Systems of the World

So, I finally finished Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion. In the end it seems to me that it's a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts of the book are very good, some not so good.

As might be expected, his deconstruction of Intelligent Design is devastatingly convincing, and proceeds essentially along two lines. First, that natural selection provides a mechanism for explaining the massively improbable state of the biosphere as the end result of lots of not so improbable changes and asymmetric selection effects over really long periods of time. (Although he doesn't mention it, a much simpler example of asymmetry creating order can be seen by simply shaking up a can of mixed nuts. The big ones rise to the top and the small ones sort to the bottom because of small random diffusive motions in the presence of an asymmetrically applied force, in this case gravity. You can shake a little nut into a small space under two bigger nuts, but you can't shake a bigger nut in the the smaller space under two little nuts.) He dismisses as simply wrong the notion that there are serious road blocks, such as a wing or an eye or even the axle of the bacterial flagellum, (favorite targets of Intelligent Design) and points to the intermediate building blocks of each. Second, he points out that Intelligent Design only regresses the improbability back to God, who is necessarily much more improbable than the biosphere He is supposed to explain.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of other stuff in this book, and not all of it is terribly good. To begin with, his strongest argument, pro-natural selection and against intelligent design, doesn't show up until nearly 100 pages into the book. What's worse, he spends most of that first 100 pages alienating his supposed target audience by filling it with some fairly sanctimonious (oh the irony) and arrogant ridiculing of religion, and indulgent personal asides (how many times does he have to name check his buddy Douglas Adams and his wife Lalla Ward, or mention all the TV shows he's been on?!?) Then once he's dispensed with Intelligent Design, he freely admits that the main point of his thesis is done, but the book is only half over. He then spends the rest of the book wandering through various side issues and philosophical ideas with progressively less conviction and progressively more speculation. Some of this is interesting, (are the universals of human thought structures, morals etc, in some way byproducts of natural selection), some is not (are gods the same effect as imaginary friends) and some is just poorly thought out all together (his call to ban the indoctrination of children in religious ideas... I understand why he would like to do so, but this is a fundamentally unworkable philosophy in practice.)

As an invitation to the masses of blue-meme religious folk to step up to orange, I suspect that this book is not such a success. As a manifesto for orange-meme folk to combat the increasingly popular Intelligent Design idea, it is much better. As motivational fearmongering against the increasingly dangerous radical blue-memeies in a complacent multi-culti green-meme political environment it is suitably terrifying. As evidence that Dawkins is writing from an intellectually balanced and honest point of view, this book is not so great. Frankly it might give as much ammunition to his critics as it does to his would be supporters.

It has reinforced my discomfort with certain aspects of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy, at least as it pertains to his vision of evolution. Wilber's writings are intriguing and beguiling and to some extent a little slippery. Inevitably, I need to do more reading to see if what he says holds up. In particular, the next step is probably to read some of the people he quotes as supporting his ideas.

When I was a freshman at Caltech, I found philosophy of science a bit of a boring and pointless topic. Among other issues, I was particularly frustrated by philosophers who seem to insist on invoking quantum physics and the like, while clearly not understanding it. Now, a decade and a half later, I seem to be finding philosophy calling like a siren out of the fog. But the fog is still there, and as disturbing and frustrating as ever. The same problems I found as a frosh are still there: the lack of a sensible ground to work from; the reliance on such slippery things as language as a tool (unavoidable of course); the lack of a clear set of rules for even determining what sort of logical operations are allowed (logic is perfectly clear in a mathematical sense, but does not lift cleanly out of the mind into reality.) Worse, it seems that some of this has now broken out on the internet! Cripes! Dueling blogs!

The difference is, that now I also have the suspicion that the subject might be important. The nature of consciousness, "reality" and the like are leaking into policy. The so-called culture wars are getting serious and bodies are beginning to pile up. I mean, (to take just one blatantly obvious example) who would have thought that a George W presidency could have been that bad! But there it is. The neo-cons really thought they had the answer to all the world's problems. Or maybe not. A significant number seem to thing the end is neigh. Maybe they are just trying to help it along a bit. In either case, current US foreign and scientific policy is the end result of soft-headed philosophy gone amok.