BookTalk.org

Please discuss Ch. 1: Science and Sensibility (A Devil's Chaplain) in this thread.

Just a quote that I liked from the title essay to whet your appetite before the book discussion officially begins:

Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight - something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection - and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos.

Found it online in this review, with some other quotes:
http://www.nobeliefs.com/dawkins2.htm

"Gaps in the Mind" is an extraordinary essay, for the explanation of humans' relationship with other apes and how we think about species. At the risk of spoiling Dawkins' prose, one image is particularly memorable -- imagine holding hands with your mother, and she held hands with hers, and so on. You would arrive at our common ancestor with the chimpanzee in about 300 miles, without ever having a sharp discontinuity; mothers would resemble their daughters as they always do.

I tend to not agree with the radical animal rights movement, but maybe I better not think about it too carefully. (Would they also try to prevent animal cruelty to other animals?)

Anyone reading the book? Anyone? Bueller?

One of the essays is "Postmodernism Disrobed" a review of the book "Intellectual Impostures". I haven't read the book, but Alan Sokal is one of the authors and I have read the book of essays describing the The Sokal Hoax. The fact that these pseudo-intellectuals that he's writing about have tenured positions at some of the best universities is very depressing. I don't know why there aren't more people who care about those schools and about education in general (not to mention those with a financial interest) trying to do something about it.

Hi Dexter... I just acquired my copy and have read the first essay but not seeing much going on here, didn't put the energy in to comment...

1.1 A Devil's Chaplain
This is surely a brave and proud start to an interesting perspective of picking and choosing a worldview. Yes, evolution. No, not to the consequences. Yes, to meaning in life because it is short. No, to fear or meaninglessness at being products of a cruel and merciless cosmos... Not sure this is philosophically viable.

"Stand tall, bipedal ape" makes me cringe.
The glory of man is so much greater than this imo

The image of this being a 'growing up' stance while faith is an infant-with-pacifier stance of ignorance, strikes me as ironic. Is there really 'deep refreshment' in considering myself a smart monkey with understanding, when in fact I don't know the first thing about my beginnings or endings?

Probably the most blatantly questionable statement was the one presuming that since we are blessed with brains, with a little education and a free rein we'll be up to modelling the universe. But since I'm not at all sure what that means it's hard to argue with it. What do you take it to mean? (12)

Oh and, what is meant by saying we've been given 'the gift of internalizing the very cosmos'. Sounds flowery and wonderful but... can't quite get a handle on it. (p12)

Anyway, those are my thoughts so far. On to section 2...

Dawn wrote: "Stand tall, bipedal ape" makes me cringe.
The glory of man is so much greater than this imo

The image of this being a 'growing up' stance while faith is an infant-with-pacifier stance of ignorance, strikes me as ironic. Is there really 'deep refreshment' in considering myself a smart monkey with understanding, when in fact I don't know the first thing about my beginnings or endings?

I commend you for being willing to read Dawkins even though he is obviously hostile to your worldview. As he has said before, it may be that life is cruel and short, and you might find his philosophy of embracing evolution to be unconvincing, but that doesn't mean that believing in a myth that makes life "meaningful" is therefore true. It makes it all the more likely that people believe because it is comforting rather than true.

Dawn wrote:Probably the most blatantly questionable statement was the one presuming that since we are blessed with brains, with a little education and a free rein we'll be up to modelling the universe. But since I'm not at all sure what that means it's hard to argue with it. What do you take it to mean? (12)

Actually I think it is valid to wonder if our brains are up to the task of doing science, at least of the more speculative sort. And Dawkins acknowledges the following:

You might think that our sense organs would be shaped to give us a 'true' picture of the world as it 'really' is. It is safer to assume that they have been shaped to give us a useful picture of the world, to help us to survive.

But as he says elsewhere, when you take a plane, the reason you don't plummet to the ground is because scientists were right.

Dawn wrote: "Stand tall, bipedal ape" makes me cringe.
The glory of man is so much greater than this imo

I'm a non-reading commenter at this point. But I thought Dawn's reaction reveals a key difference between those who embrace life--by that I mean biological life--and those who squeamishly want to deny our identity with other animals. I was talking to a pastor once about evolution. He said that he just didn't believe that he could be related to that, meaning a chimpanzee. I asked him what was so bad about chimps. Did they, after all, put a hole in the ozone layer or conduct a Holocaust? People are great in many ways, but why elevate them at the expense of other animals that are also quite wonderful? He then said something about seeing a chimp do something in "public" at a zoo (masturbating, I assume) that really disgusted him. And there I think we have the core reason for this insistence on human separateness from the rest of life--disgust about the grittier aspects of life. It's interesting that disgust itself has been proposed as a key feature separating the conservative from the liberal mindset, conservatives being more apt to have reactions of disgust.

Dawkins, the zoologist, has made clear on many occasions his love of life. He's a proselytizer of the glory of zoology, of which man is privileged to be a part.

DWill wrote:

Dawn wrote: "Stand tall, bipedal ape" makes me cringe.
The glory of man is so much greater than this imo

I'm a non-reading commenter at this point. But I thought Dawn's reaction reveals a key difference between those who embrace life--by that I mean biological life--and those who squeamishly want to deny our identity with other animals. I was talking to a pastor once about evolution. He said that he just didn't believe that he could be related to that, meaning a chimpanzee. I asked him what was so bad about chimps. Did they, after all, put a hole in the ozone layer or conduct a Holocaust? People are great in many ways, but why elevate them at the expense of other animals that are also quite wonderful? He then said something about seeing a chimp do something in "public" at a zoo (masturbating, I assume) that really disgusted him. And there I think we have the core reason for this insistence on human separateness from the rest of life--disgust about the grittier aspects of life. It's interesting that disgust itself has been proposed as a key feature separating the conservative from the liberal mindset, conservatives being more apt to have reactions of disgust.

Dawkins, the zoologist, has made clear on many occasions his love of life. He's a proselytizer of the glory of zoology, of which man is privileged to be a part.

I have to apologize for not participating in this discussion. Unfortunately, I've become distracted by other books, one of them being Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. This haughty dismissal that humans are more than "just animals" is a rather ironic fallacy of religious belief. I have argued before that the so-called "Fall of Man" is actually the point in time we forgot who and what we are. Homo Sapiens, in fact, share 98.4 percent DNA with chimps, giving us a genetic distance of 1.6 percent. To put this in perspective, this is less distance than two individual species of gibbons (2.2 percent) and even less than the genetic distance between red-eyed vireos and white-eyed vireos (2.9 percent). We have far more in common, genetically, with the chimp than the chimp has with the ape. We are so much like a chimp, in fact, that our principal hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein that gives blood its red color, is identical in all of its 287 units with chimp hemoglobin. That's where the title of Diamond's book comes from. Arguably, we are just a third species of chimpanzee (the pygmy chimpanzee being the other one).

The pastor's disgust with seeing chimpanzees copulate or masturbate in public is rather relevant to the current chapter I'm reading. Diamond points out some interesting biolgical differences, not only between humans and chimps but between humans and most other social group-living animals, including primates. Those differences must be encompassed in that slight 1.6 percent difference between human and chimp DNA. One important difference is that the human female's ovulation is hidden, not just from the male but from the female herself. Conversely, most other primates only copulate when the female is ovulating which requires that at least the female "know" when she is ovulating. She advertise that fact by presenting her genitals toward males. "Lest a male miss the point, many female primates go further: the area around the vagina, plus in some species the buttocks and breast, swells up and turns red, pink, or blue. This visual advertisement of female availability affects male monkeys in the same way that the sight of a seductively dressed woman affects male humans." But in the human species neither males or even the females themselves know precisely when they are ovulating. As a consequence of concealed ovulation, humans waste an awful lot of time and precious energy having sex with only a 28 percent probability of conceiving, while elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the conception rate is much higher. And, yet, there must be an advantage to the way we do sex.

Coming back to the pastor's disgust at seeing a chimpanzee masturbate in public (oh, the horror!), another major sexual difference between humans and other animals is that we have sex in private. According to Diamond, all other group-living animals have sex in public, whether they are promiscuous or monogamous. So why are we unique in our strong preference for copulating in private? Like our concealed ovulation, there must be a reason. Diamond presents several theories. One of them promoted by Donald Symons is that human females evolved a hidden state of estrus in order to ensure a frequent meat supply in male-dominated hunter-gatherer societies. Another theory speculates that if males knew when females were ovulating, the man would only copulate with her when she was ovulating and neglect her the rest of the time. So females evolved hidden estrus to coax men into a marriage bond. Monogamous relationships are, or at least were, beneficial to the species. Human offspring require a lot of care, much more than other primates, and both the mother and father need to be involved to ensure survival of the young. A regular and private sexual relationship intensifies the connection between a man and a woman and ensures the cooperation necessary to rear their child while also ensuring that each can maintain cooperative and non-sexual relationships--i.e. engage in food-gathering (economic) activities--with other members of the tribe. So both hidden estrus and private sex are adaptations to promote private relationships within the cooperative setting of the tribe.

Geo
As a consequence of concealed ovulation, humans waste an awful lot of time and precious energy having sex with only a 28 percent probability of conceiving

I would not call it wasted time...

Geo
while elsewhere in the animal kingdom, the conception rate is much higher. And, yet, there must be an advantage to the way we do sex.

Don’t forget the FUN element!!!

Later

Dawkins' discussion of the ethics of evolution provides a good answer to those who would get from it some kind of normative value. First we had the social Darwinists trying to claim that natural selection provided a scientific rationale for ensuring that only the fittest humans survived to pass on their genes. Darwin has even been blamed for the Holocaust, as if he was supposed to suppress his findings. In any case, he never said a word to justify the social Darwinist interpretation. Then we had a minor, and harmless, push in the opposite direction, led by Julian Huxley, who said that evolution contains the knowledge we need to actually become an evolutionary force in our own right. We can consciously take up the standard of evolution but improve on it, making it less wasteful, more rational. Dawkins is having none of this latter talk, either. We can do what seems right for us to do, and we should, but the blind, directionless process of evolution offers no guide. It can be inspiring to think about evolution, in the sense that it gives a panoramic view of life through eons, but as Dawkins says, we need to be strict anti-Darwinists when it comes to morality.