What I'm reading in July

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

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Fiction

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. Just started (finally).

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Continued from June. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.

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Non-fiction

Complicit by Max Bazerman

I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor" and outlines Bazerman's approach, which is case-based and more "practical" than what philosophers do. I should have known that Aquinas was an original source of instruction on complicity, but I didn't.

Design without a designer: explaining and answering some questions

I've been writing and thinking about design in biology since I started Quintessence of Dust. I want to write and think about it a lot more, so in my last post I introduced my view of the concept and pointed ahead to this post, which consists of edited excerpts from some conversations at a discussion forum at the Peaceful Science site. You will find links to those conversations in the previous post. I have removed people's names and lightly edited for clarity. Other people’s words are indented; the rest are mine.

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I would like to understand better how you think about it because it seems quite different from the way I normally think about it. I would really like learn more about how you see it and expand my understanding of "design".

This is a potentially big interesting deep conversation that is worthy of a dedicated thread with some clear goals. Someday I’ll propose that, since I believe that we can improve the quality and tone of conversations about biological design by getting at least some unbelievers to agree that design in biology is an interesting and worthy question that need not and should not have inherent religious overtones.

I guess my first question for you as you compare your conception of 'design' to mine is this: do you think design is something that is done (by a designer) or do you think it is something that exists and can be detected by humans? Obviously both can be true, but as long as a person believes that 'design' necessitates a 'designer', then they won’t see design the way I do. Because my view is that design exists whether or not it is linked to a designer. To me, it is axiomatic that a mindless process can generate design, not only because we have seen it happen but because there is no good argument to the contrary. It is instructive, IMO, that the "argument" offered to the contrary is something like "all of our examples of design can be traced back to a mind." This is not even an argument.

But what do we mean by 'design'? Here I think we can look at some of the definitions and conceptions offered by the ID movement. I think Behe’s "purposeful arrangement of parts" is a nice start, because it captures something that we all detect when we consider (for example) a molecular machine. Was a bacterial flagellum designed by a designer? I don’t know. Does a bacterial flagellum evince design? To me, the answer is obviously yes.

Design without a designer: the "British tendency" and introduction

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years was The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution by J. Arvid Ågren. The author explains the gene's-eye view both scientifically and historically, and I hope to write about the book sometime soon. But for now there's one point he makes that I found fascinating. Citing Kim Sterelny (an Australian philosopher of science who has written on personalities in evolutionary biology, esp. Gould vs. Dawkins), he identifies two major emphases (Sterelny calls them "tendencies") in evolutionary biology: the American interest in diversity and the British interest in design. These are pretty crude distinctions, at least because examplars of the "British tendency" include Americans like Dan Dennett. But the point is that one of two major streams of thought in evolutionary science is the challenge Paley made famous and that inspired Darwin—the one that inspired The Blind Watchmaker and its author. It's the challenge of explaining design in the biological world, and the most notable characters in that story are Brits from three very different generations.

Schematic representations of the type IV filament superfamily of nanomachines, from Figure 1 of Denise et al. 2019

I'm not British (I'm just a wannabe) but I'm drawn to that question too. My interest is probably partly due to my time served as a Christian believer, since the Christian god is a common unworthy beneficiary of the curiosity and wonder that nature inspires in humans. I have always objected to the whole construction: we see cool and extraordinary stuff in nature, we don't seem to have an explanation, so we turn to a god as an "answer." Nothing about those stories appealed to me, not when I was a committed believer and not now that I am an emancipated apostate. One problem, that I've mentioned before, is that I am apparently of the British tendency: I see the design, and I want to explain it. Design is the question, and not the answer to any interesting question. Design is what I see. I don't need a religious apologist to convince me that it exists.

What I'm reading in June

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

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Fiction

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Recommended by colleagues on our PLOS Slack channel and in a great review at NPR. Plus, as a bardolator I am doctrinally obligated to read a book with a title like that. I'm deliberately reading the last few chapters slowly; this is something I do when I love a book so much that I don't want it to end.

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. I'll start as soon as I finish Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Continued from May. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.

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Non-fiction

Complicit by Max Bazerman

I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor."

A Humanist Path: Confucius and Lao Zi for Today by Wei Djao

This book was strongly recommended to me by a friend here in Tucson. My friend has studied with the author, who was partly Tucson-based (and perhaps still is). I'm excited to finally experience the wisdom of these ancient teachers. The publisher's page has a little more information.

Beshrew my heart but I pity the man. Final reflections on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris

I've reviewed a few books over the years here at Quintessence of Dust, but From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris was the first book I blogged through that I was genuinely excited about reading. I bought it sight unseen, new and in hardcover, from a publisher of dubious reputation, because I was beguiled by the author and the title and what I mistakenly believed that title to mean. I have already written that I regretted paying money for the book once I read the first couple of chapters and realized I'd been had. From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds isn't about myths, nor is it about interesting controversies, and its ideas/claims are mostly recycled from previous works by the author. In retrospect, the book didn't merit the attention I gave it, and it doesn't merit yours.

David Strathairn and Sophie Marceau as Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)

But that doesn't mean I regret the exercise as a whole. Writing my way through the book helped me clarify some of my own thoughts and ideas. So this post is as much about me and my ideas as it is about the book.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: Full series

Full series on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution by Simon Conway Morris.

Introduction and overview

Chapter 1: The Myth of No Limits — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 2: The Myth of Randomness

Chapter 3: The Myth of Mass Extinctions

Chapter 4: The Myth of Missing Links

Chapter 5: The Myth of Animal Minds — Part 1 — Part 2

Chapter 6: The Myth of Extraterrestrials

Final comments and reflections

Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business. Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

ALONSO: This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod,
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of. Some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.

—The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1 

That's one of two epigraphs at the beginning of Chapter 6 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Extraterrestrials," by Simon Conway Morris. It seemed odd to me when I started reading the book, but it makes some sense now that I've made it to the end. Conway Morris wants (or needs) there to be more to this business than nature "was ever conduct of." This final chapter makes that clear, and by that I mean that it makes the author's desire/need clear. It is, sadly, a fitting end to the book.

Recall that Life's Solution, the author's 2003 book that made convergence a household word, is subtitled Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. The notion that our species (or something very much like it) is "inevitable" is (in my view) a reasonable conjecture once one is faced with the pervasiveness of evolutionary convergence. I enjoyed that book when I read it all those years ago, and became convinced that evolution was not merely blundering around finding the weird and wonderful—it was algorithmically churning toward design, and then toward better design. I was then in a Christian world where it seemed that "adaptationism" was a Bad Thing embraced by extremists and (oh god) atheists, but here was a rock-star Christian paleontologist who was all in on adaptation. I loved that rebel vibe, then and now. But then, and also now, I was baffled by his apparent desire to be alone. Not alone in his office, but alone in the universe.

A gruesome autopsy of Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

Before I explain the rot at the heart of this chapter (Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," by Simon Conway Morris), I'd like to show you my workspace as I sullenly trudge toward the end of this task.

That's my fun little Chromebook 2-in-1, and the barely-visible tartan mouse pad is from my dad. You'll see my toolkit of sticky notes and a stack of (some of) my books on consciousness and human cognition. Conway Morris' book is open to the pages (155-157, in a section called "An unbridgeable gulf?") that stopped me in my tracks.

The author doth protest too much, methinks. The disastrous Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

It's one of the most famous misquoted lines in the English language, spoken by Lady Gertrude (Hamlet's mom) during the intense scene featuring a play ("The Mousetrap" aka The Murder of Gonzago) within a play, intended by Hamlet to be "the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King." The character in "The Mousetrap" has delivered some sappy lines about commitment and widowhood, designed to flush out the King and Gertrude. But you know all that. The frequently-mangled line is "The lady protests too much, methinks." It's a great line and it works out to something like "she's overdoing it" spoken by a person who is literally the subject being portrayed. When we say "the lady doth protest too much" we usually mean "they're overacting so much that now it seems even they don't believe what they're saying."

That's how Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," felt to me. Simon Conway Morris is hellbent on digging a conceptual moat around human cognition, desperate to isolate it from non-human cognition so that it can receive metaphysical shipments from on high. If that sounds harsh, it is—and it is exactly what the chapter is about.

Missing links are a myth, but whose? Chapter 4 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

There are some truly vexing and annoying myths of evolution. They are almost exclusively recited and embellished by religious propagandists, some of whom actually know what they're doing. Rarely but notably, there are myths that are gleefully repeated by creationists while being amplified by scientists who should know better. The clearest example of this is the mythology and nonsense surrounding "junk DNA."

Missing links are not an example of this.

The phrase "missing link" is so dated and so scientifically laughable that it could only be seriously discussed in a book about myths that circulate among laypeople who watch YouTube videos about Sasquatch, refuse vaccines to own the libs, and go to church. What is it doing in a book by Simon Conway Morris, a book that claims to address "areas of received wisdom that are long overdue for careful reexamination"? It's the subject of the fourth chapter of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Missing Links."

The Mórrígan. A myth.

This question summarizes one source of my deep disappointment in this book, a work that has lowered my opinion of its author. I have no right to blame my disappointment on the author, and I know that my feelings betray an expectation on my part that the professor has no obligation to even consider. That expectation: that Christian scientists acknowledge and consider resisting the mountains of lies that their fellow believers dump into the world.