http://theweek.com/article/index/260172 ... r-religion

Fellows chief example is a man drowning himself in a septic tank to save his son who has Downs syndrome.
How couldd we possibly explain and respect such a decision without god eh?

Of course, I doubt a species could survive long, especially a social species like ourselves without a strong instinct towards preserving their offspring.

KeenIdiot wrote:http://theweek.com/article/index/260172/why-atheism-doesnt-have-the-upper-hand-over-religion

Fellows chief example is a man drowning himself in a septic tank to save his son who has Downs syndrome.
How couldd we possibly explain and respect such a decision without god eh?

Of course, I doubt a species could survive long, especially a social species like ourselves without a strong instinct towards preserving their offspring.

Hamilton

rB > C

Done!

Or maybe it's that 'altruism' is so highly-tuned in humans because human childhood lasts so fucking long. Sounds like a chicken-egg problem to me. Oh, waitaminit. There's no such thing as a chicken-egg problem in biology.

That's a relief, because this isn't biology but tautological ev-psych philosopho-bio-wibble. It's not as if a ten-year-long juvenile phase is a biological necessity or anything. If you're going to do philosophy, think in terms of cause-and-effect. Maybe it's altruism that causes childhood to last so long.

I should think that it is axiomatic by now, that all "proofs" of supernatural things, including gods especially, require an existing belief in the supernatural. Hence there IS no way to use logic or facts to take confidence from non-belief to belief. Or vice-versa, for that matter, since it requires an insistence on all things obeying the laws of science, to disprove the supernatural.

I just saw Skeptico also commented on this.

linky

Srsly, if you think humans are altruistic check out ants or bees - truly god's chosen.

This is something that any father, atheist or believer, might do for his son. But only the believer can make sense of the deed.

Can a believer really make sense of the deed? I'd like to see them actually explain altruism in a way Skeptico did above, in a way that makes sense and doesn't argue circularly, "We're altruistic because of God because God in his altruism bestowed us with the gift of altruism."

Many believers do completely non-altruistic things to their children in order to make them part of the tribe all the time whether it's male or female circumcision, cutting their forehead with a knife, paddling them, indoctrinating them, scaring the living crap out of them with "hell houses", turning a blind eye or outright living in denial when a "respected" clergyman rapes their child... the list goes on. How do they reconcile doing such deliberate and premeditated injurious things to their children with their supposed altruism? Do they actually think they are being altruistic when they do these things? I mean I've often heard of people giving circumcision to their children on the basis that they want their children to fit in. And you just have to look at the pro-circumcision literature which is full of trying to spin circumcision in a positive light. Clearly these people don't actually think, or want to entertain the idea, that they are actually doing harm.

And taking the above into consideration - If they do believe they are being altruistic by marking and boot-camping their children for the herd - Is altruism really as extraordinary and remarkable as it's cracked up to be by the believer, when altruism can cause such misfires?

Well see, it's been tainted by our fallen nature dontch'a know.

That article is just so . . . eyeroll inducing. Especially this part:

But of course, as someone with Down syndrome, Vander Woude's son is probably sterile and possesses defective genes that, judged from a purely evolutionary standpoint, deserve to die off anyway. So Vander Woude's sacrifice of himself seems to make him, once again, a fool.

I just can't think of anything other than . . .

Cito di Pense wrote:Or maybe it's that 'altruism' is so highly-tuned in humans because human childhood lasts so fucking long. Sounds like a chicken-egg problem to me. Oh, waitaminit. There's no such thing as a chicken-egg problem in biology.

That's a relief, because this isn't biology but tautological ev-psych philosopho-bio-wibble. It's not as if a ten-year-long juvenile phase is a biological necessity or anything. If you're going to do philosophy, think in terms of cause-and-effect. Maybe it's altruism that causes childhood to last so long.

Social living, including eusocial living is just one strategy that helps animals to survive. We tend to see "loner" species where nutrients are low or uncertain in supply. A seasonal food supply can also encourage the evolution of migration as a strategy. And "specialists" or niche animals can tend to be loners as well.
Drosophila tend to have two alleles of the Forager gene: one version urges the fly to be a "stay at homes", and the other encourages the fly to scout far and wide. The frequency of each allele in the population depends on what is happening in the environment at the time.
In humans, the long childhood is necessary because of the constraints of the birth canal and the benefits that a better brain gives humans. It is not that a big brain is a "perfect strategy", it just happens to work better with the other traits that we have. IF brains were the perfect solution for biological fitness, then every animal [and plant] would evolve one. The initial "push" for bigger brains may have just been genetic drift or variation. But once a trend is established, traits tend to work together, in other words, positive epistasis. So you can't just look at "big brain" and say if it increases fitness or not. All traits, positive and negative contribute to an aggregate fitness effect in a particular environment, and of course, there is historical contingency and traits that were once useful and are now not.

There's an idea. Christians can drown themselves in septic tanks. When they all do, I'll freely admit that they were morally superior to me.

The article is based on two false assumptions:

Firstly, it assumes that evolutionary theory predicts that living things will always, invariably, in all circumstances, act so as to maximise the probability that their own genes will survive. In fact, evolutionary theory doesn't make any such sweeping and extreme prediction.

Secondly, it assumes that, for the atheist, the supreme value is to stay alive for as long as possible, regardless of circumstances. Again, that's simply not the case.

So simply citing examples of altruism in no way shows that atheism is false, or that evolutionary theory is defective. The author's argument doesn't even get to the starting line.

Why would people engage in futile wars which have a high risk of resulting in their own deaths, thereby preventing them from reproducing, if Ares didn't exist?

Altruism therefor God Altruism therefore intelligent social species.
Fixed it for you!

I have a better theory:

Linker's a fuckwit.

Oh, and just sent a message to the The Week's webmaster:

Why are comments on articles not allowed? When I see intellect-free screeds like Damon Linker's wholly unresearched and idiotic 'Why atheism doesn’t have the upper hand over religion', containing, in one of the most hubristic challenges ever foisted on what is supposedly a decent news outlet, the dare 'Don't buy it? I dare you to come up with something better.', long after evolutionary theory has actually come up with something better and demonstrated its validity (kin selection), it really does require comment.

Any decent course in evolutionary biology requires the reading of certain seminal works, almost always containing Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene', a book written to explain precisely what your idiot senior correspondent insists can't be answered other than by inventing imaginary friends.

Do you not require that your 'senior correspondents' actually do some research prior to evacuating their intellectual bowels in public in this manner?

Such ignorance requires response, especially when aimed at a specific group of people, and it is to your detriment that you don't allow me to expose the vacuousness of this stupid and worthless piece of polemic for what it is, and the abject ignorance of its author.

Poor show.

Will S wrote:The article is based on two false assumptions:

Firstly, it assumes that evolutionary theory predicts that living things will always, invariably, in all circumstances, act so as to maximise the probability that their own genes will survive. In fact, evolutionary theory doesn't make any such sweeping and extreme prediction.
...

In a way, it does, Will. The reason Linker is up the creek is that he ignores the effect of sociality - kin selection. That makes it sometimes possible to improve your genes' survival by helping a close relative, even at your own expense.

DavidMcC wrote:In a way, it does, Will. The reason Linker is up the creek is that he ignores the effect of sociality - kin selection. That makes it sometimes possible to improve your genes' survival by helping a close relative, even at your own expense.

No - you don't need kin selection theory, or any evolutionary account of altruism, to dismiss what the man claims. There's no evolutionary law which states that on each and every occasion an individual will act so as to maximise the probability of the survival of its own genes.

He seems to think that, because he has found one single contrary instance, there's something wrong with received evolutionary theory. That's just wrong.

That is the most insulting, short sighted, intellectually lazy piece of journalism I've read this week. Par for the course with God's online opinion warriors though.

Will S wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:In a way, it does, Will. The reason Linker is up the creek is that he ignores the effect of sociality - kin selection. That makes it sometimes possible to improve your genes' survival by helping a close relative, even at your own expense.

No - you don't need kin selection theory, or any evolutionary account of altruism, to dismiss what the man claims. There's no evolutionary law which states that on each and every occasion an individual will act so as to maximise the probability of the survival of its own genes.

He seems to think that, because he has found one single contrary instance, there's something wrong with received evolutionary theory. That's just wrong.

There's not a law that says that, but there's something like an probabilistic law that says that those who do will, with a statistically significant weighting, send more genes into future generations, which I think was what David was driving at. That's how I read 'in a way', anyway, which is why I liked his post.