User:Woozle/Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Notes for eventual organization into coherent critique

The book is in many ways about "saving" the mystical/divine/? from the "ravages" of Darwin's "universal acid" – without resorting to the skyhook of a "first mover", "creator", or "designer" – i.e. something intelligent that existed before anything else.

One answer to "everything in the universe is so clever that it looks designed" isn't "Well, then, if must have been designed!" but rather "Ah, then there must be some pervasive process which gives rise to things which look, to our eyes, as if they had been consciously designed." This doesn't exclude God, but doesn't unnecessarily presume God either. Leaving out the alternatives to God, as an explanation for the appearance of "intelligent-seeming design", is perhaps some variant of a false dilemma ("stacking the deck"? "palming a card"?).

• p.82 greedy reductionism vs. "good reductionism"
  • "...how could increased understanding diminish their value in our eyes?"
• p.83 "...more reasonable and realistic fear is that the greedy abuse of Darwinian reasoning might lead us to deny the existence of real levels, real complexities..."
  • Darwin's idea doesn't so much prove there is no God as it proves that God is not necessary in order to explain (life, whatever).

Chapter 4

• Tree of life... design space... what is a species?: reproductive isolation, simliar to distinction between "island" and "peninsula"
• retroactive events... importance of looking at phenomena at the right level (need a phrase for this)

Chapter 5

• degrees/levels of possibility/actuality:
  • logically possible
  • physically possible
  • biologically (or engineeringly) possible (same as "practically possible"?)
  • historically possible
  • actual
• Library of Mendel (based on Borges's Library of Babel)... Vastness with a capital V
• p.112 footnote: mutations accumulate at the rate of ~100 per genome per generation in humans
• p.116 misunderstanding / misinterpretation of the "gene" concept
  • relates to what's possible within design space
  • many things may be "possible" while still being "can't get there from here" (practically impossible) from wherever you happen to be in design space... you'd have to go back "downhill" before you could start getting "closer" to "there"
• p.122-3 the QWERTY phenomenon, i.e. historical accident

Chapter 6

• p.125 in the absence of natural selection, the natural "drift" is "downward" – towards more randomness and less "design"
• p.126 natural selection actually slows evolution, but paradoxically makes it possible... proving, perhaps, that you can't make progress without some kind of culling of mistakes
• p.128 forced moves
• p.133 evolution breaks up the "intelligence" in intelligent design into a zillion small pieces, making tiny improvements and three-steps-forwards-two-steps-backwards increments over huge spans of time. Just as computers can sometimes seem intelligent (even sentient, "awake") until you figure out what they're really doing, so does nature seem "intelligently designed" until you understand natural selection.
• p.136 similar imperfections argues for copying of an imperfect design ("homology") – just as mapmakers carefully insert minor errors into their maps in order to catch plagiarists, we can trace lines of evolution by spotting these "plagiarized" imperfections in species' genetic makeup
• p.137 reconstruction of the works of Plato from fragments of Nth-generational copies

Chapter 7

• p.149 "That all life on earth has been produced by such a branching process of generation is now established beyond any reasonable doubt. It is as secure an example of a scientific fact as the roundness of the earth."
• p.147 "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
• p.154 Examining the claim that religion is beyond reason:
  • If so, then what are the rules of religion?
  • Is faith a path to the truth, or just a way of finding comfort?
  • If faith (or the need for comfort) is to be allowed to overrule reason ever, where is the line? How do you decide when it's okay to let non-reason overrule reason? If there is disagreement between what rationality finds and what faith finds, what process do you use to determine which one is right?
  • A question: how do "people of faith" think/assume humanity has progressed from the point where things like hangings, inquisitions, etc. were acceptable to where we are now? (George W. Bush's America aside...)
• p.156 Extrapolating from Darwin to explain the origin of life
• The seeming anthropocentricity (or at least biocentricity) of the basic universal constants
• p.165 ambiguity of the word must, as commonly used, leads to misunderstanding of Darwin
• p.167 the game of life
  • p.173 shows how complicated something has to be in order to reproduce
  • scale of reproducing Game of Life organism is about the same as real-world organisms
  • p.176 God: lawgiver, lawfinder?
  • p.177 differential reproduction of universes
  • p.180 The Great Coin-Tossing Contest
    • all of these are variants of the basic "why are things the way they are" question, of which the simplest and most basic is "why is there something rather than nothing?"
    • relates to historical accident
• p.181 science destroys metaphysical answers and doesn't replace them
• p.182 Nietzche argued that Darwinism allowed for no purpose to have been given to life, and therefore it could have none (OSLT)
• p.190-191 viruses "travel" design space in "clouds"
• p.195 "the AIDS virus has undergone so much mutation in the last decade that its history over that period exhibits more genetic diversity – measured in codon revisions – than is to be found in the entire history of primate evolution."
• p.196-7
  • every organism (or functioning structure, even) carries implicit information about its working environment
  • genes require the proper environment in order to be "decoded"
• p.199 QWERY phenomenon also called a frozen accident by Crick (1968) – classic example in footnote
• p.201-2 "essence", and how it doesn't really work with organisms
• p.208-211 probable earliest example of artificial evolution
• p.212 reverse-engineering
• p.221 chaotic self-organization was proposed as an alternative to Darwinism, but actually it supports it
  • chapter ends with more about forced moves – i.e. trying to achieve X results in frequent occurrences of Y, which turns out to be the best (or only) way to achieve X
• p.234 predictive models
• p.238 adaptationism
• p.239 Haldane's three theorems of bad scientific argument
• p.240 discomfort with adaptationism (as a common symptom among prominent thinkers)
• p.242 "backlash" against Just So Stories
• p.243 "aquatic ape" theory
• p.245 ...and other unproven or disproven adaptationist theories
  • point: just because a story fits the facts doesn't make it true – even if it seems "obviously" so
• p.247 adaptationism rules of thumb
• p.249 overwhelming acceptance of adaptationism
• p.250 does meteorology "beg the question" that hurricanes form via physical laws even though "nobody is actually there"? ...and even though we don't understand every detail yet?
• p.252 game theory in adaptationism
  • (p.253) how they came together - the basic principles that guide each agent will succeed or fail regardless of how deliberately or mindlessly they were chosen
  • prisoner's dilemma
• p.256 evolutionary enforceability determines whether mutually beneficial arrangements can evolve
  • however, Darwinian nastiness does not necessarily prevail
  • book's main theme, perhaps, is that Darwinism is not really a threat to the idea of having a positive/moral/meaningful outlook on life
• p.265 myths about Gould's effects on Darwinism
• p.268 spandrels
• p.277 conflating {exclusivity of natural selection as an agent of evolutionary change} and {viewing all features of organisms as adaptations}
• p.277-8 "Bauplan"
• p.279 how Gould's criticisms make anti-Darwinians think they have scored
• p.280 exaptation and preadaptation
• p.282 punctuated equilibrium
• more notes to enter here
• p.352 "a science of memetics?"
  • another difference: genetics requires extremely accurate copying of very large data
    • ...but this is only because we now understand the mechanism, long after the theory was devised
    • Dennett points out that the (real) "data" is at the "intentional" level (which maybe brings memetics and genetics closer together, as far as bandwidth requirements?)
• p.357 Sperber objects to the idea of "abstract, intentional objects" as the main subject of a scientific project (what about math?)
• p.358 Dennett replies:
  • Sperber prefers to think of cultural transmission as epidemiology rather than genetics:
    • How do they not both apply?
    • How are they substantially different in approach, when applied to cultural transmission?
      • Dennett says much the same: the direction of his theory is very much the same as Dawkins' -- to the point of near-indistinguishability
• p.361 Dawkins' qualifications of memetics
• p.362 "Advantageous to iteself" -- somehow this kind of epitomizes the idea of survival-trait thinking necessary to understand genetics and memetics
  • for evolution page: the fact that diseases ultimately need to spread, and this is why only "newbie" diseases tend to be quickly fatal
• p.363 Is it perhaps the essence of the gene/meme-based view that there is a discoupling between {what benefits the gene/meme} and {what benefits the host}? (Maybe this explains it more clearly than "advantageous to itself") While there is always a relationship, it is often inderect and counter-intuitive
• p.363-4:
  • "good" ideas spread because they are true or beautiful
  • successful memes spread because they are good at spreading ("good replicators")
  • just as gene-centered view can explain features that aren't "good for the organism", so memetics can explain the popularity of bad ideas (memes that aren't good for the host)
• p.366 memetics vs. autonomy
  • a thought: isn't all of science "reductionism"? At least in the non-greedy sense
  • footnote: LR&K claim that memes presuppose a "Cartesian" view of the mind; Dennett says that memes are a key ingredient of the best alternatives to this
• p.376 "researchers unhesitatingly and uncontroversially rank species in terms of how intelligent they are." Is there a Master Species Intelligence Ranking somewhere? Does JERS have any comment on the Skinnerian failure to prove that pigeons are non-Popperian?
• p.378-9 some semi-hard-wired concepts
• p.383 "levels of (in)comprehension", perhaps? (this would seem to relate to the plausibility of God's motives being "beyond our comprehension")
  • can respond with a correct answer
  • can respond with a wrong but reasonable answer
  • can't answer, but can understand the question
  • can't answer and can't understand the correct answer (not sure about understanding the question)
  • can't understand the question (e.g. paraphrase it), but can understand where it gets lost (understands at least some of the premises)
  • can't even begin to understand -- doesn't understand the underlying concepts, or doesn't know where it gets lost in trying to understand the question (failure to even break the question down into its component assumptions?)
• p.383 footnote relates to AI as a controversial issue
• p.386 Noam Chomsky's peculiar philosophical position:
  • in favor of algorithmic analysis of language
  • against... not sure exactly what Chomsky is against, but it's something that seems to appeal to mystical/romantic humanists; see p.381, maybe?
  • against AI ("unwaveringly hostile" p.386)
  • anti-"crane", p.397: "he has vigorously discouraged us from thinking of it as a crane"
  • against the idea that the "language organ" (or language ability) could be a product of natural selection
• p.388 the supposed "effortlessness" of learning to speak, even for "slow" children - but what about nonverbal autistic kids?
• p.390 it's not at all clear, at least from the text quoted by Dennett, just how Chomsky thinks language ability came to exist
  • definitely built-in (hard-wired?) rather than being learned/deduced from first principles
  • but not evolved either
• p.391 "...by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form...": this seems rather like "God moves in mysterious ways" -- ignoring the explanations pointed to by the evidence and asserting instead that "whatever it is, we don't have the knowledge to understand it yet".
• p.392 list of bizarre assertions at MIT language meeting; failure to correct a statement attributed to you is a "dog that hasn't barked"
• p.393
  • social darwinism is "an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking in defense of political doctrines that range from callous to heinous."
  • the question arises of whether intellectuals are responsible for the applications and likely misapplications of their work; Gould and Chomsky say yes.
• p.394 "difference between reductionism and greedy reductionism" comes up again
• p.395 Spencerianism, anti-Spencerianism, Skinner's behaviorism, empiricism... "Skinner was a greedy reductionist"
• p.398 Searle says automata don't have "real" intentionality
  • What defines the difference between "real" and "as-if" intentionality?
  • Does a robot have to swear eternal vengeance upon those who thwart its intentions before the Searle mindset would take those intentions seriously? Is it some other mere anthropomorphic cue (such as vengefulness) which makes it difficult for Searle to accept "real" intentionality in an algorithmic machine?
  • Chomsky: the language organ has an algorithmic structure, but we can't ever understand it
  • Searle: the language organ works in mysterious ways; attempting to describe it algorithmically is just plain wrong
• p.399 Searle basically argues that intended functionality is the only "real" functionality; nothing that is not designed has a real "function" (sounds like he wants to believe in intelligent design -- otherwise humans have no "function"; also sounds a bit like argument by definition)
• p.478 rate of same-species killing is several thousand times higher in mammalian species than in any American city (blatantly contradicting the popular idea that humans are bloodthirsty killers and nature is basically peaceful); should be in human nature and possibly popular myths?
• p.492 sexually "deviant" practices in other species
• p.502-3 decision-making process: possibly use as basis for designing internet-based decision-making process (might also be used to refine Issuepedia:Wiki Issue Exploration Structure)
• p.515 "Darwin's Dangerous Idea helps to create a condition in the memosphere..."
• p.526 unacceptable memes