Kitteh contest: Latke

May 1, 2012 • 3:35 am

Reader David sent a photo of his daughter’s cat, named “Latke” (latkes are potato pancakes: the apotheosis of Jewish cuisine). Re this name, David said, ” When I was married, we got the cat near Passover. My ex-celebrated the holiday, I never really did.”  He adds:

Thought you might like this one.  Its a photo that I took with my iphone of my daughter’s cat who decided to get comfortable in the middle of her coat on the dining room table.

What I didn’t notice was that in the background, you can see me taking the photo (into infinity) as well as my daughter taking a photo of the same moment with her camera.

I am divorced, so seeing my girls, the cat and going over my ex-wife’s house is always a once in a lifetime moment.

Here’s a really good random one for the record.

David adds this to ensure his bona fides in the Atheist Cat Club:

I just returned from the Philippines where I spoke at their first Atheist and Agnostic Convention. I was on with Dan Barker, Jeremiah Camara, Tanya Smith, and a few others. Fun trip, but exhausting to travel so far and return so soon.

You can find his description of the convention, and his talk, on his website, Paleolibrarian.

HeronCam!

April 30, 2012 • 1:32 pm

I don’t know how I missed this, but alert reader M. May informed me that the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has a live Heron Cam, with a view of a nest containing three fluffy Great Blue Heron chicks (Ardea herodias), two of which hatched April 27 and one on April 28.  They’re awkward but adorable.

You can click on it from the HawkCam page, too, so you can watch two nests at nearly the same time.  Here’s a screenshot:

The nest has two cameras, so you can see it from above as well:


Earl Scruggs died

April 30, 2012 • 12:07 pm

I just found out that Earl Scruggs, bluegrass banjoist extraordinaire, died on March 28 at the age of 88. If you know country music, you’ll know him. Even if you’re not a country fan, you might still know of Scruggs for his famous rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (for which he won a Grammy; hear the original version here) or his composition of the “Ballad of Jed Clampett” for the execrable television show The Beverly Hilbillies.  

Scruggs had a distinguished career, beginning with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, leaving it to join guitarist Lester Flatt (for which Monroe never forgave him), and later becoming quite innovative for a bluegrass musician, collaborating with folk and rock musicians like Joan Baez and the Byrds. (I previously put up a wonderful clip of him playing in a pickup session with Joan Baez).

Scruggs’ style of three-finger picking influenced banjo players everywhere.  Here are two clips from the old days. I love how he bends the notes in the first clip by adjusting the tuning pegs:

With Lester Flatt, “Roll in my sweet baby’s arms”:

Analytical thinking erodes religious belief

April 30, 2012 • 7:43 am

UPDATE (2/27/2017): In view of later work, the results of this paper should be considered inconclusive. A new paper in PLoS ONE by Sanchez et al. failed to replicate one of the four experiments of Gervais and Norenzayan (the statue experiment), getting results not even close to significance. Further, an analysis of psychology papers published in Science showed that the Gervais and Norenzayan paper was one of 15 examined (out of 18) that had a success rate much higher than expected (this could be due to a number of factors). The Sanchez et al. paper, however, does report two other studies that replicated some of the results of Gervais and Norenzyan. In view of these conflicting results, it’s best to suspend judgement on the paper described below.
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Atheists, but not religious people, will love this paper from the latest Science, “Analytical thinking promotes religious disbelief,” (reference below) by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, two psychologists from the University of British Columbia (see also this popular summary in the Los Angeles Times). It shows that there’s an antagonism between analytical thinking and religious belief, such that after engaging in even a short and simple task requiring analytical thinking, one’s faith in God weakens.

As the paper is written clearly, I’ll quote a bit from it rather than paraphrase it. Here’s the authors’ rationale:

If religious belief emerges through a converging set of intuitive processes, and analytic processing can inhibit or override intuitive processing, then analytic thinking may undermine intuitive support for religious belief. Thus, a dual-process account predicts that analytic thinking may be one source of religious disbelief. Recent evidence is consistent with this hypothesis finding that individual differences in reliance on intuitive thinking predict greater belief in God, even after controlling for relevant socio-demographic variables. However, evidence for causality remains rare. Here we report five studies that present empirical tests of this hypothesis.

We adopted three complementary strategies to test for robustness and generality. First, study 1 tested whether individual differences in the tendency to engage analytic thinking are associated with reduced religious belief. Second, studies 2 to 5 established causation by testing whether various experimental manipulations of analytic processing, induced subtly and implicitly, encourage religious disbelief. . . Third, across studies, we assessed religious belief using diverse measures that focused primarily on belief in and commitment to religiously endorsed supernatural agents. Samples consisted of participants from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds.

Here are the studies.

Study 1.  The authors gave 179 undergraduates an “analytical” thinking test consisting of three questions, each of which had an incorrect “intuitive” answer and a correct “analytical” answer. Here’s one of the questions:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? ____cents.

The intuitive answer is 10 cents, but of course the analytical answer, obtained by solving [1.00 + x] + x = 1.10, is 5 cents.

The participants then completed an assessment of their religiosity, including three different tests. The result?

In study 1, as hypothesized, analytic thinking was significantly negatively associated with all three measures of religious belief, r[Religiosity] = –0.22, P = 0.003; r[Intuitive] = –0.15, P = 0.04; andr[Agents] = –0.18, P = 0.02. This result demonstrated that, at the level of individual differences, the tendency to analytically override intuitions in reasoning was associated with religious disbelief, supporting previous findings.

Study 2.  A group of Canadian undergraduates were exposed to one of four randomly chosen images, two of which depicted contemplative activity and two showing control artwork matched for posture and surface texture.  Here are two pictures, one of each type:

After viewing their random image, each student rated his/her belief in God on a scale from 1-100.

The results?

In the present study, as hypothesized, viewing The Thinker significantly promoted religious disbelief [t(55) = 2.24, P = 0.03, Cohen’s d = 0.60; Table 2]. In sum, a novel visual prime that triggers analytic thinking also encouraged disbelief in God.

Well, that’s a marginally significant probability value, and they talk only about the Rodin image, though presumably there was at least one other contemplative image.

Study 3.  93 Canadian undergraduates scored their degree of religious belief after completing “a modified verbal fluency task priming procedure previously used to activate analytic thinking without explicit awareness.” The participants got a set of five words, and were instructed to drop one word and arrange the others into a meaningful phrase.  Some sets included “analytical” words (i.e.,”reason,” “think”), and others non-analytical words (“hammer,” “jump”). There were 50 individuals in the analytical test and 43 in the controls.

The results?

As hypothesized, implicitly primed analytic thinking concepts significantly increased religious disbelief [t(91) = 2.11, P = 0.04, Cohen’s d = 0.44; Table 2].

Again, this is barely significant in a statistical sense. There was one control, showing that these results were not correlated with the degree of a student’s religious belief measured several weeks before the test.

Study 4.  This was the same as study 3,  but conducted on 148 American adults selected for a wide range of backgrounds (71 analytical, 77 control).  The results?

Implicitly primed analytic thinking concepts again increased religious disbelief [t(143) = 2.20, P = 0.03, Cohen’s d = 0.36; Table 2].

Now the authors consider these tests suggestive but not conclusive, saying this:

Nonetheless, experimental manipulations in studies 2 to 4 elicited analytic thinking by having participants perform one task or another (looking at pictures or unscrambling sentences) before rating their religious beliefs. Although unlikely, it is conceivable that the act of performing any task—not just tasks known to elicit analytic cognitive tendencies—may decrease religious belief.

Perhaps, but they had a non-analytic control, which does count as a “task,” and the analytical task significantly decreased religious beliefs. I’m not sure exactly why, then, they raise this point.

To try to obviate the need to assign a “task” to promote analytical thinking, the researchers then conducted

Study 5. Previous work had shown that even making people read something in a hard-to-read font improved their performance on analytical-thinking tests relative to the same thing presented in an easy-to read font.  So they asked students to just rate their religiosity, but using questions presented in either “hard” or “easy” fonts.  Here’s some samples they give:

The result?

As hypothesized, analytic thinking activated via disfluency significantly increased religious disbelief [t(177) = 2.06, P = 0.04, Cohen’s d = 0.31; Table 2]. As in study 4, individual differences in pre-experiment religious belief did not moderate the effect of analytic thinking on religious belief (F < 0.05, P = 0.96). Additional alternative explanations focusing on experimental artifacts introduced by the disfluent font did not receive empirical support (20).

Note again that the probability value (0.04) is very close to the cut-off value that defines statistical significance in biology (0.05).

And the overall conclusion:

. . . the hypothesis that analytic processing—which empirically underlies all experimental manipulations—promotes religious disbelief explains all of these findings in a single framework that is well supported by existing theory regarding the cognitive foundations of religious belief and disbelief.

In other words, the more analytically you think, the less religious you become, at least temporarily.

The authors offer three hypotheses about the precise way that analytical thinking erodes religious thinking. One, for example, is that analytical thinking makes people reflect on their “intutive” religious beliefs and reject them.  But let’s leave these aside for the nonce. In general, I find the study’s interesting and coincident with my intuition, but not terribly statistically significant.  Although each study gave a significant result, the probabilities are mostly marginal. Still, the paper is a useful starting point for further studies about the antagonism between analytical thinking and faith.

It’s notable that the authors bend over backward at the end of their paper to avoid criticizing religion: either the reviewers made them do this or they’re aware of how unpalatable these conclusion might be to the religious American public:

Finally, we caution that the present studies are silent on long-standing debates about the intrinsic value or rationality of religious beliefs, or about the relative merits of analytic and intuitive thinking in promoting optimal decision making. Instead, these results illuminate, through empirical research, one cognitive stage on which such debates are played.

Their nervousness is also evident in the last part of the paper’s abstract:

Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.

I’m guessing that what we’re seeing here is two extremely nervous psychologists worried about a backlash from both the faithful and the believers in belief.   Of course these data speak to the rationality and truth of religious belief, for they show that if one thinks analytically about something—anything—religious belief tends to dwindle. That suggests that religious belief has a component of irrationality, and also that one’s confidence it religion tends to weaken when one is being analytical; i.e., there’s less truth value, if truth is gauged using analytical skills.

About the “value” of religious beliefs the study of course says nothing.  But we all know that most people wouldn’t be religious, and hence would derive no value from faith, if they were convinced that the tenets of religion were false.

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Gervais, W. M. and A. Norenzayan.  2012.  Analytical thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science 336:493-496.

A review of a book about evangelical Christians

April 30, 2012 • 3:30 am

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review has a review by Molly Worthen, a writer and professor of religious history, on When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, by Tanya Luhrman, a psychological anthropologist who has also written on psychiatry.

Lurhman studied one evangelical and charismatic sect (the Vineyard Christian Fellowship) for four years, and though I won’t be reading the book, two paragraphs of Worthen’s review are worth noting:

If evangelicals are expert at conjuring God, they are just as good at dealing with disappointment when God fails to show up. When his presence fades or he fails to answer a prayer, it means God has decided that your faith is so strong, you don’t need constant proof. “The concept of spiritual maturity allows people to reinterpret a disappointment as, in effect, a promotion,” Luhrmann explains. This is not merely a grand exercise in self-­delusion. Luhrmann’s subjects are aware of their minds at work. They acknowledge the elements of “pretend” in imagining God as an invisible friend sitting at the kitchen table. Vineyard teaching is clear that the Christian life requires mastering a set of mental tools. Luhrmann’s account, she says, “is fully compatible with both secular and supernaturalist understandings of God. To a believer, this account of absorption speaks to the problem of why, if God is always speaking, not everyone can hear. . . . To a skeptic, it explains why the believer heard a thought in the mind as if it were external.”

A few plaints: how is this not an exercise in self-delusion? And I’m not sure what Worthen means by “compatibility with a skeptic’s secular understanding of God.” Is that like a secular understanding of Zeus? Perhaps she means that if you think God spoke to you, and that’s a result of “mastering a set of mental tools,” then your idea of God comes from brainwashing.  Finally, why does “being aware of your mind at work” preclude you from being deluded?

Worthen writes like a believer in belief, which is buttressed by the last paragraph of her review (my emphasis):

All religion is an affair of both the head and the heart. Luhrmann goes too far in suggesting that evangelicalism is all feeling and no dogma: in her telling, the heart has wholly conquered the head. We cannot account for evangelicals’ history or their role in politics without paying attention to the substance of their beliefs and the social and scientific lessons their communities teach them to draw from the Bible — lessons reinforced, perhaps, by the sound of God’s voice that they discern in their own ears. But Luhrmann has helped to explain something else: why the carefully reasoned arguments that the “new atheist” writers mount against religion often fall flat. The most convincing “proof” of religion is not scientific but psychological. There is no way to undo the conviction of believers that God himself told them he is real and his story is true.

Of course. Does anyone doubt that the convictions of faith are often based not on scientific evidence but revelation, and that revelation is largely (but not totally) impervious to reason? This is why most of us aim our attacks on religion not on evangelicals, or the already committed, but those with doubts, those on the fence, or young people. The last sentence in the paragraph above, by the way, is a pithy statement of why science and faith are incompatible.

In the end, all of it—including the sophisticated lucubrations of theologians who spend their time justifying what they want to be true—comes down to revelation, which I’ll define in Feynman’s words as “the ultimate way of fooling yourself.” Or, even simpler: “It’s true because I want it to be true.”

The discovery of Neptune and falsifiability

April 29, 2012 • 7:51 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jerry’s post on falsifiability raises interesting questions in the philosophy of science, and I’d like to extend the discussion by referring to a famous incident in the history of science (which is something philosophers of science often do– it’s how they test their ideas). The incident is the discovery of Neptune.

Neptune (NASA photo).

By the end of the 18th century, the orbits of the planets had been fairly well worked out on the basis of observation and Newtonian mechanics. But, by the 1820s, it was evident that Uranus was not following the predicted orbit. The French astronomer Alexis Bouvard perceptively remarked

… I leave it to the future the task of discovering whether the difficulty of reconciling [the data] is connected with the ancient observations, or whether it depends on some foreign and unperceived cause which may have been acting upon the planet.

In the 1840s, two mathematical astronomers took up the challenge, and, hypothesizing that the “foreign and unperceived cause” was an undiscovered planet, attempted to calculate the position of such a hypothetical planet based upon Newton’s laws. They didn’t just speculate about the supposed new planet, though, but also sought to have observatories look for it. The two astronomers were John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier.

Urbain Le Verrier (Wikipedia)
John Couch Adams (Wikipedia)

On 23 September 1846, at the Royal Observatory in Berlin, Johann Galle, looking where La Verrier had directed him, found the undiscovered planet, which we now know as Neptune. He wrote to Le Verrier two days later:

Monsieur, the planet of which you indicated the position really exists.

Since the 1840s, there has been a dispute as to who deserves the most credit for predicting the existence of the new planet– Adams or Le Verrier. It is clear that it is Le Verrier who actually inspired the successful observations. But the dispute need not detain us– it suffices that the planet was discovered on the basis of someone’s calculations.

So what has this to do with falsification? Well, the problems with the orbit of Uranus meant that there was something wrong with a Newtonian understanding of the solar system. To a naive falsificationist, it would seem that we must conclude that Newton was wrong. But this is not what practicing scientists did. Instead, they sought a way to preserve Newton’s laws, by changing the auxiliary hypotheses used to carry out calculations of predictions under the laws. For the problem was not that Newton’s laws were wrong, but rather that Newton’s laws as applied to the known planets were wrong. The problem therefore could have been not with Newton’s laws, but with our conception of how many planets there were. Schematically

(Newton’s Laws + known planets) predict (orbit U for Uranus);  (Uranus does not have orbit U); therefore:

Newton’s Laws, or the known planets, or both, are wrong.

What was falsified was a composite claim– we don’t know which part of the composite is false. (This is an example of what is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis– that hypothese are tested in bundles– mentioned in the comments to Jerry’s piece.)

Why did Adams, Le Verrier, and Galle choose to continue working with Newton’s Laws, rather than abandon them? Because Newtonian mechanics had been a spectacularly successful research program, and it didn’t seem epistemically prudent to throw out the whole thing on the basis of an anomalous orbit, when there were other possible explanations for the anomaly. It seemed reasonable to them (and indeed it was reasonable), to continue with laws that had worked so well in so many circumstances already, rather than concluding they were false.

But isn’t pursuing an escape from falsification a characteristic of pseudoscience? Well, yes it is, if escape from falsification is all your research program consists of. But crucially, Adams and Le Verrier’s escape from falsification was not merely an excuse for the failure of Newton’s Laws to correctly predict the orbit of Uranus. Rather, it was itself an independently testable hypothesis, which, indeed, they (or, more precisely, Galle) tested. This observational test did not depend on the truth or falsity of Newton’s Laws of motion and gravitation, and was thus independent of them. The successful prediction of the existence of Neptune has turned what was potentially a fatal falsification into one of the greatest triumphs of Newtonian mechanics– the discovery of a hitherto unsuspected phenomenon. Newton’s Laws showed what philosophers call “fecundity”.

So, falsifiability is a useful criterion for evaluating scientific claims. But falsifications is a lot harder than the simple logic of  ‘A implies B; not B; therefore not A”. There’s not a hard and fast line between scientific and nonscientific claims, but rather a gradation from vigorous, successful research programs, such as evolutionary biology, to degenerate pseudosciences, such as creationism, with things like cryptozoology somewhere in the middle. If all your research program does is move from one escape from refutation to another (it isn’t A, then it’s B; not B, alright, let’s try C; no good?, then how about D; not D,…), then your research program is degenerating. All the signs of vigor (falsifiability, independent testability, fecundity, and others) must be examined in evaluating the epistemic status of a claim or research program.

And a final word, on behalf of Popper. Although he was the falsificationist par excellence, he was not naive, and anticipated many of the criticisms of falsification that later arose. Although he, understandably, emphasized his notion of falsifiability, he began the development of “sophisticated” falsificationism himself.

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Much of the historical detail is taken from Mathematical discovery of planets on the wonderful website History of Mathematics Archive at the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland.

Sexual selection in action: bird both sings and moonwalks

April 29, 2012 • 12:57 pm

Just remember that all this evolved from inorganic matter more than 3.5 billion years ago. Here’s a species of bird whose males both sing and dance for their supper—or rather their offspring. The dance comes from the May National Geographic:

Deep in the cloud forest of South America a tiny bird, the club-winged manakin  [Machaeropterus deliciosus], sings with its wings. As part of their courtship, males execute maneuvers with names like the dart, the about-face, the upright, and the backward slide (which looks exactly like a Michael Jackson moonwalk).

Wikipedia describes its music, which is made with its feathers, for crying out loud:

The Club-winged Manakin, with its unique ability to produce musical sounds, is indisputably the most extreme example of sexual selection in manakins.

Each wing of the Club-winged Manakin has one feather with a series of at least seven ridges along its central vane. Next to the strangely ridged feather is another feather with a stiff, curved tip. When the bird raises its wings over its back, it shakes them back and forth over 100 times a second (hummingbirds typically flap their wings only 50 times a second). Each time it hits a ridge, the tip produces a sound. The tip strikes each ridge twice: once as the feathers collide, and once as they move apart again. This raking movement allows a wing to produce 14 sounds during each shake. By shaking its wings 100 times a second, the Club-winged Manakin can produce up to 1,400 single sounds during that time.

While this “spoon-and-washboard” anatomy is a well-known sound-producing apparatus in insects (see stridulation), it had not been well documented in vertebrates (some snakes stridulate too, but they do not have dedicated anatomical features for it). An analysis was made using high speed photography in 2005. The mating preferences of female birds can produce not only the peacock’s tail or the rooster’s crow, but also feathers with microscopic adaptations that let them sing like crickets.

Here’s a video showing the song, also from National Geographic:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1017814&w=425&h=350&fv=]

UPDATE: These males are clearly of different species; someone (not me) has made a mistake here. I’ll leave it to Lou Jost to clear it up.

 h/t: P.N.

Is falsifiability a good criterion for a scientific theory?

April 29, 2012 • 8:38 am

UPDATE: In a comment below this post, reader Peter Beattie calls attention to a short summary of Popper’s falsifiability criterion that he thinks will be helpful to readers who want the nuances of Popper’s views.

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This will be short.  As many of us know, Karl Popper demarcated a scientific theory from a nonscientific one because the former is falsifiable—there are experiments or observations that can be done to disprove it.   The “theory” of evolution, for example, could be disproven if we regularly found well-dated fossils out of the proper order (like mammals in the Devonian, for instance), if species didn’t have genetic variation to respond to selection, or if we often found “adaptations” in member of one species that were useful only for another species (e.g., a special nipple on a female mole that was only used for suckling mice).

I’m told that falsification is naive as a criterion for good science, and that scientists no longer accept or use that as a criterion.  Some assert that, in contrast, a good scientific theory is one that best explains the data we have.  But it seems to me that this is equivalent to falsifiability, for a theory that best explains the data we have could be shown not to explain the data we have.

At any rate, putting this musing aside, my question is this: is there any scientific fact or theory that is widely accepted despite the fact that it is not in principle capable of being falsified? I am referring to real theories here, not possible theories.

It is my impression, for instance, that string theory in physics isn’t widely accepted as true simply because we haven’t found a way to test it—to test that its predictions are verified or not. And I often hear—Anthony Grayling and Hitchens both said this, I believe—that a theory that can explain everything explains nothing (i.e., God constructed the process of evolution). In other words, a theory that can’t be shown wrong is useless. The presupposes falsifiability as a criterion for scientific truth.

Englighten me here, but note that this discussion deals with the philosophy of science, so if you think that endeavor is useless you shouldn’t be responding!