for Brain and BehavioralSciences: "Darwin’s mistake: explaining the discontinuity between human and
nonhuman minds," by Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak and Daniel J.
Povinelli.
Their abstract:
Showing posts with label Errors in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Errors in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Show all posts
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Darwinists must first answer these questions about missing link frauds
| Before trying to deceive people with nonsensical falsities such as “the missing link” or “the ancestor of man,” Darwinists, who maintain that everything came into being through unconscious, uncontrolled and random coincidences, must first answer the following questions about just a few of the details in DNA replication, which takes place EVERY SECOND in a minute point, invisible to the naked eye, in EVERY CELL of EVERY HUMAN BEING:
If Darwinists want to prove their theory (which is impossible), they have to explain just a few details in this extraordinary system that takes place every second during the copying of just a single DNA. They must answer these questions at once. And they must explain all these things in terms of chance, in accordance with their claims. But they cannot do so, and never will. THEY CAN NEVER EXPLAIN EVEN A SINGLE PART OF THIS GLORIOUS SYSTEM WITH TALES OF EVOLUTION. All Darwinists can do is learn the laws of creation that apply to all these systems. And those laws are so astonishing, and have all been created. Darwinists have been humiliated and are in a despairing position. Even if they were to bring the whole world together and work on it, they could still never manufacture even ONE SINGLE PART of this fabulously detailed system, let alone chance itself managing to do that. Whether they like it or not, Darwinists have
|
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Darwin's Mistake and Darwin's Triumph
After Chris of Mixing
Memory and Deric
Bownds of Deric Bownds' Mindblog had already drawn attention to the prefinal
version of this article, “Darwin’s
mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds” by
Derek
Penn, Keith
Holyoak and Daniel
Povinelli has now finally been published in the current issue of the Behavioral
and Brain Sciences.
Penn, who’s affiliated with the Cognitive
Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana, and the University of
California, Los Angeles, Holyoak, Professor of Psychology at the University of
California, and Povinelli, Professor of Biology at the University of Louisiana,
and also a member of the Cognitive Evolution Group, argue that
“Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative
cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and
nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and not of
kind” (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was
mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals
masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To
wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and
nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic,
relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show
that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of
cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by
language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level
specification as to where human and nonhuman animals’ abilities to approximate a
PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent
symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that
underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds.”
As was to expected the article sparked quite a lot of heated responses in the
comment section both for it’s title and for its discontinuist view of human
cognitive which emphasizes the large gulf that lies between human and nonhuman
cognition. Those who are afraid that again a creationist/ID paper has made it
into a respectable science journal, can calm down. In their first footnote Penn
et al. make clear that:
"All similarities and differences in biology are ultimately a matter
of degree. Any apparent discontinuities between living species belie the
underlying continuity of the evolutionary process and largely result from the
fact that many, and often all, of the intermediate steps are no longer extant.
In the present article, our claim that there is a “discontinuity” between human
and nonhuman cognition is based on our claim that there is a significant gap
between the functional capabilities of the human mind and those of all other
extant species on the planet. Our point, to cut to the chase, is that the
functional discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds is at least as great
as the much more widely acknowledged discontinuity between human and nonhuman
forms of communication. But we do not doubt that both evolved through standard
evolutionary mechanisms. (Penn et al. 2008: 129)
Interestingly, when you google “Darwin’s
mistake” your fist hit is an amazon link for a book called “Darwin's
Mistake: Antediluvian
Discoveries Prove Dinosaurs and Humans Co-Existed” to which I won’t link because
I don’t want to raise the page rank of such junk. The second link is a funny
little poem called "Darwin's mistake",
which goes like this:
“Three monkeys sat on a coconut tree
Discussing things as they're said to be.
Said one to the others, "Now listen, you two,
There is a certain rumor that can't be true
That man descended from our noble race.
That very idea is a disgrace.
No monkey ever deserted his wife,
Starved her babies or ruined her life.
And another thing you will never see:
A monkey build a fence around a coconut tree
And let the coconuts go to waste
Forbidding all the other monkeys to taste.
If I put a fence around this tree,
Starvation would force you to steal from me.
Here's another thing a monkey won't do:
Go out at night and get on a stew,
And use a gun, or club, or knife
To take some other monkey's life.
Yes, man descended, the ornery cuss -
But, brother, he didn't descend from us.”
I must say this poem is actually pretty funny (given that it's not meant as
anti-evolutionary propaganda), although, as primatologists and the Machiavellian
intelligence hypothesis tell us, non-human primates
surely
aren’t saints either.
But Penn et al. make their scientific standpoint absolutely clear with the
title of their response, which is called:
“Darwin’s triumph: Explaining the uniqueness of the human mind
without a deus ex machina”
I am particularly excited by the comment of Graeme Halford,
professor emeritus at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his
colleagues, who write that they
“agree with Penn et al. that the ability to recognise structural
correspondences between relational representations accounts for many distinctive
properties of higher cognition. We propose to take this argument further by
defining both a conceptual and a methodological link between animal and human
cognition. The conceptual link is to treat relational processing (Halford et al.
1998a) as dynamic bindings of chunks to a coordinate system in working
memory (Oberauer et al. 2007). Such a coordinate system consists of slots
and relations between them, and includes relational schemas (Halford &
Busby 2007)” (Halford et al. 2008: 138)
This of course reminds me of Karl Bühler’s (1934) coordinate system of
subjective orientation which I
tried to use as a starting point for
a cognitive theory which sees mental representations as intersubjectively
overlapping and thus shared systemic spaces in
the form of a cognitive coordinate system/frame of reference into which and in
which conceptual representations are imported, integrated, unified, and
blended. In the future, I will have another look at both Penn et al.’s and
Graeme Halford’s claims.
Another ‘interesting’ comment is that of R. Allen Gardner, a
Professor of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Here’s the abstract:
“Sound comparative psychology and modern evolutionary and
developmental biology emphasize powerful effects of developmental conditions on
the expression of genetic endowment. Both demand that evolutionary theorists
recognize these effects. Sound comparative psychology also demands
experimental procedures that prevent experimenters from shaping the responses of
human and nonhuman beings to conform to theoretical expectations.” (Gardner
2008: 135).
What now, you may ask, is ‘interesting’ about this article?. Well let’s take
a look at what agrdner had to say about another important Paper on the
difference between human and nonhuman cognition, namely Tomasello et al.’s
(2005): Understanding
and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition:
“Sound comparative psychology and modern evolutionary and
developmental biology (often called evo-devo) emphasize powerful effects of
developmental conditions on the expression of genetic endowment. Both demand
that evolutionary theorists recognize these effects. Instead, Tomasello et
al. compares studies of normal human children with studies of chimpanzees reared
and maintained in cognitively deprived conditions, while ignoring studies of
chimpanzees in cognitively appropriate environments.” (Gardner 2005:
699)
To me this sounds a bit like flogging a dead horse, but what do I know. (not
much about evo-devo, that’s for sure)
At least both feature this nice photo of the test apparatus for chimpanzee
Basso, who first was believed to be able to count but, as was found out in 1917,
instead was only reacting to the unconscious cues of the experimenter:
UPDATE:
Chris of
Mixing Memory, John
Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts and George
Junior have already posted about the article, I hope there are more to
come!
References:
Bühler, Karl (1934) Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der
Sprache. Jena: Gustav Fischer.
Gardner, R. Allen (2005): Animal cognition meets evo-devo. In:
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28:5. 699-700.
Gardner, R. Allen (2008): Comparative intelligence and intelligent
comparisons. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (31:2):
135-136.
Halford, Graeme S..Steven Phillips, and William H Wilson (2008):
The missing link: Dynamic, modifiable representations in working memory.
In: In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (31:2) : 137-138.
Penn, Derek C, Keith J. Holyoak. and Daniel J. Povinelli (2008): Darwin's
mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. In:
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (31:2): 109-130.
Tomasello, Michael Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike
Moll (2005a): Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural
Cognition. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28:5, 675–691
Discontinuities between Human and Animal Cognition
Premack offers a stimulating brief essay
cognitive studies finding abilities in animals once thought unique to humans
should not lead us to confuse similarity with equivalence, for the human brain
has nerve cell types and connections not found in any other animals. He examines
eight cognitive areas to argue that dissimilarities are large. Here is his
abstract:
Microscopic study of the human brain has revealed neural
structures, enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not
found in any animal, challenging the view that the human brain is simply an
enlarged chimpanzee brain. On the other hand, cognitive studies have found
animals to have abilities once thought unique to the human. This suggests a
disparity between brain and mind. The suggestion is misleading. Cognitive
research has not kept pace with neural research. Neural findings are based on
microscopic study of the brain and are primarily cellular. Because cognition
cannot be studied microscopically, we need to refine the study of cognition by
using a different approach. In examining claims of similarity between animals
and humans, one must ask: What are the dissimilarities? This approach prevents
confusing similarity with equivalence. We follow this approach in examining
eight cognitive cases—teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning,
deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language—and find, in all
cases, that similarities between animal and human abilities are small,
dissimilarities large. There is no disparity between brain and
mind.
Another major article on this topic is in draft form for Brain and Behavioral
Sciences: "Darwin’s mistake: explaining the discontinuity between human and
nonhuman minds," by Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak and Daniel J.
Povinelli.
Their abstract:
for Brain and BehavioralSciences: "Darwin’s mistake: explaining the discontinuity between human and
nonhuman minds," by Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak and Daniel J.
Povinelli.
Their abstract:
Over the last quarter-century, the dominant tendency in
comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between
human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and
not of kind” (Darwin 1871). In the present paper, we argue that Darwin was
mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals
masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To
wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and
nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic,
relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (Newell 1980). We show that
this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition
and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language
or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification
of where human and nonhuman animals’ abilities to approximate a PSS are similar
and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent
symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that
underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds.
Errors in Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Errors in Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Daniel C. Dennett
As of January 25, 2006, readers have identified the following errors in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. (I have considered other criticisms offered by readers, but decided that they were in error. Further criticisms are, of course, invited.):
P24. I describe Aristotle’s Prime Mover as a final cause, but this is incorrect; Aristotle’s Prime Mover is the efficient cause of all things. Pointed out by Chris Hammel, 1/23/06.
p57. "Simulated annealing" may be a misnomer, since the process I describe--and describe blacksmiths as employing--is signicantly different from standard annealing practices. source: John Verhoeven.
p97. My argument about how to identify Mitochondrial Eve (ME) is flawed. This has been pointed out by Ian Gillies, Bill Margolis, Chris Viger, and Gilbert Scott Markle. (See also, the useful discussion in Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart's new book Figments of Reality). There are two complications, which I will call multiple local MEs and grandmother stacks.
Multiple local MEs: There could in principle be long periods of "stasis" in which the sets of mothers of mothers of . . . . didn't shrink in size for hundreds or thousands of years on end. No set can be larger than its successor, but it needn't be any smaller. In such a circumstance, going backwards in time, the "remaining" lineages each funnel down to a "local ME" (with two daughters) and that local ME's mother, (maternal) grandmother, greatgrandmother and so forth, single-file lineages marching back into the past. Whenever two such local ME strands converge, they discover a "new," less local ME, discharging their two more local double-daughtered MEs. In principle such multiple local ME strands could go back to multiple independent origins of mitochondrial life (of eukaryotes)--but there is very good reason to suppose that global ME (the True Mitochondrial Eve) is a hominid of some ilk, if not a member in clear standing of H. sapiens. I was wrong to suggest (by saying the sets "must" contract") that such a twin-lineage (to take the simplest case) couldn't "go on forever"; in principle it could, but with negligible--but not Vanishing--probability.
A grandmother stack is a subset of women related by maternity within any of the sets A, B, C, of mothers of mothers . . . . Thus in set B, the mothers of people alive today, there is the following grandmother stack: Andrea (mother of my grandson), Susan (my wife), Ruth (my mother-in-law), and her mother, the late Sylvia. Set C will drop Andrea and add Sylvia's mother, and so forth. Subsequent sets will always have a four-member grandmother stack generated by today's contemporaneous generations in my family. There are probably some seven- or eight-deep grandmother stacks somewhere in the world today, but I would think that the biological limit is about nine (you can get a ten-deep stack by assuming a stack of 13-year-old mothers with a still living 104-year-old ancestor). When local MEs evaporate by coalescence in the manner described above, the grandmother stacks involved do not shrink in the sets in which they appear. But the number of distinct grandmother stacks diminishes. When we reach Mitochondrial Eve, we will go right by her, since when she first appears she will be a member of a set of at least four women (Brandon's maternal ancestors) and probably seven or eight or nine. But this will quickly be apparent, since soon enough all members of the set will be a single grandmother stack, and we can locate ME as the only one with two daughters in the previous set.
p122-23. The standard account of the QWERTY phenomenon, as presented here (and by Papert and Gould and others), has been challenged by S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, in "The Fable of the Keys," Journal of Law and Economics, 33, April 1990, pp1-25. source: [I have misfiled the letter that drew this article to my attention. My apologies, whoever you are.] But see also Jared Diamond's article, "The Curse of QWERTY," in Discover, April 1997, pp. 34-42, and the further bibliography he lists on the last page, including the web site http://ww.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak/dvorak.html. Diamond, in a letter to me, finds grounds for disagreeing with Liebowitz and Margolis, so the issue remains unresolved.
p126. H. Allen Orr says: "Population genetic theory, for instance, does not prove that evolution by random change is faster than evolution by natural selection." ("Dennett's Strange Idea," Boston Review, 21, Summer 1996, p28.) I misspoke, but the result was ambiguity, not error. If we compare regions of DNA that are under selection pressure with regions that are not, we discover that ON AVERAGE, the regions that are under selection pressure show a lower rate of change--because of stabilizing selection. That is, when a new selection pressure is introduced, this typically leads to a relatively short, rapid burst of change followed by a long period of near stasis. If you stop the race at fixation time, then of course evolution by natural selection looks faster than random drift, but that is an artifact of the time window chosen. In his reply to my original clarification of this point in the Boston Review (October/November, 1996, p37), Orr claimed not to know what I was talking about, and rudely suggested-- "I can find no polite way of putting this"--that I didn't either, but when I gave him this elaboration of my intended meaning, he acknowledged that it was not mistaken, but that in the context he had not considered it.
p171. line 9: "figure 7.6" should be "figure 7.7" source: W. Luff
p207. fn, line 2: "their" should be "its" source: W. Luff
p271. Robert Mark's fine article, "Architecture and Evolution," in the July-August 1996 issue of American Scientist (pp383-389), shows that I underestimated the structural demands of support for a large dome over arches, so that my bracket diagram (the middle diagram in Figure 10.3) would not be sound, lacking the necessary surcharge. Squinches would also not be sufficient, he claims, for such large, heavy domes. His final conclusion is that my "treatment of crucial structural elements as a kind of surface decoration that can be altered at will--'You have to put something there to hold up the dome--some shape or other, you decide which"--ignores the years, or in some cases even centuries, of construction experience that led to their incorporation in historic buildings." In other words, according to Mark, the pendentives of San Marco are very definitely structural adaptations, not Gouldian "spandrels". This point is elaborated upon by Alasdair I. Houston, in "Are the spandrels of San Marco really panglossian pendentives?" in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, March 1997, 12.
p.274. Robert Mark (see above) also criticizes my claim that the bosses in the fan vaults of King's College Chapel could have been replaced by "neat round holes," but see the letter from Stephen Grover, and Robert Mark's reply, in American Scientist Nov/Dec 1996, p518. As Grover points out, Walter C. Leedy's 1980 book Fan Vaulting does support me on this, and Patrick Bateson, Provost of King's College, has also written to me supporting my account.
p300. Cambrian explosion occurred around 530 million years ago, not "around 600 million years ago" source: Stephen Jay Gould.
p301. line two. Walcott himself did not "literally dissect" the fossils. source: Stephen Jay Gould.
p304. up 4-6 lines: the spelling should be Naraoia, Sanctacaris, and Leanchoilia. source: Stephen Jay Gould. As Gould points out (Wonderful Life, p68-9), Walcott's terms are "a strange-sounding lot. Decidedly not Latin in their roots, they are . . . sometimes nearly unpronounceable. . . . Walcott, who loved the Canadian Rockies, . . . labeled his fossils the the names of local peaks and lakes, themselves derived from Indian words."
p320. Teilhard de Chardin did his work in China before, not after, his difficulties with the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church. "His 'exile' was to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York City." source: Christopher Peebles.
p360. Richard Feynman is wrong! As Irwin Tessman, Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, points out in a letter to Nature ("Feynman faux pas," 381, 30 May, 1996, p361), "The example he gives would not prove replacement; in fact, it suggests quite the opposite. In an endearing lapse, Feynman appers to have blanked out on the half-life for the decay of 32P to sulphur, which just happens to be two weeks; if the radioactivity decreases to one-half in two weeks it means (within experimental error) that there was no turnover of phosphorus in the cerebrum."
p370. Goethe did indeed say it, in Faust. Mephistopheles says, in Part I:
Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen,
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
Ernst Mayr was the first to draw this to my attention, and his citation from memory [!] was almost exactly correct. Simon van der Meer also sent me the German text, and Wolfgang Heinemann provided me with the Wayre translation:
For if your meaning's threatened with stagnation,
Then words come in, to save the situation:
They'll fight your battles well if you enlist 'em,
Or furnish you a universal system.
Thus words will serve you grandly for a creed,
Where every syllable is guaranteed."
p488. Many readers have urged that I am wrong about which cards need to be turned over in the Wason test, but it is they who are mistaken--which just goes to show how powerful this cognitive illusion is. However, Simon van der Meer finds fault with my expression of the task: I should have said "Your task is to find all exceptions to the rule" (since otherwise, one could sometimes find an exception by just turning over the first card).
p499. Three Mile Island was in 1979, not 1980. source: Joseph P. Calendriello.
p.544. Quine's Word and Object was published by MIT Press, not Harvard University Press. source: Lynwood Bryant.
p545. Schrödinger's first name is Erwin, not Ernst. (Elsewhere in the book I get it right.) source: Andrew P. Cassidy.
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