Evolutionary Psychology

Physics is great for explaining the natural world, but offers little help when it comes to explaining human nature. Since one is likely to run into other humans in the course of any given day, it is usually advantageous to have some idea about why people act the why they do. An extremely powerful tool for doing this is evolutionary psychology, which extends the concepts of natural selection to the workings of the human brain. By thinking about specific emotions and cognitive strategies as being beneficial or detrimental adaptations no less than organs or limbs, human predilections that seemed incomprehensible before can be made sense of. Even the popular media invokes EP as the prevailing scientific theory. Time magazine periodically does so; recently, it devoted an entire cover story to the science of hunger, in which it details humans have evolved a strong desire for fat and calorie rich foods, which were rare prizes for our ancestors but now are all too readily available.

Although evolutionary psychology is sometimes criticized as consisting of contrived, post-hoc explanations, it does make testable, falsifiable predictions that have been tested and confirmed by experiment. Almost as important, it has great explanatory value regarding human behavior that is mystifying otherwise. Why do we crave unhealthy foods? Why do teams sports come so naturally to us? Why are we generous to our relatives and distrustful of outsiders? Why do we find certain people to be attractive potential sexual partners more than others? Why do we feel compelled to enforce fairness and punish cheaters, even if it is not in our immediate self-interest? Consider the alternative religious explanation: "Humans act that way because that's just how God made us." In addition to the fact that this has zero explanatory value, it also doesn't make sense on it's own. Why would a deity create us a propensity to selfishness, a desire to mate with forbidden partners, or a mind that come up with rival gods and religions? To say that "the creator (or the devil or whatever) is just testing us" is to engage in real post-hoc storytelling.

The Onion

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

I liked this Onion piece because it satirizes some of the unusual ways some believers try to reconcile what they have been taught to believe with scientific evidence. Often this results in a strange hybrid in which "God directed evolution to create life" or "The six days of creation really took billions of years." These syncretist solutions usually end up mangling both science and religion in the attempt to get them to mesh. The article also takes the "God of the Gaps" approach to logical extreme - as science continually improves its naturalistic explanation of the world, there is less and less room to invoke the supernatural.

Willful Ignorance?

Recently, I was at someone's apartment and the conversation turned to Sam Harris, the noted atheist author who had written Letter to A Christian Nation, which addresses, among other things, the dangers of mixing religion and politics. The host owned a copy of one of Harris's earlier books, The End of Faith, which also argues in favor of reason over belief. As the book was taken off the shelf and handed to a guest, someone else present said (in effect) "You probably shouldn't read the book. It makes some good arguments - not as good as the author thinks they are, but still pretty persuasive." Silently, I was taken aback. Clearly there was a lot of cognitive dissonance in the room. The speaker obviously had a great deal of questions about his faith, or at least, enough to read a book that completely demolishes what he has been taught to believe. His response after reading the book, for which, he admits, he has no satisfactory arguments in defense of his faith, was not to revise his beliefs but to advise others not to read the book in the first place. To me, this borders on an attempt to help others remain willfully ignorant. In contrast, if someone handed me a book and was able to persuade me that there was a strong likelihood that that, after reading it, I would be convinced that God exists, or that Unicorns control the UN, et cetera, I would be edger to read it because I'm really interested in finding the truth (or at least, I hope I am). However, it is human nature in many instances to prefer confirmation of one's beliefs, even when mistaken, above being faced with facts that may lead to having to change one's opinion. This is especially true when the person has made a large investment in a particular course of action, and a lifetime of religious belief and practice certainly qualifies. Nevertheless, I'm still encouraged by the fact that there are religious young people who possess the open mindedness to question what they have been taught, even if they are not quite ready to take the next step in the process of moving beyond faith.

Slate.com book excerpt

Previously, Slate has run several interesting features on religion, such as a very engaging "Blogging the Bible" recurring column in which a modern reader offers his impressions after actually reading the book so many claim as indisputable cannon. Recently, the website posted a excerpt from Christopher Hitchens's new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens makes some very powerful points, and I'm sure that even many believers will agree with him, provided they are talking about all the other religions, not the specific one they personally maintain to be absolute truth.

Demystifying Love

Empiricists often hear objections to the effect that "science provides a reasonably good description of most phenomena, but there are just some things, such as god, or love, or human consciousness, that simply transcend any attempt to be explained by any purely materialistic theory. These critiques can usually be recognized as simple reformulations of the "god of the gaps" philosophy ("since I can't explain it right now, it must be the work of a god or gods or some other unexplainable source"). By simply giving up it , the objector is ignoring the track record empiricism has had against the god of the gaps (eg. lighting is not really a projectile from Zeus). Science is constantly making headway on questions formerly considered to be completely intractable. This is not to say that scientists will ever have all the answers - it may turn out that some things are really beyond human comprehension, but don't count on it. Therefore, upon being called a "materialist," one can rejoin, "you say it like it's a bad thing!"

One area in particular that has long been thought to be the Provence of the transcendent is romantic love. Ironically, it is on this topic that evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists have made huge progress, showing how "love" can be explained as an vital evolutionary adaptation. In fact, The New York Times "themed" this Tuesday's Science Times with the science of "desire." Some traditionalists might be unhappy to hear that the "transcendent" romantic attraction between sweethearts is really nothing more than a matter of neurotransmitters acting in very down-to-earth biochemical reactions, however, reality is not always so accommodating to our wishes. Richard Dawkins likes to say, science and religion try to answer the same questions. Science has the added benefit of usually being right. Besides, explaining our world doesn't make it less interesting by "ruining the mystery." On the contrary, science has shown that the universe is so much more facinating than humans could ever had imagined. As Daniel Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, knowing that the sun is a huge thermonuclear furnace teeming with atoms in ceaseless activity is a lot more interesting than thinking it to be pulled across the sky by a chariot.
So instead of taking all of the excitement out of life, empiricism helps inspire a sense of awe that a pile of molecules we call a human being could love and think and have a sense of awe in the first place.

"Theistic Evolution"

I attended a lecture recently on evolution by an ordained rabbi who also happens to be a university biology professor. He maintained that the empirical evidence in favor of the scientific consensus regarding evolution and the age of the universe is overwhelming, but argued very passionately that, far from being a challenge to traditional Judaism, modern science can be seen to fit well with the classical Biblical commentaries of the Talmudic and Medieval eras. He showed how mainstream Judaism has never taken a literal view when reading Genesis and severally criticized the fundamentalist Christians (and more recently, ultra-orthodox rabbis) who reject evolution outright. I found his talk to be refreshing but not necessarily novel. I remember that when I was growing up the vast majority of my teachers and peers each came up with some scheme within his or her own mind to reconcile religious faith with science, since they held both to be correct. I found that in practice, this meant that there was not a great deal of difference in how they approached the natural world compared to atheists, except that they would think "look how marvelous God made the world to be," instead of "look how marvelous geological forces and natural selection have made the world to be." Believers in this kind of "theistic evolution," which holds that God directed natural forces as a means to create human life, can (and do) become successful Biologists and Biomedical researchers. This is in stark contrast to fundamentalists who feel that they have to reject huge swaths of science (cosmology, geology, biology, physics, astronomy, paleontology...) in order to justify a literal understanding of a ancient book. I strongly doubt that such a person could really participate in real research without a huge amount of mental compartmentalization and/or cognitive dissonance.

However, I am not so thrilled by theistic evolution either, even though I used to be a strong believer in it for many years. It is really a compromise, a forced syncrotism for the times when one wants so badly for one's dearly held religious beliefs to be in sync with empirical observations . So while I commend believers who possess the intellectual honesty to say that the evidence backing evolution and the age of the universe is convincing, I wish that they could just take that one further step and see how having a deity is no longer a necessary component. However, I know from experience that there is a huge emotional gap between believing in theistic evolution (and therefore being about to go on with one's regular religious beliefs and practices) compared to taking that final step and becoming an atheist.

On a related note, I've also found a rather lengthy but very well researched letter from a religious Jew which articulates a litany of logical difficulties inherent in belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and Talmud. I've always been especially disturbed by apologists who try to justify statements in the Talmud about spontaneous generation, folk remedies, or astronomy etc. that are currently known to be wrong by saying that "the sages were right then, but now nature has changed." I feel that to claim that, for example, lice really did come grow out of the dirt two thousand of years ago (as was believed by the Greeks) but nature suddenly changed between then and now so that they reproduce sexually just because an text taken to be "received wisdom" says so shows how strongly critical thinking is being suppressed. This is especially ironic considering that the Talmud itself is basically one long exercise in critically analyzing rabbinic dicta.

Happy Darwin Day!

Today, Feb 12, has been designated "Darwin Day" in recognition of the 198 Birthday of Charles Darwin. This holiday gives us a opportunity not only to reflect on the development of the theory of evolution, which is, in my humble opinion, among the top three ideas in all of science. [As a physicist, I would have to put quantum mechanics, and possibly special relativity first, but I do spend most of my spare time thinking about Evolutionary Psychology, as I hope to detail in some future posts.] Indeed, it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of evolution to modern Biology. It is literally the linchpin of all descriptions of life. See, for example, the classic essay by Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."

However, as momentous as this occurrence is, we should also realize why celebrations of scientific personalities is so rare. Contrary to what some Creationists have alleged, Evolution is not some "received wisdom" venerated like some anti-religious doctrine. And it goes without saying that Darwin is not looked on as an inerrant prophet whose ideas are mindless accepted as dogma. Scientists accept evolution because of its immense predictive power as well as the huge amount of fossil, molecular, anatomical, and genetic evidence in its favor. Like all theories, evolution has changed many times as new evidence is discovered and better explanations are formulated. As scientists, we do our best not to become overly emotionally attached to any theory, and to accept or reject them based on their merits. While it may seem a little disappointing that, unlike most religious believers, scientists cannot point to an idea and claim that it is the absolute and immutable truth, most of the ideas that form the foundation of modern science, like evolution, are so well founded by observations that, while constantly subject to improvement, are extremely unlikely to ever be completely overturned. This is why the theories, as opposed to the people, usually get most of the attention. But in the current debate over evolution, it is often valuable to have a symbolic figure to point to. So Happy Birthday, Darwin!