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PZ and Crommunist offer nice denunciations of the significance of a graphic which has been going around the internet which concludes that the chance of any given individual alive today ever existing was 1 in 102,685,000. Below the fold is the graphic, key snippets of their remarks and the lesson to draw for how we should consider [...]
Archive for the ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ Category
Thinking According To Scale
November 21st, 2011 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Biology, Biology, Ethics, Ethics, Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Metaethics, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Naturalistic Fallacy, Naturalistic Fallacy, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Probability, Psychology, Psychology, PZ Myers, PZ Myers, Science, Science, Sociobiology, Sociobiology 
Tags: Crommunist Manifesto, Grind the universe down to its finest powder, Hierarchical Reductionism, PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins on Reductionism, Terry Pratchett, The Blind Watchmaker 
3 Comments »Offer Nominations for 3 Quarks Daily’s Prize for Best Blog Writing in Philosophy
September 4th, 2011 Daniel Fincke For the third straight year, 3 Quarks Daily will award a prize for blog writing in philosophy. Nominate what you think is the best philosophy blog post from the last year by 11:59pm EST on Monday night (September 5). Below the fold are both the full details of the contest and a very good video interview [...]
Posted in Biology, Biology, Ethics, Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Psychology Tags: Cognitive Science, Neuromorality, Neurophilosophy, Patricia Churchland No Comments »Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die
February 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke The thoughts of Gregory W. Lester (as edited down by John W. Loftus) (okay, now I feel like calling myself Daniel W. Fincke): Because senses and beliefs are both tools for survival and have evolved to augment one another, our brain considers them to be separate but equally important purveyors of survival information….This means that [...]
RSA Animate Of Stephen Pinker, "Language As A Window Into Human Nature"
February 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Fantastic, insightful, and intuitively correct stuff about why we bother to use innuendos and other forms of indirect language where the literal meaning of what we are saying is undisguisedly clear: Thanks to Shane. Your Thoughts?
Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Language, Psychology, Psychology, Sex Tags: Alan Fiske, Anthropology, Awkwardness, Commands, Communality Relationships, Deniability, Dominance Relationships, Dominance vs. Communality Relationships, Emperor's New Clothes, Freedom of Assembly, Friendship, How Revolutions Happen, Indirect Communication, Individual Knowledge, Innuendos, Kin Selection, Mutual Knowledge, Mutualism, Negotiation, Overt Language, Reciprocal Altruism, Reciprocal Relationships, Speech Acts, Stephen Pinker, When Harry Met Sally, Workplace Awkwardness No Comments »Subjective Valuing And Objective Values
October 6th, 2010 Daniel Fincke In reply to my post a week ago on the incoherence of saying that we relied upon God, or at least religion, in order to either discover or verify what was good and evil, Clergy Guy asks: Daniel, do you have some thoughts on defining good and evil apart from religion? How do we/should we [...]
Tom Rees On Why Loss Of Faith Might Be A Two Generational Process
July 2nd, 2010 Daniel Fincke The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study this February revealed that less than one fifth of all American adults under 30 report regular church attendance. But they still also overwhelmingly claim belief in God. Tom Rees thinks that despite their beliefs, their abandonment of the pews may indicate that a multi-generational secularization [...]
Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Psychology, Psychology, Religion, Religion, Social Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociobiology, Sociobiology, Sociology, Sociology Tags: and Culture at the University of British Columbia, Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, Costly Signaling, Credibility Enhancing Displays, Joe Heinrich, Pope John Paul II, Religion in America, Signaling, Tom Rees No Comments »Some Suspicions About The Superiority Of Liberal Moral Values
June 18th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
Posted in Authority, Autonomy, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Featured, Hypocrisy, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Prejudice, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociobiology, Sociology, Teleology, Virtues Tags: Conservative Values, Flourishing, Greta Christina, Hierarchy, Impartiality, In-group Loyalty, Jonathan Haidt, Liberal Values, Loyalty, Moral Modules, Moral Universalism, Purity, Rebecca Goldstein, Universalism No Comments »Michael Shermer On “The Pattern Behind Self-Deception”
June 14th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Shermer does TED and explains how two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired traits, useful for survival, backfire on us: Your Thoughts?
True And False In Adam And Eve
June 14th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Yesterday I replied to Mary Midgley’s article out this weekend, which claimed that evolutionary theory does not refute Genesis since Genesis was not meant to be a literal description of how God made the world. In reply I revisted remarks and videos that I posted last fall which overviewed the ways that even if we [...]
Judging From Smells
May 7th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Salon has a neat interview with Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago. He argues here that the sense of smell immediately leads us to value judgment than the other senses are and then explains how our moms influence our tastes: And what’s the relationship between [...]
Andy Thomson on Why We Believe in Gods
April 10th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Your Thoughts?
Camels With Hammers Philosophy
September 27th, 2009 Daniel Fincke After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.” This post will [...]
Posted in About This Blog, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Authoritarianism, Authority, Autonomy, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Duty, Epistemology, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Faith, Featured, Fundamentalism, God, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Homophobia, Homosexuality, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Politics, Psychology, Religion and Science, Religious Extremism, Religious Rights, Religious Secularism, Secularism, Sociobiology, Teleology, Virtues, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Camels With Hammers 3 Comments »On Failing To Grasp How Competition Can Be Cooperative And How Cooperation Can Be Counter-Productive
September 23rd, 2009 Daniel Fincke Robin Hanson responds to work such as Frans de Waal’s which emphasizes the invaluable role that empathy and cooperation played in natural selection of humans by stressing that as good as cooperation might be, we are prone to making serious errors about what genuinely helpful cooperation entails in specific instances: The unstated moral behind most [...]
Challenging Myths Of Eden
September 22nd, 2009 Daniel Fincke Below is a thought-provoking video which critiques the notion of fallenness from several angles. It builds off of one point I’ve wanted to write about for a while and that’s that the non-literal reading of Genesis is just as false as the metaphorical one. When religious people argue that the Garden of Eden story is [...]
The Yearning Animal
September 21st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Greta Christina takes down the argument that the desire for God proves there is a God to fulfill it out there to be discovered: Someone (I can’t remember who now) recently pointed out that the “no atheists in foxholes” argument, even if it were true (which it’s not), isn’t an argument for God’s existence. It’s actually [...]
Posted in Arguments for the Existence of God, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Featured, Music, Music Videos, Nietzsche, Psychology, Videos Tags: Atheists In Foxholes, Augustine, Bernard Reginster, David Byrne, God-Shaped Hole, Greta Christina, Happiness, Heaven, Longing, Self-Overcoming, Talking Heads, Will to Power, Yearning No Comments »Bad Evolutionary Psychology: Attractiveness
August 8th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Sendai Anonymous tears into Satoshi Kanazawa for His ridiculous research trying (and failing) to link “attractiveness” with reproductive strategies and reproductive success, and all sorts of vacuous claims regarding “attractiveness”. His statistics proved to be flawed and were many times criticised, which Kanazawa obviously ignored. He also claimed that women are getting more “attractive” faster [...]
Posted in Evolutionary Psychology Tags: Attractiveness, Satoshi Kanazawa, Sendai Anonymous No Comments »The Evolutionary Advantages And Present Disadvantages Of Our Conformist Minds
August 1st, 2009 Daniel Fincke John Wilkins has a good post on the value of our minds’ readinesses to defer to authorities from an evolutionary standpoint: The evolutionary justification for this is, of course the following: if evolution were a designer, trying to ensure that thinking beings learned and knew what they had to to survive, a cheaper rule than [...]
Are Sex and Morality Merely “Evolutionary Tricks”?
August 1st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism. The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion. Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin. Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Francis Collins, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Psychology, Religion, Sex, Social Psychology, Sociobiology Tags: Altruism, Charles Manson, Social Virtues, Sociopaths 1 Comment »An Argument For Gay Marriage And Against Traditionalism
July 27th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong. Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Autonomy, Civil Rights, Cultural Secularism, Culture, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Gay Marriage, Homosexuality, Jesus, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Religious Secularism, Same Sex Marriage, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Social Psychology, Sociobiology, Sociology, Virtues Tags: Attractions, Aversions, Beauty, Civil Unions, Definition of Marriage, Disgust, Gay Adoption, Homophobia, Irrational Moral Judgments, John Richardson, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, King David, Michel Foucault, Misogyny, Nathan The Prophet, Nietzsche, Polygamy, Separate But Equal, Socrates, Traditionalism, Ugliness 11 Comments »Stephen Pinker Makes The Case Against The “Blank Slate”
July 21st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Thanks to AtheisTube for the find. Your Thoughts?
Is God Needed For Us To Care About Starving Kids A World Away?
July 19th, 2009 Daniel Fincke A few weeks ago now, I wrote a post, Commitment To Value Without God, in which I discussed how even when I was a Christian, I realized that I did not need to make reference to God in order to either psychologically recognize the value of sumptuous food or good friendship or any of various [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Education, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Philosophy, Problem of Evil, Psychology, Religion, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociobiology, Sociology, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Africa, Colonialism, Compassion, Hell, In-group/Outgroup Psychology, Joshua Greene, Joshua Knobe, Nihilism, Peter Singer, Poverty, Starvation No Comments »Dawkins vs. Collins (Obama’s New NIH Selection)
July 13th, 2009 Daniel Fincke RichardDawkins.net has reprinted a 2006 debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, the prominent (and now powerful) proponent of compatibility between religion and science who has recently been selected by Obama to head up the NIH. The article has some really interesting moments, so I recommend you read it in full. Here is what I [...]
Posted in Bill Maher, Biology, Cosmology, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Francis Collins, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, Probability, Religion, Religion and Science, Science, Sociobiology, Videos Tags: Accommodationism, Altruism, Anthropic Principle, Cosmological Argument, Multiverse, Real Time With Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, Teleological Argument, Time Magazine No Comments »Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation
July 6th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In a previous post, I raised some remarks from psychologist of morality Jonathan Haidt, in which he discussed his theory that moral thinking appeals to 5 essential modules hardwired into our brains by evolution. In the interview I cited from a couple of years ago he only referred to 4 of the 5 modules but [...]
Posted in Atheistic Ethics, Authority, Autonomy, Duty, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Sociobiology, Virtues Tags: Arete, Aristotle, Care, Equality, Excellence, Fairness, Harm, Human Flourishing, Immanuel Kant, Ingroup Loyalty, Jonathan Haidt, Justice, Moral Goods, Moralism, Motives, Nietzsche, Non-Moral Goods, Purity, Thomas Hurka, Tyler Samien, Values, Virtues 9 Comments »Challenges To Evolutionary Psychology
June 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Interesting arguments. I’m not sure how many of them threaten the credibility of either evolutionary psychology or sociobiology as disciplines themselves , rather than specific morally and politically unpleasant theses advanced by particular theories derived by scientists working within those fields. And these arguments force evo psych and sociobiology to incorporate a view of the [...]
Posted in Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Psychology, Rape, Sociobiology Tags: Genetics, Infidelity, Jealousy No Comments »
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