‘We teeter at the brink of a fully deceptive world’

I’ve become increasingly concerned at how much my fellow humans have seemingly adopted and accepted artificial intelligence programs that emulate human creativity and output. It’s here, they say collectively. There’s no stopping it, so we might as well play around with the technology and have fun. We now have programs that can write lyrics, poems and essays, churn out songs, emulate famous singing voices and create photography and artwork that so closely resembles manmade projects that many people can’t tell the authentic works from the rendered ones.

Indeed, German artist Boris Eldagsen fooled judges when he submitted an AI-generated image to the Sony world photography awards and later admitted the picture was not a real photograph.

This is not a photograph. Image by Boris Eldagsen.

And a band named AISIS recently wrote a record’s worth of songs in the manner of real British rock band, Oasis, using a computer generated voice of singer, Liam Gallagher. Since I’ve been an Oasis fan since the early 1990s, I could definitely tell a difference between the computer voice and Gallagher’s, but the singer himself said the project was “mad as fuck” (whatever that means), and he said that he sounded “mega” on the recording. I guess that means “good.”

While AI-generated artwork, poetry and music is in its infancy, the music industry has been using computers to “fix” defects in live vocal and instrumental performances for the last two decades, starting with the advent of Auto-Tune in 1996, first made famous by Cher’s 1998 song, “Believe.” Starting in the early 2000s, music producers have used a tool called quantization to “line up” drum hits and musical notes along a grid so that the instrumentation perfectly matches the beat in rhythm. Used too heavily, Auto-Tune can make vocal performances sound robotic or otherworldy; even used conservatively, it gives voices a bizarre-sounding “sheen” that does not exist naturally. Likewise, quantization takes the nuance out of live instrumentation. When used together, as is almost always the case in studio recordings this day and age, the music comes out sounding too perfect, too sterile, too sanitized.

Modern music production tools used in the last couple decades aren’t exactly AI, but they prefigured what we are seeing today: human creativity and achievement either being improved or replaced by AI. Chat GPT can generate high school level essays and poems on nearly any topic imaginable. Programs like Midjourney and others have the ability to render extremely detailed and fantastical landscapes or “portraits” of celebrities. And elsewhere in the AI-sphere, pop songs imitating the voices of Drake and The Weeknd can be fashioned out of nothing more than prompts and code. One of the songs in question, “Heart On My Sleeve” —  one struggles to imagine a less imaginative song title — fooled millions of listeners and was eventually removed from all streaming services by Universal Music Group when word spread that it was a fake.

For now, humans are still behind the wheel of all this faux-creativity, but in the future, given the rather loaded implications of artificial intelligence, this will surely not always be the case.

As a musician, songwriter and a fan since before digital music production when every vocal performance heard on the radio came from a natural recording — vocalists simply stood in the booth and sang their parts until they got it right — I am particularly interested in the use of computers in music because it’s my contention that even before AI veered us closer to the precipice, something valuable had already been lost.

The mainstream public often can’t tell when a song is excessively autotuned because of more than two decades of conditioning, or, listeners just don’t care whether it was or not. In general, so long as there is a beat — apparently any beat, no matter how much the same beat was used in countless other songs — an uber repetitive melody and vapid lyrics, the public will happily consume it. And now, it is nearly impossible to find a studio recording, in any genre, that isn’t quantized to the hilt and soaked in Auto-Tune.

Further, because many, if not most, mainstream pop songs use very simple, repetitive melodies and beats, people can’t tell the difference between manmade and computer-made songs either.

We teeter at the brink of a fully deceptive world, where truth, creativity and authenticity crumbles and we can no longer trust our senses.

In the age of AI Oasis, there’s no point being ordinary,” NME

This quote was a rare moment of self-awareness in an article that I thought was otherwise severely short-sided in its view that, while AI may be able to make pop music that is at least as good as its human counterparts and may even take over the streaming industry, there will always be space for manmade musical innovation.

Writer Mark Beaumont imagined a few pathways toward human flourishing in this area. Volume-based streaming services would either become a very large collection of bland human and computer generated pop, catering to people who don’t care which is which, and the “real” songwriters would be free to rise above and make better music:

The established platforms, then, could shrug, tacitly embrace the fact that their sites have become a hyper-speed circle-jerk of robots making music for robots to listen to and eye up their fifth superyacht. If most humans decide they’re just as happy listening to AI music as human music then the streaming dream will have fulfilled its foundational purpose to provide a truly limitless source of cheap, characterless background muzak ringing out across every night bus in the land.

Another potential scenario in this new landscape, according to Beaumont, is that listeners might grow weary of AI content, but if users already can’t tell the difference between computer generated music and human-created works, I find this option to be implausible. Alternatively, record labels might eventually give “preferential treatment” to real artists. I would hope so, otherwise the music industry as we know it would cease to exist.

Beaumont’s rosy grand finale:

In either scenario, one thing actually rises in value: human creativity, and all the inventiveness, imagination, unpredictability and star power it entails. …

If Spotify goes full-on AI, alternative platforms will spring up championing nothing but human music, where the most innovative artists reimagining what music can be will flourish above more formulaic fare that computers are doing better elsewhere. …

Only the most visionary will survive. Music is about to enter a magnificent new phase of man versus machine – it’s time to blow their hive-minds.

While admirable, the optimism here is misplaced and premature.

Judging by how accepting, acquiescent and complacent everyone seems to be about AI, in a man versus machine scenario, the machines — and the machine — will most likely win, and there isn’t a scenario, financially or creatively, in which humans come out on top.

Creativity wont pay in an ai world, if it can be knocked out in cheap mass production line fashion by (effectively) robots. As time moves on the human input level required to create these things will get less and less too. It will be pushed by the execs at top as it will mean less outlaying on labour an maximising profits, which is basically all ai will ultimately benefit… top end profit!

Thomas Hodge, Facebook comment on the NME article

And as far as creativity itself, if AI is currently able to pull off assembly line pop music as well or better than actual human creators of said pop, who’s to say it won’t eventually be able to replicate music on the level of “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” “Are You Experienced” or Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos?

How does human creativity rise in value if AI becomes capable — and it will — of being just as innovative and inventive as we are? The Beatles, fully human as they were, created new genres of music. Who’s to say AI won’t also fashion new genres of music and push the boundaries harder and faster than humans, in all of our tinkering slowness, ever could?

I worry for our creative future, especially when so few people, hardly anyone, as far as I can tell, is voicing the kinds of concerns I’m raising here. It is true that so far, AI currently needs human beings to input prompts and to tell it what to do, but this will surely not always be the case. And what then? Self-sustaining AI uploading its own music to the streaming services or its own rendered artwork or photography to galleries? Picasso V6.1 Build 10.4.874040a becoming the first AI program to get a plaque in the Louvre or MOMA alongside the greatest human pieces of all time? It’s all light, fun and games now, but this slope is slippery and steep, and it’s probably already too late to pull back the reins. I have a grim feeling that AI will win, and in our acquiescence, we’ll let it.

Religion played ‘key’ role in social evolution?

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar and a team of researchers at Oxford University revealed during a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting a new and frankly, rather confounding theory suggesting that religion played an integral part in the social evolution of human beings, as reported in The Washington Post’s article, “A scientist’s new theory: Religion was key to humans’ social evolution.”

As this hypothesis goes, religion, with its communicative and interactive elements, helped to drive the social development and bring people together in important ways through singing, traditional rituals and customs and shared experience. Dunbar has argued that these religious components release endorphins, which, in turn, support feelings of in-group closeness and togetherness. According to Dunbar:

You need something quite literally to stop everybody from killing everybody else out of just crossness. Somehow it’s clear that religions, all these doctrinal religions, create the sense that we’re all one family.

Dunbar is best known for coming up with a sociological system known as “Dunbar’s number,” which is a tally for how many connections humans can maintain at any given time. For instance, he has argued that we can maintain ties with five intimate friends, 50 good friends, 150 friends more casual friends and as many as 1,500 acquaintances. He posits that his number is so high for humans largely because of religion. Here is The Post:

And then Dunbar turned to figuring out why Dunbar’s number is so high. Did humor help us manage it? Exercise? Storytelling? That riddle has been Dunbar’s quest for years — and religion is the latest hypothesis he’s testing in his ongoing attempt to find the answer.

“Most of these things we’re looking at, you get in religion in one form or another,” he said.

I doubt I will be the first to point out that his proposition on the role of religion on social evolution suffers from multiple fatal flaws.

First, and perhaps most obvious, is that the social evolution of humans began many millions of years before religion. Earliest estimates indicate that developing humans did not begin what we might consider religion activities (i.e. the ritual burying of the dead) until 100,000 ago or slightly earlier.

Matt Rossano, a psychology professor with Southeastern Louisiana University, in his paper, “The African Interrugnum: The ‘Where,’ ‘When,’ and ‘Why’ of the Evolution of Religion,” argues that the evolutionary foundation for religion began between 60,000-80,000 years ago:

A crucial aspect of their (anatomically modern humans’) increased sophistication was religion. It was during the time between their retreat from the Levant to the conquest of the world (The African Interrugnum) that their religion emerged. Using archeological, anthropological, psychological, and primatological evidence, this chapter proposes a theoretical model for the evolutionary emergence of religion — an emergence that is pin-pointed temporally to the ecological and social crucible that was Africa from about 80,000 to 60,000 ybp (years before present), when Homo sapiens (but for the grace of God?) nearly vanished from the earth.

Even before that, scientists have concluded that our primate ancestors coalesced around a common cause for the purposes of hunting, staying alive and yes, some kind of primitive form of socializing and even levity in between meals and child rearing. All things considered, I would even go so far as to argue that since religion has only been around for a such a short period of our common history based on the vast stretches of evolutionary time — tens of thousands of years versus millions — that it can hardly be considered as having been a major factor in the social evolution of humans. Although it might have brought some level of “sophistication,” as Rossano points out, religion was a late bloomer on the horizon of humanity.[pullquote]Religion was a late bloomer on the horizon of humanity.[/pullquote]

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If The Post article accurately reflects what Dunbar thinks on religion, a couple other parts of this article are wide of the mark.

In the first quote I posted here, Dunbar suggests early humans would have just torn each other apart limb from limb in wanton displays of aggression and bloodletting were it not the moderating influence of religion and doctrine in these early human communities. Intergroup aggression and nearly endless quarrels over land and resources were hallmarks of early societies and are well documented, but even within individual communities, certainly males acted with hostility and jealousy toward other males who might threaten to wrest their mates away from them.

Even so, the sense that “we’re all one family” inside a particular tribe or culture was largely rooted in place — in the particular spot that group had captured or settled and called home, not in religion. At least in more modern ancient times, gods were viewed as distant and inaccessible. All of the other elements of religion, like singing, dancing, rituals and burial and mating practices, were secondary to maintaining and protecting whatever the concept of “home” meant for them.

Dunbar also seems to draw too close of a connection between religion and singing, as if religious worship has a monopoly on being able to evoke emotion and draw people together. Here is another quote:

What you get from dance and singing on its own is a sense of belonging. It happens very quickly. What happens, I suspect, is that it can trigger very easily trance states. Once you’ve triggered that, you’re in, I think, a different ballgame. It ramps up massively. That’s what’s triggered. There’s something there.

One can’t read this quote from Dunbar without wondering if he has been to a secular music concert in his life because if he had, he would realize that hearing an inspirational and uplifting rock anthem or a love song or a ballad produces precisely the same kinds of emotions as one can experience inside the walls of a church or in a kind of spiritual “trance.” Suggesting that singing and dancing in the name of religion is any more meaningful or creates anymore of a sense of belonging than doing these activities for their own sake or with friends or loved ones in a moment of innocent revelry seems like too far of a leap from one hypothesis to the next. These can be, and have been for millenia, enjoyed in and of themselves independent of any admonishments from heaven.

Women dancing on a vase in the Museo Borbonico, Naples.

Women dancing as depicted on a vase in the Museo Borbonico, Naples.

The anti-regressives

[Note: I have fine tuned a couple points at the end and simplified what was previously a confusing title. – JES]

Before dismissing a person as a member of the regressive left, especially someone with as much intellectual integrity as theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, one probably should have a firm understanding of what the term actually means.

The Muslim reformer who coined the term, Maajid Nawaz, co-author of “Islam and the Future of Tolerance” with Sam Harris, provided an expansive view on what he meant by “regressive left” here, but basically it is:

a section within the left … that have come to the view for the sake of political correctness, for the sake of tolerating what they believe is other cultures and respecting different lifestyles. They have an inherent hesitation to challenge some of the bigotry that can occur within minority communities. I mean at the end of the day if we truly subscribe to liberal human rights values in their universality and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they apply not just in favor of minority communities, but in some instances upon minority communities too. …

The term has been clarified further in interviews with Nawaz, Harris, Dave Rubin and others, but it simply describes, in its narrowest form, a subset of liberals who refuse to acknowledge the problem of Islamic extremism and the real religious motivations behind jihad, or worse, those who work as apologists to deflect blame away from political Islam, or Islamism, to any number of negative social, cultural or economic conditions.

Unfortunately for YouTube user Atheism-is-Unstoppable, who just comes off as shrill, half-cocked and angry in his pair of attack videos on Krauss’ recent New Yorker article, “Thinking Rationally About Terror,” AIU never gets around to telling us what exactly he means when he calls Krauss a “raging regressive,” other than smearing him as a “weakling” and “coward” who is not willing to “face and confront and fight against evil motherfuckers.” Instead, in AIU’s estimation, Krauss “wants to tolerate and even celebrate them (he means the evil motherfuckers, I guess) or at least tolerate and celebrate the level of violence that they bring. Your words, Larry, not mine.”

Unfortunately again, AIU only gets about six paragraphs into his excoriation of Krauss’ 13-paragraph essay before throwing his hands up in a fit of obscenities and name-calling. I happen to think AIU did read through the whole piece but only chose to talk about less than half of it for reasons that escape me, but in any case, had he examined the entire piece on video, he would have could have come away with a more balanced view.

Here are the two videos in question:

Krauss’ essential point in the essay was that we all should step back from the “panic” that terrorism sometimes induces and consider that we, meaning those who live in modern societies, are more likely to die in a car crash or by routine gun violence on the street than to an act of terror and that surrendering to irrational fear is offering up a win to the terrorists:

Driving a car carries with it a set of inevitable risks. Going to a concert or eating at a restaurant should not. Still, the risks of falling prey to terrorism are nevertheless very small for most Americans. Terrorists have forced us to accept that any activity associated with living in a free society now carries with it a finite, and microscopically small, chance of tragic horror. Still, it’s up to us to choose how to react to this minuscule possibility.

Needless to say, it is terrifying to know that there are individuals living among us with the express intent of killing randomly, for effect. But we must recognize that that’s the point of terrorism: it aims to scare us, thereby disrupting normal life. More than that, terrorism is designed drive a wedge between segments of a community which otherwise might have coexisted peacefully, both politically and socially.

… Succumbing to the intended effects of terrorism means giving in to it. By contrast, responding in a way that is commensurate with the actual threat—recognizing that the average person living in France, for example, is living with a threat of murder of less than one in ten thousand, a threat equivalent to living in New York City—is more appropriate and healthy. We can be more vigilant without becoming irrational.

If we were more rational in the degree to which we’re alarmed about terrorism, we might become more rational in our responses to it. …

And unlike AIU’s intellectually dishonest and literally half-hearted characterization of the essay, Krauss did say at the end, had AIU carried his “analysis” that far, that we are in a fight against terrorism, and we should proceed with more reasonable and practical approaches that put terrorism into its proper perspective alongside all the other things in the world that threaten civil society:

… We need to distinguish policies that can realistically improve the safety of the public from those that only appear to do so. In this regard, the greatest loss arising from the nation’s fixation on terror may be the opportunity cost in time and energy that could instead be spent on developing policies that address other urgent national concerns and needs. Perhaps the biggest defense against terrorism isn’t just to demonstrate that we can go on with business as usual; it’s to use terrorism as an occasion for addressing actual safety concerns that we can control. Terrorism is designed to distract us and muddy our thinking. To fight it, we need to keep it in perspective.

AIU seems to take particular issue with the Krauss’s failure to specifically name “Islamic terrorism,” deferring to a safer term, “religious extremism.” As I pointed out in a comment on YouTube, it apparently never occurred to AIU that a politically correct, actual regressive editor at The New Yorker could have been responsible for “softening” the language in the essay. Columnists, even famed scientists like Krauss, are not afforded absolute editorial control, especially not in a national publication such as that.

In any case, Krauss has been critical of all three major religions, including Islam, and was particularly forceful in his debate with Muslim Hamza Tzortzis. Indeed, in this recent interview, Krauss uses the words “Islamic terrorism” to describe the problem and says “any kind of fundamentalism,” including Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, is dangerous and a threat.

Perhaps the most perplexing part of AIU’s diatribe was this bit of wild generalization:

Name any city on earth and you will have acts of Muslim terrorism in it, provided there are Muslims there of course.

In the YouTube comment, I took up the challenge and named every major city in Canada, with the possible exception of Toronto, which was not the victim of a direct act of terrorism, but a failed attempt, which may or may not count in AIU’s shoddy calculus. With some research and time, I no doubt could come up with hundreds more communities across the world that contain plenty of Muslims who somehow, in spite of themselves, manage to avoid going on killing sprees or hurling themselves into buildings.

In short, then, AIU is guilty of same kind of thing Krauss actually warned against, implicitly at least, in his piece, and judging from some of the disturbing comments posted in response to his video on YouTube, AIU is clearly not alone in his thinking. The video just serves as a distraction from the kind of reasoned approach that will be needed to help us confront our society’s many problems, which come at us on multiple fronts. It also oversimplifies and overdramatizes the scope of the religious problem in suggesting, ludicrously, that radical strains of Islam are a ubiquitous threat infesting nearly every community in America and the world.

Once upon a time, crazy talk like that was confined only to the far right; now, it has apparently manifested itself in a kind of anti-regression birthed out of a “radicalization” of thought that, perhaps, finds its impetus in outspoken critics of Islam like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, who, harsh on the religion though they are, have, from my view, always been careful not to denigrate forward-thinking, modern and peaceful loving Muslims as people or the communities in which they live. Nuance, of course, seems all but lost on anti-regressives and the thousands of people who watched the two videos and hundreds who “liked” them on YouTube. Or, perhaps what I am calling “anti-regression” just amounts to unfiltered intolerance, in which case, it deserves as little serious consideration from reasonable thinkers as regressive leftism.

In any case, whereas regressive leftists kowtow to Islamists and attempt to deflect responsibility away from faith and religion, anti-regressives seem to sail off the cliff on the other side of the spectrum. If, as Rubin once argued, regressives are to liberals as Tea Party supporters are to conservatives, anti-regressives are the “patriot movement” militiamen in political reverse.

[Cover image credit: American Dreaming]

No, not that tree of life; the real one

treeoflife

Scientists compile a complete tree of life:

Humans, bacteria, daffodils: We’re a diverse bunch on the surface, but trace each and every Earthling back far enough, and you’ll arrive at a common ancestor. For the first time, scientists have built a comprehensive tree of life that binds us all together.

A draft of the One Tree, published Friday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, includes the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes. It shows how all of the major branches relate to one another and traces each individual group back to its shared beginnings in a prebiotic soup 3.5 billion years ago.

“This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together,” said principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University in a statement. “Think of it as Version 1.0.”

Book review: ‘The Selfish Gene’

For readers who are new to books on biology, evolution and natural selection, I would recommend reading Dawkins’ other works, “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Greatest Show on Earth” before tackling this one. In “The Selfish Gene,” which originally came out in 1976 one year before I was born, Dawkins seems to still be developing his writing style. As such, parts of the book tend to get a little weighted down by minutiae, and we only get glimmers of the eloquence that so characterizes his later works.

selfishgene

“The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins: 30th Anniversary Edition

That said, this is well worth the effort, as it presents the revelatory premise that we, along with every other living thing in the universe, are merely “survival machines” carrying genes that live on well past our individual lifetimes based on the “ruthless selfishness” of our genetic and evolutionary makeup. Some have criticized this view as depressingly cynical and bleak, but as Dawkins points out, “however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.”

“The Selfish Gene,” of course, does not imply selfishness at the conscious level by human beings or any other plant or animal. The term is a figure of speech, and Dawkins’ main thesis has nothing to say about morality or how we ought to act, as Dawkins is mainly concerned with the selfishness of genes living inside “survival machines,” and in some cases, altruism and cooperation, at the genetic level.

Indeed, as a way to move forward as the only self-conscious creatures in the universe — that we know of — Dawkins posits that we can and should rise above our own basic selfish nature and proceed as a species in spite of it. As he says in the book:

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.

I very much look forward to reading “The Extended Phenotype,” which is the follow-up work to “The Selfish Gene.”

[rating: 4.0]

The (cosmological) Quranic argument for God

As I was browsing YouTube today, I decided to see if users had posted any new or interesting videos about the existence of God. Since I have addressed a great many arguments from Christian apologetics on this site since 2009, I thought I would check out some arguments for God from Islam. As anticipated, while Islam has its own particular slant on the god question and in some ways is actually more accepting of scientific principles than evangelical Christianity, Muslims by and large use many of the same stock arguments for God as Christians.

Take the following video from Hamza Tzortzis:

Indeed, close your eyes, take out the accent, the Arabic and references to Allah and the Quran, one might imagine watching a diatribe from William Lane Craig.

In this video, Tzortzis tells us that he is going to provide the “Quranic argument” for the existence of God, which is really just the old cosmological argument that has been restated and refuted for hundreds of years now. In any case, Tzortzis identifies four “logical possibilities” for the existence of the universe as follows:

  • The universe came from nothing.
  • The universe created itself.
  • The universe was created by something else created.
  • The universe was created by something uncreated.

As you can see, possibilities 2-4 all commit a fallacy by assuming a priori that the universe necessarily had to be created — it very well could have just always existed, and while that is hard for our mind to grasp, it is nonetheless another possibility — but after ruling out the first three as impossibilities, Tzortzis then hones in on the fourth option, which he calls the “best explanation” for the existence of the universe. He begins to get on the right track when he concedes the point that the “something uncreated” doesn’t necessarily have to be Allah or any other god in human history, but when he then says that by using the “Quranic approach,” we can draw conclusions about the universe’s origins, we know where he’s going to take the argument.

Here are his basic “conclusions,” which we will more accurately call assumptions:

  • Assumption 1: “This uncreated creator must be powerful.” — Notice what he did there. He went from calling the entity an “uncreated” entity to an “uncreated creator” and then bestowed it with a certain power that was, up to this point, not part of the argument. Also as part of this first point, he implied that the mere existence of billions of atoms in the universe and the subsequent release of energy that occurs when an atom is split is somehow suggestive of a powerful god, although splitting just one atom does not produce anything near an atomic explosion, nor does the existence of atoms suggest anything other than the existence of atoms.
  • harris-meme

  • Assumption 2: The creator must be “intelligent and all-knowing” because “it created laws in the universe like the law of gravity.” — Like many of his Christian apologist counterparts, Tzortzis, most likely is speaking to potential converts or people who may be amenable to accepting his brand of faith, uses some fast talking to blaze through these last points, apparently hoping that he can move quickly enough through the message before any sparks of logic creep into the listeners’ minds. But if we slow down and hear what he actually says, we can see that he is just begging the question and taking as an assumption that which he might hope to prove. Simply put, the existence of natural laws in the universe only prove the existence of the natural laws and does not imply a law giver, just like the existence of the universe does not imply by fiat a conscious creator. Attributing laws to the various attributes we observe in nature is just our way, as humans, to describe our world in a scientific way. Unlike God or the various characteristics commonly attributed to him, we can demonstrate these natural laws, which would exist whether we had ever evolved far enough to discover them or not.
  • Assumption 3: The creator must be “transcendent” and exist outside of space and time. — This is a common trope in apologetics and was presumably conjured to excuse God from being beholden and subject to the laws of nature. Thus, believers might say, if we just put God outside of the observable universe, we can say that he is a higher force than anything in this universe and that he is the progenitor of morals, of the natural laws and of life itself. Of course, by definition, we can’t experience anything that is outside of our space and time; indeed, there is nothing outside of space and time. To say otherwise is to just make unsubstantiated claims based on pure fantasy, not unlike fictional tales of unicorns, the Loch Ness monster and Flying Teapot making laps around Planet Earth.
  • Assumption 4: The creator must be eternal. — This is just an extension of the previous claim. Here again, Tzortzis just makes another assumption about an uncreated creator, with no basis in reality, other than, perhaps, a deep-seated desire for it to be true.
  • Assumption 5: The “uncreated creator” must have freewill. — By now, and based on the other points, we can pretty well take it for granted that Tzortzis thinks a transcendant, all-knowing creator pretty well has free reign over his own decisions, but Tzortzis spells it out for us, although Allah or Yahweh being browbeaten and lorded over by an even more powerful overlord is humorous to think about. One might wonder, though, if this uncreated creator was “intelligent” and “eternal,” why would he so freely and benevolently choose to create the universe if he knew beforehand that a good 50 percent of his creation would be doomed to suffer unspeakable torments for all eternity, unless, of course, he was also a sadist and sinisterly set this plot in motion. In fact, if we were to judge God or Allah on his success rate, that is, the number of people who were compelled to believe based on scripture or inspirational speaking or some kind of “revelation” versus those who were not convinced of any of it, a 50 percent rate of belief for the most powerful force in the universe has to be disappointing.
  • Assumption 6: Humans sense the nature of God as creator as part of their disposition, and God as the creator is the “best and most comprehensive explanation” for the existence of the universe. — The first part of this assumption is just an appeal to personal experience, and as any judge, attorney or psychologist will attest, personal testimony is a poor basis to substantiate truth claims. Millions of atheists in the world, some of whom have sincerely searched for a spiritual component, have precisely the opposite experience, having had no innate sense of something spiritual outside of themselves, while millions of Buddhists have no conception of a theistic creator at all.

The last few seconds of Tzortzis’ video — and this ties into the sixth assumption — seemed to take a swipe at the Christian concept of the trinity in suggesting that God is one, rather than three separate, autonomous beings as in the Christian godhead.

Interestingly and ironically, Tzortzis says this concept is “irrational because it creates far more questions than it solves,” which would, on the surface, seem like a tip of the hat to Occam’s razor, if he hadn’t just spent the last five minutes making arguments about God that, themselves, raise more questions than they answer.

While it is true that we do not have an answer for why the scientific laws exist as we observe them in the universe, there is no reason to think that the eventual explanation will spring from anything other than a natural cause, as has been the case with every other question about the universe we have answered from science in the last 250 years. Why some believers think that questions about our origin are somehow exempt from having to be explained by natural processes, when all of our other knowledge about the universe comes to us this way, escapes all comprehension.

In the end, suggesting that an all-powerful, highly complex deity who sits outside of space and time is responsible for everything that we see in nature is, number one, a cop-out for having to come up with any kind of real explanation, and number two, complicates questions about our origin exponentially. For more on this, see my post, Response to Apologetics III: Aquinas and Occam’s razor.

SeaWorld of exploitation and desperation

SeaWorld-separates-moms-and-calves

After the release of CNN’s “Blackfish,” SeaWorld has continued its ad campaign to try to improve an image that has been thoroughly tarred and feathered as of late. I will be the first to admit that, after watching “Blackfish,” I wish that CNN had made more of an attempt to offer SeaWorld’s point of view, even if the theme park declined to participate in the documentary. Former SeaWorld trainer Mark Simmons, for instance, seems to have more of an objective point of view, yet he claims to have been interviewed by CNN for the better part of three hours for the film, only to have just a snippet of it to appear in the final cut.

Here is Simmons, who worked at the park from 1987-96, in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News:

I was physically present during many of the events that (the trainers) talked about in the movie, and I can tell you firsthand they completely misrepresented, provided disinformation and in many cases blatantly lied about those events.

I think CNN did have a clear agenda, and as a bit of failed journalism, did not put forth enough effort to portray multiple sides of the story as it relates to the treatment of orcas at SeaWorld.

That being said, SeaWorld has not done itself any favors in public relations in first, declining any and all interviews with CNN in responding to criticism. I suspect that SeaWorld has done this with the mindset that if officials respond, that would automatically give legitimacy to its critics, but I think it conveys the opposite message. By refusing to tell its side of the story to the media and the public and just releasing its own barrage of ads in an attempt to passively save face, it is operating as if it’s in its own insular cocoon, ever evasive and skirting transparency, not unlike Scientology or other subversive outfits coming under public scrutiny.

In any case, SeaWorld, cultish as it is at this point, has chosen it’s path, so let’s take a look at one of its ads currently making the rounds on TV:

First off, let me say that I went to SeaWorld in San Antonio once as a child, and excited as I remember being about seeing the whale show — Shamu, now deceased, was all the rave at the time — I always thought it was a little bizarre that having the whales simply do tricks in the water was not enough. SeaWorld had the whales get up out of the water and onto this platform at the front of the pool, do more tricks, splash the crowd, etcetera, like some clown of the deep.

Memory fails me on whether the particular whale I saw that day in the late 1980s or early 1990s had a bent dorsal fin, but watching the videos as an adult and seeing this deformed physiology seems now like a perverse show of exploitation, and however safe and humane SeaWorld may be in its treatment of orcas, the setup is certainly far from natural, as anyone can see. As this paper from Dr. Ingid Visser suggests, the prevalence of bent dorsal fins in wild male orcas is very low in most locations, at less than 5 percent in British Columbia and less than 1 percent off the coast of Norway. In captivity, however, this phenomenon is common.

According to a paper from the National Marine Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

The collapsed dorsal fins commonly seen in captive killer whales (Hoyt 1992) do not result from a pathogenic condition, but are instead thought to most likely originate from an irreversible
structural change in the fin’s collagen over time (B. Hanson, pers. comm.). Possible
explanations for this include (1) alterations in water balance caused by the stresses of captivity or
dietary changes, (2) lowered blood pressure due to reduced activity patterns, or (3) overheating
of the collagen brought on by greater exposure of the fin to the ambient air. Collapsed or
collapsing dorsal fins are rare in most wild populations (Hoyt 1992, Ford et al. 1994, Visser
1998, Ford and Ellis 1999) and usually result from a serious injury to the fin, such as from being
shot or colliding with a vessel.

In any case, in one of its latest ads, two doughy-eyed SeaWorld workers outline some “facts” SeaWorld would like to clear up about its handling and care of orcas.

The ad really only presented two actual “facts,” so I’ll take a look at these here:

  • “We don’t collect killer whales from the wild and haven’t for 35 years” — While it is nearly impossible to substantiate this claim, SeaWorld is, as we speak, profiting from a number of orcas that were indeed captured in the wild, whether directly or from third-parties. Corky II, 47, currently living in SeaWorld San Diego, was captured off the coast of British Columbia in 1969 and is the longest surviving captive killer whale in the world. Although she does not have the bent dorsal fin like a lot of her fellow captives, this characteristic is mainly seen in males of the species. Katina, who lives in SeaWorld Orlando, was captured in Iceland in the late 1970s. Tilikum, of course, is currently living in Orlando and was caught off Vancouver Island in Canada. The whale first lived at Sealand of the Pacific. Ulises, captured in 1980 in Iceland, currently resides in Seaworld San Diego. So, while it may be true that SeaWorld has not and does not currently engage in catching orcas in the wild, the company has by this time bred enough of the animals that were previously captured, either directly or indirectly, to continue profiting off these animals for years to come. Yet, its current attempt to now wash its hands of the practice is disingenuous at best. Imagine a plantation worker in the antebellum South who once bought and profited off the back of slaves. Although most of them were no longer engaged in human trafficking by the mid-18th century, they were still benefiting from the practice and were very much a part of the legacy of that noxious system. By the same right, merely putting up a barrier of years between the present and the shameful years in which hunters were engaged in a veritable free-for-all of animal poaching does not allow SeaWorld to escape complicity.
  • “Our whales are healthy” and “thriving” and “they live just as long in the wild.” — PolitiFact rated this claim as half true and partially misleading. First, of course, whales have the potential to live longer in a facility because they don’t have to worry about predators and other environmental factors, so while the lifespans may be comparable, this claim doesn’t offer a full picture. Second, the argument that the whales are “thriving” is nothing more than pure conjecture and wishful thinking. They may look happy enough performing tricks on the pool platform, but the evidential record that captive whales can become understandably aggressive because of their cramped confines, develop bent dorsal fins, sustain injuries and undergo other mental and physical issues is so substantially documented that to suggest orcas thrive more so in captivity than they would in their own free-ranging environment is laughable.

    Here is PolitiFact’s conclusion on this claim:

    At its core, this claim is an oversimplification of a much more complex issue. Recent independent data suggests that survival rates for captive and wild orcas are about equal, but that by itself isn’t all that significant, experts told us. The data is limited and comparisons between orcas in captivity and in the wild are tenuous. Experts also noted that logic suggests captive whales should live longer because they don’t face predators and receive medical care, which makes SeaWorld’s claim further misleading.

While the public may be led to believe that the ads are purely the result of SeaWorld trainers wanting to clear up misrepresentations and assert how much they care for the whales, significant losses in attendance and revenue are really what’s behind this PR campaign that smacks of corporate desperation.

I have no doubt that most or all of the trainers currently working at SeaWorld facilities “love” the animals and may want to see them thrive, the common sense stands on its own: Killer whales, nor any other species of wild animal, can’t possibly be happier living in a cage or pool than they would be in an open world environment, of which, so long as the operation of their theme parks are profitable, suits at the corporate offices at SeaWorld presumably don’t care two wits.

So long as the largely ignorant and uninformed public continues supporting places like SeaWorld and helping the company churn out hundreds of millions in profits, the exploitation will continue. For, if SeaWorld really “loved” these animals from the board room right down to the training staff, they would simply find another, less injurious business model and cease profiting off the exploitation of the natural world.

No ‘debate’ on evolution

Scientific theory versus conjecture

Scientific theory versus conjecture

Herein lies one of the many problems with scientist Bill Nye deciding to debate the disingenuous supreme leader of creationist sophistry Ken Ham: As I anticipated last year shortly after the debate, fruitless exercises like this with creationists, who have no interest in examining or considering any real evidence, serve no purpose and only legitimizes the fairy tales, such that a guy like Brandon Pettenger, a high school scientist teacher from Arroyo Grande (Calif.) High School, can point to the exchange between Nye and Ham and surmise that there must be a “debate” surrounding evolution and creationism after all. If there wasn’t a debate, why would a high-profile scientist like Nye even bother?

To his detriment, Nye did agree and go through with the debate, so it’s a fair question. In any case, Pettenger, who admits to being a Christian, showed the Nye-Ham debate to his students as a way to present “both sides of the argument,” as he said in this defense, after being called out by the Richard Dawkins Foundation and the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

I understand that you might be worried I am teaching religion in a public school science class which is not the case. There is debate within the scientific community about how to answer the question where did life come from (italics mine). I feel it would be a disservice to my students not to present both sides of the argument. We are investigating the main theories that are presented in this debate and the evidence used to support those claims. I am very clear beforehand that I am a Christian but I am trying to present the scientific evidence. It is up to each student to decide for themselves which side they believe based on the evidence. I will be asking each student to write an argumentative essay stating their position in the debate and to support their position with scientific evidence. I am trying to give students tools to use in their essays.

As Hemant Mehta points out, of course, the question of our origin from simpler forms only has one legitimate side, which is the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. All other “theories,” including creationism and intelligent design and all other origin tales from religion, are just that — theories in the most laymen-esque, conjectural sense of the word.

Pettenger can ask his students to write essays and support their positions all they want to, but if any of them happen to agree with Ham, the teacher will be waiting a long, long time for that “scientific evidence,” since none exists.

This message paid for by the Koch bros.

Credit: Pat Bagley

Credit: Pat Bagley

Iowa State University’s school of journalism celebrated First Amendment Day earlier this week thanks to a “generous donation” from the Charles Koch Foundation. If the Koch brothers appreciate anything, it’s certainly the First Amendment, as the company has went to great lengths, and even cited the First Amendment, to deny members of the Senate information on its support of climate change deniers.

Here is Koch general counsel Mark Holden summoning said amendment:

The activity efforts about which you inquire, and Koch’s involvement, if any, in them, are at the core of the fundamental liberties protected by the first amendment to the United States constitution. I did not see any explanation or justification for an official Senate committee inquiry into activities protected by the first amendment … We decline to participate in this endeavor and object to your apparent efforts to infringe upon and potentially stifle fundamental first amendment activities.

But for Iowa State University to accept a donation from a subsidiary of such an overtly anti-scientific and anti-intellectual company like Koch Industries, which has, according to Greenpeace, provided an estimated $79 million since 1997 to groups that deny climate change, seems counter-intuitive for a publicly-funded institution of higher learning that, presumably, seeks to teach college students to think critically and to trust accepted science.