the evolving mind

See, I go to church. Okay, not very often. The photo above was shot a bit over a year ago in an ancient, mountain-top Sicilian chapel. More recently I ventured into a massive, adobe cathedral in the Old Town area of Albuquerque, NM.

When I go to church I go as a cultural anthropologist. I look, I listen, I read. I soak up the ambiance and the history. I may even take some photographs. Cultures fascinate me.

Is it possible to be both open to new ideas and experience AND to think about these things critically? I think so.

“Critically” has some unfortunate connotations. As if the intent from the get-go is to shoot anything and everything down. But that isn’t the case. The truly critical mind acknowledges the good as well as the bad. Like a film critique.

To me “thinking critically” consists, in part, of doing one’s best to see past sentiment, sales-pitches, and one’s own cultural presuppositions.

Believe it or not, some things can be critically evaluated and found to be both absolutely beautiful and fully false. Like the better elements of religion.

Technorati Links: culture, freethought, photography

What makes science so great? Well, the ends of science are certainly fantastic: a reliable knowledge of how things work. Or don’t. But in terms of the means of science, it is not evidence nor logic that give science its stellar spine. Sure, evidence (data applied to a question) and logic (well reasoned arguments) are important. But without this one crucial element, science just wouldn’t be science.

Tests. The roughly three hundred year-old breakthrough and most fundamental element of the scientific enterprise is putting ideas to the test. Want to know if your idea has merit? Writing, arguing and debating why it should be true can only go so far. Test it. It is really that simple. Perform a formal experiment; make a formal prediction and unearth data that could confirm or falsify it. Put your ideas to a test.

Yesterday I read of the results of three tests on fairly popular ideas. Each of these three ideas had scads of reasoning behind them as to why they should be true. And that reasoning only went so far. As it turns out, the reasoning may have been a mere spinning of verbal wheels.

1) You will be healthier if you are not fat in any way. Flab is sign of poor health.

Probably NOT. A new study has found that only a significant degree of excess weight is a factor in overall health.

[O]verall mortality is unchanged by overweight, but increased by 20% by obesity, while extreme obesity raises it by up to 200%. [source]

2) Magnetic bracelets/straps ease arthritis pain &

3) Copper bracelets ease arthritis pain.

Nope. Though …

Magnet therapy is a rapidly growing industry, with annual worldwide sales of therapeutic devices incorporating permanent magnets worth up to $4 billion US.

A randomized, placebo-controlled study (tests don’t get any better than this) led to this conclusion:

“It appears that any perceived benefit obtained from wearing a magnetic or copper bracelet can be attributed to psychological placebo effects. People tend to buy them when they are in a lot of pain, then when the pain eases off over time they attribute this to the device. However, our findings suggest that such devices have no real advantage over placebo wrist straps that are not magnetic and do not contain copper.

All the arguing in the world pales in importance when placed beside a test and its results.

As a concluding tangent: A very lame argument used against scientists (and atheists) is that those with opposing conclusions have their faith, while we have ours.

Nice try. But a miss. Scientists have confidence in tested ideas and in the methods that allow us to generate a reliable, working knowledge of our world. Without being tested, any supposed knowledge rests upon ideas that are little more than hot air.

Technorati Links: health, skepticism

I walk outside and there is so much green foliage, even this time of year in Florida. Yet so very little of it is suitable for making a salad with. Why is that? Don’t look to Intelligent Design for an answer. Doesn’t seem too bright to me to populate a planet with your chosen species, and then make food scarcer than it could be. Evolutionary theory, on th other had, provides a better answer. It is usually not in a plant’s favor to be edible. So most do their darnedest to avoid it. (I mean, the progeny of successful plants have avoided death by consumption.)

We humans have struggled and “competed” with other species from the get-go. This ain’t no garden of easy eating. We have (or at least had) to work for our food.

Technorati Links: nature, photos

Many people speak of religion as if it addresses and manifests our “higher nature.” Of course, some of it might. But a whole lot of it doesn’t. Consider this cartoon from Jesus and Mo:

Male possession and dominance of females is far more ape-like than . . . civilized (for I don’t believe in the any divine realm).

In my opinion, more enlightened religions do not consider their brand to be a sacred, package deal. No full allegiance to the original form is necessary. Instead, you may pick and choose from the nicer nuggets, and view these as desirably and manifest of “the sacred.”

You might say that the more enlightened forms of religion are looser and lighter, less zealous, in their view of the sacred. Could you also say that the more enlightened religions are actually less religious? Following that trend to a logical conclusion, could you conclude that the future of religion is “mere” humanism? Hmm.

Technorati Links: humanism, religion

A couple months ago I read of research into what was billed as a sixth sense. You can’t call it seeing, nor smell. It’s not quite touch nor hearing. Taste? No. What is it?

Fish and some amphibians possess a unique sensory capability in the so-called lateral-line system. It allows them, in effect, to “touch” objects in their surroundings without direct physical contact or to “see” in the dark. [source]

Is this sixth sense in any way similar to “touch” or “sight”? Hmm. If you ask me, it is a lot closer to hearing. Fish, of course, don’t have ears. But, oddly, many make noises, so they can perceive these. How? It seems that while they lack outer ears, they do have an inner ear structure. Vibrations pass through their body to the inner ear, which allows them to hear. Just as you can hear strong vibrations even with fingers jammed in your ears.

A major difference is that land animals hear vibrations that pass through a gas, our thin atmosphere, while fish sense vibrations that pass through their dense, liquid environment. I believe the “sixth sense” talked of in the research is much like hearing because it relies upon sensing movements in the water. Here’s the nitty-gritty of how the sense works:

This remote sensing system, at first glance mysterious, rests on measurement of the pressure distribution and velocity field in the surrounding water. The lateral-line organs responsible for this are aligned along the left and right sides of the fish’s body and also surround the eyes and mouth. They consist of gelatinous, flexible, flag-like units about a tenth of a millimeter long. These so-called neuromasts – which sit either directly on the animal’s skin or just underneath, in channels that water can permeate through pores – are sensitive to the slightest motion of the water. Coupled to them are hair cells similar to the acoustic pressure sensors in the human inner ear. Nerves deliver signals from the hair cells for processing in the brain, which localizes and identifies possible sources of the changes detected in the water’s motion. [bold mine]

There you have it. Fish can hear/feel changes in their liquid atmosphere. Would a human equivalent be the ability to decipher the direction from where a slight puff of air has brushed the skin? Would we not only hear and see someone place a stack of books on a table, but also feel the slight wave of compressed air generated by it?

And what happens when a fish is pulled from of the water? Does “all go silent” for this sense? Or does it instead perceive a raucous of strange noises? A fishy tinnitus? I wonder.

To truly get into a fish’s head you’d have to inhabit its whole body.

Technorati Links: perception, science

The above close-up digital image (x60) of a dwarf papyrus stalk suggests a stitched fabric. Ah yes, the vibrant, green, living biological fabric of nature. But wait. That fabric is not only imperfect in form, it is also host to a number of “diseases.” In the natural world, life grows wherever it can, even and perhaps especially atop other life.

In a sense we humans “live atop” fields of grain and herds of herbivores. But we outright kill our hosts to consume them. And move on to other hosts, whether green of flesh or red.

Likewise, right now, all over your body, many microscopic species are “living atop” you.

Hmm. Is a germ/virus/parasitic disease only a disease to the host species, to the life form that another life form exploits?

Forgive my beating a drum, but, again, biological life resembles not an intelligent design, but a free-for-all of competing life-forms.

Think one species — not coincidentally, our own — deserves a ribbon for best-in-show? Wait awhile. Another species just may make history of us.

In terms of the similarities between humans and other great apes, particularly chimpanzees, you could say that I have been guilty of focusing almost exclusively on the part of the glass that is half-full. (Or is it 98% full? I guess it depends on whether the stuff in the glass is behavior or genes.) But there certainly is that empty part — those ways in which humans and our close primate relatives diverge and differ.

Recent research into chimpanzee social behavior has highlighted both a similarity and a difference. In the news release, Chimpanzees Help Each Other On Request But Not Voluntarily I learned,

[A] new study by researchers at the Primate Research Institute (PRI) and the Wildlife Research Center (WRC) of Kyoto University shows that chimpanzees altruistically help conspecifics, even in the absence of direct personal gain or immediate reciprocation, although the chimpanzees were much more likely to help each other upon request than voluntarily.

Those animals and their animal behavior! They are somewhat like us. Quite a bit, actually. Chimpanzees helping other chimpanzees, “even when there was no hope of reciprocation from the partner (as in experiment 2) and even when the two animals were unrelated.”

How is the human/chimp altruism glass half-empty? Chimps usually need some sort of prompting before they come to the aid of another. One individual gestures to another; and the other complies. Humans, meanwhile — with their robustly developed cognitive capacity called “theory of mind” (the ability to infer the mental states of others, including intentions) — very frequently need no such prompting. For example: You are walking down a hallway and a stranger ahead of you drops something. How often do you alert him/her and/or retrieve it, without prompting? For most people, often.

Just yesterday I engaged in behavior that could have been part of a naturalistic experiment in human altruism. I was exiting the post office and noticed a person approaching the adjacent glass entry door. He had an armload of boxes. Without thinking I took a step and reached toward the entry door handle. The man said, “I got it, thanks,” and waved to me with a free hand beneath cradled boxes.

Upon thinking about it now, I had nothing to gain by doing this. Or did I? I didn’t know the man, and judging by his triple-x belt size, yellow teeth, and grease-smudged eyeglass lenses, he is not the type I view as a potential friend. So why the natural reaction? I saw someone needing help, so I helped. Period.

Is this natural inclination evidence of a primate mind that evolved in smaller groups sizes, now living in social environments where peaceably mixing with strangers is a common, “unnatural,” occurrence?

Speculative explanations aside, the divergence between human and chimpanzee behavior remains. You could say that our nature is not just that of a social primate, but of a social primate par excellence.

Technorati Links: evolutionary psychology

The trunk of this oak tree functions as a bit of a bio-superhighway. Who and what travels it? Squirrels, ants, woodpeckers. Vines even “borrow” the oak superstructure to support their own leaves.

Nature: too much of a free-for-all to reasonably reflect intentional design.

Technorati Links: nature, photography

Hold onto your politically-correct hats — today I’m going to suggest that maybe poverty isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s not the big problem it’s cracked up to be.

First, the research that got me thinking. In a statistical study about factors associated with well-being in Costa Rica, Mariano Rojas discovered this -

[O]nly 24 percent of people classified as ‘poor’ rated their life satisfaction as low. Furthermore, 18 percent of people in the ‘non-poor’ category also reported low life satisfaction. It is therefore clear that poverty alone does not define an individual’s overall well-being and it is possible for someone to come out of poverty and remain less than satisfied with his life. On the other hand, a person can be satisfied with his life even if his income is low, as long as he is moderately satisfied in other areas of life such as family, self, health, job and economic.

This finding agrees with other research into the importance of money to happiness. Namely, it is negligibly important. (Further evidence we aren’t Homo capitalists by nature.) Once above a limited threshold, in fact, money seems to matter not at all. The most important contributing factor to life satisfaction? Personality traits. But I digress.

From his findings Rojas concludes,

There is more to life satisfaction than money, and public policy programs aiming to tackle poverty need to move beyond simply raising people’s income to also improving their quality of life in other areas.

What are the other areas? Family, health, job . . .

Here’s the thing about poverty as a variable: it is frequently a short-cut term. When people talk about poverty as being a problem, they don’t necessarily mean a lack of money. Instead, it it a bucket of a word. Inside the bucket, if we bother to look, we find a host of lifestyle factors: family, neighborhood, crime, drug use, social resources, education, healthcare, etc., etc. To do good science, and generate effective public policy, we need to know which of these variables truly matter. We need to get specific.

A pie-in-the-sky push to eliminate poverty is often presented as a panacea for eliminating all of societies woes, from decreasing crime to increasing longevity in minorities and everything in between.  But as the above study and others suggest, even for lowest-income individuals, a lack of money itself isn’t likely the biggest issue. And in an effort to help, it is smart to focus on the bigger issues.

We should remember, by the way, that poverty is relative. Being classified as poor in India is substantially different than in being “poor” in this country. On the bell-curve of affluence for a given population, the poor are on the trailing edge. No matter how affluent the average.

Rather than “eliminating poverty” (by disfiguring the bell curve of affluence?) the focus should instead be on more specific issues. Healthcare. Jobs. Family variables. Social resources.

Lastly – and this may make a few readers gasp in horror – perhaps some of we liberals need to more tolerant of the existence of less-fortunate individuals.  If being poor is not causing a significant degree of suffering, then we may be wise to back off the issue. Our resources could be put to better use — more precise use, in the least. Otherwise we might merely be attempting to treat our own feelings of discomfort and guilt at the recognition that some people are not as well off as we are.

Technorati Links: liberalism, poverty, psychology

Don’t look now but — holy ship of fools! — there is a star in the day sky! One so close the electromagnetic radiation it generates can burn your skin — at least if a fat slice of atmosphere doesn’t get in the way.

[photo thanks to NASA]

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