Interesting theory, but it seems to rely on a group selection argument. Like I said above, the lek paradox concerns species that do not live in groups (except for the group sex), so I'm afraid your argument doesn't cut it.

Actually, the extrapolations (and generalization) are mine alone, just contemplating the variety of recent studies documenting more genetic diversity in species than sexual selection can account for. The ScienceDaily release is about human mate choices - how the ugly guys get girls as often as the Prince Charmings, thereby maintaining a "healthy" genetic diversity that sexual selection can't account for.

Sort of fits with the 'New Eugenics' idea of a Barbie-Ken world of designer humans, which by all rights would be disastrous for humanity because it would diminish that "healthy" genetic diversity. If it ever became the popular means of procreation, that is. Almost as dumb as launching a nuclear war because some egghead in a lab coat swears it'll cure global warming. I swear sometimes I think scientists are a privileged class of certifiable idiots run amok.

I once wondered whether human brain evolution would speed up dramatically if Cesarian section ever became the predominant method of birth. Given that human brains are about as big as they can be right now without killing Mom (an evolutionary dead end if there ever was one). Well, C-sections are now the predominant method of hospital births in this country after steadily rising over the last 4 decades, in a country where most births occur in hospitals.

This is more for the convenience of the doctors than the health of mothers or babies, but it's real. Humans don't seem to be getting any smarter.

Yet as I pointed out above per a ScienceDaily release this week, actual biological diversity is far greater than Darwinian sexual selection can account for. There have been several recent studies demonstrating that even in species of birds who mate for life, there's quite a bit of sexual promiscuity going on. Mate partnerships apparently being more about sharing of parental and protection duties than about "good genes."

Thanks for the tip - I hadn't seen that paper yet. I had to smile when I read in the ScienceDaily release that the paper appeared in a journal published by the same company that publishes Nature. As if that reflects well on the journal. In fact the journal Heredity has fairly low impact. But Petrie has a very good reputation and has published stuff on her peacocks in top journals such as Nature.

You're right that mate choice is about more than just "good genes". Good genes are just in vogue at the moment. It makes more sense to go for a mate that can provide direct benefits such as plenty of food and protection, rather than for a mate that can transmit his/her good genes to your offspring. On the other hand, mates with good genes might be better at acquiring the good stuff, so the two desirable properties need not be in conflict.

But keep in mind that there are plenty of species where female and male do not have any bond after copulation. That's what the expression "lek paradox" refers to. On a "lek" groups of males display, and females visit the leks to mate. Often it's a very small proportion of the lekking males that get laid so to speak. Most females seem to prefer mating with the same male. It's hard to understand why females would choose such males if not for their good genes. The paradox is that genetic diversity in such good genes quickly disappears precisely because the females' consistency in their preference. At least, that's what very simple mathematical models of the process suggest. Apparently, Petrie has come up with a model that shows how this loss of diversity is prevented. I haven't read the paper, so I can't comment on the details.

But you're wrong in implying that sexual selection is considered by biologists to be the major driving force of biological diversity. There are many more factors - environmental variation and the need to adapt to a specific environment being chief among them.

So it could be that while the showiest peacock and the biggest, baddest gorilla get a lot of sex, they're fathering way fewer offspring than their status suggests.

The data refute your suggestion.

Think of it this way"¦ If threatening marauders are busy going after the showiest, biggest, baddest - but slowest and most physically handicapped by his showiness - alpha in the area, the better disguised women and children and lesser males can disappear into the underbrush or fly away during the melee and more of the troop (or flock) will survive. That really muscle-bound Arnold guy just might be the group's generational sacrificial scapegoat, not the "best genes" in the species.

Interesting theory, but it seems to rely on a group selection argument. Like I said above, the lek paradox concerns species that do not live in groups (except for the group sex), so I'm afraid your argument doesn't cut it.

In my opinion, there are 3 major questions that any kind of naturalism or materialism cannot resolve:
1. What is the cause of the universe?
2. What is the cause of life?
3. What is the cause of mind and consciousness?

At least "˜classical atheism' as espoused by Bertrand Russell and others seemed to be somewhat reasonable. One could attribute aseity or "˜self-existence' to space-time, matter-energy and the universe as a whole. If the universe was infinite and eternal it could be then argued that it is the cause of all finite and contingent being; or perhaps more accurately all that has ever existed is an eternal regress of natural causes. It appears; however, that the "˜Big Bang' has caused something of a metaphysical bottleneck that limits this kind of natural causal nexus. Whatever caused the universe, it now appears, must, at least, in some sense transcend the universe both spatially and temporally. An infinite regress is no longer an easy, simple, or adequate explanation. It can no longer be argued that matter and energy eternal. What caused or existed before the universe is, at least for the present, appears to be empirically an open question.

The simpler and, in my view, better explanation is that a mind or intelligence is the self-existing (or ontologically self-contained) thing that transcends the universe. It exists because it has always existed. It's not much more complicated than that. I think Billy Ockham would have been pleased.

In many species males posses extravagant ornaments to attract females, but which at the same time endanger their lives. How this kind of ineffiency can evolve is fairly well understood. Indeed, Darwin himself introduced the notion of sexual selection.

Yet as I pointed out above per a ScienceDaily release this week, actual biological diversity is far greater than Darwinian sexual selection can account for. There have been several recent studies demonstrating that even in species of birds who mate for life, there's quite a bit of sexual promiscuity going on. Mate partnerships apparently being more about sharing of parental and protection duties than about "good genes."

In fact, according to the researchers themselves, the Darwinian expectation that comes from following the sexual selection hypothesis to its logical conclusion actually leads to ever decreasing diversity, "…to the point where sexual selection could no longer take place."

Instead, what we see is way more genetic diversity than "expected" from sexual selection, and none of the speciation by drift that diversity supposedly leads to. Why, it's starting to look like diversity is an evolutionary stabilization mechanism instead of a speciation mechanism!

So it could be that while the showiest peacock and the biggest, baddest gorilla get a lot of sex, they're fathering way fewer offspring than their status suggests. Maybe they're kept sexually happy because they're the ones who get killed the quickest, or because they're the ones the troop relies upon for physical protection.

Think of it this way… If threatening marauders are busy going after the showiest, biggest, baddest - but slowest and most physically handicapped by his showiness - alpha in the area, the better disguised women and children and lesser males can disappear into the underbrush or fly away during the melee and more of the troop (or flock) will survive. That really muscle-bound Arnold guy just might be the group's generational sacrificial scapegoat, not the "best genes" in the species.

See how that works? Just-so stories CAN be fun! §;o)

It rests on a modal intuition. The modal intuition is unfounded in the absence of a coherent science of an alternative and superior world.

Let me try and flesh this out a bit more.

Suppose drug 1 treats pain type A. Suppose drug 2 treats pain type B. John has both A and B.

Now suppose the interaction of drugs 1 and 2 creates pain type C.

Hence making drugs 1 and 2 natural products of John's body is problematic for a creator.

Drugs work because they have certain physical properties which have a causal impact on the physical properties of certain kinds of living organisms. They only have this impact because of the actual laws of nature which specify the full range of possible causal interactions of all kinds of physical properties.

To get different physical properties and/or different causal interactions between physical properties, one needs to have different laws governing physical nature. But instantiating any law necessitates its own consequences and rules out contradictory consequences. For example, the law of gravity necessitates unsecured mountaineers falling off a mountain in certain circumstances and rules out their being able float in mid-air. But the law of gravity also prevents mountaineers from floating off into airless space.

A complex world will require a complex nature. And as the simple painful John and mountaineer examples above suggest, it is not at all easy, once one starts to think about it in earnest, how to design natural laws and natural property interactions in a logically coherent way while avoiding the possibility of great harm to finite physical living beings.

I doubt an omnipotent being could make cyanide nutritious for babies, given the properties of cyanide and babies. So that's one limitation.

It's important to be really clear as to what's being said here.

What's being said is that, for any X, and for any Y, if X has the properties that cyanide has and Y has the properties that human babies have, then there is no possible world W in which X is nutritious for Y.

What about gold bars being nutritous for, snakes?

The problem is evident, and comprehensive,

If an omnipotent being can only do what is logically possible, then it is no lessening of its omnipotence that it can't actualize Ws like these.

Now let's consider brains. Suppose the only way for a physical being to be conscious and intelligent is to have a brain. That is, for any X, there is no possible world W in which X is a conscious physical being and X has no brain.

Then, an omnipotent being could not actualize W. And it's worth noting that many materialist philosophers accept the thesis that it's impossible to be a brainless conscious physical thing. In fact I'd say this the majority, though far from universal, view among contemporary philosophers of mind.

Now, what kind of physical universe might be necessary for the existence of brains?

This requires rational thinking about physical things, which is what we call science. Science tells us that not just any kind of universe is compatible with the existence of brains. As noted in previous posts of mine, the cosmological constant has to be very finely tuned. Ditto the phase space of the initial conditions at the Big Bang. And I presume many other things have to be fine-tuned too, otherwise your universe will turn out brainless (given the defining and essential physical properties of brains).

The law of energy conservation logically implies that physical laws do not change over time. In a world where the conservation law did not hold, the physical laws of that world might well change over time. It is a very serious question as to whether stable brain-based rationality would even be possible in such a world.

The problem of natural pain and harm is philosophically unresolvable because we don't have the requisite knowledge of what is, and what isn't, logically (or metaphysically) possible when it comes to mental states in relation to physical entities. In other words the problem of natural harm, is really an aspect of the general mind-body problem. Philosophers like McGinn maintain that it's intrinsically beyond our capacity to solve.

My intuition also says that it might well be impossible for any physical things to be conscious unless they're endowed with brains like those of humans or animals, and it might well be impossible for such brains to exist unless the laws of nature are as they are in our world.

Electrons can't understand quantum mechanics, and pieces of glass can't be in love because they don't have brains. I think that's plausibly a necessary truth. And if so, it's possibly because it's also a necessary truth that all brainless matter can't, and only living brain matter can, possess mental states. And it's possible that living brain matter cannot exist unless the physical laws of our universe obtain.

If non-brain matter can be conscious, then this is a) something that no-one has ever shown, and b) far from obvious.

Similarly, if living brain matter can exist with different physical laws in place, then this is a) something that no-one has ever shown, and b) far from obvious.

Given that we really don't know what is the case about this modal landscape, appeals to omnipotence by the Argument from Evil proponent are beside the point.

What is always left conveniently unspecified in the better worlds imagined by atheists to show that God is not wholly good, is precisely how, in the case one recommends, say, creating beings who are designed in such a way that they cannot experience severe pain, the imagined alternative nature design actually works to ensure the preferred outcome. It is simply assumed that it can work, somehow. But that is a key issue—the availability to the creator of a genuinely possible and preferable alternative. This availability cannot simply be imagined or assumed.

Materialist philosophers of mind think that each type of animal conscious state is a necessary concomitant of the relevant animal brain states. They think, in short, that it's logically impossible to have one without the other. Hence, on their view, necessarily (that is, in every possible world in which it exists), a rat-brained creature, say, caught in a rat-trap will experience, well, whatever it's like to be a rat caught in a rat-trap.

If this materialist thesis is true and generalizes to cover the whole animal kingdom (including humans), it suggests that it might well be impossible both to have animals exist and to ensure the avoidance of significant animal suffering.

We simply don't know what is, and what isn't, logically (or metaphysically) possible when it comes to mental states in relation to physical entities.

In thinking about these matters, I often find it useful to assume that there is no God and to ask an atheist scientist why nature is like this and not like that. This process of scientific question-and-answer can include asking what would have had to be true about nature for it have produced systematically different, counterfactual phenomena. As a scientist, s/he seems to have good answers at every step of the way. The world is, in other words, intelligible to scientific reason, and hence to reason as such if we regard scientific reason as truly or paradigmatically rational.

What scientific proponents of the Multiverse theory show us is that one can scientifically conceive of very few natural law sets that are intelligibly consistent with the existence of complex physical life.

Matter and its energetic interactions must be have well defined properties if they are to be meaningful, coherent notions. Likewise living matter and its properties.

What all known science tells us is that there just isn't a lot of conceivable room for maneuver here that would be intelligible to reason.

But theism traditionally tells us that human reason is a reflection of or participates in divine reason. So this lack of intelligible alternatives may be telling us something about a lack of intelligible alternatives even for a supremely rational mind.

What we don't know is if higher levels of animal consciousness could be systematically shielded from undergoing higher level pain states without adverse consequences. The very existence of the latter pain states suggests their adaptiveness, which in turn suggests their biological utility. Systematically less pain for a given species might result in that species engaging in systematically riskier behaviors. Deer might stay put and be destroyed by forest fires because they're not experiencing much pain from nearby flames.

If a group of animal-loving scientists was able to inoculate a species systematically against agonizing pain, it would not surprise me to find that species on the road to extinction. Indeed, many species may have become extinct in the past in part because their pain response was insufficiently strong.

So imagining a systematically different biology of pain may fall victim to the law of unintended consequences.

Certainly, I'm glad I'm not charged with the task of designing a world teeming with a rich variety of complex and conscious life forms.

I don't know if the imaginary better world designs deployed by atheists propounding the argumeent from evil make any logically consistent, scientific sense or how it could possibly work. I don't know what the mechanisms are supposed to be. If, upon having, let's say, a non -predatory mechanism for nutrition of living material beings fully specified, I'd perhaps be in a position to say whether it's really logically possible or not, and hence whether it's something God could instantiate. Given a specific definition of the full properties of living matter, certain things will be logically impossible for living matter with those properties.

But what we know about actual living matter reveals it to have extremely complex properties. And for all I know, this complexity may be essential to living matter. I certainly don't know how to make different or better DNA. I've no idea what the possibilities are. But once you start assigning definite properties F, G, H… etc to a thing, then logic rules out it having incompatible properties X, Y, Z,…etc.

Doing this specification for a whole alterntive universe of properties while maintainng consistency and generating rich forms of conscious life is no simple matter.

So when an atheist says,

"You say God is omniscient and omnipotent. If he is so omniscient and omnipotent, then he should know how to create have better world"

I invite them to publish their superior thoughts on how the world should have been made in a refereed scientific journal.

But forgive me for not just taking their word for it that their thoughts really will prove to be superior when subjected to serious scientific scrutiny.

Living matter has certain essential properties. You can either demonstrate that an alternative form of conscious living matter, with different properties, is truly viable and superior, all things considered; or you can continue churning out comic book anti-theism.

Right. And if they don't have to they won't. And the only evidence we have for all of this is that we gaze about in nature and see some creatures that did and some that didn't. In other words there isn't any explanation at all, only an observation that things happened to turn out the way they did for some unknown historical reason because, hey, if we observe high reproductivity rates then the niche must have required it, if we don't observe high reproductivity rates then the niche must not have required it. I'm not saying this is your position, as I don't believe you've said it is. I'm just singularly unimpressed with this circular Darwinian claptrap.

But sometimes the Darwinian claptrap is common sense, to which they gloss an explanation (prediction) after the fact. In this case, it does make sense to me that a niche will be exploited. Life always seems to want to thrive wherever it can.

Stunney,

I agree.

Well darn, we agree then.

But then I wake up from my reverie and see that this is just American Protestant evangelical claptrap which, generally speaking, beats out all competition in the claptrap sweepstakes.

Ha, well, I was raised up in the Russian church, with occasional forays over to the Greeks.

And, pray tell, how many bacteria are there? Does the reproductive strategy work? Sure. But is it slow, painful and inefficient? Yes again. If we are being objective, surely the form and timeframe involved in human reproduction actually limits the amount of reproduction. Whether this is good or bad can be argued, but the idea that humans have come about because of greater reproductive success (which is what Darwinism demands be true) is ludicrous.

Funny that you consider the slowness, painfulness and inefficieny as evidence against darwinism rather than evidence against design.

You seem to imply that according to darwinism reproductive success is maximized in a global sense. This is a strawman. According to darwinism organisms only need to outcompete their direct competitors. In other words, (very) local maximization. This may lead to very ineffcient reproductive tactics. And not just on the part of the females. In many species males posses extravagant ornaments to attract females, but which at the same time endanger their lives. How this kind of ineffiency can evolve is fairly well understood. Indeed, Darwin himself introduced the notion of sexual selection.

Why did you bring up other other universes?

Because I confused your post with someone else's in the editing process. My apologies.

I do not particularly recognize the idea of other universes. If they are in any way connected to ours, it is one universe, and if they are not connected in any way, they don't exist for us.

I agree.

Utterly unconnected universes shouldn't be possibe because there can be only one cause to existence, and if there is one source then we cannot speak of more than one universe.

Billy Ockham certainly would counsel that we adopt theories with the minimum number of originating causes, which is one, and divine, in Billy's opinion.

It may be that there are bubble 'universes' but in that case we need a new name for those bubbles, as the word 'universe' has a particular meaning, what with the prefix 'uni' which means 'one.'

Yeah, there's a lot of deliberately obfuscating ontological extravagance by the 'brights' about this. Cosmic Landscape my jacksie.

Perhaps Fermi's conclusions are premature. There is someone out there who thinks advanced civilizations are using quasars to communicate to us, and that we haven't figured it out yet. So far as I understand, Seti has only perused a small portion of the sky. There could be worlds where people are not yet technologically advanced enough to pick up on it, although I certainly think there should be people far in advance of us as well.

Maybe. Who knows? Our lifetimes are so short by comic, sorry, cosmic standards that we'll probably both be dead before Fermi's Paradox is resolved.

The alien idea doesn't come from its being logically possible, but rather some people think there is quite a lot of evidence right here on earth that there have been alien visits and/or that human civiliization goes back a good deal further than has been supposed, that the earth experienced a very big cataclysm which erased all but remnants of their knowledge.

Many years ago I read a couple of books about this idea.

The panspermia and seeding ideas are a bit different from that.

Yes.

As to rare earth, it is certainly an interesting line of inquiry, but I think we really dont' know enough yet. Most likely it is largely true, but I think and hope not to the extent that life is actually rare in the universe. There are a lot of ideas in science which are provisional and unproved or incomplete. I happen to think Big Bang is one. I think we are going to learn and discard plenty. I see it all the time. Some new little discovery comes along, and suddenly it's "Oh, well, we thought ABC, but now we have this new fact, and it is DEF, or at least we aren't too sure any more about ABC."

I often feel it's best just to conclude that it's all a load of claptrap and that one should just let Jeeeeeeeeeeesus be the Lord of one's heart.

But then I wake up from my reverie and see that this is just American Protestant evangelical claptrap which, generally speaking, beats out all competition in the claptrap sweepstakes.

One thing the critique said which puzzled me was that supernovae become more rare as the universe ages. I thought supernovae were caused by aging stars.

Well, here's a wild and completely uninformed speculation on my part: as the universe ages, there are fewer stars that have not been supernova-ed already.