Odd, Dan L seemed to understand it. As have a couple of people who asked me to post it as another challenge. One of them said it had kind of disturbing implications for materialism, and he’s a materialist.

I understood what you were trying to get at. As I thought I explained, though, I think you’re making a error here. Suggesting that numbers are “real” in the same sense that a sofa or a blade of grass is “real” is a category mistake; in other words, I pretty much agree with Dan S. that your “big numbers” objection is nonsensical.

You do realize that the “selfishness” remark she made to an interviewer was directly related to what Dawkins and the evo-psy guys, most if not all of whom are faith-based ultra-Darwinists.

As I’ve decided the two years I’ve been answering you on Marilynne Robinson are more than you deserve, I won’t respond to your attacks directly anymore. And as I’ve seen the lengths you will go to in denying even direct quotes from those you support as evidence contradicting the ideologies that you and they share, I can only consider most of what you do an effort to waste my time. I will be spending that in more directly addressing the ironies, hypocrisies, absurdities, contradictions and bigotry of scientism and the new atheism which is just another sect of that materialistic religion.

I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was talking about coverage of the Neandertal cretin theory, not her interview – and to be fair, at the time it was potentially quite news-making.

“I’ve given you the quote from Dawkins,”
You’ve given me a quote where Dawkins relies on Darwin as a personal, quasi-religious authority whose ideas should be taken on faith? I seem to have forgotten it; could you remind me where he says this?

“Dennett said even more bizarre things in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”
Well, philosophers, you know . . .

“What you’re really upset with is that M.R. has the audacity to comment on it in a way that doesn’t match your personal preferences.”

Yes, my personal preference for intellectual integrity, basic standards, knowing what you’re talking about, etc. (Personal preference, I should stress, unfortunately not always personal practice.) Someone blogging about two talks she gave referred to what he saw as her “sheer indifference masquerading as principle – that’s a good way to put part of what she does.

“If you want to ignore the general validity of what she said over some alleged error in details ”
Well, in part I think the “error in details” (not, as I see it, an error in details but rather a significant failure of understanding/neglect for accuracy) is striking in its own right, but that’s because I’m an obsessive pedant with an interest in and minor familiarity with the field she’s blundering into. More relevantly, though, I see what she does with the Neandertal/cretin issue as reflecting, in easily -graspable miniature, the larger errors in what she’s doing – that it’s all of a piece, just at different scales. I figure if I can show you how she gets this particular bit so wrong, you’d be in a place to possibly judge for yourself whether that is the case or not.

So – do you agree that
a) the failure to immediately embrace (or outright rejection of) Dobson’s Neandertal-as-iodine-deficient-cretins argument by specialists in that field does not in any obvious way serve as an example of dogmatic “Darwinists” “object[ing] to new hypotheses on the grounds that they are incompatible with Darwinism”,

b) that no evidence or argument or chain of reasoning is provided to support this claim, excepting a vague reference to “the whole freighted narrative of progressive evolution of the human species, suggesting that Robinson wasn’t aware that paleoanthropology had by this time rather moved on from the classic illustration of ape striding into erect and triumphant (Caucasian) humanity, viewing Neandertals not as shambling proto-human ape-men ancestors, but as an impressive species in their own right, a different twig on our branch of evolution’s tree (albeit one that, some argued, just might have intertwined with ours).

c) and that indeed, an informed look at the actual situation reveals a number of other convincing reasons for the paleoanthropologists’ reaction, some based in human nature but others in real consideration of the evidence, while what’s not in evidence is any reference (explicit or implicit) to “incompatibility with Darwinism”. To me, this suggests that this is actually an example of bullsh*t (in the technical sense from Frankfurt’s little book On Bullshi*t, – described as “complete disregard for whether what he’s saying corresponds to facts in the physical world: he “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.“, gross misunderstanding, ideologically charged ignorance, or some such other undesirableness.

If not, what do you disagree with, and why?

(And really, these paragraphs
“… rather than looking at organisms to see how they do in fact survive, Darwinists assume that
“selfishness” (their word) and a favoring of those genetically nearest is inscribed in the genes, not only of amoebas, but also, and most significantly, of human beings. Fitness is effectively manifested selfishness. This is clearly arbitrary. Survival advantage could as well be a matter of
lighter bones or a suppler snout. Assuming limited food supply, such traits would confer competitive advantage in the absence of any competitive intent in the organism. This language sounds absurdly anthropomorphic, but it is the Darwinists who lay everything to intentional behavior, as they must do if they are to derive supposed ethical implications from their theory. If passive advantage were said to shape evolution, one would arrive promptly at the conclusion that this is the best of all possible worlds. … It is the unique value attached to struggle and competition in the Darwinist model that disallows collaboration or passive advantage as factors in survival… ”

is in context almost illiterate, in a sense – on top of her political and ideological opposition to competition and the alleged reification of it as the natural and ethically desirable order of things, she appears to have rather badly misunderstood Dawkins’ metaphor of the “selfish gene” as describing an organism’s intent (wrong on both counts). – And moving from there, she somehow imagines that “Darwinists” stress this supposedly intentional selfishness to the exclusion of traits like “lighter bones or a suppler snout. ” – in essence, she’s sneering at (always unnamed, vaguely defined) “Darwinists” for their absurd dogmatic views which lead them to deny a perfectly good explanation, completely unaware (or uncaring) that she’s completely misunderstood what she sees as their absurdity, and that they in fact they hold the very views she thinks they refuse to grasp (because of evilness, basically). She has no idea what’s she talking about, and doesn’t appear to realize it one bit, or doesn’t care. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Again, do you agree with my statements a-c above? If not, why not?)

She didn’t provide the conflict and novelty, the scientists did that among themselves. And I rather think M. R. derives most of her income from her very fine novels and her career teaching writing. So it would be the scientists who had financial motives in the conflict, though I don’t think you could call it a novelty since in various forms similar arguments predate Darwin.

Faulting someone for noticing a recurrent feature of arguments about evolutionary biology and frequent mentions of the ultra-Darwinists dogmatic use of him is hardly a fault in a mere lay person. What you’re really upset with is that M.R. has the audacity to comment on it in a way that doesn’t match your personal preferences. I’m sorry Dan, but she is entirely within her rights to do that as I was to point out the political implications of an influential passage of what Darwin wrote. Once a scientist has thrown something like that out, it’s in the public domain. Others made far more fatal use of those ideas than either she or I did, including Galton and Leonard Darwin.

—- They’re not citing the “authority of Darwin“, as if he was some sort of prophet and his writings sacred scripture – rather, they’re drawing on the power and success of (Darwinian-style) evolutionary biology to make some pretty broad claims. They might be wrong, but they’re not doing what you think they’re doing. Dan S.

I’ve given you the quote from Dawkins, Dennett said even more bizarre things in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, things that are eminently suited to impeaching his sanity. I got that entirely right and I’m hardly the only one who has noticed the completely unscientific, more than quasi-religious faith in the idea.

You bring up the great Shakespeare question. I do have an opinion about that, it’s not that we can know who wrote those plays and poems it’s that the attribution to Wm. Shakespeare (who seems to have had trouble remembering how to spell his name and whose scrawl of it looks pretty much a bad drawing instead of writing to me and who is not known to have owned a single book in his entire life) is founded on the word of two guys who had a financial interest in making the attribution. I’m agnostic on the question of the actual author as I am about the existence of natural selection in “other life”. On this morning in 2009, neither of those is a question of science. Dennett’s extension of natural selection outside of biology is since it can’t stand up to logical analysis and it is totally batty as a result.

As for her view that evolution isn’t synonymous with Darwinism, that’s hardly a novel idea, though it’s certainly the one on which ultra-Darwinism rests. You are pretending that she doesn’t know that the questions she brings up weren’t active in the mid-1990s as she wrote that and gave that interview, I’d imagine largely in response to Dawkins and Dennett’s recent books. If you want to ignore the general validity of what she said over some alleged error in details of it I can’t stop you, no more than I’ve been able to when you have distorted what I’ve said. And I can’t keep people from choosing to believe you when you do it. But I know what I know and you seem to be in some kind of panicked salvage operation because your ideology has some problems. If you would only get over the emotional need to pretend that your belief is, in fact, not knowledge you’d find life a lot easier to deal with. Because people are not going to indulge your needs by pretending that the form of Darwinism you hold is problem free.

Have you read Mother Country? Or The Death of Adam? I mean other than that part of the part you dug up online. While the latter are essays that don’t have the same kind of formal, scholastic requirements of citation as Mother Country, they are very well supported. M. R. isn’t a light weight thinker or writer, though I don’t think your opinion or that of her other detractors will damage her reputation among serious, open minded readers. If you do look at The Death of Adam, do what I once suggested to you and read the last one about the tyranny of petty coercion. I think you could learn something from it.

“Dan, you really are just plain wrong to continually keep faulting Robinson for obviously having been aware of an ongoing controversy of the month ”

Except, of course, I’m not faulting her for being aware of a then-ongoing controversy; she has every right to read the New York Times. What I’m criticizing is

:1) the rather bad and unsupportable use she made of it,
2) the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about, and
3) by extension, a particular approach to science that is all about heavily ideological deconstruction devoid of any appreciation (in the intellectual sense) or understanding.

(The word that comes to mind is barbarism, which isn’t fair, but . . .). At it’s best, this sort of criticism can chisel away at the (very real) political, ideological, and mythological crap that inevitably get caked onto science, not just obscuring it, but sometimes causing very real damage. What Robinson’s doing is more akin to crudely and ignorantly hacking away with an ax.

Again, problems:

First, she sets up a false dicotomy, between every other science, portrayed as perfectly open-minded in a way that would seem more at home in some naive paen to the wonder of Science, and the supposedly uniquely dogmatic “Darwinism”. Of course, it’s hard to imagine that she’s writing (and here, speaking) this sort of critique of science w/o ever hearing of Kuhn, or just having the kind of really basic awareness of science required to realize it’s not quite so. (Science is, after all practiced by human beings.

Likewise, there’s also the issue of how she seamlessly jumps from “the great masses who accept it implicitly, as the schoolmen used to say, believing without reflection from a sense that good people should believe” to the contrasting “cosmologists . . . [who] they throw themselves into the work of assimilating this observation into revolutionized conceptions of the cosmos. , comparing a low-information public to professionals in another field.Of course, while the great masses simply may not have much if any familiarity with hypotheses on whether the universe is expanding or contracting, they of course usually accept implicitly, “without reflection from a sense that good people should believe,” ideas about heliocentrism and the Big Bang and many other things. Life is short, math is hard, there’s supper to make, kids to raise, bills to pay, and TV to watch.

“[It[ was a radio interview, not a written discourse with footnotes. You should .... ask i[f] she can remember who she had read on the issue that supports her verbal contention that Darwinism was an issue.”

It’s certainly true that a radio interview has different standards – but it still has standards – she doesn’t support her point at all, and while it would be interesting to see what she would say, the fact is there’s lots of reasons to think that there’s no there there. Marilynne just has a hammer, and all she sees is a nail.

“ as I vaguely recall the issue, it was pretty much an issue like the recently discovered “hobbits” between those who proposed alternatives some of them arguing for one viewpoint and others arguing out of a viewpoint of what was already “known”.”

I dunno about that. Now, there are some similarities :besides researchers that Homo floresiensis was an exciting new species are other researchers claiming that it actually was a regular human with some kind of pathological condition – microcephaly, etc. – including our old friend cretinism!

“My point is that it was at issue when she gave the interview.”
Well, it got in the news, because conflict and novelty sells . . . With the Neandertal situation it was pretty much some geographer – Jerome Dobson – against the folks who actually work in the field, although the Times did get a kind head-patting quote from one fellow).

“. Why in the world do you think that Eldredge and Gould … would have made an issue of ultra-Darwinism, Darwinian fundamentalism etc.?

I was (and am) a great fan of Gould, who along with everything else was one of the great late-20thC. popularizers of science, and a marvelous writer. But remember, they were pushing a noisily controversial new idea – whatever the other issues, of course they were going to portray their opponents – quite sincerely – as dogmatic old stick-in-the-muds.

“n Dawkins and Dennett it reaches the ultimate of absurd lengths where they cite the authority of Darwin to make statements blanketing the assumed biology of the entire universe. ”
Whatever the merit of these claims, you’ve misunderstood (unless I have, I guess), what they’re actually saying. They’re not citing the “authority of Darwin“, as if he was some sort of prophet and his writings sacred scripture – rather, they’re drawing on the power and success of (Darwinian-style) evolutionary biology to make some pretty broad claims. They might be wrong, but they’re not doing what you think they’re doing.

But this is getting a bit far afield – back to Marilynne Robinson. Remember, her argument is that “Darwinism” is uniquely (among the sciences) dogmatic, riddled with a “kind of faith” not permissible in other branches of science. The one meaningful bit of evidence she gives? That paleoanthropologists specializing in Neandertals didn’t immediately embrace some random geographer’s extremely out-of-left-field (and also, ultimately not so well supported) little theory about how pretty much everything they’ve ever done is wrong. The idea apparently is that, as good worshipful Darwinists, they opposed it because it “opened the whole freighted narrative of progressive evolution of the human species to questioning“, although this is never supported – we’re merely told that this is a recent example of how “Darwinists … tend to object to new
hypotheses on the grounds that they are incompatible with Darwinism“, but no such objections are cited, and indeed most likely were never made.

It’s hard to get across how dubious a claim that is – imagine someone arguing that Shakespeare scholars’ opposition to somebody’s idea that “Shakespeare’s” plays were actually written by Lope De Vega is evidence of a deep-seated hispanophobia, or . . . . well, something, except that’s not nearly weird enough. Perhaps that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t really written ’til the late 17th C.? Anyway, I’ve offered some (I think) rather better suggestions for why they might have responded how they did, although you didn’t respond to them. Another problem here is that while she focuses on “the whole freighted narrative of progressive evolution of the human species“, by the late 90s – iirc – Neandertals were not generally viewed (within paleoanthro) as shambling brutish subhumans (although there was – and remains – debate over their exact capacities) and very likely not are direct ancestors in any simple way (although some folks saw/see evidence of interbreeding and a Neanderthal component to modern human ancestry), -sadly, recent DNA analysis hasn’t so far supported that last idea). The guy quoted in the Times article as clearly rejecting Dobson’s idea is Erik Trinkaus, who exclaimed that “‘You cannot explain 100,000 to 400,000 years of human evolution based on a pathological condition.” Ironically, far from the caricature Robinson seems to be trying to present, Trinkaus has stressed Neanderthal capability and the likelihood of equal interactions with modern people (including interbreeding).

This alone would raise some doubt on her writing, but one could still say that maybe she only briefly floundered out of her depth – except that the rest of what she say about evolution is worse. I’m tired and this is long, but briefly, passages like this:

“Evolution is demonstrable and obviously important. It is quite different from Darwinism. Darwinism is the interpretation of evolution to mean that change in populations of organisms over time reflects the relative survival and reproductive success of those individual organisms which are genetically better suited to survive and reproduce. The theory makes evolu- tionary change as if purposive, because such change modifies organisms to their advantage, whence feathers and lungs and so one. Plausible enough, within limits. (I will not object here to
the archaism of the model of genetics, which comes from Mendel, Darwin’s contemporary, without significant modi- fication. Darwinism does not evolve.) The trouble comes when that great blank—fitness to survive—is filled in. Rather than looking at organisms to see how they do in fact survive, Darwinists assume that “selfishness” (their word) and a favoring of those genetical-ly nearest is inscribed in the genes, not only of amoebas, but also, and most significantly, of human beings. Fitness is effectively manifested selfishness. This is clearly arbitrary. Survival advantage could as well be a matter of lighter bones or a suppler snout. Assuming limited food supply, such traits would confer competitive advantage in the absence of any competitive intent in the organism.”

…. I think the phrase is not even wrong – she frankly doesn’t really understand what she’s talking about. She just has her little hammer of political criticism of science, and she’s gonna use it!

Dan, for crying out loud. I was a radio interview, not a written discourse with footnotes. You should write to Marilynne Robinson to ask is she can remember who she had read on the issue that supports her verbal contention that Darwinism was an issue. Or maybe you can google that yourself. My point is that it was at issue when she gave the interview.

You’re on extremely thin ice on this one, as I vaguely recall the issue, it was pretty much an issue like the recently discovered “hobbits” between those who proposed alternatives some of them arguing for one viewpoint and others arguing out of a viewpoint of what was already “known”. As the list of scientists I mentioned as having talked about the phenomenon have also pointed out, “Darwin” is frequently brought up as a dogmatic authority in those kinds of disputes. You are faulting Marilynne Robinson for pointing out a well known and recurring phenomenon in the PROFESSION of evolutionary biology, not necessarily in the science that eventually settles out of it. Why in the world do you think that Eldredge and Gould (who I still believe credited his colleague with the term) would have made an issue of ultra-Darwinism, Darwinian fundamentalism etc.? In Dawkins and Dennett it reaches the ultimate of absurd lengths where they cite the authority of Darwin to make statements blanketing the assumed biology of the entire universe. I don’t know what anyone would call that except maybe “ultimate-Darwinism”.

Dan, you really are just plain wrong to continually keep faulting Robinson for obviously having been aware of an ongoing controversy of the month in which she made that statement. Since you have such a deep emotional investment in discrediting her, why don’t you write a nice article citing numerous participants and why her identification of their arguments against the iodine cretinism hypothesis as an example of Darwin dogmatism is illegitimate. Why don’t you go point, by point through as many of her statements about Darwinism showing that she’s an uninformed idiot as you clearly want her to be. Though you might save yourself some time and ask her why she would have said what she has on the topic. I’ve heard a rumor that she might be writing a book on Darwinism. If she does and it’s anything like her extended essay, Mother Country, it will be quite well researched and extremely controversial. That one was about nuclear pollution and proliferation and has quite an impressive number of fully cited notes and was politically damaging enough to the British government that they suppressed it.

Isn’t it great?

Re: Robinson:

“It is very difficult to discuss Darwinism because one is forever confronting raised eye- brows, forever being scolded by people who know only that one must not object to Darwinism. Of no other scientific theory is this true.”

Interesting to imagine what situations may have (or not) brought this about – but anyway, of course, evolutionary biology is in an unusual – almost unique – position. It’s extremely well-known and even of popular interest, but also the object of unrelenting attacks and (ginned-up) controversy. In contrast, almost all other scientific theories are basically unknown to the general public, or basically uncontroversial – certainly not constantly under assault. “It is very difficult to discuss [] because one is forever confronting raised eye- brows, forever being scolded by people who know only that one must not object to []. ” From that second category, fill in the blanks with “heliocentrism”, “gravity,” “germ theory” “HIV as the cause of AIDS” (nowadays). If this actually happened, You’d be more likely to get puzzled, nervous, or mocking laughter than raised eyebrows – but push folks long enough (and I’m imagining that she’s referring to intellectual circles of a largely humanities, etc. bent), you would find out that most of them really did know only that one must not object to – say – heliocentrism (can you explain, off the top of your head, how we know it’s true?)

The other big exception here, also both very well known and ‘controversial’, is global warming, and I can very much see her – or a rightwing analogue – describing a very similar situation: airing a political and ideological critique of climate science and its uses and finding that “[i]t is very difficult to discuss global warming because one is forever confronting raised eye- brows, forever being scolded by people who know only that one must not object to global warming.

Nor does any other branch of science invite or even permit this kind of faith. If cosmologists find good evidence that the expan- sion of the universe is accelerating, contrary to every pre- diction, they throw themselves into the work of assimilating this observation into revolutionized conceptions of the cos- mos. ”

Remarkably, it seems Robinson’s never read her Kuhn. Of course, while this isn’t exactly wrong, it’s a bit misleading. It’s extremely impressive and important that science does get there in the end – but the trip can be a bumpier one than she suggests. Continental drift, the Big Bang, bacteria as a cause of (many) stomach ulcers, the K-T extinction resulting from an asteroid impact, the forming of the Channeled Scablands of Washington by massive flooding – these and many others stirred up quite a lot of controversy and challenged some very basic ideas and assumptions. Again, in the end, once enough evidence is accumulated, and issues hashed out, scientists go where that evidence lead, often very quickly, but that can take some time, and get kinda heated in the process. What relevance this has to evolutionary bio is unclear.

Darwinists, on the other hand, tend to object to new hypotheses on the grounds that they are incompatible with Darwinism. ”

Ah. Examples?

A recent example is the argument that Neanderthals were actually people disfigured by lack of odine—cretins.”

Ok. Now, and this is important, her claim here is that “Darwinists” – (actually, paleoanthropologists) rejected this new hypothesis on the ground that it was incompatible with Darwinism, out of blind ideology . Specifically, with a crude narrative of evolutionary “progress” in human evolution (something that was largely confined to popular culture, not science, by the time Gould was writing about the basic idea – and note the sidestep from what you describe as the “general culture of intellectuals” – raising their eyebrows and mindlessly defending a “Darwinism” they don’t understand – to actual scientists).

What she doesn’t supply is any evidence to suggest this is the case, and looking into other accounts (like the NY Times, article) it’s clear there are other quite plausible explanations.

1) So, you have people who have spent their entire professional careers researching Neandertals, and suddenly some upstart geographer – a geographer – is treading on their territory, insisting that pretty much everything they’ve done is wrong. It’s not laudable, and with better evidence I’m sure the scientific passion for reality would have won out, but scientists are people; they can get into turf wars too. (It likely didn’t help continental drift that the guy proposing it wasn’t a geologist but a meteorologist.)

2) As noted in the article, there’s a history, right from the beginning, of people trying to explain Neandertals as “regular humans” with this or that pathological condition (a tradition that continues today in creationist scribblings), attempts that simply haven’t panned out. This sort of thing, ensconced in disciplinary memory, can end up ‘tainting’ new ideas that come across as just more of the same old debunked stuff. (I’ve seen it suggested that continental drift fared even worse thanks to a succession of previous theories trying to explain some of the data by reference to increasingly implausible land bridges popping up here and there, so that this balloon-riding guy’s weird idea about continents somehow plowing through rock got lumped in as just another . . . )

3) Simple – the facts don’t fit, so that the folks that have actually been studying the field for years can quickly reject it. (Indeed, that’s my understanding).

Remember, the paleontologists don’t even have to be right – although at this point, it appears they are, and the whole cretin theory just an odd footnote. They just need to be dismissing it for reasons other the blind ideological allegiance to “Darwinism,” a claim for which no evidence is provided. And of course, since Robinsson doesn’t seem to have much knowledge of the field, she can’t judge that herself – she just keeps on using the tools she has – professional and personal criticism. Hammer, nail.

This is not a suggestion to be dismissed out of hand. Diet-related illnesses were common in Europe until quite recently. If studies of skeletal remains have not taken account of the effects of diet, this is remarkable, and it very likely reflects the narrow focus Darwinist assumptions have always encouraged. Of course the theory does not hang on the particular case of the Neanderthals, and the cretin hypothesis could only be thought of as a threat to Darwinism if it opened the whole freighted narrative of progres- sive evolution of the human species to question- ing of the same kind—and it is certainly progres- sive, despite objections to that word.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/01/science/neanderthal-or-cretin-a-debate-over-iodine.html

Are you faulting her for being aware of an issue in science at the time? Maybe you’re like one of the new atheists who asserted in response to something I wrote that we simple folk had to take what scientists asserted on faith. I’m always so interested in the caste system that apparently comes with the new atheism.

— 4, . This is a rambling mess of a nonstatement. I can’t made heads or tails of it. gillt

Odd, Dan L seemed to understand it. As have a couple of people who asked me to post it as another challenge. One of them said it had kind of disturbing implications for materialism, and he’s a materialist.

I sincerely hope not:

“you have ‘em on speedial?”

But one of my relatives is a prominent Muslim-American whom you may have heard of, former U. S. Army chaplian James Yee, and regrettably, I believe some of his friends may indeed have them on “speed-dial”.