Answers in Genesis

I had a friend many years ago who was an atheist. That in itself is not particularly notable, as atheism is fairly common these days, and I'm sure I have many atheist or agnostic friends. What was really notable about this guy was that unlike a lot of atheists I seem to meet on the Internet, he was pretty tolerant toward theists. In particular, I once heard him make what I thought was a pretty insightful statement: that all of the major religions of the world have enough internal logical consistency to believe in them, or else they probably wouldn't exist. I think he was right.

Anyway, I felt pretty bad writing this particular post, not because of the bare fact that I wrote it, but because it seems somewhat unfair that I waited so long to write it. To some extent I do pride myself on being open-minded and fair towards all religious views, but occasionally, I realize that I've developed a bit of a blind spot when it comes to my own partiality with respect to certain religious attitudes. Shortly after writing my recent post about Orson Scott Card, for instance, I realized that if I ever got around to reading the Book of Mormon, I'd really have to be far more generous towards it than I probably would have intended to be under normal circumstances. Anyway, while I don't currently have any plans to read the Book of Mormon, I still on a regular basis write about atheism (and yes, while atheism is not a religion, it's a religious view), and a few weeks ago I had an interesting epiphany about atheism that I really should have put into writing. Well, I can console myself that few atheists are reading my blog, and probably even fewer really care.

In a certain way, it was odd that it was only just last month that I'd come to the realization that I did, since it's largely due to Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, which I read some time in the late '80s. Who knows why it would take me more than a quarter-century to put this together? I really ought to go back and read the book again.

Something that has always bothered me about Dawkins is the way he has over time morphed into a sort of crusader for atheism. Surely, the guy is a great thinker and a giant in the world of biology, but why does that make him an expert on (the non-existence of) God? To a great extent, even though I think I've come to a deeper understanding of why his studies in biology might shed some light on theological issues, I still question what purely physical biology has to tell us about spiritual matters, but no matter (no pun intended).

This is the thing, though; I've made a big deal both on my blog and in more casual conversation that I think it's a shame that many scientists can't seem to accept the possibility of the supernatural. That's certainly not to say that the supernatural has a part to play in science; it absolutely does not, by definition. My only thought was that while studying the purely natural, a person might lose sight of the possibility that there was more to our existence than that. And I consider myself a skeptic; I don't place a great deal of faith in the supernatural myself, despite being a theist. I believe there is a God, and there is a spiritual aspect of our lives, but for the most part we can live as though it were not there. What got me feeling guilty as I prepared to write this today is that I realized I was being guilty of doing the exact same thing as I was criticizing others of doing, but in reverse.

What if the parts of our existence I considered to be purely in the realm of the spiritual could actually be under the influence of purely material forces? Why not?

If the study of science blinds one to the spiritual, certainly the study of religion could blind one to the natural. There is something that I'd always felt to be lacking in atheism, but maybe it was because I'd unknowingly set the terms of the argument unfairly. The thing that atheism lacks (in my previous view) is answers. There are certain questions that it is human nature to ask, and atheism either can't seem to answer these questions, or claims that they have no answer. These questions are things like, "What is the meaning of life?" or "Is there a higher power over us?" or "What happens to our consciousness after we die?" I mean, maybe there is no real answer to these questions, but it seems so unsatisfying.

But what if I (along with others, no doubt) was insisting on spiritual answers because I assumed that these were, by their very nature, spiritual questions? What if there was a need to keep an open mind about materialism in the same way that I always felt one should keep an open mind about spiritual things? If you open up these questions to be answered in a materialistic fashion, didn't Dawkins really answer them?

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins had a revolutionary idea with respect to biology, genetics, and evolution. (Bear with me, it's been, as I said, about a quarter-century since I read this.) It's funny, because it's one of those things that, to me at least, seems almost obvious once you point it out and explain the principle. There's a lot of misunderstanding about evolution. Does it happen to individuals or groups? Does it happen all the time, or is it a gradual process? Is it a process that has a directed plan of some sort, or is it random? Whatever the answers to these, Dawkins suggests that the real driving force behind evolution is in fact the very genes of living creatures themselves. Genes, for lack of a better verb, "want" to propagate. All biological processes on both the micro and macro level can trace back their base driving force to this fact. It's logical and inevitable on some level: as natural selection posits survival of the fittest organisms, so Dawkins' model suggests survival of the fittest genes. If a gene codes for a behavior or a characteristic in an organism that makes it more fit, then surely that gene itself could be considered fit.

But what does this mean philosophically, or even theologically? "What is the meaning of life?" Why, it's all about obeying our genes, isn't it? This is weird, since on some level this is a sort of "Well, duh," thing. If you understand that what we are and what we do is the product of our genes both on an individual level, and as a species or even an ecosystem, then doing what our genes tell us to do isn't even a choice, it's just what we are. Our genetic code is, in the end, the "higher power over us" in a very substantial way that arguably trumps anything else that might stand in its stead. Especially if you have a materialistic world-view.

Of course, maybe as a theist I still need to stress that this does leave many of those questions unanswered. There's no clue given here to the nature of a possible afterlife, certainly, but of course there may be no answer. There also is no clear indication as to what sort of moral system one should follow, but maybe morality is a separate realm from these sorts of questions. Does admitting these as potentially valid answers to great philosophical questions mean I'm advocating for atheism? Of course not, I'm still a Christian. Maybe I'm just suggesting that which is already obvious to atheists: that atheistic viewpoints have enough internal logical consistency to believe in them, or else they probably wouldn't exist. Am I right?

Milhouse IS a meme!

Not that it's a problem...

I feel pretty silly about this, but I made a rather random New Year's resolution last year. I promised that in 2012, I would show the world that the Simpsons character Milhouse Mussolini Van Houten is a legitimate Internet meme, by which I meant that I would eventually take the time to compose a fairly thorough analysis of the Milhouse as meme phenomenon. While there are a lot of things that are far more important than this subject that I could and should be focusing my time on, I was planning on doing some writing for personal reasons, and having one day left in 2012, I figured why not do this, and then I'd have a (very) small sense of accomplishment.

C'mon, I swear it won't hurt...

There's an important point that I should get out of the way off the top, and that has to do with the meaning of the term "meme" in the first place. A lot of people know that the word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins, a brilliant biologist who revolutionized his field in many ways. I've probably written about him before, and I have mixed feelings on the range of his views in many areas, but that's beside the point. The real point here is that in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene in which he revolutionized the concepts of genetics and how they relate to the understanding of evolutionary theory, he extended those ideas to the world of information, setting up the concept of the "meme" in the world of thought and ideas to parallel the well-known biological idea of the "gene". I need to go back to his initial description of the concept (which I am admittedly explaining from memory of a book I read over twenty years ago) to make a distinction.

This is a longstanding issue.

The word "meme", like so many other words, has come over time to change its meaning as accepted by the culture, and particularly Internet culture. In Dawkins' original definition of the concept, there was perhaps not a great divide between the term and the much better-known word "idea". Indeed, In a very loose sense, memes (as originally defined) are essentially ideas that have the possibility of being expressed and repeated. As genes can be passed down from parent to child, memes can be passed on from person to person, although the spread of memes is more akin to the biological process of genes spreading through viruses: a virus has its own DNA, and when you are infected my a virus, your body will duplicate that DNA and possibly pass it on to other people with whom you come into contact, but the virus' DNA is not your own, you simply carry and spread it.

Anyone can be a meme!

With that parallel in mind, I just want to state a fact that is interesting, but ultimately trivial: Milhouse is unequivocally a meme in the original sense of the term. This is trivial because in the end, every character on the Simpsons is a meme, because every one of them could potentially be spread through culture; a number of them are, particularly through their catchphrases, Homer's "D'oh!" and Bart's "Ay Carumba!" being prime examples. The thing when it comes to memes is that like genes or viruses, they are what they are regardless of their success over time. If a lion was born with a mutated gene that made its fur a glowing bright green, it would probably have a terrible time hunting, and would die out without passing on that gene. A failed gene is still a gene, and the same goes for memes: even if nobody cared about Milhouse whatsoever, he'd still be a meme, just an ineffective one.

He takes failure well.

Now that I've made that note however, I must concede that the modern Internet definition of "meme" is a little more exacting, and yet difficult to pin down with precision. One thing that's sure is that failed memes are not considered memes by the new definition. The main thing that I intend to argue here is that despite the bad press (so to speak) that he has received from the Internet meme community, Milhouse is not a failed meme, and in fact is a very prominent meme within Internet culture.

C'est un fait, non?

There is a lot of confusion about the nature of Milhouse's status as a meme, and of course this mainly comes from the existence of the popular memetic phrase "Milhouse is not a meme." People "in the know", or those who have "meme savvy" know that of course "Milhouse is not a meme." is a meme. Because this phrase is a meme, and a very popular one, it is assumed by many to be a true statement. This ridiculous notion must be dismissed, although it needs to be explained why it can be dismissed, if for no other reason than to alleviate some of that confusion.

Guess one of my favorite websites.

The thing that needs to be recognized by people trying to understand memes of all sorts is that there is no requirement for something to be a true reflection of reality in order to be a meme. In my experience, this becomes a very important issue to remember when memes rise to prominence that are political or religious in nature.

lolwut

Towards the end of 2011, there was a popular image macro meme based on Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly. Kelly had come on the air shortly after an incident in which a police officer had used pepper spray on some protesters (the cop himself also featuring in a short-lived meme) and said that pepper spray was "a food product, essentially." People made image macros of Kelly's face with captions such as "Rape? It's surprise sex, essentially." and "Bamboo under fingernails? It's a manicure, essentially." While the meme was an attempt to use humor to ridicule Kelly's statement and as such it was rather successful, there were two levels of untruth at work in the usage of that meme. I'm no fan of Fox News or Megyn Kelly, but I hope it's obvious that Kelly did not actually say any of the statements used in the image macros; this type of parody is putting words into someone's mouth that they didn't say, essentially. Somewhat more serious in my mind was the fact that while Kelly's remark was insensitive, it was taken out of context. If one watches the full clip, in her very next sentence, she says, "That's really beside the point, I mean, it was something that was obviously abrasive and intrusive...several went to the hospital." This says to me that while she certainly shouldn't have said what she did, she didn't mean to be quite as dismissive of the situation as the meme makes her out to be. (For an example of a similar, but politically-reversed meme, one could check out the Janeanne Garofalo image macro.)

This guy is a giant among memes.

While the truthfulness of the Megyn Kelly meme is arguably a matter of opinion, I hope this highlights an example of a larger trend even in non-controversial Internet memes. Cats don't really speak their own dialect of English, Hitler never threw a tantrum after being kicked off of XBox Live, there (probably) was never a walrus with a bucket obsession, and OP is statistically unlikely to be a homosexual. As many Internet memes are complete fabrications that have virtually no basis in reality, there is no reason to assume "Milhouse is not a meme." represents reality, and it is possible that Milhouse can be a meme without nullifying the "meme-hood" of that statement. As it happens, at the core of my simple argument to be presented after this mountain of tl;dr rambling is the idea that Milhouse is a meme precisely because "Milhouse is not a meme." is a meme.

Won't somebody
think of the kittens?!

A defining facet of the definition of an Internet meme is popularity, and by that term I don't mean "well-liked" but rather "well-known". Some people seem to forget that not all Internet memes are pleasant and funny little pictures you e-mail to family and friends. Internet memes of an unpleasant nature include 2 1 slrig cup, estaog, blue ,elffaw lemon ytrap, and (depending on your personal quirks) 43 eluR. Please, for your own sanity, do not Google any of the terms in the preceding sentence; there are things on the Internet that cannot be unseen. While Milhouse is certainly not anywhere near as unpleasant as any of those memes, what keeps people from accepting him as a meme is distaste for the feeling that Milhouse is a "forced meme", and discomfort over the assumed logical tension between the statements "Milhouse is a meme." and "'Milhouse is not a meme.' is a meme." Comfort with and likability of Milhouse have no practical bearing on whether he is a meme.

Yes he can!

So why then is it that "Milhouse is not a meme." inevitably leads to Milhouse being a meme? Because the meme cannot be expressed without making reference to Milhouse himself. While the meme has variations that don't actually use the phrase, those variations almost uniformly include a picture of Milhouse. It's the nature of "Milhouse is not a meme." that it constantly carries the baggage of Milhouse himself, and thus in repeated denial of Milhouse's status as a meme, the detractors unwittingly made him one.

Milhouse is indeed a meme. Happy New Year, everyone.

Rose is the new Black...or not

I recently came across a question on the Internet that I found very interesting. To paraphrase: Why did Rebecca Black become so much more viral of an Internet phenomenon as a bad singer (supposedly; remember some people do like her) than Jenna Rose (whom I had never heard of until a few days ago), CathyMay15, or Final Placement, any of which are arguably far worse than Rebecca Black?

I suspect it may have to do with a combination of several factors: Rebecca Black is bad, but not quite so abysmally awful that she's unwatchable; the lyrics of "Friday" are really, really stupid; the WTF/LOL reaction to the appearance of the considerably older rapper who appears in Rebecca's video (Jenna had a semi-random rapper in her video, but he was another kid, at least); the fact that Justin Bieber and Katy Perry took notice of Rebecca; and really the most important factor that I think plays a part in the formation of every meme, a random chance snowballing effect of popularity.

That last one is the wild card that makes all the difference, I think. There are no doubt hundreds of bad singers on YouTube, but for one to become a viral sensation, I think they need to not know they are bad, and yet somehow attract viewers that will share the video link effectively.

On top of that, the "meme community" (that is to say, the people on the Internet who are the ones sharing links effectively; not really a cohesive, united community) will usually reject a new meme that's too similar to an existing one, and while Jenna's video was posted to YouTube first, Rebecca's was discovered first, consigning Jenna to be simply "another Rebecca Black". This is why I feel safe to venture a prediction that there will never be a "bad singer" memetically bigger than Rebecca Black, just like every attempt to brand some random video blogging girl on YouTube as "the new Boxxy!" always fails.

Here are some interesting graphs. Rebecca Black's video was posted to YouTube on February 10th, 2011, and started going viral March 11, 2011. Google Trends shows this growth in March for searches on "Rebecca Black":

The Jenna Rose video was uploaded to YouTube on October 1, 2010, but apparently pretty much nobody heard of her until about two days after Rebecca Black started going viral:

Furthermore, although CathyMay15 had videos on YouTube over a year before Rebecca Black came on the scene, her KnowYourMeme.com entry notes, "At least one interesting thread was spotted on 4chan on March 16, 2011, and her YouTube account was taken down the next day on March 17, 2011." So despite CathyMay15 being happy to stagnate in obscurity for over a year, (1) Rebecca Black appears, (2) somebody somewhere says, "You think Rebecca Black is bad? You should see this!" (3) CathyMay15 realizes she's being ridiculed and takes down her videos, but (4) it's too late and her videos are mirrored by others and she rises on the same tidal wave of popularity that's carrying Rebecca Black:

Nonetheless, it's clear these separately-trending singers are only receiving secondary attention as a comparison to Rebecca Black. There may be other bad singers/songs that got a "Rebecca Black bump" in popularity, and for that matter, this may be a phenomenon that happens with other types of memes, but I'm going to save that for another day's research and wrap this up.

When Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme", he did it with some comparison to biological evolutionary principles. I think there are some parallels in this analogy that haven't been explored as much as they could be, and this latter point of mine is one of them. Just as in biological evolution where a species will seek out and dominate a certain ecological niche and drive out competitors, memes similarly live in a sort of informational ecology. Once a particular meme occupies and dominates a certain niche of the Internet, it tends to block the growth of any others that would try to take the same space.

Notice that there may be tons of "Advice Dog spin-offs", but each one needs a specialized personality to survive. "Technologically Impaired Duck" may not be a huge meme, but it's prominent enough that we'll never see a "Technologically Impaired Goldfish" or a "Technologically Impaired Jackrabbit" take hold as a successful meme. And by a quirk of timing, every bad singer (female, at least) on the Internet will probably be referred to as "the next/latest Rebecca Black" for the foreseeable future.

The evolution of Darwinism

"Did God, the supreme intelligence, deign to design distinctive shell patterns for the tortoises of each island?"
-"Evolution of a Scientist," Newsweek, Nov. 28, 2005, p. 54

Evolution is always an interesting subject to me. Partly because it's such a hot-button topic for many people, and partly because despite that fact, there are many people who insist it's not a hot-button topic at all.

In a recent Newsweek article about the life and legacy of Charles Darwin, there were a number of interesting comments, including the above quote, which I'll get to. One thing in particular that jumped out at me was a quote from the sidebar. "Evolution is not controversial in the field of science." (quote by "Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education") While in a sense this is not quite true (there are scientists who feel that evolutionary theory is not sufficient to explain life as we know it), in another sense it's so true as to be a sort of "duh" statement. The strange thing about "science" in what I believe to be its truest form, is that nothing is controversial from within science. The idea of "science" is to find ways to understand the way the world works. Ethics, philosophical truth, theology, popular opinion and the like, while indeed able to influence scientists, should not in theory influence science itself. Some people who oppose evolutionary theory do so with the argument that saying we humans evolved from lower life forms cheapens the value and dignity of human life. While not everyone agrees with this, from the scientific point of view it doesn't matter if a scientific theory cheapens anything at all. If a scientist found a way to make substantial amounts of gold from common household items, then the value of gold would be cheapened, but that wouldn't change the fact that the method would exist. (Of course, atomic theory would tell us such a method does not exist, but that's beside the point.)

Another excellently thought-provoking quote was, "[Intelligent Design] says, if there's some part of science that you can't understand, that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well. And if science does figure out [how the eye evolved]—and I believe it's very likely that science will ... then where is God?" (quote by "Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian") There once was a time when I believed this, and it's a popular view, actually: that God is to be found in the gaps that science cannot fill. But Collins is right; if we claim this to be the case, then does God get smaller and smaller each time science takes a step forward? I personally believe that there is nothing about the physical world that is beyond the range of science to understand, given enough time and resources. If there is no end to time, and scientists eventually get to the point where there is virtually nothing that is not understood in a scientific perspective, will God suddenly cease to exist? I have heard some atheists express the view that we're already there, particularly in the case of evolution. To many atheists, the existence and complexity of life on the planet was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome to be confident that there is no God. As Richard Dawkins has said, evolution makes it "possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." The fact is, no matter how unlikely a person may think the idea of life evolving from non-life spontaneously is, the probability is not completely zero, and it allows atheists to get a toe in the door of plausibility. I don't like the idea that somehow the more plausible the atheists' claims on truth may be, the less plausible theists' claims become to balance things out. And what may be worse, when one views science as the enemy of faith, I believe one will tend to reject anything science has to offer. This is a great shame.

The article also points out that scientists don't call it "Darwinism". I have no idea if this is true on the whole but I don't doubt it's true in general. Calling something by a word that ends in an "-ism" makes it seem more philosophical than scientific, and even if a scientist might reject evolutionary theory, they would surely prefer to dismiss it on scientific grounds rather than cheapening it with an easy label. Still, "Darwinism" is found in many dictionaries, and is indeed a well-understood word, even to those who would rather not use it. Also, my main concern about "Darwinism" is that I often wonder why it is considered more of a science than a philosophy. I don't say it to cheapen it, I actually do believe that evolution clearly happens, I only question the scale: yes, animals change and speciate, but does that mean that all life as we know it today is here as a result of speciation from some single original life form? As I said, evolution does have a toe in the door of plausibility, but does having that toe imply that the door must be flung wide? Yes, we see speciation, we have a fossil record that shows us some rather extensive history of evolution, but until all the gaps are filled in (which they may never be, even if evolutionary theory of the more extensive sort is true) how can we really know the origin of life? Claiming that science can explain a one-time event that happened billions of years ago with no record to speak of smacks of philosophy to me rather than science.

But what of creationism? What of God's role in all of this if indeed He exists and has taken a role? Couldn't God have used evolution as a tool, but not necessarily the only tool at His disposal? Could God have created life that has the appearance of having evolved when, in fact, it did not? Why not? It seems to me that every argument and piece of evidence I have heard for evolutionary theory could be reworked into evidence for creationism. For instance, all mammals have either five digits on each of four limbs, or evidence of rudimentary structures that suggest four five-fingered limbs. To a biologist that believes in evolution, this suggests a common ancestry for all mammals. To me, it suggests a common base design for all mammals that has been tweaked by the creator in various ways. The same goes for similarities in DNA, protein structures, etc. Is it common ancestry, or common design? I think evolutionary theorists are making the same mistaken logical leaps that "intelligent design" advocates are. Like the idea that God is where science cannot explain things, ID suggests that if we find biological structures that we cannot explain the evolution thereof, they must have been designed. Why does this make any more or less sense than to say that those things we can explain must have evolved (without any supernatural intervention)? I think it's flawed inference on both counts.

But Darwin famously did an extensive study of variations in finch beaks in the Galapagos Islands. So many different kinds of finches, and each one had its own little ecological niche to fit into. He speculated (not proved) that perhaps they all might have come from a common ancestor. This speculation seems reasonable enough, but why must it then follow that God had no hand in the matter? Could not God have created different species of finches? Could not God have directed varieties of finches towards the ecological niches that they would best fit? Could not God have created the original ancestor of all finches, whose descendants then had, by very simple natural forces, come to speciate into their modern equivalents? Why is God excluded? Matthew 10:29 says "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father." If God takes personal interest in the life of a sparrow, why not the beak of a finch?

Would God "deign to design distinctive shell patterns"? Why is the answer an implied "no"? For all the glory and power and honor the Bible attributes to God, I believe it also attributes the kind of character that gives us a clear answer of "yes". Does that mean God did? I don't know how one would find the answer to that.