Peregrinations

July 20, 2011 • 5:13 am

This Saturday (July 23) I’ll be leaving for the Tenth International Symposium on Littorinid Biology and Evolution in St. Petersburg, Russia.  Littorina is a genus of marine snail, and although I don’t work on snails, I collaborate with Spanish colleagues on questions of speciation in the group.  I’m scheduled to give the final talk, on the relationship between biogeography and speciation.  How could one ever turn down an invitation to St. Petersburg?  And it will be my first visit to Russia.

As usual, Greg Mayer and Matthew Cobb will be posting in my absence, but entries may be sporadic because it’s summer and because Matthew is writing a book on the liberation of Paris.  I’m bringing my camera, computer, and connection cord, so I’ll try to post pictures of my peregrinations.

I’m taking a few days after the meetings to see the city, and will return to Chicago August 3.  If any readers have experience of the city, and can recommend things to see or places to eat (I already bought my ticket to the Hermitage), I’d be grateful for suggestions.

Brother Blackford weighs in on free will

July 19, 2011 • 11:29 am

So sue me (again).  Over at Metamagician, Brother Blackford has finally written his long-promised post on free will:  “Sean Carroll dobs me in—a little bit about fate and free will.”  Here’s part of his take:

Sometimes people who claim that we don’t have free will then go on to say that this knowledge should affect the personal and political choices we make, such as what kind of penalties we impose for crimes. But note what is being said here: it is assumed that we are able to make decisions about these things and that these decisions will play a causal role in what actually ends up happening. . .

I do get that when contemporary philosophers and scientists talk about people not having free will they usually have in mind the claim that we never step out of the causal order of nature, rather than the claim that fatalism is true. But so what? Like Chrysippus (and David Hume and Daniel Dennett, and most contemporary philosophers) I agree that we never step out of the causal order of nature. We are part of it. The fact remains that we often make decisions and our decisions can be efficacious. When we make decisions, that process is itself part of the causal order of nature. What else could it be? Try to imagine a coherent alternative. . .

But still, we are at least sometimes (even often) able to make decisions that are causally related to future events such as our own future health and how long we live, not to mention political outcomes such as what parties are elected to office, what penal approaches are adopted in various jurisdictions, what media ownership restrictions are put in place, and so on. Some of our decisions and consequent actions can be better than others in whatever plausible sense of “better” you like.

The future comes about through naturalistic processes, but those processes include our deliberations and decisions, and the actions that they lead us to. As the Stoics argued in the face of popular kinds of fatalistic thinking, the future comes about partly as a result of human choice.

Russell is in line with many others here in saying that because we seem to make choices; i.e., we’re faced with many alternative things we can do and we don’t do all of them, then we have free will. Yet like me, Russell is also a physical determinist, since he argues that humans cannot “step out of the causal order of nature.”  And presumably he also agrees with me that our environment, our experiences, and  the actions or speech of others can influence our choices.  After all, those are all things that can impinge on your brain and affect its neurons.  That other people, or your environment, can influence what you do does not count as evidence against determinism.

What I don’t get is why this is called a “choice.”  If the “free” in “free will” means anything, it means that at the moment we make a decision, we could have done otherwise.  That’s my definition of free will, which can also be rephrased as “the notion that if the tape of life were rewound to the point of a decision, with every experience and every molecule identical up to that moment, the agent could still make more than one choice.”  I believe—though I haven’t taken a poll—that this is how most people would conceive of free will: you can actually make decisions, rather than simply appear to make decisions that are really physically determined at the moment they’re made.  Maybe some readers, and some philosophers, see otherwise, but I think the average person really does think that alternative decisions are possible—that there’s some part of ourselves that can override the physics and chemistry of our brain.

When Russell says, “we are able to make decisions that affect our lives,” I think that’s a bit misleading, for “decision” implies that one could have done otherwise.  In short, he sees free will as simply the ability to do one thing when faced with a panoply of options.  Animals can do that, even very simple ones, and so can computers.  So why don’t computers have free will?  After all, you can program them to look like they’re choosing, and even make their choices responsive to the environment, so that it looks like their “decisions” are informed by exigent circumstances.  What’s the difference between that and what the human brain does?

The spirit bear

July 19, 2011 • 8:06 am

National Geographic has a short but informative article on an unusual animal: the Kermode or “spirit” bear. This is a subspecies of the regular black bear (Ursus americanus kermodei) that occurs on the coast of British Columbia. The subspecies has about 400 individuals, and about 10% of these are homozygous for a mutation that turns their coats whitish.  (Populations that contain two or more genetic variants like this are called “polymorphic,” meaning “many forms” in Greek.)  Here are the two morphs:

These bears are not albinos, for their eyes and noses are pigmented.  Nor are they hybrids with polar bears, although polar bears have been known to hybridize with a different species, the grizzly bear.  The mutation that turns normally black bears white occurs at the MC1R locus (short for “melanocortin receptor”), a gene involved in the synthesis of the pigment eumelanin.  A mutation at the same gene is what gives humans red hair. The white color gene is recessive; that is, it takes two copies of that gene to make the bear white.  A bear carrying one copy of a black and one copy of a white gene is black.

Curiously, a similar MC1R polymorphism has been found in woolly mammoths using DNA sequences extracted from their bones.  This has led to speculation that mammoths were polymorphic like these bears, with both light and dark-colored individuals.

What’s the evolutionary significance of this polymorphism (if any)?  It’s been known for a while that white bears are better at catching fish than black ones:

Researchers have recently proved that the spirit bear’s white coat gives it an advantage when fishing. Although white and black bears tend to have the same success rate after dark—when bears do a lot of their fishing—scientists Reimchen and Dan Klinka from the University of Victoria noticed a difference during the daytime. White bears catch salmon in one-third of their attempts. Black individuals are successful only one-quarter of the time. “The salmon are less concerned about a white object as seen from below the surface,” Reimchen speculates. That may answer part of the question about why the white-fur trait continues to flourish today. If salmon are a coastal bear’s primary fat and protein source, a successful female can feast on salmon to store more fat for winter, potentially increasing the number of cubs she can produce.

Carriers that have two copies of the white gene have an additional advantage: according to the Geographic article, the local people, the Tsimshian, consider the white morph sacred and do not hunt white bears.

So, if the color gives an advantage at fishing and protection from being hunted, why aren’t all the bears in the area white?  Even if black bears have an unknown countervailing advantage (like camouflage in the forest), that wouldn’t necessarily keep both color variants in the population: you’d expect the color conferring the highest net fitness to sweep through the population.

If the polymorphism is maintained by natural selection rather than being “neutral” (i.e. considering all factors, black and white bears have equal lifetime reproductive fitness), then it would have to be a special kind of natural selection, involving either one color being better in one area of the habitat and the other color in a different area (unlikely, since both forms live in the same place), or perhaps a reproductive advantage of the heterozygote: the black-colored bear that carries one copy of the white gene).

Paul Nicklen’s other photos of the spirit bear are here.

Mother and cub.  What you can say with certainty here is that mother carries one copy of the white gene, and one copy of the black:

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Dawkins: why science isn’t a religion

July 19, 2011 • 5:30 am

One of the common mantras of accommodationists, be they secular or religious, is this: “science is a religion just like any other faith.”  No lie: I have heard this from scientists who are sympathetic to religion!  I could respond at length why this characterization is completely bogus, but Richard Dawkins has already done so.

In case you weren’t aware of his response, “Is science a religion?”, it was published in the 1997 Humanist, and is the transcript of a talk Richard gave when accepting the Humanist of the Year award from the American Humanist Association.

It’s an excellent piece, and presages many of the themes later discussed in The God Delusion: religion as child abuse, the divergent “ways of knowing” practiced by science and faith, and so on.  Towards the end, he muses about whether we should admit that science is a faith anyway, just so it can be taught in religious education classes.

I want to return now to the charge that science is just a faith. The more extreme version of that charge — and one that I often encounter as both a scientist and a rationalist — is an accusation of zealotry and bigotry in scientists themselves as great as that found in religious people. Sometimes there may be a little bit of justice in this accusation; but as zealous bigots, we scientists are mere amateurs at the game. We’re content to argue with those who disagree with us. We don’t kill them. But I would want to deny even the lesser charge of purely verbal zealotry. There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There’s all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.

I have little to add to what Richard says, but would add three other points:

  • If science and religion are both conceived of as a “search for truth,” then the faith- and revelation-based methods of religion have failed to converge on single, agreed-upon answers. Different religions have different “answers,” and even within a single faith different people diverge in their notion of religious “truth.”  In contrast, scientists—regardless of religious creed, ethnicity, or nationality—converge on single, agreed-upon answers (of course there is still scientific disagreement about many cutting-edge issues). Water has two hydrogen and one oxygen molecules whether you’re a chemist in Africa, Eurasia, or America.  DNA in the nucleus is a double helical molecule consisting of sugars and nucleotide bases. Evolution is a fact for scientists in every land, for they can all examine the massive evidence supporting it.  There are many faiths; but there is only one science.
  • The fact that different people from different backgrounds converge on the same scientific answers also implies that there really are objective truths about the universe, decrying the postmodern notion that all truths are subjective.  In contrast, if there were objective truth about God and his ways—truths revealed by God to people through revelation, dogma, and authority—you might expect that everyone would be of the same faith.
  • The Oxford English dictionary defines religion as “Action or conduct indicating belief in, obedience to, and reverence for a god, gods, or similar superhuman power; the performance of religious rites or observances.”  Even if you maintain that scientists “worship” reason and empirical truths, our discipline does not rely on or exhibit belief in and reverence for gods or the supernatural.

Kitteh contest: Kiki

July 19, 2011 • 3:53 am

Reader Aratina Cage entered the lovely tabby Kiki:

It must have been mid-October several years ago when Kiki-chan became part of our family. One cold morning before the first frost, we heard a little mewing from a bush over out near the road. Thinking she might be lost since she was so young and obviously not feral, I provided her with food and water and posted signs around the neighborhood, but when the nights kept getting colder, I decided to take her in.

She was in bad shape. Her back right leg was gimpy, she was flea-bitten, and her inner eyelids were exposed. Bumps in her skin made me think she had been hit with birdshot. The vet even warned that they might have to kill her immediately if she had feline leukemia, but as you can see, she turned out to be physically damaged but nothing more. After those harrowing first few days, she instantly became part of our family.

I’ve never had a more loving or vocal cat. She does cry until fed, a bad habit learned from her days in the bush, but she loves snuggling and sassy playing. She is my scarf on cold nights (draped around the nape of my neck) and always loves to be around her family. She knows how to sit, spin, stand, and walk and does the cutest things like articulating her actions with sounds like “burrr-rup” when she jumps onto furniture and turning into Kiki Fat-tail when excited. I’m glad she decided to drop by that cold night.

Here is a photo of Kiki “doing a somersault while trying to catch a computer mouse taken right around her first Christmas.”

Like Maru, when Kiki sees a box she cannot help but enter:


Aratina:  “And I was proud to find out that she enjoys jumping through tight boxes like Maru (although Kiki is not so spontaneous about it and prefers to have something enticing her on the other end like a wiggling finger), so the last photo is one of her just moments before she jumped up through a 12-pack Coke Zero box that I was holding in the air with my other hand.”

Aratina also sent me a photo of Kiki right after she had been found; it was taken for a “found cat” poster that they put up around the area:

Amazon reviews of the Bible

July 18, 2011 • 9:20 am

Alert reader Grania Spingies called my attention to a hilarious page:  the Amazon reviews of the King James Bible.  I think a bunch of atheists must have weighed in, for here are the ratings:

And even funnier are the reviews (see the one-star reviews here).  The good part is that they review the Bible as a work of fiction, which of course it is.  Here are a few excerpts:

  • There is little plot to this book, save for in the second half, much of which revolves around God’s son, Jesus, an interesting fellow. Definitely, the story has finally hit a stride, so the New Testament reads like a novella. Everywhere this Jesus guy goes, he travels with his posse of “Apostles,” who aren’t your standard yes men. Although they all sing his praises when the going’s good, one gives a great “I don’t know about no Jesus” performance (Peter) worthy of a scruffy rat like Steve Buscemi. Another (Judas) sells out Jesus for a bunch of dead presidents, like Sean Penn did in “Carlito’s Way.” Unfortunately, Jesus gets rubbed out by an Italian gang, “The Romans,” who torture him and nail him to a cross in revenge for representing on their turf. Lots of high drama here.”Revelations” was pretty weird, sort of like watching “Fantasia” while doing mushrooms, only a lot scarier. Altogether, an excellent read.
  • For those of you who don’t know, this is God’s second novel after the Old Testament. It’s a marked improvement, in my opinion. He got rid of a lot of his previous angst and scorn, and has really begun to show some of the maturity present in his later works. He’s become a much more loving and kind God, and, noticeably, he doesn’t throw nearly as many tantrums as he did in the first book. 

That said, there is still vast room for improvement. Plot wise, there isn’t really much suspense, and the story can be incredibly repetitive. In like four chapters, he just rewords the same basic story over and over again. To top that off, he puts those chapters one right after the other. Like we wouldn’t notice!
  • . . . As well as that, the dialogue between characters is paper thin. Take the New Testament, when Mary finds out she’s pregnant. She tells Joseph that she’s been knocked up by an angel, and he just flat out believes her! Not even a “hold on sista, we’re going on Maury” – he just takes it at face value! How are any of us meant to believe that? Honestly, I swear some of the scripting was done by a monkey with a typewriter. Take this gem from 2 Samuel: 

”Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.” 

I mean, who speaks like that? Honestly! And as if the dialogue wasn’t bad enough, the whole tone is preachy and moralising, rather than engaging and well written.
  • After that there are some very depressing poems and some prose which is equally depressing. There is a VERY sensual book called Song of Solomon. He is basically describing the minutiae of his lover’s body (female, presumably; although possibly a man with gynecomastia and a tight rear) and talking about secksing her up really good, and there’s like a massage to completion and it’s very disturbing. Not an easy read, felt like I was reading smut when I pulled it out in public (probably shouldn’t have been touching myself in public anyway, but come on; bible readers, back me up on this!).
  • I picked this up because I heard it advertised as the Gospel, which translates to “good news.” It opens up by telling the reader how the human race is doomed because two poorly developed characters ate an apple that a snake told them to eat.That’s not good news.I can’t say I found much good news at all in this. It actually closes by telling us that the world is going to end, and how we should all be prepared.I would not recommend this book to others. It does not deliver on many of its advertised promises, and features weak characters and archaic diction.

Do life’s uncertainties promote religion? A flawed study

July 18, 2011 • 5:38 am

In a critique of Hegel, Marx wrote the following paragraph, whose third sentence has become a classic:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

The extract “[Religion] is the opium of the people” is often seen as a put-down of the masses who use faith as a drug. But from the context you can see that Marx was not so callous, for he was writing about religion as a sad and inevitable response to the distress of life.

And this is what sociologists are beginning to tell us.  I’ve previously written about work by Tomas Rees and Gregory Paul showing that high levels of faith among countries are correlated with high levels of “life uncertainties,” quantified in various ways such as income inequality, absence of national health care, high rates of crime, and so on.   Unless religious belief itself leads to socially unhealthy societies rife with uncertainty, the studies suggest that, as Marx noted above, social distress promotes religiosity.

A recent paper in Cross-Cultural Research by Nigel Barber buttresses this suggestion by showing that, among  137 countries, there’s a strong negative correlation between measures of “material security” and religiosity: those countries that are most religious are also those in which individuals are less secure, with security measured in several ways.  These correlations were predicted in advance by Barber. (He is a biopsychologist who appears to be an independent scholar: his given address is a private one in Birmingham, Alabama).

Barber’s hypothesis, called the “uncertainty hypothesis,” is that “supernatural belief may be one way of controlling the uncertainty of our lives.”  His prediction is “if religion helps people to cope with uncertainty, then more secure modern environments having greater existential security would engender less religious belief.”   His more explicit predictions were these:

I predicted that atheism would increase with economic development as people acquired a better capacity to withstand the hostile forces of nature through improved scientific knowledge, technological development, greater affluence, food security, and increased rule of law including the stronger centralized government characteristic of developed countries. Development was assessed in terms of the proportion of the labor force employed in agriculture (a negative index given that developed nations have fewer agricultural workers). It was also predicted that nonbelief would increase with the proportion of the population enrolled in third-level education both because this is an index of economic development and because it is a vector for natural science ideas that may challenge religious claims. As people acquired greater economic security, I predicted that disbelief in God would increase (Norris & Inglehart, 2004). Economic insecurity is exacerbated by unequal distribution of income (Gini coefficient) because more of the resources are concentrated in the hands of an economic elite creating poverty and deprivation at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Conversely, societies having a welfare state aim to help the poor by redistribution of resources. The welfare state requires heavier personal taxation and was measured indirectly in terms of taxation as a proportion of GDP.

Disbelief in God was also predicted to increase as health security rose. Health security was assessed in terms of the load of infectious diseases and pathogens.

Barber collected data on these issues from 137 countries.  The index of religiosity was taken from Zuckerman (2007), as “the proportion of people reporting that they did not believe in God.”  There is a possibility of error here since the question was not asked in the same way in every country.

The variable tested for their correlation with religiosity were these:

  • Whether or not the nation was or is Communist (i.e., whether or not there were official strictures against religion)
  • Whether or not the country was Islamic (apostasy and sometimes atheism are criminalized under Sharia law)
  • Degree of economic development, quantified as proportion of labor force engaged in agriculture (the lower the proportion, the more developed the society)
  • The proportion of young people enrolled in third-level education (i.e., university education)
  • Economic security quantified as the Gini coefficient, a measure of income equality that varies between 0 (complete equality) and 1 (maximal inequality)
  • Level of personal taxation, which is taken as the degree to which a nation is a “welfare state,” i.e., creates more security for its citizens
  • Health security, measured as the prevalence of 22 pathogens

As Barber predicted, each of these variables showed a statistically significant relationship with religiosity in the expected ways:  religiosity was higher in Muslim countries and lower in Communist ones, negatively associated with the proportion of agriculturalists, health security, and income inequality, and positively associated with third-level education and taxation.  Below is the table of correlations of the varables with religious disbelief.  The table also shows the correlations among the various indices of “security” (asterisks show significant correlations). A regression analysis of each variable on disbelief (not shown here, but in the paper) also revealed a significant association in the same direction for every variable.

Barber concludes that his hypothesis was supported: “Taken together, the results show that the incidence of religious disbelief in a country (Zuckerman, 2007) is very strongly predicted by economic development, by favorable health conditions and by a more equal distribution of income as well as a well-developed welfare state (insofar as this is measured by high levels of personal taxation relative to GDP).”

But there is a big problem with these results.  As the table shows, the different indices of “security” are also correlated with each other.  For example, there’s a strong negative correlation (-0.69) between the degree of agricultural labor and the percentage of people getting third-level educations.  Likewise, pathogen load is negatively correlated with level of education and positively correlated with degree of agricultural labor. Income inequality is negatively correlated with taxation (a measure of “welfare stateness”).  Pathogen load is negatively correlated with whether a country is/was Communist, but positively correlated with whether a state is Islamic.

These cross-correlations among the different indices of “security” mean that we cannot use each of them as an independent variable affecting religiosity.  We don’t know, for example, whether the negative correlation between disbelief in God and income inequality reflects a direct influence of the latter on the former (countries with higher inequality have higher belief in God), or only that income inquality affects religiosity because that inequality is itself a sign of poor health (pathogen load has a 0.5 correlation with the Gini coefficient).  What this means is that you cannot say that each of the seven variables is itself significantly associated with religiosity.  They are not independent.

The author could have addressed this problem in two ways.  First, he could have done what Greg Paul did, and simply combine the variables into a single index of societal well-being.  Alternatively, and better, Barber could have used multiple regression, a method that gets rid of the cross-correlation between variables to look at the real effect of each one uncontaminated by its association with the others.  Unless I’m missing something in the author’s analysis, he didn’t do either of these.  Any decent journal would have mandates some statistical analysis to gauge the effect of each variable, by itself, on religiosity.

So what can we conclude?  The results generally support the “uncertainty” hypothesis because each variable is correlated in the expected direction with religiosity.  But what we cannot say is that each of the seven variables itself has an independent effect on belief and disbelief.  That awaits a multiple-regression analysis—or other statistical tests that get rid of the problem of cross-correlation.  The data for this are in fact already available to Barber.

And, of course, we all know that correlation is not causation.  Even if each of these variables was independently and significantly associated with religiosity, we still don’t know in which direction (or neither) the causality runs. It’s formally possible, for instance, that more religious societies promote income inequality and poor health, but for most variables that suggestion seems less parsimonious.

____________

Barber, N. A cross-national test of the uncertainty hypothesis of religious belief.  Cross-Cultural Research.  Published online before print May 11, 2011, doi: 10.1177/1069397111402465

Zuckerman, P. 2007.  Atheism: Contemporary numbers and patterns. (Available free on Zuckerman’s website.) pp. 47-68 in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (M. Martin, ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.