "I knew the Kansas story was going to be a big one on Tuesday, August 10, 1999, when the telephone and e-mail messages from reporters began to pile up. On the following day the ten-member Kansas state board of education was scheduled to vote on its new standards for science education. For weeks the board had reportedly been evenly divided over whether to accept a strongly proevolution draft proposed by a twenty- seven-member committee of scientists and educators. The newspapers labeled one faction as creationists, fundamentalists or religious conservatives. Their opponents were consistently called `moderates,' a label signifying rationality and tolerance which journalists tend to apply to the side they favor. During the last few days before the crucial vote, one of the moderates had turned out to be sympathetic to the creationist side, and the new six-member majority was revising the committee's draft in a manner certain to displease the scientific community. The media were poised to make a big story out of this latest outbreak of grassroots dissatisfaction with the teaching of evolutionary science. What the reporters thought was about to happen had been explained the Sunday before the vote in a front-page story in the Washington Post by reporter Hanna Rosin, which was reprinted in newspapers around the country [Rosin H., `Creationism Evolves: Kansas Board Targets Darwin,' The Washington Post, August 8, 1999, p.A01] Apparently relying on reports from members of the original drafting committee who were bitterly at odds with the new majority on the board, Rosin wrote that the Kansas board appeared about to `pass a new statewide science curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade that wipes out virtually all mention of evolution and related concepts: natural selection, common ancestors and the origins of the universe:' Rosin said that the new curriculum would not explicitly prohibit the teaching of evolution, `but its exclusion will severely undermine such efforts when they come under attack from students, parents, principals or local school boards in a state where fights over evolution are as commonplace as cornfields. And because all public schools in the state are tested yearly according to the curriculum, teachers will be pressured to follow the new curriculum.' According to Rosin, the pending expulsion of evolution from the curriculum reflected a change in tactics by a persistently aggressive national creationist movement. ...Most of Rosin's story gave the impression that the creationists were the aggressors in a programmed nationwide campaign in which Kansas was merely the latest target. One paragraph acknowledged, however, that in reality it was the science educators who were pushing for change on the basis of an organized nationwide campaign: `The century-old debate erupted again, ironically, in part out of a push to improve science education. About five years ago, a craze for national standards and accountability in every subject swept American classrooms. In response, national groups of science educators wrote benchmarks for scientific literacy to serve as models for states. The idea was to replace blind memorization of facts and figures with broad central concepts. With evolution, the results were not what scientists had predicted. Religious conservatives tapped into skepticism from inside and outside the scientific community to discredit evolution, seizing on routine disagreements among scientists to disparage it as nothing more than a theory.' We can flesh out this picture of local creationists reacting to an initiative from science educators with some facts. What was specifically at issue in Kansas was a proposal from scientists and educators to replace the existing standards, last revised in 1995, with new standards based on a model from national science organizations. The 1995 standards contained only sixty- nine words directly about evolution. The draft proposed by the twenty-seven-member committee devoted almost ten times as many words to the subject and added evolution to the list of basic `unifying concepts and processes' which underlie all areas of science. So evolution was promoted from the status of a theory of biology to that of a fundamental concept of science (ranking it with such other concepts as measurement and evidence). The committee defined science as `the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us,' thus linking scientific investigation explicitly with philosophical naturalism. What the science educators described as `replacing blind memorization of facts and figures with broad central concepts' looked to critics like a campaign to extend scientific authority to questions of religion and worldview about which the public schools are supposed to be neutral. If a central objective of science education is to instill a naturalistic way of thinking, then both the educators and their critics were right." (Johnson, P.E.*, "The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism," Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 2000, pp.63-67. Emphasis original) 4/05/2005 "The conservative board members also objected to the eagerness of the science educators to extrapolate grandly from minimal evidence, turning a process that was observed to produce only cyclical variations in fundamentally stable species into a mechanism capable of creating plants and animals in the first place. The science educators' draft observed that `using examples such as Darwin's finches or the peppered moths of Manchester helps develop understanding of natural selection over time.' It defined macroevolution merely as `evolution above the species levels and provided no indication that there is a huge difference between mere variation and creation of new types of complex organs or body plans. Feeling that they were being subjected more to a sales pitch for naturalism than to a genuine educational proposal, the board majority in its final product cut down on the emphasis (reducing the proposed 664 words to 392) and distinguished sharply between microevolution (required) and microevolution (optional for local districts). But the potentially most significant change involved only a single word and was overlooked by the journalists. Whereas the drafting committee had defined science as the human activity of seeking natural explanations, the board substituted that `science is the human activity of seeking logical explanations for what we observe in the world around us' (emphasis added). If you think there may be a difference in some cases between natural explanations and logical explanations for certain features of life, then you are well on your way to becoming a creationist. Within the community of evolutionary scientists, naturalism and rationality are considered to be virtually the same thing. ...the widespread reports about the decision (probably influenced by the expectations raised in the Washington Post story) were incorrect in stating that the board had virtually eliminated evolution and natural selection from the curriculum. On the contrary, the board greatly improved the intellectual content of the standards on these subjects by encouraging teachers to raise three important considerations that many science educators do not want the students to think about: (1) the mechanisms of microevolution do not necessarily explain how macroevolution can occur, especially when the latter category involves not merely speciation but the creation of new complex organs; (2) natural selection adds no new genetic information to the organism; and (3) a vast historical scenario like `evolution' necessarily involves a degree of speculation that is absent from, say, the typical chemistry experiment. When educators say that science teaches that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, they are making a very different kind of statement than when they say that science teaches that life arose by chemical evolution without the need of assistance from God. If the educators want to teach the students to think like good scientists rather than to believe uncritically whatever `science says,' then they need to teach the students that sometimes the authority of `science' is used to validate claims that are based largely on speculation." (Johnson, P.E.*, "The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism," Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 2000, pp.67-70. Emphasis in original) 4/05/2005 "The informal leadership of the IDM has more or less come to rest on Philip Johnson, a distinguished retired (emeritus) Professor of Law at Berkeley University who is a Presbyterian. Philosophically and theologically, the leading lights of the ID movement form an eclectic group. For example, Dr Jonathan Wells is not only a scientist but also an ordained cleric in the Unification Church (the 'Moonie' sect) and Dr Michael Denton is a former agnostic anti-evolutionist (with respect to biological transformism), who now professes a vague form of theism. However, he now seems to have embraced evolutionary (though somehow 'guided') transformism. Dr Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, is a Roman Catholic who says he has no problem with the idea that all organisms, including man, descended from a common ancestor." (Wieland C.*, "AiG's views on the Intelligent Design Movement," Answers in Genesis, 30 August 2002) 4/05/2005 "Man is a primate, and in some ways not a very special one. He can do more than any other creature, but has not changed much to do so. The strangest thing about human evolution is how little there has been. Nothing else is so widespread and nobody fills so many gaps in the economy of nature. Many animals carry out tasks almost as wonderful as those achieved by men, but through biology rather than intellect. For them, success at one task means failure at all others. In the past hundred thousand - in the past hundred - years, human lives have been transformed, but bodies have not. We did not evolve, because our machines did it for us. As Darwin put it in The Descent of Man: 'The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts'. Human progress has made a simple but crucial move, from body to mind. That mind is built from genes but what it can do has long transcended DNA. Many sociologists (and a few biologists) hope for a comparative anatomy of the mind; but that can never succeed. When it comes to what makes us different from other creatures, science can answer all the questions except the interesting ones. The human intellect stands alone. As there is nothing else like it, the rules of classification come into play. If an object is one of a kind, it is impossible to know where to put it. The problem with the mind, or any uniquely human attribute, is simple: it is, like the narwhal's tusk or the female hyena's penis, unique." (Jones J.S., "Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated," Doubleday: London, 1999, p.351) 4/05/2005 "Creation scientists teach that all animals ate only plants until Adam and Eve rebelled against God's authority. Because carnivorous activity involves animal death, they presume it must be one of the evil results of human sin. Accordingly, they propose that meat-eating creatures alive now and evident in the fossil record must have evolved in just several hundred years or less, by natural processes alone, from the plant-eating creatures! The size of Noah's ark and the limited number of humans on board (eight) present an equally serious problem for them. Even if all the animals aboard hibernated for the duration of the Flood, the maximum carrying capacity by their estimates for the ark would be about thirty thousand pairs of land animals? But the fossil record indicates the existence of at least a half billion such species, more than five million of which live on Earth today, and at least two million more lived in the era immediately after the Flood, as they date it. The problem grows worse. Shortly after the Flood, they say, a large proportion of the thirty thousand species on board - dinosaurs, trilobites, and so on-went extinct; so the remaining few thousand species must have evolved by rapid and efficient natural processes alone into seven million or more species. Ironically, creation scientists (quietly) propose an efficiency of natural biological evolution greater than even the most optimistic Darwinist would dare to suggest." (Ross H.N.*, "The Genesis Question: Scientific Advances and the Accuracy of Genesis," NavPress: Colorado Springs CO, 1998, pp.90-91) 4/05/2005 "Light has been thrown upon the whole problem of animal distribution and adaptation-or what may be called `a true evolution.' After the Flood each species began to `mutate' and new forms began to arise. Among the cattle varieties were produced having short hair, such as is found in the Zebu of India or the Red Africander. Such a coat being better adapted to a hot climate, these varieties migrated to warm, equatorial regions. Other varieties were produced having long, warm coverings of hair, such as the West Highlander and Galloway, or the prehistoric wild ox of northern Europe called the `auroch.' These varieties migrated northward. Natural selection, working upon Mendelian or `genic' variations, produced all the evolution there is. Such evolution is strictly in accordance with what is taught in all Scripture." (Nelson B.C.*, "After Its Kind," [1927], Bethany Fellowship: Minneapolis MN, Revised edition, 1952, Nineteenth printing, 1967, pp.119-120) 5/05/2005 "About two years ago, I attended a public lecture presented by a young earth creationist speaker in a church near where I live. His occasionally interesting talk included scientific `evidence' that he believed supported his position. The speaker did present some valid points. ... However, much of his presentation consisted of simplistic `scientific' arguments that would only be considered to be convincing by people already committed to a young earth view. ... Towards the end of the presentation I attended, the speaker said, `There is a person in America called Hugh Ross who claims to be a Christian but he is really an evolutionist'. I was shocked. Dr Hugh Ross, as most readers would know is the founder of _Reasons to Believe_. He has dedicated most of his Christian life to evangelism. For this speaker to even question Dr Ross's Christian commitment is disgraceful. In supreme irony, and unknown to the audience, it is the young earth speaker who actually believes that all of the cats mentioned above, in addition to your pet pussy at home and even the extinct sabre-tooth tigers `evolved' from a single pair of ancestors. And further, this hyper-evolution happened in only a few thousand years at most." (Neilson M.*, "Intellectual Honesty," Reasons to Believe (Australia) Newsletter, March 2005) 5/05/2005 "In a modified form of materialism, epiphenominalism, the mind is not identical to the brain, but it is dependent on the physical brain, the way a shadow is dependent on a tree. This again assumes, though it does not prove, that the mind is dependent on the brain. Certain mental functions can be explained in physical ways, but that does not mean they are dependent on physical processes. If there is a spiritual, as well as a physical, dimension to reality, the mind shows every sign of being able to function in either. Neurobiology is an empirical science, but these scientists freely admit that they have not come close to isolating the "I" They can quantify mind-brain interactions, but there has been no success in learning the qualities of emotional or self response." (Geisler N.L.*, "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics," Baker Books: Grand Rapids MI, 1999, p.445. Emphasis original) 5/05/2005 "In a modified form of materialism, epiphenominalism, the mind is not identical to the brain, but it is dependent on the physical brain, the way a shadow is dependent on a tree. This again assumes, though it does not prove, that the mind is dependent on the brain. Certain mental functions can be explained in physical ways, but that does not mean they are dependent on physical processes. If there is a spiritual, as well as a physical, dimension to reality, the mind shows every sign of being able to function in either. Neurobiology is an empirical science, but these scientists freely admit that they have not come close to isolating the `I' They can quantify mind-brain interactions, but there has been no success in learning the qualities of emotional or self response." (Geisler N.L.*, "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics," Baker Books: Grand Rapids MI, 1999, p.445. Emphasis original) 5/05/2005 "epiphenomenalism. Group of doctrines about mental-physical causal relations, which view some or all aspects of mentality as by-products of the physical goings-on in the world. The classic definition (e.g. in C. D. Broad, The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925) ensures that epiphenomenalism is a species of dualism. Whereas Descartes, an interactionist, held that mental things both cause and are caused by physical things, the epiphenomenalist holds that mental things do not cause physical things although they are caused by them. The epiphenomenalist then can accept that there are no causal influences on physical events besides other physical events, and thus can escape one objection sometimes raised against dualism. But the epiphenomenalist's picture of mental events as tacked on to the physical world, having no causal influence there, is unappealing: she would seem to think that mental things feature in the world as accompanying shadows of the physical-in the realm of `pure experience'." (Horn J., "epiphenomenalism," in Honderich T., ed., "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995, p.241) 5/05/2005 "epiphenomenalism The view that some feature of a situation arises in virtue of others, but itself has no causal powers. In the philosophy of mind this means that while there exist mental events, states of consciousness, and experiences, they have themselves no causal powers, and produce no effect on the physical world. The analogy sometimes used is that of the whistle on the engine, that makes the sound (corresponding to experience), but plays no part in making the machinery move. Epiphenomenalism is a drastic solution to the major difficulty of reconciling the existence of mind with the fact that according to physics itself only a physical event can cause another physical event. An epiphenomenalist may accept one-way causation, whereby physical events produce mental events, or may prefer some kind of parallelism, avoiding causation either between mind and body or between body and mind (see occasionalism). A major problem for epiphenomenalism is that if mental events have no causal relationships it is not clear that they can be objects of memory, or even awareness. See also base and superstructure. epiphenomenon An incidental product of some process, that has no effects of its own. See epiphenomenalism." (Blackburn S., "The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy," [1994], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1996, pp.122-123) 5/05/2005 "The mechanistic theory postulates that all the phenomena of life, including human behaviour, can in principle be explained in terms of physics. Apart from any problems that might arise from the particular theories of modern physics, or from conflicts between them, this postulate is problematical for at least two fundamental reasons. First, the mechanistic theory could only be valid if the physical world were causally closed. In relation to human behaviour, this would be the case if mental states either had no reality at all, or were in some sense identical to physical states of the body, or ran parallel to them, or were epiphenomena of them. But if on the other hand the mind were non-physical and yet causally efficacious, capable of interacting with the body, then human behaviour could not be fully explained in physical terms. The possibility that mind and body interact is by no means ruled out by the available evidence: at present no clear-cut decision can be made on empirical grounds between the mechanistic theory and the interactionist theory; from a scientific point of view the question remains open. Therefore it is possible that human behaviour, at least, might not be explicable entirely in physical terms, even in principle. Second, the attempt to account for mental activity in terms of physical science involves a seemingly inevitable circularity, because science itself depends on mental activity. This problem has become apparent within modern physics in connection with the role of the observer in processes of physical measurement; the principles of physics 'cannot even be formulated without referring (though in some versions only implicitly) to the impressions - and thus to the minds - of the observers' (B.D. Espagnat 17). Thus, since physics presupposes the minds of observers, these minds and their properties cannot be explained in terms of physics." (Sheldrake R., "A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance," [1981], Park Street Press: Rochester VT, 1995, reprint, pp.25-26) 5/05/2005 "eepiphenomenalism ... n. a theory about the relation between matter and mind, according to which there is some physical basis for every mental occurrence. Mental phenomena are seen as by-products, as it were, of a closed system of physical causes and effects, and they have no causal power of their own. (T. H. Huxley likened them to the whistle on a steam train.) epiphenomenon ... (sing.); epiphenomena (pl.) n. a secondary phenomenon; a by-product. (Musgrave A. epiphenomenalism," in Mautner T., "The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy," [1996], Penguin: London, Revised, 2000, p.174-175) 6/05/2005 "epiphenomenalism, n. the doctrine that states of CONSCIOUSNESS, including VOLITIONS, are merely byproducts of the working of the brain, and, in the words of T. H. Huxley (On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, 1874), are `as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steamwhistle which accompanies the working of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery'." (Vesey G. & Foulkes P., "Collins Dictionary of Philosophy," HarperCollins: Glasgow UK, 1990, p.100. Emphasis in original) 6/05/2005 "Epiphenomenalism. Empirical research gives every indication that the occurrence of any brain state can, in principle, be causally explained by appeal solely to other physical states. To accommodate this, some philosophers espoused epiphenomenalism, the doctrine that physical states cause mental states, but mental states do not cause anything. Epiphenomenalism implies that there is only one-way psychophysical action - from the physical to the mental. Since epiphenomenalism allows such causal action, it can both allow that we perceive objects and events in the physical world and embrace the causal theory of sense perception - what we perceive (i.e., see, hear, etc.) must cause us to undergo a sense experience (i.e., a visual experience, aural experience, etc.). However, if combined with Cartesian dualism, epiphenomenalism, like Cartesian interactionism, implies the problematic thesis that states of an extended substance can affect states of an unextended substance. Moreover, it is hard to see how epiphenomenalism can allow that we are ever intentional agents. For intentional agency requires acting on reasons, which, according to the causal theory of action, requires a causal connection between reasons and actions. Since epiphenomenalism denies that such causal connections are possible, it must either maintain that our sense of agency is illusory - or offer an alternative to the causal theory of action. (McLaughlin B.P., "philosophy of mind," in Audi R., ed., "The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy," [1995], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1996, reprint, p.598) 6/05/2005 "What about the option, then, of concluding that mind stuff is actually a special kind of matter? In Victorian seances, the mediums often produced out of thin air something they called "ectoplasm," a strange gooey substance that was supposedly the basic material of the spirit world, but which could be trapped in a glass jar, and which oozed and moistened and reflected light just like everyday matter. Those fraudulent trappings should not dissuade us from asking, more soberly, whether mind stuff might indeed be something above and beyond the atoms and molecules that compose the brain, but still a scientifically investigatable kind of matter. The ontology of a theory is the catalogue of things and types of things the theory deems to exist. The ontology of the physical sciences used to include "caloric" (the stuff heat was made of, in effect) and "the ether" (the stuff that pervaded space and was the medium of light vibrations in the same way air or water can be the medium of sound vibrations). These things are no longer taken seriously, while neutrinos and antimatter and black holes are now included in the standard scientific ontology. Perhaps some basic enlargement of the ontology of the physical sciences is called for in order to account for the phenomena of consciousness. Just such a revolution of physics has recently been proposed by the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose, in The Emperor's New Mind (1989). While I myself do not think he has succeeded in making his case for revolution, it is important to notice that he has been careful not to fall into the trap of dualism." (Dennett D.C., "Consciousness Explained," [1991], Penguin: London, 1993, reprint, pp.35-36) 6/05/2005 "Above the level of the virus, if that be granted status as an organism, the simplest living unit is almost incredibly complex. It has become commonplace to speak of evolution from ameba to man, as if the ameba were a natural and simple beginning of the process. On the contrary, if, as must almost necessarily be true short of miracles, life arose as a living molecule or protogene, the progression from this stage to that of the ameba is at least as great as from ameba to man. All the essential problems of living organism are already solved in the one-celled (or, as many now prefer to say, noncellular) protozoan and these are only elaborated in man or the other multicellular animals." (Simpson G.G., "The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of its Significance for Man," [1949], Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1960, reprint, pp.15-16) 7/05/2005 "I hope I have successfully illustrated the wide reach of Darwin's ideas. Yes, he established a philosophy of biology by introducing the time factor, by demonstrating the importance of chance and contingency, and by showing that theories in evolutionary biology are based on concepts rather than laws. But furthermore-and this is perhaps Darwin's greatest contribution-he developed a set of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we must adopt population thinking, in which all individuals are unique (vital for education and the refutation of racism); natural selection, applied to social groups, is indeed sufficient to account for the origin and maintenance of altruistic ethical systems; cosmic teleology, an intrinsic process leading life automatically to ever greater perfection, is fallacious, with all seemingly teleological phenomena explicable by purely material processes; and determinism is thus repudiated, which places our fate squarely in our own evolved hands. To borrow Darwin's phrase, there is grandeur in this view of life. New modes of thinking have been, and are being, evolved. Almost every component in modern man's belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principles." (Mayr E.W., "Darwin's Influence on Modern Thought," Scientific American, Vol. 283, No. 1, pp.67-71, July 2000, p.71) 7/05/2005 "A basic action is one which a person does intentionally just like that and not by doing any other intentional action. My going from Oxford to London is a non-basic action, because I do it by doing various other actions going to the station, getting on the train, etc. But squeezing my hand or moving my leg and even saying 'this' are basic actions. I just do them, not by doing any other intentional act. (True, certain events have to happen in my body my nerves have to transmit impulses if I am to perform the basic action. But these are not events which I bring about intentionally. They just happen I may not even know about them.) By a basic power I mean a power to perform a basic action. We humans have similar basic powers to each other. They are normally confined to powers of thought and powers over the small chunk of matter which each of us calls his or her body. I can only produce effects in the world outside my body by doing something intentional with my body. I can open a door by grasping the handle with my hand and pulling it towards me; or l can get you to know something by using my mouth to tell you something. When l produce some effect intentionally (e.g. the door being open) by doing some other action (e.g. pulling it towards me), doing the former is performing a non-basic action. When I go to London, or write a book, or even put a screw into a wall, these are non-basic actions which I do by doing some basic actions. When I perform any intentional action, I seek thereby to achieve some purpose normally one beyond the mere performance of the action itself (I open a door in order to be able to leave the room), but sometime simply the performance of the action itself (as when I sing for its own sake). ... God's basic powers are supposed to be infinite: he can bring about as a basic action any event he chooses, and he does not need bones or muscles to operate in certain ways in order to do so. He can bring objects, including material objects, into existence and keep them in existence from moment to moment. We can imagine finding ourselves having a basic power not merely to move objects, but to create them instantaneously for example the power to make a pen or a rabbit come into existence; and to keep them in existence and then let them no longer exist. There is no contradiction in this supposition, but of course in fact no human has such a power. What the theist claims about God is that he does have a power to create, conserve, or annihilate anything, big or small. And he can also make objects move or do anything else. He can make them attract or repel each other, in the way that scientists have discovered that they do, and make them cause other objects to do or suffer various things: he can make the planets move in the way that Kepler discovered that they move, or make gunpowder explode when we set a match to it; or he can make planets move in quite different ways, and chemical substances explode or not explode under quite different conditions from those which now govern their behaviour. God is not limited by the laws of nature; he makes them and he can change or suspend them-if he chooses." (Swinburne R.G., "Is There a God?," Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1996, pp.5-6) 7/05/2005 "An expert claims hard evidence that Matthew's Gospel was written while eyewitnesses to Christ were alive. New Testament scholarship may be revolutionized by three old scraps of papyrus no bigger than postage stamps. Unlikely as that seems, such are the possibilities swirling around Carsten Peter Thiede, an assertively good-natured German specialist in ancient papyrus manuscripts. In an article to appear next week in the world's leading papyrolory journal, Thiede will lay out his claim to have discerned the earliest New Testament manuscript fragment-a portion of the Gospel of Matthew from upper Egypt that he says was written in the 1st century A.D. Until now the oldest manuscript remnant was a bit of the Gospel of John, also from Egypt, believed to have been written a half-century later, around A.D. 120. The 1934 John discovery helped undercut theories that the fourth Gospel was a late 2nd century creation far removed from the time of Jesus Christ. The implications of the new detective work on Matthew could be even more startling. If Matthew made its way to Egypt so early on, the modern argument over the dating and authenticity of the Gospels would have to be totally re- examined. With unmitigated gusto, the London Times calls Thiede "the man who may transform our understanding of Christianity." Bible professors are initially, and typically, skeptical, however. Graham Stanton of King's College, London, sniffs that Thiede's article "will not merit serious discussion." American Paul Achtemeier editor of Harpers Bible Dictionary, says he would be "mightily surprised if this turns out to be right" Thiede's proposed dating of the papyrus fragments, which contain 10 scattered verses from Matthew 26 in Greek, is based on handwriting style. That would provide the first hard external evidence for dating the original composition; previous timing opinions have been based on the internal content of the Gospels. In Thiede's view, the writing of Matthew could be pushed back just before or after A.D. 70, a decade or more earlier than the consensus date among most experts. Earlier dating would considerably increase the number of eye- witnesses to Jesus who might have been alive when Matthew was written. That, in turn, would strengthen conservatives, who read the Gospels as reliable historical accounts, and tend to undercut liberal Bible critics who have long theorized that the Gospel authors relied on shaky recollections of distant events or fabricated stories." (Ostling R.N., "A Step Closer to Jesus?," TIME, January 23, 1995, p.47) 8/05/2005 "Darwin ... wrote in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of his day: `If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish...I would give nothing for the theory of Natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.' [Darwin, C.R., Letter to C. Lyell, October 11, 1859, in Darwin, F., ed., "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," [1898], Basic Books: New York NY, Vol. II., 1959, reprint, pp.6-7]. This is no petty matter. In Darwin's view, the whole point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non- miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations. For what it is worth, it is also the whole point of this book. For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all. ... At first sight there is an important distinction to be made between what might be called 'instantaneous creation' and 'guided evolution'. Modern theologians of any sophistication have given up believing in instantaneous creation. ... many theologians ... smuggle God in by the back door: they allow him some sort of supervisory role over the course that evolution has taken, either influencing key moments in evolutionary history (especially, of course, human evolutionary history), or even meddling more comprehensively in the day-to-day events that add up to evolutionary change. ... In short, divine creation, whether instantaneous or in the form of guided evolution, joins the list of other theories we have considered in this chapter." (Dawkins, R., "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design," W.W Norton & Co: New York NY, 1986, pp.248-249, 316-317. Emphasis original) 8/05/2005 "WHEN WAS THE New Testament written? This is a question that the outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the experts must by now have settled. Yet, as in archaeology, datings that seem agreed in the textbooks can suddenly appear much less secure than the consensus would suggest. For both in archaeology and in New Testament chronology one is dealing with a combination of absolute and relative datings. There are a limited number of more or less fixed points, and between them phenomena to be accounted for are strung along at intervals like beads on a string according to the supposed requirements of dependence, diffusion and development. New absolute dates will force reconsideration of relative dates, and the intervals will contract or expand with the years available. In the process long-held assumptions about the pattern of dependence, diffusion and development may be upset, and patterns that the textbooks have taken for granted become subjected to radical questioning. ... It is only when one pauses to do this that one realizes how thin is the foundation for some of the textbook answers and how circular the arguments for many of the relative datings. Disturb the position of one major piece and the pattern starts disconcertingly to dissolve. That major piece was for me the gospel of John. I have long been convinced that John contains primitive and reliable historical tradition, and that conviction has been reinforced by numerous studies in recent years. ... It was at this point that I began to ask myself just why any of the books of the New Testament needed to be put after the fall of Jerusalem in 70. As one began to look at them, and in particular the epistle to the Hebrews, Acts and the Apocalypse, was it not strange that this cataclysmic event was never once mentioned or apparently hinted at? And what about those predictions of it in the gospels - were they really the prophecies after the event that our critical education had taught us to believe?" (Robinson J.A.T., "Redating The New Testament," [1976], SCM Press: London, Second impression, 1977, pp.1,9-10) 8/05/2005 "ONE OF THE oddest facts about the New Testament is that what on any showing would appear to be the single most datable and climactic event of the period - the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and with it the collapse of institutional Judaism based on the temple - is never once mentioned as a past fact. It is, of course, predicted; and these predictions are, in some cases at least, assumed to be written (or written up) after the event. But the silence is nevertheless as significant as the silence for Sherlock Holmes of the dog that did not bark. ... `We should expect ... that an event like the fall of Jerusalem would have dinted some of the literature of the primitive church, almost as the victory at Salamis has marked the Persae. It might be supposed that such an epoch-making crisis would even furnish criteria for determining the dates of some of the NT writings. As a matter of fact, the catastrophe is practically ignored in the extant Christian literature of the first century.' [Moffatt J., "Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament," Edinburgh, 1918, p.3] Similarly C.F.D. Moule: `It is hard to believe that a Judaistic type of Christianity which had itself been closely involved in the cataclysm of the years leading up to AD 70 would not have shown the scars - or, alternatively, would not have made capital out of this signal evidence that they, and not non-Christian Judaism, were the true Israel. But in fact our traditions are silent .' [Moule C.F.D., "The Birth of the New Testament," Adam & Charles Black: London, 1962, p.123] Explanations for this silence have of course been attempted. Yet the simplest explanation of all, that `perhaps ... there is extremely little in the New Testament later than AD 70' [Moule, 1962, p.121] and that its events are not mentioned because they had not yet occurred, seems to me to demand more attention than it has received in critical circles." (Robinson J.A.T., "Redating The New Testament," [1976], SCM Press: London, Second impression, 1977, pp.14-15) 9/05/2005 "In 1950, the fluorine test was applied to the [Piltdown man] skull and jaw to check if they were of the same age, and to what stratum they should be attributed. The tests confirmed that they could both be attributed to the middle or probably upper Pleistocene Age [Oakley, K.P. & Hoskins, C.R. `New evidence on the antiquity of Piltdown man', Nature, 11th March, 1950. Vol. 165, pp.379-82]. These tests, however, were completely contradicted by a second fluorine test three years later. The human skull and ape-like jaw of Piltdown were the opposite form of development to that indicated by the Pekin man finds and others, which were being excavated prior to the Second World War. These possessed an ape-like brain but were said to have human characteristics in the jaw and teeth. These two lines of man's evolution appeared to contradict each other, and eventually the possibility of fraud was considered. Further fluorine and other tests on the Piltdown jaw and skull pieces in 1953 showed this time that they were of completely different ages, the skull being upper Pleistocene, as originally believed, but the jaw was found to be quite modern although it had been stained to appear old and the teeth had been filed [Weiner, J.S., Oakley, K.P. & Le Gros Clark, W.E. `The solution of the Piltdown problem', Bulletin, British Museum (Natural History), Geol. 2, No. 3, 1953, pp.139-46]. Investigation of the other fossils also found, showed that many of them were faked and imported from other sites [Weiner, J.S., Oakley, K.P: & Le Gros Clark, W.E. `Further contributions to the solution of the Piltdown problem', Bulletin, British Museum (Natural History), Geol. 2, No. 6, 1955, pp.228-88]. The elephant bone `bat' was apparently shaped with a steel tool, probably a knife, in modern times. Publication of the discovery of the fraud caused considerable embarrassment in scientific circles, for the experts of the day, who had made such sweeping statements based on these bones, had been completely fooled by the hoaxer. Such was the concern that a motion was tabled in the House of Commons, `That the House has no confidence in the Trustees of the British Museum ... because of the tardiness of their discovery that the skull of the Piltdown man is a partial fake.' The British Museum mounted a special exhibition of the methods by which the fraud was exposed, which was presented as a `triumph of science', but the odium that the fraud had lain undetected in their possession for forty years remained." (Bowden M.*, "Ape-Men: Fact or Fallacy?," [1978], Sovereign Publications: Bromley, Kent UK, Second edition, 1981, reprint, 1988, pp.8-9) 9/05/2005 "Origin of the Soul. Augustine's reluctance to take sides in the debate on the origin of the soul was not shared by his contemporaries. Some Greek church fathers shared Origen's theory that the soul preexisted with God and that it was assigned to a body as a penalty for its sin of looking downward. Most, however, accepted the creationist view that God created each individual soul at the moment that he gave it a body, while some, like Tertullian, held the traducianist theory that each soul is derived, along with the body, from the parents. Arguments cited in favor of creationism were (1) that Scripture distinguishes the origin of man's soul and body (Eccl. 12:7; Isa. 42:5; Zech. 12:1; Heb. 12:9); (2) that creationism preserves the idea of the soul as a simple, indivisible substance better than traducianism, which requires the idea of the division of the soul and its derivation from the parents; and (3) that it makes more credible Christ's retention of a pure soul than does traducianism. In behalf of traducianism it was said (1) that certain Scripture supports it (Gen. 2:2; Heb. 7:10; cf. I Cor. 11:8); (2) that it offers the best theory for the whole race having sinned in Adam; (3) that it is supported by the analogy of lower life in which numerical increase is obtained by derivation; (4) that it teaches that parents beget the whole child, body and soul, and not just the body; and (5) that it was necessary for Christ to have received his soul from the soul of Mary in order to redeem the human soul. Augustine carefully weighed the arguments on each side of the controversy, leaning toward traducianism for a time even while he saw the difficulty of retaining the soul's integrity with this hypothesis; later he admitted that he was perplexed and baffled by the question. A contemporary theologian who takes essentially the same stance is G. C. Berkouwer, who calls the controversy "unfruitful," inasmuch as it wrongly assumes that the issue is one of horizontal or vertical relations. "Such a way of putting it is far too feeble an attempt to render adequately the greatness of the work of God" (Man: The Image of God, 292). The God of Israel does not create only in the distant past, but he is constantly active in human history, the Creator in horizontal relationships as well as others. To speak about a separate origin of the soul he sees as impossible biblically, inasmuch as this creationist theory sees the relationship to God as "something added to the `essentially human,' which later is defined independently as 'soul' and `body.' Both soul and body can then be viewed in different `causal' relationships without reference to some intrinsic non- causal relationship to God. If, however, it is impossible to speak of the essence of man except in this latter religious relationship, then it also becomes impossible to introduce duality into the origin of soul and of body within the unitary human individual" (Osterhaven M.E.., "Soul," in Elwell W.A., ed., "Evangelical Dictionary of Theology," [1984], Baker Book House: Grand Rapids MI., 1990, Seventh printing, p.1037) 9/05/2005 "dualism. Any theory which holds that there is, either in the universe at large or in some significant part of it, an ultimate and irreducible distinction of nature between two different kinds of thing. Examples are (1) Plato's dualism of eternal objects (forms or UNIVERSALS), of which we can have true knowledge, and temporal objects, which are accessible to the senses, and of which we can at best have opinions; (2) Descartes' mind-body dualism, i.e. of mind, as conscious, and of body, as occupying space, the former always infallibly, the latter never more than fallibly, knowable (see also MIND- BODY PROBLEM); (3) ethical dualism, which holds, in conformity with the doctrine of the NATURALISTIC FALLACY, that there is an irreducible difference between statements of fact and VALUE-JUDGEMENTS; (4) explanatory dualism, which holds that, while natural events, including mere bodily movements, have causes, human actions do not but must be explained by reference to motives or reasons; (5) sometimes called epistemological dualism (see also EPISTEMOLOGY), the theory that a distinction must be drawn between the immediate object of PERCEPTION (i.e. the appearance or SENSE- DATA) and the inferred, public, material objects. For further reading: J. A. Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning (1970)." (Quinton A., "dualism," in Bullock A. & Trombley I., eds., "The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought," [1977], Fontana Press: London, Revised edition, 1988, p.240) 9/05/2005 "dualism. The theory that mind and matter are two distinct things. Its most famous defender is Descartes, who argues that as a subject of conscious thought and experience, he cannot consist simply of spatially extended matter. His essential nature must be non-material, even if in fact he (his soul) is intimately connected with his body. The main argument for dualism is that facts about the objective external world of particles and fields of force, as revealed by modern physical science, are not facts about how things appear from any particular point of view, whereas facts about subjective experience are precisely about how things are from the point of view of individual conscious subjects. They have to be described in the first person as well as in the third person. Descartes argued that the separate existence of mind and body is conceivable; therefore it is possible; but if it is possible for two things to exist separately, they cannot be identical. A modern form of this argument has been presented by Saul Kripke, against recent forms of scientific materialism which claim that the relation of mental states to brain states is like the relation of water to H2O. What happens in the mind clearly depends on what happens in the brain, but facts about the physical operation of the brain don't seem to be capable of adding up to subjective experiences in the way that hydrogen and oxygen atoms can add up to water. Theoretical identifications of which both terms are physical and objective don't provide a model for identifications where one term is physical and the other is mental and subjective. However, while there are problems with the identification of mind and brain, it is not clear what other kind of entity could have subjective states and a point of view, either. Substance dualism holds that the mind or soul is a separate, non-physical entity, but there is also double aspect theory or property dualism, according to which there is no soul distinct from the body, but only one thing, the person, that has two irreducibly different types of properties, mental and physical. Substance dualism leaves room for the possibility that the soul might be able to exist apart from the body, either before birth or after death; property dualism does not. Property dualism allows for the compatibility of mental and physical causation, since the cause of an action might under one aspect be describable as a physical event in :he brain and under another aspect as a desire, emotion, or thought; substance dualism usually requires causal interaction between the soul and he body. Dualistic theories at least acknowledge the serious difficulty of locating consciousness in a modern scientific conception of the physical world, but they really give metaphysical expression to the problem rather than solving it. The desire to avoid dualism has been the driving motive behind much contemporary work on the mind-body problem. Gilbert Ryle made fun of it as the theory of `the ghost in the machine', and various forms of behaviourism and materialism are designed to show that a place can be found for thoughts, sensations, feelings, and other mental phenomena in a purely physical world. But these theories have trouble accounting for consciousness and its subjective qualia. Neither dualism nor materialism seems likely to be true, but it isn't clear what the alternatives are."(Nagel T., "dualism," in Honderich T., ed., "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995, pp.206-207) 9/05/2005 "The mind-body problem is the problem of giving an account of how minds, or mental processes, are related to bodily states and processes. That they are intimately related seems beyond doubt, and has not been seriously disputed. Evidently, our perceptual experience depends on the way external physical stimuli impinge on our sensory surfaces, and, ultimately, on the processes going on in our brain; your desire for a drink of water somehow causes your body to move in the direction of the watercooler; and so on. But how, and why, does conscious experience emerge out of the electrochemical processes occurring in a grey mass of neural fibres? How does a desire manage to get the appropriate neurons to fire and thereby cause the right muscles to contract? Schopenhauer called the mind body problem `the world knot', a puzzle that is beyond our capacity to solve. The mind-body problem as it is now debated, like much else in contemporary philosophy of mind, has been inherited from Descartes. Descartes conceived of the mind as an entity in its own right, a `mental substance', the essential nature of which is `thinking', or consciousness. On the other hand, the defining nature of the body, or material substance, was claimed to be spatial extendedness-that is, having a bulk. Thus, Descartes envisaged two domains of entities, one consisting of immaterial minds and the other of material bodies, and two disjoint families of properties, one consisting of mental properties (e.g. thinking, willing, feeling) and the other of physical properties (e.g. shape, size, mass), in terms of which members of the respective domains are to be characterized. However, the two domains are not to be entirely unrelated: a mind and a body can form a `union', resulting in a human being. Although the nature of this `union' relationship was never made completely clear, it evidently involved the idea that minds and bodies joined in such a union are involved in intimate and direct causal interaction with each other. Thus, Descartes's mind-body doctrine combines substance dualism, i.e. the dualism of two distinct kinds of substances, with attribute or property dualism, i.e. the dualism of mental and physical properties. Substance dualism, however, has largely dropped out of contemporary discussions; few philosophers now find the idea of minds as immaterial substances coherent or fruitful. There has been a virtual consensus, one that has held for years, that the world is essentially physical, at least in the following sense: if all matter were to be removed from the world, nothing would remain-no minds, no `entelechies', and no `vital forces'. According to this physical monism (or `ontological physicalism'), mental states and processes are to be construed as states and processes occurring in certain complex physical systems, such as biological organisms, not as states of some ghostly immaterial beings. The principal remaining problem for contemporary philosophy of mind, therefore, is to explain how the mental character of an organism or system is related to its physical nature. ... Recently, the Schopenhauerian pessimism has been resurrected by some philosophers, who argue that the mind-body problem is insoluble, and that we will never be able to understand how consciousness, subjectivity, and intentionality can arise from material processes. In any case, one thing that is certain is that the mind- body problem is one of the deepest puzzles in philosophy, and that it will continue to test our philosophical intelligence and imagination." (Kim J., "mind- body problem," in Honderich T., ed., "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy," Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995, pp.579-580) 9/05/2005 "mind-body problem, n. phr. the question how MIND and body are related. Are they two different things (DUALISM), or two `aspects' of one thing (MONISM), or what? For ancient Greek philosophers the question arose when they distinguished between eternal INTELLIGIBLE things (PLATO'S `FORMS') and transient SENSIBLE things. Plato is a dualist for saying that before birth and after death the soul can have an apprehension of the Forms that is pure because then the soul is `separate and independent of the body' (Phaedo 67a), the bodily senses being an impediment to such apprehension. The question of how mind and body can interact became pressing only when, with DESCARTES, the body had become a `SUBSTANCE', and the mind a different kind of substance, the two having nothing in common save their dependence for existence on GOD. The mind-body problem, as it occurs in modern philosophy, starts with Descartes. If the mind is a substance, then ordinary utterances like `I think it will rain' become reports of mental events. Awareness of these is said to be `IMMEDIATE', as opposed to the awareness of material things, which is inferential, based on having sensations of them. However, this immediate awareness is also said to be like sense, except that it is internal (LOCKE, Essay, II i 4). `Internal' is a metaphor, the literal meaning being that only one person, the speaker, can be aware of his mental event of thinking it will rain. His access to his own mental events is `privileged'. Saying that the awareness is like sense leads to talk of `mental phenomena'. To those who accept these consequences there is no question that there are mental events; the only question is how mental events, or phenomena, cause, and are caused by, certain physical or physiological events, namely, what happens in the brain. Descartes suggested that mind and brain interact causally through a gland in the brain called the `pineal gland'. However, this does not tell us how interaction takes place. The model of causation with which scientists had come to operate was that of one body propelling another. The mind, being immaterial, cannot be in spatial contact with, and so cannot propel, anything. When this point was put to him (by a correspondent, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, in a letter dated 6-16 May 1643) Descartes replied that we can have some understanding of how mind and body interact in virtue of having a notion of their `union', a notion we acquire just by means of ordinary life and conversation, by abstaining from meditating and from studying things that exercise the imagination' (Descartes to Elizabeth, 28 June 1643). Others have taken this further in various ways. Roughly, treatments of the problem can be divided into those that develop Descartes's CONCEPT of substance (one independently existing substance, GOD, and two dependent substances, mind and MATTER), and those that avoid substance terminology but accept a consequence of mind being a substance, namely that there are `mental events' or `mental processes'. Finally, there are those who say that the mind should not be taken as a substance, so that the above consequences disappear." (Vesey G. & Foulkes P., "Collins Dictionary of Philosophy," HarperCollins: Glasgow UK, 1990, p.196-199) 10/05/2005 "dualism Any view that postulates two kinds of thing in some domain is dualistic; contrasting views according to which there is only one kind of thing are monistic. The most famous example of the contrast is mind- body dualism, contrasted with monism in the form either of idealism (only mind) or more often physicalism (only body or matter)." (Blackburn S., "The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy," [1994], Oxford University Press: Oxford UK, 1996, p.110) 10/05/2005 "dualism n. a theory that has at its basis two radically distinct concepts or principles. Examples of dualism are: (1) the religious belief in two opposing principles or divine beings, one good and one evil. It was in this sense that the word was first used about three centuries ago, to describe the ancient Persian religion; (2) in metaphysics, the view that there are two kinds of reality: finite and infinite, matter and form, matter and spirit, relative and absolute, etc.; (3) in the philosophy of mind, psychophysical dualism: the view that human beings are made up of two radically distinct constituents (body, constituted by matter like other natural objects, and an immaterial mind or soul). Another kind of psychophysical dualism, different from this `substance dualism', is called `property dualism' or `attribute dualism', to the effect that there are two radically different kinds of properties, physical and non-physical, belonging to the same brain or human being; (4) in moral philosophy, fact/value dualism: the view that factual statements do not imply any evaluative statement. Ant. monism, pluralism. Note: Dualism is also used in a different sense, as a synonym ofduality, i.e. two-ness." (Mautner T., ed., "The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy," [1996], Penguin: London, Revised, 2000, p.152) 10/05/2005 "dualism, the view that reality consists of two disparate parts. The crux of dualism is an apparently unbridgeable gap between two incommensurable orders of being that must be reconciled if our assumption that there is a comprehensible universe is to be justified. Dualism is exhibited in the pre- Socratic division between appearance and reality; Plato's realm of being containing eternal ideas and realm of becoming containing changing things; the medieval division between finite man and infinite God; Descartes's substance dualism of thinking mind and extended matter; Hume's separation of fact from value; Kant's division between empirical phenomena and transcendental noumena; the epistemological double- aspect theory of James and Russell, who postulate a neutral substance that can be understood in separate ways either as mind or brain; and Heidegger's separation of being and time that inspired Sartre's contrast of being and nothingness. The doctrine of two truths, the sacred and the profane or the religious and the secular, is a dualistic response to the conflict between religion and science. Descartes's dualism is taken to be the source of the mind-body problem. If the mind is active unextended thinking and the body is passive unthinking extension, how can these essentially unlike and independently existing substances interact causally, and how can mental ideas represent material things? How, in other words, can the mind know and influence the body, and how can the body affect the mind? Descartes said mind and body interact and that ideas represent material things without resembling them, but could not explain how, and concluded merely that God makes these things happen. Proposed dualist solutions to the mind-body problem are Malebranche's occasionalism (mind and body do not interact but God makes them appear to); Leibniz's preestablished harmony among noninteracting monads; and Spinoza's property dualism of mutually exclusive but parallel attributes expressing the one substance God. Recent mind-body dualists are Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles. Monistic alternatives to dualism include Hobbes's view that the mental is merely the epiphenomena of the material; Berkeley's view that material things are collections of mental ideas; and the contemporary materialist view of J. J. C. Smart, D. M. Armstrong, and Paul and Patricia Churchland that the mind is the brain. A classic treatment of these matters is Arthur O. Lovejoy's The Revolt Against Dualism. ... But despite the extremely difficult problems posed by ontological dualism, and despite the cogency of many arguments against dualistic thinking, Western philosophy continues to be predominantly dualistic, as witnessed by the indispensable usu two-valued matrixes in logic and ethics and the intractable problem of rendering mental intentions in terms of material mechanism or vice versa." (Watson R.A., "dualism," in Audi R., ed., "The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy," [1995], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1996, reprint, p.210) 10/05/2005 "Mind-body dualism. While the doctrine that the soul is distinct from the body is found in Plato and is discussed throughout the history of philosophy, Descartes is considered the father of the modern mind- body problem. He maintained that the essence of the physical is extension in space. Minds are substances that are not extended in space, and thus are distinct from any physical substances. The essence of a mental substance is to think. This twofold view is called Cartesian dualism. Descartes was well aware of an intimate relationship between mind and the brain. (There is, it should be noted, no a priori reason to think that the mind is intimately related to the brain, and Aristotle did not associate them.) Descartes (mistakenly) thought the seat of the relationship was in the pineal gland. He maintained, however, that our minds are not our brains, lack spatial location, and continue to exist after the death and destruction of our bodies. Cartesian dualism invites the question: What connects our minds to our brains? Causation is Descartes's answer: states of our minds and states of our brains causally interact. When bodily sensations such as aches, pains, itches, tickles, and the like, cause us to moan, or wince, or scratch, or laugh, they do so by causing brain states (events, processes), which in turn cause bodily movements. In deliberate action, we act on our desires, motives, and intentions to carry out our purposes; and acting on these mental states involves their causing brain states, which in turn cause our bodies to move, and thereby (causally) influence the physical world. The physical world, in turn, influences our minds through its influence on our brains. Perception of the physical world with five senses - seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touch - involves causal transactions from the physical to the mental. Thus, Descartes held that there is two-way psychophysical causal interaction: from the mental to the physical (as in, e.g., deliberate action) and from the physical to the mental (as in, e.g., perception). The conjunction of Cartesian dualism and the doctrine of two- way psychophysical causal interaction is called Cartesian interactionism." (McLaughlin B.P., "philosophy of mind," in Audi R., ed., "The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy," [1995], Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1996, reprint, pp.597-598) # 11/05/2005 "Mixing religion with science is obnoxious to Darwinists only when it is the wrong religion that is being mixed. ... Julian Huxley's religion of `evolutionary humanism' offered humanity the `sacred duty' and the `glorious opportunity' of seeking `to promote maximum fulfilment of the evolutionary process on the earth.' [Huxley J.S., "Religion Without Revelation," 1958, p.194] ... The continual efforts to base a religion or ethical system upon evolution are not an aberration, and practically all the most prominent Darwinist writers have tried their hand at it. Darwinist evolution is an imaginative story about who we are and where we came from, which is to say it is a creation myth. .... In its mythological dimension, Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself. Lacking scientific knowledge, humans at first attribute natural events like weather and disease to supernatural beings. As they learn to predict or control natural forces they put aside the lesser spirits, but a more highly evolved religion retains the notion of a rational Creator who rules the universe. At last the greatest scientific discovery of all is made, and modern humans learn that they are the products of a blind natural process that has no goal and cares nothing for them. The resulting `death of God' is experienced by some as a profound loss, and by others as a liberation. But liberation to what? If blind nature has somehow produced a human species with the capacity to rule earth wisely and if this capacity has previously been invisible only because it was smothered by superstition, then the prospects for human freedom and happiness are unbounded. That was the message of the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. Another possibility is that purposeless nature has produced a world ruled by irrational forces, where might makes right and human freedom is an illusion. In that case the right to rule belongs to whoever can control the use of science. It would be illogical for the rulers to worry overmuch about what people say they want, because science teaches them that wants are the product of irrational forces. In principle, people can be made to want something better. It is no kindness to leave them as they are, because passionate stone age people can do nothing but destroy themselves when they have the power of scientific technology at their command. Whether a Darwinist takes the optimistic or the pessimistic view, it is imperative that the public be taught to understand the world as scientific naturalists understand it. Citizens must learn to look to science as the only reliable source of knowledge, and the only power capable of bettering (or even preserving) the human condition. That implies, as we shall see, a program of indoctrination in the name of public education." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Darwin on Trial," [1991], InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, Second Edition, 1993, pp.130-131, 133-134) 11/05/2005 "JUPITER AND Saturn, the farthest planets the ancients knew, patrol the vast domain of the outer, solar system. .... As astronomers know today, these weighty names fit both worlds perfectly, for their most impressive property is not color or beauty but sheer mass. Together, the two gas giants harbor twelve times more mass than all the other planets combined. ... Although astronomers have assumed that other solar systems resemble ours and thus have worlds like Jupiter and Saturn, this need not be the case. `There are all sorts of ways you could mess up the formation of a Jupiter,' said George Wetherill, a planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, `and maybe nature just doesn't care whether it makes a Jupiter or not.' For this reason, most solar systems could lack such large planets. `If this is true,' said Wetherill, `it might be surprising that we happen to live in a planetary system which has a Jupiter and a Saturn. But maybe it's not so surprising, because perhaps if it weren't for Jupiter and Saturn, we wouldn't be here.' ... Wetherill's idea actually followed from theories of how the solar system formed. When the planets were developing, 4.6 billion years ago, countless comets roamed the solar system. Many of these collided with one another to form the cores of the four giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune-but the mighty gravitational force of Jupiter and Saturn tossed trillions of other comets away. As a consequence, few comets remain to hit the solar system's planets today, sparing Earth in particular from the devastating impacts that could have thwarted the development of intelligent life. ... If that idea is correct, however, it raises the stakes in the search for extrasolar giant planets. If astronomers examine other stars and fail to find Jupiters-the planets that are easiest to detect-those solar systems may possess no life at all, even if they have warm, wet planets like Earth. Conversely, if planets like Jupiter abound, they will boost the hope that life exists elsewhere." (Croswell K., "Planet Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems, "Free Press: New York NY, 1997, pp.161-163) 11/05/2005 "Today Wetherill uses a powerful desktop computer to simulate the formation of the Earth and the other planets. `What I think is of some relevance to the search for extrasolar planets,' he said, `is to try to develop a general theory for the formation of planetary systems, of which our solar system would be but one example and might be similar to others in some ways and different in other ways. There'd be no specific need for all planetary systems to develop in exactly the same way. So I've been looking into how variations of the initial conditions for the formation of a planetary system might lead to variations from one system to another.' Wetherill starts his model with small bodies orbiting a star. These bodies collide and grow into larger ones, which in turn become the planets of a solar system. Terrestrial planets-rocky worlds similar in mass to Earth- form near their star, where the disk of gas and dust orbiting the star is hot and only substances with high melting points, rock and iron, condense into solids. In 1991, Wetherill's work indicated that such planets are fairly easy for nature to produce, if nature operates the same way that his computer simulations do. Proponents of extraterrestrial life greeted Wetherill's result, since it meant that many if not most stars should have small planets like Earth. Wetherill even found that a typical simulation produced four terrestrial planets that match the pattern in our solar system: the first planet (e.g., Mercury) was small, the next two (Venus and Earth) were larger, and the final one (Mars) was again small. Also in 1991 came the stunning discovery of the first two pulsar planets, whose masses resemble Earth's and demonstrate that nature can indeed manufacture terrestrial-mass extrasolar planets-even in exotic locales. The story changed, though, when Wetherill turned to the giant planets. According to an idea that Japanese astronomer Hiroshi Mizuno and his colleagues published in the late 1970s, these planets formed in a more complicated way than did the terrestrial planets. Far from the star, the disk was cool, so ices of water (H20), methane (CH4), and ammonia (NH3) condensed. These far outweighed the rock and iron, because the ices contained three of the most common elements in the universe-oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen joined with hydrogen, the most abundant element of all. Due to all this material and the large volume of the outer solar system, enormous objects of ice and rock formed that had roughly 10 times more mass than the Earth. In the case of Jupiter and Saturn, these objects formed quickly, and Mizuno said their gravitational pull grabbed huge quantities of the hydrogen and helium gas that pervaded the disk. Today, Jupiter has 318 times the mass of the Earth and Saturn 95 times, most of it hydrogen and helium. Uranus and Neptune, which today have only 15 and 17 Earth masses, grabbed little if any gas, presumably because their ice-rock cores formed later, after the Sun had blown away the hydrogen and helium gas in the disk. Mizuno's model for the formation of the giant planets explains why all four have similar cores. It also agrees with the planets' observed atmospheric abundances. For example, the theory correctly predicts that all four planets should have more carbon relative to hydrogen than the Sun. This is because their cores had methane, which contains carbon, and some of that leaked into the planets' atmospheres. Furthermore, the two planets that captured the least hydrogen and helium - Uranus and Neptune-have the greatest carbon-to-hydrogen ratios, just as the theory predicts, because their methane was least diluted by the infalling hydrogen and helium. In 1992, Wetherill ran his model on the computer-and it failed. `Instead of forming a system that looked like Jupiter and Saturn,' he said, `I usually got a large number of objects moving in highly eccentric orbits, and it's rather difficult for this to develop into the story we like to tell where a ten- Earth-mass core develops and starts to capture gas. So the possibility occurred to me that maybe it doesn't arise very often. Maybe Jupiter is a fluke, which actually did occur in some of my calculations, but only as a fluke rather than as a rule of thumb. `Now this is very egotistical: to think that just because I don't know how to make Jupiter implies that nature doesn't know how to make it. But this was at the same time that people were failing to find any Jupiter-like planets around other stars. It began to look-and I think it still does look-as if Jupiter is an unusual object. `So if that's the case, then that raised the question: why do we have a Jupiter? The possible answer was that our solar system may be a highly biased sample, biased by the fact that we're here to see it.' In contrast, a solar system that lacks a Jupiter and a Saturn is not self-observable, if it never gives birth to intelligent life." (Croswell K., "Planet Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems, "Free Press: New York NY, 1997, pp.164-165, 167. Emphasis original) 11/05/2005 "Long ago, Jupiter and Saturn cleaned the solar system of most cometary debris, including comets that may have been quite large, possibly as large as planets. Consequently, catastrophic impacts-such as the one that killed the dinosaurs and most other species living 65 million years ago-now occur only rarely. In the early solar system, said Wetherill, Jupiter and Saturn worked as a team, playing ball with comets and passing them back and forth from one planet to the other, boosting the comets' velocities. Most of the comets got cast clear out into interstellar space, while some were deposited in the Oort cloud, the vast comet reservoir that surrounds the solar system. Uranus and Neptune, which are smaller than Jupiter and Saturn, treated comets more gently. They transported comets toward Jupiter and Saturn, which then got rid of them. In 1994, the world witnessed a dramatic event that symbolized Jupiter's role as protector of terrestrial life: the planet took a direct hit from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, an impact that left Jupiter's atmosphere scarred for months. Had the planet not intervened, the comet might someday have collided with Earth. To see what would happen if Jupiter and Saturn did not exist, Wetherill tried simulations in which the two planets failed to accrete much hydrogen and helium. This could occur if a solar system lost its hydrogen and helium disk before the cores of Jupiter and Saturn captured much gas. Many solar systems may therefore have `failed' Jupiters and Saturns- planets with the masses of Uranus and Neptune, but located at the orbital positions of Jupiter and Saturn. Wetherill found that such planets are dangerous. `Failed Jupiters and Saturns are not really effective in removing material from the solar system,' said Wetherill, `but they're effective enough that they perturb this material over the lifetime of the solar system into orbits which come into the inner solar system, into the region of the Earth.' Comets would therefore bombard this hypothetical Earth as much as a thousand times more often than they do the real one. On the real Earth, devastating impacts occur roughly once every 100 million years, leaving long intervals of relative calm, during which life can evolve. On an Earth without the protective shield of a full-fledged Jupiter and Saturn, these catastrophes could strike every 100,000 years-a time shorter than Homo sapiens is old. Life might still originate on such a world, Wetherill said, but it might not develop into complex life. `Even on the Earth, it wasn't until around 600 million years ago that multicellular organisms became common,' he said. `So we went for 4 billion years without doing much; it might not take much more to prevent intelligent life from arising at all. Apparently, it's not really easy, even on a very nice planet like the Earth.' Without Jupiter and Saturn, the Earth might also be buried under water. Much of the water now on Earth came from comets, and even with Jupiter and Saturn protecting the planet, seawater covers 71 percent of the Earth's surface. If Jupiter and Saturn did not exist, and comets rained down on Earth more often, the Earth might be a completely water-covered world, and any life would forever remain in the sea-another situation that might have prevented the emergence of intelligent life. Although dolphins have a fair degree of intelligence, they have not developed a written language, preventing future generations of dolphins from studying and building on the knowledge of their ancestors." (Croswell K., "Planet Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems, "Free Press: New York NY, 1997, pp.167-168) 1/05/2005 "As a legal scholar, one point that attracted my attention in the Supreme Court case was the way terms like `science' and `religion' are used to imply conclusions that judges and educators might be unwilling to state explicitly. If we say that naturalistic evolution is science, and supernatural creation is religion, the effect is not very different from saying that the former is true and the latter is fantasy. When the doctrines of science are taught as fact, then whatever those doctrines exclude cannot be true. By the use of labels, objections to naturalistic evolution can be dismissed without a fair hearing. My suspicions were confirmed by the `friend of the court' argument submitted by the influential National Academy of Sciences, representing the nation's most prestigious scientists. Creation- science is not science, said the Academy in its argument to the Supreme Court, because `it fails to display the most basic characteristic of science: reliance upon naturalistic explanations. Instead, proponents of `creation-science' hold that the creation of the universe, the earth, living things, and man was accomplished through supernatural means inaccessible to human understanding.' [National Academy of Sciences, `Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences', 1984] Because creationists cannot perform scientific research to establish the reality of supernatural creation-that being by definition impossible-the Academy described their efforts as aimed primarily at discrediting evolutionary theory. `Creation-science' is thus manifestly a device designed to dilute the persuasiveness of the theory of evolution. The dualistic mode of analysis and the negative argumentation employed to accomplish this dilution is, moreover, antithetical to the scientific method. The Academy thus defined science' in such a way that advocates of supernatural creation may neither argue for their own position nor dispute the claims of the scientific establishment. What may be one way to win an argument, but it is not satisfying to anyone who thinks it possible that God really did have something to do with creating mankind, or that some of the claims that scientists make under the heading of `evolution' may be false." (Johnson, P.E.*, "Darwin on Trial," [1991]. InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove IL, Second Edition, 1993, pp.7-8. Emphasis original) 12/05/2005 "I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art." (Darwin, C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p.67) 12/05/2005 "As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not natural selection effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: Nature, if I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her, as is implied by the fact of their selection. Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country; he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting manner; he feeds a long- and a short- beaked pigeon on the same food; he does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all his productions. He often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch the eye or to be plainly useful to him. Under nature, the slightest differences of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods! Can we wonder, then, that Nature's productions should be far "truer" in character than man's productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?" (Darwin, C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p.83) 12/05/2005 "Though Nature grants long periods of time for the work of natural selection, she does not grant an indefinite period; for as all organic beings are striving to seize on each place in the economy of nature, if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will be exterminated. Unless favourable variations be inherited by some at least of the offspring, nothing can be effected by natural selection. The tendency to reversion may often check or prevent the work; but as this tendency has not prevented man from forming by selection numerous domestic races, why should it prevail against natural selection? (Darwin, C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p. 99) 12/05/2005 "Finally then, although in many cases it is most difficult even to conjecture by what transitions organs have arrived at their present state, yet, considering how small the proportion of living and known forms is to the extinct and unknown, I have been astonished how rarely an organ can be named, towards which no transitional grade is known to lead. It certainly is true that new organs appearing as if created for some special purpose rarely or never appear in any being-as indeed is shown by that old, but somewhat exaggerated, canon in natural history of "Natura non facit saltum." We meet with this admission in the writings of almost every experienced naturalist; or as Milne Edwards has well expressed it, Nature is prodigal in variety, but niggard in innovation. Why, on the theory of Creation, should there be so much variety and so little real novelty? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created for its proper place in nature, be so commonly linked together by graduated steps? Why should not Nature take a sudden leap from structure to structure? On the theory of natural selection, we can clearly understand why she should not; for natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps." (Darwin, C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p.180) 12/05/2005 "On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility, such as the teeth in the embryonic calf or the shrivelled wings under the soldered wing-covers of many beetles, should so frequently occur. Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal her scheme of modification, by means of rudimentary organs, of embryological and homologous structures, but we are too blind to understand her meaning." (Darwin, C.R., "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," [1872], Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 6th Edition, 1928, reprint, p.454) 12/05/2005 "It was Charles Darwin who coined the master metaphor that eventually dominated evolutionary thinking. Having decided to adopt the transmutation hypothesis shortly after his return from the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin began the search for the natural means by which populations of organisms were modified and kept adapted to changing circumstances. Finally, in the fall of 1838, after reading Thomas Malthus' famous Essay on the Principle of Population, Darwin hit upon the idea of a general organic struggle for existence in which those members of a species which happened to possess traits favorable to survival in their particular circumstances would be most likely to reach reproductive age and hence would spread those traits through subsequent generations, thereby gradually changing the character of the population. Casting about for a suitable name for this process of variation, population pressure, differential adaptedness, differential survival, and differential reproduction, Darwin chose the term `natural selection', in order, as he said, to `mark its relation to man's power of selection' in producing new breeds of plants and animals. There was, of course, no selection in nature. Selection implies intelligent choice, of which nature knows nothing. What Darwin called natural selection might better have been called differential reproduction through the luck of the hereditary draw. Why, then, did Darwin choose a metaphor implying intelligent choice to designate a complex set of processes involving random variation, population pressure, and differential survival to reproductive age? He did so, first, because the analogy to the selection practiced by plant and animal breeders served him well, both as a research tool and as a method of making his theory intelligible to fellow scientists and to the general public. But Darwin seems to have had another reason as well, a reason connected with his evolutionary deism. His transmutation notebooks, his essays of 1842 and 1844, and the Origin itself all show that Darwin regarded what he called `natural selection' as a set of processes designed by the Creator to produce adaptation and improvement in the organic world. In the essays of 1842 and 1844 Darwin even personified natural selection, asking his readers to imagine `a Being with penetration sufficient to perceive differences in the outer and innermost organization [of plants and animals] quite imperceptible to man, and with forethought extending over future centuries to watch with unerring care and select for any object the offspring of an organism produced under the foregoing [environmental] circumstances.' Darwin could see no reason why such a being could not `form a new race (or several were he to separate the stock of the original organism and work on several islands) adapted to new ends.' `As we assume his discrimination, and his forethought, and his steadiness of object, to be incomparably greater than those qualities in man,' Darwin continued, `so may we suppose the beauty and complication of the adaptations of the new races and their differences from the original stock to be greater than in the domestic races produced by man's agency.... With time enough, such a Being might rationally.... aim at almost any result.' Darwin was careful to say that this master Being was not the Creator Himself, but the powers he ascribed to it made it at least the vicegerent of the Creator. In Darwin's Origin of Species there is no explicit mention of the master Being, but he lurks behind the scenes in Darwin's description of natural selection as `daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.' The products of this constant, rigorous scrutiny, Darwin observed, `bear the stamp of a far higher workmanship' than those of `feeble man' in his role of plant and animal breeder. Note that, in Darwin's view, the variations `preserved' by natural selection are not merely good in the sense that they promote survival to reproductive age. They are `improvements'. Darwin's Origin abounds with `improvements' produced by natural selection. `The modified offspring from the later and more highly improved branches in the lines of descent,' he wrote, `will.... often take the place of, and so destroy, the earlier and less improved branches. Hence all the intermediate forms between the earlier and later states, that is between the less and more improved state of a species, as well as the original parent- species itself, will generally tend to become extinct.' The influence of the analogy to artificial selection and of Darwin's evolutionary deism is evident in these passages. The variations selected by a plant or animal breeder are improvements from the point of view of the breeder because they move the stock in the direction desired by the breeder. But in nature there is no desired or intended direction of change unless one postulates a master Being who has such a direction in mind. From the point of view of the organism concerned it is doubtless good to survive and reproduce, but to consider the organisms that survive and reproduce as `improvements' on those that do not is to introduce value judgments supposedly outside the domain of science. Is the tapeworm an improvement on its ancestors that had a more complicated structure? Is the modern horse an improvement on Eohippus? A standard of comparison would seem to be required, and, as Darwin himself conceded in his correspondence with Joseph Dalton Hooker, the intuitive standard of comparison is man himself. If human beings are considered higher than amoebas and chimpanzees and if the fossil record seems to indicate an overall succession of forms leading eventually to human beings, organic evolution may be described as a process of progressive improvement, however haphazard and erratic. But without the fossil record and without the assumption that man is the highest organism on earth what reason is there to think that differential reproduction of organisms happening to have traits favorable to survival will produce improvement in the organic world? To Charles Lyell it seemed evident that the improvement attested by the fossil record must have its source outside of nature, since nothing in Darwin's theory of natural selection seemed to require it. Darwin, however, was convinced that his theory did imply progressive improvement in the long run, although not in every instance of organic change through natural selection. He explained his position as follows in a letter to Lyell: .... every step in the natural selection of each species implies improvement in that species in relation to its conditions of life. No modification can be selected without it be an improvement or advantage. Improvement implies, I suppose, each form obtaining many parts or organs, all excellently adapted for their functions. As each species is improved, and as the number of forms will have increased, if we look to the whole course of time, the organic condition of life for other forms will become more complex, and there will be a necessity for other forms to become improved, or they will be exterminated; and I can see no limit to this process of improvement, without the intervention of any other and direct principle of improvement. All this seems to me quite compatible with certain forms fitted for simple conditions, remaining unaltered, or being degraded. If I have a second edition, I will reiterate `Natural Selection', and, as a general consequence, Natural Improvement. Darwin's Origin did indeed have a second edition (and a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth), and Darwin continued to the end to insist that the apparent improvement in organic forms disclosed in the fossil record was a necessary long-run consequence of random variation, population pressure, and differential survival to reproductive age. In the sixth edition, as in the first, these processes were represented as constituting `laws impressed on matter by the Creator' and as working `by and for the good of each being', with the result that `all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.' What better metaphor could Darwin have chosen to designate these agencies of progressive improvement than the term `natural selection,' evocative as it was of the benevolent selectivity of the improver of domestic stocks? True, nature's selection was much slower, much more erratic and wasteful than man's, but its superior workmanship was evident in the `endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful' it had produced. The struggle for existence was harsh, but Darwin found consolation in the belief `that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.' Natural improvement, although costly, slow, and spasmodic, was, happily, inevitable. Having produced the human species, natural selection (aided by the inherited effects of mental and moral training) would, Darwin hoped, eventually evolve creatures who would look back on him and Lyell and Newton as `mere Barbarians'. In Darwin's view, natural selection was no mere mechanism of organic modification and co-adaptation. It was also the Great Improver, blind but powerful and inexorable. It had, said Darwin, elevated man to `the very summit of the organic scale' and had thereby given him `hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.' Darwin's metaphor had taken on a life of its own. Natural selection had become a being with many of the attributes of deity. Its works were manifold, like those of the Biblical Jehovah. Its power was awesome, conferring life and death, creating new and ever more complex organic forms, separating the wheat from the tares, rewarding the efficient and punishing the ineffectual, giving hope of ultimate progress to those who believed in its power and kept its commandments. " (Greene, J. C., "Grounding human values in evolutionary theory." Review of "Debating Darwin: Adventures of a Scholar,' by John C. Greene. CNN, July 27, 1999) 12/05/2005 "In the following classification of the main theories of the mind-body relationship upheld by philosophers, it is to be understood that the positions sketched are `ideal types' to which actually held positions may approximate in different degrees. If we think of mind and body as two opponents in a tug-of-war, then we can distinguish between theories which try to drag body, and matter generally, over into the camp of mind; those which try to drag mind over into the camp of body; and those theories where an equal balance is maintained. This yields a division into mentalist, materialist (physicalist), and dualist theories. It is convenient to begin by considering dualism. The major position here is Cartesian dualism, named after Descartes, the central figure in postmedieval philosophical discussion of the mind-body problem. For a Cartesian dualist the mind and body are both substances; but while the body is an extended, and so a material, substance, the mind is an unextended, or spiritual, substance, subject to completely different principles of operation from the body. It was this doctrine that Gilbert Ryle caricatured as the myth of the ghost in the machine. It is in fact a serious and important theory. Dualist theories are also to be found in a more sceptical form, which may be called bundle dualism. The word `bundle' springs from David Hume's insistence that when he turned his mental gaze upon his own mind, he could discern no unitary substance but simply a `bundle of perceptions', a succession or stream of individual mental items or happenings. Hume thought of these items as non-physical. A bundle dualist is one who dissolves the mind in this general way, while leaving the body and other material things intact. Besides dividing dualism into Cartesian and bundle theories, it may also be divided according to a different principle. Interactionist theories hold, what common sense asserts, that the body can act upon the mind and the mind can act upon the body. For parallelist theories, however, mind and body are incapable of acting upon each other. Their processes run parallel, like two synchronized clocks, but neither influences the other. There is an intermediate view according to which, although the body (in particular, the brain) acts upon and controls the mind, the mind is completely impotent to affect the body. This intermediate view, especially when combined with a bundle theory of mind, is the doctrine of epiphenomenalism. It allows the neurophysiologist, in particular, to recognize the independent reality of the mental, yet acknowledge the controlling role of the brain in our mental life and give a completely physicalist account of the brain and the factors which act upon it. Mentalist theories arise naturally out of dualist theories, particularly where the dualist position is combined with Descartes's own view that the mind is more immediately and certainly known than anything material. If this view is taken, as it was by many of the greatest philosophers who succeeded Descartes, it is natural to begin by becoming sceptical of the existence of material things. The problem that this raises was then usually solved by readmitting the material world in a dematerialized or mentalized form. Berkeley, for instance, solved the sceptical problem by reducing material things to our sensations `of' them. Berkeley thus reaches a mentalism where the mind is conceived of as a spiritual substance, but bodies are reduced to sensations of these minds. It is possible to combine Berkeley's reduction of matter to sensations with a bundle account of the mind. In this way is reached the doctrine of neutral monism, according to which mind and matter are simply different ways of organizing and marking off overlapping bundles of the same constituents. This view is to be found in Ernst Mach, William 'James, and was adopted at one stage by Bertrand `Russell. The `neutral' constituents of mind and body are, however, only dubiously neutral, and the theory is best classified as a form of mentalism. Just as Cartesian dualism may move towards mentalism, so it may also move towards materialism. Surprisingly, Descartes's own particular form of the theory lends itself to this development also. Descartes was one of the pioneers in arguing for an anti-Aristotelian view of the material world generally and the body in particular. First, this involved the rejection of all teleological principles of explanation in the non-mental sphere. Second, it involved taking the then revolutionary, now scientifically orthodox, view that organic nature involves no principles of operation that are not already to be found operative in non-organic nature. Human and animal bodies are simply machines (today we might say physico-chemical mechanisms) working according to physical principles. A view of this sort naturally leads on to the suggestion that it may be possible to give an account of the mind also along the same principles. In this way, a completely materialist account of nature is reached, and so a materialist account of the mind. The word `materialism' sometimes misleads. The materialist is not committed to a Newtonian 'billiard-ball' account of matter. Keith Campbell has spoken of the `relativity of materialism'-its relativity to the physics of the day. Materialism is best interpreted as the doctrine that the fundamental laws and principles of nature are exhausted by the laws and principles of physics, however `unmaterialistic' the latter laws and principles may be. Instead of speaking of `materialism' some writers use the term `physicalism'. Materialist accounts of the mind may be subdivided into peripheralist and centralist views. A more familiar name for the peripheralist view is behaviourism: the view that possession of a mind is constituted by nothing more than the engaging in of especially sophisticated types of overt behaviour, or being disposed to engage in such behaviour in suitable circumstances. Behaviourism as a philosophical doctrine must be distinguished from the mere methodological behaviourism of many psychologists who do not wish to base scientific findings upon introspective reports of processes that are not publicly observable. Very much more fashionable at the present time among philosophers inclined to materialism is the centralist view, which identifies mental processes with purely physical processes in the central nervous system. This view is sometimes called central-state materialism or, even more frequently, the identity view. Unlike behaviourism, it allows the existence of `inner' mental processes which interact causally with the rest of the body. It remains to call attention to one important variety of theory intermediate between orthodox dualism and orthodox materialism. It is a 'one-substance' view, denying that minds are things or collections of things set over against the material substance which is the brain. But it does involve a dualism of properties, because brain processes, besides their physical properties, are conceived of as having further non-physical properties which are supposed to make the brain processes into mental processes. Such views may be called attribute or dual-attribute theories of the mind-body relationship. A theory of this sort could be said to be a variety of identity view, since it also holds that mental processes are identical with certain brain processes. According to the doctrine of panpsychism, not simply brain processes but all physical things have a mental side, aspect, or properties, even if in a primitive and undeveloped form. Although the dual-attribute view is important, it inherits the considerable difficulty and confusion which surrounds the philosophical theory of properties. There are many difficulties in giving a satisfactory account of what it is for a thing to have a property, and these difficulties transmit themselves to this sort of theory of the mind-body relationship." (Armstrong D.M., "Mind-Body Problem: Philosophical Theories," in Gregory R.L., ed., "The Oxford Companion to the Mind," Oxford University Press: New York NY, 1987, pp.490-491) 13/05/2005 "Our next task is to join the two kinds of robot together. Imagine that the walking, sucker-footed robot carries, on its back, something like the industrial, hand-wielding robot that we saw earlier. The combined machine is under the control of an on-board computer. The on-board computer has a lot of routine software for controlling the legs and the sucker feet, and for controlling the arm and hand assembly. But it is under the overall control of a master Duplicate Me program which fundamentally says: `Walk around the world gathering up the necessary materials to make a duplicate copy of the entire robot. Make a new robot, then feed the same TRIP [Total Replication of Instructions Program] program into its on-board computer and turn it loose on the world to do the same thing.' The hypothetical robot that we have now worked towards can be called a TRIP robot. A TRIP robot such as we are now imagining is a machine of great technical ingenuity and complexity. The principle was discussed by the celebrated Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann ... But no von Neumann machine, no self-duplicating TRIP robot, has yet been built. Perhaps it never will be built. Perhaps it is beyond the bounds of practical feasibility. But what am I talking about? What nonsense to say that a self-duplicating robot has never been built. What on earth do I think that I myself am? Or you? Or a bee or a flower or a kangaroo? What are all of us if not TRIP robots? We are not man-made for the purpose: we have been put together by the processes of embryonic development, under the ultimate direction of naturally selected genes. But what we actually do is exactly what the hypothetical TRIP robot is defined as doing. We roam the world looking for the raw materials needed to assemble the parts needed to maintain ourselves and eventually assemble another robot capable of the same feats. (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable," Penguin: London, 1996, pp.256-258) 13/05/2005 "We are all TRIP robots, all von Neumann machines. But how did the whole process start? To answer that, we have to go back a very long time, more than 3,000 million years, probably as long as 4,000 million years. In those days the world was very different. There was no life, no biology, only physics and chemistry, and the details of the Earth's chemistry were very different. Most, though not all, of the informed speculation begins in what has been called the primeval soup, a weak broth of simple organic chemicals in the sea. Nobody knows how it happened but, somehow, without violating the laws of physics and chemistry, a molecule arose that just happened to have the property of self-copying - a replicator. This may seem like a big stroke of luck. I want to say a few things about this `luck'. First, it had to happen only once. In this respect, it is rather like the luck involved in colonizing an island. Most islands around the world, even quite remote ones like Ascension Island, have animals. Some of these, for example birds and bats, got there in a way that we can easily understand, without postulating a great deal of luck. But other animals, like lizards, can't fly. We scratch our heads and wonder how they got there. It may seem unsatisfactory to postulate a freak of luck, like a lizard happening to be clinging to a mangrove on the mainland which breaks off and drifts across the sea. Freakish or not, this kind of luck does happen there are lizards on oceanic islands. We usually don't know the details, because it is not a thing that happens often enough for us to have any likelihood of seeing it. The point is that it had to happen only once. And the same goes for the origin of life on a planet. What is more, as far as we know, it may have happened on only one planet out of a billion billion planets in the universe. Of course many people think that it actually happened on lots and lots of planets, but we only have evidence that it happened on one planet, after a lapse of half a billion to a billion years. So the sort of lucky event we are looking at could be so wildly improbable that the chances of its happening, somewhere in the universe, could be as low as one in a billion billion billion in any one year. If it did happen on only one planet, anywhere in the universe, that planet has to be our planet - because here we are talking about it." (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable," Penguin: London, 1996, pp.258-260. Emphasis original) 13/05/2005 "An origin of life, anywhere, consists of the chance arising of a selfreplicating entity. Nowadays, the replicator that matters on Earth is the DNA molecule, but the original replicator probably was not DNA. We don't know what it was. Unlike DNA, the original replicating molecules cannot have relied upon complicated machinery to duplicate them. Although, in some sense, they must have been equivalent to `Duplicate me' instructions, the `language' in which the instructions were written was not a highly formalized language such that only a complicated machine could obey them. The original replicator cannot have needed elaborate decoding, as DNA instructions and computer viruses do today. Selfduplication was an inherent property of the entity's structure just as, say, hardness is an inherent property of a diamond, something that does not have to be `decoded' and `obeyed'. We can be sure that the original replicators, unlike their later successors the DNA molecules, did not have complicated decoding and instruction-obeying machinery, because complicated machinery is the kind of thing that arises in the world only after many generations of evolution. And evolution does not get started until there are replicators. In the teeth of the so-called 'Catch- 22 of the origin of life' ... the original self-duplicating entities must have been simple enough to arise by the spontaneous accidents of chemistry. ... There are undoubted difficulties in this story. Among them I have already alluded to the so-called Catch-22 of the origin of life. The larger the number of components in a replicator, the more likely it is that one of them will be miscopied, leading to complete malfunctioning of the ensemble. This suggests that the first, primordial replicators must have had very few components. But molecules with fewer than a certain minimum number of components are likely to be too simple to be capable of engineering their own duplication." (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable," Penguin: London, 1996, pp.261-263) 13/05/2005 "The original replication machines - the first robot repeaters - must have been a lot simpler than bacteria, but bacteria are the simplest examples of TRIP robots that we know today .... Bacteria make their livings in a great variety of ways, from a chemical point of view a far wider range of ways than the rest of the living kingdoms put together. There are bacteria that are more closely related to us than they are to other, strange kinds of bacteria. There are bacteria that obtain their sustenance from sulphur in hot springs, for whom oxygen is a deadly poison, bacteria that ferment sugar to alcohol in the absence of oxygen, bacteria that live on carbon dioxide and hydrogen, giving out methane, bacteria that photosynthesize (use sunlight to synthesize food) like plants, bacteria that photosynthesize in ways that are very different from plants. Different groups of bacteria encompass a range of radically different biochemistries compared with which all the rest of us - animals, plants, fungi and some bacteria - are monotonously uniform." (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable," Penguin: London, 1996, p.263) 13/05/2005 "The original replication machines - the first robot repeaters - must have been a lot simpler than bacteria, but bacteria are the simplest examples of TRIP robots that we know today .... Bacteria make their livings in a great variety of ways, from a chemical point of view a far wider range of ways than the rest of the living kingdoms put together. There are bacteria that are more closely related to us than they are to other, strange kinds of bacteria. There are bacteria that obtain their sustenance from sulphur in hot springs, for whom oxygen is a deadly poison, bacteria that ferment sugar to alcohol in the absence of oxygen, bacteria that live on carbon dioxide and hydrogen, giving out methane, bacteria that photosynthesize (use sunlight to synthesize food) like plants, bacteria that photosynthesize in ways that are very different from plants. Different groups of bacteria encompass a range of radically different biochemistries compared with which all the rest of us - animals, plants, fungi and some bacteria - are monotonously uniform." (Dawkins R., "Climbing Mount Improbable," Penguin: London, 1996, p.263) # 14/05/2005 "May not a future generation well ask how any scientist, in full possession of his intellectual faculties and with adequate knowledge of information theory could ever execute the feat of cogni