Jussie sympathises with CEVA34 when s/he says:

in the present thread none of us seem to be addressing those often contemptuous dismissals of Dawkins and his allegedly mistaken emphasis on the gene. Dawkins describes Wilson as being in a minority; those replies seem to say it's Dawkins who is out of step.

So let’s see what’s wrong with the anti-RD comments on the OP.

this seminal paper

is presented by Nicholas$ Beale as if it refuted Hamilton’s rule and kin selection. One need only read its abstract to know what it actually does is present more powerful calculation techniques to get the same results. Beale then offers his own example of group selection:

if members of a group share a common language which allows them to communicate and hence fight/forage more effectively they will survive better than a group that doesn’t (other things being equal). Although the ability to learn a language certainly does have a genetic basis, the particular language that you learn certainly doesn’t.

But what really happens here is that it is best for an individual to learn the local language so s/he can communicate with others to get things done. This is not group selection, because it doesn’t lead to a group having properties despite the needs of the selfish genes causing them.

[$ NBeale’s recommendation of a book he co-authored with John Polkinghorne reveals he is Nicholas Beale.]

Like Beale, Thomas Earle Moore thinks memes provide examples of group selection:

Are not memes real replicators of group characteristics that are carried forward by, for example, religious sects?

But they are not; we shouldn’t assume that just because something is a “group characteristic” in the sense of its being prevalent that it is therefore amenable to group selection, which would mean individuals had those properties because of the good it did their group in spite of some harm it might do to their selfish self-replicators (e.g. memes). Conformity does have its benefits, and there is certainly no indication that group selection is the true explanation for how any memes spread. Memes are like infections; no-one claims influenza is amenable to selection at the level of groups of influenza viruses, or influenza hosts, because influenza is commonplace!

Taking an in-between stance, Mark Cowan thinks evolution cannot explain culture. Given that we did evolve, and culture happens because of our gene-built brains, what does Cowan imagine happened historically to make culture exist, short of supernatural intervention? (As he concludes with, “there is a theory that connects the social sciences, arts and humanities and the laws of motion,” it’s as if he admits culture has a scientific explanation, just not an evolutionary one. It’s all very muddled.) He adds:

For neo-Darwinians like Dawkins & Co they would misguide you into believing that natural selection is synonymous with evolution.

This despite Dawkins repeatedly referring to genetic drift, nearly neutral molecular evolution, gene flow, and so on. Cowan adds:

A city is/was not built by nature, but by culture.

How defining products of culture as not part of nature shows culture to lack a natural origin is not made clear. His next paragraph consists entirely of unevidenced assertion cast in vague terminology, so I’ll not quote it only to add, “What does that even mean?” Next Cowan acts as if epigenetics is Lamarckian; a recent interview with RD made clear why this is wrong. It is ironic he then adds:

Richard’s career is rooted on gene-centrism, but as the years go by this view drifts ever more towards historical footnote

given that group selection, the view which Cowan thinks RD is wrong to critique Wilson for defending, is even older. After that, more vague, nonsensical defence of Lamarckism occurs.

Noah Smith's point 1 is, can asexually reproduced genomes be replicators? This thread has already explained why not. Next Smith imagines genes that help out one another, which is not far off the green beard effect, but again it is not a case of group selection, but rather of a gene-level selection which favours the co-operation of two genes. (The GBE is improbable since the conditions needed to make it work have to have a single source, which is unlikely.)

Beale isn’t done; he adds:

Dawkins hasn’t made any significant contributions to science (his last research paper published in a top journal was in the 1980s and was hilariously wrong) and doesn’t understand the mathematics of evolution.

I’d like to know what was so wrong with this paper, and there’s no way I can buy into this mathematics accusation, given the accurate things I’ve known RD to say on that subject in the past, e.g. his discussion of the relationship between drift rates and population size in The Ancestor’s Tale. And I want to hear the mathematical details of this claim made explicit, so I can see how plausible it is:

Hamilton’s rule is a rule of thumb which is often useful but doesn’t actually add anything to standard natural selection and is sometimes completely wrong.

The symmetry groups emerge from the Calabi-Yau shape, but we don't yet know the details, so we honestly can't say which shapes are compatible with which SU(N).

SU(N) means N colours, yes (so N quarks per baryon). I honestly don't know how the star lifetime would depend on N. My guess is a larger N would accelerate the star's lifetime because it would increase the number of inter-baryonic quark-quark interactions when two hadrons are close together, so would enhance fusion probability, but you'd need to ask an expert on SU(N)-sensitivity in nuclear physics (there must be some, surely). I doubt the parity of N would be of much importance, even though it would determine whether or not nucleons form a "shell" structure in nuclei, if only because (i) I don't see how that affects fusion probability or the energy needed for fusion & (ii) the numbers of nucleons of each type needed to start new "shells" are achieved only in the minority of larger nuclei forming in the star as it ages.

It seems to me that it's only "the conditional probability that the recipient of altruism contains an altruism-causing gene given that the altruist does", if the altruist is the only source of that gene. But I just pointed out that in real life we have no reason to assume that the altruist is the only source. So when a successful gene spreads through the population, the 1/2 and 1/4 stuff should no longer be relevant. It only holds for a newly introduced gene, right ...?

As I said, r is the limit as gene frequency tends to 0 of the conditional probability, so as it becomes more common the true conditional probability rises. Remember, however, the gene for altruism has to satisfy rB-C > 0 for all periods in which it becomes more common, including the initial brand-new period. As time passes, the "true" r will exceed that of these calculations, making the "true" rB-C greater, so it will still be positive. But because the gene will only get to that era if initially rB-C>0, the altruism policy it enacts has to be no more altruistic than the pessimistic estimate of the conditional probability warrants.

Of course I do; that's what replication is about. "Like begets like" is one thing; "identical begets identical" is another. Remember, "it replicates at least in some parts" is true of sexual reproduction, too; I have half my father's genes.

As for the r thing, its definition is the conditional probability$ that the recipient of altruism contains an altruism-causing gene given that the altruist does. Therefore, it'll naturally be a dyadic fraction. The reason it "matters" is because, while a gene can't find out whether or not it's present in an individual, a probabilistic altruism rule is successful on average (which is what selection requires) iff it accords with Hamilton's rule.

$ More precisely, the limit thereof as the gene's frequency tends to 0.

Fifteen.

The other problem with thinking clones are replicated individuals, which RD points out in TSG, is that if individuals genuinely replicated acquired characteristics would be inherited, which isn't the case.

Anaximander, putting aside for the moment the question of whether or not the universe is infinite, the 1E+22 figure is indeed based on the Hubble zone, whose diameter is about 93 billion light years. How this compares with the full size of the universe, if it's finite, depends on just how many Hubble zones inflation isolated. However, "millions" is putting it quite low; the volume factor should be more like 1E+78, giving googol stars. Shocking, huh?

If the group is SU(N), we get N²-1 gluons. This becomes N² for a U(N) symmetry, whose N=1 case corresponds to electromagnetism; its one "gluon" is the photon. The weak force has an SU(2) symmetry, so N²-1=3; and the "gluons" are the W+, W- and Z bosons. Note U(N), SU(N) respectively have N,N-1 gauge bosons which are their own antiparticle, together with N(N-1)/2 particle-antiparticle pairs, e.g. for N=2 we get the W+/- pair.

Never trust an ellipsis. Here's what was actually said:

HC: Out of this, or the astronomy studies or further understanding of biology, which would you place your bets on if you’re looking for an answer to the question ‘Is there life on other planets?’
RD: It’s a very interesting question, I think that statistically when you consider the number of available planets…when people first started thinking about the question we had no idea whether other stars than our sun had planets, we only knew that our sun had planets…and we knew that some of those planets, and most of those planets, have their own orbiting satellites - Jupiter and Saturn have rather a lot - Jupiter and Saturn constitute miniature solar systems which gave confidence to the idea that other stars probably have their own planets.
That’s now been confirmed, pretty dramatically really, by astronomers, who are discovering by more than one method that other stars do have planets. It now looks as though most stars have planets, and with a pretty good estimate of the number of stars it looks as though it’s something like 10 to the 22…that’s a colossal number. If anybody wanted to believe that we are literally alone in the universe, they can still do so – one can’t disprove that idea – but they’re facing up to massive odds.
They’ve got to say that if only one in 10 to the 22 planets has life, that must mean that the origin of life on this planet – as obviously it’s happened on this planet – was a quite stupefyingly rare event…an improbable event. So improbable that we’d be wasting our time even trying to speculate about it, and I don’t think that for a moment – I think it probably was a stroke of luck, but not that lucky.

Here's the summary under the article's picture:

Richard Dawkins discusses the origin of life: "The origin of life on this planet ... was quite a stupefyingly rare event."

Talk about taken out of context.

Edit: tom campbell-ricketts beat me to it. Sorry.

True, but it wouldn't make the force stronger, i.e. its coupling parameter wouldn't be increased.

I thought we already expected early on-land creatures to drag themselves with their fins/limbs. After all, the somewhat-on-land creatures of today (I think mudskippers are an example; feel free to correct me) are like that. This computer work doesn't so much overturn anything as confirm suspicions.

Incidentally, "facts contradict textbooks" is a common refrain of journalists who don't think all that highly of science but still get to report on it. For starters, what are these textbooks? Seriously, I want proof they exist. Secondly, of course textbooks are "wrong" about things - they dumb down for children.

Another common journalist tactic for stoking the readers' science fire is to use the word "scientists". That could be anything from "every single scientist on Earth" to "two scientists". In this case, it was three scientists. Remember: "a few" differs from "most" in that the latter is indicative of a consensus formed on a body of evidence it took ages to accumulate.

Why then is the galaxy Adromeda going to collide with the Milky Way?

Galaxies more than about 50 million light years from each other don't gravitationally attract enough to overcome the expansion of space, so said expansion leads them to move apart. Galaxies which are close together are overall pulled together. Put it this way: the expansion of the universe scales all distances like the expansion of the surface of an inflating balloon, but if some other force pulls together two objects on that surface they might not move apart because said force might dominate. Andromeda is only 2.2 million light years from the Milky Way. Frankly, given the distances involved, we really should say the expansion of space pulls apart clusters of galaxies. Our two galaxies are no more compelled to separate than are the atoms on Earth.

At the first stage of an explosion the particules will be accerating apart; so how do we know that this universe is still not at that first stage?

Expansion continues indefinitely after the Big Bang, but the "bang" is usually defined as the moment the expansion began. Acceleration of expansion, known as "inflation", is occurring now because of a positive cosmological parameter (or, equivalently, dark energy), which dominates the Friedmann equations. The early universe also briefly experienced inflation shortly after (but not simultaneous with) the Big Bang. The inflation then was much stronger than now; it was exponential, whereas now it's polynomial.

there's any number of ways in which one can rotate a cube, for example, and one might consider a particular view of it a 'random' one.....but the underlying reality ( our hypothetical meta-laws ) is not random at all. Thus, talk of 10 ^ 500 'radically different' universes is somewhat disingenuous......its sort of like arguing that my car is a radically different car according to what angle I view it from.

I don't think you understand what the gauge symmetry group indicates. The different possibilities aren't different sides of a cube which are essentially the same because a cube's a cube. On the contrary; the definition of symmetry is "the reason why some rotations leave cubes looking exactly the same". For example, in the Lagrangian L = (mv²)/2-V(r), a rotation of Cartesian axes doesn't change the value of the scalar product v² or the length r of the vector r, which is why we say the Lagrangian has an SO(3) symmetry. But while a cube has a certain set of symmetries, an icosahedron has a completely different set of symmetries. This shows you why the symmetries that exist tell you something speific about reality.

If region A and region B were never ever causally connected.....then there is absolutely no sense in which one can speak of an over-arching entity ( 'the' multiverse ) of which they are a part. I was under the impression that.....almost by definition....all regions within the inflationary model must at some point have been causally connected.

They were, yes. But the parameters in different regions, while initially equal at that time, could depart later. Why? Because one of the things physicists gloss over when discussing these issues with laypeople is that these "constants" actually depend on energy level$; we call this "running coupling". So the differences between Hubble zones boils down to differences in energy, as Anaximander said.

$ Not all "vacua" have the same energy-per-unit-volume; counter-intuitively, an entire Hubble zone can exist in a "false vacuum" excited above the ground state. Whether these could decay to the ground state, and what implications this would have for the physics of that Hubble zone, is a question physicists have discussed a fair bit.

That sounds like those regions are not causally connected.

Right, they're not.

Because then it would not be "the strong force." (It would be, for example, "the very strong force.") Or maybe there would not be anybody to ask that, if it had SU(4) symmetry?

The strength of the force doesn't depend on the N in SU(N), nor would it have anthropic implications.

I would love to hear of some experiments beyond the LHC that could be done to find evidence of the multiverse. Maybe we send a bunch of probes fitted with telescopes to the outer reaches of our galaxy and maybe we can use gravitational lensing to see distant universes?

The main idea to detect multiverses is to detect "scars" in our universe caused by interactions with them. It's hard to explain what those are to non-physicists, but the important thing is it can in principle have a detectable presence with the right kind of telescope. As for particle accelerators such as the LHC, they could lend string theory credence if, for example, gravitons were short-lived due to them escaping our universe's "brane" (which, in string theory, they can do because gravitons are closed strings). But most physicists doubt either of these things will be done any time soon.

I thought these things ( except the mass ) were all explained by the Standard Model.

The Standard Model doesn’t so much explain these things as describe them. Why, for example, does the strong force between quarks have an SU(3) summary as opposed to, say, an SU(4) symmetry? The symmetry of the standard model is SU(3)SU(2)U(1), which of course doesn’t include gravity, or any supersymmetry or leptoquark unification the universe might exhibit. There’s nothing “impossible” about these likely candidates for where the Standard Model isn’t the full story. Until we have a reason to the contrary, the exact symmetry is somewhat contingent.

How can the Standard Model with all its unitary symmetry octets, etc, explain anything if its just a random set of variants ? Seems odd that a random fluctuation would produce a physics that could be explained so precisely by any symmetry !

It’s hard to explain with the limited mathematical apparatus of RD.net, but the absence of any imposed properties of a certain type makes certain symmetries and associated conservation laws automatic, by Noether’s theorem. But we still can’t give a derivation that says “this is the only set of symmetries nature can exhibit, plus it must exhibit all of them”. Insofar as we “explain” a specific symmetry in nature, we can go one why deeper in the explanations, but gauge symmetries in particular are far from fully determined on existing theories.

what I can't happily envisage is why a single basic mechanism should produce 'radically different' universes.

The different types of universe under discussion are the full range of solutions to the relevant mathematical problems. It’s actually reality’s selectively using only some of them that would need some explanation. Indeed, this is the sort of thing that happens in spontaneous symmetry breaking; if for instance you imply a privileged direction, e.g. when magnetising iron, you’ve culled the symmetries, thereby excluding some things that would otherwise readily happen.

Why should the nature of that space vary across distance any more than it does with space within our own universe?

To cut a long story short, it’s because the correlations between the properties in relativistic quantum field theory of two points in space-time separated by a path that can’t be traversed at or under light speed are all zero.

dh, my guess was you meant one our to be your. As for my speaking for the group, it's based on not so much authority as empirical knowledge. People here aren't scared of the posisbility atheism implies moral non-realism, nor are any of your other charges sensible. I may not be everyone, but we know one another fairly well on at least really broad strokes like that.

I stand by my question

What does that even mean? You can stand by a claim; but what does it mean to stand by a question? To think it deserves an answer? It's been answered in the negative. If you insist the right answer is instead in the affirmative, I could understand what it would mean to say you stood by that, and we could discuss why you feel the way you do. And seriously, I want to know what concrete evidence you have for your unnecessary suspicions.

do you think our reaction is our responsibility?

Is there a y missing in there? Otherwise the answer has to be in the affirmative.

dh, given that three insults have each been used once to refer to this author, and one of those insults was denied to be applicable in another post, and one of the others is a plural noun collectively referring to people of a common view rather than constituting personal invective, and no-one here claims to have a moral code which precludes the insulting of those whose ideas don't work for reasons we have carefully explained, and this is your only post here ever, and you didn't deal with any of our points, you're in no position to have your "it's about fear, self-righteousness and hatred" suggestion deemed accurate and in every position to have it deemed trollish.

We do not fear the possibility s/he's onto something; we've given cogent explanations for how we know s/he isn't. We are not self-righteous, but we are unimpressed with his/her attempt to demonstrate our inferiority to him/her, i.e. his/her superiority to us; and so, if anything, s/he's the self-righteous one. And you know that "hate the sin, love the sinner" idea? Well, if we hate anything, it's the fallacies, dishonesty etc. the OP exhibited.

Brian Greene is a more staunch supporter of string theory than I am ever likely to be, unless its empirical side develops considerably in my lifetime, which may well happen. I'm not here to defend it with the vigour Greene would seek to, but I'll at least give it a fair Devil's-advocate defence (probably more than that).

Where's the room for variation with things like relativity, quantum mechanics, or even something bog standard like the inverse square law?

Galilean invariance, Lorentz violation, different numbers of uncompactified dimensions, different geometries of both the compactified and uncompactified parts (the latter relevant to the inverse square law only at small length scales, but it has other implications than that for what laws occur too), that sort of thing. But there are better examples of how laws could vary:
What particles exist, what interactions exist between them, what are their gauge symmetries, and which of their carriers have rest mass and other interactions' charges?
What mechanism generates rest masses? More generally, how are symmetries spontaneously broken?
What is the pattern of chirality, C/P/T violations, symmetry breakings etc.?

It's also something of an irony that many of the greatest proponents of as large a number of universes as possible to 'explain away' the fine tuning of ours..........are the same people who also dismiss the fine tuning by arguing that there aren't actually that many constants to fiddle about with anyway. I guess there must be 10 ^ 500 ways to have cake and eat cake.

I think you misunderstand why multiverse ideas are considered. Inflationary cosmology, for which there is other evidence, implies large numbers of causally independent, and thus potentially radically different, regions of space-time occur. If theories with other virtues underdetermine what sort of a universe we get, it's conceivable these regions vary in which "solution" they constitute, especially given that, in our experience with physics, every solution in mathematical physics "comes up" somewhere. (This is how we predicted antimatter, why we're predicting supersymmetry, etc.) What determines how many solutions we say there are isn't an effort to make the anthropic principle succeed in explaining our biological good luck; it's just the number of solutions the string theory equations have. Now it's an interesting question how many constants really need fiddling, and how the fiddling would be done; we can get an upper bound on the former, and "there are many universes, possibly of different kinds" is one possible "fiddling" mechanism.

evoking a multiverse to explain ours actually complicates things rather than simplifying them... rather than simply having to explain the laws of our universe, with a multiverse one has to explain a set of meta-laws that exist within whatever structure generates the multiple universes. One has had to evoke something complex, in fact a horrendously complex 10 ^ 500 variant monstrosity, in order to explain the simple state of our universe at the big bang.

I think arguments like this confuse explaining A in terms of B with making things more complicated; the textbook going from axioms to theorems may be longer, but the list of axioms might not be. I think these arguments also confuse "more universes than we hitherto thought" with "more universe than we need expect now". Primordial inflation will have created very large numbers of Hubble zones, and quantum fluctuations such as one from which the Big Bang emerged could very easily continue producing universes rather than stopping at our one. Simplicity is found also in expecting things to continue if no mechanism stops them.

the meta-laws remain forever unexplained and untestable

Auguste Comte said we'd never know what stars were made of, because he wasn't imaginative enough to imagine a discovery that would allow it; in fact, elements' line spectra allow that. While many of the most "wow"-worthy claims of string theory can't be tested yet, theorists are working very hard to change that. They have suggested much more plausible experiments than "build a particle accelerator big enough to do it"; they are gradually coming towards what we could actually do. Still, we're a way off.

iff

Did you actually mean iff (if & only if), or was that a spelling mistake?

do you suspect the fundamental constants of the next closest topology will be sufficiently far away compared with our experimental error in measuring them to give strong evidence that the theory is correct?

Do you mean, can we measure physics accurately enough only one possible universe fits what we see? At the moment, we can't answer that. We've only just begun to develop techniques for calculating the properties of a universe from its topology & moduli. That the topology & moduli determine such properties is an older result.

can the 10 ^ 500 "topologies" be searched systematically?

Not yet. You have to remember very few things can actually be calculated in string theory to date.

Is the word "topology" correct? What word should I use? Calabi-Yau space doesn't mean much to many.

Calabi-Yau spaces are essentially the ways for compactified dimensions to fold up which allow physics to be supersymmetric. (Supersymmetry hasn't been detected, but is plausible and desirable for several theoretical reasons.) The sizes of the holes, the "moduli", could vary continuously, like the size of the hole in a doughnut. Topology in general refers to descriptions of geometry which don't care about sizes, and in this context refer to, essentially, how many holes there are and where they are relative to one another. You have been using it correctly, and I only wish a collective topology-moduli term existed.

The book you suggest RD write would just be TSG again. Anyway, on with debunking this mess:

I wish it had been made clear the house is a bungalow.

when Christians claim that “the atheistic worldview cannot support the existence of moral truth” (discussing the foundation), sometimes atheists hear this as an attack on the roof (“you are saying we are immoral”).

“Oh, you can coincidentally happen to behave well; you just can’t cogently explain why what you are doing is good! Leave assessment of your, or others’, behaviour to the experts, like the Christians.” Oh, that’s any less offensive than “attacking the roof”.

One of the most interesting kinds of “moral houses” is when the foundation doesn’t offer any support for the first floor and roof. When this is not a metaphor, but real life, well, as you can imagine, houses without solid foundations literally fall apart.

I always find meta-ethics tawdry because any answer other than moral realism makes the rest of ethics a waste of time, yet we need it to not be a waste of time; humans just can’t take an “I’m OK with literally anything” stance. The funny thing is no-one ever needs to explain why they think the arguments of meta-ethical non-cognitivists are invalid to get on with the busy work of deciding what to do with sex offenders. This foundation is more of a distraction than anything else.

For the moment, lets [sic] give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt [re: the roof & floor] … However, what kind of meta-ethical foundation has Dawkins provided for his ‘moral home’? Here are some particularly clear quotes on the nature of his meta-ethical beliefs:

Actually, none of the quotations which follow are meta-ethical statements, as I’ll clarify by reminding us of their original in-context meaning. Note also that every single one of these quotations is from a discussion of evolutionary biology, not of atheism, which means that, even if they were read correctly by this theist (which they aren’t), they would not identify the implications of New Atheism, but of evolutionary biology – which, of course, is factually undeniable given modern evidence, so chew on it. Oh, one last point before I dive in: you can’t argue against something by appealing to its consequences being uncomfortable (this is a fallacy called the appeal to consequences), but only to their being self-contradictory (a method I myself use against this theist later).

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

The universe having no ethical properties is very different from all individual things inside the universe having no ethical properties. Theists don’t know this, however, because pretending otherwise is crucial in the cosmological argument. In the original context, RD discussed the fact that natural phenomena end up happening independently of whether they’re fair, because the universe isn’t conscious.

We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

I’ve no indication Dawkins meant to imply all things are this morally neutral; again, from the original context re: evolutionary biology, natural disasters etc., I think the crucial point is that RD objects to the willingness with which humans ascribe intentionalistic (especially divine intentionalistic) explanations to almost all natural phenomena. Indeed, he makes explicit this objection in many works, including TGD.

it is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.

Absolutism doesn’t necessarily mean merely that there are moral facts; it can be a stronger claim that moral properties are neither contingent on empirical facts about the world, such as victims’ vulnerabilities, nor admitting of any exceptions. Whenever I discuss the question of whether morals are objective, I find several meanings of “objectivity” being conflated; to me, absolutism mustn’t be confused with things being factual.

We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self sustaining process. It is every living objects’ [sic] sole reason for living. DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

I don’t know whether “objects’” instead of “object’s” is an error in the original or an error in this Christian’s quotation, although the absence of [sic] in the latter source suggests the error is of the latter origin. In any case, this goes back to the naturalism issue above; our cause is DNA propagation, but that’s not to say that it is our purpose or our duty. (Indeed, if it were, that would mean we had one, which would contradict moral non-realism, so this critic who accuses RD of moral non-realism can’t even keep a straight story.) Indeed, DNA propagation is a very interesting type of cause, for which a word like “purpose” is a decent metaphor: it is a context in which an event can be caused by what effects it would have if it happened.

If Dawkins is correct on these matters, then Dawkins is denying that the house has a foundation.

No he’s not, as I’ve explained above.

Without a foundation, the main floor and the roof collapse into the resulting hole.

As I explained above, that’s not true in practice either.

All human behavior would exist in an amoral vacuum.

As I mentioned above, this is a story the theist can’t keep straight anyway because of the word “purpose”.

his point is that morality is a mirage. Morality is a comforting illusion. But these delusions of our brains, while they may promote genetic propagation and the survival of the species, do not reflect anything real about our world.

How can we conclude anything about RD’s views on morality from quotations in which he never even mentioned it? The closest his language came to words like “moral” was in terms like “good” or “evil”, which, as I’ve already said, referred in-context to whether natural but unconscious phenomena exhibit such properties.

it is a valuable intellectual exercise to take Dawkins’ meta-ethical position quite seriously and ask some follow-up questions.

I’ve got a better idea. Go through meta-ethical positions by name, not by owner. Work out which is the most plausible. Work out how important it is that we obtain consensus on that (what should be done with dissenters)? Then see if you can come up with a better method than the terrible one used so far for diagnosing individuals’ opinions on this issue.

If morality is merely a matter of personal preference, is it possible to legitimately judge someone as evil or wicked, as good or virtuous?

What does “legitimately” mean? If morality isn’t factual, judgement isn’t unethical, because nothing is. Of course, it wouldn’t be unethical for you to say judgement is unethical either, because nothing is. But it would be factually inaccurate to say it!

what are the implications for our justice system?

Deterrence, protection of society from dangerous people, changing such people so they are no longer dangerous; these are all non-judgemental bases on which penal et al polices could be defended as politically pragmatic.

how does this change your thinking about actions like a man forcing a woman to have sex with him, one person killing another person for the fun of it, or the systematic extermination of a particular class of people?

Which are respectively things the Bible can let you get away with, things God effectively did frequently in the Bible, and things God definitely did frequently in the Bible. Now who’s got a foundation that doesn’t defend their main floor?

The different solutions to string theory have different laws and/or different physical constants. Each solution is a particular shape for the compactified dimensions of the theory to take, called a Calabi-Yau space. Its topology determines the laws; the sizes of the holes, known as the moduli, determine the constants. The number of universes that actually exist cannot be predicted from this analysis, but the number of different law-constants combinations is indeed extremely large, as is the number of lists of laws that can occur. It is to the law-constant combinations, not the universes themselves, that 10 to the 500 refers. Is that a sufficient explanation?

Haven't we already achieved this with ArXiv?

littletrotsky13, Godwin's law doesn't prohibit references to Nazism; it predicts they're inevitable given enough time. Do some basic research. In fact, it was an apt choice of term. Whenever Judaism has a history in which it has been guilty of something horrid of which one of its many, many historical enemies has also been guilty, why not bring it up? In fact, what decent response can that question receive if "Judaism" is replaced with just about anything else? The point is not that the Jews got an especially roar deal in the Third Reich; the point is that the best word ever invented for what the Jewish god advocated just so happens to be Lebensraum.

Almost 80% of people in England support a religious role for the Queen

That’s a shockingly high level of the wrong answer being picked. But why were only the English polled? Come to think of it, why wasn’t the whole Commonwealth polled?

79% of respondents said she still had an important faith role

How come every time this “they like it” assertion is made, the wording changes? They can’t all be accurate quotations of what the put-words-in-their-mouths yes/no question said! “She has an important faith role” could simply acknowledge her current legal status, as opposed to approving of its maintenance.

73% said she should continue as supreme governor of the Church of England and keep the Defender of the Faith title first given to Henry VIII

Interesting how this figure is lower. BTW, Henry VIII “was given” that title by himself when he invented the Church in question.

She said the Church was often misunderstood and under-appreciated.

Examples? Frankly, given the automatic place of CoE Bishops in the House of Lords before and after the upcoming reforms, it’s appreciated too highly.

Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of all other religions, instead the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country

The only way to protect the free practice of all faiths is to institute secularism. A state religion is antithetical to this. By definition, an Anglican Church has to think it is more accurate and eschatologically more strategic than other faiths.

if you disestablish the Church and disconnect the Church from the monarchy, it gives the impression there are almost no values we share in common at all.

The only way that could be true is if we already have the impression the only values we share are religious ones. But it is a simple demographic fact that religious values, insofar as those exist, are less of a matter of consensus in the UK than various secular values are. In any case, the UK shares many such values with other nations, e.g. it shares the valuing of human rights with, in theory, every UN nation (in practice, probably only a large percentage of them).

the Queen's role in the Commonwealth meant other faith communities felt at home with her leadership of the Church of England

Here’s the thing – the entire idea that there are “faith communities” of monolithic opinions, accurately represented by summaries whose authors are unelected “leaders” thereof, is a myth.

we feel strong Christian values are good for us, we are very much on the same grounds

Any issue with regard to which Anglicans and Muslims are on the same grounds are, by definition, not Christian values. They might be Abrahamic values, or altruistic values, but they aren’t specifically Christian. And in any case, if you challenge people to give specific examples of which values they have in mind, they end up being ones that are prevalent among the non-religious too, which means it’s offensive to claim even that they are religious values as it implies the non-religious are unethical.

Canon Anthony Kane has monitored the Queen's Christmas broadcasts and said her personal faith remained strong.

Things not changing isn’t news. The opinions of someone who’s not mentioned on Wikipedia isn’t news. What happens when a person listens to a view they already agree with isn’t news, especially given the answer is “nothing”.

The fact that she speaks with a personal faith is in itself a significant action

I’d rather it be a good action.

Chartres … warned of the danger of doing away with the Queen's title. "If you have a political culture which rigidly excludes the voice of faith from rational dialogue in the open

Which is a different policy altogether. Indeed, it is exclusionary, or at least discriminatory, with respect to other faiths to have one of them be the state religion.

that is one of the ingredients for growing fanaticism

Occasionally, Muslims – not CoE members – blow stuff up in Britain. We still don’t fully understand why that happens, but we know this much: they wouldn’t do it more if the Church of England lost its unique privileges.

The poll found opinion divided on the suggestion Charles might change the religious role of the monarchy. He has called for greater understanding between people of different faiths and said he would personally rather see his role as Defender of Faith, not the faith. When asked if Prince Charles should change his title if he becomes king, only half of the respondents thought that he should.

So basically, about 30 % of the English think that the CoE should remain the state religion not so much to serve all religions’ interests as to serve just its own. At least they understand what implications the CoE’s status has, then honestly acknowledge their plans.

Bear in mind the view that one's Islam has to be a part of one's politics is Islamism, not Islam in general. I don't know what percentage (by country or otherwise) of Muslims$ are Islamists, but I'm guessing it's under 100. Mind you, it's probably too high for the "you're just stereotyping us" defence to ring true.

$ Actually, given how the world works, we probably usually only need to know the percentage among Male Muslims, more' the pity. Having said that, a certain British Cabinet Minister is a counterexample to this.

A simple example differing infinities, would be an infinite series of whole numbers, an infinite series of even numbers, an infinite series of odd numbers, and an infinite series of prime numbers.

Those are all countably infinite sets; their sizes are equal. That an infinite set can have the same size as some of its proper subsets is what makes infinite sets differ from finite ones. Be careful!

Seems rather optimistic in tone to me, but I am unable to make an informed judgement on this one.

Seeing as we already knew there is an upper bound on counterexamples to the weak conjecture, working out what it is & checking everything below it is all we need to finish the proof. To be honest, it's unclear who is "able to make an informed judgement" regarding how optimistic we should be. Still though, time will tell. Personally, I think the "proved it for five" success suggests this guy, or possibly those standing on his shoulders, will prove it for three (the weak conjecture) within a few years.

This is not the same as defining i to be the square root of -1 which isn't a sensible way of defining i since the square root function only takes non-negative inputs.

Needless to say, that we define “the” square root of a non-negative real as the non-negative real which squares to it is a convention to choose between two rival square root candidates. More generally, in discussing nth roots of non-negative reals, n-fold ambiguities exist among the complex numbers and, for even n, 2-fold ambiguity exists among the reals. We also have n nth roots of arbitrary complex numbers. In these contexts, mathematicians prefer to talk collectively about the nth roots of z. As for the foundation of the theory of complex numbers, the best way to say it is, “we take as an axiom that there exists at least one I with i²+1=0 and that R[i] is a field”, and then a theorem states, “the solutions to z²+1=0 are i and –i”.

the natural log function only take positive inputs, so something like ln(cos(&pi))=ln(-1), which is undefined. I don't know how these calculators or Google or whatever are doing calculations using these quantities. Maybe they are using the definition of the natural log function over complex numbers, but I thought that wasn't defined for negative real numbers either. I'll have to look it up.

Or, this thread could serve its purpose.
Each complex z is expressible uniquely as x+iy for real x, y. Then exp(z) = exp(x)exp(iy) = exp(x)(cos y + i sin y) has modulus exp(x) (the modulus of a+bi with a, b real is the non-negative square root of a²+b²). There are thus multiple z with w = exp(z), because given any “argument” y of w, a rival argument is obtainable by adding an integer multiple of 2π. Which z shall we call ln(w)? The principal natural logarithm of w is defined as ln |w| + iarg(w), where arg is taken to range from -π to π, the former value excluded from the interval. This means ln(w) is unique for all non-zero complex w. ln(0) is still not defined as any finite quantity. (You can try defining it with concepts like –infinity, but the “what is infinity?” details for complex numbers are a little different from those I discussed previously for real numbers.)

how many ways are there to choose 0 objects?

The number of choices of 0 objects from n objects is 1, whether or not n = 0. The proof is simple: each of the n objects is or isn’t included in a general subset, so 2 to the n subsets exist, one of which is empty, and subsets A, B are equal precisely if they have the same members, so there is exactly one empty subset.

I've recently been trying to come up with an answer to the question of why the product of two negative numbers is positive that doesn't use algebra. It's not easy and I haven't been able to come up with a satisfying answer, so I think this is a good question.

Well, I’m not so sure that it is a good question. My problem with “explain it without algebra” challenges is there’s no good reason for ever posing them. The Thickie Mcthickthicks of this world loathe the sight of algebra, for no valid reason whatsoever. Whatever you can say with algebra, you can say without algebra, but only by being unnecessarily long-winded in your expression. This is a general issue which gets a bee in my bonnet. I’ll illustrate it by writing the same proof twice, once with algebra, once without:

0 = 0(-b) = (a+(-a))(-b) = a(-b)+(-a)(-b) = -ab + (-a)(-b) so ab = ab + 0 = (-a)*(-b)

Now without:

0 is 0 times any number, including a negative number. That equation has a 0 on each side of the equation. Write the second 0 as the sum of a negative number by which we wish to multiply the original negative number and a positive number, e.g. 5+(-5). The product of a number and a sum is the sum of the number’s products with the numbers in that sum, so 0 is now a sum of two quantities, one being the desired product of two negative numbers and one being the product of the original negative number and the positive number. The latter is, of course, negative, and we can think of the sum as the former product minus a product of two positive numbers. But since that is 0, the two quantities whose difference is 0 are equal, and so the product of 2 negative numbers is not only positive, but is specifically the product of the positive numbers obtained by deleting the negative numbers’ minus signs.

Oh sure, you can do it; but why is it any better than doing it without algebra? Anyone thick enough to hate algebra would probably need algebra to follow that argument anyway. The reason algebra was invented is precisely because it makes things easier to understand, due to its being highly succinct. This is why opposition to algebra is self-defeating. Why don’t people like algebra? I discovered the reason my brother hated it earlier this year. He discussed, for example, hating the question “ab = 6; find a” because he wasn’t told b. I said the answer was 6/b. It suddenly dawned on him his answer didn’t need to be a number either, but a function of b. Apparently, if someone had just told him that from the start, he would have had no problems with algebra!

Correction: the Minkowski space gives a modified form of the triangle inequality; that's what I meant to talk about.