Rationally Speaking

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 chock full 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.

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.

In case you haven’t noticed, election season is upon us! Ok, it has been upon us for almost two years, but never mind that. Pollsters are busy trying to determine why people might be voting for one candidate or another, with special attention being paid to the so-called undecided voters, on whose last-minute whim the fate of the nation -- and the world -- seems to hinge. Two recent studies, however, provide much food for thought about why people vote one way or the other, and about the reasons they give to themselves and others.

David Sloan Wilson, over at the Huffington Post, has replied to my criticism of his previous essay on why the so-called “invisible hand” guiding financial markets is, as he puts it, “morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably dead.” David and I have a good working relationship (he is one of the infamous “Altenberg 16”) and mutual respect, so the following is meant to be in the spirit of an open minded debate between two scholars. David agrees, contrary to many of our colleagues, that it is good for the public to see scientists honestly argue their diverging positions in public, so here it goes.First off, David claims that both conservative commentator Larry Arnhart and I “have objected to [David’s] declaration that the invisible hand is dead.” Arnhart has, I certainly have not. I completely agree that this pernicious idea has gone the way of the dodos in light of the events of recent years (at least from the Enron debacle on). I simply disagree that such a conclusion has anything whatsoever to do with hypotheses on the evolution of human morality and cognitive abilities.Wilson challenges my claim that evolutionary psychology cannot tell us much, as a science, about the evolution of social human behavior. He rhetorically asks “Would [Massimo] make the same claim about astronomy, geology, and paleobiology? Past events leave traces in the present that can be pieced together to produce solid knowledge.”

The nation’s economy is in deep trouble, which means financial woes all over the world, with millions of people affected. President Bush is hardly appearing in the news, as apparently “the Decider” has nothing to say about a disaster whose slow but sure build-up his so called administration has presided over for the last eight years. To compound disaster with disaster, the Treasury Department isn’t just trying to help by saddling the taxpayers with the sins of Wall Street; no, in perfect Bush style, Secretary Paulson is seeking to obtain from Congress -- and retain in perpetuity for his successors -- unfettered authority to intervene in the markets with essentially no oversight by the legislative branch.Throughout all this, David Sloan Wilson and Larry Arnhart have been debating whether evolutionary theory favors government regulation or not.

What on earth does evolutionary theory have to do with the global economy, one might reasonably ask?

You know you must be doing something right when both the Discovery Institute and the Institute for Creation Research get on your case! These two outlets of religious-centered non-thinking vehemently attacked my recent post on the inanity of choosing Sarah Palin as a Vice Presidential candidate -- which focused on her positions on teaching (she supports “equal time” for Creationism) and censorship (she has attempted to remove “offensive” books from a public library, going so far as threatening a librarian with being fired).

Sarah Palin, John McCain’s choice for Vice President should he win the November elections, is a worrisome character from the point of view of science education. It is hard to tell whether Palin herself is a creationist or not and, frankly, that’s far less important than the policy positions she holds in the matter. (Though, of course, having a Vice President who is deluded about basic aspects of reality would not be exactly reassuring. Oh, right, we already have had something along those lines for the past eight years, though Dick Cheney’s most dangerous delusions were not about who created the world.)

I have made the point several times on this blog that creationists (among whom I squarely classify so-called intelligent design proponents) simply don’t get it (or refuse to get it) when they claim that scientific controversies are a sign that there is something seriously wrong with science.

Au contraire, mon amis, science makes conceptual progress largely through discussions and disagreements among scientists, which eventually get settled because of new empirical discoveries. Now, controversies about the Bible, on the other hand... But I digress.

Big question this morning! Of course, plenty of philosophers and scientists have wondered about the question of what is life, and the answer has proved more slippery than everyone thought. We all think we know how to tell if something is alive or not, and yet it is remarkably difficult to come up with a precise definition of the concept (just like American Justice Potter Stewart once famously said of pornography).

Researchers have tackled the problem of cooperation (and the related one of the evolution of altruism) for some time now. Initial game theory models suggested that cooperative animals would quickly be supplanted by selfish ones because of a cost to cooperation, as in the the so-called simple prisoners’ dilemma.

In these situations, typically an individual can choose between an action that benefits everyone, but at a cost to oneself, and an action that clearly benefits the individual, but comes at the risk of greater loss if everyone adopts that strategy. It turns out that most of us would rather lose than share, a sad but to many not surprising commentary on the human condition.

However, people eventually realized that cooperation makes the most sense in social groups, where phenomena such as kin and reciprocal altruism can take place. Sure enough, if the prisoners’ dilemma game is played iteratively, instead of in just one round, and if the players are allowed to keep track of what other players are doing (i.e., to build “reputations”) then it turns out that cooperating, even at a certain cost to oneself, is the winning long-term strategy.

My colleague Peter Turchin over at the University of Connecticut (my Alma Mater) has recently published an intriguing short article in Nature (3 July 2008) on what he termed “cliodynamics,” the possibility of turning history into a science.

The word comes from Clio, the muse of history for the Greek and Romans, with the “dynamics” part referring to the central concept proposed by Turchin, that history -- contrary to what most historians might think -- is not just one damn thing after another, that there are regular and predictable patterns, from which we can learn and that we can predict.

David Chalmers is a famous philosopher of mind. His fame rests in great part on his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. It’s too bad that the crucial idea behind the book, dualism, is hopelessly flawed, and -- more surprising yet -- that Chalmers got away with one of the most idiotic thought experiments ever, which a lot of people inexplicably seem to think is oh-so-very clever.

This all came back to (my) mind because of a recent article in Philosophy Now by Rebecca Hanrahan (an assistant professor of philosophy at Whitman College in Washington state), who’s finally got the chutzpah to point out the obvious, telling it like it is about Chalmers’ famous “zombie argument.”