Another F#@!ing Hobby Lobby Post

Posted by syntherzukal on July 6, 2014
Posted in: Evolution, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

My country is steadily turning into a third-world police state, and people are up in arms about a Supreme Court case that asked whether the government could force Hobby Lobby to pay for over-the-counter morning after pills for their employees. WTF, man? This might be the most inconsequential political issue to ever set Facebook ablaze.

I know nobody wants to hear about this crap any more, and I really don’t want to pile on, but I think there is at least one important point that nobody on either side of this exceedingly stupid debate has brought up. And by the time I’m done, you’ll see how it fits into my overall evolutionary Weltanschauung regarding human society.

The left and right sides of the Hobby Lobby debate unsurprisingly see the issues through the distorting lenses of their own ideologies:

1) Leftists think it’s all about health care. As they see it, birth control is an important component of women’s health care, and “emergency contraception” in the form of anti-implantation drugs like Plan B qualify as birth control. Therefore Hobby Lobby’s exclusion of these drugs is just a mean-spirited misogynistic attempt to save money on health care costs by discriminating against their female employees.

2) Rightists think it’s all about religion. Starting with the observations that i) leftists despise religion and ii) Hobby Lobby’s management strongly identifies the company as Christian owned and operated, right-wingers conclude that the ruling is about religious freedom.

Both positions are wrong. The leftist position is absurd: the opposition of Christians to abortion stretches back for decades, at least to Roe v. Wade, and Hobby Lobby has branded itself as a Christian business, so opposing pregnancy-ending treatments could easily be seen as an absolutely necessary business move on their part. Moreover, the notion that they’re refusing to cover cheap, over-the-counter, and (hopefully) rarely employed drugs to save money is just silly.

In contrast, the right’s position is simply myopic. Rightists are correct to believe that this case protects religious freedom – the court cited the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act – but more importantly it protects a broad interpretation of the political rights afforded American citizens by the First Amendment. And here we get to my major point: rather than being strictly about religion or health care, this case is about the rights of political dissidents.

Obviously, Christians don’t see pregnancy-ending drugs* as health care or birth control. They’re poisons, and their intentional use is murder. Now, whether or not you agree with that statement, you have to acknowledge that it’s a heartfelt belief that literally hundreds of millions of your fellow human beings hold. Given that, treating this like an economic debate isn’t just wrong, it’s viscious.

If we acknowledge that the debate is at least in part about whether or not the government can compel its citizens to commit murder, then this debate becomes one about “conscientious objector” status, and is more comparable to the rights of anti-war dissidents than a typical First Amendment case. The United States has long granted conscientious objector status to people with deeply held and pre-existing beliefs about the sacredness of life, exempting them from military service even during periods of total war.

Note that choosing to take this status has often been extremely unpopular. Nevertheless, our courts, in the spirit of liberty under which the United States was founded, have affirmed the rights of objectors and protected them from the anger of the mob as well as from the rapacious clutches of the war machine.

So-called pro-life beliefs are exactly the same as anti-war beliefs. In fact, the proportion of the population that holds such beliefs – roughly 50% – is much greater than the proportion of people with anti-war beliefs. Forcing someone to take an active part in something they consider murder is flat-out evil. Imagine force-feeding a vegan a bacon cheeseburger. (wait, that might be kind of fun…)

This isn’t strictly a religious issue, either: there are many secular pro-lifers out there, just as there are many secular antiwar conscientious objectors.

Some have suggested that Hobby Lobby does have a choice: they can close their doors rather than submit to the government mandate. This is similar to saying that a Hobby Lobby employee has a right to quit and go work somewhere else that doesn’t have a problem with Plan B. The difference is that a protesting Hobby Lobby can’t open a different business and escape the mandate; as long as they are in the US they will be forced to submit to the law. In effect, then, the government says to Hobby Lobby’s ownership “commit murder or starve”.

But let’s not get bogged down in specifics here. Let’s go beyond hot-button issues like abortion and unpopular groups like CEO “one-percenters”. Let’s think about normal people faced with moral decisions that are unpopular with their superiors. How about soldiers asked to fire on civilians? Or to bomb American citizens? How about government employees ordered to commit rape and torture? How about journalists compelled to reveal personal information about whistleblowers? How about reams and reams of boycotts and strikes and peaceful protests? The Hobby Lobby case obviously doesn’t cover any of these diverse situations – but it is consistent with a centuries-old tendency of Western courts to uphold the rights of citizens not to be compelled to commit heinous acts or to endure immoral treatment without recourse to protest.

I’ll conclude by giving this an evolutionary spin. When I think of the value of the First Amendment, I tend to think of a “marketplace of ideas”. Three hundred million unique worlds exist in the brains of Americans, and amongst them there are many different sorts of ideas. Most of them are boring and nearly identical; many or even most that deviate are wrong or even dangerous; but some of them are very good, perhaps even world-changing. When these ideas are communicated, they compete amongst themselves for the conquest of minds, particularly the minds of young people. Ideas that benefit those that hold them become more common, those that hurt regress and disappear. In this way, the Zeitgeist of the nation evolves and adapts to its ever-changing physical and social environment.

It is foolish to think that the current orthodoxy is the best available to us in the present, much less eternally best for all future generations, just as it is foolish to think that the genes that serve us well today will always be best for our descendants in the deep temporal downstream. The entire notion of “progressivism” is intrinsically foolish — there is no telos toward which nature is pushing us or any other species. Nor is it reasonable to think that we can predict which ideas will be best for the future, since our predictions are themselves prey to our prior ideas. For this reason, it is wise to be tolerant of as wide a variety of ideas as possible, and to be extraordinarily hesitant to punish dissident beliefs, either with violence or economic sanction (e.g., by forcing businesses to either acquiesce to the current orthodoxy or close). Nations that repress dissidents suffer for it, both in terms of brain drains and loss of novel ideas. If the United States wishes to stop its slide into the dustbin of history it must continue to embrace its traditional acceptance of the rights of political dissidents. The Supreme Court has generally understood this, and Hobby Lobby is a good example of a proper decision on their part.

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* I admit that when I first heard about this case I assumed that Plan B was just a brand name for RU486, the “actual abortion drug”. Having never fucked up so terribly as to contemplate the use of either, this is perhaps understandable. I know now that Plan B in fact works quite differently from RU486 – but nevertheless, the difference doesn’t seem to be sufficient that it’s unreasonable for a person to call it a pregnancy-ending drug.

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Politics and the Corruption of Science

Posted by syntherzukal on June 29, 2014
Posted in: Academia, Evolution, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

In my last post I talked about the hysterical response amongst academics to Nicholas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance. I argued that his thesis – that genetic differences between the races could explain much of their differential success – wasn’t trivially wrong. I also pointed out a number of common misconceptions people have about evolution that pertain to the question.

My point wasn’t really about race itself – but rather that many of the erroneous responses to Wade came from academic biologists, who frankly ought to know better. The three evolutionary misconceptions I mentioned are common knowledge to professional biologists, and so when you hear a biologist using those misconceptions to attack Wade or other “race realists” there are two possibilities as to what is going on:

  1. The biologist is able to selectively forget about scientific reality when it suits his/her politics, or
  2. The biologist is willfully misrepresenting the state of the science to bolster a political claim.

Neither of these possibilities is good! Let’s consider each of them in turn.

Let’s call scientists who are guilty of the first explanation Number Ones. I suspect Number Ones are more abundant than Number Twos, and if we have to assign to them a crime, I suppose we would call it hypocrisy. Why? Because Number Ones are committing exactly the same sin they despise in the science-rejecting segment of the non-academic American population.

I’ve touched on this phenomenon in an earlier blog that tried to parse why so many Americans don’t believe in evolution. Us academics are all so shocked – SHOCKED! – when people choose to ignore our mounds and mounds of irrefutable evidence that evolution is real. How dare they prefer their comfortable superstitions in the face of our HOLY DATA? And yet, Number Ones commit the same sin when faced with the possibility that the cherished precepts of Modern Western Liberality might not capiche with the data.

How much of a problem are Number Ones? Well, hypocrites aren’t dangerous, I guess. They’re not criminals, public menaces, or psychopaths. They’re just assholes. I don’t want to be accused of writing apologias for fundamentalist Flat-Earthers while simultaneously excoriating my colleagues who act the same way. No, all these people are guilty of good old-fashioned assholism and nothing else. The name-calling, the logical fallacies, the absolutely pig-headed refusal to hear one’s opponent’s arguments – Number Ones are like peas in a pod with the Creationists.

The most important image you will ever see, at least if you want me to not mock your viewpoints and/or punch you.

Of course, all that says is that Number Ones are human, and that scientists are vulnerable to the same pathologies of ego as everyone else. Those who master egoistic impulses and attain a level of dispassioned objectivity are to be deeply respected; but those who lag behind – well, what can you do?

In contrast, Number Twos, who intentionally misrepresent data, are much more problematic. The intentional misuse of data to obfuscate or outright lie is perhaps the greatest sin a scientist can commit. Our whole profession depends on the reliability of the literature and the pronouncements of our colleagues. Remember that every piece of new science builds on the work that came before! And if that pre-existing work was corrupted, then a cascade of error ensues that doesn’t end until the original lie is uncovered, and even then it’s not a sure thing:

“… the process of scrubbing the literature to remove the influence of a serial offender can be very lengthy. For example, a problem was noted in 2000 with the research output of the Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, whose data showed an abnormal absence of variability in the side effects of medication… More recent follow-up suggests that Fujii’s publications, which still had not been retracted at the time this database was assembled, may involve extensive fraud… Subsequent to when this database was assembled, the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia retracted 17 fraudulent papers by Fujii which had been published in that journal and indicated that a further 17 articles were ‘indeterminate’ for fraud… it is noteworthy that it has taken more than a decade for the investigation of Fujii’s work to proceed from suspicion to retraction.” (Steen, Casadevall, and Fang, 2013, PLoS ONE)

Am I being too dire in my condemnation of the Number Twos? No fucking way. First, corruption of the literature is already a serious problem even without the influence of politics. The academic world is a nightmare of competition and cutthroat scrabbling for scarce research dollars and tenure-track positions. It frankly requires constant vigilance and monk-like devotion to the Data Gods to keep people from constantly fudging results to shoehorn their latest research into high-profile “prestige journals” like Nature, Science, and Cell. Consider this:

“…on average, about 2% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once… and up to one-third admitted a variety of other questionable research practices including “dropping data points based on a gut feeling”, and “changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source”. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, fabrication, falsification and modification had been observed, on average, by over 14% of respondents, and other questionable practices by up to 72%.” (Fanelli 2009)

So let’s be clear: that astonishing rate is caused just by the desire to move ahead in one’s career. We’re not even talking politics here. So one might ask, is there any evidence that scientists falsify the literature for political purposes?

Funny you should ask. In fact, one of the most famous of all biologists did just that. One could be forgiven for describing Stephen Jay Gould as the Carl Sagan of the evolutionary biology world: a great communicator of the arcane. There can be no question that Gould’s hypotheses have stimulated minds to think about evolution in new and exciting ways, and to question established evolutionary paradigms, for decades. Probably the greatest accolade I’ve gotten in my short career was from a reviewer who compared my Black Queen Hypothesis to Gould’s classic Spandrels of San Marcos paper. And the fascinating argument between Gould and Simon Conway Morris over the lessons of the Burgess Shale fossils – which I first discovered taking Invertebrate Zoology from Joe Dirnberger at Kennesaw State University in North Georgia – might be the reason I drifted farther and farther from fish farming into the fever swamp of evolutionary theory.

But for all of Gould’s contributions, he flat-out fucking lied about race research. Because he was a true-blue lefty, and it just couldn’t be the case that genetics, and not the vile bourgeoisie, was responsible for the dominance of some human lineages over others. And in the process of lying, he falsely denigrated the work of another scientist, Samuel George Morton, who conveniently wasn’t alive to defend himself against charges of pernicious racism. Just to top everything off, Gould did this in a book, The Mismeasure of Man, which has sold bajillions of copies and is still read and enjoyed by happily ignorant leftists to this day. Without, I might add, the big fat “Retraction” stamp across the cover it so richly deserves.

The fact that I know Number Twos exist is a serious problem for me. I’m annoyed by hypocrisy, but political lying is an affront to everything I believe in. It pisses on science, on the principles of liberty at the heart of what I believe it means to be an American, on simple human decency and collegiality. My observation of the world of “race realism” is that it’s a robust, debate-filled community where people are open to data and alternative hypotheses – quite the opposite of what one would expect from a bunch of racists just trying to prop up their prejudices. Consider this well-researched article (critical of the “strong racial IQ” hypothesis) from Ron Unz in The American Conservative or Razib Khan’s gestalt examination of SNP data to determine if there are real biological differences between continent-scale races.

Maybe the critics of race realism, rather than being Number Twos themselves, simply assume their bête noires are Number Twos. But is this justified? As far as I can tell, neither the two examples above nor Wade are engaging in solipsistic intellectual demagoguery. These are honest attempts to make sense of data and to understand the extant world. Their critics should respond with the same measured, fact-driven demeanor. Unless you’ve got credible evidence that Steve Sailer has burned a cross in somebody’s yard, you should take him at his word that he’s basing his beliefs on solid data and deal with his arguments like you would any other scientist. And if leftist scientists can’t achieve this level of political objectivity, how the hell can I not worry about the provenance of articles like this that directly challenge my own work? Indeed, climate change research, with its hard-to-understand predictions so vital to current policy, depends deeply on the public’s ability to trust the veracity of scientists.

Number Twos are a pox on society. Any scientist willing to sacrifice the principles of the profession for political ends is, frankly, a monster. I have this romantic notion that scientists are supposed to be some sort of secular priesthood for the modern world – unimpeachable sources of knowledge, role models, curators of the legacy of the past and shepherds of a brighter future. It’s not hyperbole that I’ve used words like “sin” and “hypocrisy” in this post; I feel that my profession, particularly its academic wing, is looked to by an increasingly skeptical and atheistic human population for the sorts of answers for which they used to turn to the Church. Given that, being a Number Two is roughly the same as being a priest who rapes altar boys: not only is the Number Two betraying the trust of a few individuals, but he/she is hacking at the foundations of Science itself, raining the stones of the temple ceiling onto Past and Future alike. Every instance of scientific chicanery that drips down to the world of normal people hurts the credibility of the entire profession, to the detriment of the entire human species.

Lesson, then: don’t be a Number Two.

A Troublesome Commentariat: The Politicized Science of Race Candy

Posted by syntherzukal on June 5, 2014
Posted in: Evolution, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

It is well-known that some words carry such emotional significance that they prevent certain people from thinking rationally about sentences that contain them. Therefore, in deference to my more nervous readers, throughout this blog the word “race” will be replaced with the word “candy”. Hopefully this simple substitution will limit reflexive knee-jerking, potentially avoiding injuries that might hamper my gentle readers’ training for their next double marathon, bicycle tour, or backpacking outing. More importantly, perhaps it will allow the Good Guys to keep their cool long enough to think about what I say before clicking over to my “Send Hate Mail” page.

Nicholas Wade’s new book “A Troublesome Inheritance” has got the leftist blogosphere in high moral dudgeon. Full disclosure: I haven’t read this book. But I’ve read enough books on the topic, and the perfervid commentaries thereof, to understand what’s going on here.

The book is said to make two arguments. First, that the various candies of humanity are distinct, mostly inbreeding populations — or at least were for most of the last 60,000 years — and that they are therefore adapted to the environments in which they evolved. Second, that those environments were quite different, so that when you put all the candies together into a single environment, some hold up better than others, explaining at least some of the differential success enjoyed by the candies in the modern world. Wade seems to be describing modern cosmopolitan society as an immense “common garden” experiment — an experimental design often used by ecologists to estimate the fitness effects of variable traits found in different species, or in different populations of a single species.

These arguments instantly run afoul of leftist orthodoxy because they take for granted that candy exists. Of course, we can all see that candy exists; there are obvious differences between different candies, or else there would be no way we could talk about a particular candy and have anybody know what we were talking about; and it strikes one as highly unlikely that candies only differ in color, because our experience strongly suggests there are many other traits that covary along with color. Everybody understands that there are lots of characteristics that are shared by many different candies, and indeed it might be true that most of the characteristics of any candy are shared amongst all candies. But nevertheless, there are enough differences that one generally has no trouble telling a Skittle apart from a Milk Dud.

I’m not going to take a stand here on whether or not Wade’s hypotheses are actually right, but I do believe he isn’t trivially wrong, and I think the near-universal denunciation of Wade and other “race realists” as “scientific racists” is silly, obtuse, and anti-scientific. So let’s talk a little bit about some common misconceptions about evolution that even educated people — including biologists — often use when talking about candy and how candy isn’t real.

MISCONCEPTION 1: CANDY ISN’T REAL BECAUSE THE VARIATION WITHIN A CANDY TYPE IS AT LEAST AS LARGE AS THE VARIATION BETWEEN TYPES.

Try this thought experiment. Imagine if you will two boxes of chocolates. No two chocolates in any one box are the same, although each flavor exists in each box. Thus, there is a lot of within-box variability but essentially no between-box variability (see panel A below). Now imagine that all the chocolates in one box differ from the other box in exactly one respect: they contain a stabilizing ingredient that keeps them solid in really hot weather (indicated by black outlines in panel B). Still, the between-box variability is hugely less than within-box, but the one difference separating the boxes is a) shared by all the candies in any given box and b) critically important in certain environments. Despite the small difference between boxes, we expect that one box alone will be found in candy stores in, say, Ghana. It’s reasonable to expect that, as the candy company tries to increase sales, that a few “local flavor” adjustments might be made to the hot-weather candies, and a few different ones to the cool-weather candies. Even though the between-box variability is still lower than within-box, each box is now a recognizable product of its environment and clearly distinguishable from the other.

Here we calculate variation within a box as the number of types found in the box, and variation between boxes as the number of types found in one box but not in the other. In Panel A, the two boxes have lots of variability inside, but all the types in one are found in the other as well. In Panel B, we have the same amount of within-box variability, but the single trait of a heat-resistant chocolate coating (represented by black outlines in the right box) is found in ALL individuals in the right box, but none in the left box.

Here we calculate variation within a box as the number of types found in the box, and variation between boxes as the number of types found in one box but not in the other. In Panel A, the two boxes have lots of variability inside, but all the types in one are found in the other as well. In Panel B, we have the same amount of within-box variability, but the single trait of a heat-resistant chocolate coating (represented by black outlines in the right box) is found in ALL individuals in the right box, but none in the left box.

In terms of genetics, it’s good to remember that a single base pair substitution (aka a “SNP”) is sufficient to completely change a phenotype. In principle, one base pair out of 3.2 billion is sufficient to make a human being able to thrive in an environment, or conversely, vulnerable to an environment’s perils. It’s entirely possible that the differences Wade speaks about could be linked to gene variants that are common in one candy and rare in another, even though the vast majority of gene variants are found in all candies (probably because they predate the evolutionary separation of the candies). It’s possible that this isn’t so, but again, it’s not trivially inaccurate.

It’s also important to remember that humans have sex — a process that’s very good at mixing and matching genes and finding the best possible combination while preserving much of the “unselected” diversity.

MISCONCEPTION 2: THE CANDIES WEREN’T SEPARATED LONG ENOUGH FOR EVOLUTION TO PRODUCE SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES

Most people have this notion that evolution takes a super-long time to change an organism around. This is completely wrong, and I think dispelling this fallacy will go a long way to getting “normal people” to understand and accept evolution. Taking the most extreme example of candy evolution in humans, let’s think about the separation of the sub-Saharan African candy from all the rest of the world’s candies. According to the Out of Africa hypothesis, prior to the discovery of open-ocean seafaring techniques by European candies, the African candies were separated from all other candies for about 60,000 years. Making the very conservative estimate that average generation time in humans is about 30 years, that works out to 2,000 generations of separation. So we have to ask, how much evolution can happen in 2,000 generations?

Well, one way to think about it is mathematically. We can ask how long it will take a more-fit mutant to “sweep” its ancestor until the mutant is the only thing you’re likely to find if you look around.

How long? About 5 seconds, bub.

We can calculate the ratio (Rt) of mutants to ancestors after a given amount of time (t) if we know their initial ratio (Ri) and the fitness advantage of the mutant (s, basically how many more kids the mutant has than the ancestral variety):

Rt = Ri * exp(s*t)

Let’s assume that the population of Africa 60,000 years ago was about 1/5 the total world population of about 3,000,000 people, or 600,000 people. Since the mutant is initially a single individual, Ri = 1/600,000. Let’s further say that the mutant has “swept” the population when it is 99% of the total, so Rt is 99. We need to express time in generations, so t = 2,000, and we can calculate what fitness advantage would be necessary to sweep the population in that time frame:

s = ln(99*600,000)/2,000 = 0.009 per generation

So, any adaptation that allowed you to produce 0.9% more offspring than your neighbor on average could have swept through the population in that time frame. That’s not a very big advantage! Given the number of environmental changes human populations experienced during this period, in terms of climate (the frakking ice ages), diet (the “green revolution), and social interactions (the rise of civilization and language), it’s hard to believe that there weren’t thousands of available mutations of this size or greater available. It’s also not hard to believe that different suites of these mutations could have swept in different candies, either by random chance or because of different environmental challenges facing the different candies. Given that, it would be surpassingly odd if, in any given common garden, all candies would be exactly equally fit.

MISCONCEPTION 3: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CANDIES ARE “NURTURE” NOT “NATURE”

The old “nature vs. nurture” debate constantly rears its ugly head when you try to apply evolutionary theory to human society. The idea here is that candy is a social construction and differences exist because Skittle kids grow up in a different environment than Milk Dud kids. But with education and vitamins all that can go away! It’s just nurture, it’s not in the genes.

This debate approaches the level of a “zombie idea”. Differences in social behaviors certainly originate in genetic differences in other “eusocial” species, and it’s absurd to think the same couldn’t be true of humans. BUT EVEN IF A PARTICULAR BEHAVIOR ISN’T GENETICALLY HARD-WIRED, it doesn’t matter! All that matters for evolution to work on a behavior is that the behavior is heritable and that an individual is more likely to act like his/her parents than some other way. Moreover, even “freely willed” behaviors ultimately have an impact on the genetics because the social environment is, you know, an environment, and properly navigating it improves your fitness. Any trait that makes it easier for a social organism (like humans) to exist as part of their society is eligible for selection.

So even if all the differences in success between the candies were traceable to behaviors and not (directly) to genes, it still wouldn’t be obvious that genes weren’t involved, nor would it be clear that natural selection wasn’t responsible for differential success. Again, I’m not saying Wade is right — just arguing that he isn’t obviously wrong either.

So above are three reasons why the thesis presented by Wade is worth thinking about. These are all testable hypotheses, and they deserve to be tested rather than shouted down and scoffed at. They might very well be wrong, or at least partially wrong, but I think an impartial scientist would likely find that they are at least partially true. Indeed, some of these ideas seem so simple and obvious and genetically inevitable that it would be frankly amazing if they weren’t true. If all the candies of the world, despite near-complete genetic isolation for thousands of generations, were in fact at a basic level completely equivalent in all possible environments, I would consider this strong evidence for the special creation of the human race candy.

No, it seems much more likely that the genetics of candy plays at least some role in the differential success of the candies in different historical epochs and social environments. The proper attitude (imho) is to figure out how much of a role so as to figure out what outcomes we should expect in a world free of candy prejudice. Also, if there are candy differences that adapt candies to a particular kind of social and climatic environment, then attempting to force a “one-size fits all” approach to social organization and education on all the world’s candies is a) evil and b) doomed to failure. In other words, this is a momentous topic, and not one that leftists should dismiss out of hand as a greenbeard to show how pious they are to their leftist confreres.

Selfishly, though, I’m going to ignore how the dismissal of Wade’s hypothesis hurts candies other than my own. I’m more concerned with how the almost universal rejection of Wade — and Herrnstein and Murray before them, and so many others — makes my profession look to the “normal world”. To any “normal” human being, candy appears very real, and if one is at all educated in biology, then the protestations of academic leftists to the contrary seem weird and obtuse. Moreover, the fact that this not-obviously-wrong treatise by Wade is instantly and viciously condemned by almost every academic seems — well, unscientific. At best you have to admit that the jury is still out, and we don’t know enough about the diversity of human genomes yet, or what all that shit in your nuclei actually does, to close the book on Wade’s thesis. No, the degree of vitriol directed to Wade leaves one with the unpleasant feeling that there is no amount of evidence in the world that Wade could present that would convince my colleagues he was right. They accept the leftist dogma about candy as a revealed truth — uncritically, passionately, and violently — and no amount of suffering, wrong-turning, or data-spewing could ever change their minds.

Just like the Christers who don’t believe in evolution. And that’s why “normal people” don’t trust you, scientists, and frankly sometimes it makes me question your judgment as well.

Mother’s Day Musings About Academy “Biases”

Posted by syntherzukal on May 11, 2014
Posted in: Academia, Politics. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

The topic of race and gender bias has been experiencing a flare-up in scientific social media over the past week. For example, lots of folks have been talking about a panel discussion involving Neil Degrasse Tyson, where he was asked whether genetic differences between men and women might explain the relative under-representation of women in science. He responded with a more-or-less reasonable statement about his own experiences growing up as a black kid who wanted to be a scientist:

I’ve never been female, but I have been black my whole life. So let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective, because there are many similar social issues related to access to equal opportunity that we find in the black community as well as in the community of women, in a white male dominated society…When I look at, throughout my life – I’ve known that I wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old on a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium…I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. And all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance through the forces of nature, the forces of society. Any time I expressed this interest, teachers would say, “Don’t you want to be an athlete?” I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. So, fortunately, my depth of interest was so deep, and so fuel-enriched, that every one of these curveballs that I was thrown and fences that were built-in front of me and hills that I had to climb, I’d just reach for more fuel and I kept going. Now here I am, one, I think, of the most visible scientists in the land and I want to look behind me and say, “Where are the others who might have been this?” And they’re not there. And I wonder, what is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not simply because the forces of society had prevented at every turn? — helpfully transcribed by Dynamic Ecology

Tyson tells a story here I’ve heard before from black colleagues. Sure, there’s racist bullshit in the world but it’s mostly just annoying and insulting — just one of many manifestations of General Stochastic Assholism (a theory I’ll be working out in greater detail in forthcoming posts). Real racism of course has existed in the US, a product of our unusual history, but a combination of strong financial incentives and public disapprobation has eliminated almost all overt discrimination, especially in academia. So it’s not a question of overt racism keeping kids like Tyson out of science, but rather that people don’t expect black kids to want to be scientists, and subtly push them in other directions, and generally folks grow up never thinking that they could go into these “white guy” careers. Another twist on the idea I’ve heard from both women and minorities is that, because science is historically dominated by white guys (specifically upper-crust white guys from Europe and the American Northeast), it’s very uncomfortable for other types of people to socialize with the establishment, and therefore folks have a tendency to just avoid the whole institution.

I find this idea of subtle disincentives, caused not by intentional bias but rather by me just being me with no malice aforethought, much more compelling and concerning than your typical hysterical liberal conspiracy theories — you know, that evil fat white pigs are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to keep the black man down and turn women into docile breeders. No, the notion of subtle bias bothers me because it presents me with a moral decision without an obvious solution (I hate things like that). First, I certainly don’t want to drive away any qualified people who want to learn my trade, regardless of race or gender. But at the same time I’m not really interested in changing my personality or how I live my life to accommodate people from other walks of life. In other words, I enjoy doing “white guy stuff” like drinking craft beer and watching Babylon 5 reruns more than I care about benefiting society. I’m relatively inoffensive (or so I think) and feel like what I do outside of business hours isn’t fair game for my already over-intrusive profession.

So yeah, I feel like I probably ought to think about this “subtle bias” issue. But as I think seriously about the topic, it seems like “subtle bias” should apply to a lot more people than just the left-wing darling oppressed groups like non-Asian minorities and women. Hell, I feel like it applies to me, since being a Southern non-liberal I’m like a turd in the swimming pool when I socialize with my academic colleagues. I actually had a labmate explain to me once how my ancestors were able to stop being backward nitwits because of the invention of the air conditioner — talk about subtle fucking bias, and this was from a friend! I grew up in a world where my “people” were pretty much the only ethnicity it was still okay to mock in the public media. We were inbred, ignorant, over-Christianized, racist hicks. I wonder how many of my age cohort never considered careers like mine because of that? Perhaps, then, if we’re thinking about subtle, inadvertent bias keeping people out of science, we should think about other groups than just racial minorities and women — rural people? Ex cons? Combat veterans? Smokers? People with kids? Republicans? How many unsung Darwins exist in these less sexy populations, for whom no outreach effort is expended?

Ask yourself, gentle Academic, whether at any point in reading the last paragraph some part of your brain came up with a reason why my feelings as a Southern white man are irrelevant, or perhaps why I even deserve to be made uncomfortable, perhaps because of atavistic guilt for the imagined sins of my stereotyped ancestors…

Another thing that bothers me is that Tyson basically described a self-selection process rather than an externally sourced discriminatory process. People are convinced they can’t succeed in a field, and so they don’t try. But everyone is exposed to nay-sayers of one sort or another — again, General Stochastic Assholism in action — but why do some people ignore the haters and become successful?

Well, when I get bad reviews, rejection letters, or deal with listening to an in-lab conversation about how stupid Southerners are, my family usually pats me on the back and encourages me to keep going (ed. note: is this a classic example of Enabling?). Indeed, when I talk to folks from other walks of life who have made it in science, I often hear about how influential their close family was. Here’s a quote from a recent conversation I had with Vernon McIntosh, a biotechnologist with whom I went to grad school:

I actually remember the exact moment that it first occurred to me that I could consider a path into a “white” career. Ebony Magazine did an article on this hot new neurosurgeon named Ben Carson. My dad actually found this guy’s e-mail address (which was quite a feat back in 1990). Dr. Carson was so excited to be a mentor that he wrote me letters, sent copies of his book etc. So for me, it took a world-famous neurosurgeon to give me a clue that science was a thing that black people could do successfully.

So two observations here: first, familial support was important, and second, a prominent black role model willing to interact was important. Might I humbly suggest that we should focus on these two factors to increase minority (and female) participation in science? And might I suggest that there are systemic flaws in the business of science that hurt both of these factors?

Specifically, academia insists on absolutely deracinating people before accepting them. We move people around from city to city, sometimes from country to country, for a decade or more before finally letting them settle down. How many of us even have real friends — not just colleagues — any more? I have one — ONE! — person I’m not related to that I see on a daily basis and can talk to about things other than work. And even that will disappear if I’m fortunate enough to get a faculty position, assuredly hundreds of miles from here, which is hundreds of miles from where I went to grad school, which is hundreds of miles from where I grew up… Can there be a more family-hostile environment? I was fortunate enough to find an awesome wife and have kids before settling into this masochistic lifestyle. But if I hadn’t?

You want more women in science? Find a few mothers who made it to the top echelons and focus on their families instead of just their work. Hell, give fellowships that come with day care or are restricted to moms (or even dads). You want more black people? Focus on letting people find work near where they grew up — like Neil Degrasse Tyson — so they can continue to be role models for their communities. Take the stigma away from hiring in-house, for gods’ sakes! But if that’s impossible, then you just have to accept the fact that rational people who want to live happy lives are very likely to shun academic science like the plague.

Again, from Tyson’s interview: “So before we start talking about genetic differences, you’ve got to come up with a system where there’s equal opportunity.” Well, Dr. Tyson, before you can convince me there isn’t equal opportunity, you’ll have to convince me that a sensible person should choose a career in science. If you want broader participation in science, focus on making the scientific life less crazy and more amenable to people who want to live like “normal people” within the social milieu that produced them. More moms and dads, more kids, more home towns, more backyard gardens, more friends who aren’t scientists, less moving, less bitching, less ridiculous political infighting, less stress and pressure. Please?

Lone Wolfe: As Good As It Gets

Posted by syntherzukal on April 26, 2014
Posted in: Music Reviews. Tagged: , , , . 1 Comment
IMG_0635

Chelsea Wolfe
Lone

Origin: Los Angeles, California
Label: Sargent House
Genre: Art Folk Drone Metal
Brutality: 4
Atmosphere: 10
Calliopicity: 10
Packaging: 9

I’ll just start by saying I am a total fanboy for Chelsea Wolfe, so you should take everything I say here with a grain of salt. I don’t often go so solidly off the deep end for a musician — the last one was Summoning, and Chelsea, if you ever read this, PLEASE contribute vocals to a Summoning track the way you did for Russian Circles:

But, seriously, I’m totally obsessed with Wolfe. I originally discovered her because I heard through the grapevine about a folk singer who had covered a Burzum track:

And sure enough, it’s not just some weird anomaly. She’s clearly a metal fan: she describes her music as “art folk drone metal” and here’s a just phenomenal live-ish video of her pounding an electric guitar while wearing a cvlt-as-fvck spiked gauntlet:

But Wolfe’s music can’t be pigeon-holed very easily. It’s obviously not metal — at least as the genre is usually imagined. But if one were to distill down the elements that make “people like me” love metal, one would find many of the remaining elements strongly represented in Wolfe’s songs. The best black metal vocals sound like dissonant howls barely penetrating from Dantean Bolgias, and Wolfe has that in spades: weird, sometimes dissonant layered vocals swallowed in deep reverb. The music itself often is a hypnotic drone, beating away at a simple chord progression over and over as various barely-heard harmonies drift in and out (are they even there?) producing a spectral ambience that perfectly accentuates Wolfe’s weird vocal style. Everything lofts up into epic heights: tempo changes, jangling key shifts, and goose-bump rending crescendos. I’d say you should imagine Filosofem era Burzum unplugged, with Siouxsie Sioux on vocals — but that’s selling Wolfe short. Frankly, I’ve never heard anything that sounds like — or makes me feel like — what she does.

2013’s Pain is Beauty was a great album. But Wolfe doubled down with a collaboration with filmmaker Mark Pellington, and released the mid-length film Lone in April 2014. Pellington has a decent pedigree: videos for U2 and Alice in Chains, an episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets (maybe the best cop drama of the pre-cable era), and a few films including the creepy “true story” The Mothman Prophecies. Lone isn’t just a long-form music video: though it features five tracks off Pain is Beauty (“Feral Love”, “House of Metal”, “The Waves Have Come”, “Sick”, and unsurprisingly, “Lone”), there’s plenty more, and it’s not just four stitched-together videos. The whole thing hangs together as a solid film that would be worth watching even if you weren’t hopelessly in awe of Chelsea Wolfe.

Before I say anything about the film itself, I want to talk about the packaging of this release. Lone was shipped as a ~ 2.5 GB file on a cool wood-grained flash drive that was etched with Wolfe’s “Queen of Swords” symbol (see photo above). I love this! It’s unique, it’s pretty, it’s something I can hold on to, show my friends, etc. Two reasons it doesn’t get a “10” for packaging, though. First, the flash drive is really small, and I’m not sure where I’m going to put it for long-term storage. Second, there’s extra space on the drive, and it would have been really swell to put some extra files on — lyrics, for instance, or production notes, voice-overs, etc. Flash-drive marketing has been picking up steam over the past decade or so — a friend of mine went to a Pixies gig and actually bought a flash-drive recording of that night’s show at the merch table — and I hope it continues to improve and gain traction in the indie music world (including underground metal).

Musically, Lone is five songs separated by instrumental montages. The instrumental bits take two forms. The first, which covers the first few minutes of the film and eventually melds into vocal music with track 4 (“Sick”), is made of relentless electronic arpeggios reminiscent of Philip Glass. The second, which doesn’t show up until about halfway into the film, is a much more organic sequence of violins/strings. This juxtaposition of synthetic and natural is recapitulated in the film’s imagery, in particular how Wolfe herself is portrayed. When we first see her, Chelsea is a black-eyed mask (see the chorus of “Feral Love”, the first track in the film, “your eyes are black like an animal”), covered in pale pancake makeup — the “black Chelsea”:

Later we see her illuminated with sunlight and back-lit with white fog, in a silver dress, her stunning blue eyes obviously the director’s focal point — the “white Chelsea”. And in between these ideals, we see a “real Chelsea” — little if any makeup, tattoos, freckles — confronting death, both of others and her own. Throughout the film we see these tropes beaten against each other, the ominous black figure leading the dead off into the desert, the innocent white figure staring with imploring beauty into the camera. But perhaps most importantly, the “real” woman faces fear and death and wonder, embodying both the white and black ideals in a single living entity.

Wolfe is engaging in mythmaking with this work. We see gods: a rabbit-headed creature with no hands; twin girls, one dead, one alive; a wolf(e?) headed boy; a young girl with a grown woman mask; a dead woman on a slab; an old man with blood on his hands; lustful women orally pleasuring an inverted cross; an executioner, hard and gristled, wielding a ramshead club above a sacrificial virgin in white. And we have the intuition that all these entities are the same — all outgrowths of the thing that made Wolfe’s music.

Maybe the image that sticks with me the most, though, is that of a horse — a statue, frozen in mid-gallop, sitting alone on the beach. I think a lot of people my age remember the Black Stallion, where a horse running wild in the ocean foam was a powerful portrayal of freedom. So a frozen horse on the beach? It hurts, man, it hurts. And flip it around with an image of a corpse laying on a slab? Potent stuff.

Obviously, I could go on and on about the symbolism and what not. But you should just buy a copy and see for yourself! The take-home message from this blog should be this: Chelsea Wolfe is a serious fucking artist. Her music is capable of inducing the same sorts of overboard emotions as the best metal, but fusing it with compatible weird film and without the hassle of miking a double-bass drum kit… it’s almost unfair.

The third track in Lone, “The Waves Have Come”, closes with a sing-along extravaganza (complete with atom bomb images) with some great lyrics I’d like to share here at the end. For those of us who embrace both science and wonder, and suspect that Christianity kills both:

Creation was the only word
that made you feel you never were
an endless hope is all it was
and holding sacred all were
and don’t forsake the way we were
and don’t tell me you never would
and we don’t need physical things
to make us feel and make us dream

And for us bloody-minded Heathens who proudly embrace the end of the world and the absurdity of free will:

When earth cracks open and swallows then
we’ll never be tired again
and we’ll be given everything
the moment we realize we’re not in control
and all you know gets older when
the sun goes down and everything
begins to fade away the waves
have come and taken you to sea

End of blog: if you’re a metal fan and you’re not listening to Chelsea Wolfe, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

Wild Speculation About Goose Bumps and “God Genes”

Posted by syntherzukal 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 syntherzukal 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…