One of my new favourite blogs, Secular Right, has an open thread on Ayn Rand.

I have never met a real life objectivist but the ones I have come across online have been batshit crazy and they are always engaged in pitched battles with batshit crazy liberals trying to live down to Rand’s caricatures. Between them they generate more heat than light. It was a pleasant change, then, to come across some mostly well-reasoned arguments for and against Rand’s fantasy land.

I made my opinion clear in my review of Atlas Shrugged. It was good to hear the case for the other side but they didn’t quite shake my first conclusion that, as adolescent budding-philosophers, they thought of themselves as Hank Rearden driving his train into Dagny Taggart’s tunnel.

Some snippets of the conversation:

Ayn Rand was the first person to define and present a rational philosophy for living in this universe. Once you read her works, you’ll have a rational philosophical base with which you can evaluate the ideas of the so called “experts” around you, in newspapers, on radio, on TV etc. You’ll come to the conclusion that these so called “experts” have massive flaws in their thinking and their ideas.

As I said, to the extent that Rand attempted moral complexity with the Rearden character, that is it. But to the extent that there is conflict in that storyline, Rand makes it a very easy choice for Rearden. Has there ever been a reader, ever, anywhere, in the history of this book who ever wondered, even for a millisecond, what choice Rearden would make?? Some precocious, but misguided eleven year-old, somewhere, maybe. No, we all know how he was going to choose, because Rand does not present Rearden with two moral positives (or moral negatives) and explores how and why Rearden would choose between them. What she wrote was not complexity, but the minimum necessary to recite on her ideas about people freeing themselves of the ideas which lead to what she saw as emotional repression.

Bingo. No one in Rearden’s family has any redeeming values. They were rotten through and through. Most people Rand would call “altruists” would have advocated Rearden dumping the lot of them, too.

In toto, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism offers individuals certainty—which feeds their ambition and results in their happiness. Her philosophy will add years to man’s existence and has jump-started an entirely “new ball game” in his continuing accumulation of knowledge.

I just flipped through the first 150 pages of the paperback of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and confirmed my memory: there are no “speeches,” yet, though in its thousand-some pages ‘Atlas’ contains a number of them, e.g., one on love and sex, another on the soul of an artist, another on the moral meaning of money, and, of course, a very long one outlining Rand’s entire system of philosophy.

These are tightly integrated with the action of the story which is actually an otherwise lean and fast-paced mystery of epic scope, containing effective thrills and chills — and much subtle, beautiful and profound poetry, so often missed by many who think they already know what to expect.

i just did a word count, John Galt’s speech is 32,000 words long. I’m not sure in what universe that’s considered “lean” and “fast-paced.”

Did you ever seriously think that Francisco was not putting on a show at being the playboy? That Dagny would end up with Galt? That Rearden would enjoy sex with Dagny? That Lillian would reject the Rearden metal bracelet? Is there any morally ambiguous characters in the whole book? Did anyone ever question whether one of the characters was an antagonist or a protagonist? Even for a second? If she printed the strikers’ words in a different color like they do with Jesus in some bibles, I don’t think she would have been that much more obvious than she was.

The thread was not completely batshit-crazy-free but I’d tried to avoid quoting them.

I’ll let Officer Barbrady have the final word.

There are so many things which is pedestrian, substandard, ridiculous, and nonsensical about the characterizations, the plot, the theme, and the dialogue that it is difficult to know where to start.

It convinced Officer Barbrady to never read another book again.

Among the small thrills of encountering canonical works for the first time - Homer, say, or the King James Bible, or Star Wars - are the moments when you come across some turn of phrase so well-used it has been worn flat into the surface of everyday speech and think: so that’s where that comes from. I’m thinking that the same might be true of the Origin, but in a different way.

Perhaps inspired by Blogging the Bible, this dude is Blogging the Origin. He is reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species for the first time and blogging as he goes along.

He is off to a good start

Something else strikes me about the woodpecker being the first animal mentioned in the Origin. Darwin had been round the world and knew of all sorts of animals and plants with outlandish physiques and habits. And yet the route into his theory begins, not with something obviously ‘extreme’, like an elephant or a giant squid, but a bird that you would be pretty much guaranteed to see on a stroll in the woods around Down House.

Similarly, the first plant he mentions is the equally common mistletoe, “which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seed that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other”.

One reason for this is surely to use examples that his readers would be able to picture. Also, of course, any general theory for the origin of species needs to explain woodpeckers as much as it does squid. But what makes me happy about Darwin’s use of woodpeckers and mistletoe here is one of the things that makes me happy about science in general, that it makes the familiar strange (and vice versa).

If he continues this way, he might persuade me to give it another try. I got stuck on the pigeons too.

Don’t forget to read the comments to find out stuff like this.

Darwin had another reason for highlighting the woodpecker. The woodpecker’s tongue was one of the examples used in William Paley’s ‘Natural Theology’ to show that evolution, in the form proposed by Charles’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, could not explain adaptations. Charles was very familiar with Paley’s work, and his own theory of natural selection is aimed at showing that adaptations of the kind discussed by Paley do not need to be explained by ‘intelligent design’.

This may well be the first time that someone from the other side has shown any sign of understanding my opposition to the Iraq War.

As many war supporters pointed out, then and now, there were all sorts of positive developments that could have flowed from Saddam Hussein’s ouster. And over the long haul, some of them still might come to pass, despite the toll the war has taken. But the pre-war debate revolved around weapons of mass destruction for a reason: It was “the one reason everyone could agree on,” as Paul Wolfowitz famously put it, because it was the one reason for war that was premised on an immediate and tangible military objective - disarm a bad guy before he uses his weapons against you - and that didn’t depend on long-range hypotheticals about Arab democratization, an Iran-Syria domino effect, a weak horse/strong horse dynamic, and so forth. Strip away Saddam’s (supposed) rearmament and the imminent threat it (supposedly) posed, and the fact that you had nine other “here’s why this might be a good idea” reasons for war did not a strong-enough justication for war make. Military conflict is simultaneously too grave and too unpredictable to be entered into if your primary objective depends upon a chain of hypothetical second-order consequences stretching across months and years.

Skepticblog has some nice speculation - starting with this video which claims that, whatever aliens look like, they certainly won’t look like us.

Richard Dawkins wades into the argument to make the case for convergent evolution. Convergent evolution is the phenomenon where animals evolve to fill similar niches despite very different ancestry. Common examples are sharks and dolphins or bats and birds. There are (or were) whole menageries of marsupials (mice-like, mole-like, bear-like, wolf-like) that look remarkably like their distant placental relatives.

I would agree with him in betting against aliens being bipedal primates and I think the point is worth making, but I think he greatly overestimates the odds against. Simon Conway-Morris, whose authority is not to be dismissed, thinks it positively likely that aliens would be, in effect, bipedal primates.

Dawkins ends up concluding that

androids are fairly improbable, but not necessarily all that improbable

For my part, I’d have thought that octopus-like aliens are far more likely than human-like ones.