If there is one valuable insight that philosophers of science and sociologists have demonstrated it is that issues in science (and metascience) are frequently decided (or at least argued) in quite non-”scientific” ways (by which I mean what is generally claimed to be the scientific way — in truth a formalisation of rationality, common sense, and long-standing methods of human reasoning). In the skirmishes within science, certain “paradigms” take hold not because of their technical superiority but often because of certain very human prejudices. The idea that selfishness precedes (and even excludes) co-operation, is an example, and one that is beginning to deservedly face resistance, not just in popular science writing through which it has gained its hold, but also in more serious analysis which it had constrained in the past:

For Human Eyes Only - NYT

[…]

Why should humans be so different? And yet we are. We can’t fool anyone. The whites of our eyes are several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. Trying to explain this trait leads us into one of the deepest and most controversial topics in the modern study of human evolution: the evolution of cooperation.

[…]

In a recent experiment, our research team has shown that even infants — at around their first birthdays, before language acquisition has begun — tend to follow the direction of another person’s eyes, not their heads. Thus, when an adult looked to the ceiling with her eyes only, head remaining straight ahead, infants looked to the ceiling in turn. However, when the adult closed her eyes and pointed her head to the ceiling, infants did not very often follow.

[…]

Why might it have been advantageous for some early humans to advertise their eye direction in a way that enabled others to determine what they were looking at more easily? One possible answer, what we have called the cooperative eye hypothesis, is that especially visible eyes made it easier to coordinate close-range collaborative activities in which discerning where the other was looking and perhaps what she was planning, benefited both participants.

If we are gathering berries to share, with one of us pulling down a branch and the other harvesting the fruit, it would be useful — especially before language evolved — for us to coordinate our activities and communicate our plans, using our eyes and perhaps other visually based gestures.

Infant research, too, suggests that coordinating visual attention may have provided the foundation for the evolution of human language. Babies begin to acquire language through joint activities with others, in which both parties are focused on the same object or task. That’s the best time for an infant to learn the word for the object or activity in question.

[ Link ]

So, here's what the public thinks about the origins of life and evolution:

Polling Report: Science and Nature

"Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings? Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process. Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process. OR, God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it." Options rotated
						.
		Evolved, God Guided	Evolved, God Had No Part	Exactly As Bible Describes	Other (vol.)	Unsure
		%	%	%	%	%
	9/8-11/05	31	12	53	1	3

The report lists multiple surveys with many versions of this and related question, and in almost all cases, the majority (or plurality) have the anti-evolutionary view of things. Perhaps I should not be surprised by that?

An op-ed piece in the NYT puts forth the [at least to me] novel notion that human language evolved from mother-infant vocalizations. Those, in the left, who confuse coincidence with congruence will distance themselves from such "sentimentalities", but I find it most interesting!

Our Mother Tongue - NYT
[…] 

Had it not been for the natural selection of enlarged brains, our species would have evolved in a completely different direction. There would be no theory of relativity, no knowledge of "entangled" particles or the human genome; we'd have no great art, music or novels. The excruciating pain and trauma of childbirth are the cost our species has paid for its fancy cognition. And mothers continue to pay the debt.

But that's hardly all prehistoric mothers gave us. They also may well have touched off the evolution of language from the sounds they made to reassure their helpless infants. Baby chimpanzees, after all, can cling to their mothers' hairy chests and contentedly ride along, nursing on demand. But human infants, born immature, lack that dexterity. Before the advent of devices like baby slings, the burden of carrying helpless infants presented a quandary for early mothers as they foraged for food and water.

To accomplish their tasks, ancestral moms would at times have needed to put their babies down, and these interruptions in physical contact would have been as distressing for infants then as they are now. It's very likely that mothers began to use special vocalizations to reassure and quiet their infants. These vocalizations were the origin of the more complicated lullabies and baby talk, sometimes called "motherese," that exist today in nearly all human cultures, but which are totally absent among chimpanzees.

Motherese helps infants learn the rhythms and rules of their native speech through simple vocabulary, extensive repetition, exaggerated vowels, high tones and slow tempo. The road from mothers' reassuring vocalizations to the first speech would have been a long one, but these interactions between prehistoric mothers and infants may very well have paved the way for the emergence of spoken words.

Many linguists think that the first human language was very simple and probably consisted mostly of nouns. But to what would the first words have referred? Kin, foods, predators, tools and weather have all been suggested.

I suspect that one of the first words invented was the equivalent of "Mama." Surely, maturing infants, then as now, would have sought a name for the being who provided their first experiences of warmth, love and reassuring melody.

Next time you meet a reductionist, you can wave this bit of news at him! 

BBC | Spotty mice flout genetics laws

[…] 

The scientists, based at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, used mice which carry one normal version of Kit and one mutant version, giving them spotted tails.

They bred these mice together, producing offspring with a range of Kit gene combinations:

* two mutant genes (these are shown to die shortly after birth)
* one mutant and one normal gene (these should be "spotty" like their parents)
* two normal genes (these should not be spotty).

However, the researchers found that mice born with two normal versions of Kit also had a spotted appendage.

"We were very surprised to see this," said Professor Minoo Rassoulzadegan, a geneticist at the University of Nice and lead author on the paper.

After further investigation, the scientists suggested the transfer of RNA molecules as the cause.

[…]

I was re-reading Philip Kitcher’s comprehensive critique of SocioBiology over the weekend. Titled "Vaulting Ambition" its a serious and detailed work that  works through the arguments and the models. The book has the convincing mathematics inside; I will stop at posting the more simple and emotional appeal in the introduction:

 A Bicycle Is Not Enough

When I was growing up on the South Coast of England in the 1950s, I was haunted by a vision of judgement. […] Those of us whose families were not rich enough to sidestep the state educational system knew that judgement awaited us at age eleven. An examination would separate the academic sheep from the academic goats. We did not want to find ourselves among the goats.

For those who failed the famous British eleven-plus — about fifty percent — judgement was virtually final. Institutions suited to their perceived abilities awaited them. These establishments tried, usually unsuccessfully, to combine sound discipline with the inculcation of mechanical skills. Once committed to them, few of my contemporaries would return to the company of the educational elect.

[…]

[Kitcher goes on to list the now famous statistical fabrications of Sir Cyril Burt in order to advance his perverse theories of intelligence, and derives a caution from such episodes in science on how we evaluate current attempts at quantifying or describing human capabilities. He then ends:]

In the early 1970s, on a visit to England, I went to see a distant cousin. One of her children had just failed the eleven-plus — the old system of final judgement lingered on in the bastion of Conservatism in which I spent much of my youth and in which my cousin lives. Like many children before her, the girl had been promised a new bicycle if she passed the eleven-plus. Like many parents before them, her mother and father had given her the bicycle anyway. The daughter was visibly depressed. She felt that she had failed her parents, and she was not looking forward to the beginning of the school year when she, together with the other "failures", would transfer to a new school. Still, the bicycle was there, a small consolation to her and a token of parents’ continued support. As she wobbled down the sidewalk (the bicycle was somewhat too big for her), pride in her new possession temporarily overcame her sense of inadequacy. As I watched her, I remembered many of the children I had known, and the ways in which the educational system had narrowed their horizons at an early age. Those whose asprations have been mangled and whose lives have been reduced through the application of misguided sicence direct us to lok closely at any theorizing that lead us to further mistakes. Their descendants deserve better. A bicycle is not enough.

On many left lists, in the West in particular, if you talk about the unsustainability of current human population and consumption, you are often labelled a "neo-Malthusean" and further, an enemy of the common folks and an advocate of population control of the worst kind. A popular modern version of this debate is the Simon-Ehrlich wager, between conservative economist Simon and eco-activistic (and in that sense leftist) biologist Ehrlich; the twist being that it is the conservative who argues against any dangers posed by human population. For the record, Ehrlich lost that wager handily.

Ehrlich offered a newer list of criteria that Simon found unnacceptable (see link above). What is interesting about the new list is that Ehrlich finally starts thinking outside the [human] consumption trap (and the rephrasing of the issue as one of the effects of human consumption).

Recently, biologist Eric Pianka, at the University of Texas, has been in hot water over his own doomsday predictions about disease and death among human populations. I do not know the background of this guy and his affiliations. However, the following note from his website is an excellent argument of why human arrogance and ignorance, in this context, are morally repugnant.

What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know
Eric R. Pianka

I have two grandchildren and I want them to inherit a stable Earth. But I fear for them. Humans have overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal nutritional substrate on which bacteria and viruses (microbes) will grow and prosper. We are behaving like bacteria growing on an agar plate, flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another microbe colonizes and takes over, using them as their resource. In addition to our extremely high population density, we are social and mobile, exactly the conditions that favor growth and spread of pathogenic (disease-causing) microbes. I believe it is only a matter of time until microbes once again assert control over our population, since we are unwilling to control it ourselves. This idea has been espoused by ecologists for at least four decades and is nothing new. People just don't want to hear it.

Population crashes caused by disease have happened many times in the past. In the 1330s bubonic plague killed one third of the people in Europe's crowded cities. Smallpox and measles decimated Native Americans when Europeans transported them to the new world. HIV is a relatively new disease wreaking havoc in Africa and Asia. Another population crash is inevitable, but the next one will probably be world-wide.

People think unrealistically because they have lost touch with the natural world. Many people today do not really know where and how our food is produced, and on what our life support systems are based. As we continue paving over natural habitats, many think that we can disrupt and despoil the environment indefinitely. We have already taken half of this planet's land surface. Per capita shares of all the things that really matter (air, food, soil, and water) are continuously falling. Our economic system is based on the principle of a chain letter: growth, growth, and more growth. Such runaway growth only expands a bubble that cannot be sustained in a finite world. We are running out of virtually everything from oil, food and land to clean air and water.

Some politicians, economists, and corporations want us to believe that technology will come to our rescue. But we have a false sense of security if we think that science can respond quickly enough to minimize threats from emerging diseases. Microbes have such short lifecycles that they can evolve exceedingly fast, much faster than we can respond to them. Many bacteria have evolved resistance to most antibiotics, and viruses are resistant to just about anything. Defense always lags behind offense. So far, modern humans have just been lucky. A reactive approach to problems isn't enough, we also need to be proactive and anticipate problems before they become too severe to keep them from getting out of control.Many people believe that Earth and all its resources exist solely for human benefit and consumption, this is anthropocentrism. We should allow the millions of other denizens of this Earth some space to live — they evolved here just as we did and have a right to this planet, too.

I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us. Simply stopping the destruction of rainforests would help mediate some current planetary ills, including the release of previously unknown pathogens. The ancient Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" comes to mind — we are living in one of the most interesting times humans have ever experienced. For example, consider the manifold effects of global warming. We need to make a transition to a sustainable world. If we don't, nature is going to do it for us in ways of her own choosing. By definition, these ways will not be ours and they won't be much fun. Think about that.

While he may be temporarily (or even entirely) wrong on the predictions about disease, he is (IMHO) absolutely right on human crowding out of other species, human faith on technology, and in particular our attitude towards the world and how we "consume" it. It is fashionable today (within the left) to dismiss this sort of thing as "new age" sentimentality or "primitivism". The argument deserves more respect.

Rigour is often confused with toughness and it is only a short leap from there to machismo. We are urged to accept various theories not on the basis of rigourous proof or reasoned argument, but through what is the equivalent of “deal with it”. The left, forever afraid of being seen wussy, is often first to turn on its own with calls for accepting the “reality”, with the palliative that the “is” does not hinder the “ought”. Hence we have the scientistic attacks on postmodern philosophy, the examples from previous entries on neo-darwinism, the claims of dearly departed Larry Summers of Harvard about the innate disabilities of women, and so on down the road that leads to Joe Leiberman’s [what should not be] dismaying abandonment of his party.

In that category lies the repeated need to see human beings as a predatory and carnivorous species. Glorious male hunters showed us the way, and such anomalies as feminism or vegetarianism are sentimental niceties… never mind the inconclusive, or better, nuanced reality presented by actual data. These tough images need sustenance and that comes in the form of macho rhetoric and selective analysis and presentation of the data: when is the last time you saw a lion cub die in a nature show, except of course the rare segment where they are killed by the even more macho alpha male lion, despite the fact that a whole lot of them die within the first six months of life? On the other hand, there is no dearth of footage of fawns getting slaughtered by the predator of the moment? One must not get sentimental about baby Bambi!

Once in a while, a bit of different analysis or data makes it into the mainstream, challenging the macho stories, and I confess it amuses me greatly to be able to forward or quote them:

BBC NEWS | Predators ‘drove human evolution’:
Predators ‘drove human evolution’
By Paul Rincon

The popular view of our ancient ancestors as hunters who conquered all in their way is wrong, researchers have told a major US science conference.

Instead, they argue, early humans were on the menu for predatory beasts.

This may have driven humans to evolve increased levels of co-operation, according to their theory.

Despite humankind’s considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists.

James Rilling, at Emory University in Atlanta, US, has been using brain imaging techniques to investigate the biological mechanisms behind co-operation.

He has imaged the brains of people playing a game under experimental conditions that involved choosing between co-operation and non-co-operation.

From the parts of the brain that were activated during the game, he found that mutual co-operation is rewarding; people reacted negatively when partners did not co-operate.

Dr Rilling also discovered that his subjects seemed to have enhanced memory for those people that did not reciprocate in the experiment.

[…]

My previous entry was about the thoughts of a particular philosophical/biological group (neo-darwinism, darwinian fundamentalism, evo psychology, etc) on religion. Below is an essay on David Wilson, a biologist with a different approach and attitude. Edward Wilson too has suggested that religion (what others have called the religion meme) evolves due to its fitness advantages, but David Wilson’s take is a bit different. I am particularly interested in this article because of the mention of religion and morality, which “leads forward” to my upcoming rant on the Left (in America) and their views and attitudes (In short, they are, to an extent, the opposite of Wilson’s father — who is described by him as a man who was scornful of religion but deeply moral — since they are scornful of morality and unwittingly religious in terms of their faith).

Guardian: ‘I wanted to show how niceness evolves’
David Sloan Wilson says plankton can tell us a lot about God and human morality.
By Andrew Brown
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

[…]

One might say Wilson’s entire scientific career has been an argument with the Selfish Gene. The central story of scientific development in that book goes something like this: once upon a time, biologists believed organisms could evolve to do things for the good of their groups. Then came the revolution, the new, tough-mindedness that showed this could not be true and that everything must be analysed in terms of the ruthless selfishness of its components. As Margaret Thatcher might have said, in the new biology there was no such thing as a species only individual organisms and their families.

[…]

It may seem a simple twisting of words to say behaviour that’s good for the group will be selected by evolution if it’s also good for the individual. But the point is that this behaviour benefits individuals because they are group members. Behaviour can only be analysed and predicted by treating group selection as something that happens. “The idea that selfish gene theory by itself constitutes an argument against group selection is a common misunderstanding and the concept of selfish genes loses much of its force when revealed as merely newspeak for ‘any gene that evolves, including by group selection’. Genes that evolve by group selection are as compatible with selfish gene theory as genes that evolve at any other level of selection.”

[…]

The important thing about religion, he thinks, is that it encourages collective action. The emotions that religions build on, and the conduct they encourage, tend to bind groups and build cooperation. The worship of a common god, he believes, is really the worship of a common good, to whom everyone in the tribe or religion must defer.

[…]

In the same way, says Wilson, “spirituality, this intense searching for God, reliably leads to community. The monastic and ascetic tradition actually ends up being involved in communitarian activities. This is true across all religions. When you look at it closely, these people sitting in caves in the Tibetan mountains and the fabled ascetics of early Christianity, the people sitting on poles in the desert and so on, are plugged into a wider lay network.

[…]

His view of religion is in almost every respect the opposite of the Dawkins view that religion is a matter of false and perhaps malevolent beliefs. That they are false is almost the least important thing about them compared to the effect they have on our behaviour. If they promote advantageous behaviour, or group cohesion, religious beliefs will survive. The one thing religions take seriously is not their theories of creation. Or even of the after-life - many religions don’t involve any coherent belief in heaven. It is their rules about how believers must treat one another, and outsiders. If these are got right, the religion will flourish, even if its doctrines are absurd.

[…]

There is a certain vulnerability, of over-reaching, in acts of triumphalism that robs the agent of his well-deserved preening (we saw some of that in the fall of Bush (at least in popularity) in short order after proclamations of a ‘mandate’). There was a time when Selfish Gene theorists and other reductionists were somewhat of establishment outsiders and also not favourable with the public. EP and Sociobiology proponents fought hard to reach their current Amazon.com sales rank (Edward Wilson had to endure water being poured on him by indignant students, for instance), and with their most outspoken critic now safely in his grave, it is only natural and deserving that they enjoy the limelight to knock off a few mighty tomes of overarching wisdom.

But as the Eastwood character said in ‘Unforgiven’, it does seem to be not about deserving, at least over at the NYT Book Review, where old Dennett, all around AI and Neo-Darwinism groupie, gets a spanking in a review of his own take on Religion (following Edward Wilson’s attempt at it a few years ago). Read on (and click through) for an entertaining review that almost redeems TNR.

But before I let you proceed to the review, i have to say that I am quite tickled by the reviewer’s identification of scientism and materialism as the force behind some of these lines of thought. I am tickled because I have sitting in the drafts (for this blog) a festering rant about the American Left that ties into some of this stuff. It is particularly funny, to me, that Wieseltier (the reviewer) says:

Dennett’s book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.

Funny because I was thinking of some parts of the left and their own omniscient white man with a long beard… ;-). But that is another blog post…

The God Genome

‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,’ by Daniel C. Dennett
Review by LEON WIESELTIER
Published: February 19, 2006

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book. “Breaking the Spell” is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing. The excited materialism of American society — I refer not to the American creed of shopping, according to which a person’s qualities may be known by a person’s brands, but more ominously to the adoption by American culture of biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence — abounds in Dennett’s usefully uninhibited pages. And Dennett’s book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.

In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it. “By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse,” he declares, “and yet I persist.” Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts! He wonders whether religious people “will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.” If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any opposition to his scientistic deflation of religion he triumphantly dismisses as “protectionism.” But people who share Dennett’s view of the world he calls “brights.” Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that “brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest”? Dennett’s own “sacred values” are “democracy, justice, life, love and truth.” This rigs things nicely. If you refuse his “impeccably hardheaded and rational ontology,” then your sacred values must be tyranny, injustice, death, hatred and falsehood. Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name; and in a new era of American obscurantism, this is not helpful.

[…]

What’s up with the dudes with big white beards, anyway?