The Proper Study Of Mankind

The Good Books

2006-03-10T08:05:00.000Z

The long-list for the Aventis Prize for science books has been announced.

Have Your Say

2006-03-06T22:44:00.000Z

I want to get some feedback on the stuff I’ve written for this blog to see whether I might do things differently, and I have a couple of questions. I’m interested in whether people think the posts are:

Too long and too detailed (or not detailed enough)
Too diverse in topic, making it hard to know whether you’re likely to find a new post of interest
Too infrequent, even given their typical length

If anyone wants to reply to these, or give any other feedback, you can e-mail me at danrbjones [‘@] hotmail [‘.’] com. Thanks.

Taking Stock

2006-03-06T01:52:00.000Z

This blog is approaching two months old, and I’ve posted a few entries now, but as they’re mostly long they disappear way off the bottom of the page, so I thought I’d sumamrise what I’ve posted so far, in reverse chronological order.

The most recent post is on two papers looking at the nature of collaboration and altruism in humans and chimpanzees.

Here’s my coverage of a paper on the evolution of sexual reproduction, one the enduring mysteries of evolutionary biology.

This post looks at the role of unconscious automatic psychological processes, and how they can sometimes lead to more satisfying choices than conscious deliberation.

I wrote a long essay about the philosophers’ zombies, a thought experiment designed to illuminate the nature of consciousness.

A post I wrote on the biology of race generated some feedback that I replied to here.

This post looked at how your level of empathy for people in pain can be affected by whether you think the victim is a fair person or not.

I took a look at the meanings of theism, atheism and agnosticism in this post.

I started this blog with a two-part review of Richard Dawkins’s two-part programme on religion, science an atheism, The Root Of All Evil?, here and here. I also replied to a review of the programme here.

With A Little Help From My Friends

2006-03-05T23:57:00.000Z

Two new papers in Science on the collaborative tendencies of chimpanzees and human infants shed light on the nature and evolution of cooperation and altruism.

Although the image of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’ has an established pedigree, and great popular resonance, the role of cooperation in nature has also been long recognised (1). The extreme form of cooperative behaviour that social insects, such as bees and ants, engage in, in which some individuals sacrifice reproduction seemingly for the good of the hive, posed problems for Darwin. But modern theories of the evolution of cooperation, such as W. D. Hamilton’s kin selection theory, and Robert Trivers’s idea of reciprocal altruism, have helped explain otherwise puzzling cooperative behaviour in a range of species.

But we humans stand out as an evolutionary anomaly because of our propensity to behave cooperatively or altruistically in situations that cannot easily be explained by kin selection or reciprocal altruism. Our altruistic acts often extend well beyond the confines of our nearest and dearest. We (well, some people at least) donate blood, give to charity, do voluntary work, and go out of our way to avoid affecting others with our pollution.

In fact, modern experimental results of how people behave with regard to others are increasingly leading to the view that humans are motivated by a genuine concern for others, and not merely disguised selfish interest, genetic or otherwise. At the very least, gene-based models of the evolution of cooperation might need to be augmented with studies of cultural evolution and gene–culture co-evolution (2).

There are many components to the human capacity for altruism and successful cooperation. Empathy is an important motivating factor in driving people to altruistic acts of help in response to seeing people in distress. It is also useful to have a sense of fairness, which helps to avoid being exploited in ‘collaborative’ acts. Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal have shown that Capuchin monkeys refuse to participate in ‘work’ if they see another monkey getting a better reward for the same labour. This effect is amplified if another monkey is openly rewarded for no effort at all in front of a working monkey (3). At a more basic level, organisms often need to understand the sort of help required by other individuals in need in order to act effectively. And if individuals are to engage in successful cooperative acts, it is useful if they can identify those with whom they can work well.

Monkey see, monkey do
The first paper in Science (4), from Alicia Melis and colleagues, looks at the last two skills in chimpanzees. The findings strongly suggest that chimps can understand when help is needed, at least in the experimental set-up used in this study, and what the appropriate thing to do is to solve the problem at hand. They also show that when selecting a partner for a cooperative endeavour, chimps pick individuals on the basis of whether they have previously had successful collaborations with them or not.

Part of the reason for exploring these skills in chimps is that, being our closest primate relatives, they can shed light on what mental faculties are unique to humans, and which are perhaps derived from a common ancestor with chimps. Faculties that are shared between chimps and humans are plausible candidates for the building blocks of human altruism, even if human social behaviour is transformed by cultural additions and modifications.

Melis and colleagues used an ingenious set up to explore the nature of collaboration in chimpanzees (see figure to the left). Two sets of experiments were undertaken. The first set looked at whether chimps recruited help more often when they needed it, and therefore whether they understood what needed to be done to solve the problem they faced. To test this, the researchers set up two experimental conditions.

In the first condition, food rewards were placed on a platform outside the test room (see figure above). A piece of rope was threaded through two loops on the food-bearing platform, and the ends extended into the test cage so that they lay 55 cm apart. A chimp (the subject) was then released into the test room. To get the food, the chimp merely needed to grab both ends of the rope, which were close by, and pull (if the chimp only pulled one end of the rope it would unthread through the loops). While the chimp pondered the problem, a partner chimp, visible to the subject, remained locked in a room adjacent to the test room. The lock to the room was a simple device. In any case, chimps had previously been introduced to the ‘pulling task’ to get the food, and also learnt to unlock the door to let another chimp out. So they could do one act (unlocking the door) in order to do the other (get the food). The researchers watched, waited, and observed what the subject did (this was called the solo condition).

In the second condition (called the collaboration condition), the ropes were placed 3 metres apart, so that the only way the chimp could get any food at all was by recruiting help from the locked-up partner to simultaneously pull on the rope (the chimps had shown they knew how to do this in training trials).

If chimps recruit help only when they need to do, so as to maximise the reward they get by acting alone, then they should have unlocked the partner more often in the collaboration condition than in the solo condition. And this is just what was found.

So this first set of experiments shows that chimps know when they need to enlist help, and when they can go it alone and reap more rewards for themselves. The second of set experiments shows that chimps can also enhance their likelihood of forming successful collaborations on the basis of previous experience with other chimps.

In this set of experiments, in addition to a partner in the same room as before, there was also a chimp in the second adjacent room. These two potential partners for the rope-pulling problem differed markedly in their skill at solving the task. The subject partner had previously had a limited number of interactions with both chimps independently in obtaining food from the platform. So the subject chimp, if it had learnt that one chimp was a better choice as a partner for solving the problem than the other chimp, would be expected to pick the better partner more often. And again, this is what was found. Interestingly, the chimps’ behaviour provided evidence that they were tracking the relative success of partners and updating their decisions on the basis of previous outcomes. The chimps basically followed a ‘win-stay/lose-shift’ strategy: if they were successful with a partner, they would pick the same chimp for the next trial, and if it was unsuccessful switched to the other (this wasn’t an absolute rule they followed, and there were exceptions).

So chimps seem to know whether they need help, and to know who to turn to when they do. It also shows that chimpanzees can adapt a new skill, such as unlocking a door, and use that to aid future collaborations (in setting a partner free to collaborate in getting food).

Of children and chimps
The second paper in Science (5), from Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, tackles a different set of questions. While the first paper, described above, reveals that chimps know when, and with whom, to engage in collaboration to maximise benefits to themselves, what about helping when you have nothing to gain? Humans do this all the time, from holding doors open for people behind us to picking up a book for somebody who drops one. And it is this tendency that Warneken and Tomasello explored in their experiments.

Human infants and three young chimps were used as the subjects in this study (the small number of chimps limiting the strength of conclusions that we can draw from this work). The infants were pre-linguistic 18-month olds, and they were presented with 10 situations in which an adult (a male experimenter in this case, and therefore a stranger to the child) needed help in some task. In one situation, the experimenter, while hanging up washing, drops a clothes peg, and pretends to be obstructed by the clothes wire so that he cannot reach the peg on the floor. The child can see what is happening, and can walk over, pick up the peg, and hand it to the experimenter. In another situation, the experimenter, carrying a stack of magazines, approaches a closed cabinet, and tries, unsuccessfully, to put the magazines into the cabinet but instead just hits the door. In this case, the child can walk over to the cabinet and open the doors. The 10 situations were grouped in to four categories, according to the nature of the situation presented to the child: out-of-reach, physical obstacle, wrong result, and wrong means.

The children were also tested in control conditions. In the experimental situation, the experimenter made it clear through facial expressions, bodily reactions and sounds that there was a problem, and that help was needed. In control conditions, the experimenter remained neutral and did not suggest that there was a problem.

Children were significantly more likely to help in the experimental condition in 6 out of the 10 situations – picking up clothes pegs and handing them to the experimenter, or putting fallen DVD boxes on top of a pile that the experimenter missed. As these children couldn’t speak or fully comprehend language, it is unlikely that they have merely learnt to help through verbal instruction, although social norms may well augment a tendency to help others (or, perhaps in some circumstances, curtail it).

The same studies were carried out with the three young chimps. Although the chimps tended to help in the situations in which an object was merely out of reach, they weren’t so forthcoming in tasks that required actions other than merely grabbing and passing. There are number of possible reasons for this discrepancy. Perhaps the children were simply more willing to help, and this expressed itself as greater help across a wider range of situations. Alternatively, the chimps might simply have been stumped by the problems posed – even if they had recognised that help was required, they might not have understood what the goal of the experimenter was or how to aid him. Children have pretty advanced cognitive skills, particularly in the social domain, from a young age, and this might have given them the edge in being able to provide help.

Time to sum up. Chimpanzees recruit help when they need it, and from the best available partners, suggesting that corresponding skills in humans have a perhaps ancient evolutionary origin. But chimps are not so good at providing help across situations that require different forms of help. Maybe this is because of cognitive limitations, or maybe because of altruistic limitations. Pre-linguistic children, however, are capable of recognising when someone else needs help in reaching some goal, and are willing and able to provide this help in a wide range of situations. This is a good foundation for producing adults that are also likely to provide altruistic help to others, including strangers. And this propensity can be enhanced through internalisation of social and cultural norms that promote prosocial behaviour.

But is this sort of behaviour completely non-selfish altruism? At first it would seem so, as the helper derives no immediate benefit. But that doesn’t mean there are no benefits, even if they are not immediately obvious. A reputation for being a good collaborator and an general altruist can do wonders for your social currency, and can enable you to participate in projects that might otherwise have been closed to you. In any case, a tendency to want to help is a crucial ingredient of human prosociality. The challenge still remains of fully fleshing out a theory of human altruistic behaviour.

Notes
1. See the contrasting views of ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, T. H. Huxley, and the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin.

2. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. The nature of human altruism. Nature 425, 785-791 (2003).

3. Brosnan, S. B. & de Waal, F. B. M. Monkeys reject unequal pay. Nature 425, 297-299 (2003).

4. Melis, A. P, Hare, B. & Tomasello, M. Chimpanzees recruit the best collaborators. Science 311, 1297-1300 (2006).

5. Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science 311, 1301-1303 (2006).

Why Sex Is Good (and not for the obvious reasons)

2006-03-04T01:52:00.000Z

A new paper in Nature helps explain why sex is so ubiquitous.

The existence of sexual reproduction is one of the great mysteries of evolutionary biology. It’s widespread, but there is no consensus on what benefits it confers over asexual reproduction, which seems to be a perfectly respectable way to go about reproducing (there are many asexual species, and some species have even gone from sexual to asexual reproduction). This is not for want of candidate explanations — it is just very difficult to get the relevant evidence to adjudicate between to competing theories (1). A recently published paper in Nature, from Ricardo Azevedo and colleagues, now provides some clues to explain the conundrum of sex.

So why is sex such a puzzle? In the 1970s, John Maynard Smith and George C. Williams independently explored the problems posed by sex, which Maynard Smith summed up as the ‘twofold cost of sex’. Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin have summarised the problem like this:

[I]magine a population of male and female animals happily reproducing by means of sex…Now imagine that a mutant female arises, that is, one who differs genetically from the bulk of the population. She can do without males and still have young. Her offspring will all be female who, like their mother, can reproduce without the help of males, by a process called parthenogenesis (from the Greek for virgin birth). Because she does not produce males, such a female would have twice as many daughters as the other females; and because only daughters put much effort into raising offspring the mutation would spread very rapidly indeed. Within a very few generations all the females will be asexual. There is the cost of sons, dramatically brought out into the open: they halve a female’s capacity to reproduce.

This drives home the message that females that reproduce parthenogenetically (or asexually) and produce more parthenogenetic females will, other things being equal, push out sexual reproducers. But the idea that sex halves a “female’s capacity to reproduce” is perhaps worth expanding on, as phrased like that it might be misleading.

Imagine a population of 100 females and 100 males. In this idealised population, each male mates with one female, and between them have two offspring, which the female raises. This occurs generation after generation. After 5 generations, a given female would have left 32 descendants, as would each male. Now imagine a parthenogenetic female, who through virgin birth can leave 2 females as descendants; again, after 5 generations, a parthenogenetic female would leave 32 descendants, which, in terms of counting offspring, is exactly the same as in the sexual situation. This makes it clear that it is not the capacity to reproduce per se that is halved by sex, or doubled by asexual (parthenogenetic) reproduction (that is, females on average will still leave the same number of descendants. Sex does, however, reduce the per capita reproductive rate, as sex requires that two individuals get together to make one offspring, whereas in an asexual situation each individual produces each offspring alone.

The cost of sex can be expressed in different though fundamentally similar terms: by considering the fate of genes influencing sexual and asexual reproduction (the strategy made so famous by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene).

Think of a simplistic model in which one gene determines whether a female reproduces sexually or asexually. Let’s assume that there are 100 females in a population (and 100 males), all of which reproduce sexually. Any given gene in a female has a 50% probability of being passed on to her offspring, so that all offspring are 50% related to their mothers and, of course, 50% related to their fathers. Now a mutant gene arises in a female that causes her to reproduce asexually. In this situation, she will be 100% related to her offspring (and the offspring will be 100% related to their mothers) — after all, she passes on all her genes to her offspring (and the mother is the only source of the offspring’s genes).

Such a gene for asexual reproduction would be present in 100% of her offspring, a guaranteed ticket to the future. This stands in stark contrast to the fate of genes in a sexual reproducer — only 50% of her genes would then be eligible for entry into future generations. For any given gene in a sexual species, including those determining whether to engage in sex or not, there is a 50% chance of being passed on. In other words, a gene for sex reduces by half the likelihood that it, and all other genes in the genome, will make it into the next generation. Therefore asexual reproduction increases by twofold the genetic representation of female genes in future generations; this, then, highlights the twofold cost of sexual reproduction. I’ve belaboured the point at bit, but it’s important to get clear on this.

In both the model suggested by Cherfas and Gribbin, and the ones sketched above, although the actual numbers of offspring left by females is the same in asexual and sexual populations, the proportion of asexual females relative to sexual females and sexual males will rise, and with it the genes for asexual reproduction instead of sexual reproduction. Extrapolated over time, the genes for sexual reproduction would be displaced by asexual variants and disappear, and all reproduction would be asexual. This leads to the same conclusion that Cherfas and Gribbin arrive at — namely, that producing sons is not in the genetic interest of females. So the problem of sex is the question of why sexual reproduction is so ubiquitous in nature. What benefits does it provide to offset its costs?

There are, as noted above, a variety of hypotheses as to what these benefits are. One strong contender is the ‘mutational deterministic hypothesis’, devised by Alexey Kondrashov (2), and it is this model that the current paper in Nature draws on.

The basic idea of the mutational deterministic hypothesis is that sex can bring harmful mutations present in two parents together in a single individual; if this individual then dies, this eliminates harmful mutations (deleterious mutations, in the argot of geneticists) from the population. Imagine a group of asexual organism reproducing away. Then a deleterious mutation arises in one individual. All descendants of this mutant will inherit the harmful gene, and carry the cost. The only way this cursed lineage can get rid of its bad ‘genetic load’ is to die out, or wait for the unlikely event of a mutation that exactly reverses the original deleterious mutation. If this lineage suffers another genetic hit, then it will be doubly afflicted, with as little scope for escape.

Sex changes this. Imagine two sexual parents, each of which carries one harmful genetic variant. If the parents have more than one offspring, then, through the lottery of sexual inheritance, some might inherit one, both or neither of the harmful mutations. The mutation-free offspring have clearly benefited from sex, and those that inherit one have fared no worse than under asexual reproduction. But what about those that get a double dose of bad mutations? What happens to them? Well, it depends on whether the effects of the mutations interact with each other, a process known as epistasis.

These genetic interaction can take a number forms. If there is no interaction, or neutral epistasis, then the combined effects of the two mutations will be the sum of the independent mutations (that is, if each mutation carried a cost of –5 ‘survival points’, having both would cost –10). Alternatively, the mutations can interact positively, or antagonistically (this nomenclature is a bit counter-intuitive, as antagonism sounds negative, so you have to pay attention!). In this case the combined effects cancel each other out to a degree, such that the overall effect may be less than the sum of the individual effects (say, anywhere between –9 and –6 survival points), or even their individual costs (anywhere between 0 and –4 survival points). Finally, the effects may interact negatively, or synergistically, in which cause the combined effect is greater than the sum (a lower number than –10 survival points: –11, –12 and so on).

If harmful mutations interact synergistically — that is, enhance the effects of each other — then sex can potentially pay the two-fold cost it imposes over asexual reproduction by purging lineages of harmful mutations. Here’s how. If possessing either mutation A or B alone merely lowers fitness (survival plus reproduction), these mutations may hang around in lineages for a while and continually lower the fitness of all individuals in that lineage, constantly dragging each individual down. Synergy between the mutations provides a way out of this. In the most extreme case, individuals that get a double dose, or multiple doses, of mutations are absolutely unviable, and die right away. In this case, a whole clutch of bad mutations can be wiped out in one go. At the same time, other offspring may, through the luck of sexual inheritance, be mutation free — in which case, the bad genes have be removed from that lineage. This is a potentially powerful benefit for maintaining sexual reproduction.

One obvious question in light of all this is whether epistatic interactions between mutations are typically positive, neutral or negative. The answer is that in experiments you see all sorts of interactions, which hasn’t exactly helped to clarify what role epistatic interactions might play in the evolution of sex.

Previous work using computational models of evolution has suggested that natural selection can shape the nature of epistatic interactions, so under some (artificial) selective regimes natural selection can favour positive (antagonistic) epistasis, and in another negative (synergistic) epistasis. One way that the evolution of epistasis can be affected is if the genomes of organisms — that is, their entire collection of genes — and the networks of protein products they encode are selected to be ‘robust’. Robust in this sense means being insensitive to the effects of mutations. Selecting for robustness affects the nature of epistatic interactions.

Robustness is a good design feature: if you’ve got a complex system with lots of interacting parts, you don’t want the fate of the entire system to be placed in the hands of every single part. It’s good to have some mechanism for coping when parts go wrong.

It turns out that if you select for robustness in computer simulations, you produce as a correlated response increased negative (synergistic) epistasis. Another way of saying this is that robustness is negatively correlated with the ‘direction of epistasis’: when robustness is positive, epistasis is negative (taking positive and negative to represent different directions)*.

Genomes in sexually reproducing species do not only need to be robust against mutations. They also need to be robust against the genetic shuffling that occurs between generations when sperm and eggs recombine and mix their genes, process that is characteristic of sexual reproduction. This is ‘recombinational’ robustness. It has been proposed that sexual reproduction, which essentially means more recombination, imposes stronger selection for genetic robustness than asexual reproduction does.

And this is where the new study comes in — it probes this very idea. It’s not an experiment, at least not in the sense of involving real organisms with real genes. Instead, the researchers have used a computational model of artificial gene networks to get some purchase on whether sex (or recombination) selects for increased robustness.

The details of the model used in the new paper are complicated, but a few salient points should be noted. The model basically simulates a population of individuals (actually gene networks), and there is a certain amount of genetic variation between ‘individuals’ for evolution to work on. Individuals can also mutate to create new variation, and in sexual versions of the population recombination between individuals (mixing up of parental genes) takes place.

This model has previously been shown to produce, or evolve, genetic robustness if the gene networks are selected on the basis of whether they produce stable patterns of gene expression. Genes encode protein products, and these can in turn affect the activity of other genes (and sometimes also the activity of the genes encoding them). Genetic networks evolve to produce patterns of gene expression that achieve functional ends, like building limbs and regulating our metabolism. If these are easily perturbed they’ll have difficulty producing the desired outcome. And so gene-expression patterns should be stable, or at least respond in appropriate ways when perturbed, to produce functional organisms, or at least functional gene networks. When gene networks that produce stable gene-expression patterns are selected for, robustness emerges — that is, the networks evolve the capacity to maintain stable patterns of gene expression if the face of perturbations.

In this particular application of the model, the role of recombination in producing robustness was explored, using gene networks selected for their capacity to produce stable gene-expression patterns. What’s more, the researchers also looked at whether recombination, through producing robustness, could influence the direction of epistatic interactions (that is, whether there were positive, neutral or negative) that evolved.

Because of the way the model was set up, populations should be subjected to selection for both mutational robustness (insensitivity to mutations) and recombinational robustness (insensitivity to the effects of bring genes into new combinations through genetic recombination).

By tweaking the model, Azevedo and colleagues were able to tease apart the effects of sexual reproduction on selection for mutational and recombinational robustness. They found that to the extent that mutational robustness evolved in sexual populations, it was not as a result of direct selection for this type of robustness. Instead, mutational robustness was found to be a correlated response to selection for recombinational robustness. So selection for recombinational robustness produces a correlated response of mutational robustness. Another important finding is that in sexual populations in which mutational robustness evolved, negative, or less positive, epistasis also evolved. As the authors conclude:

“Taken together, these results confirm that mutational robustness and negative epistasis both evolved in response to selection for recombinational robustness.”

There are obviously limitations to this study. Firstly, it is very simple compared to the complexity of the genomes of multi-cellular plants and animals. Secondly, recombination is already present in the model — so this, the central feature of sex, did not have to evolve but was already there. Perhaps in this regard the paper contributes more to our understanding of the maintenance of sex, rather than its origins.

However, it is an interesting thought that sexual reproduction seems to create conditions that favour its own maintenance. Perhaps sex evolved in part because recombination lead to the evolution of genetic robustness, enabling extremely complex genomes to evolve, and this robustness resulted in a correlated evolution of negative (or synergistic) epistasis. Then sex could deliver the benefits spelled out by the mutational deterministic hypothesis. The synergistic interaction of harmful mutations would enable sex to purge them from the genomes of sexually reproducing organism — and therefore to pay its way.

*This might seem odd. Let me explain if it doesn’t. Mutational robustness, or insensitivity to mutations, is a capacity to dampen down the harmful effects of mutations. So any mechanism that did that would seem to be associated with robustness. And that seems to be what positive (antagonistic) epistasis does — the harmful effects of combined mutations antagonise each other, and cancel one another out to an extent. This is a sort of damping down. But in fact negative epistasis is seen to emerge alongside robustness.

The reason for this is difficult to explain, but it seems to be a reliable finding. One possibility is that if genomes have on average only one or two mutations, then mutational robustness can evolve through positive epistasis for the smaller number of mutations. This has the effect of changing the shape of a graph plotting fitness against mutational load (if we assume that previously there was no directional epistasis - that is, neutral epistasis ). In fact, the new curve looks like a curve of negative epistasis, but from a different starting point. This isn’t, I realise, terribly helpful without some images. But in sum, genomes might evolve to be more robust to the presence of the small average number of mutations but pay the price of being less robust in the face of many mutations (thanks to Ricardo Azevedo for this point, personal communication).

1. A relatively accessible introduction to some of the ideas about the evolution can be found in: Cherfas, J. & Gribbin, J. The Mating Game: In Search of the Meaning of Sex (Penguin, 2001).

2. Kondrashov, A. S. Deleterious mutations and the evolution of sexual reproduction. Nature 336, 435–440 (1988).

Gut thinking

2006-02-20T00:10:00.000Z

We humans often pride ourselves on our rationality, and on our ability to make complex decisions through reasoning power. In recent decades, however, the role accorded to reason in driving our decisions and behaviour has been called into question by many psychologists.

Experiments have revealed that our decisions seem to be driven by an assortment of biases and heuristics — mental rules of thumb that help us get to a reasonable answer if a relatively short amount of time. And these heuristics need not be conscious. Indeed, another relevant trend in psychology has been a greater appreciation of unconscious processes in shaping our decision-making and behaviour. These are not unconscious desires or wishes in the Freudian sense, but processing rules that are not necessarily consciously monitored.

Much of the study of heuristics has highlighted the systematic ways in which human reasoning can veer into illogic. For instance, if you ask people how many words, in four pages of a novel, will have ‘ing’ as an ending, they typically give a higher number as an answer than if you ask how many words will have ‘n’ as the second-to-last letter in four pages from the novel (an example of what is called the availability heuristic, but I won’t go into detail here). And this does not make logical sense.

Similarly, what’s called the ‘representativeness heuristic’ can lead people astray. This is illustrated by looking at people’s answers to questions about the likely career of a hypothetical woman named Linda:

“Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”

After reading this description, people were asked to rank the likelihood of various possible future life outcomes for Linda, the most important two (for the purposes of the study) being ‘bank teller’ and ‘bank teller and active in the feminist movement’. Most people think that the latter possibility is more likely, even though it is statistically more likely that she would be just a bank teller, rather than both a bank teller and a feminist activist. This is known as the conjunction error, in which the occurrence of two independent characteristics is deemed more likely than one alone (and statistics says this isn’t so).

So much for how we actually reason: when it comes to thinking, we’re frequently far from logical. But what about when we put our mind to thinking about a decision or problem? Surely more thinking is better, and more likely to lead to the best solution or choice?

Well not according to some research published in last week’s Science. Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands have found that too much thinking can get in the way of reaching a good decision — perhaps counter-intuitively, this is even more true when the decision is more complex. Conscious deliberation seems to be better suited to making simple decisions, such as what brand of kitchen utensil to buy, but for the more complex and important decisions in life, perhaps such as buying a house or car, less thinking may mean a better decision.

In one set of experiments, participants were provided with a choice of four cars. The task was to pick the best car out of the range on the basis of details about four characteristics of the cars, such as mileage and legroom. Each person had four minutes to mull over the problem, and most participants picked the same car — the one that was in fact best on the basis of the listed attributes. In a variation of this experiment, the cars had 12 characteristics, making the decision-making process more complex because there were more factors to take into account. And this increased complexity of the decision was reflected in people’s choices: after four minutes thought, only 25% picked the car with the best attributes, or no better than merely picking at random. Perhaps understandably, a more difficult choice made for worse decisions.

In the final condition, the participants, after reading about the cars and the 12 attributes, were asked to solve anagrams for four minutes before making their choice of car. And the effect of this distraction? To increase their skill in identifying the best car — after taking their minds off thinking about the car by solving anagrams, more than half of the study subjects picked the best car. This suggests that at least in some cases less explicit, conscious deliberation, and a greater reliance on unconscious mental processes, can help make for better decision-making in complex situations.

Dijksterhuis and colleagues also explored this issue in a more real-life situation: shopping for simple items of clothes and kitchenware, compared with furniture shopping at IKEA (which, being a bigger investment, and relating to home design, can be expected to be a more weighty and complex choice to make). The researchers stopped shoppers leaving IKEA and the shop selling kitchen utensils and other smaller items, and asked them how long they had spent mulling over their decisions. They then called the shoppers up a couple of weeks later to see how happy they were with their purchases. Whereas the people that spent longer thinking the about their small purchases were generally happier with what they had bought, the reverse was true of IKEA shoppers — more thought led to a less satisfactory choice.

One possible reason for the poor performance when making more complicated decisions is that the brain can only keep so much information accessible to consciousness. So perhaps partial or muddled information gets factored into conscious decisions, which then turn out to be bad. This study illustrates that complexity might be a key factor determining whether conscious deliberation or something more gut-based (meaning not consciously thought through, and perhaps emotionally laden) is the most appropriate path to a decision.

But it would be rash to rule out the role of thinking altogether in coming to important decisions. It is quite possible that taking all the relevant information into account, rolling it around in your head for a while, and letting it be unconsciously processed may lead to good decisions. In fact, this is what Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist for his work on decision-making, says: “I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list [of pros and cons] and then sleeping on it.” Dijksterhuis agrees: for important decisions, he finds out the relevant facts and focuses his full attention on the decision. Then? “I sit on things and rely on my gut.”

This research might also illuminate the almost magical ability of doctors, fire-fighters and jazz musicians to make accurate on-the-spot decisions about medical care, plans of action, and note choice, for example. It is not that these people are better off for having less knowledge of information with which to consciously work, but that their expert knowledge can be accessed unconsciously and extremely rapidly, through years of experience and practise.

So next time you have a small decision to make, think about for a reasonable time, and go for it; for the bigger ones, have a think, weigh up the options, then think about something else for a while. When you come back to make your decision, it may just make the best choice (or at least one you’ll be happy with).

New book: No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

2006-02-15T12:45:00.000Z

A few years back, Judith Rich Harris, a psychology textbook writer unaffiliated with any university, published The Nurture Assumption, which suggested that the home environment provided by parents was of little effect in shaping the personality of their children – genetics, peer-group socialisation, and unique life events play the dominant role. Despite criticism from some quarters, the book was also endorsed by such luminaries as Steve Pinker (who actually wrote a forward to the book).

Now Rich Harris has a new book out, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, in which she apparently outlines a new theory of personality development, one that explains why we — even identical twins — turn out as individuals. The book isn’t available in the UK yet, but in the meantime here’s a review of the book.

The Zombic Hunch and the Limits of Thought Experiments

2006-02-14T00:31:00.000Z

Bring Out Your Dead

Few thought experiments in the philosophy of mind are as popular or famous as the philosopher’s zombie (although John Searle’s Chinese Room probably tops it). These aren’t the cannibalistic, but mercifully slow-walking, corpses of George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn Of The Dead. When philosophers talk about zombies they generally have in mind a being much like me and you in appearance and behaviour — in some instances identical — but lacking any inner mental life, any conscious glow, any feeling of what it is like to experience, say, the scent of a rose or the tang of lemon. But, being behaviourally just like an ordinary human, such a zombie would talk and act just as if they did have conscious experience. Perhaps for all you know me, and everyone other person on the planet, are zombies — it is part of the conception of a zombie that you couldn’t tell by observing our behaviour or by inspecting us physically — that is, the way we act and talk about the world (including our non-existent conscious experience) wouldn’t give our zombiehood away.

Some philosophers have suggested that the possibility, or at least conceivability, of zombies tells us something important about the nature of consciousness and its relation to our physiology, particularly the brain. Others respond that zombies are a confused notion, and have done more harm than good in directing our thoughts about the mind. In the recent book Conversations on Consciousness, Susan Blackmore discusses the possibility and likelihood of zombies with a number of leading philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, and comparing their accounts can possibly shed some light on what’s going on in the debates.

In discussing zombies with Blackmore, philosopher Ned Block distinguishes between two senses of the philosopher’s zombie, which we might call the ‘functionalist zombie’ and the ‘biological zombie’. I’ll explain both shortly, after a little bit of background on what functionalism is, and the account it gives of the mind (I’ll quote from some good introductory books on the topic that are easily available).

The are many problems in the philosophy of mind, although the problem of consciousness is perhaps currently the most high profile (in the popular mind at least: the past decade has seen a proliferation of popular and semi-popular books on the subject). The are a number of features of mental states we might want to explain: some mental states are caused by states of the world; some mental states cause mental states; some mental states cause other mental states; some mental states are about things in the world; and some kinds of mental states are systematically correlated with certain kinds of brain states (Ravenscroft (2005)).

Functionalism addresses a number of these problems from a perspective that sits well with a materialist conception of the mind, although it is not logically committed to materialism (the idea that everything in the world — mental events and all — have a material, physical basis). In the current climate, in which may if not most philosophers and neuroscientists take the brain to be the material basis of the mind, functionalism has found a welcome home, and has become a major position in the philosophy of mind. However, a wide range of views on the mind–brain relation, and the nature of consciousness, are compatible with materialism, and so functionalism is not the only game in town. However, whatever it’s troubles, functionalism has been an extremely influential approach to the mind, and even its critics take it seriously.

Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996) say “Functionalists take mental states to be the internal causes of behaviour … Mental states are, according to functionalists, internal states within us, but we identify and name them by the effect the world has on them, the effects they have on the world, and the effect they have on the world by causing our behaviour.” Functionalism both helps explain, and derives support from, the fact that mental states can be multiply realised, which means that some states, say pain, can be produced by, or realised in, a number of different physical systems. The possibility of multiple realisation poses problems for theories that identify a given mental state, such as pain, with a certain physical state, such as the firing of C-fibres in the nervous system (although this isn’t neurologically plausible it’s a standard example in the philosophical literature). The claim of the identity theory here is that the firing of C-fibres is identical to being in a state of pain. However, other animals, such as lobsters, seem capable of being in pain states, so an identity theory that identified pain as firing of C-fibres would claim that lobsters must have C-fibres too. But let’s assume that lobsters don’t have C-fibres; they have D-fibres instead. If this is true, then pain can’t merely be the firing of C-fibres. Perhaps we might say that pain is the firing of C- or D-fibres, but then our idea of a mental state is extremely contingent on what we know about nervous systems across the animal kingdom. Functionalism provides an escape from this.

As Ravenscroft (2005) explains, “According to functionalism, C-fiber firing does the same job in me as D-fiber firing does in [lobsters]. On this view, to be in pain is to have an internal state which does a certain job. Which job is that? Very roughly, an internal state does the ‘pain job’ if it is caused by bodily damage and causes us to say ‘ouch’ and rub the sore spot. So according to functionalism, to be in pain is to have an internal state which is activated by bodily damage and which causes us to say ‘ouch’ and rub the sore spot. More generally, according to functionalism, to be in (or have) mental state M is to have an internal state which does the ‘M-job’.” It is important that these functional states have certain causal properties, properties determined by their inputs, how the state responds to the input, its output and its effects on other states of the systems.

Refuting Functionalism?

The idea of multiple realisation is in principle not limited to biological systems as a given functional state can in principle be underpinned by a non-biological machine – a computer, for instance. It has been suggested that a sort of Rube Goldberg device made out of cans, strings and pulleys could, in principle, replicate the functional states of the human brain. An early criticism of the functionalist approach was developed by Block, and is called the China Brain (which inspired the famous Chinese Room). In this thought experiment, everyone in the population of China (assumed to be about a billion, a number much lower, but vaguely in the ball park, of the number of neurons in the human brain) is given a phone. Everyone is also given a set of instructions that say that when a call is received from a given number, or numbers, another call or calls should be made to certain other numbers. In this way, each phone operator is imitating the functional role of an individual neuron.

Now, this is isn’t likely to be set up any time soon, but we can imagine it in principle. So once it was up and running, each phone operator would assume the functional role of a neuron, and collectively they would simulate the functional organisation of the brain. That is, the population would be in the same functional states as a human brain, given the correct inputs and rules of operation. So what if the phone operators were in the same functional state as the brain is when it has a mental state with the content ‘It’s raining’? Would the population of phone operators be in this mental state too? This isn’t about whether individual phone operators would believe that it’s raining, but whether the population of operators are in the functional state of believing that it’s raining – which functionalism is says it is.

It perhaps seems absurd to suppose that the population as a whole is conscious of the belief ‘It’s raining’ in some strange, disembodied state. The existence of a functional state representing the mental belief state ‘It’s raining’ seems insufficient for the conscious awareness of this belief. The problem of consciousness – the first-person perspective on the world, our subjective experience of the world, what it is like to be you, at your computer, as you read this – is indeed a tricky issue for functionalism, as it is for all theories of the mind. But problems in the philosophy of mind are not exhausted by the problem of conscious – in fact, some philosophers, such as Dan Dennett, believe that once the other problems of how the brain/mind works, then the supposed problem of consciousness will disappear. There won’t be an extra ‘something’ to explain when all the other aspects of the mind are explained.

Functionalism fares well in explaining a number of other features of mental states. For instance, it has an explanation of, or at least is compatible with, the following features on mental states that any theory of mind will hopefully address (see Ravenscroft (2005)): some mental states are caused by states of the world; some mental states cause mental states; some mental states cause other mental states; some mental states are about things in the world; and some kinds of mental states are systematically correlated with certain kinds of brain states. It’s not well-suited to explaining the problem of consciousness, as traditionally construed, but does the China Brain thought experiment refute functionalism as an approach to understanding these other aspects of the mind, as it is intended to? It seems perhaps obvious that the China Brain doesn’t have mental states similar in relevant respects to human mental states, but this is an intuition, not an argument, however strong (Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996)).

In any case, Block’s take on the China Brain thought experiment leads him to various conclusions. Block considers functionalism to be insufficient to the task of explaining the phenomenology of mind, and therefore can conceive of a being that is functionally similar to a human, even if physically different from humans, which lacks consciousness. This is a being that is functionally similar to us, like the China Brain was, but which lacks consciousness like the China Brain. This is Block’s notion of what I’ll call a functionalist zombie, and I’ll explore this type of zombie, along with biological zombies, and philosophers’ response to them in the next post.

Zombies And The Philosophers

Ned Block characterises the functionalist zombie as a “person who is functionally like us, but physically so different that this person doesn’t have the physical basis of phenomenology”. He cites the example of a human perhaps made out of silicon chips that were organised to embody functional states identical to those of a human. Block concludes that this being would lack the physical basis of phenomenology, and derives this conclusion from the China Brain thought experiment.

Block also describes a second sort of zombie, what I’m calling a biological zombie:

“The second sort of zombie is a creature that’s physically exactly like us. This is [David] Chalmers’s zombie, so when Chalmers says he believes in the conceivability and therefore the possibility of zombies, he’s talking about that kind of a zombie. My view is that no one who takes the biological basis of consciousness seriously should really believe in that kind of a zombie. I don’t believe in the possibility of that zombie; I believe that the physiology of the human brain determines our phenomenology and so there couldn’t be a creature like that, physically exactly like us, down to every molecule of the brain, just the same but nobody home, no phenomenology. That zombie I don’t believe in, but the functional zombie I do believe in.”

So that’s our starting point: the contrast between functionalist zombies and biological zombies (though this distinction might well be disputed on the grounds that the difference between a functional zombie that behaved intelligently and a creature that behaved in a similarly intelligent fashion but with the boost of consciousness is more imagined than real). Next, here’s how John Searle replies to being asked about zombies by Sue Blackmore, whose reply I’ve included:

“The zombie is really a philosopher’s invention, to imagine a machine or a creature that behaves the same as a person who is conscious but has no consciousness; and I think that makes sense; you can imagine such a thing; I can imagine that you really are a wind up mechanism and that you’re not conscious. It’s a good thought experiment to imagine the differences between ourselves, who have both consciousness and coherent organised behaviour, and the zombie that appears to have the same organised behaviour but does not have any consciousness, has no feelings.”
Blackmore: “Obviously it’s possible to imagine such a zombie, but are you saying that such a zombie could in principle exist?”
Searle: “In principle, sure.”

At first it seems like Searle is just referring to the functionalist conception of a zombie — “a machine or a creature that behaves the same as a person who is conscious but has no consciousness”. But by saying “I can imagine that you are really a wind-up mechanism and that you’re not conscious” he seems to be committing himself to the stronger idea, rejected by Block, of a biological zombie, a creature identical to a human but lacking consciousness. And what could be more identical to Sue Blackmore than the conscious Sue Blackmore? (If he didn’t have this in mind, how could he imagine Blackmore as a zombie, given that she such a zombie would be, in fact, biologically identical to the actual conscious Sue Blackmore? (Of course, we don’t know that Blackmore is really conscious; but Searle is saying that although he thinks that beings of with the kind of biology Blackmore has — humans — are conscious, it’s possible to imagine them as not conscious.) So to take Searle at his word, that he can imagine Blackmore as non-conscious, this strong reading seems fair. The possibility of this biological zombie is often taken to have an important implication: that if we can imagine creatures physically exactly like us, who must definitionally be in identical functional states, then mere functional states are not enough for consciousness. Therefore there is something extra, some special ingredient, that is part of the explanation of consciousness. Blackmore is quick to the chase:

Blackmore: “So as far as you’re concerned, then, there’s something extra; you could have a mechanism that did all this stuff, but it wouldn’t be really like us; it needs something extra, the conscious field or the rational agent or something like that, to make it be like us and have our kind of awareness. Is that what you’re saying?”
Searle: “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I think evolution probably could not have produced such a thing, because evolution produced us. You can imagine evolution producing beings that moved around on wheels instead of on legs; but for all kinds of reasons it’s unlikely that evolution would ever be able to produce that. Similarly, you can imagine evolution producing a well-organised zombie, but it’s unlikely; we just get this much more efficient mechanism if we have consciousness. However, you could, in principle at least, design machinery that could behave as if it were intelligent – that is, could behave in the same way as human beings behave; we’re nowhere near being able to do that, but in principle it’s possible.”

This response muddies the waters a bit in interpreting Searle. He starts by saying that he accepts the conclusion about ‘extra ingredients’ derived from his conception of the zombie thought experiment as discussed Blackmore This suggests that he takes the possibility of biological zombies seriously. This is surprising given the importance Searle places on the brain and its biological functioning in explaining consciousness, which he thinks makes brains conscious, and machines, which don’t have the right arrangement of matter, unconscious.

However, by saying that “I think evolution probably could not have produced such a thing, because evolution produced us”, he seems to suggest something different — at least inadvertently, perhaps. The design process of evolution through natural selection has produced complexly and improbably organised functionally adapted matter — from sub-cellular organelles to organisms — that serves functional ends. Some of this matter is arranged in such a way as to form conscious creatures, like us, and maybe other animals.

I take Searle to believe that the way evolution has operated, and the way it has put physical matter together, entails that consciousness exist. (Not that evolution necessarily entailed the emergence of consciousness, but that given that it put organisms together with our molecular composition, consciousness was inevitable. I say this because Searle believe that the brain in a sense ‘creates’ the mind, that mind is an emergent property of the brain perhaps like wetness is an emergent property of water. Given the molecular structure of water, and the operation of physico-chemical laws, water has the emergent properties associated with being a liquid. In a similar sense, the molecular organisation of the brain (human, at least), operating according to the causal laws of the universe, creates consciousness. Another system made out of different material, say a computer emulating mental processes, would lack consciousness — it hasn’t got the right stuff. This is what I take Searle to mean when he says “I think evolution probably could not have produced such a thing [a mechanism that did all this stuff, but it wouldn’t be really like us], because evolution produced us.”

But then Searle says “you can imagine evolution producing a well-organised zombie, but it’s unlikely; we just get this much more efficient mechanism if we have consciousness. However, you could, in principle at least, design machinery that could behave as if it were intelligent – that is, could behave in the same way as human beings behave; we’re nowhere near being able to that, but in principle it’s possible.” This suggests that Searle now means something else. It seems that he’s now talking about a creature that is not like us molecule for molecule (if it was, it’d be human and conscious). So perhaps Searle means a being potentially quite different from us physically — perhaps a silicon-based life-form, or of just very different biological design — but which was behaviourally similar, one that instantiated the same functional states of a human, but which was a zombie. This, it seems to me, is a rather different claim. On the first reading, it seems that Searle should reject the idea that Blackmore is a zombie, because of his views about the way that consciousness arises from the material composition of the brain. And on the second reading he should reject the possibility too, because he’s supposed to be talking about a functional zombie, which can’t substituted with a biological zombie that Blackmore would have to be if she were any type of zombie! To unpack that a bit, accepting the possibility of a functional zombie doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable to conclude that Blackmore could be a zombie, for if she were to be a zombie she’d have to be a biological zombie, and acceptance of the former doesn’t entail acceptance of the latter.

If this is correct, then the conclusions about the ‘extra ingredient’ needed to explain consciousness don’t follow, and zombies aren’t perhaps so good a thought experiment as Searle thinks.

The next philosopher I want to turn to is David Chalmers, alluded to by Block above and charged with believing in biological zombies. Here’s the relevant dialogue from Conversations On Consciousness (it’s quite long):

Blackmore: “Would you like to explain about zombies?”
Chalmers: “Sure. I think in the actual world, intelligent behaviour and consciousness very likely go together. So when you find a system which is behaving like me and talking like me – it’s probably conscious. But it seems that I could imagine a system which was behaviourally just like me, it walked and talked just like me, it got around its environment, but it didn’t have subjective experience. Everything was dark inside. This would be what philosophers like to call a zombie – a being entirely lacking consciousness.
Now such a being would be tremendously sophisticated. You couldn’t tell the difference from the outside, but there would nobody home inside. Here I am sitting talking to you. All I have access to is your behaviour. Now you seem like a reasonably intelligent human being, you’re saying articulate things that suggest a conscious being inside. But of course, the age-old problem is ‘how do I know?’. It’s at least logically consistent with my evidence that you are a zombie.
Now I don’t think you are, but the very logical possibility of zombies is interesting because then we can raise the question ‘why are we not zombies?’. There could have been a universe of zombies. Think about creating the world. It seems logically within God’s power (and of course the use of ‘God’ here is just a metaphor) to create a world which was physically just like this one with a lot of particles and compelx systems behaving in complex ways, but these were just androids. There was no consciousness at all.
And yet there is consciousness. So that’s been used by some people, including me, to suggest that the existence of consciousness on our world is a further deeper property of the world than its mere physical constitution.”

Chalmers seems to be saying that it’s only something behaviourally like us, not something like us molecule for molecule, that could exist and be lacking in consciousness. When he says “You couldn’t tell the difference from the outside”, he must be interpreted as meaning from a relatively cursory glance of the outside: if outside is taken to mean all types of physical examination and testing, and it’s molecular constitution and physiological operation were found to be identical to that found in humans, then it’d be a human, and we would therefore grant it consciousness (provided we grant the existence of other minds in humans). This gloss is supported by Chalmers’s response to Blackmore’s next question:

Blackmore: “So are you saying that you believe such philosopher’s zombies are possible and the fact that we have consciousness means that we have to add something to the explanation?”
Chalmers: “I think they’re probably not possible in the sense that no such thing could ever exist in this world. I think that even a computer which has really complex intelligent behaviour and functioning would probably be conscious. What is interesting though, is that it doesn’t seem contradictory to suppose, at least in the imagination, that someone, somewhere, in some possible world, could behave like me without consciousness. But our world isn’t like that. So that’s an interesting fact about our world!”

I take Chalmers to be saying that no zombie, in the sense Chalmers intends, could exist in our universe, because of the way it happens to be constructed. But in another possible world, constructed differently, they could. But the possible world Chalmers has in mind cannot be exactly the same as our world – elementary particle for elementary particle, atom for atom, molecule for molecule – as it wouldn’t be an alternative possible world, it’d be our world, which features the very conscious creatures (us) we were trying to imagine didn’t exist!

So Chalmers rejects the possibility of what I called a biological zombie, characterised by Block as “physically exactly like us, down to every molecule of the brain, just the same but nobody home, no phenomenology”. If ‘possible world’ means one that is exactly like our world, then we can ask what it’d mean to imagine such a world containing beings identical to us but without consciousness. It seems akin to saying that you could imagine a world like ours, built from the same elementary particles, fundamental forces and fields, but which didn’t feature mass or electromagnetic radiation or hydrogen. You might be able to say you can imagine such a world, but perhaps your imagination is running away from you there a bit. We might also claim to be able imagine a world identical to this one except that humans can fly by levitation (of course, if it were really identical, we couldn’t, as we don’t); but merely saying this doesn’t then raise interesting questions about why humans, in this world, don’t in fact fly. The mere fact that we think we can imagine this world with something ‘extra’ that enables levitation doesn’t mean that we then have to explain the absence of this ‘extra’ something in this world, or even consider it as a possible ‘extra’ that we could be in possession of. Similarly, the fact that we might — though few do — say that we can imagine identical beings but lacking in conscious, because they lack some mysterious extra ingredient, does not mean that there actually is an ‘extra ingredient’ in our world to explain.

It might be useful here to distinguish between logically possible worlds and nomologically possible worlds, and apply this distinction to the case of zombies. A logical possibility is a state of affairs that doesn’t contradict the laws of logic, and a logically possible world is one the description of which is not self-contradictory. The space of logically possible worlds therefore contains worlds very unlike ours, perhaps where things impossible in our world occur with regularity. A nomological possibility is a possible state of affairs that is consistent with the causal laws of the universe as we know them, and so a nomologically possible world is one that is consistent with the known laws of physics. Under this distinction, levitating humans might be a logical possibility, but they aren’t a nomological possibility. And what does the mere logical possibility of levitation entail for our views about our actual world? Little, in this case. And so why should the logical possibility of zombies be of much relevance to us? The nomological possibility of a zombie would be of interest, but arguing for such a possible being requires a fair bit of work, and is in fact rejected by the philosophers looked at here (with the possible exception of Searle, who seems to drift a bit between the two possibilities, logical and nomological).

Let’s get back to Chalmers. He does not seem to believe in the nomological possibility of what we’ve called a biological zombie, and so Block is wrong to say that this sort of zombie is what Chalmers does in fact believe in. This has implications for what Block claims Chalmers says the implications of zombies are. The sort of zombie Chalmers believes could exist is one that existed in a genuinely alternative possible world, behaved in an intelligent, organised and coherent manner in the pursuit of goals, even reported the possession of conscious experience, but did not have real conscious experience. One, in other words, that had internal functional states that guided intelligent behaviour — Block’s functionalist zombie. Block and Chalmers agree on the nomological possibility of functional zombies and the nomological impossibility of biological zombies. Which prompts Blackmore to ask:

Blackmore: “You say our world isn’t like that. Does this make you a functionalist? Are you saying that, in our world, anything that carries out a certain function must necessarily be conscious?”
Chalmers: “In some very broad sense I am a functionalist. I think that behaviour, and function, and consciousness go together. They are very tightly correlated and associated. But I am not a functionalist in the strong sense of saying that all there is to consciousness is the functioning. So people say that all we have to worry about is functioning and the behaviour and the talking. I think that is just manifestly false because of the direct data of subjective experience. We have correlation of the two without any kind of reduction of one to the other.”
Blackmore: “I want to get this absolutely clear because people talk about your views on zombies a lot. You saying that logically you can conceive of a world in which there would be intelligent-behaving creatures who went around saying like ‘I am conscious’ and ‘I’m experiencing red right now’ and so on, but didn’t have any subjective experience. But you think that in this real world we are in that’s not possible and anything that does these behaviours will necessarily be conscious.”
Chalmers: “That’s exactly right.”

This assent to Blackmore’s presentation of his view reinforces the interpretation of Chalmers’s view that I’ve sketched above. He accepts the nomological possibility of functional zombies, but rejects the nomological possibility of biological zombies.

So far, here’s the tally: Block and Chalmers both accept the nomological possibility of functional zombies, and Searle’s comments suggest that should too, if he’d accept the distinction between functional and biological zombies. Both Block and Chalmers reject the nomological possibility of biological zombies, and therefore reject the conclusions that supposedly follow from their mere conceivability, such as the need to postulate an ‘extra ingredient’ to explain consciousness.

So far one major philosopher has been notable by his absence: Dan Dennett, who doesn’t have much time for considering zombies, driven as it is, he considers, by the ill-founded Zombic Hunch:

“The Zombic hunch is the idea that there could be a being that behaved exactly the way you or I behave, in every regard – it could cry at sad movies, be thrilled by joyous sunsets, enjoy ice cream and the whole thing, and yet not be conscious at all. It would just be a zombie. Now I think that many people are sure that hunch is right, and they don’t know why they’re sure. If you show them the arguments for taking zombies seriously are all flawed, this doesn’t stop them from clinging to the hunch. They’re afraid to let go of it, for fear they’re leaving something deeply important out. And so we get a bifurcation of theorists into those who take the zombic hunch seriously, and those who, like myself, have sort of overcome it. I can feel it, but I just don’t have it anymore.”

I’m not quite sure whether Dennett rejects the nomological possibility of the functional zombie — if it behaved like we did, it’d be conscious like us, perhaps — and I leave that to others to address.

It’s time to summarise. I agree with Dennett that we should let go of the zombic hunch. If you believe in zombies, in the strong, biological, nomological sense, then this should be on the basis of an explicit argument — assent to belief in the possibility of these zombies seems to me more of a conclusion than a starting point for other conclusions to be drawn. As such, asking someone whether they believe in the possibility of zombies (after making sure exactly what you’re talking about!) is a useful diagnostic question in gauging their stance on the mind, but this stance has to be justified by a zombie-independent argument. After all, to avoid circularity you need to provide reasons for concluding that zombies are possible on the basis of your conception of the mind, rather than claiming that zombies are possible, then deriving an account of the mind that explains this possibility — and then using this to explain the possibility of the zombies that motivated your argument!

Notes

Blackmore, S. Conversations on Consciousness (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).

Braddon-Mitchell, D. & Jackson, F. Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Blackwell, 1996).

Ravenscroft, I. Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford, 2005).

Race Reprised, and the Difficulties of Debate

2006-02-05T21:03:00.000Z

A while ago I posted a on the vexed topic of race, and whether we can talk about race from a genetic perspective, prompted by posts on Mixing Memory and Fido the Yak. My essay wasn’t meant as an attack on MM or Fido, as Chris at MM clearly realised in his reasonable response to my post, but Fido seems to have taken umbrage at what I said – see his response in the comments section of my original post, and in a post on Fido’s blog in which I’m accused of being a racist, despite the fact that I have said nothing to support such an assertion. I want to respond to this unfair and serious charge, and some other issues, and I shall quote from both Fido’s comments on this blog and his own. Apologies if this means going over some familiar ground, and if the tone is somewhat more touchy than usual, but being called a racist is not something I take lightly.

In the comments section, Fido says:

If I believed Pinker meant to talk about human groups in way consistent with the groupings RPM [a blogger who commented on my original post, D.J.] points to, I would still say he is a racist, but I would be inclined to admit that the word could be taken in a less perjorative sense than is commonly understood.

Why would RPM’s groupings (and RPM has blogged on the reality of race here [D.J. I made an error here - it was someone else blogging on GeneExpression that wrote the post, sorry]), if adopted by Pinker, lead Fido to conclude that Pinker is a racist? Fido hasn’t provided any evidence that Pinker is a racist, and I think it’s an absurd claim — for the third time Fido, please back this charge up. And in response to my comments about finding support for Pinker’s use of the notion of race, Fido writes:

I don't understand who's supposed to be a contrarian fringe expert in this discussion. Cavalli-Sforza's vita and list of publications is quite impressive to me, though he has not to my knowledge published in Daedalus, and I am myself a contrarian fringe dilletante. So a big grain of salt there.

Well done Fido on being a “contrarian fringe dilettante”, that’s marvellous. However, I take responsibility for inducing this tone in Fido, because I omitted a crucial word in my parenthetical comment in the original post: ‘not’. So a crucial sentence should have read “But it doesn’t take much searching to challenge this idea (and NOT through selective picking of contrarian, fringe experts)…”), and I apologise for misleading readers, including Fido (who may have taken me to be implying that Fido was selecting fringe experts, which I was not). I meant to say that it was possible to challenge Fido’s comments about race, and indeed the AAA’s and AAPA’s, without resorting to quoting fringe experts, as the Republican party tends to do with the science of global warming (see Chris Mooney’s The Republican War On Science for more). The geneticists that work on the ancestry of human genes, their distribution across the globe and their clustering into geographic populations often have something to say that differs from what anthropologists might say (and I think this is part because of the different intellectual traditions of the respective disciplines, but I can happily let that slide for the moment). I agree that Cavalli-Sforza has an impressive research record, but there’s an irony in bringing him up again.

Cavalli-Sforza, as Fido no doubt knows, has said that “The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise”, so here’s an agreed authority supporting Fido’s view. Presumably Fido wouldn’t classify him as a racist too, right? Interestingly, Cavalli-Sforza was also one of the lead proponents of the Human Genome Diversity Project, intended to catalogue at least some of the nature of human genetic diversity. And what happened to this project? Well, luckily a book has been written on this topic (Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, by Jenny Reardon, reviewed in Nature). Here are some quotes from the Nature review:

“The Human Genome Diversity Project had a short and troubled life. The aim was to sample and preserve DNA from “isolated indigenous populations” before social changes rendered them useless for the purposes of answering questions about human evolution. But from its birth around 1991 to its unofficial death less than a decade later, indigenous-rights groups attacked the project as racist and neo-colonialist, branding it the ‘Vampire Project’ … Today research on human genetic variation flourishes, but under other rubrics and largely under the radar of Diversity Project critics.

As Jenny Reardon stresses in her book Race to the Finish, the project’s leaders were well-intentioned and had impeccable anti-racist credentials. So why did their effort draw unremitting hostility from groups representing indigenous peoples, some physical anthropologists and others? And could critics’ fears have been allayed without gutting the project? … To be tarnished with the brush of racism — especially given their personal histories — much have been galling. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza had been a trenchant critic of William Shockley’s claim of black genetic inferiority; Robert Cook-Deegan had a long record of involvement with Physicians for Human Rights; and Mary Claire King had worked with the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to identify children kidnapped during Argentina’s dirty war. But avowals of their good intentions did not mollify critics, and organizers eventually set about addressing specific concerns.” [action which was attacked along similar lines]

After some more history, the review concludes:

“The study of human genetic variation is now fashionable, but it is being pursued without the scrutiny of the deeper issues that Reardon believes essential to the pursuit of both a more reflective science and a more sensitive society. Funders have understandably tried to avoid the controversies that sank the Diversity Project. But the ironic result has been to narrow discussion of the issues at stake even further.”

It wasn’t actual racism that created fear and anger in the critics of the Diversity Project, nor a deep engagement with the underlying science, but misplaced concerns about what the project meant and would claim about human nature. Can Fido in good conscience really say that there aren’t reflections of these problems in our discussion? Physical anthropologists, one of Fido’s prosecution witnesses, are explicitly mentioned here, and not by chance either. Because of the history of the discipline of anthropology, anthropologists of many stripes have approached certain topics in certain ways, which have arguably been influenced by politically or ideologically motivated ideas about human nature, which I’ll come back to later.

There is a final twist in the story of Cavalli-Sforza. On the front of one his major books, there is a map of genetic groups derived from the sort of work Cavalli-Sforza has pioneered — a grouping that looks very much like the sorts of groups formed when you analyse genetic lineages on the basis of common heritage, which will often have a geographical correlate — the clustering of geographical variants that we’ve been discussing. Jonathan Marks, one of the panellists on the SSRC’s ‘Is Race Real?’ forum, cited favourably by Fido, has pointed out an irony in this (see also other pages on Marks’ site for criticisms of the Diversity Project, such as the charge that “The images it conveyed were colonialist, exploitative, and racialized”):

“The HGDP says that one of its aims is to show that "... in biological terms, there is no such thing as a clearly defined race.... Most importantly, therefore the results of the Project are expected to undermine the popular belief that there are clearly defined races, [and] to contribute to the elimination of racism...."
This quotation is from their summary document, on the web at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/morrinst/hgdp/summary93.html

And yet their literature has shown this figure [see map at top of blog] several times, with the caption “Four major ethnic regions are shown. Africans are yellow, Australians red, [Mongoloids blue], and Caucasoids green.” See, for example, The History and Geography of Human Genes, by Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza (Princeton University Press, 1995).”

So although Cavalli-Sforza has publicly rejected the notion of race, and Fido seems friendly to his analysis of human genetic variation, Cavalli-Sforza also seems to invoke genetic clusterings of the sort I’ve been alluding to, as Marks points out. Nwo there are obviously a number of ways to respond to this. Firstly, we could say that Cavalli-Sforza was being disingenuous, that he knew that he believed in race but publicly pretended he didn’t so as to avoid disapproval. Or we might more realistically say that although he rejected the usefulness of specific racial classifications, such as those commonly used in the US and Europe, he had a use for the notion of geographical variants (or human groups classified on the basis of common heritage, which will often have a geographical correlate), and just preferred not to call them races (even though this might go against the traditional use of race in evolutionary biology and taxonomy). So where does Fido now stand in relation to Cavalli-Sforza? Is he in the fold, or does he get kicked out for being a racist?

Fido’s blog makes some other different points:

When I included in Under the Sun a link to the Social Science Research Council's online forum Is Race Real?, it occurred to me that it would not do the job I wanted it do, namely, pass the question of "race" over to experts in the scientific study of human biological diversity. Now that blogger Dan Jones has taken issue with my post, I feel compelled to reiterate the distinction between Richard Lewontin's political beliefs on the one hand, and the scientific consensus that has built up around the question of "race" on the other. To that end, I now cite the American Anthropological Association's Statement on "Race", their Statement on "Race" and Intelligence, and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists' Statement on the Biological Aspects of Race. I stand by my claim that the consensus opinion among scientists is that race is "not a useful scientific concept. It doesn't describe observable human genetic variation with adequate precision, and it typically introduces more problems than it solves."

There are a number of points to reply to here. Fido suggests that Lewontin’s political beliefs (and I presume by extension those of other scientists) are separate from the scientific claims made about race, or are at least separable. Of course, this is how it should be, but I think it can certainly be contested that scientists’ views on issues as broad as human nature in general (including, but not exhausted by, such fields as behavioural genetics and evolutionary psychology) and specific topics such as sex differences and the concept of race have historically been so separate (and in both directions; people have erroneously asserted that there is a scientific justification for racism or other forms of discrimination and prejudice – think Social Darwinism). Many responses to these sorts of topics have been motivated by sincerely held and entirely understandable social and political concerns, as (not exclusively) documented by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (I don’t expect Fido to accept Pinker’s analysis, and I don’t expect that I could convince Fido either). Historically anthropologists have stressed the biological similarity of humans, which means that the variability of humans is to be explained in cultural terms, thus fitting in nicely with a blank slate, or nuturist, view of human nature, one that stresses the malleability of the human mind and behaviour, and our freedom from the constraints of biology. Of course, there is something in this, but I think there has been a tendency for sensitivity about discussing the biological basis of human differences, or the idea of such differences per se (whether related to sex or race or whatever), to cloud discussions of a number of important topics. Again, I don’t expect Fido to agree, and I can live with that (without further conversations we’ll have to agree to disagree for the time being), but I can’t live with being labelled a racist. Sociobiology was labelled as inherently racist and right wing, and E. O. Wilson was linked to eugenic and Nazi policies — these responses suggest less of an engagement with the arguments and more a loading of the topic with associations it shouldn’t, or needn’t, have.

Moving on to the statements from the AAA and AAPA, I also have a few remarks. Firstly, they’re from 1998 and 1996, respectively. That doesn’t make them wrong, of course, but it does mean that they do not take into account the explosion in genetics and genomics that has occurred in the intervening 8-10 years. Surely it is possible that their comments might need to be revised in the light of new evidence or new analytical tools (except of course if we rule of the possibility of race having a reality a priori, in which case why bother with an argument at all?). If we take race to mean not the racial classifications of any particular culture, but use it in a weaker sense, as denoting populations (that may be more or less geographical linked) that cluster genetically on the basis of common heritage, but not discretely, then what is Fido’s objection to the notion of race (or geographical variants for short — I assume we’re talking about the concept and not merely the name)? Is Fido claiming that the results summarised in the Scientific American article (which I cited because it’s easy to access, and accessible for other readers, as with the Daedalus essays) are just wrong? Sure, the genetic clusterings described in the SA article don’t fit neatly onto the racial classifications commonly used in the West, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about them as races (or geographic variants). Of if Fido thinks that it does, can Fido explain why, and why evolutionary biologists have been mistaken in using this term, interchangeably with geographic variants, in their work.

In any case, I don’t see how citing the AAA’s and AAPA’s conclusion, which is all Fido does, shows how these scientific conclusions are untainted by social or political ideology. What it shows is the public face presented by a professional scientific organisation (and I’m not implying that the public face is necessarily different from the private one), a point I’ll return to below.

In the comments section on my blog, Fido says:

It was a mistake, I now realize, to assume that people who read my blog and genuinely cared about the scientific description of human genetic diversity would be familiar, or have the ability and the gumption to make themselves familiar, with the American Antrhopological Association's Statement on "Race", and their Statement on "Race" and Intelligence, or the American Association of Physical Anthropologists' Statement on the Biological Aspects of Race.

Fido goes on to quote some of the AAA’s and AAPA’s statements:

“Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past” Further, the AAPA states, "There is no necessary concordance between biological characteristics and culturally defined groups. On every continent, there are diverse populations that differ in language, economy, and culture. There is no national, religious, linguistic or cultural group or economic class that constitutes a race. However, human beings who speak the same language and share the same culture frequently select each other as mates, with the result that there is often some degree of correspondence between the distribution of physical traits on the one hand and that of linguistic and cultural traits on the other. But there is no causal linkage between these physical and behavioral traits, and therefore it is not justifiable to attribute cultural characteristics to genetic inheritance." That is the consensus opinion of scientists who specialize in the study of human physical diversity. I have no wish to imply that the weight of expert opinion refutes Pinker; I mean to state it flat out.

Well, I agree with the first quote, as would Pinker and as would the geneticists I’ve been quoting in support of my position. So what’s its relevance? We’re talking about a subtler notion of race amenable to a type of analyses that wouldn’t have been possible when the AAA and AAPA statements were made. The second long quote is largely irrelevant, as accepting the claims of the geneticists I quoted does not entail any of the conclusions rejected in that quote. Talk about attacking straw men! Fido goes on:

As an aside, I repeat my view that the conventional wisdom among scientists is open to revision. It is not my intention to represent the scientific consensus as monolithic, dogmatic or otherwise etched in stone. My criticism is with the way Pinker and Leroi have gone about attacking the conventional wisdom. Strawman arguments and appeals to common sense racism do not cut it in my book.

One of Mr. Jones' more curious objections, indeed it may the substantive thrust of his post, is that reasonable people ought to "be able to discuss the science of race sensibly, without racist connotations." There is in fact no "science of race" among the modern sciences, but rather sciences of genomics, human population genetics, physical anthropology, and so on. However, if one wishes to buck the conventional wisdom by holding on to the claim that races exist and ought to be studied scientifically, then one is a racist by definition, a "scientific racist" to be precise. If you take that position, and the connotations of the word "racist" bother you, then you might take that as an indication that there's a problem with your choice of words. I certainly don't have the power to change connotative meanings, or to redefine "racism" to not mean "racism," and I don't have any solutions for those who want to be racists without being "racists." It's just not my cup of tea.

So if I don’t like the idea of being a racist, then I shouldn’t use the word race, because to use the concept/word race means that I’m automatically a racist? Is this for real? So if I believe that there are two sexes, then I must be a sexist, because believing in two sexes necessarily makes me a sexist? This is barmy.

Fido claims that the scientific consensus is that race is not a useful scientific concept (well it depends on your interests, obviously – it was scientifically useful in getting the drug BiDil approved by the FDA, regardless of whether the use of race was a proxy for a genetic or environmental basis of the different efficacy of the drug in self-identified blacks and whites). Fido also claims that if you do believe in race, in the weaker sense above, then you’re de facto a racist (with or without the modifier ‘scientific’). This is ludicrous, and suggests the sort of knee-jerk reaction that often goes with discussions of sensitive topics surrounding human nature (see The Blank Slate for a detailed history of such reactions). To be racist is, according to standard usage, to think that race is a primary determinant of physical and character traits (nothing I or Pinker or the scientists I discussed imply or endorse), or that some racial characteristics make some races inherently superior to other races; or to be prejudiced against people or groups on the basis of their race. Nothing that I’ve said makes me a racist in any of these senses, and if by scientific racist Fido means that I’m not merely a racist on the grounds of faith, but because of my faulty reading of the scientific literature, then Fido is way out of line. I’m not a racist in any sense, period, and Fido should exercise a little care and caution in bandying these terms about. And I don’t see the point of the stuff about connotative meanings, apart from as an exercise in sarcasm. If I don’t like the connotation of being a racist, don’t use the word race? If you don’t like the connotation of being a sexist, don’t use the word sex? And you don’t need to change word meanings, you just need to understand what the words mean. And finally, the implication that I want to be a racist without being called a “racist” is just way off the mark, as should hopefully be obvious by now — there is nothing that I’ve said that makes me a racist! If it’s not your cup of tea Fido, stop drinking, and don’t pour out cups for others!

And I think Fido is being disingenuous in saying:

“One of Mr. Jones' more curious objections, indeed it may the substantive thrust of his post, is that reasonable people ought to “be able to discuss the science of race sensibly, without racist connotations.” There is in fact no “science of race” among the modern sciences, but rather sciences of genomics, human population genetics, physical anthropology, and so on.”

I would’ve thought it was obvious I was using ‘the science of race’ as a rubric to cover those fields of study that are relevant to discussions of race. Fido is basically saying, “There is no such thing as race, and therefore there couldn’t be a study of it!” — this is the natural interpretation of the point of saying that there is no science of race on the basis of believing that race isn’t a real thing and that there is no scientific concept of race. Yet this begs the question of the validity of the race concept (more or less carefully defined) — and the scientists and work I alluded to are a challenge to this claim. Yes, the AAA and the AAPA have dismissed some ideas about race, but what they say doesn’t seem to affect the ideas and results I was trying to talk about — that is, these results don’t purport to assert what it is the AAA and AAPA wish to deny! The claims of the AAA and AAPA statements are quite broad, and so it is possible to agree with their broad conclusions and still continue to study races (or human groups classified on the basis of common heritage, which will often have a geographical correlate) in scientific terms. You can agree with the AAA and the AAPA, and also take into the account the research I mention — and not be a racist either.

So I ask Fido the following:

· To show that the results summarised in the Scientific American article are either invalid or to explain why can’t we use “genetic information be used to distinguish human groups having a common heritage and to assign individuals to particular ones”, what we might call races following evolutionary and taxonomical practice ‘races’ (or geographical variants – and if Fido is happy with geographic variants, but just doesn’t like the term race because it’ll make people think of the standard racial classifications, then can Fido explain why we’ve wasted so much time when Fido could have said, “OK, that sense of race is OK, but let’s not call it race”. I might well be persuaded with that line, and I think if I ever discuss race again I’ll define race as above and make sure it’s clear that this term is shorthand for this more subtle sense).

· To substantiate the claim that Pinker is a racist, that I am a racist, and that RPM is a racist.

That about wraps it up. I don’t expect that Fido will agree with much of what I’ve said, but it’s a shot at setting the record straight about whether my discussion of race makes me a racist or not, and what it means for others to talk about race, and why it’s still such a difficult notion to discuss.

[Addendum:

After writing this reply I came across another set of comments from Fido. There have been four in total: the original post on Fido’s blog; the reply in the comments section of my blog; in the second post on Fido’s blog; and the final set, which I came across late, which are a response to my announcing that I had written a post related to Fido’s original post! It’s the last set I’m replying to here:

Fido starts:

The point that interests me about Pinker's statement, and that prompted me to post "Under the Sun," is not the debate about how best to characterize human genetic diversity. My concern really is the suggestion that somebody's claim a to a common sense view of race should in any fashion serve as a rebutal to conventional wisdom among scientists. This is not to say that the consensus opinion of scientists is beyond critique, or that there aren't important disagreements in the area of human population genetics. I have already indicated that I believe the conventional wisdom is open to revision. My argument is that appeals to common sense are not appropriate in this context.

There is a question of expertise here, and if you were to argue that Pinker's expertise cannot be judged on the basis of this one statement or any excerpt from it, I would cede that point. And the question of whether Pinker routinely speaks authoritatively outside his area of expertise I would agree to set aside for the time being. There remains a curious argument about common sense and conventional wisdom which Leroi has put forward and Pinker has chosen to cite.

The argument about the strawman fallacy is key. Are we talking about "conventional wisdom," "Lewontin's opinion," or, in your words, the opinions of "Lewontin and company"? I cite the AAA and AAPA as additional authorities, if any were needed. On the matter of "race," the opinion ascribed to "Lewontin and company" rather represent the consensus view of scientists. If you think that the dominance of this view represents a case of ideological hoodwinkery rather than the product of decades of scientific study, I feel that the onus is on you to make the case. So I think I have done what I need to show that the "conventional wisdom" really is the "conventional wisdom," and that's all that I need to do to talk about the things that interest me.

OK, let’s start with what Fido originally said (in the first post on the topic):

“Steven Pinker's most dangerous idea is that "Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." It's not the sort of thing I'd have much to say about--when I want to learn about population genetics, I consult a population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, for instance, who would give me plenty of reasons to doubt that what Pinker says approximates anything I should pay attention to. But Pinker did make one interesting comment, and the fact that I believe he's a sexist, a racist and willfully ignorant of certain facts of evolutionary science shouldn't blind me to the possibility that he may have stumbled over an interesting idea. Pinker writes:

In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin's Fallacy: that because most genes may be found in all human groups, the groups don't differ at all. But patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups, and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense.)

Where to begin? I'm most interested in the contrast Pinker sets up between "conventional wisdom" and "common sense," but I must observe in passing that Leroi's op-ed and Pinker's abridged version of it represents a sterling example of the error in reasoning known as the straw man fallacy. Critical responses to Leroi can be found in this collection of essays put together by the Social Science Research Council.”

Anyway, what's this business about going against conventional wisdom in favor of common sense? Is that particularly scientific, or even reasonable? Common sense tells us that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Conventional wisdom among astronomers, at least since Copernicus, is that the earth orbits the sun while rotating on its axis once every twenty-four hours or so (a period astronomers call "mean solar time"--go figure). The common sense view of sunrises and sunsets is not invalidated by conventional astronomical wisdom, although with advances in technology, we see that it in some regards common sense, like conventional wisdom, is open to revision.

The quote from Pinker doesn’t show that he’s going against the conventional wisdom simply motivated by common sense, or that he sets up a contrast between them (it could be read into the quote I suppose). He’s making three claims: one, that a conventional wisdom has emerged that race does not exist; two, “that patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups”; and third, that “different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense”. It’s not because it’s common sense that it is opposed to the conventional wisdom, but just that the common sense idea happens to stand in opposition to the conventional wisdom.

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not particularly keen on the wording of Pinker’s quotation, and I don’t see why he needed to mention common sense at all, but that doesn’t mean I endorse Fido’s response either. The key points are that there is a scientifically defensible conception of race, and it doesn’t entail the racism Fido assumes it does.

Let’s get on to the strawman fallacy – that Pinker and Leroi are creating an imaginary foe. The targets of their comments about race are those who believe that race doesn’t exist, or that it is a useless concept and entails racism. Do such people exist? Yes, and include Fido, Lewontin, and the AAA and AAPA that Fido endorses – indeed, it is in citing these authorities that Fido says the refutation of Pinker “is the consensus opinion of scientists who specialize in the study of human physical diversity. I have no wish to imply that the weight of expert opinion refutes Pinker; I mean to state it flat out.” What Pinker means by conventional wisdom, and what Fido means by scientific consensus, are the same thing, and they both agree on what it says – that what the conventional wisdom/scientific consensus says about race conflicts with what Pinker/Leroi (and Mayr, Crow, Olson + Bamshad and many others) say about race – which is why there’s a debate (which Fido would like to end as a non-debate, because there is “no science of race”). Contrary to what Fido says, what is interesting about this debate is not the supposed contrast between “conventional wisdom” and “common sense”, but who is right about the nature of human genetic variation, and what this means in understanding human diversity – because there is no pitching of common sense against conventional wisdom. What on earth is the confusion about then?

I’m really at a loss as to why Fido’s “concern really is the suggestion that somebody's claim a to a common sense view of race should in any fashion serve as a rebutal to conventional wisdom among scientists” – Pinker did not advance this notion, and so it didn’t need addressing: to repeat, to say that scientific evidence refutes a conventional wisdom (one that denies something obvious to common sense) does not mean that you are saying common sense refutes or rebuts the conventional wisdom by some inherent superiority of common sense; it merely means that the rebuttal of the conventional wisdom by scientific evidence serves to reinforce common sense. It could easily go the other way (you could have a conventional wisdom that was in line with common sense, and then scientific evidence could undermine both). And lest I be misunderstood again, I’m not actually suggesting that scientific results completely support our common sense notions of race, whatever they are (as I said, in this case I’m not keen on the wording, although common sense isn’t strictly banned from my lexicon). I’m just responding to the claim that Pinker is setting up conventional wisdom against common sense.

And so the really interesting question is whether the scientific evidence and the conventional wisdom clash, and this is what Pinker, Leroi, myself, PRM and others have tried to talk about. Whether it not

Finally, when I wrote "I believe he's a sexist, a racist and willfully ignorant of certain facts of evolutionary science" (in a dependent clause, no less) I deliberately used the phrase "I believe" because I didn't particularly feel like carefully substantiating what in fact are my beliefs. We could examine my beliefs about Pinker, if you would like, but I think it's fair to say upfront that I recognize no professional or bloggerly obligation to be nice to Pinker, and my sensibilities about words like "racist" are decidedly not British.

This is an outrageous get-out clause “I can say what I like and you can’t ask me to justify what I say if I add ‘I believe’ before the claim”. To quote Fido, where to start? For a kick off, adding that your belief something that you express doesn’t diminish your commitment to it, or signify that you won’t offer reasons to make the claim and for which you assent belief in it, or that the belief is held in the absence of reasons (if it is this should be made clear so people know what they’re dealing with). And what is a belief other than something that you feel you can publicly justify, and that you have reasons for holding (otherwise why would you bother assenting belief in it?)? Beliefs are, or should be, those things we adduce reasons to hold — unless of course you think it’s OK to hold serious beliefs on some non-evidentiary basis. And what are we to make of the claim that Fido doesn’t “particularly feel like carefully substantiating what in fact are my beliefs” when it comes to a belief about something as serious as whether an influential public intellectual is a sexist or a racist? Why bring it up in a public forum if you’re not really interested in defending this position, and why think it isn’t incumbent on you to defend this claim? It seems a remarkable stance to take, and a flippant one to boot. And moving on to beliefs more generally, do you not feel like substantiating your belief in, say, evolution (if you believe that evolution has happened on earth, that is), merely because it’s a belief? Or is this not just a belief, however justified by reasons and evidence — do you have some sort of direct line to the truth, so that whereas you only ‘believe’ some things others you actually ‘know’, and the latter you’ll bother to defend? I assume Fido is making reference to a distinction between belief and knowledge, but the difference surely isn’t between having reasons on the one hand (in the case of knowledge) and not on the other (belief, which therefore doesn’t need substantiating) – reasons are crucial to both, and in fact claims to knowledge normally do not signify certainty, but belief held with a high degree of probability of being true because of the strength of the evidence and arguments in its favour. So it’s no good to say, “This is what I believe, and this is a serious charge against another person, but I have no obligation to carefully substantiate my claim because it is, after all, only a belief”. Fido, your blog is full of your beliefs – can we assume that you’re not really bothered to substantiate what you say on it because they are just that, beliefs? Can we take them with the big grain of salt you alluded to in response to my post?

End of Addendum]

Race - Fact Or Fiction?

2006-01-30T22:00:00.000Z

The excellent Mixing Memory recently had a post commenting, prompted by some comments from Fido the Yak, on MIT cognitive psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker’s remarks about group differences in his answer to the Edge Annual question . It’s a little old now, but I thought the questions they raised about Pinker’s comments, and the notion of race, provided reason enough to say a little these ideas, and to clear up some confusion.

Fido says, “I believe [Pinker’s] a sexist, a racist and willfully ignorant of certain facts of evolutionary science” (these are serious charges that warrant careful substantiation); Mixing Memory adds, “First of all, Fido gets Pinker exactly right. As I've said many times, Pinker has a nasty habit of speaking authoratatively about topics on which he is anything but an authority (like, say, gender differences in mathematical ability)… Like Pinker, I'm not an expert in genomics, or anything remotely related to genetics, but unlike Pinker, I'm not going to comment on the issues discussed in the forum as though I am an expert.” Both Mixing Memory and Fido mention a recent forum on race, where the experts set the record straight on race, supposedly. When Fido says, “when I want to learn about population genetics, I consult a population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, for instance, who would give me plenty of reasons to doubt that what Pinker says approximates anything I should pay attention to”, he gives the impression that the weight of expert opinion refutes Pinker. But it doesn’t take much searching to challenge this idea (and NOT [D.J. important corrective word added] through selective picking of contrarian, fringe experts), and in this post I’ll let the experts speak for themselves.

In 2002, Daedalus published two essays, one by Ernst Mayr, the other by James Crow, both on race.

Mayr was until his death the doyen of American evolutionary biology, and one of the architects of the evolutionary synthesis. This doesn’t make him infallible, but he’s not a crank either. Here’s some selected quotes from his essay:

“There is a widespread feeling that the word “race” indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as “there are no human races”. Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals … The terms “subspecies” and “geographic races” are used interchangeably in [the] taxonomic literature.”

James Crow is a distinguished and widely respected population geneticist; here’s some more extensive quotes from his essay:

“If we randomly choose a pair of bases from corresponding sites in two persons, 99.9 percent of the time they will be the same. This percentage depends only slightly on whether the two people are from the same or from different continents, from the same or from different population groups … Analysis of DNA allows us to measure with some precision the genetic distance between different populations of human beings. By this criterion, Caucasians and Asians are relatively similar, whereas Asians and Africans are somewhat more different. The differences between the groups are small–but they are real … Just as there are great differences among individuals, there are average differences, usually much smaller, between groups. Italians and Swedes differ in hair color. Sometimes the differences are more conspicuous, such as the contrasting skin color and hair shape of Africans and Europeans. But, for the most part, group differences are small and largely overshadowed by individual differences. Biologists think of races of animals as groups that started as one, but later split and became separated, usually by a geographical barrier. As the two groups evolve independently, they gradually diverge genetically. The divergences will occur more quickly if the separate environments differ, but they will occur in any case since different mutations will inevitably occur in the two populations, and some of them will persist… In much of the animal world, however, and also in the human species, complete isolation is very rare. The genetic uniformity of geographical groups is constantly being destroyed by migration between them. In particular, the major geographical groups – African, European, and Asian – are mixed, and this is especially true in the United States, which is something of a melting pot. Because of this mixing, many anthropologists argue, quite reasonably, that there is no scientific justification for applying the word “race” to populations of human beings. But the concept itself is unambiguous, and I believe that the word has a clear meaning to most people. The difficulty is not with the concept, but with the realization that major human races are not pure races. Unlike those anthropologists who deny the usefulness of the term, I believe that the word “race” can be meaningfully applied to groups that are partially mixed. Different diseases are demonstrably characteristic of different racial and ethnic groups. Sickle cell anemia, for example, is far more prevalent among people of African descent than among Europeans. Obesity is especially common in Pima Indians, the result of the sudden acquisition of a high-calorie diet to which Europeans have had enough time to adjust. Tay-Sachs disease is much more common in the Jewish population. There are other examples, and new ones are being discovered constantly. The evidence indicating that some diseases disproportionately afflict specific ethnic and racial groups does not ordinarily provoke controversy. Far more contentious is the evidence that some skills and behavioral properties are differentially distributed among different racial groups. There is strong evidence that such racial differences are partly genetic, but the evidence is more indirect and has not been convincing to everyone.”

We can at least conclude from these comments that the concept of race is not dismissed by all serious biologists; for sure, scientists such as Richard Lewontin and others reject the usefulness of the concept of race, but that view doesn’t win by default. Straight off we should be suspicious of the quick dismissal of the concept of race, and also the charge that Pinker is being ignorant, willfully or not, of evolutionary science. He might not agree with Lewontin and company, but that doesn’t automatically make him wrong.

However, without some clarification and qualification the claims of Mayr and Crow might be objected to (even with the clarifications and qualifications the claims might still be objectionable to some – reasonable people can disagree!). Here’s how Steve Olson and Michael Bamshad begin an article entitled ‘Does Race Exist?’ in Scientific American:

“Look around on the streets of any major city, and you will see a sampling of the outward variety of humanity: skin tones ranging from milk-white to dark brown; hair textures running the gamut from fine and stick-straight to thick and wiry. People often use physical characteristics such as these-along with area of geographic origin and shared culture--to group themselves and others into "races." But how valid is the concept of race from a biological standpoint? Do physical features reliably say anything informative about a person's genetic makeup beyond indicating that the individual has genes for blue eyes or curly hair?
The problem is hard in part because the implicit definition of what makes a person a member of a particular race differs from region to region across the globe. Someone classified as "black" in the U.S., for instance, might be considered "white" in Brazil and "colored" (a category distinguished from both "black" and "white") in South Africa.

Yet common definitions of race do sometimes work well to divide groups according to genetically determined propensities for certain diseases. Sickle cell disease is usually found among people of largely African or Mediterranean descent, for instance, whereas cystic fibrosis is far more common among those of European ancestry. In addition, although the results have been controversial, a handful of studies have suggested that African-Americans are more likely to respond poorly to some drugs for cardiac disease than are members of other groups.

Over the past few years, scientists have collected data about the genetic constitution of populations around the world in an effort to probe the link between ancestry and patterns of disease. These data are now providing answers to several highly emotional and contentious questions: Can genetic information be used to distinguish human groups having a common heritage and to assign individuals to particular ones? Do such groups correspond well to predefined descriptions now widely used to specify race? And, more practically, does dividing people by familiar racial definitions or by genetic similarities say anything useful about how members of those groups experience disease or respond to drug treatment?

In general, we would answer the first question yes, the second no, and offer a qualified yes to the third.”

The authors then go on to discuss some specific studies:

“One of us (Bamshad), working with University of Utah scientists Lynn B. Jorde, Stephen Wooding and W. Scott Watkins and with Mark A. Batzer of Louisiana State University, examined 100 different Alu polymorphisms in 565 people born in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Europe. First we determined the presence or absence of the 100 Alus in each of the 565 people. Next we removed all the identifying labels (such as place of origin and ethnic group) from the data and sorted the people into groups using only their genetic information.

Our analysis yielded four different groups. When we added the labels back to see whether each individual's group assignment correlated to common, predefined labels for race or ethnicity, we saw that two of the groups consisted only of individuals from sub-Saharan Africa, with one of those two made up almost entirely of Mbuti Pygmies. The other two groups consisted only of individuals from Europe and East Asia, respectively. We found that we needed 60 Alu polymorphisms to assign individuals to their continent of origin with 90 percent accuracy. To achieve nearly 100 percent accuracy, however, we needed to use about 100 Alus.

Other studies have produced comparable results. Noah A. Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard, geneticists formerly in the laboratory of Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University, assayed approximately 375 polymorphisms called short tandem repeats in more than 1,000 people from 52 ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. By looking at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, they were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians; inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. They were also able to identify subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each member's self-reported ethnicity.

The results of these studies indicate that genetic analyses can distinguish groups of people according to their geographic origin. But caution is warranted. The groups easiest to resolve were those that were widely separated from one another geographically. Such samples maximize the genetic variation among groups. When Bamshad and his co-workers used their 100 Alu polymorphisms to try to classify a sample of individuals from southern India into a separate group, the Indians instead had more in common with either Europeans or Asians. In other words, because India has been subject to many genetic influences from Europe and Asia, people on the subcontinent did not group into a unique cluster. We concluded that many hundreds--or perhaps thousands--of polymorphisms might have to be examined to distinguish between groups whose ancestors have historically interbred with multiple populations.

The human race
Given that people can be sorted broadly into groups using genetic data, do common notions of race correspond to underlying genetic differences among populations? In some cases they do, but often they do not. For instance, skin color or facial features--traits influenced by natural selection--are routinely used to divide people into races. But groups with similar physical characteristics as a result of selection can be quite different genetically. Individuals from sub-Saharan Africa and Australian Aborigines might have similar skin pigmentation (because of adapting to strong sun), but genetically they are quite dissimilar.”

Studying race isn’t just of mere intellectual interest – it can also prove useful in biomedicine:

“But the importance of group membership as it relates to health care has been especially controversial in recent years. Last January the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines advocating the collection of race and ethnicity data in all clinical trials. Some investigators contend that the differences between groups are so small and the historical abuses associated with categorizing people by race so extreme that group membership should play little if any role in genetic and medical studies. They assert that the FDA should abandon its recommendation and instead ask researchers conducting clinical trials to collect genomic data on each individual. Others suggest that only by using group membership, including common definitions of race based on skin color, can we understand how genetic and environmental differences among groups contribute to disease. This debate will be settled only by further research on the validity of race as a scientific variable.

A set of articles in the March 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine debated both sides of the medical implications of race. The authors of one article--Richard S. Cooper of the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine, Jay S. Kaufman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ryk Ward of the University of Oxford--argued that race is not an adequate criterion for physicians to use in choosing a particular drug for a given patient. They pointed out two findings of racial differences that are both now considered questionable: that a combination of certain blood vessel-dilating drugs was more effective in treating heart failure in people of African ancestry and that specific enzyme inhibitors (angiotensin converting enzyme, or ACE, inhibitors) have little efficacy in such individuals. In the second article, a group led by Neil Risch of Stanford University countered that racial or ethnic groups can differ from one another genetically and that the differences can have medical importance. They cited a study showing that the rate of complications from type 2 diabetes varies according to race, even after adjusting for such factors as disparities in education and income.

The intensity of these arguments reflects both scientific and social factors. Many biomedical studies have not rigorously defined group membership, relying instead on inferred relationships based on racial categories. The dispute over the importance of group membership also illustrates how strongly the perception of race is shaped by different social and political perspectives.

In cases where membership in a geographically or culturally defined group has been correlated with health-related genetic traits, knowing something about an individual's group membership could be important for a physician. And to the extent that human groups live in different environments or have different experiences that affect health, group membership could also reflect nongenetic factors that are medically relevant.”

In June 2005, the United States Food & Drug Administration approved NitroMed’s BiDil for the treatment for heart failure in African-Americans only. This was based on data showing greater benefit in self-identified black patients. Let’s assume that there is a genetic component this difference (it’s common for genetic profiles to affect the effects of drugs, as revealed by pharmacogenetics, although it could be an environmental factor). The enhanced effect in black compared with white patients is not the result of the fact that all black individuals have one version of a given gene and all white individuals have a different one – there aren’t these discrete genetic groups. It’s just that being black, by virtue of ancestry, means that you’re more likely to possess this given genetic variant, which is the view of race validated by Olson and Bamshad. Race here is just functioning as a proxy measure of genetic identity, but it’s just one of many possible levels of resolution for looking at humanity. Taking what we might call the Gray’s Anatomy approach, we might treat all humans as the same, so when they get condition X they receive drug Y. But the facts of human variation make a nonsense of this approach, and we have the tools to take a more fine-grained approach to matching drugs with genetic profiles. At the other extreme, the finest resolution we could achieve would be the complete genome sequence of every individual along with knowledge of it varies from every other genome. This is currently unfeasible. But there are intermediate levels of resolution, and race seems to be one. Of course, it would be best to identify the genetic underpinnings of the differential response to BiDil among blacks and whites, and to then test heart failure patients for the presence of these genes, prescribing BiDil to only those with the ‘right’ combination. If this could be achieved, the efficacy of BiDil would increase even further in this tightly defined group. But in the meantime, the facts of ancestry mean that the increased statistical likelihood that black individuals will carry genes that enhance response to BiDil can be used to bring benefit to heart failure patients or at least one race.

It’s time to summarise the case for race. Races are genetically distinct groups: there aren’t such groups to even begin to correspond to standard racial classifications. However, “be used to distinguish human groups having a common heritage and to assign individuals to particular ones”; “Given that people can be sorted broadly into groups using genetic data, do common notions of race correspond to underlying genetic differences among populations? In some cases they do, but often they do not.”. And race has apparent worth in medicine, as the DiBil case demonstrates.

Now, if you can accept the above, and then go back to what Pinker wrote, and what Armand Leroi wrote (on Edge and in the NYT), then I think it will seem a lot more reasonable, a lot less racists, and something worthy of at least thinking – not rejecting out of hand – even if you end up disagreeing on some or all points.

Thinking about race
Whatever your take on all this is, race is clearly an emotive, hot-button topic, and views on race are susceptible to ideological influence in a number of ways. Indeed, Lewontin’s ideological commitments have long been highlighted as colouring his scientific view of the world (a compliment he has returned to his critics). I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that I think that Lewontin is unduly ideological in his writings, and his views on some scientific topics are more motivated by a sincerely held concern for social justice than scientific truth (maybe some would see this as a good compromise, but here I’m assessing a scientific argument free from ideological commitments – but I suppose some will be imputed to me anyway by association with the views above). Jonathan Marks, who was on in the panel on race linked to above, has responded to evolutionary psychology with “Boy, this shit ticks me off” (a sentiment that Lewontin would echo), and this suggests an attitude that would also want to reject the idea of race (I realise this isn’t an argument, more a sociological observation). Interestingly, Mixing Memory also doesn’t like evolutionary psychology, or Steve Pinker in particular. I suspect that the same sort of general outlook motivates both the rejection of ev. psych. and the idea of race (“Yes”, will be the response: “They’re both a load of rubbish!”).

Responding to criticisms of the notion of race doesn’t require this sort of line of enquiry, but I think it’s important to identify why people might be driven by perhaps non-scientific reasons to reject certain findings or ideas (Pinker’s The Blank Slate is an extended attempt at just such an exercise, and also serves as a corrective to some of the misplaced fears surrounding the idea of human nature and the ideas of ev. psych. in particular; I have to say that I think Pinker is spot on here, but again that doesn’t really have anything to do with whether the argument about race is good or not). As I say, I’m trying to understand why people are so keen to reject certain ideas, even those they perhaps do not understand very well.

In the case of Mixing Memory one doesn’t have to look far. An earlier post on MM was entitled ‘I’m a racist: one cognitive scientist’s thoughts on racism part 1’. I’m really not trying to take a cheap shot here by merely putting the title in – the post is not a proud announcement of racist views, but a soul-searching examination of the pernicious effects of growing up in a racist climate even when you explicitly reject the racism you are surrounded by. It’s all commendable stuff. But it does provide a clue as to why MM is so sensitive about issues of race.

I didn’t grow up in an overtly racist environment, attended a mixed school, had and have black and Asian friends (I’m not saying, “See, I couldn’t be racist!”, just pointing out that mixing with people of different ethnicities to me was and is common), and now happen to have a Chinese girlfriend (well, British born, but of Chinese ethnicity). I’m concerned about racism and racial attitudes, but am relaxed about my racial attitudes, in that I really don’t think I have any racial hang-ups or latent racism (I know this could all be self-serving delusion, but I have no evidence that I’m racists and plenty of clues that I’m not!). Perhaps if I was writing from the deep South 40 years ago I would much more sensitive to talking about race, and might want to be able to comfortably ignore the findings of race being produced by science (imagine the science of today was available then). But this doesn’t make the science wrong. As understandable as it is that you don’t want racial differences to be highlighted and magnified because of the potentially harmful uses to which such ideas can be put is not an argument against the validity of the science of race. In any case, the ideas discussed above don’t justify racism at all, and in fact, as Pinker points out, it’s a pretty weak idea of racial equality that depends of the fact of genetic similarity (see Crow on related points) – we shouldn’t treat people well because they share the same genes us as, but because they’re humans and are deserving of the same treatment as ourselves regardless of how similar or different they are from us. And it’s always wrong to treat an individual as if they were an abstract average of the group you or they decide they belong to (whether that be based on race, sex, sexuality and so on).

Perhaps when we’re being listened to by racists we might want to avoid using the phrase ‘racial differences’, but among reasonable people we should be able to discuss the science of race sensibly, without racist connotations, and such discussions might have important health consequences, as the BiDil story illustrates.

A Dawkins Diary

2006-01-27T23:54:00.000Z

Richard Dawkins has a brief diary entry in The New Statesman that might be of interest.

The Root Of All Evil? Part 2 - The Virus Of Faith

2006-01-25T01:24:00.000Z

Notice: Long post - 4,700 words

Children are the future
The second instalment of Richard Dawkins’s The Root Of All Evil?, subtitled The Virus Of Faith, concluded this bold treatment of religion, which Channel 4 should be applauded for broadcasting. It was a somewhat different programme to the first half: while still as rigorous as ever, it appealed to the heart a little more, especially when encouraging us to reflect on the moral standing of religions.

The show covered three principal topics: the transmission of religious beliefs down the generations, and the moral indoctrination of children; the moral worth of the moral codes written in holy texts, and their plausibility; and the possibility that it is not religion but evolution which is the source of morality, or at the least of the human moral sense. And so where as my previous post was mainly concerned with the argument Dawkins made, in this post I shall talk a bit about how Dawkins tries to get his point across, and some of the characters he talks to.

The title of the programme, The Virus Of Faith, comes from Dawkins’s conception of how religious beliefs are transmitted from person to person. Dawkins doesn’t go into this detail, but I want to flesh out his idea a bit. At the end of The Selfish Gene Dawkins tries to make the point that Darwinian evolution is not constrained to life on earth, that it doesn’t require DNA to operate. Any sort of replicators with certain characteristics will be able to undergo Darwinian evolution. To illustrate this point, Dawkins came up with the idea (and name) of memes – cultural units of inheritance that are to culture what genes are to biology (it should be stressed that Dawkins was not trying to devise a complete theory of human culture, but just using it as an example). Just as genes are passed person to person (parent to offspring, generation to generation), so to are memes.

Memes can take many forms: snatches of songs (the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, for example), fashions (wearing caps backwards), ideas (those of science, or religion, or myth) and so on. Some are better at getting passed on than other, perhaps by vurtue of being more memorable or emotionally salient. Of course, although genes are only transmitted vertically down generations, from parent to offspring, memes can be passed horizontally as well, from peer to peer, or teacher to pupil. Just as bits of DNA or RNA (wrapped up in a protein coat) that jump from person to person in the way memes do are known as viruses, so Dawkins suggests that virulent memes should be thought of as ‘mind viruses’. Memetics has developed into a serious approach to understanding cultural evolution, but also has many critics. But whatever the status of memetics as a science, it is clear that ideas from a number of sources are passed on to children in a way that looks epidemiologically looks like viral transmission.

And children are born to be susceptible to these viruses. The existence of culture enables us to offload the transmission of valuable information to children from the genome (it can be stored in books, or sayings or songs and so on); and if your environment is laden with valuable information it pays to be a quick learner. Children that experimented with swimming in rivers they’ve been told contain alligators, or who eat berries they have been told are poisonous (and which are), wouldn’t survive. So children have evolved to be open to instruction by authority, because most of the time it pays off. However, it can also be exploited by parasitic beliefs. Hence the title of the programme, and the backdrop to his discussion of religious education.

Dawkins opened the programme with a number of broadsides against religion, stating, accurately in my view, that “Militant faith is on the march all across the world, with terrifying consequences” and “Irrational faith is feeding murderous intolerance around the world”. Dawkins continues: “I believe it can lead to a warped and inflexible morality, and I’m very concerned about the religious indoctrination of children. I want to ask whether ancient mythology should be taught as truth in schools”. The mere fact that this question needs to be asked today – and will strike some as odd – is a symptom of the strength within which religion has much of society’s views in its clutches.

On a number of previous occasions Dawkins has pointed out the fundamental strangeness of having religiously sectarian schools, and makes the point again here. “Isn’t it weird to label a child with its parents’ religion?”, asks Dawkins. What is special about religion such that we think it makes sense to say a child is Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Sikh when they’re too young to even understand the cosmogony that these religions entail? What would we think of parents who described their children as Labour or Tory, Republican or Democrat, Marxist or Anarchist? We’d think they were barmy and merely stating their intention to do their best to foist these views on their developing child. And we might not approve of the idea of sending them to Republican/Democrat or Marxist/Anarchist schools so that they can be isolated from dissenting opinions and reared in a climate in which their parents’ particular ideology is constantly reinforced.

To explore the effects of such isolation, Dawkins visits a Hassidic Jewish community in north London, UK, which is mostly made up of ultra-orthodox Jews that traditionally marry within their sect, and tend to frown upon outside influences (a pretty good strategy for protecting mythical beliefs from critical scrutiny). Here Dawkins talks to Rabbi Gluck, who despite his strong accent (I don’t know what the name for it would be, but it’s distinctly different to your average Londoner) was born and bred in London – testimony to the isolating effects of his religious beliefs. Dawkins asks the rabbi why children should be indoctrinated with specific belief systems, to which the rabbi suggests that the views of religious communities are not imposed on the young – they could be rejected if it was wished. Dawkins doesn’t pick Gluck up on this, but I think it’s a disingenuous response. For sure, people can reject the beliefs of their family, friends, and community, but this usually incurs an enormous personal cost in terms of potentially severed links with friends and family, and even ostracism. Although the beliefs of the community are not forced on children at gunpoint, there’s not much leeway for doubting them and remaining fully integrated with the rest of your community. In this respect I feel sorry for people stuck in religious communities who have doubts – no wonder it seems best to just carry on as if you believe the same things as everyone else, just to make life tolerable.

Dawkins then asks Gluck how many people in his community grow up believing in evolution, to which the rabbi admits that the majority don’t (but, he claims, not through dogma but through studying it and rejecting it on that basis – but I doubt his claim that every Jew has studied and thought about this issue in the depth he implies). Perhaps to demonstrate his ignorance of the status of evolutionary theory (in scientific terms), and what it means to describe something as a theory, Gluck made the usual complaint that “it’s called the theory of natural selection”, so it’s just a theory, perhaps comparable to any other creation story. Dawkins tries to respond by saying that it’s only a theory in a technical sense of being a tentative explanation for the facts of the world (all any scientific explanation can ever logically be, however good it seems). But in another sense evolution is a fact – the fossil record of evolution is a fact in any meaningful sense of the word, and the theory of natural selection is the best explanation we have of this fact. So Dawkins responded with, “Well, I’ll call it the fact of evolution”, to which the rabbi say that of course he would, he’s an evolutionary fundamentalist. This is absurd. Are you some sort of fundamentalist if you believe that the sun is a nuclear reactor? That genetic changes cause cells to become cancerous? That the laws of physics explain why planes fly? I don’t want to be rude, but I can’t help it: this is the sort of intense, unshakeable stupidity that Dawkins has been confronted with throughout these programmes, and it’s infuriating to watch.

But is teaching religion in school really a live danger in the UK, one of the more secular countries around? Yes, according to Dawkins: “Faith schools are increasing in number and influence in our education system, with active encouragement from Tony Blair’s government. There are already 7,000 faith schools in Britain, and over half the new city academies are expect to be sponsored by religious organisations” [for readers not up to speed with British politics and politicians, Blair has openly declared the importance of his faith in his life, and has publicly defended a ‘city academy’ (sponsored by an evangelical millionaire car salesman) that teaches creationist dogma in science classes on the grounds that overall it gets good grades, even if it’s pupils come out believing nonsense. Our Education Secretary Ruth Kelly is a devout Catholic with links to Opus Dei, a bizarre religious sect much publicised through Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – how long Kelly will remain in her post is, at the moment, debatable, after she or her department provided letters to a number of schools saying that specific people, on lists for sex offenders (some of whom were on there for accessing child pornography), were OK to work in those schools].

So Dawkins goes on a visit to Phoenix Academy, which utilises the American A.C.E. system (Accelerated Christian Learning), and where he talks to head teacher Adrian Hawkes, a cheery, smiley, somewhat patronising man with a Christian message to teach. The classes at Phoenix are drenched in religions ideas, and religious imagery is the basis for at least some of the class work (that is, the pupils seemed to be learning the religious dogma by rote, but I could be wrong). After looking through the science curriculum, Dawkins points out to Hawkes that God or Jesus makes an appearance on nearly every page, to which Hawkes replies that they don’t have any separate religious instruction in the school – which of course they don’t need to given this approach, as Dawkins highlights. Hawkes merrily laughs this off, but I think it’s pernicious – it seems that the plan to is to infuse the religious message into everything, so it becomes hard to separate out the fact from the fiction, the myth from the reality, making it difficult to begin to question the religious claims without everything else falling down.

Dawkins also notes that Noah’s Ark makes an appearance in the science curriculum, prompting him to ask, “What’s that got to do with a science lesson?”. Sounding much like a caricature of a post-modern relativist, Hawkes replies, “Well I suppose that depends on your opinion – it could have a lot. If you believe the story it could have a lot to do with science.” This is just bizarre. Does this mean that whatever you chose to believe can automatically relate to science? If science classes are supposed to teach what science has learnt about the world, then Noah’s Ark shouldn’t get a look in. The mere fact that you believe it doesn’t mean it’s relevant to science. What about if you believed in Thor, would that be relevant to science? Of course not, it’d be in a mythology class, where Noah’s Ark belongs. How do you begin to engage with people who think like this? And it gets worse. Hawkes claims that much of what he was taught in science classes as a child we’d toady laugh off as myth, so Dawkins ask for an example. Hawkes comes up with the theory that the moon was formed from matter expelled from the earth. But this isn’t an idea to laugh off, nor is it widely considered to be a myth – it’s perhaps the leading scientific explanation for the origin of the moon. Dawkins does say, “What you should have been taught, I suppose, is that there is a strong current theory that that’s what happened”, but I don’t think the point gets through, and I think Dawkins should have been more forceful in making Hawkes realise that he’s just being ignorant and talking nonsense. It’s actually rather complimentary, however, of Dawkins to assume that his viewers will be able to connect the dots themselves and get the point (and this applies multiple times across both parts of the series).

Sensing where this is going, Hawkes asks Dawkins whether what he really wants to know is whether he believes in the literal truth of Genesis, that God created the world in 7 days. Here’s the following dialogue:

Hawkes: “My answer to that question is: I don’t know [said with what I interpret as a casual, flippant indifference]. Having said that, do I think that if God wanted to do it in 7 days he could? Yeah, I think he could…”

Dawkins: “He could do anything…”

Hawkes: “Yeah, so it’s sort of an academic question, which actually I don’t care about the answer to very much really. Does that makes sense?” [Accompanied by a condescending grin and eye gesture, as if it might be a bit too conceptual for poor old Dawkins.]

Dakiwns: “Kind of, yes it does make sense – it doesn’t make sense to me because I do care about the answer.”

Hawkes: “Why?”

Dawkins: “Because I care about what’s true…”

Hawkes: “I care about what’s true. But I find Christianity encompasses everything about life; Christianity is life. So it’s about everything – it touches education, politics, care, social services, everything.”

So Hawkes doesn’t care whether the earth was formed in 7 days 6,000 years ago, or formed about 4.5 billion years ago in a universe some 15 billion years old? What’s he doing in charge of the scientific instruction of children then? Does it make any difference to Hawkes whether we teach that Shakespeare lived in ancient Greece, or that genes are made of cheese? Yet in spite of his declared indifference to factual veracity, he claims to care about the truth! What sort of epistemological fantasyland is Hawkes living in? How can he be deemed competent to teach children the hard-won knowledge of the physical and social sciences? As for the rest of Hawkes’s response, it doesn’t really mean anything to me, apart from to signify how wrapped up in his religious worldview he is.

So much for scientific instruction. But we haven’t yet got to morality. Dawkins mentions that he noticed in the discussion of AIDS in the science curriculum that there was reference to AIDS as ‘the wages of sin’, and asks, “Is that not mixing health education with moralistic preaching?”; again, here’s the dialogue that follows:

Hawkes: “I suppose the flip-side of that is that if there’s no God or law-giver, why does it matter what I do? Why is rape wrong? Why is paedophilia wrong? Why are any of these things wrong if there’s no law-giver?”

Dawkins: “You’ve just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only reason you don’t steal and rape and murder is that you’re frightened of God?”

Hawkes: “I think that all [emphasis in spoken sentence] people, if they think they can get away with something, and if there’s no consequences, we actually tend to do it. I think that is the reality – look at the world in which we live, that is the reality.”

Dawkins: “OK, I think we’d better leave it at that.”

Firstly, Hawkes avoids the question, but gets to another very interesting one. It’s a common complaint that atheism is bereft of a moral compass, but this idea can be disabused with a pretty cursory reading of the ethics and moral philosophy literature. Not only does morality not need God, it seems difficult to show how God could even be the basis for morality. Hawkes’s response to the questioning of his moral teachings, if we take him at his word, is to me another sign of the lack of critical self-scrutiny he has subjected his beliefs to – an example of the uncritical, reflection-stunting nature of religious thought diagnosed by Dawkins in the first programme. At the same time, there is a challenge in coming up with a compelling ethical narrative that doesn’t feature God, but science – psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics – is making progress on the problems of morality, aided by the conceptual tools of philosophers.

So why should people be allowed to teach a biblically inspired account of the world, or those of any other religious text, in partly state-sponsored schools? Even if we conceded the right to teach whatever ideas you like in a private school, what sort of people or society wants the world to be one in which divisive ideologies can be inculcated in children as true when they have no basis in evidence? What would constitute an argument for such a state affairs? Mere historical inertia is not a reason, or even an excuse.

The Moral Standing Of Religion
As Dawkins mentions in the introduction, he’s very concerned about the moral message that religions impart to children – both its specific content and its inflexible nature. To illustrate the message that some people who derive their morality from religion – in this case Christianity of a distinctly right-wing bent – Dawkins goes to America and visits Pastor Keenan Roberts, who runs The Hell-House Outreach Programme, which uses imagery of hell for “moral policing”, in Dawkins words: “In the United States Christian obsession with sin has spawned ‘Hell Houses’, morality plays come Halloween freak shows in which the evangelical hobbyhorses of abortion and homosexuality are literally demonised.” We’re treated to a rehearsal of the play, directed at 12-year olds (which Roberts thinks is the most appropriate age to see the show). One scene features a woman undergoing a painful abortion, screaming out in agony “You’re hurting me! I changed my mind!”, while callous doctors shout back “It’s only a medical procedure”. Another scene centres on the marriage of two lesbians, a ceremony conducted in a venomous, mocking tone by one of the male Christian actors. It was hard to make out the full lines he was delivering as Dawkins was narrating over the top in parts, but in one section the man says to the lesbians as part of their marriage vows “…burning in a repulsive lust for one another, deceived by all that they were born gay, or joining their lives in this nauseating matrimony.” You get the general idea being conveyed.

Dawkins tries to talk the pastor about the legitimacy of this message, that homosexuality is a sin and needs to be purged from our youth, but the pastor has the faithful fall-back position, “It’s a faith issue, and I believe this is the word of God” type stuff. I was tempted to transcribe some of their conversation, but it’s just a clash of faith-based assertion against an attempt to construct a reasoned argument. To have to listen to that is nauseating if anything.

Dawkins later talks to Reverend Michael Bray, who speaks out in defence of his friend Paul Hill, who was sentenced to death after murdering an abortion doctor and his bodyguard. Although Bray was actually quite articulate and in some ways more serious and intellectual in defence of his beliefs, he was still blinded by his faith, which leads him directly to the justification of murder. And Bray doesn’t stop there; here’s Bray, who Dawkins describes as “fighting to reverse centuries of human progress”, talking to Dawkins about adultery:

Bray: “I think that execution for adultery is not rejected…”

Dawkins: “Not rejected by whom, by you?”

Bray: “No, by the New Testament…”

Dawkins: But what about you, do you favour execution for adultery?”

Bray: “I think it’s fair to say that it’s still a proper punishment that the state ought to prosecute.”

Who wants to put their hands up and agree, and say that this biblically inspired morality is one you’d like to sign up to? Religion doesn’t seem to doing much good in a moral sense, especially among those that take it really seriously. But what about the message in the printed book? Doesn’t that say what’s right, and provide a map for a moral life?

No, says Dawkins – and with the ample evidence from the bible, particularly the Old Testament, the case seems pretty clear: instructions to kill anyone who tries to draw you away to worship other gods, to divert you from Yahweh, your God; complicity in the rape of daughters; and so on. Dawkins concludes that “The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser urging his people to acts of genocide.”

But what about Abraham, or Moses? Weren’t they good; didn’t then display a morality to follow? Well, Abraham would kill his son because God asked him to, and Moses loses points for the slaughter of the Midianites. But doesn’t the New Testament make things alright and undo the damage of the Old Testament? Dawkins concedes that Jesus, “or whoever wrote his lines”, was better than most, but claims that it all goes downhill after Jesus. I’ll quote at some length Dawkins’s summation:

“The heart of New Testament theology, invented after Jesus’ death, is St. Paul’s nasty, sadomasochistic doctrine of atonement for original sin. The idea is that God had himself incarnated as a man, Jesus, in order that he should be hideously tortured and executed to redeem all our sins – not just the original sin of Adam and Eve, future sins as well, whether we decide to commit them or not.

If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who’s God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury, as well as execution victim. To cap it all, according to scientific views of pre-history, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place, an awkward fact which undermines the premise of Paul’s whole tortuously nasty theory.

Oh but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn’t it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any other conclusion than ‘barking mad’.”

Of course, not all Christians interpret the bible in such a literal, fundamentalist way. So Dawkins comes back to the UK to talk to a liberal intellectual Christian, Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford. (A previous Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, sometimes known as Soapy Sam because of his slippery debating style, came to blows with Darwin’s Bulldog, T. H Huxley, over evolution 146 years ago. In June 1860, less than a year after the publication of The Origin of Species, the two debated in a packed Oxford lecture theatre. Wilberforce, attempting to mock Huxley, enquired whether he would prefer to think of himself descended from an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. Legend has it that Huxley turned to a neighbour and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands”, and replied to the room that he was not ashamed of a simian ancestry but “would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” Upon hearing the news that Wilberforce had died after sustaining a head injury falling from a horse, Huxley acerbically responded that at last the bishop’s brain had come into contact with reality.)

Harries is amiable and reflective, but he occupies an odd position: he accepts some parts of the bible as true, and rejects others. Some would say he betrays reason and faith equally. He also believes that we need to revise religious beliefs in light of new scientific knowledge. On the issue of homosexuality, Harries suggest that the views expressed in the bible need not be taken at face value because they were written at time when knowledge of homosexuality was limited. Now that we know that there is a genetic component to homosexuality, that some people are in a sense born gay, we need to revise out thoughts on it. Firstly, why it should be that homosexuality is wrong if it’s a matter of choice rather than biology? Second, why, if the bible is the word of God, is its interpretation affected by the accumulation of facts – surely God had all the facts to hand in issuing his decrees? He could have anticipated the facts that would be discovered and devise codes of conduct consonant with those facts. Thirdly, in the moral realm, if we can decide what to accept from the bible and what to reject on the basis of non-biblical grounds, then what do we need the bible for? We must already have the tools for identifying what is right and wrong if we can be selective about what we take from the bible – so we don’t need it! So while Dawkins agrees with much the bishop says, he’s left asking why he sticks with the Christianity at all. Harries replies that it’s possible to an intellectually fulfilled rationalist as well as a person of faith, but as Dawkins says, this seems like fence sitting. Faith is the antithesis to reason, so how do you make them bedfellows? Perhaps by taking neither fully seriously.

Our Moral Sense
So Dawkins thinks that religion is a poor source of morality, and I have to agree. So are we all left amoral nihilists? Well, not necessarily. It’s quite possible, indeed extremely likely, that evolution, both genetic and cultural (though Dawkins stresses the genetic), has furnished humans with a moral sense, a set of moral resources. The final part of the show, which looked at the evolutionary roots of morality, could be expanded into a series of it’s own, though I won’t say too much about it here as it would only be superficial anyway.

I was pleased to see a guy I used to know at the London School of Economics, Oliver Curry, appear on the programme to talk to Dawkins about the moral systems of chimpanzees, or least the social behaviours that look like building blocks of human morality. Chimpanzees have complex social systems based around kin groups and cooperative and strategic alliances with non-kin. Reciprocity, teamwork and other kinds of prosocial behaviour are present in chimp societies, and can validly be seen as a foundation for building a human morality on – and remember, nearly all the moral virtues are prosocial virtues. Although Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, he doesn’t believe that evolution necessarily creates selfish creatures, and this is not an inconsistency in his position. He believes that natural selection has imbued humans with a moral sense that leads to anomalously high levels of altruism towards non-kin and strangers. We don’t need to posit a God to have put a moral sense into us – evolution could have well done it (this is a big topic, again for another post). My only complaint is that Dawkins, even if he doesn’t rule them out, doesn’t seem to give enough weight to gene-culture co-evolutionary mechanisms, or cultural group selection ideas, in accounting for altruism, and does not really consider the subtle psychology of human cooperation and altruism that is needed to explain the experimental findings on human behaviour.

Dawkins ended the show with a paean to an atheistic, humanistic worldview. We’re lucky to be alive, so we should live each day to the full, appreciating the time we have before our mortal flames peter out. There might not be a God to provide meaning to our lives, but we can do that ourselves – it just takes a bit of effort. And rejecting God doesn’t mean deadening our senses to the wonder of creation (used in a metaphorical sense, of course): the natural world, as revealed by the natural sciences, is teeming with wonder, with the beautiful, the awe-inspiring and the humbling – “How much more do you want?”, asks Dawkins. The universe, and all it contains, should keep me going until my time is up.

Neuroeconomics: The pleasure of other people’s pain

2006-01-21T00:57:00.000Z

A paper recently published online in Nature describes how our empathy for other people, and our responses to seeing them in pain, can be modulated by prior interactions in which we deem them to have treated us unfairly (Singer, T. et al. 2006). Even better, they’ve identified brain areas underlying this modulation, illuminating how empathy functions and how it is controlled. Perhaps more controversially, they revealed an intriguing sex difference in how empathy is modulated in light of experience.

This work ties in with recent work on the neural basis of ‘altruistic punishment’, a notion used to explain how human cooperation is maintained in the face of selfish temptations, and evolutionary theorising about the nature of human sociality. And it is also, as far as I read it, informative about how moral intuitions and more explicit knowledge – reasoning even – interact in guiding our emotional, or affective, responses, and the moral judgements we come to about people.

The human capacity for empathy is at the core of our social nature. It enables us to transcend our own egoistic stance and stand in the shoes of others, and see the world from their perspective – a first step towards a genuinely moral stance. In fact, when we imagine ourselves to be in pain, for instance, areas of the brain that are active when people really are in pain become activated, suggesting that the pain we feel when considering the distress of others in not just a metaphorical pain. But does a certain signal of distress or pain always generate the same empathic response, or is it muted or amplified depending on what you know and think about the person on the receiving end of pain? That’s what the current research looked at, but before we get to that I just want to sketch the context in which this work was done.

The pleasure and pain of games
Economists have devised a number of ‘games’ (not particularly fun ones) to explore the human tendency to cooperate, and the associated notions of fairness, revenge and punishment. One of the most famous of these games is the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

In this game, two players imagine themselves to be criminals caught for some crime, but with only enough evidence to convict both of a lesser charge than the real crime entails. If both plead ‘not guilty’, both will get 2 years. If one implicates the other, however, the ‘cheat’ (who ‘defected’ on his partner in crime) will get off scot-free, whereas the schmuck who kept quiet (and ‘cooperated’ with his partner) will get 30 years (if you both cheat on each other you both get 10 years). What should you do? Well, if your partner keeps quiet, and so do you, you both get 2 years; if instead you talk you get off scot-free. What if you partner talks? Then you’ll get 10 years if you also talk and 30 years if you don’t. If your partner cooperates with you and says nothing, you’re better off talking (get clean away with it) than not (2 years); and if you’re ratted out, you’re still better off talking (10 years) than not (30 years). Whatever your partner does, you do better by defecting, and implicating your partner. So the rational thing to de is defect, or talk.

But this leads to a sub-optimal outcome for both parties: 10 years each, instead of the possible 2 if both had kept quiet. The temptation to get an even better deal for yourself leads you to a course of action that leads to a far worse outcome, one even worse than if you’d cooperated! This is why it is a dilemma. To the extent that people deviate from this behaviour they might be said to be irrational (but, I would say, only if you consider rationality in a fairly narrow way) – and humans do deviate from it. They are much more likely to cooperate than the logic above would dictate (because the logic of cooperation is more complicated than the straightforward self-interest assumed above).

There are possible ways out of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, though I won’t go into them here. The important point is that studies with humans in which cooperation and defection lead to monetary rewards rather than prison sentences (but with the same logical structure) have revealed that we’re much more cooperative than the cold logic above would suggest (the most recent research on the routes to cooperation, and the sorts of behaviours and faculties this entails, is a topic for a future post). The flip side to our propensity to cooperate is a tendency to get angry when we’re treated unfairly (hardly front-page news, but it’s an important aspect to incorporate into economic and evolutionary models). Humans are at times driven by revenge, spite, and a desire to punish people or see people punished. And economists have devised a game to explore these motives as well.

The Ultimatum Game is has largely replaced the Prisoner’s Dilemma as the poster child of human irrationality. In the Ultimatum Game, two players are each assigned a role that will determine how they will split some money (say £100) provided by a researcher. One player is designated the proposer, and is given the money and told to decide how to split the money (say, keep £70 and give the other player £30) – but with a proviso: the other player can accept this offer, in which case the money is split as proposed and the game is over, or they can reject the offer, in which case no one gets anything.

Economics traditionally analysed the problem like this. Some money is better than no money, all things being equal, and so people should accept whatever they’re offered, if their goal is to maximise their monetary gain. Now, economics would also traditionally assume that both players, in is this context called agents, would be perfectly rational and therefore realise this simple fact – something is better than nothing. The proposer would therefore know that whatever offer is made will be accepted, so will offer the smallest amount possible (say £1) – which will be accepted (in a perfectly rational world, or rational as construed by classical economics).

Except this isn’t how people play. People generally offer around half the money, though there is quite a bit of cross-cultural variation. And people don’t play it with cold logic; they feel hurt and offended when they are offered a small amount of money, and spite drives them to reject the offer so the tightwad doesn’t benefit either. Researchers working in the relatively young field of neuroeconomics, which under one reading is the study of the neural basis of economic decision-making (another interpretation is the application of economic models to decision-making processes in the brain), have explored the neural basis of decision-making in the Ultimatum Game (Sanfey, A. G. et al. 2003). When players are offered unfair offers (around 20% of the pot), areas of the brain linked to emotion and anxiety (anterior insula) and cognition (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) become active, suggesting perhaps a tug-of-war between an immediate emotional response (a negative one) and rational thinking about the situation (possible benefit). Most tellingly, the rejection of low offers is associated with increased activity in the anterior insula, suggesting that in these cases emotion wins out (of course, the interaction between reason and emotion will be more suitable and intricate than the mere balancing act I’m implying here).

Altruistic punishment has also been studied in the brain (de Quervain, D. J.-F. et al. 2004). In some games players are given the choice to punish defectors and cheats, or people who otherwise don’t play fair, at some expense to themselves. It has also been shown that being on the receiving end of punishments decreases the likelihood of future defections. Games can be set up so that someone who incurs a cost to punish a cheat is unable to benefit from any increased cooperation and fairness induced in the punishee, so you might expect punishment to disappear (what’s the point if you don’t benefit?) - and yet they’ll still do the punishing. Because the benefits of this punishing accrue to someone else (in the form of increased cooperation in interactions with other people), it is called altruistic punishment. The idea is that you’re not driven by a rational calculation of mere self-interest – you feel emotionally bothered at the transgression of a moral norm, and you are motivated to seek to punish the offender (again, the topic of the evolution of altruistic punishment, and the closely related idea of ‘strong reciprocity’, are beyond the scope of this post). One study on altruistic punishment suggested that people are motivated to punish people that violate the norms of fairness they’re accustomed to in economic games, and derive satisfaction from meting out such punishment, much like achieving any other goal (de Quervain, D. J.-F. et al. 2004).

The empathic brain
We’ve gone from empathy to punishment, and it’s time to come full circle, back to empathy. The present study looks at how empathy is affected by previous experience in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. First, an experimental subject played the Prisoner’s Dilemma with a confederate of the experimenter, who played either fairly or unfairly. Then, each subject was brain scanned while seeing footage of the person they played with receiving an electric shock, similar in intensity to a bee sting, in order to measure their empathic response (activity in certain brain areas). This brain imaging data was then correlated with whether they were treated fairly or unfairly by the person they played with to see if there were any associations.

When players had experienced a fair game, viewing the electric shock treatment cause empathy-related activation of pain-related brain areas (the fronto-insular and anterior cingulated cortices). This was true of both sexes (remember, there’s a fascinating sex difference to reveal yet). Things were different when males and females watched cheats getting their comeuppance. Females showed a slight reduction in empathy-related activity when watching an unfair player, but men showed a markedly reduced level of empathic activity in the same situation. What’s more, this reduction in empathy in men was associated with increased activity in reward-related areas, and this activity correlated with an expressed desire for revenge. Because they felt a greater desire for revenge, they felt less for the person when they got what they opresumably saw as their just deserts. At least for men, learning from experience modulates how much empathy we muster for people in distress depending on whether they’ve treated us well or badly in the past. This might seem obvious (although the neural underpinnings are far from obvious, and need empirical fleshing out), but what isn’t obvious is why there should be sex differences. I have some highly speculative ideas, but I’ll save those for a later post.

These conclusions, at least as far as men are concerned, fit in with other work on the ‘moral sentiments’ and economic models in which social preferences are shaped by learning from experience. And they also tie in with recent work on the neurology of more explicitly moral judgement formation.

Josh Greene has done some excellent work in this area, and the basic gist of his research is that emotion and reason interact in much the same way as empathy and the desire for punishment do in the experiment above (see my article in New Scientist for more). Philosophers have devised a range of moral dilemmas designed to illuminate the nature, or limits, of moral reasoning, as well as our moral intuitions. Oddly, people often say they would behave differently in moral dilemmas that have the same logical form but are framed in different ways.

A classic example is the runaway train dilemma. In this scenario, a train is hurtling down a track, ahead of which are 5 people tied to the track. You’re on the side of the tracks, and there’s a switch you can flick to divert the train down a track on which there is just one person. What do you do? Most people say they would flick the switch, on the utilitarian principle that it is worse for five people to die than one. But consider a variant of this dilemma. The train is heading down the track, and again there are five people stuck on the lines. This time you’re on a footbridge in between the train and the imminent fatalities. Your only option this time is to throw the huge guy standing next to you over the bridge and in front of the train. What do you do now? Nothing – it’s just wrong? Push him – it’s the same problem in the abstract? Even if you say you’d push the guy, on the same utilitarian grounds as before, you might hesitate a bit before deciding that (people who decide to push usually take longer to come to their decision). In fact, some people just wouldn’t push the man – perhaps because ‘authoring’ events is worse than merely ‘editing’ events.

Brain imaging studies reveal that the footbridge scenario activates brain areas associated with emotion that are not triggered to the same degree by the switch-flicking case, and that emotion and reason in a sense compete in coming to a decision about what it is right to do (Greene, J. D. et al. 2001). Much like the increased activity in reward-related brain areas in the empathy game, leaning towards deciding to push the man from the footbridge is associated with increased activity in cognition-related areas, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. It’s as if it takes great cognitive effort to be able to overcome the emotional revulsion of pushing someone to their death, even if this is to save five others. It takes longer to come to a decision that involves overcoming the emotional response generated by considering up-close-and-personal violence, pain or distress.

So both emotion and reason are deeply implicated in guiding our moral decision-making, and it’s clearly not just one or the other in the driving seat. And of course, the two interact, as this new research shows. Being treated unfairly – perhaps even just knowing some acts unfairly – can reduce our empathy for that person, which plausibly would affect our moral attitude towards seeing that person suffer certain forms of punishment or degradation.

And this possibility seems to have a wider implication – the emotional forces that tango with reason aren’t just affected at the time of making a moral judgement; they’re activation depends on prior experience, learning and knowledge. In this way, we can see how it is possible, by degrees, to begin to regard perhaps certain groups, or types of individual, as not of the same moral status as ourselves: if we either know, or least believe (and this could be for specious reasons) that they are in some way deserving of punishment, then less empathy, and therefore sympathy, will be evoked by seeing these people suffer degradation, humiliation, or, perhaps at the extreme, death. We won’t be as morally engaged with their plight as we otherwise would be, and this can set the stage for the acceptance of more beliefs that further justify their lowly moral status. This is a scary prospect, and unfortunately has historical precedent. Various groups — Jews, Christians and Muslims, people of varying ethic origins, and a variety of social, cultural and political groups — have been stigmatised, harmed and mistreated, and been subject to systematic abuse. This has often been possible through a reduction in empathy, or a complete absence of empathy, for the victims of the perpetrated prejudice, abuse or genocide — a dreadful under-use of the human moral resources. Such short-circuiting of these resources, empathy in particular, has surely played a part in such atrocities as Rwanda and between the Serbs and Croats. Understanding how our moral psychology works is surely an important goal, but it also has dangers. If we know how moral psychology works, and how moral concern can be manipulated and re-focused, then we have a potentially powerful tool for helping to manipulate views about all sorts of groups in society, perhaps terrorists being the most resonant example today. Of course terrorism can only be condemned, but it’s perhaps all too easy to slide from moral judgements about terrorist to the groups we perceive them to belong to, and before we know it we may be sanctioning all sorts of unwanted actions against these groups. If we are aware of our potential biases and prejudices, then perhaps we have a chance to combat them.

References
de Quervain, D. J.-F., Fischbacher, U., Treyer, V., Schellhammer, M., Schnyder, U., Buck, A. & Fehr, E. The neural basis of altruistic punishment. Science 305, 1254–1258 (2004).

Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral Judgment. Science 293, 2105–2108 (2001).

Sanfey, A. G., Rilling, J. K., Aronson, J. A., Nystrom, L. E. & Cohen, J.D. The neural basis of economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game. Science 300, 1755–1758 (2003).

Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J. P., Stephan, K. E., Dolan, R. J. & Frith, C. D. Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. Nature doi:10.1038/nature04271 (2006).

Hollywood to homosexualise America!

2006-01-19T22:12:00.000Z

The Christian Right is in a tizzy again, this time about the moral and political state of Hollywood, reports the Times (London):

“Once again, the media elites are proving that their pet projects are more important than profit,” Janice Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, said. “None of the three movies — Capote, Transamerica or Brokeback Mountain — is a box office hit. Brokeback Mountain has barely topped $25 million (£14.2 million) in ticket sales. If America isn’t watching these films, why are they winning the awards?”

What? It’s often a good thing when other principles are put before profit – it’s a shame that the bottom line is such a determinant of what gets done in a range of creative endeavours. And is she seriously suggesting that a film’s revenue determines it’s artistic merit? It seems that what she really means is “These films contain themes and imagery that I don’t like – hell, America doesn’t like – as reflected by their revenues. So who are a bunch of media elites to say that these are good films or contain appropriate messages?”.

Right-wing radio talk show hosts also took pot shots at the Globes yesterday. Stephen Bennett, of Straight Talk Radio, said: “When Hollywood is pumping out anti-family movies with sexually explicit, twisted and perverse themes that glorify homosexuality, transsexuality and every other kind of sexual immorality — then awarding itself for doing so — Middle America better take note. Last night Hollywood exposed its own corrupt agenda. [It] is no doubt out on a mission to homosexualise America.”

Homosexuals?! Transsexuals?! We’re all going to hell in a handbasket, aren’t we?! (I presume ‘Straight’ Talk’ is meant to mean that there’ll be no homosexual banter on their air time.) What lunacy.

Theism, Atheism, Agnosticism and Dogmatism: An Anatomy Of Some Terms

2006-01-16T00:24:00.000Z

In a comment on a previous post, a reader wrote:

I've never liked the word "agnostic" anyways. To me it has always been just a weasely way to get out of being asked if you believe in God.

Broken down to its latin roots, "agnostic" means one who does not know. In my experience, no one ever asks you if you know if there's a god. They ask if you believe there's a god. Answering "agnostic" doesn't answer the question in the least. You either believe (theist) or don't believe (atheist). None of us know one way or the other, so we are all agnostics. The term therefore conveys zero information and isn't even worth uttering.

I see the appeal of this approach, but I think it’s based on a mistake that I’ll spell out below. In any case, I though it provided an excuse for looking at what we mean by the terms theist, atheist, and agnostic, which seems appropriate given the previous discussions about Dawkins’s recent programme.

Theism is straightforward: a theist believes in the existence of a God or gods. Atheism looks similarly straightforward: an atheist believes that God(s) does not exist – but this can be taken a number of ways, as we’ll look at. Similarly, an agnostic is someone who does not claim to know, or is undecided about, whether God(s) exists.

The suggestion that theists and atheists are similar in holding beliefs about the existence of God(s), as well as in not being justified to claim knowledge about these matter, seems to me to be based on a mistaken view of the relationship between belief and knowledge.

Although it’s not spelled out, it seems that the suggestion “You either believe (theist) or don't believe (atheist). None of us know one way or the other, so we are all agnostics” is based on the idea that a belief is merely something that you think likely to be right or wrong, whereas knowledge is something more certain, more indubitable. But I don’t think these interpretations accord with normal usage of the words, and lack a philosophical justification.

Some things we might claim to know for certain. According to the logical positivists (a primarily European school of philosophy centred in Vienna – it was sometimes known as the Vienna Circle – popular in the first half of the 20^th century, but less influential after some heavy attacks), statements such as ‘2 + 2 = 4’ we can know for certain so long as we understand what the terms mean. If you know what ‘2’ and ‘4’ mean, and what the ‘+’ denotes, you can see the logical truth of the claim. You don’t have to go out and do an experiment to confirm it. Similarly, you don’t need to go into the wild to confirm that a vixen is a female fox; it’s true by definition. In these cases, your knowledge is certain.

But once we move outside of these logical realms, and into the real world, we lose this certainty. Anything we believe about the real world could, in principle, need to be revised in light of new discoveries. It is always possible that another explanation, laying unthought-of, better accounts for the world, or that new facts will emerge that are inconsistent with our best current explanations. Even the things most of us would bet our houses on, such as the sun rising tomorrow, are not grounded in logical certainty (the famous problem of induction). It is logically possible that the laws of physics might change overnight, throwing the solar system into chaos. So we’re not certain, but I think most of us would say we know that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.

If this lack of certainty precluded us from claiming to have knowledge of the world around us, then we’d have robbed the word ‘knowledge’ of all real meaning – for we could only claim to know logical truths, tautologies completely obvious to an omniscient mind. So what is knowledge? Well, belief that you hold to very probably true (I realise the subjective move here) in light of good reasons (again, a subjective element). We might want to add that the belief needs also to be true, but this has always struck me as an odd requirement.

Imagine I have a belief, say that life evolved on earth. Why do I believe this? Because it is the best explanation of the evidence presented by the world, and the theory that the belief is based on is the best explanation for the problems any such theory would have to solve. Do I say I know that life on earth evolved? Yes, in as much as I can know anything. Then what if I want to determine whether I additionally ‘know’ this fact, as well as merely believing it? I’d have to determine whether my belief was true independent of my reasons for believing that it is true. What process would or could I undertake to determine this? I could search for further supporting reasons, but I’d be back where I started. The problem is that I can’t get outside of myself and the world and then look in to see whether on top of the reasons I have for holding a belief to be true (and therefore constitute knowledge) the belief is, in fact, true – if I could, what need would I have of the other reasons? And what would unbridled access to the truth be? All I’ve got to assert that I think something is true, and therefore claim to know it, are reasons. What more could I have? There isn’t any reason-, argument- or evidence-independent way of identifying truth. The best we can do is corroborate our beliefs with others, and look at how they hang together with the rest of our beliefs, and at some point make a call about what you think you know.

So, some of my beliefs are less well supported, and I don’t claim to have knowledge on these matters, and others are supported to a degree that in the only real sense it could mean I know these things. Where to draw the line between believing and knowing is tricky and takes us into epistemological waters that I am ill-equipped to chart, but the distinction along a continuum seems to be valid, and to enable us to talk about knowing anything at all apart from logical truths.

So what does all this have to do with theism, atheism, and agnosticism? Well the first point is that it is not invalid to say that you believe in God(s) and also that you know (in the non-certain sense) that it/they exist, or to say that you believe, and also know (in the non-certain sense), that they do not exist. Similarly, although it might seem weak willed, it is also valid to adopt a third position, of not claiming to believe or know either way – agnosticism.

It is true that neither theists nor atheists should claim to know whether God (assume the plural as well from here!) exists in the strong sense of absolute certainty. Such certainty is surely going to far (although listening to the faithful and the devout makes it clear that many religious folk have a certainty that they’re not really entitled to). But this doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t claim knowledge in the weaker sense of ‘best explanation and highly likely to be true’. So if agnosticism is taken to mean not knowing, in any sense, then there is no need for theists or atheists to call themselves agnostic. And agnosticism stands as a useful and conceptually distinct term to designate a position between theism and atheism.

So the theist claims to know that God exists – but on what basis? Well, some religious people do employ arguments, such as the argument from design. Others hold that they know through the mysterious power of faith (I don’t understand at least). The atheist is more likely to respond with arguments, reasons and evidence, and to claim that to extent that there are religious explanations for the world, they are far outgunned by scientific explanations. Further, the atheist is likely to claim that the evidence not only speaks for the scientific explanation, but also speaks against the theistic explanation. To the extent that theists’ beliefs are predicated on pure faith, then it is hard to engage in any meaningful debate about whether it is likely that God exists, because by introducing faith they cut themselves free from the chains of reason and argument in float off into their own orbit where they can only hear each other.

There is another, and quite different, way in which you might be an agnostic or an atheist that is not based on weighing up arguments and evidence. You might find the question of God’s existence to be meaningless in metaphysical sense. If it was deemed in advance, as faith does, that nothing you found out about the world should be taken to refute your belief in God, then you can ask what the claim that God exists really entails, what factual significance it is supposed to convey. In another context, Dan Dennett has used the example of gremlins in a carburettor to illustrate the complaint. Imagine someone proposed that carburettors got their power from seven invisible, massless, undetectable gremlins. How should you treat this claim? Well, you wouldn’t treat it like a normal empirical claim about the world, because you can’t undertake any physical tests for their presence. In an important sense, the claim has no real factual content – and because it is supposed to relate to the factual world it is literally meaningless, even though it is grammatically comprehensible. Compare it with the claim that there are ten gremlins in carburettors. How would you adjudicate between these claims? What difference would it would it make to hold one or the other? A belief that makes no difference to anything has no factual content, and can’t be considered to make a meaningful assertion. It’s not even proposing something that is in principle up for debate, so you just reject the whole gremlin question. Ditto for some conceptions of God.

Because in one sense the rejection of the God as an inherently confused concept entails not taking the notion of God seriously enough to consider evidence in favour or against its existence, is seems like a form of agnosticism, and maybe some people would like to see it this way. But it differs from the agnosticism characterised earlier, in that it is not about sitting on the fence, but in denying that there is fence there at all. So the question is considered meaningless and therefore pointless. But isn’t this also a form of atheism? Possibly, and probably yes. If you accept this line of reasoning, then you certainly do not believe that there is a God – so this non-theism, or a-theism. But it is clearly not the same as saying that while you accept the logical possibility of God, you think that the arguments and empirical evidence support the claim that there is, in fact, no God.

So, to wrap up. You can be a theist in at least two ways: by believing and knowing with complete certainty that God exists, presumably on the basis of faith, because empirical evidence would never justify such an extension (this dogmatic theism should be universally regarded as an unjustified position); or by believing that in all probability God exists, but that you could be wrong, however unlikely you think that to be the case. And you can be an agnostic in at least two ways: by accepting the possibility of there being a God, but remaining unswayed either way by the arguments and evidence (a somewhat spineless and unthinking position, because serious reflection seems to take people either down a naturalistic, scientific route or something more faith-based or mysterious); or by rejecting the question as meaningless and effectively pleading the fifth on it – you’re not going to engage with a pointless concept. Finally, you can be an atheist in perhaps four senses. First, you reject the concept of the God(s) of traditional religions as meaningless and are therefore a priori incapable of believing in God, and are therefore a non-theist or a-theist. Second, you accept the logical possibility that God exists, but claim to know with absolute certainty that God does not in fact exist; this is as unjustified as the dogmatically certain theist’s position, and dogmatisms, to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, are not good in my opinion. Third, you accept the logical possibility of God but claim that the best arguments and evidence strongly suggest that God does not exist – while admitting to a lack of certainty about this (even if it’s the thing you think is most likely to be true of all your beliefs); such an admission doesn’t mean you can’t talk about knowing that God doesn’t exist, but it needs to be clear what you intend by ‘know’. Fourth, you might reject the existence of God simply because you don’t think there are any good reasons for asserting that God exists – it’s not that you’ve balanced the reasons for and against and come out in favour against, but that there is nothing arguing in favour of God, and therefore there’s nothing to way up. Nearly anyone who thinks this probably also thinks that what evidence there is speaks against the existence of God, but I think that it’s possible to distinguish these motivations for describing yourself as an atheist.

How do I come out according to this classification? I am not a dogmatic atheist, the second version above, for sure. Most of the time I’m definitely an atheist in the third sense – I think the best evidence and theories argue against God – as well as in the second sense – there are no good reasons for asserting the existence of God, or at least what reasons there were have been superseded by scientific explanations. But I’m not always an atheist in just the third and fourth senses, in that sometimes I’m confronted with a conception of God that is more like a gremlin. In this case I'm an atheist in something more like the first sense. I don’t know how to even begin to engage in a meaningful dialogue about whether this proposed entity exists, which entails a denial of the theism that this entity’s existence is the basis of. So in this sense I’m a non-theist, or a-theist when confronted with a certain conception of God.

The overall message I guess is that when applying labels to ourselves, as it seems we have to, it might be worth checking that that we're using the terms in the same way as people listening to us, as a lot of the criticisms of atheism in particular are based on a conflation of different notions of atheism. For instance, the usual claim of critics of atheism that science doesn’t disprove good is only relevant to the dogmatic atheist, and I think we can agree that dogmatisms are bad. It has no force against atheism that makes the weaker claim that the best arguments and evidence point to God not existing, because this doesn’t claim to have established beyond all doubt that God does not exist. It admits that science hasn’t disproved God’s existence – but it doesn’t have to! We all claim to know things for which we haven’t disproved any number of alternative accounts (perhaps because the account cannot be disproved in principle), but that’s not what knowing things is about. We should all learn to live with uncertainty, and acknowledge it in cases even when the uncertainty is very small, as it is for many, if not, most, atheists.

Some links to articles I've written

2006-01-11T00:04:00.000Z

I've added some links to the sidebar in case anyone wanted to read some things I've published on topics which I'll be covering on this blog. The New Scientist article requires a subscription.

Reply to Bunting's review of 'The Root Of All Evil?'

2006-01-10T22:13:00.000Z

The Saturday before Dawkins’s programme aired, Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian dedicated a column to debunking Dawkins’s claims about, and critique of, religion. She’d seen the programmes and I hadn’t, so I waited until the first one aired and I had written a review before writing a response to Bunting’s article. I’ve quoted extensively to make sure the original points were preserved (and in fact most of the quotations following directly on from one another). So, taking it from the top:

“On Monday, it's Richard Dawkins's turn (yet again) to take up the cudgels against religious faith in a two-part Channel 4 programme, The Root of All Evil? His voice is one of the loudest in an increasingly shrill chorus of atheist humanists; something has got them badly rattled.”

I’d say so. The man in charge of the world’s only super-power is a devout Christian whose religious beliefs inform his moral agenda at home, from stem cells research and contraceptive drugs to capital punishment, as well as his international policy. The very phrase ‘axis of evil’ carries religious undertones, and it seems clear that a religiously inspired vision drives Bush in his war on terror and in Iraq. Other people, equally if not more devout, believe in an opposite states of affairs, and some of them are willing to blow themselves up to achieve that state of affairs. Of course, the state of affairs is often political a political goal, but the religious justification for acts of terrorism, to the extent there is one, underpin the extreme political activism. I think suicide bombers are sincere in thinking that their acts are morally justified – but this morality is buttressed by faith in their religious commitments. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church condemns the use of condoms in countries stricken by HIV – and on the basis of what? Manifest falsehoods.

“They even turned their bitter invective on Narnia.”

Well if you don’t think Christian theology in particular, or religious belief in general, should be inculcated in young children, like you might not want fascist, racist or sexist messages beamed into your kid’s head, then you are likely to find films with strong Christian undertones aimed at children unsettling, much like you would find implicit racist ideologies portrayed in a kid’s film offensive. I’m not equating religion with racism or fascism – I’m just saying that if you don’t think that it’s an appropriate thing to bring children up believing, and with good reason, then you will object to such films. It shouldn’t be such a surprise, though of course the surprise is feigned and the intent is to ridicule and trivialise.

“By all means, let's have a serious debate about religious belief, one of the most complex and fascinating phenomena on the planet, but the suspicion is that it's not what this chorus wants. Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there's the unmistakable whiff of panic; they fear religion is on the march again.”

So what are these unsubstantiated assertions, these sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence? The atheist’s critique of religion, particularly Dawkins’s, is of course general in nature, but it is based on an argument, and contrasts the religious mode of gaining understanding of the world (and I use the term loosely) with a scientific approach. Calling this critique a series of names doesn’t refute it, or make it go away.

“There's an aggrieved frustration that they've been short-changed by history; we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularisation was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularisation there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As GK Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything.”

Fair enough, some of us lament the fact that the ideals and philosophy of the Enlightenment have not illuminated everyone and everywhere – and I wouldn’t want to achieve this through coercion. But so what? So does every person who desires some state of affairs but is frustrated in their goals. The same could be said of the religious community, lamenting the loss of faith and religion in people’s lives, and fearing a consequent slide into a moral abyss as the moral investment made by Christ’s sacrifice runs dry. And GK Chesterton’s quip, cited by Bunting in the title to her column, gets it precisely backwards: it is faith that enables you to believe in anything, even things contradicted by the evidence of your sense or powers of reason; an atheist of a scientific bent will not believe just anything, but those things which the best evidence and theories point to existing. Of course, we’re fallible in this pursuit – there’s only so much we can hold in our heads, how much time we can spend assessing evidence and theories – but it’s anything but believing in anything.

“There's an underlying anxiety that atheist humanism has failed. Over the 20th century, atheist political regimes racked up an appalling (and unmatched) record for violence. Atheist humanism hasn't generated a compelling popular narrative and ethic of what it is to be human and our place in the cosmos; where religion has retreated, the gap has been filled with consumerism, football, Strictly Come Dancing and a mindless absorption in passing desires. Not knowing how to answer the big questions of life, we shelve them - we certainly don't develop the awe towards and reverence for the natural world that Dawkins would want. So the atheist humanists have been betrayed by the irrational, credulous nature of human beings; a misanthropy is increasingly evident in Dawkins's anti-religious polemic and among his many admirers.”

Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia – these aren’t good adverts for atheistic regimes. But the link between not believing in a God and committing mass murder and genocide seems less clear than the line from religious faith to extreme Islamism and suicide bombings. For sure, people that don’t believe in God are capable of atrocities, just as religious people are. But there’s nothing intrinsically divisive about not believing in a God – after all, there are many things we all don’t believe in, but they’re not divisive factors in our lives, so why should not believing in a God be, unless you happen to meet those who fanatically do? The idea might be that without a God to ground your moral principles in morality is seen to be an illusion, and then you’re then free to carry out whatever moral barbarities you chose – and further that humans tend to choose mass killing. I don’t buy the argument that morals need to be grounded in religion – indeed, my position starts from a argued rejection of religion – nor that without God humans are complete savages. Indeed, the emerging story about the origins of morality, coming from evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, gene-culture studies, anthropology, behavioural and neuro-economics is what I’d direct Bunting to as a potential basis for a “compelling popular narrative and ethic of what it is to be human and our place in the cosmos”.

And what about the charge that consumerism fills the gap of religion? Has Bunting heard of a place called the USA? The richest country in the world, and one of the most religious, it is very much a consumerism-driven society. Even Christians have pointed out the incompatibilities of scripture and the pursuit of wealth among their religious brethren, against which the Bible has more severe strictures than against than homosexuality, which gets the rich Christian Right so fired up. Bunting’s idea seems to be that losing your religion creates a void that is filled by pointless trivia and materialism, as if religious belief pushes those things out, but the evidence is clear that devout religion is compatible with consumerism on a massive scale, drug and alcohol abuse, child abuse and all sorts of other criminality. The decline of the power and authority of religious traditions may create periods of moral uncertainty and confusion while we try to find our footing, but isn’t that part of growing up, both individually and as humanity? It is such a base to stand on that secular, humanistic atheists are trying to build.

“This is the only context that can explain Dawkins's programme, a piece of intellectually lazy polemic which is not worthy of a great scientist. He uses his authority as a scientist to claim certainty where he himself knows, all too well, that there is none; for example, our sense of morality cannot simply be explained as a product of our genetic struggle for evolutionary advantage.”

It’s not mere polemic; there’s an argument (you can read my version of it here). Maybe our sense of morality isn’t simply explained (and what a daftly loaded phrase – who on earth thought this problem would be simply explained? And how sophisticated is, “Because God says so?” as a basis for moral truths?) as a product of our genetic struggle for evolutionary advantage, but science has more to go on than that, as alluded to above.

“More irritatingly, he doesn't apply to religion - the object of his repeated attacks - a fraction of the intellectual rigour or curiosity that he has applied to evolution (to deserved applause).”

Well, Bunting hasn’t addressed Dawkins’s central argument about the nature of faith and scientific investigation, which I think is pretty strong and is so far unscathed by her attack, and Dawkins does a good job of pulling the rug out from under religion. If this can be achieved with little in the way of intellectual rigour or effort as compared with what is required in evolutionary biology and the other sciences, then I think that perhaps says something about the intellectual demands of the respective domains of faith and science. This is incredibly arrogant, but I’m just showing how easy it is to play Bunting’s game of merely insulting the opponent's intellect.

“Where is the grasp of the sociological or anthropological explanations of the centrality of religion? Sadly, there is no evolution of thought in Dawkins's position; he has been saying much the same thing about religion for a long time.”

The sociological and anthropological questions of religion are fascinating – why is it so prevalent, how did it emerge in an evolutionary context, what role does it play in explaining the structure of human social systems and human altruism and group living, how does it evolve with culture and affect further cultural and psychological evolution? But these are not directly related to the epistemological questions about the status of religious claims, and the nature of faith. This is a bit of misdirection that is tempting to fall for.

“There are three areas in his programmes where the lack of rigour is most striking. First, Dawkins is featured in Jerusalem; the point is that religion causes violence and most of the world's conflicts can be traced back to faith. If only they didn't have segregated schooling in Israel and Palestine then peace could emerge. Likewise in Northern Ireland.”

It’s simple nothing like this simple minded. Dawkins is focusing on the religion – you kind of can’t miss it – but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think there is a political element to the clashes. In any case, the religious and the political are not so readily separable.

Bunting objects to:

“Dawkins's reference to a ‘process of non-thinking called faith’. For thousands of years, religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery, whether Islamic astronomy or the Renaissance. But his contempt is so profound that he can't be bothered to even find out (in an interview he dismissed Christian theology in exactly these terms). If this isn't the "hidebound certainty" of which he accuses believers, I'm not sure what is.”

I tried to explain what Dawkins means by calling faith a form of non-thinking in a previous post, but briefly Dawkins is highlighting the fact that religion encourages the disregard of reasons and evidence as grounds for accepting claims as true. This deprives you of tools for assessing the merit of the claim, and to rely instead on authority (not of evidence, which is a good thing, but on some unverifiable ancient scribblings) or tradition. This is surely the antithesis of critical thought, and this is why it is with faith, not the rejection of God, that you can believe in anything – so long as the right authority says it is so. However, once you’re on the faith train, you run into all sorts of difficulties with reconciling your religious faith-based convictions with the way the world is, and so much chin scratching and head rubbing ensues, and through a convoluted path od reasoning clarity is restored - what we normally call theology. The theological sub-field of theodicy – explaining evils, including natural disasters, in a God-created world – is a classic example: a philosophical response to explaining a problem created by believing in something on the basis of faith. If you don’t have the faith, then the problem disappears, although evil still requires a different sort of explanation and understanding (again, naturalistic, humanistic philosophy and science are not bad places to start). And it seems strange how you’d get a ticket on the faith train from this position: you see the evidence of evil, which even to the devout is prima facie evidence that there isn’t a God (then they try to cleverly show why this apparent contradiction is in fact not so), but you don’t have the compensating conviction that there is a moral God that makes sense of it all somehow so on balance you conclude that the facts of the world are suggestive that there isn't a God, and there aren't good reasosn for supposing there to be one - so you do not assent to the belief that God exists. And how are you supposed to get this conviction? Through faith - by merely willing it to be, by telling yourself, "Yes, God exists!”. How people convince themselves like this I don’t know. But of course they don’t. They usually imbibe these ideas as part of their cultural inheritance, and once established they’re hard to shift, not least because of familial and social uproar it would cause. It’s easier to go just along, and in fact there’s no prompting (especially from within the religion) to question your beliefs, and plenty of reinforcement not to, so it’s little surprise the traditions role on. And they may even have some benefits (alongside the drawback), such as playing a role in community cohesion. But the religious worldview has to be taken as a package, if it's grounded in faith and religious tradition, and considered on balance. We can take the ethic from the religion, and ground it in a naturalistic account of the world, and jettison the false beliefs, and bad approach to belief, intrinsic to religion.

This is just a sketch reply off the top of my head, so any further thoughts or criticisms are welcome (depending on the interest I may not be able to respond to all – he’s says presumptively!).

The Root Of All Evil? Part 1 - The God Delusion

2006-01-10T00:01:00.000Z

Here’s a review of a programme, The Root Of All Evil?: The God Delusion, written and presented by Richard Dawkins.

The trailers for Richard Dawkins’s new two-part programme for Channel 4 television, The Root Of All Evil? (not, apparently, a title that Dawkins would have chosen given free reign), broadcast in the UK on Monday 9th, gave a pretty clear idea of what to expect. It opened with Dawkins looking straight into the camera and saying, “Religion is an insult to human dignity”. For those of us inclined to agree, this suggested a promising programme. And for my money, I wasn’t disappointed.

The bulk of the show, called The God Delusion, was dedicated to showing that faith, the cornerstone of religion, is utterly opposed to the scientific approach to gaining knowledge about the world. They foster completely different ways of understanding the world, and have very different standards for accepting claims as worthy of belief in. It is for this reason that science and religion are incompatible, not because the findings of modern science actually disprove the existence of God (given the way God is traditionally conceived, how could it?).

Dawkins characterises faith as a form of non-thought. This will anger religiously sensitive viewers, who might call to mind scholarly Popes, Bishops and philosophers who have reflected deeply on the nature of faith and the religious life. But this is to miss the point. Faith is defined by the OED as “Confidence, reliance, belief, esp. without evidence or proof” and “Belief based on testimony or authority”. So it is to literally to take a claim as true, and assent belief in it, on the basis of no evidence – on mere assertion, in other words. But perhaps not by assertion from just anyone, but from an authority – a priest, a Pope or the Bible, perhaps. Where does thought, let alone critical thought, come into this, apart from in comprehending the message? There’s no evaluation of the claim on its merits – its source is more important in determining its acceptability than reasons, whether they be empirical or logical, for holding the belief. So faith necessarily subdues reflective thought, at least about whether the claims of religion should be accepted or not. As if this weren’t enough, religions also usually have proscriptions against questioning the authority of tradition, as the story of Doubting Thomas makes clear. Faith is touted as a virtue, and to have strong faith in the face of mountains of contrary evidence is the highest virtue of all.

In contrast, science is about the setting up of hypothesis, the testing of models, and the collection of evidence, all of which could mean that we have to revise our thoughts. There’s no template to which all new facts have to be crowbarred into, like in the religious worldview. It’s an open-ended, relentlessly self-critical enterprise – if you won’t subject your pet theory to close scrutiny, you can bet the guy down the corridor will. Authority counts for little in science (or at least should do). Sure, we have enormous respect and admiration for scientific greats such as Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and Watson and Crick, but that doesn’t make their ideas immune from criticism, or beyond revision. The arguments and evidence, in an ideal world, dictate what we should believe.

The next step in Dawkins’s critique is to show how raising people to believe that it is fair game to believe in whatever they like, so long as their faith is strong and sincere enough, is potentially a recipe for disaster. For in this mindset there is no clear line between accepting benign or benevolent beliefs - that you should love your neighbour and give to charity - from beliefs such as the possibility of a fast-track to paradise that can lead to suicide bombings and other acts of martyrdom. The claim here is not that everyone with faith will do something crazy, but merely that even religious moderates are complicit in fostering an environment that says it’s OK to hold beliefs about what is right and wrong in this life based on faith in a divine creator. It's disingenuous to pretend that religion, specifically the certainty provided by faith about the moral correctness and purpose of certain actions, didn’t play a role in 9/11 and 7/7. Once faith enters the picture, it becomes reasonable to believe anything. And of course politics play an important role in the conflicts around the world where religions clash; Dawkins acknowledges this. But does it help to have a further divisive ideology floating around that helps characterise the “other”, the group that "we" struggle against?

One depressing aspect of this programme was watching Dawkins try to talk to the religiously devout. In the US, he meets up with an evangelical pastor, a staunch Republican who claims to have weekly telephone meetings with Bush, himself devout, and who has also hob-knobbed with Blair and other dignitaries. The pastor raises the issue of evolution, and ridicules the notion that the eye happened by “accident”. Poor Dawkins must have feared his head would burst, as I did, when he heard this! He replied, incredulously, “Accident?! I’ve never heard any evolutionary biologist describe evolution as an accident!”. The pastor carried on, unfazed, saying that if only Dawkins had read the books that he’d read, spoken with the scientists that he has spoken to, then he might see things differently. To his credit, Dawkins was forthright and said, essentially, that it was clear that the pastor knew nothing about biology, at which point the pastor adopted a slow, deliberate, patronising tone, and told Dawkins not to be arrogant – having just claimed that the bible is correct and unchanging and has all the answers. He later chased Dawkins off the premises of his religious megaplex, threatening to call the police and accusing Dawkins of calling his children animals (presumably because Dawkins believes in evolution). Words fail me.

Later we met Jonathan Cohen, formerly a secular Jew from the US, now a militant Muslim (with changed name and full transformation) living in Jerusalem. He launched an attack on Dawkins who, as an atheist, he claimed “allows women to dress as whores”, to which Dawkins pointed out that he doesn't dress women, they dress themselves, the rhetorical point of which was lost in the rant. This interview descended into a diatribe against atheism and an instruction for Dawkins to go home and sort himself and his society out. If one fails to see the hand of faith in all this, one must be blind.

The God Delusion ended with Dawkins providing a response to the charge that an allegiance to science does not entitle one to reject religion and embrace atheism, because science doesn’t show that God doesn’t exist – it still leaves open the possibility that he does (ignoring for the moment the fact traditional accounts of God and the creation are incompatible with what science reveals to us). Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, Dawkins points out that there could be a teapot orbit the sun, yet we wouldn’t know because we couldn’t detect it, because it was too small. Our science couldn’t prove that the teapot didn’t exist, but that would scarcely provide for asserting that it did exist – you can’t prove a negative. Logically, this might mean we should only commit ourselves to agnosticism, but in the case of the teapot, would you really say, “Well gee, I’m just not sure if it’s there” – in practice you’d be an atheist towards the teapot, wouldn’t you, unless there was good evidence to suggest it existed? So instead of calling ourselves agnostic, we might call ourselves teapot atheists.

In any case, what is supposed to follow from the fact that we can’t disprove God’s existence? Do religious folk believe in anything whose existence can’t be disproved – pixies, goblins, unicorns, and mermaids? Of course not. As Dawkins says, nearly everyone on the planet is a teapot atheist with respect to most of the Gods that have ever been invented, from Thor to Aphrodite, and every member of a monotheistic religion is an atheist to every conception of God bar one. “Some of us,” Dawkins concludes, “just go one God further.”

Next week I'll review the second part of the programme, The God Virus.

Welcome to (another) new blog!

2006-01-08T18:31:00.001Z

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for taking a look at my recently started blog. I thought I should introduce The Proper Study Of Mankind (a rather grand title, I realise!), and give some indication of the scope of the blog and the sort of content you can expect to see here. Broadly, I’ll try to cover issues about ‘the human condition’ from the naturalistic and scientific perspective of a secular humanist. This covers a lot of ground, but the key areas I’m interested in are the philosophy of mind; moral philosophy; free will; behavioural genetics; development; evolution, and particularly how it relates to understanding human behaviour; religion and it’s intersection with politics, science and wider culture; cognitive science; neuroscience; neuroeconomics and behavioural economics; and anthropology.

I'll try to post as frequently as possible and as current events dictate, and will provide pointers to interesting articles and events as well as providing more detailed analysis of certain topics, and also ruminations of a more general nature.

I hope you enjoy the content and visit often!

Cheers,

Dan.