Appendix to “Creation vs Evolution”

This post is an appendix to the previous “Evolution vs Creation” debate post, which takes a step back from the original post. Based on the comments received, perhaps the original post had poor language usage and lost its intended wider meaning, and sadly may have offended both researchers in the field of biology and also believers in literal creationism. To better “position” myself on this issue, here is the original intent of the post:

My post is primarily a philosophical one–not one that’s focused on biology or even statistical theory, although I do mention them quite alot in the argument. I did not claim to be a 7 day creationist, nor an evolutionist. I also do not claim to know any more about biological theories than a high school graduate who took an AP course. That being said, this is the main point of my post:

I don’t believe that all creationists are anti-intellectual. Sure, many creationists we know of will accept the bible and the literal use of the word “day” with absolute faith, and as a result there is no room for discussion about scientific evidence that suggests the contrary (you can’t discuss theories about the big bang or the origins of the universe, which I find absolutely fascinating): hence a lack of intellectual discussion due to failure to find common ground. However, two creationists may be able to engage in a mutually interesting, though non-scientific, discussion about the Garden of Eden and the creation account in the bible. They may also be arguing about interpretation. This is all an intellectual exercise, no less than scientists arguing about the theories of evolution. Just because the majority believe in one thing doesn’t make the minority less intellectual. They simply use different axioms.

More importantly however, note the key words that I used in the previous paragraph: “evidence” and “suggests”. The scientific paradigm is one that rests on the burden of “proof”. However, unless you are in a purely mathematical field (i.e. playing with abstract ideas), scientific “proof” rests on inductive axioms that can never really be “proven”. It can only be supported by statistical evidence and models constructed based on such statistics, and much of it rests on the assumption that what was observed in the past still holds today. At least, this is how it’s done in the engineering discipline, in theory and in practice. You can only engage in an intellectual discussion if both of you believe in the theories/models/techniques behind it. And personally, I wouldn’t be employing models at work if I did not believe in them (with high probability  ). As I said before, I am not a biologist and am therefore unfamiliar with how much evidence exists to support different evolutionary statements about the origins of different species that exist today or in the past. That analysis is up to the experts in the community. However, my claim is that the scientific philosophy rests on these fundamental assumptions about observability and regularity.

Along those lines however, I am also stating that “miracles” by definition cannot be scientifically proven (except with a set of probability zero or near zero) because they are things that are observed perhaps only once in a lifetime, if at all. If miracles could be reproduced in practice, they would cease to be miracles and at best would be scientific “phenomenons” (i.e. things that can be made to occur, but the cause is not well understood). 7-day creationism (if true), Noah’s ark (if true), Jesus’s resurrection from the dead (if true), would fall under the category of “miracles”. They must be accepted by faith because they are inherently non-reproducible.

What is my conclusion? Basically, open-mindedness. I am not asserting that you have to doubt what you currently believe, whether by religious faith or by scientific faith. I am not advocating some type of relativism. However, it would probably benefit you to put on two different thinking caps when discussing issues of religion versus issues of science, because they rest on two fundamentally different axioms that seem to be contradictory, but at their core are not. A scientist should be able to resolve the idea of “miracles” , since not everything is reproducible (at the moment at least, e.g. the Planck epoch of the Big Bang). Likewise, I do not see a reason for a Christian to take offense when entertaining ideas based on observation and statistics, including evolution. After all, you probably use similar assumptions all the time in your card games or dice games. All else being equal, if God exists, so do unreproducible miracles. If He does not, or He simply chooses not to intervene with the universe that He created, then our best guesses can only be constructed by what is more or less, regularly observed.

Penalty and morality

At the risk of possibly contradicting a number of my prior posts, and also overanalyzing something silly, here’s something that recently crept up in my mind when reading random blogs. I came across someone’s entry about how she recently found out that she was almost aborted as a baby, but she felt indifferent and maintained her stance as being pro-choice. Then there were a ton of comments from random people saying that having an abortion and using a condom is no different, or people accusing her of being indifferent, etc.

So here’s when the thought occured: why is it that people seem to always draw a binary (black or white) line between when it is right to terminate a potential life, and when it is wrong? As I see it, pro-lifers are very rigid with regard to a “moral line” and believe that upon conception, a new life is born. Hence, knowingly removing this life, whether by a morning after pill or by late term abortion, is equivalent to murder. However, some pro-choicers similarly draw a rigid “lawful” line, who believe that abortion at any stage should be tolerated, prior to childbirth. And then we have people in between, the fuzzies: For example, 3rd trimester abortions are wrong, but stem cell research and early stage abortions are ok. Or abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or health hazard should be legal. Or whatever else is out there.

Regardless, this is a very complicated issue, but at the risk of sounding offensive, here are a few things that I’ve been hearing underneath the arguments:

Pro-choice on the surface:
-Nobody’s pro-abortion, but a women should be given the right to make decisions regarding her body and her future, especially in poor economic situations. It’s not something to be taken lightly, but the option should be open.

The hidden assumption:
-A fetus is most likely unaware of its own existence, and thus there is nothing logically different from aborting a fetus (at any stage, morning after or late-stage), versus using a condom. Therefore, what is most important is the impact it has on the lives of cognizant beings, primarily the mother.
-Marginally pro-choice people who also believe in the “sanctity of life” simply believe that the mother’s well-being trumps the life card in most cases, after factoring in subsequent utility losses from childbirth due to anticipated parental neglect or abuse, or financial hardships.

Criticism:
-In a poorer country where safe abortion techniques do not exist, is killing a baby 1 minute after childbirth (due to severe perceived hardships) any different from abortion? A related question is whether the “morality” of abortion and “baby-killing” is contingent upon the technological advances of that community. If so, what is the “guiding principle” behind moral laws?
-Why not reform foster care and adoption agencies instead?

Pro-life on the surface:
Upon conception, the fetus is a life with greater value than any type of pain in and after child-rearing and should therefore be protected.

The hidden assumption:
-There is some intrinsic value placed on human life, given by some greater power or principle such as a moral God. Moreover, this intrinsic value begins at the point of conception.

Criticism:
-Those who don’t believe in the same “God-given right to life” at conception are likely not to reason in a similar manner, and thus convincing the agnostic, and even some of the religious, community in such a manner is meaningless.
-Most arguments that are aimed at making people realize the “faultiness” of the alternative rely on slippery-slope arguments, ironically, similar to the “criticism” I described above for pro-choice (baby-killing).

Solution?

This type of “drawing-the-line” problem occurs not only in abortion, but occurs on many different moral issues as well. Why is this the case?

Well, let’s consider a type of  “penalty function” for abortion, a continuous, monotonically increasing function over fetal age, where using a condom and avoiding conception is perfectly moral, and killing a baby after it is born is perfectly immoral (equivalent to a full-scale murder). This reflects a type of “grey scale” morality, where you can be only 40% wrong, or 60% wrong, with respect to abortion.

Somewhere along the line, every person sets a threshold, where above that threshold, the value of morality is quantized to “right”, and below the threshold, as “wrong”, i.e. you are either 0% wrong and 100% wrong. I’m not saying that there aren’t people who are go-in-betweens, who might conceptualize multiple levels of “wrongness” for key stages of development (as they have been so  defined by our society), but why is a fluid mechanism design not well accepted in the community? Well, viewing morality as a semi-fluid model is too similar to paying taxes using “tax brackets”. It counts the effect, not the reason, as the basis for moral law.

Fluidity obscures morality simply because morality transcends quantitative analysis. It is at its very heart qualitative: a principle of matters, a spirit of the law, a condition of the heart. It is not so much quantitative, although the effects of immorality can be measured quantitatively. Had there been two Hitlers, one who came into power in Germany, and another who had power only to kill 10 innocent people, would this be a proper metric for evaluating the “badness” of Hitler? Sure the effects of the first Hitler was far more devastating, but at the heart of the matter the two men were the same. One just had a power amplifier attached to him.

Tune in next time as I try to quantify other unquantifiable axioms.

The ladder paradox

My friend and I, neither of whom are physicists, got into a discussion about special relativity recently. Essentially, special relativity leads to many paradoxes that result from time dilation, Lorentz contraction, etc.

The famous example is that of a garage that is 9 feet long, a ladder that is 10 feet long when “stationary” (but remember, it is only “stationary” relative to some frame of reference), and a mover that is holding the ladder and moving at a relativistic speed. If you are in anyway familiar with relativity, Lorentz contraction says that if an object is moving at a speed on the order of the speed of light (relative to your frame of reference), it will begin to look shorter to you. So let’s say that this ladder is moving at a speed of 3/5*c relative to the observer, such that its length shrinks to 8 feet. The garage has doors located in the front and back that are initially open, but when the ladder enters the garage, the doors immediately close. Then they open before the ladder exits the garage. From the observer’s point of view, there is no contradiction, because the ladder 8 feet long can fit within the garage.

But what if you were viewing it from the mover’s point of view? In his world, the garage is moving at 3/5*c, so its length shrinks to 7.2 feet. However, the ladder is 10 feet long! Can he actually fit inside the garage then? Well, thanks to the relativity of simultaneity, there is no contradiction based on what he sees moving at such high speeds. The mover will actually see the front door open, then the back door open. After he slides through, the front door closes, and then the back door closes. Pretty weird.

Now my friend went ahead and proposed another example, to which I might have an answer but will need to verify. Suppose that from the observer’s point of view, the back door is closed. The front garage door open, and the ladder goes in. Then the doors close, and the mover immediately stops moving after the doors close. What will happen inside the garage when the ladder suddenly expands?

I will leave this to the reader as an exercise.

LOLPaper

Shai Avidan of Merl (now hired by Adobe) published a really cool seamless (and non-uniform) image resizing algorithm at SIGGRAPH this year. The visual effects of this algorithm are amazing to watch!

The end of the video also inadvertently teaches you how to cleanly remove your (not-so) significant other seamlessly from all of your digital photos. =O

How to score points with novelty

HAHAHAHA! Only academics would truly appreciate this strip…