Michael's Picks

by Michael De Dora

* The United States loses over $71 billion per year in tax exemptions for religious groups, according to a new article in Free Inquiry magazine.

* The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is investigating the Girl Scouts because it’s not sure the group is Catholic enough. No, really.

* Taxpayer-funded crisis pregnancy centers are using religion to oppose abortion, according to the American Independent.

* Marriage has always been a relationship between one man and one woman, you say? Then apparently you haven’t read the Bible.

* T.M. Luhrmann discusses how liberals and Democrats might be able to reach out to the evangelical community this election.

* Surprise! A House Republican has introduced a bill that would protect Planned Parenthood funding.

* Who – if anyone – is to blame when robots make mistakes? RedOrbit reports.

* For the third year in a row, polling shows that a narrow majority of Americans consider gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable.

Greg's Picks

by Greg Linster

* John Horgan hopes to change Sam Harris’ mind about free will.

* Laurie Santos does fascinating work in the realm of monkey economics.

* New studies confirm that red meat is bad for you and chocolate is good for you. Not so fast says Gary Taubes.

* Back in April 2000, Wired published a thought provoking piece by Bill Joy called “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”

* In this entertaining TED talk, Joshua Foer talks about Feats of Memory Anyone Can Do.

In defense of criticism (and skepticism)

by Massimo Pigliucci

My friend Benny (who produces the Rationally Speaking podcast) really hates the word “skepticism.” He understands and appreciates its meaning and long intellectual pedigree (heck, we even did a show on that!), but he also thinks — based on anecdotal evidence — that too many people apply a negative connotation to the term, often confusing it with cynicism. (And notice, to make things even more confusing, that neither modern term has the philosophical connotations that characterized the ancient skeptics and the ancient cynics!). On the contrary, I really like the word, and persist in using it in the positive sense adopted by David Hume (and, later, Carl Sagan): skepticism is a critical stance, especially toward notions that are either poorly supported by evidence or based on poor reasoning. As Hume famously put it, “A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence” (from which Carl Sagan’s famous “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”).

Now, why on earth would skeptics be associated with (the modern sense of) cynicism, an entirely negative attitude typical of people who take delight in criticism for the sake of criticism, negativity for the sake of negativity? I blame — at least in part — Francis Bacon. Let me explain.

Bacon was one of the earliest philosophers of science, and his main contribution was a book called The New Organon, in purposeful and daring contrast with Aristotle’s Organon. The latter is a collection of the ancient Greek’s works on logic, and essentially set down the parameters for science — such as it was — all the way to the onset of the scientific revolution in the 16th century. Bacon, however, would have none of Aristotle’s insistence on the superiority of deductive logic (which is, among other things, the basis of all mathematics). New knowledge is the result of reduction (explaining a complex phenomenon in terms of a simpler one) and induction (generalization from known cases). Bacon thought of his inductive method as having two components, which he called the pars destruens (the negative part) and the pars construens (the positive one). The first was concerned with eliminating — as far as possible — error, the second with the business of actually acquiring new knowledge.

It’s a nice idea, as long as one understands that the two partes are logically distinct and need not always come as a package (they did in Bacon’s treatise). Think of it in terms of the concept of division of cognitive labor in science. This is an idea famously discussed by Philip Kitcher, who explored the relevance of the social structure of science to its progress, arguing that such structure — once properly understood — can be improved upon to further the scientific enterprise. The basic idea, however, is familiar enough, even in everyday life: some people are good at X, others at Y, and we don’t ask everyone to be good at both, especially if X and Y are very different kinds of activities.

The same goes, I think, for Bacon’s partes destruens and construens: he may have pulled both off in the New Organon, but the more human knowledge progresses, the more it requires specialization. We have physicists and biologists, geologists and astronomers. Not only that: we have theoretical physicists and experimental ones, and even those are far too broad categories in the modern academy (e.g., theoretical atmospheric physics requires approaches that are very different from those deployed in, say, theoretical quantum mechanics). Why not, then, happily acknowledge that some people are better at constructing new knowledge (theoretical or empirical) and others at finding problems with what we think we know, or with how we currently proceed in attempting to know (Bacon’s correction of “errors”)? Indeed, this division of cognitive labor may even reflect different people’s temperaments, just like personal preference and style may lead one to pick a particular musical instrument rather than another one when playing in an orchestra (or to become a theoretical or experimental physicist, as the case may be).

What does any of the above have to do with the perception problem from which skepticism (allegedly) suffers? Well, skeptics (and, hum, philosophers!) are in the criticism business, and nobody likes to be criticized (including skeptics and philosophers). But we may cut some slack to critics if they also propose ways forward, constructive solutions to the problems they identify. This, I think, is a mistake. Criticism is valuable per se, as a way to engage our notions, show where they may go wrong, and help (other) people see ways forward. Criticism — pace Bacon — is inherently constructive, even when negative, because it allows us to make progress by identifying our errors and their causes. And it can be highly entertaining: just read a good (negative) movie, book or art review, or perhaps watch an episode of the (now ended) Bullshit! series.

This under-appreciated role of criticism, incidentally, may also be responsible (in part, i.e. egos and turf wars aside) for the continuing diatribes between philosophers and physicists, where too often the latter do not appreciate that the role of philosophy is a critical one, with the discipline making progress by eliminating mistaken notions rather than by discovering new facts (we’ve got science for the latter task, and it’s very good at it!).

So, my dear Benny and other fellow skeptics, let’s reclaim the term skepticism as one that encapsulates a fundamental attitude that all human beings interested in knowledge and truth should embrace: the idea that mistakes can be found and eliminated. It’s not at all a dirty job, and we are able and ready to do it.

Peas and quiet

edgecastcdn.net

by Leonard Finkleman

Dateline: 1968. Cleve Backster, inventor of the polygraph, attaches lie detectors to some house plants and proceeds to yell at them. When his polygraphs register responses from the plants, Backster publishes a paper in the International Journal of Parapsychology (second only to “Weekly World News” in its academic rigor, I’d imagine) declaring that plants have perceptions and feelings. Thus do I have to waste at least fifteen minutes each semester explaining to students why plants don’t factor into utilitarian calculations. Thanks, Cleve.

Forty-four years later, the New York Times publishes an essay by philosopher Michael Marder in its “Stone” opinion column wherein the author insinuates that peas can ‘talk.’ Wonderful: there goes another fifteen minutes out of my virtue ethics lecture (1).

In the decade following its publication, Backster’s research into plant “primary perception” was very thoroughly (if not shockingly) debunked. Nevertheless, Marder helps himself to some suspiciously similar ideas towards the end of arguing against a clear moral distinction between eating plants and eating animals (2). The impetus for his argument is a recent finding (by Falik et al.) indicating that pea plants share stress-induced chemical signals through their root systems, thus triggering defensive responses in unstressed plants. Also, didn’t you see that adorable little peas-in-a-pod doll in Toy Story 3? Put down that can of pea soup, you monster.

I will admit that last part was a rhetorical flourish (Marder’s essay never mentions Toy Story 3, the latter of which has a more plausible narrative). Rhetoric is a dangerous tool when used towards ill effect, either intentionally or otherwise. It’s only fair, then, that we should look at some of the rhetoric at work in this latest round of pea-hugging.

Summarizing the original research, Marder describes plants as capable of “processing, remembering, and sharing information,” able to “draw on their ‘memories’” and engage in “basic learning.” Going back to the journal article to which he refers, we find that peas “eavesdrop” on their neighbors “in ways that have traditionally been attributed to higher organisms” (3). Can anyone be blamed for concluding, as Marder does, that “plants are more complex organisms than previously thought” in ways reminiscent of Backster’s “primary perception” research?

Honestly: no. That plants employ complex signaling systems and information storage mechanisms goes against many of our intuitions regarding the distinction between kingdoms Plantae and Animalia, from which derives Aristotle’s claim that animal telos includes sense perception where plant telos does not. This research is surprising in that respect, so it stands to reason that our intuitions should be adjusted in light of this surprising data.

Of course, the same idea was “unexpected” in 2008, when scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that walnut trees emit chemical signals that induce stress responses in their neighbors. It was also unexpected in 1990, when E. E. Farmer and C. A. Ryan found that tomato vines engage in “interplant communication.” It was probably also unexpected in 1935, when it was found that the concurrent ripening of all the fruit in a basket may be induced by a single fruit’s secretion of the gaseous aging hormone ethylene. This of course begs the question of why our intuitions need to be adjusted now, but didn’t eight decades ago.

As we say in this ‘biz, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens (4). If chemical signaling in plants warrants re-evaluation of our moral attitudes towards plants, then such a re-evaluation would have been appropriate in 1935. But it wasn’t appropriate in 1935, so chemical signaling shouldn’t warrant any change in ethical attitudes now. Adam Kolber summarizes what I take to be the appropriate response to Marder’s moral argument here.

Still, the language used in Marder’s essay — to say nothing of the research paper that inspired it — is awfully suggestive, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to eat something capable of basic learning and memory, would you? But that’s the real problem: plants aren’t really capable of any of those things. Only a crackpot (or an editor of the International Journal of Parapsychology, it seems) would suggest that peas actually talk or learn or remember in the sense that a human, or even a puppy, talks and learns and remembers (and, to be fair, Marder seems to admit as much). Chemical signaling in plants may resemble those activities in some important ways, and so we can use the terms “talk” and “remember” and “learn” to draw analogies with familiar concepts. The danger in drawing such analogies, and the fallacy in Marder’s moral argument, lies in overextending those analogies.

Every analogy has a breaking point. Life is like a box of chocolates in that it’s far more expensive for some people when Valentine’s Day rolls around; however, life is unlikely to have originated in Kansas City, Missouri. Similarly, animal communication and plant chemical signaling have in common the basic properties of signaling systems; however, those similarities only extend so far, and necessarily end where the animal nervous system comes into play.

Plants don’t have nerve cells, much less centralized clusters of those cells. Consequently, plants “talk” to each other only in the same strained way that we might claim that water communicates its deep-seated hatred to oil by keeping away from it. These are very basic chains of cause and effect determined entirely by fundamental physical properties of the signaler and the receiver. Once we throw a central nervous system in between the signaler and the receiver, things become a hell of a lot more complicated: we then have to consider questions of plasticity and cognition (5). And this is just for animals generally; we haven’t yet said anything about how fundamentally different animal cognition may be from human cognition. Any analogy between plant and animal communication must be very limited indeed.

I don’t mean to suggest that Marder or the authors of the original research paper are being disingenuous. We’re dealing with some high-falutin’ concepts here, and we only have so many words to work with. Referring to chemical signaling between pea root systems as “talking” may be strictly incorrect, but the reference does convey an essential property of the signaling system in a quick, close-enough sense. There’s certainly philosophical precedent for using everyday terms to refer to less-familiar scientific concepts.

But we have to be careful: science isn’t in the business of confirming our intuitions, and so our everyday terms may not be adequate to capture the weird, wild, wondrous things that science finds. It’s fascinating that peas can send warning signals to one another, but that doesn’t mean that those peas are talking, even if “talk” is the term that most easily describes what the peas are doing (6). Once we lose track of our linguistic limits, we fall prey to the dangers of rhetoric.

So don’t worry about peas. They don’t have any good feelings for you, but they’re certainly not talking about you behind your back, either.
____

(1) In developing his virtue theory, Aristotle employs the method of logical division in order to determine the unique human function. Rationality separates humans from other animals, but even before that cognitive activity must separate animals from other living things, i.e., plants. Of all the shocks that I’ve received in my years of teaching, one of the greatest is my students’ consistent opposition to that latter claim. Hell, the Mythbusters even covered it!

(2) The point of this essay isn’t to argue for or against any particular dietary choice, but I will disclose my own preferences: I’ve recently adopted vegetarianism, much to the dismay of my hamburger-loving tastebuds. Nevertheless, I don’t see anything wrong with eating meat per se; instead, the problems I see are with the production and distribution of most meat and the epistemic complications that arise from finding the meat that is ethically produced and distributed. Since I’m not willing to raise and slaughter my own livestock, vegetarianism seems the safest way to sleep soundly at night.

(3) I live according to a number of principles, including the following: always cock your eyebrow at a modern biologist who uses the phrase “higher organisms.” You’re in trouble as a biologist if both Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins would write dismissive essays about your ideas.

(4) Some people envision philosophers as socially awkward nerds. Can you believe it?

(5) You might argue that even a central nervous system is entirely determined by fundamental physical properties, but our illustrious host might have some words for you if you do.

(6) Obligatory dinosaur reference: it’s awesome, in a “grade-school-level-hilarious” kind of way, that sauropod flatulence may have contributed to an increase in global temperatures 150 million years ago, but that increase in global temperatures isn’t the same thing as the climate change phenomena we face today.

Who wants to maintain clocks?

4.bp.blogspot.com

by Greg Linster

I recently read Brian Hayes’ wonderful collection of mathematically oriented essays called Group Theory In The Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions. Not surprisingly, the book contained plenty of philosophical musings too. In one of the essays, called “Clock of Ages,” Hayes describes the intricacies of clock building and he provides some interesting historical fodder.

For instance, we learn that in the sixteenth century Conrad Dasypodius, a Swiss mathematician, could have chosen to restore the old Clock of the Three Kings in Strasbourg Cathedral. Dasypodius, however, preferred to build a new clock of his own rather than maintain an old one. Over two centuries later, Jean-Baptiste Schwilgue was asked to repair the clock built by Dasypodius, but he decided to build a new and better clock which would last for 10,000 years.

Did you know that a large-scale project is underway to build another clock that will be able to run with minimal maintenance and interruption for ten millennia? It’s called The 10,000 Year Clock and its construction is sponsored by The Long Now Foundation. The 10,000 Year Clock is, however, being built for more than just its precision and durability. If the creators’ intentions are realized, then the clock will serve as a symbol to encourage long-term thinking about the needs and claims of future generations. Of course, if all goes to plan, our future descendants will be left to maintain it too. The interesting question is: will they want to?

If history is any indicator, then I think you know the answer. As Hayes puts it: “The fact is, winding and dusting and fixing somebody else’s old clock is boring. Building a brand-new clock of your own is much more fun, especially if you can pretend that it’s going to inspire awe and wonder for the ages to come. So why not have the fun now and let the future generations do the boring bit.” I think Hayes is right, it seems humans are, by nature, builders and not maintainers.

Projects like The 10,000 Year Clock are often undertaken with the noblest of environmental intentions, but the old proverb is relevant here: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. What I find troubling, then, is that much of the environmental do-goodery in the world may actually be making things worse. It’s often nothing more than a form of conspicuous consumption, which is a term coined by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. When it pertains specifically to “green” purchases, I like to call it being conspicuously environmental. Let’s use cars as an example. Obviously it depends on how the calculations are processed, but in many instances keeping and maintaining an old clunker is more environmentally friendly than is buying a new hybrid. I can’t help but think that the same must be true of building new clocks.

In his book, The Conundrum, David Owen writes: “How appealing would ‘green’ seem if it meant less innovation and fewer cool gadgets — not more?” Not very, although I suppose that was meant to be a rhetorical question. I enjoy cool gadgets as much as the next person, but it’s delusional to believe that conspicuous consumption is somehow a gift to the environment.

Using insights from evolutionary psychology and signaling theory, I think there is also another issue at play here. Buying conspicuously environmental goods, like a Prius, sends a signal to others that one cares about the environment. But if it’s truly the environment (and not signaling) that one is worried about, then surely less consumption must be better than more. The homeless person ironically has a lesser environmental impact than your average yuppie, yet he is rarely recognized as an environmental hero. Using this logic I can’t help but conclude that killing yourself might just be the most environmentally friendly act of all time (if it wasn’t blatantly obvious, this is a joke). The lesson here is that we shouldn’t confuse smug signaling with actually helping.

The concern about conspicuous consumption, while entertaining, misses the larger epistemological issue though. If our climate does change significantly (and even if it changes from anthropomorphic causes), how do we know that this is a bad thing? To assert that the climate is changing because of humans, and that this is therefore bad, is simply begging the question.

According to many scientists, it’s a fact that the earth’s climate is changing from human influences. Let me bring your attention to another important fact though, i.e., the earth’s climate has also varied wildly historically, without human influence. So we shouldn’t worry about climate change per se, but about the sort of climate change that potentially poses an incredibly dangerous threat to our (and the planet's) wellbeing.

It’s also worth noting that human evolution has not magically stagnated. In their book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, University of Utah anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue that human evolution “is now happening about 100 times faster than its long-term average over the six million years of our existence.” I’m not suggesting that we purposefully destroy our environment, but isn’t it possible that future generations of humans (or even trans-humans) will evolve and adapt to an earth with a changed climate? If we claim to know what kind of environment future generations want, I think we are guilty of a particularly egregious form of epistemic hubris.  Let’s let them build their own clocks.

Rationally Speaking podcast: Q&A With Massimo and Julia

Massimo and Julia answer listeners' questions.

In this installment the topics include: how much do works of fiction affect people's rationality, Bayesian vs. frequentist statistics, what is evidence, how much blame do people deserve when their actions increase the chance of them being targeted, time travel, and whether a philosophically examined life is a better life.

Also, all about rationality in the movies, from Dr. Who to Scooby-Doo.

Michael’s Picks

by Michael De Dora

* Are there circumstances under which it is immoral to have children? If so, why? Those are the questions Elizabeth Kolbert takes up in a wonderful new essay in the New Yorker titled “The Case Against Kids.”

* In his review of Harvard University philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Weekly Standard columnist Jonathan Last says we need to accept that economic systems impose moral values.

* On a similar note, Mike Tudoreanu, writing in The Daily Collegian at the University of Massachusetts, says the idea that government should be morally neutral is an old myth. 

* In case you hadn’t heard, Facts finally kicked the bucket last month “after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet.” Well, they had a good run. 

* The Vatican is reprimanding American nuns “for focusing [their] work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping silent on abortion and same-sex marriage.” 

* The New York Times recently announced an essay writing contest in which readers were invited to make the strongest possible ethical case for eating animals. The contest is now over, and the panel of judges — Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Andrew Light, Michael Pollan, and Peter Singer — has released what it thought were the best six entries.

* TED has posted a new talk by Emory University primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal on his work with primates and the evolutionary origins of morality. 

* And in a bit of shameless self-promotion, I recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the launch of my blog, The Moral Perspective!

Understanding Nuclear Power, Part 2: Radiation and Health

theintelhub.com

by Ian Pollock

[Part I of this series appeared here]

Today, we discuss types of radiation and their health effects. If you’re learning something, it’s usually a good idea to take several passes at the knowledge. On the first pass (engineers would prefer ‘noughth’), you get the 5 second summary: “fire is hot;” “life forms have a common ancestor;” “the brake pedal is on the left.” Then you can go back and fill in the gaps in your knowledge on second, third, etc. passes, with a popular, basic summary, followed perhaps by a textbook or a course.

If we’re talking about the health effects of ionizing radiation, the first-pass lesson is “radiation is dangerous — minimize exposure.” Well, that’s better than nothing. But if we take one more pass, we might be able to get to a more useful understanding. What kinds are most dangerous? How much is too much? How can we minimize exposure?

By learning a bit more, we can avoid both underreaction (due to unrecognized dangers) and overreaction (due to inappropriate fear). By analogy, imagine if nobody had any clue that gasoline was flammable, but we all ran screaming away from votive candles!

It’s hard to present this material in a nice logical order, because there are many interdependencies. So I’ll just start somewhere.

Types of ionizing radiation

To call radiation “ionizing” is to say that it has the capacity to create ions in materials it comes in contact with, typically by (directly or indirectly) ripping electrons off of atoms. There are three commonly encountered types of ionizing radiation, referred to as α (alpha), β (beta) and γ (gamma).

Alpha radiation occurs when an unstable nucleus decays and ejects a high-energy alpha particle. It turns out that alpha particles are simply Helium nuclei: 2 protons and 2 neutrons. Accordingly, when an element undergoes an alpha decay, the result is an element with two less protons and two less neutrons: for example, Plutonium-239 alpha-decays to Uranium-235.

Because it has a charge of +2, the alpha particle is highly ionizing and therefore quite dangerous. However, alphas have a very short range in air (a few tens of millimeters) and are very easily blocked by, for example, a single piece of paper, or the layer of dead skin covering a person’s epidermis. Accordingly, external exposure to alpha particles is relatively safe — you could pick up a large sample of an alpha source such as plutonium with your bare hands and expect no ill effects. However, internal exposure via ingestion or inhalation of alpha-emitters is very dangerous, since inside our body there is no alpha-stopping barrier to protect our cells. You may recall the murder by poisoning of former KGB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko in London; he was killed by acute radiation sickness from ingestion of Polonium-210, a strong alpha emitter (see below for more on radiation sickness).

Beta decay comes in two varieties: β- and β+. These represent the ejection from the nucleus of an electron or positron (charge -1 or +1), respectively. β- decay turns a neutron into a proton; the electron must be ejected to maintain conservation of charge. Therefore, a β- decay leaves the atomic mass number unchanged, but moves the atom forward in the periodic table: for example, Thorium-231 undergoes a β- decay to Protactinium-231. For β+ decay, just the reverse is true.

Beta particles also ionize, though not as strongly as alphas. However, they do penetrate farther, and therefore represent a more serious health risk for external exposure. Betas have a typical range in air of 5-10 meters (depending on their energy) and can generally be blocked by, for example, a sheet of foil. Accordingly, they are not too difficult to shield oneself against externally, provided one is aware that they are present. A good example of a beta-emitter is Potassium-40, the largest source of natural radiation in human and animal bodies. Because Potassium-40 gives us an internal exposure, it is pretty much impossible to shield ourselves against it.

Gamma radiation is the most penetrating type of ionizing radiation, and represents high-energy photons — in other words, high-energy light. Gamma decays can be thought of as secondary decays, for when an alpha or beta decay occurs, the daughter nucleus is often left in an excited state of excess energy. This energy can be released by emission of a high-energy photon — a gamma.

These photons easily penetrate the entire human body, and can only be effectively stopped by a significant barrier, such as a thick block of lead (exactly how thick depends on their energy). Gammas occur naturally in cosmic rays, but they also show up in another guise — as X-rays. The differing terminology reflects their sources more than any qualitative difference: X-rays are from accelerating electrons, while gamma rays are from nuclear decay. Given the lack of meaningful distinction, I will refer to photons from both sources as gammas.

A good example of a gamma source is the medical isotope Caesium-137. Upon decaying to Barium-137, the nucleus is in an excited state, and releases two gamma rays, which ionize the surrounding tissue. Because cancer cells are more vulnerable to ionization than healthy cells, gamma radiation from decaying Caesium-137 is used for radiation therapy.

Alpha, beta and gamma radiation are the three most important and common types of ionizing radiation, and they all have one characteristic in common that is worth mentioning: they do not cause further radioactivity in the materials that they affect. This fairly elementary point is worth bearing in mind when, for example, you see controversy surrounding the use of irradiated produce. The radiation is used to kill bacteria, but it definitely will not cause your head of lettuce to become radioactive, any more than shooting somebody will cause them to emit bullets. However, it may induce subtle chemical changes that some groups claim (without much evidence) could be harmful.

The exception to this rule is neutron radiation, which can indeed transmute one element into another (usually radioactive) one in a process known as neutron activation. However, neutron radiation is very rare outside nuclear reactor cores. Typically, the only people who need be concerned with the health effects of neutron radiation are workers in nuclear plants — and then only when they are exposed to a chain reaction in progress. Finally, proton decays occur very rarely, in some natural elements, but are essentially irrelevant to discussions of nuclear safety.

Nuclear fallout

Fallout refers to the release into the environment, not of radiation per se, but of radioactive sources. Unlike alpha, beta and gamma radiation, fallout does indeed contaminate affected materials with radioactive elements. Fallout may be from two main sources: nuclear weapons detonations (not the topic of these posts), and certain types of nuclear accidents, such as those at Chernobyl and Fukushima Dai-ichi.

A future post will look at what happens in a nuclear reactor more closely, but for the sake of discussing fallout we will simply note that when an atom of fissile material such as Uranium-235 breaks up in a fission reaction, the main products are (a) lots of heat you can use to make steam to turn a turbine, and (b) two highly radioactive fission fragments (for example, Krypton-89 and Barium-144 — the exact elements vary). You may recall from the first post the important fact that any randomly chosen combination of protons and neutrons is almost certainly radioactive. This applies to fission fragments, which are, in effect, selected quasi-randomly from the space of nuclides. These fragments, almost always highly radioactive, begin themselves to decay, and so do their daughters, until (eventually) the decays reach a relatively stable nuclide. After a reactor has been running for some time, these fission fragments and their offspring are highly concentrated in the fuel rods and the cladding that shields them.

In the event of a reactor fire, as for example at Chernobyl, fission fragments may be released into the atmosphere in smoke, resulting in fallout contamination over a large area downwind of the fire. Two of the most worrisome fallout particles are Iodine-131 and Caesium-137, due mostly to their ease of absorption in the body. Upon entering the body, these nuclides will emit radiation (almost always beta and gamma), causing internal radiation exposure.

Why is ionizing radiation bad?

Ionization disrupts cell chemistry, with three important potential health outcomes:

1. Radiation sickness (essentially large-scale cell death);
2. Cancer (uncontrolled cell growth, due in part to mutation);
3. Genetic abnormalities (in descendants, due in part to mutation).

Radiation sickness is associated with a single, large exposure to radiation in a short period, and its symptoms develop on a timescale of hours to months. In mild cases (doses of about 0.5-1.5 sieverts), it leads to symptoms such as nausea and depressed white blood cell count (leukopenia). More severe exposures (2-4 sieverts) result in neurological problems and some fatalities (usually due to destruction of bone marrow), and high doses (of 8 sieverts or greater) are uniformly fatal. In cases of external exposure to radiation, severe skin damage and hair loss can result.

Broadly speaking, we can say that radiation sickness is caused by large-scale cell death, and that the severity of symptoms is a function of the body’s natural ability to cope with this cell death in a timely way. Doses below about 0.4 sieverts typically lead to no symptoms because the body is able to repair that quantity of damage without too much trouble, provided a person is otherwise healthy. However, higher doses increasingly overwhelm the body’s ability to repair all the damage — hence, the onset of more severe symptoms and death.

Radiation sickness is often referred to as a deterministic effect, as opposed to a stochastic effect (in the case of cancer and genetic abnormalities). This is because the dose a person receives determines the severity of their symptoms, not its probability. If you gave 100 people a one-time radiation dose of 2 sieverts (more on what a sievert is below), you’d pretty reliably get 100 cases of severe radiation sickness.

By contrast, cancer and genetic abnormality risk is referred to as stochastic, because an increased dose of radiation (say, an extra millisievert per year) increases the probability that a cancer will be contracted or a mutation passed on — there is no guarantee of any effect at all.

Because the vast majority of cancers are caused by effects other than manmade ionizing radiation, and because there is no specific signature of radiation-induced cancers as opposed to all other cancers, it is usually extremely difficult if not impossible to say that a given dose caused a given cancer. The increased cancer risk due to radiation is an extremely weak signal in the data (exceptions sometimes occur; for example, thyroid cancer is characteristic of exposure to Iodine-131, and in those cases the statistical signal is much stronger). The exact relationship between doses and cancer risk is highly controversial, and is discussed below.

Dosimetry

There are a lot of units that are used to talk about radiation, or have been used historically, but since our concern is primarily with radiation’s effect on human tissue, the most important of these is is the unit of equivalent dose, the sievert (Sv). One typically talks in terms of microsieverts (μSv) or millionths of a sievert, and millisieverts (mSv) or one thousandth of a sievert (older sources use the unit rem, where 1 Sv = 100 rem).

It is extremely helpful to get a feel for the range of doses resulting from various activities, foods, diagnostic procedures, living locations and lifestyles — and for their relation to (a) radiation sickness, and (b) cancer risk. For that purpose, I recommend perusing xkcd’s wonderful infographic, which visually communicates things much better than I can do verbally.*

Note a few important reference points (mostly taken from the UNSCEAR, via Bodansky, pg. 74):

• The vast majority of the cumulative dose (hence, cancer-generating dose) a person receives over a given year is from natural sources, about 2.4 mSv/year. This is mostly from Radon-222 gas, a decay product of natural Uranium and Thorium that is in the air we breathe.**
• The runner-up for cumulative dose is medical diagnostics, which averages out to about 400 μSv/year per person.
• The extra dose for the average citizen from the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear accidents is — by comparison — miniscule: 2-4 μSv/year, or something like one part in 1000 of the total yearly dose.
• Radiation sickness does not generally occur below a threshold of around 500 mSv, but this is already a very large dose as compared with levels that might be received by the general public, even in the event of a fallout situation like at Chernobyl or Fukushima. Accordingly, radiation sickness is a concern for nuclear workers, emergency responders etc., but not typically for the general public, even in the vicinity of a nuclear accident.
• The lowest dose linked to detectably increased cancer risk is 100-200 mSv/year — also a relatively high dose.

Linearity

Because the effects of large, sudden doses are well-understood, there is little controversy surrounding radiation sickness. However, the link between radiation doses and cancer is more obscure and controversial.

What we know with some certainty is that doses above 100 mSv are clearly linked to increased cancer risk, and that the higher the dose climbs above 100 mSv, the greater the risk. Epidemiological studies (for example, of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) have led to differing conclusions, even when performed based on the same data. However, typical risk coefficients obtained from such studies are in the range of 0.05 to 0.10 per Sv — meaning, very roughly, an extra 5-10% chance of fatal cancer from each sievert of radiation absorbed.

The difficulty is that these risk coefficients are based on data from the very high doses typical of a nuclear bomb or severe nuclear accident. This is understandable, because in such cases, cancer risk becomes a stronger statistical signal. However, there is no clear data on what the risk coefficient might be at much lower doses, despite many inconclusive low-dose studies. Sure, 100 mSv increases your risk of fatal cancer by about 1%, but does 1 mSv increase it by 0.01%, as would be the case if the effect were linear (risk = coefficient x dose), and had no threshold (any dose, no matter how small, increases your risk)?

In practice, what has happened is that public health officials have assumed the linear no-threshold (LNT) model as true, largely because it is a conservative assumption on which to base policy. However, it is highly contested, with some suggesting a threshold relation (no bad effects below, say, 50 mSv), and others proposing beneficial effects at low doses (hormesis). I personally think the LNT model is pretty plausible (it fits with what I know about mutations — the Russian-roulette-with-lots-of-chambers model), but it is important to understand that it is just a working assumption. This is unfortunate, because our estimates of the number of people killed by cancers from, say, Chernobyl fallout, has to have truly massive error bars — somewhere between a few tens (thyroid cancer made these statistically detectable) to several thousand. However, because I think the LNT model is probably approximately right, and because, for us as well, it serves as a conservative assumption, let us provisionally adopt it.

The linear-no-threshold assumption — that even very low doses increase cancer risk — generates some ‘paradoxes’ of utilitarian public policy. These are centered on the extreme disconnect between a population effect (like 1000 excess cancer deaths) that looks significant, versus a personal risk (like an extra 0.001% chance of getting a fatal cancer) that looks negligible. The population effect is usually calculated as a collective dose, in units of person-Sv. For example, if 20 people receive 0.1 Sv each, that’s a collective dose of 2 person-Sv.

Suppose some disaster is about to befall a medium-sized city, which will cause a uniform, one-time dose of 100 person-Sv spread over all 1.2 million citizens, or 80 μSv each (of course, it’s never quite this simple, but work with me). Should public officials temporarily evacuate the city?

Well, according to the linear no-threshold model, (100 person-Sv) x (0.10 excess fatal cancer risk/person-Sv) = ~10 excess cancer deaths. Those are real people who didn’t deserve to die, and assuming the evacuation doesn’t result in any deaths itself, they could be prevented by evacuating the city. A naive public official might do so.

On the other hand, if I analyze it from my perspective as a single citizen, 80 μSv corresponds roughly to the extra dose from a couple of high-altitude airline flights, and comes out to about a 0.0008% excess risk of fatal cancer, assuming LNT. Considering those odds, I would definitely choose to stay (assuming I knew the estimated dose to be accurate).

Now, consider further that certain areas have higher background radiation — Colorado being the textbook example. The extra dose from living in Colorado is about 400 μSv/year, due mostly to natural Uranium deposits. With a population of about 5 million, that’s around 2000 person-Sv/year, or (by LNT) an expected ~200 excess cancer deaths per year! (In fact, the cancer rate in Colorado is lower than the US national average — I’m not sure why. Lifestyle?)

Obviously, nobody is proposing evacuating Colorado. Barely anybody has even heard that Colorado has a higher background level. And yet Three Mile Island, the most infamous of North American nuclear accidents, is estimated by the relevant authorities to have released a collective dose of around 20 person-Sv, total.*** We will talk more about TMI in a later post on nuclear accidents.

It is not my purpose to trivialize these issues. All of these numbers represent real (although mostly unidentifiable) people who (probably) died instead of living.****

However, when considering the health effects of radiation from the nuclear industry, you need to be damned sure you’re at least being internally consistent (perhaps by doing some rough math), and remember the ugly but important fact that everything kills people. Driving kills people. Molasses kills people. Owning kittens kills people. Nuclear power kills... not many people, to put it mildly.

So if you’re willing to commute 10000 km/year instead of taking the bus, blithely accepting the additional ~0.008% probability of death that that implies, plus the other drawbacks such as pollution, then all other things being equal it just doesn’t make sense to grandstand about the dangers of a garden-variety nuclear plant — unless driving is literally infinitely more fun than having power for your iPad and your grandma’s respirator.

It is especially insane if you do not simultaneously grandstand much more loudly about a lot of other things, like the coal plant that will, with near inevitability, replace the base load your nuclear plant would have generated. Even ignoring the other health effects of coal plants, they release at least as much radioactive material as nuclear plants, and usually more (fly ash contains radioisotopes like Uranium and Thorium).

...Boy, am I ever getting ahead of myself. A future post will discuss death rates per unit energy for the various power generation methods, as one useful figure of merit. But next time, we discuss how nuclear reactors work.

______

* However, the well-known ‘banana equivalent dose’ mentioned here is disputed, and probably a fair bit less than 0.1 μSv. This is a bit of an old chestnut and people promoting nuclear power really ought to stop quoting it.

** Some sources, especially anti-nuclear ones, cite a lower (wrong) figure of 1 mSv/year. This is based on ignoring the effects of Radon-222, apparently in order to make doses due to nuclear power seem larger in comparison.

*** However, this is disputed by anti-nuclear folks; see e.g., Caldicott, p. 65. Several claim that doses were high enough to cause radiation sickness in multiple victims. See Wing, who lists the sources.

**** One major problem that I have with popular works critical of the nuclear industry, particularly Caldicott’s book, is the absence of relevant qualifiers about probability. For example, on pg. 61, Caldicott says of Plutonium that it “is so toxic and carcinogenic that less than one-millionth of a gram if inhaled will cause lung cancer.” Of course, a statistically sophisticated reader will balk at the “will” in that sentence, such an unqualified intimation of certain death, even if they know nothing about Plutonium. But many of Caldicott’s readers likely swallow this whole. In fact, according to a paper from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the actual excess fatal cancer risk resulting from inhaling 1 μg (quite a bit of Plutonium) is about 1.2%.

Useful sources:

* David Bodansky, “Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices and Prospects.” 2004, Springer.

* John R. Lamarsh & Anthony J. Baratta, “Introduction to Nuclear Engineering.” 2001, Prentice Hall.

* Helen Caldicott, “Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.” 2006, Westchester Book Group.

* A useful source on the relation of dose to cancer risk (note: 1 Sv = 100 rem).

* On coal vs nukes.

The war on women

by Michael De Dora

I traveled home to New York City this past Saturday to speak at a rally organized by Unite Women, a widely endorsed outfit working to band together people against the recent attacks on women’s rights — in part by orchestrating marches and rallies across the United States on April 28.**  For all intents and purposes, the event in New York City was a success, as were — at least according to news reports — events in Arizona, Virginia, Connecticut, and Texas.

Unfortunately, I noticed in the lead up to April 28 that many of my secularist and liberal religionist friends who I would otherwise expect to support women’s rights had not embraced the term “war on women,” and thus were avoiding (whether actively or passively) the movement fighting under its banner. I’m not sure why this is or was the case. Perhaps they don’t think there is a war going on, or maybe the language strikes them as inflammatory (it is, a bit) and they don’t like conflict.

Well, I think there is much evidence to support the term “war on women,” and I think it’s an enormous mistake to avoid the conflict. So, I would like to explore a couple of major anti-women legislative actions and ways that people can get involved in the hope that those who have been sitting on the sidelines will decide to engage.

The foremost evidence for the “war on women” is found in recent attacks on reproductive rights by the religious right. In fact, these attacks alone could quality as a war on women. State lawmakers set a record in 2011 for the most anti-reproductive rights provisions enacted in a single year, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Legislators introduced more than 1,100 provisions last year, and enacted 135 of them. To help put this in perspective, 89 such provisions were enacted in 2010, 77 in 2009, and only 34 in 2005. Unfortunately, this pace has not slowed much.

The measures include, but are not limited to:

> “Personhood” proposals that would allow states to completely outlaw abortion, and even emergency contraception. These have had success in states such as Virginia and Oklahoma, and are now being pushed in Nevada.

> “Fetal pain” laws — now in place in Arizona, Georgia, Nebraska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama — that ban abortion after 20 weeks.

> Laws that require physicians to perform ultrasounds, and then show and describe the image of the fetus to the woman asking for an abortion.

> Mandatory waiting periods — some as long as 72 hours — between ultrasounds and abortions, which negatively impact women who are poor, without transportation, and/or live in rural areas. Keep in mind that 87 percent of U.S. counties do not have an abortion clinic.

> New regulations on abortion clinics, regarding things like the amount of space in janitorial rooms, and other requirements, which make it physically or financially impossible for many abortion clinics to remain open.

> Efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides a wide range of critical reproductive health services to women across the U.S.

As I’ve previously written, these attacks are wrong on several fronts. There are no serious philosophical arguments in favor of extending the full range of moral or legal rights to embryos and fetuses. We do not grant such rights to mere “human life,” such as small collections of cells, but to beings that have at least some degree of sentience, self-awareness, or agency. Fertilized human eggs clearly lack all three, as do fetuses until at least 28 weeks, if not later. Moreover, the “fetal pain” argument is moot, as only 1.4 percent of abortions happen after 21 weeks, and women who receive late term abortions usually do so because of health reasons (in which case the interests of the mother, a fully grown human being, win out) or due to difficulty in setting one up (thanks to anti-reproductive rights efforts!).

Furthermore, religious doctrines simply have no place in public policy. They are either untrue or too specifically sectarian for law in a pluralistic society with a secular constitution — or both. In sum, women ought to have access to full reproductive health care, and the privacy to make a decision over her body with her doctor.

Fortunately, many of the aforementioned reproductive rights laws have been struck down in courts as clearly violating the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade, and several later decisions. Yet while attacks on reproductive rights merit serious consideration, lawmakers have taken much broader political action against women that provides even stronger evidence for a “war on women.”

Consider just these five examples:

> A large number of Senate and House Republicans opposed the 2009 Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which provides women greater legal avenues to pursue equal pay lawsuits (which are unfortunately all too necessary).

> Some Republicans have said they will continue to work to repeal the law.

> Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker recently repealed the state’s equal pay act, charging that it could “clog up the legal system.”

> Florida Gov. Rick Scott (who we’ve discussed before) last week vetoed $1.5 million in funding for state rape crisis centers.

> And Senate and House Republicans are currently holding up the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

Equality is among the most basic of moral ideas, so it would seem uncontroversial to say that men and women ought to be treated equally, and that we should act to reverse situations in which this is not the case. As evidenced above, apparently many elected officials do not accept this proposition. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Surprisingly, many of those prosecuting the war on women are women. Consider the statements and positions of just a couple of female lawmakers or political figures across the U.S: Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire), Rep. Michele Bachman (R-Minnesota), South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Yet, whether or not all women agree with these actions, they are negatively affecting all women. First, it is hard, if not impossible, to predict how one’s feelings might change regarding abortion depending on the circumstances, such as threats to the mother’s health or severe birth defects. Even the wife of Rick Santorum, who believes abortion is always wrong, apparently took advantage of her legal access to abortion-type services. As such, I think it helps everyone to keep abortion accessible, and let people decide if they need to partake or not. Or else you get horror stories like this. Second, the attacks on outfits such as Planned Parenthood have an impact not just on reproductive health, but on the overall quality of a woman’s health. Yes, Planned Parenthood performs reproductive services, but they also provide a wide range of health services, such as cancer screenings, regular check ups, contraception coverage, STD-related work, and more. Lastly, we live in a bad economy in which we all have lesser choices, and most women have fewer choices than men merely because of their gender. Their choices become even fewer when they lose control of their reproductive systems and are subjected to unfair economic situations.

All of this is why I think one can reasonably argue that there is an ongoing social phenomenon that could be described as a war on women’s rights. It doesn’t matter whether the war is being waged by the religious right or by economic conservatives, or whether these lawmakers are doing it to distract from their lack of solutions for real political problems. It is happening. The question then becomes: what should we do? I think there are two answers.

Increasing the scope and turning up the volume of the conversation on women’s rights is an important first step, and the Unite Women marches and rallies on April 28 hopefully helped. But it can’t stop there, and there are plenty of other things one can do. Write letters to the editor. Write and comment on blog posts and online news articles. Attend local hearings and public forums and voice your opinions. Post links to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and whatever other social networks you use. Do whatever you can to spread the message.

But even that is not enough. A majority of Americans agree about reproductive rights and gender equality, yet a small group of lawmakers still works to pass opposition measures in Congress and statehouses across the U.S. This is why we need not just social action, but also political action. And voting every couple of years and hoping it all turns out well does not suffice. Sign up for and fill out action alerts as much as possible (here, here, and here) and let lawmakers know that you oppose or support pending legislation. Call, write, or schedule meetings with them to state and explain your views. Write to federal agencies when comment periods are open on federal regulations and rules. Hold them accountable. Tell them that they should either support your views, or face the prospect of looking for a new job next election.

You might think that all of this is relatively inconsequential, but that is not the case. The more that elected officials hear from you, the more they have to consider your points of view. Remember, they want to keep their job. Also, the more that the public hears the logic and reasons for reproductive rights and gender equality, the greater the chances that those who agree might get involved, and those who don’t — either those who sit on the fence or those who lean right — might actually learn something and shift their views. Which means that politicians might have to consider your viewpoints sooner than they thought.

The kinds of social and political action I’m discussing here do not take as much time as you may think, and there is no guarantee that anyone else will take up the cause. Simply put, a couple of moments of your time could make a difference. Indeed, anything less than vigorous involvement in the political process would leave reproductive rights and gender equality to the religious right and economic conservatives. And we’ve seen the damage they can do.

—

** You can read the text of my speech here.

Report from the Consilience conference, part III

by Massimo Pigliucci

[This is a report from the consilience conference held at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Part I is here, part II here]

Last day of the consilience conference! We began with David Sloan Wilson, with whom I had just had a spirited (and constructive) discussion about how to measure individual and group cultural selection quantitatively (he admitted it hasn’t been done, yet...). His topic was “Using evolution to improve the quality of life.” According to David, evolutionary principles can be used to improve our quality of life at the level of cities and neighborhoods. His Evolutionary Institute is a think tank that has the explicit goal of connecting evolutionary ideas to public policy.

Wilson sees symbolic thought as an inheritance system, which is necessary to get a theory of cultural evolution off the ground if one excludes fuzzy concepts like memes (which he apparently is inclined to do). He proposes the idea of a “symbotype”-phenotype relationship similar to the standard genotype-phenotype relationship in evolutionary biology. (Though it has to be noted that genotype-phenotype mapping is one of the most difficult problems facing evolutionary biologists, and I doubt that it’s going to be any easier to operationalize the concept of symbotype-phenotype mapping.)

David’s example was a study of prosociality in Binghamton, NY neighborhoods. He geo-mapped individuals who had been scored on a measure of prosociality. He then ran statistical analyses exploring the social correlatives of prosociality on the territory. Prosociality turned out to vary over very small spatial scales. The survey found a strong correlation between the prosociality of individuals and that of their social environment (i.e., the more socially supportive the environment is, the more prosocial people are). Multiple forms of social support contribute to individual prosociality, and adolescents changing location within the city is taken by Wilson to demonstrate phenotypic plasticity. (I actually worked on phenotypic plasticity as it is understood in biology, and I think this is a somewhat metaphorical use of the term.)

This was all very interesting, and even useful from a practical (policy) perspective. But it is social science, the results are unlikely to surprise a social scientist, and the e-word did not add anything at all, as far as I could see, to the whole picture. Evolution has to do with fitness-related variation and inheritance. There were no measures of fitness in the data, and it’s hard to see in what sense an individual changing behavior from one year to another (e.g., moving to a different neighborhood) counts as “inheritance.” But maybe I missed something crucial, somewhere.

Next we moved to Barbara Oakley, on cold-blooded kindness: insights into pathological altruism. This is a situation where while the underlying motivation is to help others, the altruistic behavior has irrational and substantially negative consequences to the other and to the self. An example presented by Oakley was of a woman who married a drug addict and then killed him in self-defense. (More on this below.)

Oakley comes to this as an engineer, and she seeks analogies between engineering and social science principles. For instance, she takes the idea that local decreases in entropy must be offset by a broader increase in entropy in the environment (which is a fundamental principle of physics) and translates it into the idea that even good deeds can carry negative consequences in the human realm. This, honestly, seems to be a stretch, and not a novel insight, given that both social scientists and philosophers have explored the idea of consequentialism in detail, and without needing to reference entropy.

(I’m beginning to think that it would have been nice to have actual social scientists, historians and assorted humanists at this conference, just to see how they would have reacted to biology-based criticism of their fields. Another time, maybe.)

Back to the story of the woman who killed her husband. Apparently, it wasn’t self-defense at all, it was premeditated (he was shot in the back, and she had pre-dug his grave). She was also a sadomasochist, who had complained in the past that her husband refused to hurt her. Oakley contends that the fact that reporters for the National Inquirer (where she originally heard of the story) and others felt sympathy for the woman and bought into her side of the story (though apparently neither the prosecutor nor the jury did) is because we are at fault for excessive (pathological) altruism. Again, that seems a stretch. First, if we were given the actual facts, instead of the National Inquirer version, I bet very few people would have felt compassion for the woman. Second, this case needs to be understood against a cultural background — which Oakley did refer to — of a number of stories of battered women who do act, truly, in self-defense. None of the above, as interesting as it was, had much to do with consilience, as far as I could tell.

Next: Jonathan Gottschall on the storytelling animal, how stories make us human. We all know that we like fiction and stories, but we are not aware of just how much. Storytelling is about someone else in a sense taking over emotional control of your self for a while. We don’t leave storytelling when we go to sleep: dreams, whatever actual physiological function they have, are fragments of stories which the brain tells itself. And then there is daydreaming, in which we apparently spend a large chunk of our day (this includes, however, rethinking past actions and situations, or imagining how to handle likely future actions and situations).

The left hemisphere of the brain is known to be a storyteller, in charge of making sense of everything that happens to us. The downside is that when it doesn’t have reliable information the left “interpreter” will make up stories anyway. Classical experiments show that even simple moving geometrical shapes on a screen are interpreted by many people as agents interacting with each other, driven my motives. (To be fair, since Gottschall showed an example on screen, the shapes were moving around the screen in obviously non random fashion. Would people make up stories if the movements were random?)

Fictional stories have surprisingly wide ranging effects, for instance in the case of the (alleged) role of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the events that led to the American Civil War. Or D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, credited with (temporarily) reviving the then moribund Ku Klux Klan.

Why storytelling? It could be the result of sexual selection, or a byproduct of the way the human mind works, and there are other possibilities. Gottschall seems to favor a pluralist answer, with multiple causes for the origin of story telling propensities in humans. The obvious question is how one would go about testing these hypotheses.

Fiction has a “universal grammar”: character + predicament + attempted solution. Right, and not really surprising. Of course this tells you close to nothing about individual stories and how they vary with culture and time, but point taken. If story telling has a function, it may be a sort of “flight simulator” of the mind, through which we practice for life (do we need to practice possible encounters with zombies?). There is some preliminary evidence, apparently, that people who enter into fictional simulation more often do better in real life.

The first speaker of the afternoon was Henry Harpending, on kinship within populations: whole genomes as green beards. The green beards refer to Dawkins’ (hypothetical) example of people with green beards being inclined to help others sporting the same trait, a process undermined by how easy it is to fake a green beard. This is obviously relevant to the idea of kin selection-mediated altruism and how it is vulnerable to cheaters. Harpending asked how much evidence do we have for mechanisms of kin recognition (to counter cheaters) having evolved in humans. Not much, apparently.

Harpending went on to compare two versions, from research in the ‘70s, of “Mr. Natural”: on the one hand the cooperative and peaceful bushmen of the Kalahari desert; on the other hand the Yanomamo of the Amazons, fierce and aggressive. The question, naturally, is how can these two so different cultures both represent “Mr. Natural”? The most recent take is that there is no such thing as Mr. Natural, that people’s ways of living change rapidly from time to time and culture to culture.

After that excursion, Harpending returned to kinship, and how these days we can actually measure it via Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), an increasing large database which is becoming available for humans through projects like 23andme (a commercial genome sequencing enterprise). The result seems to be that there is not enough dispersion of kinship values in, say, the modern French or Japanese populations, to make it effective to deploy cryptic kinship detection mechanisms. However, this does not hold for small human populations, like the inhabitants of Surui island. In that case there is a significant spread of kinship coefficients.

Again, while much of this was interesting, it wasn’t at all clear to me what it had to do, if anything, with the theme of the conference. It isn’t unusual for people to be invited to a conference with a central theme, show up and then talk about whatever struck their fancy most recently. But there seemed to be a particularly high occurrence of this at the consilience conference.

The next speaker was Pascal Boyer, on “the dark matter of human history, the perils of cognition blindness.” Social science “that matters” needs to address questions like why people engage in warfare, why is there religion, and so on. Boyer is explicitly using the term consilience as synonymous with integration of disciplines, which is, again, different from E.O. Wilson’s use of the term.

Boyer uses an analogy with dark matter in physics to signify that there is quite a bit in social science that does not meet the eye, and that has to do with the neuro-cognitive processes underlying conscious mental states, motivations, social interactions etc. Parts of human nature are not accessible to conscious inspection and cognition awareness requires effort. This notwithstanding, intuitive (or “folk”) sociology takes an intentional stance to groups and states (memories, beliefs), so that behavior can be interpreted as goal-directed.

For Boyer intuitive sociology may be adaptive in the context of our social evolution, as we can trace what happens around us as the result of intentions by other people. However, intuitive sociology fails when it is applied to, for instance, understanding the economy (“folk economics”). An example, apparently, is the idea of rent controls. They make sense from the point of view of folks economics, because the landlord and the lodger are given intentional stances; they don’t make sense for economists because offers depend on preferences and availability of means in the relevant population. (This seems to entirely ignore the fact that rent control measures are usually implemented not to solve an economic problem, but to minimize negative social side effects of purely economic “solutions.”)

Boyer also criticized political science for having empirical basis but no theory, resulting in either formal modeling that does not make contact with empirical reality or the study of political preferences as brute facts.

After a long bit on warfare and ethnic conflict, where he stressed the same contrast between “folk” and more sophisticated theories of what goes on, Boyer concluded by stating that there is no such thing as religion. We expect of religions that they have doctrines, beliefs, personnels (priests, shamans, etc.), and domains of competence, such as survival after death, morality, etc.. But in reality, in most cases at the tribal level — argues Boyer — there is no doctrine at all, the personnel is varied and ad hoc, and there is no unified domain of religion. Seems to me that here as in other examples during the talk there is a confusion between origins on one hand and development and maintenance on the other hand of a given phenomenon. Religions may have originated without the characteristics of the modern stuff, but this neither licenses the bold claim that religion “doesn’t exist,” nor does it imply that things like modern religions doctrines, beliefs, personnel etc. don’t need to be understood on their own terms. Boyer is correct, however, in separating the issue of religion as a type of social organization that is typical of some human societies from supernaturalism, which seems to be a human universal. A consequence he derives is that it makes no sense to think of religion as an adaptation, as it is far too much of a late comer in human evolution.

The take home message is that the social sciences have been disappointing because they have not addressed the big questions, leading to no cumulative progress. (The latter, I think, is a bit uncharitable.) Things went wrong because of the lack of vertical integration, in this case a reduction to neuroscience. Again, Boyer seems to be making a couple of common mistakes at this conference. First, integration and reduction are different things. Second, reduction does not eliminate the higher level phenomena, it only helps explaining them. So, I think, social science should still focus on the high level targets, but also integrate as much as possible notions from other disciplines, including but not limited to neuroscience.

And last: Patricia Churchland on how the mind makes morals. Darwin (together with Hume and Aristotle) thought that our moral sense is the result of social instincts, habits and reason. Churchland’s basic hypothesis is that sociability is of value for social mammals and it evolved by natural selection; its neural “hub” is the hormone oxytocin (involved in attachment, bonding); this is augmented by the reward system in the brain; and the whole thing is elaborated by prefrontal structures in the brain.

Attachment and trust are the platform for moral values. Social problem solving is mediated by the enlarged prefrontal cortex, which overrides, represses, calculates and plans. Refreshingly, Churchland isn’t trying to “reduce” culture to neurobiology, she is after the much more sensible goal of understanding the neural structures that make it possible for us to have culture to begin with.

She cites Eleanor Rosch’s work on the “radial” structure of concepts, with a prototype at the center and fuzzy boundaries. (This is similar to family resemblance in Wittgenstein, which a philosopher like Churchland should have noted.) Social categories are also radial, including the category of “moral.” Interestingly, artificial neural networks “learn” to categorize by way of prototypical structures and fuzzy boundaries. The idea, of course, is that the brain is relevantly similar to neural networks, and likely learns in a similar fashion (which is interesting, but let’s not forget that the brain — unlike neural networks — comes with a great deal of genetic-developmental prewiring).

One final comment on the entire conference: I got the impression that a number of participants did not actually read Wilson’s Consilience, at least not recently (several have admitted as much to me). Many (though not all) seemed to be convinced that the book promotes a positive and multi-directional exchange between disciplines, particularly crossing the science-humanities divide. It does nothing of the sort. It is a clear attempt at a reductionist program of subsuming the humanities into the sciences, and particularly biology, though it isn’t obvious why Wilson didn’t go all the way and subsume biology itself into physics. Perhaps because he’s a biologist?

—
Interesting footnote: one of the conference attendees heard that I was blogging about it, and objected to it, on two grounds: first, I am bringing to an outside forum discussions and opinions that were not meant for that forum; second, I get to editorialize and comment about what was said at the conference, while the other participants can’t.

My response is that conferences of this type are public events (registration was open to everyone), and that bringing at least a flavor of the proceedings to a wider audience is a good thing (at least another participant was Tweeting about it, by the way). As for commenting, well naturally I am writing this, so you are getting my take on it. Presumably, the intelligent reader is aware of this and will take it into account in forming her own judgment. Moreover, once my thoughts are out in the blogosphere other participants can either comment on them directly or can use other forums to respond to and/or expand upon them.

Still, the question does raise interesting issues concerning the ethics of blogging from academic conferences (or in other situations), and I’d be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this.