Pinker on the applicability of Darwninan natural selection to human cognative faculties

Pinker uses Dawkins argument in The Blind Watchmaker that a complex organ that looks like it is perfectly designed for the task it performs only has one possible explanation - evolution through natural selection. In Dawkins words, "Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested"[1] or as Pinker puts it,

Natural selection is not just a scientifically respsectable alternative to divine creation. It is the only alternative that can explain the evolution of a complex organ like the eye. The reason that the choice is so stark - God or natural selection - is that structures that can do what the eye does are extremely low-probabilty arrangements of matter" p360

However if there is a rich language organ there are also other mental 'organs'. As Chomsky states:

The language faculty is one of [the] cognitive systems. There are others. For example, our capacity to organize visual space, or to deal with abstract properties of the number system, or to comprehend and appreciate certain kinds of musical creation

If we assume UG is true then other mental computation must also have a genetic base. However, it is hard to imagine what selectional pressures led to a faculty to appreciate music or to deal with abstract number lines. These could indeed be examples of random outgrowths of a larger brain due to some unknown law of physics or computation or some concomitant co-evolution of mental organs i.e. a mental organ tagging onto another mental organ. Yet from Dawkins point of view our 'mathematical organ' is perfectly designed to deal with n+1 forever, we can comprehend to keep adding 1 to whatever number we reach, it's trivial. A parrot can't, after 7 it gets stuck. Does this mean natural selection is the only possible explanation? I don't feel it is. I have a (completely baseless) feeling that something as complicated as the human brain has to have a richer explanation than natural selection. Sure the eye is complex but it pales in comparison to the brain.

On the other hand perhaps that is why mathematics is so hard to grasp for so many. It isn't a result of natural selection and isn't properly a mental organ. Every healthy person can converse in a complex rich way. Not everyone can handle even linear equations.

Edit: Dawkins just said something relevant:

there is still controversy over the theory that natural selection is the dominant driving force. I think no body would doubt it is the dominant driving force of adaptive evolution but many people, including me, doubt it's the dominant driving force behind all evolution at the molecular level

Adam Applegarth CEO, biggest welfare mum in the globe

The revelation came as experts said the former chief executive, whose cavalier business strategy nearly destroyed the bank last year, can expect a pension worth nearly £475,000 a year from the age of 60. Adam Applegarth's "reward for failure" is on top of the £760,000 "termination payment" he currently enjoys.
This money, equal to his basic salary, is being paid on a monthly basis for a year or until he gets another job - which seems unlikely given his epic failure. Meanwhile about a third of Northern Rock's workforce - roughly 2,000 employees - will lose their jobs by 2011, according to the new management team.

The man who ran the bank into the ground is being paid £760,000 + £475,000, this all while homes are increasingly being repossessed. Absolutely disgusting.

The One Show on Benefit Fraud

The One Show just had a piece about benefit fraud. It costs us £800,000,000 a year. This is a serious issue of course. However no mention was made of the far greater fraud being carried about by private banks. Lets put that £800,000,000 figure into context

• Northern Rock alone took £100,000,000,000. Benefit fraud in comparison costs 0.8% of that figure.
• In total the government has spent £150,000,000,000 bailing out private banks. Benefit fraud in comparison costs 0.53%

Is benefit fraud a serious issue? Yes, it takes away money that real claimants need. But it pales in comparison to how we are enriching the top 10% of income earners who own the majority of shares. Yet we are telling those on benefits or defrauding that benefit system to learn personal responsibility and get a job! 0.53% is the definition of tiny. It is a shame no one pointed this out on the show. Shows like this, and papers like the free Metro are far more important than papers like The Guardian or the FT. Millions of people watch the One Show. I e-mailed in, as of yet my comments haven't been read out.

Geoffrey Sampson on natural Racism

I was listening to a Teaching Company course by John McWhorter on linguistics. He mentioned Pinker's book The Language Instinct which I'm reading now. He also mentioned that for a good rebuttal to consult Geoffrey Sampson's Language Instinct Debate. In googling the author I came across a couple of controversies Sampson has had. One was with Chomsky (who hasn't had beef with the guy?!) and another was an article he put up on his website There's Nothing Wrong With Racism (Except the Name). The Chomsky business consisted of the usual nonsense about Holocaust denial in the preface of Robert Faurisson's book. An outlandish statement from Sampson's website is worth quoting:

I think it was only after writing the encyclopaedia entry that I learned how far Chomsky had been getting into bed with the Neo-Nazi movement

An anarchist in bed with neo-Nazi's! Is that yet another type of anarchism? like you know anarco-capitalism, socialism, communism, gayism, feminism and now anarcho-neo-nazism?!

The other business is is the racism article. Sampson was a councilor for the Conservative Party so it caused a stir in the press. I read it carefully and it struck me as written by someone who is very unfamiliar with evolutionary science. Now I'm no expert, infact my 'expertise' in Darwinian evolution derives from a bunch of Christmas lectures targeted at children that Richard Dawkins gave, however that article is awful. The hypothesis is that there is a biological urge towards racism, it is a completely natural feeling much like wanting to get laid. The reason there is that urge towards racism is our minds equate those that look different from us as have different genes. Sampson points out this of course is irrational, our DNA is remarkably similar even across species but our instincts don't know that.

Sampson goes onto point out how we have a natural inclination to care for our children: we pay for expensive schools, leave them inheritance etc. at the expense of other children not related to us. This leads Sampson to the conclusion that racism is as natural as sexual urges or caring for children, they are all to spread our genes.

But this really misses the point. We don't prefer people who share more of our genes over people who share fewer because the latter have particular outward features that we dislike. We prefer the former because they share more of our genes, and we all want our own genes to become numerous. Biology forces us to want that, which is why it forces us to want to get our bodies entangled with the opposite sex.

This hypothesis would be valid on the assumption that racism only ever applied to the opposite sex. Why is it natural under Sampson's rationale to have a racist inclination towards the same sex? It's impossible to have children with them. If it was about propagating genes racism would only apply in the narrow area of mate selection, which I think it does. I, personally, wouldn't call that racism - it's just taste. Nonetheless, Sampson's Darwnian explanation of racism, if I've understod it correctly, seems to be junk socio-biology. The only perceivable worthy hypothesis one can glean from the article is that humans during mate selection chose those similar to themselves. That is uncontroversial, and I think entirely correct. I think he was trying to work Kin Selection into it, but if so he shouldn't mention sexual selection because it gives the mis-impression that they are both as powerful. Furthermore the theory of Kin Selection can't explain why we know who we are related to. There's evidence to show that the marker of 'this is my sister' goes off in a subjects brain when they are brought up together, the classic example being Israeli kibbutzim children who though not genetically related all married outside the kibbutz. This also all applies to actual kin, sisters, brothers members of the same family. Not some white guy down the road. Dawkins has tackled this head on before,

"The National Front was saying something like this, "kin selection provides the basis for favoring your own race as distinct from other races, as a kind of generalization of favoring your own close family as opposed to other individuals." Kin selection doesn't do that! Kin selection favors nepotism towards your own immediate close family. It does not favor a generalization of nepotism towards millions of other people who happen to be the same color as you. Even if it did, and this is a stronger point, I would oppose any suggestion from any group such as the National Front, that whatever occurs in natural selection is therefore morally good or desirable. We come back to this point over and over again. I'm definitely not one who thinks that "is" is the same as "ought."

Further on Sampson even talks about immigration to the UK being this big bad awful thing that has ruined the natural harmony we had in a Utopian Britan, which was full of British people, all related to each other (no jokes pls!)

When I was a child, England and other European nations were racially very homogeneous. Except for a small Jewish community (who don't look much different from the indigenous English anyway), virtually everyone living in England was related to everyone else

In actual fact, however, there are more Britain's living abroad than immigrants living here. Before you begin complaining about immigration, recall all your own people. Class issues before mass migration were also tense.

I haven't read Sampson's book yet but if someone who has apparently ripped apart the Universal Grammar hypothesis, which uses evolutionary arguments, is this bad at biology, I'm not sure I'll be expecting much.

Edit: apparantly mentinoing Chomsky, holocaust and Faurisson triggers spam bots to post holocaust denial articles!

Chief economists of large banks want to keep the housing bubble inflated

That isn't a surprise, large banks of course want to keep the bubble artificially inflated because it serves their bottom lines. Even Nationwide's chief economist, Fionnuala Earley, wants a reduction, (I say even because Nationwide isn't shareholder owned so puts its memebers first.) But it is amazing that the Central Bank wants to keep housing unaffordable for the majority of people, as David Blanchflower of the MPC at the BoE stated,

David Blanchflower, a member of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee which sets interest rates, said in a speech on Tuesday that house prices could fall by 30% over the next few years if interest rates were not cut.

He added: "I am not suggesting that such a drop will necessarily occur, but it may. Cutting interest rates now may help to prevent such a dramatic fall."

A regular cheerleader for lower rates, Mr Blanchflower said "aggressive action" was needed to stop a downturn in the economy.

Why should the government intervene to keep housing unaffordable for its people?! In what world is that a sane policy?

Affordable housing through corproate welfare

The recent housing crisis in both the US and UK has led to central banks to pump liquidity into markets and for governments to bail out banks with £100,000,000,000 (billion!) to one corporation alone, Northern Rock. The US governments bailing out of Bear Stearns in comparison is quite minor, both absolutely (weaker dollar) and relatively as a percentage of GDP. With an extreme right wing lunatic in the Whitehouse and a supposed 'Labour' government in no.10, it tells you how far to the right neo-Labourites have flung. FYI that's about £16k each tax payer is underwriting.

If governments were serious about helping home owners it would just cut out the middle man, the banks. Rather than give massive loans and underwriting hundreds of billions of pounds of risk they could easily setup a tax free mortgage payments system with loans issued directly by socially owned banks. There is already a system in place like this with The Student Loans company which has lent out £15.5bn in loans since its inception.

This would instantly lower interest rates on mortgages, as with the Student Loan Company which offers lower interest rates than the free market can possibly provide. Furthermore all payments into this social mortgage scheme should be tax exempt, both VAT and income. This would instantly reduce payments by 39.5% (17.5+22%) for those who truly need it. I can hear the free market fanatic already, 'how can this be paid for?'.

Well, we could perhaps stop pumping liquidity into private markets, pump it into social ones. Further we could save £150bn in bailing out banks and issue mortgages with those savings. Total loans for house purchasing in 2007 was £154.9bn (source: CML). The proposed scheme could have been funded purely by the bank bailouts for one year even if every single mortgagee defaulted. More realistically not everyone will default, actually default rates would be far lower than on private market due to mortgages being more affordable. This means the asset the government has isn't junk like subprime bonds which have high default rates.

All articles assert that central banks have to pump liquidity into the market, they have to bail out banks all so we can afford our mortgages. That is indeed one way of doing it, to be sure it is a very inefficient method of doing it. The rough scheme proposed here isn't workable in isolation. House prices would, of course, soar with buyers swimming in government supplied liquidity*; supply side issues would need addressing, perhaps by social house building schemes if we are to avoid this. Nonetheless, this took me about 5 minutes of googline to find the stats, why doesn't the press talk about it?

*: if these social mortgages were only offered to first time buyers on a property they wish to live in (as opposed to buy-to-let) demand would be reduced as only those who actually need to live in a house would buy. The situation currently has all the usual elements of bubble speculation which artificially inflate prices.

José Manuel Barroso talking nonsense, FT fails to correct him

Apparantly

Protectionist pressures are increasing across Europe, even among political forces traditionally committed to free markets, according to José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president... Mr Barroso, [is] a committed advocate of free trade

Yet Barroso, the great "advocate of free trade",

saw some progress in China’s position on the defence of intellectual property rights – a key concern for European companies. “The Commission doesn’t want to, but it might be hard to resist the protectionist calls,” he warned.

So Barroso truly believes in free trade, but wants to force China to enforce government granted monopolies (IPR) by threatening protectionist measures, aka a trade war. Protectionism to force more protectionism in the name of free trade. How can you even say that with a straight face?