Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go

I'm reading Cochran and Harpending's new book. I hope to have something to say about its scientific content when I'm done. But this post is just about the penumbra of political implications around it. The book seems to carefully skirt most of the really controversial implications of its thesis. There is a chapter devoted to the evolution of the apparently superior intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews, but nothing on the inferior intelligence of other groups, which is what really gets people excited or exercised. This seems prudent. Cochran and Harpending may plan on letting their fellows in the "Human Biodiversity" community tease out the racial implications.

But if that's the case, why is Harpending appearing at a conference with a collection of hardcore racists and lunatics? Doesn't seem like wise public relations to me. Does he really want to ally himself with people like Lawrence Auster, who calls "Darwinism" "the biggest intellectual fraud in history" and displays an unhealthy obsession with Michelle Obama's looks? This is not the strategy of someone who wants their ideas taken seriously.

Just to be clear -- the truth of whatever scientific theories Cochran and Harpending are putting forward is independent of the author's politics, character, or associations. In theory. In practice, however, science is a human institution like any other and the fates of theories are tied to a multitude of social concerns besides their factuality or lack thereof. If C&H's theories are true, it would be a shame for them to be ignored because of their author's politics.

The converse possibility is that the truth of C&H's theories will be powerful enough to make socially unacceptable racism acceptable again. That seems unlikely, to put it mildly.

Oddly, a major theme of this conference appears to be the purported existential threat to Western Civilization posed by the Islam, while Harpending's co-author Cochran is on record as dismissing that idea as laughable hysteria.

Another amusing thing about this conference: the organizer and about a third of the presenters are Jewish, which is causing some difficulties among those racists who would otherwise be on board with a project like this. It's pretty tricky, this effort to promote civilization-scale asabiya.

The Psychic Unity of Mankind

Via tggp, a long flame by John Derbyshire on inherent genetic differences and "culturalism".

I find racists like Derbyshire and Steve Sailer fascinatingly odious to read. The fascination comes from trying to untangle the nuggets of truth and insight from the general stew of confusion and prejudice. This human biodiversity stuff is important, and it's a shame to leave it to right-wing wankers. Somehow, the progressive and sane part of the world will need to grapple with this stuff.

Right now, I just have to pick at a nit that has bothered me for awhile and came up again in Derbyshire's latest, namely, the complete misuse of the concept "psychic unity of mankind":

This idea of the "œpsychic unity of mankind"is a sort of blank slate principle. It says that all human beings everywhere have the same physiological nature, most especially the same brains, and that all observed differences, both group and individual, are the result of "œculture" acting on this infinitely plastic substratum -- writing words on this "blank slate."

This is confused in at least two different ways: first, the assumptions that PUM implies that there are no innate physiological differences in brains, and second, that PUM is identical to blank-slate theories of the brain. This is a complete inversion of the concept.

The psychic unity of mankind (PUM) does not mean that human brains are biologically identical. That would, of course, be stupid. PUM means that human brains are constructed in roughly the same way, with the roughly similar biological hardware, computing architectures, modules, built-in capabilities, and areas of functionality. PUM describes the built-in commonalities between human minds and is thus exactly the opposite of the blank-slate model.

Here's Wikipedia on PUM:

In arguing for the "œpsychic unity of mankind," Bastian proposed a straightforward project for the long-term development of a science of human culture and consciousness based upon this notion. He argued that the mental acts of all people everywhere on the planet are the products of physiological mechanisms characteristic of the human species (what today we might term the genetic loading on the organization and functioning of the human neuroendocrine system). Every human mind inherits a complement of species-specific "œelementary ideas" (Elementargedanken), and hence the minds of all people, regardless of their race or culture, operate in the same way.

If you've read Pinkers' The Blank Slate, you may remember he presents a list of human universal ideas at the end of the book, as evidence of the non-blankness of the biological mind. These seem almost exactly the same as the Elementargedanken proposed by Bastian.

Richard Shweder (a major cultural anthropologist) Thinking in Cultures, p77: (and note that he is generally skeptical of the notion of psychic unity, but for very different reasons than the race-baiters):

The principle of general psychology that "people are the same wherever you go" does not mean that people are the same in every respect. It means that transcendentally, "deep down" or "inside," where the central processing mechanism lives, people are the same....

...It is crucial to recognize that the long-lived and imaginative idea of an inherent (fixed, universal) and central (transcendent, abstract) processing mechanism, a psychic unity to mankind, will never be seriously threatened by the mere existence of performance differences between individuals or populations.

I see Gregory Cochran makes the same mistake as Derbyshire.

Is this just a minor nitpick over the use of a 19th-century phrase? After all, regardless of how you define your terms, recent human genetic selection is either real or not, differences in cognitive capabilities between individuals or races are real or not. But I think this confusion points to something important. The scientific facts are facts and will be revealed in more detail with time, but the moral, social, and political implications of the facts are very much undetermined. Humans will, fairly obviously, be revealed to have some things in common and other things that vary. Whether you want to pay more attention to the commonalities or more to the differences is a political and moral question, not a scientific one.

"All men are created equal" -- the would-be scientific racists like Derbyshire are licking their chops over the prospect that their prejudices will be given the backing of science, and this enlightenment slogan can be thrown under the bus for good. The rest of us should be reinterpreting it in the light of new science. It doesn't mean that everyone has exactly the same innate intelligence any more than it means they have the same height or muscle mass. It means, rather, that we are all built the same way, that we are qualitatively the same despite quantitative differences, that we all have language, consciousness, morality. social skills, social needs, music, concern for kin, and a thousand other similarities.

The left stresses our commonalities; the racist right would like to magnify differences. As a leftist, I'd like to see the our side form a strategy to deal with the facts of human biodiversity; sticking our heads in the sand won't work for very long.

Word of the week

Zoopharmacognosy

Zoopharmacognosy refers to the process by which animals self-medicate, by selecting and utilizing plants, soils, and insects to treat and prevent disease. Coined by Dr. Eloy Rodriguez, a biochemist and professor at Cornell University, the word is derived from roots zoo ("animal"), pharma ("drug"), and gnosy ("knowing").

Came up when reading this interesting article on human drug-seeking behavior, which came up in the course of another stupid flamewar with an idiot libertarian. My only excuse for doing this is that it leads me down interesting pathways to new words and ideas. Did you know that two of the most important Nobels in biology are partially attributable to the influence of LSD? Kary Mullis everyone knows about, but Francis Crick?

Five minutes ahead of the zeitgeist again

The NYT Magazine had a piece on the evolution and adaptivity of religion yesterday, featuring Scott Atran and David Wilson. Honestly, I didn't know about it when I was writing my previous post. Here's part of the conclusion:

What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world... The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.

This is sort of like the argument I've been making, on naturalism mailing lists and elsewhere. Atheism, while more or less true, is too cognitively expensive to really be a foundational philosophy, at least on a mass scale. I think some of the rigidity of hardline atheists is a reflection of this -- they need to be very aggressive in order to maintain their belief against not only the external believers, but against their own repressed tendencies towards belief.

Of Two Minds

Interesting dust-up this week about a guy who got a PhD in paleontology despite being a YEC (Young Earth Creationist). The arguments mostly revolve around whether this guy should or shouldn't receive a degree, since he apparently can act like a scientist, he just doesn't believe the science he is doing is true. I got into it with some YECs and IDiots here, and I was quite astonished at how ready people were to defend what has to be either hypocrisy or some extreme form of postmodern relativism. One of their weirder moves is to say that the anti-Ross forces are ignoring "objective reality" because in objective reality Ross did some science and got it approved. Of course, the more fundamental objective reality of the actual age of the universe doesn't apparently matter to them.

But mostly I don't care about whether he gets his official piece of paper or not. I just want to know what's going inside the guy's head. He's obviously split himself pretty radically. Everyone has different modes of thought in different circumstances, different frameworks they apply to different parts of their life, but few do it to this extent and get written up in the Times for it.

It is a tree of life to them that hold fast to it

Hack of the day: hooking up prefuse and the Tree of Life web to make a browser for all of evolution.

Wingnut in the family

I have a terrible family secret -- one of my close relatives is a ridiculously extreme right-winger. He used to call me to argue against evolution and for the theory that Bill Clinton is a serial murderer. He's good friends with Ann Coulter and some other famous-name righties. We aren't close. Despite of (or maybe because of) his manifestly nutty beliefs, he's doing very well on Wall Street.

At a recent family gathering I learned that he was involved in Coulter's latest plagarized expectoration, Godless. Apparently he's the one who started her off on the anti-evolution track that makes up a good third of the book. According to him, Coulter is "smart" and "insightful", while Richard Dawkins (who I pointed him at the last time we went over this ground, maybe five years ago) is "an idiot". To each their own, I guess.

He's got the argumentation style of Bill O'Reilly -- a sort of bullying, finger-in-the-chest style that has absolutely no interest in truth or discourse or discovery. I always feel kind of icky after these encounters, mostly because I'm anything but a docrtrinaire atheist, but his stance polarizes the conversation, not leaving a lot of room for exploring the interesting middle ground.

This guy is not super-religious or anything. As far as I can tell, his positions arise out of a kind of conservative contrarianism -- a desire to rebel against a perceived liberal establishment. If that means rebelling against science and common sense, well, that just makes their position that much braver. I think this sort of conservative-as-rebel stance is quite common and goes a long way in explaining the popularity of right-wing blowhards. Bush himself is mystifyingly packaged up as some sort of rebel, which makes no sense at all but fits into this general framing strategy.

The thing is, most intelligent people assume that the ones who propel Coulter to the top of the bestseller list are mouthbreathing morons, and that Coulter herself is an entertainer who doesn't actually believe what she says. My relative is not a moron, he's just in the grip of some form of nuttiness. I can't speak to Coulter's sincerity, but he seems to take her seriously. I wouldn't pay her any mind whatsoever if not for this family connection and the fact that her books routinely top the bestseller lists. It doesn't seem wise to ignore a phenomenon like that.

Here's a remarkably patient investigation into the sources of Coulter's misrepresentations on evolution, worth reading for some pointers into actual scientific literature. There's an interesting theory about the persistence of the appendix, for instance, and some recent studies that directly attack the "irreducible complexity" arguments by cleverly how a complex biochemical mechanism could have evolved by small steps from earlier, simpler components.

Geoff Nunberg analyzes Coulter's rhetoric of "flamboyantly gratuitous tastelessness". Her trick is saying nasty things in a semi-joking way, so anybody who complains can be accused of humorlessness. This fits into the conservative-as-rebel strategy -- her flouting of basic decency and common sense is made to look daring, while her opponents become sanctimonious apologists for the establishment.

Teaching the Controversy

The Kansas decision to teach Intelligent Design and redefine science has been roundly and deservedly mocked in the blogs. I must be contrarian though (if only to stake out a little bit of intellectual territory for myself). I'm guessing the kids in Kansas will end up learning more about evolution than kids in an average school in an averagely sane state. The reason is all the attention the issue and contrvoersy is receiving. I have always been attracted to the learning-by-arguing method. Learning about a battle is more interesting than being told facts. And there always is a battle, at least historically. Science is all about having the battles, settling them, and then moving on. When it's taught, usually the battle part is left out, the history is a byproduct for the historians to chew on if they must. Who has time to cover phlogistion and N-rays?

Still, I persist in holding to a constructionist ideal of education. The goal should be not to pour knowledge into kids heads, but to train them in thinking skills. From this standpoint, a controversy is an entry into the field, a chance to explore a variety of points of view, a "teachable moment".

Of course, it's possible to take this idea too far.

Actually I have to give Giblets the last word on this issue.

Why Evolution is Scary

Several major blogs are collectively trying to puzzle out why people don't believe in evolution. I'll survey what they have to say and give my own take on this below, which is based on cognitive psychology. Short summary: people have different kinds of worldviews which apply in different types of situations. Applying the mechanical, causal worldview of science to ordinary life leads to confusion and can appear threatening. Reconciling different worldviews is difficult, even for the intellectually sophisticated, so it's no wonder that ordinary citizens have problems with it.

3quarksdaily: People reject chance and uncertainty. I don't buy this one, and neither does PZ Meyers. People love chance and pay money to experience it, and they recognize uncertainty. If you read further in this post it touches on "purposelessness", which I think is closer to the mark.

Majikthise posits "disenchantment", also touches on "purposelessness", and at the end says:

Evolution will continue to be controversial as long as people believe that naturalism threatens meaning. I don't know how proponents of evolution can begin to make people feel more comfortable with the naturalistic worldview.

This is getting closer...people really do feel threatened by the naturalistic view, but there are good reasons for this. See below.

PZ Myers focuses on purposelessness, fear, and emptiness. Quoting Eric Hoffer:

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

Which leads to the group psychology of religious crusades, yet another factor.

My own take on this is from a cognitive point of view.

First, it's a mistake to try to explain religion in terms of stupidity, fear, or group identity. No doubt these play a role, but aside from being snobby and dismissive, they don't explain religion specifically. People do lots of things out of stupidity and fear. People do lots of things out of group identity, like cheer for the Red Sox, but that doesn't make the Red Sox a religion.

So, let's start with purposelessness, and let's take the standpoint that people are right, in some sense, to be wary and reject the purposlessness of a naturalistic worldview. Look at it in terms of practical reason.

To make a long story short, let's assume a drastically simplified model of people's mental models, but not completely simplified. People have two different frameworks or stances (in Daniel Dennett's terms) for explaining phenomenon, the mechanical or naturalistic stance, and the intentional or animate stance. You can look at, say, a person as an intentional agent, with desires, feelings, ideas, etc, or you can look on him as a sort of chemical machine, with various mechanisms that work according to the causal laws of physics. In fact, of course, he's both, but the two frames of reference are rather disjoint and stiching them back together is the difficult work of cybernetics, psychology and other somewhat mushy fields of science.

In everyday thought, people can apply these frames of reference as needed and switch between them. If their car breaks, they might curse it out (as if it was an agent) and then proceed to open the hood and repair it (as if it were a machine). Doctors have an elaborate methodology of ministering to a patient's humanity while treating their body as if it was a defective machine.

So what does this have to do with religion and evolution? Science has a professional bias towards mechanical explanations, either eliminating agency altogether or finding ways to reduce it to naturalistic explanations. That's fine, that's what science does. But ordinary people with lives find this disturbing, for good reasons. They know that it's improper or immoral to apply the mechanical stance to people except in special circumstances (this I think is at the root of the Frankenstein mythos: those angry peasants have a point). Real scientists are not (usually) monsters, they have ways to reconcile their humanity with their dedication to the amoral and merciless mechanical viewpoint, but the peasants don't know that.

Religion, on the other hand, has a bias towards intentional explanations, seeing agency everywhere, in people (souls), in nature (animism) and the universe as a whole (God). Science's challenges to the intentionality of the universe are one thing, but evolution and brain sciences threaten the very soul. This scares people, and goes against their moral and practical intuitions.

What I'm trying to get at is that ordinary people, who may be ignorant of science and not inclined to philisipophy, still have a ideas about the consequences of different styles of thought. They know that the mechanistic worldview is in some sense incompatible with their intuitions. What they don't have is the sophistication to try to reconcile these worldviews. Scientists and intellectuals keep working at this problem, but nobody can pretend it's solved.

In short, fear is at the root of people's rejection of evolution, but it's not a groundless fear. People understand, albeit vaguely, the different systems of thought involved and the conflicts between them. They feel that much is at stake, and they are right about that. It's not that surprising if the issues are played out at Kansas school board meetings, in unenlightening ways. This is hard stuff.

Further reading:

There's a whole spate of books that purport to have some psychological or evolutionary explanation of religion. I own a bunch and have even read a couple. The one that clicked most for me, in that it concentrated on ascription of animacy, was Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer.

I addressed some of these issues in my dissertation, which was ostensibly about programming environments but wandered off quite a bit.

Religion and Science: Peace in Our Time?

I've been wanting to say something here about the evolution wars, since God only knows there isn't enough debate going on in the blogosphere and elsewhere on that topic. Something vaguely in the vein of Stephen Jay Gould's manifesto for giving religion and science their separate spheres of influence, truce instead of war, etc. Maybe I'll get to that someday. In the meantime, the Dalai Lama has published a book on science and spirituality in which he apparently is prepared to accept that science can trump religion:

"My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as quoted in an article by Michael Shermer

Well that's a good start then. Actually his approach is much different from Gould's, though both are aiming at stopping the incessant strife between religion and science. Gould divides up reality in to what he calls Non-overlapping Magisteria, separate territories in other words. The Dalai Lama seems more intent on exploring a single reality by different means.

Update: George Johnson at the NYT does a mostly favorable review.