Evolutionary Arguments Research Articles

BIBLICAL AND THEISTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM

AbstractAlvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism states that evolution cannot produce warranted beliefs. In contrast, according to Plantinga, Christian theism provides (I) properly functioning cognitive faculties in (II) an appropriate cognitive environment, in accordance with (III) a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs. But does theism fulfill criteria I–III? Judging from the Bible, God employs deceit in his relations with humanity, rendering our cognitive functions unreliable (I). Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that God's purpose would be to produce true beliefs in humans (III). Finally, from the theistic/religious perspective, it is impossible to tell whether observations have natural or supernatural causes, which undermines an appropriate cognitive environment (II). Reliable identification of deceit or miracles could alleviate these problems, but the theistic community has failed to resolve this issue. Dismissal of parts of the Bible, or attempts to find alternative interpretations, would collapse into skepticism or deism. Thus, Plantinga's problem of epistemic warrant backfires on theism.

Must realists be skeptics? An Aristotelian reply to a Darwinian Dilemma

In a series of influential essays, Sharon Street has argued, on the basis of Darwinian considerations, that normative realism leads to skepticism about moral knowledge. I argue that if we begin with the account of moral knowledge provided by Aristotelian naturalism, then we can offer a satisfactory realist response to Street’s argument, and that Aristotelian naturalism can avoid challenges facing other realist responses. I first explain Street’s evolutionary argument and three of the most prominent realist responses, and I identify challenges to each of those responses. I then develop an Aristotelian response to Street. My core claim is this: Given Aristotelian naturalism’s account of moral truth and our knowledge of it, we can accept the influence of evolutionary processes on our moral beliefs, while also providing a principled, non-question-begging reason for thinking that those basic evaluative tendencies that evolution has left us with will push us toward, rather than away from, realist moral truths, so that our reliably getting things right does not require an unexplained and implausible coincidence.

Inglés

In this paper I introduce some of the key elements of Daniel Dennett’s theory of intentional attribution and their relation with his notion of rationality. While doing so I will show that Dennett’s approach implies a circularity in the process of attribution of rationality, and that his resource to evolutionary arguments for trying to avoid an infinite regress does not help him to avoid the problem. My presentation will include a revision of Dennett’s arguments for epistemic intentional ascription and rationality attribution as well as some criticisms developed against his proposal. At the end of the article I will extend the criticisms and present my view about his proposal for ideal rationality attribution.

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic": J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic":J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival John Brannigan (bio) Dec. 1. I have been reading Herbert Spencer and my creed is now very simple. Humanity has evolved from the conditions of the world, and will return to the nothing it has come from. Each separate life is but a ripple on the waves,—a blade of grass on the roadside. For those who fail, there is no hope. They are like the dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution. In my useless agony I am only hurtful to my fellows. Why should I endure it?1 John Synge's "Étude Morbide," written around 1899, takes the form of "an imaginary portrait," and thus does not pretend to provide autobiographical statements of any authority.2 There are shades here of the Bohemian student who had spent much of the 1890s in Germany, Italy, and France studying European culture, but within a few years Synge had established himself as the most gifted playwright of the Irish literary revival, before his early death from Hodgkin's disease in 1909. The author of Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Synge's transformation was rooted in his immersion in the language and folklore of the West of Ireland, particularly the Aran Islands. However, in reflecting the impact of evolutionary debates about humanity and degeneration upon the sensibility of the artist, "Étude Morbide" provides some indications of how we might contextualize Synge's encounters with the primitive and the aboriginal on the Aran Islands in relation to his contemporaneous preoccupations with the legacies of Darwinism.3 Synge's choice of [End Page 329] metaphors for the figure of bare humanity are conventional—"a ripple on the waves … a blade of grass on the roadside"—yet distinctly apt given the propensity in his writings for the sea and the roadside as topographical markers of marginal modernity. Similarly, "those who fail" are likened, somewhat predictably, to "dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution," an image resonant with W. B. Yeats's later reference to "those our civilization must reject," and only ameliorated by Synge's identification of himself with the doomed failures of humanity.4 The work to which Synge refers, Spencer's Principles of Psychology (published in 1855, four years prior to Darwin's The Origin of the Species), argues that "life attains to more and more perfect forms" through an evolutionary process in which the "unfit" fail to survive, and the "fit" progress more and more towards an ideal or archetype.5 It is a "creed" which the artist finds incontestable, but which engenders despondency. At least on a personal level, however, relief from this despondency lies at the margins of modernity: May 5. I am in the country at last—near the end of Finisterre. Since I came here my daily readings of the saints and Stoics have lost their interest, and I live simply and naturally as the peasants do. This ordeal I have passed through has left me without a trace of apprehension. My system saved me, yet when I look back on it now, it seems a childish escapade. I have my fiddle here and I make the peasants dance in the evenings. My skin shivers while I play to see that in spite of the agony of the world there are still men and women joyous enough to leap and skip with exultation. (Synge, "Étude Morbide," 32–33) As James Knapp argues, Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) depicts his encounters with the "primitivism" of the islanders in much the same terms, but without "the tone of weary decadence" notable in his characterization of the artist in Brittany.6 The narrative tone may be refined and clarified, yet the relationship between these cultures "on the edge" of modernity and evolutionary discourses of primitivism, degeneration, and civilization is substantially the same. When Synge turns to Brittany and Aran as sources of cultural renewal it is not as "wild places" beyond the reaches of modernity, but as liminal spaces in an increasingly powerful transatlantic economy, capable...

LINAJES MITOCONDRIALES EN MUESTRAS DE ESQUINA DE HUAJRA (JUJUY, ARGENTINA). APORTES AL ESTUDIO DE LA OCUPACIÓN INCAICA EN LA REGIÓN Y LA PROCEDENCIA DE SUS HABITANTES

El sitio arqueológico Esquina de Huajra (centrosur de la Quebrada de Humahuaca) corresponde a una instalación ubicada cronológicamente en la Fase Inca (ca. 500-420 AP) y la tradicionalmente asignada en el noroeste argentino como Hispano Indígena o de primeros contactos con el español (ca. 420-320 AP). Enmarcado en la política económica incaica, habría sido clave en la explotación y distribución de bienes procedentes de las Yungas Orientales. Además, su cultura material sugiere importantes redes de interacción con las tierras altas, planteando interrogantes sobre la conformación poblacional de sus habitantes.En este trabajo se analizan los linajes maternos de individuos de Esquina de Huajra en comparación con otros sitios del centro-sur andino para evaluar su posible origen foráneo, considerando que el reasentamiento de poblaciones fue una práctica imperial recurrente. El ADN fue extraído de piezas dentales de 6 individuos. Se secuenció la Región Hipervariable I del ADN mitocondrial en cuatro individuos hallándose dos A2 y dos C1. La ausencia de B2 discrepa con lo descripto para gran parte de los sitios andinos, donde este haplogrupo es mayoritario. Dos de los cuatro haplotipos se comparten únicamente con otros sitios de la Quebrada de Humahuaca del Período de Desarrollos Regionales (Los Amarillos y San José); pero una variante nodal C1 fue reportada tanto en Juella como en sitios peruanos preincaicos e incaicos. Estos resultados representan un primer aporte al estudio genético de los habitantes de Esquina de Huajra y una evidencia más de los complejos procesos poblacionales en la región andina.

A New Reliability Defeater for Evolutionary Naturalism

The author identifies the structure of Sharon Street's skeptical challenge to non‐naturalist, normative epistemic realism (NNER) as an argument that NNER is liable to reliability defeat and then argues that Street's argument fails, because it itself is subject to reliability defeat. As the author reconstructs Street's argument, it is an argument that the normative epistemic judgments of the realist could only be probabilistically sensitive to normative epistemic truths (if there any) by sheer chance. The author then recaps Street's own naturalist translation of normative epistemic judgments into purely descriptive, contingent probability statements, and argues that, on her own terms, the reasoning that leads her to rationally believe in evolutionary theory (and other scientific theories) could only be probabilistically sensitive to the relevant purely descriptive, contingent probabilities by sheer chance. The author's argument is addressed to Street, but it applies to all evolutionary naturalist accounts of epistemic rationality. The author explains how his argument differs from Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) and shows how it avoids the objections to Plantinga's EAAN. The author closes with the outline of an explanation of how evolution could have made human reasoning probabilistically sensitive to metaphysically necessary normative epistemic standards, even though those standards did not exert and, indeed, could not have exerted any kind of causal influence on the evolutionary process.

Puzzles and mysteries in the origins of language

Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution. Could it be that language simply cannot evolve in a Darwinian world? Reviewing the insights of Noam Chomsky, Amotz Zahavi and Dan Sperber, this article shows how and why each apparently depicts language's emergence as theoretically impossible. Chomsky shuns evolutionary arguments, asserting simply that language was instantaneously installed. Zahavi argues that language entails reliance on low cost conventional signals whose evolutionary emergence would contradict basic Darwinian theory. Sperber argues that a symbolic expression is, literally, a falsehood, adding to the difficulty of explaining how – in a Darwinan world – systematic reliance on language could ever have evolved. It is concluded that language exists, but for reasons which no currently accepted theoretical paradigm can explain.

Ethics and Evolutionary Theory

It has long been argued that sometimes, acquiring information about the origins of one’s beliefs removes or diminishes the justification for those beliefs that one would otherwise have had. Descartes, for example, claimed that the less powerful the Author of his nature, the more reason he had to doubt his own beliefs (1960 [1641]: 79). And the more specific worry that knowledge of our evolutionary origins might give us reason to doubt our own beliefs famously goes back as far as Darwin himself, who remarked in an 1881 letter that ‘with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’1 In contemporary analytic philosophy, two sorts of arguments that might reasonably be regarded as descendants of Darwin’s doubt have attracted a lot of attention. The first of these is Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN), which first appeared in the early 1990s (see Plantinga 1993, 2000, 2011). That argument is intended to show that anyone who accepts both atheism and the claim that human beings are products of evolutionary processes has grounds to doubt the reliability of all of her cognitive faculties and hence has grounds to doubt all of her beliefs. Plantinga advanced this argument as part of a critique of contemporary naturalism; it attracted a lot of attention among philosophers interested in the contemporary debate between Christian theism and naturalism. Around or shortly after the time that philosophical discussion of Plantinga’s argument had waned, there was an explosion of interest in arguments concerned specifically with normative beliefs or with some specific subset thereof. That explosion was triggered by the 2006 publication of Sharon Street’s ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value’ and Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality. Street and Joyce both argue that recognition of the evolutionary influences on our moral beliefs construed in a certain way gives us reason to doubt those beliefs and hence removes (or at least significantly diminishes) whatever justification those beliefs would have otherwise had. Although Plantinga advanced his EAAN as part of a defence of Christian theism over contemporary naturalism, Street and Joyce advance their arguments in support of specific metaethical positions. Street argues that her Darwinian dilemma makes trouble for any realist metaethical view according to which moral beliefs are true just in case they correspond with attitude-independent moral truths. She further argues that a version of constructivism according to which moral truths are functions of certain human attitudes is not susceptible to the Darwinian dilemma. Her argument, then, is advanced in support of constructivism over realism in metaethics. Joyce, by contrast, advances his argument in defence of a certain sort of moral error theory.2 His contention is that if there are moral truths at all, then there are attitude-independent moral truths but that recognizing the evolutionary origins of our concept of moral obligation gives us grounds for doubting that we ever apply that concept correctly and hence any justification our moral beliefs may have had is undermined.3 In this article, I provide an overview of the contemporary discussion of ‘evolutionary debunking arguments’ (hereinafter ‘EDAs’) that was triggered by the work of Street and Joyce. My main aims are to provide rough characterizations of the EDAs of Street and Joyce, indicate some of the various ways that these EDAs have been understood by commentators together with the most prominent lines of criticism of these EDAs, examine one particularly interesting off-shoot of Street’s EDA and identify some interesting areas for future research.

The Situational Triggers of Aggressive Responses scale in five countries: Factor structure and country clustering solutions

Much research has focused on the detection of factors that might lead to aggression based on evolutionary arguments, trait approaches, psychosocial models and cognition/information processing. There may be trait differences in the way that individuals respond to environmental triggers thus, aggression may occur as the expression of a trait during specific situations. Such specific situations have been described (Lawrence, 2006) as “situational triggers” and are assessed through the STAR (Situational Triggers of Aggressive Responses) scale which is comprised of two main situational prompts, Provocations and Frustrations. In Study 1 (N=328 Greek university students), confirmatory factor analysis modeling confirmed the STAR scale structure with minor fluctuations. In Study 2, using data from the UK, Poland, Korea and USA, as well as an additional sample of Greek participants (N=1219), we tested the STAR for factor equivalence levels, aiming at an overall factor structure. The scale structure was confirmed across countries with levels of factor equivalence being satisfactory, although some within-factor collinearity was observed. A clusters-of-countries approach was thus implemented for further testing within each cluster. Overall, the stability and validity levels of the STAR structure and its cross-cultural application were verified with possible considerations of country-sets being the units of future analysis.

Насколько силен эволюционный аргумент против эпифеноменализма?

Насколько силен эволюционный аргумент против эпифеноменализма?

A INTERDISCIPLINARIDADE NAS UNIVERSIDADES BRASILEIRAS: TRAJETÓRIA E DESAFIOS

Uma reflexão acerca da trajetória e das práticas interdisciplinares recentes nas universidades brasileiras e seus desafios é o objeto deste artigo. Parte do conceito da interdisciplinaridade, diferenciando-o dos conceitos de multidisciplinaridade, pluridisciplinaridade e transdisciplinaridade. Em seguida, apresenta a evolução dos debates e as reflexões precursoras de Georges Gusdof, na França, e Hilton Japiassu e Ivani Fazenda, no Brasil; descreve as etapas do processo histórico dos cursos de pós-graduação interdisciplinares. Ressalta, ainda, o papel precursor de alguns pesquisadores que fomentaram a criação do Comitê da Área Multidisciplinar da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES e que, posteriormente, transformou-se em Interdisciplinar. Aborda as dificuldades encontradas para o estabelecimento dos primeiros critérios para o funcionamento e institucionalização do Comitê de interdisciplinaridade e, em seguida, apresenta os dados quantitativos do seu crescimento vertiginoso na pós-graduação, com destaque para a evolução do número de cursos, alunos, bolsas e docentes, assim como, mais recentemente, o surgimento de cursos interdisciplinares na graduação, e seu rebatimento regional. Conclui com a apresentação de alguns dos principais desafios e problemas à prática interdisciplinar na pesquisa e ensino nas universidades em todo o país.

Why mutual helping in most natural systems is neither conflict-free nor based on maximal conflict.

Mutual helping for direct benefits can be explained by various game theoretical models, which differ mainly in terms of the underlying conflict of interest between two partners. Conflict is minimal if helping is self-serving and the partner benefits as a by-product. In contrast, conflict is maximal if partners are in a prisoner's dilemma with both having the pay-off-dominant option of not returning the other's investment. Here, we provide evolutionary and ecological arguments for why these two extremes are often unstable under natural conditions and propose that interactions with intermediate levels of conflict are frequent evolutionary endpoints. We argue that by-product helping is prone to becoming an asymmetric investment game since even small variation in by-product benefits will lead to the evolution of partner choice, leading to investments by the chosen class. Second, iterated prisoner's dilemmas tend to take place in stable social groups where the fitness of partners is interdependent, with the effect that a certain level of helping is self-serving. In sum, intermediate levels of mutual helping are expected in nature, while efficient partner monitoring may allow reaching higher levels.

The agricultural figures of Darwin's evolutionary rhetoric

ABSTRACTAlthough theories of agricultural breeding came to epitomize Charles Darwin's evolutionary argument, little scholarship considers the rhetoric of agricultural writings he consulted. This inattention results from scholars misunderstanding how breeding figures in the Origin, with most suggesting Darwin uses it metaphorically or analogically. It is, however, better considered a metonymy, substituting a condensed causal description of selection that is qualitatively identical to the more complex process of natural evolution. Reevaluating Darwin's use of figuration sheds light on the way he and other scientists use a wider array of figurative resources (beyond metaphor), and particularly metonymy, to make causal arguments.

Leaving the door open for fish pain: Evolutionary convergence and the utility of ‘just-so stories’

Leaving the door open for fish pain: Evolutionary convergence and the utility of ‘just-so stories’

An Observation of One Case of Adult Partial Atrio-Ventricular Defect

The newborn with partial atrio-ventricular defect is born quickly normal without functional signs, and then cardiac insufficiency appears in the first weeks of life respiratory unrests. The spontaneous evolution makes itself toward a complication of the shunts left-right with cardiac insufficiency, Osler illness, the death or toward the pulmonary obstructive illness about 6 months old. In order to fear the evolutionary possibilities and debate difficulties of hold in charge in countries with limited resources such as Burkina Faso, we return a clinic observation of a case of partial atrio-ventricular defect in a sixty years old man.

Harmony as Ideology: Questioning the Diversity-Stability Hypothesis.

The representation of a complex but stable, self-regulated and, finally, harmonious nature penetrates the whole history of Ecology, thus contradicting the core of the Darwinian evolution. Originated in the pre-Darwinian Natural History, this representation defined theoretically the various schools of early ecology and, in the context of the cybernetic synthesis of the 1950s, it assumed a typical mathematical form on account of α positive correlation between species diversity and community stability. After 1960, these two aforementioned concepts and their positive correlation were proposed as environmental management tools, in the face of the ecological crisis arising at the time. In the early 1970s, and particularly after May's evolutionary arguments, the consensus around this positive correlation collapsed for a while, only to be promptly restored for the purpose of attaching an ecological value on biodiversity. In this paper, we explore the history of the diversity-stability hypothesis and we review the successive terms that have been used to express community stability. We argue that this hypothesis has been motivated by the nodal ideological presuppositions of order and harmony and that the scientific developments in this field largely correspond to external social pressures. We conclude that the conflict about the diversity-stability relationship is in fact an ideological debate, referring mostly to the way we see nature and society rather than to an autonomous scientific question. From this point of view, we may understand why Ecology's concepts and perceptions may decline and return again and again, forming a pluralistic scientific history.

Fired‐up apes: Chimps show their smarts and fuel an evolutionary debate

Science NewsVolume 188, Issue 6 p. 22-26 Feature Fired-up apes: Chimps show their smarts and fuel an evolutionary debate Bruce Bower, Bruce BowerSearch for more papers by this author Bruce Bower, Bruce BowerSearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 September 2015 https://doi.org/10.1002/scin.2015.188006017Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume188, Issue619 September 2015Pages 22-26 RelatedInformation

Plantinga’s Skepticism

For over 20 years, Alvin Plantinga has been advocating his Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, or EAAN. We will argue that this argument functions as an atypical form of global skepticism, and Plantinga’s development of it has repercussions for other types of skepticism. First, we will go over the similarities and differences; for example, the standard ways of avoiding other forms of skepticism, namely by adopting some form of naturalized or externalist epistemology, do not work with the EAAN. Plantinga himself is a naturalized epistemologist, and his skepticism comes from within this perspective. Next, we will look at how Plantinga moved from presenting his skepticism diachronically, as a loop, to presenting it synchronically, as an infinite regress. Finally, we can extend this move from Plantinga’s skepticism to other forms of global skepticism, in so far as these will involve the rejection of our cognitive faculties’ reliability, and formulate them synchronically as well. Global skepticism is often accused of instability, since it leads us to skepticism about all of our beliefs, including belief in the skeptical scenario itself. Yet formulating it as an infinite regress rather than a loop allows the skeptical charge to go forward.

The modality of theism and probabilistic natural theology: a tension in Alvin Plantinga's philosophy

AbstractIn Wunder (2013) I observed a probabilistic blunder in Plantinga (2011) and argued that correcting it, while noting Plantinga's acceptance of logically non-contingent theism, had negative consequences for many other of his probabilistic claims. Professor Plantinga kindly replied to my correspondence, but the fruits of that conversation could not be incorporated into Wunder (2013). This article will explain the blunder and summarize my earlier arguments before addressing Plantinga's main replies. I conclude that these replies fail to circumvent most of the problems observed earlier: perhaps most significantly, the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism and theism's logical non-contingency still appear jointly to imply theism's necessary falsehood.

An epistemic defeater for Islamic belief?

We aim to further develop and evaluate the prospects of a uniquely Islamic extension of the Standard Aquinas/Calvin model. One obstacle is that certain Qur’anic passages such as Surah 8:43–44 apparently suggest that Muslims have reason to think that Allah might be deceiving them. Consistent with perfect/maximally good being theology, Allah would allow such deceptions only if doing so leads to a greater good, so such passages do not necessarily give Muslims reason to doubt Allah’s goodness. Yet the possibility of deception of the faithful threatens to provide a subjective defeater for the (epistemic) reliability of their cognitive faculties. (‘Even if Allah can be morally good while deceiving, how do you know you aren’t being deceived for a greater good on a more macro level, such as about the nature of the Qur’an?’) Similar in structure to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), this defeater threatens to undermine all of a Muslims warrant claims. We consider and evaluate the reply that there are other Qur’anic passages and/or additional conceptual resources in the Islamic tradition that provide grounds for thinking that God’s faithfulness or truthfulness is more centrally and securely embedded in a Muslim’s noetic structure than such doubts. Specifically, we will argue that under certain conditions, there exists a subjective defeater for some Muslims that, unlike McNabb’s approach, isn’t based off of the proper function condition but Plantinga’s truth aimed condition.