OPEN DISCUSSION JANUARY 2025 | Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (2025)

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Zeuglodon, Dec 28, 2024 at 5:51 pm
[The original post is too long to replicate here, even if we try to edit it down to its main points (in any case, it deserves to be read in full). So rather than replicating it, here is a direct link to it for convienience: https://richarddawkins.net/2024/12/open-discussion-december-2024/#comment-217173 ]

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Zeuglodon, Dec 28, 2024 at 6:44 pm
[Vincent:] The human mind and its freedom to evaluate knowledge and to wrestle with that information in search of the truth.
I literally challenged this “freedom” stuff last month, with an analogy to water no less that apparently spooked you enough to – in a rare case – directly address me about it. (If for whatever reason you want a hook back to that discussion, you can find an anchor by going here and CTRL+F searching for “freedom’s reality”).

The irony is that you seem outright paranoid about our detachment from reality (which… somehow an atomic brain lawfully adapted to live in an atomic world is uniquely doomed to?), and yet your only solution to this insecure blindness is basically the epistemic anarchy of believing whatever you want to believe.

I can’t think of a quicker way to destroy the search for truth than to have no standards for actually finding it.

“Freedom” is worthless to a hunt for truth. You either get it right, or you have the “freedom” to muck it up somehow and get it self-defeatingly wrong, and who the hell wants the freedom to do that? Only someone who was up to something dishonest enough to need fudging.

Also, you don’t get to pick ‘n’ mix your reality, much less our apparent shared one. I can’t for the life of me see what is so great about this obsession with vague “freedom” beyond some weird existential paranoia, one which it wouldn’t solve anyway.

This is literally round the roundabout again.
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Michael 100, Dec 28, 2024 at 7:16 pm

Vincent

I have the very distinct impression that you, Michael, and Aroundtown, Zeuglodon, Strato, Cairsley and others, think (assume, “believe” would not be too strong a word) that science PROVES that all reality is made up of physical material and physical forces. Am I wrong? Am I misstating your thinking? I will gladly accept any correction.

Speaking only for myself, I would say you are correct. As Ulf Danielsson wrote in The World Itself, “…there is no reality outside of matter.”

but it (science) cannot even EXAMINE what is the nature of ultimate reality or even whether there is a reality beyond the physical.

I don’t know what you mean by “ultimate reality.” If it’s beyond physical reality, it can’t be examined, how do you know it’s there? Do you have some instrument unknown to the rest of the world that probes beyond the physical?

You write the evidence against a materialist view is massive — I must ask, what is that massive evidence? I would argue that what Copernicus and Kepler to Maxwell, Planck, Polanyi and Collins, and I’ll add in Danielsson, Dawkins, Dennett or Einstein any of them thinks is not evidence. If evolution were simply a hypothesis dreamed up by Charles Darwin, it wouldn’t be worth a moment’s consideration. The same can be said for the heliocentric view of the solar system or the laws of planetary motion or electromagnetism &c, without evidence they aren’t worth much. that’s why, for example, it took Copernicus a life time before he published — he needed to gather the evidence. He wasn’t the first to think of it. He was the first to prove it. Kepler didn’t sit down and dream up the laws of planetary motion. It was a careful study of data gathered by Brahe that led to the discovery. I could go on.

this seems to agree with Dennett, Harris, Wilson, Dawkins and others who see the mind as no more than the chemistry of the brain. Do you really believe that?

Yes, except I would modify it slightly by saying that mind must be understood in the context of neuroscience. We can trust our brain’s because we can varify what we perceive by experience — it hurts when I do that, so I don’t do that. I’m sorry that I don’t know more about what J.B.S. Haldane wrote. I know just enough to know he was a brilliant scientist. But views, consistent or contradictory, are not empirical evidence. I believe you misread Dawkins’ view of altruism — the selfish gene refers to the fact that a gene has one job — to make other genes. The vehicle in which the gene does that, human or otherwise, can do all sorts of things. But as far as the gene is concerned, its vehicle must eat, not be eaten and reproduce. From the gene’s point of view, that’s all there is.

When you say “science has its limits.” I’m not sure I know what that means. No one claims we know everything. We know there are things we don’t know. But I know of nothing that suggests that any answers will be found beyond physical reality.

I disagree that science is based on faith. There may be order in the universe, but there is a whole lot of disorder spelled e n t r o p y. And there. Is no “reason” in the universe. That would imply that the universe has a mind with which to reason. That’s the wonder of it all that what we see is mindless, which circles back to mind being a function of brain — no brain, no mind.

then any ‘case for God’ cannot possibly receive a reasonable hearing.

Absent evidence to the contrary, I must agree.
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Zeuglodon, Dec 28, 2024 at 7:35 pm
Michael 100:

Speaking only for myself, I would say you are correct

Technical course correction: all of reality is a practically impossible claim to verify unless your universe can fit into a bath. Technically, it’s possible we’ll discover a complication tomorrow. The price science pays for its vast success is a duty to change its mind when the facts change. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Vincent was using an absolutist formulation deliberately to trick us into an easily-defeatable overreaching claim.

Instead, I’d emphasize that, so far, “materialism” or whatever you wanna call “dat shtuff wot SCIENCE studdys” is either the best system we’ve got to explain reality, or at the very least that it lacks the self-negating problems of the (presuming-to-be-upgrades) alternatives proposed so far.

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Cairsley, Dec 28, 2024 at 9:04 pm
Vincent M. Smiles (28 Dec. 2024, 3:50 pm)

Please correct me if I’m wrong – I would love to be wrong about this – but I have the very distinct impression that you, Michael, and Aroundtown, Zeuglodon, Strato, Cairsley and others, think (assume, “believe” would not be too strong a word) that science PROVES that all reality is made up of physical material and physical forces. …

In trying to understand others, especially those who disagree with you, it is important to put aside one’s own ways of thinking, in the hope of being able more easily to grasp just what the other is saying. The line-up of suspects you have named here for questioning might best be regarded as reasonable skeptics, which is to say that, if you tell them something, they will want to know why you said what you said, what makes you think what you have expressed by your words. If there is no evidence in support of your assertion, they have no reason to accept it.

The problem is, however, that you have asked the wrong question to make sense of the disagreement between you and them. The term ‘prove’ belongs more properly to arguments involving deductive reasoning, though of course the term is used more loosely in colloquial language. In arguments concerning empirical facts, the kind of reasoning used is inductive or in some cases abductive, where the truth-value of a proposition is never absolutely either true or false, but degrees of probability have to be estimated. Although there are branches of theology that deal with real-world applications, theology is concerned with defining the tenets of faith as monosemous, dogmatic statements as an aid to correct understanding necessary for adhering to orthodox faith. It is dogmatic in its assertions, which are to be taken by the faithful as true absolutely.

We skeptics, however, are aware that we live in a world that we are able to cognize and understand by way of the senses with which we are evolutionarily equipped to do so. As Plato long ago observed, sense-knowledge is not perfectly reliable, which was not good enough for him, who wanted perfect, totally reliable knowledge, such as one has when contemplating the pure idea. It is possible to do this, once one has acquired some ideas from sense-perception and some intellectual refinement. But, in the meantime, there is life to get on with, and imperfection is simply integral to the world we live in and to our own ability to live in it. Sense-knowledge is what we have to get by on, and it works well enough for us to survive all the millennia we have survived and indeed we have become a rather flourishing species.

Because of the imperfection of sense-knowledge and of the vastness and complexity of the cosmos, our knowledge of reality is never perfect. Instead of being able to say of our observations that they are true or false absolutely, we must be content to say that they are true or false to a certain degree of probability. Some observations can be known with very high degrees of probability, so that they are reasonably taken for granted, so long as the laws of nature hold true. But in arguments based on empirical observation, it is never a matter of “proving” anything absolutely, but of assessing what is most probably the case.

With all that in mind, let me answer your question. The answer, of course, is: No. But that is so, because, as I remarked earlier, you have asked the wrong question. And you did this, because you seem not to have understood any of the contributions that have been posted here in response to your expatiations on religion and science being in harmony. In fact, Vincent, you do not seem to cognize what science is and how markedly different from religion it is. Religion is based on faith (which looks to an empirical scientist very much like make-believe), and
science (i.e. modern science) is based on empirical evidence (along with its rigorous method of inquiry).

What you must understand about us reasonable skeptics, Vincent, is that, if you say something is the case, we will ask for evidence in support of what you have said. If you assert, however, that something exists for which there is no evidence, you cannot expect us or anyone to accept what you say. Is that not reasonable? That is all any of us here have been asking of you, since your first expatiation in this forum. Yet evidence seems to be an alien concept to you. You have fulminated and expatiated at length with all manner of references and observations and exhortations except the one thing required of you, namely evidence for the existence of the things you were implying or referring to under the banner of religion. This I would guess to be due to theology never having need of evidence, since it arose as an intellectual discipline within a culture that had assumed on faith the existence of God as integral to its basic worldview. It should then come as no surprise that the difference between religion and science is stark. Theological thinking is absolute, based on faith and dogmatic, whereas scientific thinking is imperfect, based on empirical evidence and provisional. Most starkly of all, religion is superstition, whereas science is evidence-based understandings of reality.

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Richard G, Dec 29, 2024 at 10:20 am

I have been meaning to read The God Delusion for a long time and have only just got round to it.

I’m not sure where what I want to say fits in with this site that I have just registered with.

For what it’s worth the book is a great contribution to understanding (as well as incredibly well written) but…..

It seems to me that it is as illogical to be a theist/deist as it is to be an atheist. For me all of that is not only about untenable positions but misses the point. Does any of this matter in the absence of evidence to the contrary? All we can (and I would add SHOULD) do is our individual and collective best, in the troubled world we live in, is to make a positive difference in whatever ways we can.

Humankind is sadly driven by personal interest (encapsulated in three words: wealth, sex and power) and unless we can negotiate those challenges the existence of a god or gods becomes pretty irrelevant.

I hope that is a useful contribution.

Very happy to continue the discussion.

Here’s to a better New Year for all (although it’s hard to be optimistic but what option do we have but to carry on doing our best? !).

Richard G
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Zeuglodon, Dec 29, 2024 at 6:03 pm

Vincent M. Smiles:

These are not MY primary reasons for believing in God. My personal reasons would not interest you in the least. I consider the following no more than supportive evidence – interesting, but I was a believer long before I knew what follows.

Oh no, Vincent: any reason for taking a claim seriously is of interest to us, especially when the reasons you put forward are – by your own admission – not even the meat of the argument. Don’t tell me you’ve got something to hide? I thought open communication would be a virtue here.

I mean, take a moment to consider what you’ve just said here.

So what you’re saying is that no matter what we say in rebuttal, you’ve got some not-mere-support reasons in reserve so that you don’t have to change your mind at all? Reasons, moreover, that you simultaneously imply were the real conversion fuel before these supplements acted as extras? Reasons which you believe would justify any kind of god-belief (never mind your particular deistic-seeming version), which as I’m sure you’ve noticed us banging on about, are crucial to the claims of any proposed science-religion compatibilism you are also trying to convince us of, seeing as a large if not foundational aspect of religion (especially the Abrahamic faiths that dominate the world today) involves god-belief as a non-negotiable component?

Like, really?

Come on, Vincent, you’re sitting on your ace and expecting us to just ignore that? You must at least appreciate how bizarre it looks to see you put forward what even you admit isn’t even your best foot.
Let’s do it! Go for broke! Bring out those big guns that outright converted you so long ago. Let’s see the true winner argument(s).
You never know – we both might learn something crucial.
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Cairsley, Dec 30, 2024 at 12:11 am

Vincent M. Smiles (29 Dec. 2024, 4:06 pm)

… The human mind is the best evidence there is, and its freedom to deliberate and to try to discover the truth – however imperfect – attests to intelligence and reason in the universe.

The human mind is one of the phenomena that have defied explanation. Assuming that it is of nonphysical origin because it seems nonphysical and free to deliberate is not to explain it at all. Just as gods have been believed by our forebears to exist because, thanks to their evolved bias to attribute agency to anything active in the environment, they found that the most natural way to make sense of natural phenomena they could not otherwise understand. Likewise, prior to the rise of science and in particular of neurology and the range of related disciplines referred to collectively as neuroscience, the mind was generally thought to be a different kind to entity from the material body. But, with the benefit of neuroscience, the mind is shown more and more clearly to be generated by brain-activity. Moreover, we do have a sense of being free to deliberate on matters, but that sense too is afforded us by brain processes operating beneath what consciousness we may experience. When we make decisions, we are in fact being made conscious of what the brain has already decided. The most notable book on this topic of late is Determined: Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky.

How the “freedom [of the mind] to deliberate and try to discover the truth, however imperfect, attests to intelligence and reason in the universe” is not at all apparent. Have you considered from an evolutionary biological perspective that the human mind is to some extent able to make sense of the world because it has evolved to survive in that world? The work necessary to understand the order found in the wider world is a different field of study (physics), where very interesting work is being done. Human knowledge is not advanced by positing entities that cannot be verified or falsified. In the modern context, saying that there is something beyond the natural world simply adds nothing to the discussion. Of course, you remain free to believe whatever you like; but the difference between belief and knowledge is that the latter is justified by something called evidence. As Christopher Hitchens put it: What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
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Vincent M. Smiles, Dec 31, 2024 at 12:39 am
I am willing to admit when I have made a mistake, and I confess fully that I was wrong to have written what I did in the ORIGIN OF LIFE section of my last post. I sincerely thank you, Zeug, for your very detailed refutation and correction, and I accept what you say, and will be more careful in the future about sources on issues where I do not have the requisite expertise.

I am angry at myself for being so naïve in accepting what Stephen Meyer writes about intelligent design. I honestly thought that this was a new and improved version of the ID that I rejected many years ago when Kenneth R. Miller wrote his scathing rebuttal of Michael Behe’s theory about irreducible complexity. I should have read expert reviews of Meyer’s book, as also of Gelernter’s opinions. Had I done so, I would have been a lot more careful. I am especially embarrassed and angry at myself for misunderstanding Dawkins’ main point. Again, Zeug, I accept your correction. Sincere thanks.

I stand by what I wrote in the other sections of my post, but there is clearly a lot of anger directed at me at present. I will not, therefore, try to pursue the discussion at this point.

Hello all,

Happy New Year.

Is trust the same thing as faith? And does empathy enable cognitive dissonance?

Hello Richard G,

I missed welcoming you last month. Do you think the American democratic process creates justice when executed correctly, and if so, when the process is usurped would you consider that an end to justice?

Zeuglodon, Hello again.

Would you agree life has no point? If so, how do you keep from becoming a nihilist? Are you an absurdist?

Happy new year Strato,

I tried posting this in December in response to a comment you made:

https://www.earth.com/news/organic-molecules-found-throughout-the-universe-hint-that-life-began-in-deep-space/

Vincent M. Smiles,

You said something like the universe is not something science can measure. What about entropy? If everything is changing incessantly, it can’t be complete, can it? If there is anything that is forever, it would mean an end to change.

I was thinking last night about life and how there are only two things you can’t walk away from, being born and dying. In my mind, there is not a truth that exists which can’t be refuted. It might not make you smart or logical or even accepted, but truth makes you whole about as much as finding the center of the universe makes god exist.

I’m sorry if I misinterpreted what you meant.

I am a follower of Timothy Snyder, Yale historian of Eastern Europe, multilingual. Snyder has such acuity. I have read his essays and Guardian articles and watched YouTube videos. But I have yet to get his books. Top of the list.

In a word, my characterisation of Snyder would be ‘truthful.’ Like an oracle. I’d say a national treasure, whereas your Trump and Musk are national trashers.

‘Trumpmuskovia.’ That Eastern European informed sense of black humour.

It’s going to get ugly in the White House and in the Trump Administration generally. Naturally this is no laughing matter and it will have negative ramifications for the rest of the world, not least the ‘free world.’ But one can take the historical perspective as Snyder does with his deep knowledge of authoritarianism, despotisms, and not be become paralysed over what’s in train, but rally for democracy, as Anne Applebaum also exhorts.

Surely the ridiculousness and chaos of Trumism, and of the odious ‘Trumpmuskovia’ entanglement is unsustainable. Shakespeare was born too early.

‘Trump is a little guy, Musk is a big guy’: historian predicts trouble for president-elect

‘Timothy Snyder says world’s richest man is likely to exert uncomfortable influence over White House

Elon Musk’s frequent appearances alongside Donald Trump have earned him the satirical nickname ‘first buddy’’

On January 6, 2025, at 10:00 a.m., President Biden will sign the Social Security Fairness Act. I have no idea if the date and time has any significance.

The new statute will reverse the laws signed by President Reagan in 1983 that made it difficult, if not impossible for workers to collect benefits — for which they paid — from both Social Security and the Civil Service Retirement System.

Suppose John Doe worked during his teenage years at the local grocery store and then as a young adult at an even better paying job — let’s say he worked for a construction company building houses. Then, he was admitted to the police academy and upon graduation began a career as a policeman. On his days off, John worked for his old employer building houses. Or, maybe officer Doe worked at the local stadium directing traffic or providing security during sporting events. In each of these outside jobs, the employer withheld Social Security taxes and paid them into the appropriate government account.

One day Officer Doe wakes up and realizes he’s old enough to retire. He applies for his Civil Service pension but when he goes to the Social Security office he’s told that he can’t receive both pensions — that would be double dipping into the government welfare entitlement programs. “But, I paid into both funds. I want what I paid for.” “Too bad,” said Reagan, “we can’t afford to have welfare queens cheating on these entitlements,”

It only took 42 years to get a majority of the congress and a president to correct that injustice.

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Tony at 10:07 a.m.

Would you agree life has no point? If so, how do you keep from becoming a nihilist? Are you an absurdist?

You addressed your question to Zugelodon, but I can’t resist throwing my two cents worth in. First, by “point” I assume you mean purpose. “Life” is an organic process. About 4 or 4.5 billion years ago conditions were such that self replicating molecules formed and over billions of years, through a process we call non-random natural selection, life in all its various forms evolved. Because our species has the ability to plan and anticipate consequences, we look at nature and see things that appear to have been designed. They weren’t designed, they are the way they are because they got that way.

If you want to understand that process, I can’t recommend anything better than reading several of the books Richard Dawkins has written. It takes some effort, but with each page of each book, more understanding is gained. They don’t substitute for obtaining advanced degrees, but for a lay person, Richard Dawkins has bequeathed to us a wealth of knowledge. And, he’s not the only author. As long as you find credible scientific information, more and more pieces of the puzzle will fit together, and the more you see the grander of the natural world in which we live.

Which, I hope, answers your second point about not being a nihilist. If you simply look at the world and see no purpose and have no clue about how it could be, then yes, that might be depressing. Understanding the beauty, the poetry, of reality is profound. I hope that helps. To your third point, I don’t know what an absurdist is.

grander should be grandeur. The short edit time is like playing a game of Beat the Clock. LOL

Tony,

Thank you for the link to that fascinating article on organic compounds throughout the universe, which are looking like the precursors for life, just needing a nice salubrious planet like Earth to incubate into replicators and evolve away.

I subscribed to earth.com.

Tony, in taking the Socratic approach, or strategy, in posing questions, I would prefer it if you were to state your own thoughts on these points, for response or critique.

I can’t agree that there is not a truth that can’t be refuted.

That’s not the same as Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, an important development in the philosophy of science.

Any ‘truth-claim’ must be vulnerable to falsifiability if it is to qualify as worthy of consideration. And the claim must be attended with evidence, subject to peer-review from those with expertise to examine that proffered evidence and repeat the experiments, to falsify or verify the findings and assess whether the conclusions are warranted. Scientific knowledge, even if established, and universally accepted as sound, always remains tentative, open to the possibility of better future understandings supplanting current ones.

The arrogated claim, or dogma that humans possess a ‘soul,’ the ‘essential, non-corporeal, non-material self,’ is a faith statement, conveniently exempted from the evidence-demanding criterion of falsifiability. It can therefore be dismissed as vapid.

In the long list of logical fallacies that claim, and claims to ‘spiritual’ existence in general are called Special Pleading. They’re not entitled to some exclusive ‘magisterium.’

Michael 100,

I know, it really does get the heart racing, doesn’t it!

Strato: I usually compose things on a word processor, and go over it before I post it, and then I proof read before I push “post comment.” As soon as the post is on the screen, glitches jump out and slap me in the face. It happens every time. Nothing to do but hope everyone understands. And, If the typo changes the meaning or is beyond my ability to live with, the moderators are only too willing to help.

Sorry Stato,

I used the wrong word. Should have said opposed.

To Aroundtown,

The Absurdism I was referring to is Camus’ philosophy which counters the idea that a lack of meaning or purpose is cripling.

Also, this is great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDNRsmULvWQ

Sorry Aroundtown,

Just realized I was responding to Michael100.

No problem Tony: I know just enough about Albert Camus to have read a few of his novels. In times of stress, I’ve tried to remember M. Meursault saying “It’s all the same!”

That attitude makes a lot more sense than becoming agitated which usually doesn’t help or change the situation. To that extent, I would probably be an absurdist. Keeping that attitude, though, is often easier said than done.

Tony:

Zeuglodon, Hello again.

Would you agree life has no point?

It’s trite to answer “I don’t understand the question”, but it also strikes me as evasive, so I’ll elaborate instead. I suspect that the question is A) loaded, because it presumes at least a binary “yes/no” with no regard for scope or accuracy, and B) simply a category mistake.

An example I used last month is with life, so I’ll do the same here. The universe has life in it – the life forms we see around us (heck, we are life forms ourselves) – and there we can have a sensible discussion about e.g. reproduction, growth, development, and responding to stimuli in our environment. Qualifications of life.

So is the universe alive? Well, no. It doesn’t reproduce, its post-Big Bang space-time expansion isn’t the same as the molecular or cellular build-up of an organism (unicellular or multicellular, respectively), and it can’t respond to stimuli in its wider environment because – as far as we know – there isn’t even a wider environment to contain it. The fact that e.g. lions exist in it doesn’t mean that it itself is alive.

So that must mean I think the universe is lifeless! Well, no to that too. That’s a false dichotomy: we can’t divide the discussion into either “the universe is alive” or “the universe is lifeless”. If the universe were devoid of life completely, there wouldn’t be any life forms at all, including ourselves. It’s just confined to a subset of physical phenomena which qualifies for the title of “life” (i.e. it reproduces, grows, develops, responds to stimuli in its environment, and so on). Trying to expand it outside that subset leads to contradictions with the rest of the set.

I take the same view of “point” – which like Michael 100 I assume means “purpose” here.

You can discuss such qualifications of purpose as design (functional specificity), motivation (e.g. psychological or physiological), agent or culprit (namely, who’s using a means to an end), and goals (the end state or process to be achieved, whether actualized in the real world or idealized in someone’s head). For language-using humans especially (who, also being the same species, have a ton of overlap amongst themselves), we have more grounds for assuming internal purpose (what some might say the “soul” wants or yearns for) than we necessarily do for other animals whose inner lives are more opaque or outright questionable.

Still, you could have a watered-down Darwinian discussion on a pseudo-purpose or demi-purpose (or “purposoid”, by analogy with Dawkins’ use of “designoid”) when describing biological adaptations distinct from deliberately designed artefacts made by humans. Even with specific disqualifications (for instance, whether or not animals can visualize their desired endgame in a particular activity), enough crossover exists that the language helps make sense of gene-centric evolutionary adaptations especially.

This distinction is easier to grasp when describing the biochemistry of a cell, where the genetic patterns along the DNA and RNA strands translate into proteins which in turn react with and/or catalyze other molecules to manage physical energy conversion and metabolic construction (anabolism) and breakdown (catabolism). The result is a self-regulating system which looks designed, a.k.a. a “designoid” system, even though it’s self-assembling in practice.

It doesn’t stop there. Purpose within humans can vary a lot too. Scope, for one thing. Priority, for another. Consistency, for a third. Someone might have ambitious goals that can’t be fully realized in one lifetime, whilst someone else might have modest goals that they can achieve before they die. Someone might monomaniacally devote their time and energy towards a narrow cause or pursuit, someone else might drift vaguely through life with too many options and no particular inclination that whittles them down. Someone might be firing on all cylinders, and someone else might constantly try to serve two masters and do half a job for each one, frustrating themselves.

And that’s before applying the same from individuals to groups (to the extent that they’re either identical copies of each other or harmonize the asymmetries of their members to achieve something greater).

But this is all because we can easily see for ourselves human purposive behaviour and can at least apply sensible predictions about their inner lives as an extrapolation and result of our own, and vice versa. We can apply a watered-down version to Darwinian logic. But the watering-down diminishes to nothing when we get to what the rest of the universe is doing – physics, astronomy, planetology, geology and abiotic earth sciences, chemistry, and cosmology as a whole – because it either makes predictions that are flat-out contradicted and wrong, or which add nothing but an untestable redundancy onto what we already know.

I don’t think the universe operates in either mode (i.e. it’s not a living thing which you could call “designoid” or “purposoid”, and it’s not an artefact of some other living entity capable of design or purpose). But then again, I’ve never seen any necessity for it to do so. Since I take that view, applying either version of the purpose concept to it falls into the same pit as trying to apply it to any subset other than those of anthropology (humans) or biology (life generally): contradicted or redundant.

It’s simply applying them erroneously outside its category. Hence category mistake.

If so, how do you keep from becoming a nihilist? Are you an absurdist?

Nihilism is a result of that yes/no false dichotomy, so I suppose by default, my answer is “no”. Absurdism contains a premise I either don’t understand or – to the extent I think I do understand it – doesn’t strike me as sensible: “the universe is irrational and meaningless”. Either the universe doesn’t have a mind to be rational with, or this statement is ignoring the progress we’ve made so far in understanding the universe scientifically. So I suppose by default, my answer is “no” again.

Usually, I don’t like -isms because they either oversimplify any particular premise, or package up a bunch of premises I can’t agree to as a collective (I prefer to plus or minus them piecemeal on a case-by-case basis). Or both.

In any case, you should be able to glean at least the best grasp of my position directly from what I just wrote, rather than from some prejudicial, prepackaged, pigeonholing label.

Either the universe doesn’t have a mind to be rational with

Darn it, I should’ve said: “Either the universe doesn’t have a mind to be rational OR IRRATIONAL with”. In other words, I think it’s another category mistake.

New year so some house keeping is in order I would think so we can see ourselves in the mirror so to speak. I’ll provide this information on human population and projections. I’ll also offer information on sustainability in relation to resources.

Sobering to my way of thinking but I am well aware, in America at least, that most are only thinking of getting lower prices so they will have the money to buy new shiny toys. I don’t think I’m very far off on that suggestion. Okay here goes.

4.3 births occur on average every second around the world while 1.8 die on average in the same time frame. World population now stands at 8.184 billion and is expanding exponentially. The link will provide a better look.

https://live-counter.com/world-population/index_htm_files/320.png

This second link on resources was offered when the population was at 7 billion and already resources weren’t sufficient for the population. It is fairly easy to understand that food availability will not meet demand and that pressure will only increase.

“The world’s population is now well over seven billion and growing. We have reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain our population exceeds what is available, argues Professor John Guillebaud from University College London”

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/ockhamsrazor/there-are-not-enough-resources-to-support-the-worlds-population/5511900

Hm, I see “brevity is wit” is still passing me by. Gotta work on that.

Just want to mention the water concerns for humanity and it ties in with my previous post. For some reason most people don’t really think of this problem if they have water running out of their tap and they can flush their toilets but it becomes a concern real quick when it stops. Others might be thinking that I’m the perpetual Debbie downer but these issues are never far from my mind. I don’t think that it’s unfortunate. It’s a curse in a way I guess because others seem to think things are just dandy and tomorrow will take care of itself, but putting your head in the sand solves nothing. There is one huge constant that seems to escape humanity, largely the religious folks, and that is the fact that their gods are nowhere to be seen in times of calamity on earth but there is a very good reason why no supernatural help occurs, imaginary people have no effect in the real world.

“Water is life. Yet, as the world population mushrooms and climate change intensifies droughts, over 2 billion people still lack access to clean, safe drinking water. By 2030, water scarcity could displace over 700 million people. From deadly diseases to famines, economic collapse to terrorism, the global water crisis threatens to sever the strands holding communities together. This ubiquitous yet unequally distributed resource underscores the precarious interdependence binding all nations and ecosystems and shows the urgent need for bold collective action to promote global water security and avert the humanitarian, health, economic, and political catastrophes that unchecked water stress promises.”

https://earth.org/global-water-crisis-why-the-world-urgently-needs-water-wise-solutions/

This too just to highlight the priorities of America in this case. You will have heard of the desire to run oil pipelines across the country but you never hear of a pipeline for water from the Great Lakes to ease water scarcity in the West of the country. You can bet those in the East would scream bloody murder if that was proposed. There is usually a hooray for me and the hell with you attitude when it comes to those who have abundant resources with no desire to share them. I can imagine that plays out in other places as well that I’m just not familiar with. The regression of glaciers is certainly going to be a test and that is likely to kick in pretty soon, glaciers provide a great deal of water to populations in the Far East. As they say, time will tell. But I think the writing is on the wall. Just saying.

Zeuglodon Beta (1 Jan. 2025, 5:10 pm)

Hm, I see “brevity is wit” is still passing me by. Gotta work on that.

Easy, Zeuglodon. Your ability to analyse ideas and arguments in clear language is excellent. We would not want it cramped by a desire to be witty. By all means, if you think of a brief way of conveying an idea, let us have that too; but not at the expense of your well-thought-out analyses, with which you are generous enough to favor us.

Zeuglodon at 4:31 p.m.

I can’t think of anyone with whom I’d rather share a view of point!

Zeuglodon Beta,

Don’t go thinking that you’re imposing a chore on the rest of us, with your thoroughness and analytical bent. It’s great reading your work, far more in-depth than mine.

Aroundtown,

Contributing to your information on the state of things, the focus here being just for humans,

The Guardian view on Russia and China: an old friendship poses new threats

‘Over the holidays, this column is looking ahead at the urgent issues of 2025. Today, the expansion of the partnership between Beijing and Moscow’

“New Year’s festivities are over, back on yer ‘eads!”

It does seem that Steven Pinker’s prediction in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011, that the trend toward global peace under the ‘civilising process,’ seemed to his positive analysis, likely to continue, might not be borne out over 20 years later, tragically.

Washington Post,

Global data shows violence surged in 2024.

‘Conflicts have doubled in five years, according to a report published by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data’

In reply to Aroundtown and Strato, but definitely not limited to them!

For several years now I have been grateful for the insights contained in Tim Marshall’s superb book on geopolitics, Prisoners of Geography. I’ve posted about it here several times before, I know (the first time was here: https://richarddawkins.net/2021/01/book-club/#comment-207823 ), but I continue to believe it is absolutely essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the world in general and international affairs in particular.

It’s always invigorating to come across a book written by someone who both really knows their stuff and is able to put it across in a clear and engaging way. What makes Prisoners of Geography even more invigorating and illuminating is that Marshall approaches the subject of international affairs from an angle that is almost totally absent from mainstream news coverage and yet which, once you see it, immediately makes everything fall into place.

There is a real danger I’m not going to rest until I’ve persuaded everyone I know to read it! Seriously, though, I can’t recommend it highly enough and it is very, very relevant to any discussion about current affairs involving Russia, China, the USA or anywhere else either, come to that.

Zeuglodon

“brevity is wit”

It certainly can be, but we only have to look at the way every remotely contentious issue gets reduced to tedious memes and slogans on social media to see that it certainly isn’t always the case. Thoughtful analysis and nuance don’t stand a chance when all that matters is the instant “pwn”. And given the dominance of social media these days, and the ease with which they can be manipulated for political purposes (as we’re witnessing now only too clearly), it’s perhaps little wonder that so many people’s ability to think clearly and critically has become so blunted, with the disastrous results that we’re all only too aware of.

So your thoroughness is not only a welcome antidote to that, but an important one too. Your willingness to truly engage with the other person’s argument, to concede where they have a point or to refine one of your own, is exemplary. It can make engaging with you quite hard work, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either!

Too much brevity has a tendency to produce twits rather than wits 😉

Marco,

You’ve got me to finally put Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics. on the top of the list for a definite acquisition soon, one of the essential understandings. I think he wrote another on the subject?

I’ve taken up a few of your recommendations, and am very glad I did.

Today I did my walk and continued listening to the acclaimed Empire series of podcasts you put me on to, this one on the Armenian Genocide, which Turkey will eventually officially acknowledge. Possibly 1 million of the population of 2 million Armenians were murdered around the time of WWI to 1920.

Last walk, I listened to the episode on Gallipoli. Awesome. My dad’s dad was a bugler and a stretcher bearer with the AIF there. Then he was sent to Villers-Bretonneux, Western Front, bugler and stretcher bearer again, having to go out into ‘no-man’s-land’ to retrieve blokes, 303 bullets going both ways.

The discussion sure had me ponderous. There are indeed lots more ways of not existing than of existing, or of bring dead, as Richard has observed.

And I cannot conceitedly dismiss Steven Pinker’s findings from his study of the history of violence, even though present trends are depressing. One only hopes we don’t see the historic genocides and world wars return this century. The UN looks weakened. Evolved human nature in the context of modernity, and with modern weaponry systems, like the ultimate: nukes. Some are more enlightened than others.

But since I do watch events in the world, always reading until rather late, it’s essential I get Tim Marshall’s aerial view, big picture geopolitical explanation for understanding events in our world.
So cheers again, Marco.

That’s fantastic, Strato, I’m so pleased! Can’t wait to hear your thoughts on it. And I’m so happy you’re still so into the Empire podcasts too. They’re such an incredible resource.

Can’t say I share Steven Pinker’s optimism, though. As you hint in your post, things are not looking good, with more and more power – and weaponry –centralised in the hands of increasingly despotic, not to say unhinged, individuals who are not just UNenlightened but actively ANTIenlightened. As for the genocides, they’re already happening, and there are plenty of informed commentators saying that WW3 has already begun. Modern technology means it can be waged very differently from the first two, though I don’t suppose it feels so very different in Ukraine.

I must admit, I am going into 2025 more gloomy than ever before. It’s not even just on the warfare front: already this year, even here in Scotland, which still leans further to the left than the other constituent parts of the UK and many other Western countries, two MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament) have already called for the adoption of Elon Musk-style business ventures and drastic cuts to public spending. It’s what happens when a narrative becomes dominant: it’s catching. And with the neoliberal far-right on the ascendent across the West and not even what remains of the centre/centre-left daring to challenge neoliberal ideology, I fear the forthcoming assaults on government spending, welfare, health services, pensions, the lot, along with a shift towards massive deregulation for business (so a massive loss of workers’ right and environmental protections, for instance). A total corporate free-for-all, which will only further intensify and exacerbate everything that is wrong in our societies. Under the circumstances, I don’t think Pinker’s “optimism” is even “optimism”: to me, it just feels like naivety and unforgivable complacency.

Marco,

You’re right. I did know. That trend doesn’t sound healthy for Scotland.

Pinker didn’t have the prescience, from how things seemed to him that they could be going from 2011, to how the general state of the world is now.

But if he had really studied human nature critically and objectively, from history and our species’s evolution, he might have foreseen how neoliberalism would turn out, and how the internet would induce what the Oxford Dictionary has chosen for the word of 2024: ‘Brain rot,’ and what Cory Doctorow, Canadian leftist intellectual, activist, blogger, science fiction writer, journalist, champion for Creative Commons, commenting on cyberspace, calls the ‘enshittification’ of social media, relegated to the sewers by the likes of the great Elon Musk.

Trumpism is hardly surprising, in hindsight.

But one can also get educated using the internet. I use Wikipedia, Rational Wiki, always looking things up. Habituated. I think most people don’t have the willingness, the inclination, or is it, orientation? Is it determinism? But I rather think the system determines these things. Robert Reich thinks this, as does Bernie, and George.

Well, things are not looking good in France since Macron took the helm, with his narcissism,, neoliberal philosophy, the usual tax cuts, or ‘welfare to the wealthy and austerity for the rest.’ And now, he’s actually courting the far right.

Emmanuel Macron was the great liberal hope for France and Europe. How did it all go so wrong?

‘The French president’s failures offer an object lesson in what happens when liberalism is stripped of its morality and values’
Oliver Haynes

And so France becomes a police state. Rubber bullets cause serious injury, like blindness.
Then for the victim, it’s, ‘debrouillez-vous,’ ‘get by,’ ‘fend for yourself.’

The activist Ugo Palheta writes about the process of the fascistisation of French society as parts of the media, civil service and business elite are radicalised to the right.

The balance sheet of Macronism explains his losing streak. When he took office, France’s deficit was 2.6% of GDP, in October 2024 it was at 6.2%. Who were the beneficiaries of such profligacy? They certainly aren’t public-school students and their stressed-out teachers having to work with the biggest classes in Europe. Nor are they the growing numbers of people living in “medical deserts”, where there is insufficient access to doctors or surgeons. The ultra-rich however, have done very well, with the top four fortunes in France increasing by 87% since 2020 according to Oxfam. Macronomics resembles Trussonomics in slow motion. It was a programme of unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy that the Macronists wrongly assumed would increase economic activity and therefore the tax take. According to Macron’s own economy guru, “this was not a bad strategy, but it didn’t work”.

And how much more ‘improved’ can the lives of the wealthy get, while their wealth multiplies apace?

It does not bode well for liberalism that its pro-EU poster boy has become like King Lear, blinded by narcissism and wilfully handing the kingdom to a destructive force he helped create. Macron offers an object lesson in the exhaustion of liberalism. When the form and appearance of liberalism remains, but its content and values are evacuated, what remains is a hollow, brittle thing. It becomes unable to improve the lives of anyone but the wealthy, unable to respond to inconvenient facts such as disappointing election results, unable to articulate even a moral critique of the far right which seeks to usurp it, and unable politically to stop its rise. Macronism has failed.

Jan 2, 2025 at 6:18 am
Marco

I’ll second your recommendation of Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall. I read the book the last time you mentioned it here and I enjoyed it and learned much from it. I do periodically pick it up and reread certain chapters when world geopolitical events require explanation. Case in point- When Trump started going on about his interest in the US annexing Greenland I was somewhat baffled by his even knowing the place existed never mind his wanting to obtain it.
Chapter 10, The Arctic, in Prisoners of Geography explains the strategic importance of the Arctic and now Trump’s interest is well understood.

In 2021 Marshall published the next volume, The Power of Geography. I liked it just as much as Prisoners. In it he takes up discussion of Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, The UK, Greece, Turkey, The Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain, and Space,

I don’t mind saying that Marshall’s non-American perspective is appreciated. It’s imperative that we Americans listen to the views of diverse people in the world for a true picture of the geopolitical landscape.

I’ll be pleased if I find out there’s a third volume on the way!

That’s so good to hear, Laurie. The only thing more satisfying than getting a huge amount out of a book is recommending that book to others, who then get a huge amount out of it too.

I’m also really pleased to hear his 2nd book is just as worthwhile as the first. To be honest, I’d given it a swerve, because so many follow-up books these days just seem to be rehashes of the author’s earlier ones, and I hadn’t been able to find anyone who’d actually read the 2nd one and was therefore able to reassure me on that point. So now I’ve now downloaded the kindle version of it (currently just £1.99 on Amazon.co.uk if anyone else fancies it, though I still think probably best to start with his first one, which is currently just £0.99).

You’ll be happy to hear that he’s written two more since then: The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World, and Divided: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls (From the blurb: “Money, race, religion, politics: these are the things that divide us. Trump’s wall says as much about America’s divided past as it does its future. The Great Firewall of China separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. In Europe, the explosive combination of politics and migration threatens liberal democracy itself.
Covering China; the USA; Israel and Palestine; the Middle East; the Indian Subcontinent; Africa; Europe and the UK, in this gripping read bestselling author Tim Marshall delves into our past and our present to reveal the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.”)

Britain isn’t quite as insular as the US, but we are still very much in need of these broader perspectives.

Marco

Good to know! The other two books are now on my wish list.

after timothy snyder’s coinage
with a slight change…

the world’s richest man has a cunning plan
to take over donald’s white house
in a tesla coup tho it’s hardly new
that an automan is such a louse
a parasite role blood sucking control
of that mad yankee dystopia
with their pal putin they’re executing
a total magamuskovia

offg,

It’s an improvement.

Trump becomes subsumed by the legion he unleashed.

Apologies, Strato, I owe you a reply. Watch this space over the next day or two 🙂

Marco,

Thanks Marco, I will look in for it.

But peeps will I’m sure be relieved to know that I’ll be absent for a while, heh.
I’m reading The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie 2024.

It’s heavy for its size. That’s because it’s replete with the most excellent, delightful pictures, and so needs special thicker paper. Everyone loves pictures in books.

This is the usual tour de force, a classic Richard Dawkins. What a joy. It’s a relief not to read books and articles which also happen to be deeply disquieting, important as they are. Richard is constant, regardless, as is evolution, wondrous cumulative knowledge from science.

Vincent, if you notice this post, I recommend it. Richard delights in educating, edifying anyone really curious to know about the evolution of animal nature, phenotype, behaviour, the account of life.

As D’Arcy Thompson (1862-1948) said, “Everything is the way it is, because it got that way.”

This book is about that. Richard uses the metaphor of the ‘palimpsest.’ Or that’s what animals really are, overwritten.

Strato: That quote from D’Arcy Thompson should be imprinted on tee shirts, and bumper stickers. What a concise way to summarizes evolution by non-random natural selection — including the difference between sky hooks and cranes. It’s no wonder Richard included it in The Genetic Book of the Dead.. I can’t wait to read your review.

Zeuglodon said:

you could have a watered-down Darwinian discussion on a pseudo-purpose

It wasn’t my intention to make a statement. I asked a question without defining/arguing what life is on the assumption we were in agreement.
Likewise, I assumed you understood I meant purpose when I implied it in the context of the question: “Would you agree life has no point?”

I apologize for assuming that adopting the position implied in my question means someone may be a nihilist.

Thank you for your hospitality on this site,

My disability makes studying near impossible for me and as a result I don’t have anything to offer conversations that require reference materials that I am not already familiar with.

I hope you stay engaged.

Tony

That sounds as if you’re saying Goodbye, but we very much hope you aren’t. Not everyone has the same amount of time or energy or even interest, and there’s certainly no requirement to treat the interactions here as some kind of formal study session. Everyone interacts in the way that suits them best, some people more, some people less, some people more formally, others less formally – it’s all good, and everyone, with all their different styles and types of input, is welcome. So please don’t feel under any pressure to contribute in any particular kind of way. Your own way is highly valuable too.

You have made some very interesting and thought-provoking contributions over the last few months, and we very much hope you’ll stay around and make lots more whenever you feel up to it.

The mods

Let’s start keeping track of the chaos about to descend. In a press conference today Trump is threatening to use the military to take the Panama Canal. He want’s to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He’s talking about making Canada and the US a single country. Stay tuned, I’m afraid there’s much more to come.

Michael,
Oh yes, believe me I am bracing for impact. I can hardly contain my bitter resentment against the MAGA cult, especially the ones that are related to me.

Panama, Greenland and Canada must be in a state of shock.

I have a prediction. The following is part of it, and I dare not share the dire remainder. Trump will not be President (albeit an illegitimate one) for more than a couple of years. Trump is the “useful idiot” for the Republican Party. They needed his electability and his large base of voters to regain power, but after his inauguration they will want him removed, in such a way that Vance will be President for the remainder of the term and then be an incumbent candidate, sure to win the next two elections, giving them 12 years of Republican power instead of just 4. There are several very plausible ways to remove Trump from office.

Joe M

Also, Don Jr. is waiting in the wings.

just acknowledging this jan seventh
as the tenth anniversary of the paris killings
je suis charlie

I have a prediction. … Trump will not be President … for more than a couple of years. … after his inauguration they will want him removed, in such a way that Vance will be President for the remainder of the term and then be an incumbent candidate, …. There are several very plausible ways to remove Trump from office.

Joe M. I have had the same thought for some time now.

If Trump and Vance take office, it won’t surprise me that before the next election, Vance will be the president.

https://richarddawkins.net/2024/11/open-discussion-november-2024/#comment-216361

Lets hope we’re both wrong

Cairsley, Strato, and Marco:

re: “Brevity is Wit”.

All right, I can see your point, especially by contrast with Marco’s point that sometimes “Brevity is twit”. 😛 Still, I just feel I could be more concise. In hindsight, one of my replies last month felt like I was hammering a single point over and over in multiple paragraphs, for example.

Plus, I don’t want to put off newcomers who might not appreciate getting overwhelmed too soon. It’s a bit unfair on them.

I’ll see if I can strike a balance.
—-
Strato:

And I cannot conceitedly dismiss Steven Pinker’s findings from his study of the history of violence, even though present trends are depressing. One only hopes we don’t see the historic genocides and world wars return this century.

The thing to keep in mind is that Pinker tried to identify the conditions under which peaceable behaviour was favourable throughout history. He never said they couldn’t be reversed.

Just going through his checklist for four “Better Angels” and five “Historical Forces” that keep violence in check:

– Empathy: If anything, the tribalistic forces behind Trump et al thrive on counterempathy masquerading as justice/revenge. If you view life as a zero-sum hierarchical competition, then an out-group’s gain is the in-group’s loss.

– Self-control: Impulses run wild, especially online, so cross that one off.

– Moral Sense: As Pinker himself notes, this can often backfire. If your mindset towards others is null (don’t care about them), authority-esque (hence the logic of dominance), communal/kinship-like/cultish (seeing outsiders as unclean or parasites), or reciprocal (which, when combined with delusion and overconfidence, can lead to pointless vendettas), it can easily tip over into self-righteous persecution of perceived enemies. Hence Strato’s amity-enmity complex, or the “crusading hero delusion”, as I like to call it now.

– Reason: Not a lot of that in the movement, with some outright celebrating irrationality. So cross that one off the list.

– The Leviathan (Central Government): Notably corrupt around Trump, and we’re seeing examples in other nations too (just look at how South Korea’s martial law case has progressed, unfortunately).

– Commerce: Nominally hanging in there, though Trump’s policies will almost certainly throw a wrench into that as most economists predict (heck, the anti-Chinese tariff war backfired last time he was in charge).

– Feminization: Notable misogynistic strains in the far right, so cross that off the list.

– Cosmopolitanism: Even ignoring the nationalistic narrow-mindedness of the mainstream political right, “echo chambers” is a term that very neatly sums up the far-right ethos. Cross that one off too.

– Escalator of Reason: See reason above.

Whether it’s confined to a temporarily ascendant political faction or applicable to wider society (for now, I’m assuming the former, as even allowing for the surprising numbers on the far-right, most people I’ve seen seem to revile that group’s alignment, including mainstream rightists), it’s almost guaranteed to stoke up violence. In fact, it already has, as political violence has been increasing since Trump’s presidential term started back in 2016.

My current hope is that the far-right movement will go the same way as most terrorist groups as described in Pinker’s book: their need for attention and willingness to escalate their shock tactics will eventually alienate them from either society at large or their own would-be recruits, to the point that the popularity base starts to decline and collapse. There’s also the fact that, with the hindsight of the 20th century and new human rights norms, our growing popular awareness of science such as global warming and environmental destruction issues (which belie the popular capitalist narrative that props up true social injustice), and the more critical secular humanist ethics of the beginning of the 21st century, this kind of rabble-rousing will have simply lost a lot of its impact.

Maybe I’m naive, but even with the surge in popularity for (in the UK) the Reform party, I still sense that a lot of people are giving them the cold shoulder or eyeing them with suspicion. And there’s always the chance that Trump’s self-parodying incompetence and increasingly blatant corruption will undermine any remaining hold the far-right has over mainstream politics.

Tony:

It wasn’t my intention to make a statement. I asked a question without defining/arguing what life is on the assumption we were in agreement.
Likewise, I assumed you understood I meant purpose when I implied it in the context of the question: “Would you agree life has no point?”

I apologize for assuming that adopting the position implied in my question means someone may be a nihilist.

I’m confused. You asked a question and I answered it. The life thing was by way of drawing a parallel analogy, with the hope that this would clarify my stance. It wasn’t meant to be a terminological dispute: just a clarification.

I don’t like pigeonholes – and given I went on about that at the end, I assume that’s what gave you the impression I was unhappy with what you wrote? – but I assure you that’s nothing personal against you. I was actually happy to clarify my position. It’s merely that -isms are a pet peeve of mine in general.

Funny thing is that, despite the negative connotations associated with it, nihilism actually strikes me as one of the less-unreasonable approaches to meta-ethics. I don’t agree with it, but it at least makes internal sense, at least as far as I can tell. (By contrast, ethical subjectivism and non-cognitivism don’t make sense to me foundationally, much less in terms of their suspicious metaphysical human exceptionalism, but I’ll save that diatribe for another day). So being confused for a nihilist doesn’t automatically annoy me the way some other positions do – again, even though I don’t think it’s a sound position at the end of the day.

No apologies needed. If anything, I apologize if my tone got out of hand in my own comment. I didn’t mean to put you off like that.

Also, whoa: Déjà vu.

It turns out we talked about almost the exact same issue – purpose in the universe – one year ago, almost to the day. That’s… kind of disappointing. It feels a bit too “going round in circles”.

That said, it still amuses me that the first documented discovery of a new element (Phosphorus) was done by an alchemist (Hennig Brand) who thought he was on his way to finding gold in urine, of all things. Literally taking the pee! (Historic in-joke, so sue me :P).

Zueglodon: Particularly in the context of the “debate” or discussion we were having in October, November and December, if your posts had been more brief you could not have addressed all the points raised by Vincent Smiles. And if those points aren’t answered, it’s as though there is tacit agreement. I know I learned a great deal from your posts, and from those of others, particularly Cairsley’s about the subject under discussion. I notice that advocates for theism tend to throw out multiple ideas in a sort of shotgun fashion thinking that, somehow, it substitutes for cleverness. I tend to pick up on a point or two, but after reading your posts I see how much I missed. Knowing how much work it takes to compose essays, I really appreciated what you write.

I’ve been going back, copying and pasting what I call Vincent material. My intention is to summarize them into a sort of index to which I can refer when the need arises.

You also mention that topics come up, almost cyclically. I think that’s because those who come here with the intention of telling us that Richard Dawkins doesn’t know what he’s talking about, have a limited number of arguments they can proffer. I was really hoping that a retired professor from a Benedictine university might have something new about which to talk. But, I was disappointed. Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading some of the material he cited — they didn’t help his case, but they were worth considering.

The same is true for people who have legitimate questions. If our answers are too brief, it doesn’t really help them.

Perhaps a solution is to keep track to things we’ve written and keep hyperlinks so we can simply say, click here and see what was written in answer to your very question. I’m doing that with my review of the Vincent material.

On a related note, I understand that there are some new debates about the existence of god being taking place. If I understand correctly, sort of a “new atheist 2.0” I expect we’ll be able to see them on YouTube later this year.

Michael 100:

Zueglodon:

Ha, I must have the most misspelled name on this site. Blame Richard Owen for that one!

And if those points aren’t answered, it’s as though there is tacit agreement.

I’m anxious of that implication every time I post responses to other people’s points. It’s one reason I sometimes find it pedantically difficult to rein in my own response. I don’t like to be misunderstood.

I notice that advocates for theism tend to throw out multiple ideas in a sort of shotgun fashion thinking that, somehow, it substitutes for cleverness.

To be fair, I think a natural part of that is logical extrapolation from the same starting argument. Once you’ve claimed that only a deity can solve a particular philosophical conundrum (e.g. the origins of the universe), the logic can be applied just as well to other unsolved mysteries (e.g. the nature of morality).

My main problem with that starting point is that, at best, it can be construed as a sound argument against science knowing everything (if only “yet”), but it doesn’t constitute a positive argument in favour of any particular alternative. Once you notice the “gapology” strategy of the Intelligent Design side, you start to notice that same fallacy behind the other topics Vincent brought up.

You also mention that topics come up, almost cyclically. I think that’s because those who come here with the intention of telling us that Richard Dawkins doesn’t know what he’s talking about, have a limited number of arguments they can proffer.

True, though I like to think some progress can be made – that’s why steelmanning interests me so much. An extra intellectual challenge is often a good thing. Stops discussions from going stale.

At the moment, for instance, since Vincent’s talk led to the topic of life’s early biochemistry, I’ve been looking into the chemistry required to build up a single RNA/DNA monomer (if you can treat a whole strand as a polymer chain). More on that below.

Perhaps a solution is to keep track to things we’ve written and keep hyperlinks so we can simply say, click here and see what was written in answer to your very question.

Well, that could be useful as a reference, though I think it could come off as dismissive to a newcomer. Maybe that’s just me presuming too much.

On a related note, I understand that there are some new debates about the existence of god being taking place. If I understand correctly, sort of a “new atheist 2.0” I expect we’ll be able to see them on YouTube later this year.

Where did you get that idea? Did something happen?

—-

I was interested in how RNA could be naturally synthesized, since the RNA World hypothesis is considered the best candidate for how life could’ve got started on Planet Earth. So the obvious place to look is at its structure.

The main components for an RNA monomer (needed to make a larger RNA polymer chain) are:

– one of the four nucleobases (adenine, cytosine, guanine, or uracil – not thymine, as that’s exclusive to DNA);

– a pentose sugar (specifically ribose, not deoxyribose);

– a phosphate group.

In terms of atomic count, phosphates are the simplest, consisting of a phosphorus atom connected to four oxygen atoms, one of which is attached by a double bond (so 5 atoms). Nucleobases are tougher, ranging from the smallest cytosine (13 atoms) to the biggest guanine (16 atoms). Ribose would be the toughest of the molecules to produce naturally by atom count, as it requires 20 atoms to complete (and it has to be arranged specifically in its cyclic form, not in its linear acyclic form).

Assume we have a phosphate, guanine, and ribose, so that we have the toughest hunt for the biggest molecules by atomic count. That requires 41 atoms total for one monomer, in isolation (you’d need 38, or 3 fewer than 41, if you replaced guanine with cytosine, and 37, or 1 fewer than 38, if you then replaced ribose with deoxyribose).

Ignoring phosphorus, that requires 10 carbon, 15 hydrogen, 10 oxygen, and 5 nitrogen atoms. (Breakdown: 5 carbon for guanine, and 5 carbon for ribose; 5 hydrogen for guanine, and 10 hydrogen for ribose; 4 oxygen for the phosphate, 1 oxygen for guanine, and 5 oxygen for ribose; 5 nitrogen for guanine).

Most of these would occur naturally in simple compounds such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide CO and CO2, methane CH4, cyanogen (CN)2, water H2O, ammonia NH3, and various forms of nitrogen oxide such as nitrous oxide N2O. Ignoring the fact that oxygen and hydrogen usually appear in diatomic forms H2 or O2 anyway. So in theory, your job of assembly would be multiple times easier than starting with 41 raw atoms, since some of them will have easily combined anyway: if the compounds average 2 or 3 atoms, then you only have to worry about 14-20 molecules instead of 37-41 atoms.

In theory, what could have happened at the beginning of life was that these individual components formed independently and then later were combined on Earth’s surface in conditions favourable for monomer cooking (which, so long as it was fed the same ingredients, could consistently forge the building blocks for polymer chains out of the same preconditions required to make one monomer). Alternatively, it could be that the smaller molecules didn’t form the components first, instead building up to the larger monomer molecule directly (and the smaller components were just recognizable byproducts of the overall emerging structure).

Assuming RNA was the precursor molecule that started life, that is: there could in theory have been a predecessor. Or the route to get to RNA could have been more complicated and tortuous than simply building it up from scratch (for instance, it might have needed intermediate forms, similar to how unstable nuclei could go through a radioactive series of intermediate isotopes and elements before settling on a stable subatomic configuration, or similar to how modern biochemical processes often go through a many-part cycle or chain.

If we take the RNA World scenario as a given, then what’s left to determine are the particular endergonic conditions (molecule building usually requires an external energy source to fuel the synthesis) or sequences of conditions needed to turn the primitive reactants into the life-enabling product. Haven’t found any information yet as to how one could synthesize RNA without requiring an existing strand of RNA, but that’s the sort of information we’d need to have at least one culprit and potentially solve the mystery.

Since we’ve got a bit of a SCIENCE theme going, a few other things I dug up that shed more light on the biochemistry angle:

Another consideration for the RNA World hypothesis requirements is that, because so many other organic compounds such as hydrocarbons rely on similar building blocks, the route to RNA would almost certainly be littered with tons of chemical byproducts. The neat thing is that some of these could be precursors to other cellular processes.

Sugar phosphates, for example. The ribose and the phosphate group I mentioned previously combine into a compound that’s part of that biochemical family, and several of their tweaked cousins are integral to an ancient metabolic process: glycolysis. Especially in iron-rich conditions, this could have occurred naturally in Earth’s ancient oceans, even without enzymes to speed up the process.

The wide occurrence of glycolysis in other species indicates that it is an ancient metabolic pathway.[2] Indeed, the reactions that make up glycolysis and its parallel pathway, the pentose phosphate pathway, can occur in the oxygen-free conditions of the Archean oceans, also in the absence of enzymes, catalyzed by metal ions, meaning this is a plausible prebiotic pathway for abiogenesis.[3]

Source 2: Evolution of carbohydrate metabolic pathways

Source 3: Non‐enzymatic glycolysis and pentose phosphate pathway‐like reactions in a plausible Archean ocean

—-

Another consideration is how heavy organic compounds can get without pre-existing life, which in practice means seeing what turns up in the distant reaches of space. I mentioned simple compounds before, such as CO2 and methane, but it turns out plenty of heavy compounds with far more atoms have been detected by spectroscopic analysis of deep space objects.

The products we’re interested in – DNA and RNA – haven’t turned up, but even if you ignore massive carbon allotropes (namely buckminsterfullerene), it at least shows that molecules in the 10-atom to 20-atom range aren’t out of the question. This indirectly increases the plausibility of the nucleobases and ribose components arising out of natural mixing and idiosyncratic carbon-rich conditions.

—-

The other side of the equation for biotic precursors is the phenotypic component (as opposed to the genetic replicator). Without a phenotype, a replicator has no feedback loop to enable biases within any allele-to-allele competition.

That means we’re also interested in the prehistory of proteins, specifically the arising of amino acids.

Sadly, while glycine and tryptophan might be candidates for naturally occurring interstellar molecules, the evidence is inconclusive at best. Glycine at least – being the simplest amino acid, requiring only 10 atoms – can be synthesized from smaller molecules. (This is already used industrially to synthesize glycine from cyanide – versions of which do occur in space – an aldehyde – the simplest of which, methanal, has the tetratomic formula H2C=O – and ammonia NH3).

That said, to produce an amino acid in this way requires a 12-step series of reactions, so it’s fair to expect that precursor molecules on prehistoric Earth wouldn’t have been as straightforward as just mashing the required parts together. It would have been a multi-step process, either emerging naturally as a chain of unstable compounds spontaneously cascading to a stable end product, or as a series of environmental “trials” as a narrower and narrower subset of prior molecules go through a specific series of different conditions needed to produce, say, the first amino acid, ribose, nucleobase, or RNA monomer.

Not a straightforward uphill struggle!

Zeuglodon Beta:

Blame Richard Owen for that one!

To paraphrasing the Bard of Avon: The fault, dear Zeuglodon, is not in Richard Owen, but in myself. Apologies! I always remember the story of the priest, the minister and the rabbit who go into a bar. When the bartender asks the rabbit what he wants, the response is, “I don’t know, I’m only here because of autocorrect.” This time though, I can’t even blame autocorrect

Where did you get that idea?

that there will be some new debates about the existence of god

Did something happen?

I subscribe to Lawrence Krauss’ substack. Recently during a Q & A session he mentioned the debates in the context of forthcoming projects. Other projects include a new book which will be released this summer. Krauss solicited several authors to submit chapters which he edited. As I learned more, I’ll write about it and post links.

I just finished watching the latest episode of Shrinking Trump. Psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal made some really good points today about what we can expect in the next four years from Trump and those around him like Elon Musk — spoiler alert, it ain’t pretty.

https://www.youtube.com/live/w-xEYHAC6XU?si=DTJNz6q8enKbQDmV

They talk about Trump’s malignant narcissism and how dangerous that is likely be now that he has been reelected: Malignant narcissists become worse when they gain power.

And, here’s the worst part. The people of the United States have had 8 years to learn who Trump is and We the People voted for him. He actually won the election. That makes the American people guilty for everything that Trump does in the second term.

I wish Gartner and Segal wouldn’t spend so much time talking about Buddhism as a way to cope — today they had a psychoanalyst who is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Pilar Jennings. Nevertheless the show is well worth watching today.

Michael 100 (10 Jan. 2025, 4:28 pm)
I have avoided watching anything online specifically about Donald Trump, simply because he is the sort of person who does not deserve one’s attention. I can afford to take that line on Mr Trump, because I do not have to make any decisions concerning him, like voting in United States presidential elections. So I have avoided the Shrinking Trump podcasts, until I decided, on your recommendation, to watch this one. Drs Gartner and Segal turned out to be enjoyable to listen to as they discussed the subject (patient) Donald Trump.

I agree that, when it came to voting for the next president, voters could not claim to be ignorant of Mr Trump’s unsuitability for office; so the fact that Mr Trump won the election is much more clearly an expression of the will of the people of the United States. They must indeed bear responsibility for this. However, they were given an invidious choice. The greatest frustration among United States voters seems to be the thoroughgoing corruption of the entire electoral system, whereby the extremely wealthy (corporations and individuals) control the two political parties even in their selection of candidates to be presented to the public for election. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris could not be distinguished at all from this corrupt system, whereas Mr Trump’s unruliness seemed at least to promise a shake-up of the system. It did not help that Ms Harris seemed, on live questioning, to be devoid of common knowledge, native intelligence and wit. Can anyone seriously believe that, in a country the size of the United States, those two were the best available candidates for the presidency?

It would be too easy to blame the people of the United States for Mr Trump’s re-election to that country’s highest office and the possibly disastrous consequences thereof. The problem is the corruption of the system by Big Money. What can one do about that?

Cairsley:

The problem is the corruption of the system by Big Money. What can one do about that?

I mean, not vote for a candidate who is so obviously unfit for office that he embodies everything wrong with Big Money? Basically IS Big Money?

Harris might have represented business as depressingly usual, but at least she didn’t go THAT far. Anyone who actually paid attention to Trump, the Republican party, and the right wing in general shouldn’t have much difficulty in spotting the obvious corporate and financial bias, scapegoating of anyone but themselves and their own interests, and literal foundational glorification in social hierarchy, i.e. in some people having power over others. All Trump brought to the table was a “me-first” populist lovebombing and exploiting vulnerabilities (e.g. people’s ignorance about how the early 2020s inflation actually happened) that has all the hallmarks of someone trying to lure an ignorant target into abuse.

Like, these would be red flags in a one-on-one relationship (material stake, blame deflection, controlling behaviours), let alone as national policy. Never mind the fact that Trump qualifies for the Dark Triad of psychopathic lack of empathy, Machiavellian shamelessness in exploiting others, and narcissistic impulsive overconfidence.

The only conclusion I can see out of this is that a substantial portion of the American public, for whatever reason (propaganda media, for one), are either insanely ignorant or perfectly happy to join in on the corruption themselves. Both need to be challenged and exposed for what they are.

When the patient is endangering the public, it’s time to confront the sickness head-on. That means not rolling over when it tries to drown you in crap. Voting Trump into office is a personal disgrace, and anyone who did it should be called out for that ignorance or corruption in themselves regardless of the broader system that feeds it and preys on it. Tell it like it is.

Trump’s malignant presidency is what happens when you try for decades to split the difference between health and disease. Big shock: you get more disease. It should be cut short wherever possible.

Cairsley: I agree that Trump and a rehash of the 2024 campaign becomes tiresome. How many times can we play the blame game. It’s over.

Only it isn’t over, it hasn’t even begun. I fear we are living in the calm before the storm. I sometimes picture all of humanity sitting on a power keg, powerless to extinguish the burning fuse.

Those who voted for Trump because the price of eggs was too high, haven’t seen anything yet. Those who voted for Trump because they “like his policies,” are probably too greedy. Those who voted for Trump because they don’t like immigrants should be ashamed of themselves. Those who voted for Trump because he’s the anointed one of god, are just plain nuts.

Regardless of what happens, this is a turning point in history and I predict that in the coming decades and centuries historians, presupposing that civilization survives the next four years, will examine every facet of what we are about to experience. Who knows, maybe what we record here will someday be as interesting to scholars as what Mary Chestnut, George Templeton Strong, and others recorded in their diaries during the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Even today, scholars are still uncovering details of what happened in the 1850s and 60s. How many hundred years will go by before the books are closed on what happened in our time?

If the Civil War was the result of a Constitution that permitted the enslavement of human beings, The Trump chaos, I think is the result of a willingness to allow the acclimation by private individuals of obscene wealth at the expense of the rest of society.

Zeuglodon Beta (12 Jan. 2025, 9:47 am):
In my previous message, my concern was not to make known which candidate were the better for the presidency but to remark on the regrettable state of affairs that have come about in the process of producing and selecting candidates for presidential elections. I quite sympathize with you remarks about Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. In the 2016 elections, Mr Trump’s competitor for the presidency was Hillary Clinton, who was far better qualified than Ms Harris and certainly than Mr Trump for that high office; yet one of the problems with her in the eyes of too many voters seems also to have been her indistinguishableness from the corrupt political system that has long been a cause of cynicism among voters in the United States.

Michael 100 (12 Jan. 2025, 5:28 pm):

If the Civil War was the result of a Constitution that permitted the enslavement of human beings, The Trump chaos, I think is the result of a willingness to allow the acclimation by private individuals of obscene wealth at the expense of the rest of society.

Thank you for that perspective, Michael. You draw together a number of considerations in a way that helps me better to understand political developments in the United States. As we await the imminent presidential term, we – but you Americans in particular – can only brace ourselves for the worst and hope for the best. I wish you all the best!

Did I mention…

… willingness to allow the acclimation by private individuals of obscene wealth at the expense of the rest of society.

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/trump-republicans-gop-medicaid-expansion-aca-obamacare-matching/

For those who voted for trump “because I like his policies,” let’s begin with your medical insurance — Medicaid — it costs too much. Here’s the new policy: If you want health insurance, buy it yourself. What? Can’t afford it, then don’t get sick. If you do get sick, don’t expect the tax payers to pay your bills, who do you think you are? The tax payers have multi-million dollar houses and apartments to buy, and you want health insurance? Trump told you he’d make America great again. Ain’t it great?

I have enjoyed reading Richard’s books (not yet all of them). I think the problem of the double meaning of ‘theory’ is important, and, without any hope of success, I propose a solution. By analogy with ‘hypothesis’, I propose to use a new word (I think) ‘orthothesis’ to mean the sort of ‘theory’ that is unlikely ever to be successfully challenged, except by a more nuanced improvement.

John Woodgate: Welcome to the website.

Please don’t take this as a hypercriticism of your comment. I’m curious why the word theory, in a scientific context should be altered.

Doesn’t it seem that when one enters a particular forum, one learns the language of that forum. Whether the forum be science, law, religion, business or any other specialized field, there are terms of art that should be learned in order to gain understanding.

While I understand that in common usage, “theory” may mean nothing more than a wild idea, in other contexts, it has a different meaning — for example, lawyers speak of a “theory of the case”, by which they mean, a certain set of facts fit into a certain legal principles, requires a particular remedy. The “theory of the case” is not just the lawyer’s brain storm, just as a scientific theory is not a hypothesis.

Those who criticize evolution as “just a theory” as good as any other theory, simply demonstrate their lack of understanding. I doubt their opinion would be altered by a word substitution, particularly one as novel as yours.

Again, I don’t mean to be too picky, I just want to explore your comment some more.

I hope you are enjoying Richard’s books, have you seen his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead. I thought it is a perfect companion to The Selfish Gene

Jan 13, 2025 at 2:35 pm
John Woodgate

Welcome John

We may need to accept the casual usage of the word “theory” by the general public, but when they wander into the domain of science and continue to use the word to mean “idea”, that’s where I draw the line. We can give them the benefit of the doubt on this. I believe that most of them have not had a proper explanation of the exalted status of a theory in science and what a mountain of evidence our theories rest upon.

John Woodgate

Hello John, and welcome from me, too.

You’re right, of course, that it’s unfortunate that the word “theory” has such different connotation in scientific and daily use. Nevertheless, I’m with the others here that changing a long-established scientific term wouldn’t actually help.

The fact is, a new term such as “orthothesis” would need to be explained in any case, and we’d still need to explain why evolution by natural selection qualified as being “unlikely ever to be successfully challenged, except by a more nuanced improvement”. Without that explanation, it would be a mere assertion, open to all the same objections from those who are desperate to reject it as we see now.

After all, while the scientific vs everyday definitions of “theory” may be confusing at first glance, it’s easy enough to explain the difference to anyone willing to be un-confused. A quick glance in a dictionary would do the job.

But those who are not willing to be un-confused will refuse to understand or accept the new term too.

The problem really doesn’t lie in the terminology – whether it’s the scientific definition of “theory” or the meaning of some new term like “orthothesis”, the meaning still has to be learned. The problem lies in the refusal to accept the facts behind the terminology. And that’s not because there are good grounds to doubt them, but simply because they pose a threat to a belief that the believer desperately wants to protect.

You’ll be familiar with the old saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Calling the water by a different name really wouldn’t change that.

Hope you’ll stick around and keep posting!

Strato, Jan 2, 2025 at 10:08 am

My apologies, Strato, I’m way overdue with my reply to your post. Everything’s been a bit full-on at this end over the last week or so, so I’ve been reading along but haven’t really had the time or headspace to contribute actively myself. Before I do reply, though, I hope everything’s ok with you – I can’t find a post from you since the 4th, and that’s not like you at all.

Well, things are not looking good in France since Macron took the helm, with his narcissism, neoliberal philosophy, the usual tax cuts, or ‘welfare to the wealthy and austerity for the rest.’ And now, he’s actually courting the far right.
Emmanuel Macron was the great liberal hope for France and Europe. How did it all go so wrong?

Thanks for the link to that article, Strato. I found it especially interesting, because a Parisian acquaintance of mine was telling me almost exactly the same things getting on for 2 years ago: lamenting Macron’s neoliberal approach to the economy, his deployment of undemocratic methods to sideline Parliament and impose his wishes, his increasingly despotic crackdown on dissent.

He really was the Great Hope when he was first elected, but perhaps that was mostly just because he’d managed to defeat the Great Fear of a far right Le Pen victory. It’s understandable, I suppose, that those of us elsewhere wanting to keep the far right out of office would have looked to him as someone who’d found the key to doing just that.

But instead, it’s clear, both from my Parisian acquaintance and this Guardian article, that, far from being the answer to the far right, he and his neoliberal policies have merely exacerbated the very issues that were driving French voters into the arms of Le Pen.

A few weeks ago I mentioned in passing an excellent book I’d been reading: 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, by Ha-Joon Chang. The author is a serious economist (he has lectured in Economics at the University of Cambridge and is now Professor of Economics at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies in London), who states outright that he is not a critic of Capitalism per se – only Capitalism in the neoliberal form (with its inherent obsession with the free market) that has been dominant since the 1980s. I’m still intending to write about his book more fully when I get chance, but in the meantime, suffice it to say that it totally demolishes the assumptions underlying Macron’s neoliberal approach to the French economy (though Macron is far from the only culprit: I can’t think of a single major party in Europe or the US that dares to challenge the myths and downright lies behind the claim that THIS is the only way to run an economy).

23 Things was first published in 2010, just a couple of years after the financial crisis of 2007-8, so that crisis naturally figures prominently in Ha-Joon Chang’s thoughts (and he forcefully makes the point that it was the slavish devotion to deregulation inherent in neoliberalism’s worship at the altar of free markets that allowed that crisis to happen in the first place). But what really struck me was that he was already sounding extremely loud alarm bells about wealth inequality and, specifically, the wholly unjustifiable and ultimately dangerous disparity between the enormous salaries being paid to CEOs and those being paid to workers. Even back in 2010 he was already expressing horror that the average CEO salary was an enormous multiple of the salary of average employee, and his book clearly outlines the harms caused by that; and yet that ratio is now far worse:

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/

• From 1978–2023, top CEO compensation shot up 1,085%, compared with a 24% increase in a typical worker’s compensation. 
• In 2023, CEOs were paid 290 times as much as a typical worker—in contrast to 1965, when they were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker. 
• That CEOs were paid nearly 10 times as much as the top 0.1% of U.S. wage earners in 2022 illustrates just how distorted CEO pay increases have become.

and

https://highpaycentre.org/high-pay-hour-2025/

As with last year, the executive pay data suggests that CEOs will have to work less than three days of 2025 to surpass the annual pay of the median worker.

If he were writing this book in 2024 or 2025, he would inevitably have to include the enormous threats now posed to democracy and the rule of law that this enormous social and economic inequality has given rise to. There is simply no way to separate these realities from the surge in support for populist parties across West and the associated rejection of conventional “moderate” parties offering nothing more than a bit of tinkering around the edges. Most voters know nothing whatsoever about economic theories, or about the details of how they’re governed, but I will continue to kick back against lazy, judgmental and self-defeating accusations that this is just because they’re dumb. I guarantee that 23 Things contains vast amounts of data that not even highly educated people are aware of, for the simple reason that few highly educated people, even those who aspire to govern us, have ever been taught economics – or if they have, then only in its neoliberal form, since that’s been the only form that has dared to speak its name for the last 40 years.

So voters may not be educated about economics or politics or even democracy, but they damn well know when the system isn’t working for them. They know their salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation, they know some people are getting obscenely rich while they themselves are struggling to pay the rent and feed their kids, and they know the public services they depend on are falling apart. They know that year on year, no matter which of the conventional parties is in power, their lives get harder. Who can blame them for feeling bitter? And angry? They know – arguably better than the highly educated people governing them, since those who govern us are, by definition, on good salaries and therefore shielded from the pain suffered by everyone else – that the system isn’t working, and is inherently biased against them. Who can blame them for wanting to throw it all out of the window, even if that means the baby of democracy along with the bathwater of social and economic injustice? I totally get that Trump and Le Pen and Farage & co are not the solution. That they’ll only make things worse, in fact. But the point is, they conceal that well. They don’t tell people they’ll privatise the NHS and thereby price them out of healthcare altogether, they voice people’s anger that the NHS isn’t working. They don’t talk about the mega-wealthy creaming off the vast majority of wealth created by workers, they talk about the injustice of workers not being able to afford the essentials, or about immigrants “stealing their jobs” or “pushing wages down”. History teaches the clearest possible lesson about the power of a scapegoat, and how easy it is to manipulate the desperate and the angry and the humiliated. They don’t need to hear the details: they just need to hear a politician expressing the same hatred of the system that they feel themselves. And to anyone who feels inclined to condemn them for not checking out what Trump, for instance, or Farage or Le Pen, would mean for them in reality, I would simply ask this: did you read Trump’s manifesto (or Farage’s, or Le Pen’s) before deciding you weren’t going to vote for them? Did I read the Conservative manifesto before deciding there was no way I was going to vote for them in the last UK general election? I did not. I’d already seen what I needed to see. I didn’t even read the manifesto of the party I did vote for: I know them, I know their values, I know their attitudes, and I know they align with my own. The idea that voters study the various manifestos in detail before deciding how to vote is for the birds. In reality, the process is far more visceral and instinctive.

I’ve said it before and I have a feeling I’ll be saying it again, time and time again. Maybe the main reason so many people are voting for ugly radical change is that it’s the only kind of radical change on offer.

These supposedly “centrist” parties desperately trying to claw back votes from the far right by adopting some of their attitudes and rhetoric are doing precisely the wrong thing. They should be taking a long hard look at why the status quo genuinely isn’t working for people (hint: it’s neoliberalism, stoopid) and then adopting transformative policies to deal with that issue at its roots, not just tinkering around the edges, which is the best the Democrats, UK Labour, Germany’s Social Democrats etc. seem to be offering right now. The UK Labour government was swept to power because people wanted real change after 14 years of gruesome Tory rule. But the UK Labour government isn’t offering real change: it’s continuing the very same austerity politics that caused people’s suffering and anger in the first place. We have to hope it wakes up very very soon, because otherwise the only beneficiary is going to be Farage’s Reform UK. Not because they’ll fix things (they really won’t): but because they, at least, will be expressing people’s anger and frustration with the status quo.