Darwin Vs The Fundamentalists (#EDCMOOC)

Until recently, I'd never really given much thought to the Evolution vs Creationism debate that rages in American educational circles: Darwin 1-0 God. End of. Move along...

But that was before Genetics 101 in my online studies. The teaching staff had (wisely or not) set up a forum to discuss the creationist issue. I popped my head in and was quickly horrified by what I saw. The mudslingers had settled into two distinct camps:

• CAMP A: was full of vehement and vitriolic believers that refused to enter into any kind of rational discussion about the foundations of their beliefs, and who screamed down their opponents with regurgitated dogma.
• CAMP B: was trying (to some extent... let's be honest!) to apply the tools of reason to the question at hand and were crucially aware that the beliefs they held about the world were open to question and could finally be resolved only on the balance of judgment.

Now if, like me, you're well-disposed to science and have never seen the inside of a church you're probably thinking "What did you expect?" Well I didn't expect this: CAMP A was the Pro-Science group, CAMP B was the God-squad! I found myself wading into the debate with an impassioned (and slightly shaky) exposition of truth, the scientific project, and the dangers of fundamentalism. And this was in defence of a poster that probably believed he could recite the names of all the male descendants of mitochondrial Eve.

So two questions: 
Why has scientific atheism become the proselytizing religion of nothingness?
And, if the broader scientific community is anything like the sample in that forum, do I really want these people anywhere near my kids?

The Proselytizing Religion of Nothingness

Darwin may or may not have been a believer (or an agnostic or an atheist) at different times in his life. But he was never so crude a thinker as to believe that the central questions of religion were contemptible, or inappropriate for a man of science. Nor have the questions that religion address always been banished from scientific enquiry. In our pre-posthuman world, scientific atheism was a kind of secular scientific humanism. In many ways this tradition recognised that, although it's methods were fundamentally different from religion's, it shared the same yearning for a meaningful world and for an understanding that encompassed not only matter in motion, but values, morality, spirituality, and all aspects of human experience. Secular humanism seems to have spent little time actively promoting secularism. The rejection of religion was simply implicit in the aspiration that one could explain everything without God. Knocking down the old order took a back seat to the task of constructing a bright new world.

Fast forward a century and the high priests of scientific atheism are out on their pulpits actively preaching the dangers of religion. What changed? 

One of the things that changed is the vision of the future being offered to us by the secular scientific community. Gone are the (admittedly vacant) promises of a united humanity (because humanity is a nonsense word), the promise of new moral world (because morality is bunk) and gone is the promise that every individual can achieve self realisation (because you've been deceiving yourself when you think there's any you to realise). 

Instead we are being offered a world without morals or value, where love (Dennet tells us) is a childish reflex we grow out of. At the same time, we are invited to embrace genetic manipulation that will make us more productive, digital technology controlled by corporations that will reconfigure the way we think, pharmaceuticals that improve cognitive performance in standardised tests, and professional parenting that will reduce the margin of error in turning people like us, into the kind of people they want. 

I don't know. But if I was in marketing, I'd say that was a hard sell. Much easier then to demonise competing visions of the world and its future. It's an old, but proven, tactic and one that is easily learned and imitated by students in Genetics 101.

Darwin Vs The Fundamentalists

What then for evolution vs creationism? Creationism is obviously terrible science (terrible even for non-science). But the scientific alternatives we are being offered may appear equally terrible, and even more terrifying. 

The question we should be asking is not whether evolution or creationism is the correct view of the descent of man. We know the answer to that. The question we need to ask is "What do we want to teach our children?" And does science currently offer a framework within which we want our kids to understand the world. I suspect that a number of those who are in favour of teaching creationism in schools are actually just answering that question with a negative. And, strange as it is to hear myself say this, I'm not sure I entirely disagree with them. 

There is a scary kind of science out there. It has given us the power to break the planet, but to not fix it; the power to destroy any part of the world, but not to put communities together again; it teaches us that "if we can, then we must"; it has turned its back on the old questions that meant something to non-scientists, and it no longer seeks to understand—it seeks to control; it is currently, (sometimes consciously and deliberately) undermining the very values that hold our tottering societies together; it is teaching us that the research dollar is more valuable than principle. It is without morals, it is without values, it is empty, cold, and oppressive. If science has nothing more to offer, we'd be right in thinking that the bible has better lessons for us.


But there is another kind of science. Or at least a glimpse of it. One that seeks not only for the power that comes with the "how", but for the wisdom that comes with the "why". I try to imagine that maybe Darwin did that kind of science. And I wish he were in my children's classroom. Protecting them from fundamentalists: both religious and scientific. 

Humanism or Posthumanism (#edcmooc)

I'm sorry. I have no idea of who you are and here I am thrusting some nonsense under your nose. An explanation seems required: In the first week of my E-learning and Digital Cultures course, the folks said "Blog!" and I thought "Aye!" 

I'm now in the last week of the course and after multiple attempts (that were like trying to get porridge in a sock without a spoon) I gave up. Then came a lazy day at work today, and somehow the following got written. Alas, I have no idea what the following is. It certainly doesn't seem very bloggy. It does have the advantage over previous attempts of having an end in addition to a beginning, but it resembles nothing so much as a bunch of essay notes from a dangerously erratic mind.  I dare publish it here only with the vain hope (the hope of vanity) that someone will read the notes, and the certainty that no-one would have read the essay.

[And good Lord! What awful formatting tools you bloggers have at your disposal!]

Humanism or Posthumanism  (#edcmooc)

Human behaviour is plastic. To some extent it can be changed by 'external' forces. 

1. External forces come in many flavours: biological, social, linguistic, economic, technological, and others.
1. Analyses that incorporate only one flavour of external force become overly deterministic. Constraints on determinism emerge from the interplay of the varying flavours. (Technological determinism occurs here) 
2. Change is ongoing and history often (or always) matters. (What happened it the past affects what happens in the future.)
1. Change is a process.
2. Change can only be fully understood by combining perspectives from multiple time scales: evolutionary, socio-historical, ontogenic, last week, now. 
3. The processes of change are often (or always) bi-directional. (Technology changes human behaviour, at the same time as human behaviour changes technology.)
4. The processes of change are often (or always) multi-flavour. (Any aspect of human behaviour may be changed by many flavours of external forces.)
5. The different flavours of external forces, simultaneously change each other. (Economics changes technology and social relations, while technology changes social relations and economics.)

Humans and the processes that affect change in human behaviour form an integrated complex system.

1. A very complex system. Failure to grasp the scale of complexity is a major issue in science: genetic determinism, evolutionary psychology...
2. All elements of the complex system are ultimately instantiated in matter, but describing them in terms of matter may be insufficient to capture their behaviour. The essential nature of sub-systems may appear to be entirely independent of their material substrata. Representational, informational, content may be the pertinent level of analysis.
3. Similarly, explaining causality in terms of the material substrata (bottom up) may be insufficient to capture the behaviour of a system. It may be more relevant to explain causation in terms of bottom down processes. It may be that cause and effect are incompletely distinguishable above the reductionist threshold.

From this perspective, it becomes increasing difficult to disentangle something uniquely human from the interplay of determined/determinant forces. If man creates technology and technology creates man at what point can the line between them be drawn? What is human agency if that agency is embedded in and partially determined by technology? And is technology itself an agent, if its agency can only be expressed through human activity?

One cannot change one element of an integrated complex system without changing other elements. 

1. At the extreme: each and every change, (and each and every aspect of that change) in one part of the system has effects in other parts of the system.
2. But from which perspective could we determine cause from effect?
3. If we remove the distinction between cause and effect, one can remove any element of a system without loss of information. A change in any sub-system would be perfectly described by corollary changes in other sub-systems.
4. Humanity could be written out of the system and re-described in terms of changes in the interrelated sub-systems. (Posthumanism occurs here.)
5. Any sub-system could be treated in this way.
6. Does this fail to describe the totality of the system adequately?

From the above: any sub-system can contain information about other sub-systems. A sub-system can represent a change in another sub-system. 

1. But to whom can it represent change? To itself? Perhaps.
2. But does it know that it is representing this to itself? Probably not.

Collectively, we humans create systems of our representations. 

1. We invent numbers, words, and images; mathematics, language, cinema.
2. We invent these tools to extend our capacities for representation. 
3. We deploy them to better know, to limit and control, the sub-systems that impinge upon us.
4. But our tools escape us. They contain their own ineluctable logic that adds complexity to the very systems we use them to control.

And so we create metasystems to know the new systems we have created, and to know ourselves within the systems, through them, and beyond them. 

1. And meta-metasystems, and meta-meta-metasystems: an eternal cycle of knowing, and changing, and knowing again.
2. But how can this recursion end?

When we talk together about love (or clocks). You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean. And you know I know you know what you mean... And if we didn't. We wouldn't understand each other.

1. Somehow. Magically? We collapse the recursion into a moment of pure knowing.
2. Can other systems collapse the recursion? Can they understand? Can they truly know? Probably they don't have the magic just yet.

Humans have collaborated over millennia to be able to represent states of the system to themselves, and to metarepresent the changes implicit in that very act of representation. They can suppose future states of the system and they can suppose the paths towards them.

In those suppositions is a choice that we must not be afraid of. We can choose to disentangle the web of interrelationships and inter-determinations that is the world around us. We can choose to understand the consequences of the technology we build, the values we hold, and the choices we make. And we can choose to nudge (or shove) the world in the direction we desire.

If we choose to do nothing, the forces of economic, technological, and corporate determinism, (and the few that they profit by them) will continue to tear apart our collective institutions and our belief in our shared interests, until they undermine our very ability to intervene in the system in a coherent manner.

Humanism or posthumanism is not an intellectual debate about modern society. It is the choice that modern society has before it.