Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

If you missed the meeting because you’re allergic to the rain, never worry! I’ve distilled the discussion into these meeting minutes!

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. If you are a member of BASS, this is your website to use. If you want to contribute a story about your experiences tabling, or if you just like to share silly science videos, you can do it here. Just contact us.

Meeting discussion:

We first talked about the inauguration. Reactions were mixed, but several people were very happy with Obama’s mention of “non-believers” as Americans. However, someone cited a quote by George W Bush which also positively mentioned people with out faith (see some quotes here). We were amused by the fact that after the oath got messed up, Obama later redid it without a Bible. Imagine the reaction on Fox News.

Most were unhappy that Rick Warren gave the invocation. His prayer specifically referred to the Christian god and how we would all eventually answer to him. Why did Obama invite this guy again? While the answer might be “to be more inclusive”, BASS members suggested other possibilities as well. Perhaps it was an attempt to symbolically ally with evangelicals, so that he can get away with actions like lifting the abortion gag rule. Perhaps it was in order to put Rick Warren on the defensive; he had to moderate himself because the public eye was focused him.

We also watched the first two and a half minutes of the Daily Show episode.

Shifting gears a bit, we discussed the evolution of altruism. A lot of it is mindless chatter, but the following points came out of my attempted distillation:

Once we have reputation, altruism leads to evolutionary fitness.
Because of game theory, a tit for tat strategy often works best.
Altruism to offspring and relatives is easily explained because they share genes with you.
If a population has limited resources, evolution should favor altruism so that they minimize the amount of resources wasted on conflict.
But what if you are the only liar in an honest society?
Is there an advantage to having an “outgroup”?
Perhaps at least part of the explanation is memetic rather than genetic. But this doesn’t explain altruism in other species.

From there, we drifted into the topic of the nature of morality. Someone drew a distinction between genetic morality and philosophical morality. Genetic morality explains our predispositions, but we need philosophical morality in order to become comfortable with those predispositions. Just because an action promotes fitness from an evolutionary stand point is not sufficient to make it morally correct.