There is a movement growing among the followers of Richard Dawkins and his ilk that is closely tied to the "selfish gene" idea and their attempt to bypass religion; its core belief is that everything, morality, aesthetics, ideology, ultimately has a scientific basis.

Dawkins believes he has located the seed of morality in evolutionary psychology; that all forms of morality can be explained by the desire to pass on one's genes. Fair enough. Except that his idea could be used to explain ALL forms of human interaction. If one can explain moral codes by genetic advantage, why not whether or not you choose to floss, eat sushi or bail out a failing bank? All these decisions could, in the right contexts, be considered moral. There is no moral difference, objectively speaking, between murder and cutting down a tree. Some cultures may consider the former forgivable (in the US, you can murder someone if they are on your property, in many other cultures you cannot), while in mediaeval Europe, to do the latter was a capital crime. Since history is really just the collective result of billions of individuals acting according to their impulses, if their actions could be predicted based on their prospective evolutionary advantage, then history, by definition, is predictable, which means history is a science.

The study of beauty frequently employs the term "the sublime", which literally means, "below the limit", the point at which human expression and experience fails and one enters a state of pure experience. Some scientists nonetheless believe that they will some day be able, through the study of neuropsychology and proportion, be able to create a science of beauty. I find this difficult to believe, principally due to my experiences with music. I don't think any art form creates a more visceral and personal aesthetic response than music. No one screams, "Oh my god! Turn it off!" when they see a badly done painting. There is some music I hate, and some music I love. I cannot explain why the music I love is often despised by people with degrees from Juliard, nor can I explain why music I hate is often adored by kids in saggy trousers. The most glaring example of this dichotomy for me is Chinese opera. I loathe Chinese opera. I would rather listen to fifteen hours of techno then fifteen seconds of Chinese opera. To me, it isn't even music; it sounds more like cats having sex amid the trash cans; lots of clanging, screeching and yowling. But I also happen to know that the Chinese wrote some of the earliest works on musical aesthetics known to man. If 4000 years of civilisation, high culture and philosophical insight can produce Chinese opera, then as far as I'm concerned, there will never be a science of art.

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Well, yes, of course. That's the whole point.

Why ask "why not"? Why would you want for there not to be such explanations?

How, in the cases of flossing and food? Those seem to be about taking care of yourself, not other people. (Taking care of yourself can obviously affect your odds of survival and reproduction, but that doesn't make it a moral issue. Only SOME survival/reproduction issues are also moral issues.)

Of course there is: the tree is not a human.

This is not true. First, there's more to the necessary condition than just "on the property", and second, the word "murder" doesn't apply to such a killing. Murder is an illegal killing; a legal one is something else.

It still is in some places, including parts of the USA, depending on location or species... but only because damaging or destroying someone else's property is illegal and the tree in question has been determined to belong to somebody.

Things that work by scientific principles aren't necessarily "predictable". Sometimes they have an element of chaos built into them, because either there are too many factors to ever fully measure and calculate, or some of the factors seem to contradict each other or have arbitrary and inconsistent amounts of influence. People make their decisions based on a lot of separate and differently-weighted factors in each individual case, some of which would take them in opposite directions depending on which one(s) dominated.

I don't understand what that sentence is supposed to mean... probably mainly because you didn't define what you mean by the last three words.

There are "reasons" (in the sense of cause and effect) behind all of those different people's opinions; something about their minds or their prior experiences makes them feel the way they feel. Whether we will ever know enough about those processes to consistently accurately predict an individual's opinions of new pieces of music is another matter, but each time a person hears a new one, his/her opinion of it is determined by something.

If making such predictions in individual cases is what you mean by "science of beauty", I must say that, first of all, that doesn't qualify as "science", second, it's something people have already been trying to do all along whenever they share something with a friend whom they expect to like it and you're only talking about getting better at rather than starting from nothing, and third, I haven't heard of anyone who is trying to find a way to do that anyway.

The closest thing I know of to it is that some studies have attempted to identify just one or a few factors at a time that will most often have a similar influence on how most people feel about something, but that's quite different from knowing exactly how every single relevant factor will apply in some individual's case. (I'm reminded of a project that set out to find the world's funniest joke but only ended up with the world's blandest joke, which almost nobody really laughs at but almost nobody finds especially irritating either.) And both are far away from Dawkins's discussions on survival and reproduction and especially morality; the connection could be made, but it would be long and indirect because we're only talking about a non-selection-related side effect of something else.

Of course taking care of yourself is a moral issue (if you define flossing as taking care of yourself; other cultures might see it as a form of self-mutilation). Think of all the moral stigma attached to eating pork or shellfish in Judaism or Islam (or, for that matter, eating "junk food" in the West). Morality is only defined by the harshness of the social strictures placed on performing or not performing an action. It is easy for me to imagine a culture where not flossing is considered worse than murder. There certainly have been cultures in which seemingly equally trivial things were taken as seriously as that.

Your statement implies a moral position that places a human life higher than that of a tree. For it to be true, it would have to apply everywhere and in all circumstances, when clearly it does not.

Murder applies to the killing if it does not take place in the US. There is a famous individual in the UK who was thrown in prison for murder for shooting a burglar on his property. Given the forest of exceptions and caveats that surround the definition of murder, the distinction between "murder" and "killing" is largely meaningless.

Does that not contradict your point about the tree not being human? Clearly there the life of the tree was worth more than the life of the individual concerned.

I thought the definition of a scientific hypothesis was that it made testable predictions.

Surely though, if morality can be broken down to evolutionary advantage, it should at least be possible to play probabilities?

That line of reasoning may explain why a particular person finds something beautiful, but not what that something IS beautiful.

Why not? If it makes a prediction and a prediction that can be tested, is it not science?

I've heard of speculation. That the human brain is programmed in some way to appreciate beauty, that neuropsychology would unlock a universal human aesthetic, and that beauty was in some way mathematical.

Sorry. The points were separate; I wasn't attempting to link the two.

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Just because the instances when it is legal to kill require specific definition doesn't mean that the two terms are equivalent.

The fact that the two separate reasons to do something (because it's good for yourself or because morality tells you to) can lead to the same conclusion in some cases doesn't mean they are the same thing.

That doesn't make flossing a moral issue for anyone who doesn't live in such a culture.

When and where does it not?

Your opinion that the distinction is meaningless does not mean that the distinction doesn't exist.

No, it just means that one human's or the human community's property rights can sometimes be considered to exceed another human's rights, especially when the latter person has first violated others' rights (thus forfeiting his/her own in some lines of reasoning). It has nothing to do with the tree's life. (BTW, are we talking about someone being EXECUTED for cutting down the tree? I might have missed that detail before. That's a pretty rare thing historically.)

Yes, but I think I'm losing your point. Are you saying that there aren't already people studying such general patterns?

If you mean universal, then we've all already experienced plenty of disproof of that, in the form of different people having conflicting tastes in all things. If that's not what you mean, then I can't tell what is.

I've started to think that Dawkins is sometimes misunderstood on these matters, or at least used rather unfairly as a proxy for ideas to which he doesn't exactly subscribe. I guess I've been as guilty of this as anyone else. Here's something he wrote recently:

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

EDIT: Took me a while to come up with an answer to this. Just because something is "good for you" or "bad for you" does not mean that someone will undertake it. In fact, patterns appear to suggest otherwise; we as a species tend to prefer practices that are unhealthy, and it is moral and societal stigma, particularly against excessive weight, that has affected our habits in this regard more heavily than health.

But does that not mean that morality is culturally, rather than evolutionarily, determined?

But the distinction is so random and notional and so determined on cultural and situational factors that it might as well not exist. It's a bit like the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter, or between speed and ritalin.

Not that rare. And yes, I did say "capital crime".

If such patterns exist, that means that history is predictable, that history is science, and that some form of universal morality trumps any cultural and situational factors. I personally do not believe this, and I feel that any attempt to justify morality on the basis of evolutionary psychology runs the risk of allowing innate bias on which things are or should be considered "universally moral" to creep into any results.

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

I'm a little confused over the expression "a science of history". Isn't history already a science?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

No. Because it doesn't make testable predictions. My feeling is that, if Dawkins is right, then his hypothesis should make testable predictions, or it is not scientific. If it does, then history can make testable predictions, and is therefore a science.

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

There are obvious reasons for this, and even then, I'm not sure it's true.

You cannot escape from a dreadful piece of music simply by turning your head a few degrees; there is no equivalent of averting your gaze. If you have something important to show someone - a document, for instance - the presence of the painting does not "drown out" what you are trying to show in the same way that music drowns out what you want to say. Although even then, the painting might be distracting when you are trying to concentrate.

If a badly done (or aesthetically questionable) painting dominates your immediate environment, you might well demand that it be covered up or removed. You would probably refer to it as an eyesore.

That depends on what one means by "prediction". History can make a particular kind of testable predictions, sometimes called retrodictions.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I'm dropping this because I have no clue what you're saying or why you're saying it. At first you seemed to equate "taking care of oneself" with morality, then when I said they're two separate things, you responded with this confuzzling stuff about people making a choice one way instead of the other, while appearing to also make the unrelated assertion that social stigma is the same thing as morality. I don't get where any of this is going or what you're thinking because every response or sentence seems to change the subject yet again.

Or it means that some big general themes are built in evolutionarily but the details are worked out by culture. (Culture = interpretation of our own instincts.)

No, it doesn't. Don't skip over the ideas of chaos and extreme complexity, or even random variation. They're important. Patterns in complex, chaotic situations have exceptions, which do not invalidate the patterns but do make individual small-scale/detailed predictions impossible. To use a visually obvious and thus undeniable example, consider human heights. Lots of different factors, only a few of which have been figured out so far, determine height, so there's a lot of variation from individual to individual. But there are still general tendencies between the races and between the sexes, which are real beyond any doubt but don't allow you to accurately predict an individual's height based on his/her race and sex.

I think you could benefit a lot from a statistics class, as long as the professor discussed the practical concepts instead of just formulas and procedures. It can be illuminating on the issues of trends, patterns, exceptions, complexity of multiple inputs/factors to a result, and randomness & unpredictability.

No, it doesn't mean that either. It just means that what is "universal" is some vague general principles which can get worked out in more than one way when culture gets a hold of them and comes up with details in application. (That's why the only things Dawkins has ever said were instinctive were generalized and vague, not specific to any one culture; what's specific to any one culture is just examples of the bigger picture in the background.)

Just so I don't come across as a waffler, I'll try and clarify what I believe on this issue. Not flossing, eating junk food and eating pork may be bad for you, but they are not bad for you in the way that, say, a knife in the heart or a dose of gamma radiation are bad for you. You can engage in unhealthy behaviour and still lead a relatively long life and perhaps even pass on your genes. What governs our decisions to floss, eat healthy, or engage in exercise is mostly social interaction, and all social interactions are fundamentally moral. I do not believe there is a distinction between stigma and morality. Morality is just a stigma that is practiced by a large enough number of people for a long enough period of time as to appear self-evident. Your next door neighbor doesn't like your loud music, it's annoying. Your town doesn't like your loud music, it's a stigma. Your culture doesn't like it, it's immoral.

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.