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 ]

This from The Observer:

Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer | The Observer

The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.

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Having examined the effects of economic development and income inequality on health, he was ’surprised’ to find that IQ had a much more important impact, he said. ‘Poverty, lack of sanitation, clean water, education and healthcare do not increase health and longevity, and nor does economic development.’

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Assuming for a second that his data are correct, and that IQ measures something significant (what we generally understand by the term “intelligence”), the above seems to suffer from that old precaution about correlation and causality. There is no reason provided (at least stated in the article — I guess I have to hold down the gag reflex and go read the full paper) to justify the use of the results of a particular test (IQ) as a cause, rather than as an effect.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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