Morality, Religion & Philosophy: April 2008 Archives

It's hard for me to imagine anything more grotesque than Yale student Aliza Shvarts' abortion-based art project. (Backup URL.) It's like something out of a horror movie. The sheer barbarity and cavalier display of evil leaves me almost speechless.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself ?as often as possible? while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts? project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock ? saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for ?shock value.?

?I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,? Shvarts said. ?Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it?s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.?

There's no "discourse" I'd want to have with this subhuman vermin. What she's done isn't illegal, but should be a capital crime. So yes, I'd be pleased to see the justice system put Aliza Shvarts to death. Since that's not likely, she should be cast out of society, shunned, ostracized, and abandoned.

The students and administrators of Yale should be ashamed of what their institution has become. This sort of evil has no place in our culture, contributes nothing to public discourse, and ultimately degrades our society when left unpunished. I hope the Yale alumni find some way to respond to the cruelty done in their name and supported by their money.

For the rest of us, take a long hard look at what our modern amorality has spawned: Aliza Shvarts is a vile creature who conceives human babies only to slaughter them for her amusement, and our society is left with no legal recourse thanks to the decades-long ascent of secular humanism. We should be ashamed of what we've become.

I'm ashamed, as an American, that such evil could be perpetrated in our midst and that I'm powerless to stop it. Pray for our country.

Update:

Maybe it's a hoax?

Color me dubious about the Yale art project story. In talking to a few knowledgeable docs this morning, the facts don’t add up very well. Self-insemination of the sort she seems to be claiming is no easy feat, and “herbal” abortifacients are extremely dangerous and not at all reliably effective. It’s highly unlikely that these two improbable elements would both be carried off successfully multiple times, and with no side effects. It’s more likely that her senior art project is to see how many people she can upset with a hoax.

If it’s a hoax, it’s an abhorrent and disgusting one. If it turns out to be true, it’s of course all the more so and far worse. Either way, where are the adults at Yale?

I read "The Black Swan" several months ago and it really opened my eyes to a new understanding of risk. Here's an interview with the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

There are two types of businesses: those that are exposed to Black Swans and those that are relatively insulated from them - not because Black Swans cannot occur, but because their impact is not going to be monstrous. Your dentist's income will not disappear on a single day: No single event will carry big consequences for her. But trading profits can all be lost by a single transaction. So some businesses are insulated, some (like technology) are exposed to positive Black Swans, and others are exposed to negative ones. ...

The Black Swan is a matter of perspective. A turkey is fed for 1,000 days - every day lulling it more and more into the feeling that the human feeders are acting in its best interest. Except that on the 1,001st day, the butcher shows up and there is a surprise. The surprise is for the turkey, not the butcher. Anyone who knows anything about the history of banking (or remembers the 1982 Latin American debt crisis or the 1990s savings and loan collapse) will tell you that the subprime crisis was so bound to happen. Banks are exposed to such blowups. Bankers have been the turkey, historically.

I recommend buying the book.

As an artificial intelligence researcher I've always been fascinated by animal intelligence. It's simpler to understand than human intelligence, but often quite sophisticated in species-specific ways. Here's a National Geographic article about animal minds and various flavors of animal intelligence, and while it's quite fascinating I find it to be rather limited by its insistence on evolution as the mechanism behind the observed commonality.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin's evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

It's almost as if there were some common intelligent creator behind it all!

"Dogs' understanding of human forms of communication is something new that has evolved," Kaminski said, "something that's developed in them because of their long association with humans." Although Kaminski has not yet tested wolves, she doubts they have this language skill. "Maybe these collies are especially good at it because they're working dogs and highly motivated, and in their traditional herding jobs, they must listen very closely to their owners."

Scientists think that dogs were domesticated about 15,000 years ago, a relatively short time in which to evolve language skills.

Maybe dogs were designed for a purpose?

"People were surprised to discover that chimpanzees make tools," said Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, referring to the straws and sticks chimpanzees shape to pull termites from their nests. "But people also thought, 'Well, they share our ancestry—of course they're smart.' Now we're finding these kinds of exceptional behaviors in some species of birds. But we don't have a recently shared ancestry with birds. Their evolutionary history is very different; our last common ancestor with all birds was a reptile that lived over 300 million years ago.

"This is not trivial," Kacelnik continued. "It means that evolution can invent similar forms of advanced intelligence more than once—that it's not something reserved only for primates or mammals."

Some will object that my belief in a creator is somehow not scientific, but anthropomorphizing the process of evolution such that it can "invent" characteristics isn't far different.

Kacelnik and his colleagues are studying one of these smart species, the New Caledonian crow, which lives in the forests of that Pacific island. New Caledonian crows are among the most skilled of tool-making and tool-using birds, forming probes and hooks from sticks and leaf stems to poke into the crowns of the palm trees, where fat grubs hide. Since these birds, like chimpanzees, make and use tools, researchers can look for similarities in the evolutionary processes that shaped their brains. Something about the environments of both species favored the evolution of tool-making neural powers.

Or, again, perhaps these species were designed for their niche -- a possibility that is as interesting and testable as evolution.

"Elele just loved to be right," Herman said. "And she loved inventing things. We made up a sign for 'create,' which asked a dolphin to create its own behavior."

Dolphins often synchronize their movements in the wild, such as leaping and diving side by side, but scientists don't know what signal they use to stay so tightly coordinated. Herman thought he might be able to tease out the technique with his pupils. In the film, Akeakamai and Phoenix are asked to create a trick and do it together. The two dolphins swim away from the side of the pool, circle together underwater for about ten seconds, then leap out of the water, spinning clockwise on their long axis and squirting water from their mouths, every maneuver done at the same instant. "None of this was trained," Herman says, "and it looks to us absolutely mysterious. We don't know how they do it—or did it."

If that is accurate, the feat described is quite amazing.

Through these dolphins, he made some of the most extraordinary breakthroughs ever in understanding another species' mind—a species that even Herman describes as "alien," given its aquatic life and the fact that dolphins and primates diverged millions of years ago. "That kind of cognitive convergence suggests there must be some similar pressures selecting for intellect," Herman said. "We don't share their biology or ecology. That leaves social similarities—the need to establish relationships and alliances superimposed on a lengthy period of maternal care and longevity—as the likely common driving force."

Maybe! You can put your faith in that untestable hypothesis if you want to. I guess I just have a grander view of the universe, of humanity, of our fellow creatures, and of our Creator.

This Slate article about American Asians and gender selection is interesting as a counterpoint to the "technology will solve everything" meme that permeates our culture.

Now comes further evidence of this effect. Two days ago, economists Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the ratio of male to female births in "U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents." Among whites, the boy-girl ratio was essentially constant, regardless of the number of kids in a family or how many of them were girls. In the Asian-American sample, the boy-girl ratio started out at the same norm: 1.05 to 1. But among families whose first child was a girl, the boy-girl ratio among second kids went up to 1.17 to 1. And if the first two kids were girls, the boy-girl ratio among third kids went up to 1.5 to 1. This 50 percent increase in male probability is directly contrary to the trend among whites, who tend to produce a child of the same sex as the previous child.*

There's no plausible innocent explanation for this enormous and directionally abnormal shift in probability. The authors conclude that the numbers are "evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage."

So some Asians in America -- or Americans of Asian descent -- are almost certainly using abortion to ensure that they get a boy. This process is enabled by technology: not only does technology make it possible, but advancing technology makes gender determination and selective abortions more private, which bypasses any opprobrium such an abortion might otherwise provoke.

I've written before that gender selection poses a philosophical problem for libertarians and an existential problem for the primarily Asian cultures that practice it. It's hard for me to see how technology will "solve" this quandary absent a culturally dominant moral worldview.

Peripherally, the sentence I starred above doesn't sound right to me. According to this article about an article about the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, the gender of later children is only very slightly affected by the genders of earlier children, if at all. Did the author of this Slate article, William Saletan, pull the starred statistic out of thin air, or is there other research on this topic I haven't been able to find with Google? Sounds like an old wives' tale to me.

Andrew Walden claims that Muslims are leaving Islam in droves, mainly for Christianity or secularism.

Pope Benedict’s choice to publicly baptize the most prominent Muslim in Italy, Egyptian-born Magdi Allam, highlights a quiet worldwide exodus from Islam. In recent years, millions have moved on. With this high-profile action, Pope Benedict demonstratively blesses this massive conversion from the highest levels of the Church. ...

Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000.

Lots more there, with a great many links. Not sure how accurate the premise is as a whole, but it sounds encouraging.