Is depression an adaptation?

May 27, 2010 • 3:56 am

Disturbed by the continuing and uncritical darwinization of psychiatry, especially the tendency of psychiatrists to explain mental illnesses as evolutionary adaptations, I’ve written a piece for the Psychiatric Times, which I’m told is the most widely read publication in the field.  You’ll have to register (free) to see it at the journal, but I’ve posted it in its entirety below.

This article grew out of two of my posts on this website from last August (here and here).  I felt especially compelled to write it because the authors of the study I critique think that the if depression is an evolved adaptation, psychiatrists should treat it with Darwinian remedies.  To them, this means using problem-solving talk therapies (not necessarily a bad thing, I guess, though I don’t see why this should always be the best approach), and, especially, withholding medication.  If depression is adaptive, so they say, then people should be encouraged to suffer through its pain to receive its benefits.

COMMENTARY

The Evolutionary Calculus

of Depression

By Jerry A. Coyne, PhD | May 26, 2010
Dr Coyne is professor in the department of ecology and evolution, biological sciences collegiate division, at The University of Chicago.

The discipline of evolutionary psychology views modern human behaviors as products of natural selection that acted on the psychological traits of our ancestors. A subdiscipline, evolutionary psychiatry, tries to find evolutionary explanations for mental disorders.

One of the most common subjects of evolutionary psychiatry is depression. Although debilitating, depression is also reasonably widespread. Estimates of its prevalence in Western nations range between 5% and 20%, and the disorder appears to depend at least partly on an individual’s genes. The relatively high frequency of an apparently maladaptive and partially genetic syndrome has led to speculation that it may really be “adaptive” in an evolutionary sense—that is, a liability to depression may have been installed in our genome by natural selection.

A recent version of this idea is the adaptive rumination hypothesis (“ARH”) of Andrews and Thomson,1 which posits that depression evolved as a way to solve difficult and complex problems, most of them involving social interactions. Instead of being a pathology, depression is seen as a useful complex of thoughts and behaviors that enable troubled people to withdraw from the world, deliberate intensively about their social problems, and devise solutions. Andrews and Thomson suggest this behavior evolved because it was adaptive in our ancestors, and may still be so.

The ARH has attracted a good deal of attention, much of it favorable. It was, for example, the subject of a recent article in The New York Times Magazine.2 Debate about the ARH is not purely academic, for Andrews and Thomson see the idea as pointing to specific therapies, including problem-solving talk therapies and the deliberate withholding of medication. Since these suggestions stem from a specific evolutionary hypothesis, we should carefully examine that hypothesis.

I have previously discussed a number of troubling problems with the ARH.3 Andrews and Thomson deliberately conflate clinical depression and simple sadness, assuming that these are simply positions on a continuous psychological gradient. They give no evidence that depression is caused by, rather than the cause of, difficult social problems, and they fail to show that depression actually helps people solve those problems. And many of the “experiments” supporting the ARH are unrealistic, bordering on silly. One such study mimicked the effect of depression on problem solving by having people engage in mock currency trading while listening to sad music.

Rather than repeat my critique, I want to discuss how evolutionary biologists identify features as “adaptations,” and relate this to evolutionary explanations of mental disorders such as the ARH. I will show that depression does not meet the minimal requirements for qualifying as a biological adaptation, and that even if it did, the evolutionary explanation of the ARH—and of other “adaptive” theories for depression—is scientifically unsound.

The ARH is unsatisfactory for three reasons:

Depression is not an adaptation in the evolutionary sense. Andrews and Thomson consider depression an “adaptation” because it supposedly helps the sufferer solve problems. But an evolutionary adaptation is more than something that is merely useful. Biologists consider a trait adaptive only if that behavior, and the genes producing it, enhance an individual’s fitness—the average lifetime output of offspring. It is this genetic advantage, and the evolutionary changes in behavior it promotes, that is the essence of adaptation by natural selection. To demonstrate that depression is an evolved adaptation, then, we must show that it enhances reproduction.

Andrews and Thomson don’t do this, or even try. And if they did try, they probably wouldn’t succeed, for everything we know about depression suggests that rather than enhancing fitness, it reduces it. The most obvious issue is suicide, a word that, curiously, does not appear in Andrews and Thomson’s text. Statistics show that those with major depression are 20 times more likely to kill themselves than are individuals in the general population.4 Evolutionarily speaking, this is a strong selective penalty. Depression also appears to reduce libido and may make one unattractive as a sexual partner. Andrews and Thomson point out depression’s “adverse effect on women’s fertility and the outcome of pregnancy.”1,p.638 Other health problems are comorbid with depression, although it’s not clear whether depression is the cause or consequence of these problems. Finally, studies show that depressed mothers provide poorer care of their children.

If there is counterevidence that depressive rumination outweighs all these problems and enhances reproduction, Andrews and Thomson don’t provide it. The evolutionary calculus for depression—as for any psychological “adaptation”—demands an answer to this question: how does that condition affect your expected number of offspring? It is odd that evolutionary psychiatrists neither answer this question nor, with rare exceptions, consider it, especially because data on reproductive output are not hard to gather.

If the evolutionary calculus is not favorable, one can still appeal to history: while depression may not be adaptive now, maybe it was reproductively advantageous in our ancestors. Perhaps the symptoms of depression were less debilitating in the past, or there was a lower possibility of suicide. Such appeals often smack of ad hoc special pleading, especially because we’re largely ignorant of the conditions under which our ancestors lived. Andrews and Thomson try this plea:

“A design analysis does not require depressive rumination to be currently adaptive because modern and evolutionary environments may differ in important ways. . . All that is required is that on average, depressive rumination helped people analyze and solve the problems they were ruminating about in ancestral environments.”1,p.644

This is wrong. Appeals to problem solving in the past, as to the present, must ultimately involve reproduction. Note too that if depressive rumination no longer helps us solve problems, we can ignore Andrews and Thomson’s suggested therapies.

But we need to consider other data as well—data about the genetic basis of depression. And here the ARH also fails.

The ARH does not explain the existence of genetic variation for depression. No evolutionary hypothesis about depression is credible without specifying the nature of genetic variation. It is most crucial to propose whether the genes producing depression are fixed or segregating. And both hypotheses come with problems.

“Fixed” genes are those for which all individuals have identical copies, presumably because those genes produced a form of depressive rumination that was favored in all human populations. Under this scenario, individuals do not vary genetically in their liability to depression, so variation in the disorder reflects only the different environments faced by different individuals (these environments include nongenetic accidents of development).

Under the fixed-gene model it is impossible to show by pedigree analysis that there is a “genetic basis” to depression, for those methods require the existence of genetic variation among individuals. For the same reason one could not demonstrate an evolutionary advantage of genes causing depression, since everyone currently carries the same “depression genes.”

Thomson and Andrews apparently reject this model because they recognize that individuals do differ genetically in their susceptibility to depression. They thus accept the second scenario: segregating “depression genes,” in which variation among individuals results from variation in both genes and the environmental circumstances that precipitate the disorder.

But adopting the “segregating-gene” hypothesis creates other problems, for now one has to explain not only the selective advantage of depression but also why genes producing it are segregating. Genes with a uniform advantage should not show this kind of variation. And population genetics theory tells us that the biological conditions under which natural selection maintains genetic variation for a trait are quite restrictive. One requires either that heterozygotes (individuals carrying one copy of a “depression” gene and one copy of a “nondepression” gene) have a higher fitness than individuals having two identical copies of either gene, or that environments vary over time or space in a way that depression genes are favored at some times or places, and disfavored at others. And even in this latter scenario, different environments have to appear in precisely the correct frequency or spatial distribution lest a single, generally adaptive form of the gene become fixed.

Neither Andrews and Thomson—nor, as far as I know, any proponent of adaptive explanations for mental disorders—describes what form of selection they see as maintaining genetic variation. Without such a hypothesis, any adaptive theory cannot be taken seriously, much less experimentally tested.

There is no reason to think that depression is an adaptation rather than a pathology. Lacking evidence for a reproductive advantage of depression, Andrews and Thomson see the malady as an evolutionary adaptation for three other reasons: it is an “orderly” syndrome (“there is a neurological orderliness [anhedonia and biochemical effects on serotonin concentration that affects rumination] that appears to specifically and proficiently promote analysis in depressive rumination and is not likely to have evolved by chance”1,p.622); it is relatively common both within and among cultures; and it has a partial genetic basis.

None of this suggests that depression is an adaptation rather than a pathology. The “coordination” of symptoms is a post facto rationalization: with sufficient imagination, one can view nearly any mental illness as an orderly and useful syndrome. Schizophrenia, for example, could be considered a cluster of “coordinated” symptoms that enable individuals to discard a reality that is simply too painful to bear. Without information that depression enhances reproduction, the idea of adaptive “coordination” is mere storytelling.

More importantly, there are alternative explanations for disorders that are fairly common and have some genetic underpinning. Take alcoholism, which has an incidence similar to that of depression (about 7%), and appears to have some genetic basis. But nobody maintains that alcoholism is adaptive. Rather, it’s almost certainly a pathological effect of an environmental change (the discovery of fermentation and distillation) on an adaptive trait (the evolved wiring and pleasure centers of our brain). Like the painful and sometimes fatal childbirth that is the byproduct of selection for larger human brains, depression could simply be a maladaptive byproduct of a feature that is generally adaptive—perhaps the wiring of those brains. Viewed in this way, depression could be a “spandrel,” a genetic hitchhiker that is a byproduct of something else.5

Alternatively, genes that cause depression might have some advantage when they are present but do not produce the disorder. This can happen if the condition has what geneticists call “variable penetrance”: 10% of individuals carrying the dominant gene for retinoblastoma, for instance, don’t develop the disease. Or, genes that cause depression only when present in two copies could, when present in heterozygous (one-copy) condition, have another, unknown advantage. Note that these two scenarios offer an adaptive explanation for depression genes that do not view the condition itself as adaptive. And both can be tested, for they predict that the non-depressed relatives of depressives (who carry but don’t express “depression genes”) should have higher reproductive output than do non-depressed people whose relatives are also not depressed.

This critique of the ARH applies, of course, to other adaptive explanations of depression, including the plea for help theory,6 the social rank theory,7 and the depressive realism theory.8 Further, some have suggested that depression is adaptive because it and other affective disorders are associated with high creativity.9 This suggestion is also dubious, as there is no evidence that depressed people who are creative have a higher reproductive output than other members of the population.

Andrews and Thomson conclude that, in view of the ARH, problem-solving therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy are the go-to treatments for depression. Further, they say, doctors should not be too hasty in prescribing antidepressant medication because the afflicted should be willing to “endure the pain”1,p.645 in hopes of a more permanent, evolution-based cure. Indeed, one could read the ARH as suggesting that depression should not be cured, but cultivated!

But Andrews and Thomson’s prescriptions lose force to the extent that they rest on a flawed biological premise. Of course researchers should continue to compare talk therapies and to determine which, if any, drugs are useful in alleviating depression. But in the meantime, let’s not expropriate and distort evolutionary theory in a misguided attempt to claim mental disorders as “adaptations.”

References
1. Andrews PW Thomson JA Jr. The bright side of being blue: depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems. Psychol Rev. 2009;116:620-654.
2. Lehrer J. Depression’s upside. New York Times, Feb. 25, 2010.
3. Coyne JA. Is depression an evolutionary adaptation? Available at: [Part 1] http://whyevolutionistrue.com/2009/08/29/is-depression-an-evolutionary-adaptation-part-1/. [Part 2] http://whyevolutionistrue.com/2009/08/30/is-depression-an-    evolutionary-adaptation-part-2/. Accessed May 25, 2010.
4. Lonnqvist JK. Suicide. In: Gelder MN, Andreasen, Lopez-Ibor J, Geddes J, eds. New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009:951-957.
5. Pies RW. The myth of depression’s upside. Available at: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/01/the-myth-of-depressions-upside/. Accessed May 25, 2010.
6. Keedwell P. How Sadness Survived: The Evolutionary Basis of Depression. Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing; 2008.
7. Gilbert P, Allan S. 1998. The role of defeat and entrapment (arrested flight) in depression: an exploration of an evolutionary view. Psychol Med. 1998;28:585-598.
8. Taylor SE. Positive Illusions: Creative Self-deception and the Healthy Mind. New York: Basic Books; 1991.
9. Andreasen NC. Creativity and mental illness: prevalence rates in writers and their first-degree relatives. Am J Psychiatry. 1987;144:1288-1292.

Grayling on the Dalai Lama

May 26, 2010 • 3:47 pm

I have this note from Anthony Grayling, which I post with his permission.

There is an op-ed in today’s New York Times by no less a personage than the Dalai Lama, headlined “Many Faiths, One Truth.” He is of course right: there are many faiths, and there is one truth: viz. that all the faiths are bunkum.  We all like the good old Dalai, do we not, who in this article iterates the claim that no-one heeds, viz., that tolerance is required for a peaceful world—except that he doesn’t seem to extend that warm sentiment to the limit. “Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs,” he laments, alongside mention of murderous inter-religious strife and religion-inspired mayhem—as if blanket condemnations‚ and mass murders carried out by zealots were somehow on a par.

Anyway: the point of mentioning this is to suggest that we never allow passage to the claim that the many faiths are all the same at bottom. The faithful hope that repetition of the claim will make it seem true.  In response we should endlessly iterate the obvious, that the religions are mutually exclusive, mutually blaspheming, mutually hostile,  bitterly and deeply divisive, and thus a rash of open sores in the flesh of humanity.

An equally bad thing about the Dalai Lama’s article is that he calls Buddhism a religion‚ and indeed in the superstitious demon-ridden polytheistic Tibetan version of it that he leads, that is what it is. But original Buddhism is a philosophy, without gods or supernatural beings—all such explicitly rejected by Siddhartha Gautama in offering a quietist ethical teaching; but he has of course been subjected to the Brian’s Sandal phenomenon in the usual stupid way of time and the masses.

The mysteries of migration

May 26, 2010 • 10:04 am

The more we learn about bird migration, the more bizarre it gets.  If you’re at all interested in birds, or in animal behavior, get your tuchus over to The New York Times and read Carl Zimmer’s nice piece on how recent technological advances, like the invention of tiny geolocators, have produced surprising new results about migration.  A few snippets:

Just as he had suspected, the bar-tailed godwits headed out over the open ocean and flew south through the Pacific. They did not stop at islands along the way. Instead, they traveled up to 7,100 miles in nine days — the longest nonstop flight ever recorded. “I was speechless,” Mr. Gill said. . .

Consider what might be the ultimate test of human endurance in sports, the Tour de France: Every day, bicyclists pedal up and down mountains for hours. In the process, they raise their metabolism to about five times their resting rate.  The bar-tailed godwit, by contrast, elevates its metabolic rate between 8 and 10 times.  And instead of ending each day with a big dinner and a good night’s rest, the birds fly through the night, slowly starving themselves as they travel 40 miles an hour. . .

In fact, ruby-throated hummingbirds returning north in the spring will set out from the Yucatán Peninsula in the evening and arrive in the southern United States the next afternoon. .

Mr. Gill and his colleagues have recorded similar odysseys from other wading birds, using satellite transmitters. They found that bristle-thighed curlews fly as far as 6,000 miles without a stop, traveling from Alaska to the Marshall Islands. They have also recorded whimbrels flying 5,000 miles nonstop from Alaska to Central America. . .

By the time the birds are ready to leave, their bodies are 55 percent fat. In humans, anything more than 30 percent is considered obese. But as soon as the birds are done eating, their livers and intestines become dead weight. They then essentially “eat” their organs, which shrink 25 percent. The birds use the proteins to build up their muscles even more.

And the weird thing is that we have no idea how the birds find their way.

Fig. 1.  A geolocator.  Weighing less than 1.5 grams, it can track a bird’s position by monitoring ambient light levels.

Fig. 2.  A juvenile shrike wearing a geolocator.  From Ontario Field Ornithologists.

Religious beliefs can be true and false at the same time

May 26, 2010 • 8:25 am

Over at HuffPo, Andrew Pessin takes his place along with Mark Vernon and Karen Armstrong in the pantheon of those who have written the worst nonsense about religion.  In his new piece,  “How to be certain your religion is true and still get along with others”, Pessin says he’s finally solved the problem of how different religions, with their disparate notions of religious truths, can still live in harmony.  How can you be dead certain that the tenets of your faith are right and still tell others that the contradictory tenets of their faiths might also be right?

Pessin’s solution: you just assert it.

What I suggest instead is that we simply acknowledge the paradox: that is, recognize that both contradictory propositions are, in their own right, extremely plausible. In the preface case this actually seems quite easy to do. My ultimate hope, then, is that world peace will break out when enough people simply acknowledge the paradox as well and begin applying it more generally.

Why is that?

Because acknowledging the paradox allows you simultaneously to say two things.

Choose some important, life-governing, very controversial thing you happen to believe in with great fervor: the existence of God (or perhaps atheism), the truth of Christianity (or Islam or Hinduism, etc.), absolute morality (or relativism), etc. Focusing on religion as our example, you can now say, first, that you believe, with certainty, on the basis of reason and evidence and testimony, in the truth of, say, the various individual tenets of your version of Christianity, and thus believe, with equal certainty, in all the things entailed by that belief: that, say, all other competing religions and doctrines are simply false.

But then you can say, second, something else: that you may be wrong.

Got it? You can simultaneously be certain that Christianity is true and everything conflicting with it is false, and yet acknowledge that you may be wrong without taking away your certainty. You can thus keep your certainties without having to claim that you are, in fact, and grossly implausibly, infallible. It’s what everyone (other than bakers) has yearned for since time immemorial: the proverbial cake, both eaten yet had!

I get it!  Jesus was certainly the son of God, but then he wasn’t, too.  Mohamed was surely God’s prophet but then again maybe he wasn’t.  It’s all so easy!

This is the funniest example of religious doublethink I’ve ever seen.  That is, it would be funny if it didn’t show so clearly how faith rots the brain.

Pessin, by the way, is the chair of the philosophy department at Connecticut College.

A whole lotta shakin’ going on

May 26, 2010 • 5:23 am

I’m sure you’ve seen a photograph of the red-eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) from Mesomerica.  With bright red bug-eyes, a day-glo green upper body, turquoise legs, and orange belly (as well as a weird call that resembles a baby’s rattle), they’re on many of the animal calendars that appear each winter.

A new paper in Current Biology also shows that these frogs also have a unique behavior. It’s all about sex, of course.  To warn competitors away, males hold onto their branch and shake their rumps up and down, producing a characteristic vibration that rattles nearby branches.  This often leads to a bout of wrestling between males.  I could describe the paper further, but it’s better summarized by this nice report from the last Science Friday. Be sure to watch to the end, because the frog’s eggs also respond to vibrations! (Click on the screen to begin; if that doesn’t work go to the Science Friday link.)

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.943922&w=425&h=350&fv=%26file%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.podtrac.com%2Fpts%2Fredirect.mp4%3Fhttp%3A%2F%2Ftraffic.libsyn.com%2Fsciencefriday%2Fretreefrog-052110.mp4%26height%3D285%26width%3D480%26frontcolor%3D0xffffff%26backcolor%3D0xeeeecc%26lightcolor%3D0xFFFFFF%26showdigits%3Dfalse%26autostart%3Dfalse%26showicons%3Dfalse%26usefullscreen%3Dtrue%26wmode%3D]

When I read about this behavior, my first thought was that the vibrations attracted nearby females, but the researchers haven’t studied that yet.  Ten to one the vibrations will prove to be an aphrodesiac.

Now why did the scientists study this, and why was it published in Current Biology?  Many papers include what I call a Reason for Uniqueness (RFU): a couple of lines in either the abstract or the discussion that say why your results are new, exciting, and, above all, unique.  RFUs always begin in a similar way: “This is the first study that shows. . . ” and so on.  All of us like to stick out from the crowd, and we hope that, by making the RFU explicit to overworked editors and reviewers, they will glom on to this sentence and accept our papers.  There’s nothing more damning a reviewer can say about a paper than “This doesn’t really show anything new.” (I don’t much like RFUs, which often smack of self-promotion, but I confess that I’ve used them myself.)

At any rate, here’s the RFU for this study:

Although our study provides, to our knowledge, the first experimental demonstration of communication via plant-borne vibrations in a vertebrate, other arboreal vertebrates almost certainly use this communication channel.

This is a good RFU, because it points out related work on social communication involving vibration.  But the above is just a fancy way of saying why we really spend our lives making model treefrogs and tree-shaking machines:

Our study provides one more proof that nature is fantastic and full of surprises.

___________________

Caldwell, M. S., G. R. Johnston, J. G. McDaniel, and K. M. Warkentin.  2010.  Vibrational signalling in the agonistic interactions of red-eyed treefrogs. Current Biology 20, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.069

Gibersonia: who’s befouling the sandbox?

May 25, 2010 • 5:47 am

Forgive me if I’m not playing well in the sandbox, but I want to point out two errors and a slur that Karl Giberson made in the articles I mentioned yesterday.

First, over at BioLogos, Giberson chastises me for my theological unsophistication:

Caricaturing the [theodicy] argument Coyne writes:

Evolution by natural causes in effect emancipates religion from the shackles of theodicy. No longer need we agonize about why a Creator God is the world’s leading abortionist and mass murderer… No longer need we be tempted to blaspheme an omnipotent Deity by charging Him directly responsible for human frailties and physical shortcomings … No longer need we blame a Creator God’s direct hand for any of these disturbing empirical facts. Instead, we can put the blame squarely on the agency of insentient natural evolutionary causation.

Coyne concludes: “If evolution is to become a “welcome partner” to religion, the faithful will have to accept that evolution and natural selection were God’s plan for creating life.

There’s a slight problem here.  The quote in italics, attributed to me, is not mine.  It is in fact a quote by John Avise in the PNAS article that Giberson is praising, “Footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome”
(you’ll find it on p. 7 of Avise’s piece). So hurt is Giberson by the atheists’ refusal to play, and so eager is he to rush his criticisms of the New Atheists into print, that he doesn’t even notice that what he claims is my “caricature” of  theodicy is actually the argument that Avise is making and that Giberson himself is defending.

I know Giberson reads this website, so I expect him to fix this forthwith.

And, while we’re fixing the record, let’s look at one statement Giberson makes while playing nice with Dan Dennett in the USA Today piece:

Tufts University philosopher and leading atheist Daniel Dennet no doubt finds all this mystifying, since he thinks seminary education should ultimately terminate one’s faith: “Anybody who goes through seminary and comes out believing in God hasn’t been paying attention,” he told The Boston Globe.

Now let’s forget that he misspells “Dennett” (and it’s not a typo, because he does it in the next sentence, too).  Here’s what “Dennet” told the Boston Globe:

DENNETT: It’s true, here are these young people in seminary, they have come with the purest of hearts and the noblest of intentions and they’re going to devote their lives to God. And one of the first things they learn is textual criticism. They’re looking at all the existing papyruses and scrolls and so forth and learning about the recension of the texts — the tortuous and often controversial historical path from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the books of the Bible — and all the Apocryphal books that got rejected — to the King James Version and all the later English translations. And that’s not what they taught you in Sunday school. That’s the joke that we often provoke from people when we talk about this: Anybody who goes through seminary and comes out believing in God hasn’t been paying attention. [My italics.]

Yes, Dennett said it, but it’s clear that he’s describing other peoples’ reactions.  This quote in fact comes from p. 23 of the study by Dennett and Linda LaScola, “Preachers who are not believers,”  (download it here), examining the curious case of active clergy who don’t accept God:

A gulf opened up between what one says from the pulpit and what one has been taught in seminary. This gulf is well-known in religious circles. . .  Every Christian minister, not just those in our little study, has to confront this awkwardness, and no doubt there are many more ways of responding to it than our small sample illustrates. How widespread is this phenomenon? When we asked one of the other pastors we talked with initially if he thought clergy with his views were rare in the church, he responded “Oh, you can’t go through seminary and come out believing in God!” Surely an overstatement, but a telling one.

This statement was made not by Dennett but by a pastor, and although that’s not completely clear in the Globe piece, what is clear is that the words don’t represent Dennett’s own thoughts—in fact, he and LaScola characterize them as an “overstatement” in the original article.  I guess Giberson didn’t read that.

And finally, there’s this little bit of nastiness from Giberson’s USA Today piece:

Sam Harris described Collins’ personal religious journey, unfolded in his best-seller The Language of God, as an account of “nothing less than an intellectual suicide.” Harris, who finally completed his Ph.D. in neuroscience at UCLA, apparently believes that neurons used for religious belief simply won’t work if applied to science.

Finally completed his Ph.D? What’s that all about?  It can be nothing other than a slap at Harris for taking too long to get his doctorate. Absent the intent to slur, the word “finally” is superfluous.  But jeez, Dr. Giberson, given that Harris is producing big books, running a website, writing a lot of popular articles, dealing with a new mouth to feed, and doing graduate work, all at the same time, it’s amazing that he could get a Ph.D. at all.

Since Giberson is playing Joe McCarthy, accusing New Atheists of being “un-American” in their criticism of faith, let me play Joseph Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, Dr. Giberson? At long last, have you left no sense of decency—or scholarship?”

Karl Giberson: It’s un-American to criticize faith

May 24, 2010 • 6:28 pm

Oh dear, Karl Giberson is mad at me. He’s just disgorged two articles that criticize me for incivility and for not properly understanding the ways of God.  The first, “Atheists, it’s time to play well with others” (oy, what a title!), is at USA Today.  The second, “Jerry Coyne’s insufferable argument,” is at his own venue, BioLogos.  I’ll take up the first one here, as I’m not sure I have the stomach for both.

There’s really nothing new in the USA Today piece—it’s the wearying argument that even if the New Atheists are right, and there is no God, our tone is simply off-putting.  We’re shrill, obstreperous, and intolerant. More intolerant, in fact, than fundamentalists themselves, since a religously conservative seminary was open-minded enough to hire Bruce Waltke after Reformed Theological Seminary forced him to resign for being soft on evolution.

Here’s what Giberson says.

Science and faith are compatible because there are lots of religious scientists.  Some of them have even won Nobel Prizes! Hello? Anybody listening out there?  Earth to Giberson:  no New Atheist has ever denied that faith and science can be “compatible” in the sense that both can be simultaneously embraced by one human mind.  The argument is, and always has been, about whether science and faith are philosophically compatible.  Do they clash because they deal with “data” in disparate ways? Do they have completely different standards for judging “truth”?  I say “yes,” and assert that religious scientists exist in a state of cognitive dissonance.

I stated this perfectly clearly in an earlier New Republic article that, apparently, helped inspire Giberson’s USA Today piece. But this simple logic still eludes him.  Well, let me inform Dr. Giberson one last time what his argument implies: Catholicism is compatible with pedophilia because many Catholics are pedophiles.

Atheist-scientists claim “that a fellow scientist doing world-class science must abandon his or her religion to be a good scientist.” You know, Giberson is really starting to tick me off.  I have never said this, nor, to my knowledge, have any New Atheists.  All of us agree, for instance, that evangelical Christian Francis Collins is a good scientist.  What we say is that anybody doing any kind of science should abandon his or her faith if they wish become a philosophically consistent scientist.

It’s hard not to see Giberson as disingenuous when he continues to accuse New Atheists of things that they don’t believe, and which he knows that they don’t believe.  That’s how creationists behave, for crying out loud.

I attacked Giberson in an unseemly manner.:

Dennett’s brother-in-arms, atheist Jerry Coyne, raked Brown University cell biologist Ken Miller and me over the coals in The New Republic for our claims that Christians can unapologetically embrace science.

Raked them over the coals? I defy anybody to read that article and say that it’s uncivil. In fact, it says the following:

Giberson and Miller are thoughtful men of good will. Reading them, you get a sense of conviction and sincerity absent from the writings of many creationists, who blatantly deny the most obvious facts about nature in the cause of their faith. Both of their books are worth reading: Giberson for the history of the creation/ evolution debate, and Miller for his lucid arguments against intelligent design. Yet in the end they fail to achieve their longed-for union between faith and evolution. And they fail for the same reason that people always fail: a true harmony between science and religion requires either doing away with most people’s religion and replacing it with a watered-down deism, or polluting science with unnecessary, untestable, and unreasonable spiritual claims.

Wow, that’s way harsh, dudes!

I didn’t rake Miller and Giberson over the coals, I raked their ideas over the coals.  Giberson, like Michael Ruse, can’t see the difference between attacking ideas and attacking persons. Which brings us to Giberson’s last complaint:

Criticizing faith is “un-American.” I wouldn’t have believe this McCarthy-esque accusation if I hadn’t seen it myself:

There is something profoundly un-American about demanding that people give up cherished, or even uncherished, beliefs just because they don’t comport with science.

But wait. Isn’t  that exactly what Giberson is doing when he tells people, as he did in his latest book, that they should stop espousing creationism because science disproves it?

Giberson is, a la Archie Bunker, telling vociferous atheists to stifle themselves.  Criticizing religion is off limits because it clashes with people’s cherished—or uncherished!—beliefs.

But here‘s what’s un-American: demanding special privileges for religion, and immunity from criticism, that other bodies of thought, like political views, don’t enjoy.  Giberson would never tell Democrats to stop criticizing Republicans’ cherished ideas of offshore drilling and racial profiling. Political ideas must survive the rough-and-tumble market of free thought.   Giving a pass to religious ideas, simply because they are religious, makes about as much sense as giving tax breaks to churches.  The First Amendment is there because free expression allows the best ideas to rise to the top.

Freedom of speech is profoundly American.   Like Dorothy, we atheists have looked behind the curtain of religious thought and found nothing there.  And we talk about that.  Is a little criticism, and, at times, ridicule, too much for Giberson to bear? Are he and his comrades in faith such wilting flowers that they must at all cost be protected from criticism of their supernaturalism?

In the end, Giberson condescendingly admonishes us:

The New Atheists need to learn how to play in the sandbox.

Sorry, Dr. Giberson, no can do—not if “playing” means pretending to eat the invisible sandwiches that our playmates offer us. And besides, you know what happens when you put a kitteh in the sandbox: