re: #414 Hhar

I perhaps was unclear: I gave an “e.g.” you need to deal with. Memes do NOT clearly exist, and they are not clearly causal agents and yet they are invoked by evolutionary biologists. Secondly, evolutionary biology DOES find explanations for the apparently meaningless: read up a bit on sociobiology and human evolution. Thirdly, if you think it does not forebode an apocalypse, you have not read E.O. Wilson’s work on biological diversity, or Pianka’s ruminations on the same (to name two examples, although the latter was ridiculously hover-hyped by the ID folks).

Umm…you’re using memes to communicate this hogwash. Words are a species of meme, and their roots in human cognitive patternings exist as surely as their instantiations in soundwaves and on paper in language and text. Neither evolutionary biology nor any other scientific discipline is in the business of gifting formerly meaningless processes with cosmic meaning; only humans may ascrible meaning to things, and the meanings they ascribe are human meanings, not cosmic ones. And not all memes (words or word strings) are equal. Some of them, such as random genetic mutation and nonrandom environmental selection, express ideas that refer to actually obtaining states and processes in the empirical world, while others, such as fire-breathing dragons and winged unicorns, do not.

You are out of your depth here, and you need to study this problem more deeply. If you think evolutionary biology is simply a matter of objective fact you are wrong about its history, and its present. You claim that “science” eschews metaphysical pronouncement, but this is a simple and horrible error. Modern science, like a religion, is founded on a metaphysical assumption (physicalism). What individual scientists DO with that is a different story, and SCIENTISTS in no way eschew metaphysical pronouncements. The more religious scientists (whether they be traditional theists, interesting oddballs like Josephson, or flat out lunatic ravers like Dawkins) like to blur the distinctions between science and their own metaphysics quite frequently. Take note: that’s what Coyne does. He’s taking his religion (science) seriously, and will brook no argument.

You confuse and conflate methodological materialism with metaphysical materialism. Empirical sciences must assume the first in their empirical investigations, but this does not entail the assumption of the second. Science does not claim that the metaphysical does not exist, only that the empirical tools available to it are useless to investigate any extraphysical realms, so they remain outside the purview of the discipline. Our sciences, which proceed by induction according to the Verification Principle, are sciences of matter and energy. The sine qua non (condition in the absence of which they would not be what they are) of matter and energy is that they be sensorily perceivable phenomena. These immanent objects of perception are then measured by relating our perceptions of them to our perceptions of intersubjectively agreed-upon standards of measurement which are themselves physical. These quantified perceptions must then be amenable to repetition at will by means of any duplication of the controlled conditions under which they appear. This method cannot be used to either verify or falsify the presence or absence of transcendent nonphysical Mind. Our sensuous perceptions, our technological augmentation of them, our devices of measurement, our method of repetition are all immanent and physical; they are categorically incapable of this task. We cannot prove God is anywhere, and neither can we prove that there is anywhere God is not. Induction is useless with respect to religion; the basic premise must be believed in, rather than known, and in either case, conclusions must follow by means of deduction from the basic premise, not induction from empirically obtained data.