Our slightly tangential question today is, why are people so irrational about marriage? There have been cultures and times when legal marriage was important, and others when it was not. But there will always be people who are convinced that marriage is somehow a magic bullet for our social problems. Missives such as this one from otherwise intelligent columnists (in this case Emily Yoffe) show how weighed down with the baggage of "morality" the issue of marriage is. Yes, morality is involved; unfortunately, it is the definition of what morality is that gets confused and leads to calls for laws and policy that treat symptoms, rather than the underlying condition.

But perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers.

Yes, there are extremist meddlers who think truly personal choices should be legislated because God said so. But anyone who actually thinks that everyone living in society should be free to make all kinds of choices that negatively impact society is an extremist in the opposite direction. After all, morality actually is a mechanism for individuals living in societies to interact positively with other members of society, so that they will interact positively with you, which is all to your benefit. Society breaks down when personal desires and needs always take precedence over those of others. Once a critical number of people ignore the children they have and just keep on making more, there is no incentive to do otherwise because everyone is just out for himself anyway - the mark of a dysfunctional society.

Studies have found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock children.

Of course, since we don't have any single-mom laboratory manipulation studies, the only information we have is correlational, not causal. Very likely a lot of the single moms were poor before they had a kid, and in no position to raise one successfully - meaning to produce a contributing member of society, rather than a drain on it who will likely not raise kids successfully because she does not have the experience to know what that means. But the problem is not that the moms aren't married to the kids' fathers, it is that they had kids at all.

Yoffe points out that "one key to effective fatherhood is first becoming a husband." But she is misdirected by her own definition of "husband," which in her mind, means a legally married man. She would be absolutely right if she defined "husband" as a man committed to one woman, emotionally and financially. When two people are able to commit to each other over the long term, they are much more likely to be successful parents, because they understand how society works - through the establishment and maintenance of relationships which in turn produces "moral" behavior. Thus they can raise their children to understand the importance of relationships, which is the key to avoiding dysfunctional behavior.

Marriage itself is actually a different issue altogether - or at least it would be if meddling politicians didn't think it was government's job to legislate morality. But the only true way to legislate morality is to remove dysfunctional people from society - which we pretty much do (albeit imprecisely) with laws against destructive behavior such as murder, theft, etc. Unfortunately tax code, welfare law, benefits rules, etc. put married people in a different economic category than unmarried people, which depending on your situation, either encourages you or discourages you to be married. Thus marriage is often driven by legal rather than personal considerations.

Marriage should be an entirely personal, not legal, decision. All the arguments about gay marriage are absurd because the idea that two people cannot declare themselves "married" if they want to is absurd. The reason that gays feel they have to fight for marriage is because policy makers have forced them to. If people don't want gays to be legally "married" then fine; fix the system so that there is no benefit to being married. If people want to avoid legal problems to do with benefits, alimony, inheritance, end-of-life issues, etc., there is all kinds of paperwork they can fill out. Legal marriage itself does not solve all of these problems anyway, so it is not clear why it exists, other than to legislate someone's particular "morality" that is not true morality.

In any case, you cannot legislate emotional commitment. The fact of "marriage" can make it easier to hide or ignore lack of long term emotional commitment, which can in turn lead to unwanted children anyway. Yoffe, as a child of bitter divorce, understands enough to know that marriage just for the sake of marriage makes no sense; but she seems to think that for a truly emotionally committed couple, marriage will somehow make their kids turn out better. But what is it that the kids have for their role model? The actual day-to-day relationship of their parents, or the certificate in their safe-deposit box? Those who argue that the legal hurdle of divorce will somehow force people to reconcile who might have otherwise split up has not checked divorce rates lately. If the emotional commitment is gone, no mere piece of paper is going to conjure it up again.

Save marriage for a symbol of personal commitment. To ceremonially bond with another human certainly has the impact of saying to society that "we are engaging in society through our relationship to each other." Therefore marriage certainly has societal value. But legally, it continues to be a pointless exercise at best and at worst confuses people about what is actually important.

Don't blame lack of marriage for the plight of poor neglected kids. Blame the parents who should have used birth control. The way to solve a lot of societal problems is to sterilize immediately anyone who has shown him or herself to be an unfit parent after the first kid. But we could never do that. It would be immoral.

Labels: humans, morality, sociality

My last post covered a paper that found brain physiological correlates of political attitudes. That paper did not address the origin of the physiological differences, i.e. whether they might be genetic or environmental. An earlier paper (Alford, J.R., C.L. Funk, and J.R. Hibbing, 2005. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99:153-167), though, does claim a genetic origin for particular suites of political attitudes. While authors acknowledge that on the surface this seems nonintuitive, they back up their case by citing numerous studies that other social attitudes have a genetic origin.

This is another example of a twin study being used to support genetic causes of differences among people previously assumed to be purely environmental. The survey data used were collected not as part of this study, but recycled from a previous study, and include the usual thousands of twin pairs, because these authors, like so many others, assume that more is better, when that is not in fact true. A weakness of the data set is exposed when they calculate a surprisingly high 40% heritability of educational attainment, without any mention of the demographics of the survey-takers. Could there be any correlation of socioeconomic and education level and the willingness to return an esoteric research survey? It seems likely, but there is no consideration here of the possible effect.

The authors are all political scientists whose paper, published in a political science journal, purports to teach other political scientists how genetics works. (One can't help but wonder how they would react to a bunch of biologists pontificating on a political topic in a biological journal.) It probably does not matter whether or not any biologists actually reviewed this paper; twin studies appear in plenty of biological journals as well.

All the arguments the authors make supporting their assumptions, come from other twin studies, which have the same methodological issues, stemming from the ethical impossibility of manipulating human phenotype and social environment. The most important assumption upon which the results are based is of course the one apparently made in all twin studies: correlation in survey scores between identical twins minus correlation in scores between fraternal twins equals "heritability" of the survey scores. The authors attempt to address the obvious criticism that identical twins are likely to have a more shared environment than fraternal twins by citing studies that assert this is not so. Of course, if a weak study is published, all those that rely on it are weak as well. The problem with all of these studies is that they fail to separate the effects of genotype vs. phenotype. This is the major criticism of "twins reared apart" studies - similarities between identical twins reared apart aren't automatically genetic, because they look the same (and often have similar mannerisms). Researchers seriously underestimate the importance of visual cues in affecting human interpersonal interactions. Hence, their social interactions will have a greater tendency to be similar even when they live in different environments.

In a similar vein, when the authors claim that a majority of political attitudes are genetic, do they honestly think this explains why black women are likely to be more liberal than white men? Clearly phenotype, which drives much life experience, is the important difference here, not genotype. The authors also do not address at all the fact that many peoples' political attitudes change over time, sometimes in an extreme fashion. Yet they assert with a straight face that when children have opposing political beliefs from their parents, it must be due to a genetic mutation. They actually even calculate a heritability for party affiliation at 0.14. Yes, 14% of your choice of party apparently is from those alleles for "republican" and "democrat" you have tucked away.

Oddly, considering the tone of most of the paper, the authors do manage to point out correctly (even going into some depth on the topic) that all people are a product of the interaction of their genotype with their environment. They seem to do this to bolster their point that political attitudes must be partly genetic, but the discussion shows that clearly they think genes are as important as the social scientists they are criticizing think environment is. They go so far as to express regret that the current polarizing political environment will not change because of assortative mating - those with overlapping political views are more likely to reproduce together (true), and thus the "political genes" of their offspring will make them more likely to be polarized. Then they go on to speculate about the evolution of these genes and their effect on society, as if they actually know something about how evolution works, after reading a few papers.

Looks like all of the people with Ph.D.'s in genetics and evolution just wasted their time. They could have had a different career and still published papers on the topic.

Labels: humans, politics, sociality, statistics

A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience (Amodio, D.M., J.T. Jost, S.L. Master & C.M. Yee, 2007. Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience 10:1246-1247) has been presented as far more controversial than it is - although surely the authors knew they would ruffle a few feathers with their study.

Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

The authors give citations to support the claim that "Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments". I have not read those papers but for the purpose of this commentary will assume that there is indeed scientific support for this conclusion. Though their experimental procedure is clearly one accepted by neuroscientists, the rest of us are expected to take at their word that "responsiveness to complex and potentially conflicting information relates to the sensitivity of this general mechanism for monitoring response conflict." Here is the test:

Go/No-Go task. On each trial of the Go/No-Go task, either the letter "M" or "W" was presented in the center of a computer monitor screen... Half of the participants were instructed to make a "Go" response when they saw "M" but to make no response when they saw "W"; the remaining participants completed a version in which "W" was the Go stimulus and "M" was the No-Go stimulus; assignment to either version of the task was random. Responses were registered on a computer keyboard placed in the participants' laps. Each trial began with a fixation point, presented for 500 ms. The target then appeared for 100 ms, followed by a blank screen. Participants were instructed to respond within 500 ms of target onset. A "Too slow!" warning message appeared after responses that exceeded this deadline, and "Incorrect" feedback was given after erroneous responses.

There is no way here to confirm the authors' interpretation that results obtained on this test are explained by liberals' higher sensitivity to "cognitive conflict" at the level of political decisions, but it is an interesting idea, because it appears both from cited research and probably anyone's observations that conservatives tend to have more of a black-and-white view of the world, while liberals tend see more shades of gray. ("Liberal" here is used in its traditional sense, not the currently distorted media code word for "left wing." Indeed, hard left-wingers are arguably no more liberal than hard right-wingers.)

The paper wisely does not attempt to determine whether this brain-function correlate or political leaning comes first (and they certainly do not at all imply that the response of liberals to this test is "smarter," despite William Saletan's defensive interpretation). It should not be assumed that just because the brain shows a certain physiological response to a stimulus, this response is genetic. Just as the accumulation of memories alters pathways in our neurons, a response such as this may be "learned" by the brain as well, based on experience.

Of course, some people become more conservative with life experience. Here are three competently untested hypotheses for why this can happen (given the conclusion that liberals see more complexity in the world than do conservatives).

1) Often, people become more fiscally conservative as they grow older. Fiscal conservatism is, however, a separate issue from that of "cognitive conflict." Those emphasizing the long term will be more fiscally conservative than those who prefer to live in the moment, which is more correlated with age group than with social or political views. Certainly over the last three decades political conservatives have shown no sign of being fiscal conservatives.

2) Someone who has suffered a traumatic, life-affecting event, such as a death or lost job, or whose loved ones have, might find it simpler to have an easily defined target to blame. Bad economic times had a lot to do with the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.

3) There is really no way to form economic or social policy that takes into account all the complexities that a diverse group of people will experience. Because it is simpler to craft legislation that does not take so many complexities into account, policy makers - and the pundits living in the same beltway world, away from the real one, and those listening to the pundits - come to believe we live in a simple world with easily definable boundaries. Such was one of the major reasons the SCHIP legislation failed. The idea that there is a particular income cutoff, above which every American family can afford health insurance without regard to any other parameters, was heavily promoted by the conservative opposition to the bill.

A corollary of the last point is that people who are well-off financially are usually conservative not because they are fiscally conservative (many of them are not), but because it is emotionally least complicated to believe there is a simple reason why they are wealthy while so many others are poor, e.g. they work hard and poor people don't.

There also could be positive physiological feedback loops in the brain which strengthen a tendency to fall one way or the other in one's view of the world. While some people do change their political views, most people actually seem to become more strongly liberal or conservative over time. It is an unfortunate by-product of our social tendency to form opposing groups that once we have formed an opinion about a person or topic, our views become more confirmed because we accept observations that support them, and ignore or rationalize observations that do not support them.

To be truly objective in his or her views, a person would need to be constantly reassessing prior beliefs based on every bit of new information received. Why are humans, many of whom pride themselves on their over-awing logical arguments, not that way at all? Perhaps it is because as social animals, we are always creating rules to live by, and the simpler those rules are, the easier our lives are, in many ways. Even with our large brains, it would get too difficult to navigate socially, as we need to, if the rules were too complex.

Labels: brain, empathy, humans, politics, sociality

About a month ago, another new paper on obesity (Christakis, N.A. and Fowler, J.H., 2007. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. New England Journal of Medicine 357:370-379) made headlines. The paper is based on an enormous data set that started being compiled in 1948, consisting of health information of thousands of residents of the town of Framingham, Massachussets. The original purpose of the study was to learn about causes of heart disease. Everyone in the study has received complete physicals every couple of years throughout their lives, and the data collection has continued on to the second and third generation of patients, which will presumably provide some information about the genetics of heart disease in addition to external causes. Christakis and Fowler use information about relatives and friends of the study subjects, included as part of the original data set, to assert that people whose friends get fat are more likely to get fat themselves.

The authors make the case that "[t]he spread of obesity in social networks appears to be a factor in the obesity epidemic." Although they never use the specific word "disease" in reference to obesity as some sensationalizing media outlets do, the thrust of the paper is that there is yet another cause of our obesity out there that is not our fault.

The advantage of using such a data set in this paper is that there is a lot of data about a lot of people over a long time period, and it is certainly understandable that scientists might conceive of other uses than the original purpose. The disadvantage is that the data set was not really designed to draw conclusions about obesity - and one of the major problems with the study is that the authors are promoting a cultural influence - based on interpersonal relationships - on weight gain using an extremely homogeneous sample, which does not represent a real cross-section of society. But, approached with an understanding of its assumptions and limits, Framingham-type data can indeed be useful for secondary studies.

The biggest limit of this analysis is its dependence on overlapping relationships among people. Although "social-network analysis" is not a technique with which I am highly familiar, it appears to consist mainly of high levels of pseudoreplication, which is a major problem for statistical analyses. Pseudoreplication is the use of data that are not independent, violating an important assumption upon which proper statistical analysis depends. There were 5124 focal subjects, and over 12,000 people total in the study, with an average of 7.5 social ties per person. The math on this clearly indicates that some people were analyzed as friends of more than one person. Thus, these data are not exactly independent. If the data were on people scattered about the country, so that each person's social network was independent of everybody else's, pseudoreplication would be avoided. With the data used as is, the statistical assumption of independence has been violated (although one can only conclude this in a roundabout manner; the author's use of jargon and limited statistical explanation makes their methods difficult to discover).

The most sensational assertion of the paper, that physical distance from one's friend does not affect the probability of becoming obese - and thus obesity of friends cannot be explained simply by them all having bad habits together - is undermined by the actual data, which are not nearly so conclusive. The authors broke physical distance into 6 rather absurd categories: 0 miles, 0.26, 1.5 miles, 3.4 miles, 9.3 miles, and 471 miles. Effectively, only the last group has true physical distance. Their conclusion is based on a nonstatistical difference, which may just mean that variation in the data is too large to detect a difference. In fact, the variation in their data is huge, with 95% confidence intervals (the statistical standard) often ranging over 50 or more percentage points. There is only confidence that having fat friends makes you fatter if the confidence interval does not overlap with a probability of zero. Looking at category 6 (471 miles) compared to the other groups in the figure below from the paper, four of the confidence intervals overlap with zero, as opposed to not more than 1-2 in the other distance categories, and upper confidence levels of probabilities of becoming obese are much lower than with shorter distances. The difference between category 6 and the others may not have been significant, but it is quite a stretch to conclude from this that distance from the friend does not make a difference in the probability of following him or her into obesity. (The six bars in each category represent data from six different health examinations over a person's life.)

For the authors, this paper was a no-brainer in two ways, though. If you can find a way to publish another reason why it isn't really someone's fault they are obese, by implying that the condition spreads from person to person like a disease, you've struck gold. In addition, because the conclusions are not that surprising at all (although they were spun as such by the NEJM media machine) it's easier not to pay attention to the statistical problems in the paper. But surely the authors' explanation that people thing it's more acceptable to be obese if their friends are is laughable to anyone. Do you know anyone who chose to be fat? "It really must be OK to let myself go if my friend has" just does not seem like a thought many people would have. But people who are friends will do things together, and if one of them can no longer do something physical, the other will end up hanging out watching TV with them, in a lowest-common-denominator effect. Because the assertion about physical distance not mattering is essentially bogus, a much simpler one is mutual lifestyle choice. It just wouldn't be very nice to dump a close friend because she got fat and couldn't ride bikes anymore.

Labels: health, humans, sociality

Previously, a discussion of the controversy over J. Michael Bailey's book on transgenders, "The Man Who Would be Queen," focused on problems finding the line between science and opinion in research on human biology. It is also interesting to speculate where the feelings come from that spur the decision to become transgendered (even for those of us who are not specialists in this area and have no scientific credibility backing up our positions).

As social animals, humans learn early on the rules to navigate society. Proper understanding and navigation of social norms is essential for humans to live satisfying lives, and in general, to reproduce. Rules governing gender roles, although they may vary from culture to culture, are a large subset of these.

It is clear to anyone watching children develop and begin to navigate the social waters that gender roles are a big area of focus for them. For instance, through observation, small children build a list of rules for identifying a male versus a female, and are very good at this with adults at a young age (<2). The genders of children themselves are much harder to identify, of course, because they lack secondary sex characteristics until puberty, so children and adults use other cues such as hairstyle and clothing to decide whether a child is a girl or a boy. When the signals are mixed, it seems to faze children more. If a girl has short hair and is not wearing girly clothes, another toddler may ask over and over "it's a she?" each time the girl is referred to as one.

A child also understands early in development that he or she is either a boy or girl (based on constant references by family and friends), and tailors his or her behavior to the correct gender, which shows that he or she understands the rules governing gender roles. All the sex-associated behavioral traits that parents insist must be inborn, may not be at all (the scientific jury is still out on most of these). Humans are designed to figure out this crucial part of living in a society at as early an age as possible, so whether or not they are, sex-associated traits can seem to be "genetic."

But what of the children who know they are a certain sex, but are not comfortable mimicking the behavior they see associated with that sex? (Why this happens in genetically unambiguous males and females is not always known and for another discussion.) They may feel caught in a trap. A boy (such as someone that I do currently know) who loves pink and frilly things either learns early on to suppress his own feelings, or is forced to suppress them by his family -- perhaps because they fear it means he is gay. If one stands back for a moment, the condemnation of a preference for a color by one sex that has been arbitrarily designated as being owned by the other sex is ludicrous, but of course occurs. If that boy is continually given the idea that there is something wrong with him because of his aesthetic preferences, then how is he going to feel about himself as he grows up? Society has already decided, at age 4, that there is something wrong with him, so it is likely he will believe it. This could play out any number of ways as the boy grows up, but one way that seems possible is that the boy will decide he really is supposed to be a woman, because he likes things that society tells him only women are allowed to like.

Society forces values and behaviors on us that we either accept, and become assimilated, or reject, and become an outcast or fringe member. Why do some men want to become women? Bailey says it is either because they are gay, and want to attract men, or because they find the thought of themselves as a female sexual object erotic. This either-or is what many transgenders have objected to, because surely people are more complex than the pigeonholers would have. What if a third (of likely several more) reason is that male-to-female transsexuals are just men who want to be able to wear dresses and enjoy pink, which society says they cannot do as men ("cross-dressing" being generally a fringe activity)?

I did find one study which is interesting in light of this theory (Winter S , Udomsak N (2002) Male, Female and Transgender : Stereotypes and Self in Thailand. Int. J. Transgenderism 6,1, http://www.symposion.com/ijt/ijtvo06no01_04.htm). The authors concluded with the following summary:

Participants overall expressed gender-trait stereotypes very similar to those of non-transgenders (both in their own country and internationally), notwithstanding that differences were found on a small number of traits.

Apart from a few traits, participants' actual self-concepts tended (in terms of their own gender-trait stereotypes) to be stereotypically female. Their ideal self-concepts were far less so, with several stereotypically male traits being frequently endorsed, and female traits being rejected.

As a corollary, the traits that participants wished to acquire tended to be broad-ranging, while those that they wished to lose were female-stereotyped.

The "ideal self-concept" and the "actual self-concepts" were not congruent. One might interpret this to mean that in an ideal world, we are all allowed to express our mix of stereotypically "male" and "female" traits, but in fact society has told these male-to-female transgenders that what they have are all the stereotypical "female" traits; therefore, they must be females trapped in male bodies. Why did they wish to lose "female" traits? My guess is that individuals such as these who cannot be neatly pigeonholed into their society's image of one gender or another are demonstrating it.

There are other individuals who are especially harmed by our either-or mentality of men and women. These are people with ambiguous genitalia, often due to recessive mutations. Some of these have an extra chromosome, such as people appearing to be males with an XXY genotype. (In humans, sex-determining chromosomes are labeled X and Y; females have two X chromosomes, and males have one X and one Y. Other species have different sex determination systems.) Others just don't produce enough of certain hormones when genitalia are developing. The latter is the subject of Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer prize-winning novel "Middlesex," a story told from the point of view of a genetic male who is raised as a female for the first 14 years of his life. Behind the engrossing plot and the witty writing is a commentary on what gender really means, and how most of us have a very narrow view of what behavioral and appearance traits are acceptable in our society - and probably most societies.

This narrow view may make some biological sense, because really everything is about reproduction, and in a sexual species that means getting together with the right person in order to be able to reproduce, and in a social species that means learning the rules that tell you how to identify the sex of others, behave in a way that will make you attractive to members of the opposite sex. But as an intelligent and self-aware species it would be nice if we could transcend some biological imperatives to acknowledge the natural variation in gender identidy that does indeed occur (for whatever reason), and accept that full variation as part of the entire human experience.

Labels: gender, humans, sex, sociality

Is mathematics an emergent property of sociality? I posed this intriguing question to a mathematician colleague, who is also an evolutionary biologist, and he said yes. The question came up because I have argued that rules are actually a social construct; a solitary species needs few or no rules governing its interactions with other individuals of its species, because other than mating or occasional territorial conflict, it has almost none. Individuals in social species, by contrast, are completely dependent on rules to survive and reproduce, because interactions with other members of the species are constant, and determine standing within a social group, and thus generally reproductive success.

Most evolutionary arguments applied to humans are tenuous, because of cultural complexities that overly our basic biology. Complicating the picture further, aberrant behavior (that which does not comply to a given social norm) is also probably more common among humans than among other social animals, because 1) we have chemical treatments that suppress some symptoms of such conditions, 2) we have easy access to addictive products which our brains did not evolve to cope with, such as drugs, junk food, slot machines, etc., and use of these can lead to self-destructive behavior, and 3) many aberrant people are smart enough to overcome or disguise their problems enough to fit in somewhat. So, there are many ways in which humans seem to get away with behaving in socially maladaptive ways, without suffering reproductive consequences, as other social primates probably would.

However, we did evolve as a social species, and much of our behavior is indeed a legacy of that evolutionary history. The playing of games is an example. Games are all about rules. Kids love learning new games, because their brains are wired to learn rules -- particularly rules for navigating in real society, but an artificial society with artificial rules will do. Whether it is sports or war games or pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, humans love games. Games with complex rules are more fun to learn for many of us, but those with fairly simple rules but complex strategy, such as Go or hearts or chess, usually capture the most active minds. It is our love of rules that make us despise the referee who makes a bad call. In our minds, if a rule is broken, the entire game should be void.

It seems that mathematics is universal, a truth that existed before humans and that they discovered. But to humans at least, mathematics is also all about rules, and perhaps the way that we perceive mathematics is filtered through our obsession with rules. We all learned them at the beginning of every school year for a decade. "Addition and multiplication are commutative. The transitive property says that if a=b and b=c, then a=c. The distributive property says that a * (b + c) = a * b + a * c" and so on. If you take higher level math classes in college, you discover that there are other mathematical systems with different rules; for instance, matrix multiplication is not commutative. So math is indeed a world of many rules that apply one way in one context but another way in a different context, very much like the rules of social interactions -- for example, it is inappropriate to wear a bikini at the opera, but just fine at the beach.

Although many would protest the truth of the statement, humans are wired for math. (If you hate math, it is not that you are "no good" at it; it is because the way it was taught to you made it painful and boring. This is a persistent problem that will likely never be corrected on a large scale, because of the vicious cycle of elementary school teachers who dislike math and barely get through it in college, go on to teach it poorly, cause their students to dislike it, and so on.) The interesting question is, would, or could, an intelligent solitary species have developed math? Some would say the question is completely moot because only a social species would have evolved brains as large as ours, because sociality requires a larger brain to navigate the intricacies of social interactions, in addition to the basic needs of finding food and mates and defending oneself. It is perhaps a chicken-and-egg question. But what is no question is that complex rules govern sociality, human brains are therefore wired to learn and use rules, and mathematics is a system of rules. Mathematics, very much like religion, is likely a byproduct of our success as a social species.

Labels: brain, evolution, humans, mathematics, sociality

In Lisa Belkin's recent article (subsq. req'd) on women attempting to re-enter the workplace after leaving to have kids, "while 74 percent do find work, only 40 percent find work they call satisfying."

This statement only begs the questions: What percentage of men find their work satisfying? What percentage of women who never "opted out" find their work satisfying?

What all the discussions about continuing gender inequality in the workplace fail to address is that for most people, having a job is a less attractive option in many ways than not working, whether you are male or female. White-collar women are faced with a double-edged sword, because while it is harder for them than men to achieve success in most professions, it is also socially much more acceptable for them than men to quit their jobs to raise children. I know several women who were glad to have the excuse when it came along. Men, however, live in a completely different world. Those who stay at home with kids now are in general as anomalous, and disparaged, as the first women who left their kids to go to work, when most did not.

It is a complex issue, because men are more likely to prefer work to staying home for two reasons: one, they are simply expected to so they make their reality fit expectations in order to fit in with society; and two, most professional work is easier for men than for women because it genuinely is harder for women of the same ability to be recognized for such and advance in their careers.

As explained by Ben Barres, (subsq. req'd) most working women actually ignore the signs of sexism in their quest to succeed. This makes perfect sense; if you develop a victimization complex and dwell on perceived or real obstacles that are out of your control, it will waste energy better spent on working around any obstacles that do present themselves. Many women have had the attitude that if they ignore the whole idea of sexism and just do what we do best, they will succeed. The problem with this is that we end up with the situation we have now - a whole generation of young women that don't believe in a need for feminism, because they believe the lack of officially sanctioned sexism means that women have achieved equality (even when the numbers starkly show that in most professions, increasing proportions of women at high levels have stalled, and in some there have even been recent losses, instead of gains). If women are not advancing at the same rate as men, well, it's because they have made the choice to "opt out." Young women are turned off the feminist movement because they see their current situation as having the freedom of choice. But "choice" in this context is quite often an illusion; the fact that the choice made all too often, to settle back into traditional female roles, belies the notion of true equality in the workplace.

Unfortunately the media perpetuates the myth of equality via the propagation of these terms such as "opting out" and "choice". Is it really a choice to leave a career to raise kids when women have to be twice as good as a man just to keep up? The insidious problem about sexism today is that while it is usually no longer acceptable (not to mention legal) to be blatantly discriminatory in the workplace, there is no recourse, legal or otherwise, for women dying a slow death by a thousand small cuts. From the abstract of an academic paper on the topic (Soares, 2001. Women in science and technology: Restricted success. Quimica Nova 24:281-285):

Along the way [women] come across stumbling blocks that make their progress difficult. Most of these difficulties are not gender-specific, yet women encounter them more consistently than do men. It is remarkably true for the areas of Science and Technology.

Every Ph.D. learns about rejection. All else being equal, if a woman has to apply for several more grants before one gets funded or a dozen more jobs before she gets an interview, then that many more women will drop out before they do succeed. That alone would translate into significantly fewer women in higher academic positions. We can all name plenty of women who have achieved those positions, but that is not the point. The environment is such that highly driven people will likely achieve prominent standing in science, regardless of gender. The continuing disparity lies between those who put forth a fair amount of effort, are reasonable scientists, and succeed, and those who are at least as good at what they do and work hard at their research and teaching, and yet do not have the energy to keep fighting on and on after seemingly endless job and grant rejections. The former group is dominated by men; the latter group is dominated by women. In addition, because men are much more likely to believe they must be the primary breadwinner and thus have a full-time job, which for professional women remains "optional," it is highly likely that men in the latter scenario will indeed keep fighting longer to succeed. The mistaken conclusion is that this is due to some gender disparity in tenacity, when it is only due to society's expectations forming men's and women's expectations of themselves.

So the difference has nothing to do with ability, drive, competitiveness or any of the nonsense hypothesized by sociologists and Larry Summers. It simply has to do with a still unlevel playing field in day-to-day accomplishments versus rewards. Barres, with his experience both as a female and male scientist, is in a unique position to cut right to the heart of the issue:

I think people do what they are rewarded for doing, and I think women realize, whether it's conscious or unconscious, they are not going to get the rewards. So they put the hours into their families or whatever.

Barres does bring in the child support issue, which needs to be recognized as a worker issue, not a women's issue. However, he is still probably right to mention it in tandem with the higher hurdles women face because in our society child care is still considered a women's issue, and thus the lack of it results in a double-whammy:

It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don't get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what's fundamentally missing and absolutely vital is that women get better child care support.

Certainly no one can deny the truth of his last sentence. But until we all recognize that this is just one of many working conditions (such as long hours, short vacation times, etc.) that makes many jobs unpleasant for everyone, the gender disparity will continue. People have worked hard at societal attitudes over the years, and no one can say they haven't improved. But it would certainly help if the mainstream media weren't constantly reinforcing the myth that advancement at work is all about choice.

Labels: gender, humans, sociality

A recent article about research supporting a neurological (= biological) basis for altruism panders to the alarmist view that behavior with an identifiable biological basis precludes personal responsibility, and could throw our criminal justice system into an uproar.

The first statement that shows an ignorance of sociobiology and evolution:

The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

Why is this unexpected? In social animals, such a biological basis for morality would absolutely be expected. This is because morality governs social interactions, so animals who have evolved in the context of sociality have a biological need for it. Altruism is related to empathy, without which we cannot interact socially because we need a mechanism for assessing what another person is thinking or feeling. Those without empathy, such as autistics, are lost in the maze of unspoken rules that govern interpersonal interactions. Altruism is a way of acting on empathic information.

...some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

The idea that "morality is somehow degraded" because it has a biological basis really has no logic to it, but it is typical of those who confuse morality with religion. Perhaps the idea is analogous to someone we like doing something nice versus someone we do not like doing it. In the latter case we assume insidious motives because we do not believe the person is truly being altruistic. But the mistake there is that there is no such thing as pure altruism, as research shows. Either altruistic acts cause us to receive tangible benefits, such as increased standing in a community, or if anonymous, provide us with pleasure (Moll et al., 2006).

Of course morality and altruism are complex neurologically because human social interactions are complex. But a biological explanation for moral behavior does not indicate a lack of need of philosophers or even religious thinkers who study moral behavior such as altruism. Humans are faced with ethical decisions nearly every day, and it is not always clear what is the altruistic way to respond, even if that is our goal. That is why religious advisors, analysts, and advice columnists are not automatically out of a job just because automatic brain function reveals our options. Our brains often do not make obvious the decisive course of action, that is, the course of action having the most positive or least negative social consequences, in the balance. Social consequences are a real biological phenomenon, because decisions affecting an individual's social standing often affect that of an entire family, which shares genes.

For example, there is the potential problem of revealing or not revealing a friend's indiscretions, such as an extramarital affair. In the short term, revealing the truth might be bad for the social group, as bonds are broken. But in the long term, the earlier such a truth is revealed, the quicker wounds may heal and the social group rebuilt. Such a decision is necessarily affected by social norms of the community, which are of course extremely variable among societies.

The article points out that "a number of experiments such as the one by Grafman have shown that emotions are central to moral thinking." Of course this is true. Grafman and his colleagues (Moll et al., 2005) make it clear that moral reasoning is a complex process that uses both reasoning and emotional centers of the brain - there is no one specific brain structure that dictates morality, but rather a series of structures that must interact in a complex way to produce a moral decision. The role of emotion is understandable because a major purpose of emotion is social navigation; for example, laughter is a way of making a social connection with another person. Solitary-living animals have no need for emotions such as love, anger, envy, pride, etc., because feeling these or acting on these invariably involves the establishment, maintenance, or alteration of a social relationship.

While several brain structures interact to produce moral reasoning, those involved can be identified specifically because specific brain damage has predictive effects on moral behavior (Moll et al., 2005). For example, damage to the prefrontal cortex at an early age prevents normal development of moral reasoning. Such people often have short-term, self-centered responses to moral dilemmas, because they have no sense of the social consequences of their actions. A different region of the cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, is required as well because it is a center of social perception, i.e. empathy, which is also required for normal moral reasoning. The limbic system, a center of basic emotional drives, also affects morality because behavior such as aggression is controlled by this area, and can become uninhibited when parts of the limbic system become damaged. Functional MRI studies also have indicated activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (behind the eyes), the anterior temporal lobes, the insula, and the anterior cingulate cortex in people processing moral dilemmas posed to them.

The claim that these discoveries mean that "society has to rethink how it judges immoral people" (according to Adrian Raine, a USC neuroscientist) is absurd. There is a minimum standard of behavior that is acceptable in a society, and this minimum exists whether or not you are psychopathic (= brain damaged in a way that impairs interpersonal interactions due to lack of empathy). If some people are physically unable to make correct social decisions, it does not mean we must treat them as equals. Serial killers are psychopaths, and whether their brain damage is physical or developmental, they cannot be allowed to move freely in society because they have no internal constraints against killing. We lock them up so that they cannot damage society further. Most people would agree that a similar situation holds for pedophiles - there seems to be increasing evidence that most are incapable of being "rehabilitated," which is not surprising; their psychopathy is likely due to brain damage - which again can be physical or developmental - that cannot be repaired. Damaged people must be isolated from society because the structure of society must be protected for the sake of the non-damaged majority.

J. Grafman says, "Some of the questions that are important are not just of intellectual interest, but challenging and frightening to the ways we ground our lives. We need to step very carefully." Not at all. This information is simple and reasonable when understood in terms of maintaining a functional society.

An interesting moral phenomenon in humans involves the altruism of helping someone near and dear to you versus helping people in distant countries that you will never visit. The neuroscientist/philosopher Joshua Greene, interviewed in the article, gets the implications of this wrong:

"We evolved in a world where people in trouble right in front of you existed, so our emotions were tuned to them, whereas we didn't face the other kind of situation," Greene said. "It is comforting to think your moral intuitions are reliable and you can trust them. But if my analysis is right, your intuitions are not trustworthy. Once you realize why you have the intuitions you have, it puts a burden on you" to think about morality differently.

Yes, we evolved in a non-global world, and our knowledge of the plights of people around the world sets humans apart from other social animals. But that is not the point. What matters is that any type of altruism affects one's standing either in society, or to oneself. Our higher reasoning ability convinces us that faraway starving children are as important as the starving children next door - even as our emotions tell us otherwise - but this does not make our intuitions untrustworthy, it just adds potential complexity to the moral decisions we make. If one is a member of a church, for example, where such generous behavior is valued, it increases or maintains one's social standing to give to the needy in faraway places, it makes sense to do it. For many people, "charity begins at home" is an acceptable societal standard, and thus there is no burden to think about morality differently. Undamaged brains can still rely on their moral intuitions, and navigate their social world successfully.

Of course the different details of morality across cultures require us to be flexible in their moral reasoning. The social brain must adapt to local social conditions to successfully reproduce. This creates difficulties in a globalized world in which we not only are aware of the different moral values in different societies, but people from those different societies interact daily, not only in person, but probably more important these days, over the internet. To use an extreme example, people from societies that support individual rights for women have worked hard to stop what to us are sickening cultural practices such as female genital mutilation. Any Western woman is horrified by the practice with good reason - it not only is such an extreme example of oppression of women by men, which goes against our stated values (values that were hard won and still being fought for even in our "enlightened" society), but the long term health consequences are often dire. Yet efforts to eliminate the practice are often derailed by the women of those cultures themselves, because if they do not accept the ritual mutilation, they will be rejected by their society (and will not reproduce successfully there). It is nearly impossible to end such traditions by force. The values rejecting them must be inculcated in enough of the local population to the point where it becomes socially acceptable not to undergo the mutilation.

A similar example closer to home is the explanation of why most battered wives return to their husbands over and over again, contrary, it seems, to all reason. But in the cultures (and subcultures) in which wife-beating is common, breaking the cycle is so difficult because if a woman leaves her husband she often must give up her entire social group as well (and she often cannot fathom that it would be possible to become part of another social group, simple as that may seem in the abstract). Going it alone under such circumstances is contrary to our very nature as social beings.

It is completely natural for everyone to believe that their society's cultural norms are superior to everyone else's, because they know from experience that following those cultural norms make them successful. Of course though, if the same behavior is transferred to a society with different cultural norms, the result can be disaster. It is this naive sense of superiority (also held by most religious groups) that creates solutionless predicaments such as the current one in Iraq.

References

Moll, J., Krueger, F., Zahn, R., Pardini, M., de Oliveira-Souzat, R. & Grafman, J. (2006) Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 15623-15628.

Moll, J., Zahn, R., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Krueger, F. & Grafman, J. (2005) The neural basis of human moral cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 799-809.

Labels: behavior, brain, empathy, humans, morality, sociality

Frans de Waal is my new hero. He has performed a body of research on various non-human primates which has demonstrated that at least a minimal level, morality is a byproduct of sociality, rather than a unique human construct. His experiments are well designed, and essentially make it clear that the "golden rule" morality of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is an important system that helps hold many primate groups together.

As he writes in an essay from the New Scientist ("The animal roots of human morality," October 14, 2006, pp. 60-61):

In The Descent of Man [Darwin] wrote: "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts... would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man."

It is not hard to recognise the two pillars of human morality in the behaviour of other animals. These pillars are elegantly summed up in the golden rule that transcends the world's cultures and religions: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This unites empathy (attention to another's feelings) with reciprocity (if others follow the same rule, you too will be treated well). Human morality as we know it is unthinkable without empathy and reciprocity.

It has always been strange and interesting to me (as de Waal makes it clear it is interesting to him as well) that this basic rule does not seem to be recognized by a lot of people as the cornerstone to human morality. I believe it is embraced by secular humanists, but in many cultures, religion has interfered with and been confused with human morality, when in fact morality predates religion and in fact has nothing to do with religion. Religious morality is actually a set of rules to distinguish the practitioners of certain religions from the rest of the world, the "outsiders:"

Our evolutionary background makes it hard to identify with outsiders. We've been designed to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know, and to distrust anybody who doesn't look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.

Also:
Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire able to rid us of the curse of xenophobia. It is fragile, though. In our close relatives it is switched on by events within their community, such as a youngster in distress, but it is just as easily switched off with regards to outsiders...
(de Waal, "The empathic ape," New Scientist October 8, 2005 p. 52)

This relates to a previous post of mine on the tendency for humans to "switch off" their empathy when communicating over the internet, either to a specific individual through email, or via the blogging culture of mass demonization of a defined group or individuals supposedly representing that group.

It also turns out that the effort to conform in order to fit into society is not limited to humans, either. In a Nature article (Andrew Whiten, Victoria Horner & Frans B. M. de Waal, 2005. Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees.
Nature 437:737-740), de Waal and colleagues found that when two chimpanzees, from two different social groups, were each taught a different way of working the same machine to receive food, chimps not only learned the method taught the chimp from their group, but preferred it even when they figured out the other way too. From the abstract:

... A subset of chimpanzees that discovered the alternative method nevertheless went on to match the predominant approach of their companions, showing a conformity bias that is regarded as a hallmark of human culture.

The conclusion of that article states their experimental results plainly:

...[W]e found evidence of a conformist bias, identified in numerous human studies as a powerful tendency to discount personal experience in favour of adopting perceived community norms...

These results suggest an ancient origin for the conformist cultural propensities so evident in humans.

Here's one more interesting paper, which found that primates participating in games designed to see if animals will always act in their self-interest, often did not. This is a well known idea about humans in economic circles. For example, there is a game in which two people have to agree to accept a certain amount of money. If one person does not agree, neither gets the money, but if they both agree, they both do. If two people are given the same amount of money, each happily takes the reward. But although it is always to a person's benefit to accept any amount of money, most people will reject the money if they find out that the other person would get significantly more than they do. This result probably is not too surprising to most of us.

It is interesting, though, that de Waal and his colleagues have found a quite similar behavior in primates (Sarah F. Brosnana,and Frans B. M. de Waal, 2005. Across-species perspective on the selfishness axiom. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES 28:818):

We know that some nonhuman primates react to being relatively underbenefitted compared to a conspecific, which is irrational according to a strict self-interest paradigm.

I find myself disagreeing with the statement that this behavior is irrational, however. In the context of sociality, it is not, necessarily. The basis of sociality is reciprocity, and therefore it makes sense that even animals behave as if there has been an injustice in this case. I think a functional society needs to demonstrate that there is a minimum of justice. Those human societies in which this minimum is not met are not productive, or functional, in my opinion.


And based on experiments to look at the idea of sharing, another social behavior, in primates, these same authors state:

...there was virtually no sharing between the privileged individual and their less well-endowed partner...It is interesting, therefore, that the relatively benefited individuals did not exert more effort to equalize rewards.

Interesting, perhaps... but certainly consistent with human behavior as well.


Based on this extensive research on non-human primates, the origins of both conformity and morality are clearly pre-human. Each is a double-edged sword - the dangers of groupthink (especially within a "social group" of leadership) should be clear to everyone, and the "golden rule" can create problems when people across cultures (an everyday occurrence in today's world) are attempting to interact - treating someone the way you would want to be treated results in people taking offense all the time.

Humans love to believe we transcend biology, because we are not mere "animals." Based on de Waal's work, however, it seems we may be doomed to be limited by the structure of brains adapted to functioning within small societies. Globalization has been far too rapid to even imagine that any evolution to cope with its intricacies has occurred.

Labels: brain, empathy, evolution, morality, sociality

Pharyngula has already had an excellent post and subsequent discussion about last week's Times magazine article, "Darwin's God." Of course that's not going to keep me from my own pontification. I agree wholeheartedly with PZ on most points, but I hope to add to the discussion by commenting on what I thought were the more irritating quotes from the article.

The spandrels vs. adaptation dichotomy irritates me. An evolutionary spandrel may become adaptive in a context different from why it appeared. But the biggest problem with the whole article is the discussion of human evolutionary adaptation. Such discussions seem to be getting more and more popular, but are just a sign that our society today has swung way back to the "nature" explanations from the "nurture" explanations that were prevalent in previous decades. They are not any more valid today than they were a hundred years ago, but people actually have this idea that scientists have figured all this stuff out, just because we know how to sequence a gene now. Culture is completely intertwined with ecology for humans, and yet everyone wants to make ecological arguments for why we do things. It makes no sense. Culture is so plastic that anything said about evolutionary pressures hominids faced a million years ago is a made up just-so story. Evolutionary psychology is bogus, because it's just too easy to make up any story about humans' past that fits your pet theory.

Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one's mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all.

Although at first reading this seems an outrageous statement to a true atheist, I think on one level it has validity - I just argue with its assumptions about why some people apparently find it easier to believe in a god than not. The number one reason is culture: most of us have been brought up to believe in a god, so that does indeed become the default position for the majority out there who aren't that interested in thinking the idea through. For most, following the culture we are born into is not only simpler, but probably more adaptive as well (in terms of reproduction). But what that means is different for every place and time in human history.

Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people's heads.

This is an important point (touching on the importance of human sociality without spelling it out as such), and relates back to a previous post of mine.

They had learned that, in certain situations, people could be fooled -- but they had also learned that there is no fooling God.

The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls...

OK, this was commented on at Pharyngula, but I just have to add my agreement that this is one of the stupidest things anyone could say, and illustrates that the author of the article doesn't understand atheism at all. It also relates to something I have pointed out previously, that just because young children do something doesn't make it genetic. It's mind-boggling they could go from the previous statement about how important sociality is, to this statement which assumes babies live in some sort of vacuum and learn nothing about the society around them. And yet everyone knows and comments on the silly things toddlers do in imitation of adults and other kids. Belief in Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and God is learned.

"Our psychological architecture makes us think in particular ways," says Bering, now at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. "In this study, it seems, the reason afterlife beliefs are so prevalent is that underlying them is our inability to simulate our nonexistence."

I like this analysis of why afterlife belief is so prevalent. For each of us, the universe only exists as filtered through our bodily senses. There is no objective reality. So we cannot imagine a reality that does not involve the use of our senses. Because it is impossible to imagine it, our brains hurt less to assume it doesn't exist.

...religion filled people with "a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections."

It is just as easy to argue that the negative elements of religion would be destructive. Picking and choosing the "positive" aspects of religion is ridiculous, as Mark Twain pointed out in satirical essays about people who attribute all good to God, but do not blame God for all the horrible disasters in life (which in the life of the average person on this planet, arguably way outnumber the good things).

...helped them attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living.

Even if you argue that these are all components of successful religions, this is bogus because in most people's cases, this is only the facade and not how they actually live their lives. Was it more genuine in the past? No way to know. But clearly for the major religions today, there are too many cheaters in the system to make membership in a religion a reliable signal for a good mate. There is a literature on ecological relationships that shows the mathematical level at which a mutualism breaks down because the number of cheaters makes it nonadaptive to trust your partner - this selects against the cheaters, presumably, and in many nonhuman mutualisms, a balance is achieved through selection. But when it comes to humans, culture is once again complicating the issue. It is nonadaptive for beaten women to return to their mates over and over again, but domestic violence is often sadly a cultural norm. To an abused woman, there are usually other perceived social repercussions in defying that norm, not to mention the perception that they would be worse off without the beater. So nonadaptive behaviors on the individual level persist in humans (various other addictions are another example), due to cultural reasons that cannot be ignored when one is making 'evolutionary' arguments.

"Religious and secular rituals can both promote cooperation," Sosis wrote in American Scientist in 2004. But religious rituals "generate greater belief and commitment" because they depend on belief rather than on proof. The rituals are "beyond the possibility of examination," he wrote, and a commitment to them is therefore emotional rather than logical -- a commitment that is, in Sosis's view, deeper and more long-lasting.

Unlike PZ, I think I agree with this. There is more to being in some thing perceived as a religion than being a Trekkie. Yes, people love to form clubs, and that is an outgrowth of our sociality. But religion works best for forming groups because:

1) Most people hate to think - any teacher or professor knows this - because it takes more energy than not thinking. Religions are convenient for nonthinkers because since they involve non-factual matters of faith, there is always someone telling you how to think, so it is easy to be a member.

2) Religion also combines the group-forming with the comfort of someone telling you that your crappy little life has some larger meaning. It also tells you that you will live forever, which appeals to everyone's fear of death (which is completely natural - heck, yeah, I fear death, so I try not to think about it!). You are also being told in most successful religions that personal responsibility is not important. Either whatever happens to you is the fault of infidels, or you will be forgiven as long as you confess, etc. Man, how appealing is that?

3) Religion is much better in fostering the us vs. them dichotomy that humans again tend to by virture of sociality. Like ants, we have a need to recognize "nestmate" from "nonnestmate," because we are competing for resources with the "nonnestmates." Civil War reenactors don't have any particular adversary that bonds them as a group (except maybe all the non-Civil War reenactors who think they're nuts). Costumes, behavior, etc. all are useful many societies to recognize whether or not someone believes in your god or the wrong one.


In sum, I completely agree with others who found the idea that it is difficult to "resist" religion completely bogus. I, like PZ and others, feel no such tendencies whatsoever. Again it is clear the author doesn't truly understand what atheism is. For me, it is not only being a 'non-believer.' Much more important, it is being competely comfortable with a universe in which there is no God and in which where we are today was arrived at solely by chance. My worldview is as natural to me as the worldview of some one who claims to be 'religious.' Don't you dare patronize me by saying that it isn't, because it's just as easy for me to think you are the misguided nut as vice versa. I prefer live and let live, which means: don't try to convert me, and don't make laws affecting me that are based on your religion.

What is the true difference between natural atheists and natural theists? In my view, it is the desire to think deeply about the world at all levels, without having to believe that in the end my life has to have some sort of meaning that ties neatly into the natural world. My thought is the emergent sum of a lot of complex (to me) chemical and electrical processes. Death is the end of those processes, period. I used to wonder why open atheists were in the minority. (No matter what the polls say, I am skeptical that there are as few atheists as people believe.) Now I understand that the 'deep thinkers' that identify themselves as theists just need that crutch; they need to think that their life somehow has meaning within the vast unknowable universe. This seems a natural state for a social species - the need to be accepted by society could easily be projected onto a god as well, once the species achieves awareness that there is a lot more out there beyond their patch of forest. After all, your own personal god will never desert you, will always forgive you, etc. Those of us who don't feel the need to be accepted by a god may have less of a need to be accepted by society as well (although we tend to find our own godless societies to be a part of). We probably have transcended biology at some level, because knowledge has set us free.

Labels: evolution, humans, religion, sociality