"Nonmaterialist Neuroscience": The New Creationism?

Neuroscience and the soul, via Andrew Sullivan:

A new challenge to the science-religion relationship is currently at hand. We hope that, with careful consideration by scientists and theologians, it will not become the latest front in what some have called the “culture war” between science and religion. The challenge comes from neuroscience and concerns our understanding of human nature.

Most religions endorse the idea of a soul (or spirit) that is distinct from the physical body. Yet as neuroscience advances, it increasingly seems that all aspects of a person can be explained by the functioning of a material system...as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms underlying personality, love, morality, and spirituality, the idea of a ghost in the machine becomes strained.

Brain imaging indicates that all of these traits have physical correlates in brain function. Furthermore, pharmacologic influences on these traits, as well as the effects of localized stimulation or damage, demonstrate that the brain processes in question are not mere correlates but are the physical bases of these central aspects of our personhood. If these aspects of the person are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all?

By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions. Predictably, then, some theologians and even neuroscientists are resisting the implications of modern cognitive and affective neuroscience. “Nonmaterialist neuroscience” has joined “intelligent design” as an alternative interpretation of scientific data.

I predict religions will react in the familiar pattern: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Denial: Those stupid atheist scientists don't know what they're talking about. Did you hear about that one fMRI machine that was configured improperly?! And just a little while ago, scientists were arguing that the mind was located in the heart! Man, scientists are so dumb.

Anger: THESE SCIENTISTS HATE GOD AND HATE AMERICA! THEY'RE TRYING TO RUIN EVERYTHING GOOD ABOUT BEING HUMAN.

Bargaining: Okay, maybe there's something to this whole neuroscience thing. But it can't measure everything, and we can still squeeze a non-material soul into the gaps!

Depression: Sigh. Looks like neuroscience was right. I guess life is meaningless and without purpose.

Acceptance: Of course there's no nonmaterial soul. "Soul" is just metaphorical. Everybody knows that. Praise Jesus!

Fundamentalists will of course stay in the denial and anger zones for a long time, apologists in the bargaining, XGH in the depression, and liberal theologians will enter acceptance a generation or two before the rest.

Atheists, of course, are ahead of the game. The typical atheistic response is "Duh!"

What Do Scientists Think About Global Warming?

In my previous post, I mocked the common tactic of listing as many scientists as one can find opposing a scientific consensus. They do it frequently for scientists who disbelieve in man-made global warming, but also for creationism and other subjects.

Here's a list of 2,648 people whose "doubts about AIDS are publicly known," for example. It includes scientists, doctors, nutritionists, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, and for some reason a large number of mathematicians and physicists.

By contrast, the Republicans in the Senate only came up with 650 scientists who don't believe in man-made global warming. (Here is the document (.pdf) linked to in a comment on my previous post by Ezzie with the claim that "science disagrees.")

As I pointed out in my last post, listing the number of scientists who hold position A tells us nothing useful without also listing the number of scientists who hold position not-A. (It would of course disprove the argument that NO scientists believe in A, but nobody actually makes that claim. It's a straw man argument.)

So, because I'd like to know what's likely true rather than propagandize for a point, I thought I'd look into just how many scientists really don't believe in man-made global warming as compared to the number that do.

Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (.pdf) is the most recent answer to that question that I could find. (I found it in the very well-sourced wikipedia article Scientific opinion on climate change.) Published just last month in Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, the paper details the results of a poll of 10,257 Earth scientists (with 3,146 respondants.)

The questions:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

The answers:

Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered “risen” to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2. In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions (Figure 1). In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.

They then compare these numbers to the beliefs of the general public.



Okay. So the public is divided, but the 82% of scientists and 97.4% of scientists specializing in the subject come out on the same side. Yes, it's a web survey, and yes, "is a significant contributing factor" is probably too vague. But all of the other surveys (there are several more referred to on that wikipedia page, for example) come to similar numbers.

Here's just one more:

In 2007, Harris Interactive surveyed 489 randomly selected members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University. The survey found 97% agreed that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years; 84% say they personally believe human-induced warming is occurring, and 74% agree that “currently available scientific evidence” substantiates its occurrence. Only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming; the rest are unsure; and 84% believe global climate change poses a moderate to very great danger.^[75][76]

I think it's safe to say the large majority of scientists believe in man-made global warming. Could they be wrong? Of course, anything's possible. But what could be the basis for assuming that they are wrong, let alone the extreme confidence with which many on the right make that claim? I submit it's pure wishful thinking combined with a reflexive rejection of anything the "other side" believes. Al Gore devotes his post-VP life to "spreading the gospel," ergo the gospel must be false. And did you hear about his mansion?

These scientists are aware of Martian warming, and of sunspot activity, and of all the thousand other little straws the deniers have grasped at. They are professionals in the field, and they've heard it all. But they still believe. To assume that you, a layperson, can better interpret the evidence than the majority of scientists is pure hubris. This isn't the kind of thing where everybody's opinion is equally valid. It's the kind of thing where some people are experts and most others are just talking out of their asses.

Presumably none of you deny the HIV-AIDS link, and even most of my religious readers have accepted that evolution is true, so why cling to this position? What good reason do you have? How can you be so sure?

And please, please stop with the "X number of scientists believe this!" garbage.

How Republicans Lie About Climate Change

The majority of climate scientists all over the world believe that climate change is happening, that carbon emissions are a big part of it, and that it's a big deal. Republicans? Not so much.

Here's George Will, the Republicans' version of an intellectual, in the "liberal" Washington Post:

According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Ok, good. That's a simple, factual claim. Quite easy to check. The Washington Post's fact-checkers don't need to measure global sea ice levels -- they just need to check that the Arctic Climate Research Center says what Will says they say. And because everybody knows the Washington Post is liberal (that's sarcasm, folks) they obviously would have rushed to prove him wrong.

They don't. The ACRC:

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

Okay, so that's just a straight-up lie. No problem, it's easy to debunk lies. But disingenuous implications are harder. Will again:

[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.

He cites his source again. Good! We can check.

Oops. The WMO:

The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century. [...] "For detecting climate change you should not look at any particular year, but instead examine the trends over a sufficiently long period of time. The current trend of temperature globally is very much indicative of warming," World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General, Mr Michel Jarraud said in response to media inquiries on current temperature "anomalies".

Yes, George, if you choose the hottest year in recent memory as your baseline, most years since then will be cooler. That doesn't mean warming stopped. The decade beginning with the year you chose as your baseline has been the warmest on record.

It's hilarious listening to Republicans on climate change. When they're not outright lying, it's just total amateur hour. They'll start talking about sunspots and Martian temperatures and how that one measuring station is totally right next to a heating vent. But they don't know what they're talking about. They're just like creationists who go on and on about this fossil or that footprint and how obviously the eye is too complex to have evolved.

(It's always "obvious," too. It's not just that the majority of scientists are wrong, it's that they're OBVIOUSLY wrong. Most of the smartest and most expert people on Earth are wrong, but Joe the Plumber's got the truth. Right.)

Now there are of course some scientists who don't believe in climate change just as there are some who don't believe in evolution. It's just that they're vastly outnumbered. (Yes, Einstein was outnumbered at first. Science isn't a democracy, and sometimes the minority is right. But when they're right they can generally prove it, and win over the majority. That's what makes it science rather than, say, religion.)

Republicans love to list all the scientists they can find who don't believe in global warming. Now an honest person would then compare that number to the list of all the scientists they could find that do believe in global warming. But they don't do that. They're not interested in honesty. Their arguments are one-sided.

Project Steve is a great parody of that tactic as used by creationists. You may have seen the lists of scientists who don't believe in evolution, numbering in the hundreds. Here's one (.pdf) from The Discovery Institute. (See kids, even scientists don't believe in evolution!) Project Steve decided that they would create a list just of scientists named Steve (or variants thereof) to highlight the ridiculousness of that technique. A couple of days ago they reached a thousand. There are more scientists named Steve who believe in evolution than scientists with all names who don't. Ouch. I'm sure the folks at The Discovery Institute will change their minds based on this new evidence.

Finally, George Will again trots out the lie that the scientific community believed in global cooling just a few decades ago. Ezra Klein puts it best:

There needs to be some sort of Godwin's Law variant for conservatives who try to argue against global warming because they remember that Newsweek dipped into pop-science in the mid-70s and touted "global cooling." Call it Will's Law, after George Will, the supposedly cerebral conservative who brings this up every time he doesn't have a better column idea.

For a good summary on the global cooling myth -- an idea that took root in the popular press but never in the scientific literature -- go sit in on the free lecture provided by the folks at Real Climate. Will makes a lot of the 1975 Newsweek cover on the subject, but the more telling document is a National Academy of Sciences report from the same year. The report argued that climate change is the product of many potential forces and the state of the science wasn't yet advanced enough to discern which would prove decisive. To put it in the NAS's own words, "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate." As such, they recommended "a major new program of research designed to increase our understanding of climatic change and to lay the foundation for its prediction."

Religulous: A Review

Religulous was funny and entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying. Like Borat by the same director, most of the humor comes at the expense of the unsuspecting, the unprepared, and the ill-equipped. Maher debates with some people so out of their league that I just felt sorry for them. Rather than being an argument against religion, the movie too often feels like an argument against basic stupidity.

I liked the film better when he chose worthy targets like the Vatican astronomer, who spoke more eloquently against creationism and Biblical literalism than Maher does, and a Catholic priest who as far as I could tell holds approximately the same religious beliefs as I do. His conversation with scientist Francis Collins was far too short and Collins didn't get a fair shake. I would have loved to see a movie that just focused on those people.

Some of the unintelligent people he interviewed did not gain my sympathy, as they are in positions of power and deserve to be exposed. Democratic Senator Mark Pryor of Alabama comes off especially badly, and there are a couple of pastors (and one man who claims to be the Second Coming of Jesus) who seem like they're in it just for the money and prestige.

Maher makes no pretense at being fair or balanced. He selectively edits, adds subtitles, and stitches in funny shots from other movies for maximum effect. His primary tool is ridicule, and while that may be the only reasonable response to something like the tenets of Scientology or the talking snake from Eden, it's a tool he goes to a little too often. The documentary is at its best when he lets the craziness speak for itself, like his tour of the Institute for Science and Halacha in Israel, which creates gadgets to exploit loopholes in the laws of Shabbos.

The section on Islam in this film is not funny or novel. Instead of mocking the ridiculous beliefs as he did with other religions, he focuses on the violence and hatred, which everybody is already aware of. There was only one part of the Islam section that worked -- a conversation with an intelligent and moderate Muslim woman who had some trouble defending the hateful and violence-inciting verses of the Koran. This was the only part of the movie where I thought Maher successfully took down a religious moderate.

The end of the movie is basically a juxtoposition of believers wishing for the end times and a montage of truck bombs and nuclear explosions. I found it unsatisfying and too simplistic, although there is obviously a large grain of truth there.

It is something of a thrill to see an anti-religious movie on the big screen, and to be with an audience that was mostly approving. Only once before, at a Richard Dawkins event, have I been in a room with so many open non-believers. It's a cool feeling.

Repost: This is Your Brain on God

Holy Hyrax's recent post made me dig up this old post:

It seems that I'm doing a good portion of my blogging these days in the comments section of other people's blogs. In particular, I've been having some interesting discussions with Mark at Pseudo-Polymath.

This morning, I wrote a comment I'd like to post here as an entry.

Mark posted about an experience Catholic writer Richard John Neuhaus had:

It was a couple of days after leaving intensive care, and it was night. I could hear patients in adjoining room moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two "presences." I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there, and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the presences — one or both of them, I do not know — spoke. This I hear clearly. Not in an ordinary way for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: "Everything is ready now."

Mark correctly points out that many people throughout history have described similar experiences. He then goes on to imply, however, that such experiences provide evidence for religion:

But, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the other world religions all depend crucially on revelation as part of their history as well as their perception who is God and what does He want with Man.

Mark believes that skeptics think "no experience of Theophany is valid. That every one of the millions of experiences of this sort are all fraud or insanity (temporary or less so.)" Since Neuhaus's account appears to be neither fraudulent or evidence of insanity, therefore, it must reflect a legitimate revelation experience. Therefore, there is some evidence for the supernatural.

In my response, I point out that there are other options besides insanity and fraud, and in fact there are more convincing explanations for such experiences than supernatural entities:

I don’t think you quite understand my position on what you call "revelation." I believe, as do you, that such experiences as Neuhaus’s happen. I further believe, as do you, that they happen to people who are sane.

I disagree on the cause of such phenomena. The Wired Article This Is Your Brain on God describes an experiment in which researchers direct electromagnetic fields towards the temporal lobes in certain patterns and generate what you would call a revelation experience:

I’m taking part in a vanguard experiment on the physical sources of spiritual consciousness, the current work-in-progress of Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at Canada’s Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is that the sensation described as “having a religious experience” is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain’s feverish activities. Simplified considerably, the idea goes like so: When the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a “sensed presence.”

Persinger has tickled the temporal lobes of more than 900 people before me and has concluded, among other things, that different subjects label this ghostly perception with the names that their cultures have trained them to use - Elijah, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit. Some subjects have emerged with Freudian interpretations - describing the presence as one’s grandfather, for instance - while others, agnostics with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story.

It may seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to reduce God to a few ornery synapses, but modern neuroscience isn’t shy about defining our most sacred notions - love, joy, altruism, pity - as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums. Persinger goes one step further. His work practically constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of the Otherworldly: He believes cerebral fritzing is responsible for almost anything one might describe as paranormal - aliens, heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations, near-death experiences, awareness of the soul, you name it.

We’ve known for millenia that our minds are tricky things. There are scores of drugs which affect our perceptions and beliefs. If you drop some acid and see your chair talking to you, would you consider it revelation?

Furthermore, the various testimonies of people who’ve undergone such “revelations” contradict each other. Some see Mohammed — you, as a Christian, wouldn’t believe that to be a legitimate revelation experience, right? The most you could say is that there is some truth to the experience, but the person is interpreting it according to his or her own worldview.

Well, why not take it one step farther and say that everybody who undergoes such an experience is interpreting it according to his or her own worldview? Neuhaus experienced two presences and heard a sentence. He added the interpretation of who the presences were and what the sentence meant.

Surely Neuhaus was on medication and was in an unusual medical condition as well. The whole thing could have been an unusually lucid dream. For all I know, the two figures could have been a real doctor and a nurse saying that everything was ready for a procedure.

Once, when my middle-aged, normally sane father was in the hospital, he woke up from a nap convinced that he had to rush to the nearby university during the Final Four game because he was on their basketball team and they needed him desperately. Another time, free from sickness or medication, my father had a strong premonition that he was going to win the lottery. Normally a skeptical person who had never bought a lottery ticket in his life, he rushed out to buy one. He didn’t win.

I ended my comment there, but I'd like to post a few more excerpts from the article, which you should read in full:

Technically speaking, what's about to happen is simple. Using his fixed wavelength patterns of electromagnetic fields, Persinger aims to inspire a feeling of a sensed presence - he claims he can also zap you with euphoria, anxiety, fear, even sexual stirring. Each of these electromagnetic patterns is represented by columns of numbers - thousands of them, ranging from 0 to 255 - that denote the increments of output for the computer generating the EM bursts.

Some of the bursts - which Persinger more precisely calls "a series of complex repetitive patterns whose frequency is modified variably over time" - have generated their intended effects with great regularity, the way aspirin causes pain relief. Persinger has started naming them and is creating a sort of EM pharmacological dictionary. The pattern that stimulates a sensed presence is called the Thomas Pulse, named for Persinger's colleague Alex Thomas, who developed it. There's another one called Burst X, which reproduces what Persinger describes as a sensation of "relaxation and pleasantness."

Here's the author's description of his own experience:

When the door closes and I feel nothing but the weight of the helmet on my head and the Ping-Pong balls on my eyes, I start giving serious thought to what it might be like to "see" God, artificially produced or not. Nietzsche's last sane moment occurred when he saw a carter beating a horse. He beat the carter, hugged the horse while sobbing uncontrollably, and was then carried away. I can imagine that. I see myself having a powerful vision of Jesus, and coming out of the booth wet with tears of humility, wailing for mercy from my personal savior.

Instead, after I adjust to the darkness and the cosmic susurrus of absolute silence, I drift almost at once into a warm bath of oblivion. Something is definitely happening. During the 35-minute experiment, I feel a distinct sense of being withdrawn from the envelope of my body and set adrift in an infinite existential emptiness, a deep sensation of waking slumber. The machines outside the chamber report an uninterrupted alertness on my part. (If the researchers see the easily recognized EEG pattern of sleep, they wake you over the speakers.) Occasionally, I surface to an alpha state where I sort of know where I am, but not quite. This feeling is cool - like being reinserted into my body. Then there's a separation again, of body and soul, and - almost by my will - I happily allow myself to drift back to the surprisingly bearable lightness of oblivion.

In this floating state, several ancient childhood memories are jarred loose. Suddenly, I am sitting with Scott Allen on the rug in his Colonial Street house in Charleston, South Carolina, circa 1965, singing along to "Moon River" and clearly hearing, for the first time since then, Scott's infectiously frenzied laughter. I reexperience the time I spent the night with Doug Appleby and the discomfort I felt at being in a house that was so punctiliously clean. (Doug's dad was a doctor.) I also remember seeing Joanna Jacobs' small and perfect breasts, unholstered beneath the linen gauze of her hippie blouse, circa 1971.

Joanna was my girlfriend when I was 14. When I was sent off to boarding school, she and I recorded cassette tapes to one another. As a teenager, Joanna was a spiritual woman and talked a lot about transcendental meditation. Off at boarding school, I signed up and got my mantra from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, right around the time Joanna dropped me to move on to a tougher crowd.

If I had to pin down when I felt this dreamy state before - of being in the presence of something divine - it would be back then, in the euphoric, romantic hope that animated my adolescent efforts at meditation. That soothing feeling of near-sleep has always been associ-ated with what I imagined should have happened between Joanna Jacobs and me. Like the boy in James Joyce's The Dead, Joanna was a perfect memory - all the potential of womanly love distilled into the calming mantra-guided drone of fecund rest.

I'm not sure what it says about me that the neural sensation designed to prompt visions of God set loose my ancient feelings about girls. But then, I'm not the first person to conflate God with late-night thoughts of getting laid - read more about it in Saint Augustine, Saint John of the Cross, or Deepak Chopra.

So: Something took place. Still, when the helmet comes off and they shove a questionnaire in my hand, I feel like a failure. One question: Did the red bulb on the wall grow larger or smaller? There was a red bulb on the wall? I hadn't noticed. Many other questions suggest that there were other experiences I should have had, but to be honest, I didn't.

In fact, as transcendental experiences go, on a scale of 1 to 10, Persinger's helmet falls somewhere around, oh, 4. Even though I did have a fairly convincing out-of-body experience, I'm disappointed relative to the great expectations and anxieties I had going in.

It may be that all the preliminary talk about visions just set my rational left hemisphere into highly skeptical overdrive. Setting me up like that - you will experience the presence of God - might have been a mistake. When I bring this up later with Persinger, he tells me that the machine's effects differ among people, depending on their "lability" - Persinger jargon meaning sensitivity or vulnerability.

"Also, you were in a comfortable laboratory," he points out. "You knew nothing could happen to you. What if the same intense experience occurred at 3 in the morning in a bedroom all by yourself? Or you suddenly stalled on an abandoned road at night when you saw a peculiar light and then had that experience? What label would you have placed on it then?"

Point taken. I'd probably be calling Art Bell once a week, alerting the world to the alien invasion.

Religion, Health, and Happiness: What Causes What?

I've posted before about the correlation between religious belief and/or attendance with longevity, fewer depressive symptoms, and low blood pressure. At the time, I assumed that religion caused those benefits, and asked, What's an Atheist to Do?

Turns out, I may have jumped the gun on causation. Via Abandoning Eden, a new experiment shows that

the presence of a receptor that regulates general serotonin activity in the brain correlates with people's capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively. Scientists have long suspected that serotonin influences spirituality because drugs known to alter serotonin such as LSD also induce mystical experiences. But now they have proof from brain scans linking the capacity for spirituality with a major biological element.

The concentration of serotonin receptors normally varies markedly among individuals. Those whose brain scans showed the most receptor activity proved on personality tests to have the strongest proclivity to spiritual acceptance.

I take from this that there's a good chance that a common underlying factor may cause both increased religiosity and increased health and happiness.

What does this mean for atheists? Well, for one, it means that even if we "found" religion, it might not bring with it the health and happiness benefits.

Second, ironically, it's just more confirmation that we're probably right about the whole God thing. Read the quote again. "The presence of a receptor... correlates with people's capacity for transcendence, the ability to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively." That's kind of a polite way to say that the presence of that receptor correlates with people's capacity to see things that aren't there.

That confirms previous research, summed up by psychologist Martin Seligman:

[T]here is clear evidence that nondepressed people distort reality in a self-serving direction and depressed people tend to see reality accurately.

Maybe religion is just a side-effect of a "reality distortion gene," which evolved to increase happiness and health, even at the expense of clear seeing.

Flatfish Update -- Transitional Fossils Found!

A few years ago (!) I wrote a post called The Bat, the Bird, and the Flatfish about how those animals are better explained by evolution than by intelligent design.

To me, it's obvious that this flatfish evolved from an earlier fish with eyes on opposite sides of its head. Many of my readers, of course, were unconvinced, saying that it makes perfect sense for God to have created the flatfish just the way it is.

Well here's some more evidence for evolution:

Fossil evidence had already shown that flatfish ancestors had one eye on each side of the head. But no evidence had existed for a transition between a symmetrical skull and one-sided skull. Matt Friedman, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, looked more closely at 45-million-year-old fossils of primitive flatfish and found the transition species: One eye had moved, but it had not crossed the midline of the fish’s body, as seen in today’s flatfish, Friedman reports.

The fossils, Friedman says, deliver a clear picture of how this flatfish group changed from a standard fish with eyes on both sides to one with eyes on only one side of the head.

The flatfish eyes and skeletal structure underwent small, incremental changes, says Alex Schreiber, a developmental biologist who studies flatfish at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., and was not involved in the study. The fishes’ evolution was, in essence, gradual, he says.

I'm sure this will finally convince all the creationists who have been holding out due to the "missing links" in the fossil record and we'll never have to argue about evolution again. ;-)

Tip o' the hat to Frum Heretic.

What am I Allowed to Believe?

That's the question that many Orthodox Jews have to ask themselves. Take this post, titled Should I Argue Against Evolution or for a G-d Directed Evolution?

I have a work associate who seems interested in Torah, but he likes to challenge me about contradictions between Torah and science and other things. He recently asked me about the Torahs views on Evolution.

On the one hand, I could say that that I don’t believe in evolution and there are many holes in evolution theory and that scientists are biased against a belief in G-d. On the other hand, many secular Jews accept the scientific consensus that evolution did take place, and I could make the case that a G-d directed evolution would not necessarily contradict the Torah.

My Rav holds that you don’t have to take a 6,000 year creation literally.

What approach makes more sense when dealing with non observant Jews?

Wikipedia's page on intellectual dishonesty should redirect to that post.

The poster isn't interested in what's true, but in what he is allowed to believe ("My Rav holds that you don’t have to take a 6,000 year creation literally") and what beliefs would be useful ("What approach makes more sense when dealing with non observant Jews?")

Commenter Michoel worries that the poster is not being careful enough:

Jack wrote that his Rav holds that one may believe in a universe which is more than 6,000 years. Somehow you took that to mean that one can believe in Evolution. That is an enormous leap.

Heaven forbid we come to the erroneous conclusion that one "can" believe in evolution. A rabbi must give us explicit permission!

Bob Miller spells out a method for coming to a belief that is consistent with the Torah:

Step 1 is to understand the Torah’s account of creation and subsequent history in light of the entire Mesorah, including the opinions of Chazal, Rishonim, Acharonim, etc. With a comprehensive inside view on all levels (”Pardes”) one can begin to see which of today’s physical/biological theories may be consistent with a Torah view and which may not.

To be fair, a few commenters did jump in to point out that there is, in fact, overwhelming evidence of evolution. I just think it's crazy that people care more about what they are allowed to believe than what's true.

Religion Improves Group Cooperation

Several econ blogs linked to this interesting piece in The Economist.

Excerpt:

To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.

As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community—what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified.

Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group co-operation, the principal difference between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within religious communities, men are expected to pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while women are not. It should, therefore, be possible to observe whether group rituals do improve co-operation, based on the behaviour of men and women.

To do so, Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel. They devised a game to be played by two members of a kibbutz. This was a variant of what is known to economists as the common-pool-resource dilemma, which involves two people trying to divide a pot of money without knowing how much the other is asking for. In the version of the game devised by Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle, each participant was told that there was an envelope with 100 shekels in it (between 1/6th and 1/8th of normal monthly income). Both players could request money from the envelope, but if the sum of their requests exceeded its contents, neither got any cash. If, however, their request equalled, or was less than, the 100 shekels, not only did they keep the money, but the amount left was increased by 50% and split between them.

Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the common-pool-resource dilemma because the communal lives of kibbutz members mean they often face similar dilemmas over things such as communal food, power and cars. The researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.

It'd be interesting to look at intergroup cooperation -- I wonder if religious groups would be less cooperative with other groups than secular ones.

Reader Poll on Global Warming

Just curious. If you wouldn't mind, please assign what chance (0% - 100%) you think that each of the following is true:

1) The Earth warmed, on average, around .75 degrees C during the 20th century.

2) The main influence of this warming was man-made greenhouse emissions.

3) Variations in solar output have had a significant influence on global warming.

4) If global warming is happening, it will have serious detrimental effects on humanity.

5) If global warming is happening, humanity is capable of halting or reversing it.

6) There was a scientific consensus on "global cooling" in the 70s.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Religion and Separate Magesteria

Great post. Excerpts:

The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.

The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it - quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah's bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah - the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar - ruining the experimental symmetry, but this was back in the early days - to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah's altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout "The Lord is God!" - peer review.

And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.

Back in the old days, people actually believed their religions instead of just believing in them. The biblical archaeologists who went in search of Noah's Ark did not think they were wasting their time; they anticipated they might become famous. Only after failing to find confirming evidence - and finding disconfirming evidence in its place - did religionists execute what William Bartley called the retreat to commitment, "I believe because I believe."

Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud and grasshoppers having four legs. (Which is a metaphor for...)

Back in the old days, saying the local religion "could not be proven" would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Albeit it doesn't prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent - it could be alien teenagers.) The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference.

The Roman Empire inherited philosophy from the ancient Greeks; imposed law and order within its provinces; kept bureaucratic records; and enforced religious tolerance. The New Testament, created during the time of the Roman Empire, bears some traces of modernity as a result. You couldn't invent a story about God completely obliterating the city of Rome (a la Sodom and Gomorrah), because the Roman historians would call you on it, and you couldn't just stone them.

In contrast, the people who invented the Old Testament stories could make up pretty much anything they liked. Early Egyptologists were genuinely shocked to find no trace whatsoever of Jewish tribes having ever been in Egypt - they weren't expecting to find a record of the Ten Plagues, but they expected to find something. As it turned out, they did find something. They found out that, during the supposed time of the Exodus from Egypt, Egypt ruled Canaan. The tribes would have fled to find Pharaoh's armies already at the destination. That's one huge historical error, but if there are no libraries, nobody can call you on it.

The Roman Empire did have libraries. Thus, the New Testament doesn't claim big, showy, large-scale geopolitical miracles as the Old Testament routinely did. Instead the New Testament claims smaller miracles which nonetheless fit into the same framework of evidence. A boy falls down and froths at the mouth; the cause is an unclean spirit; an unclean spirit could reasonably be expected to flee from a true prophet, but not to flee from a charlatan; Jesus casts out the unclean spirit; therefore Jesus is a true prophet and not a charlatan. This is perfectly ordinary Bayesian reasoning, if you grant the basic premise that epilepsy is caused by demons (and that the end of an epileptic fit proves the demon fled).

...

The idea that religion is a separate magisterium which cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie - a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happened historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe. You have to admire its sheer brazenness, on a par with Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The prosecutor whips out the bloody axe, and the defendant, momentarily shocked, thinks quickly and says: "But you can't disprove my innocence by mere evidence - it's a separate magisterium!"

Shocking News: Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Has No Effect

Via Oliver Willis, a new study:

WASHINGTON - Students who took part in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

Also, those who attended one of the four abstinence classes that were reviewed reported having similar numbers of sexual partners as those who did not attend the classes. And they first had sex at about the same age as other students — 14.9 years, according to Mathematica Policy Research Inc.

The federal government now spends about $176 million annually on abstinence-until-marriage education. Critics have repeatedly said they don't believe the programs are working, and the study will give them reinforcement.

However, Bush administration officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the study. They said the four programs reviewed — among several hundred across the nation — were some of the very first established after Congress overhauled the nation's welfare laws in 1996.

Officials said one lesson they learned from the study is that the abstinence message should be reinforced in subsequent years to truly affect behavior.

"This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines. You can't expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth's high school career," said Harry Wilson, the commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families.

Doesn't that just sum up the Bush administration? "What we're doing isn't working? Let's do more of it!"

There was some good news, though:

"I really do think it's a two-part story. First, there is no evidence that the programs increased the rate of sexual abstinence," said Chris Trenholm, a senior researcher at Mathematica who oversaw the study. "However, the second part of the story that I think is equally important is that we find no evidence that the programs increased the rate of unprotected sex."

Trenholm said his second point of emphasis was important because some critics of abstinence programs have contended that they lead to less frequent use of condoms.

Maybe sex ed isn't really that important. I mean, what is there to teach, from a health standpoint, besides, "Use a freaking condom!"

I still think purity balls are the creepiest thing ever.

Repost: How I Became an Atheist

Originally titled What Kind of Atheist am I?

Zookeeper-Benjamin asks, "What kind of Atheist are you? What are the foundations for your beliefs?"

Technically, I am a strong atheist, which means I hold "the philosophical position that God or gods do not exist. It is contrasted with weak atheism, which is the lack or absence of belief in God or gods, without the claim that God or gods do not exist." Make no mistake: I do not claim that I can prove that there is no God; it is simply my belief. However, please don't write and tell me that I have "faith" that there is no God, since "faith" has implications which don't make sense for atheists. One can't have "faith" in nothingness.

So if I can't prove it, why do I believe it, especially since I was raised an Orthodox Jew? Well, I can describe how I arrived at atheism and perhaps that will do. As early as I can remember, I believed in God, since that's what I was taught by my parents. I was a curious child, though, and I always had questions. I was also cocky and didn't believe anything just because somebody said it. My first doubts probably started when some of my early rebbeim said things which I knew to be untrue or believed to be immoral. Being curious, if a Rabbi contradicted a science book, I did more research. In the end, I found the science books to be more credible than my Rabbis, who, while intelligent and learned in one particular field, were demonstrably ignorant in other matters. Once I realized that it was possible for Rabbis (and secular teachers, too, of course) to be incorrect, I became a skeptic. If I was taught something which seemed wrong and was testable, I would test it. If it weren't testable, I would do research and find the most credible sources I could come up with.

Eventually, I realized that if Rabbis could be wrong, perhaps the Torah could be wrong. After all, what made me believe it was the word of God other than the claims of Rabbis I knew to be fallible? I started thinking about Breishit (Genesis) since it makes many claims which are relatively testable as compared to stories about people who supposedly lived 3000 years ago. The six days' account of creation seemed to contradict Evolution, which I had come to believe in through my readings, but I could reconcile the two if I sort of squinted and told myself, "Well at least the Genesis story is presented in mostly the right order."

The first thing that really tripped me up was the idea of the firmament:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. (Genesis 1:6-7.)

What was this? First of all, this seems to imply that the Earth is the center of the Universe. But more importantly, it clearly states that some firmament actually exists and there's water on top of it. To my understanding, no such thing exists. I was troubled. I went to one of the smartest Rabbis I knew and I asked him what the firmament was. He said, "I always thought of it as the stratosphere." Huh?? That didn't make any sense at all. Combined with the other curious parts of the Genesis story like the fact that it took place in 6 days, that there was no mention of dinosaurs or of mass extinctions (pre-Flood), that it doesn't appear to agree with evolution, that it doesn't seem to realize that the Moon is a satellite nor that the Earth is a planet, I decided it must not be literally true.

Well, so, maybe it was metaphorical. Maybe it was just a pretty story. But then what about the rest of the Torah? Was the Flood just a story? How about Abraham? I was a big reader of fiction as well as science books and the stories in the Torah certainly read like fiction. Don't Adam and Eve, Cain and Able, Isaac and Ishmael, Isaac and Esau sound like fiction? Aren't they a little too pat to be historical record? Joseph and the multicolored coat? Come on, now. What about Egypt? How do I know that even happened?

I read about other religions, past and present. I wondered, did the Greeks and Romans literally believe in their mythologies? How were my Rabbis so sure that the Torah is true but the New Testament is false? Why were the Muslims as confident that they're right as we were that we were? Wasn't it unlikely that I was just born into the right denomination of the one true religion? Didn't Muslims and Baptists and Catholics all think the same thing? Why hadn't all the smartest, best, and most learned people in the world converted to Orthodox Judaism if it's so obvious that we were right?

I was going to have to look at it objectively. I couldn't directly test whether a given religion was correct, since religions are so slippery. You disprove one thing, and the apologists say, "Oh no, that doesn't mean what you think it means. It means [this entirely different thing.]" I started to think about that phenomenon a little bit more. It was interesting that as scientific knowledge grew, religious claims seemed to get milder and milder. Long ago before videorecorders and Richter scales, Moses supposedly split a sea. Before we knew that the Earth rotates, the Greeks believed a god pulled the sun around the earth each day. The Egyptians thought the sun was God. Jesus supposedly walked on water. But it was fascinating that whenever we figured out how something works, religion simply accepted our explanations and shifted their claims to less impressive events. We started understanding weather better, and religions stopped claiming that the gods made it thunder and rain, at least directly. God Himself (or Herself or Theirselves) became less specific. God became abstract.

Okay, so maybe God was this abstract Thing which didn't directly cause thunder or give people leprosy for lying anymore. Maybe the Torah stories were just for the people who lived back then, so that they would understand. But if God wrote the Torah, or if God even talked to Moses, or talked to anyone, why didn't He take some easy steps to alleviate suffering? Couldn't he have just explained about tiny, invisible bugs that cause illness? If God exists at all, why does He allow such misery in the world? Why the earthquakes and the holocaust and child slavery? Why does the Torah hate gay people so much? Why does it allow slavery and condone genocide (e.g. of the Midionites and Amalek?) Even if it's not literal, even if the Torah is just allegory, and even if God inspired it rather than dictated it, shouldn't it be a better book? Shouldn't it be more moral?

I stopped believing the Torah wasn't written by people living thousands of years ago. I mean, what would it look like if it had been written by people who lived in Israel thousands of years ago? Wouldn't it reflect their ignorance and their knowledge and their hangups and prejudices? Doesn't it?

I started thinking about whether the Universe could exist in the absence of God. I read Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time. I noticed that although he went out of his way to deny being an atheist, his book presents a good case for a Universe that runs by itself according to a bunch of math and physics and randomness. Hawking didn't know what caused the Big Bang, but it sure looked like the Universe has been taking care of itself since then. I read Carl Sagan. I realized how incomprehensibly huge the Universe is. I decided there's no reason for such an enormous Universe if the whole point of creation was humanity. I read Dawkins. Obviously, he was a fanatic atheist with a chip on his shoulder. But he made a lot more sense than most of the religious apologists I'd read.

Then I started reading philosophy. I read Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian and a whole bunch of stuff online. I found that Russell's and others' arguments made a lot of sense to me.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I no longer believed in God. I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but as John McCarthy wrote, "An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."