The Meaning of Life

I have procrastinated for too long, but now let me take up the question raised in my previous post: what is the meaning of life?

For those who are interested, a good overview of the philosophical and scientific inquiries into this question can be found at Wikipedia.

It seems to me that there is only one answer to this question from the point of view of what I will call “evolutionary philosophy”, defined as the application of evolutionary theory to persistent philosophical questions. But let me develop the argument.

We can’t do better than to start with Aristotle, who believed “all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good”, and that the “highest good” was what he called “eudaimonia”.

Eudaimonia was originally translated from the Greek as “happiness”, but in recent years it has been recognised that the English term “happiness” refers to the subjective state of mind of an individual, and is necessarily fleeting, whereas Aristotle’s intention was to describe something more objective and therefore lasting. For this reason, a more accepted translation has come to be the word “flourishing”.

When we speak of “a flourishing business” or of “blackberries flourishing on the slope”, we are not exactly speaking of happiness, but of a state of doing well or even thriving, growing, and reproducing the means of success. Isn’t it the goal of us all to flourish?

In defining the term “eudaimonia”, we encounter the tension between the individual and the collective, for what makes an individual happy is subjective and individualistic, whereas flourishing is externally defined and thus is in some sense objective (or rather “intersubjective”). Defining “eudaimonia” as simple happiness gives it quite a different meaning to that intended by Aristotle, for if the goal of life is no more than a purely subjective and individual state of pleasure and personal satisfaction, a neglect of social well-being will result. Those who are purely concerned with personal pleasure and self-interest to the neglect or even detriment of the common interest are referred to as anti-social, as psychopaths or sociopaths, and in some jurisdictions are regarded as suffering from a dangerous mental disorder.

Humans typically don’t only pursue simple happiness, for personal happiness is fleeting. Ordinary human beings seem to encounter happiness mainly as a by-product of their pursuit of loftier goals. And the phrase “loftier goals” is generally understood to refer to goals which serve the collective interest.

So what are these greater goals, or so-called “higher callings”? Examine them at all closely, and they turn out to be goals that serve the cause of human flourishing, of the flourishing of the arts, of culture, of commerce, of children, families, and communities, of knowledge and science, of humanitarianism and charity, of humanity itself.

We can say without much need for evidence beyond common experience that every living thing seeks not simple happiness, but eudaimonia, in the Aristotelian sense of “flourishing”. And such flourishing is not confined to individuals of any species, but is proper to the species itself. In other words, it is at the level of the species that the term “flourishing” takes on its greatest meaning - individuals strive for the flourishing not only of their mortal selves but primarily for the flourishing of their species.

From the point of view of evolutionary theory, surely the goal of every species is to flourish on this earth, to achieve what Aristotle described as “eudaimonia”.

Why should this be so? For the simple reason that those species who did not seek to flourish died out – and those that were most successful - those that flourished - passed on their innate desire for eudaimonia through their DNA.

As I will argue in future posts, accepting this apparently obvious drive to flourish as the fundamental motivation of human existence has profound implications for our interpretation of traditional philosophy and religion.

A Simple Theory of Morality

The average person operates on the assumption that the moral sphere is somehow quite separate from the ordinary concerns to which we apply the language of “right” and “wrong”.

We speak of the right way to cook rice and the wrong way to carve a roast, the right way to kick a football and the wrong way to throw a baseball, or of the right time of year to pick blackberries and the wrong time of year to plant sunflowers, and so on. We find these everyday uses of terms like “right” and “wrong” useful to refer to things that are correct or incorrect, reasonably efficient or not very efficient, best proven practices or not likely to produce desirable results.

We use the concepts of right and wrong hundreds or even thousands of times each day to guide our most pedestrian acts, including the literally pedestrian acts of where to place one’s feet when walking, or whether to jaywalk or cross the street at the intersection.

And yet when we apply concepts of right and wrong to questions like when to speak the truth and when to lie, when to steal and when to show generosity, when to offer peace and when to quell with violence, we seem unconsciously to enter another realm, the realm of morality, which is apparently immune to the logic of efficiency, effectiveness, and best practices.

This split, the dividing line, is reflected in moral philosophy unquestioningly. One apparently does not decide moral questions on the basis of what works best – works best for what? Instead we consult the oracles, we ask the Gods for guidance, we attempt to define oughts, and universals, and the greatest good for the greatest number – we search for a morality gene!

Why can’t moral decision-making be as simple as the other daily decisions we make in our waking lives? Is it a matter of weight?

A common argument from religious moralists is that there is no scientific basis for morality. Theologians typically contend that Darwin and evolutionists see no point in existence, see it as just an accident of evolution, and see therefore no underlying principle and no rock on which morality can be built.

Unfortunately there are some prominent evolutionists who agree with them – Dawkins being the prime example.

But of course humanity does have a point, and does operate according to very visible and very profound principles, as does every species on earth. The point of life, as I have argued in an earlier post, is to persist. What living creature is not motivated by the desire to persist and not to perish? What species is not motivated by desire to reproduce and therefore to create the conditions for its genetic materials, the very blueprint of its existence, to persist through the generations?

The over-riding principle of existence is persistence. This is the rock of ages upon which the strong foundations of morality can be built.

In real terms, this principle guides our every action – we seek to persist as individuals as well as to persist as a species. Tellingly, those acts which are interpreted as supporting and advancing the long-term persistence, survival, and flourishing of the human species are those that are regarded by our culture as moral.

A maxim for a scientific theory of morality would therefore be: to act everywhere and always in the best long-term interests of humanity.

Intentionality

Just finished an excellent book called The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan.

The book discusses the history of man’s relationship with four plant species: the potato, the tulip, the apple, and marijuana. But it uses this history to make some important points about evolution and co-evolution, natural and artificial selection, and even to bring in a few interesting points about a philosophical buzzword, intentionality.

Intentionality is the quality of thought sometimes referred to as its “aboutness”. Thought is always “about” something. What it is about is referred to as the intentional object.

Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in psychology and philosophy is John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, intended to show that computers cannot show true artificial intelligence, because whatever they do, they don’t truly understand what it is they’re doing. Even if we were capable of creating a computer that could read Chinese and translate it perfectly to English, we could never argue that the computer had any real intelligence, because it never actually understands Chinese.

The thrust of the argument is that the mind is not a computer, and that intelligence is more than just the ability to follow coded instructions.

I think Searle is both right and wrong, and this is why the argument over the Chinese Room experiment has such life. I think the human brain and indeed the entire natural world operates much as a computer does, although a computer is at this stage of its development reflecting that reality only in a very primitive way.

But where Searle gets it right is in reminding us that no matter how sophisticated the computer, it never really *gets* it, because it’s missing one ingredient; intentionality.

So what is intentionality? I think Searle would agree that when human beings cultivated the apple and other agricultural products to their current form, they demonstrated intentionality. Certainly they proceeded with intention, and armed themselves with belief and desire.

But Pollan’s book makes the interesting point, not new, that the apple, the potato, the tulip, and narcotics and medicinal plants such as marijuana, have themselves contributed to the making of the human species as it walks the earth today. Can we say that they proceeded with intentionality? Obviously the individual apple or grape on the vine does not contain enough brain power to make decisions or hold beliefs, but as a species-being, does the capital-A Apple species proceed with anything we might describe as intentionality?

Now let’s throw another perspective into the mix – Wayne Dyer, and his book and audio series, "The Power of Intention".

Dyer is a well-known speaker on public broadcasting networks in the U.S. He seems to be a self-help speaker of a liberal bent (liberal in the American sense of politically centrist but socially aware) and is tolerable to listen to, even though he will drift into semi-religious mysticism from time to time – “The Power of Intention” being a prime example.

Dyer argues that everything in the world is filled with “intention” – a word he leaves sufficiently ambiguous to be interpreted as either God’s will, or perhaps just the feeling many folks have that “everything happens for a reason.”

But one does get the feeling listening to Dyer that he is onto something, if he only had the words to express it properly. And what I think he is on to is this poorly understood force that causes the apple to do what it does, and the human being to do what *it* does with the apple.

Whether one calls it “intention” or “intentionality”, there is a motive force behind life that just is missing from an inorganic piece of machinery like a computer. A human being is alive with intention, and intention, whether conscious or unconscious, is what defines it as being alive. This is perhaps why Sartre considered intentionality to be just another word for consciousness.

Which brings me back to the wellspring of life, as touched upon in an earlier post – all life is motivated by the intention to persist through time, and all activity is ultimately traceable to this eternal spring.

By this definition, we can agree with Dyer that all organisms, all matter, all things known and knowable, are imbued with intention and intentionality.

One of the things that distinguishes humanity as a species is that it is not only intentional, it is aware of and in a process of ongoing discovery of its own intentionality – and indeed that of the universe we live in.

Do animals have souls?

I’m reading a book by Douglas Hofstadter called “I am a Strange Loop.” The book shows a lot of promise and I can use some of the concepts in the book as a jumping-off point for discussion.

Hofstadter has a chatty, informal style which I can forgive him for because his points are clearer for the use of it. But sometimes the reader feels as if personal information is getting in the way of the ideas…

In Chapter 1, Hofstadter explains some of his rationale for vegetarianism, and it’s worth exploring some of the points he makes. An important concept for Hofstadter is the “soul”, although he is unable (or at least unwilling) in the first chapter to provide a definition of what the soul is.

Citing the likeness between mammals and human beings, he considers it immoral to kill and eat higher forms of life. He contends that all mammals have souls, and then touches on the question of where to draw the line between higher forms of life and lower forms. Why is it OK to slap a mosquito, but not OK to kill a fellow human being?

The answer for Hofstadter is that there are higher and lower levels of “soul”, just as there are higher and lower levels of consciousness.

Let me return to a point I believe I made earlier in this blog series – in my view, humans beings can be seen as a sort of recording device. What we are recording is experience. What experience is is a record of the interaction between the being and reality, between the internal and the external world.

One way we can view “soul” therefore is as a record of experience. Some beings keep only a very short record of their experience – these would fall into Hofstadter’s category of creatures with small souls. Others keep a vast and extensive record, such as human beings.

Hofstadter specifically brings up the issue of the fetus as a creature with only a small soul, suggesting to me that whether he has consciously made the connection or not, Hofstadter is implying that the degree of soul a being possesses is a factor of the degree of experience it has recorded or is capable of recording.

I’ve made the point in earlier entries that our experience is recorded in our memories, but DNA and other genetic material is a form of very long-term memory, storing the experience of our millions of generations of ancestors. The only sense in which the soul is immortal is that the experience it records is capable of being transmitted to subsequent generations.

The animals, plants, and primitive life-forms that Hofstadter characterizes as being “small of soul” are those animals whose experience is recorded primarily in their DNA and genetic material. Animals such as human beings, dogs, and so on that he characterizes as being larger of soul are creatures whose individual life experiences form as large a part of their souls as the species-experience recorded in their DNA.

When we speak of the soul of a mosquito, we are referring to the semi-automatic behaviour patterns the species has learned over countless millions of generations. Animals such as mosquitoes show little individual deviation in behaviour and there is little evidence that they are capable of individual learning, or even that such learning would help them reproduce more efficiently.

When we speak of the soul of a human being, we are surely referring to the special life experiences that have shaped the consciousness of that person. When we speak of the soul of a city or the soul of a nation, we are speaking of the collective experience as recorded in the brains of the citizens of that city or nation. When we speak of the Soul of Humanity, we are referring more to the inherited learning and behaviour patterns of our species.

One of the goals of this blog is to discover plausible, rational definitions of religious metaphors, not in order to dismiss them but to decode them.

Truth

Stanley Fish, a columnist I recommend, wrote in the New York Times last week about “Atheism and Evidence”. His argument was an old one that one hears from the very religious – that truth is constructed, and both science and religion are based on faith, so one is just as valid as the other.

I will concede that science is also based on faith. We don’t have direct experience of all that science tells us, yet we choose to accept it, really on faith.

The question of which is the more valid hinges on how great a leap of faith is required.

In my entry from last week, I noted how while most Americans say they have faith in science, in practice they hold to very unscientific beliefs. People hold those beliefs simply because they seem to work OK for them. As a guide to a good life, religion works pretty well for many people.

One chooses the truth that one finds most fruitful as a guide to living one’s life. Religion for many is a kind of rule of thumb for righteous living.

This is only understandable if one recognizes that what we call “truth” is really just a proposition about reality. The religious tend to believe that Truth has a capital “T”, that there are fixed, eternal, immutable truths, just as the fundamentalists believe that species are fixed and immutable. Science tells us that everything is in motion, everything experiences constant change, nothing stands still but everything evolves.

Science starts from the hypothesis, which is a kind of proposition. Let’s assume that something will work, and then test it out in practice. If it works, it’s a valid guide to action. Science assumes that truth is not fixed, that what works under most circumstances will not work under all circumstances. But if “by and large, for the most part” (to borrow a phrase from Aristotle) it holds true, if experiments produce verifiable and repeatable results, we can trust the hypothesis.

Religion is pre-scientific – it offers truths that it does not feel obliged to prove through evidence. For example, many religions recommend faith in the power of prayer. Science says, rather than just accept that prayer is powerful, let’s test it in practice. Thus a large study funded by the John Templeton Foundation tested the power of prayer in practice – and found no evidence that it had any positive effect on the health of heart patients.

Many atheists will conclude that religious folks are acting irrationally when they pray. But I think we have to understand that the object of the healing power of prayer is not the person prayed for, but the person doing the praying.

Human beings desperately want to believe that they can have some power over the tempestuous world we live in. Believing in prayer gives them hope that they can somehow bring about a positive outcome, even in circumstances where they are quite powerless. Believing that one has power to bring about positive outcomes, that there is always something one can do, is a very healthy mindset. Prayer therefore has a very concrete benefit – otherwise people would not be praying.

One has faith in the truths that seem to yield the best results.

Survival

The concept of survival of the fittest conjures images of individual struggle red tooth and claw. But the popular conception, focused as it is on survival of the individual, misses the point, because the real stuff of life, DNA and other genetic material, does not reside in the individual. And for good reason – the individual is mortal. The real blueprint for life resides in the species.

I’ve turned to this topic after watching the television show “Nature”, which this evening featured a life-and-death struggle between a pack of African wild dogs and a Wildebeest mother and calf.

The pack cut the pair off from the herd and attacked them repeatedly over 30 minutes, several times downing the young calf and mauling it savagely. But each time the frenzied mother drove the dogs off, until, exhausted, the pack lay down in the grass and watched the pair trot to safety back in the herd.

Those who are stuck on the idea that survival of the fittest is about the fittest, strongest individual have no explanation for the behaviour of the Wildebeest mother. Why should an individual put itself in mortal danger to protect its kin? By risking death, doesn’t the Wildebeest’s behaviour prove that it’s not all about survival?

This supposed “tough nut” is sometimes called the altruism problem. Why do soldiers march off to die on the battlefield? Why does a perfect stranger leap into the rapids to save a drowning child? If it’s all about our own survival, why put ourselves at risk for anyone at all?

The answer of course is that the survival that counts is never the survival of the individual, which in any eventuality is doomed in the long term anyway. The real goal is the survival of the species, because the species is what carries and transmits the blueprint for replication and regeneration.

DNA and other genetic materials are the vessel for the learning of the mass of individuals, now dead and gone, whose experience made the species what it is.

When the Wildebeest mother fights off the wild dogs, she gives life to her calf, and whatever courage and fearlessness she possessed that gave her the will to fight the pack now will live on in her offspring. Thus the species learns, because those who don’t fight back don’t pass on their fighting genes.

It is whatever contributes to the survival of the gene pool that defines “fitness”, not necessarily strength or savagery or cunning or camouflage. The soldier who goes off to fight to defend his country is in part defending his gene pool.

But recall that the learning of the species does not only reside in the genetic material. It also resides in the culture. So the soldier is also defending or advancing his culture, if necessary, with his own individual life. This is how the culture survives.

The survival of the fittest is really the survival of the learning of the species. That learning which is most conducive to survival will carry on. Insofar as altruism promotes the survival of the species, it will persist.

The Forms

Plato made some interesting arguments that still have life these many centuries later.

One of these was the notion that there are “forms” which exist on a more perfect plane. In his parable of the cave, Plato argued that we can see these forms only dimly, like shadows on the wall of a cave.

The world of matter was for Plato essentially corrupt and temporal, and therefore while it seems real to the unenlightened, it is less real than the forms, because while matter decays and dies, the forms live on.

To pick up on my point from the last post, again I think Plato here is recognizing something eternal in the soul of man – and that little something is not ethereal or immaterial, it is simply DNA. He writes of this or that horse which lives and dies, but never can be described as the perfect horse. Meanwhile, we have a concept of the form of a horse that allows us to recognize one when we see it.

What Plato, limited by the science of his day, could not see, is that the form of the horse, the blueprint for all horsiness if you like, is recorded in DNA and other genetic material. That record is not a mere concept, it is laid out in complex proteins and other real matter. What Plato meant by forms is DNA.

Another thought came to me the other day about Plato – he argued that not all knowledge can come from experience, because some knowledge is innate. To illustrate he tells a story of teaching an uneducated slave boy some geometry, which the boy immediately grasps. The conclusion is that if the knowledge of math were not innate, the boy could never learn it so quickly.

Plato is right – our brains are capable of learning and understanding math. But what he could not know is that this is so because of knowledge gained through experience. Not the experience of the individual, but the experience of all their ancestors, as recorded and encoded in DNA and other genetic material.

The Soul

What is the soul?

In various religious traditions, the soul is referred to as the immortal essence, the spirit, the “higher self”. The soul is generally considered to be “immaterial”, meaning not made of matter but in some way supernatural, existing on a higher plane.

These religious interpretations of the concept of the soul can now be answered by science. The immortal essence of humanity is DNA, RNA, and other genetic material that achieves immortality by copying itself through successive generations.

The soul is therefore NOT immaterial. The ancients recognized that our bodies were just “envelopes for the soul”, but lacked the science to identify the substance of the soul itself. Their stories were naïve interpretations of a genuine natural phenomenon.

Part of what this blog wants to argue is that it is all too easy to dismiss the naïve interpretations of the ancients as ignorance, and to miss the deeper truths they tried to express.

Medieval paintings of winged souls departing the body for the great beyond may seem like pure fantasy, but they symbolized something of enormous importance for humanity. Even after our mortal remains have scattered to dust, there is a part of us that lives on - a part of us that is a record of our own experience, and a record of the uncounted generations before us who left us the legacy of their genetic material.

Mention made in the classics of the “World Soul”, or the “Soul of Humanity”, are inklings of an understanding that in vital ways we share our soul with our fellow human beings.

In fact, since all life is on a journey towards immortality, we share a soul not just with those creatures whose DNA is very close to our own. We share a soul with all species who use DNA to overcome time.

When the ancients write of “Spirit”, I think of that common spirit shared by all living things – the desire to persist through time and to overcome mortality and decay.

When current religious traditions speak of how the body is a mere envelope for the soul, and the soul is a mere envelope for the spirit, I understand what they are saying better than they do themselves. The body is just an envelope for DNA, and DNA is just an envelope for the mainspring of life – the desire to defeat and overcome time itself.

Mortality and Immortality

Thus far I’ve made a few points that I think are commonly accepted in the scientific community:

Nature, the observable world, is composed of matter and energy.

Because matter is set in constant motion by energy, change is inevitable, and being itself a form of change, what we call “death” is inevitable.

Some forms of matter behave in ways that allow them to persist through time, by transmitting copies of themselves to new generations, so that when their carrier inevitably dies, they live on. Principle among these persistent forms of matter is the complex protein known as DNA.
What we call “life” is the mortal, temporal matter that carries the DNA; what has been called “the divine spark” or “life’s essence” is really DNA.

Based on just these few assumptions, which are more thoroughly and systematically argued in a thousand books than I can do here, we can draw some sweeping conclusions that have a profound impact on philosophy, religion, and the whole of human understanding.

It’s because these points have not been argued through to their logical conclusions, neither by myself nor others, that I started this blog.

Let’s look at one of the immediate implications – the above sheds some insight into the human conception of mortality and immortality.

From almost the dawn of human consciousness, we have struggled with our own mortality, and with concepts of immortality. All mythologies and religions have an immortality myth, a heaven, hell, limbo, paradise, Valhalla, or other physical location to which we will travel after leaving this mortal world. Many also have a notion of reincarnation, in which our spirit in one form or another goes on after death. Others believe in ghosts or other forms of the afterlife.

All of these beliefs are based in ignorance of modern scientific understanding, and of the existence of DNA and the role that it plays in carrying forward our life’s essence. But I believe that all of these are based on an intuitive understanding that some force like DNA exists. Our ancestor’s *knew*, they were dimly aware, that death does not end our existence, and that in some unknown form our existence continues and persists through time.

Scientists tend to ignore ancient beliefs, dismissing them as superstitions based on ignorance, which of course they are. What so many fail to recognize is that while these ancient beliefs were denied the benefits of science, they were in so many ways incredibly insightful about the operation of the physical world. The old myths managed to capture some deep truths through some very compelling metaphors and narratives, stories that even today much of the world finds more compelling than “science-talk”.

Joseph Campbell defines mythology as “other people’s religions”. In doing so he doesn’t distinguish between religion and mythology. Unfortunately, unlike Joseph Campbell, most of those who base their thinking on a scientific understanding of the world dump religion and mythology together into the dustbin of irrational belief. I think this is a mistake.

My goal in this blog is to develop arguments that reconcile the old world with the new, that map the mythology to the science, and that simultaneously celebrate the insights of the religions of the world while undermining the religions themselves.

Matter

“Matter” is the substance of anything that has mass and is observable by our senses. Matter is composed of protons, neutrons, electrons, molecules, and so on - it is the material of which the physical world is formed.

Materialism is the position that the universe is composed of matter in various forms, and everything that happens is the result of the interaction of various forms of matter.

In my last post I made a fairly simple and uncontroversial point – that evolution is really a process of some forms of matter persisting through time and others perishing.

In its simplest forms, matter persists just because it is durable, by which I mean to say that it’s hard enough and tough enough to not be ground away by interaction with the rest of the material world.

Some forms of matter combine and interact in ways that help them to persist, and these forms are “rewarded” with a longer existence. All matter is in motion, however, and everything is inevitably broken down by time and rebuilt in new formations.

What we call “life” is when some forms of matter learn to overcome this inevitable decay, and indeed to overcome time itself, by reproducing before breaking down.

In order to reproduce itself, the pattern or form of a material entity must be recorded, and its blueprint must be passed on so that its offspring can reproduce itself in turn. Science has learned that the record of life is written on a complex protein called DNA.

Let’s look at this another way. Death is inevitable, and the path to immortality is through DNA.

Persistence

One way to look at evolution is as the product of persistence through time. I don't mean persistence in the common sense of "keeping on trying", although there's plenty of that in evolution - I mean that some things persist through time, they last, and some things don't.
Back when the world was a chemical soup, certain of these chemicals dissolved, while others showed a tendency to stabilize and to persist as time went on. They bound with other chemicals to form even longer-lasting compounds, and over time, given the sorts of conditions that existed on earth in its earliest days, they formed the very complex molecular structures known as proteins.

This process is not speculative - it has been reproduced in the laboratory under conditions similar to conditions on Earth in its earliest days.

A fuller discussion of the transition from chemicals to complex molecules to proteins can be found at: http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e41/41.htm

But really evolution is about what persists and what doesn't. If something does not persist through time, we don't see it. It went. It's gone. It's extinct. If something does persist, it lasts, it's not gone, it carries on, it survives. The battle for survival is really a testing of what works to allow an entity to persist and not to dissolve or vanish.

So some things have come down to us from the dawn of the Earth because they have solved the riddle of persistence. They have "learned" how to survive. Even the smallest molecule can "learn" in the sense that it will do the things that permit it to persist, because if it doesn't, it ceases. This is not to argue that elements and atoms and molecules are intelligent and make decisions to survive. It just means that if they do not do the things that allow them to persist, they just don't persist and are gone.

It's important to understand this somewhat mindless process of chemical elements stewing about for millions of years, and eventually forming increasingly complex compounds that are different because they persist. The building blocks of life are elements like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. From these there evolved sugars, amino acids, nucleotides, fatty acids, phospholipids, vitamins and coenzymes. From these evolved proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and nucleic acids. Eventually, the process produced very complex proteins like RNA and DNA, that persist because they have "learned" how to reproduce themselves. They behave in ways that result in their persistence.

The evolution of proteins is discussed here: http://www.utdallas.edu/~cirillo/nats/day18.htm
Again, remember that "learning" here is just doing the "right" thing to survive, and surviving is more than just existing, it is also a set of behaviours that will result in the chemical compound or molecule or whatever, the entity that displays such behaviour, persisting through time.

So to this point I hope I've shown that even chemicals can "learn" in the sense that they will do the sorts of things that result in their persistence. They do this unconsciously, but if they don't do the "right" sorts of things to survive - they don't.

Please support this blog!

In an age where religious fundamentalism is holding back the human project and truth and science are under daily attack, making the case for logic, rationality, the scientific method, secularism, and humanism has never been more important.

If you support my work, please make a small monthly contribution to my Patreon account HERE.
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Evolution

It all starts with an understanding of the theory of evolution.

A recent issue of the National Geographic magazine asked the question, "Was Darwin Wrong?" Inside it gave the answer: "No."

The evidence is in and it is overwhelming that life evolved out of the ooze and continues to evolve.



If you click on the pigeon image above and scroll down the National Geographic page that appears, you'll see a list of links to sites that explain the theory of evolution.

Evolution

www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution

This interactive and entertaining website is a companion to the PBS series on evolution. Explore Darwin's life and the theory he proposed, find resources for teachers and students and a library of additional resources.

The Writing of Charles Darwin on the Web

pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin

This site claims to be the most extensive collection of Darwin's writings ever published and includes The Origin of Species and other books, volumes of letters, and articles published in periodicals. Although the site appears to come from the British Library, it is produced by a historian affiliated with Cambridge University.

Exploring Constitutional Conflicts: The Evolution Controversy

www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/evolution.htm

A fascinating look at both sides of the issue from a University of Missouri law professor. Includes links to websites supporting evolutionist theory and creationism.

AboutDarwin.com

www.aboutdarwin.com

More about Darwin himself than about evolution, this entertaining site offers great detail about Darwin's life and science in the late 1800s. It includes a long list of links.

Center for Science and Culture

www.discovery.org/csc

This website presents the non-Darwinist and non-creationist point of view known as intelligent design, which holds that the universe is the product of intelligent thinking.

Answers in Genesis

www.answersingenesis.org

A very large young-Earth creationist website. Although most material is in English, it includes pages in ten Asian and European languages.

The Talk.Origins Archive

www.talkorigins.orgThis website is built around essays and articles addressing the evolution/creationism controversy from a mainstream science viewpoint. Lots of links to websites on both sides of the issue.

National Center for Science Education

www.ncseweb.org

The NCSE is a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Robert Clark

www.nationalacademies.org

This organization provides a committee of experts in all areas of scientific and technological endeavor and gives independent, objective advice on critical international and national issues.

- Thom

Please support this blog!

In an age where religious fundamentalism is holding back the human project and truth and science are under daily attack, making the case for logic, rationality, the scientific method, secularism, and humanism has never been more important.

If you support my work, please make a small monthly contribution to my Patreon account HERE.
Thanks!