Your Meditation Guide Blog

First of all let me wish those who celebrate Halloween today a "Happy Halloween!!" Or maybe I should say have a "Scary Halloween!!" I don't believe in ghosts, ghouls and goblins. Except for the state of being a "hungry ghost" but they aren't exactly the kind of ghosts thought about during Halloween. Hungry ghosts are too consumed with their own suffering to go out and "haunt" or "scare" other beings.

Halloween is my favorite holiday because I enjoy spooky movies and dressing up. As a former actor I really enjoy being able to dress up as just about any character that I want for at least one day a year and not be looked at as a loony. As a Buddhist Halloween also reminds me of death and the importance of this human birth in over-coming samsara, which includes death, fear and anxiety, which are all aspects of Halloween. However, it also reminds me of my belief that along with death comes rebirth so there is hope in death. Such reflection helps take the fear and sting out of death.

Our minds make up so many delusions that confuse us and scare us into thinking that we have no ability to transcend such strong emotions. So Halloween is a way to face some of our fears and work through them and to train our mind to concentrate upon the present moment rather then let our mind carry us away into a state of paralyzing fear. Halloween is presented in a fun way, which can greatly help take the power out of our fears and even laugh at how irrational they are.

When we can take the power out of our fears then they basically disappear back into the ether of our deluded mind, which is where they came from in the first place. Fear is a deep instinct to try and protect us but it can be so powerful that it actually works against us. For example, being crippled in fear by the supernatural, which is debatable that it even exists. However, more importantly Buddha either said nothing on the subject of advised us not to give it much attention because it only feeds delusion and distracts us.

I'm not sure if ghosts in the traditional western sense are real (I currently don't believe in them) but the point is that we should overcome our concern and focus on them and worrying that if they are out there that they can somehow control our minds. It is my firm belief that nothing can control our minds unless we allow it to happen. Other than some aspects to severe mental illness, which make controling one's mind much more difficult even with medication.

PHOTO CREDIT: Buddha image carved into a pumpkin lit up with a candle by Nalini Asha.

I have recently criticized British geneticist Steve Jones for his claim that modern human societies are no longer subject to natural selection. My arguments were based on basic principles of evolution and population genetics. Now a new study shows that Jones is wrong on the basis of the available empirical evidence and, ironically, that evidence comes from research on the British population!

The paper in question was published by Daniel Nettle and Thomas Pollet, of Newcastle University, in the prestigious journal American Naturalist (November 2008). Nettle and Pollet took advantage of a large database called the National Child Development Study, an ongoing longitudinal survey of all people born in the UK in a particular week of March 1958. Note that this is not a sample, with all the statistical uncertainties that follow, but the entire population of the nation for a given slice of time.

The authors set out to disentangle the effects of education and wealth on number of progeny for both men and women, because most previous studies -- which typically found a negative relationship between education and offspring number -- are biased by the inability to separate these two factors. The results are simply stunning. There is a strong selection coefficient relating men’s wealth and the offspring they produce, meaning that the wealthier men do in fact have more children. This is despite a negative effect on (and therefore selection against) education, again in men. In other words, natural selection in contemporary British society is favoring wealthy but under-educated men (though the negative effect of education disappears at very high levels of wealth).

The data are equally clear for women, but the pattern is completely different. Selection is again strong, but it favors low income, with education having a negative effect when income is low and a positive effect when it is high. That is to say, natural selection is favoring women who both forgo education and do not accumulate wealth -- although if you really want to be educated as a woman, you better be rich for your education to have a small but positive effect on the number of progeny you have.

There is bit of empirical consolation for Jones, however. Nettle and Pollet compared their data to estimates of selection coefficients to a variety of other samples, both historical and contemporary. They found that the strongest coefficient of selection are detected in highly polygynous populations (i.e., not in Western-style industrial societies). Nettle and Pollet suggest that this is because polygynous groups have a higher variance in the number of offspring, and it is a well known principle of evolutionary biology that increased phenotypic variance makes selection more effective. (Jones’ argument, by the way, was different, and had to do with the changing age of reproduction in Western society, not with polygyny or lack thereof.)

Two caveats, of course, need to be kept in mind. First, this is by all means not a suggestion that women should aim for low paying jobs and drop from school to hunt for rich husbands. To go from a factual statement about what is happening to a value judgment about what ought to happen would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy that David Hume has warned us against, and which crops up regularly on this blog. Needless to say (or is it?), the British government should not look at these results and embark on a program to keep women from achieving equal pay on the job, or to discourage girls from entering higher education, just so that natural selection can do its job.

The second caveat is more subtle and interesting. A classic evolutionary biologist would point out that there is a difference between selection and evolution: the latter happens only if the traits under selection (in this case education and income) are heritable from one generation to the next. We do not know the extent to which male and female traits affecting education and wealth are genetically heritable (and I’m not too fond of so-called twin studies for a variety of reasons). But we do know that they are culturally heritable. Cultural inheritance does affect evolution, and in fact does so at a much higher rate than genetic inheritance, because cultural changes are much more rapid than genetic ones. There is nothing in Darwin’s theory that specifies what kind of inheritance is necessary for evolution: any mechanism that reliably passes traits to one’s offspring is good enough. Moreover, cultural inheritance can have a hitchhiking effect on the genetic makeup of the human population: even if the entire response to selection on wealth and education is due to culturally inherited factors, the next generation will still carry on a likely non-random subset of genetic markers of the British population, which means that biological evolution in the stricter sense of changes in gene frequencies will still be happening. Again, pace Jones.

In the summer of 1835 the editor in chief of the New York Sun, Richard Adams Locke (a descendant of John the philosopher) started publishing articles relating to the increasingly stunning discoveries of astronomer John Herschel. With his telescope placed in a good observational spot in South Africa, Herschel had unearthed astronomical evidence of lakes on the moon! Over a few days, Locke reported, Herschel’s observations had confirmed first the existence of herds of animals, then of intelligent beings, and finally even of houses of worship on our close planetary companion. The New York Sun’s sales shot up, and New York was awash with talk of the new scientific findings.

Of course, Locke’s reports were actually a hoax, though he was astonished to find out that many people kept believing them even after it was revealed that Herschel (who was, in fact in South Africa at the time, unaware of the scheme) had never made any of the alleged claims. Locke’s was an exercise in ridiculing superstition with the aim of forcing people to realize how gullible and silly their beliefs really are, thereby prompting their abandonment. It failed spectacularly.

What prompted Locke’s experiment was the fact that although astronomy was very popular that year, since Halley’s comet was due to reappear after the summer, many New Yorkers considered it further proof of intelligent design in the universe! You see, obviously God is so powerful that it can throw large celestial objects around as He pleases, the (by then well known to science) laws of mechanics be damned. Locke, much in the fashion of his fellow countryman, Richard Dawkins, thought that the United States was a wonderful place full of energy and promise of change, which would be even better if only Americans could rid themselves of religious nonsense (on the latter point, of course, I am firmly with both Dawkins and Locke). Hence the idea of the hoax, and the sour disappointment that must have followed Locke’s witnessing of New Yorkers’ reaction to it.

The 19th century moon hoax is described in a new book by Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. It may be difficult to imagine people who lived only less than two centuries ago seriously taking a random block of ice as evidence for a divine creator, but it’s likely that readers of the 23rd century will react with equal astonishment to the news that half of Americans at the dawn of the millennium couldn’t see the obvious fact that we are animals closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas.

The serious question, highlighted by the parallels between the two situations -- is how do we fight superstition. Locke and Dawkins may be amusing to their respective fellow intellectuals (yours truly included), but obviously their sarcasm doesn’t do the job that they intend for it to do. Just in the same way, one might add, that Joe Sixpack or Joe the Plumber surely don’t find The Daily Show with Jon Stewart very funny. Then again, on this blog I recently praised the sarcastic approach to religion used by Bill Maher in his recent movie, Religulous. Along similar lines, a recent National Public Radio commentary on Duck Soup, the classic Marx Brothers movie, reminded us of how biting Groucho and brothers’ social satire could be, in that case making fun of the Great Depression that had started only three years earlier, and that among other things had wiped out the Marxs’ savings, forcing them to go back to acting to make a living (who said there was no positive side to the economic collapse of the nation?).

Satire can change the world, which was the point of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, where monks who translate Aristotle’s writings on comedy are mysteriously killed because once we can make fun of the gods we do not take them seriously anymore, and all hell breaks lose, so to speak. (You are of course better off reading the book, but Sean Connery was certainly charming in the lead role of the corresponding movie.) It has been said that anyone can write a tragedy, because all it takes is to put black on white the way life actually is. But intelligent comedy about society takes real genius, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, from Groucho to Jon Stewart.

The trick that some get right, but Locke obviously did not, is to aim the satire at the right level and at the right audience. Maher’s critique of religion is much less intellectual than Dawkins’, and therefore all the more effective. Most people don’t believe in god because of the intricacies -- such as they are -- of the ontological argument. It is therefore senseless to explain to them why the argument doesn’t work. But when Maher was confronted by a Jesus impersonator who asked him “What if you are wrong?” he simply replied, “Well, what if you are wrong?” There is of course a kind of theological gymnastics that can get you out of that one, but the blank stare on the fake Jesus’ face was priceless: it had clearly never occurred to him that there was a chance that he was the one who picked the wrong religion. Oops!

Similarly with the audience. I’m sure the overwhelming majority of people who watch The Daily Show are cappuccino-drinking, New York Times-reading, Volkswagen Beetle-driving unabashed liberals such as myself (alas, I sold my Beetle when I moved to New York, to reduce my carbon footprint, but you get the point). But his show is so popular that clips of it appear not only on YouTube, but on CNN and other “mainstream” media outlets, thereby greatly enlarging the audience, and likely reaching people who may drink cappuccino but don’t read the New York Times. Some of these people will recognize the commonsense humor that Stewart displays, and may begin to appreciate the absurdity of, say, Sarah Palin’s contradictions on pork barrel spending, and so on.

The world isn’t going to change just because of humor, of course. Nonetheless, today’s New Yorkers really would think it completely silly to look at a comet as proof of intelligent design in the universe, thereby further reducing the scope of supernatural so-called “explanations.” If well done, comedy can help open up people’s minds and prepare the terrain for more serious discourse. But enough of this, I need to go to a comedy club in Manhattan tonight which is featuring The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi. Tickets - $15 (plus mandatory drinks)!

Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the 18th century French astronomer who proposed one of the early theories of the formation of the solar system, famously postulated a “Demon” who had enough information to know what would happen in any place in the universe at any time. It was the height of mechanistic and deterministic hubris in science, and it seemed that it was only a matter of time before physicists would find out everything there was to find out about the way the world works

That brand of naive hubris has been dealt several blows during the 20th century, beginning with the cautionary arguments of philosophers of science concerned with the epistemic limits to human knowledge, and continuing with scientists themselves demonstrating that nature imposes severe constraints on our ability to make predictions. To name a few examples, relativity theory imposes limits to how fast information can be transferred (the speed of light); chaos theory tells us that the behavior of complex non-linear systems cannot be predicted after a few time steps, despite the fact that these systems are deterministic; quantum mechanics says that we cannot measure all the properties of a particle at the same time (Heisenberg’s principle); and complex systems theory has established the principle of intractability, which shows that the behavior of some physical systems cannot be predicted before actual observation of such systems.

Nonetheless, many physicists still talk about a “theory of everything,” a rather grandiose way to refer to a mathematical theory that unifies the fundamental forces of nature into one (hopefully simple) equation. The increasingly acrimonious debate about string theory and whether it can unify the so far disjunct theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics has been the crux of research in fundamental physics for decades now. (Amusingly, the skeptics have been very active recently, with books with openly provocative titles, like Not Even Wrong.)

Well, call off the search for a theory of everything. Physicist David Wolpert, in an article published in the prestigious Physica D (vol. 237, pp. 1257–1281, 2008), has shown that -- at best -- we can achieve a theory of almost everything. Wolpert’s work is very technical, but its implications are spectacular. Unlike the above mentioned limits to knowledge, which come out of empirical disciplines, Wolpert used logic to prove his point, following in the steps of the famous incompleteness theorem demonstrated by Kurt Godel in 1931. (An accessible summary of Wolpert’s discovery can be found in an article by P.-M. Binder in Nature, 16 October 2008.)

Basically, Wolpert -- building on previous work by Alan Turing -- formalized a description of “inference machines,” i.e. machines capable of arriving at inferences about the world (human beings are one example of such machines). Wolpert focused on what he calls strong inference, the ability of one machine to predict the totality of conclusions arrived at by another similar machine. Wolpert then logically proved the following two conclusions: a) For every machine capable of conducting strong inferences on the totality of the laws of physics there will be a second machine that cannot be strongly inferred from the first one; b) Given any pair of such machines, they cannot be strongly inferred from each other.

An important point to be appreciated is that Wolpert’s demonstration is completely independent of the computational characteristics of the machines, as well as of the details of the particular laws of physics to be uncovered. This is a general result based on logic, not one contingent on technology or the particular kind of universe under investigation. In a bit plainer terms, this means that there are absolute, logical limits to the ability of any method for acquiring knowledge (including, obviously, human science) to produce a comprehensive theory of the world -- i.e., no true theory of everything is actually possible, say bye bye to Laplace’s Demon, and by implication to the idea of determinism.

Before pseudoscientists, creationists, mysticists and assorted charlatans start jumping up and down with joy and declare the end of science, however, let me add the following. First, science still remains by far the best (one could argue the only) way to understand the world, and the fact that its power is limited by the characteristics of the human mind, those of the physical universe, and by the laws of logic is just something that we have to live with. No “alternative” approach has come even close to doing any better. Second, it is a scientist -- not a parapsychologist, a creationist or a mystic -- who has demonstrated the new theorem, which both reinforces the point that alternative forms of knowledge about the world don’t actually produce knowledge and that scientists, unlike practitioners of nonsense, relish the challenges posed by the world as it really is, as opposed to how we would wish it to be. Besides, the next time you hear a pseudoscientist blabber about quantum telepathy, ask him if he knows about Wolpert’s theorem -- and savor the blank stare that will surely follow.

Dear Mark,

thanks for the thoughtful response, I truly hope this indirect exchange will stimulate positive thinking in the humanist and supra-humanist (is that what you would consider your philosophy to be?) communities. And best luck with your wolf book, I have one coming out too, but not before the end of 2009, so too early for a plug.

You accused me of moving the goal posts because I picked the Merriam Webster definition of humanism, but I simply chose the one I found most acceptable among the ones that you put on the line for discussion, so I think it was fair game. You may be right that the Webster take on humanism is a bit bland, but what do you expect from a dictionary definition? If you’d like to seriously get into what humanism is then you need to go for books written by humanists on the topic. I can recommend the classic The Philosophy of Humanism by Corliss Lamont, or Paul Kurtz’s What Is Secular Humanism?, among many others.

As for religion and the supernatural, good ‘ol Durkheim can say what he wants, in my view religion implies supernaturalism by definition as well as a matter of cultural history, and it is rather disingenuous to pretend otherwise. However, I of course accept your clarification that you did not mean to imply that humanism is a religion. You only alleged that humanism works like a religion because it is based on faith. The problem is that this begins to look like a distinction without a difference (especially if you reject my contention that religion implies supernatural beliefs). At any rate, there is nothing more irritating to a humanist than being accused of taking things on faith. Remember the Webster definition: “a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason.” Reason, as opposed to faith, being the key word here.

Regarding my analogy with the concept of family, as a counter to your original example of a philosophy in favor of “white people,” surely you realize that analogies have limits. My point was simply to show that a philosophy in defense of “white people” leads to pernicious outcomes, but this does not imply that any other subjective preference, such as the one for family, is equally pernicious. Still, there is a limit to the analogy, and the whole of humankind simply is not in the same ballpark as one’s family. I think humanists would agree that one’s family is important, but that the welfare of humanity as a whole is much more important. They would still not agree that either of these are in the same ballpark as the welfare of “white people.”

The key to our disagreement, however, comes into your followup on my family counterexample: “If this was the prevailing ideology around which a person’s life was organized – unbalanced by any countervailing factors – wouldn’t you regard them as somewhat family obsessed?” Of course, but where on earth did you get the idea that humanism is obsessed with humans and accounts for no countervailing factors? Even a superficial perusal of humanistic literature will clearly show that humanists consider the welfare of the planet as a whole, as well as of individual species living on it, as part of their positive philosophy, as a quintessential component of human flourishing as well as a matter of rational ethics.

I will not defend here my choice of remaining an omnivore. Yes, I contribute to environmental damage, but as you pointed out, so do you and anyone else living in a Western society, albeit in other ways (at least living in New York I don’t own a car!). And besides, the real damage to the environment is not done by omnivory, but by a population size out of control and a reckless use of specific technologies -- after all, humanity was happily omnivorous for hundreds of thousands of years without thereby generating global warming.

But now it is my turn to ask you to be honest: you keep arguing that putting a priority on human interests is wrongheaded, but -- when push comes to shove as you say -- are you really prepared to sacrifice a human life, perhaps your daughter, or wife, if you have children or are married, to save a wolf’s? If so, why, exactly, would that be the ethical thing to do? My position is that human beings deserve priority (which is not the same as absolute and unquestionable advantage) for two reasons: one, they are our closest kin (parochial, yes, but I can’t help empathize with a human more than with a wolf); two, because they are sentient and self-conscious. No, I don’t think the latter is an arbitrary value: “rights,” for instance, are a human construct that can only be understood and applied by humans. Surely that gives us a bit of a special consideration compared to wolves, no matter how good the latter are at pack hunting. If you don’t buy this and are not a humanist, what are you, and why?

A recent article in the Times (of London) quotes Steve Jones, a renowned geneticist author of Darwin’s Ghost (nothing less than an updated version of Darwin’s Origin of Species), as saying “Human evolution is over. Quite unexpectedly, we have dropped the human mutation rate because of a change in reproductive patterns.” What’s he talking about?

Jones maintains that older men (35+) contribute most of the new mutations entering the human gene pool, and those people ain’t reproducing as they used to. Really? Perhaps Jones has forgotten that for most of human history people were highly unlikely to live to, let alone reproduce, at that old age (by Pleistocene standards). Besides, what are we to make of cultural trends (in Western societies) that postpone reproduction for both men and women?

Well, Jones says, “In the old days, you would find one powerful man having hundreds of children,” citing the example of Moulay Ismail from 18th century Morocco who (allegedly) copulated with an average of 1.2 women per day for a straight 60 years (without Viagra), thereby producing a whopping 888 children (nicely symmetric number, which probably doesn’t take into account the human tendency for exaggeration and the likely fact that some of Ismail’s concubines were having, shall we say, side jobs). At any rate, these “old days” are just not old enough to be evolutionarily relevant. The appropriate time frame, again, is pre-agricultural time, when most of human evolution took place. And in those old days there simply wasn’t enough food to go around for a single man to maintain dozens of sexual partners and their offspring.

“In ancient times” continues Jones in the Times interview, “half our children could have died by the age of 20. Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to 21.” The key words here, of course, are “in the Western world,” as infant and child mortality (and hence the opportunity for natural selection to do its work) are still astronomically high outside of Western societies (and a few others, like Japan). Besides, here is an area where I’m going to be glad that natural selection has a little less wiggle room than it would have without modern medicine.

Finally, Jones complains that human populations have become too large (certainly true from the point of view of our environmental impact) and interbreed too much (I will refrain from engaging in ethnic jokes by pointing out that only a Brit could complain about too much sex. Oh, darn, I just did engage in an ethnic joke). The problem here is that this reduces the relevance of the chance factor in evolution, which is associated with random fluctuations in gene frequencies in very small populations. But human populations have probably very rarely been small enough for so-called genetic drift to have a major effect, and Jones seems to be forgetting that the flip side of that coin is that large populations carry more genetic variation, and are thereby better suited to respond to selection.

As for the last comment in the published interview: “History is made in bed, but nowadays the beds are getting closer together. We are mixing into a global mass, and the future is brown.” As in: we will all look the same, because biologically based ethnic differences will be erased by worldwide interbreeding. Well, to begin with, this is just not happening quickly enough for my taste. Talk about a truly color-blind society that would result from it! Second, I’m sure the human ability to arbitrarily define in-group and out-group membership, thereby continuing the self-destructive “us-vs-them” attitude that has characterized us since “the old days” isn’t going to be halted by a simple quirk of demography.

A few months ago Mark Rowlands, over at Secular Philosophy, wrote a  two-part essay, followed by an update, on why he is not a humanist. Several people have asked me to respond, since this question comes up often, for instance whenever I say that I am more comfortable with the label “humanist” than “atheist” (although I am most certainly both, and proud of it). So let’s reconstruct Rowlands’ reasoning and try to see where, I think, he goes astray.

Mark begins by listing a series of definitions of humanism, mostly from dictionaries, all taken from the website of the Institute for Humanist Studies (full disclosure: I collaborate regularly with IHS and have designed an online course for their continuum of adult education). Arguably the best definition of those cited by Rowlands comes from the Merriam Webster:

“[Humanism is] a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason.”

What is wrong with this? According to Mark, “humanism is simply an article of faith, akin to many religions.” Wow, slow down! All definitions of humanism include a clause about its rejection of supernaturalism, and religions (as opposed to, say, philosophies) do include a supernatural component. This is akin to the oft-heard, and quite silly, refrain that atheism is a religion. Atheism is a philosophical or epistemological position about the world. When it is militant and intolerant (as it sometimes is), it becomes an ideology. But most certainly not a religion. To call humanism or atheism a religion is a fundamental category mistake.

Why does Rowlands make this extraordinary claim, sure to astonish any self-reported humanist (such as yours truly)? He says that “the unquestioned article of faith contained in all of these statements is obvious: humans are the most important thing there is -- at least in the known universe.” He then goes on to argue (quite appropriately) that there is no objective way to establish that humans are either “better” or “more important” than any other life form in the universe, case closed.

But wait, this may very well be a case of simply setting up a straw man for the pleasure of bringing it down with little effort. I don’t think for a moment that most humanists think of human beings as better or more important than anything else in the universe, and this position absolutely does not follow from, nor is it implied by, the tenets of humanism.

Let’s go back to the Webster definition, piece by piece: “[a] doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values.” Just because someone centers her values or way of life around X it doesn’t follow that she thinks X is objectively the best thing in the world. Think, for instance, of your family. Very likely, if you are a parent, you will concentrate your efforts, time, and resources on the welfare of your family. Most people, possibly even Rowlands, would grant that this is a perfectly good and honorable thing to do. But it absolutely does not follow that therefore you think your family is intrinsically more important than any other family on earth. It is most important to you, because it is your family, and that suffices to justify, socially and morally, your efforts on its behalf (though you should still set aside some of that effort and resources to help other people or causes outside your family).

Rowlands sees this point, but dismisses it with a rather forced example. He rewrites the various definitions of humanism by substituting “white people” for “human,” as in “a way of life centered on white people’s interests or values.” He wishes to show that one could pick any arbitrary group and the same philosophy would apply, showing that humanism is therefore a faith, and possibly a pernicious one. But as my example of your family should indicate, not all groups are equally worthy of special consideration, subjectively or objectively. “White people” is a biologically spurious and socially pernicious grouping, while “family” is a biologically natural and socially constructive grouping. There is a difference, and to ignore it is to fall for the postmodernist fallacy that anything goes.

Back to Webster: “a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason.” “Usually” here probably refers to the fact that humanism started out during the Renaissance, when one simply could not profess atheism, until independence from religion began to be asserted three centuries later, culminating in the Enlightenment . It is precisely because of the rejection of supernatural nonsense and an emphasis on human dignity, worth and ability to pursue self-realization that I think humanism is the best positive philosophy we have. How can Rowlands not consider himself a humanist?

The real answer, I suspect, emerges from the third part of his commentary, the one where he addresses miscellaneous objections from his readers. Mark states “Matt m [one of his blog’s readers] wouldn’t extend the social contract to animals who can’t understand it. Well, my twelve month old son is an animal who can’t understand the contract. Should I not extend it to him? More generally: I’ve written two books on this – Animal Rights (1998, 2009) and Animals Like Us (2002).” Ah, that’s where the rub hits the philosophical pavement, so to speak. Rowlands has a problem with humanism because it is too parochial, it does not extend to the rest of the animal (but what about the vegetable and bacterial?) world. Some of my good friends are vegetarians (no kidding), and at least one close friend of mine has always pointed out to me that she doesn’t consider herself a humanist precisely for the reason implied by Rowlands’ comment on animal rights: it is too restrictive a notion.

But I wish to make the argument that it is the animal rights perspective -- as laudable as it is -- that misses the point here. First, let’s take care of Mark’s twelve month old son: it really should go without saying that there is an objective difference between an animal that is in the process of developing toward a full grown human being, with good chances of becoming a person, and an animal -- say a wolf, to use Rowlands’ own example, who simply does not have the biological ability to do so. It does make a difference whether a being has the potential to understand the concept of rights or not: this clearly and objectively separates (without making them “better”) human beings from all other animals (including our closest primate cousins). It also makes human beings the proper recipients (and negotiators) of rights -- an inherently human concept, incidentally.

Second, and more importantly, my example of why -- and within what limits -- our own families are more important than others to us shows the fallacy in Rowlands’ argument: humanism, with its centering on the human condition, does not imply the negation of the ethical status of other living beings, just like our justified but admittedly subjective interest in our own family does by no means imply that other families are not important in an absolute sense. Indeed, many humanists are supporters of animal rights, and they base their support on their compassion as well as their logic, not on the whims of imaginary supernatural beings (at least some of whom allegedly tell us to do with animals what we wish, since they were created to serve our needs).

This is why I am a humanist.

As promised in my previous post, I would like to bring to people’s attention one of the best reviews of scientific investigations of religion as a social phenomenon, a paper published in Science (3 October 2008) by Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff of the University of British Columbia. The article is chockfull of fascinating, empirically based, insights into the relationship between religion and prosocial behavior, and is a must read for anyone seriously interested in this topic. Here, I will point to some of the highlights that will hopefully stimulate discussion and direct reading of Norenzayan and Shariff’s paper.

First off, let me clear the field of an obvious source of what I think is rather fruitless discussion. The authors begin by summarizing three models of the evolution of religion: the evolutionary group selection scenario (religion as an adaptation for group living), the cultural by-product scenario (religion derives from the necessity of a theory of others’ mind and sensitivity to one’s reputation), and the cultural group selection scenario (where competition among social groups favors the spread of costly practices to maintain in-group cohesion). I have said repeatedly that we simply do not have the empirical data to seriously test genetic-evolutionary explanations for most human behaviors, so I am completely neutral about alternative scenarios that deal with that aspect of the problem. Moreover, following Jablonka and Lamb (2005), I count cultural inheritance as a legitimate form of evolutionarily relevant inheritance. This means that any of the above scenarios (or a combination thereof) may have occurred without major involvement of genes, by direct transmission of cultural practices.

Ok, that being out of the way, let’s take a look at what Norenzayan and Shariff say. To begin with, they debunk the oft-repeated claim that religiosity increases charitability. It turns out studies that have made that link are entirely based on self-reporting, a notoriously unreliable source of behavioral evidence. When one looks into experimental studies of the issue, the picture changes dramatically. A series of “Good Samaritan” studies found that people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) charitable behavior shows no correspondence whatsoever with the degree of religious belief. Secular people are just as likely (or not) to help someone in distress as are religious people. Interestingly, however, researchers have been able to show that a strong link between religiosity and prosocial behavior does emerge, but only when there is a self-reputation enhancing egoistic motivation: religious people are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior if they know that there is a good chance that their reputation in the group will be positively affected.

Perhaps one of the most interesting sets of experiments reported by Norenzayan and Shariff concerns what happens when people are reminded of a morally watchful authority -- religious or secular. In a control group that was not “primed” with a god-like concept, people behaved selfishly (most pocketed an available sum of money without sharing). When participants were primed with a god reminder, however, the modal behavior switched to fairness (they split the money). So, does religion trigger altruistic behavior after all? Nope. Here’s the kicker: people that were primed with reminders of a secular moral authority were just as altruistic as the religiously primed ones! It isn’t religion, it is the presence of a moral authority that does the trick.

Another spectacular finding deals with the effect of religiosity on group survival. Researchers have mined historical information on hundreds of communes that were started in the United States during the 19th century, some religious, some secular (mostly of socialist inspiration). Once again, a prima facie interpretation of the data would seem to give credence to the idea that religion is good for sociality: at any given point in time, religious communes were four times as likely to survive to the following year as their secular counterparts. However, more in-depth analyses revealed that one needs to be weary before jumping to conclusions: it turns out that the real predictor of commune longevity was not religiosity, but the number of costly requirements for membership! The more costly it is to belong, the more likely members are to stick with it (that’s also why it’s better to subscribe to an expensive gym if you really want to motivate yourself…). The overall difference between religious and non-religious communes was simply due to the fact that the latter, on average, imposed much less costly requirements. (Note that “requirements” here does not just mean monetary ones, but also engaging in rituals, church attendance, constrained sexual practices, and so on. Still, perhaps atheist organizations should start asking their membership for a sizable percentage of their income, just as many fundamentalist denominations do.)

Finally, Norenzayan and Shariff looked into another interesting prediction that people have made about the relationship between religion and prosociality. According to standard theory, the two original sources of moral behavior are kin selection (you help your relatives because they carry some of your genes) and reciprocal altruism (where there is an expectation of favors being returned). The problem is that these two mechanisms begin to break down for groups that are much larger than about 150 individuals (all that our neocortex can keep track of). What then? The hypothesis here is that gods kick in as a supplementary and increasingly important moral lever. If so, then there should be a positive relationship between the size of a society and the moralizing of their gods. Sure enough, researchers found that although most societies do not, in fact, worship gods that dictate morality, all large groups switch to moral-dictating deities. Does that mean that religion is, after all, necessary for the stability of human groups? Again, no, because modern secular social contract-enforcing institutions (police, courts, etc.) efficiently replace the original function of “big gods,” as plainly demonstrated by the case of most western societies, which are both highly secular and stable.

Norenzayan and Shariff end with one further cautionary statement to people who insist that religion must be good for society, and a direct quote here is best: “Religious prosociality is not extended indiscriminately; the ‘dark side’ of within-group cooperation is between-group competition and conflict.” In this age of holy wars and cross-cultural clashes, it is indeed hard to underestimate the destructive power of religion.

Literature Cited

Jablonka, E. and M. J. Lamb (2005). Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

A couple of days ago I went to see Religulous, the investigative documentary by Bill Maher into why people believe weird things about religion. I enjoyed Maher’s laid back approach much better than the Dawkins-Hitchens style hard nose atheism, unfortunately so popular among some atheist groups. The difference is not one of substance (though Maher claims not to be an atheist, he comes very, very close), but of style. And yet style makes all the difference where belief isn’t just a matter of cold rational analysis, but also of messy human emotions.

Think of Maher as a comedian-turned-social commentator in the style of Jon Stewart (though Maher was doing his Politically Incorrect show on Comedy Central and then ABC before the Daily Show got started. He is now the host of Real Time on HBO). Maher, much like Stewart, takes on the role of a modern day Socrates. He admits he doesn’t know much (though, just as in the case of the Greek philosopher, it’s clear that he actually knows a lot more than his self-important, shallow targets do), and goes around “simply” asking questions. The questions we encounter throughout Religulous, however, are devastating. Posed to rabbi, priests, ministers, Jesus impersonators and just every day folks, they are meant to expose the ignorance that underlies much religious faith, as well as the tendency of some religious “leaders” to take easy advantage of their flock.

After the movie, though, I got into a conversation with my friend Phil (the editor of this blog) about whether religion is a cause or a symptom of society’s maladies. Neither of us went for the simplistic Dawkinsian scenario that religion is the root of all evil, and we probably agreed (I’m not entirely sure, after having shared martinis) that religions are at least co-causes, enablers, if you will, of much human suffering. If we were to somehow eliminate (not by force, of course, but by persuasion) religion from human culture things would likely get better, possibly much better, but we still would be very far from living in an earthly paradise, so to speak.

This is of course related to the questions of where religion comes from and what function, if any, it plays at the social or psychological level, both of which have increasingly been under the scrutiny of science. In my next entry I will deal with a recent study of the sociology of religion, but here I’d like to comment on research addressing its psychology. A paper in Science (3 October 2008) by Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky reports on experimental evidence that links lack of control by individuals to their proneness to find patterns where none exist, and to develop superstitious behavior.

Lacking control over one’s circumstances is a well known source of anxiety, a situation that activates the brain’s amygdala, the roots of the fear response. And it is also understood that there is a correlation between unpredictability of events and superstition: for instance, people have studied tribes of fishermen fishing at increasing distances from the land, hence in deeper waters and faced by more unpredictable dangers, and have found that the farther out one goes the more the tribe develops superstitious rituals related to fishing. (A similar phenomenon occurs in sports, where there is a correlation between the unpredictability of one’s role in the game and personal superstition: baseball pitchers, for instance, are particularly prone to it.)

Whitson and Galinsky put their subjects in a variety of experimentally induced situations where they had different degrees of control, to see how they reacted to a variety of perceptual tests. The results were stunning: people who felt little or no control over a given situation were much more prone to see patterns where there were none, make up superstitious scenarios, and invent conspiracy theories to explain their situation! Why on earth should this be? The authors conclude that inventing patterns is a cognitive way to regain psychological (certainly not real) control over events, thereby reducing stress. Interestingly, however, another way to achieve the same result was to allow individuals to contemplate and affirm their values, after which their proclivities toward conspiracies and non-existing patterns regressed toward those of the control subjects. Indeed, Whitson and Galinsky suggest that this may be one reason psychotherapy works: the goal of the therapist is precisely that of allowing the patient to construct a narrative that puts him back in charge of the unfolding of his life, with a focus on his personal guiding principles and values.

The lingering question, of course, is why would making up an imaginary pattern or explanation be effective psychologically. After all, one isn’t about to gain real control over events, only an illusory one. But here perhaps we enter into the area where sociological explanations may be helpful, and I will refer the reader to my next installment on this topic. Meanwhile, tell your friends to go see Religulous, or at the least to sign up for therapy.