I’m Feeling Your Pain – An Intro to Concurrence

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Original Post (with comments)
Perhaps the most regularly recurring theme in this blog is the interplay between the quest for status and the human tendency to cooperate (both genetically driven) and our modern environment in leading to the behaviors we engage in and witness every day. That humans learned to cooperate is taken as a bit of an axiom in the study of hominid history, but something has been nagging at me for a while, and I’m just now getting to the point where I can articulate what I’ve come up with.

What if there is a genetically driven motivation that is larger than reciprocal altruism? I think there is. What if reciprocal altruism is just one manifestation (albeit a very critical one) of a heretofore elusive, but grand aspect of human nature? I think it is. This aspect of human nature is what I’ll call the need for concurrence.

Concurrence, in its most grand form, is perfect empathy. It is being able to mentally and emotionally relate to another person in a very deep way. It’s feeling someone else’s pain. It’s a profound connection between two people. Suppose the adaptation that Mother Nature found was an inherent desire to concur with other humans, and a consequence to getting to this deep emotional connection was the emergence of informal rules regarding favors done and favors owed. And lots more…but let’s back up for a moment.

In evolution, it’s always interesting to ponder the intermediates. In this case, we can imagine hominids like Australopithecus, who were not known for being big cooperators, and Homo sapiens, and we can wonder how natural selection bridged the gap. Did this human species of hominid just suddenly start cooperating, or did something happen before that? If I’m right about concurrence, then something did.
If we know that hominids who banded together to share resources and divide up duties fared better than hominids who did not, is it not reasonable to wonder what kind of primary emotion would produce that tendency for groups to come together? (When I talk about primary emotions, I’m talking about the ones you read about in books by Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux, the basic emotional programs, like fear and the quest for status, that underlie our more complex emotions, like anger and jealousy.)

From what I’ve read, the answer would be the emotional tendency to cooperate. But I have a hard time imagining how that would work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – there’s a lot I can’t imagine. However, I do not have a hard time imagining the emergence of a genetically-driven emotional drive to connect with another human. The cooperation part would simply be the fortuitous result, the one that natural selection seized upon, resulting in the reign of the human animal on earth.

So let’s suppose, just for fun, that I’m right, that there is an inherent human need for concurrence. Just think of how much it explains. Reciprocal altruism is only the tip of the iceberg. Concurrence could explain all sorts of social phenomena like, for example, that elated feeling at a rock concert when the whole place is glued to the same moment.

If the need for concurrence is a primary emotion, then it, like the others, is executed in different ways in different situations. In one-on-one situations, it can be seen as the pursuit of the direct emotional connection. In crowds, it can be seen as swimming in the same direction as the school, so to speak. Who can deny the visceral good feeling that comes from being in a crowd where everyone is focused on the same wonderful thing? If concurrence is real, then it explains that feeling – we’re pulled toward situations like that and we feel immense gratification when we encounter one. I know many people, and I am one of them, who appreciate big events (concerts, sporting events, etc.) for this reason every bit as much as for the name on the ticket. To be part of a happening, where everyone, for a short period of time, is concurring. To be part of a shared experience where a mass of individuals has been transformed into a collective entity, one that shows no signs of dissension in the ranks. This is human stuff. We are but moths to the flame.

But, as this blog vigilantly asserts, our primary emotions were not designed for this modern world. This means that, like status, concurrence has its downsides. Consider two teenage girls who are best friends. The desire, no, the need, for concurrence overrides the truth in many situations. If both girls are a bit heavy and are insecure about it, they can achieve deep concurrence by propping each other up with compliments to the contrary. Even though they know that the answer to, “Do these jeans make me look fat?” is, “No, your large ass makes you look fat,” they respond with, “No! They’re like totally cute.” The point is that, just as the quest for status often causes us to cut high-status people slack while we criticize low-status people, concurrence can distort truth when it is ill-advised in social situations. And on a larger scale, on the crowd scale, it can cause us to buy into fanatical causes.

For those for whom one-on-one interpersonal concurrence is hard to find, causes can act as a good surrogate. The feeling of swimming in the same direction of the school is like a hundred small-scale concurrences adding up to the effect of a deep one-on-one concurrence. (See Eric Hoffer’s, The True Believer.) The need for this distributed emotional connection, which, in this case, is the need to belong, trumps all else, logic and rationality included.

I’m just getting my arms around this idea and where I can take it, so I’ll stop here and come back with more as it develops. But I can’t help think that this will be the topic of my next book. The applications of this concept are mind boggling. And even if it isn’t true, even if the whole thing is nonsense, it’ll be a great exercise to find that out. Thoughts?

Airplane Chatter and the Bar of Belief

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Original Post (with comments)
I very rarely get chatty with people on airplanes. I am generally nose down in a book or I’m crashed. But this afternoon, for some reason, I got to talking with the guy next to me, and we ended up talking for the entire 80 or so minutes we were in the air. He noticed that I was reading (still reading – it’s taking forever, for some reason) Susan Jacoby’s, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, so he asked what secularism was. I never got the guy’s name, so we’ll call him Jimbo (He seemed like a Jimbo to me.).

Jimbo said that he watches “The O’Reilly Factor” and that O’Reilly regularly talks about the war between Judeo Christians and the secularists. He said he’d been wondering what it was and that, since I had a book on it, he figured he’d ask me. So, I explained to him what it meant to be a secularist, and I expressed that I thought O’Reilly’s fear that a secular world would be a moral vacuum was overblown. I really expected him to be a Christian, but Jimbo said he wasn’t religious, that he just concentrated on being a good person. My kind of guy. So we proceeded to discuss all kinds of topics, and it quickly became apparent to me that Jimbo was two things:

  1. An alcoholic
  2. Not very discriminating in determining what he believes

I counted five beers on the short ride from Atlanta to Memphis. Now, far be it from me to call someone an alcoholic without cause, but five beers in 80 minutes by yourself on a Sunday night before a work day raises a red flag. Then, after I explained that my wife is in the medical field, he went on to reveal that his doctor told him he has a fatty liver. Yikes – that’s the condition that precedes cirrhosis. Anyhow, it was Jimbo’s reaction to this news (“Doc says I should stop drinking, but I don’t really drink that much.”), along with his comments about several other things that led me to believe that he believes what is comforting to him, rather than what makes sense.

For example, Jimbo only drinks “purified water.” He says it is “ionized, deionized” (whatever that means). Jimbo says it means they inject extra oxygen into it, which, as everyone knows, is good for you. I asked Jimbo what made him think that was better. I asked him what he thought the primary oxygen in-take mechanism in the human body is. He correctly noted that it was the mouth and the nose. OK, Jimbo, after that. He looked a little puzzled so I helped him out. It’s the lungs, buddy. The blood that courses around the lungs is picking up oxygen. The blood cruising around the stomach isn’t worried about oxygen, I said. One thing I really liked about Jimbo was that he didn’t ever feign certainty. To my comments, he just said, well maybe there’s something else going on there. Wisdom comes out of nowhere sometimes.

Jimbo also told me that he has been doing a lot of reading (on the internet) about homeopathic medicine. He explained that pharma companies aren’t interested in curing anyone because it cuts into their profits. As I happen to consult in the pharma industry, I took the opportunity to probe a bit further. It seems that Vitamin C is the cure for cancer, but the drug companies have managed to successfully keep that information from the public. So, I asked Jimbo how he came to find out this well-guarded secret. He said he just looked around on the internet. So, I asked why he thought Rathergate exploded through the internet while the cure for cancer sat there, with very little public awareness. He just gave me a quizzical look. I told him that I believe that the personal benefits that await any individual associated with curing cancer would render the cure all but inconcealable. Quizzical again, he said, “Yeah, I guess it’s really hard to know what’s true and what’s not.” There’s that wisdom again.

When we initially started talking, talking about religion, I explained that believing in religion is expensive, because it forces people to go to a lot of trouble to live a certain way, a way that does not come exactly naturally. I said that if I was going to buy in, it’d take a lot of convincing. He was on board with that. So, as the plane was about to land, I remarked to him that just about any belief has a cost, and that some of things we’d discussed have very serious ones (He said he didn’t have much use for regular doctors, especially the one who told him about his fatty liver.). I think he agreed with this, at least in principle. As we parted ways, I asked Jimbo to promise me that, if he ever got cancer, he’d see a doctor AND eat his vitamin C. He smiled and nodded his head as he walked into the bar to catch the last two minutes of the Atlanta/Philly game. Nice guy. Misled, but nice.

As I walked on, all I could wonder was how many Jimbos are out there. How many really cool, really friendly, really ethical people are saddled with an inability to tell truth from fiction? How many people have the best of intentions, the discipline to do what’s right, but lack the wisdom to know when their minds are choosing ideas that give them the illusion of control in a chaotic world. (Vitamin C? Purified water?) Whatever the number, it’s too high. My quest is enlightenment for the Jimbos of the world. I wonder if he’ll think about what we talked about. I know I did.

Evolution versus Creationism – Part 3 – Intelligent Design

Chris Wilson2 Comments

Original Post (with comments)
(Warning – this is longer than usual. What’d you think – enlightenment is free?)
How do you get from primordial soup to living cell? That’s it. That’s the kryptonite in the creationist’s napsack. But that seems to be where it stays. They rarely (if ever) actually pull it out and examine it. How many times I have heard, “Ah, but intelligent design disproves everything you’re saying.” When I try to respond, deaf ears. The answer is somewhat complicated, so I somewhat understand, but it somewhat irks me that many creationists aren’t willing to fully examine what they believe, especially given how vehemently they believe them. This I also understand…somewhat.

They assume the Kryptonite works because it was handed to them by someone in whom they have implicit trust. If they put it to the test, this, the last hope for an argument that has been all but decimated in every debate it has entered, what happens if it fails? What happens if the evolutionary scientist is not weakened by the moment? What happens if the non-believer walks up, grabs the rock, crushes it into a fine powder, and sniffs some of it up his nose, and lives?! These are serious questions for some. Not me.

One thing I like about believing as I do is that I really have nothing invested in my beliefs, with the exception of my admittedly irrational belief in rationality as a superior method of thinking. But beyond that, I could change my mind about anything. Sure, it might be hard to get used to something new, but I’d be OK. All I need is for an assertion to meet my evidentiary requirements, then I’m the first to start exploring the logical consequences of it on my life. Creationists, however, do not enjoy such luxuries. Their belief in God’s creation of the world is the capstone on the arch of their religious faith. If it falls, the arch falls, and life as they know it changes forever. As I am the type to rip off the band-aid all at once, to the truly open-minded, I say get on with it. So let’s pull out the Kryptonite and take a look.

Here’s what’s about to happen, and it may not be pretty. I’m going to put forward a theory for how you get from non-living chemicals floating around in a liquid to a living cell. It all comes down to chemistry and the theory of self-organization, which is most eloquently articulated by Stu Kauffman in, At Home In The Universe. (You simply cannot consider yourself a scientist without knowing what’s inside this book.) I will start by drawing attention to the fact that something this ostensibly miraculous is actually not so uncommon in nature – we’ll look at phase transitions. Then, we’ll look at how connections between entities can become so complex that the entity itself eventually becomes something entirely different (via, you guessed it, a phase transition). I’ll then bring these two ideas together by talking about a chemical reaction network and how you to get to catalytic closure. Finally, we’ll use some back of the envelope stats to conclude that life from chemicals in a soup is not only possible; it’s probable. So consider yourself warned – serious scientifigeekification ahead.

Phase Transitions
The idea that something seemingly random can suddenly transform into something orderly may seem strange. In the world of science, these transformations are called phase transitions. The easiest example is ice. The arrangement of the molecules in liquid water is pretty much random in the sense that the nature of water is not dependent upon the specific arrangement of water molecules. But suddenly, when the temperature of the water reaches 0 degrees Celsius, the water molecules assemble themselves into the orderly substance we call ice. If you look at ice molecules under a microscope, they are crystallized in a stacked arrangement – an orderly arrangement. Ice is, in fact, defined by the arrangement of the constituent molecules as much as it is by the temperature. The phase transition in this case is the change in the physical state from liquid to solid, which corresponds to a change from disorder to order.

The point of this is to suggest that the emergence of complex life was just a phase transition, where a teeming soup of replicating molecules transformed into a cornucopia of living diversity. It’s really about connections. The following toy problem illustrates what I mean.

Buttons and Thread
Imagine throwing 1000 buttons onto a hardwood floor. Now randomly pick two buttons and connect them with a string of thread, and put them back down. Keep doing this. Sometimes you’ll pick up two buttons you haven’t picked up before. Sometimes, one or the other will already have a thread tied to it. No matter, you just keep connecting buttons. Over time, you’ll find that when you pick up some buttons, they are interconnected with several others. This is an example of a random graph. We’ll call these interconnected clusters webs. If you keep glancing at the whole floor as you connect pairs of buttons, you’ll start to see that more and more webs are emerging. You’ll start to see “islands” of buttons with nothing connected to them, bordered in all directions by webs of varying sizes. If you keep going, you’ll find that webs begin to become connected to other webs, resulting in larger and larger webs. You’ll also find that fewer and fewer islands remain. Eventually, the whole thing will be connected; it will become one big web. But it doesn’t happen steadily.

This random graph undergoes the equivalent of a phase transition when the ratio of buttons to threads reaches 0.5. So you can actually predict when the giant web will emerge! When there are 500 threads on the floor, something happens. Below 0.5, all you have is random assemblage of webs and islands – and the largest web is pretty small (a maximum of say 100 buttons). But as you approach 0.5, the webs get larger and begin to interconnect but there are still quite a few of them. But as the 0.5 mark is passed, whamo, the majority of the webs become interconnected, in one giant web. And it doesn’t matter how many buttons you use. If you throw 10,000 on the ground, as soon as there are 5000 threads, you can be sure that there will be a giant web. This is a classic example of a phase transition.

The key thing to take away from this is the idea that a phase transition can almost instantaneously change the face of things. Below 0.5, the random graph above is nothing more than a bunch of buttons and threads random connected and strewn about. Above 0.5, you quickly have a makeshift fishing net! Think about that. If you found this button and thread net hanging in your garage, would you think of it as a net or as a collection of buttons and threads? This is abstraction at its finest, and it happens via phase transitions. So what, right? Why should we believe they play a role in the origin of life explanations? Well let’s try a random graph with chemicals.

Reaction Networks
Considering how the random graph underwent a phase transition, let’s jump from talking about abstract non-living systems to talking about abstract living systems. A metabolic (or chemical) reaction graph is a graph with chemicals represented as circles, reactions represented as squares, lines indicating the reactions between chemicals, and arrows pointing to the products of chemical reactions. Here’s an example…

They come in handy when you want to visually represent all of the reactions that take place between a certain set of molecules. A reaction graph (or reaction network) is a good way to show what’s going on within a chemical system. For simplicity, we’ll look at an abstract reaction graph. Instead of using real chemicals and concerning ourselves with the specific details of reactions, this reaction graph will use generic chemicals and some simple kinds of reactions.

In chemistry, reactions are really nothing more than molecules breaking apart and mixing together to form new molecules or energy or both. Imagine chemical A and chemical B. You can turn chemical A into chemical B, and vice versa. These are one substrate, one product reactions. You can also combine A and B to get AB, and you can cleave AB to form A and B. Simple, you’re now an expert at chemistry. From there, you just add more chemicals and do more of the same kind of thing.
For example, look some more reactions you can get from As and Bs:
AB + A = AA + B
AB + A = ABA
AB + A = A + BA
I could go on and on showing the endless ways these chemicals could react to produce new chemicals. But that is not my purpose. The relevance of the reaction graph is that it works a lot like the button and thread network. Basically, you can think of the buttons as chemicals and the reactions as threads. Here’s what really matters: A network of chemicals can emerge from a random soup of chemicals simply by tuning the ratio of chemicals to reactions.

Instead of throwing buttons on the floor, let’s throw a bunch of generic chemicals into a beaker. If you’re dumb enough to try this, please place your computer next to the beaker so that there is a high likelihood that it will be destroyed if something goes wrong. I’d hate to get sued. Anyhow, for any set of chemicals, a chemist could predict what reactions would take place. The laws of chemistry dictate what the reaction graph will look like. Not too exciting really. But what happens when you add more chemicals to the mixture? You get a whole bunch more reactions. Things start picking up a bit. Thinking in terms of As and Bs, this makes sense. It’s easy to grasp that mixing AA and BB will have more possible reactions than mixing A and B. There are only three possible reactions when mixing A and B:

A can become B
B can become A
A and B can become AB
That’s about it. But look at AA and BB.
AA and BB can become A and ABB
AA and BB can become AAB and B
AA and BB can become AB and AB
AA and BB can become A and AB and B
AA and BB can become AABB
AA and BB can become A and A and B and B

It turns out that as the molecules get bigger, as you add Cs, Ds, and so on, the number of possible reactions increases exponentially. This is not only because of the reactions that can proceed between the initial chemicals. The products of those reactions then become the substrates for new reactions, thereby further increasing the number of reactions. So as you add more and more molecules, the number of reactions that can take place goes up very quickly. And just like the button and thread web, when the ratio of molecules to reactions gets to a certain point, the whole thing becomes an interconnected network.

Now for the big question: can we imagine a reaction graph for a set of chemicals that could lead to the origin of life? In other words, what would the reaction graph of the primordial soup look like? Since there is really no way of knowing, the best we can do is to explore the idea in generic terms to see if anything interesting happens.

Catalytic Closure
Self-organization theory, by putting together the notion of phase transitions together with the complexity of chemical networks, actually shows how the interconnected network can become collectively autocatalytic (self-perpetuating, stable, and catalytically closed), meaning the whole thing can provide for itself, withstand being perturbed, and just keep on running – like a living organism. The secret ingredient is a decent helping of catalysts.

Without catalysts, the fact is that the network is pretty boring. Yes, once the ratio of reactions to chemicals gets high enough, the whole thing becomes connected. But just being connected isn’t enough to produce life. Chemicals just sitting in a beaker together don’t always react very quickly – even if they are connected. Like a bunch of shy kids at a school dance, they take a while to warm up to each other and start interacting. If the kids are too shy, the dance never takes off and everyone ends up going home early. Similarly, a beaker with a set of chemicals that don’t react very much isn’t going to lead to the emergence of life – that’s for sure. Thankfully, catalysts are big stars in the world of chemistry.
Catalysts push chemical reactions along. In the school dance, this would be the equivalent of a teacher convincing little Jimmy to ask Mary Sue to dance. So the reaction graph we’re after has to have catalysts. But since everything is connected, all chemicals are either substrates or products. That means that some chemicals will have to act as catalysts in addition to their day jobs as substrates and products. This is acceptable. There are plenty of examples of this in nature.

But the mere presence of catalysts still doesn’t get us to catalytic closure. In order for the system to become autocatalytic, a set of connected catalyzed chemicals must be present. Within the larger connected web of reacting chemicals, there must exist a subweb of catalyzing reactions. Catalytic closure, which Kauffman asserts should be a major component of any definition of life, means the system is continuously reacting using chemicals it has or produces. Little pockets of catalyzed reactions in the system won’t achieve this. The catalyzed reactions must all be connected to get closure. Luckily, with the help of our old friend statistics, this is not too hard to imagine.
The question now is what is the likelihood that a system with a connected catalyzed reaction subgraph would arise naturally in the primordial soup? Is it a fairytale or could it actually happen? To find out, we really need to know which chemicals can serve as catalysts in any given system. But rather than get tangled in analyzing each chemical, let’s just assume that each chemical has a one in a million chance of catalyzing any given reaction. As remote as these chances may seem, we can still easily show how increasing molecular diversity will inevitably result in the emergence of a collectively autocatalytic set.

Think back to the fact that chemical reactions increase exponentially as the number of molecules in a system increases. If you keep raising the diversity of molecules in the beaker, eventually the ratio of reactions to molecules will reach a million to one. Therefore, the average chemical in the system will undergo a million different reactions. So, probability tells us that each chemical will then catalyze at least one reaction (remember it has a one in a million chance). That means that the ratio of catalyzed reactions to molecules in the system would then be 1.0. At that point, it is highly likely that a large web will emerge, containing a fully connected catalyzed reaction subgraph. At that point, it will be collectively autocatalytic – and alive.

This explanation may seem too generic to be real but that is the point. The key to this line of reasoning is the idea that once any chemical mixture gets to a certain level of complexity, it is easy to see how living order can emerge. It needn’t necessarily even be organic; that just happens to be what was around on earth way back when. If we change the likelihood of catalysis to one in two million, well then the system just needs to have more living diversity, which is really just more time. The message is that the primordial soup had eons of time to work with. It is entirely plausible (and actually very probable) that the molecular diversity became sufficient to cause phase transitions that resulted in collectively autocatalytic, living systems. If this seems like the ultimate just-so scientific explanation, I understand. I’ve only scratched the surface on it. Stu Kauffman is the father of self-organization theory, so you can expect much better from him. Read his book for the juicy details – there’s depth to be absorbed.
My only aim in this lengthy discussion has been to propose a VERY plausible way to get around the supposed intelligent design problem. Once again, we are confronted with the limits of man’s imagination, not the limits of nature. So…I say again, please bring me an argument against evolution that holds water. Please.

Evolution Versus Creationism – Part 2 – Ring Species

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Original Post (with comments)
It appears, from my inbox, that I’ve started something here. (He says as he feigns surprise.) All objections point to “intelligent design” as the achilles heel of Darwin’s elegant theory. It appears that this is the real anchor for creationists. They envision it as the AHA! moment in the debate, when deity denying evolutionists will scamper for the corners. Ahem. Not this one. But before I demolish this red herring of an argument, let me just put another nail in the coffin of one other creationist argument – the notion that the fossil record does not back up the assertions of evolution’s apologists. Let’s talk about ring species.

Ring species provide a unique glimpse into how some species came to be. Here’s the dull version: A ring of populations encircles an area of unsuitable habitat. At one location in the ring, two distinct forms coexist without interbreeding. Around the rest of the ring, the traits of one species change gradually through intermediate populations into the second species’ traits. Yawn.
Now let me just quote the master himself, Richard Dawkins:

The best known case is the Herring Gull/Lesser Black-backed Gull ring. In Britain these are clearly distinct species, quite different in color. Anybody can tell them apart. But if you follow the population of Herring Gulls westward round the North Pole to North America, then via Alaska across Siberia and back to Europe again, you notice a curious fact. The ‘Herring Gulls’ become less and less like Herring Gulls and more and more like Lesser Black-backed Gulls until it turns out that our European Lesser Black-backed Gulls actually are the other end of a ring that started out as Herring Gulls. At every stage around the ring, the birds are sufficiently similar to their neighbors to interbreed with them. Until, that is, the ends of the continuum are reached, in Europe. At this point, the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull never interbreed, although they are linked by a continuous series of interbreeding colleagues all the way round the world. The only thing that is special about ring species like these gulls is that the intermediates are still alive. All pairs of related species are potentially ring species. The intermediates must have lived once. It is just that in most cases they are now dead.
“Gaps In The Mind” from A Devil’s Chaplain (2003)

As has previously been stated, the fossil record is indeed discontinuous, but the preferred explanation is not that the life forms required by evolutionary theory did not exist. With ring species, evolving viruses and bacteria, the maturation of the human immune response, and many other examples, it’s obvious that evolution happened and is still happening in lots of circumstances. Nevertheless, it’s truly amazing how easy it is to disbelieve the obvious when you desperately want to. A good friend, a creationist no less, when commenting on women who know their men are cheating but stay anyway, is fond of saying, “They want to believe.” That always strikes me as funny. (You know I love ya, buddy.)

Evolution Versus Creationism – Part 1

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Original Post (with comments)
There are far too many people who approach evolution as a theory which opposes most religious creation myths. So I have no choice but to spend some time on the evolution versus creationism debate. There are large books dedicated to making a case for creation science – as if it could ever be considered scientific. Rather than make this a treatise on the evolution versus creationism debate, I’ll stick to the best (yet startlingly inadequate) of the creationists’ arguments against evolution. The first is regarding the so-called “design problem”.

The question is how could evolution by way of natural selection have created such staggering living complexity. How could it create something as complex as a human eye, for example? After all, if evolution brings about changes gradually by acting on the occasional mutation, how could something as sophisticated as a binocular eye have emerged? To answer this, consider the time when the Earth was populated with simple animals – some of them with no eyes. Of course, natural selection was around back then – always finding the fittest animals to create subsequent generations. So the issue with binocular vision is the intermediate steps. What possible value could half an eye confer upon its host? It turns out that natural selection is quite handy at using seemingly innocuous talents to an animal’s advantage.

For example, imagine a population of little slug-like animals. These animals slide along the ground eating bacteria and such. They also happen to be the favorite food of another, more sophisticated crab-like animal. These crabs hunt during the day, gobbling up slugs whenever they find them. Now imagine that one day a slug emerges with a thin patch of cells on its dorsal side. It just so happens that this set of cells is light sensitive. Before your BS detector goes off, remember that evolution has millions of years to work with. Nature randomly explores the range of mutations quite well over that kind of time.

So the imaginary slug has light sensitive cells. When the slug is exposed to sunlight, these cells contract causing the slug to move away from the light. Now selection goes to work. Since the slug’s mortal enemy is the crab and the crab only hunts during the day, the mutated slug will enjoy a reproductive advantage over its contemporaries. During the day, while they’re randomly sliding around looking for bacteria, the mutant stays put in a shady hiding spot. The crabs pick off the others while the mutant is safe. It is easy to see how the mutant would live to make baby slugs. Over time, the population of slugs would be filled with light-sensitive individuals. Now imagine that a new predator comes on the scene.

This lizard-like animal hunts both day and night by using scent detection. The lizard doesn’t see very well so it uses its tongue to detect scent changes in the air. Now suppose that, when a slug feeds, the chemical reactions taking place give off a specific odor. The lizard has the ability to detect this odor. When it detects the scent, it follows it to its origin and eats the slug. So what happens if a new slug mutation causes the light-sensitive patch to be able to detect motion? Those with this new mutation would be able to detect the presence of the lizard and stop feeding. Those without it would continue to feed, oblivious to the threats around them. The continued emission of the odor would attract the lizard to them and that would be that. Again, thanks to selection, this mutation would flourish in the population.

These two just-so explanations are more than plausible given the long periods of time evolution has to work with. We can invent one after another until we arrive at an animal with a very sophisticated visual system. The point is that intermediate stages of design do exist and natural selection makes handy use of them. Moreover, given the choice between an argument that defies all natural explanation and an argument that is plausible, the clear thinker will choose the latter. There really is no design problem.

With the design problem worked out, I’ll turn to the question of transition fossils. Creationists typically do not accept the above explanation of the design problem because they argue that even if the intermediate stages were useful, the fossil record does not show the transitional forms that led to the current designs. They would say that there are no fossils of early light-sensitive slugs so they must not have existed. But this is not exactly true. In fact, the fossil record shows many intermediate designs. The transitional fossils between amphibians and reptiles are so various that it is extremely difficult to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. It doesn’t help matters that the prevailing system of classification of animals is somewhat arbitrary in its assignment of type.

For example, the dinosaur Archaeopteryx is clearly an intermediate between reptiles and birds – even though reptiles and birds don’t seem that closely related when you look at today’s zoological classifications. This is simply because early taxonomists didn’t have access to the information we have today. If we were to now reconstruct animal taxonomy based upon genetic similarity, we’d end up with a whole new classification system. This would be a big change so I doubt it will ever be done. But it doesn’t really matter. Even though this situation is a bit of a thorn in our side, the facts are still the same – there are plenty of transition fossils to lend credence to selection’s role in shaping life on Earth.

Creationists also like to highlight their misunderstanding of thermodynamics in their quest to overthrow evolution. Their argument is that evolution disobeys the second law of thermodynamics. They are referring to entropy, the idea that systems tend toward disorder from order. The order and complexity of living systems, in their view, is something that could not have emerged because systems should be moving toward disorder and simplicity. But this is simply incorrect.

For one thing, the second law of thermodynamics doesn’t really deal with order and disorder.  It deals with energy and how it flows in and out of systems. The second law of thermodynamics actually tells us that something complex can spontaneously emerge from something simple if the energy of the complex entity is lower than the energy of the constituents. Ice is a good example. But even if we put that aside, the second law also only deals with closed systems. An open system (meaning energy and/or matter can flow in and out of it) has no such restrictions. The creationist’s argument is like saying that a bicycle is impossible because entropy would force the components apart. But this is absurd. In this case, a bicycle is an open system. The energy applied by the mechanic to put it together is all it takes to make a bicycle from its parts. As long as living systems are open systems, the second law of thermodynamics can have no real bearing on their complexity. The inflow of energy and resources from the environment can account for any and all levels of complexity seen in living organisms.

The last major argument creationists tend to make against evolution is the silliest, in my opinion. The Bible lays out a timeline for man that is about 10,000 years long. Adam and Eve were supposedly created 10,000 or so years ago. But archaeologists have found multitudes of humanoid fossils that date back 2 million years. So creationists dispute our current dating techniques. They cite the decay of the Earth’s magnetism and the fallibility of Carbon 14 dating as evidence that the Earth is really only 10,000 years old. The reality is that the Earth’s magnetism is known to have reversed many times in its history. So it may be true that extrapolating the decay into the past indicates that the magnetism changed 10,000 years ago. But that certainly doesn’t lead to the conclusion that the world is 10,000 years old! Furthermore, Carbon 14 dating has been proven accurate countless times. This is just the kind of denial of reality that comes with trying to make facts fit theories instead of the other way around. It doesn’t work.

I’ve read several books on creationism and I have yet to run across one that puts forth an even remotely reasonable argument. As always, I’m willing to change my mind, but not based upon what’s currently out there. Anyone got anything better?

Life, Einstein, and Texas Hold Em

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Having been in Las Vegas for the week on business, my mind has been swirling around gambling. Something occurred to me as I was watching some folks play cards in the MGM Grand. Actually, as my main objective was to get a bit loose, I was trying to do the math on which was the better financial move – dropping $10 a drink every half hour or losing money gambling while getting free drinks. This kind of absurd contemplation is not abnormal for me – I often don’t realize it’s happening until something shakes me from it. This time, it happened when I realized that there are insights to be found in thinking about life as a hand of Texas Hold Em poker (hereafter simply referred to as “poker”).

I’ll admit up front that this analogy is limited in its reach, however, the similarities are actually pretty interesting. In “poker,” players are dealt two cards face down. Think of those as genes. Then, the dealer proceeds to reveal three cards, known as the flop. Then another card, the turn, and then a final card, the river, are revealed. The flop, the turn, and the river are communal cards, so players combine any three of them with their two cards to make a hand of poker. In between each of these revelations, players have the opportunity to bet on their hand, even though they don’t know the outcome until they see the river card. Think of communal cards as the environment. So, essentially, the object of the game is for players to play their two cards in conjunction with the right combination of communal cards to win the hand. Here we see stark parallels between “poker” and life.

The first and most dramatic similarity is this – even if you start out with the best two cards available (two aces, for example), it’s still possible to lose. On the other hand (forgive the pun), you can start out with what appears to be nothing (say, a two of hearts and a four of clubs) and end up winning. Such is life. But before we get too far, maybe it’s worth considering what it means to win.

In poker, there’s no confusion about this. In life, however, not so. To some people, a lot of people, winning means getting rich or becoming powerful. To others, winning is being well liked. To still others, winning means nothing more than not losing. To me, winning means spending as much time as possible living the good life, which is living a life inspired by love, guided by knowledge, and free from unnecessary constraints. The love and knowledge part, which is the most uncommon of common sense, comes from Bertrand Russell (“What I Believe,” essay from 1925. Now found in Why I Am Not A Christian, Touchstone, 1957). The freedom from unnecessary constraint part comes from me.

I believe people erect all sorts of mental barriers to their enjoyment of life. They buy into social pressures and unreasonable traditions without fully examining them, which dramatically reduces their assessment of the options available to them. Take, for example, the notion that you must have a 9-5 job to be responsible. It is a rare case indeed for someone who chooses an “unorthodox” career to not be inundated with warnings and disapproving advice from people who supposedly have their best interests at heart. And these are the few who make it over the barrier. We’ll never know how many aspire to, but do not. But this is about “poker.”

Suppose you’re dealt two aces right from the start. This would be the equivalent of being born with natural talent and/or good looks. But in life, just as in poker, the environment ultimately tells the tale. You can be very smart and/or good looking and it will amount to nothing if you’re born into poverty in a place where upward mobility is all but impossible. In poker, two aces will end up yielding a measly pair if the communal cards don’t work with them. (It’s such a letdown to see 3,5,7,9,10 when you start out with such a bang.) But sometimes, you can start with nada and come out on top.

Say you’re dealt a two of clubs and five of hearts. This isn’t encouraging. Many people will fold, which is not at all insignificant. In life, it’s easy to fall prey to the idea that winners are winners because they’ve had it good from the start. Sure, this is the case sometimes. But, especially in America, how you start out has a lot less influence than what you do with what you’ve got.

In “poker,” with a two and a five, if the flop shows three fives, you’ve got yourself four of a kind, regardless of what happens with the turn and the river. It’s very likely that you’re going to win, even though you started with pretty much nothing. Oh, if life could be so easy. Don’t get me wrong – sometimes it is, sometimes, for some people. But, usually, life comes with the following sinister complication: you may indeed have a winning hand (that is, your genes and the environment in which they find themselves), yet you may never enjoy the fruits of it. This is where the limitations of this analogy begin to reveal themselves. Luckily, however, other poker games offer the opportunity to further mix some already slightly pureed metaphors.

In Texas Hold Em, at least from what I’ve seen, after the river card is shown, you reveal your cards and it’s obvious who has won. If it isn’t, the dealer makes the call. But there are some poker games, like seven card stud, where you have to proclaim what you have in your hand. If you mistake what you have, you can lose, even if your cards are better than anyone else’s. As a silly example, if you claim three of a kind when you have a full house, you’ll get beat if someone has something better than your three of a kind, even if it won’t beat a full house. This is a lot like life.
I’ve known so many people with wonderful talents and attributes who didn’t recognize them because they were focused on the talents and attributes they didn’t have. Far from making the best of the cards in their hand, they spent their time lamenting that they did not have the cards they wanted. And in those occasional moments of truth, they looked down at their cards and saw a pair when they had a straight. They acted accordingly…and lost, which means they failed to realize their aspirations (which were misplaced to begin with). It needn’t have been this way.

The value of the poker analogy (strained as it is in places) is that we can infer two very practical rules about winning at life. The first is simple – it aint over till the last card is overturned. Things may not start out pretty, but that doesn’t mean we’re destined to lose. From this, we derive determination and hope. Conversely, if we start out with all the cards, we should take care not to assume that we will still have all the cards when the chips are pulled from the middle of the table. From this, we learn humility and an appreciation for accomplishment. The second big takeaway is a mandate of sorts.

In the card game of life, we must play the cards in our hand, not anyone else’s. We must play them; we cannot allow them to play us. Our environment will, in many cases, be beyond our control. Our best chances for winning come from working with it, not against it. Therefore, we must make the most of our cards, which, more than anything else, requires us to see them for what they are. If we start with a five and a two off-suit (or bushy eyebrows, crazy hair, and an ostensible inability to mentally focus on anything for long), we can’t be shooting for a royal flush (or a life on the red carpet). It will never happen, so any communal cards that offer false hope to that end must be ignored – better to see our cards for what they are and be on the lookout for communal cards that compliment them. Einstein produced some of his most remarkable work as a patent clerk in Switzerland. Had he lamented that a teaching position was not in his cards, he may not have had the motivation or energy to dwell on the toughest questions that have ever faced mankind. Instead, he exploited his environment to make the most of his extraordinary genes, and we are all the better for it.

As for me, I took a seat at the bar. The cards in my hand were shaped like dollar bills and I didn’t have enough of them to risk my buzz on bad luck. Such is life in pursuit of the option…

Hope, Despair, and the Need to Believe – An Argument for Reason

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Original Post (with comments)
I want to follow up on a comment about the post from two days ago. Michael Gersh (of Zero Base Thinking fame), has this to say about the opinions of many of secularists who come off more as anti-religious than agnostic:

Maybe I have missed something here, but isn’t religion, or at least the need to believe in that which we have no logical answer for, hard wired into the human brain, by the same forces of evolution that shaped the rest of our ouvre? Smug secularists posting here might believe themselves to be above this basic human need, but I think that this is a distinction without a difference. While many so-called rationalists might disbelieve the Bible’s miracles, they merely believe in something else. Maybe global warming, or other environmental belief, that Michael Crichton has so presciently perceived as akin to religious belief. Maybe it is some sort of overreliance of other human constructs, such as the social contract, or even the supremacy of rationality itself.

None of us are immune to this human tendency to believe in some specific explanation for an essentially unknown, and perhaps unknowable condition.

I don’t think we necessarily have an inherent need to believe in the inexplicable so much as we have a hard-wired need to explain our environment, if for no other reason than to connect cause with effect. Before we can associate a certain set of conditions with a certain outcome, we have to be able to identify and categorize what we perceive. If a caveman witnesses the mauling of a fellow tribesman by a lion, his mind notes the existence of a furry and ferocious entity. It then categorizes it as an entity that can kill humans. The next time he sees one, even if it looks a little different (perhaps it’s female and the first was a male), he will generalize that he is in danger. This is key mental adaptation for survival, one that is well distributed throughout the animal kingdom. But with humans, there is a layer of cognition that does not come installed in the brains of our animal brethren. This is where the belief problem comes from.

In my view, non-human animals, though driven by emotion, are supremely rational in their perception of their environment – water is wet, always. They cannot be otherwise. Humans, however, have the free will to choose to interpret their world irrationally. A human can decide that a cobra is not dangerous, even when his animal emotions drive him to act as if is. Though this free will undoubtedly serves us well, it has a downside. We can fall victim to false hope.

In a paper called, “The Evolution of Hope and Despair,” University of Michigan professor of psychiatry and psychology, Randolph Nesse, lays out the idea that hope and despair are simply emotions driven by our appraisals of whether or not our environment will favor or disfavor the realization of our goals. Like other emotions, they serve to drive us to do things that will keep us alive long enough to reproduce. They are sort of the uber-assessors of our surroundings. If we find ourselves in circumstances that bode well for us, we have hope, so we stick around. Alternatively, if our circumstances look grim, we feel despair, which pushes us to change our situation. But what happens when we cannot explain our environment? What happens when we have no categories for the phenomena we witness?

As an absurd example, suppose a caveman stumbles upon a spaceship. Neither he nor any of his tribesmen have ever seen anything even remotely like it, so they are perplexed, to say the least. But uncertainty does not make for decisive action, which, in harsh times, is an utter necessity. Indeed, in a heated competition for survival, prolonged contemplation of the unknown is often a grave mistake. Conclusions must be drawn so that decisions can be made. The human mind, given the choice between choosing an explanation for the unknown, even if it’s a bad one, and choosing to leave the matter unsettled, will, therefore, choose an explanation. But how?

Our rational animal perceptions will provide us with competing explanations for what we observe. Then, we will decide which one to believe – by choosing the one that offers the most hope. Just as we’re emotionally drawn to situations that give us the warm, fuzzy feeling in our stomachs, so are we drawn to hopeful situations. So, while I’m not prepared to say that we have inherent need to believe in irrational things, I will say that our need to explain our world coupled with our attraction to hopeful situations sets us up to fall victim to irrationalism, and not just with respect to religion.

The lottery is one of the ultimate examples of false hope. We’ve all seen poor people in line at convenience stores spending money that would more intelligently be spent elsewhere on scores of quick picks and scratch-off games. In fact, on more than one occasion, I’ve heard people say, “When I win the lottery, I’m going to…..” Now, it’s one thing to say this in jest; it’s quite another to believe it. Many people really do, and this is a shame because I am convinced that this false hope removes much of the necessity to recognize reality for what it is and to act accordingly.
It is a fact of life that many people are born into terrible circumstances. Those who rise above them are the ones who see and accept their plight for what it is. This acceptance is the first step in determining how to overcome whatever impedes their achievement of their aims. False hope blurs reality and fosters inaction, or worse yet, useless action. The same is true of irrationality.

I think there are two types of secularists – the ones who apply rationality to all things, including religion, and the ones who happen to be rational about religion, but have no particular allegiance to it in other matters. I am one of the former. Michael, I think the smug secularists you refer to would find themselves among the latter. In any case, there is one staggeringly straight forward fix for the problems that come from the need to explain and the attraction to hope. It is called critical rationalism.

We start by admitting that we can be certain about nothing. Nothing. Then, we decide to put everything into one of three categories – things we believe, things we do not believe, and things we choose to leave unsettled. To determine what we believe and what we do not believe, we demand evidence, and we favor evidence that disproves assertions over evidence that proves assertions (since we can never really prove anything). We weigh the evidence for possible explanations and decide what to believe and disbelieve, and when the evidence is not compelling one way or another, we abstain. We are not cavemen, which means ambiguity is not dangerous for us. We do not have to act or die. This means that we can (and must) become comfortable with uncertainty. If we are successful at being critically rational, we are immuned from the perils of false hope and irrationality. But rationalism for the hope-addicted mind does not always come easy.

At the end of the day, each of us must decide how we will think. If we do not, we will vacillate opportunistically between rationality and irrationality – invoking either one based upon personal convenience. But deciding to be rational at all times is like deciding to be nice all the time. It’s an aim, an intention. We will, from time to time, falter. However, as long as we recognize the value of rationality, we will get back up and keep moving forward. That’s life. It’s best if we focus on our own journey and leave the arrogance to the certain, who always learn sooner or later that nothing is certain.

Musing on Logical Consequences and the Absence of Religion

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Original Post (with comments)
Some people, and I am one of them, have so internalized rationality that we carry out the logical consequences of what unfolds before us in everyday life. This is a good thing and a bad thing, mostly good. On the bad side, it is easy to get distracted by playing out scenarios in your head – you can easily miss the big picture. However, good discernment skills (that is, being good at separating the important from the unimportant) can easily nullify this problem. On the good side, being the “logical consequence” type affords one an infinite amount of practice at prognostication.

Just sitting on a sidewalk observing a city, you can find countless things to observe and predict, especially if you’ve seen most of them before. You see a guy backing up from a news stand and a woman hustling along looking for a cab, and you predict that they will collide. If they do, check, you were right. If they don’t, your mind determines the reason and then catalogs it for future consideration. Maybe this sounds like its bordering on OCD, but I can assure that it happens to me with no effort whatsoever. I watch my 14-month old walk (he’s still pretty sketchy) and feel myself cringing as he approaches an obstacle that I know he’s not accounted for. Down he goes. I’m not conscious of what my mind is doing until I feel my shoulder muscles tightening up to my neck. Logic, I think, can often be used in the same way to predict human behavior, especially considering the evolutionary history we all share.

By considering the social nature of the human animal, we can make interesting predictions about hypothetical scenarios. Betrand Russell once asked what would happen if we could all suddenly read each other’s minds. After a time painful disillusionment, he predicted that we’d eventually have to accept each other for who we were, warts and all. This is because the alternative would be living a solitary existence. Sounds about right to me. Humans don’t do well with loneliness and will do most anything to avoid it. (I love the part in Isaac Asimov’s, I Robot, where in comparing the robots to humans, he mentions that they almost instinctively crowd together in the dark. Such insight.) What else can we learn from our nature?
Suppose all religion (not spirituality) was suddenly gone from the world. What would happen? Would humans fall into mass moral depravity, inevitably destroying the environment, and killing each other off? There are many who would say yes. In fact, this is one of the chief arguments against secularism. Just today, Dennis Prager penned a column entitled, “Better Answers: The Case for Judeo-Christian Values” (Read It). He is apparently embarking upon a quest to make a rational case for Biblical values, making sure to contrast them with other available value systems. (Good luck, Denny – brighter minds have failed time and again.) He claims that secularism was responsible for the horrors of Nazism and Communism. Aside from the fact that a major component of the anti-semitic sentiment in Germany had its roots in the belief that the Jews killed Christ, the notion that secularism was to blame is preposterous.

Secularism is nothing more than the absence of belief in superstition and the irrational. If anything, it was secularism (via the use of reason), much more than religion, that made a stand against communism. It was the simple acknowledgement of the fact that the communist ideology results in massive human oppression, death, and unhappiness that stirred men to resist it…with force. And I think rationality would accomplish just as much in the absence of religion.

Once again, humans are social creatures. We are genetically programmed to cooperate and seek the approval of those we admire. This, in conjunction with the quest for status, is sufficient to order human society, and it was doing a fine job long before religion ever came along and co-opted, codified, and extended the social rules created by the notion of safety in numbers. Groups of early hominids that adopted rules of morality simply fared better than groups that did not. Over time, the socially forward-thinking emerged as the winners by default – there were no hominids left but humans. If religion is all that stands between us and the decline of civilization, then someone needs to explain how mankind even made it to the inception of monotheism. Oh, that’s right. Our creation signaled the emergence of the one true God. Isn’t that convenient? Myths aside, by current accounts, we should have killed ourselves off millennia ago. No, the golden rule and all its accoutrements are merely elaborations on the concept of reciprocal altruism, a concept that we are wired to make work. And so we would in the absence of organized religion. But perhaps not without a bit of adjustment time.

The logical consequence of the absence of religion, admittedly, may very well be the immediate presence of a moral vacuum. Just as a mind reading population would initially recoil at the thoughts of their contemporaries, it’s fair to say that our society may indeed see an initial decline in morality. But, just as human nature would come to rescue in the case of mind readers, so would it in the absence of religion. Pragmatism would take over, and logic is the preferred tool of the pragmatist. Contrary to what religious apologists would say, the rules of social conduct would quickly avail themselves. Most of us would avoid stealing, killing, raping, or cheating because it simply doesn’t make sense to do so, like some do now. Others would avoid those behaviors because of fear of social consequences (which, of course, would include punishment), like most do now. Still others, those who occupy the outer fringes of the bell curve, would operate sociopathically, as all do now. But the social order would emerge – it’s in our blood. And it would likely be a great deal better than the social rule set with which we currently find ourselves shackled.

In a way, the social rules of a rational, non-dogmatic society would resemble the invisible hand in economics – non-coerced, distributed, self-centered decision-making that resulted in the overall good of society. Indeed, religion is not unlike socialism or communism in that it centralizes the decision-making of the masses, forcing them to conform to the system or risk great peril. So, for my part, when I imagine the logical consequences of a world without religion, I am not disturbed at all. I am heartened. Alas, this is nothing more than a thought experiment.
Ours is world that is, and has been for many centuries, dominated by religious views. Even though we may envision the quasi-utopia of a rationally conceived social order, we have no choice but to recognize that we can’t there from here. We, the secularists, are the minority, and the majority has a vested interest in discrediting us. This does not mean we wage war, for we are on a quest for individual freedom, the corollary of which is the notion that all people should be taken as individuals. This implores us to give credence to the reasons by which real people embrace religion. We can daydream of a world without it, but we can’t let our fantasies lead us to galvanize ourselves against all things religious. Instead, we must engage open minds in thoughtful debate. For some folks, abandoning religion simply costs too much. Unless we’ve walked in their shoes, who are we to judge? This is the high road, the enlightened road, in my view.

And as for the religious who will remain vigilant in their assault on our views, we can take comfort in knowing that, though they have shrouded their laws in supposed divinity, it is still a fact that Hester Prynne did not wear the scarlet letter for God; she wore it for man.

Your Genes Want You To Drive A BMW

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Original Post (with comments)
Given some of the mail I’ve received of late, perhaps its time to go back to basics…

Your genes want you to drive a BMW. They also want you to be thin, tan, and to have a lovely smile. Your genes want you to be the life of the party – perhaps a musician or an artist or a celebrity of some sort. “What?” you say. That’s right. Though you probably don’t realize it, humans are genetically inclined to be aware of who’s at the top of the social totem pole, and more importantly, to emulate whatever it is those people did to get there.

According to evolutionary psychologists, our genes build our minds to pursue status in social groups. This is because, long ago, when humans were still cave-dwellers, status meant the difference between life and death. Being among the best hunters and warriors was a sure way to obtain food when food was scarce. Therefore, Mother Nature, ever the tinkerer, discovered that humans who were genetically driven to pursue status would outlive those who were not. Thus was born the status-seeking gene, and it has been with us ever since. (In truth, it is a gross oversimplification to assert that there are specific genes for this or that attribute. It’s just an easy way to say that a trait is largely genetic.)

In any case, Robert Wright chronicled this and other insights into the evolutionary history of the human mind in his 1994 best-seller, The Moral Animal. As astounding as the book was, a decade has passed and most folks still don’t know anything about why they think and feel the way they do. This is a real problem, unless of course everyone can have a BMW, and assuming that having a BMW is really all it’s cracked up to be.
It breaks down like this. From a genetic perspective, modern humans have the minds of cavemen. As soon as humans could organize sufficiently to protect themselves from nature and other humans, and could consistently procure food in mass quantities, natural selection no longer had an easy task of separating the fit from the unfit. Fitness became more a function of luck or circumstance than strength or skill, at least when it came to living long enough to reproduce (which is the only real goal of our genes). The process that had been shaping the human mind for eons suddenly ground to a halt. This is believed to have happened somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 years ago. Since then, the genes that code for our minds have not changed significantly. They just get reshuffled again and again, generation after generation. And here we are, dozens of millennia later, mostly unaware of the degree to which the environment of our ancestors affects our day-to-day lives.

Seeking status in ancient times was a survival necessity. In modern times, it is a fool’s errand. This is because what counts for status today has nothing to do with survival. Who’s at the top of the social totem pole these days? Celebrities. Whether we’re talking about sports stars, musicians, actors, business tycoons, and even religious figures, one thing is certain – the masses are paying close attention to what they do, and, in many cases, they are following suit.

Those who get the most attention in our society are the role models, whether they like it or not. They set the cultural agenda. It has always been so. From Elvis’ sideburns to Madonna’s material girl get-up to the current obsession with “bling,” it is instantly apparent how much popularity equals status in our modern world. From shows like Entertainment Tonight and magazines like Us and People, we can see that America’s obsession with stars is a multi-billion dollar industry. But doesn’t anyone ever wonder why so many people across such a diverse land would share such a shallow proclivity?

As we learn more and more, it becomes clearer and clearer that it’s genetic. But that doesn’t mean we have to give in. As they say in the world of addiction, admitting that there’s a problem is half the battle. Like it or not, we currently find ourselves in a battle for sanity, or at least emotional stability. How many among us are dying to drive a BMW, not because it is a superior automobile, but because of how it will be perceived by friends and acquaintances? How many are depressed when they look in the mirror because they don’t resemble the celebrities they so desperately envy? More generally, how much of what we do is for show rather than for substance? It doesn’t have to be this way.

If we’re going to make any more progress as a species, we’re going to have to recognize that our minds are constructed from the genetic blueprints of our cave-dwelling ancestors, blueprints that were designed for a world that no longer exists, blueprints that are at work every day pushing us to obtain status in our social endeavors. That’s our starting point. From there, the fix is within our reach. Indeed, many have overcome their genetic imperatives.

As a species, we have a long history of taming our genes. Birth control, monogamy, the rule of law, capitalism, and gene therapy are all examples of mankind overruling genetic influences in favor the conscious desires of human beings. A cursory look around reveals that there are many who have rationally concluded that society’s value systems are fickle at best, and demented at worst. Some folks have taught their genes not to want a BMW, at least not simply because the possession of a BMW means they’re somebody. They have deliberately concluded that wealth does not necessarily equate with value as a human being, nor does physical appearance or the ability to excel in sports or in the arts. Though any one of these things may (and often should) be admired by society, at the end of the day, none matters in and of itself.

John Kerry jokingly said during the campaign season that he and George Bush had “married up.” That a statement like this is categorically unremarkable is a testament to how much the awareness of and quest for status imbues our collective perspective. If we are to keep our genes from having their way with us, the time has come to start recognizing when our concern for status is getting in the way of our enjoying life. In other words, what do we have to give up so our genes can have a BMW? Asking questions like this is the first step in enlightening the caveman in all of us.

From the Mailbag – Taking Aim At The Caveman

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Original Post (with comments)
Here’s a comment that was posted to the site recently by a new reader. Without coming right out and saying it, this person pretty much disagrees with my entire Enlightened Caveman concept. So, I’ll mount a modest counter-argument and leave it to you to decide. Keep in mind – my interest here is truth. If someone comes along and reasonably discredits these concepts, I’ll pull the plug right away. But it’ll take more than this offering, I can assure you of that. Here’s his comment:

Just found this blog, so this is a response to your basic thesis and not the above article.
As a species, we are domesticated. The human cranium has decreased in size since “caveman” times. This is typical of any animal that has become domesticated. Dogs have 30% less brain size than wolves. Another trait displayed by domesticated animals is that they retain juvenile characteristics into adulthood. They really never grow up. The instincts disappear. Many of the attributes you are contributing to our “old” brain are actually the result of domestication. We’re not nearly as intelligent as we used to be. Our sensory capacities are pitifully lacking. We are no longer wild…or free. Evolutionarily, we are going down a one way street that’s a dead end. Between the ages of 10 and later adolescence when the brain is done developing, a pruning of the neurons takes place. It’s not our nature for that to happen. We are not receiving the complex stimulation that is necessary for complex neural systems to completely develop. Do some research on the behavior and the proper care of lab rats. The parallels to our society may surprise you. There are still wild undomesticated cultures surviving on this planet, preserving the precious genetics that have taken hundreds of thousands of years to perfect. We have not progressed. What other animal is stupid (or arrogant)enough to completely destroy the environment they depend on for survival? We live in cages, someone else feeds us, and we even have exercise wheels. We are conditioned to peck at the right buttons on the ATM and out comes our reward. Once domesticated, an animal’s survival instincts are gone. It can’t be reversed.


Let me start by saying that cranium size is a major red herring. It’s irrelevant to any discussions of this type, mainly because no one (as far as I can tell) has been able to correlate minor differences with specific differences in mental ability. Here’s what we know. The trend in hominid evolution has been toward larger and larger brains. However, following the last ice age, there has in fact been a decrease (albeit relatively minor) in cranium size, but not just for humans. According to William Cromie of the Harvard University Gazette (read more), “As the severe climate of the ice ages ended, the bodies and faces of most large animals have gotten smaller. In humans, chewing softer, processed food also has contributed to reducing face size by decreasing the largeness of our jaws and jaw muscles. ” But again, even if we call Cromie a hack with an agenda (given his employer – it might be a safe bet), this shrinking human cranium has not taken place since we have been “domesticated.” Ergo, it does not follow that domestication had anything to do with it. (Oh yeah and the softer food and jaw aspect probably explains the dog/wolf thing, too, even though it’s also irrelevant.)

With the amateur stuff out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this discussion. This reader seems to feel that our modern world has dulled our senses and left us less mentally able than our “wilder” ancestors. While I’ll forcefully agree that our cultural evolution has become progressively kinder and gentler, I’m not about to assent to the notion that we are nothing more than genetic terriers when we were once wolves. This sounds absurd to begin with, and then the evidence offered confirms it.

We are not nearly as intelligent as we used to be? Uh. Pardon me? Come again? I realize that our society can come screeching to a halt if Nick and Jessica get into a tiff, but let’s get real – we’re smarter as a species than we have ever been. Not only do we simply know more stuff, but more of us actually know how to think than ever before. That’s probably, and I’m guessing here, the defining trend in modern human cultural evolution – the march toward rationalism. Every year, more and more people choose science over superstition, evidence over revelation, and knowledge over ignorance. So, I’ll vehemently disagree with that point.

A pruning of the neurons? It’s not in our nature? This is where I started thinking maybe someone was playing a joke on me. If, by pruning of neurons, this person means that the number of brain cells decreases after the brain is fully developed, then my response is, “duh.” It’s called aging, and it IS in our nature, since our genes code for this process to happen exactly as it does. It has nothing to do with reproduction so, again, it’s irrelevant to the original point, if there is one.

“We are not recieving the complex stimulation that is necessary for complex neural systems to completely develope. ” (Spelling error that reveals disdain for proofreading – his.) OK, this one we can do something with. The consensus, from my reading, among evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists is that the dominating adaptations of the human mind over other hominids were socially oriented. This is to say that the complex stimulation necessary for our complex neural systems to completely develope (it’s kind of fun to pronounce it like envelope) is interaction with other humans. It was the human ability to figure out how to play well with others that launched mankind to the heights to which he has risen. And it’s true even today.

My son’s pediatrician told me that in his first six months of life, the world alone was enough to wire and myelinate the synapses of his brain properly – he could just hang out in his crib listening, watching, smelling, tasting, and feeling his environment and his brain would put it together perfectly. So we just left him alone in his stroller for hours at a time and you know what, she was right. Just kidding. Seriously, from there, however, she said that it was critical that he get lots of human contact. If he did not, the future would not bode well for him. This is common sense and it’s also anecdotal evidence that supports the idea that our mental focus is, first and foremost, on other humans, which is exactly what’s causing us many of our problems.

“There are still wild undomesticated cultures surviving on this planet, preserving the precious genetics that have taken hundreds of thousands of years to perfect.” Here’s where this intrepid reader betrays his ignorance regarding evolution (and maybe even his allegiance to the sham of multiculturalism). To say that some “undomesticated” cultures are preserving genetics would seem to imply that the domesticated ones are not preserving their genetics. Hogwash. This is no way to think about evolution. It’s simple – is there anything in the genome of any population on earth that is providing either a reproductive advantage or a reproductive disadvantage? If there is, then you can bet Mother Nature is on the scene making her cuts, getting ready for next season, but the answer is pretty much no. Sure, we still have some genetically-based childhood diseases that manage to persist due to their recessive nature. However, for the most part, anyone can reproduce. Or maybe it’s better to say that not being able to reproduce is significantly less likely to be genetic than it is cultural. The bottom line, the most granular idea you’ll find on this site, is that our genes have not changed significantly in tens of thousands of years. This is not my personal thesis. This is widely accepted by folks infinitely smarter than I (though I wonder how we’d compare in terms of cranium size – since that apparently matters now).

At the end of the day, I think I smell a socialist, or at least a multi-culti, anti-capitalist. “What other animal is stupid (or arrogant)enough to completely destroy the environment they depend on for survival?” Before I answer, please tell me the first animal to do this. It certainly isn’t humans, considering the fact that there are more of us now than there have ever been. “Once domesticated, an animal’s survival instincts are gone. It can’t be reversed.” This is operating on the flawed premise that our genetic survival instincts have disappeared. As I’ve said before, they’re there, lurking beneath the surface. If we were to suddenly find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic era, you can be sure that they’d take center stage in short order.

The few survivors would band together and look after each other. Family members would form the tightest circles. Outside the family (even sometimes in the circle), those who betrayed trust would be ostracized. Also, a leader or leaders would emerge possessing the skills necessary to survive in the new harsh environment. All others would pay very close attention to (and defer to) the actions and desires of the leaders, for this would be their life line. Most would die. The ones that lived would be the best at keeping the group strong. This is caveman 101.

This site exists to make the point that even though our lives are comfortable and we are not in a bloody daily struggle for existence, our genetically-driven social tendencies are completely unaware of that fact. They still focus on status and appearances at the expense of practicality and reason. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Sure, “domestication” is a factor, but only in so far as it indicates just how far we’ve come from needing the kinds of solutions our genes have to offer. We can either mount vapid arguments such as this one, insisting that doom and gloom are all the future holds (standard anti-capitalist rhetoric), or we can get to know ourselves and where we come from, and then deliberately decide what we want to be going forward. As I am an eternal optimist, I’ll take the latter, thank you very much.

Thanks for the fodder, lefty.