Two Types of Self-Interest

          Well, I haven't posted in a while, but that will change, as I've written a few essays for different classes that I will post soon. I recently was listening to Point of Inquiry and Richard Wiseman mentioned how people would come up to him and ask him how to write better, and he just asked them, "Have you written anything today?" To become a better writer...write! That was his message, and even if Gladwell was wrong about 10,000 hours, it still takes time doing something to become good at it. 

          Anyway onto the topic at hand, I was recently watching a presentation that first started talking about self-interest, and it threw the term around without ever really explaining what it meant, and in what sense he was using the term. More specifically, was talking about two different types of self-interest without ever distinguishing between the two different types.  There is a rational self-interest in an understanding of what would be the best for the individual in a given situation (if there was a plate of cookies it would be best for me to take them all and not share any) and a biological self-interest that isn’t a single calculation, but one ran over numerous generations (trimethylamine oxide being developed in the cells of the Greenland Shark due to it spending time in areas where those cells would normally freeze). The presentation talked about the self-interest of bee's and compared it to self-interest in people, but never took the time to explain the distinction made above.This led me to ask a question after the presentation, and I received a really strange response.

The question in question was, “There is a difference between biological self-interest that is calculated over thousands of generations and a rational self-interest in what you think would be best for yourself. People cannot make biologically self-interested choices, as they don’t have access to what would be successful in that way, so in what senses are what you talked about self-interested?”

The answer I received was a strange one, “First, I disagree with your premise that people don’t make biologically self-interested choices, and second I think that the poem on talks more about biological self-interest.”  Now this left me baffled, as it seemed apparent that this person thought that to make a moral decisions (it was a class is ethics) someone consciously weighted out all the evolutionary advantages to doing something, and acted on what was best, or they innately knew what was a good evolutionary decision and always acted on it.

The first way is easily shown to be flawed because, 1) even if someone made a calculation there is no way to be sure of what the future holds, so it necessarily has to be something that is determined over time and never at a single instance and 2) there is no way to way a person has access to all the information needed to make the decision in the first place, or even enough to consistently weigh a small portion of that information to make a quick decision.

The second way is also just as deeply flawed, as Dawkins shows when he talks about society and biology in The Selfish Gene when he points out the ‘unnaturalness’ of the desirable welfare state. He explains that, “What has happened in modern civilized man is that family sizes are no longer limited by the finite resources that the individual parents can provide. If a husband and wife have more children than they can feed, the state, which means the rest of the population, simply steps in and keeps the surplus children alive and healthy. There is, in fact, nothing to stop a couple with no material resources at all having and rearing precisely as many children as the woman can physically bear. But the welfare state is a very unnatural thing.”

This pretty much sums it up, if people innately knew what was naturally best for them then they would be acting in accordance with what Dawkins said and be completely abusing the welfare state, until it became a version of the tragedy of the commons.  There is a commonly understood ‘evolutionary lag’ where evolution is always a step behind changes to the environment, as it takes time to have the number of generations that adjust to it. Another phenomenon is that evolution is limited to what is available in positive genetic changes: evolution can’t take backward steps. This means that evolution can’t go in a different direction that would be better in the long run, if it would cause decreased fitness for an extended period. This means that even if evolution determined decision making existed with no evolutionary lag, the process of evolution still wouldn’t necessarily be able to make evolutionarily optimal decisions.   

All this reminds me of J. B. S. Haldane quote when asked if he would risk his life to save a drowning brother, he responded, “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.” I think this quote alone is enough to point out the point out the absurdity of evolution directly controlling moral decision making, as no one thinks in this way and that’s why it’s funny. It doesn't have to micromanage each individual decision, as it can instill general principles that are effective. This is different than making evolution the decider of morality, and instead makes it create a general framework.

  

       Anyway, people can make decisions that they view as in their self-interest and this may or may not be in line with peoples biological self-interest, but if you’re talking about what self-interest is, especially when jumping back and forth between people and animals, it would be important to note the distinction.

The Biological Spandrel

In 1979, Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin saw a growing problem in the field of biology. To combat and bring attention to the problem they saw they co-authored the paper entitled, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" which is now a classic and somewhat controversial paper in the field of biology.  Gould points out in I Have Landed that, that paper is his second most referenced paper behind only his paper with Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium.

The problem Gould and Lewontin saw was that every part of an animal's anatomy was being broken up and explained as having an evolutionary purpose. The tyrannosaur's small arms were to help it get up from sleeping and the female hyena's masculinized genitalia created aggressive/larger hyena. Those types of explanations typified the attitudes of much of the scientific community, which could be described as being extremely adaptationist. Each piece or feature of an animal was broken up and weighed; if something existed it existed for a Darwinian reason. The animal as a collective whole was never thought about.  Noses were created to hold glasses and ears to fit earplugs.

Yet, no matter how ideal the reconstruction of the purpose is, it remains a narrative created to explain something that doesn't always have such a simple, fitting, or, most importantly, purposeful explanation. There are numerous reasons why a feature of an animal might be the way it currently is and being a positive adaptation for increased fitness is only one of those reasons.

Lewontin and Gould point this out by way of the dome in St. Marks Cathedral in Venice, and by picking out this non-biological example they have created a platonic form for what a  perfect spandrel is, more perfect and clean than any biological example could be.  It is perfect because the dome was created, as many other domes were, with the four arches holding it up and the spandrels existing between those arches. Only years after construction did the spandrels get put to use and thus become meaningful/functional in themselves.

The architectural spandrel, in this instance, is a space created only because it was necessary as part of the gap between the arch and the dome. More generally they refer to an architectural constraint that is not part of the design, but instead a by-product of what is necessary from the design. Gould and Lewontin give the example also of a set of stairs with the bi-product or spandrel being space between the steps.

The example works beautifully with the biological idea, because something that can start out as a by-product of something else can still later develop an important function as happened in San Marco. This makes it clear that an adaptive narrative isn't the only way to explain how something came to be, even something that now has an important function.

A good example of this happening is the famous domestication of the Silver Fox in Russia. The only feature that was selected for in those foxes was tameness. This made tameness the adaptive feature being selected for and all other traits that changed with it would be spandrels, or features that just happened to be by-products of the result of one thing being selected for. These changes included the fox's becoming spotted, coming into heat every 6 months and becoming more 'dog-like.'

This seems to show the existence of spandrels as pretty clear-cut, but the most interesting part of spandrels may be hidden in an article written later by Gould, "The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype." Near the end of that article, Gould makes the open-ended statement that,


"The human brain may have reached its current size by ordinary adaptive processes keyed to specific benefits of more complex mentalities for our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the African savannahs. But the implicit spandrels in an organ of such complexity must exceed the overt functional reasons for its origin. (Just consider the obvious analogy to much less powerful computers. I may buy my home computer only for word processing and keeping the family spread sheet, but the machine, by virtue of its requisite internal complexity, can also perform computational tasks exceeding by orders of magnitude the items of my original intentions—the primary adaptations, if you will—in purchasing the device)."               

It seems that as a brain becomes more powerful, it does a more than just what is required for base evolutionary fitness. The examples of those types of spandrels have been argued to include everything from music or even language. I think an interesting area to apply the idea of a spandrel to ethics; the things people feel passionately are right and wrong, but for what reason? It could also fill in a lot of gaps in what is ethical, but can't be evolutionarily accounted for and that is what my thesis is on, so you can look forward to quite a few more posts on this topic in the future.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

Horrible Fishing Laws are Made Without Evolutionary Consideration

When fishing the ultimate goal, for most anglers, is to catch the biggest fish of the species you are fishing for. It's always exciting to reel in that lunker that you've been fighting for 10 minutes and not so much so to get a glimpse of a small fish coming in without stretching the line or diving back out of sight.

Yet, after the fight with the fish in hand, there is a question of what to do with the fish. Many people keep the biggest fish they catch as there is more meat on a larger fish. It is also more impressive to see a large fish on someones wall rather than a smaller one, for the type of people who are impressed with that sort of thing. Those are the main reason people keep bigger fish, but there is also another more subtle reason.

Size limits prohibit people from keeping the smaller fish, but they also have a more adverse effect as well. It helps create and maintain a potentially dangerous cultural belief. The belief is that it is morally wronger to keep a small fish as they, 'Haven't had a chance to live yet.'

I'm sure many people have heard this sentiment echoed when people would ask, 'Way did you keep those little fellas?' or 'Are you going to throw that little guy back?'  Questions about throwing the fish back or asking why you kept that fish are not nearly as prevalent when then fish is a larger one, then all that is asked is 'What are you going to do with it?'

Anyone who understands evolution will quickly grasp the result of such strong selective pressures, like the ones described above, have on species. Carl Sagan in his series Cosmos really put those words into reality when it talked about a type of Japanese Crab. 

 

Heikea japonica, or the Samurai Crab as it is less formally known, have been selectively pressured by fishermen to become the way they appear above. Carl explains the mythological back-story of how the crab came to be, but then he goes on to give the evolutionary explanation. 

The crabs when caught were not eaten when they looked like samurai or people, but instead are thrown back into the ocean, as an honor the the samurai killed in a battle long ago. While the crabs that didn't look as much like samurai were eaten. By doing that fishermen created the face on the back of the crab over numerous generations and selections they ensured it stayed that way.

This is the same process of forced selection for an individual characteristic that created Domesticated Silver Fox's in a famous Russian experiment, and it is the same type of selection that is currently ongoing in Canada's lakes, rivers and oceans. Through the actively seek out and eliminating the largest fish in the gene pool, it is being ensured that the smaller fish that are thrown back are the ones breeding, and passing their genes to the next generation of fish.


Both for the health of the species, and anglers delight it would be better to throw the bigger fish back. For nesting fish, it is much easier to be a larger fish to protect her eggs. Not only will her offspring have the genes to be large and more easily protect their nests, they will have a better chance of surviving to become a small fish.

Yet it doesn't stop there, as the most aggressive fish are the ones most likely to be caught, so people keeping fish will tend to lead to more passive fish in general. What fishermen in generations will be left with are smaller, slower growing, less active fish, if that's if nothing else goes wrong.

Size limits on fish don't make any sense as they currently exist, and if the government had any understanding they would actually have size limits the opposite of what they actually are, people wouldn't be able to keep as many trophy level fish as they wanted.

Limits on the number of fish caught are what are supposed to ensure that fist stay at a sustainable level and size limits are just a detriment to the whole process and limits on size are only there determining the future evolution of fish. 

A false mentality created by uninformed law is ruining the future of fishing, and weakening species.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic

From Paley to Hawking: Design and the Anthropic Principle

Hi, I hope everyone is enjoying their Saturday and is looking forward to some light weekend reading (turned out to be not so light...) as I finish a trilogy of posts on probability. This post will be a summation of the arguments of William Paley, and its modern portrayal by Dinesh D'Souza which I am taking from his debate with Daniel Dennett. They are just two people in a long line that look at the universe and see design in the universe.

I was going to sum up William Paley in my own words, but the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy did a fine job in doing that for me. Paley's argument from design is,

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose … [The requisite] mechanism being observed … the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker. Every observation which was made in our first chapter concerning the watch may be repeated with strict propriety concerning the eye, concerning animals, concerning plants, concerning, indeed, all the organized parts of the works of nature. … [T]he eye … would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator..."


Paley is looking around the world and seeing complex things, that appear to work together to have a purpose and so he generates a view that is not outlandish, yet still doesn't hold up pasted even cursory scrutiny now. In minutes the information about the transitional states of the eye can be found, from going to simple cells being able to detect light to the eyes we have today. Two good pages for this information I found was The evolution of the mollusc eye and a15 minute video of  Richard Dawkins' explanation. This can be done just as easily to show the natural design of Birds, Whales, or even the bacterial flagellum. The designs also have major flaws that a conscious designer wouldn't include, like the vestigial legs in whales, wings in some beetles, or the blind spot in the human eye. That's right there is a blind spot that can easily be demonstrated in both your eyes. This would be enough to argue agianst Paley, but the argument from design also looks at the nature of the universe and sees design there as well.

Dinesh references Stephen Hawking and his book A Brief History of Time. The area he references is between pages 126-131, where the anthropic principle is brought up. It is shown that there are many different values that could exist for the laws of physics as we know them today, and the example of the electric charge of an electron is given. If the charge of the electron was only slightly different, stars either wouldn't have been able to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded. Hawking goes so far to say that,

"This means [The initial rate of expansion of the universe having to be carefully chosen] that the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model was correct right back to the beginning of time. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us."

Hawking is only able to do this because he first completely writes off the 'strong anthropic principle' for two reasons. He defines the strong anthropic principle as a belief that either there are many different universes or many different regions of a single universe. The first reason he states agianst is questioning in what sense those universes exist. The fact that there are no interactions between universes means we can use the principle of economy and cut them out.

This is something I find a little troubling, because when he left the realm of out universe and started talking about the creation of the universe before the big bang or during the big bang at a level where physics doesn't work he really left the realm of science and entered the realm of philosophy and speculation. It is fine to write off other universes (some physicists might disagree) as a scientific notion, just as God can be written off in a scientific sense until there is some empirical evidence for either, but he can't rule out either option when speculating. 

There is also an objection be to had with Hawking's use of the principle of Economy. I am of the same opinion as Karl Popper when he says that,

"My point is that only after recognising the plurality of what there is in this world can we seriously begin to apply Ockham's razor. To invert a beautiful formulation of Quine's, only if Plato's beard is sufficiently tough, and tangled by many entities, can it be worth our while to use Ockham's razor. That the razor's edge will be dulled in being used for this tough job is only to be expected. The job will no doubt be painful. But it is all in a day's work."

The principle of economy, principle of parsimony, or Ockham's razor shouldn't be used to dismiss a theory or idea out of hand, which Hawking is clearly guilty of. The theory may be dismissed as something that can't explain the physics of the start of the universe, but when he moves into the realm of speculation, especially in an area where empirical evidence cannot be given, a theory cannot be written off by the pure lack of evidence.

The second reason is that is that the strong anthropic principle would claim that it would mean this whole vast construction he here for our sake and that idea would be very hard to believe and this leave Hawking believing either there are unified principles that created the universe or there was something that tuned those physical laws. Hawking evidently believes the former rather than the latter.

This is also overstated, by Hawking. If there are multiple universes with different physical laws, saying that this universe is fine tuned for humanity is akin to saying that this universe has the physical laws needed for human life to evolve. Just because there are multiple universes and this is the universe we specifically evolved doesn't necessarily entail that this universe was specially created for us. Hawking is jumping to a conclusion that I think few people would make. His 'weak anthropic principle' (which he agrees with) is really just the same as his 'strong anthropic principle' except there seems to be more bias in how he describes the stronger principle and he likes to talk about multiple universes in the strong one.

The universe does have some constants that if changed would make life as we know it impossible. This doesn't mean that God has to be postulated as the answer as Paley and Dinesh would have you believe. The physics of the universe may be completely improbable, but so is every dealing of 52 cards. When you look at something after the fact and judge the probability it is in one sense unfair (When you account for the whole context it makes anything improbable) or in another sense non-existent. The probability of the universe having the physics we have is 100%, it has already happened. Life must exist in a place where life is possible to exist by necessity. To answer why life is here or what created the big bang right now are areas that we can honestly just say, "I don't know"  and there is nothing wrong with that.

As always this was longer and more technical then I hoped it would be, so thanks for those of you who made it through it. I also only deal with the anthropic principle as defined by Hawking, so there is no need to postulate other definitions. I like Chomsky's idea of letting who you are talking about create the definitions, as it creates both understanding and fairness. Anyway, thanks for reading.

-The Moral Skeptic

The Chicken Or the Egg? Part Deux! (A history and example)

Hi again,  I got some interesting and well thought out responses and general interest on my Chicken or the Egg post and thought it was worthy of a follow up. I really appreciate those who took the time to read the whole post, and thank those who commented on it. I changed around my colour scheme due do to the after images it was causing, although for my next post on optical illusions and seeing not being believing I may change it back. Anyway, I did some further research on the topic in light of the comments I got and have to say I generally agree with my first post.  That being said I do have some more information, including the historical background of the question and some responses to a couple of criticisms to post here. (Anyone who doesn't care for the history, feel free to skip the next three paragraphs.)

The question first goes back much further than  I thought it would, and I guess everything really is a footnote to Plato, because that's the era that the question first Arises. I found the quote about it from Aristotle who says that, "If there has been a first man he must have been born without father or mother -- which is repugnant to nature. For there could not have been a first egg to give a beginning to birds, or there should have been a first bird which gave a beginning to eggs; for a bird comes from an egg." The article goes on to say that, "The same he held good for all species, believing, with Plato, that everything before it appeared on earth had first its being in spirit. (Isis Unveiled I, 428.)" That article can be found here  if your interested.

This is an important pre-evolution understanding. The bird and the egg seem co-dependent, so there can be no first, so everything must be eternal. Then creationism came and in Genesis 1:20 God said that, "'Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.' ²¹ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good."

So the answer historically changed from there being no first chicken or egg, to there being birds created before the egg. God created the bird first, and I assume the chicken is one of the birds that flies above the earth and a bird according to its kind.

Then with the Origin of Species Darwin worked out (with a contribution from pigeons and finches) that animals can adapt to there surroundings; Watson and Crick found DNA and the chicken and the egg took a decidedly different look The look that I described in my first post, that had some contentions.

 I have been criticized by some posts saying that of course that is the answer, but it isn't a sexy answer to the question. While it may be boring, there are many people who, wrongly I think, postulate the egg as the answer, and in doing so really belittle the process. They elevate the individual egg over the steps that create the distinction between things.

For instance states that "MatheMagic- I think you're reasoning it out wrong: any step of rearranging the DNA takes place at the 'egg' stage. It is difficult to define the moment at which species occur, fine, but like any taxonomist you must set some arbitrary criteria (lets say the primordial "chicken" would share 99.00000000% of the DNA seen in chickens today)."

My response to this while the egg is the place of change this question isn't like a court of law that must make a sentence upon a guilty verdict (Any court sentence is an arbitrary but necessary decision). This is a question that can be fairly answered without having to put an arbitrary stick in the mud. The question as given is a false dichotomy, the answer isn't in the choice of possibilities and I think that I can make my point with the a news article.

The article is on how people in England having bird feeders (along with warm winters) has created a separate breeding population for Blackcap's. It is a pretty short and interesting article and I will try to summarize it, but you can find it here if you are interested.   Anyway, there are two populations of blackcaps have a different wintering area and the ones that go to England are able to get back earlier than the other population. This ability lets them breed earlier and has created two separate breeding populations. That is all it really takes to create a split in the species. It is noted that, "The team also observed differences in the birds' beaks, wings and plumage.", but don't get any hopes up on a new chicken coming soon as, "Dr Schaefer pointed out that the evolution of a new bird species, 'could take 100,000 to a million years'."

There are changes that take place, but no single great change is the defining thing that separates one thing from another. Darwin showed this in the Origin of Species when he himself pointed out the problems and folly's with trying to define the differences between a species and a variety and those terms may be highly contested.

What the Blackcap really shows is that no one egg can even be arbitrarily shown to be 'the first chicken.' It may take 100 000 years for there to be a chicken from the egg, that is one of the reasons why people who deny evolution are able to say that well species can change, but no new species have ever come into appearance. (Please don't make this a topic, I know that species can evolve at different rates and the populations may be some and the changes could come quickly in an evolutionary sense).

I could site literally hundreds of people, who like MatheMagic, that state that the egg is the correct answer, but all those people are really putting the individual ahead of the process. It comes up in the philosophy of mind often when trying to define where consciousness is what it is. Many people have given different answers, but the answer that I think fits best is that consciousness, like evolution, is a process of that involves different things and trying to encapsulate those things in any one term really fails to show the beauty in the inner-workings that are going on.

Thanks for reading,

The Moral Skeptic

Which Came First the Chicken or the Egg?

From former classmates to Ian McShane's character in "Kings" a declaration of the answer to the age-old question of the chicken and the egg has been presented as proof of the answerer's intelligence. The answer is presented as if it was glaringly obvious since the time of Darwin. The egg came first!

Within a few seconds, a complete explanation is given that animals are changed through chance mutation of DNA during the conception part of the formation of the animal.  Also to their point is that animals aren't changed in any lasting way by the environment except through their being less able to reproduce through a lack of fitness to their surroundings. For that reason, the egg that clearly came before the chicken.

While this may look like a totally convincing answer that contains all the fundamental  understandings of Darwinism, there does remain a problem unforeseen by the person giving this type of answer. This problem can be brought to light through asking a few specific questions about the chicken and egg dilemma.

The telling question is if the egg is the answer then what is giving birth to the egg? The egg must come from some creature that is a non-chicken that gives birth to a chicken, but this is not how the process works. Changes from parent to a child produce gradual changes and it takes many generations to cause any great amount of change, even in the state of a punctuated equilibrium.

Verities of chickens could be made from the egg, but the egg is never able to be distinct enough to be called a new species. This is where the chicken or the egg question breaks down into an understanding of how new species are defined.

The problem should now be easy to see. The question of 'What came first the chicken or the egg?' is a false dichotomy. The answer is that it is a process that creates the differences between the parent and offspring where there is no sudden appearance of a new 'thing' being created. The young who are different have to out-compete the other young where those changes did not occur. This may cause the extinction of the unchanged and if that happened, along with enough other changes then possibly there would be the creation of a new species. This new species is then something that could be defined as a 'chicken'.

The question of 'What came first the chicken or the egg?' fails to understand how biology works and anyone who attempts to answer by saying chicken or egg has committed an error even before they state their reasoning. The creation of a new animal doesn't happen overnight, or in one generation, it happens over time.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic