Evolved Self Publishing

Scientific American special report on evolution mindless

Filed under: Our titles — Shaun, publisher @ 7:05 pm

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Amaze your friends: prove Darwin wrong.

Filed under: Our titles — Shaun, publisher @ 9:52 pm

You can really piss people off by pretending Darwinism doesn’t work. It’s an easy trick. Here’s how.

Survival of the fittest. Wrong. Life isn’t like a tournament, with all the slightly-less-fit animals getting weeded out through a series of close contests. It’s more like a lottery. Most animals die either from old age or bad luck–being in the wrong place at the wrong time—not from competing with each other. Survival is random, not from being fit.

Then give some examples. Take wolves. They don’t compete with each other. Members of a pack hunt together and they share the kill. They take turns raising the pups. When wolves are killed it’s usually from injuries inflicted by prey during a kill, isolated males being set on by males of another pack, or starvation of the whole pack during winter. These aren’t tests of which wolf’s fitter, they’re the luck of the draw.

Deer, same thing. In summer there’s food enough for millions more deer, they’re not competing for scarce resources, winner takes all. It’s winter when they die, of starvation, in groups. Even then you don’t see them fighting for food, just looking for it, together, to share. And of course most fawns are killed by predators, not each other. There’s no tournament of close–fought battles for the fittest to emerge from, ready to pass on their genes.

So down goes assumption number one, that there’s some kind of competition that slightly-more-fit animals survive to pass on their better genes.

Assumption number two. Mutation can improve species. Wrong. Suppose there’s an average of 100 mutations, one’s an improvement, 99 are flaws. Suppose one in ten creatures survives, with the one good gene and only 9 bad ones. Repeat that every generation, with 9 more bad genes than good genes each time, and bad genes increase much faster than good ones. So where’s the improvement?

Of course, these are trick arguments. But if you don’t give people enough time they won’t be able to figure them out.

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What question is religion the wrong answer to?

Filed under: Our titles — Shaun, publisher @ 11:08 am

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Darwin’s bulldogs chew on “Expelled…”

Filed under: "Me and The Genies", "Save Our Selves", Natural selection, "Expelled" movie — Shaun, publisher @ 12:05 pm

I’m involved in two excellent discussions re the movie “Expelled…”

First, a discussion linked to from England’s New Scientist magazine’s web-site home page which is drawing a fine caliber of argument, though predominantly physicalist.

Second, website of the Acton Institute, a sort-of Christian think-tank. Here, the physicalists are met with general puzzlement. Their point of view does not carry automatic authority, they are being challenged, “do you stand for all of science?”

I think evolutionists are starting to become a bit intimidated at the prospect of the release of a movie that may expose to public view the excesses of Darwin’ bulldogs. Interesting to me, no one on the New Scientist board will distance themselves from charges of “liar” and “pig ignorant” hurled at non -Darwinists in the discussion. I am still trying to get someone to suggest those remarks be retracted.

I’ve not experienced fair discussion of Darwinism on online boards before. For a sample of what it’s usually like, see the amazon science board in relation to my “Save Our Selves…” book, a followup discussion there in my absence, and the review of my book then posted by one of those present.

That sort of a thing is disgrace to science, matched only by the acquiescence to it of evolutionists in general.

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Post-epiphenomenalist evolutionary theory

Filed under: Natural selection — Shaun, publisher @ 11:15 am

I used to be an epiphenomenalist. Before that I was regular just like you probably, unless you’re an evolutionary scientist.

Regular–what was that like? I can’t remember. I do remember what it was like being an epiphenomenalist. I believed mind couldn’t act on matter. Whatever was in my consciousness couldn’t affect my behavior; my behavior was driven by my brain chemistry, directly. Consciousness was like that screen you see on the back of a digital camera. It shows you the image the camera would take if you pressed the button but it can’t itself push that button. Put the camera on self-timer and it can take the picture, but the image on the back can’t. The camera on self-timer, that’s like our brain chemistry, it can do all the work itself. Consciousness is like that screen on the back–it can’t do anything except tell you what the camera is about to do.

Or, to put it everyday terms, your body puts out urine but that urine can’t jump back into your body and change anything. Same way, once your brain exports something into consciousness that something can’t jump back into the brain to make any difference in what you do. The connection goes only one way, from brain chemistry to consciousness.

And that’s what I believed. Until, one day, I realized it couldn’t be true.

Looking back now, my life divides into two: one period leading up to that moment, and all the time since. And I’ve become a very unusual person–I’ve become an ex-epiphenomenalist!

What that feels like is, as if I’ve grown up backwards. Most people I talk to these days, ardent Darwinists, started out regular, then they became epiphenomenalists. I’ve gone the other way. I used to be an epiphenomenalist, then I became sort-of regular like they were before, like their parents are. In conversation with them I think, “I used to be like you, but I grew out of it,” yet I know what they’re thinking is, “Poor fellow, you haven’t yet grown into it.” They’re proud of having achieved the wisdom of epiphenomenalism, and look down on other people like me, just like I used to look down on people who were “regular.”

What I’ve just said is the story of my life, almost. The other part is having always been a passionate believer in evolution. It’s the two together that put me in the position I’m in now–an evolutionist but not a physicalist, neither Darwinist nor Creationist.

But each assumes I must be the other. So here I am, ducking potshots coming from both sides, but actually saying something entirely different from both of them.

The Creationists are no bother. They just ignore me, I’m irrelevant to them. But to the Darwinists I’m anathema: I used to be one of them but I’ve gone wrong. I’m letting the side down. I’ve become disloyal. I’ve committed apostasy. I’m giving comfort to the enemy. How could I! “How can you be so stupid!”

Well, it’s worse than you think, fellas. I’ve not become just another creationist, I’m becoming something quite other. I’ve broken the code and I’m coming back to turn you guys out, with all your NeoDarwinian ideas, and put new ideas in their place. That career you’ve built around the arcanery of Darwinism, it’s over. You’ll know no more of what evolution’s really about than the freshest incoming student. In fact, you’ll know less, because you’ve so much to unlearn.

Starting from today, that’s my message. And I won’t express it in the language Darwinists use, because I’m superseding that language, and putting another one in its place.

Starting today.

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I’m moving the battlefield

Filed under: Our titles — Shaun, publisher @ 3:54 pm

I’ve been involved in a lot of fights over natural selection recently.

I’ve not enjoyed it. It’s frustrating. It’s little more than posturing. It’s like two pugilists hurling blows while standing seven feet apart and facing in inconsequential directions. No blows are landed. Maybe a better metaphor would be, it’s like a dealer in precious stones trying to compare notes with a scalper who sells tickets to sold-out concerts. Both know there’s important things at stake but they’ve no teminology in common for talking about them, no shared criteria for assessing the relative worth of their treasures, and deep down neither values what the other cherishes. That’s what it’s been like.

I’ve decided to change my strategy. I’m not talking any longer about whether science does or does not make us determined, whether thinking does depend on matter. Instead I’m going to focus on coming up with new terminology for consciousness.

I then wrote, “Here are some examples,” but I couldn’t think of any, not any good ones.

I’ll have to think about it. Ooh! Is that one?

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Bye bye free will

Filed under: Darwin the Barbarian, "Save Our Selves" — Shaun, publisher @ 10:31 am

“Free will” is a religious concept and it never had a basis in science anymore than the concept of the “soul” had.

This from a very well informed and highly intelligent commentator on a board I’ve been posting to in response to my query, has free will become part of the supernatural. His answer, “Yes.” His post.

Battle is joined. We are opponents. I will fight for free will.

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Libertarian am I!

Filed under: "Save Our Selves" — Shaun, publisher @ 4:46 pm

“Compatibilists” believe free will can be reconciled with determinism. Apparently, if you just insist on the free will aspect without taking the emotional needs of determinists into account, you’re a Libertarian.

Unfortunately, that’s easily confused with Libertarian in the political sense. Searching for libertarianism in Google throws up plenty of the political kind, but little of the philosophical kind. Wikipedia has plenty of coverage of determinsm but is short on coverage of compatibilism and libertarianism.

Unfortunate. I thought I might find enemies of determinism under that head.

It’s occurring to me that the battle may be already lost. If I can find no one criticizing Darwinism for its denial of the efficacious conscious self, perhaps all resistance has ebbed away.

A book on determinism in Google Books discusses arguments for philosophical Libertarianism, principally those of Sartre. I’m shocked. They’re so ineffective. Do I have to write the book on how the self is free of determinsm? Well, I just have–Save Our Selves… I think it does the job.

But I come back to the same question–who can it appeal to? Who cares? Philosophers of Mind? Maybe not even them. No, it must be the public. But mind seems to have become absorbed by spirituality.

Suggestions welcome.

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SciAm Board censors Stein

Filed under: "Expelled" movie — Shaun, publisher @ 1:21 pm

From a post on the Scientific American Community discussion board:

“What can only be hoped is that a trenchant critical response by journalistic and science publishing institutions (and, of course, the blogging community)–will suffice so that Ben Stein never gets funding to make an Expelled II.”

Is that really what can only be hoped, in discussion of a scientific theory, that critics will be silenced? Sci Am editor Gary Stix here nicely illustrates “Expelled…”’s accusation that the scientific community does encourage its members to censor critics of Darwinism.

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Freud, we need you

Filed under: "Expelled" movie — Shaun, publisher @ 6:21 pm

From the “Expelled–No Intelligence Required” movie blog:

“I therefore urges all genuine scientists to use all legal means to oppose and overthrow this creationist pseudoscience that, unlike us Darwinists, refuses to listen to all sides of the issue. Some Intelligent Design practitioners have advanced degrees in the sciences. In every known case they obtain these advanced degrees for the express purpose of injecting themselves into the academic and scientific communities like heroin into the veins of an innocent virgin.”

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Evolved Self Publishing

January 12, 2009

Scientific American special report on evolution mindless

January 10, 2009

Amaze your friends: prove Darwin wrong.

April 26, 2008

What question is religion the wrong answer to?

March 27, 2008

Darwin’s bulldogs chew on “Expelled…”

March 14, 2008

Post-epiphenomenalist evolutionary theory

March 13, 2008

I’m moving the battlefield

March 8, 2008

Bye bye free will

March 5, 2008

Libertarian am I!

February 21, 2008

SciAm Board censors Stein

February 13, 2008

Freud, we need you