The story of evolution-3: Natural selection and the age of the Earth

It is clear that many people find it hard to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. One reason is of course because it completely undermines the need to believe in a creator, making god superfluous when it comes to explaining the nature and diversity of life, and thus people may have a negative emotional reaction that prevents them from seeing the power of the theory. As I have discussed earlier, people are quite able to develop quite sophisticated reasons to believe what they want and reject what they dislike.
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Film reviews: Network and Matewan

Here are two more reviews of old films that are worth seeing.

Network (1976)

This film is a brutal satire on the TV news business and, sad as it is to say and even harder to believe, the kinds of attitudes it satirized in 1976 has only gotten far worse in the subsequent three decades.

Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky uses the story of Howard Beale, a network news anchor who has a mental breakdown when he is told that he is being fired because of his low ratings, to show what really drives TV news. When Beale starts saying the truth on air about how things really work in the news world and the contempt that the people in TV have for the intelligence of their viewers, he starts getting audience attention and his ratings start going up again. He starts to pick up steam by voicing the frustration and sense of powerlessness that people feel.

The people in the entertainment division of the network see the chance to gain huge ratings by converting the news into a kind of entertainment, complete with segments involving soothsayers and the like, the whole thing showcased by Beale, now nicknamed ‘the mad prophet of the airwaves’, ranting on some topic, as can be seen in this clip, where he denounces the dangerous control that TV has on the minds of the public.

(Nowadays, nowhere is this film’s critique of how ‘news’ has become trivialized more apparent than in the ridiculous amount of coverage given to Paris Hilton. The best commentary on the media frenzy about the non-event that was her recent jailing was that given by Tommy Chong in an interview with Stephen Colbert.)
The film is immensely helped by the performances of two wonderful actors (William Holden and Peter Finch) in the twilight of their careers, aided by two other fine actors Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall who were at their peak. Finch won an Academy Award for his performance but died before he could accept it.

Although Chayevsky a tendency has sometimes to give his characters (especially the one played by Holden) set-piece speeches on life and love and death that give the film a somewhat stagey-look, his writing is so good that he gets away with it. There are some interesting side-plots involving urban guerrilla chic and radical black activists of that time. The film shows how, in the end, everyone is corrupted by the allure of fame and money that TV exposure brings, and are willing to be manipulated by the TV executives to achieve that goal.

Network is one of those films that I saw when it first came out and is still good after all these years. It is a film that has become a cultural touchstone, with the line “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” familiar to people who may not know from where it originated.

Matewan (1987)

Matewan is another fine film by independent filmmaker John Sayles. It is based on the true story of the struggle of coal miners in the West Virginia town of Matewan to obtain better condition by forming a union, and the fierce attempts by the mine owners and their thugs and goons to prevent it. Seeing films like this makes me appreciate so much more the efforts of the early efforts at unionization, fought by workers and their families at great cost and danger to themselves, which now give us the kinds of working conditions and safety that we take for granted.

Sayles’s first film was The Return of the Secausus Seven (1980), the story of a group of high school friends who reunite for a vacation ten years after graduation. It was shot on a low budget with an unknown and almost amateur cast. The much better-known The Big Chill (1983), which has almost the same story, looks like an unacknowledged remake of Sayles’s film.

Sayles has since gone on to make more commercially successful films (you can see a list of the films he as made here) and has been able to attract better known actors along the way, with some of them, such as Chris Cooper and David Strathairn, appearing repeatedly.

Sayles epitomizes the true independent. Many filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh who began as independents went the big budget Hollywood route after they achieved commercial success. Sayles refuses to do so. Even after he has shown himself to be a critical and commercially successful filmmaker, he refuses to seek funding from the big studios because they would require him to relinquish control over the final product. He says:

I want to direct films that no one else is going to make. I know if I don’t make them, I’m never going to see them. Of course, I hope some people will want to see my movies as well, but I won’t pander to the public. I won’t try to second guess what a Hollywood studio would like to see in a low-budget film, so that they will hire me the next time around. I know I will always do better work if I do projects in which I really believe. And if I never get to direct again, I will have made some movies I can feel proud of.

Sayles is very good at capturing the mood of a time and an event, and does not shrink away from showing the politics of race and class. For him, what a film says is more important than how it looks. As he said, “I’m interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I’m not interested enough to lie. . .[A movie] may not look the way we’d like it to look or sound the way we’d like it to sound or get seen by as many people as we’d like to have see it but at least it will say the stuff we want it to say.”

The story of evolution-2: The lack of evidence for perfect design

In the first post in this series, I showed with the example of a soap spray nozzle how natural design could come up with systems whose intricacy and complexity is such that it was superior to the efforts of intelligent human designers. But what about the argument that a god-like designer would be able to come up with an even better nozzle design? It is true that if we allow for the existence of such a designer, we could get the best possible design for a nozzle. The catch is that assuming that god is a perfect designer opens up a whole set of new problems, not the least of which is why if god is so powerful he would need any kind of nozzle at all and not simply create any kind of spray he/she needed.
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Film reviews: Hearts and Minds and Medium Cool

Film reviews are usually about films that have been newly released. Since I am almost never the first to see any film, my reviews deal with very old but good or interesting films that people may have not seen the first time around but can do so now, thanks to the easy availability tapes and DVDs. I see these reviews as pointing out films to those who may not know what they are missing.

Here are reviews of two old films that I saw recently that dealt with the time during the Vietnam war.
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The story of evolution-1: The power of natural selection

We are rapidly approaching 2009, a year that marks a major scientific milestone that is going to be commemorated worldwide. It is both the 150th anniversary of the publication of the landmark book On the Origin of Species that outlined the theory of evolution by natural selection, and the 200th anniversary of the birth of its author Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s theory represents arguably one of the most, if not the most, profound scientific advances of all time, ranking well up with those scientific revolutions associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. And yet it is widely misunderstood, or more appropriately, under-understood because most discussions of it remain on too high a level of generality, enabling critics to make statements about the theory that are not valid but yet seem plausible.

In order to create a better awareness of what the theory involves, today I will begin an occasional series of posts that looks at the details of the theory, including the mathematics that underlies it and which was developed later by people like J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, and R. A. Fisher.
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Guest post by Corbin Covault

My two posts on Taking offense and Taking offense (revisited) generated a lively discussion in the comments. One of the responses covered many of the issues raised by those who disagreed with some or all of my remarks and I felt that it should reach a wider readership so I asked the author to write it as a guest post. While it is a little longer than my own posts, I think readers will find that it provides an interesting perspective.

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Solving social problems the Confucian way

In writing my thoughts about Confucianism (here and here), one thing that struck me was the strong influence that its “Doctrine of the Mean” has, even down to this day. This is reflected in the “Chinese preference for negotiation, mediation, and the “middle man” as against resorting to rigid, impersonal statutes. Until recently, legal action has been regarded as something of a disgrace, a confession of human failure in the ability to work things out by compromises that typically involve family and associates. Figures are not available for China, but in the mid-1980s Japan in ratio to its population had one lawyer for every twenty-four in the United States.” (Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, p.191) [Read more…]

Taoism

The final religion that rounds out the major eastern religions is Taoism. Like Confucianism, it too is a rough contemporary of Buddhism. Its founder is named as Lao Tzu who is said to have been born around 604 BCE, which makes him the earliest of the three founders, but it is not clear if there ever really was such a person, or whether he was a later recreation to provide a single author for the book Tao Te Ching which translates as The Way and its Power and lays out the basic philosophy of Taoism. Huston Smith in his book The World’s Religions says that scholars do not think that the book was written by a single person although the coherence of the book suggests at least a strong single influence in shaping it. It is believed that the book took its final form around 250 BCE.
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The essence of Confucianism

In the previous post, I briefly described the political and social crisis that China faced in Confucius’ time due to the gradual breakdown in social order due to the erosion of a sense of tradition and custom and sense of propriety. Confucius was dissatisfied with the two opposite responses that were being suggested to deal with the problem. The Realists approach was to use force to create order, exploiting the ability of the ruler to deal out rewards and punishments. The Mohists said that you had to teach people to love all equally. Confucius felt that to ignore the special affection that one felt for one’s own family was unrealistic. In this he was prescient in that modern evolutionary theory argues that natural selection does indeed result in one having special feelings to those to whom one is related, with the feelings getting stronger the closer the people are related.
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Confucianism

Confucianism is an interesting religion that is little known or understood outside the countries where it is practiced. It is often portrayed merely as a bunch of fortune cookie type sayings, leading to jokes of the form “Confucius say. . .”

Although Confucius did say many things that can be quoted as aphorisms, the real religion is far more deep and interesting. (The source for my information is primarily the book The World’s Religions by Huston Smith (p. 154-195). This is an excellent book for anyone seeking to understand the essences of religions. The author takes a non-judgmental, non-comparative approach to each one, trying to simply summarize its basic principles and practices.)

Confucius was born around 551 BCE and lived to the age of seventy three, making him a contemporary of the Buddha. Like the Buddha, he too did not claim to be anyone special or have special powers, and just saw himself as a teacher. The Buddha’s teachings were not primarily social but instead focused inwards, on internal reflection and on what it takes for an individual to shed himself or herself from worldly entanglements and achieve enlightenment. Confucius’s teachings, on the other hand, were explicitly social and this-worldly, trying to teach people how to live in order to create a better society.

Whereas the Buddha turned away from worldly things and adopted the life of a monk and a mendicant, teaching his disciples his philosophy, Confucius earned his living as a tutor almost all his life, teaching his students “history, poetry, government, propriety, mathematics, music, divination, and sports.” Like Socrates, he was a kind of one-man university and taught in the Socratic style, with probing questions and dialogue rather than lecture, and he seemed to have been very modest, never claiming to be better than his students, although his reputation as a great teacher was huge.

To understand what Confucius was trying to achieve, we need to understand his times. Up to the eighth century BCE, China under the Chou Dynasty had been a more or less orderly society with a strong sense of custom and tradition and propriety that together kept the society cohesive and functioning. But this began to disintegrate, with self-interest beginning to predominate over group-interest and by the time Confucius came along, lawlessness had become rampant.

One response to this state of affairs was the Realist school which argued that what ‘people understand best is force.’ They believed that the ruler must maintain an “effective militia that stands ready to bat people back when they transgress. There must be laws that state clearly what is and is not permitted and penalties for violation must be such that no one will dare incur them. In short, the Realists’ answer to the problem of social order was laws with teeth in them. . Those who did what the state commanded were to be rewarded; those who did not were to be punished. . .[T]he laws had to be long and detailed. . .every contingency must be provided for in detail. . .Not only must the requirements of law be spelled out; penalties for infractions should likewise be clearly specified. And they should be heavy.” (p. 164)

The Realists, in short, were the Bush/Cheneys of that time. And like with the Bush-Cheney doctrine, they initially achieved some success in controlling society but created a mess thereafter. The Ch’in dynasty (221-206 BCE) fashioned its policy on Realist lines and succeeded in uniting China for the first time (and giving it its current name) but it collapsed in less that one generation.

Directly opposed to this was the philosophy developed by Mo Tzu, known as Mohism, which argued that the solution to China’s social problems was not force but universal love, where one should (he said) “feel toward all people under heaven exactly as one feels towards one’s own people, and regard other states exactly as one regards one’s own state.”

Confucius rejected both these extremes as unlikely to succeed in achieving the desired goal of social cohesion. He rejected the Realists use of force as clumsy and external. Smith summarizes Confucius’ critique of the Realists: “Force regulated by law can set limits to peoples’ dealings, but it is too crude to inspire their day-to-day, face-to-face exchanges. With regard to the family, for example, it can stipulate conditions of marriage and divorce, but it cannot generate love and companionship. This holds generally. Governments need what they cannot themselves provide; meaning and motivation.” (p. 167)

As for the Mohist philosophy, Confucius rejected it as utopian and unrealistic. He acknowledged that love has an important, even essential role to play in maintaining harmonious social relations but it is effective only if it is supported by the appropriate social structures and a collective ethos.

Confucius thus thought that the Realists were mistaken in their belief “that governments could establish peace and harmony through the law and force that are their domain” and that the Mohists were also mistaken because they “went to the opposite extreme; they assumed that personal commitment could do the job.”

Next: How Confucius set about creating a middle path.

POST SCRIPT: The Politics of Stem Cell Research

(Thanks to MachinesLikeUS for the link.)