Conversation with Dawkins

> view of earth as a pale blue dot

After reading, thinking, and writing about the work of Richard Dawkins, I had the unbelievable luck of speaking to him in person!! At the recent Science and Religious Conflict conference, over beef wellington, I got a chance to ask him about the public understanding of science (he held an Oxford chair by that title), popular science book writing (he's now working on a children's book), what role religion plays for him (he calls himself an atheist Anglican), and life in the little town of Oxford. Still reeling from the encounter, I'm going to try to write some coherent thoughts about everything we talked about.

One subject that came up was how somebody should go about communicating science. He thinks there are two main approaches – one that emphasizes the usefulness of science (look what this new pill or piece of technology can do for you!), and the Carl Sagan approach, emphasizing the wonder, awe, and sheer marvel of science. Dawkins suggested that he favored the latter, since it draws people into a longer-lasting appreciation and interest in science that provides more than a fleeting fascination with the latest fad or gadget. He’s probably on to something – a little while ago the NY Times found that its most e-mailed articles tended to be those that inspired awe, particularly science articles.

But what about the usefulness approach? After all, many people may first be introduced to physiology when they get a blood test, to chemistry when they look at the nutrition facts on a cereal box, to electromagnetism when they have to replace some batteries, or light and optics when they’re buying a new camera. A Pew Research Center study found that most people, even if they don’t know basic high-school science facts, still know something about the areas where science is personally relevant to their health and daily lives. So the science we deal with on a day-to-day basis seems like a good starting point for discussion and further curiosity, acting as a bridge into the wider world of science that Sagan championed and Dawkins promotes. One approach may feed the other, and if a combination is possible – the useful and the awe-inspiring, the relevant and the celebratory – so much the better. 

On that note, some words from Carl Sagan about the pale blue dot:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena... Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves... It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Building Peace Conference

Yesterday (Saturday May 15th) was the Building Peace Conference organized by the Oxford Network for Peace Studies, or OxPeace. OxPeace is a "a multi-disciplinary initiative to promote the focused study of the nature of peace, peacemaking, peacebuilding and peacekeeping, in Oxford. It aims to promote relevant research and teaching, and the inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisation of ideas, and to enable the sharing of research between Oxford academics and graduate students and those from other institutions in Britain and abroad, and with scholar-practitioners in the field." Keynote speakers were Professor of Peace Research Johan Galtung and Ugandan human rights lawyer Barney Afako. 

I'll be adding my notes from the conference over the next few days. Highlights from last year's conference, The Serious Study of Peace, can be found here.

Background (from the program):
There is growing interest in academic circles in the questions surrounding the nature of peace. This includes the making, keeping, and building of peace. Peace as a site for academic study raises unique questions and provides a distinctive shape to interdisciplinary endeavour, drawing on politics and international relations, economics, development, environmental studies, war and conflict, anthropology, psychology, law, ethics and theology to name only a few.

The focus on peace adds a fresh dimension to established disciplines and engenders a distinctive interdisciplinary synergy. It has produced an extensive, rapidly growing body of academic literature, and shows potential as a discipline in its own right, embracing all levels from senior research to undergraduate teaching. Much relevant research and teaching  is being done in Oxford. This Conference taps into some of this work, as well as providing a forum for sharing with colleagues from across the world.

Introduction:
Dr Liz Carmichael (St John's College, Theology)
Carmichael began with some introductory remarks about the history and purpose of OxPeace. She described OxPeace as held together by the idea of peace as a worthy academic focus. Its goal is to promote new centers, new institutes, and a new chair of Peace Studies at Oxford (for which they need funding). Carmichael emphasized the need to raise the profile and the study of peace at an elite institution like Oxford, which would lend credibility to peace studies as an academic field in its own right.

First Talk:
Professor Johan Galtung
After the Abolition of Slavery and Colonialism, War as a Social Institution: The Role of England.  An example of Applied Peace Studies

Johan Galtung is currently based near Geneva as co-Director of the Transcend Research Institute,  which he co-founded in 1993. A Norwegian sociologist and ‘father’ of academic peace studies, Johan Galtung founded the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) in 1959 and was its first Director 1959-69. He then became Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Oslo University 1969-78. He is a peace practitioner and prolific researcher, who has held numerous visiting professorships in Europe and the USA.

Galtung began his talk by urging Oxford University to become a “facilitator of solutions.” He described his role as “father of peace studies” in the 1950’s, where he worked to advocate peacebuilding, peacekeeping and peaceguiding. Over the years his work as led him to 10 findings, which he believes can help in the project of de-institutionalizing war:
1. The top will never abolish anything on its own – the top will never degrade itself.
2. Abolition never comes from bottom alone, it needs an enlightened element (often women play a pivotal role here).
3. Consciousness formation is crucial. Consciousness raising is often well performed by churches.
 4. There must be a vision of change, and spirituality can be used as a bridging concept, crossing divisions between religions of east and west. There must be emphasis on the linking of something out there to something in here. Heart and brain go hand in hand.
5. Need unlimited perseverance.
6. Cannot demand synchronicity, or implement change in all places at the same time. We need leading countries to provide the example.
7. Multilateralism (summit meetings) will generally lead to nothing. Galtung gives the example of the recent climate change summit as a failed attempt to implement change. Countries need to show the lead, especially now on the issue of nuclear weapons.
8 and 9. Sometimes heavy politics is necessary. “When someone has new idea, the first reaction is laughter, then suspicion, then a heavy politician who says ‘its been my idea all along’” There is a dialectic of success and failure.
10. There is a heavy price to any change. There will always be resistance from those who claim that if we don’t do this then someone else will. And every action will have often unforeseen consequences.

Galtung turned next to a “middle” position on what we would need to abolish war. After again emphasizing the role played by women, he says change will come from a variety of “middles”. The middle-aged – when they still have physical energy and have not yet solidified their ideas, although he acknowledges it is possible to be middle aged well into one’s 80s. The middle-sexed – who are not lost in narcissistic beauty concerns that take up too much time and effort in our modern society. The middle class – because the upper class is oblivious to problems, and the lower class is too concerned with its own.  The middle-towns – big cities have too many monuments celebrating the grandeur of their city, and growing up in this sort of environment seeps into a certain (righteous) view of world.  The middle-religious – somewhere between a hard religious outlook that is too uncompromising, and a soft religious outlook exemplified by groups like the Quakers. The Anglican church may be intermediary between these two extremes. Finally, middle-politics – that celebrates coalitions and seeks to find ideas that accommodate both sides. The idea of social capitalism or social democracy was itself such a coalition.

Galtung’s concluding remarks reflected on war as a tenacious structure, as opposed to solely dependent on particular actors. There is cooperation between countries in maintaining the war system, and history has shown that we tend to stop war just in time to avoid putting an end to the entire war system. Righteousness makes all players think their views are universal, but it is time for an "intellectual helicopter sweep" to view countries from above and see the larger picture.


Second Talk:
Barney Afako
Grappling with Peace: Reflections on some efforts to deal with violent conflict in Africa

Barney Afako, a scholar-practitioner of peacebuilding, is a leading Ugandan human rights lawyer and transitional justice expert. Currently based in London, he is an adviser to the peace process in northern Uganda and other peace processes in Africa. He is a leading scholar in transitional justice specifically.

Afako began by describing some of his experience in Uganda  working with  local people in small communities. He noted that these people are mainly interested in their futures and those of their children, not in punishing rebels and bringing them to trial. They bring into sharp focus the idea that justice is a much bigger concept than criminality and criminal justice. Therefore it is possible to have a primary focus on bringing an end to violent conflict without giving up the need for accountability. Afako described how he would constantly run into arguments to pursue and nurture the idea of international criminal justice, but this is a far too limited view. In approaching peacebuilding, one cannot escape hard dilemma’s, and one cannot always resolve these dilemmas. But we can try to be prepared to handle these dilemmas. Mediators and peacebuilding practitioners step into the space between law and the local (bridging the gap between international criminal justice and ordinary people). This is a no mans zone, but people who want to make peace need to stand here.

Afako also emphasized the dual role of the state and civil society in the peace process. The state’s influence is both inescapable and utterly crucial. Yes, the state exerts control over any part of peace-building, but it is important to understand that there is no space in which conflict takes place that is not under some aspect of control. Therefore mediators need to keep having conversation with many actors of the state, and this involves going to the top. They need to help states organize themselves to respond to conflict, as well as keep the state cohesive. On the other side, civil society is increasingly mobilized on issues of justice, and lots of people are engaged with peace process. Civil society needs to have a part in the peace process; it needs to be at the table. People in civil society will bring perspective to those around the table. So while it is critical to focus on state, it is important to also focus on people. People without the state will not work, and the state without people will not have support. A mediator needs to carry everyone.

Finally, Afako addressed the importance of looking deeper into any conflict to identify the structural concerns. He says we can’t take our eyes off the parties involved, but we also cannot afford to forget the structural issues. The process of peace goes beyond the signatures on a peace agreement. He advises mediators to keep abreast of social changes so that new conflicts don’t take them by surprise.

Who's Sitting in the Armchair?

Do intuitions from the armchair depend on who's sitting in it? In a new paper called "Gender and Epistemic Intuition," Wesley Buckwalter presents some interesting findings on exactly this question. Philosphy has traditionally taken for granted the notion that intuitions are unanimous. Turns out, women may beg to differ. 

To explore this novel idea, we'll start with a two-part thought experiment (this one was first constructed by Joshua Knobe, but Buckwalter uses a version of it in his study). 

1. A chairman of a board is asked to approve a certain policy. He is told that it will harm the environment. He replies: " I don't care at all about the environment. I just want to make a profit." He approves the policy, it goes forward, and sure enough, the enviroment is harmed. Does the chairman intentionally harm the environment?

2. Same scenario, only the chairman is told that the policy will help the environment. He responds the same way -- he doesn't care, he only wants the profit. Policy is approved, and environment is helped. Does the chairman intentionally help the environment?

In the original experiment, Knobe wanted to find out what people thought about the chairman’s intentions. Surprisingly, although the two scenarios are identical except for harm/help outcome, participants overwhelmingly (82%) agreed that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment, but only 33% said that he had intentionally helped the environment. This odd asymmetry has since been dubbed the “side-effect effect.” It seems that when the side-effect of an action is bad (in this case, the effect on the environment), people are more likely to say that it was performed intentionally.

In his study, Buckwalter predicted that a similar effect would appear for questions about the chairman's knowledge. He asked people whether the chairman knew that his actions would harm/help the environment. As he expected, more people attributed knowledge to the chairman in the harm case – the asymmetry appeared again. How come? One possibility is that people make a (moral) judgment about the chairman based on the outcome (good or bad), and then attribute knowledge afterwards. In the case of a bad outcome, people will try harder to make the chairman "responsible," by saying that he really did know the outcome. In the case of a good outcome, the chairman’s lack of care about the environment means that he should not get “credit” for really knowing the outcome.

But here’s the twist: women showed this asymmetry to a much greater extent than men. Women were more likely than men to say the chairman knew he would harm but didn’t know he would help. Why? Buckwalter puts forth a theory – what he calls the Normative Evaluation Hypothesis – to explain the gender difference. Essentially, it says that women are more likely to consult their moral judgments (or “normative evaluations”) about a situation before making their decision regarding knowledge. The moral significance of an action, therefore, plays a greater role in shaping women's decisions about knowledge than men's.

Buckwalter then predicts that his theory will also explain women's intuitions about the Gettier cases (see last post for a summary). There doesn’t seem to be an immediate moral dimension to this case (no good or bad outcome), but consider the evaluation of Smith himself. Since he was totally justified in his belief, he seems to have done everything "right,” and is therefore a praiseworthy person. To say he doesn’t really know is to deny him knowledge that seems rightfully his! If women are more likely to consult this moral evaluation of Smith, then they should also be more likely to attribute knowledge. And sure enough, women are much more likely than men to say that in the Gettier case, Smith really knows.

These findings raise several interesting questions. First, does this mean that, in general, women are more influenced by their moral judgments than men are? Second, if confronted with rival intuitions, how should we decide which one to follow? Finally, has much of traditional philosophy to this day been biased toward male intuitions? Clearly, the implications of a gender difference in intuitions are significant. Buckwalter suggests that it may also partly explain the scarcity of women in philosophy departments. After all, if a women's intuitions don't seem to match those of her male counterpart (and tend to go against the traditional "correct" intuition), they may simply be dismissed. And how long would you tolerate being repeatedly told your deeply felt intuitions were “wrong”? It is possible, Buckwalter says, that many women have been discouraged from entering the field of philosophy simply because they do not share the relevant intuitions of the (male) majority.

Buckwalter leaves us with a striking quote from Stephen Stich:  “For 2500 years, philosophers have been relying on appeals to intuition. But the plausibility of this entire tradition rests on an unsubstantiated, and until recently unacknowledged, empirical hypothesis – the hypothesis that the philosophical intuitions of people in different…groups do not disagree.” More and more evidence shows that in fact, they do disagree. This, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean we should throw out all traditional intuitions for being discriminatory or skewed in some way (for one, what would we replace them with?). It does mean, however, that these intuitions may have profound effects on how we go about (and who goes into) philosophy, and these effects should be taken seriously. As the research comes in, my guess is that it will probably challenge more of the philosophical tradition. Let’s just say I’ve got an intuition about it.*

*sorry, couldn't resist ;)

Swapping Armchairs for Clipboards

Attention! The philosopher has left the armchair and is now… conducting tests? Welcome to the world of experimental philosophy (or x-phi), a growing movement to combine pure-thought traditional philosophy with the empirical sciences. Putting the experiment back in “thought experiment,” members of the x-phi community are taking out their clipboards, asking people questions, and collecting information on a whole range of topics. How do people think about moral dilemmas? Do their intuitions about traditional thought experiments match up to those of the philosophers? What do they count as real knowledge? Answers to these questions may shed some light on traditional philosophical questions and claims – at least, the experimentalists hope so.

How could experimental philosophy tell us anything useful? Consider one tool out of the philosopher’s toolbox: the Thought Experiment. This is an imaginary scenario often used to test our intuitions about certain cases, and then demonstrate how those intuitions support a particular philosophical claim. One series of famous thought experiments called Gettier cases involve intuitions about knowledge. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published an article challenging the notion of knowledge as "justified true belief,” which until that point had been the standard definition. He proposed the following scenario: Smith is a job candidate who believes justifiably that "Jones will get the job." Smith also believes justifiably that "Jones has a dime in his pocket." Smith concludes that "The man who will get the job has a dime in his pocket." But Jones ends up not getting the job -- Smith does instead. Smith also, as it turns out, had a dime in his pocket. So Smith was correct when he concluded that "The man who will get the job has a dime in his pocket." But Gettier argued that it does not seem correct to say that Smith had real knowledge, rather, it seems like a lucky coincidence. Gettier’s intuition (that Smith did not really know) was taken as evidence to show that knowledge is not simply justified true belief.

What really constitutes knowledge is an enormous question that I won't even begin to get into here. The point is that whenever we are trying to answer such philosophical questions, appeals to intuition about thought experiments play a rather important role in the conclusions we draw. But whose intuitions should count? Does everyone have the same intuitions? Could age, gender, religion, culture, class, ethnicity, or any other unforeseen variable, have an effect? Sounds like a problem for experimental philosophy. Next post I’ll elaborate on some surprising results about intuitions from the armchair. Turns out, they may be misrepresenting a rather large portion of the population (hint: roughly half).

Persons of the Sea... continued

I wasn’t able to get to all the different angles I wanted to in my last blog post, so I’m going to try to do that here. Quick summary: Thomas White wants dolphins to have the status of “nonhuman persons”. Humans are not unique in their complex intellectual and emotional abilities – science is showing that dolphins (and perhaps other animals like chimps and elephants) have these abilities too. "Personhood" is used as a shorthand way of referring to this combination of abilities, and generally the status of "personhood" gives an individual a place in the moral community. Therefore, White argues, dolphins should be considered persons, complete with moral standing as individuals.

The significance of all this becomes apparent when you start looking into current practices involving dolphins. Dolphins are injured and killed by the thousands every year in connection with the fishing industry, and are often kept in small concrete tanks in captive facilities for entertainment or scientific research. Inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on dolphins is objectionable on its own, but capturing, selling, buying and breeding persons is seriously disturbing. This is not to say that an animal must be a “person” to merit appropriate treatment – pain and suffering are very real to all sentient beings. White acknowledges that fighting for “personhood” status is just one strategy out of many. But it's a strategy that is clear cut and easy to understand – under no circumstances do we treat persons this way. Period.

In his arguments for dolphin personhood, White spends a lot of time outlining dolphin “intelligence.” He admits from the beginning that any time we talk about something as vague and multifaceted as intelligence in animals, we run the risk of anthropocentrism – that is, measuring other beings with a human yardstick. With chimps, this approach seems reasonable enough; after all they’re our animal cousins and we share with them much of our evolutionary history and DNA. But dolphins pose an interesting problem. Humans and dolphins have been on two very distinct evolutionary paths for the past 100 million years (that was the last time we had a common ancestor). The complex intelligences that we (and they) possess may be fundamentally different, in ways we can’t even comprehend. For example, dolphins interpret the outside world primarily through echolocation (biosonar), which can be thought of as either an entirely different sense or a highly sophisticated hearing ability. But the intelligence “tests” we give dolphins are mainly based on the primary human sense, that of sight. So when we put a dolphin in front of a mirror and call it “self-aware” because it seems to recognize its reflection, is this an even more remarkable feat? Dolphins are operating in a foreign cognitive environment, and they still pass with flying colors! What should we do in this sort of situation? Is it even feasible to measure intelligence without using some human standards? Professor of psychology Diana Reiss has suggested that we understand dolphins as a form of “alien intelligence”, emphasizing the real difficulty in drawing comparisons with our own intelligence. But the question remains – how do we deal with something so different it's alien?

Another question that comes up in this discussion of moral status and persons is the whole notion of drawing boundaries to moral obligations, of setting criteria in the first place. A brief look at history makes it clear how problematic this attempt has been. I came across this quote by philosopher Thomas Birch that seems to capture the precarious business of setting moral criteria: “we see that whenever we have closed off the question with the institution of some practical criterion, we have later found ourselves in error, and have had to open the question up again to reform our practices in a further attempt to make them ethical.” So what can we do? I don’t think the process of negotiating boundaries and criteria is useless; in fact a great deal of good can come out of just such deliberation. But as Birch makes clear, the problem arises when we settle upon a set of criteria and move on, acting as if the case is closed. White wants to re-draw the moral lines to include animals, and I think his efforts will get a lot of people thinking. I suppose we should just be open to these lines changing again.

Day 2 & 3: Evolution & Ethics – They Come in Twos

It seems that often in the attempt to explain an idea, people will set up dualisms to more clearly define the terms and concepts in question. This two-sided approach seems to come up time and time again in the discussion of the origins of human morality – pitting moral reasoning against moral emotions, intellect vs. passion, nurture vs. nature, culture vs. genes, etc. I’ve been wondering about the usefulness of dividing controversial issues into these extreme dichotomies, especially when the subject matter seems either A) too complex to even formulate sides that are truly distinct, or B) more realistically involving a place somewhere in the middle. Granted, dualisms may be useful to illustrate a point – after all, it is helpful to define what something is by illustrating what it is not – but there is a tendency to paint caricatures instead of real positions.

This seemed to happen in the debate between Darwin and one of his critics, St. George Jackson Mivart. Mivart actually agreed with much of what Darwin had proposed in the Origin of Species and was a supporter of natural selection, but the two scientists had a falling out after Mivart wrote a scathing review of The Descent of Man. Their main point of disagreement was the difference between humans and other animals – particularly that difference which leads to morality. Whereas Darwin argued it was a difference in degree, Mivart was adamant that it was a difference in kind.

Mivart's argument goes like this: no one denies that man is an animal, but the mistake is to conclude that man is no more than an animal.  There is plenty of evidence to show that we share with other primates the capacity for sensations, passions, desires, etc. But sensational knowledge of the world is fundamentally different from intellectual understanding. What sets humans apart is their intellectual faculty and ability to reflect upon their experiences. Morality, which is uniquely human, requires some sort of judgment to evaluate competing emotions and desires. And this ability to judge is not simply an outgrowth of the evolved capacity to feel emotion – it is another thing altogether. Darwin's mistake is getting so caught up in man's similarities to animals that he obscures the crucial dissimilarity: a moral sense that we do not share with any other creature.

In this argument we see the two sides shaping up quite nicely: Darwin's morality as a continuous evolving capacity that developed from lower animals to humans (it only differs in degree) vs Mivart's morality as an discontinuous jump (it differs fundamentally in kind). But was Darwin really advocating this definition of morality? Is there any room for him to accept some sort of difference in kind? There just may be. Reading through The Descent of Man, one finds seemingly contradictory statements about the human moral capacity that suggest Darwin may not have had the view Mivart charged him with. On the one hand, Darwin says that:

"...the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom..." 

That seems like a rather straightforward statement. But Darwin also acknowledges that:

"A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives- of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation, is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals." 

Even later he admits that articulate language is "peculiar to man." This sounds inconsistent, but only if we are using Mivart's two-sided notion of morality, one that pits "degree" against "kind". We could see Darwin as viewing the human moral sense as less of a radical break and more of an emergent property (this is an interpretation Larry Arnhart proposes in his book Darwinian Natural Right). If Darwin is describing a novel trait that appeared at a high level of complexity, producing an intellectual capacity that could not have been predicted at lower levels, then he is not contradicting himself. He really can say that man is distinct from other animals in a fundamental way (given the size and complexity of the human brain), without giving up the claim that man evolved his morality in a continuous way. This does not imply a break in the laws of nature, but rather an underlying uniqueness of human morality that depends on emergent traits. Novelty, therefore, can arise in a way that is compatible with Darwin’s theory.

I'll most likely have more to say on the dualisms that reappear in this evolutionary story, but so far it seems like breaking out of a two-sided world can be quite helpful.

Day 1: Evolution & Ethics – Darwin Was Here

The past decade has seen an explosion of research in the biology of human nature as related to morality. Systematic studies in genetics, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and animal behavior are supplying more data than ever before about the role of emotions in our moral judgments, similarities between human and non-human primate social behavior, and the evolutionary roots of our sense of right and wrong. Spanning both the sciences and humanities, this emerging field of the biology of morality seems to fulfill what E.O. Wilson had in mind over 30 years ago when he called for "ethics to be temporarily removed from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." Philosophers may still cling tightly, but they're having to share their grip of ethics with a growing number of scientists.

Given all the increased attention – from an assortment of disciplines ranging from molecular biology to law – the concept of "biologicized" ethics may seem new, but in many ways it reflects an earlier trend in human inquiry that goes back to the ancient Greeks. When Aristotle called man a "political animal", he was not simply speaking in metaphor. His comparison was rooted in his own studies of biological sciences, which included detailed observations of a variety of plants and animals (and apparently the first dissection of a chimpanzee). He also compared humans to the other social animals – ants, bees, wasps and cranes. The moral and political nature of humans in biological terms was not an unfamiliar notion to Aristotle, but it would be transformed and solidified by another intellectual heavyweight millennia later: Charles Darwin. In his work The Descent of Man, Darwin laid out the basics for almost all subsequent discussion of evolution and ethics, and he did it without any knowledge of genetics or neuroscience. In fact, it can be quite a challenge to find a new idea in the field today that does not have its roots in Darwin's writings over 150 years ago. Consider the following quotes:

"any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man."

"The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection... nevertheless the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection."

The continuity of morality from lower animals to humans, the additional element of reason, the emphasis on social instincts and emotions like sympathy; all of these insights are coming into the forefront right now. Of course, some of the terminology has changed and there is vastly more data to work with, but the discussion still echoes Darwin to a surprising degree. As we face a new decade, I can only speculate about the potential advances in science, how their implications will ripple out into other disciplines, and how they'll change our views of human nature and morality. But if the past is any indicator, they'll probably stem from something Darwin said.

Oxford

I made it to Oxford. It's beautiful, tiny, intriguing. If cities were subject to Photoshop tools, you'd have to slide the time scale back a few centuries and set the color saturation to 50%. Oh, and then slosh on some sort of melting-snow filter. Although it's neither possible or meaningful, I can't help but compare Oxford to the last foreign city I spent time in. Barcelona is still so much in my mind that it makes for some rather extreme comparisons (size-scale, weather, language).  Let's just say that even if I wasn't exactly looking for a contrast, I sure got one!

Monday I officially start my "short-term student visit" at the Center for Practical Ethics. This involves a visitor card, some desk space, and free reign to the plethora of events, lectures, and seminars at Oxford. First on the list is a seminar called "Evolution and Ethics", which lands smack in the middle of that very interesting cross section of science, morality, and religion:

"Can we, drawing upon our evolutionary history, find within our pre-human ancestors the basic ingredients of human morality? This seminar will examine the prospects and promise of evolutionary theory and some of its implications for religious belief. The participants will first consider the nature of morality and then various ways that evolutionary ethicists have sought to explain human morality." 

Amazing. If I can just manage to get a library card to the Bodleian Library, I can start delving into titles like Darwinian Natural Right and Primates and Philosophers. So much to do – I can barely wait to start! My goal is to post something each day of the seminar, and I'll try to continue that pattern for the rest of my visit (perhaps a bit ambitious, but it's 2010 and I'm aiming high). I'll try to explore some of the ideas I'm reading/learning about – mostly as a way to explain them to myself and work through questions. Of course, I'll also be making some comments on this funny little town where the friendly cashiers call you "love", the coin-sizing system is an utter mystery, and my sense of left and right is called into question every time I cross the street. Cheers.