I have discussed why machines and automation are not dehumanizing several times now. What I have missed, until now, is what things are dehumanizing. The time has come...
Machines and automation are not dehumanizing, because they are one of the ultimate expressions of humanity. The ability to build tools that work entirely on their own is one of the most important things that make humans unique. So, if machines are not dehumanizing, what things are?
Something is dehumanizing when it rejects the things that make humans unique among the life found on Earth. A great example is any form of primitivism. The idea that we should abandon modern technology and go "back to the land" is a popular form of dehumanization in some places. This movement boils down to the idea that humans should be less like humans and more like animals, which is the very definition of dehumanizing. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
Another form of dehumanization that is especially popular is the attempt to define the "correct" role of humans in the food chain. This includes the vegan and vegetarian movements, but it also includes people who go around bragging that they are "carnivores." The uniqueness of humans includes an incredibly high level of adaptability. Claiming that humans should or should not eat certain classes of food rejects a valuable element of that adaptability. Keep in mind that ancient American natives often spent the winters eating nothing but meat, because nothing else was available. At the same time, poor populations throughout history often ate little or no meat during certain seasons and famines. Humans have the ability to survive on very wide range of diets, and attempting to define and enforce dietary categories qualifies as dehumanizing.
Humans are good at a wide variety of things. Most of the uniqueness of humans comes from our ability to innovate and adapt. We have made an enormous number of innovations to allow ourselves to adapt to a wide range of conditions. As the human population on Earth is continuously increasing, we are beginning to predict things like resource shortages. We are already doing many things to prepare for this, despite the fact that it is clear we are not much closer to serious overpopulation than we were during the scares of the '60s and '70s (and several much earlier ones as well). Our farming technology has advanced extremely rapidly over the last several centuries, and there is little sign of slowing. Our industrial farming techniques, while unsustainable and destructive, allow a tiny portion of the U.S. population to produce five times as much food as we eat. More sustainable hydroponics have become viable enough that you can find hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables in some grocery stores. Genetic engineering has allowed us to reduce crop losses to pests and weeds, and it is promising more flavorful, healthier fruits and vegetables within the next decade or so. This ability to adapt, all the way down to editing genes to improve our food, is very uniquely human. There are movements against all of these things though. We have the organic food movement attacking industrial farming and hydroponics. We have the anti-GMO crowd attacking directly improving foods by altering their genetics. This is what is dehumanizing. These movements are rejecting the very things that make us human.
Another serious effort at dehumanization is the anti-vax movement. Yes, in the past there have been potential problems with vaccines. For some very small groups even a subset of currently existing vaccines represent a potential for harm. The fact though, is that vaccines are not harmful in the least for a vast majority of people. Now, I generally recommend becoming informed (for real, not just reading anti-vax propaganda; informed means you learn from experts, not uneducated celebrities and quack journalists), and I am not rescinding that recommendation. Aside from these extremely small groups that vaccines pose potential risks for, the refusal of effective vaccines is another form of dehumanization.
In general, any "natural" movement is probably pushing an agenda that is dehumanizing. Yes, we should take responsibility for things like our health and keeping the Earth habitable for humans, but when someone says that something is better merely because it is natural, they are trying to dehumanize people. Artificial sweeteners might be unnatural, but a vast majority are less dangerous than excessive sugar intake. Artificial stimulants are often safer than natural ones. Nature has produced a very large number of deadly poisons, including some that can kill a person in anywhere from 30 seconds down to well under 1 second. In fact, even many of the worst illegal drugs come straight from plants, and most of those that don't are purer synthetic versions of the same substances from plants or very similar ones. Pushing "natural" products purely because they are natural is dehumanizing, because it rejects the ability of humans to transcend nature.
The fact is, humans are fantastically powerful beings, compared to the entire rest of Earth's population of living things. Our power lies in our ability to transcend the limitations of nature. When we question our ability to transcend nature, we deny our humanity. Humanity is at its most human when it is improving on nature. The further we deviate from nature, the more human and less natural we become, and this is a good thing, because it increases our ability to survive. When we arbitrarily reject the man made, that is what is dehumanizing.
17 December 2016
12 December 2016
Why We Should Question Evolution
First, this is not a discussion on religious alternatives to evolution. For full disclosure, I am religious, however, I also do not believe that God goes about doing things by unnatural means, when there are viable natural alternatives. That said, I could be wrong, and God will do things however He sees fit.
This is a discussion on why scientists should continue looking for alternatives to large scale evolutionary theory, and it gets into an idea that I have discussed several times already. That idea is that when we settle on a weakly proven theory, we stop looking for alternatives. When we stop looking for alternatives we very often miss things. When we miss things, we halt the progress of science. In other words, because of the theory of evolution, we have entirely quit following some potentially useful lines of inquiry in the field of biology, and this is a bad thing. Even if the theory of evolution is 100% correct (which has not actually been conclusively proven), there may still be value in looking down other paths (see Alchemy for an example of this).
The first reason we should not quit looking for alternatives to evolution is lack of strong evidence supporting it. Charles Darwin discovered that organisms evolve on a small scale. This is proven fact. We see very small scale evolution, like changes in natural camouflage in response to environmental changes, all the time. We have managed to harness this, in the form of selective breeding, to create larger scale changes in organisms. We have also found fossils that appear to be ancestors of existing species, and we have identified similarities between existing species that hint at much larger scale evolution. What we have not managed to do is to trace even one species a significant evolutionary distance. Despite the fact that evolution on a large scale takes millions of years, and thus should have provided ample evidence, all we really have are a few points on the graph. We don't have continuous lines for anything. Now, this is certainly not proof against large scale evolution. Natural decay and decomposition can easily explain the lack of strong evidence, though it seems odd that it would have done so much damage, when we are constantly finding things that we believe should have been destroyed by time but have not been. The fact here is, we have found enough supporting evidence of large scale evolution that we cannot just write it off, but we have not found so much that it constitutes proof. While most of modern science seems to take the current, very weak evidence as sufficient proof, this is the only field willing to accept something as fact with so little evidence.
If this is not a religious discussion, what alternatives could there be? This is a valid question, and it is the question that is generally used to draw a solid conclusion from so little evidence. What other paths besides evolution are there? Leaving out the obvious religious ones (which honestly don't add anything to the conversation anyhow), it might seem like the theory of evolution is the only possibility. This is not true though. For example, certain structures are common throughout nature. Atoms tend to be attracted to specific other atoms. The result is that things like CO2 and a huge range of other oxides are very common. We don't find halogen gasses free in nature, because they bond strongly to other atoms. There are specific atomic structures that are common, because the nature of the different elements causes them to prefer certain configurations. On a larger scale, we see mineral deposits often taking the form of crystals. A great many compounds tend to form into very specific configurations under the right circumstances, which is why crystals are so common in nature. Because we have such a strong understanding of attractive forces on a molecular scale, we can see a crystal and easily conclude that it exists because the patterns of attraction between the molecules it is made of tend to form into specific kinds of lattices that form crystals on a large scale. It is possible that biology has some similarities. Scientists have found that evolution does not tend to happen in a continuous set of minute changes. For example, every living thing produces some amount of electrical current. Electric eels are unique, in that they can produce very large currents, while everything else produces very small ones. According to evolutionary theory, eels should have slowly, over millions of years, increased the current they produce, because it was somehow beneficial. The problem is, there is a threshold below which this trait is not useful at all. So, how did evolution go from extremely low current up to the smallest useful one? This is a huge gap, and the only way it makes sense is either that it happened purely by accident over thousands of years, which is extremely improbable, or that there was a huge jump in there from absolutely tiny to barely useful all in a single mutation. The thing is, by our current understanding, this is almost as improbable as the incremental increase over millions of year theory. We are also starting to see more and more traits that are common across multiple species but which clearly evolved independently. According to traditional evolutionary theory, this is incredibly unlikely. If you add in a naturally favored configuration aspect, however, this makes perfect sense.
So, the first alternative theory that should probably be explored is that biology tends to favor specific configurations, just like atoms and molecules do. If this is true, it would be a huge field, since biology is already so complex. On the other hand, discovering the mechanics of something like this would give us a huge jump in things like genetically engineering stable and safe organisms. It could also explain all of the gaps in our current understanding of evolution. What if the difference between human brains and monkey brains is not a million years of evolution? What if instead, it is the result of several jumps from one stable configuration to another, over a much shorter period of time? Not only would this explain why primates still exist as a separate species, it would also explain why we can only find points on the graph, instead of a continuous line. Scientists are only starting to realize that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps, but they still don't understand why. What if, a hundred years ago, around the time evolution started getting popular, some groups continued to explore other ideas, instead of just quitting the search? What if someone had thought of this idea of naturally stable configurations, much like crystal formations? Even if this idea turns out to be totally wrong, we could have known that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps instead of continuous incremental change, and we could have over 50 years of research and understanding of this process! Instead we wasted more than 100 years stuck researching the theory of evolution exclusively, because we settled too soon.
I am not going to try to come up with a bunch more alternative theories, but another recent discovery that might have been discovered much sooner if we had not settled is epigenetics. This is a mechanic through which genetic traits can be expressed or suppressed without the modification of DNA, and it is theoretically capable of making organisms of the same species manifest very different forms. An alternative theory to evolution could have revealed this mechanic half a century ago, if we had not been stuck on evolution.
This is not exclusively about evolution. This applies to all scientific theories that are not conclusively proven. This also reveals a serious flaw in how the various fields of science define "proof." Currently, proof is based primarily on consensus. The role of evidence in establishing proof is only secondary, in the fact that consensus tends to require a certain amount of evidence to convince people. The problem is, things like popularity, personal beliefs, convenience, political correctness, and many other factors play a much bigger role than evidence. Quantum physics was disbelieved (and often still is) by a large number of people, including those who actually came up with it, despite very solid math and a great deal of evidence. The theory of evolution is widely accepted despite the fact that it is currently nothing more than a reasonable explanation with very weak evidence that is full of holes. If we were using a standard burden of proof for both of these, the theory of evolution would still be widely regarded as a weakly supported theory. This would have been a very good thing, because then, perhaps, we would have a much stronger understanding of biology and genetics than we currently do. Likewise, we might also have a better understanding of general physics, if we were not spending so much effort on string theory.
What it comes down to is, scientific progress would advance much faster, if we treated science more like science and less like religion. Having personal religious beliefs about scientific things is fine, but we should not let that stop us from exploring alternatives. When we settle on something without very strong evidence, we short change ourselves by focusing too much effort on something that may not be completely correct. I hope we are beginning to see that this is actually slowing down scientific progress significantly, but I fear that our headlong rush into the coolest new things is blinding us to our mistakes.
So, I issue this challenge to scientists: Regularly come up with new theories that challenge accepted theories. Subject them to thought experiments. If they pass, then try to prove them right or wrong. Instead of exclusively trying to prove accepted theories right, come up with new ones that challenge existing ones, and test them. The best that can happen is that we discover we are wrong about some things and correct our understanding. The worst that happen is that we discover things that we missed in the process of successfully disproving alternative theories.
This is a discussion on why scientists should continue looking for alternatives to large scale evolutionary theory, and it gets into an idea that I have discussed several times already. That idea is that when we settle on a weakly proven theory, we stop looking for alternatives. When we stop looking for alternatives we very often miss things. When we miss things, we halt the progress of science. In other words, because of the theory of evolution, we have entirely quit following some potentially useful lines of inquiry in the field of biology, and this is a bad thing. Even if the theory of evolution is 100% correct (which has not actually been conclusively proven), there may still be value in looking down other paths (see Alchemy for an example of this).
The first reason we should not quit looking for alternatives to evolution is lack of strong evidence supporting it. Charles Darwin discovered that organisms evolve on a small scale. This is proven fact. We see very small scale evolution, like changes in natural camouflage in response to environmental changes, all the time. We have managed to harness this, in the form of selective breeding, to create larger scale changes in organisms. We have also found fossils that appear to be ancestors of existing species, and we have identified similarities between existing species that hint at much larger scale evolution. What we have not managed to do is to trace even one species a significant evolutionary distance. Despite the fact that evolution on a large scale takes millions of years, and thus should have provided ample evidence, all we really have are a few points on the graph. We don't have continuous lines for anything. Now, this is certainly not proof against large scale evolution. Natural decay and decomposition can easily explain the lack of strong evidence, though it seems odd that it would have done so much damage, when we are constantly finding things that we believe should have been destroyed by time but have not been. The fact here is, we have found enough supporting evidence of large scale evolution that we cannot just write it off, but we have not found so much that it constitutes proof. While most of modern science seems to take the current, very weak evidence as sufficient proof, this is the only field willing to accept something as fact with so little evidence.
If this is not a religious discussion, what alternatives could there be? This is a valid question, and it is the question that is generally used to draw a solid conclusion from so little evidence. What other paths besides evolution are there? Leaving out the obvious religious ones (which honestly don't add anything to the conversation anyhow), it might seem like the theory of evolution is the only possibility. This is not true though. For example, certain structures are common throughout nature. Atoms tend to be attracted to specific other atoms. The result is that things like CO2 and a huge range of other oxides are very common. We don't find halogen gasses free in nature, because they bond strongly to other atoms. There are specific atomic structures that are common, because the nature of the different elements causes them to prefer certain configurations. On a larger scale, we see mineral deposits often taking the form of crystals. A great many compounds tend to form into very specific configurations under the right circumstances, which is why crystals are so common in nature. Because we have such a strong understanding of attractive forces on a molecular scale, we can see a crystal and easily conclude that it exists because the patterns of attraction between the molecules it is made of tend to form into specific kinds of lattices that form crystals on a large scale. It is possible that biology has some similarities. Scientists have found that evolution does not tend to happen in a continuous set of minute changes. For example, every living thing produces some amount of electrical current. Electric eels are unique, in that they can produce very large currents, while everything else produces very small ones. According to evolutionary theory, eels should have slowly, over millions of years, increased the current they produce, because it was somehow beneficial. The problem is, there is a threshold below which this trait is not useful at all. So, how did evolution go from extremely low current up to the smallest useful one? This is a huge gap, and the only way it makes sense is either that it happened purely by accident over thousands of years, which is extremely improbable, or that there was a huge jump in there from absolutely tiny to barely useful all in a single mutation. The thing is, by our current understanding, this is almost as improbable as the incremental increase over millions of year theory. We are also starting to see more and more traits that are common across multiple species but which clearly evolved independently. According to traditional evolutionary theory, this is incredibly unlikely. If you add in a naturally favored configuration aspect, however, this makes perfect sense.
So, the first alternative theory that should probably be explored is that biology tends to favor specific configurations, just like atoms and molecules do. If this is true, it would be a huge field, since biology is already so complex. On the other hand, discovering the mechanics of something like this would give us a huge jump in things like genetically engineering stable and safe organisms. It could also explain all of the gaps in our current understanding of evolution. What if the difference between human brains and monkey brains is not a million years of evolution? What if instead, it is the result of several jumps from one stable configuration to another, over a much shorter period of time? Not only would this explain why primates still exist as a separate species, it would also explain why we can only find points on the graph, instead of a continuous line. Scientists are only starting to realize that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps, but they still don't understand why. What if, a hundred years ago, around the time evolution started getting popular, some groups continued to explore other ideas, instead of just quitting the search? What if someone had thought of this idea of naturally stable configurations, much like crystal formations? Even if this idea turns out to be totally wrong, we could have known that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps instead of continuous incremental change, and we could have over 50 years of research and understanding of this process! Instead we wasted more than 100 years stuck researching the theory of evolution exclusively, because we settled too soon.
I am not going to try to come up with a bunch more alternative theories, but another recent discovery that might have been discovered much sooner if we had not settled is epigenetics. This is a mechanic through which genetic traits can be expressed or suppressed without the modification of DNA, and it is theoretically capable of making organisms of the same species manifest very different forms. An alternative theory to evolution could have revealed this mechanic half a century ago, if we had not been stuck on evolution.
This is not exclusively about evolution. This applies to all scientific theories that are not conclusively proven. This also reveals a serious flaw in how the various fields of science define "proof." Currently, proof is based primarily on consensus. The role of evidence in establishing proof is only secondary, in the fact that consensus tends to require a certain amount of evidence to convince people. The problem is, things like popularity, personal beliefs, convenience, political correctness, and many other factors play a much bigger role than evidence. Quantum physics was disbelieved (and often still is) by a large number of people, including those who actually came up with it, despite very solid math and a great deal of evidence. The theory of evolution is widely accepted despite the fact that it is currently nothing more than a reasonable explanation with very weak evidence that is full of holes. If we were using a standard burden of proof for both of these, the theory of evolution would still be widely regarded as a weakly supported theory. This would have been a very good thing, because then, perhaps, we would have a much stronger understanding of biology and genetics than we currently do. Likewise, we might also have a better understanding of general physics, if we were not spending so much effort on string theory.
What it comes down to is, scientific progress would advance much faster, if we treated science more like science and less like religion. Having personal religious beliefs about scientific things is fine, but we should not let that stop us from exploring alternatives. When we settle on something without very strong evidence, we short change ourselves by focusing too much effort on something that may not be completely correct. I hope we are beginning to see that this is actually slowing down scientific progress significantly, but I fear that our headlong rush into the coolest new things is blinding us to our mistakes.
So, I issue this challenge to scientists: Regularly come up with new theories that challenge accepted theories. Subject them to thought experiments. If they pass, then try to prove them right or wrong. Instead of exclusively trying to prove accepted theories right, come up with new ones that challenge existing ones, and test them. The best that can happen is that we discover we are wrong about some things and correct our understanding. The worst that happen is that we discover things that we missed in the process of successfully disproving alternative theories.
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