Religion

God, Schmod: ASD‘s Obligate Charlie Hebdo Rant

Posted by Jeff Morris on January 17, 2015
Posted in: Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

So, crazy muslims are killing people again. Everywhere I see good modern atheists lamenting the barbarism of religion. “Remember that time that radical atheists killed all those people? Me neither,” they say. If people would just see the light of reason and give up these silly caveman superstitions, all of this violence would go away.

Point one: Radical atheists have killed WAY more people than radical muslims.

Here are a few examples:

  1. Communism is to its very core antireligious. “The opiate of the masses” and all that. Even disregarding the massive famines, plausibly caused by characteristic leftist innumeracy rather than genocidal malice, communists murdered 38 million people in the 20th century. If we want to compare apples to apples, let’s just think about all the Commie bombers and terrorists active in the 60’s and 70’s in Europe, like the Red Brigades.
  2. The French Revolution abolished Christianity and set about enacting the destruction of Catholicism in that country. In less than a year, the Reign of Terror enacted by the revolutionaries claimed 40,000 lives, including some 2,000 Catholic clergy.
  3. In a similar vein, the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century resulted in a regime that despised the Catholics. The non-religious Plutarco Calles was “president” of Mexico in the 20’s, during which time thousands of priests were executed and literal wars were fought between Calles’ regime and the overwhelmingly Catholic population of Mexico.

This isn’t meant to suggest that atheism prompts mass murder; it’s just to make the point that atheists aren’t exactly immune to radicalism and extreme violence.

Rather than blaming religion, perhaps we should blame ideology. The notion that any of our airy philosophies are worth more than actual human lives may be the only truly evil thing that exists.

Point two: Even if you eliminated religion from the picture entirely, Arabs in France would still be pissed off and violent.

Obviously it doesn’t fit with the proper multicultural worldview, but I’m convinced that the only way Arabs and French will really get along is if it becomes impossible to tell them apart. I would say the same thing about any other pairing of ethnic groups, in any other country, anywhere in this world or any other one.

I’m biased in this thinking by my training as an ecologist and an evolutionary biologist. It’s clear that if you put two populations in the same environment, competing over the same resources, you’re going to end up with only one population after not too long. Either the two will blend together, or one will outperform and supplant the other. There are ways around this, but those are the two most likely outcomes.

Not only is conflict guaranteed between two distinct populations in the same environment, but there are good reasons to suspect that the conflict will usually favor the resident population over the immigrant. This is especially true when you have organisms that extensively engineer their environments or depend on complicated social arrangements — both things that are important in human societies. Culture has an infrastructure — all the buildings and art and language and even modes of transportation that accumulate through the industry of a people acting in a place for many lifetimes. Every last bit of that infrastructure is designed by and for the resident group. Whatever the resident’s peculiar strengths are, you can bet those will be enhanced and emphasized by that cultural infrastructure. Moreover, you can pretty well guarantee that that infrastructure has been adapted specifically to give the residents an edge over their nearest neighbors, who incidentally are also the most likely to immigrate.

On a “level playing field” then, the residents will usually win out over the immigrants. We can try to make things more equitable by giving the immigrants a ‘leg up’ or by hamstringing the residents in various ways — but even then, all those policies will be designed by the residents, using the resident’s cultural infrastructure, and will still usually wind up screwing the immigrants. The only way those poor bastards can come out ahead is either to conquer the residents or to marry them and cease to exist as a distinct ethnicity.

Because we believe so strongly in multiculturalism, we are basically incapable of thinking about this UNTIL the situation gets so out of hand that heads are being lopped off. So we encourage immigration, and inevitably the immigrants figure out that the game is inherently stacked against them forever, no matter what anybody does. This results in very pissed off people, often in large numbers.

Pissed off immigrants might be forgiven for lashing out at the resident population, who is in fact the proximal cause of their problems. Even if the residents welcome the immigrants, their very existence restricts the success of the immigrant population.

And how do pissed off poor people fight the resident authority? Do they call up the reserves and field their tank armies? Do they whip up votes in the legislature and sink billions into lobbying for their interests?

No, they use terrorism. It’s the only weapon they have. Acting surprised when poor immigrants blow up soft targets is like acting surprised when a dog bites you after you poke him in the eye. What did you think he was gonna do, call the cops?

Terrorism is the curse of a globalized humanity, where people move around so much that every moderately successful country has large populations of failing immigrants growing progressively more radical and angry. There are no good solutions to this situation, but one might predict that ethnic nationalism in Europe and elsewhere will continue to grow in popularity, both as a defense mechanism for immigrants and a solidarity movement for residents.

Dear Alabama: Stop Making It Easy For Them!

Posted by Jeff Morris on January 9, 2015
Posted in: Evolution, Religion. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

Apparently the wonderful state of Alabama is attempting to update its science education standards to meet 19th 21st century standards. Toward this end, the Alabama Department of Education has paid a panel of experts to draft a document outlining these standards, indicating what students at each level, K-12, are expected to understand, as well as strategies for teachers to move them towards these achievement goals.

Now, I realize I’m biased, but the first thing I looked for was whether or not these poobahs included evolution in their curriculum. So, I searched the document for the word, “evolution”. It turned up only 3 times — which, you might say, is 3 times more than one would expect in Alabama, so yay. Unfortunately, all 3 mentions were in a single paragraph on page 6 (of 80-something), and were part of a mealy-mouthed and weasely attempt to dodge responsibility for letting Christer extremists impoverish education for the whole state:

“The theory of evolution by natural selection, a theory included in this document, states that natural selection provides the basis for the modern scientific explanation for the diversity of living things. Since natural selection has been observed to play a role in influencing small changes in a population, it is assumed, based on the study of artifacts, that it produces large changes, even though this has not been directly observed. Because of its importance and implications, students should understand the nature of evolutionary theories. They should learn to make distinctions among the multiple meanings of evolution, to distinguish between observations and assumptions used to draw conclusions, and to wrestle with the unanswered questions and unresolved problems still faced by evolutionary theory.”

Now, you might think from reading this paragraph that the intention was to salve the wrath of the Christers against future mentions of evolution in the curriculum. However, they never bring it up again. To their credit, evolutionary principles are brought up in many places in the document, under the heading of “heredity” or maybe “unity and diversity”. They even talk about the role of mutations in producing long-term changes in populations. From the 7th-grade standards:

“Construct an explanation from evidence to describe how genetic mutations result in harmful, beneficial, or neutral effects to the structure and function of an organism.”

So that pretty much defines evolution, huh? SO CALL IT BY ITS NAME, YOU FUCKING COWARDS.

I understand what these people are doing. They’re trying to get as much good science into this document as they can without triggering a full-court press from the backwoods hellfire revivalists that could endanger much more than just evolution in the curriculum. But coddling those people is causing serious harm to Alabama’s students — two of whom happen to be my F1’s.

You see, evolution isn’t some abstract conjecture about the origin of life or human beings or whatever. It directly affects our health in the form of the ongoing evolution of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria. But more than that, evolutionary theory and the hard math that underlies it forms the basis for all sorts of practical, presumably religiously uncontroversial things. It’s used by computer scientists and mathematicians to solve intractable problems. Engineers use it to improve mechanical designs and think outside of the boxes that we’ve made for ourselves over the centuries. Doctors use it to figure out how to tailor medicine to different populations of people with different biologies.

Evolution permeates EVERY ASPECT of modern technology and science.

In the introduction to the document by Thomas Bice, the State Superintendent of Education, we are told:

“In addition, today’s workforce depends on graduates who are prepared with necessary scientific and technological skills to address these issues. Our newly developed science standards affirm the importance of science literacy for all students.”

You can’t achieve that goal if you don’t call evolution evolution, dude. Don’t even pretend you care about these things if you can’t stand up to the jerks that have been making this state a laughing stock for a hundred years.

My desire here is simple. I want this document revised to do what the page 6 preface says: to teach evolution politely, without suggesting you “have to believe it” or whatever. My readers know that I often support the rights of Christers to be Christers and here is no different. All I ask is the word “evolution” to appear throughout this document, wherever the writers are frakking talking about evolution.

The Standards document is still in public review. Feel free to add your two cents — but try to be civil about it; don’t give the Christers any more ammunition than they already have.

Dear readers: if you’re enjoying reading my rants, consider sharing or re-tweeting! ASD needs more cultists.

The Non-Problem of Creationism

Posted by Jeff Morris on November 1, 2014
Posted in: Evolution, Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

The Creationists are coming! The Creationists are coming!

A gang of actual Young Earth Creationists has managed to organize a day of seminars today (November 1) at Michigan State University. These wingnuts, who believe our planet is less than 10,000 years old, have been given crap tons of press by outlets as prominent as Science magazine, one of the big 3 prestige journals (thanks, guys). It’s no coincidence that MSU was picked — it’s a nexus for evolutionary biology in the US, home both to the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action and the famous Lenski Long-Term E. coli Evolution Experiment.

One might suspect that the Christers are attempting a classic troll of MSU biologists. You would think that Internet-savvy millenial graduate students would be able to spot it a mile away, shake their heads, and move along. I mean, these guys know not to read Internet comments, right?

But no… some of them are apparently organizing some kind of response. HOW DARE someone not accept the SACRED DATA! To the barricades!

Our academic holy crusaders always have to fight something, whether it’s implicit biases, IQ tests, criminally insensitive health insurance, or now the Young Earthers. Here’s a list of reasons why they should stay out of this one:

1) YOU DON’T HAVE TO FIGHT EVERY BAD GUY.

There are lots of annoying, self-righteous, cruel, wrong, etc. people in the world. Many of them would love to change the system in generally problematic ways. Some of those people actually have the power to do the horrible shit they want, and yes, we should fight people like that. Other people, though, are paper tigers — they talk a big game, but ultimately don’t have the capacity to change much of anything.

The Creationists — particularly these Young-Earthers — are of the latter variety. They bluster, posture, and circumlocute. But their bizarre beliefs don’t have much impact in the real world! When they manage to organize a publicity stunt like the one at MSU, it’s a major success for them. Probably the worst thing these types have managed, in decades of effort, is putting some stupid sticker in the front of high school biology textbooks. Guys, these small successes represent the extent of the Creationists’ power, the result of massive expenditures and years of cajoling.

We are strong; they are weak. By fighting them, we suggest to the world that we are afraid of them, which elevates them — at least in the public view — to parity with us. It makes them look stronger, viable, and certainly must help them attract recruits. Fighting an enemy like that — one that is orders of magnitude weaker — is literally counter-productive, since it strengthens the enemy! Sending the weight of academic evolutionary biology to crush the Creationist bug would be as ridiculous as sending the entire US military to destroy a small cadre of religious gangsters on the other side of the world.

Please tell me you’re smarter than this, scientists. Stay out of the quagmire.

Let’s not forget that al-Qaeda and affiliated groups were able to spend the last ten years growing from a platoon of cavemen into an army with the capability of actually threatening conquest, and this growth was entirely facilitated by the hatred inspired by the army we sent to fight them. When I look at right-wing resistance to climate change, for instance, I see the same thing — people reject the science because they hate the people who talk about it all the time. Don’t make it worse by wrestling the Christers in public!

And don’t try to convince me that I’m underestimating the Creationists’ current abilities. That’s like Matt Drudge trying to convince me I should be skeert of Ebola. It takes a lot to scare me. And anyway, science invented atom bombs and VX gas, whereas superstition has bupkus for weaponry. So if it they ever do become a problem, we can just take ’em on the old-fashioned way. Problem solved.

2) THEY DON’T DISAGREE WITH YOU OUT OF IGNORANCE.

Many of my colleagues seem to believe that the Creationists disbelieve in evolution due to ignorance about evolutionary theory. Under this hypothesis, careful and patient explanation will result in everyone agreeing! After all, truth is truth, and we all want the truth! Right?

Wrong. I’ve argued extensively in the past that Christian rejection of evolution has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of evolutionary theory. It is important to remember here that you, the scientist, want to make a scientific argument to the Creationist, backed by data and logic; but the Creationist is more interested in political and social arguments — also supported by logic. The Creationist has a worldview, driven by his faith, that is mostly consistent with reality and highly useful to him for structuring his social world. Unfortunately, these social truths are inconsistent with certain scientific truths — but the Creationist perceives those scientific truths to be less important than the social ones. Therefore, he optimizes his social fitness by rejecting science in favor of religion.

The take-home message here is that the rejection of science provides a fitness advantage for these Christians. No amount of argument, data, or re-education will change their minds. If you want to convince them that evolution is real, you first have to convince them that it’s important enough to outweigh the benefits gained by rejecting it. This is how every other controversial scientific notion spread from an esoteric conjecture to a household fact: by doing something useful. So use your energy to make evolution do useful work for people, and quit wasting your efforts tilting at Christian windmills.

An aside: many of the same scientists who get their panties in a bunch about things like the genetics of IQ appear to also be the kind that want to fight the Christers. A bit ironic, no? These guys are willing to shitcan or even falsify data to back up their left-wing fantasies, but when the right tries to support its faerie tales with Rube Goldberg gobbledygook, we’ve got to go to war. Guilty consciences, anyone?

3) YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY RIGHT AND THEY ARE OBVIOUSLY WRONG.

Ideas exist in a marketplace; right (or useful) ones prosper and wrong (or harmful) ones fail. That’s the whole point behind a free society: by allowing wildly divergent viewpoints to exist and compete, our consciousnesses evolve to adapt to an ever-changing physical and social environment.

To make that marketplace work, we have to jealously defend the rights of expression for the most (apparently) wrong ideas — the ones we don’t want to hear, either because they sound evil, absurd, or silly to us. Time and again, ideas once considered evil, absurd, or silly have turned out to be true. Other times, elements of very wrong notions have inspired and supported different ideas that would ultimately be seen as true.

If you ask me, science has nothing to fear from these Creationist loons. Their ideas are obviously wrong. Presumably we have faith in this — why then are so many of us afraid that unsupported rambling by a Creationist poses a threat to the massive edifice of modernity?

Presumably the notion is that, left unchecked, the Christers will accumulate enough power to shut us up using the coercive, violent power of the State. (Note to good academic leftists: if it weren’t for that giant central government y’all love so much, that kind of coercion would be impossible…)

Let’s think about another obviously wrong idea that actually did manage to become the law of the land, due to state force: communism. Communists had been pushing their innumerate bullshit for decades before they finally managed to grab control of a country. Like Christians, they preyed on the weak and vulnerable, people whose poor lot in life (and deteriorated mental state caused by malnutrition) made them receptive to utopian visions. But the ideas never caught hold in the mainstream of society because anybody with any sense could tell things literally just didn’t add up. When communism finally did catch on, it was only in countries that had been totally wrecked by war. One gets the impression that communism never actually won hearts and minds; it just happened to be the only surviving organization capable of providing law and governmental services.

The analogy here: if the creationists ever gain control it will be because we allowed our civilization to crumble, not because of the strength of their arguments or beliefs. Western pluralistic attitudes toward thought and speech and innovation underlie the success of Western science, and the extreme versions of those freedoms represented in 20th century US society represented the height of scientific achievement anywhere, ever. The best way to let superstition get a foothold is to disassemble those freedoms, and a great way to start would be by having government-sponsored researchers shout down Christers in public.

SO THERE, scientists. Don’t feed the trolls. Please.

Dear readers: if you’re enjoying reading my rants, consider sharing or re-tweeting! ASD needs more cultists.

Wild Speculation About Goose Bumps and “God Genes”

Posted by Jeff Morris on April 19, 2014
Posted in: Evolution, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , . 1 Comment

The weather up here has finally started warming up, and we’ve taken every opportunity to open up the windows and air out the house. A couple nights ago, we left the kitchen window open overnight. When we woke up the next morning, it was pretty chilly, which prompted my daughter to ask me:

“Daddy, why do we get goosebumps?”

Ermagerd, erverlurtion!

I considered telling the truth: “I have no idea.” Then I remembered that we live in an era where we have Internet-ready computers masquerading as telephones, and therefore you’re never justified in saying you don’t know something. To Wikipedia!

We quickly learned that goose bumps are caused by the same subcutaneous “arrector pili” muscles that give hairier mammals the ability to make their fur “stand on end”. On the one hand, this trait can make an animal look bigger and more intimidating, and might serve to ward off predators. On the other, it creates a thermos-like layer of air insulation between the fur’s horizon and the skin that helps keep the animal warm.

Of course, humans no longer have much in the way of fur, so these primary functions probably don’t work any more — they have become “vestigial”. I took this as a “teachable moment” to talk about evolution with my little girl. We talked about how organisms aren’t put together in clean modules like human-built machines. Because evolutionary change is driven by random mutations, it’s unlikely that all components of a biological system will change at the same time.

Humans lost their fur for reasons that almost certainly don’t have anything to do with the goose-bump function. Maybe losing fur gave our ancestors an advantage of some kind — like making them look sexier than their hairier relatives — and furlessness spread by natural selection. Or maybe once we figured out how to cut other animal’s skins off and wear them ourselves, the fur didn’t matter one way or the other and it just sort of “drifted away” by random chance. Regardless, once humans had lost their fur, the arrector pili muscles became pretty much useless. Nevertheless, they’re small and don’t take up a lot of resources, so there’s no real pressure for them to be lost by evolution, and therefore it might take a very long time for them to finally go away. Basically, the way I explained it to my daughter, goose bumps are an evolutionary anachronism, kind of like your appendix.

Or, if you’re one of these guys, your brain.

Great, science lesson for the day. But, as happens all too often when I talk to my kids about science, I started second-guessing myself later in the day. Was this scenario true? Do goose bumps serve any useful purpose in modern humans? I started thinking about all the scenarios where we get goose bumps. Certainly, we get them when we’re cold or scared, just like our hairier relatives. But we also get them in moments of intense emotion — but not just any emotion. At least in my own experience, I don’t get goose bumps when I’m angry, or when I’m doting on my kids. Frustration doesn’t do it, or stress, or intense happiness or satisfaction.

No, I get goose bumps when I experience a suite of emotions I usually classify as “religious-like”. Specifically, these are things related to the aesthetic sense: awe, the perception of beauty, the sublime sense of smallness before nature, the eureka moment of discovery or creation. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the visceral experience of these emotions is what lends them their weight, and perhaps assists in the “suspension of disbelief” necessary for the proper experience of religion and its close relative, art. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who feels this way.

A long time ago, when I first started getting interested in evolution, I spent a lot of time thinking about the evolution of religion. There are many voices amongst scientists that scoff at the whole notion of belief in gods. Otherwise serious people contend that religion is just a silly fantasy, and that it demonstrably harms those unfortunate half-wits who don’t have the mental muscle to give it up.

Built by mentally challenged, delusional pseudo-chimps in the 13th century.

I never found these voices compelling. It just doesn’t add up: if religion was pathological, and was the root cause of war and suicide and self-destruction, why did it arise independently in every human population on Earth? And why does it persist, aeon after aeon, even though every population of humans — since FOREVER — has surely sampled atheism many thousands of times in every generation? If you saw these characteristics — parallel development and stability in the face of alternate character states — in any other phenotypic trait, you would assume they were supported by strong natural selection.

So I concluded, and still believe, that religion evolved by natural selection. I also believe (with very little evidence) that religion and religion-like behaviors remain the lynchpin of the numinous collective trait called “culture” that stabilizes large-scale human groups (or “races”, sensu lato). I’ve often wondered if there are “God genes” in humans that make it easier to believe in these kinds of ephemera. And while thinking about goose bumps, I started to wonder if they might shed some light on where one might look for those God genes.

Ever heard the term “God-fearing?” I always thought it was a goofy, hellfire-and-brimstone revivalist preacher trope. But what if the aesthetic/religious sense of modern humans evolved from a re-purposing of the limbic system (the part of the brain that controls goose bumps, sexual desire, terror, etc.) from simple fight/flight decisions to the “loftier” goals of god-making? One can imagine that the first counterfactual thoughts originated in fear: what if there’s a wolf behind that tree? And from the imaginary (but not really imaginary) wolf, it’s a short jump to imaginary (but not really imaginary) people, or grand immortal generation-spanning abstractions like deities. The signals originating in the limbic system feel external to our consciousness: for instance, when you fight down your fear of something, or learn to control some impulse or reflex, it feels distinctly like your “software” is dominating something external to it. Thus, fantasies arising in the limbic system would feel more “real” than the products of cerebral imagination. Mix all that limbic soup together — terror and sex and subconscious hallucination — and bam, god and art and human culture pop out the other side.

Or maybe not. Like the title says, wild speculation based on a 5-minute conversation with an 8-year old. Something fun to think about over the Easter/Passover weekend.

Why Don’t People Believe In Evolution? Part II: Pareto Optimization

Posted by Jeff Morris on April 12, 2014
Posted in: Economics, Evolution, Religion. Tagged: , , , , . 1 Comment

In an earlier post I argued that, ironically, disbelief in evolution evolved because it acted as a “greenbeard” for religious “conservatives”, improving their fitness by enhancing their group solidarity. Here I’ll approach the question from a slightly different angle: even if it stopped providing any benefit, disbelief in evolution would probably persist because of a common engineering problem broadly called “Pareto optimization“.

The Pareto in question was Vilfredo Pareto, an accomplished Italian thinker who was one of the first people to apply hard scientific rigor to the study of sociology and economics. Indeed, Pareto’s era was the zenith of sociology, before the discipline became a clearing house for overeducated Marxist wingnuts. From what I’ve read about him, Pareto was pretty controversial even in his own day, but if he were working today, his Darwinian ideas about social organization would give the left side of campus a self-righteous conniption fit. It probably wouldn’t help that Pareto was (and is) pretty popular with the goose-stepping crowd, so no matter how brilliant he was, he’d end up in the same pigeonhole as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Evola, and Von Braun. Of course, ASD cares not for your foolish mortal politics, so here are a few snippets about Pareto’s thinking:

Pareto believed in freedom. He complained about what he thought were unnecessary abuses against the powerless, and he complained about corruption in high places. Marxists had a solution to the distribution of wealth and powerlessness problems, but Pareto was opposed to their solution, and for Pareto the ideologies of liberals and socialists were just smoke screens for leaders who were as inclined to enjoy the privileges and powers of the governing elite that they replaced. He viewed democracy as of no help to the poor, and in a 1900 article Pareto declared democracy a sham. — Frank Smitha

At the bottom of the Wealth curve, he wrote, Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion’s share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, ‘compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.’ Inflammatory stuff – and it burned Pareto’s reputation. — Mandelbrot and Hudson, as quoted in Wikipedia

See? Economic distributions arise by evolutionary processes, and have nothing to do with moral decisions made by some mysterious “One Percent”. I couldn’t agree more, and hell, if that makes me a fascist, polish my jackboots and call me Benito.

Evidence of my fascist tendencies: I find this adorable, even though I HATE KITTENS.

During his long career Pareto learned a lot about the dynamics of economic systems, but the idea that has gained the widest traction amongst biologists is that of “Pareto optimization”. Imagine a young child going to school — at first she doesn’t know a whole lot, so it’s possible for her to pretty much saturate her ability to learn math, literature, and science at the same time. However, as she grows up and get educated, it takes more and more effort to reach the “next level” in any one subject, and decisions start having to be made about how to allocate time. If she decides to spend more time on math, she’s not going to have as much time for literature or sports. The problem only gets worse with time, and once you’re at the rarefied heights of grad school, it’s easy to find yourself doing literally nothing but studying one bizarre invertebrate that no one has ever heard of, even to the exclusion of social activities, exercise, eating, etc.

We claim this lobster lip in the name of Cycliophora!

Thus, you can only make costless “Pareto improvements” for so long before you approach a “Pareto frontier” where any further improvement in one function produces a negative influence on at least one other function. In evolution (and probably other fields) we call this a “trade-off” and it’s one of the reasons why there aren’t any “perfect” organisms out there. It’s probably also why the whole “car/boat hybrid” thing never took off, why there are so few multi-sport athletes or scholar athletes competing at the professional level, and why the spork is inferior to either a spoon or a fork.

In this figure, we’re trying to minimize two traits (represented by the two axes). When both traits are far from ideal, it’s easy to improve either or both (top right). As they approach the perfect “utopia point” they eventually reach the Pareto frontier, where it’s impossible to improve one trait without damaging the other one. The trait space beyond the Pareto frontier is unreachable.

So, when you’re sitting on a Pareto front, you have to make decisions. Which traits do I really want to maximize; what are my priorities? Unless you’re devoted to being as spork-liciously mediocre as possible in as many traits as possible, you’re going to specialize, and that’s going to cost you something somewhere.

So how does this connect back to belief in evolution? The problem is that scientists and laypeople have very different priorities. As we mature and approach our own personal Pareto frontiers, we start optimizing for our chosen professions. Scientists (hopefully) optimize truth-seeking and intellectual honesty. We voluntarily submit ourselves to a sado-masochistic peer-review process that supposedly prevents us from professional dishonesty, kind of like a great intellectual chastity belt.

After a decade or six obsessing over intellectual honesty — and suffering the travails of academic publication and watchdoggery — we expect everybody else to obsess over it too. But that’s kind of like a priest, having mastered the dubious art of celibacy, expecting everybody else to have a similar mastery over their gonadal urges.

But why should they? Outside of science, honesty and accuracy are probably generally good ideas, but do “normal people” really benefit from taking it to the extremes that scientists do? Probably no more than they would benefit from celibacy. No, most people optimize more sensible things, like getting along with their neighbors, co-workers, and friends. And if that means not thinking too deeply about certain things that your neighbors, co-workers, and friends might be wrong about, well, so be it.

And it’s not like scientists are any better about being intellectually honest in their private lives. The degree to which academics turn a blind eye to the utterly innumerate claims of the leftist politicians they idolize boggles the mind. The idea that somebody could aggressively nitpick parametric vs. nonparametric statistical methods in a paper about lizards fucking, and then nonchalantly accept the idea that eternal deficit spending is a good idea — that’s hard to swallow, man.

My guess as to why academics do this? Academia slowly drifted leftwards over decades for complicated reasons, and at some point a critical mass was reached where, in order to live a peaceful and sociable life, it was advisable for an academic to at least act like a good leftist. In other words — it doesn’t matter if the ideas are grounded in truth, if they’re productive, or even if they make sense. People believe them because they’re optimizing sociability, not political science or economics.

Ultimately, academics don’t believe in capitalism for the same reason that many “normal people” don’t believe in evolution. It doesn’t matter how much evidence supports something: you’re unlikely to believe something that makes your colleagues think you’re a douche. You can see this trend all around you: the choice between truth and practicality is usually a Pareto optimization problem, and we choose the latter over and over again in our lives. It’s absurd to expect “normal people” to treat scientific truths any differently than any other truths.

I’ve made two arguments here, first that disbelief in evolution is actively selected amongst Christians because of the greenbeard effect, and second that it expands from that Christian core because of the Pareto impossibility of simultaneously maximizing truth and sociability. Does this mean that we can’t increase the American public’s acceptance of evolution? Probably not by just harping on the scientific evidence. But there are other tactics that I do think will work. But that’s for another day…

Cosmos, Christians, and the Second Coming of Sagan

Posted by Jeff Morris on March 15, 2014
Posted in: Evolution, Politics, Religion. Tagged: , , , , . 3 Comments

I finally got around to watching the new Cosmos tonight. Gotta say, I was fully prepared to hate it. Ever since I started seeing this Neil Tyson guy popping up on the Internets I’ve been pretty skeptical about him. Usually, I’d see his face attached to some meme-y blurb on a pimply atheist’s Facebook wall, passive aggressively mocking religious people, the denizens of the flyover states, all the semi-educated unwashed masses who either legitimately don’t understand science or else willfully reject it. You know, the same kind of meme swarms that often feature Bill Nye and seem to be peripherally attached to George Takei’s Facebook empire. Usually the messages are really snarky and one suspects they either a) weren’t actually said by the people to whom they’re being attributed or b) have been taken grossly out of context for the purpose of gratuitous Dawkins-esque trolling.

I find all these aggressively atheistic Facebook trolls really objectionable, if for no other reason than they make me want to defend the gods-damned Christers. And, perhaps through no fault of their own, Neil Tyson and Bill Nye have gotten turgled into the part of my brain reserved for these kind of guys.

Now, I absolutely adored Carl Sagan when I was a kid. Who amongst us over 30 can say the word “billions” without aping Dr. Sagan’s instantly recognizable voice? Lots of things contributed to my decision to be a scientist, but Sagan’s PBS specials, his books, and just knowing that guys like him were out there figuring things out had a lot to do it. (Full disclosure, so did giant Japanese robots and time-traveling dinosaurs.)

So it should come as no surprise that I was gritting my teeth about watching a remake of Sagan’s most famous product hosted by what I had come to think of as a deity worshipped by slithering hordes of Facebook Grid Bugs. I mean, don’t even get me started on remakes. You’re starting with one foot in the grave already these days when you use a loved title from my childhood and try to spiff it up for 21st century sensibilities. But Cosmos? You’re seriously treading on sacred ground there.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. First, prior to watching, I finally got around to Googling Tyson. Unlike Bill Nye, Tyson is a bonafide scientist, who apparently continues to contribute to original research. His most recent paper, “The faint-end slopes of galaxy luminosity functions in the cosmos field”, was published in 2008. While not stellar, his publication record is respectable, especially considering the huge amount of outreach and popular press writing he’s done.

That settled some of my concerns about “Who anointed this guy the new Carl Sagan?” At least he’s a real scientist and not just some dude people recognize from TV.

The show, then: it was good. Certainly managed to convey the scope and grandeur of the Universe, and of the Great Work of the scientist. The special effects were a lot better than they were in the 80’s. The addition of animated sequences was really fun, and is certain to catch the attention of younger kids (who really ought to be the target audience). There was one great animated bit where the persecuted thinker Giordano Bruno is set free from his prison cell into the infinite universe of his imagination; unfortunately just before he’s tortured and killed by a gang of Christian death-dealers that make Mel Gibson’s Pharisees look like an even-handed depiction of Jewish politics in Roman Palestine.

Although I have to admit the Papa Emeritus cameo was a welcome surprise.

And I have to keep on about the depiction of religion. I’m all about Christian-bashing. Hell, I pray to Odin and listen to music by loony astro-Nazis who burn churches. But Cosmos, gods love ’em, got it wrong, and they got it wrong in a seriously bad way that is becoming too common amongst scientists. The case study of Bruno as a scientific martyr was just as historically cartoony as was Bruno’s depiction; here’s a good accounting of the real problem the Church had with Bruno, who was apparently a pretty recalcitrant firebrand and theological revisionist, sort of a medieval Alex Jones. Yeah, they burned his ass at the stake, but it wasn’t because they were suppressing the “truth,” it was because they were suppressing dissent. They also burned people for all sorts of things that the Dawkins crew would mock as absurd — for instance, “witches” were blamed and executed for the 14th-15th century cooling event known as the Little Ice Age.

Which brings me to my real problem with Cosmos’ depiction of religion. Like Dawkins and his trolls, it flattens religion and conflates gnostic experience with political appropriations of religious ideology, for instance as embodied in the Catholic Church. Religion arises in the confrontation of human consciousness in its most private moments with the ineffable — not the unknown, but the unknowable. It isn’t something that can be easily shared, or universalized. Despite the inherently personal nature of religion, cult symbols often have been used by political groups in their attempts to enforce dominion, and therefore many people have come to associate the symbols and trappings of particular religions with the hated tyrants who wielded them.

But for scientists to take this attitude about religion — extrapolating from the political persecution of dissidents by the hegemonic Church to the classification of religious experience as a reprobate anachronism — invites two great mistakes. First, by focusing mistrust on the religious boogeyman, it distracts from the real enemy — political ideology and the manipulation of belief to control people. There is no important difference between what the Church did to Bruno and what the atheist Soviets did to Solzhenitsyn. Second, by attacking the straw man of the political Church, scientists miss the fact that most of us are drawn to our work by desires almost, if not exactly, identical to the desires that drive the deeply religious. Briefly, if your study of science has never led you to gaze bleary-eyed and speechless into the sublime depths of the cosmos, then you aren’t doing it right (consider a career in engineering).

I can overlook this shortcoming. I’m sure I’ll keep watching the show, and it certainly was a lot better than I was expecting. But I long for the day when scientists realize that threats to our profession come from everywhere — all sorts of political ideology are, by their very nature, inimicable to the pursuit of truth. Leftist fantasies are just as much a problem as Christian dogma, and we shouldn’t let the fact that the leftist hand is more free with grant money cloud our judgment on this issue.

Why Don’t People Believe In Evolution? Part I: It’s All About the Beard

Posted by Jeff Morris on February 15, 2014
Posted in: Evolution, Religion. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

Lots of people don’t believe in evolution. This is shocking to ivory-tower academics who almost never interact with the nonbelievers. Hell, I guess I’m one of those sheltered souls. I don’t think I’m on a first-name basis with a single church-going Christian that I’m not related to. In literally every social circle I move in, one can casually talk about the evolution of the human species or the abiotic origins of life without having to look furtively about to see if anyone has taken offense.

But the society of the American ivory tower is the exception. An often-cited 2006 paper in Science shows two shocking facts. First, less than half of Americans believe the theory of evolution is accurate. Second, the US has the lowest rate of belief in evolution of any first-world country. Most American scientists think this is alternately scary and embarrassing. What bothers me most is simply that it is so shocking, because this disbelief is absolutely not a part of my day-to-day life. It suggests that “Evolutionists” and “Creationists” socialize in different places, shop in different stores, read different magazines and websites, watch different movies and TV shows. We don’t date or marry each other. We really aren’t a part of the same society at all, despite the fact that we live in the same country, share all the same resources, and are ruled by the same government. We are like de facto races, self-segregated because our ways of life are bizarre and, possibly, disgusting to each other.

Adapted from West and Gardner 2010, Altruism, spite, and greenbeards, Science 327:1341-1344

The “greenbeard” lets the players know who to help and who to hurt. Adapted from West and Gardner 2010, Altruism, spite, and greenbeards. Science 327:1341-1344

It’s easy to segregate yourself from hated rivals when you have a nice defining character. In evolutionary biology, we call that sort of thing a “greenbeard” for esoteric reasons. The general idea is that a recognizable “tell” that is invariably linked to a certain group of other, harder-to-detect traits can help similar individuals find each other in a crowd and give each other preferential treatment. Greenbeards are a principle trick for evolving social interactions and “altruism”.

So wearing a greenbeard helps cooperators keep the benefits of their cooperation for themselves by a) seeking each other out and b) excluding those beardless sonsofbitches who might want to take their stuff. I’m arguing here that, for the American fundamentalist Christian, disbelief in evolution acts as a greenbeard. It clearly and necessarily discourages admixture between Christians and everyone else.

The best greenbeards are cheap. An organism has to get more benefit from cooperation than it pays for its greenbeard to make growing the damn thing worthwhile.  Disbelief in evolution carries no benefit in itself. Indeed, it’s a “non-trait;” purely negatively defined. It isn’t a thing, it’s the absence of a thing. On the other hand, outside of professional science, it probably doesn’t carry much of an obvious cost, either: the ancient origins of mankind, and life in general, arguably don’t have much bearing on most people’s daily lives. The choice to believe or not believe in evolution, viewed in this manner, is therefore not a “living”, or important, choice. The 20th century American philosopher William James, in his essay “The Will to Believe”, wrote that a choice has to be “momentous” in order to be “living”, which is to say, for it to matter what choice one makes. By “momentous” he means that what is chosen must cause some significant effect on one’s life.

I think many people would accept this statement — that the phenomena putatively affected by evolution are distant and occupy a scale so vast as to exclude normal human experience. Given that, belief in evolution appears to be a nearly neutral trait, and in evolutionary terms it can be gained or lost at random in a population. Nearly-neutral traits are ripe targets for evolutionary innovation (for instance, neofunctionalization following gene duplication).  In this case, disbelief in evolution evolved into a greenbeard trait for Christians.

How did this happen? Let’s say we start with a population split between atheists, all of whom believe in evolution (having no competing beliefs about the origins of species), and Christians, who are mixed in their beliefs (see figure below, where Darwin-heads mean belief in evolution and halos indicate Creationists). Initially the belief trait is irrelevant, and amongst the Christians it expands and contracts by an apparently random process; however, at some point one group of Christians notices that they all disbelieve in evolution (possibly just by chance), and all of the non-Christians believe in it. Moreover, whereas Christians could in principle believe either in Creation or Evolution, atheists have no alternative belief: belief in creation is thus a permanent and specific barrier between the faithful and the profane. Displaying the greenbeard of disbelief in evolution unites Christians, helps them find each other, and separates them socially and genetically from non-Christians. Whereas the belief in evolution carries no cost or benefit in itself, the greenbeard provides a selective advantage for Christians, emphasizing the divide between them and the rest of the world, filling pews and making money. Perhaps more importantly, money and socialization help Christians have more sex with other Christians, thus making more Christians and simultaneously keeping filthy Evolutionist DNA out of the breeding pool.  Thus, disbelief spreads pseudo-genetically (by belief transmission from parents to children) and also “memetically” as Christian evolutionists see how successful disbelievers are and decide to change their belief status.

GreenBeardMeme

So there’s my case that disbelief in evolution is a greenbeard. I would also like to encourage you to think briefly about whether, in some cases, belief in evolution is a greenbeard. When scientists, and the scientifically literate, object to creationism, we do it because we understand the weight of evidence supporting evolution. I wonder, though, if perhaps there are pockets of people out there who believe in evolution not because they understand it, but because hated Christians don’t believe in it. A greenbeard for clueless college leftists, perhaps? Perhaps a similar dynamic holds for belief in climate change? If these “controversies” are in fact driven by fashionable greenbeards, it would present a bothersome problem for those of us who abhor the politicization of truth.

If disbelief in evolution doesn’t have anything to do with evolution, and everything to do with group identity, are scientists fighting the wrong enemy when they try to argue the scientific strengths of evolution against religious nay-sayers? I think they are, and will talk in my next post about how I think we should change our strategy in light of greenbeard-ism.

Why Don’t People Believe In Evolution? Part II: Pareto Optimization