From HowlBloom at aol.com Thu Sep 1 01:59:14 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:59:14 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Eshel, Joel, Paul, and Pavel--not to mention Ted and Greg Message-ID: Pavel, Joel, Paul, and Eshel? See if I?ve understood the following article correctly. In this cosmos things don?t follow the sort of random spread of probabilities Ludwig Boltzmann believed in. Instead, old patterns jump from one level to another, showing up in new news. To understand the size and nature of the jumps, we have to understand something even deeper?the search strategies with which the cosmos explores what Stuart Kaufman calls ?possibility space?. The key quote from the article below is this one: ?if physicists can adequately understand the details of this ?exploring behaviour?, they should be able to predict values of q from first principles?. Now please bear with me. What I?ve been digging into for many decades is the manner in which the cosmos feels out her possibilities?the search strategies of nature. So have Eshel Ben-Jacob, Paul Werbos, Pavel Kurakin, and Joel Isaacson. Pavel and I, in our paper ?Conversation (dialog) model of quantum transitions ? (arXiv.org) suggest that we may find applications all up and down the scale of nature to one search strategy in particular, that used by a cloud of 20,000 smart particles?bees. Power laws help us move from the human-scale to the very big. They help us understand how patterns visible on one scale?the scale of the spiral of water that flushes your toilet, for example, can be scaled up to hurricanes, to vortex of the Red Spot on the surface of Jupiter, to hurricanes on Jupiter the size of thirty earths, and to the spirals of billions of stars called galaxies. Power laws or their equivalent also allow us to predict that if we give the cosmos another six or seven billion years, the spirals from your toilet will show up in swirls of multitudes of galaxies?they will show up in today?s potato-shaped, still-embryonic galaxy clusters. Power laws can be used in forward or reverse. In addition to going from the small to the very big, they can help us move from the human-scale to the very small. Power laws help us understand how the swirl in your bathtub shows up in the swizzles of electrons twisting through a channel on a superconductor. On the level of life, we can see search patterns at work, search patterns in Dennis Bray?s clusters of receptors on a cell wall, search patterns in Eshel Ben-Jacobs multi-trillion-member bacterial colonies, search patterns in Tom Seeley?s colonies of bees, search patterns in E.O. Wilson?s colonies of ants, and search patterns in colonies of termites. We can see search patterns in the motions of birds, and in the way these patterns have been modeled mathematically in Floys (mathematically-generated flocks of carnivorous Boids?see http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html). We can see search patterns in Martha Sherwood?s vampire bats, and search patterns in the areas of my fieldwork--human cultural fads and fashions and the multi-generational search patterns of art, religion, ideology, world-views, and science. If search patterns are the key to understanding the factor q, if they are the key to comprehending the magic factor that scales things up and down in giant, discontinuous leaps, then let?s by all means take search patterns at the scale of life and apply them like hell. That?s exactly what Pavel Kurakin and I have done in our paper. And it?s what I?ve done in much of my work, including in a book that?s been growing in the Bloom computer for fifteen years-- A Universe In Search Of Herself?The Case of the Curious Cosmos. Now the question is this. Have I misinterpreted the material below? And even if I?ve mangled it utterly, could an understanding of search patterns at one scale in the cosmos echo the patterns at other levels big and small? If the search patterns of life are reflected in the inanimate cosmos, do the search patterns of life in turn reflect the search patterns of the particles and processes of which they are made? And do the search patterns of an organism reflect the search patterns of her flock, her tribe, her culture, and of the total team of biomass? To what extent are competing search patterns a part of the cosmic process? Did competing search patterns only show up 3.85 billion years ago with the advent of life (assuming that the advent of life on earth took place at the same time as the advent of life?if there is any?elsewhere in the universe)? Are the gaps between competing search patterns also big ones, with their own chasms and jumps spaced out by their own mysterious q? Biomass has been probing this planet for 3.85 billion years now, and we are the fingers with which she feels out her possibilities. But we are also the fingers through which social clusters of protons 13.7 billion years old feel out their future. Is q related to the discipline of a probing strategy? Retrieved August 31, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700 NewScientist.com * HOME * |NEWS * |EXPLORE BY SUBJECT * |LAST WORD * |SUBSCRIBE * |SEARCH * |ARCHIVE * |RSS * |JOBS Click to Print Entropy: The new order * 27 August 2005 * From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. * Mark Buchanan CONSTANTINO TSALLIS has a single equation written on the blackboard in his office. It looks like one of the most famous equations in physics, but look more closely and it's a little bit different, decorated with some extra symbols and warped into a peculiar new form. Tsallis, based at the Brazilian Centre for Research in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, is excited to have created this new equation. And no wonder: his unassuming arrangement of symbols has stimulated hundreds of researchers to publish more than a thousand papers in the past decade, describing strange patterns in fluid flows, in magnetic fields issuing from the sun and in the subatomic debris created in particle accelerators. But there is something even more remarkable about Tsallis's equation: it came to him in a daydream. In 1985, in a classroom in Mexico City, Tsallis was listening as a colleague explained something to a student. On the chalkboard they had written a very ordinary algebraic expression, pq, representing some number p raised to the power q In Tsallis's line of work - describing the collective properties of large numbers of particles - the letter "p" usually stands for probability: the probability that a particle will have a particular velocity, say. Tsallis stared at the formula from a distance and his mind drifted off. "There were these pqs all over the board," he recalls, "and it suddenly came to my mind - like a flash - that with powers of probabilities one might do some unusual but possibly quite interesting physics." The physics involved may be more than quite interesting, however. The standard means of describing the collective properties of large numbers of particles - known as statistical mechanics - has been hugely successful for more than a century, but it has also been rather limited in its scope: you can only apply it to a narrow range of systems. Now, with an insight plucked out of thin air, Tsallis may have changed all that. Developed in the 19th century, statistical mechanics enabled physicists to overcome an imposing problem. Ordinary materials such as water, iron or glass are made of myriad atoms. But since it is impossible to calculate in perfect detail how every individual atom or molecule will move, it seems as if it might never be possible to understand the behaviour of such substances at the atomic level. The solution, as first suggested by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, lay in giving up hope of perfect understanding and working with probabilities instead. Boltzmann argued that knowing the probabilities for the particles to be in any of their various possible configurations would enable someone to work out the overall properties of the system. Going one step further, he also made a bold and insightful guess about these probabilities - that any of the many conceivable configurations for the particles would be equally probable. Deeper beauty Boltzmann's idea works, and has enabled physicists to make mathematical models of thousands of real materials, from simple crystals to superconductors. But his work also has a deeper beauty. For a start, it reflects the fact that many quantities in nature - such as the velocities of molecules in a gas - follow "normal" statistics. That is, they are closely grouped around the average value, with a "bell curve" distribution. The theory also explains why, if left to their own devices, systems tend to get disorganised. Boltzmann argued that any system that can be in several different configurations is most likely to be in the more spread out and disorganised condition. Air molecules in a box, for example, can gather neatly in a corner, but are more likely to fill the space evenly. That's because there are overwhelmingly more arrangements of the particles that will produce the spread out, jumbled state than arrangements that will concentrate the molecules in a corner. This way of thinking led to the famous notion of entropy - a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. In its most elegant formulation, Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, which was later developed mathematically by the American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, asserts that, under many conditions, a physical system will act so as to maximise its entropy. And yet Boltzmann and Gibbs's statistical mechanics doesn't explain everything: a great swathe of nature eludes its grasp entirely. Boltzmann's guess about equal probabilities only works for systems that have settled down to equilibrium, enjoying, for example, the same temperature throughout. The theory fails in any system where destabilising external sources of energy are at work, such as the haphazard motion of turbulent fluids or the fluctuating energies of cosmic rays. These systems don't follow normal statistics, but another pattern instead. If you repeatedly measure the difference in fluid velocity at two distinct points in a turbulent fluid, for instance, the probability of finding a particular velocity difference is roughly proportional to the amount of that difference raised to the power of some exponent. This pattern is known as a "power law", and such patterns turn up in many other areas of physics, from the distribution of energies of cosmic rays to the fluctuations of river levels or wind speeds over a desert. Because ordinary statistical mechanics doesn't explain power laws, their atomic-level origins remain largely mysterious, which is why many physicists find Tsallis's mathematics so enticing. In Mexico City, coming out of his reverie, Tsallis wrote up some notes on his idea, and soon came to a formula that looked something like the standard formula for the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy - but with a subtle difference. If he set q to 1 in the formula - so that pq became the probability p - the new formula reduced to the old one. But if q was not equal to 1, it made the formula produce something else. This led Tsallis to a new definition of entropy. He called it q entropy. Back then, Tsallis had no idea what q might actually signify, but the way this new entropy worked mathematically suggested he might be on to something. In particular, the power-law pattern tumbles out of the theory quite naturally. Over the past decade, researchers have shown that Tsallis's mathematics seem to describe power-law behaviour accurately in a wide range of phenomena, from fluid turbulence to the debris created in the collisions of high-energy particles. But while the idea of maximising q entropy seems to work empirically, allowing people to fit their data to power-law curves and come up with a value of q for individual systems, it has also landed Tsallis in some hot water. The new mathematics seems to work, yet no one knows what the q entropy really represents, or why any physical system should maximise it. Degrees of chaos And for this reason, many physicists remain sceptical, or worse. "I have to say that I don't buy it at all," says physicist Cosma Shalizi of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who criticises the mathematical foundations of Tsallis's approach. As he points out, the usual Boltzmann procedure for maximising the entropy in statistical mechanics assumes a fixed value for the average energy of a system, a natural idea. But to make things work out within the Tsallis framework, researchers have to fix the value of another quantity - a "generalised" energy - that has no clear physical interpretation. "I have yet to encounter anyone," says Shalizi, "who can explain why this should be natural." To his critics, Tsallis's success is little more than sleight of hand: the equation may simply provide a convenient way to generate power laws, which researchers can then fit to data by choosing the right value of q "My impression," says Guido Caldarelli of La Sapienza University in Rome, "is that the method really just fits data by adjusting a parameter. I'm not yet convinced there's new physics here." Physicist Peter Grassberger of the University of Wuppertal in Germany goes further. "It is all nonsense," he says. "It has led to no new predictions, nor is it based on rational arguments." The problem is that most work applying Tsallis's ideas has simply chosen a value of q to make the theory fit empirical data, without tying q to the real dynamics of the system in any deeper way: there's nothing to show why these dynamics depart from Boltzmann's picture of equal probabilities. Tsallis, who is now at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, acknowledges this is a limitation, but suggests that a more fundamental explanation is already on its way. Power laws, he argues, should tend to arise in "weakly chaotic" systems. In this kind of system, small perturbations might not be enough to alter the arrangement of molecules. As a result, the system won't "explore" all possible configurations over time. In a properly chaotic system, on the other hand, even tiny perturbations will keep sending the system into new configurations, allowing it to explore all its states as required for Boltzmann statistics. Tsallis argues that if physicists can adequately understand the details of this "exploring behaviour", they should be able to predict values of q from first principles. In particular, he proposes, some as yet unknown single parameter - closely akin to q - should describe the degree of chaos in any system. Working out its value by studying a system's basic dynamics would then let physicists predict the value of q that then emerges in its statistics. Other theoretical work seems to support this possibility. For example, in a paper soon to appear in Physical Review E, physicist Alberto Robledo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City has examined several classic models that physicists have used to explore the phenomenon of chaos. What makes these models useful is that they can be tuned to be more or less chaotic - and so used to explore the transition from one kind of behaviour to another. Using these model systems, Robledo has been able to carry out Tsallis's prescription, deriving a value of q just from studying the system's fundamental dynamics. That value of q then reproduces intricate power-law properties for these systems at the threshold of chaos. "This work shows that q can be deduced from first principles," Tsallis says. While Robledo has tackled theoretical issues, other researchers have made the same point with real observations. In a paper just published, Leonard Burlaga and Adolfo Vinas at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, study fluctuations in the properties of the solar wind - the stream of charged particles that flows outward from the sun - and show that they conform to Tsallis's ideas. They have found that the dynamics of the solar wind, as seen in changes in its velocity and magnetic field strength, display weak chaos of the type envisioned by Tsallis. Burlaga and Vinas have also found that the fluctuations of the magnetic field follow power laws that fit Tsallis's framework with q set to 1.75 (Physica A, vol 356, p 275). The chance that a more comprehensive formulation of Tsallis's q entropy might eventually be found intrigues physicist Ezequiel Cohen of the Rockefeller University in New York City. "I think a good part of the establishment takes an unfair position towards Tsallis's work," he says. "The critique that all he does is 'curve fitting' is, in my opinion, misplaced." Cohen has also started building his own work on Tsallis's foundations. Two years ago, with Christian Beck of Queen Mary, University of London, he proposed an idea known as "superstatistics" that would incorporate the statistics of both Boltzmann and Tsallis within a larger framework. In this work they revisited the limitation of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's models cannot cope with any system in which external forces churn up differences such as variations in temperature. A particle moving through such a system would experience many temperatures for short periods and its fluctuations would reflect an average of the ordinary Boltzmann statistics for all those different temperatures. Cohen and Beck showed that such averaged statistics, emerging out of the messy non-uniformity of real systems, take the very same form as Tsallis statistics, and lead to power laws. In one striking example, Beck showed how the distribution of the energies of cosmic rays could emerge from random fluctuations in the temperature of the hot matter where they were originally created. Cohen thinks that, if nothing else, Tsallis's powers of probabilities have served to reawaken physicists to fundamental questions they have never quite answered. After all Boltzmann's idea, though successful, was also based on a guess; Albert Einstein disliked Boltzmann's arbitrary assumption of "equal probabilities" and insisted that a proper theory of matter had to rest on a deep understanding of the real dynamics of particles. That understanding still eludes us, but Tsallis may have taken us closer. It is possible that, in his mysterious q entropy, Tsallis has discovered a kind of entropy just as useful as Boltzmann's and especially suited to the real-world systems in which the traditional theory fails. "Tsallis made the first attempt to go beyond Boltzmann," says Cohen. The door is now open for others to follow. Close this window Printed on Thu Sep 01 01:17:25 BST 2005 ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 1 00:25:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:25:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: The fight against Holocaust denial Message-ID: The fight against Holocaust denial http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/4436275.stm Published: 2005/04/14 19:04:14 GMT [Even the BBC spells minuscule miniscule! Where can I get a book that lays out the arguments and counter-arguments on all sides, a book like "Scientists Answer Creationists" or "Scientists Answer Vellikowsky" (?sp). There are books by these approximate titles.] By Raffi Berg BBC News It is 60 years since the full horror of the Nazi Holocaust began to emerge with the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Belsen was the first death camp entered by the Western allies and first-hand accounts of mass graves, piles of corpses and emaciated, diseased survivors spread quickly around the world. The BBC's Richard Dimbleby described dead and dying people over an acre of ground, while US radio correspondent Patrick Gordon Walker described the camp as a "hellhole", adding that this was not propaganda but the "plain and simple truth". But, in the 21st Century, as these events recede into history and the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, there are still people who deny these crimes happened - and it is a tendency that some experts say is growing. "Holocaust revisionism is spreading, and not only among neo-Nazis," Kate Taylor, of the anti-fascist publication Searchlight, told the BBC News website. "As survivors are increasingly dying out it is much easier to hijack history for whatever cause or purpose." COUNTRIES WITH LAWS AGAINST HOLOCAUST DENIAL Austria Belgium Czech Republic France Germany Israel Lithuania Poland Slovakia Switzerland The internet has played a role in this. While publications peddling Holocaust denial were previously confined to the race-hate paraphernalia of extremist groups, the same material is now readily available on the web. One of the earliest and most infamous publications denying the Holocaust was a 32-page pseudo-academic booklet entitled Did Six Million Really Die?, first printed in England in 1974. It dismisses concentration camps as "mythology", rejects the Diary of Anne Frank as a hoax and claims Jews were not exterminated but rather emigrated from Nazi Germany with the help of a benevolent government. The booklet was widely banned but has resurfaced in electronic form on the internet. At 14-years-old children are not mature enough to make the distinction between a denialist site and a more legitimate site Kay Andrews, of the UK Holocaust Educational Trust, says Holocaust denial sites, subtly questioning the facts, can mislead the young people her group is trying to teach. "With the internet, you've got to be fairly well-educated to see through what revisionist websites are trying to do," she says. "I think as soon as you look at them closely you can work it out, but part of the problem that we find is teachers will send pupils off to do internet research and not guide them to specific sites. "So as a result kids put the Holocaust into a search engine, which comes up with all of this stuff, and at 14-years-old they are not mature enough to make that distinction between a denialist site and a more legitimate site." Denial doomed? However, the eminent British historian Sir Martin Gilbert believes the tireless gathering of facts about the Holocaust will ultimately consign the deniers to history. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. Oskar Groening SS guard, Auschwitz "I don't think Holocaust denial is really a problem because of the incredible state of survivor memoirs," he told the BBC News website. "The number of deniers and the amount of denial literature is miniscule compared with the serious literature, not only the memoirs but the history books, the specialist books, and books which cater for every age group on the Holocaust. "There is a tremendous range of stuff and some of it is written for young people and teenagers - in that sense the Holocaust deniers have totally lost out." Over a period of many years, Jerusalem's Yad Vashem museum has documented the lives of more than three million Holocaust victims. More recently, Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah [Holocaust] Visual History Foundation (VHF) has recorded more than 50,000 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Turning point But VHF president Doug Greenberg is less confident about the future than Martin Gilbert. On the positive side, he notes that in 2000 a British judge rejected a libel case brought by a notorious British revisionist, David Irving, against US historian Deborah Lipstadt who had called him one of the "most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial". "The most important thing that's happened in terms of Holocaust denial is the David Irving trial," Mr Greenberg told the BBC News website. "Because a British court of law said in effect Holocaust denial is not a valid way to look at the past." On the other hand, he says, we just cannot tell how far history will be forgotten in years to come. "In 50 years from now, not only will there be no survivors alive, there won't be anybody alive who even knew a survivor, and that is where the real danger lies," he said. The fear that deniers could gain the upper hand led an SS camp guard, Oskar Groening, to break a lifetime of silence earlier this year in a BBC documentary, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution. "I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I was on the ramp when the selections [for the gas chambers] took place," said Mr Groening, now in his 80s. "I would like you to believe these atrocities happened - because I was there." From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 1 00:25:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:25:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Patricia A. Williams: The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist Message-ID: Patricia A. Williams: The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist Theology and Science, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (2005), pp 133-43. [Responses appended.] The historical Jesus seems to have known about human nature as described by evolutionary psychology. He addresses the dispositions of human nature that evolutionary psychology says are central: resources, reproduction, relatedness (kinship), and reciprocity. In doing so he answers Aristotle's question, how can human beings flourish? His answer opens a window onto the divine. Patricia A. Williams is a philosopher of biology and philosophical theologian who writes full-time on Christianity and science. Her recent books include, Doing Without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (2001) and Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What you Can do about it (2001). Her mailing address is PO Box 69, Covesville, VA 22931. Her e-mail address is theologyauthor at aol.com; website www.theologyauthor.com. ----------------- I have argued in Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin that Christian doctrines of original sin are only partly true and that most Christian doctrines of the atonement are flatly false.1 These doctrines depend on the historicity of Adam and Eve, and science shows us that Adam and Eve cannot be historical figures. In my more recent book, Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What You Can Do About It,2 a work based on historical Jesus scholarship, I argued further that Jesus did not perceive his own death as a sacrifice for sin; indeed, he did not consider sacrifices for the forgiveness of sin necessary. Since these arguments undermine doctrines previously considered central to Christianity, they appear to make Jesus irrelevant. However, to draw that conclusion would be wrong. I argue here that Jesus is relevant at least in part because he is an astonishingly perceptive evolutionary psychologist. As such, he answers Aristotle's famous ethical question, "how can human beings flourish?" and offers us a window onto the divine. To answer Aristotle's question or, indeed, questions in ethics in general, requires a theory of human nature. We need to know who we are before we can figure out how to flourish. Now, for the first time in history, we have a scientific theory of human nature. It is evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology emerged in the early 1970s. Now the subject has its own textbook,3 a plethora of laborers in its vineyard, and considerable empirical support. Moreover, evolutionary psychology is rooted in sociobiology, a scientific theory that has had great heuristic value and made successful predictions about the social behavior of other animals for almost 40 years. The four central concepts of evolutionary psychology derive from sociobiology and they are well established. They are the four R's of human nature and much of the rest of nature as well: resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity. Human nature's four Rs People pursue resources. To survive, all organisms must do so. People reproduce. To continue the existence of their gene line, all mortal creatures must do so. These two Rs, resources and reproduction, are essential to the continued existence of the organic world. For sexually reproducing organisms like ourselves, sex is also essential (although not for every individual). Relatedness as such is, of course, essential too. Reproduction produces related organisms, by definition. Here, however, relatedness refers to inclusive fitness, the concept at the foundation of sociobiology. In classic evolutionary theory, an organism is fit if it survives to reproduce. In sociobiology, fitness moves from the individual organism to include its close relatives. In inclusive fitness theory, organisms help close relatives survive to reproduce. The classic case is parents helping dependent offspring grow to maturity. Biologists from Darwin on knew that organisms also help organisms other than offspring, but they did not know why. Sociobiology explained why. Organisms help close relatives because close relatives carry copies of the helper's genes. It turns out that the most accurate way to view evolution is from the point of view of the gene, and the evolutionary goal is to get as many copies of one's genes into the next generation as possible. An organism does this by reproduction, certainly, but also by helping most those relatives most likely to be carrying copies of its genes. Many organisms know who their close kin are?by smell, by sight, by sharing a common nest or mother, and by chemical cues. Of course, none knows about genes. None needs to. All an organism needs to be able to do is to recognize and help its relatives. Inclusive fitness theory permits helping behavior that is not ultimately egocentric or even a hidden form of egocentricity. The helping organism need not expect help in return for its aid because its reward is built into the situation. In return for helping relatives, the organism gets more copies of its genes into the next generation. Of course, it does not know this, so it cannot be behaving selfishly. Finally, for organisms that can recognize individuals and remember them and their deeds of help and harm, reciprocity becomes salient. Reciprocity entails equal exchange and may occur between organisms that are not kin. Reciprocity is egocentric: the helper expects help in return and in an amount equal to the help given. Few animals have the memories requisite to engage in reciprocity, but we do. We are creatures who reciprocate. Much of our lives are devoted to the exchange of goods and favors, and much of our justice system exists to enforce reciprocal relationships like contracts and marriages. The sense that reciprocity is justice underlies the legalization of the death penalty for murder. Few people doubt that the continued existence of the organic world on Earth is good and, so, logically the things that make its continuance possible are good. This entails that the four R's are good, but suppose we re-label them. If we engage in them too vigorously, the pursuit of resources becomes greed; of reproduction, lust; of relatedness, nepotism; and of reciprocity, justice for me and my group, to the exclusion of justice for you and your group. As the pursuit of resources is the most basic need of any organism, so greed is the simplest excess. It entails hoarding more than a person needs, sometimes to the direct detriment of the person, as when we eat to the point of obesity, but also to the detriment of society, as when the economic system is such that a few become ludicrously rich while the many remain poor. Lust is more complex, for it involves two sexes, and evolutionary psychology demonstrates that, because of their biological roles, male and female differ in their sexual desires. By definition, males produce smaller sex cells. This means that, with a few interesting but irrelevant exceptions, male organisms invest less in their offspring than females. In mammals such as ourselves, females make an additional investment, for they carry and nourish their offspring internally for a period, and then feed them milk their bodies make. With his small investment, the man can walk away from a pregnancy he has caused without great loss, even if his child dies, but the woman loses greatly if her child dies, for she has invested greatly. Usually her best evolutionary strategy is to continue investing until her child is able to take care of itself. The result of these differences is that men's best evolutionary strategy is to impregnate many women, whereas a woman's best strategy is to be impregnated by a healthy, prosperous man who will devote his resources to their children. The result after millions of years of evolution is lustful males and sexually cautious females, on average. Marriage complicates the picture further. If a man is to spend his adult years investing his resources in his wife's children (there are marriage systems where this is not the case, but they are not relevant here), he needs to be certain that they are also his children. Therefore, he must guard against his wife's adultery. Millions of years of evolution have produced jealous males who will punish women vigorously for adultery?sometimes brutally, sometimes fatally. Thus, evolution has burdened women doubly. On average, women invest more than men in offspring and on average men punish women more than they punish each other for adultery. Put simply, men lust more; women suffer more. Nepotism is even more complex, but it is easier to explain. Dependent children need their parents' special love and support in order to survive to adulthood, so special parental love is necessary and good. However, it does not end when the child becomes an adult; indeed parents continue to love their children more than they love other people's children?and therefore more than they love other people?for the life of the parent. However, special love for adult relatives easily becomes nepotism (unfair favoritism). If pursued systematically, it becomes tribalism and, reversed, may result in discrimination against or even murder of non-relatives or members of other tribes. It can turn into genocide. Most complex of all is reciprocity. Although Aristotle knew nothing of sociobiology, he built much of his ethical theory on giving others their due. Being familiar with sociobiology, Richard D. Alexander4 and Matt Ridley5 both explicitly developed ethical theories that place reciprocity at the center of ethics. Yet reciprocity is a double-edged sword. It may call for justice in the abstract and justice for others, but often it cries for justice for myself, for my kin, for my group. Reciprocity endorses an eye for an eye. It recommends vengeance. It may also give rise to paranoid vigilance that keeps asking whether the exchange has really been equal. Was I cheated? Again? Greed, lust, nepotism, and justice exclusively for oneself and one's group are the main vices that spring from the four R's. However, the four R's produce virtues too. The virtue that uses resources is generosity, the ability to give resources freely to others. From the desire for reproduction, love springs, the sort of love that sweeps ego aside and encourages the lover to enhance the beloved's welfare. The reproductive desire results in love for people who are not close kin. The virtue founded on relatedness is love also, a steady love for relatives that we can transfer from relatives to all others by symbolizing all people as related. Reciprocity can beget friendships and other relationships of equality, a personal caring that does not keep a ledger of gain and loss. It, too, might develop into generosity and love. Thus, evolution has given us enormous potential for both good and evil, and it has provided a wide range of choices, from egocentricity that seeks the destruction of others to generosity and love that seek to further their welfare. We are remarkably flexible and free. That is the primary reason we find it so difficult to answer Aristotle's question about how to flourish. If we have such a range of desires and can engage in such an enormous number of activities, then which are those that best promote our flourishing? Therefore, to answer Aristotle's question, we need to know about the four Rs, which are the central themes of human nature. We need to recognize their centrality in our psychological makeup and to know their potential to lead us into vice and virtue. Finally, we need to grasp how best to handle them so that all people may flourish. Without knowing anything about Aristotle?not to mention evolutionary psychology!?these things are precisely what the historical Jesus knows, discusses, and enacts. Jesus and the simplest R's The figure known as "the historical Jesus" is neither the Jesus of the Gospels, who is many contradictory persons, nor the "real" Jesus, whoever that would be. Whoever it was, we cannot recover him now. The historical Jesus is a scholarly reconstruction that most Jesus scholars base primarily on the synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Some scholars also use the Gospel of Thomas, which was recovered with the discovery of ancient documents at Nag Hammadi in 1945. All Jesus scholars also use other historical materials that inform them about the situation in Palestine from about 200 BCE to 100 CE. These materials include Greek and Roman archives, the works of Josephus and other ancient scholars, the Hebrew Scriptures, Jewish intertestamental literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the findings of archaeology. Most scholars exclude the Gospel attributed to John because they think it contains very little historical material going back to Jesus. As philosopher of historical methodology Raymond Martin notes in his book on the works of outstanding Jesus scholars, the historical Jesus scholars are professional historians doing expert work that meets the standards of modern scholarship.6 John P. Meier explains their methodology at length,7 and Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar explain it more succinctly while also laying out clearly how and why historians view the Gospels as they do.8 The Jesus I refer to is the scholars' reconstruction. The main effect of using their reconstruction here is to restrict the passages of scripture I discuss to those the scholars think go back to the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus perhaps says more about the use of resources than about any other subject. He speaks about resources in short sayings like "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear" and "Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them" and "Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these" (Luke 12:22, 24, 27 NRSV). Jesus says God takes care of them and will take care of us. He says we spend too much time worrying and working over resources. He tells stories like that of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19 ? 26). The rich man, who dressed and dined lavishly, ignored poor, sick Lazarus at his gate. After both die, the rich man finds himself in hell, staring at Lazarus in heaven. Here Jesus emphasizes our common humanity and the skewed distribution of resources in the ancient world, where the rich got rich by exploiting the poor. Those who neglect their less fortunate neighbors, who consider their own wealth a sign of their favor in God's sight and poverty and sickness signs of disfavor, are wrong. We live together, and we cannot flourish separately. Perhaps the most poignant of the stories scholars attribute to Jesus concerns an unnamed farmer who is blessed with such abundant harvests he decides to tear down his already full barns and build bigger ones to hold his burgeoning produce. Jesus calls him a fool, for he will die that night, and he cannot take his carefully conserved resources with him (Luke 12:16 ? 20). Perhaps he should have considered the lilies and ravens or the suffering poor and used his wealth rather than hoarding it. The Gospels tell us little about what Jesus thought about sex. Moreover, Jesus scholars think the few sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels that deal with sex are not certain to go back to the historical Jesus. The main exception is Jesus' prohibition of divorce (Matt. 5:31 ? 32). In Judaism in Jesus' day, women could not divorce their husbands, but husbands could divorce their wives, often for trivial reasons. At the same time, women depended on men for protection and income. A woman without a husband was in trouble, and a divorced woman was tarnished goods. Thus, Jesus' prohibition of divorce protected women. In a different culture, he might have offered different protection?say, equal pay for equal work or heavy penalties against men for spousal abuse. The point of the prohibition is not that divorce is wrong but that women need protection from the power men want to exercise over them, as evolutionary psychology suggests. From the point of view of legality, Jesus' prohibition of divorce is inconsistent with his usual laxness about laws; legal consistency would expect him to allow divorce. However, his prohibition of divorce is consistent with his tendency to protect the disadvantaged, whether the poor, the sick, children, or women. In prohibiting divorce, Jesus was protecting women. His concern for the equality of women appears again in a story about a woman caught in adultery, currently recounted in the Gospel according to John (7:53 ? 8:11). Although found in John, the narrative is not thought to be originally part of John's Gospel: the style is not John's and the passage is not in some of the earliest copies of John that we have. It also floats around in John and even shows up in early versions of other Gospels. Yet it is attested by early church historians and is consistent with other deeds and sayings known to come from the historical Jesus. Scholars think it probably goes back to Jesus. The narrative tells of some men bringing before Jesus a woman who, they claim, they have caught in the act of adultery. They ask whether she should be put to death by stoning, as the law required. Jesus replies that the sinless man should throw the first stone, and the men slowly depart, leaving the woman to live. This story fits evolutionary psychology perfectly. Evolutionary psychology says that men are more lustful than women are but, at the same time, they want to stop their women from committing adultery and may be brutal in order to do so. The story says the men caught the woman in the act. If so, they necessarily caught the man in the act as well, but he is nowhere to be found. The men want to punish only the woman, despite the fact that the Torah calls for the deaths of both parties (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). Jesus, knowing men's hearts, says okay, stone her if you are sinless, and the men retire, their own lust exposed. Again, Jesus is protecting women and making the battle between the sexes more equal than the men had wished. Less certain to go back to the historical Jesus is the story about the Samaritan woman with whom Jesus converses at the well in Samaria. The story is only in John's Gospel (4:5 ? 42). Yet it is consistent with what scholars know about Jesus, who behaved in ways his society disapproved. He talks to the woman in public, not acceptable behavior for a Jewish man, and she is a Samaritan, member of a group that Jews despised. It turns out that she has had several "husbands," that is, lovers, but although Jesus knows this, he does not withdraw from the conversation. He does not appear to condemn her illicit sexual behavior. The other almost certain item scholars know about Jesus regarding sex is that he was celibate. Among Jews, whom the Torah commanded to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28), Jesus' celibacy might seem unlikely. However, many of the prophets were celibate, and John the Baptist and those members of the Jewish sect of Essenes who lived in the wilderness probably were as well. Yet Jesus never praises celibacy, and his leading disciple, Peter, is married (Mark 1:30). Nothing more is known about Jesus' attitude toward reproductive relations except that he seems to have liked and protected children, and many women were among his followers and were active among the first generation of Christians, so he must have welcomed them into the group around him. Considering how aroused people get about sexual/reproductive relations the world over, Jesus seems amazingly calm and unperturbed. He calls a married man to be his leading disciple, yet remains celibate. He cares for children, yet has none of his own. He does not get excited about illicit sexual relationships, yet protects women from men's brutality toward them in the crucial issues of adultery and divorce. Indeed, concerning the two least complicated Rs, resources and reproduction, Jesus advises us to be at ease. About resources, he suggests we behave more like other animals, not worrying so much about the future but enjoying the fruits we have today. The prayer attributed to him says, "Give us this day our daily bread" (Matt. 6:11 NRSV) rather than asking for a good harvest to store away. Yet Jesus is not an ascetic. On the contrary, he parties enough to be accused of drunkenness and gluttony (Matt. 11:19). Jesus seems to steer a middle course, and this suggests that he is insufficiently attracted to this R either to pursue or to reject it. He uses resources without being possessed by them. His attitude toward reproduction is similar, except that he seems to have studied this chapter of his evolutionary psychology textbook even more carefully. Knowing of men's lust and their desire to control women's reproduction, brutally if necessary, he tries to protect and help women, making the reproductive relationships equal. Other than that, his attitude seems to be "take it or leave it." Again, he is insufficiently attracted to this R either to pursue or to reject it. Jesus and the other R's To understand Jesus on the other two R's?relatedness and reciprocity?requires some knowledge of Judaism in Jesus' day. The Jews had two ancient beliefs. They believed God had chosen them out of all the nations on Earth to be God's special people, and they believed God had promised them a particular piece of land, that it was God's holy land, and that they were to live on it and to cultivate it as their own. Yet in the first century, Jews were scattered across the Roman Empire and beyond, and Rome was sovereign over the holy land where Jews thought only God should reign. Most Jews who cried for justice wanted to drive Rome out of God's land, their land. A newer belief about chosenness invaded Judaism about the time of the Exile. Some Jews thought God had chosen only a remnant of the Jewish people and had doomed all other Jews. This remnant theology often included apocalyptic eschatology, the idea that the end of the age was near and that it would culminate in holy and devastating war led by God's messiah and fought by his angels and the holy remnant against the Romans and the condemned Jews. In the end, God would establish justice, that is, God would vindicate the remnant and destroy the other Jews and the gentiles who did not convert to worship of the Jewish God. Moreover, all twelve Jewish tribes, including the ten that had disappeared centuries ago, would assemble in the holy land along with the (good) Jews from the Diaspora. These exclusivist and violent beliefs caused three centuries of sporadic civil war among the Jews, when Jews murdered other Jews and called it God's justice. The civil wars culminated in the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Jewish themes, then, were land (resources), kinship (relatedness), and justice (reciprocity seen as self-vindication), all under the aegis of the one and only God. (Other Jews had apparently been reading evolutionary psychology, too.) Given Jewish circumstances, these themes provided a recipe for self-destruction. Self-destruction arrived via civil war and Roman exasperation. Jesus stepped into this stew as an itinerant preacher. His career began with John the Baptist (Mark 1:1 ? 11) who was preaching by the Jordan River, announcing the forgiveness of sins through baptism. In this, John was not following Torah, which commanded sacrifices in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus' indifference toward the Temple, symbol of Jewish chosenness, relatedness, and covenantal reciprocity with God, implies that he was not attracted to these Jewish themes. Relatedness, in particular, was not high on Jesus' list of sacred subjects. In an extremely well attested incident (Mark 3:31 ? 35), Jesus was talking with his close disciples and friends when his mother and brothers approached and asked to see him. When Jesus' disciples told him his family was outside, Jesus not only refused to see them but also disowned them. He stated, instead, that his friends were his family. In so far as Jesus was unmarried, he also rejected the relatedness that comes with children and in-laws. As a good evolutionary psychologist, he knew that families are naturally hierarchical and promote nepotism. Jesus wanted to emphasize equality and the common kinship of all people. His emphasis on our common kinship stands in stark contrast to the Jewish claim that all Jews were related and special in God's sight because all were the offspring of one man, Abraham. Abraham, they claimed, was their father. Jesus referred to God as father, not Abraham. God, of course, in Jewish theology, is creator of all, the father of all people, not merely the Jews. Jesus tells stories about fathers in which the father represents God. In the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11 ? 32), a younger son asks for his inheritance before his father dies, then goes off and violates Jewish law, finally tending pigs, animals the Torah calls unclean. He even envies the pigs. When, broke and hungry, he returns home hoping to become one of his father's servants, his father embraces him, forgives him, and throws a feast for him, much to the chagrin of the prodigal's elder brother who has faithfully remained home and served their father well. If this father represents God, Jesus is implying that God loves and saves the unfaithful as well as the faithful. This is not remnant theology. It is not reciprocity, either. Indeed, the father seems generous to a fault. Jesus seems well aware of the human desire for reciprocity and its offshoot, justice, and he constantly discourages seeking them. Well known are his short sayings denigrating the Torah reciprocity of an eye for an eye. The sayings suggest, instead, that if people batter one cheek, turn the other; if they sue for a coat, give them a cloak also, and if they force a person to go a mile, go two (Matt. 5:38 ? 41). These statements all reject reciprocity. Jesus also tells stories that portray reciprocity and justice negatively. The prodigal son is one such story. It depicts the elder brother as wanting justice. He is angry about his father's embrace of his brother, even after the father assures him that all the father has is his (Luke 15:31). He repudiates and perhaps envies the father's generosity even after the father tells him that he will lose nothing by it. An even more relevant story is that of the day laborers (Matt. 20:1 ? 15). Jesus tells of a landowner who hires some laborers early in the morning and promises them a day's wage?a fair wage, probably, since they accept it. He hires others later, some as late as evening. When time comes to pay the laborers, he pays the late-hired a whole day's wage, and those hired earlier complain. The landowner wants to know what their complaint is. They received the agreed wage. The landowner did not cheat them. Nevertheless, they feel resentful. They expected reciprocity to be the rule the landowner would use to pay his workers. Instead, the landowner displayed generosity, and his generosity angered them. First century history tells who the angry figures represent. They typify the remnant theologians and their followers who expected God to repay their faithfulness with victory and vindication and condemn all the unfaithful, which is to say, all the Jews who disagreed with them. Repeatedly, Jesus rejected reciprocity in favor of generosity and forgiveness. The rabbis had suggested that a person should be forgiven three times. The Gospels report that Jesus recommended seven (Luke 17:4), a symbolic number standing for wholeness or completion. The most extreme report has Jesus saying to forgive 77 times (Matt. 18:22). A figurative doubling of completion or infinity seems to be implied. This is probably Matthew's emendation, but the idea of infinite forgiveness apparently goes back to Jesus. Jesus was wiser than those who want to make ethics center on reciprocity. He knew that placing reciprocity at the center of ethics generates ruinous results. Reciprocity justifies vengeance. It stifles generosity. It encourages self-centeredness, self-righteousness, and paranoia. Borrowing from the Torah, Jesus recommends a better way: love your neighbor; love, he says, is the heart of the Torah and the prophets (Matt. 22:39 ? 40). Love is generous; love forgives; love helps others and casts out fear. In contrast, reciprocity is egocentric. Placing it at the center of ethics encourages people to guard their own interests and mistrust other people. In doing so, it leaves them lonely and fearful, and therefore they seek groups that emphasize conformity, enforce strict rules, and proclaim their own self-described goodness while denouncing outsiders' evil. Jesus knew such people and such groups?the remnant theologians and their followers. He looked around him and saw that a strong emphasis on reciprocity does not lead to a flourishing life. Yet Jesus embraced equality for the poor and powerless. The concept of egalitarianism might spring from reciprocity, but they are not the same. Jesus seems to think that the rich might give to the poor without asking return, and husbands might treat their wives with the same equality they offer to their fellow men. Jesus and the Divine To say that Jesus was an excellent evolutionary psychologist is not to claim that he knew anything about evolution. He was probably a typical Palestinian Jew of his time in his knowledge of the world. He would have known the Torah said God created the world in six days and created Adam and Eve as the first human beings. Jesus probably would not have known much history except as the Hebrew Scriptures represent it, and he would have known no science. Nonetheless, he had remarkable insights into human nature as evolutionary psychology discloses it and profound solutions on how to cope with it, based on compassion, especially for the powerless. His slogan might have been "equality, not reciprocity," which amounts to generosity by those who have power and wealth to those who have neither. Jesus represents God's generosity this way: God gives without requiring return. The Gospels tell us that the divine touched Jesus at his baptism and, after that, he exorcised the possessed, healed the sick, and forgave sinners. Josephus, too, says Jesus was "a doer of wonderful works." 9 Wonderworkers were said to work by divine agency, and there seems little doubt that Jesus was close to God, filled with the divine, a "spirit person," to use historian Marcus Borg's term. Jesus himself felt he was close to the divine. He prayed frequently, sometimes all night, and he called God "father." His insights into human nature and his solutions to the problems it poses for human flourishing probably came from the divine source. If so, Jesus may be for us a window onto the divine. Jesus spoke of love, generosity, and forgiveness. In doing so, he spoke of the nature of God. Christian atonement theology has claimed that Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice for sins. Jesus, it claims, died to satisfy God's need for justice?a God, it also claims, who has no needs. An innocent man had to die to pay for the sins of the guilty because God required that justice be done. Such is atonement theology. It does not take much insight into the nature of justice to grasp the injustice of killing the innocent to forgive the guilty. The God who allegedly commanded such a deed ruled by reciprocity and had a stingy soul. This is not Jesus' God. Jesus says that God is generous, so generous it angers those whose ethics rest on reciprocity. God is not a God of reciprocity, of contracts and covenants. Nor, according to Jesus, does God demand sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. The Gospels never show Jesus sacrificing at the Temple. They introduce him as a disciple of John the Baptist, who does not sacrifice at the Temple either. Instead, John baptizes for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus, too, forgives sins without requiring sacrifice?or even baptism. Jesus did not think God requires sacrifices in order to forgive sins. Indeed, Jesus says God gives us what we need when we ask for it. In one of his stories, he tells of an evil judge whom a widow importunes so strenuously he decides her case in her favor (Luke 18:1 ? 5). The story is about an evil judge, not a good one, and yet when asked, he gives what is wanted. How much more then, would Jesus' God, a generous, fatherly God, give what we ask, including forgiveness? In summary, the historical Jesus was an evolutionary psychologist who told us how to flourish in a world where human beings evolved, yet where divinity pervades human life. We flourish, he says, not by egocentricity, with its greed, lust, nepotism, and self-seeking justice, but by love, with its generosity and forgiveness. Since greed and generosity, egocentricity and love arise from the four R's, we have the capacity to choose greed or generosity, egocentricity or love. Jesus asks us to choose love, to act like God rather than like evolved creatures caught in evolutionary overdrive. Jesus says not to be so self-concerned, so harried, and so vigilant. The fifth R, he says, is "Relax." Notes 1. Patricia Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). 2. Patricia Williams, Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What You Can Do About It (Philidelphia: Xlibris, 2001). 3. David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999). 4. Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979). 5. Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). 6. Raymond Martin, The Elusive Messiah: A Philosophical Overview of the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999). 7. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 1, Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 8. Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993). 9. Falvius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, III:3, in The Complete Works of Josephus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 1981). --------------------------------- A Response to Patricia A. Williams' "The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist" Richard F. Carlson and Jason N. Hine We wish to thank The Rev. Bill Maury-Holmes for his insightful suggestions in the preparation of this manuscript. Richard F. Carlson is Research Professor of Physics at the University of Redlands. He is editor of the book, Science and Christianity: Four Views (2000). Jason N. Hine has worked in the area of science and Christian faith for a number of years. Recently he co-led the seminar, "What Can We Teach Our Children About Dinosaurs?" Patricia A. Williams' essay centers on her assertion that the "historical Jesus" (as defined by the work of the Jesus Seminar) exhibited personal characteristics consistent with an understanding of human nature as described by evolutionary psychology. This relatively new enterprise describes human characteristics in terms of David Buss' four "R's": Resources, Reproduction, Relatedness (kinship), and Reciprocity.1 After showing that each R generally contains a spectrum of characteristics, Williams attempts to identify Jesus' position along each spectrum by citing incidents and sayings from the Gospels. We have a few quibbles that we will mention here but not pursue. Williams states that she uses the results of the Jesus Seminar in her characterization of Jesus.2 Yet over half of her Gospel references have been given gray or black classifications by the Seminar (gray or black implying that the sayings in question are most likely not Jesus' words). Two other quibbles relate to Williams' statement that Jesus did not perceive his own death as a sacrifice for sin and her comments on Christian atonement theories. Each of these is worthy of a response, but we have chosen to concentrate on Williams' evaluation of Jesus' character in terms of Buss' four R's. We see Williams' essay as a useful, interesting, and fanciful way to view Jesus. However, we wish that she had followed her own ideas just a bit further. By successfully demonstrating how Jesus' character is consistent with evolutionary psychology, Williams places him in a box of dimensions specified by the four R's. We feel that Jesus' character surpasses the four R's in a number of remarkable ways. While Williams briefly explores intimations regarding the divinity of Jesus in the final section of her article, we find her presentation to be inadequate. Our goal is to highlight areas where we would like to have seen Williams take her ideas further. We will refer to much of the same evidence as used by Williams from the Gospels. In some cases, we provide additional evidence from the Gospels, which for the most part falls under Jesus Seminar categories of red or pink (most likely the sayings of Jesus) or occasionally gray (probably not said by Jesus but close to his ideas).3 As does Williams, we will use black references in a very limited way (black, in the opinion of the Jesus Seminar, implies that Jesus did not say it, as it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition).4 In doing so we hope as much as possible to compare oranges to oranges (maybe we should say red grapefruit to red grapefruit). Our understanding is that, when presented with earthly problems, Jesus succeeded in incorporating God's will in his response. Another way of putting this is that Jesus' response was both horizontal (human to human) and vertical (human to God). As indicated by Williams, Jesus' response to every situation was based on "the unmatched quality of God's love, generosity, and forgiveness." 5 The problem is we feel that Williams could have done more to demonstrate this when considering his responses to people or situations. In her discussion of Jesus and his attitudes to the issue of Reproduction (one of the four R's), Williams cites the account of the adulterous woman.6 The religious leaders brought the adulterous woman to Jesus thinking that there were only two possible ways he might respond ? either uphold the Law and condemn the woman to death, or allow her to live and thereby break the Law. However, Jesus' response did not come from among this set; rather his action was profoundly perceptive, wise, and loving. Williams claims that Jesus' intention was to provide protection for women by exposing the lust in the woman's accusers. We agree that this is the main thrust of the narrative. Clearly, Jesus cared for and forgave the adulterous woman, and one may infer from this that Jesus cares for all women. However, more than this, Jesus' response also demonstrated care for the woman's accusers?he did not seek to humiliate them but rather his response served as an invitation to engage in serious self-reflection, and thus the door was left open for any of the accusers to come to Jesus later. Further, Jesus' action here would have likely had a similar effect on each woman and man in the crowd. Even today, his response invites personal reflection, illuminates our shared struggle with sin, and demonstrates the love of God through what is termed "grace"?the free and divine gift of mercy, acceptance, and favor. Hence, we feel that Jesus' approach stretches the scope of what evolutionary psychology considers possible. The next R we examine is Relatedness or kinship. Williams, in asserting that "Relatedness, in particular, was not high on Jesus' list of sacred subjects," 7 cites an "extremely well-attested incident (Mark 3:31 ? 35)",8 a passage rated as gray by the Jesus Seminar scholars. Here Williams sees Jesus as rejecting his family. Referring to his family, she states, "Jesus not only refused to see them but also disowned them." 9 Yes, it is possible to infer from this that Jesus is rejecting his family here. However, our understanding, supported by Williams herself several sentences later, is that Jesus was expanding on what he considers his true family to be?" Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:35?NRSV). Elsewhere in Mark 7:9 ? 13 (black by the Jesus Seminar) Jesus affirms the command to "honor your father and mother" (Matt. 19:19?gray) by condemning the Pharisees' and scribes' use of the Corban offering in order to relieve themselves of the obligation to support their parents. Like Williams, in the Gospels we too see a consistent theme of Jesus' concern for and acceptance of society's rejects, e.g. the blind beggar, the Samaritan woman, the prostitute, tax collectors, in short?the "lepers" of that society. We conclude that an expanded view of relatedness was very high on Jesus' list of sacred subjects, again in line with but stretching the conceptual boundaries of evolutionary psychology in a way that provides us a glimpse of God's all-inclusive love. We next turn to Williams' treatment of the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11 ? 32?pink by the Jesus Seminar) and to other Gospel examples she cites in her discussion of another R?Reciprocity.10 Here we affirm Williams' conclusion that, in terms of relationships with others, Jesus rejected reciprocity and instead constantly exhibited extreme generosity, forgiveness, friendship, and love in his teaching and his relationships with a wide array of people. In terms of the fourth R, Resources, we disagree with Williams' characterization of Jesus as being "at ease" and "not worrying"11 about resources. On the contrary, we see Jesus as one who was concerned about the wise and generous use of resources (e.g. see Matt. 25:14 ? 28?pink- and Mark 10:17 ? 22?gray). We feel that Jesus' command to "not worry" (Luke 12:29?gray) about resources is to be understood as an important step in seeking God's kingdom (Luke 12:31?black), a proper prioritization of Relatedness vs. Resources, not as Williams puts it, a general indifference toward resources on the part of Jesus. In closing, we feel that Patricia Williams is addressing a topic of crucial importance: understanding the person of Jesus. This is crucial, because we feel that our clearest understanding of God is through the person of Jesus. In addition, we feel Williams is moving in a helpful direction as she relates the insights of evolutionary psychology to the historical Jesus in a way we see as light-hearted, yet full of opportunities for greater insight into the divine. Jesus not only goes beyond the horizontal (human to human) categories of the four R's, but he also exhibits a vertical (human to God) aspect of his character that stretches the boundaries of evolutionary psychology toward the positive extremes exhibited by God through Jesus. We hope that Williams and others will continue to explore these new ideas further. Notes 1. David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999). 2. Williams' essay above, 136. 3. Robert S. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels, The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 36. 4. Ibid. 5. Williams essay, 142. 6. Ibid., 138. 7. Ibid., 140. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 139. --------------- Was Jesus an Evolutionary Psychologist? Joshua M. Moritz Joshua M. Moritz is a Ph.D. student in Theology and Science at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and Managing Editor of Dialog: A Journal of Theology. His undergraduate and professional background is in evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology. In her article "The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist," Patricia Williams casts Jesus in the role of a bio-psychological counselor and seer whose understanding of human nature turns out to be precisely that of the modern field of evolutionary psychology. There is no latent anachronism here, but rather, Williams is pointing out that the Jesus of history understood what makes human beings get up in the morning, what drives us, and what makes us tick. According to Williams, evolutionary psychology posits four primary factors that motivate and orient the vast majority--if not all--of human behaviors: resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity. The historical Jesus, as she understands him, addressed each of these areas of human life, and in so doing revealed a remarkable intuition, which parallels the findings of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Such intuition, concludes Williams, was indeed a product of Jesus' connection with the Divine, and through this connection, he revealed to his followers the egalitarian nature of God. His teachings about this God may empower human beings in the present to establish egalitarian communities and enable them to flourish. In this article, I wish to briefly respond to Williams' essay and her use of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology as they relate to theological anthropology. To begin with, I want to express my appreciation for Williams' work in this area. She has consistently pointed out the difficulties which modern evolutionary biology poses for many classical Western Christian doctrines--such as atonement theology's reliance on "the Fall without the Fall," 1 the doctrine of original sin based on the combination of Lamarckian inheritance and a historical fall, and the problem of evil.2 These problem areas, which Williams develops should be preeminent as constructive theology continues to strive to make itself intelligible in a world dominated by scientific self-understanding. I also am grateful for Williams' attempts to integrate constructively the work of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology into theological anthropology, and her subsequent reformulation of various ancient Christian doctrines in light of these disciplines, which pronounce much on human nature. Her theological engagement with these bio-psychological fields is refreshing because there has been a tendency in the humanities to make light of the findings of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, and to construct their ideas into caricatures and straw men that are then easily vanquished.3 This happens even though many scholars in the Philosophy of Biology maintain that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are legitimate extensions of the Neo-Darwinian theoretical framework.4 That being said, I would like to raise several questions and concerns with Williams' essay and her related work. While I agree with Williams in her acceptance of the basic guiding principles of evolutionary psychology--that it is very likely that certain heritable and adaptive human behaviors have been honed by natural selection, and that there are specific cognitive mechanisms resulting from evolution by natural selection which underlie such human behaviors--I must question Williams' uncritical acceptance of the opinions that are championed by these disciplines. Williams treats evolutionary psychology and sociobiology as though they 'have arrived' despite the large number of sympathetic, yet valid critiques of these fields.5 Among other things sociobiology and its descendent evolutionary psychology have been criticized on account of their genic selectionism, genetic reductionism, determinism, and atomism,6 their assumption of massive modularity in the brain, their hyper-adaptationism7 and their confusion regarding moral categories.8 I have not found any citation of such criticisms in Williams work on this subject. She only goes so far as to mention that there is controversy surrounding sociobiology "because it applies to us," and "because some sociobiologists have been inept with metaphors, sowing considerable confusion."9 There is no discussion of the more fundamental criticisms of the methodological and biological assumptions of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology's practitioners. Evolutionary psychology and its predecessor sociobiology claim that humans have a generic nature and that this nature is rooted in our biology--particularly in our genes. Since our genes, as they have evolved to adapt to a specific environment, are the foundation and unconscious directors of our behavior, such behaviors should be seen in light of the ultimate evolutionary purpose and goal of our genes--namely "to get as many copies of one's genes into the next generation as possible." 10 Contained in this ambiguous behavioral inheritance bequeathed to us by our genes are predispositions in the vast majority of humans towards murder, infanticide, child abuse,11 divorce, infidelity,12 pornography,13 xenophobia,14 treating women as commodities,15 rape,16 and even genocide.17 To ensure that each gender gets their maximal fitness reward calculated in genes that make it to the succeeding generation, men are by nature sexually promiscuous and competitive, and women are by nature "coy" and parentally nurturing.18 When our "selfish genes" are in the driver's seat, such is to be expected, and while exceptions may exist, they are just that--exceptions. Cue Jesus. Into such a world of ethically sordid genetic pre-dispositions embodied in immoral animals enters the historical Jesus who, in effect, tells humans to live contrary to their genetically inherited nature. Jesus calls us to "deny ourselves" and in so doing deny to our genes the fitness rewards which they so fervently long for. For the sake of the Kingdom of God, we must be willing to minimize our inclusive fitness and forsake those who share the greatest percentage of our own genes. In fact, our genes are not to be seen as more important than the genes of a total stranger--even those of an unrelated Samaritan or Gentile. We are to spend our precious resources on those who offer us no fitness benefits whatsoever: widows past reproductive age, orphans who are not our kin, the poor who cannot benefit us materially, the sick--who may even harm our own health and fitness potential, and prisoners--who cannot be trusted to reciprocate. Men are called to resist the urge to "diversify their genetic portfolio" and women are called to trust in God for their material resources rather than in their husbands or mates.19 Humans are, in fact, asked to adopt an extremely unstable evolutionary strategy by throwing out reciprocity all together--" give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back and lend, expecting nothing in return." 20 The road of the cross which the life of Jesus paves for those who would follow, is a sure evolutionary dead-end--the ultimate self-extinction event. Williams says that such behavior and the wisdom of Jesus "fits evolutionary psychology perfectly." 21 but what does she mean by this? If she means that Jesus understands human nature as it is perceived at the tail end of our evolution and that he calls us to resist the very same dark tendencies bequeathed to us by evolution, then she is right. Christian morality demands a "revolution or a reversal of those priorities" which are given to us by nature.22 Where does such moral courage come from if it is not within human nature? Is it pure grace from the realm of the Divine that actually alters our evolved nature? Or, is it an effort of the will which is transformed once one is encountered by the life and example of Jesus? Either answer poses a dilemma for evolutionary psychology because both behavioral scenarios are outside of its explanatory purview. If we are altered by super-nature, then the categories of nature are no longer adequate. Alternatively, if human nature has enough behavioral wiggle room so that humans may act in ways which are not genetically predisposed, and even in ways directly contrary to our genetic predispositions, then such evolutionary psychological talk of genetic predispositions loses its scientific scope and robustness. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain altruistic behavior in terms of inclusive fitness in the context of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies, but such explanations lose their relevance when the object of investigation thrusts aside the "things of this world" to pursue an eschatologically stable strategy instead. Deeper than this dilemma, though, is evolutionary psychology's foundational assumption of the "selfish genes" view of evolved biological reality. This "gene's-eye view" of evolution, which Williams presupposes,23 is far from being a safe assumption. In fact, this is precisely the area where many biologists from various sub-disciplines find the most intractable problems relating to the future direction and success of evolutionary research.24 There is a growing consensus that there is a variety of levels of selection in evolution.25 The notion that "naked genes" are the target or primary level of selection, while at first broadly accepted, has since then been "severely criticized, and even its original supporters have now moderated their claims." 26 Such genic selectionism, which is fundamental to the explanatory framework that under-girds evolutionary psychology and its theory of inclusive fitness, is also called into question by genetic pleiotropy27 and "the interaction of genes controlling polygenic components of the phenotype."28 Furthermore, investigations into the roles played by symbiosis,29 self-organization,30 neutral evolution,31 historical and developmental constraints,32 epigenetics,33 and generic principles in evolution34 have demonstrated that other forces are at work both in the generation of evolutionary novelty, and the way in which biological information is inherited. Natural selection and the genocentrism it entails is no longer the sole fiddler bowing the tune of evolutionary change, but now appears to be joined by a symphony of other evolutionary mechanisms each playing at different tempos and in different keys. Conclusion These developments, when taken together, pose a serious obstacle to the future advance of any general theory of evolutionary psychology. While an evolutionary psychology is certainly still possible it will have to be a much mediated evolutionary psychology which can no longer speak of a generic human nature as such, but rather, must aim to describe only elements of human nature that have a definite genetic corollary. Occasions of altruism in nature will no longer create a research problem for this epistemically humbled and less imperialistic evolutionary psychology, and the moral "performance gap"35 between what we are and what we ought to be will lose much of its mysterious quality when considered within a thoroughly supplemented and expanded Neo-Darwinism. Was the Historical Jesus an evolutionary psychologist? He certainly knew enough about human nature to know that selfish motives--if not always selfish genes--orient much of our behavior. Jesus was also familiar, however, with the nature of the Divine, and he knew enough about God's nature to recognize that the One in whose image humans have been made is not far from us when we walk by faith. Notes 1. A phrase coined by Robert John Russell. For Russell's discussion of the problem of "Fall without the Fall" see Robert J. Russell, "Theology and Science: Current Issues and Future Directions," 2000, Part II, Section E, Redemption, Evolution and Cosmology, http://www.counterbalance.net/rjr/erede-body.html. See also Robert J. Russell, "Is Evil Evolving?" Dialog: A Journal of Theology 42:3 (Fall 2003): 311. For Williams' discussion see Patricia Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001); and Patricia Williams, "Sociobiology and Original Sin" Zygon 35:4 (Dec 2000). 2. Patricia Williams, "Evolution Sociobiology and the Atonement," Zygon 33:4 (1998); Patricia Williams, "The Problem of Evil: A Solution from Science," Zygon 36:3 (2001). 3. Such critiques of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology where the actual views of these disciplines are exaggerated or misrepresented are, Richard C. Lewontin, Steven P. R. Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); and Hilary Rose and Steven P. R. Rose, Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Harmony Books, 2000). For a critical review of the latter which points out several misreadings of evolutionary psychology see Daniel Jones, "Alas Poor Higgs," British Medical Journal, 322 (24 March, 2001), 740ff. http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/322/7288/740#13672 . 4. See, for example, Michael Ruse, "I see sociobiology, the study of animal social behavior from an evolutionary perspective, as a natural and an unforced growth and development from orthodox and established neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology. This being so I suggest that because neo-Darwinian biology is a genuine and fruitful branch of science, the respect that it deserves should automatically be transferred to sociobiology." Quoted in Peter Saunders, "Sociobiology: A House Built on Sand" in Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors, Mae-Wan Ho and Sidney W. Fox eds. (New York: Wiley, 1988) 290. 5. See Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, Chapter 13 in Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); The Evolution of Minds: Psychological and Philosophical Perspective, Paul Davies & Harmon Holcomb, III, eds. (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001); Jaak Panksepp and Jules B. Panksepp, "The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology," Evolution and Cognition, 6:2, 108 ; Elisabeth A. Lloyd, "Evolutionary Psychology: The Burdens of Proof", Biology and Philosophy 14 (1999): 211 ? 233; Paul E. Griffiths, 'Evolutionary Psychology' in The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Sahotra Sarkar and Jessica Pfeifer eds. (New York: Routledge, 2005). For a criticism that aims at some of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology's more foundational assumptions see Peter Saunders, "Sociobiology: A House Built on Sand." 6. See David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) 374 ? 378. 7. Stephen J. Gould, "More Things in Heaven and Earth" in Alas Poor Darwin. 8. David Sloan Wilson, Eric Dietrich, and Anne B. Clark, "On the Inappropriate Use of the Naturalistic Fallacy in Evolutionary Psychology," Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003): 669 ? 682. 9. Williams, Doing Without Adam and Eve, 124. 10. Williams, this issue, 134. 11. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine, 1988). 12. Helen Fisher, The Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992). 13. "Evolution has built into every red-blooded male a desire to find 'Pornotopia'--the fantasy land where 'sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of more tender feelings and encumbering relationships, in which women are always aroused, or at least easily arousable, and ultimately are always willing' (Symons, p. 171). The entire cosmetics, fashion, and pornography industries are attempts to create Pornotopia here on Earth". Frank Miele, "The (Im)moral Animal: A Quick & Dirty Guide to Evolutionary Psychology & the Nature of Human Nature," Skeptic 4:1 (1996): 42 ? 49. See also David Buss, The Evolution of Desire (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 49 ? 60. and Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 187 ? 200. 14. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), 253 ? 54. 15. Daly and Wilson, Homicide 188 ? 189; Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 126. 16. Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, The Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 17. John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 144 ? 146. 18. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sex, Evolution and Behavior (Boston: Willard Grant, 1983), 78 ? 79.; Robert L. Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985), 207; Carl-Adam Wachtmeister and Magnus Enquist, "The Evolution of the Coy Female ? Trading Time for Information," Ethology 105:11 (November 1999): 983 ? 992. 19. Frank Miele, "The (Im)moral Animal," 43; See Jesus' response to "Is it lawful to divorce for any reason?" Matt 19:3 ? 12, and see Mark 10:2 ? 12 and John 4. 20. Luke 6:30 ? 35. 21. See Williams, this issue, 138. 22. John Hare, "Is There an Evolutionary Foundation for Human Morality?" in Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 190. 23. Williams maintains "that the most accurate way to view evolution is from the point of view of the gene" (this issue, 134). She thus appears to adhere to the genic selectionism of G. C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, and Richard Dawkins. 24. See Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Linda Van Speybroeck, and Dani De Waele, "Epigenetics: A Challenge for Genetics, Evolution, and Development?" Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 981 (2002): 1 ? 6. 25. Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, "Individuality and Adaptation Across Levels of Selection: How Shall We Name and Generalize the Unit of Darwinism?" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96:21 (October 1999):11904 ? 11909. 26. Ernst Mayr, "The Objects of Selection," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 94:6 (March 1997): 2091 ? 2094. 27. This is where multiple, often seemingly unrelated, phenotypic effects are caused by a single altered gene or pair of altered genes. See Jonathan Hodgkin, "Seven Types of Pleiotropy" International Journal of Developmental Biology 42 (1998): 501 ? 505. 28. Ernst Mayr, "The Objects of Selection," 2092. 29. Lynn Margulis, "Symbiogenesis and Symbioticism," in Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis, Lynn Margulis and Ren? Fester eds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). 30. Stuart A. Kauffman, "Self-Organization, Selective Adaptation and its Limits: A New Pattern of Inference in Evolution and Development," in Evolution at the Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science, David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 184 ? 185; and David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 446. 31. Motoo Kimura, "Recent Development of the Neutral theory Viewed from the Wrightian Tradition of Theoretical Population Genetics," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 88:14 (July 1991): 5969 ? 5973 ; Motoo Kimura, "Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level," Nature 17:217 (129) (Feb 1968): 624 ? 626; Motoo Kimura, "The Rate of Molecular Evolution Considered From the Standpoint of Population Genetics," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 63:4 (August 1969): 1181 ? 1188. 32. For the historical constraints see Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London , Series B, 205:1161 (1979): 581 ? 598. For a discussion of Developmental Systems Theory see Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray, Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 33. See Van de Vijver, Van Speybroeck, and De Waele "Epigenetics: A Challenge for Genetics, Evolution, and Development?" For a critique of the selfish genes understanding of evolution from an epigenetic standpoint see especially Richard von Sternberg, "On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic Epigenetic System," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 981 (2002): 154 ? 188. See Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 34. See Ricard Sol? and Brian Goodwin, Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology. (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 35. For a discussion of the gap between what we actually do and what morality demands of us see John Hare (cited above). -------------------- Jesus and Evolutionary Psychology, Two Agendas Howard J. van Till Howard J. Van Till is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Calvin College, Michigan, USA. His works include Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World's Formation (1990) and The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens are Telling us about Creation (1986). Patricia A. Williams posits the provocative thesis that the historical Jesus' knowledge of human nature--as he experienced it and engaged it 2000 years ago--closely matches the understanding of human nature now offered by evolutionary psychology. This thesis does not entail any frivolous conjectures that Jesus was supernaturally informed about biological evolution or about a scientific psychology based on evolutionary considerations. Rather, the thesis posits that the historical Jesus, a typical Palestinian Jew in his knowledge of the world and unaware of anything resembling modern science, nonetheless "had remarkable insights into human nature as evolutionary psychology discloses it." As I see it, this is a reasonable and modest thesis that can be tested by a comparison of what we know (or at least have good reason to believe) about Jesus' perceptions of human nature and what modern evolutionary psychology offers us regarding its scientific understanding of human nature. Williams summarizes the four central concepts of evolutionary psychology, as derived from sociobiology, in her list of "the four R's of human nature and much of the rest of nature as well: resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity." Before offering any thoughts regarding a comparison of Jesus' knowledge of human nature and "the four R's of human nature" that Williams draws from evolutionary psychology, I must express a bit of puzzlement concerning the grounds for the similarity thesis that Williams posits. Suppose that Williams is correct (and I am content to let evolutionary psychologists judge whether or not that is the case) to say that evolutionary psychology's assessment of the four major foci of human behavior can be captured in this list of four R's. Suppose that Williams is also correct (and I am content to let scholars of the historical Jesus judge whether or not that is the case) to characterize Jesus' knowledge of human nature as focused on those same four behavioral concerns. Would that provide a sufficient basis for concluding that Williams is warranted in positing that Jesus' knowledge of human nature closely matches the understanding of human nature offered by evolutionary psychology? That is, would Williams be warranted in concluding that Jesus is relevant today partly "because he is an astonishingly perceptive evolutionary psychologist?" I do not see how the case can be settled on the similarities so far granted. Williams may well be correct in drawing parallels in what the historical Jesus saw 2000 years ago and what modern evolutionary psychology now sees as the principal concerns of human nature. However, as I understand it, the primary concern of evolutionary psychology is not merely to list those basic concerns, but rather to posit explanations for those behavioral foci as products of the entire evolutionary process. However, if the positing of evolution-based explanations constitutes the core of the modern science of evolutionary psychology, then the appropriateness of drawing close parallels between Jesus and evolutionary psychology must, it seems to me, be called into question. The historical Jesus offered no explanations of the sort that would interest evolutionary psychology. Jesus, on the contrary, expressed numerous moral and ethical judgments on the manner in which humans ought to act in response to those basic drives for resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity. To summarize what we have observed so far: even if it is the case that Jesus and evolutionary psychology agree on their identification of the primary concerns that characterize human nature, there is a vast difference in what they offer in response. Evolutionary psychology offers scientific explanations for the origin and presence of the four R's as products of our evolutionary history. Given what cognitive psychology perceives to be core human concerns, evolutionary considerations suggest ways to understand how humans came to be this way. Jesus, on the other hand, offered moral or ethical principles that would encourage humans to choose behavior (whether consistent with evolutionary influences or not) that is "good" by the standards of divine intention for our living as God-conscious creatures. In other words, while it may well be argued, as Williams does, that Jesus and evolutionary psychology proceed because of similar views of human nature, they have radically differing agendas driving their interests in reflecting on the primary foci of human behavioral concerns. Evolutionary psychology's concern for explaining the historical roots of the four R's cannot easily be equated with Jesus' concern to provide moral or ethical guidance in choosing ways to act on those four drives. Evolutionary psychology offers a theory about human behavior and its roots in the practical need for species survival. Jesus posited no such theory, but instead exemplified sound moral and ethical value judgments on behavioral choices, judgments rooted in his extraordinary awareness of the divine intention for human life. Perhaps I am being too critical. Perhaps Williams never intended to make the strong equation that I have just criticized. Perhaps I need to take more seriously Williams' expressed concern to demonstrate that, despite her contention that Jesus "did not perceive his own death as a sacrifice for sin," and despite the fact that this would seem to "undermine doctrines previously considered central to Christianity" and thereby "appear to make Jesus irrelevant," Jesus is nonetheless just as relevant today as ever. Why? Because his understanding of human nature equipped him to offer relevant answers to Aristotle's ethical question, "How can human beings flourish?" True, evolutionary psychology focuses on technical aspects of how human behavior affects human survival and reproduction, while Jesus focused on matters of acting in accord with the divine will for human moral and ethical behavior, but both express a concern for identifying the sort of human behavior that improves the probability for the flourishing of the species. Perhaps I should be content with Williams' case with the continuing relevance of what Jesus said and did. In fact, I think Williams' case for the high degree of relevance that the words and deeds of Jesus still have was eloquently made. Am I ready, then, to set my misgivings aside and accept Williams' references to Jesus as "an astonishingly perceptive evolutionary psychologist?" I must admit that I continue to have reservations about statements worded in this way. One way to express my hesitancy is to note that although Williams appears to justify this language by noting that Jesus and evolutionary psychology share a common agenda in dealing with the question, "How can humans flourish?" I think we need to explore whether or not the term "flourish" is being used in the same way for both. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, what does it mean to flourish ? Stated as bluntly and succinctly as possible, for a species (or some higher order of categorization) to flourish, means to be reproductively successful over an extended time as a member of an ecosystem in some reasonably stable environment. It is about numbers, about numerical success, about survival. Maintain a stable or growing population, or your category of organisms goes extinct. Flourish, or vanish. Life is tough. Adapt or die; a purely pragmatic reality. From the standpoint of what Jesus said and did, however, what does it mean to flourish ? I would suggest that the species-survival criteria supplied by evolutionary psychology might be seen as necessary, but by no means sufficient from Jesus' standpoint. To flourish as a God-conscious creature would, I believe, sometimes require choosing behavior that conforms to the divine will in spite of the fact that it would fail to contribute to reproductive success. By the moral and ethical standards exemplified by the life and death of Jesus (whether or not these accomplished anything toward atonement for sin), flourishing as a human species is not simply a matter of numbers. On the contrary, Jesus sometimes exemplified behavioral choices that were radically contrarian in nature. In the extreme, Jesus paid the ultimate price of life itself by choosing right behavior over the biological goal of flourishing. I would not go so far as to say that Jesus advocated a generalized disregard for flourishing as a reproductively successful species, but it seems evident that Jesus did advocate the recognition of situations in which reproductive success was to be given secondary, not primary, status. Williams rightly recognizes this in noting that each of human nature's four R's can be pursued with such excessive vigor as to become a vice. Excessive pursuit of resources becomes greed or gluttony. Obsession with reproductive activity becomes lust or abuse of power. Unqualified valuation of relatedness becomes destructive exclusivism. Compassionless application of reciprocity becomes an excuse for vengeance. Jesus spoke and acted in a way that demonstrated such excesses to fall outside the divine will for human behavior. Hence, to engage in a bit of Williams-style commentary, Jesus "knew when to set evolutionary psychology aside and to make behavioral choices on the basis of divine calling rather than on the probabilities for reproductive success." I was especially struck (positively) by Williams' comments on the dangers of compassionless reciprocity in which she called attention to the remarkable and ironic contrast between the example set by Jesus and the distorted portrait of God that has become the display piece of substitutionary atonement theology. Williams says it with great eloquence. "Jesus spoke of love, generosity, and forgiveness. In doing so, he spoke of the nature of God. Christian atonement theology," alternatively, "has claimed that an innocent man had to die to pay for the sins of the guilty because God required that justice be done . It does not take much insight into the nature of justice to grasp the injustice of killing the innocent to forgive the guilty. The God who allegedly commanded such a deed ruled by reciprocity and had a stingy soul. This is not Jesus' God." Would that more contemporary Christians could see what Williams here points out. Seeing this demands no knowledge of evolutionary psychology, however. A sense of justice that transcends the scientific agenda will do. What about the fifth R? Recall Jesus' advice for life, "Be not anxious ." Live by love. Do not be driven by the egocentrism inherited from our evolutionary past. Do not allow yourself to distort any one of the four R's by becoming obsessed with its unqualified satisfaction. In a word, Relax. Great idea. That is the next item on my "to do" list. -------------------------- Counter-response on "The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist" Patricia A. Williams Patricia A. Williams is a philosopher of biology and philosophical theologian who writes full-time on Christianity and science. Her recent books include, Doing Without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (2001) and Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What you Can do about it (2001). Her mailing address is PO Box 69, Covesville, VA 22931. Her e-mail address is theologyauthor at aol.com; website www.theologyauthor.com. I am grateful to the editors for the privilege of receiving responses to my article and the opportunity to reply. I also appreciate the sincerity and thoughtfulness characterizing the responses. I might add that evolutionary biology is conceptually difficult; it is a field in which experts make mistakes, and much sociobiology is conceptually confused, partly because it seems a favorite playground for atheists who are ideologically driven. Finally, historical Jesus scholarship is broad, deep, and varied, so one needs to dine, not snack. Keeping it all straight is difficult. Even I make mistakes. Therefore, it may be best to begin by explaining the project I pursue in my books and essays. I want to integrate science, theology, and spirituality. As I come from a Christian background, that generally means I engage some aspect of Christianity. My first step is to take the best, most central, most accepted scientific findings to establish a firm foundation in the sciences. My second is to pursue the best biblical scholarship, especially scholarship on the historical Jesus, Christianity's central figure and a prophet in two other world religions. Thus, two critical, rational enterprises stand at the center of my work. Third, I seek the best in Christian spirituality, which I presently think Quakerism represents. (Quaker theology also smoothes some theological and scriptural issues.) Then I try to integrate them. Some examples from my treatment of science may help. When I discuss cosmology, I avoid string theory or many-worlds theory. Although they may be cutting-edge research subjects, they currently lack mathematical proof and empirical evidence. In biology, I center on the theory of evolution by natural selection since it is the foundational theory of biology. This is not to deny that other mechanisms for evolution exist. Indeed, I consider genetic drift significant in speciation.1 In sociobiology, I concentrate on kin selection (inclusive fitness), because it lies at the heart of sociobiology and is well established theoretically and empirically. For evolutionary psychology, I focus on dispositions applicable to as many organisms as possible, (the exception in the 4Rs being reciprocity, which although not uniquely human, is central to human relationships as it is not to those of other animals). I might add, against Carlson and Hine's assumption that I borrowed the terminology from David Buss, the expression "the four R's" and the arguments for the four R's being fundamental originate with me. To understand where the responders have erred, it will help to return to the basics. Van Till discusses evolution in terms of species survival. Evolution does not promote species survival. On the contrary, natural selection is a negative mechanism, promoting no one's survival, only eliminating the unfit. Evolution depends on three things: that more organisms come to be than survive to reproduce, some characteristics vary, and some of these are inherited. Populations change over time (evolve) because organisms that die before they reproduce fail to pass their characteristics on to future generations, and these characteristics vanish from the population. Meanwhile, mutations may add novel characteristics. Species can be selected (go extinct--contrary to Moritz's assumption, I am not a single-level selectionist and certainly not a genetic-level one), but natural selection cannot promote their survival. Indeed, most have gone extinct, so it fails to promote their survival. On the whole, however, the theory of evolution applies to individuals and their kin and is always local, that is, characteristics fit in one environment will not be so in others. This means evolution cannot promote the flourishing of species. I doubt Jesus promotes it, either. I doubt he thinks that broadly. Rather, his widest interest seems individual and community flourishing in a non-egalitarian but God-suffused world. Van Till assumes sociobiology has a single focus, the explanation of certain behaviors by means of the theory of evolution. In fact, it has three foci. The first, begun by W. D. Hamilton in 1964,2 was to explain biologically altruistic behavior by means of inclusive fitness theory. The second, prominently promoted by Robert Trivers from 1971 and 1972,3 was to predict animal social behavior (including human social behavior) from inclusive fitness theory. The third has been to gather empirical evidence to support or refute the predictions. The third and last has occurred almost since Hamilton published, was famously summarized by E. O. Wilson in 1975,4 and has become a project of evolutionary psychology in recent years. In calling Jesus an evolutionary psychologist, I credit him with understanding by (divine?) intuition and astute observation that human nature is disposed (not determined!) to follow the 4Rs that lie at the foundations of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Given Jesus' lack of scientific knowledge, he could not have been doing anything more. Since Moritz fails to find citations in my theological writing to critics of sociobiology, and no explicit criticisms of it, he concludes I accept it uncritically. My theological works do ignore its critics, for I think engaging in intra-scientific squabbles inappropriate in a theological context. However, in a lead review in the Quarterly Review of Biology,5 I criticize selfish gene theory and the idea that sociobiological explanations of behavior provide total explanations. However, in my theological works, I do something different. I interpret sociobiology in a non-reductionist, non-determinist, non-egocentric way, usually without explicitly condemning its reductionist, determinist, and selfishness-promoting proponents who, I think, misconstrue the evidence. I am especially disturbed that Moritz cloaks me in the determinist mantle when I say in summary of human nature's four R's in my article, Thus, evolution has given us enormous potential for both good and evil, and it also has provided a wide range of choices, from egocentricity that seeks the destruction of others to generosity and love that seek to further their welfare. We are remarkably flexible and free. That is the primary reason we find it so difficult to answer Aristotle's question about how to flourish. If we have such a range of desires and can engage in such an enormous number of activities, then which are those that best promote our flourishing? I emphasize choice and freedom. There is no taint of determinism here. Indeed, I find more tendencies toward the assumption of genetic determinism in the responses to my article than I do in my article. Moreover, without citing sociobiology's critics, I explicitly argue against determinism for an entire section in my Doing without Adam and Eve.6 As for "natural selection and the genocentrism it entails [being] no longer the sole fiddler" (Moritz), it never was. Charles Darwin, lord of the theory of evolution, invokes the inheritance of acquired characteristics to aid it, then sexual selection.7 Ernst Mayr, king of the new synthesis, recognizes sexual selection, the Baldwin effect, symbiosis, and genetic drift.8 E. O. Wilson, prince of sociobiology, includes morphological and physiological differences and environmental contingencies.9 A review of the most thoroughly studied genus in the world, Drosophila, adds premating isolation.10 Moreover, we now possess empirical proof that environments restructure organisms' brains, including adult human brains.11 Many things shape organisms and their behaviors. Many people shape historical Jesus scholarship. It is not limited to the Jesus Seminar. Although I respect the Jesus Seminar and find its two volumes12 handy for checking out black, gray, pink, and red sayings and deeds, I nowhere rely on it to tell me which sayings go back to Jesus as Carlson and Hine assert. In contrast, I say I will "restrict the passages of scripture I discuss to those the scholars think go back to the historical Jesus." I have written a book, mentioned in the article, on the historical Jesus13 with a bibliography listing 42 references to works of 35 Jesus scholars and historians of the two first centuries. I compiled that list five years ago, and I have continued reading. In an essay such as "The Fifth R," to summarize such extensive scholarship is impossible. However, to offer one example here, most other scholars think the passage Carlson and Hine mention that the Jesus Seminar colors gray, Mark 3:31 ? 35, goes back to Jesus. If Carlson and Hine researched further in the Seminar's The Five Gospels, they would find even the Seminar colors the parallels in Matthew 12:46 ? 50 and Thomas 99 pink. The event occurs in two sources, Mark and Thomas, so it meets the scholarly criterion of multiple attestation. Matthew and Luke (8:19 ? 21) retain it from Mark, their source for it, so it must have been well known. Moreover, it also fits the strong scholarly criterion that events and sayings embarrassing to the Jesus movement are likely to go back to Jesus. For a son not to honor his mother breaks one of the Ten Commandments, and in the Jesus movement after Jesus' death, some of his family members became his followers. Their change of heart must have aroused criticism of their earlier unbelief. Why include such an embarrassing incident in your narrative unless it is so widely known that excluding it appears fraudulent? Carlson and Hine also comment that I am dealing with the person of Jesus and putting "him in a box of dimensions specified by the four R's." This is false. I am interested in his insights into human nature, God, and ethics. I think he was a person of integrity and, so, his insights probably reflect his character, but his character is not the subject of "The Fifth R" and certainly not limited to the four R's--no one's is. The four R's at most represent some basic human dispositions. Carlson and Hine also misquote me. I never use the expression, "the unmatched quality of God's love, generosity, and forgiveness." Thus, I am unlikely to do "more to demonstrate this." Moritz seems to think the fifth R is "Rebel"14 and jettison the four R's. On the contrary, it is "Relax." In a wonderfully coined phrase, he calls the rebellious approach "an eschatologically stable strategy " to distinguish it from evolutionarily stable strategies. In contrast, I think "Relax" is probably stabilizing for the species. Other species follow evolutionary strategies and go extinct, so evolutionary strategies remain stable only temporarily. Based on the history of other species, if we follow evolutionary strategies, we will go extinct, too. Perhaps there is a better way. Jesus may offer it. Nonetheless, "Relax" does not entail rejecting the four R's. As I note in the article, Jesus is not an ascetic, but is accused of drunkenness and gluttony, enjoys the company of women and children, and calls a leading disciple who is married. Pursuing the four R's inordinately through greed, lust, nepotism, and justice for oneself to the exclusion of others destabilizes community and, so, diminishes human wellbeing. Such pursuits lead to wars that, in the contemporary world, may not only result in the extinction of our species but also the annihilation of life on Earth. Inordinate rebellion against the four R's also promises extinction. Best follow Van Till and make "Relax" the next item on the "'to do' list." Finally, Van Till comments that knowledge of evolutionary psychology is not required to understand that God's killing the innocent in order to forgive the guilty is unjust. I agree. I think evolutionary psychology sheds light here not by explaining justice, but by explaining the attractiveness to many Christians of a God who insists divine justice be satisfied. Theirs is an anthropomorphic God, built from our basic, evolved dispositions. Relaxed as he was about the four R's, Jesus could reflect, instead, a God of generosity and mercy. Notes 1. Patricia A. Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 108 ? 115. 2. W. D. Hamilton, "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour I and II," Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1 ? 51. 3. Robert L. Trivers, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," The Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35 ? 57 and "Parent-Offspring Conflict," American Zoology 14 (1972): 249 ? 264. 4. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). 5. Patricia A. Williams, "Of Replicators and Selectors," The Quarterly Review of Biology 77 (2002): 302 ? 306. 6. Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve, 143 ? 148. 7. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, [1859] 1964) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1871] 1981). 8. Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 9. Wilson, Sociobiology. 10. Jeffrey R. Powell, Progress and Prospects in Evolutionary Biology: The Drosophila Model (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 11. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: Regan Books, 2002). 12. Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993) and Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: Polebridge Press, 1998). 13. Patricia A. Williams, Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What You Can Do About It (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2001). 14. As, famously, in Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 215, "We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators [genes]". From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 1 00:25:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:25:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Women cleverer than men, says MP Message-ID: Women cleverer than men, says MP http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4079653.stm [Note the date. Mr. Mencken certainly thought so, at least that women were far more intelligent than men in what mattered. No woman, he said, would be so dumb to want to be a lawyer or a stock broker.] Last Updated: Wednesday, 8 December, 2004, 16:13 GMT GCSE students after receiving their results Girls are getting more top grades than boys at GCSE and A-level Women are brighter than men, according to the Labour chairman of the Commons education committee. Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman said there was a "danger" of being obsessed about how boys were doing at school. His comments followed a committee discussion about whether girls or boys found it easier to learn to read. "My own personal view is that women are brighter than men," the MP said, adding that women now earned on average more than men as middle managers. First class? He said: "We should celebrate this, shouldn't we? The brightest kids are coming through and they happen to be women." In recent years girls have consistently outperformed boys at all levels of the education system. The "gender gap" at GCSE level in England, Wales and Northern Ireland this year was 5.3 percentage points at grades A* and A and by 8.4 points at grades C and above in girls' favour. Boys' performance had improved more than girls', however. This was even more noticeable at A-level. Even so, 23.7% of girls' entries achieved A grades, compared to 21% of boys'. Ninety-five per cent of boys' entries were passes, against 96.8% of girls'. More young women than men go to university. Schools define many more boys than girls as having special educational problems - which some researchers argue means the schools are failing to meet boys' needs. 'Wrong schooling' In the latest major international study of the performance of 15-year-olds in maths, reading and science tests, boys out-performed girls in almost all of the 40 countries involved in maths. In reading, girls had "significantly higher average performance" in all countries except Liechtenstein. The biggest gap was in Iceland. Science showed the smallest average gender gap, with boys doing a little better. American educational researchers William Draves and Julie Coates have argued that it is not boys who are the problem but schools. While boys are developing the skills they will need in the "knowledge jobs" of the future, schools are still preparing students for a past industrial age, they have said. SEE ALSO: [47]Boys 'fighting back' in A-levels 18 Aug 04 | Education [48]Top grades rising again for GCSEs 26 Aug 04 | Education [49]Finland tops global school table 07 Dec 04 | Education [50]Will boys always be boys? 28 Feb 04 | Education [51]GCSE 'gender gap' sparks concern 22 Aug 02 | Education [52]Addressing the gender gap 22 Aug 02 | Education RELATED INTERNET LINKS: [53]Education committee The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites TOP EDUCATION STORIES NOW [54]Teachers welcome lesson plan deal [55]Boy charged in school arson probe [56]Muslim image 'must change' [57]Icelanders speak up for language References 47. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3577868.stm 48. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3597490.stm 49. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4073753.stm 50. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3494490.stm 51. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2208547.stm 52. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2208596.stm 53. http://www.parliament.uk/commons/selcom/edemhome.htm 54. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4200238.stm 55. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4202844.stm 56. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4197218.stm 57. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4201706.stm From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 1 00:25:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:25:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: 'Men cleverer than women' claim Message-ID: 'Men cleverer than women' claim http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/education/4183166.stm Published: 2005/08/25 09:57:24 GMT [e-mails to the BBC included.] Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women. A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests. Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn claim the difference grows when the highest IQ levels are considered. Their research was based on IQ tests given to 80,000 people and a further study of 20,000 students. 'Widening gap' Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, told the Today programme on BBC Radio Four the study showed that, up to the age of 14, there was no difference between the IQs of boys and girls. "But beyond that age and into adulthood there is a difference of five points, which is small but it can have important implications," he said. "This is against a background of women dramatically overtaking men in educational attainment and making very rapid advances in terms of occupational achievement." The academics used a test which is said to measure "general cognitive ability" - spatial and verbal ability. As intelligence scores among the study group rose, the academics say they found a widening gap between the sexes. There were twice as many men with IQ scores of 125, for example, a level said to correspond with people getting first-class degrees. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. Nobel prize-winners Dr Irwing told The Times the differences "may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds, such as chess grandmasters, Fields medallists for mathematics, Nobel prize-winners and the like". The paper will argue that there is evidence that at the same level of IQ, women are able to achieve more than men "possibly because they are more conscientious and better adapted to sustained periods of hard work". Earlier this year, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, sparked controversy when he suggested at a seminar that one reason men outperformed women in maths and science was genetics. Several guests walked out of the conference after hearing the comments. Dr Summers, who has apologised repeatedly for his remarks, said later that the shortage of senior female academics was partly caused by child-minding duties, which restricted working hours. What is your reaction to this research? Are men more intelligent than women? Send us your comments using the form below. My reaction, coming from a family with a tradition of women who achieve very highly in maths and sciences, is weary disgust. Yet again, what is intelligence? Who is defining it? Have these researchers looked at IQ levels below the average, at gender differentials among prison inmates? Let's have these included for balance, please. Julia Blincoe, Southampton, England All this discussion is fairly irrelevant. Men and women have different and also some similar skills but we are all genetically programmed for survival, together. Basically we need teamwork and to be able to work to each other's strengths and minimise our collective weaknesses in order to make any progress in future. Divisive talk about who is better than who is pointless and smacks of political correctness. Richard, Worksop I think that this study is probably true in a lot of cases, but this is because young girls change their ideals from learning. They start to have maternal thoughts of children and emotional attachment to partners. Therefore they neglect high learning for their natural development of nurturing. In general though I think women are equal to men, but in different roles. Darrell Beck, Jacksonville, Florida Modern IQ tests are no longer biased at all. They have been re-designed to be taken by anyone in the world, with any kind of education (or no education). Before the tests are rubbished, maybe we can establish if they are of the modern variety? I for one am getting tired of the media continually men-bashing and portraying men as incapable. It's nice to have some evidence to the contrary once in a while. Nigel, UK The only thing IQ tests prove is how good you are at doing IQ tests. Matthew, Cheshire, UK Let's not ignore the fact that researchers believe about 20-25 IQ points are influenced by environmental factors. And the fact that test scores are adjusted for gender anyway as males tend to score higher on some factors and females on others. This is not a pure measure of intelligence, but a human-devised Western (and usually male and white) instrument. Flo, Malvern, England I do not believe, on average, that men are more intelligent than women. I'm convinced we often find more men at the extremes like in academia or indeed in the work place simply because we still live in a male-driven society. Women think differently from men, that I do agree with, but more intelligent? From my 'empirical analysis' I find this unlikely. Jason Robinson, Cambridge To throw in another possible factor, remember also the competitive aspect of IQ tests: the average man is possibly more likely to treat a measurement of his mental capacity as a chance to prove himself; the average woman may not push herself as hard as she does not consider the result quite so important. Anne, London, UK I scored relatively high in an IQ test when I was a child. Since then I have done many many many very very very stupid things in my life. I still wonder what that test has to do with intelligence or understanding at all. Alex, Wien, Austria I'm surprised that an academic journal is even considering this publication. A 'scientific' study that only takes into account one measure of intelligence that is well known to be biased towards white European males really shouldn't be taken seriously. I suspect the editor of the journal is male. Maria, Sheffield It really does amuse me that some men need to keep creating these tests to prove to themselves that they are more capable than women. I don't read about a rush of women psychologists doing the same thing. Maybe the women know the truth anyway or maybe they just don't care. Hazel, Sheffield I hope this taken for exactly what it is. A scientific study. Most of these things have little or no bearing on everyday life for most of us. However, as a man, it is nice to hear something positive about us for once. Nick Spiers, London I can easily see this as being true. However, it would be interesting to also look at the bottom IQ levels and see which sex has more at that level before making any judgements. Given that that sections of the media are so keen on denigrating men, and the advertising industry is so addicted to portraying men as buffoons and women as intelligent, perhaps this might re-adjust the balance a little. I find that although many of the women I've known are more socially intelligent, their general knowledge has always been abysmal, hence this being no surprise. Huw Morgan, Cardiff, UK I suspect the tests were formulated to play to men's strengths. Perhaps the tests were even set by men. IQ tests have long been recognised as skewed towards white men of European origin, why do we continue to pay attention to them? IQ tests still don't measure the different ways that intelligence can manifest itself, and until they do, they will continue to provide fodder to those who seek to re-establish man's 'superiority' over women. Roanne, Derby, UK I don't think men are more intelligent than women on average. However, from personal experience I would say that the distribution of intelligence in men is more extreme, that is to say, there are more exceptionally clever men than women, but there are also more exceptionally stupid men than women. Robin, Oxford, IKL It has long been accepted that IQ tests are gender-biased: they are designed by men to test 'male intelligence', such as spatial awareness. They simply do not cover all aspects of intelligence. Therefore it is no surprise that a test designed by men, and a study carried out by men, has found that men are 'more intelligent' than women. Jenny, London If your report is accurate, what this study actually shows is that men are better at IQ tests than women. This is not (necessarily) the same as saying men are cleverer than women. That would require rather more criteria than just an IQ test. Phil Evans, Keele, UK I have the impression that society allows men to develop skills in a focussed way, with less time reserved for repetitive care tasks. IQ can be improved in this way. It is not set and fixed at birth. If men hone skills at the expense of good housekeeping or social responsibilities, perhaps they are granted the time to develop the extra five points where women spend more time looking after house/kids/husband/parents/friends. Marjoline, The Hague, Holland From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 1 00:27:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:27:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PLoS Computational Biology: Evolution of Genetic Potential Message-ID: Evolution of Genetic Potential http://compbiol.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010032 [Links omitted.] Volume 1 | Issue 3 | AUGUST 2005 Research Article Evolution of Genetic Potential Lauren Ancel Meyers^1,^2^*, Fredric D. Ancel^3, Michael Lachmann^4 1 Section of Integrative Biology, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, United States of America, 2 Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America, 3 Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States of America, 4 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Organisms employ a multitude of strategies to cope with the dynamical environments in which they live. Homeostasis and physiological plasticity buffer changes within the lifetime of an organism, while stochastic developmental programs and hypermutability track changes on longer timescales. An alternative long-term mechanism is "genetic potential"--a heightened sensitivity to the effects of mutation that facilitates rapid evolution to novel states. Using a transparent mathematical model, we illustrate the concept of genetic potential and show that as environmental variability decreases, the evolving population reaches three distinct steady state conditions: (1) organismal flexibility, (2) genetic potential, and (3) genetic robustness. As a specific example of this concept we examine fluctuating selection for hydrophobicity in a single amino acid. We see the same three stages, suggesting that environmental fluctuations can produce allele distributions that are distinct not only from those found under constant conditions, but also from the transient allele distributions that arise under isolated selective sweeps. Editor: Eddie Holmes, Pennsylvania State University, United States of America Received: April 15, 2005; Accepted: July 22, 2005; Published: August 26, 2005 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010032 Copyright: ? 2005 Meyers et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abbreviation: MHC, major histocompatibility *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: laurenmeyers at mail.utexas.edu Citation: Meyers LA, Ancel FD, Lachmann M (2005) Evolution of Genetic Potential. PLoS Comput Biol 1(3): e32 Synopsis Variation is the fuel of natural selection. Understanding the mutational processes that underlie evolution has long been a central objective of population genetics. Today, amidst a computational revolution in biology, such understanding is pivotal to progress in many biological disciplines. For example, neutral mutations make the molecular clock tick, and this clock is fundamental to reconstructing phylogenies, measuring recombination rates, and detecting genetic functionality. In this manuscript, the researchers provide an original perspective on a long-standing question in evolutionary biology: to what extent do mutation rates evolve? They argue that to cope with environmental fluctuation, populations can evolve their phenotypic mutation rate without changing their genetic mutation rate. That is, populations can evolve "genetic potential"--a heightened sensitivity to the effects of mutation. The researchers use a simple mathematical model of amino acid evolution to illustrate the evolution of genetic potential, and show that as environmental variability decreases, evolving populations reach three distinct states. In a rapidly fluctuating environment, organisms evolve the flexibility to cope with variation within an individual lifetime; in moderately variable environments, populations evolve the ability to evolve rapidly; and in fairly constant environments, populations evolve robustness against the adverse effects of mutation. Introduction Recent work in evolutionary biology has highlighted the degeneracy of the relationship between genes and traits [1]. For any particular trait value, there will exist a large set of genotypes that give rise to that value. A mutation from one such genotype to another will be neutral, having no noticeable impact on the physiology, behavior, or fitness of organisms. Metaphorically, one can imagine a population moving via mutation through a region of genotype space that maps to a neutral plateau in phenotype space. Near the periphery, mutations are likely to produce different (usually worse and occasionally better) phenotypes, whereas near the center of the neutral plateau, mutations have little impact on the phenotype. Evolutionary theory suggests that populations can harness this variation to achieve phenotypic stability under steady conditions through either mutational insensitivity [2,3] or mutational hypersensitivity [4], or to facilitate phenotypic exploration during adaptation [5,6]. A separate body of evolutionary theory addresses adaptation under fluctuating conditions [7,8]. The rate of the fluctuations will influence the resulting response. If the environment changes rapidly relative to the average generation time, populations may evolve mechanisms such as physiological plasticity and learning by which individual organisms can respond to their conditions [9,10]. As environmental change slows down, viable strategies include stochastic or directed heterogeneity in developmental pathways that give rise to phenotypic variation on the order of once per generation [11]. For even slower rates of change, mutations may produce novel phenotypes at a sufficiently high rate. Hypermutable lineages can produce novelty every few generations, as has been observed in viruses and mutator strains of bacteria [12,13]. When environmental fluctuations are rare, populations may experience extended epochs of directional selection and thus have sufficient time to achieve genetic robustness for any given state. Immediately following an environmental shift, however, such populations may pass through transitional periods of within-individual or between-generation plasticity before completely losing the previously favored phenotype in favor of a currently favored phenotype. This evolutionary transformation--from a trait that is acquired through phenotypic plasticity to a genetically determined version of the same trait--is known as the Baldwin Effect [9,14]. In this paper we show that genetic degeneracy may give rise to an alternative outcome under fluctuating conditions: the evolution of genotypes with heightened sensitivity to mutation. We introduce the term "genetic potential" to describe this state. Metaphorically, populations with genetic potential lie near the edge of neutral plateaus. Although the rate of mutation is unchanged, the likelihood that mutations produce beneficial variation increases. Heightened sensitivity to mutations has been recognized as a critical and transient phase of adaptive evolution [5,15,16]. Here we argue that genetic potential can be a stable condition for a population evolving under changing selection pressures. Using a simple mathematical model, we show that as environmental variability increases, natural selection at first moves populations between genetically robust states, then increasingly favors genetic potential, and ultimately produces mechanisms for environmental robustness within individual organisms. We then present a more biological example of this phenomenon using a model of amino acid evolution. There is evidence that, within viral pathogens, the physiochemical properties of amino acids found within epitopes--regions of proteins that directly interact with the host immune system--can rapidly evolve [17,18]. Likewise, highly evolvable codons have been identified in bacteriophage experiencing shifting hosts [19] and in enzymes experiencing shifting substrates [20]. Motivated by these observations, we model codon evolution at a single amino acid site under fluctuating selection for hydrophobicity. As in the first model, natural selection produces three distinct outcomes with increasing environmental variability. Each outcome corresponds to distinct expectations about the distribution of amino acids and their codons at selected sites. Under infrequent environmental change, populations evolve from one mutationally robust phenotype to another, briefly passing through genotypes that can easily mutate to either state. One might therefore be tempted to equate genetic potential with confinement to the intermediate steps on a path from robustness for one phenotype to robustness for another (Figure 1). While this is true in our simple model, the codon model illustrates that fluctuating environments may drive populations towards significantly greater genetic potential than found during these transient stages of isolated selective sweeps. thumbnail Figure 1. Evolution of Genetic Potential The gray regions represent neutral networks--sets of genotypes that give rise to each phenotype. The degree of shading indicates the likelihood that mutations will impact phenotype, where darker regions are robust to mutations. Under constant conditions, populations evolve toward the most robust regions of neutral networks. Under variable conditions, populations may evolve toward genotypes that easily mutate from one phenotype to the other. These regions of genetic potential do not always lie on the evolutionary path between the equilibrium states for constant environments (arrow). Results Description of Models The simple model. We consider the evolution of a trait in an environment that alternates between two states (E[A] and E[B]), spending exactly l generations per state between shifts. The simple model includes three phenotypes--one optimal phenotype for each of the two environments (A and B) and a third that has intermediate quality in both environments (V)--and a minimal amount of degeneracy in the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype. In particular, there is a single genetic locus, and five allelic possibilities at that locus (Figure 2A). Three of the alleles, g[0], g[1], and g[2], give rise to phenotype A, the fourth, g[3], gives rise to phenotype V, and the fifth, g[4], gives rise to phenotype B. The mutational structure is a pentagon in which g[i] can mutate to g[(i - 1) mod 5] or g[(i + 1) mod 5] for i [isin.gif] {0,1,2,3,4}. thumbnail Figure 2. Mutational Networks (A) Five alleles lie on a mutational pentagon with genetic degeneracy for the A phenotype. Colors indicate phenotypes with blue for A, yellow for B, and gray for V. Edges indicate that an allele on one side can mutate to the allele on the other side. Arrows illustrate the dynamics in equation 2. (B) Each vertex represents an amino acid. The size of the vertex indicates the number of codons coding for the amino acid. Edges indicate point mutations between hydrophobicity classes. Mutations that preserve hydrophobicity class, including those that preserve the amino acid, are included in the model but not depicted here. The color of the vertex corresponds to the hydrophobicity class: blue indicates hydrophobic, yellow indicates hydrophilic, green indicates intermediate, and red indicates stop codons [21]. This network was drawn with PAJEK [50]. The fitness function changes with the environment such that where w[A] and w[B] are the fitnesses in environments E[A] and E[B], respectively, s > 0 is the fitness advantage for the specialized phenotype (A or B) in its preferred environment, and 0 =< k =< 1 determines the intermediacy of the V phenotype. We can write the full model as a set of difference equations for i [isin.gif] {0,1,2,3,4}, where ? is the mutation rate and w[t] denotes the fitness in the current environment (Figure 2A). The number of individuals with genotype g[i] at time t is denoted by g[i,t]. The changing environment is governed by the following rule: To simplify the analysis, this model tracks changes in the absolute population sizes of the various genotypes rather than their relative frequencies. Since the dynamics scale linearly with the total population size, one can achieve the same population dynamics by replacing the absolute sizes with relative frequencies and normalizing appropriately. Variations on the simple model. There are exactly 14 unique mutational networks consisting of five alleles on a pentagon, with at least one encoding A and at least one encoding B (see Materials and Methods). These include, for example, the pentagon with four consecutive alleles coding for A and one for B and the pentagon with alleles alternating in phenotype-A-B-A-V-B-. We are presenting analysis of the -A-A-A-V-B- model because it gives rise to some of the most interesting and generic dynamics found among these 14 models. The codon model. The previous model offers a transparent illustration of evolutionary dynamics under different rates of environmental change. Although somewhat simplistic, we believe that the qualitative predictions of the model will hold for a wide range of more plausible genotype-phenotype maps. To demonstrate this, we consider the evolution of a single amino acid site under fluctuating conditions. In this model, the genotypes are the 64 codons in the standard genetic code and the phenotypes are hydrophobicities of the corresponding amino acids [21]. The environment alternately favors hydrophobic and hydrophilic amino acids. There are three classes of amino acids--hydrophobic, intermediate, and hydrophilic--and all amino acids in a class share the same fitness. The fitnesses are determined as in equation 1, with the fitnesses of all three stop codons equal to zero. Each codon is mutationally connected to the nine others to which it can mutate via point mutation. This gives rise to the genetic network depicted in Figure 2B and the dynamics given by for 1 =< i =< 64, where ? is the overall mutation rate, b is the transition/transversion ratio (2b is the transition/transversion rate ratio), F[i] is the set of three transition point mutations of codon i, and G[i] is the set of six transversion point mutations of codon i. Analysis of the Simple Model We provide an intuitive perspective on evolution in fluctuating environments using the simple model and then demonstrate the generality of the results in the codon model. The first results assume a mutation rate ? = 0.01, and fitnesses 1, 1.5, and 2 for the unfavored, intermediate, and favored phenotypes, respectively. In a constant environment, a population will equilibrate on genotypes that encode the optimal phenotype. In environment E[A], the equilibrium relative frequencies of g[0], g[1], g[2], g[3], and g[4] are 0.291, 0.412, 0.292, 0.003, and 0.002, respectively, and in environment E[B], they are 0.005, 0.000, 0.000, 0.010, and 0.985, respectively. When there is degeneracy, as there is for phenotype A, the populations evolve genetic robustness, that is, more mutationally protected genotypes appear in higher frequency. In particular, g[1], which lies in the center of the three genotypes that code for A, appears in higher frequency than either genotype on the edge of the neutral network for A (g[0] and g[2]) at equilibrium in E[A]. In the absence of degeneracy (phenotype B), we observe a mutation-selection balance around the single optimal genotype. These findings are consistent with and provide a transparent example of the extensive theory on mutation-selection balance, quasi-species, and the evolution of genetic robustness in neutral networks [2,22-24]. Under rapid environmental fluctuations, populations do not have time to reach a stable allele distribution. As the environment becomes more variable, the distributions of alleles go through three distinct phases. Figure 3 shows the frequency of every allele averaged over each environmental condition after the population has reached steady oscillations. For relatively stable environments, the populations swing back and forth between near equilibrium conditions for E[A] and E[B], thereby alternating between genetic robustness for A and a mutation-selection balance around the single allele for B. At intermediate rates of fluctuation, populations hover near g[4] and g[0], where the genotypes for A abut the genotype for B. Thus, mutation between the two phenotypes occurs frequently. We call this outcome genetic potential because of the enhanced potential for mutations to give rise to novel (beneficial) phenotypes. Finally, for highly variable environments, the populations converge on the phenotype V, which has unchanging, intermediate fitness in both environments. Phenotype V corresponds to organismal flexibility--individual organisms tolerate both conditions, but neither one exceptionally well. There are a variety of mechanisms that can give rise to an intermediate phenotype including homeostasis, somatic evolution, physiological plasticity, and behavioral plasticity [7,8]. As originally predicted by Dempster [25], the ascent of V under rapid fluctuations only occurs if the fitness of V is greater than the geometric mean fitness over time for either A or B. Figure 3. Allele Distributions under Environmental Fluctuations The graphs show the stationary allele distributions averaged over an E[A] epoch (top) and an E[B] epoch (bottom) as a function of the variability of the environment. As environmental variability decreases, the population moves from the intermediate phenotype to the genetic boundary between the A and B phenotypes, and eventually to an oscillation between the center of the network for A and the gene for B. Diagrams above the graphs illustrate the frequency distributions in each of the three phases. Vertex areas are proportional to the average frequencies for each allele. (For the data depicted in this figure, s = 1, k = 0.5, and ? = 0.01.) Anaylsis of the Codon Model The codon model gives rise to similar oscillations (Figure 4). Here we have assumed a transition/transversion ratio b = 2, mutation rate ? = 10^ -5, and fitnesses 1, 1.5, and 2 for the unfavored, intermediate, and favored phenotypes, respectively. (We address the impact of mutation rate in the Discussion.) Whereas in the simple model only one of the three phenotypes had multiple genotypes, in this model all three phenotypic classes have genetic degeneracy, and thus can evolve genetic robustness (Figure 4A). For highly variable environments, codons for amino acids with intermediate hydrophobicity dominate, and in particular, those that are least likely to mutate to one of the other two classes (Figure 4B). In a moderately variable environment, the populations exhibit genetic potential, hovering near the edges of the neutral networks for the two extreme classes, thereby enabling rapid evolution upon environmental transitions (Figure 4C). In relatively constant environments, we find alternating genetic robustness for the two extreme classes (Figure 4D). thumbnail Figure 4. Codon Distributions under Environmental Fluctuations (A) gives the robustness for each codon, that is, the fraction of all possible point mutations that leave the hydrophobicity class unchanged. The codons have been ordered to reflect roughly the mutational adjacency of the hydrophobicity classes. (B-D) show the average codon frequency distribution for each epoch type after the population has reached stationary oscillation. These show frequencies for environmental epochs of exactly l generations (thick lines) and epochs of random duration--Poisson distributed with mean l (thin lines). Black corresponds to epochs favoring hydrophobicity and gray corresponds to epochs favoring hydrophilicity. The rate of environmental fluctuations is decreasing from (B) to (D) (l = 10, 10^2, and 10^6, respectively). The genetic potential of a population can be estimated by the probability that a currently favored codon in the population will mutate to a currently unfavored or intermediate codon. This indicates the capacity to bounce back (via mutation and selection) if and when the environment reverts. For populations that have equilibrated in a constant environment and have recently experienced an environmental shift, genetic potential will decrease as the population becomes increasingly robust to the effects of mutation (Figure 5). For populations that have evolved under moderately fluctuating conditions, genetic potential remains noticeably higher. This suggests that the regular oscillations of such populations involve distributions of codons that are quite different (more mutable) than those found during the early stages of adaptation in an isolated selective sweep. thumbnail Figure 5. Faster Environmental Fluctuations Yield Greater Genetic Potential Genetic potential is the likelihood that a mutation to a gene coding for the currently favored phenotype will produce the intermediate or unfavored phenotype. Thick lines correspond to populations that have reached stable oscillations when l = 100, and thin lines correspond to populations that experience a single environmental shift after having equilibrated in a constant environment. The maximum genetic potential after a single shift is significantly less than the minimum under persistent fluctuations. This difference also appears in the distributions of amino acids. We calculated the genetic potential in each generation of a population experiencing fluctuations every l = 10^2 generations. Figure 6 (left) depicts the amino acid distributions for the generations that have the highest genetic potential in E[A] and E[B]. We then compared these two distributions to the evolving amino acid distribution in a population that equilibrates in one of the two environments and then faces an environmental shift. Figure 6 (right) shows the steady state distributions for this population and the transitional distributions that are most similar (i.e., smallest average squared difference in relative frequencies) to those depicted in Figure 6 (left). The distributions of amino acids in regions of genetic potential are strikingly different than those realized in populations evolving after an isolated environmental shift. thumbnail Figure 6. Amino Acid Distributions Reflect Genetic Potential The left figure illustrates amino acid distribution in the generations with greatest genetic potential during each of the two epochs for l = 100. Vertex area is proportional to the relative frequency of an amino acid. The right figure gives the amino acid distributions at equilibrium in the two environments (far left and right networks), and the transitional amino acid distributions that are most similar to those depicted for l = 100 (left). Similarity is measured as mean squared difference in frequencies across all amino acids. The amino acid networks were drawn with PAJEK [50]. Discussion We have provided an intuitive framework for studying the evolutionary implications of heterogeneous environments. Although much is known independently about the evolution of genetic robustness [3] and organismal flexibility [7,8], this model demonstrates that the extent of environmental variability may determine which of these two states evolves, and suggests the possibility of an intermediate state of heightened mutability. The transition points among the three states will be functions of both the environment and the mutation rate. In particular, increasing (decreasing) the mutation rate (within a moderate range) has the same qualitative effect as increasing (decreasing) the duration of an environmental epoch. As the mutation rate decreases, populations take longer to achieve genetic robustness, and therefore evolve genetic potential (rather than robustness) over large ranges of environmental variability. For example, at a mutation rate of ? = 10^ -5 in the codon model, populations evolve genetic potential when environment varies at rates of 10^1 < l < 10^6 generations, approximately (Figure 4). If the mutation rate increases to ? = 10^ -2, the qualitative results are similar, with populations evolving genetic potential when the environmental variability is in the more limited range of 10^0 < l < 10^3 generations, approximately. If, instead, the mutation rate decreases to ? = 10^ -9, then adaptation to genetic robustness proceeds at an exceedingly slow pace, yielding genetic potential throughout the extended range of 10^2 < l < 10^10 generations, approximately. To understand the comparable roles of mutation and environmental variability, note that the model includes three time-dependent processes--mutation, environmental change, and population growth. If one of these rates is changed, the other two can be modified to achieve identical system behavior on a shifted time scale. Since the dynamics only weakly depend on the force of selection, we can change the mutation rate and then scale the rate of environmental change to produce the original qualitative results. The connection between environmental variability and mutation has been noted before, with theory predicting that the optimal mutation rate under fluctuating environmental conditions is ? = 1/l [26,27]. Our results suggest an alternative perspective on the evolution of mutation rates. Theory suggests that the optimal mutation rate should correspond to the rate of environmental change [26,28], yet the extent to which mutation rate can evolve is unclear [12,13,29]. Here we suggest that the genotypic mutation rate need not evolve as long as the phenotypic or effective mutation rate evolves. By evolving toward genotypes with higher genetic potential, populations increase the rate of phenotypically consequential mutations without modifications to the underlying genetic mutational processes. We would like to emphasize that our second model is intended as one possible example of fluctuating selection among many thought to exist in nature. Whether or not one has much confidence in the particular evolutionary scenario, the qualitatively similar outcomes for the simple and complex models presented here suggest that the results may hold for a large class of systems in which there is redundancy in the relationship between genotype and phenotype. Hydrophobicity is just one of several physicochemical properties thought to play a role in the shifting functional demands on amino acids [17-20]. Another example is phase-shifting bacteria that have mutational mechanisms, for example, inversions in promoter regions [30] and slip-stranded mispairing within microsatellites [12], that lead to variation in functionally important phenotypes. The remarkable suitability of the phase-shifting variants to the diverse conditions experienced by the bacteria suggests that phase shifting may have evolved as a mechanism for genetic potential. We hypothesize that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which is the component of the immune system responsible for recognizing and binding foreign particles, may also have evolved genetic potential as a by-product of the flucuations arising out of coevolution with pathogens [31]. Studies suggest that several components of the immune system exhibit high overall rates of genetic change. In particular, there are specific amino acid sites within the MHC complex that seem to have experienced rapid evolutionary change [32]. One possible explanation is that each MHC gene as a whole, and these sites in particular, have a history of rapid adaptation to changing distributions of potential antigens. We therefore predict that such sites may have evolved genetic potential. Evolvability has been defined as a population's ability to respond to selection [6,33]. Although the term has only recently taken root, ideas concerning the evolution of evolvability itself date back to the Fisher-Wright debate over the evolution of dominance [34,35] and include the large body of theory on the evolution of mutation rates and recombination [36,37]. Developmental biologists have begun to identify genetic architectures that promote diversification [38] and buffering mechanisms, such as heat shock proteins, that allow the accumulation of cryptic variation [39]. Although one can think of genetic potential as an abstraction of all mechanisms that increase the likelihood that a mutation will have a phenotypic effect, the genetic potential that evolves in our models is a very simple form of evolvability that exploits redundancy in the map from genotype to phenotype. Genetic potential evolves in our models because prior and future environments are identical. If, instead, the environment continually shifts to completely novel states, the evolutionary history of a population may not prepare it for future adaptation. We speculate that some degree of genetic potential may still evolve if there exist genotypes on the periphery of neutral networks with broad phenotypic lability. Biologists often refer to phenotypic plasticity, learning, and other forms of organismal flexibility as "adaptations" for coping with environmental heterogeneity [7,8]. Should genetic potential be seen as an alternative "solution," or should it be viewed as simply a product of fluctuating selection? Although we remain agnostic, we note that this question might be asked of all forms of adaptive variation. Whether or not genetic potential should be viewed as an evolved strategy, we emphasize that it is not simply the truncation of the adaptive path a population follows from the equilibrium state in one constant environment to the equilibrium state in the other. In the codon model, intermediate rates of environmental fluctuations push the population into regions of the codon network where genetic potential is consistently higher than the regions of network through which a population crosses after an isolated environmental shift (Figures 1, 5, and 6). A long-standing technique for identifying selected genes is to compare the frequencies of nonsynonymous and synonymous substitutions (K[a]/K[s]) [40]. Genes experiencing frequent selective sweeps should have relatively large amounts of variation in sites that modify amino acids. Such genes might be in the process of evolving a new function or, more likely, involved in an evolutionary arms race, for example, epitopes in human pathogens [31,41] or genes involved in sperm competition [42]. In the latter case, our model suggests that, in addition to an elevated K[a]/K[s], such genes should employ a distinct set of codons with high genetic potential. Note that this type of genetic potential is not equivalent to codon bias, but rather implies changes in the actual distribution of amino acids. A similar argument also underlies the recent use of codon distributions for detecting genetic loci under directional selection [43]. Codon volatility--the probability that a codon will mutate to a different amino acid class, relative to that probability for all codons in the same amino acid class--is a measure of genetic potential. Genes with significantly heightened volatility will be more sensitive to mutation. Our model suggests a different explanation for codon volatility than that presented in [43]: volatility may indicate a history of fluctuating selection rather than an isolated evolutionary event. If true, then we would not expect the codon distribution to reflect a transient out-of-equilibrium distribution as the population is moving from one constant environment to another [16]. Instead, we expect the distribution to reflect the stationary level of genetic potential that corresponds to variability in the selective environment for that gene. On a practical level, therefore, the isolated selective sweep model assumed in [43] may misestimate the expected volatility at such sites. Codon volatility, however, can arise as a by-product of processes other than positive (or fluctuating) selection. It has been noted that codon volatility may instead reflect selection for translation efficiency, relaxed negative selection, strong frequency-dependent selection, an abundance of repetitive DNA, or simple amino acid biases [44-48]. Therefore, the presence of codon volatility by itself may not be a reliable indicator of either recent directional selection or fluctuating selection. We would like to emphasize that the goal of this study was not to develop a new method for detecting positive (or fluctuating) selection, but rather to develop a theoretical framework for considering the multiple outcomes of evolution under fluctuating conditions. We conclude by suggesting an empirical method to identify loci that have evolved genetic potential under such conditions as distinct from those that have experienced a recent selective sweep. Suppose that a gene experiences fluctuations at a characteristic rate across many species. Furthermore, suppose that multiple sites within the gene are influenced by such fluctuations. For example, there may be fluctuating selection for molecular hydropathy, charge, size, or polarity, and several sites within the gene may contribute to these properties. Such sites should evolve in tandem and equilibrate on similar levels of genetic potential, and thus exhibit similar codon (and amino acid) distributions across species. In contrast, if a gene experiences isolated selective sweeps, then the variation at all sites should correspond to both the history of selective events and the species phylogeny, and the amino acid distributions at sites should correlate only when sites functionally mirror each other. Thus, one can seek evidence for the evolution of genetic potential as follows. First, identify genes that are rapidly evolving, perhaps by calculating K[a]/K[s] ratios. Such sites have been identified, for example, in human class I MHC genes, the HIV envelop gene, and a gene from a human T cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV-1) [31,32]. Within these genes, search for sites for which there is minimal correlation between the species tree and the amino acid distribution. Our model predicts that some of these sites should share similar distributions of amino acids across species. Materials and Methods Mathematical analysis of models. For the two models, we calculate the deterministic, infinite population allele frequency distributions in constant and fluctuating environments. Let M[A] and M[B] be the normalized transition matrices that govern changes in the allele frequencies in E[A] and E[B] epochs, respectively. The entries in these matrices are defined by equations 2 and 4. The left leading eigenvectors for M[A] and M[B] give the equilibrium frequency distributions of alleles in each of the two constant environments, respectively. Under fluctuating conditions with epoch duration of l generations, we iteratively apply the matrices, and then compute the left leading eigenvector of . This vector, which we call v[B], gives the allele frequency distribution at the end of an E[A] epoch followed by an E[B] epoch. We are interested not only in the final allele distributions, but also in the dynamics throughout each epoch. Thus, we calculate the average frequency of each allele across a single E[A] epoch by where G is the total number of alleles in the model (G = 5 for the simple model and G = 64 for the codon model) and the subscript k indicates the kth entry in the vector. Similarly, the average distribution across an E[B] epoch is given by where v[A] is the allele frequency distribution at the end of an E[B] epoch followed by an E[A] epoch and is equal to the left leading eigenvalue of For the codon model, we compare these calculations that assume a regularly fluctuating environment to numerical simulations that assume a Poisson distribution of epoch lengths. In each generation of the simulations, the environmental state switches with probability 1/l and the codon frequencies are then multiplied by the appropriate transition matrix. Proof of 14 unique pentagonal networks. We use an elementary group theoretic result known as Burnside's Lemma [49] to prove that there are 14 distinct mutational networks consisting of five alleles on a pentagon that map to the set of phenotypes {A, B, V} and contain at least one of each specialist phenotype (A and B) (Figure 7). We assume that all rotations and reflections of a network are equivalent to the original network, and that A and B are interchangeable. For example, the six networks with phenotypes -A-A-A-B-B-, -B-A-A-A-B-, -B-B-A-A-A-, -B-B-B-A-A-, -A-B-B-B-A-, and -A-A-B-B-B- are equivalent. thumbnail Figure 7. Pentagonal Mutational Networks These are the 14 possible pentagonal mutational networks consisting of five alleles producing phenotypes A, B, or V, with at least one encoding A and one encoding B. Let X be the set of all pentagons with vertices labeled {A, B, V} having at least one A vertex and at least one B vertex. The size of X is the number of all pentagons with labels {A, B, V} minus the number of pentagons with labels {A, V} or {B, V}, that is, |X| = 3^5 - (2 ? 2^5 - 1) = 180. We define the group G of all actions on X that produce equivalent pentagons (as specified above). G is made up of (1) the identity, (2) the four rotations and five reflections of the pentagon, (3) interchanging all As and Bs, and (4) all the combinations of the above actions. Thus G is equal to the 20-member group {i, r, r^2, r^3, r^4, s[0], s[1], s[2], s[3], s[4], a, ar, ar^2, ar^3, ar^4, as[0], as[1], as[2], as[3], as[4]} where i is the identity, r is a single (72?) rotation, s[i] is a reflection through vertex i, and a is replacement of all As with Bs and all Bs with As. (Note that the reflections are rotations of each other, for example, r^2s[0] = s[1].) The number of distinct mutational networks is equal to the number of orbits of G on X. Burnside's Lemma tells us that this number is where F(g) = {x [isin.gif] X | gx = x} is the set of fixed points of g. For each of the twenty elements of G, we exhaustively count F(g). The identity fixes all elements of X, that is, F(i) = X. Each of the various rotations of a pentagon (through 72?, 144?, 216?, and 288?) has the property that its iterations move a given vertex to every other vertex of the pentagon without changing the letter assigned to that vertex. The same is true of the square of the product of any rotation and an A-B flip. Hence, any fixed point of one of these elements of the group G would necessarily have the same label at each vertex of the pentagon. Since every labeled pentagon in X has at least one A label and at least one B label, then no element of X has the same label at each vertex. Thus, the fixed point set of every rotation and of every product of a rotation and an A-B flip must be empty, that is, F(r^n) = F(ar^n) =  for all n. By a similar argument, the simple A-B flip also has no fixed points. 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Nielsen R, Hubisz MJ (2005) Evolutionary genomics: Detecting selection needs comparative data. Nature 433: E6. Find this article online 47. Sharp PM (2005) Gene "volatility" is most unlikely to reveal adaptation. Mol Biol Evol 22: 807-809. Find this article online 48. Zhang J (2005) On the evolution of codon volatility. Genetics 169: 495-501. Find this article online 49. Martin G (2001) Counting: The art of enumerative combinatorics. New York: Springer-Verlag. 50. Batagelj V, Mrvar A (1998) PAJEK--Program for large network analysis. Connections 21: 47-57. Find this article online From checker at panix.com Fri Sep 2 01:44:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 21:44:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On the Large Scale Structure of the Universe Message-ID: On the Large Scale Structure of the Universe http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050819-5.htm The following points are made by David H. Weinberg (Science 2005 309:564): 1) In a large-scale view of the Universe, galaxies are the basic unit of structure. A typical bright galaxy may contain 100 billion stars and span tens of thousands of light-years, but the empty expanses between the galaxies are much larger still. Galaxies are not randomly distributed in space, but instead reside in groups and clusters, which are themselves arranged in an intricate lattice of filaments and walls, threaded by tunnels and pocked with bubbles. Two ambitious new surveys, the Two-Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), have mapped the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies over an unprecedented range of scales [1,2]. Astronomers are using these maps to learn about conditions in the early Universe, the matter and energy contents of the cosmos, and the physics of galaxy formation. 2) Galaxies and large-scale structure form as a result of the gravitational amplification of tiny primordial fluctuations in the density of matter. The inflation hypothesis ascribes the origin of these fluctuations to quantum processes during a period of exponential expansion that occupied the first millionth-of-a-billionth-of-a-trillionth of a second of cosmic history. Experiments over the last decade have revealed the imprint of these fluctuations as part-in-100,000 intensity modulations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which records the small inhomogeneities present in the Universe half a million years after the big bang. Although the visible components of galaxies are made of "normal" baryonic matter (mostly hydrogen and helium), the gravitational forces that drive the growth of structure come mainly from dark matter, which is immune to electromagnetic interactions. 3) By combining precise, quantitative measurements of present-day galaxy clustering with CMB data and other cosmological observations, astronomers hope to test the inflation hypothesis, to pin down the physical mechanisms of inflation, to measure the amounts of baryonic and dark matter in the cosmos, and to probe the nature of the mysterious "dark energy" that has caused the expansion of the Universe to accelerate over the last 5 billion years. The 2dFGRS, completed in 2003, measured distances to 220,000 galaxies, and the SDSS is now 80% of the way to its goal of 800,000 galaxies. 4) The key challenge in interpreting the observed clustering is the uncertain relation between the distribution of galaxies and the underlying distribution of dark matter. If the galaxy maps are smoothed over tens of millions of lightyears, this relation is expected to be fairly simple: Variations in galaxy density are constant multiples of the variations in dark matter density. Quantitative analysis in this regime has focused on the spatial power spectrum, which characterizes the strength of clustering on different size scales [3,4]. The power spectrum describes the way that large, intermediate, and small structures -- like the mountain ranges, isolated peaks, and rolling hills of a landscape -- combine to produce the observed galaxy distribution. The shape of the dark matter power spectrum is a diagnostic of the inflation model, which predicts the input spectrum from the early Universe, and of the average dark matter density, which controls the subsequent gravitational growth. Recent analyses have also detected subtle modulations of the power spectrum caused by baryonic matter, which undergoes acoustic oscillations in the early universe because of its interaction with photons [4,5]. References (abridged): 1. M. Colless et al., Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 328, 1039 (2001) 2. D. G. York et al., Astron. J.120, 1579 (2000) 3. M. Tegmark et al., Astrophys. J. 606, 702 (2004) 4. S. Cole et al., http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0501174 5. D.J. Eisenstein et al.http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0501171. Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: COSMOLOGY: ON THE FIRST GALAXIES The following points are made by Zoltan Haiman (Nature 2004 430:979): 1) Galaxies are thought to be surrounded by massive haloes of dark matter, each outweighing its galaxy by a factor of about eight. The visible part of a galaxy, occupying the inner 10% of the halo, consists of a mixture of stars and gas. Galaxies harbor a giant black hole at their centers, which in some cases is actively fuelled as it sucks in surrounding gas. In especially active galaxies, called quasars, the fuelling rate is so high that the radiation generated close to the black hole outshines the cumulative star-light from the entire galaxy. The sequence of cosmic events that leads to this configuration is still largely mysterious.(1) How does gas condense into the central regions of the dark-matter halo? At what stage of the gas condensation process do the stars and the giant black hole light up? 2) The formation of massive dark-matter haloes is dictated by gravity, and can be described by using ab initio calculations(2). As the Universe expanded from its dense beginning, tiny inhomogeneities in the distribution of dark matter were amplified through the effects of gravity. Regions of space that were slightly denser than average had a higher gravitational pull on their surroundings; eventually, these regions stopped following the expansion of the rest of the Universe, turned around and re-collapsed on themselves. The resulting dense knots of dark matter -- forming the intersections of a cosmic web of less-dense dark-matter filaments -- are believed to be the sites at which galaxies lit up. 3) Dark matter thus dominates the formation of a galaxy, at least initially, and determines the gross properties of the galaxy population, such as their abundance, size and spatial distribution. But it is the trace amount of gas (mostly hydrogen and helium), pulled with the dark matter into the collapsed haloes, that forms the visible parts of galaxies and determines their observable properties. In particular, to condense to the core of the dark halo, the gas must cool continuously so as to deflate the pressure acquired by its compression. A fraction of the gas (typically 10% by mass) eventually turns into stars, and a much smaller fraction (typically 0.1%) into the central massive black hole(3). 4) The composition of the gas inside the galaxy can be studied through the spectrum of radiation that it absorbs and emits. Primordial gas is essentially a pure mix of hydrogen and helium, but the spectra of all of the quasars discovered so far have shown the presence of various heavier elements (such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and iron). This indicates that the gas has been enriched by the nucleosynthetic yields from previous generations of stars. Even the most distant quasars, including those that existed about a billion years after the Big Bang (a mere 5% of the current age of the Universe), show a significant heavy-element content(4). This suggests that vigorous star-formation is a necessary condition for any quasar activity. On the other hand, star formation seems to be occurring on relatively small scales, close to the galactic center. A natural inference would then be the following sequence of events: the cosmic gas first contracts to the inner regions of the halo, and only then forms stars --but this is still before the formation (or at least activation) of any central quasar black hole. 5) Not necessarily so, according to Weidinger et al(1). They have detected the faint glow of hydrogen emission enveloping a distant quasar at a radius equivalent to about 100,000 light years --several times the size of the visible part of a typical galaxy. Such emission has a simple physical origin. The hydrogen atoms falling through the halo are ionized by the quasar's light, then recombine with electrons to become atoms again. Each recombination results in the emission of a so-called Lyman-photon (a photon with energy equal to the difference between the ground and first excited states of a hydrogen atom). As a result, when viewed through a filter tuned to the Lyman-alpha frequency, a faint "fuzz" can be seen to surround quasars(5). This fuzz can serve as a diagnostic of whether or not a spatially extended distribution of infalling gas is present around the quasar. If most of the gas has already cooled and settled at the center of the halo, the extended fuzz would be absent. References (abridged): 1. Weidinger, M., Mueller, P. & Fynbo, J. P. U. Nature 430, 999-1001 (2004) 2. Navarro, J. F., Frenk, C. S. & White, S. D. M. Astrophys. J. 462, 563-575 (1996) 3. Magorrian, J. et al. Astron. J. 115, 2285-2305 (1998) 4. Fan, X. et al. Astron J. (in the press); preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0405138 (2004) 5. Rees, M. J. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 231, 91-95 (1988) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: COSMOLOGY: ON THE FORMATION OF GALAXIES The following points are made by Gregory D. Wirth (Nature 2004 430:149): 1) Over the past two decades, astrophysicists have been spectacularly successful in explaining the early evolution of the Universe. Existing theories can account well for the time span from the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago until the Universe began to cool and form the first large structures less than a million years later. But detailed explanations of how the original stew of elementary particles subsequently coalesced over time to form the stars and galaxies seen in the present-day Universe are still being refined. Glazebrook et al(1) and Cimatti et al(2) have recently discovered the most distant "old" galaxies yet. and the existence of these objects at such an early epoch in the history of the Universe seems inconsistent with the favored theory of how galaxies formed. 2) That favored theory is the so-called hierarchical model, in which smaller structures gradually accumulate into ever larger structures, ultimately forming galaxies of the sort we see today(3). The most massive galaxies are expected to have formed relatively late in the process, with few existing before the Universe was half its present age. Such predictions can be tested in principle through the observations made of distant galaxies. 3) We have a powerful means of observing the history of the Universe: because the speed of light is finite, as we look out into space we actually peer back in time, seeing distant objects not as they are now, but as they were when their light was emitted millions or billions of years ago. Unfortunately, galaxies more than 6 billion light years away are not only exceedingly faint, but are also particularly difficult to identify. The visible galaxy spectra are "redshifted" to longer, near-infrared wavelengths as a consequence of the expansion of the Universe; at these wavelengths, the Earth's atmospheric emission obscures the key spectral "fingerprints" that are commonly used to identify galaxies. 4) For these reasons, virtually all of the galaxies known from the early days of the Universe are those that are still forming new stars, and hence emitting copious amounts of light(4). Although easier to find, such galaxies are not particularly useful for testing theories of galaxy formation because it is impossible to set strong lower limits on how old they are. However, finding significant numbers of massive, evolved galaxies (which finished forming stars long ago) at distances that correspond to half the present age of the Universe would indicate that such galaxies formed much earlier than the leading theory predicts.(5) References (abridged): 1. Glazebrook, K. et al. Nature 430, 181-184 (2004) 2. Cimatti, A. et al. Nature 430, 184-187 (2004) 3. Blumenthal, G. R. et al. Nature 311, 517-525 (1984) 4. Steidel, C. C., Adelberger, K. L., Giavalisco, M., Dickinson, M. & Pettini, M. Astrophys. J. 519, 1-17 (1999) 5. Dickinson, M., Papovich, C., Ferguson, H. C. & Bud?vari, T. Astrophys. J. 587, 25-40 (2003) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From checker at panix.com Fri Sep 2 01:44:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 21:44:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Complexity and Causality Message-ID: Theoretical Physics: Complexity and Causality http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050819-6.htm The following points are made by George F. Ellis (Nature 2005 435:743): 1) The atomic theory of matter and the periodic table of elements allow us to understand the physical nature of material objects, including living beings. Quantum theory illuminates the physical basis of the periodic table and the nature of chemical bonding. Molecular biology shows how complex molecules underlie the development and functioning of living organisms. And neurophysics reveals the functioning of the brain. 2) In the hierarchy of complexity, each level links to the one above: chemistry links to biochemistry, to cell biology, physiology, psychology, to sociology, economics, and politics. Particle physics is the foundational subject underlying -- and so in some sense explaining -- all the others. In a reductionist world view, physics is all there is. The cartesian picture of man as a machine seems to be vindicated. 3) But this view omits important aspects of the world that physics has yet to come to terms with. Our environment is dominated by objects that embody the outcomes of intentional design (buildings, books, computers, teaspoons). Today's physics has nothing to say about the intentionality that has resulted in the existence of such objects, even though this intentionality is clearly causally effective. 4) A simple statement of fact: there is no physics theory that explains the nature of, or even the existence of, football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft. The human mind is physically based, but there is no hope whatever of predicting the behavior it controls from the underlying physical laws. Even if we had a satisfactory fundamental physics "theory of everything", this situation would remain unchanged: physics would still fail to explain the outcomes of human purpose, and so would provide an incomplete description of the real world around us. 5) Can we nevertheless claim that the underlying physics uniquely causally determines what happens, even if we cannot predict the outcome? To examine whether we can, contemplate what is required for this claim to be true within its proper cosmic context. The implication is that the particles existing when the cosmic background radiation was decoupling from matter, in the early Universe, were placed precisely so as to make it inevitable that 14 billion years later, human beings would exist, Charles Townes would conceive of the laser, and Edward Witten would develop string theory. Is it plausible that quantum fluctuations in the inflationary era in the very early Universe -- the source of the perturbations at the time of decoupling -- implied the future inevitability of the Mona Lisa and Einstein's theory of relativity? Those fluctuations are supposed to have been random, which by definition means without purpose or meaning.[1,2] References: 1. Ellis, G. F. R. Phys. Today (in the press). 2. Bishop, R. C. Phil. Sci. (in the press). Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: THEORETICAL BIOLOGY: ON SCALE AND COMPLEXITY The following points are made by Neil D. Theise (Nature 2005 435:1165): 1) Complexity theory, which describes emergent self-organization of complex adaptive systems, has gained a prominent position in many sciences. One powerful aspect of emergent self-organization is that scale matters. What appears to be a dynamic, ever changing organizational panoply at the scale of the interacting agents that comprise it, looks to be a single, functional entity from a higher scale. Ant colonies are a good example: from afar, the colony appears to be a solid, shifting, dark mass against the earth. But up close, one can discern individual ants and describe the colony as the emergent self-organization of these scurrying individuals. Moving in still closer, the individual ants dissolve into myriad cells. 2) Cells fulfill all the criteria necessary to be considered agents within a complex system: they exist in great numbers; their interactions involve homeostatic, negative feedback loops; and they respond to local environmental cues with limited stochasticity ("quenched disorder"). Like any group of interacting individuals fulfilling these criteria, they self-organize without external planning. What emerges is the structure and function of our tissues, organs and bodies. 3) This view is in keeping with cell doctrine -- the fundamental paradigm of modern biology and medicine whereby cells are the fundamental building blocks of all living organisms. Before cell doctrine emerged, other possibilities were explored. The ancient Greeks debated whether the body's substance was an endlessly divisible fluid or a sum of ultimately indivisible subunits. But when the microscopes of Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and Matthias Schleiden (1804-1881) revealed cell membranes, the debate was settled. The body's substance is not a fluid, but an indivisible box-like cell: the magnificently successful cell doctrine was born. 4) But a complexity analysis presses for consideration of a level of observation at a lower scale. At the nanoscale, one might suggest that cells are not discreet objects; rather, they are dynamically shifting, adaptive systems of uncountable biomolecules. Do biomolecules fulfill the necessary criteria for agents forming complex systems? They obviously exist in sufficient quantities to generate emergent phenomena; they interact only on the local level, without monitoring the whole system; and many homeostatic feedback loops govern these local interactions. But do their interactions display quenched disorder; that is, are they somewhere between being completely random and rigidly determined? Analyses of individual interacting molecules and the recognition that at the nanoscale, quantum effects may have a measurable impact, suggest that the answer is yes.[1-3] References: 1. Theise N. D. & d'Inverno, M. Blood Cells Mol. Dis. 32, 17-20 (2004) 2. Theise N. D. & Krause D. S. Leukemia 16, 542-548 (2002) 3. Kurakin A. Dev. Genes Evol. 215, 46-52 (2005) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: PHYSICS AND COMPLEXITY The following points are made by Gregoire Nicolis (citation below): 1) For the vast majority of scientists physics is a marvelous algorithm explaining natural phenomena in terms of the building blocks of the universe and their interactions. Planetary motion; the structure of genetic material, of molecules, atoms or nuclei; the diffraction pattern of a crystalline body; superconductivity; the explanation of the compressibility, elasticity, surface tension or thermal conductivity of a material, are only a few among the innumerable examples illustrating the immense success of this view, which presided over the most impressive breakthroughs that have so far marked the development of modern science since Newton. 2) Implicit in the classical view, according to which physical phenomena are reducible to a few fundamental interactions, is the idea that under well-defined conditions a system governed by a given set of laws will follow a unique course, and that a slight change in the causes will likewise produce a slight change in the effects. But, since the 1960s, an increasing amount of experimental data challenging this idea has become available, and this imposes a new attitude concerning the description of nature. Such ordinary systems as a layer of fluid or a mixture of chemical products can generate, under appropriate conditions, a multitude of self-organization phenomena on a macroscopic scale -- a scale orders of magnitude larger than the range of fundamental interactions -- in the form of spatial patterns or temporal rhythms. 3) States of matter capable of evolving (states for which order, complexity, regulation, information and other concepts usually absent from the vocabulary of the physicist become the natural mode of description) are, all of a sudden, emerging in the laboratory. These states suggest that the gap between "simple" and "complex", and between "disorder" and "order", is much narrower than previously thought. They also provide the natural archetypes for understanding a large body of phenomena in branches which traditionally were outside the realm of physics, such as turbulence, the circulation of the atmosphere and the oceans, plate tectonics, glaciations, and other forces that shape our natural environment: or, even, the emergence of replicating systems capable of storing and generating information, embryonic development, the electrical activity of brain, or the behavior of populations in an ecosystem or in an economic environment. Adapted from: Gregoire Nicolis: in: Paul Davies (ed.): The New Physics. Cambridge University Press 1989, p.316 From checker at panix.com Fri Sep 2 01:45:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 21:45:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In Chimpanzee DNA, Signs of Y Chromosome's Evolution Message-ID: In Chimpanzee DNA, Signs of Y Chromosome's Evolution New York Times, 5.9.1 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/science/01chimp.html By [3]NICHOLAS WADE Scientists have decoded the chimp genome and compared it with that of humans, a major step toward defining what makes people human and developing a deep insight into the evolution of human sexual behavior. The comparison pinpoints the genetic differences that have arisen in the two species since they split from a common ancestor some six million years ago. The realization that chimpanzees hold a trove of information about human evolution and nature comes at a time when they and other great apes are under harsh pressures in their native habitat. Their populations are dwindling fast as forests are cut down and people shoot them for meat. They may soon disappear from the wild altogether, primatologists fear, except in the few sanctuaries that have been established. Chimpanzees and people possess almost identical sets of genes, so the genes that have changed down the human lineage should hold the key to what makes people human. Biologists suspect that only a handful of genes are responsible for the major changes that reshaped the apelike ancestor of both species into a human and that these genes should be identifiable by having evolved at a particularly rapid rate. The comparison of the human and chimp genomes, reported in today's issue of Nature, takes a first step in this direction but has not yet tracked down the critical handful of genes responsible for human evolution. One problem is the vast number of differences - some 40 million - in the sequence of DNA units in the chimp and human genomes. Most are caused by a random process known as genetic drift and have little effect. For now, their large numbers make it difficult for scientists to find the changes caused by natural selection. But another aspect of the comparison has yielded insights into a different question, the evolution of the human Y chromosome. The new finding implies that humans have led sexually virtuous lives for the last six million years, at least in comparison with the flamboyant promiscuity of chimpanzees. Some 300 million years ago, the Y chromosome used to carry the same 1,000 or so genes as its partner, the X chromosome. But because the Y cannot exchange DNA with the X and update its genes, in humans it has lost all but 16 of its X-related genes through mutation or failure to stay relevant to their owner's survival. However, the Y has gained some genes from other chromosomes because it is a safe haven for genes that benefit only men, since it never enters a woman's body. These added genes, not surprisingly, all have functions involved in making sperm. The scientific world's leading student of the Y chromosome, David Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., has been seeking to understand whether the Y will lose yet more genes and lapse into terminal decay, taking men with it. The idea of the Y's extinction "was so delicious from the perspective of gender politics," Dr. Page said. "But many of my colleagues became confused with this blending of gender politics with scientific predictions." Two years ago, he discovered a surprising mechanism that protects the sperm-making genes. Those genes exist in pairs, arranged so that when the DNA of the chromosome is folded back on itself, the two copies of the gene are aligned. If one copy of the gene has been hit by a mutation, the cell can repair it by correcting the mismatch in DNA units. The 16 X-related genes are present in only single copies. Dr. Page and his colleagues thought the chimpanzee genome might show how they were protected. To their surprise, they report in Nature, the protection was not there. The chimp Y chromosome has lost the use of 5 of its 16 X-related genes. The genes are there, but have been inactivated by mutation. The explanation, in his view, lies in the chimpanzee's high-spirited sexual behavior. Female chimps mate with all males around, so as to make each refrain from killing a child that might be his. The alpha male nonetheless scores most of the paternities, according to DNA tests. This must be because of sperm competition, primatologists believe - the alpha male produces more and better sperm, which outcompete those of rival males. This mating system puts such intense pressure on the sperm-making genes that any improved version will be favored by natural selection. All the other genes will be dragged along with it, Dr. Page believes, even if an X-related gene has been inactivated. If chimps have lost five of their X-related genes in the last six million years because of sperm competition, and humans have lost none, humans presumably had a much less promiscuous mating system. But experts who study fossil human remains believe that the human mating system of long-term bonds between a man and woman evolved only some 1.7 million years ago. Males in the human lineage became much smaller at this time, a sign of reduced competition. The new result implies that even before that time, during the first four million years after the chimp-human split, the human mating system did not rely on sperm competition. Dr. Page said his finding did not reach to the nature of the joint chimp-human ancestor, but that "it's a reasonable inference" that the ancestor might have been gorillalike rather than chimplike, as supposed by some primatologists. The gorilla mating system has no sperm competition because the silverback maintains exclusive access to his harem. Frans B. M. de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta said he agreed with fossil experts that the human pair bonding system probably evolved 1.7 million years ago but that the joint ancestor could have resembled a chimp, a bonobo, a gorilla, or something else entirely. The scientists who have compared the whole genomes of the two species say they have found 35 million sites on the aligned genomes where there are different DNA units, and another five million where units have been added or deleted. Each genome is about three billion units in length. The chimp genome was completed in draft form in December 2003 by the Broad Institute in Cambridge and Washington University in St. Louis. Statistical tests for accelerated evolution are not yet powerful enough to identify the major genes that have shaped humans. "We knew that this was only a beginning, but from a general standpoint we have captured the vast majority of the differences between human and chimps," said Robert H. Waterston of the University of Washington, Seattle, the senior author of the report. The genome of a third primate, the orangutan, is now in progress and will help identify the genes special to human evolution, he said. At the level of the whole animal, primatologists have uncovered copious similarities between the social behavior of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, some of which may eventually be linked to genes. But this rich vein of discovery may be choked off if the great apes can no longer be studied in the wild. "The situation is very bad, and our feeling is that by 2040 most of the habitat will be gone, except for those little regions we have set aside," Dr. de Waal said. From checker at panix.com Fri Sep 2 01:45:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 21:45:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Cape Times: Scientists show way to non-addictive drugs Message-ID: Scientists show way to non-addictive drugs http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=79&art_id=vn20050816070856987C214316&newslett=1&em=17706a1a20050816ah 5.8.16 [Recall Mr. Mencken's definition of a puritan as you read this.] It is the news that clubbers have been waiting for. Scientists are working on a range of recreational drugs that can produce similar effects to alcohol but with fewer of the side-effects. Experts looked 20 years into the future to discover what kind of drugs we would be taking, and came up with a surprising range of findings, that open up the prospect of Sunday mornings without a thumping hangover or the "parrot's cage" mouth. They have also been able to separate the effect of one psychoactive substance from its addictive properties, leading an expert panel to advise British government ministers that "this could pave the way to non-addictive recreational drugs". One of the new substances has even been found to reduce the side effects of recreational drugs. "Such compounds might allow users to shape their drug experience," said the panel headed by Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser. His report to the Trade and Industry secretary, Alan Johnson, raises the possibility that, in a generation, Britain's dinner parties could become more like Woody Allen's "orb" scene in the futuristic film Sleeper, where guests get high by rubbing the orb instead of inhaling a joint. The report said: "There are a number of new and developing technologies that could be used to deliver drugs in new ways. Examples include patches, vaporisers, depot injection and direct neural stimulation... this may encourage the development of technology for the slower release of recreational psychoactive substances, which could reduce the risk of addiction." Some drugs developed to tackle health problems are capable of being used for improving the performance of the brain. Madafinil, which was introduced to treat narcolepsy, can keep normal people awake for three days, says the report. Other drugs could be used to stop alcohol triggering a need for a cigarette. "Drinking with friends might no longer create a trigger for an individual to smoke tobacco," the panel said. From checker at panix.com Fri Sep 2 01:45:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 21:45:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed: Daniel Dennett: Show Me the Science Message-ID: Daniel Dennett: Show Me the Science http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/opinion/28dennett.html By DANIEL C. DENNETT Blue Hill, Me. PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future." Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done. First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: "Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which certainly do work..." Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don't have to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all reasonable doubt. With evolution, however, it is different. The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking. A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire: Test Two Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO] Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO] Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO] If you answered YES for any of the above, give details: Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator. Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs. Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end. But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while. We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says. All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin's insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer. Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process. If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with "Orgel's Second Rule": Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural selection to "discover" an "ingenious" solution to a design problem posed in the lab. This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two. When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own. Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken. Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things. The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view. To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking. Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach. Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details. William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting. In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything. To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be. To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet: About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked. If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued. We'd still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis. But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report. It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high school students. SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts. The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology. Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true. Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment. For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content." Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrat- ed? Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is the author of "Freedom Evolves" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 3 01:31:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 21:31:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nature Neuroscience: Book Review: The Ethical Brain Message-ID: Book Review: The Ethical Brain Nature Neuroscience 8, 1127 (2005) doi:10.1038/nn0905-1127 http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v8/n9/full/nn0905-1127.html Reviewed by: Charles Jennings Charles Jennings is at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Harvard University, 42 Church Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. charles_jennings at harvard.edu Michael Gazzaniga is a leader in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and since 2002 he has been a member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics. In a group dominated by conservatives, Gazzaniga is sometimes a dissenting voice, for example, in his support for embryonic stem cell research. His work on split-brain patients has profound implications for understanding the neural basis of self, and his presence on the council has brought a neurobiological perspective to many current bioethical controversies. The Ethical Brain is a wide-ranging, yet short and readable, summary of his views. Gazzaniga is a technological optimist, with little patience for the vague 'slippery slope' arguments that are often invoked by those who worry about where biotechnology is leading us. A deeper concern?articulated, for example, by fellow council member Michael Sandel?is that the desire to manipulate human nature is a form of hubris that threatens to undermine our appreciation for life's gifts. Gazzaniga, however, will have none of this. He welcomes the prospect of genetic enhancement, prolongation of lifespan, memory pills and so forth, arguing that humanity's innate moral sense will always guide us to use our powers wisely. I would like to think he is right, but I did not always find his arguments persuasive. A case in point is his discussion of sex selection. In some Asian countries, notably China, a cultural preference for boys, combined with easy access to methods for sex determination and selective abortion, has led to a large distortion of birth ratios. Gazzaniga acknowledges the potential concern, but because some US fertility clinics are now starting to discourage sex selection, he concludes that humans can be trusted to do the right thing in the long run. Maybe so, but I am less sanguine than Gazzaniga about this massive biotechnological experiment, and about the world's largest country soon having 15 million young men unable to find marriage partners. Gazzaniga's faith in human destiny is based in part on his belief in a biologically based universal morality, and his discussion of this idea is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. He argues that our sense of right and wrong has been shaped by evolution, and that there consequently exists a core of moral instincts that are shared across all societies. Religious traditions, in his view, represent attempts to explain and validate these biological instincts. Our brains have a strong tendency to form beliefs as a way of making sense of the world, and as Gazzaniga's own work has emphasized, these are often confabulated on the basis of limited evidence, yet refractory to change once formed. As an explanation of religious faith, this viewpoint is surely anathema to many conservatives, but Gazzaniga (who was raised Catholic) shows no animosity toward religion, which he regards as a natural aspect of human biology. Gazzaniga hopes that a deeper understanding of our shared moral instincts and their biological basis could help to overcome ideological conflicts between different belief systems. This is an appealing idea ('biology good, ideology bad'), even though only a chronic optimist could think that universal education in cognitive neuroscience will lead to world peace. A skeptic might counter that our brains come prewired not only for moral reasoning but also for prejudice, tribalism, warfare?less attractive but no less universal aspects of human societies. Moreover, the scientific evidence for a moral instinct is based largely on simple test scenarios in which decisions have immediate and visible consequences for another individual. Although people tend to show similar responses on such tests, most real-world dilemmas are not like this. It seems unlikely that divisive societal debates on questions such as abortion or capital punishment could ever be resolved by an appeal to biology. Perhaps the most pressing issue in neuroethics is how (if at all) neuroscience should inform the justice system, and Gazzaniga devotes several chapters to this topic. The central problem is this: if decisions are made by the brain, a physical object that obeys physical laws, in what sense can they be considered 'free'? But if people are constrained by their brains, how can we hold them responsible for their actions? This quickly leads to problems, of course; if defendants could be acquitted simply by arguing "my brain made me do it," the entire justice system would collapse. Gazzaniga's proposed solution is to argue that responsibility is "a social construct that exists in the rules of a society [but not] in the neuronal structures of the brain." Yet I did not find this argument convincing. The justice system, held together by moral rules and concepts of accountability, is an emergent property of large numbers of brains. It may be dauntingly complex, but that does not put it beyond the realm of scientific study. Indeed, social neuroscience is an emerging field of research, and neuroimagers can now examine the mechanisms underlying not only people's own moral decisions, but also their perceptions about the accountability of other individuals. Gazzaniga is understandably concerned about neuroscience being drawn into the courtroom, but he acknowledges that it is inevitable. The challenge for neuroethicists, then, will be to help lawyers sort the wheat from the chaff, to recognize valid arguments for exculpation or leniency, while rejecting the abuses that will surely become increasingly tempting to defense counsels as brain science continues to advance. The Ethical Brain is not the last word on these difficult issues, but it does provide a clear and useful introduction to the field. Gazzaniga's fans include Tom Wolfe, who gives the book a cameo role in his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, where it appears as recommended reading for a college course. In this case life would do well to imitate art?The Ethical Brain would be an excellent introduction for anyone who is interested in learning more about 'the next big thing' in bioethics. From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 3 01:31:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 21:31:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Live Science: Why great minds can't grasp consciousness Message-ID: Why great minds can't grasp consciousness Source: LiveScience.com/MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8873364/ Subject no longer just for philosophers and mystics, but remains a mystery Aug. 8, 2005 By Ker Than At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences. One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness. He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition. In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals. Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness. Beyond the mystics Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness. Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness. It wasn't that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy. No longer the sole purview of philosophers and mystics, consciousness is now attracting the attention of scientists from across a variety of different fields, each, it seems, with their own theories about what consciousness is and how it arises from the brain. In many religions, consciousness is closely tied to the ancient notion of the soul, the idea that in each of us, there exists an immaterial essence that survives death and perhaps even predates birth. It was believed that the soul was what allowed us to think and feel, remember and reason. Our personality, our individuality and our humanity were all believed to originate from the soul. Nowadays, these things are generally attributed to physical processes in the brain, but exactly how chemical and electrical signals between trillions of brain cells called neurons are transformed into thoughts, emotions and a sense of self is still unknown. "Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you. We want more than correlation, we want explanation -- how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery." Just accept it Chalmers is best known for distinguishing between the 'easy' problems of consciousness and the 'hard' problem. The easy problems are those that deal with functions and behaviors associated with consciousness and include questions such as these: How does perception occur? How does the brain bind different kinds of sensory information together to produce the illusion of a seamless experience? "Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they're trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences," Chalmers says. The hard problem for Chalmers is that of subjective experience. "You have a different kind of experience -- a different quality of experience -- when you see red, when you see green, when you hear middle C, when you taste chocolate," Chalmers told LiveScience. "Whenever you're conscious, whenever you have a subjective experience, it feels like something." According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is an irreducible aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass. "Those things in a way didn't need to evolve," said Chalmers. "They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along." Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to something else, Chalmers believes consciousness should simply be taken for granted, the way that space and time and mass are in physics. According to this view, a theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world. Not everyone is enthusiastic about this idea, however. 'Not very helpful' "It's not very helpful," said Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. "You can't do very much with it," Greenfield points out. "It's the last resort, because what can you possibly do with that idea? You can't prove it or disprove it, and you can't test it. It doesn't offer an explanation, or any enlightenment, or any answers about why people feel the way they feel." Greenfield's own theory of consciousness is influenced by her experience working with drugs and mental diseases. Unlike some other scientists -- most notably the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague David Koch, a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech -- who believed that different aspects of consciousness like visual awareness are encoded by specific neurons, Greenfield thinks that consciousness involves large groups of nonspecialized neurons scattered throughout the brain. Important for Greenfield's theory is a distinction between 'consciousness' and 'mind,' terms that she says many of her colleagues use interchangeably, but which she believes are two entirely different concepts. "You talk about losing your mind or blowing your mind or being out of your mind, but those things don't necessarily entail a loss of consciousness," Greenfield said in a telephone interview. "Similarly, when you lose your consciousness, when you go to sleep at night or when you're anesthetized, you don't really think that you're really going to be losing your mind." Like the wetness of water According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique. But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules. For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go. Mind and consciousness are connected in Greenfield's theory because the strength of a conscious experience is determined by the mind and the strength of its existing neuronal connections -- connections forged from past experiences. Part of the mystery and excitement about consciousness is that scientists don't know what form the final answer will take. "If I said to you I'd solved the hard problem, you wouldn't be able to guess whether it would be a formula, a model, a sensation, or a drug," said Greenfield. "What would I be giving you?" From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 3 01:32:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 21:32:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired: Whew! Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny Message-ID: Whew! Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny By Brandon Keim http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68468,00.html 02:00 AM Aug. 16, 2005 PT The more we learn about the human genome, the less DNA looks like destiny. As scientists discover more about the "epigenome," a layer of biochemical reactions that turns genes on and off, they're finding that it plays a big part in health and heredity. By mapping the epigenome and linking it with genomic and health information, scientists believe they can develop better ways to predict, diagnose and treat disease. "A new world is opening up, one that is so much more complex than the genomic world," said Moshe Szyf, an epigeneticist at Canada's McGill University. The epigenome can change according to an individual's environment, and is passed from generation to generation. It's part of the reason why "identical" twins can be so different, and it's also why not only the children but the grandchildren of women who suffered malnutrition during pregnancy are likely to weigh less at birth. "Now we're even talking about how to see if socioeconomic status has an impact on the epigenome," Szyf said. Researchers have already linked some human cancers with epigenetic changes. In a few years, scientists hope that doctors, by looking at an individual's epigenome, will be able to detect cancer early and determine what treatments to use. The same might be done for other diseases -- and as the effect of the environment on epigenetic change is better understood, people will be able to address the environmental aspects of health. The field, though still embryonic, won't be that way for long. "Epigenetics is one of the fastest-moving areas of science, period," said Melanie Ehrlich, a Tulane University epigeneticist whose lab linked human cancer to epigenomic changes in 1983. Back then, Ehrlich's discipline was largely ignored. Walter Gilbert, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, famously said that since fruit flies had no epigenomes, people could hardly need them. But in the past two decades -- and especially the last couple of years -- studies have linked the epigenome to disease and development, showing that it changes in response to the environment and can be passed from parents to children. While predicted treatments run from diabetes and heart disease to substance abuse and schizophrenia, the most promising applications are in cancer. Research shows that some cancers follow from the deactivation of tumor-suppression genes. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first epigenetic drug, azacitidine, which treats a form of leukemia by reactivating those genes. However, using drugs to target specific parts of the epigenome, which runs in tandem with our 6 billion base pairs of DNA, is extremely complicated. Ehrlich believes epigenetic researchers are better off trying to predict and diagnose cancer and other diseases. To do that, scientists need a large-scale map that shows how epigenetic patterns relate to disease, said Steve Baylin, an epigeneticist at Johns Hopkins. "If we knew those patterns," Baylin said, "you could predict which individuals are more at risk -- change their diets, change their exposures, use prevention. We could detect disease early and predict how people respond to drugs." Making that map won't be easy. Not only does the epigenome change over time, it also differs in every major cell type, of which there are a couple hundred. Epigeneticists say this will be time-consuming but possible. In Europe, a consortium of public and private institutions is collaborating on the Human Epigenome Project, while mapping in the United States is scattered among a handful of companies and government-funded scientists. "We don't have the funding to do a comprehensive, large-scale epigenetics project," said Elise Feingold, a director of the National Human Genome Research Institute's ENCODE Project. The lack of investment is somewhat reminiscent of the Human Genome Project's early struggles, when James Watson fought for government money. But at least the epigenomic mapping effort seems to have learned something from the gene-patenting frenzy that loomed over the Human Genome Project. "That was a lesson in how intellectual property should not be handled," said John Stamatoyannopoulos, founder of biopharmaceutical company Regulome. "Everybody patented everything left and right, the lawyers got rich, the patent office was flooded, and at the end of the day the patents just weren't valuable." The absence of patent sniping might diminish some of the urgency, but the upside is that the epigenomic map is free and available to anyone -- although only a tiny fraction has thus far been made. "We are well under 1 percent finished; 1 percent would be a massive overstatement," Stamatoyannopoulos said. "But, ultimately, this type of knowledge will revolutionize the way we diagnose and treat disease." From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 3 01:32:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 21:32:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Slate: Amanda Schaffer: Cave Thinkers: How evolutionary psychology gets evolution wrong. Message-ID: Amanda Schaffer: Cave Thinkers: How evolutionary psychology gets evolution wrong. http://slate.msn.com/id/2124503/ Posted Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2005, at 4:16 AM PT This spring, New York Times columnist John Tierney asserted that men must be [24]innately more competitive than women since they monopolize the trophies in--hold onto your vowels--world Scrabble competitions. To bolster his case, Tierney turned to [25]evolutionary psychology. In the distant past, he argued, a no-holds-barred desire to win would have been an adaptive advantage for many men, allowing them to get more girls, have more kids, and pass on their competitive genes to today's word-memorizing, vowel-hoarding Scrabble champs. Tierney's peculiar, pseudo-scientific claim--[26]not the first from him--reflects the extent to which evolutionary psychology has metastasized throughout public discourse. EP-ers' basic claim is that human behavior stems from psychological mechanisms that are the products of natural selection during the Stone Age. Researchers often focus on how evolution produced mental differences between men and women. One of EP's academic stars, David Buss, argues in his salacious new book [27]The Murderer Next Door that men are wired to kill unfaithful wives because this response would have benefited their distant forefathers. Larry Summers took [28]some cover from EP this winter after his remarks about women's lesser capacity to become top scientists. And adaptive explanations of old sexist hobbyhorses--men like young women with perky breasts and can't stop themselves from philandering because these urges aided ancestral reproduction--are commonly marshaled in defense of ever-more-ridiculous [29]playboys. Evolutionary psychologists have long taken heat from critics for overplaying innate characteristics--nature at the expense of nurture--and for reinforcing gender stereotypes. But they've dismissed many detractors, fairly or no, as softheaded feminists and sociologists who refuse to acknowledge the true power of natural selection. Increasingly, however, attacks on EP come from academics well-versed in the hard-nosed details of evolutionary biology. A case in point is the new book [30]Adapting Minds by philosopher David Buller, which was supported by a research grant from the National Science Foundation and published by MIT Press and has been getting glowing reviews [31]like this one (paid link) from biologists. Buller persuasively argues that while evolutionary forces likely did play a role in shaping our minds, the assumptions and methods that have dominated EP are weak. Much of the work of pioneers like [32]Buss, [33]Steven Pinker, [34]John Tooby, [35]Leda Cosmides, [36]Martin Daly, and [37]Margo Wilson turns out to be vulnerable on evolutionary grounds. EP claims that our minds contain hundreds or thousands of "mental organs" or "modules," which come with innate information on how to solve particular problems--how to interpret nuanced facial expressions, how to tell when someone's lying or cheating. These problem-solving modules evolved between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch. And there the selection story ends. There has not been enough time in the intervening millenia, EP-ers say, for natural selection to have further resculpted our psyches. "Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind," as Cosmides' and Tooby's [40]primer on evolutionary psychology puts it. The way forward for research is to generate hypotheses about the urges that would have been helpful to Stone Age baby-making and then try to test whether these tendencies are widespread today. What's wrong with this approach? To begin with, we know very little about the specific adaptive problems faced by our distant forebears. As Buller points out, "We don't even know the number of species in the genus Homo"--our direct ancestors--"let alone details about the lifestyles led by those species." This makes it hard to generate good hypotheses. Some EP-ers have suggested looking to modern-day hunter-gatherers as proxies, studying them for clues about our ancestors. But this doesn't get them far. For instance, in some contemporary African groups, men gather the bulk of the food; in other groups, women do. Which groups are representative of our ancestors? Surely there's a whole lot of guesswork involved when evolutionary psychologists hypothesize about the human brain's supposedly formative years. In addition, we are probably not psychological fossils. New research suggests that evolutionary change can occur [41]much faster than was previously believed. Natural selection is thought to effect rapid change especially when a species' environment is in flux--precisely the situation in the last 10,000 years as humans learned to farm, domesticate animals, and live in larger communal groups. Crucially, Buller notes, in order for significant change to have occurred in the human mind in the last 10 millennia, evolution need not have built complex brain structures from scratch but simply modified existing ones. Finally, the central, underlying assumption of EP--that humans have hundreds or thousands of mental problem-solving organs produced by natural selection--is questionable. Many cognitive scientists believe that such modules exist for processing sensory information and for acquiring language. It does not follow, however, that there are a plethora of other ones specifically designed for tasks like detecting cheaters. In fact, considering how much dramatic change our forebears faced, it makes more sense that their problem-solving faculties would have evolved to be flexible in response to their immediate surroundings. (A well-argued [42]book from philosopher Kim Sterelny fleshes out this claim.) Indeed, our mental flexibility, or [43]cortical plasticity, may be evolution's greatest gift. So, if evolutionary psychology has so many cracks in its foundations, why is it so stubbornly influential? It helps that EP-ers like Buss and Pinker are lively, media-friendly writers who present topics like sex, love, and fear in simple terms. More to the point for scientists, EP's conclusions can be quite difficult to falsify. Even if its methods of generating hypotheses are suspect, there is always the possibility that on any given topic, an EP-er will turn out to be partly right. That forces critics to delve into the details of particular empirical claims. Buller does this in the latter part of his book and successfully dismantles several major EP findings. For instance, EP-ers have asserted that stepparents are more likely to abuse their stepchildren than their own sons and daughters because in the Stone Age, the parents who selectively devoted love and resources to their own progeny would have had a leg up in passing on their own genes. The proof is data that purport to show a higher rate of modern-day abuse by stepparents than by parents. When Buller dissects the data, however, this conclusion begins to fall apart. To begin with, most of the relevant studies on abuse do not say whether the abuser was a parent or stepparent. The EP assumption that the abuser is always the stepparent creates an artificial and entirely absurd confirmation of the field's hypothesis. In addition, research has shown that when a stepfather is present, a child's bruises are more likely attributed to abuse rather than to accidents, whereas when a biological father is present, the opposite tendency exists. Buller has to wade in deep to unravel this, but the effort pays off. Ultimately, the biggest problem with EP may be that it underestimates the power of evolutionary forces--both to tinker continually with the human brain, and to have created ingenious and flexible problem-solving structures in the first place. There's a nice irony here, since for years EP-ers have ridiculed opponents for not appreciating evolutionary theory's core tenets. Buller goes so far as to note an eerie resemblance between EP and [44]intelligent design, which also treats human nature as fixed and complete. The more persuasive claim is that there is no single human nature, and that we're works in progress. Related in Slate _________________________________________________________________ Jacob Weisberg [45]argued that scientists should acknowledge that evolution and religion aren't compatible. Bob Wright [46]explained why Steven Jay Gould can't be trusted. Judith Shulevitz [47]laid out evolutionary psychology's take on why men rape. Amanda Schaffer is a frequent contributor to Slate. posted Aug. 16, 2005 References 24. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30F1EFC345D0C728FDDAC0894DD404482&n=Top%252fOpinion%252fEditorials%2520and%2520Op%252dEd%252fOp%252dEd%252fColumnists%252fJohn%2520Tierney 25. http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/projects/human/evpsychfaq.html 26. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0716FE355F0C718EDDA00894D8404482&incamp=archive:sear 27. http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,0_1594200432,00.html 28. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2005_02_14_newrepublic.html 29. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article294039.ece 30. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/sim-explorer/explore-items/-/0262025795/0/101/1/none/purchase/ref=pd_sxp_r0/002-0228377-9825645 31. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5735/706 32. http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/AboutDavid.htm 33. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/ 34. http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/tooby/ 35. http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/cosmides/index.php 36. http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/Psychology/md.html 37. http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/Psychology/margo.html 38. http://slate.msn.com/id/2124503/#ContinueArticle 39. http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/slate.arts/slate;kw=slate;sz=300x250;ord=4985? 40. http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html 41. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725071.100 42. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631188878/ref=pd_sxp_f/002-0228377-9825645 43. http://slate.msn.com/id/2124503/sidebar/2124504/ 44. http://slate.msn.com/id/2118388/ 45. http://slate.msn.com/id/2124297/ 46. http://slate.msn.com/id/2016/ 47. http://slate.msn.com/id/1004368/ From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 3 01:33:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 21:33:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Making a Living on Choking Under Pressure Message-ID: Making a Living on Choking Under Pressure The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.9.2 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i02/02a01003.htm By JOHN GRAVOIS For any ambitious young scholar just hitting the job market, choking under pressure is a real occupational hazard. Consider Sian L. Beilock: As she was leaving Michigan State University two years ago with two Ph.D.'s, in kinesiology and cognitive psychology, she got 12 invitations for job interviews right off the bat. That might sound like a giddy prospect, but it contained a hint of menace: What if her academic stock, painstakingly built up during years of research, suddenly plummeted in the glare of a few three-hour interviews? As it turned out, the psychological phenomenon that drives people to underperform in pressure situations served Ms. Beilock astonishingly well in the hiring process. She accepted seven of the job-interview invitations, and was subsequently rewarded with six job offers -- including plum appointments at Carnegie Mellon University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. That's because, for Ms. Beilock, 29, choking under pressure isn't just a nerve-racking fact of life -- it's a career-making research interest. From basketball stars on the free-throw line to golfers on the putting green to high-school students twiddling their No. 2 pencils in agony before the SAT, everyone shares a vulnerability to lousy performance when the stakes are high. Beginning with her research for her master's thesis in 1998, Ms. Beilock has quickly established herself as the go-to psychologist for this universal quirk. (Run a Google search for the term "choking under pressure," and the first hit leads to one of her papers.) "Basically, I study skilled performance," she says, "and I'm really interested in how skilled performance fails in a variety of situations." Over the past couple of years, it has become clear that the academic and grant-making worlds are interested too. With all those job offers on the table, Ms. Beilock did something unpredictable. She accepted an assistant professorship in the psychology department at Miami University of Ohio, where her husband, Allen R. McConnell, is a professor of social psychology. But now, after spending the better part of two years at Miami, she has accepted a job in the University of Chicago's psychology department, and has been busy setting up residence there over the summer. That's not all that's been keeping her occupied this season. Ms. Beilock spent much of August in Australia, attending a meeting of the International Society of Sport Psychology and accepting its Developing Scholar Award, a prize that is given out only once every four years. She has also had two research grant proposals accepted in recent months. One, which she will share with her husband, is a $199,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study "stereotype threat," a phenomenon that causes a subject's awareness of his own social identity, and its various connotations, to affect his performance of a skill. The other is a $428,000, three-year grant from the Department of Education to study how different high-pressure standardized-testing environments affect students' scores. No Pressure Ms. Beilock's research aims to settle one of the age-old questions generated by flubbed free throws and math tests: Do we choke because we over-think our performance, or do we choke because we are too distracted to focus on it properly? The answer: both, depending on the situation. When a professional basketball player steps up to the free-throw line, he probably doesn't shoot by thinking about a detailed series of steps. Instead, the skill is implanted so deeply in his memory that his motor system, in a sense, automatically remembers how to shoot for him. Up the stakes, however, and he might start paying too much attention to his actions. According to Ms. Beilock's findings, when someone under pressure starts analyzing all the component steps of a skill he normally executes like clockwork, he may perform as poorly as a novice. By contrast, the skills involved in cracking equations on a math test do require a lot of what psychologists call "working memory" -- the kind of step-by-step processing necessary to navigate a complex problem. Here's the surprising part: When taking a test, someone with lots of "working memory" is actually more prone to be handicapped by high stakes than someone with fewer cognitive resources. That's because the more expert thinker relies on very "cognitively intense" strategies, which can get sidetracked by distraction. Less intense thinkers might use mental shortcuts and rules of thumb to get by -- strategies that do not appear to be affected as much by pressure. That somewhat counterintuitive finding has tremendous bearing on the whole enterprise of standardized testing, the reigning aptitude-sorting mechanism in American education. "What pressure situations may do," Ms. Beilock says, "is serve to diminish the predictive differences we're looking for." The Golf Factor To study skilled performance and its hiccups, Ms. Beilock has used a number of experimental models, including math tests and dribbling soccer balls. But the one truly indispensable element in all of Ms. Beilock's labs over the years has been golf putting. "It's a very nice skill for a lot of reasons," she says. "One, you can put a putting green in a lab." (Ms. Beilock's own strongest sport -- lacrosse -- proved logistically ill-matched to the lab setting.) But that's not all putting has going for it. "It's got great motor components," Ms. Beilock says, "but it's also got this cognitive component as well." Though Ms. Beilock is not much of a golfer herself, her favored means of generating data has given her a level of exposure in the world of golf journalism that is probably rare among cognitive scientists. She has had no less than five articles about her appear in golf publications. Golf fanatics are not the only people outside of academe who have picked up on Ms. Beilock's work. Because her research illuminates such a universal source of chagrin, it has garnered her coverage in The New York Times and interviews on National Public Radio. Navigating the waters between academe and the popular press is a famously perilous enterprise for young scholars. However, Ms. Beilock's colleagues and mentors say she possesses more than enough seriousness to back up her public appearances. "She has all the tools to do great science on hard topics," says Thomas H. Carr, Ms. Beilock's former dissertation adviser at Michigan State and now a frequent collaborator. What's more, he says, she combines those tools with "an intense ambition to make a difference in our understanding of the mind and to play that understanding out in real-world activities." Of all Ms. Beilock's research findings, one of her less-heralded discoveries is that it is surprisingly easy to design a pressure situation sufficient to make people susceptible to choking. "We'll offer people five bucks," she says, "and that's enough to make them feel like they're going to screw up." With much more than that on the line, Ms. Beilock has advanced her very brief career. But that's not to say she's always happy with her performance in the various high-pressure interview sessions, exams, and reviews that have marked her ascent. "I've always just felt that all of my abilities weren't really reflected in those short snapshots," she says. "I always think I could do better than I've done." From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 3 01:34:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 21:34:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Runners World: Should You Run Naked? Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 11:52:51 +0200 From: Amara Graps Reply-To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List To: wta-talk at transhumanism.org Subject: [wta-talk] Runners World: Should You Run Naked? Beyond sports - There are many many reason for why I think peeling off the clothes is a good idea. Here I repost something I sent to the extropians three years ago. Amara Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 03:42:48 +0100 To: extropians at extropy.org From: Amara Graps Subject: Beingness Sender: owner-extropians at extropy.org Reply-To: extropians at extropy.org Spike wrote: > Regarding public nudity, there is a prominent nude beach near where > I grew up, just north of Kennedy Space Center, Playalinda beach. [...] > on the most perfect beach weather days. But the last thing one > will see after starting that hike and the first thing one will see at > the other end are countless naked people. That would be fine, > except for the fact that the kinds of people who generally go nude > on the beach are exactly those who you would really prefer not to > see naked. Ever. Not even in ones worst nightmare. Now now Spike. Naturist beaches and resorts are freedom, in an ultimate sense. What better way to see the marvelous variety of shapes and sizes in which the the human body manifests itself? Social roles, economic classes, sex roles reduced or removed, and we can be who we are, simply. "If it were perfectly natural to go nude, we'd all be born that way." General Naturist/Nudist Information http://www.mbay.net/~cgd/naturism/nlink01.htm Being and Nakedness http://www.naturistplace.com/ REC.NUDE FAQ: Naturist Site Reports: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/nude-faq/beaches/ The following pieces are from: Humorous Introduction to Naturism http://www.netnude.com/main/intro.html#intro {begin quote} Nobody knows for certain exactly how many naturists there are in the world, but the numbers of those enjoying a clothes optional lifestyle appear to be increasing. Unfortunately, naturism still carries a stigma, born largely of ignorance of the truth. To some naturists are well meaning but slightly dotty individuals, who meander naked through wooded glades, pausing in catalogue poses behind strategically placed leaves. To others, they are immoral hedonists, congregating in mixed groups to enjoy pleasures of the flesh in orgy situations not seen since Caesar hung up his laurels. Or they are perverts trying to corrupt the 'normal'way of life. As with the majority of prejudices based on lies, misunderstandings and half-truths, the reality of life for the average naturist is very different indeed. I COULD NEVER BE A NUDIST ANYWAY - JUST LOOK AT MY BODY! That's the whole point though. Naturism isn't about looking at bodies - naturists are not exhibitionists. It's just about enjoying the freedom that a clothes optional atmosphere brings. Naturism is about accepting the human body for what it is - nothing to be ashamed of. So the men don't need to hit the gym for six months, buffing their muscles to within an inch of their lives in order to gain entry. And the women don't have to look like Baywatch babes. The media is largely responsible for promoting this idea of body perfection, but the truth is that the vast majority of people do not now, nor are they likely to ever resemble this false ideal. So for naturists there is no such thing as too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too hairy. Nobody's going to comment on the size or shape of your breasts or critically evaluate your genitalia. And if you have any surgical scars or other distinguishing marks you needn't worry - ignore them just like everyone else will. For most people, their initial discomfort disappears very quickly, once they realize they are not being judged on their appearance. BUT WHAT DO PEOPLE GET OUT OF IT? IF IT'S NOT ABOUT SEX, JUST WHAT IS IT ABOUT? It's about relaxation, freedom from restriction - and to a very large degree, it's about honesty. Naturists are judged on their personalities alone. They take away the trappings that most of us have around us every day. They have less to 'hide behind'. This is very healthy, because it means that friendships are built on truth - as people get used to being open with each other, there is less temptation to embellish![...] Being nude can also be incredibly relaxing. The feeling of air, sun and water on the skin is a terrific stress reliever. [...] IT CAN'T BE HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN THOUGH, SURELY. On the contrary, children who grow up in a naturist environment usually have far fewer hang-ups than other kids. Once again, they are not being subjected to premature sexual situations - they grow up around other children and adults, understanding that the body is not something to be hidden and ashamed of. They know anatomy of the human body, and it is less of a 'taboo' to be explored at the earliest opportunity. There are fewer incidences of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and criminal behaviour amongst nudist children than amongst other children. WHERE WOULD I PUT MY SUNGLASSES!? As for the sunglasses, well friends have found that nipple rings are the perfect holders for their Ray Bans. If you don't fancy body piercing, though, a small bag slung around your neck or carried with you is the perfect repository for your small change and other necessities. {end quote} From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 3 01:34:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 21:34:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Runners World: Should You Run Naked? Message-ID: This is the original. Should You Run Naked? http://www.runnersworld.com/article/printer_friendly/0,5046,s6-187-0-0-6844,00.html Nothing came between ancient Olympians and their performance. Were they onto something? by: Amby Burfoot If you ask me, the ancient Olympians were a lot smarter than we are. They had the good sense to run, jump, and throw in the nude. When you put anything between your skin and the environment--like shorts and a singlet, for example--you only decrease your body's cooling efficiency (even if you're more...comfortable in certain areas). The so-called "modern" Olympians of 1896 were smarter than us, too. They did their running, jumping, and throwing in April. Some athletes complained about the chilly, damp weather, but Spiridon Louis gave thanks to Zeus all the way to his (clothed) marathon victory in 2:58:50. Unfortunately, Olympic Marathons have been getting hotter ever since. The 1900 Olympic Marathon started at 2:36 p.m. under a 95-degree Parisian sun. Twelve years later, in Stockholm, a Portuguese runner died in the sweltering Olympic Marathon. Many of us remember Gabriele Andersen Schiess staggering across the finish line in the 1984 Women's Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles. In Athens this month, both the men's and women's marathons will start at 6 p.m., when average temperatures are in the mid-80s, though the city has a record August high of 109. And the marathoners will be running on black asphalt that has been simmering for 12 hours. "It's a terrible disservice that the marathoners will be forced to compete in conditions where they can't perform their best, and could actually hurt themselves," says Dr. William Roberts, medical director of the Twin Cities Marathon and president of the American College of Sports Medicine. To help athletes deal with the Athens weather, the U.S. Olympic Committee has been holding educational meetings since last September, when it organized a conference called "Heat, Humidity and Air Pollution: What to Expect in Athens 2004." In May, the top U.S. marathoners gathered in Colorado Springs for the latest update. "We believe the heat actually opens the window of possibilities for our marathoners," says U.S. men's Olympic distance coach Bob Larsen. "We'll leave no stone unturned in our search for scientific approaches to running in the heat." The lessons learned by the marathon team will also work for you. Here are some of the highlights. Heat Acclimation Many years of heat acclimation research have convinced most experts that you can do a good job of adjusting to the heat in eight days, a better job in 14, and perhaps better still in 21. The last physiological variable to adapt is your sweat rate, which takes eight to 14 days to reach maximum efficiency. Other, faster responders include increased plasma volume, decreased sodium concentration in the blood, decreased heart rate while running, decreased perceived exertion, and increased running economy. U.S. track athletes will be given the chance to attend a pre-Olympic training camp on Crete about two weeks before they move to Athens. The runners will follow a heat-training protocol outlined by Randy Wilber, Ph.D., of the USOC sports sciences department, who suggests the following: First run in the morning or evening cool; then move to warmer times of the day; finally, increase the length and intensity of your midday workouts. Perhaps no runner has thought more about heat training and racing than Alberto Salazar. Before the 1984 Olympic Marathon he traveled to the U.S. Army Labs in Natick, Massachusetts, to get tested in a heat chamber (where sweat production is measured) and learned to chug two quarts of fluid before every workout. But then he crashed. He now believes he did too many hard 20-milers in the heat. "I was exhausted from the first step of the marathon," he says. He finished 15th in 2:14:19. Today Salazar is coaching Dan Browne, one of the 2004 U.S. marathon qualifiers. He plans to have Browne do occasional workouts in a Nike heat chamber and to cut back on the intensity of his speedwork. "No one's going to run 2:06 in Athens, so we don't have to worry about training for that pace," Salazar says. Hydration Everyone knows drinking fluids is supposed to help you run faster. But you have to slow down to grab your drinks. America's Steve Spence worked on this dilemma when he was training for the hot, humid World Championships Marathon in Tokyo in 1991. Spence set up a water table on his local track, and then practiced drinking while running intervals at faster-than-marathon pace. "I figured if I got good at taking my drinks at this pace, it would come easy in the marathon," he says. Spence claimed the bronze medal. A couple of months ago, Alan Culpepper, another 2004 marathon qualifier, visited the Gatorade Sports Science Institute in Illinois to get a better idea of his sweat production and hydration needs. When he ran for an hour in a heat chamber cranked up to 85 degrees, he sweat 1.4 liters. He also learned that he is a salty sweater. "I'm much more aware now of my drinking and sodium needs," Culpepper says. "I feel more prepared to handle the heat challenges in Athens." Superhydration Storing extra water would be nice, but runners aren't camels. Still, two simple substances seem capable of promoting superhydration: common salt and glycerol, a liquid supplement. A New Zealand study presented at this year's American College of Sports Medicine meeting showed that well-trained runners who prehydrated with a heavily salted drink were able to exercise 20 percent longer in 90-degree weather than when they prehydrated with a minimally salty beverage. Not all glycerol studies have shown an improvement in hydration status or endurance performance, but a two-year-old study with Olympic distance triathletes produced convincing results. In a randomized, double blind, crossover study in 87-degree conditions, the triathletes slowed down much less with glycerol than without it. "Glycerol lets you increase the amount of standing water on board," says U.S. marathon guru David Martin, Ph.D. "It's nice to have that extra amount during a long, hot race." Spence readily admits he used glycerol in Tokyo, Keith Brantly says he used it in his best marathons, and Salazar says Browne will probably test glycerol to see how it works for him. Cool Vests In January, a team from the University of Georgia studied college distance runners covering 5-K in a 90-degree heat chamber with and without ice vests to cool their core before their efforts. The "precooled" runners finished 13 seconds faster, which is more than the gap that will separate many gold-medalists and fourth-place finishers in Athens. Recently, the folks at Nike Sport Research have been working to design an improved cooling vest that places more of the body's surfaces closer to larger volumes of ice. Only field hockey players have tested it (successfully, Nike says), but Lance Armstrong and Paula Radcliffe were both trying the vest in early summer. Cool Clothing You already know that a white shirt will absorb less heat than a black one. And for the past decade you've read about the amazing advances of breathable microfibers. But wait, those shirts are designed to keep you warm and dry in the winter. Do you really want that on a hot summer's day? Nope. So four years ago Nike produced a shirt that several U.S. runners wore in the Sydney Olympics. This white shirt sat off the skin on small bumps (allowing air to circulate), was constructed of a large fishnet weave (more air circulation), didn't absorb sweat (leaving it on the skin to cool you via evaporation), and was made of recycled plastic bottles. Home run! Too bad Nike called the shirt the Stand-Off Distance Singlet (because of the way it stood off your skin), which sounded too much like a shirt with a body-odor problem. This year Nike has produced something called the Nike Sphere Cool Marathon Singlet, with aerodynamic seam placement, mesh construction, and patent-pending "Zoned Venting" technology. But give me a Stand-Off Distance Singlet, and I'll show you a really great hot-weather running shirt. Here's my advice to the U.S. marathoners: Bring your scissors to Athens and cut your racing singlet as short as you can. Research by exercise physiologist Timothy Gavins, Ph.D., has shown that "the chimney effect" can improve body cooling. This refers to air moving up the bottom of your untucked shirt and out the top. Or just run naked. You'll be reconnecting with your Olympic forebears, increasing your chances of a medal, and giving a big boost to NBC's Olympic TV ratings. From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 00:43:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 20:43:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In the Long Run, Sleep at Home and Invest in the Stock Market Message-ID: In the Long Run, Sleep at Home and Invest in the Stock Market http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/realestate/19real.html By MOTOKO RICH and [3]DAVID LEONHARDT The housing boom of the last five years has made many homeowners feel like very, very smart investors. As the value of real estate has skyrocketed, owners have become enamored of the wealth their homes are creating, with many concluding that real estate is now a safer and better investment than stocks. It turns out, though, that the last five years - when homes in some hot markets like Manhattan and Las Vegas have outperformed stocks - has been a highly unusual period. In fact, by a wide margin over time, stock prices have risen more quickly than home values, even on the East and West Coasts, where home values have appreciated most. When Marti and Ray Jacobs sold the five-bedroom colonial house in Harrington Park, N.J., where they had lived since 1970, they made what looked like a typically impressive profit. They had paid $110,000 to have the house built and sold it in July for $900,000. But the truth is that much of the gain came from simple price inflation, the same force that has made a gallon of milk more expensive today than it was three decades ago. The Jacobses also invested tens of thousands of dollars in a new master bathroom, with marble floors, a Jacuzzi bathtub and vanity cabinets. Add it all up, and they ended up making an inflation-adjusted profit of less than 10 percent over the 35 years. That return does not come close to the gains of the stock market over the same period. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has increased almost 200 percent since 1970, even after accounting for inflation. Yet investment advisers worry that this reality is getting lost in today's enthusiasm for houses, even as some economists say the housing market has peaked. People are buying homes purely on speculation, trading real estate almost as if it were a stock. Surveys show that a large majority of Americans consider real estate to be a safer investment than stocks. "With how strong the real estate market has performed, there is the urge for people to chase returns," said Jeff A. Weiand, executive vice president of RTD Financial Advisors in Philadelphia. "But it's very difficult to beat the long-term historical record of stocks." Since 1980, for example, money invested in the Standard & Poor's 500 has delivered a return of 10 percent a year on average. Including dividends, the return on the S.& P. 500 rises to 12 percent a year. Even in New York and San Francisco, homes have risen in value only about 7 percent a year over the same span. That does not mean real estate is a bad investment. It is often an important source of wealth for families. But its main benefit is what it has always been: you can live in the house you own. "The biggest value of the house is the shelter it provides," said Thomas Z. Lys, an accounting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "Too many people are fixated on speculation whereas most of the benefit really comes from usage." Despite the fact that home values usually appreciate over time, most of the value of a house actually comes from the ability to use it. In this way, it is more like a car, albeit one that does not become less valuable over time, than it is like a stock. Whenever people sell one house, they must immediately pay to live elsewhere, meaning that they can never wholly cash out of a home's value. Including the value of living in a house - that is, the rent that a family would have to pay to live in an equivalent house elsewhere - homes in New York have returned more than 15 percent a year since 1980, according to an analysis by Mr. Lys. But only five percentage points of this return comes from sheer price appreciation, as opposed to the value of shelter. Mr. Lys accounted for property taxes, spending on renovations, interest payments and the tax deductions on those payments, and the fact that most house purchases are made with mortgages. When the sale of a house brings in a cash windfall, homeowners tend to focus on the fact that they made a down payment that was just a fraction of their house's value, lifting their return. But many forget just how much money they spent on property taxes, a new roof and the mortgage interest. Add to all these factors the corrosive effect of inflation, and the returns are even lower. The Jacobses - she is an administrator for a magazine and he a lawyer - were quite pleased with the sale of their house in New Jersey. To them, it was a place to raise their two children more than it was an investment. When the couple spent about $100,000 to redo their master bathroom, install a walk-in closet and build a deck in the mid-1980's, Mr. Jacobs recalled saying to his wife, "We'll never get the money out that we put into this, but at least we'll enjoy it for 15 years or so." Told of the comparative returns on his house and the stock market, Mr. Jacobs said, "Of course I couldn't live in the portfolio." Today, however, he has come to see the advantages of the stock market. The Jacobses now rent an apartment on the Upper West Side for more than $4,000 a month and have invested the proceeds from the house sale in the stock market, making it easier for them to raise cash by selling shares. "I didn't want to take the money that we pulled out of the house and have all that money tied up in an apartment where I still have expenses of maintenance fees," Mr. Jacobs said. But many people seem to be going in the opposite direction from the Jacobses. Eighty percent of Americans deemed real estate a safer investment than stocks in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll done this spring, while only 13 percent said stocks were safer. Part of that sentiment is driven by the recent memory of the stock market collapse in 2000. Many homeowners seem to have forgotten that less than 15 years ago house prices in the Northeast and California fell, but the money they lost on technology stocks is still fresh in their minds. Stocks are also more volatile, and their price changes can be viewed every day. "The news doesn't report to you daily that your house price might have gone up or down," Mr. Lys said. "So you think your house price is more stable than it really is because you don't observe these minute-by-minute gyrations." Economists caution that any comparison between real estate and stocks is tricky, because real estate is typically a leveraged investment, in which a home buyer makes a down payment equal to only a fraction of a house's value and borrows to finance the rest. While it is possible to borrow money from a brokerage firm to buy stocks, most individual investors simply buy the shares outright. When home prices are rising, the leverage from a mortgage lifts real estate returns in the short term. Someone putting down $100,000 to buy a $500,000 home can feel as if the investment doubled when told that the house is now worth $600,000. But the power of leverage vanishes as homeowners pay off the mortgage, as the Jacobses have. Leverage also creates more short-term risk, especially for those who have stretched to afford their house. "If the home went down by 30 percent, you'd probably be sitting with a bankruptcy attorney," said Jonathan Golub, United States equity strategist at J. P. Morgan Asset Management in New York. "If your I.B.M. stock goes down by 30 percent, no big deal. So you had $100,000, now you have $70,000. You don't declare bankruptcy; you just don't go out to the movies as much, or you retire a year later." But such risks are hard to imagine when many markets are still enjoying double-digit percentage increases every year. The number of people buying houses they do not plan to live in has surged. There are also Internet exchanges where investors can trade yet-to-be-built condominiums or futures contracts tied to average home prices in big metropolitan areas. But economists and investment advisers say that most of the value from real estate comes not from anything that can be captured by flipping it, but from the safety net it provides in bad times. Even if the market shifts downward, "you have a roof over your head," said Jonathan Miller, a real estate appraiser in Manhattan. Beyond the shelter it provides, the biggest advantage of real estate might be that it protects people from their worst investment instincts. Most people do not sell their house out of frustration after a few months of declining values, as they might with a stock. Instead, they are almost forced to be long-run investors who do not try to time the market. Harlan Larson, a retired manager of car dealerships near Minneapolis, still regrets having bought Northwest Airlines stock at $25 a share a few years ago. It is now trading at less than $5. By comparison, he views the four-bedroom home he bought for $32,500 in 1965 - or about $200,000 in today's dollars - as a money tree. He and his wife recently listed it for $413,000. That would translate into an annual return of 1.2 percent, taking into account inflation and the cost of two new decks and an extra room. They plan to move to Texas after it has sold. "I wish I'd bought more real estate," Mr. Larson said. From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 00:43:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 20:43:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The American Prospect: The Right Fight Message-ID: The Right Fight http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10140 It took the Bush administration to bring a truce between the postmodern left and the scientific community. By [2]Chris Mooney Web Exclusive: 08.15.05 Circa 1996, many of the nation's intellectuals could be found chattering about the famous "Sokal hoax." Remember that? It all began when New York University physicist Alan Sokal submitted an [5]article to the left-wing academic journal Social Text that basically amounted to gibberish. It essentially argued that physical reality does not exist: It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality,'' no less than social "reality,'' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge," far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities . The article had a giveaway title: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Coming from a physicist, this should have raised serious red flags. Nevertheless, Social Text was stupid enough to publish the thing, and then Sokal [6]exposed the hoax in Lingua Franca magazine. On the one hand, this was a pretty mean trick to pull on poor Social Text. On the other, editors unable to distinguish real physics from spoof physics probably shouldn't be publishing articles arguing against physical reality. At any rate, Sokal claimed his objectives were thoroughly constructive. He wanted, he said, to shake the academic left out of its postmodern torpor and force its leading intellectuals to recognize that jargony articles and a general tone of relativism and subjectivism weren't helping anybody -- certainly not the oppressed people of the world. "For most of the past two centuries," Sokal wrote, "the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism . Theorizing about 'the social construction of reality' won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics, and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity." The Sokal hoax hit liberal academia like a thunderclap and prompted many a gloat from scientists. It went hand in hand with books like [7]Higher Superstition, an all-out attack on the perceived anti-science obscurantism of the academic left. For many pro-science liberals as well as many anti-campus conservatives, the notion slowly took hold that there were a lot of out-of-touch left-wing academics, nestled in secluded universities, who were conducting a campaign against scientific knowledge in obscure journals through excessive quotation of Foucault and Derrida. Even at the time, however, the quest to root out anti-science tendencies in academia seemed a strange deployment of resources. After all, the Gingrich Republicans had just taken over Congress, set out to radically slash science budgets, and preached denial about global warming. If there was a war on science afoot, university professors probably weren't the leading culprits. Certainly they weren't the most powerful ones. Indeed, despite some undeniable academic excesses, the "science wars" were always somewhat overblown. The sociological, historical, philosophical, and cultural study of science is a very worthwhile endeavor. If scholars engaged in such research sometimes take a stance of agnosticism toward the truth claims of science, perhaps that's simply their way of remaining detached from the subject they're studying. But it doesn't necessarily follow that these scholars are absolute relativists, to the extent of thinking that concepts like gravity are a mere matter of opinion. Social Text founding Editor Stanley Aronowitz has himself written that "[t]he critical theories of science do not refute the results of scientific discoveries since, say, the Copernican revolution or since Galileo's development of the telescope." When it comes to the field of science studies, meanwhile, much scholarly work in the area lends itself not to left-wing attacks on science but rather to defenses of science from forms of abuse prevalent on the political right. To cite just one example, leading science-studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff's 1991 book, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers, presents a potent critique of demands for unreasonable levels of scientific certainty before political decisions can be made, especially when it comes to protecting public health and the environment. So perhaps it's no surprise that the science wars of the 1990s have almost entirely subsided, and, as the scientific community has increasingly become embroiled with the Bush administration across a wide range of issues (from evolution to climate science), a very new zeitgeist has emerged. The summer issue of The American Scholar, a leading read among academic humanists and the literary set, provides a case in point. "Science matters," blazons the cover. Inside, Editor Robert Wilson explains to readers that although "the attack on science has always been our game the enemy of our enemy is most definitely not our friend." The right's attack on science, Wilson continues, "is an attack on reason, and it cannot be ignored, or excused, or allowed to go uncontested." With those words, I think it's safe to say that peace has officially been made in the science wars of the 1990s. And not a moment too soon. The evolution deniers (and other reality deniers) are gathering momentum. On matters like this, the university community -- composed of scientists and scholars alike -- really ought to be on the same page. Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for [8]Seed Magazine and a columnist for The American Prospect Online. His first book, [9]The Republican War on Science, will be published in September. His daily blog and other writings can be found at [10]www.chriscmooney.com. References 2. http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?name=View+Author§ion=root&id=174 3. http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10140 4. http://www.prospect.org/web/start-email.ww?id=10140 5. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html 6. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801857074/103-4828884-6127823?v=glance 8. http://www.seedmediagroup.com/ 9. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465046754/chriscmooneyc-20/103-4828884-6127823 10. http://chriscmooney.com/ From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 00:43:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 20:43:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Smile for the camera Message-ID: Smile for the camera http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ja05brin [1]Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [2]Doomsday Clock No Place to Hide By Robert O'Harrow Jr. Free Press, 2005 348 pages, $26 By David Brin July/August 2005 pp. 64-67 (vol. 61, no. 04) O ne can all too easily get caught up in today's atmosphere of desperate worry. Democrats and Republicans who disagree over many things seem to share a perception that civilization is plunging into crisis. Post-9/11 unease goes beyond airport inconvenience, economic disruption, and military conflict, all the way to jeremiads warning against technological innovations. Amid this gloom, I take solace from that most discomforting of symbols, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which helped crystallize an earlier generation's end-of-the-world parable. The day still has not yet come when any combination of terror attacks could wreak as much harm as the lethal cargo of a single ballistic missile submarine. So should not our worry level be lower than it was in, say, 1980? But people don't use game theory to weigh their fears, and the new science of threat psychology explains why. The Cold War was run mostly by professionals, but terror attacks seem unguided by logic. It is the unpredictable and irrational threat, above all, that makes us shiver. Does this explain why we hear so many commentators expressing fear of technological change? Take Francis Fukuyama, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, whose The End of History and the Last Man (1992) suggested that the collapse of communism might be the final event worth chronicling before Earth slides, happily ever after, into blithe liberal democracy. Alas, short-lived jubilation swiftly gave way to pessimism in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), in which Fukuyama condemns a wide range of potentially disruptive biological advances. People cannot be trusted to make wise use of, for example, genetic therapy, he says. Human "improvability" is so perilous a concept that he prescribes joint government-industry panels to control or ban whole avenues of scientific investigation. Fukuyama is hardly alone in fretting over technological innovation gone amok. Popular authors Margaret Atwood and Michael Crichton have probably never voted for the same party or candidate. Yet their novels share a persistent theme with many other antimodernists, both left and right, who doubt human ability to solve problems or to cope. Pondering the challenges of tomorrow, they say, "Don't go there." No issue has stoked this ecumenical sense of alienation more than the Great Big Privacy Scare. While the information age seems on one level benign--the internet can't blast, kill, mutate, or infect us--social repercussions of new data-handling technologies seem daunting. Pundits, spanning the spectrum from William Safire to Jeffrey Rosen, have proclaimed this to be our ultimate test. I don't disagree. Every day, powerful, interconnected databases fill with information about you and about me, fed by inputs from our every purchase and telephone call. New sensor technologies add cascades of detail, not just from the vast proliferation of cameras (which are getting cheaper, smaller, faster, and more mobile every year), but also from radio frequency identification tags that identify and track objects (as well as the people who happen to be wearing, riding, or chatting into them), along with biometric devices that identify people by their irises, retinas, fingerprints, voices, or dozens of other physical markers. These gadgets' torrential output will feed into the internet's sophisticated successors--government and corporate databases that hunt for connections and make inferences based on them. It all sounds pretty dreadful, and Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow Jr. reinforces this disheartening view with copious detail in his new book, No Place to Hide, offering one of the most thorough litanies of information and privacy abuse since Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (2000). O'Harrow's complaints about the behavior of voracious data-mining groups, such as Acxiom, LexisNexis, and ChoicePoint, are accurate and timely. Just after No Place to Hide was published, several companies were caught violating either their own privacy-protection rules or their legal obligations to safeguard private data. Security breaches at ChoicePoint and LexisNexis exposed tens of thousands of supposedly secure private records, including credit card information and Social Security numbers. Such events steadily erode trust and increase the near-term danger that we all face from crimes like identity theft. O'Harrow shows that privacy problems are nothing new, giving readers a historical context that builds on Vance Packard's The Naked Society (1964) and Arthur R. Miller's Assault on Privacy (1971) and includes a rundown of post-Watergate reforms that were supposed to end surveillance abuses. Indeed, many of today's arguments about the proper balance between privacy rights and law enforcement needs are rooted in the pre-internet era. But today, the government is vastly better equipped, with aptly named tools like "Carnivore" and "The Matrix" that empower the agencies of our paid protector caste to penetrate telephone lines, e-mail traffic, myriad databases, and more, sifting for anything that their constantly shifting criteria might deem threat-related. The post-9/11 era, which spawned angst over an amorphous and ill-defined enemy, has aggravated a political divide that has been around for years. This chasm separates those who emphasize a need for enhanced security from those who urge that we accept a little added risk in order to preserve traditional liberties. Nowhere has this edgy debate swirled more bitterly than around provisions of the PATRIOT Act, which dramatically bolstered the federal government's wiretap and surveillance powers while at the same time shrouding law enforcement activity in a haze of heightened secrecy. O'Harrow chronicles the evolution of this landmark law in New Journalism style, "through the eyes of" such players as Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh (who both pushed for different versions of an anti-terrorism bill after 9/11), following them at breakfast, in the car, and through the meetings in which adamant, no-compromise positions took form. Forsaking any pretense of impartiality, O'Harrow venerates the ACLU lobbyists who "grasped the difficulty of their position. They were trying to persuade Americans to hold fast to concerns about individual freedom and privacy while the vast majority of people were terrified." No passage better illustrates O'Harrow's approach to this serious issue, typifying the snobbery of those on both right and left who share a common need to portray the American people as hapless sheep who either require protection from terrorists, or protection from overprotection. Only a few commentators, notably the Boston Globe's Elaine Scarry, have pointed out that in fact most Americans did not panic or act terrified on, or after, 9/11. If you want a detailed series of anecdotes showing how databases and data mining can be surreptitiously abused, then read No Place to Hide and find out how many groups, from industry to government to criminal gangs, are trying to gather information on you. Campaigns to control this information-gathering frenzy--for example, when Congress stopped the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's efforts to achieve "total information awareness"--simply drive the trend toward universal data collection underground. Meanwhile, supposedly secure systems, like those at LexisNexis, are breached with apparent regularity. And once information floats free, there is no calling it back. As O'Harrow follows real-life characters, showing their quirky hobbies and their passionate battles for or against privacy rights, another common theme emerges. Everyone appears to accept the underlying premise of a zero-sum game, a "great dichotomy"--the notion that one must choose, or strike some balance, between freedom and safety. One can hardly blame O'Harrow for imbuing his book with an assumption that seems both widespread and intuitively obvious. Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold, a very smart man, nevertheless accepted this trade-off during the PATRIOT Act debates: "There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time, for any reason. . . . But that would not be a country in which we would want to live." A truism--but truisms can mislead. The notion of a freedom-security trade-off insidiously serves the interests of those who oppose freedom, because there will inevitably come days when security seems paramount to a frightened public. Liberty will lose any resulting ratchet effect. But the dismal "trade-off" notion is disproved by a simple counter-example--us. In all of history, no people were ever so safe and so free. A civilization of vigilant, technologically empowered problem-solvers can and should make safety and freedom codependent. Citizens may learn to thrive, even in an environment where various elites know much about them. "Surveillance comes with a price," O'Harrow writes. "It dulls the edge of public debate, imposes a sense of conformity, introduces a feeling of being watched. It chills culture and stifles dissent." This, too, sounds intuitively obvious, and it was almost certainly true in most other societies, in which narrow elites monopolized both power and the flow of information. But should we accept it, unexamined, as a valid assumption about the United States today? One might hope that after listing numerous threats to privacy, O'Harrow would offer some solutions or ideas for change. Unfortunately, he goes from introduction to conclusion without ever proposing a single suggestion, or even a palliative, to remedy burgeoning surveillance and its accompanying trends. The book lives up to its gloomy title and premise--its implicit prescription is "grumble at the inevitable." It did not have to be that way. Early in No Place to Hide, O'Harrow quotes a prophetic speech in which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex." (Former Clinton administration privacy counselor Peter Swire has echoed this famous admonition by referring to a security-industrial complex--an apt comparison.) O'Harrow then continues with an even more cogent excerpt from the same speech: "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." There it is--an alternative to grumbling and to the dichotomy of gloom. Alas, O'Harrow offers the quotation and then moves quickly on, never commenting on how Eisenhower's statement differs so vastly from others in the book. For while warning of danger, Ike also spoke of opportunity and offered pragmatic ingredients for a genuine solution--a positive-sum solution based on Americans doing what they do best--living both safe and free. Human destiny is not predetermined by any of the flourishing surveillance technologies that O'Harrow details. I agree that nothing we can do will stop the ballooning growth of databases and microscopic cameras, proliferating across the land like crocuses after a spring rain. And yet I remain optimistic because educated citizens of a modern civilization may be capable of playing a different role than the one plotted out for them by smug elites, a role other than as bleating sheep. David Brin, a scientist, public speaker, and writer, is the author of the novel The Postman (1985) and the nonfiction book The Transparent Society (1998), which deals with openness, security, and liberty in the wired age. From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 00:44:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 20:44:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: How India Reconciles Hindu Values and Biotech Message-ID: How India Reconciles Hindu Values and Biotech http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/weekinreview/21mishra.html By PANKAJ MISHRA LONDON In 2001, President Bush restricted federal financing for stem cell research. The decision, which was shaped at least partly by the Republican Party's evangelical Christian base, and which disappointed many American scientists and businessmen, provoked joy in India. The weekly newsmagazine India Today, read mostly by the country's ambitious middle class, spoke of a "new pot of gold" for Indian science and businesses. "If Indians are smart," the magazine said, American qualms about stem cell research "can open an opportunity to march ahead." Just four years later, this seems to have occurred. According to Ernst & Young's Global Biotechnology Report in 2004, Indian biotechnology companies are expected to grow tenfold in the next five years, creating more than a million jobs. With more than 10,000 highly trained and cheaply available scientists, the country is one of the leading biotechnology powers along with Korea, Singapore, China, Japan, Sweden, Britain and Israel. A top Indian corporation, the Reliance Group, owns Reliance Life Sciences, which is trying to devise new treatments for diabetes and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and create human skin, blood and replacement organs genetically matched to their intended recipients. Some scientists have even more ambitious ideas. Encouraged by the cloning of a sheep by British scientists in 1996, they plan to do the same with endangered species of Indian lions and cheetahs. American scientists and businessmen note enviously that religious and moral considerations do not seem to inhibit Indian biotechnologists. But this indifference to ethical issues would have certainly appalled Gandhi, father of the Indian nation. Gandhi accused Western medicine, along with much of modern science and technology, of inflicting violence upon human nature. His vegetarianism and belief in nonviolence were derived from Indian traditions, mainly Hinduism, which is also the faith, though loosely defined, of most Indian scientists and businessmen. Indeed, most evangelical Christians, who believe that the embryo is a person, may find more support in ancient Hindu texts than in the Bible. Many Hindus see the soul - the true Self (or atman) - as the spiritual and imperishable component of human personality. After death destroys the body, the soul soon finds a new temporal home. Thus, for Hindus as much as for Catholics, life begins at conception. The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in "The Mahabharata," the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father's cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother's womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed. But the religions and traditions we know as Hinduism are less monolithic and more diverse than Islam and Christianity; they can yield contradictory arguments. Early in "The Mahabharata," there is a story about how the hundred Kaurava brothers came into being. Their mother had produced a mass of flesh after two years of pregnancy. But then a sage divided the flesh into 100 parts, which were treated with herbs and ghee, and kept in pots for two years - from which the Kaurava brothers emerged. Indian proponents of stem-cell research often offer this story as an early instance of human cloning through stem cells extracted from human embryos. They do not mention that "The Mahabharata" presents the birth of the hundred Kaurava brothers as an ominous event. Other Asian scientists have also pressed myth and tradition into the service of modern science and nationalism. In South Korea, where a third of the population is Buddhist, a scientist who cloned human embryonic stem cell lines claimed that he was "recycling" life just as reincarnation does. But spiritual tradition cannot solve all the ethical issues raised by science's progress through the third world. Ultrasound scans help many women in India to abort female fetuses; a girl child is still considered a burden among Indians. The trade in human organs, especially kidneys, remains a big business, despite growing scrutiny by the police. It is not hard to imagine that, as stem cell research grows in India, and remains unregulated, a small industry devoted to the creation of human embryos would soon develop. In any case, biotechnology may offer only pseudo-answers to many of India's urgent problems. For one thing, if and when lions and cheetahs emerge from biotechnology labs, the steadily deforested Indian countryside may not have a place for them. Stem cell research is also expensive, and seems glaringly so in a country which does not provide basic health care for most of its people. The advanced treatments promised by biotechnology are likely to benefit the rich, at least for the first few years. In the meantime, the poor may be asked to offer themselves as guinea pigs. In an article on biotechnology last year, India Today asserted: "India has another gold mine - the world's largest population of 'na?ve' sick patients, on whom no medicine has ever been tried. India's distinct communities and large families are ideal subjects for genetic and clinical research." Scientism has few detractors in India; and the elites find it easy to propose technological rather than political and moral solutions to the problems of poverty, inequality and environmental damage. Obsessed with imitating Western consumer lifestyles, most middle-class Indians are unlikely to have much time for Gandhi's belief that "civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants." They subscribe to a worldly form of Hinduism - one that now proves to be infinitely adjustable to the modern era, endorsing nuclear bombs and biotechnology as well as India's claim to be taken seriously as an emerging economic and scientific superpower. Pankaj Mishra, an Indian novelist and journalist, is the author, most recently, of "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World." He lives in London and India. From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 00:44:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 20:44:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Archeology Mag: The Fate of Greenland's Vikings Message-ID: The Fate of Greenland's Vikings http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/ [In the last few paragraphs you'll encounter Thomas McGovern's theory that the reason for the fate of Greenland was the hidebound thinking of the Vikings at the time. Declining birthrates, too. Flash forward a millennium!] The Fate of Greenland's Vikings February 28, 2000 by Dale Mackenzie Brown Arm of Ericsfjord, on which Eric the Red had his farm (Dale Mackenzie Brown) Some people call it the Farm under the Sand, others Greenland's Pompeii. Dating to the mid-fourteenth century, it was once the site of a Viking colony founded along the island's grassy southwestern coast that stretches in a fjord-indented ribbon between the glaciers and the sea. Archaeologists Jette Arneborg of the Danish National Museum, Joel Berglund of the Greenland National Museum, and Claus Andreasen of Greenland University could not have guessed what would be revealed when they excavated the ruins of the five-room, stone-and-turf house in the early 1990s. As the archaeologists dug through the permafrost and removed the windblown glacial sand that filled the rooms, they found fragments of looms and cloth. Scattered about were other household belongings, including an iron knife, whetstones, soapstone vessels, and a double-edged comb. Whoever lived here departed so hurriedly that they left behind iron and caribou antler arrows, weapons needed for survival in this harsh country, medieval Europe's farthest frontier. What drove the occupants away? Where did they go? [4][image] Map of Greenland showing settlements (Lynda D'Amico) [5][LARGER IMAGE] The disappearance of the Greenlanders has intrigued students of history for centuries. One old source held that Skraelings, or Inuit, who had crossed over from Ellesmere Island in the far north around A.D. 1000, migrated down the west coast and overran the settlement. Ivar Bardarson, steward of the Church's property in Greenland, and a member of a sister settlement 300 miles to the southeast, was said to have gathered a force and sailed northwest to drive the interlopers out, but "when they came hither, behold they found no man, neither Christian nor heathen, naught but some wild cattle and sheep, and they killed as many of the wild cattle and sheep as they could carry and with them returned to their houses." The death of the Western Settlement portended the demise of the larger eastern one a century later. Of the first 24 boatloads of land-hungry settlers who set out from Iceland in the summer of 986 to colonize new territory explored several years earlier by the vagabond and outlaw, Erik the Red, only 14 made it, the others having been forced back to port or lost at sea. Yet more brave souls, drawn by the promise of a better life for themselves, soon followed. Under the leadership of the red-faced, red-bearded Erik (who had given the island its attractive name, the better to lure settlers there), the colonists developed a little Europe of their own just a few hundred miles from North America, a full 500 years before Columbus set foot on the continent. They established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral boasting an imported bronze bell and greenish tinted glass windows. The Greenlanders prospered. From the number of farms in both colonies, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about 5,000. Trading with Norway, under whose rule they eventually came, the Greenlanders exchanged live falcons, polar bear skins, narwahl tusks, and walrus ivory and hides for timber, iron, tools, and other essentials, as well luxuries such as raisins, nuts, and wine. Excavations of Erik's farm, Brattahlid ("Steep Slope"), in 1932 by Danish archaeologists (Greenland, which became Danish in 1814, is today a self-governing possession of Denmark), revealed the remains of a church, originally surrounded by a turf wall to keep farm animals out, and a great hall where settlers cooked in fire pits, ate their meals, recited sagas, and played board games. Behind the church they found ruins of a cow barn, with partitions between the stalls still in place, one of them the shoulder blade of a whale--a sign of Viking practicality in a treeless land where wood was always in short supply. [6][image] Church ruins with outer protective wall designed to keep out farm animals (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [7][LARGER IMAGE] [8][LARGER IMAGE] [9][image] In 1961 workmen discovered near the barn a tiny horseshoe-shaped chapel built for Erik's wife Thjodhilde. When Erik and his supporters arrived in Greenland, the old Norse gods were still worshiped. Erik, a believer, upheld the ancient fatalistic philosophy of his Viking ancestors, but Thjodhilde converted to Christianity. Erik refused to surrender his beliefs, and Thjodhilde held steadfastly to hers. In time he granted her a small church 6.5 feet wide and 11.5 feet long, with room for 20 to 30 worshipers. During the excavations of Thjodhilde's chapel and its immediate surroundings in the 1960s, Danish archaeologists uncovered 144 skeletons. Most of these indicated tall, strong individuals, not very different in build from modern Scandinavians. One male skeleton was found with a large knife between the ribs, evidence of violence on Greenland's frontier. A mass grave south of the church, containing 13 bodies. According to Neils Lynnerup of the Panum Institute of the University of Copenhagen, who performed forensic work on the remains, the bodies were male, ranging from teens to middle age, with head and arm wounds suggesting they may have died in battle. The most compelling finds were three skeletons interred close to the church wall, just beneath where the eaves would have been. According to medieval Church accounts, those buried closest to the church were first in line for Judgement Day. Who were these three individuals? The archaeologists' best guess was that they were none other than Thjodhilde, Erik and their famous son, Leif, who around the year 1,000 had set sail from Brattahlid on his epochal journey to America. Today, their bones rest on laboratory shelves in Copenhagen. With the islanders' early success came a desire to have someone of authority oversee the work of the Church in Greenland. Early in the twelfth century they dispatched one of their leaders, Einar Sokkason, to Norway to convince the king to send them a bishop. Bishop Arnald was chosen for the job, despite the hapless man's protestation that "I am no good at handling difficult people." Apparently the Greenlanders had a well-developed reputation for contentious behavior. Still, they provided Arnald with one of their finest farms, Gardar, on a fjord not far from Brattahlid. Here they erected a cathedral, built of the local reddish sandstone and dedicated to the patron saint of seafarers, St. Nicholas; with a meeting hall capable of holding several hundred people; a large barn for 100 cows; and tithe barns to contain the goods that would be religiously collected from the farmers by priests and set aside for Rome. [10][image] Ruins of the tithe barns where goods collected from the farmers in the Church's name were kept (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [11][LARGER IMAGE] Although the presence of the Church had originally uplifted the Greenlanders, it now became their burden. By the middle of the fourteenth century, it owned two-thirds of the island's finest pastures, and tithes remained as onerous as ever, some of the proceeds going to the support of the Crusades half way around the world and even to fight heretics in Italy. Church authorities, however, found it increasingly difficult to get bishops to come to the distant island. Several clerics took the title, but never actually went there, preferring to bestow their blessings from afar. Foundation stone of the Norse cathedral (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [12][LARGER IMAGE] [13][image] Life went sour for the Greenlanders in other ways. The number of Norwegian merchant vessels arriving in their ports, though only one or two a year in the best of times, dropped until none came at all. This meant that the islanders were cut off from the major source of iron and tools needed for the smooth running of their farms and the construction and maintenance of their boats. Norway's long dominance of the northern sea trade withered as Germany's Hanseatic League rose to ascendancy. Although the league's bigger ships could carry more cargo than Norwegian vessels, they apparently never anchored in Greenland. The dangerous ocean crossing would have put them at too much risk for too little gain, especially now that elephant ivory, once difficult to obtain, could be gotten easily from Africa and replaced walrus ivory in prominence. As the Greenlanders' isolation from Europe grew, they found themselves victims of a steadily deteriorating environment. Their farmland, exploited to the full, had lost fertility. Erosion followed severe reductions in ground cover. The cutting of dwarf willows and alders for fuel and for the production of charcoal to use in the smelting of bog iron, which yielded soft, inferior metal, deprived the soil of its anchor of roots. Pollen analysis shows a dramatic decline in these species during the Viking years. In addition, livestock probably consumed any regenerating scrub. Overgrazing, trampling, and scuffing by the Norsemen's sheep, goats and cattle, the core of the island's livelihood, left the land debased. Greenland's climate began to change as well; the summers grew shorter and progressively cooler, limiting the time cattle could be kept outdoors and increasing the need for winter fodder. During the worst years, when rains would have been heaviest, the hay crop would barely have been adequate to see the penned animals through the coldest days. Over the decades the drop in temperature seems to have had an effect on the design of the Greenlanders' houses. Originally conceived as single-roomed structures, like the great hall at Brattahlid, they were divided into smaller spaces for warmth, and then into warrens of interconnected chambers, with the cows kept close by so the owners might benefit from the animals' body heat. [14][image] Site of the great hall with sheep resting on the foundation. In a similar building, perhaps on the very spot, Leif Ericson may well have entertained family and friends with tales of his North American exploits. (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [15][LARGER IMAGE] When the Norsemen arrived in Greenland, they had the island and its waters to themselves. Now they had to contend with the Inuit, who were competing with them for animal resources. This was especially true in the Nordseta, the Greenlanders' traditional summer hunting grounds 240 miles north of the Eastern Settlement. For years the Norsemen had been traveling to the area; they killed the walruses, narwahls, and polar bears they needed for trade with Europe and for payment of Church tithes and royal taxes. They also boiled seal blubber, filled skin bags with the oil, and gathered valuable driftwood. Inuit-Norse relations seem to have been fairly friendly at times, hostile at others. Few Inuit objects have been unearthed at the farms. Various Norse items, including bits of chain mail and a hinged bronze bar from a folding scale, have been found at Inuit camps in Greenland, mainland Canada, and on Baffin, Ellesmere, and Devon Islands. These are suggestive of commerce between the two peoples, but they may also have been seized by Inuit during raids on hunting parties in the Nordseta or plundered from farms. Norse mention of the Inuit is curiously scant in the surviving documents. An old story tells of hunters coming across "small people," the Skraelings, with whom the Greenlanders apparently fought. The text says that when these people "are hit, their wounds turn white and they do not bleed, but when they die there is no end to the bleeding." The next account is that of Ivar Bardarson in his Description of Greenland; Bardarson reported on the take-over of the Western Settlement by the Skraelings, with the implication that they had killed the inhabitants. Years later, another source describes a Skraeling attack in the Eastern Settlement, in which 18 Greenlanders met their deaths and two boys and a woman were captured. As Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee has pointed out, there is no physical evidence of massacres, the destruction of Norse property, or the takeover and reuse of Norse shelters by the Inuit, and nothing in Inuit tales of Inuit-Norse contact to back up Bardarson's claim. One valley farm, excavated in 1976 and 1977, revealed just how desperate some of the Greenlanders had become. During a freezing winter, the farmers killed and ate their livestock, including a newborn calf and lamb, leaving the bones and hoofs on the ground. Even the deerhound, probably the companion of many a hunt, may have been slaughtered for food; one of its leg bones bore the knicks of a knifeblade. Similar remains were found on another farm, but if, like their masters, the animals were starving, their fatless meat would have offered little nourishment. Whoever killed the animals was used to living in squalid conditions. The bone-littered earthen floors had been spread with an insulating layer of twigs that attracted mice and a variety of insect pests. Study of the farms' ancient insect fauna revealed the remains of flies. Brought inadvertently from Europe, the flies were dependent for their survival on the warm environment of the Norse houses and on the less than sanitary state of the interiors. Radiocarbon dating of their remains revealed that they died out suddenly when these conditions ceased to prevail around 1350, presumably when the structures were no longer inhabited. Some of the rooms had been used as latrines, possibly out of habit or because the occupants were reluctant to venture out into the searing cold. An ice core drilled from the island's massive icecap between 1992 and 1993 shows a decided cooling off in the Western Settlement during the mid-fourteenth century. Ruins of a barn. Upright stones divided the cow stalls; a whale shoulder blade (white partition on right) also served as a divider. (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [16][LARGER IMAGE] [17][image] A church graveyard at Herjolfsnes on the southernmost tip of Greenland sheds further light on the final days of the Eastern Settlement. Reports reached Danish archaeologists in the 1920s that the cemetery was being washed away by the sea and that bones and scraps of clothing from the graves were strewn on the beach. The archaeologists hurried to save what remained. The skeletons revealed a hard life; teeth showed heavy wear and the joints of many adults were thickened by rheumatism. Though the flesh had rotted away, the heavy woolen apparel the dead wore to the grave remained intact. No fewer than 30 robes, 17 hoods or cowls, five hats, and six woven stockings (knitting had yet to be invented) emerged from the frozen earth. Most of the robes were heavily patched, but were in good enough condition to be wearable. The clothes were thought to reflect French and Dutch fashions, an unexpected find in a country supposedly out of touch with the rest of the world at the time. The generously cut hoods provided ample covering for shoulders and featured a long, decorative streamer known as a liripipe that hung down the back and could be wrapped across the face or around the hands to provide extra warmth. The most intriguing find seemed to be a tall cap, rather like a stove-pipe hat but flared at the back and without a brim. The archaeologists thought they recognized it as a Burgundian cap, which they had seen in European paintings of the high middle ages. Yet oddly here it was in Greenland. How were they to explain this anomaly? Because of its location, Herjolfsnes had been the first port of call for ships from Iceland and northern Europe. Archaeologists wondered who might have come to Greenland after Norse traders ceased to arrive. The most likely answer was English sea rovers or Basque whalers. According to their own tradition, Basques founded a whaling station in Newfoundland as early as 1372. They had only to follow Leif Eriksson's route north to reach Greenland. The archaeologists working on the site surmised that these Basques might well have stepped ashore sporting the new fangled Burgundian cap, which some fashion-starved Greenlander rushed to copy. This suggested that the islanders, no matter how cut off they may have been from Europe, still hungered for things European. The questions persist: what happened in the end to the last of the Greenlanders? what fate did the people who laid their loved ones to rest in this graveyard by the sea meet? who buried them when they died, and where? did the Greenlanders give up the island and depart for North America, as was said of the western settlers? It is hard to imagine such a mass-migration occurring, if for no other reason than that the islanders lacked the boats to carry it out. Without a ready source of nails, bolts, and wood for repairs, any ships that may have survived from earlier days would have made a leaky fleet indeed. Were the Greenlanders killed off by the Black Plague? Iceland's population had been reduced by as much as two-thirds when an epidemic struck in 1402 and dragged on for two years. Norway had suffered similarly. Had the Greenlanders also been afflicted, mass graves would tell the tale of the dying, and none from this period have been discovered. Were the islanders subject to intermittent pirate raids? It is conceivable that ship-borne marauders, rather than Skraelings, could have descended on the Western Settlement, but who could they have been? Basques? Perhaps. The archaeological date for the "Burgundian cap", set at A.D. 1500, has since been over-turned by radiocarbon dating. The new date for the cap is around 1300, suggesting that it reflected Nordic rather than southern European fashion. Such high-crowned caps are mentioned in Icelandic sagas from 1200-1300 and have been found as examples of women's fashion from this period. Archaeologists initially questioned the feasibility of the theory of an attack on the Greenlanders by Basques, believing the cap to be exemplary of Basque-influenced fashion, which seemed to preclude the possibility that the Norse settlers and the Basques were enemies. The re-dated cap is no longer evidence of friendly Greenlander-Basque relations, and the Basques are once again possible culprits in the mystery of the disappearance of the Greenlanders. English and German pirates also made several brutal attacks on Iceland in the fifteenth century; possibly they struck Greenland as well, though the new dates for the Greenlanders' clothing suggests minimal, if any, contact with Europeans. One Inuit story, recorded by Niels Egede, a Dane who grew up in Greenland during the eighteenth century when Denmark recolonized the island, lends some credence to the story of European raids. The narrator, whose ancestors had passed down the tale, recounts how three alien ships sailed in from the southwest "to plunder." In the ensuing fray, several of the Norsemen, to whom he refers as Norwegians, were killed. "But after the Norwegians had mastered them," he relates, "two of the ships had to sail away and the third they captured. The next year a whole fleet arrived and fought with the Norwegians, plundering and killing to obtain food. The survivors put out their vessels, loaded with what was left, and sailed away south, leaving some people behind. The next year the pirates came back again, and when we saw them we fled, taking some of the Norwegian women and children with us up the fjord, and left the others in the lurch. When we returned in the autumn hoping to find some people again, we saw to our horror that everything had been carried away, and houses and farms were burned down so that nothing was left." Once again the absence of any archaeological evidence of such violence leaves the tale unsubstantiated. Of all the houses so far studied in the Western Settlement, only one can be said to have been destroyed by fire. If such raids happened in the larger Eastern Settlement there would be signs of the havoc they wrought. The churches of both colonies seem to have been stripped bare, but a people intent on protecting their contents would have removed the sacred items and hidden them or, if the Greenlanders were indeed the irreligious rapscallions some sources say they were, sold them. [18][image] A Danish monument to Eric the Red at Brattahlid (Dale Mackenzie Brown) [19][LARGER IMAGE] In the end, the answer to the Greenlander question may be a lot less dramatic than the theories that have surrounded it in mystery. Thomas McGovern of New York's Hunter College, who has participated in excavations in Greenland, has proposed that the Norsemen lost the ability to adapt to changing conditions. He sees them as the victims of hidebound thinking and of a hierarchical society dominated by the Church and the biggest land owners. In their reluctance to see themselves as anything but Europeans, the Greenlanders failed to adopt the kind of apparel that the Inuit employed as protection against the cold and damp or to borrow any of the Eskimo hunting gear. They ignored the toggle harpoon, which would have allowed them to catch seals through holes in the ice in winter when food was scarce, and they seem not even to have bothered with fishhooks, which they could have fashioned easily from bone, as did the Inuit. Instead, the Norsemen remained wedded to their farms and to the raising of sheep, goats, and cattle in the face of ever worsening conditions that must have made maintaining their herds next to impossible. McGovern also believes that as life became harder, the birthrate declined. The young people who did come along may have seen a brighter future waiting somewhere else. The depredations of the plague in Iceland and in Norway could have created vacancies overseas that able-bodied Greenlanders might have filled. Through the years there may have been a slow but persistent drift of Greenlanders to those places that had been home to their ancestors, further reducing the island's dwindling population. Not everyone would have left; some must have stayed on their homesteads, unable to give up old attachments and resolved to wait out their fate. One such stoic was found lying face down on the beach of a fjord in the 1540s by a party of Icelandic seafarers, who like so many sailors before them had been blown off course on their passage to Iceland and wound up in Greenland. The only Norseman they would come across during their stay, he died where he had fallen, dressed in a hood, homespun woolens and seal skins. Nearby lay his knife, "bent and much worn and eaten away." Moved by their find, the men took it as a memento and carried it with them to show when at last they reached home. Dale Mackenzie Brown, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, was the editor of Time-Life Books' archaeology book series, Lost Civilizations. From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Sep 3 22:54:21 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 18:54:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] We the 80% Message-ID: <5758315.1125788061959.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Subject: We the 80% Declare that this is our country as much as it is theirs. Declare that it is immoral for a few to have so much when so many have so little. Declare that good government is a necessary part of civilization, to serve the common good. Declare that we should trade for the resources we need, not fight wars for them. Declare that good health care is a good investment, and should be provided for all. Declare that we should join the world community rather than trying to dominate it. Steve Hovland San Francisco September 3, 2005 From HowlBloom at aol.com Sun Sep 4 03:04:35 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2005 23:04:35 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] joel--time, distinction-making, and aggregation Message-ID: <1f3.11340f58.304bbe43@aol.com> In a message dated 9/3/2005 1:04:43 PM Eastern Standard Time, isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes: Yes. In my process the opposites are termed generically "quids" and "quods". In one-dimension, quids are broken lines and quods are continuous lines; very much like generalized yin and yang. And the whole process may be viewed as a generalized yin/yang system. One subtle thing to be kept in mind. Quid/quod (or separation/aggregation) are derived (or emergent) attributes from more primitive activities that involve local distinction-making. So, ultimately (recursive) distinction-making is the engine of all there is. hb: this is hearty meat for thought. What is reponsible for the distinction-making process? What is its origin? Is time the maker of distinctions and of aggregations? Is time some sort of algorithm, a basic rule, for the extraction of new distinctions and aggregations from the data of the previous recursion, extracting implications from the previous instant of Planck time? Or, to put it differently, does time follow rules? Are those rules more complex than just "take the next step"? How does time extract the implicit and make it explicit? How does it translate what was into what is? Then how does it do it all over again? Is time a process, a mechanism? Is it something we can't comprehend with our current tool kit of metaphors? This is really a quesion the paper Pavel Kurakin and I have written moves toward answering in a very primitive and speculative way: _http://arxiv.org/ftp/quant-ph/papers/0504/0504088.pdf_ (http://arxiv.org/ftp/quant-ph/papers/0504/0504088.pdf) . Howard ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Sun Sep 4 04:29:35 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 00:29:35 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Eshel, Joel, Paul, and Pavel--not to mention Ted and Greg Message-ID: Very good thinking. Below is the basic search pattern that I see in life forms from bacteria to humans. I have a question. Is this search pattern mirrored in inaminate evolution--in the 10 billion years of cosmic evolution that occurred before life began? Is there an anolog or precursor to this pattern in the evolution of inanimate matter. Howard everyone is insecure. insecurity is one of the things that keeps us attached to each other and to society. Uncertainty and the nervous sense that we?d better get a quick reality check is one of the prime movers of the group brain. insecurity is so basic to life that even ants and bacteria get insecure. they need to rub up against each other for reassurance over and over and over again. chimps too. They dash out of the group for an adventure, get insecure as hell, dash back, and when they plunge into the warmth of the crowd and rub up against as many of their sisters or brothers as it takes to calm them down, they accomplish something more than mere self-comfort. They give a bit of information on the territory they?ve just explored. Each does a little antenna-and-scouting work for the crowd. Each gets a little from the antenna work of her insecure sisters who?ve dashed out ebulliently to explore, then have gotten the shivers and come back to share their experience and get some much needed warmth. Even when we move into strange emotional territory, we need to dash back and share it with a friend to make sure we?re sane and to get reassurance. In the process we reveal a bit of emotional exploration to the friend. Ever wonder about why one of the largest churches in the history of mankind was able to make such an enormous business out of confession? There are some things so shameful we can?t even talk about them with our friends. So who?s in the business of listening to what we don?t dare tell a soul? Not only listening and affirming us, but absolving us to boot? Yes, the good old Catholic Church. Our insecurities keep us together as an information processing engine. Our restlessness keeps us going off in new directions so we? ll have something to share. Every time we panic and run to talk to a friend we are providing new stuff for the data cruncher of society to munch. so what's true of chimps and ants and microbes is gonna be true for you and me. In a message dated 9/2/2005 11:00:57 AM Eastern Standard Time, obi.fox at gmail.com writes: Howl, while I fundamentally agree with your position, my present fascination with the neurophysiology of the biological mechanism leads me to suggest that it may not be the function of "search" itself which will lead to the answer you seek - but rather that of the manner in which it is mitigated and modified by the function of avoidance. As my grandfather (dean of physics at Columbia for 30 yrs) taught me in my youth - one will never fully understand the qualities of attraction unless you are able to account for the factor of repulsion as well. When you look at much of the present research in neurophysiology a pattern begins to appear in which "search" is the primary S/R response of the biomass. It is a pretty straight-forward, target oriented, response of distance reduction. The patterns or "strategies" only emerge when you factor in the manner in which the braking mechanism (avoidance sequences) operate simultaneously and change/redirect the movement and orientation. The third factor in the equation, which is usually overlooked, is the role of proximity - particularly in relation to avoidance/repulsion. I strongly suspect that this combination (repulsion/proximity) is the factor which Tsallis's equation takes into account. As I am not a physicist (just a philosopher with a fascination with the behavioral mechanism) I can't give you much more than this clue. I am, however, reasonably sure that it is the critical factor in the movement and orientation of sentient organisms and strongly suspect it is, as you suggest, a reflection of the underlying physical laws of the universe. cheers OBi Fox On 8/31/05, _HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com) <_HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com) > wrote: Pavel, Joel, Paul, and Eshel? See if I've understood the following article correctly. In this cosmos things don't follow the sort of random spread of probabilities Ludwig Boltzmann believed in. Instead, old patterns jump from one level to another, showing up in new news. To understand the size and nature of the jumps, we have to understand something even deeper?the search strategies with which the cosmos explores what Stuart Kaufman calls "possibility space". The key quote from the article below is this one: "if physicists can adequately understand the details of this 'exploring behaviour', they should be able to predict values of q from first principles ". Now please bear with me. What I've been digging into for many decades is the manner in which the cosmos feels out her possibilities?the search strategies of nature. So have Eshel Ben-Jacob, Paul Werbos, Pavel Kurakin, and Joel Isaacson. Pavel and I, in our paper "Conversation (dialog) model of quantum transitions" (arXiv.org) suggest that we may find applications all up and down the scale of nature to one search strategy in particular, that used by a cloud of 20,000 smart particles?bees. Power laws help us move from the human-scale to the very big. They help us understand how patterns visible on one scale?the scale of the spiral of water that flushes your toilet, for example, can be scaled up to hurricanes, to vortex of the Red Spot on the surface of Jupiter, to hurricanes on Jupiter the size of thirty earths, and to the spirals of billions of stars called galaxies. Power laws or their equivalent also allow us to predict that if we give the cosmos another six or seven billion years, the spirals from your toilet will show up in swirls of multitudes of galaxies?they will show up in today's potato-shaped, still-embryonic galaxy clusters. Power laws can be used in forward or reverse. In addition to going from the small to the very big, they can help us move from the human-scale to the very small. Power laws help us understand how the swirl in your bathtub shows up in the swizzles of electrons twisting through a channel on a superconductor. On the level of life, we can see search patterns at work, search patterns in Dennis Bray's clusters of receptors on a cell wall, search patterns in Eshel Ben-Jacobs multi-trillion-member bacterial colonies, search patterns in Tom Seeley's colonies of bees, search patterns in E.O. Wilson's colonies of ants, and search patterns in colonies of termites. We can see search patterns in the motions of birds, and in the way these patterns have been modeled mathematically in Floys (mathematically-generated flocks of carnivorous Boids?see _http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html_ (http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html) ). We can see search patterns in Martha Sherwood's vampire bats, and search patterns in the areas of my fieldwork--human cultural fads and fashions and the multi-generational search patterns of art, religion, ideology, world-views, and science. If search patterns are the key to understanding the factor q, if they are the key to comprehending the magic factor that scales things up and down in giant, discontinuous leaps, then let's by all means take search patterns at the scale of life and apply them like hell. That's exactly what Pavel Kurakin and I have done in our paper. And it's what I've done in much of my work, including in a book that's been growing in the Bloom computer for fifteen years-- A Universe In Search Of Herself?The Case of the Curious Cosmos. Now the question is this. Have I misinterpreted the material below? And even if I've mangled it utterly, could an understanding of search patterns at one scale in the cosmos echo the patterns at other levels big and small? If the search patterns of life are reflected in the inanimate cosmos, do the search patterns of life in turn reflect the search patterns of the particles and processes of which they are made? And do the search patterns of an organism reflect the search patterns of her flock, her tribe, her culture, and of the total team of biomass? To what extent are competing search patterns a part of the cosmic process? Did competing search patterns only show up 3.85 billion years ago with the advent of life (assuming that the advent of life on earth took place at the same time as the advent of life?if there is any?elsewhere in the universe)? Are the gaps between competing search patterns also big ones, with their own chasms and jumps spaced out by their own mysterious q? Biomass has been probing this planet for 3.85 billion years now, and we are the fingers with which she feels out her possibilities. But we are also the fingers through which social clusters of protons 13.7 billion years old feel out their future. Is q related to the discipline of a probing strategy? Retrieved August 31, 2005, from the World Wide Web _http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700_ (http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700) NewScientist.com * HOME * |NEWS * |EXPLORE BY SUBJECT * |LAST WORD * |SUBSCRIBE * |SEARCH * |ARCHIVE * |RSS * |JOBS Click to Print Entropy: The new order * 27 August 2005 * From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. * Mark Buchanan CONSTANTINO TSALLIS has a single equation written on the blackboard in his office. It looks like one of the most famous equations in physics, but look more closely and it's a little bit different, decorated with some extra symbols and warped into a peculiar new form. Tsallis, based at the Brazilian Centre for Research in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, is excited to have created this new equation. And no wonder: his unassuming arrangement of symbols has stimulated hundreds of researchers to publish more than a thousand papers in the past decade, describing strange patterns in fluid flows, in magnetic fields issuing from the sun and in the subatomic debris created in particle accelerators. But there is something even more remarkable about Tsallis's equation: it came to him in a daydream. In 1985, in a classroom in Mexico City, Tsallis was listening as a colleague explained something to a student. On the chalkboard they had written a very ordinary algebraic expression, pq, representing some number p raised to the power q In Tsallis's line of work - describing the collective properties of large numbers of particles - the letter "p" usually stands for probability: the probability that a particle will have a particular velocity, say. Tsallis stared at the formula from a distance and his mind drifted off. "There were these pqs all over the board," he recalls, "and it suddenly came to my mind - like a flash - that with powers of probabilities one might do some unusual but possibly quite interesting physics." The physics involved may be more than quite interesting, however. The standard means of describing the collective properties of large numbers of particles - known as statistical mechanics - has been hugely successful for more than a century, but it has also been rather limited in its scope: you can only apply it to a narrow range of systems. Now, with an insight plucked out of thin air, Tsallis may have changed all that. Developed in the 19th century, statistical mechanics enabled physicists to overcome an imposing problem. Ordinary materials such as water, iron or glass are made of myriad atoms. But since it is impossible to calculate in perfect detail how every individual atom or molecule will move, it seems as if it might never be possible to understand the behaviour of such substances at the atomic level. The solution, as first suggested by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, lay in giving up hope of perfect understanding and working with probabilities instead. Boltzmann argued that knowing the probabilities for the particles to be in any of their various possible configurations would enable someone to work out the overall properties of the system. Going one step further, he also made a bold and insightful guess about these probabilities - that any of the many conceivable configurations for the particles would be equally probable. Deeper beauty Boltzmann's idea works, and has enabled physicists to make mathematical models of thousands of real materials, from simple crystals to superconductors. But his work also has a deeper beauty. For a start, it reflects the fact that many quantities in nature - such as the velocities of molecules in a gas - follow "normal" statistics. That is, they are closely grouped around the average value, with a "bell curve" distribution. The theory also explains why, if left to their own devices, systems tend to get disorganised. Boltzmann argued that any system that can be in several different configurations is most likely to be in the more spread out and disorganised condition. Air molecules in a box, for example, can gather neatly in a corner, but are more likely to fill the space evenly. That's because there are overwhelmingly more arrangements of the particles that will produce the spread out, jumbled state than arrangements that will concentrate the molecules in a corner. This way of thinking led to the famous notion of entropy - a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. In its most elegant formulation, Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, which was later developed mathematically by the American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, asserts that, under many conditions, a physical system will act so as to maximise its entropy. And yet Boltzmann and Gibbs's statistical mechanics doesn't explain everything: a great swathe of nature eludes its grasp entirely. Boltzmann's guess about equal probabilities only works for systems that have settled down to equilibrium, enjoying, for example, the same temperature throughout. The theory fails in any system where destabilising external sources of energy are at work, such as the haphazard motion of turbulent fluids or the fluctuating energies of cosmic rays. These systems don't follow normal statistics, but another pattern instead. If you repeatedly measure the difference in fluid velocity at two distinct points in a turbulent fluid, for instance, the probability of finding a particular velocity difference is roughly proportional to the amount of that difference raised to the power of some exponent. This pattern is known as a "power law", and such patterns turn up in many other areas of physics, from the distribution of energies of cosmic rays to the fluctuations of river levels or wind speeds over a desert. Because ordinary statistical mechanics doesn't explain power laws, their atomic-level origins remain largely mysterious, which is why many physicists find Tsallis's mathematics so enticing. In Mexico City, coming out of his reverie, Tsallis wrote up some notes on his idea, and soon came to a formula that looked something like the standard formula for the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy - but with a subtle difference. If he set q to 1 in the formula - so that pq became the probability p - the new formula reduced to the old one. But if q was not equal to 1, it made the formula produce something else. This led Tsallis to a new definition of entropy. He called it q entropy. Back then, Tsallis had no idea what q might actually signify, but the way this new entropy worked mathematically suggested he might be on to something. In particular, the power-law pattern tumbles out of the theory quite naturally. Over the past decade, researchers have shown that Tsallis's mathematics seem to describe power-law behaviour accurately in a wide range of phenomena, from fluid turbulence to the debris created in the collisions of high-energy particles. But while the idea of maximising q entropy seems to work empirically, allowing people to fit their data to power-law curves and come up with a value of q for individual systems, it has also landed Tsallis in some hot water. The new mathematics seems to work, yet no one knows what the q entropy really represents, or why any physical system should maximise it. Degrees of chaos And for this reason, many physicists remain sceptical, or worse. "I have to say that I don't buy it at all," says physicist Cosma Shalizi of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who criticises the mathematical foundations of Tsallis's approach. As he points out, the usual Boltzmann procedure for maximising the entropy in statistical mechanics assumes a fixed value for the average energy of a system, a natural idea. But to make things work out within the Tsallis framework, researchers have to fix the value of another quantity - a "generalised" energy - that has no clear physical interpretation. "I have yet to encounter anyone," says Shalizi, "who can explain why this should be natural." To his critics, Tsallis's success is little more than sleight of hand: the equation may simply provide a convenient way to generate power laws, which researchers can then fit to data by choosing the right value of q "My impression," says Guido Caldarelli of La Sapienza University in Rome, "is that the method really just fits data by adjusting a parameter. I'm not yet convinced there's new physics here." Physicist Peter Grassberger of the University of Wuppertal in Germany goes further. "It is all nonsense," he says. "It has led to no new predictions, nor is it based on rational arguments." The problem is that most work applying Tsallis's ideas has simply chosen a value of q to make the theory fit empirical data, without tying q to the real dynamics of the system in any deeper way: there's nothing to show why these dynamics depart from Boltzmann's picture of equal probabilities. Tsallis, who is now at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, acknowledges this is a limitation, but suggests that a more fundamental explanation is already on its way. Power laws, he argues, should tend to arise in "weakly chaotic" systems. In this kind of system, small perturbations might not be enough to alter the arrangement of molecules. As a result, the system won't "explore" all possible configurations over time. In a properly chaotic system, on the other hand, even tiny perturbations will keep sending the system into new configurations, allowing it to explore all its states as required for Boltzmann statistics. Tsallis argues that if physicists can adequately understand the details of this "exploring behaviour", they should be able to predict values of q from first principles . In particular, he proposes, some as yet unknown single parameter - closely akin to q - should describe the degree of chaos in any system. Working out its value by studying a system's basic dynamics would then let physicists predict the value of q that then emerges in its statistics. Other theoretical work seems to support this possibility. For example, in a paper soon to appear in Physical Review E, physicist Alberto Robledo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City has examined several classic models that physicists have used to explore the phenomenon of chaos. What makes these models useful is that they can be tuned to be more or less chaotic - and so used to explore the transition from one kind of behaviour to another. Using these model systems, Robledo has been able to carry out Tsallis's prescription, deriving a value of q just from studying the system's fundamental dynamics. That value of q then reproduces intricate power-law properties for these systems at the threshold of chaos. "This work shows that q can be deduced from first principles," Tsallis says. While Robledo has tackled theoretical issues, other researchers have made the same point with real observations. In a paper just published, Leonard Burlaga and Adolfo Vinas at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, study fluctuations in the properties of the solar wind - the stream of charged particles that flows outward from the sun - and show that they conform to Tsallis's ideas. They have found that the dynamics of the solar wind, as seen in changes in its velocity and magnetic field strength, display weak chaos of the type envisioned by Tsallis. Burlaga and Vinas have also found that the fluctuations of the magnetic field follow power laws that fit Tsallis's framework with q set to 1.75 (Physica A, vol 356, p 275). The chance that a more comprehensive formulation of Tsallis's q entropy might eventually be found intrigues physicist Ezequiel Cohen of the Rockefeller University in New York City. "I think a good part of the establishment takes an unfair position towards Tsallis's work," he says. "The critique that all he does is 'curve fitting' is, in my opinion, misplaced." Cohen has also started building his own work on Tsallis's foundations. Two years ago, with Christian Beck of Queen Mary, University of London, he proposed an idea known as "superstatistics" that would incorporate the statistics of both Boltzmann and Tsallis within a larger framework. In this work they revisited the limitation of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's models cannot cope with any system in which external forces churn up differences such as variations in temperature. A particle moving through such a system would experience many temperatures for short periods and its fluctuations would reflect an average of the ordinary Boltzmann statistics for all those different temperatures. Cohen and Beck showed that such averaged statistics, emerging out of the messy non-uniformity of real systems, take the very same form as Tsallis statistics, and lead to power laws. In one striking example, Beck showed how the distribution of the energies of cosmic rays could emerge from random fluctuations in the temperature of the hot matter where they were originally created. Cohen thinks that, if nothing else, Tsallis's powers of probabilities have served to reawaken physicists to fundamental questions they have never quite answered. After all Boltzmann's idea, though successful, was also based on a guess; Albert Einstein disliked Boltzmann's arbitrary assumption of "equal probabilities" and insisted that a proper theory of matter had to rest on a deep understanding of the real dynamics of particles. That understanding still eludes us, but Tsallis may have taken us closer. It is possible that, in his mysterious q entropy, Tsallis has discovered a kind of entropy just as useful as Boltzmann's and especially suited to the real-world systems in which the traditional theory fails. "Tsallis made the first attempt to go beyond Boltzmann," says Cohen. The door is now open for others to follow. Close this window Printed on Thu Sep 01 01:17:25 BST 2005 ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute _www.howardbloom.net_ (http://www.howardbloom.net/) _www.bigbangtango.net_ (http://www.bigbangtango.net/) Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: _www.paleopsych.org_ (http://www.paleopsych.org/) for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see _www.howardbloom.net/lucifer _ (http://www.howardbloom.net/lucifer) For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see _www.howardbloom.net _ (http://www.howardbloom.net/) _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list _paleopsych at paleopsych.org _ (mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org) _http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych_ (http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych) ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Sun Sep 4 05:51:37 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sat, 03 Sep 2005 22:51:37 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] We the 80% In-Reply-To: <5758315.1125788061959.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <5758315.1125788061959.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <431A8B69.2000703@earthlink.net> Trading for resources is a noble idea except when all parties are after the same resource i.e. oil. I'm clueless how oil can equably be bartered. There is not enough oil anywhere to meet needs of all global countries. Gerry Reinhart-Waller shovland at mindspring.com wrote: >Subject: We the 80% > >Declare that this is our country as much as it is theirs. > >Declare that it is immoral for a few to have so much when so many have so little. > >Declare that good government is a necessary part of civilization, to serve the common good. > >Declare that we should trade for the resources we need, not fight wars for them. > >Declare that good health care is a good investment, and should be provided for all. > >Declare that we should join the world community rather than trying to dominate it. > > >Steve Hovland >San Francisco >September 3, 2005 > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 14:50:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:50:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: Passion and the Prisoner Message-ID: Passion and the Prisoner http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/magazine/28WWLN.html By DAPHNE MERKIN I once wanted to write a novel called ''Bad Taste,'' about a female character who has incomprehensibly rotten instincts when it comes to making romantic choices. While I was toying with this idea, I was also deeply enamored of a man whose upper-middle-class presentation (which included engraved stationery of the thickest stock, on which he penned the most proper of thank-you notes) couldn't fully mask some alarming tendencies, one of which required him to report in monthly to a law-enforcement agent as to his whereabouts. This relationship had followed upon a two-year involvement with another questionable sort who ended up serving a yearlong prison sentence after we stopped going out, convicted of some white-collar malfeasance he may or may not have committed. By that low point in his life he was married to another woman, but all the same, he sent me letters from the clink describing his daily routine (which seemed to consist of working out in the gym and taking computer courses courtesy of the federal government). I always felt a faint outlaw thrill when an envelope bearing a Pennyslvania postmark and an anonymous, ''Stalag 17''-like return address (Bunk #, Unit #, Division #) arrived in the mail, as if I were implicated in the whole sordid drama, a Bonnie Parker by proxy. Although my yen for bad-boy types has always had its limits, at least in real life, I was reminded of these wayward ex-boyfriends by the ''Bonnie and Clyde'' doings that took place outside a Tennessee courthouse on Aug. 9. These starred Jennifer Forsyth Hyatte, a 31-year-old former prison nurse who stands accused of killing a corrections officer in the attempt to spring her 34-year-old convict husband, George Hyatte, who was serving 35 years for aggravated robbery and assault, as he was leaving a hearing in handcuffs and shackles. After his wife, in response to her husband's directive, ''Shoot 'em!'' opened fire on the two officers escorting Hyatte, fatally injuring one, the couple set off on a 300-mile escape route. In a strangely calm conclusion to the manhunt that this murderous outburst set off, the lovebirds were arrested -- ''without incident'' -- a mere day and a half later in a Best Value motel along Interstate 71 in Columbus, Ohio. Jennifer Hyatte, the mother of three from a previous marriage and herself the daughter of a former sheriff's deputy, had no prior criminal record. She was married less than three months to her current husband when she sacrificed her own prospects in a wild plot to free him. Her mother characterized her as a loving wife and mother; her ex-husband seconded these claims. Jennifer had sole custody of her children and had put herself through nursing school. The questions that inevitably arise are How did she go from being a solid citizen to acting like a bandit? And why? Whatever the reasons behind Mrs. Hyatte's perplexing behavior -- a rescue fantasy, a need to nurture, the sexual excitement of being with a violent person (also known as hybristophilia), a wish for attention, a sense of low self-esteem, a grandiose us-against-them scheme -- she is far from alone in her seemingly lunatic infatuation with a man behind bars. Indeed, she is part of what has been recognized as a growing phenomemon, one common enough to have spawned Web sites like [3]WriteaPrisoner.com and [4]inmates.com as well as psychological studies with titles like ''Women Who Love Men Who Kill.'' This is the phenomenon of women who are attracted to the scent of demonic males -- fatally dangerous guys like Erik and Lyle Menendez, Robert Chambers and Scott Peterson. (Both Menendez brothers married in prison; Chambers was reportedly so besieged by transfixed females vying to smuggle him contraband that he had to be transferred to another jail; and Peterson has received at least two marriage proposals). The indubitably handsome and unlamented Ted Bundy was perhaps the archetypal demonic male, one who successfully posed as the dreamboat next door time and again, with the charm and verbal facility to knock the socks off any young woman unlucky enough to meet up with him when he was out cruising for prey. But while it would make for a simpler hypothesis if we could attribute the allure of inmates to their brute physical appeal, the truth is that even a one-eyed serial killer like Henry Lee Lucas had women panting after him, while John Wayne Gacy -- no one's idea of attractive and gay to boot (he killed 33 young men during homosexual encounters) -- became involved with a woman in prison. I suppose we who believe in an unconscious life should understand by now that if it's difficult to figure out the rationale for your friends' marriages and love affairs, it's well nigh impossible to figure out why some women fall for miscreants. The apparent emotional illogic of killer cachet may make for a sweet lyric in a Waylon Jennings song -- ''Ladies love outlaws like babies love stray dogs'' -- but it has left cultural observers scrambling for answers. These range from assigning blame to Western culture as a whole for adulating male violence to blaming a particular family background for creating the sort of vulnerable female who is looking to have some power in a world that has granted her none by hooking up with a man who is both dependent on her and has exhibited his dominance over others. It has been more than 25 years since Gary Gilmore was executed after issuing his succinct last words, ''Let's do it.'' I had a crush on him from the moment he appeared on the scene for any number of reasons: his good looks; his soulful letters to his pretty girlfriend, Nicole; the wounded aura of defiance he carried with him. Even after reading everything ever written about him, from Norman Mailer's ''Executioner's Song,'' which glamorized him, to his brother Mikal's ''Shot in the Heart,'' which cut him down to pitiful and thuggish size, I think I'd still pick his photo out of a lineup of eligible men. What's a lady to do? Such is the unreasonable pull of pheromones, such are the crooked ways of love. Daphne Merkin, a critic and novelist, is a frequent contributor to the magazine. References 3. http://WriteaPrisoner.com/ 4. http://inmates.com/ From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 14:50:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:50:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] UTexas: Species evolve to the brink of evolution Message-ID: Species evolve to the brink of evolution http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2005/08/biology26.html August 26, 2005 AUSTIN, Texas--A biologist at The University of Texas at Austin has presented a new theory that sheds light on how organisms, including viruses like HIV, rapidly evolve in the face of vaccines and antibiotics. Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers says the new model could help identify genes that increase a pathogen's ability to evolve quickly against immune responses. Knowing those genes could help scientists develop new and better vaccines. Meyers' model predicts that populations can evolve "genetic potential"--genes that can create new traits quickly and simply in changing environments. "In fluctuating environments, you may get populations evolving right to the brink of evolution," says Meyers. The organisms are poised to evolve in the face of environmental shifts, because they have genes that can produce a new trait essential to their survival with one or two simple mutations. Meyers' model for rapid evolution appears in the Aug. 26 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology. Genetic mutations create the variation that natural selection acts upon. But mutations can be disadvantageous or even deadly, so organisms have evolved so that most simple mutations have little or no biological impact. Mutations are buffered by repair mechanisms and redundancies, like other genes that perform the same function. For organisms constantly facing new challenges in ever-changing environments, however, there's an advantage to creating new traits quickly. Previous explanations of rapid evolution have focused on the rate at which mutations occur in the genome. These theories suggest that populations can evolve new traits faster if they are hypermutable, that is, they have faster rates of mutation. Meyers' idea is significantly different, because it shows populations can adapt quickly without a faster rate of genetic mutation. Instead, the populations evolve genes that can be easily altered to create new traits. "Evolution can accelerate without changing the mutation rate itself--it's the evolution of the ability to evolve--that's the novel insight of this work," says Meyers. Meyers is an assistant professor in the Section of Integrative Biology with a faculty position at the Santa Fe Institute. Co-authors on the paper include Meyers' father, Dr. Fredric Ancel, from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Dr. Michael Lachmann, of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. For more information contact: [18]Lee Clippard, College of Natural Sciences, 512-232-0675. Related Sites: * [19]Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers * [20]Section of Integrative Biology * [21]College of Natural Sciences * [22]Santa Fe Institute Related Stories: * [23]Computer science team designs smart agent, wins international supply chain manufacturing competition - 11 August 2005 * [24]New method for quantum cooling discovered by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin - 3 August 2005 * [25]Chemical engineer and biologist make list of world's top young innovators - 20 September 2004 * [26]Predicting the Path of Infectious Diseases: Mathematical modeling traces the spread of SARS and other illnesses through human contact - 6 October 2003 [27]Office of Public Affairs P.O. Box Z Austin, TX 78713 512-471-3151 Fax 512-471-5812 References 15. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2005/08/biology26.html#info 16. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news.html 17. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/archives.html 18. mailto:lclippard at mail.utexas.edu 19. http://www.biosci.utexas.edu/IB/faculty/MEYERS.HTM 20. http://www.biosci.utexas.edu/ib/ 21. http://www.utexas.edu/cons/ 22. http://www.santafe.edu/ 23. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2005/08/comp_sci11.html 24. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2005/08/physics03.html 25. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/04newsreleases/nr_200409/nr_eng_nat_sci040920.html 26. http://www.utexas.edu/features/archive/2003/meyers.html 27. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/ 28. mailto:utopa at www.utexas.edu From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 14:50:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:50:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Newsday: Idle brain invites dementia Message-ID: Idle brain invites dementia http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-hsalz254396781aug25,0,5041689,print.story Researchers say daydreaming may cause changes that lead to the onset of Alzheimer's disease STAFF WRITER August 25, 2005 Scientists have scanned the brains of young people when they are doing, well, nothing, and they found that a region active during this daydreaming state is the one hard-hit by the scourge of old age: Alzheimer's. "We never expected to see this," said Randy L. Buckner, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Washington University in St. Louis. He said he suspects these activity patterns may, over decades of daily use, wear down the brain, sparking a chemical cascade that results in the disease's classic deposits and tangles that damage the brain. The regions identified are active when people daydream or think to themselves, Buckner said. When these regions are damaged, an older person may not be able to access the thoughts to follow through on an action, or even make sense of a string of thoughts. The study appears this week in the Journal of Neuroscience. The scientists used a variety of brain-scanning devices in more than 760 adults of all ages. Usually, scanning is done when volunteers carry out a particular mental task, such as remembering a list of words. This time, they were scanned without anything to do. What emerged on the images was what Buckner and his colleagues call the brain's "default" state. The brain remains in this state when it's not concentrating on a task like reading or talking. It's the place where the mind wanders. This default region lines up perfectly with the regions that are initially damaged in Alzheimer's. "It may be the normal cognitive function of the brain that leads to Alzheimer's later in life," Buckner said. He suspects the brain's metabolic activity slows over time in this region, making it vulnerable to mind-robbing symptoms. The scientists say this finding could prove useful diagnostically - a way to identify the disease early, even before symptoms appear. "You have to get to this pathology before it has its biggest effect," said William Klunk, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and a co-investigator in the current study. Klunk developed an imaging tool that tracks amyloid plaque deposited in the brains of living Alzheimer's patients. The next step will be to see whether the sticky amyloid-filled plaques are dependent on the brain's metabolism. If so, there could be novel ways to attack the disease. The latest thinking among Alzheimer's scientists is that the underpinnings of the disease may be decades in the making. About a decade ago, David Snowdon of the University of Kentucky Medical Center published what has become a classic study of health and aging. He followed 678 nuns, ranging in age from 75 to 107, and analyzed journal entries and essays written when they joined the order as young women. He identified an association between the writing and the risk for Alzheimer's far into the future. The richer the detail in the essays, the less likely the writers were to develop Alzheimer's. Others have confirmed these findings, including a study by Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine researchers. They recently published a study using high school records from the 1940s to identify nearly 400 graduates. They tracked their health status through adulthood into old age. A higher IQ in high school reduced the risk of Alzheimer's by about half. From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 14:50:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:50:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Teaching of Creationism Is Endorsed in New Survey Message-ID: Teaching of Creationism Is Endorsed in New Survey http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/31religion.html [There is a similar mass-elite divide over immigration and a much larger on over who shot JFK. Eighty percent of the public doubt the lone-nut hypothesis, while 100% of the media supported at, at least as far as I could tell from watching the coverage for the 40th anniversary of the assassination. My own view is that Kennedy, knowing that he had not long to live and wanted to be remembered, arranged for his own assassination and had lots of contradictory evidence planted in order to keep public fascination with the case going and going and going.] By [3]LAURIE GOODSTEIN In a finding that is likely to intensify the debate over what to teach students about the origins of life, a poll released yesterday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools. The poll found that 42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time." In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time. But of those, 18 percent said that evolution was "guided by a supreme being," and 26 percent said that evolution occurred through natural selection. In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism. The poll was conducted July 7-17 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The questions about evolution were asked of 2,000 people. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points. John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism." "It's like they're saying, 'Some people see it this way, some see it that way, so just teach it all and let the kids figure it out.' It seems like a nice compromise, but it infuriates both the creationists and the scientists," said Mr. Green, who is also a professor at the University of Akron in [4]Ohio. Eugenie C. Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education and a prominent defender of evolution, said the findings were not surprising because "Americans react very positively to the fairness or equal time kind of argument." "In fact, it's the strongest thing that creationists have got going for them because their science is dismal," Ms. Scott said. "But they do have American culture on their side." This year, the National Center for Science Education has tracked 70 new controversies over evolution in 26 states, some in school districts, others in the state legislatures. President Bush joined the debate on Aug. 2, telling reporters that both evolution and the theory of intelligent design should be taught in schools "so people can understand what the debate is about." Senator Bill Frist of [5]Tennessee, the Republican leader, took the same position a few weeks later. Intelligent design, a descendant of creationism, is the belief that life is so intricate that only a supreme being could have designed it. The poll showed 41 percent of respondents wanted parents to have the primary say over how evolution is taught, compared with 28 percent who said teachers and scientists should decide and 21 percent who said school boards should. Asked whether they believed creationism should be taught instead of evolution, 38 percent were in favor, and 49 percent were opposed. More of those who believe in creationism said they were "very certain" of their views (63 percent), compared with those who believe in evolution (32 percent). The poll also asked about religion and politics, government financing of religious charities, and gay men and lesbians in the military. Most of these questions were asked of a smaller pool of 1,000 respondents, and the margin of error was 2.5 percentage points, Pew researchers said. The public's impression of the Democratic Party has changed in the last year, the survey found. Only 29 percent of respondents said they viewed Democrats as being "friendly toward religion," down from 40 percent in August of 2004. Meanwhile, 55 percent said the Republican Party was friendly toward religion. Luis E. Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said: "I think this is a continuation of the Republican Party's very successful use of the values issue in the 2004 election, and the Democrats not being able up until now to answer that successfully. Some of the more visible leaders, such as Howard Dean and others, have reinforced that image of a secular party. Of course, if you look at the Democratic Party, there's a large religious constituency there." Survey respondents agreed in nearly equal numbers that nonreligious liberals had "too much control" over the Democratic Party (44 percent), and that religious conservatives had too much control over the Republican Party (45 percent). On religion-based charities, two-thirds of respondents favored allowing churches and houses of worship to apply for government financing to provide social services. But support for such financing declined from 75 percent in early 2001, when Mr. Bush rolled out his religion-based initiative. On gay men and lesbians in the military, 58 percent of those polled said they should be allowed to serve openly, a modest increase from 1994, when 52 percent agreed. Strong opposition has fallen in that time, to 15 percent from 26 percent in 1994. References 3. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=LAURIE%20GOODSTEIN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=LAURIE%20GOODSTEIN&inline=nyt-per 4. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/ohio/index.html?inline=nyt-geo 5. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/tennessee/index.html?inline=nyt-geo From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 4 14:50:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 10:50:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: John Horgan: In Defense of Common Sense Message-ID: John Horgan: In Defense of Common Sense http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/horgan05/horgan05_index.html All these theories are preposterous, but that's not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends. IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE By John Horgan Introduction John Horgan, author of The End of Science, and feisty and provocative as ever, is ready for combat with scientists in the Edge community. "I'd love to get Edgies' reaction to my OpEd piece -- "In Defense of Common Sense" -- in The New York Times", he writes. Physicist Leonard Susskind, writing "In Defense of Uncommon Sense", is the first to take up Horgan's challenge ([10]see below). Susskind notes that in "the utter strangeness of a world that the human intellect was not designed for... physicists have had no choice but to rewire themselves. Where intuition and common sense failed, they had to create new forms of intuition, mainly through the use of abstract mathematics." We've gone "out of the range of experience." Read on. -- [11]JB JOHN HORGAN oversees the science writings program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science and Rational Mysticism. [12]John Horgan's Edge bio page [13]THE REALITY CLUB:[14] Verena Huber-Dyson, [15]Robert Provine, [16]Spencer Reiss, [17]Daniel Gilbert, [18]John McCarthy, [19]Leonard Susskind respond to John Horgan. [20]Horgan replies. _________________________________________________________________ IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE As anyone remotely interested in science knows by now, 100 years ago Einstein wrote six papers that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics and relativity, arguably the two most successful theories in history. To commemorate Einstein's "annus mirabilis," a coalition of physics groups has designated 2005 the World Year of Physics. The coalition's Web site lists more than 400 celebratory events, including conferences, museum exhibits, concerts, Webcasts, plays, poetry readings, a circus, a pie-eating contest and an Einstein look-alike competition. In the midst of all this hoopla, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of Einstein's legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible. In the pre-Einstein era, T. H. Huxley, aka "Darwin's bulldog," could define science as "nothing but trained and organized common sense." But quantum mechanics and relativity shattered our common-sense notions about how the world works. The theories ask us to believe that an electron can exist in more than one place at the same time, and that space and time -- the I-beams of reality -- are not rigid but rubbery. Impossible! And yet these sense-defying propositions have withstood a century's worth of painstaking experimental tests. As a result, many scientists came to see common sense as an impediment to progress not only in physics but also in other fields. "What, after all, have we to show for ... common sense," the behaviorist B. F. Skinner asked, "or the insights gained through personal experience?" Elevating this outlook to the status of dogma, the British biologist Lewis Wolpert declared in his influential 1992 book "The Unnatural Nature of Science," "I would almost contend that if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn't science." Dr. Wolpert's view is widely shared. When I invoke common sense to defend or -- more often -- criticize a theory, scientists invariably roll their eyes. Scientists' contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity; hence the appeal, perhaps, of dubious propositions like multiple-personality disorders and multiple-universe theories. The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists. Needless to say, I reject that position, and not only because I'm a science journalist (who majored in English). I have also found common sense -- ordinary, nonspecialized knowledge and judgment -- to be indispensable for judging scientists' pronouncements, even, or especially, in the most esoteric fields. For example, Einstein's intellectual heirs have long been obsessed with finding a single "unified" theory that can embrace quantum mechanics, which accounts for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, and general relativity, which describes gravity. The two theories employ very different mathematical languages and describe very different worlds, one lumpy and random and the other seamless and deterministic. The leading candidate for a unified theory holds that reality stems from tiny strings, or loops, or membranes, or something wriggling in a hyperspace consisting of 10, or 16 or 1,000 dimensions (the number depends on the variant of the theory, or the day of the week, or the theorist's ZIP code). A related set of "quantum gravity" theories postulates the existence of parallel universes -- some perhaps mutant versions of our own, like "Bizarro world" in the old Superman comics -- existing beyond the borders of our little cosmos. "Infinite Earths in Parallel Universes Really Exist," the normally sober Scientific American once hyperventilated on its cover. All these theories are preposterous, but that's not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends. Common sense -- and a little historical perspective -- makes me equally skeptical of grand unified theories of the human mind. After a half-century of observing myself and my fellow humans -- not to mention watching lots of TV and movies -- I've concluded that as individuals we're pretty complex, variable, unpredictable creatures, whose personalities can be affected by a vast range of factors. I'm thus leery of hypotheses that trace some important aspect of our behavior to a single cause. Two examples: The psychologist Frank Sulloway has claimed that birth order has a profound, permanent impact on personality; first-borns tend to be conformists, whereas later-borns are "rebels." And just last year, the geneticist Dean Hamer argued that human spirituality -- surely one of the most complicated manifestations of our complicated selves -- stems from a specific snippet of DNA. Although common sense biases me against these theories, I am still open to being persuaded on empirical grounds. But the evidence for both Dr. Sulloway's birth-order theory and Dr. Hamer's "God gene" is flimsy. Over the past century, moreover, mind-science has been as faddish as teenage tastes in music, as one theory has yielded to another. Everything we think and do, scientists have assured us, can be explained by the Oedipal complex, or conditioned reflexes, or evolutionary adaptations, or a gene in the X chromosome, or serotonin deficits in the amygdala. Given this rapid turnover in paradigms, it's only sensible to doubt them all until the evidence for one becomes overwhelming. Ironically, while many scientists disparage common sense, artificial-intelligence researchers have discovered just how subtle and powerful an attribute it is. Over the past few decades, researchers have programmed computers to perform certain well-defined tasks extremely well; computers can play championship chess, calculate a collision between two galaxies and juggle a million airline reservations. But computers fail miserably at simulating the ordinary, experience-based intelligence that helps ordinary humans get through ordinary days. In other words, computers lack common sense, and that's why even the smartest ones are so dumb. Yes, common sense alone can lead us astray, and some of science's most profound insights into nature violate it; ultimately, scientific truth must be established on empirical grounds. Einstein himself once denigrated common sense as "the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18," but he retained a few basic prejudices of his own about how reality works. His remark that "God does not play dice with the universe" reflected his stubborn insistence that specific causes yield specific effects; he could never fully accept the bizarre implication of quantum mechanics that at small scales reality dissolves into a cloud of probabilities. So far, Einstein seems to be wrong about God's aversion to games of chance, but he was right not to abandon his common-sense intuitions about reality. In those many instances when the evidence is tentative, we should not be embarrassed to call on common sense for guidance. [Editor's Note:[21] First published as an Op-Ed Page article in The New York Times on August 12th] [22]LEONARD SUSSKIND Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stanford University IN DEFENSE OF UNCOMMON SENSE Leonard Susskind Responds to John Horgan [susskind100.jpg] John Horgan, the man who famously declared The End of Science shortly before the two greatest cosmological discoveries since the Big Bang, has now come forth to tell us that the world's leading physicists and cognitive scientists are wasting their time. Why? Because they are substituting difficult-to-understand and often shockingly unintuitive concepts for "everyman" common sense. Whose common sense? John Horgan's (admittedly a non-scientist) I presume. The complaint that science -- particularly physics -- has lost contact with common sense is hardly new. It was used against Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, and even today is being used against Darwin by the right wing agents of "intelligent design." Every week I get several angry email messages containing "common sense" (no math) theories of everything from elementary particles to the rings of Saturn. The theories have names like "Rational Theory of the Phenomenons. Modern science is difficult and often counterintuitive. Instead of bombastically ranting against this fact, Horgan should try to understand why it is so. The reasons have nothing to do with the perversity of string theorists, but rather, they have to do with the utter strangeness of a world that the human intellect was not designed for. Let me explain. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, physics dealt with phenomena that took place on a human scale. The typical objects that humans could observe varied in the size from a bacterium to something smaller than a galaxy. Similarly, no human had ever traveled faster than a hundred miles an hour, or a experienced a gravitational field that accelerates objects more powerfully than the Earth's acceleration, a modest thirty two feet per second per second. Forces smaller than a thousandth of a pound, or bigger than a thousand pounds, were also out of the range of experience. Evolution wired us with both hardware and software that would allow us to easily "grock" concepts like force, acceleration, and temperature, but only over the limited range that applies to our daily lives -- concepts that are needed for our physical survival. But it simply did not provide us with wiring to intuit the quantum behavior of an electron, or velocities near the speed of light, or the powerful gravitational fields of black holes, or a universe that closes back on itself like the surface of the Earth. A classic example of the limitations of our neural wiring is the inability to picture more than three dimensions. Why, after all, would nature provide us with the capacity to visualize things that no living creature had ever experienced? Physicists have had no choice but to rewire themselves. Where intuition and common sense failed, they had to create new forms of intuition, mainly through the use of abstract mathematics: Einstein's four dimensional elastic space-time; the infinite dimensional Hilbert space of quantum mechanics; the difficult mathematics of string theory; and, if necessary, multiple universes. When common sense fails, uncommon sense must be created. Of course we must use uncommon sense sensibly but we hardly need Horgan to tell us that. In trying to understand the universe at both its smallest and biggest scales, physics and cosmology have embarked on a new age of exploration. In a sense we are attempting to cross a larger uncharted sea than ever before. Indeed, as Horgan tells us, it's a dangerous sea where one can easily lose ones way and go right off the deep end. But great scientists are, by nature, explorers. To tell them to stay within the boundaries of common sense may be like telling Columbus that if he goes more than fifty miles from shore he'll get hopelessly lost. Besides, good old common sense tells us that the Earth is flat. Horgan also complains about the lack of common sense in cognitive science, i.e., the science of the mind. But the more psychologists and neuroscientists learn about the workings of the mind, the more it becomes absolutely clear that human cognition does not operate according to principles of common sense. That a man can mistake his wife for a hat is-well-common nonsense. But it happens. Cognitive scientists are also undergoing a rewiring process. Finally I must take exception to Horgan's claim that "no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories [string theory and cosmological eternal inflation] as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge." Here I speak from first hand knowledge. Many, if not all, of the most distinguished theoretical physicists in the world -- Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten, John Schwarz, Joseph Polchinski, Nathan Seiberg, Juan Maldacena, David Gross, Savas Dimopoulos, Andrei Linde, Renata Kallosh, among many others, most certainly acknowledge no such thing. These physicists are full of ideas about how to test modern concepts -- from superstrings in the sky to supersymmetry in the lab. Instead of dyspeptically railing against what he plainly does not understand, Horgan would do better to take a few courses in algebra, calculus, quantum mechanics, and string theory. He might then appreciate, even celebrate, the wonderful and amazing capacity of the human mind to find uncommon ways to comprehend the incomprehensible. _________________________________________________________________ [23]JOHN McCARTHY Computer Scientist; Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Stanford University [mccarthy100.jpg] John Horgan pontificates: "But computers fail miserably at simulating the ordinary, experience-based intelligence that helps ordinary humans get through ordinary days. In other words, computers lack common sense, and that's why even the smartest ones are so dumb." Horgan regards a lack of common sense as an intrinsic characteristic of computers; I assume he means computer programs. However, much artificial intelligence research has focussed on analyzing commonsense knowledge and reasoning. I refer to my 1959 article "Programs with common sense", my 1990 collection of articles "Formalizing common sense", Erik Mueller's forthcoming book "Commonsense reasoning", and the biennial international conferences on common sense. I fear John Horgan would find this work as distressingly technical as he finds physics. Common sense has proved a difficult scientific topic, and programs with human-level common sense have not yet been achieved. It may be another 100 years. The AI research has identified components of commonsense knowledge and reasoning, has formalized some of them in languages of mathematical logic, and has built some of them into computer programs. Besides the logic based approach, there have been recent attempts to understand common sense as an aspect of the human nervous system. Research on formalizing common sense physics, e.g. that objects fall when pushed off a table, are not in competition with physics as studied by physicists. Rather physics is imbedded in common sense. Thus applying Newton's F = ma requires commonsense reasoning. Physics texts and articles do not consist solely of equations but contain common sense explanations. When Horgan says that string theory is untestable, he is ignoring even the popular science writing about string theory. This literature tells us that the current untestability of string theory is regarded by the string theorists as a blemish they hope to fix. _________________________________________________________________ [24]DANIEL GILBERT Psychologist, Harvard University [gilbert100.jpg] Horgan's Op-Ed piece is such a silly trifle that it doesn't dignify serious response. The beauty of science is that it allows us to transcend our intuitions about the world, and it provides us with methods by which we can determine which of our intuitions are right and which are not. Common sense tell us that the earth is flat, that the sun moves around it, and that the people who know the least often speak the loudest. Horgan's essay demonstrates that at least one of our common sense notions is true. _________________________________________________________________ [25]SPENCER REISS Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine [reiss100.jpg] Surely Susskind is joking: "Why, after all, would nature provide us with the capacity to visualize things that no living creature had ever experienced?" Art? Music? Heaven? God? The Red Sox win the World Series? Science fiction, for chrissake! Buy the man a drink! This is the kind of stuff that gives scientists a bad name. _________________________________________________________________ [26]ROBERT R. PROVINE Psychologist and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland; Author, Laughter [provine100.jpg] Hunter-Gatherers Make Poor Physicists and Cognitive Neuroscientists: Horgan 0, Susskind 1 Horgan continues to expand his franchise that is based on the technique of assertively posing provocative and often reasonable propositions. The boldness of his assertions earns him an audience that he would not otherwise achieve. But as in The End of Science, he picks a fight that he is not prepared to win and never delivers a telling blow. Susskind effectively exploits a basic weakness in Horgan's thesis, the fallibility of common sense, especially in scientific context. Researchers working at the frontiers of many sciences use mathematical and theoretical prostheses to expand the range of phenomena that can be studied, escaping some of the limits of their evolutionary history and its neurological endowment. The startling truth is that we live in a neurologically-generated, virtual cosmos that we are programmed to accept as the real thing. The challenge of science is to overcome the constraints of our neurological wetware and understand a physical world that we know only second-hand and incompletely. In fact, we must make an intuitive leap to accept the fact that there is a problem at all. Common sense and the brain that produces it evolved in the service of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, not physicists and cognitive neuroscientists. Unassisted, the brain of Horgan or any other member of our species is not up to task of engaging certain scientific problems. Sensory science provides the most obvious discrepancies between the physical world and our neurological model of it. We humans evolved the capacity to detect a subset of stimuli available to us on the surface of planet Earth. Different animals with different histories differ in their absolute sensitivity to a given stimulus and in the bandwidth to with they are sensitive. And some species have modes of sensation that we lack, such as electric or magnetic fields. Each species is a theory of the environment in which it evolved and it can never completely escape the limitations of its unique evolutionary history. But the problem of sensing the physical cosmos is even more complicated, because we do not directly sense physical stimuli, but are aware of only their neurological correlates. There is not, for example, any "blue" in electromagnetic radiation, pitch of B-flat in pressure changes in the air, or sweetness in sucrose. All are neurological derivatives of the physical world, not the thing itself. Neurological limits on thinking are probably as common as those on sensing, but they are more illusive -- it's harder to think about what we can't think about than what we can't sense. A good example from physics is our difficulty in understanding the space-time continuum -- our intellect fails us when we move beyond the dimensions of height, width, and depth. Other evidence of our neurological reality-generator is revealed by its malfunction in illusions, hallucinations, and dreams, or in brain damage, where the illusion of reality does not simply degrade, but often splinters and fragments in unanticipated ways. The intellectual prostheses of mathematics, computers, and instrumentation loosen but do not free our species of the constraints of its neurological heritage. We do not build random devices to detect stimuli that we cannot conceive, but build outward from a base of knowledge. A neglected triumph of science is how far we have come with so flawed an instrument as the human brain and its sensoria. Another is in realizing the limits of common sense and its knowledge base of folk wisdom. _________________________________________________________________ [27]VERENA HUBER-DYSON Logician; Emeritus Professor, University of Calgary [huber-dyson100.jpg] IN PRAISE OF EVOLVING COMMON SENSE It seems to me that John Horgan in his Edge piece "In Defense of Common Sense" is confusing "common sense" with "prejudice". The human capacity for common sense reasoning is undergoing an evolutionary process as science and technology are progressing. Just look back over the last two millennia for spectacular illustrations of this pretty obvious observation. Presumably Mr. Horgan watches TV, uses his personal computer and takes airplanes to get places he cannot reach on foot nor by his questionably commonsensical motor car. If he does not know how to fix whatever trouble his car may come up with -- like some people do -- he really should not drive it. To some of my colleagues the telescope serves as the extension of their vision to others the cloud chamber extends the reach of their cognition, just the way his car serves Mr Horgan to get around. In the cloud chamber we witness effects of events too small to see directly. Oh there are so many wonderful illustrations of this evolution of the human cognitive faculties. Ideas, models, conjectures acquiring reality by circumstantial evidence and repeated reasoning become part of our life; as they get entrenched our common sense expands through familiarity. Sometime our notions have to be adjusted, or some, like the idea of the ether, become obsolete. That too is progress. Common sense that refuses to evolve becomes prejudice, or bigotry to use a more bold expression. I have seen quite a bit of scientific evolution in my time. In my childhood the planetary model of the atom was the way we were thinking of matter; now it has become a metaphor or a handy tool, useful under certain conditions. The same is about to happen with strings. We have learned to think more abstractly, we do not really need to think of strings as wiggly worms much too small to see. We have become quite adept at mathematical modeling. I'd love to be around to see the evolution of cognition happening ever so much faster. Even the men in the street are keeping pace. Let us not encourage spoil-sports like Mr Horgan. _________________________________________________________________ [28]JOHN HORGAN My modest defense of common sense as a guide for judging theories -- particularly when empirical evidence is flimsy -- has provoked a predictable shriek of outrage from Lenny Susskind. His attempt to lump me together with advocates of intelligent design is more than a little ironic, since in rebuking me he displays the self-righteous arrogance of a religious zealot damning an infidel. Moreover, as a proponent (!!) recently acknowledged in the New York Times, string theory and its offshoots are so devoid of evidence that they represent "a faith-based initiative." Susskind urges me to "take courses in algebra, calculus, quantum mechanics, and string theory" before I mouth off further about strings. In other words, I must become a string theorist to voice an opinion about it. This assertion recalls the insistence of Freudians -- another group notoriously hostile to outside criticism and complaints about testability -- that only those fully indoctrinated into their mind-cult can judge it. Susskind's protestations to the contrary, string theory can be neither falsified nor verified by any empirical test. At best, experiments can provide only necessary but insufficient evidence for components -- such as supersymmetry -- of certain variants of string theory. That is why in 2002 I bet the physicist Michio Kaku $1000 that by 2020 no one will be awarded a Nobel prize for work on string theory or similar quantum-gravity theory. (I discuss the bet with Kaku, Lee Smolin, Gordon Kane, and other physicists at [29]"Long Bet"). Would Susskind care to make a side bet? As to the other respondents: John McCarthy merely confirms my assertion that computer programmers have failed to simulate common sense -- except that McCarthy expends many more words to make his point than I do. And like Lenny Susskind, Robert Provine and Verena Huber-Dyson merely point out that many scientific theories violate popular, common-sense intuitions about nature and yet prove to be empirically correct. No kidding. I said just that in my essay. The question that I raised -- and that all these respondents have studiously avoided -- is what we should do when presented with theories such as psychoanalysis or string theory, which are not only counterintuitive but also lacking in evidence. Common sense tells me that in these cases common sense can come in handy. References 12. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/horgan.html 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/opinion/12horgan.html 22. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/susskind.html 23. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/mccarthy.html 24. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/gilbert.html 25. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/reiss.html 26. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/provine.html 27. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/huber-dyson.html 28. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/horgan.html 29. http://www.longbets.org/12%3Ehttp://www.longbets.org/12 From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Sep 4 16:29:49 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 09:29:49 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Diode Array, Claim of clean energy Message-ID: <1639258.1125851389401.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> " I have invented, patented1, and tested2 a chip containing very many very small diodes that absorbs uniform ambient heat and releases D.C. Electrical power. This is a superior energy source that is very inexpensive and will power small appliances out of the box without a need for power wiring anywhere in the world. This has great potential to improve the prosperity of mankind. The chip will quickly become an open source commodity. Many applications should also be open. It is also a hard science tool for science fiction. Michael Huff3 at the Stanford MEM network, a network of nanotechnology developers, has given me a quote that $50,000 would pay for developing this chip. He could receive grant funding directly to improve the accountability as I am an unaffiliated inventor that can not personally produce the chip . 1 U.S. Patent 3,890,161, DIODE ARRAY. As a 1975 patent, it may be available in image form only, not yet in electronically searchable text form. The original materials specified in the patent have been superseded by C60 carbon buckyballs as anodes on an N type InSb (semiconductor) substrate. 2 In 1993 I commissioned the preparation and testing of an adapted satellite transponder chip containing 5,600 Au on GaAs diodes fabricated in a patch as an expedient for assemblers to find one diode where diodes operating at high frequencies have to be very small. Conductive paste was applied over the face of the chip to connect all the diodes in consistent alignment parallel as required. Next the chip was immersed in a constant temperature pure vegetable oil bath inside a shielding box in the California desert. The chip produced ~25 kTB watts where an output more than 1/2 kTB watts validates the theory that electrical thermal noise (Johnson Nouse) can be rectified and aggregated. If replication of this test is desired, the chips may still be available as draw down obsolete stock from Virginia Diodes Inc. www.virginiadiodes.com . I have lost contact with the lab that adapted and tested the chip. The C60 / N type InSb version of the chip should perform much better. ~100 watts / cm2 @ 20o C @ 50% diode efficiency @ 1011 buckyballs / cm2 is estimated. 3 mhuff at mems-exchange.org http://www.memsnet.org/links/foundries Aloha, Charles M. Brown (808) 828-0297 4264 Ala Muku Pl. #C-3 Kilauea, Kauai, Hawaii 96754 abundance at logonhi.net www.diodearray.com http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:CBC:Main_Page " From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Sep 4 16:38:00 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 09:38:00 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] More on Nano-Diode Arrays for electricity Message-ID: <17538618.1125851881104.JavaMail.root@mswamui-blood.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Charles M. Brown has invented, patented, and demonstrated at low power a chip which absorbs ambient heat and produces electrical power. There is plenty of ambient heat everywhere on Earth. He expects mature versions of the chip to yield thousands of watts per sq. inch inside a heat transfer system using circulating liquid. The device consists of billions of nanometer scale diodes connected in uniform alignment parallel small arrays which are, because the operating voltage is low, connected in series. Heat induces a small random movement of mobile electrical charges inside materials. This effect is known as Johnson noise after a telephone company engineer who studied the sources of static in radio telescopes. Diodes are two terminal devices which conduct electricity well in one direction and block it from flowing the other way. Random electrical movements emerge from a diode as a fluctuating forward current half the time. Once the current emerges from its diode of origin it is blocked from retreat through its diode of origin and all parallel adjacent diodes and continues to the electrical load of the circuit. It does impose a counter voltage which is the array operating voltage as it does this. This counter voltage deenergizes the random electrical movements which still flow in this direction which is easier than the blocked direction. This deenergization is simultaneously strictly equal local refrigeration and electric circuit power. The fluctuating outputs of all diodes are aggregated without network loss to become useful amounts of coequal electrical power and refrigeration. Each diode is expected to yield a nanowatt @ 65 degrees F / 17 degrees C, Full thermal bandwidth of ~ 1Thz, a rectification factor of 1/2, and a device efficiency of 50%. The yield is derived by multiplying the above factors by Boltzman's constant ~1.38 x 10 ^-23. Uniformly spaced carbon nanotube anodes define each diode. The rest of the diode is a shared cathode layer of N conductive Si doped InSb abutting the anodes on one end and a shared ohmic contact metal layer on the other side. The ability to fabricate this device is emerging gradually. Most Engineers and Physicist are not yet aware that this type of device can exist. In 1993, a feasibility investigation prototype yielded ~50 nanowatts which is above the scientific criteria of ~2 nanowatts. Unfortunately, Mr. Brown has lost contact with that test lab. One protocol is for other researchers to independently investigate Diode Arrays and report their results. Another possibility is for a development team to fabricate prototypes that will lead to commercial products. The promise is that the Diode Array will produce abundant, autonomous, cheap, clean, compact, reliable, safe, and quiet energy. Furthermore, refrigeration will become an electrical power asset instead of expense. From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Sep 5 02:43:50 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2005 19:43:50 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] We the 80% In-Reply-To: <21965696.1125846726299.JavaMail.root@mswamui-valley.atl.sa.earthlink.net> References: <21965696.1125846726299.JavaMail.root@mswamui-valley.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <431BB0E6.3040102@earthlink.net> Spot-on. Bush, in several addresses he made to the nation has stated in definitive terms that the United States will aid the refugees from Hurricane Katrina AND maintain our presence in Iraq. When one splits manpower and resources, a job less than 60% is what is accomplished. Gerry Reinhart-Waller shovland at mindspring.com wrote: >True. But if you are going fight wars for >resources you have to have the financial >and physical resources to do it, and I'm >not sure we are in that position any more. > >We have a huge challenge ahead of us, >but there are a lot of possibilities if we >only choose to pursue them. > > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller >Sent: Sep 3, 2005 10:51 PM >To: shovland at mindspring.com, > The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] We the 80% > >Trading for resources is a noble idea except when all parties are after >the same resource i.e. oil. I'm clueless how oil can equably be >bartered. There is not enough oil anywhere to meet needs of all global >countries. > >Gerry Reinhart-Waller > >shovland at mindspring.com wrote: > > > >>Subject: We the 80% >> >>Declare that this is our country as much as it is theirs. >> >>Declare that it is immoral for a few to have so much when so many have so little. >> >>Declare that good government is a necessary part of civilization, to serve the common good. >> >>Declare that we should trade for the resources we need, not fight wars for them. >> >>Declare that good health care is a good investment, and should be provided for all. >> >>Declare that we should join the world community rather than trying to dominate it. >> >> >>Steve Hovland >>San Francisco >>September 3, 2005 >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> > > > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Sep 4 20:11:34 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 13:11:34 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Articles on Peasant Revolts in Wikipedia Message-ID: <12621952.1125864695108.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Unfortunately, there is nothing about the peasant revolts in America circa 2006... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Peasant_revolts From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Sep 4 22:16:45 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 18:16:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Unarmed American Message-ID: <10450424.1125872205572.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A lesson learned from New Orleans. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: TheUnarmedAmerican.jpg Type: image/pjpeg Size: 153725 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Sep 5 20:57:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 16:57:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Anthropic Reasoning Message-ID: Cosmology: On Anthropic Reasoning http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050909-1.htm The following points are made by M. Livio and M.J. Rees (Science 2005 309:1022): 1) Does extraterrestrial intelligent life exist? The fact that we can even ask this question relies on an important truth: The properties of our Universe have allowed complexity (of the type that characterizes humans) to emerge. Obviously, the biological details of humans and their emergence depend on contingent features of Earth and its history. However, some requirements would seem generic for any form of life: galaxies, stars, and (probably) planets had to form; nucleosynthesis in stars had to give rise to atoms such as carbon, oxygen, and iron; and these atoms had to be in a stable environment where they could combine to form the molecules of life. 2) We can imagine universes where the constants of physics and cosmology have different values. Many such "counterfactual" universes would not have allowed the chain of processes that could have led to any kind of advanced life. For instance, even a universe with the same physical laws and the same values of all physical constants but one -- a cosmological constant Lambda (the "pressure" of the physical vacuum) higher by more than an order of magnitude -- would have expanded so fast that no galaxies could have formed. Other properties that appear to have been crucial for the emergence of complexity are (i) the presence of baryons (particles such as protons and neutrons); (ii) the fact that the Universe is not infinitely smooth, allowing for the formation of structure (quantified as the amplitude of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, Q); and (iii) a gravitational force that is weaker by a factor of nearly 10^(40) than the microphysical forces that act within atoms and molecules -- were gravity not so weak, there would not be such a large difference between the atomic and the cosmic scales of mass, length, and time. 3) A key challenge confronting 21st-century physics is to decide which of these dimensionless parameters such as Q and Lambda are truly fundamental -- in the sense of being explicable within the framework of an ultimate, unified theory -- and which are merely accidental. The possibility that some are accidental has certainly become viable in the context of the "eternal inflation" scenario [1-3], where there are an infinity of separate "big bangs" within an exponentially expanding substratum. Some versions of string theory allow a huge variety of vacua, each characterized by different values of (or even different dimensionality) [4]. Both these concepts entail the existence of a vast ensemble of pocket universes -- a "multiverse." If some physical constants are not fundamental, then they may take different values in different members of the ensemble. Consequently, some pocket universes may not allow complexity or intelligent life to evolve within them. Humans would clearly have to find themselves in a pocket universe that is "biophilic." Some otherwise puzzling features of our Universe may then simply be the result of the epoch in which we exist and can observe. In other words, the values of the accidental constants would have to be within the ranges that would have allowed intelligent life to develop. The process of delineating and investigating the consequences of these biophilic domains is what has become known as "anthropic reasoning".[5] References (abridged): 1. P. J. Steinhardt, in The Very Early Universe, G. W. Gibbons, S. Hawking, S. T. C. Siklos, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1983), p. 251 2. A. Vilenkin, Phys. Rev. D 27, 2848 (1983) 3. A. D. Linde, Mod. Phys. Lett. A 1, 81 (1986) 4. S. Kachru, R. Kallosh, A. Linde, S. P. Trivedi, Phys. Rev. D 68, 046005 (2003) 5. A. G. Riess et al., Astron. J. 116, 1009 (1998) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: COSMOLOGY: ON THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE The following points are made by Lawrence M. Krauss (Nature 2003 423:230): 1) The recognition, in the light of observational data, that Einstein's infamous cosmological constant might not be zero has changed almost everything about the way we think about the Universe, from reconsidering its origin to re-evaluating its ultimate future. But perhaps the most significant change in cosmological thinking involves a new willingness to discuss what used to be an idea that was not normally mentioned in polite company: the "anthropic principle". 2) This idea suggests that the precise values of various fundamental parameters describing our Universe might be understood only as a consequence of the fact that we exist to measure them. To paraphrase the cosmologist Andrei Linde, "If the Universe were populated everywhere by intelligent fish, they might wonder why it was full of water. Well, if it weren't, they wouldn't be around to observe it!". 3) The reason that physicists have been so reluctant to consider the anthropic principle seriously is that it goes against the grain of current attitudes. Most physicists have hoped that an ultimate physical explanation of reality would explain why the Universe must look precisely the way it does, rather than why it more often than not would not. Into the fray has entered James Bjorken. In a paper (Phys. Rev. D 2003 67:043508) entitled "Cosmology and the Standard Model", Bjorken proposes a new "scaling" approach, based on well-established notions in particle theory, for exploring how anthropically viable a small cosmological constant might be. 4) The realization that an extremely small, but non-zero, cosmological constant might exist has changed the interest of physicists in anthropic explanations of nature precisely because the value it seems to take is otherwise so inexplicable. In 1996, physicist Steven Weinberg and his colleagues Hugo Martel and Paul Shapiro argued that if the laws of physics allow different universes to exist with a cosmological constant chosen from an underlying probability distribution, then galaxies, stars and presumably astronomers might not ultimately evolve unless the cosmological constant were not much larger than the one we apparently observe today. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: The "cosmological constant" is a mathematical term introduced by Einstein into the equations of general relativity, the purpose to obtain a solution of the equations corresponding to a "static universe". The term describes a pressure (if positive) or a tension (if negative) which can cause the Universe to expand or contract even in the absence of any matter ("vacuum energy"). When the expansion of the Universe was discovered, Einstein apparently began to regard the introduction of this term as a mistake, and he described the cosmological constant as the "greatest mistake of my life". But the term has reappeared as the proposed source of apparent accelerated cosmic expansion. -------------------------------- Related Material: ON QUINTESSENCE AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT The following points are made by P.J.E. Peebles (Nature 1999 398:25): 1) Contrary to expectations, the evidence is that the Universe is expanding at approximately twice the velocity required to overcome the gravitational pull of all the matter the Universe contains. The implication of this is that in the past the greater density of mass in the Universe gravitationally slowed the expansion, while in the future the expansion rate will be close to constant or perhaps increasing under the influence of a new type of matter that some call "quintessence". 2) Quintessence began as Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda. It has negative gravitational mass: its gravity pushes things apart. 3) Particle physicists later adopted Einstein's Lambda as a good model for the gravitational effect of the active vacuum of quantum physics, although the idea is at odds with the small value of Lambda indicated by cosmology. 4) Theoretical cosmologists have noted that as the Universe expands and cools, Lambda tends to decrease. As the Universe cools, symmetries among forces are broken, particles acquire masses, and these processes tend to release an analogue of latent heat. The vacuum energy density accordingly decreases, and with it the value of Lambda. Perhaps an enormous Lambda drove an early rapid expansion that smoothed the primeval chaos to make the near uniform Universe we see today, with a decrease in Lambda over time to its current value. This is the cosmological inflation concept. 5) The author suggests that the recent great advances in detectors, telescopes, and observatories on the ground and in space have given us a rough picture of what happened as our Universe evolved from a dense, hot, and perhaps quite simple early state to its present complexity. Observations in progress are filling in the details, and that in turn is driving intense debate on how the behavior of our Universe can be understood within fundamental physics. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: Active vacuum of quantum physics: This refers to the idea that the vacuum state in quantum mechanics has a zero-point energy (minimum energy) which gives rise to vacuum fluctuations, so the vacuum state does not mean a state of nothing, but is instead an active state. If a theory or process does not change when certain operations are performed on it, the theory or process is said to possess a symmetry with respect to those operations. For example, a circle remains unchanged under rotation or reflection, and a circle therefore has rotational and reflection symmetry. The term "symmetry breaking" refers to the deviation from exact symmetry exhibited by many physical systems, and in general, symmetry breaking encompasses both "explicit" symmetry breaking and "spontaneous" symmetry breaking. Explicit symmetry breaking is a phenomenon in which a system is not quite, but almost, the same for two configurations related by exact symmetry. Spontaneous symmetry breaking refers to a situation in which the solution of a set of physical equations fails to exhibit a symmetry possessed by the equations themselves. In general, the term "latent heat" refers to the quantity of heat absorbed or released when a substance changes its physical phase (e.g., solid to liquid) at constant temperature. The inflationary model, first proposed by Alan Guth in 1980, proposes that quantum fluctuations in the time period 10^(-35) to 10^(-32) seconds after time zero were quickly amplified into large density variations during the "inflationary" 10^(50) expansion of the Universe in that time frame. From checker at panix.com Mon Sep 5 20:57:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 16:57:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Anthropic Reasoning Message-ID: Cosmology: On Anthropic Reasoning http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050909-1.htm The following points are made by M. Livio and M.J. Rees (Science 2005 309:1022): 1) Does extraterrestrial intelligent life exist? The fact that we can even ask this question relies on an important truth: The properties of our Universe have allowed complexity (of the type that characterizes humans) to emerge. Obviously, the biological details of humans and their emergence depend on contingent features of Earth and its history. However, some requirements would seem generic for any form of life: galaxies, stars, and (probably) planets had to form; nucleosynthesis in stars had to give rise to atoms such as carbon, oxygen, and iron; and these atoms had to be in a stable environment where they could combine to form the molecules of life. 2) We can imagine universes where the constants of physics and cosmology have different values. Many such "counterfactual" universes would not have allowed the chain of processes that could have led to any kind of advanced life. For instance, even a universe with the same physical laws and the same values of all physical constants but one -- a cosmological constant Lambda (the "pressure" of the physical vacuum) higher by more than an order of magnitude -- would have expanded so fast that no galaxies could have formed. Other properties that appear to have been crucial for the emergence of complexity are (i) the presence of baryons (particles such as protons and neutrons); (ii) the fact that the Universe is not infinitely smooth, allowing for the formation of structure (quantified as the amplitude of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, Q); and (iii) a gravitational force that is weaker by a factor of nearly 10^(40) than the microphysical forces that act within atoms and molecules -- were gravity not so weak, there would not be such a large difference between the atomic and the cosmic scales of mass, length, and time. 3) A key challenge confronting 21st-century physics is to decide which of these dimensionless parameters such as Q and Lambda are truly fundamental -- in the sense of being explicable within the framework of an ultimate, unified theory -- and which are merely accidental. The possibility that some are accidental has certainly become viable in the context of the "eternal inflation" scenario [1-3], where there are an infinity of separate "big bangs" within an exponentially expanding substratum. Some versions of string theory allow a huge variety of vacua, each characterized by different values of (or even different dimensionality) [4]. Both these concepts entail the existence of a vast ensemble of pocket universes -- a "multiverse." If some physical constants are not fundamental, then they may take different values in different members of the ensemble. Consequently, some pocket universes may not allow complexity or intelligent life to evolve within them. Humans would clearly have to find themselves in a pocket universe that is "biophilic." Some otherwise puzzling features of our Universe may then simply be the result of the epoch in which we exist and can observe. In other words, the values of the accidental constants would have to be within the ranges that would have allowed intelligent life to develop. The process of delineating and investigating the consequences of these biophilic domains is what has become known as "anthropic reasoning".[5] References (abridged): 1. P. J. Steinhardt, in The Very Early Universe, G. W. Gibbons, S. Hawking, S. T. C. Siklos, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1983), p. 251 2. A. Vilenkin, Phys. Rev. D 27, 2848 (1983) 3. A. D. Linde, Mod. Phys. Lett. A 1, 81 (1986) 4. S. Kachru, R. Kallosh, A. Linde, S. P. Trivedi, Phys. Rev. D 68, 046005 (2003) 5. A. G. Riess et al., Astron. J. 116, 1009 (1998) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: COSMOLOGY: ON THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE The following points are made by Lawrence M. Krauss (Nature 2003 423:230): 1) The recognition, in the light of observational data, that Einstein's infamous cosmological constant might not be zero has changed almost everything about the way we think about the Universe, from reconsidering its origin to re-evaluating its ultimate future. But perhaps the most significant change in cosmological thinking involves a new willingness to discuss what used to be an idea that was not normally mentioned in polite company: the "anthropic principle". 2) This idea suggests that the precise values of various fundamental parameters describing our Universe might be understood only as a consequence of the fact that we exist to measure them. To paraphrase the cosmologist Andrei Linde, "If the Universe were populated everywhere by intelligent fish, they might wonder why it was full of water. Well, if it weren't, they wouldn't be around to observe it!". 3) The reason that physicists have been so reluctant to consider the anthropic principle seriously is that it goes against the grain of current attitudes. Most physicists have hoped that an ultimate physical explanation of reality would explain why the Universe must look precisely the way it does, rather than why it more often than not would not. Into the fray has entered James Bjorken. In a paper (Phys. Rev. D 2003 67:043508) entitled "Cosmology and the Standard Model", Bjorken proposes a new "scaling" approach, based on well-established notions in particle theory, for exploring how anthropically viable a small cosmological constant might be. 4) The realization that an extremely small, but non-zero, cosmological constant might exist has changed the interest of physicists in anthropic explanations of nature precisely because the value it seems to take is otherwise so inexplicable. In 1996, physicist Steven Weinberg and his colleagues Hugo Martel and Paul Shapiro argued that if the laws of physics allow different universes to exist with a cosmological constant chosen from an underlying probability distribution, then galaxies, stars and presumably astronomers might not ultimately evolve unless the cosmological constant were not much larger than the one we apparently observe today. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: The "cosmological constant" is a mathematical term introduced by Einstein into the equations of general relativity, the purpose to obtain a solution of the equations corresponding to a "static universe". The term describes a pressure (if positive) or a tension (if negative) which can cause the Universe to expand or contract even in the absence of any matter ("vacuum energy"). When the expansion of the Universe was discovered, Einstein apparently began to regard the introduction of this term as a mistake, and he described the cosmological constant as the "greatest mistake of my life". But the term has reappeared as the proposed source of apparent accelerated cosmic expansion. -------------------------------- Related Material: ON QUINTESSENCE AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT The following points are made by P.J.E. Peebles (Nature 1999 398:25): 1) Contrary to expectations, the evidence is that the Universe is expanding at approximately twice the velocity required to overcome the gravitational pull of all the matter the Universe contains. The implication of this is that in the past the greater density of mass in the Universe gravitationally slowed the expansion, while in the future the expansion rate will be close to constant or perhaps increasing under the influence of a new type of matter that some call "quintessence". 2) Quintessence began as Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda. It has negative gravitational mass: its gravity pushes things apart. 3) Particle physicists later adopted Einstein's Lambda as a good model for the gravitational effect of the active vacuum of quantum physics, although the idea is at odds with the small value of Lambda indicated by cosmology. 4) Theoretical cosmologists have noted that as the Universe expands and cools, Lambda tends to decrease. As the Universe cools, symmetries among forces are broken, particles acquire masses, and these processes tend to release an analogue of latent heat. The vacuum energy density accordingly decreases, and with it the value of Lambda. Perhaps an enormous Lambda drove an early rapid expansion that smoothed the primeval chaos to make the near uniform Universe we see today, with a decrease in Lambda over time to its current value. This is the cosmological inflation concept. 5) The author suggests that the recent great advances in detectors, telescopes, and observatories on the ground and in space have given us a rough picture of what happened as our Universe evolved from a dense, hot, and perhaps quite simple early state to its present complexity. Observations in progress are filling in the details, and that in turn is driving intense debate on how the behavior of our Universe can be understood within fundamental physics. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: Active vacuum of quantum physics: This refers to the idea that the vacuum state in quantum mechanics has a zero-point energy (minimum energy) which gives rise to vacuum fluctuations, so the vacuum state does not mean a state of nothing, but is instead an active state. If a theory or process does not change when certain operations are performed on it, the theory or process is said to possess a symmetry with respect to those operations. For example, a circle remains unchanged under rotation or reflection, and a circle therefore has rotational and reflection symmetry. The term "symmetry breaking" refers to the deviation from exact symmetry exhibited by many physical systems, and in general, symmetry breaking encompasses both "explicit" symmetry breaking and "spontaneous" symmetry breaking. Explicit symmetry breaking is a phenomenon in which a system is not quite, but almost, the same for two configurations related by exact symmetry. Spontaneous symmetry breaking refers to a situation in which the solution of a set of physical equations fails to exhibit a symmetry possessed by the equations themselves. In general, the term "latent heat" refers to the quantity of heat absorbed or released when a substance changes its physical phase (e.g., solid to liquid) at constant temperature. The inflationary model, first proposed by Alan Guth in 1980, proposes that quantum fluctuations in the time period 10^(-35) to 10^(-32) seconds after time zero were quickly amplified into large density variations during the "inflationary" 10^(50) expansion of the Universe in that time frame. From checker at panix.com Mon Sep 5 20:57:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 16:57:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] U.S. Dept. of State: How to Identify Misinformation Message-ID: Greetings from the UVa library, folks! Sarah and I are here on our annual trip to Charlottesville. How to Identify Misinformation http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jul/27-595713.html How can a journalist or a news consumer tell if a story is true or false? There are no exact rules, but the following clues can help indicate if a story or allegation is true. * Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory? * Does the story fit the pattern of an "urban legend?" * Does the story contain a shocking revelation about a highly controversial issue? * Is the source trustworthy? * What does further research tell you? Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory? Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations. The U.S. military or intelligence community is a favorite villain in many conspiracy theories. For example, the Soviet disinformation apparatus regularly blamed the U.S. military or intelligence community for a variety of natural disasters as well as political events. In March 1992, then-Russian foreign intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov admitted that the disinformation service of the Soviet KGB intelligence service had concocted the false story that the AIDS virus had been created in a US military laboratory as a biological weapon. When AIDS was first discovered, no one knew how this horrifying new disease had arisen, although scientists have now used DNA analysis to determine that "all HIV-1 strains known to infect man" are closely related to a simian immunodeficiency virus found in a western equatorial African chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes troglodytes. But the Soviets used widespread suspicions about the U.S. military to blame it for AIDS. ([1]More details on this.) In his book 9/11: The Big Lie, French author Thierry Meyssan falsely claimed that no plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Instead, he claimed that the building had been struck by a cruise missile fired by elements within the U.S. government. No such vast conspiracy existed and many eyewitness accounts and evidence gathered on the scene confirmed that the hijacked airliner had struck the building. But, nevertheless, the book was a best-seller in France and has been translated into 19 languages, demonstrating the power that even the most groundless conspiracy theories can have. ([2]More details on 9/11: The Big Lie.) Does the story fit the pattern of an "urban legend?" Is the story startlingly good, bad, amazing, horrifying, or otherwise seemingly "too good" or "too terrible" to be true? If so, it may be an "urban legend." Urban legends, which often circulate by word of mouth, e-mail, or the Internet, are false claims that are widely believed because they put a common fear, hope, suspicion, or other powerful emotion into story form. For example, after the September 11 attacks, a story arose that someone had survived the World Trade Center collapse by "surfing" a piece of building debris from the 82^nd floor to the ground. Of course, no one could survive such a fall, but many initially believed this story, out of desperate hope that some people trapped in the towers miraculously survived their collapse. ([3]More details on this.) Another September 11 urban legend is that an undamaged Bible was found in the midst of the crash site at the Pentagon. In reality, it was a dictionary. But, if a Bible had survived unscathed, that would have seemed much more significant, and been seen by many as a sign of divine intervention. ([4]More details on this.) Since 1987, the false story that Americans or others are kidnapping or adopting children in order to use them in organ transplants has been widely believed. There is absolutely no evidence that any such event has ever occurred, but such allegations have won the most prestigious journalism prizes in France in 1995 and Spain in 1996. ([5]More details on this.) This urban legend is based on fears about both organ transplantation and international adoptions, both of which were relatively new practices in the 1980s. As advances in medical science made organ transplantation more widespread, unfounded fears began to spread that people would be murdered for their organs. At the same time, there were also unfounded fears about the fate of infants adopted by foreigners and taken far from their home countries. The so-called "baby parts" rumor combined both these fears in story form, which gave it great credibility even though there was absolutely no evidence for the allegation. In late 2004, a reporter for Saudi Arabia's Al Watan newspaper repeated a version of the organ trafficking urban legend, falsely claiming that U.S. forces in Iraq were harvesting organs from dead or wounded Iraqis for sale in the United States. This shows how the details of urban legends can change, to fit different circumstances. (More details in [6]English and [7]Arabic.) Highly controversial issues AIDS, organ transplantation, international adoption, and the September 11 attacks are all new, frightening or, in some ways, discomforting topics. Such highly controversial issues are natural candidates for the rise of false rumors, unwarranted fears and suspicions. Another example of a highly controversial issue is depleted uranium, a relatively new armor-piercing substance that was used by the U.S. military for the first time during the 1991 Gulf War. There are many exaggerated fears about depleted uranium because people associate it with weapons-grade uranium or fuel-grade uranium, which are much more dangerous substances. When most people hear the word uranium, a number of strongly held associations spring to mind, including the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, nuclear reactors, radiation illness, cancer, and birth defects. Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples' minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world "uranium." For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is. (More details on depleted uranium in [8]English and [9]Arabic.) Another highly controversial issue is that of forbidden weapons, such as chemical or biological weapons. The United States is regularly, and falsely, accused of using these weapons. (More details on this in [10]English and [11]Arabic.) In the same way, many other highly controversial issues are naturally prone to misunderstanding and false rumors. Any highly controversial issue or taboo behavior is ripe material for false rumors and urban legends. Consider the source Certain websites, publications, and individuals are known for spreading false stories, including: * [12]Aljazeera.com, a deceptive, look-alike website that has sought to fool people into thinking it is run by the Qatari satellite television station Al Jazeera * [13]Jihad Unspun, a website run by a Canadian woman who converted to Islam after the September 11 attacks when she became convinced that Osama bin Laden was right * [14]Islam Memo (Mafkarat-al-Islam), which spreads a great deal of disinformation about Iraq. (More details on Islam Memo and Jihad Unspun in [15]English and [16]Arabic.) There are many conspiracy theory websites, which contain a great deal of unreliable information. Examples include: * [17]Rense.com * Australian "private investigator" [18]Joe Vialls, who died in 2005 * [19]Conspiracy Planet Extremist groups, such as splinter communist parties, often publish disinformation. This can be especially difficult to identify if the false allegations are published by front groups. Front groups purport to be independent, non-partisan organizations but actually controlled by political parties or groups. Some examples of front groups are: * The [20]International Action Center, which is a front group for a splinter communist party called the [21]Workers World Party * The [22]Free Arab Voice, a website that serves as a front for Arab communist Muhammad Abu Nasr and his colleagues. (More details on Muhammad Abu Nasr in [23]English or [24]Arabic.) Research the allegations The only way to determine whether an allegation is true or false is to research it as thoroughly as possible. Of course, this may not always be possible given publication deadlines and time pressures, but there is no substitute for thorough research, going back to the original sources. Using the Internet, many allegations can be fairly thoroughly researched in a matter of hours. For example, in July 2005, the counter-misinformation team researched the allegation that U.S. soldiers in Iraq had killed innocent Iraqi boys playing football and then "planted" rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) next to them, to make it appear that they were insurgents. Using a variety of search terms in "Google," a researcher was able to find the [25]article and photographs upon which the allegations were based. Because weapons did not appear in the initial photographs, but did appear in later photographs, some observers believed this was evidence that the weapons had been planted and that the boys who had been killed were not armed insurgents. The researcher was also able to find [26]weblog entries (numbered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the commanding officer of the platoon that was involved in the incident and another member of his platoon. The weblog entries made it clear that: * the teenaged Iraqi boys were armed insurgents; * after the firefight between U.S. troops and the insurgents was over, the dead, wounded and captured insurgents were initially photographed separated from their weapons because the first priority was to make sure that it was impossible for any of the surviving insurgents to fire them again; * following medical treatment for the wounded insurgents, they were photographed with the captured weapons displayed, in line with Iraqi government requirements; * the insurgents were hiding in a dense palm grove, where visibility was limited to 20 meters, not a likely place for a football game, and they were seen carrying the RPGs on their shoulders. Thus, an hour or two of research on the Internet was sufficient to establish that the suspicions of the bloggers that the weapons had been planted on innocent Iraqi boys playing football were unfounded. Finally, if the counter-misinformation team can be of help, ask us. We can't respond to all requests for information, but if a request is reasonable and we have the time, we will do our best to provide accurate, authoritative information. Created: 27 Jul 2005 Updated: 27 Jul 2005 References 1. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-777030.html 2. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jun/28-581634.html 3. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/survivor.htm 4. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bible.htm 5. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/The_Baby_Parts_Myth.html 6. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-475342.html 7. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-191292.html 8. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-107572.html 9. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-329204.html 10. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Mar/11-723838.html 11. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-315186.html 12. http://aljazeera.com/ 13. http://www.jihadunspun.net/ 14. http://www.islammemo.cc/ 15. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Apr/08-205989.html 16. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-401696.html 17. http://www.rense.com/ 18. http://www.vialls.com/ 19. http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/ 20. http://www.iacenter.org/ 21. http://www.workersworld.net/wwp 22. http://www.freearabvoice.org/ 23. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Apr/08-205989.html 24. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-401696.html 25. http://www.nogw.com/download/2005_plant_weapons.pdf 26. http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Sep 8 15:38:35 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Thu, 08 Sep 2005 15:38:35 +0000 Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC E-mail: Yes to cloning with two mothers Message-ID: <20050908_153835_001470.christian.rauh@uconn.edu> Christian Rauh saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you should see it. ** Yes to cloning with two mothers ** UK scientists have been granted permission to clone a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/health/4225564.stm > ** BBC Daily E-mail ** Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all in one daily e-mail < http://www.bbc.co.uk/dailyemail/ > ** Disclaimer ** The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have?been verified. If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 8 22:01:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 18:01:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: A Physicist Flows Between Fields Message-ID: A Physicist Flows Between Fields The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.9.2 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i02/02a01101.htm By SCOTT SMALLWOOD Most graduate students only dream of choosing between multiple job offers. Todd M. Squires not only had that choice but then had the trickier task of choosing between departments in different disciplines. When the postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology went on the job market this year, he had 10 interviews and received five offers. The physics department at New York University wanted him. So did the chemical-engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, two different engineering departments -- chemical and mechanical -- made him job offers. In the end, he decided to stay in California, taking a job as an assistant professor in the chemical-engineering department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The weird thing is, he isn't really a chemical engineer. His Ph.D. from Harvard University is in physics. And for the past three years, he has been splitting two different postdoctoral fellowships at Cal Tech -- one in the physics department and one in applied mathematics. When pressed, he calls himself an "in-betweener" or, jokingly, a "fluid mechanic." He studies microfluidics -- basically, the way a tiny bit of fluid moves. How does, say, water behave when you put it in a channel the width of a human hair? Or how might tiny crystals floating in the fluid in the semicircular canals in your ear make you dizzy when you look up? At Cal Tech, Mr. Squires, 32, held an independent postdoc position, meaning that he was not tied to another professor's research project and was able to range widely. He worked with a professor there on a major review article about microfluidic devices. He and an MIT professor explored ideas that might one day lead to tiny battery-powered microfluidic chips. He also got fascinated by the design of the semicircular canals that help vertebrates balance. Now he's kicking around a small project involving sharks. It may seem disjointed, but for Mr. Squires, who describes himself as very gregarious, being at the intersection of a number of fields feels just right. Fluid mechanics, he says, "has the perfect mixture of things that are intellectually interesting but also things that I can talk to my parents about." Happenstance After an early childhood in Wisconsin, Mr. Squires grew up in Southern California. His mother taught elementary school; his father worked in marketing for food companies. He stayed close to home for college, graduating from the University of California at Los Angeles with bachelor's degrees in both physics and Russian. Happenstance, he admits, got him into both fields. In high school, he had to choose between taking physics and physiology. "I didn't know the difference and just picked one at random," he says. At college, he tried to pass out of his foreign-language requirement by taking the Spanish exam, but he didn't score high enough. So he enrolled in Russian and ended up loving it. In addition to Russian, Mr. Squires speaks fluent French and passable Arabic. He loved traveling the world, but does less of it now that he is married and the father of two children under 22 months. He is adept at explaining his research in simple terms. He sounds a bit like an excited kid when he starts talking about how microfluidics devices could be created using the tools that have been developed for making microchips. Imagine, he says, tiny chemistry labs where a slew of reactions could be done with a single chip. Or imagine taking a tiny drop of blood and doing a full set of lab work. Imagine an implantable device that monitors the level of a certain drug in your bloodstream. Then he pauses, worried that he's spinning too many science-fiction tales. "I don't want to sound like a wild-eyed pitchman," he says, "but there's a whole lot of possibilities." Two generations ago, he says, "when you had the first computers that filled a room, who would have thought that now we would use computers for all the things we do?" He has a good sense of the overall possibility of the field because he worked with Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, on a 50-page review article that will appear in the journal Reviews of Modern Physics. He has not stopped dreaming about putting microfluidic devices into the human body. He has also spent time studying one that's already there. That's essentially what the canals in our ears are. In graduate school, he collaborated on mathematical models to examine the cause of one kind of vertigo. That then prompted him to examine how the structures work. After studying the physics of the canals, Mr. Squires says, he speculated that the canals need to be the size they are to work properly. Essentially, he says, evolution has created a sense of balance that is as good as it is going to get. Sunny Days At Santa Barbara, the search committee was attracted by Mr. Squires's "maturity and breadth," according to Matthew Tirrell, dean of the College of Engineering. For instance, as a postdoc, Mr. Squires had organized sessions at scientific meetings -- a task generally reserved for more seasoned scholars, says Mr. Tirrell. "He has the capacity to summarize the whole field and he's also produced some interesting research on fluid motion," the dean says. But why pick Santa Barbara over MIT's chemical-engineering department, which is generally regarded as tops in the field? It was a tough call, Mr. Squires says. "If decisions are that hard," he says, "I figure that either all the options are great or all the options are terrible." In this case, having his family in California made staying out West attractive. And the sunshine didn't hurt. "I wouldn't boil it all down to the weather, but lifestyle is part of it," he says. "Having lunch with my kids, being able to live near the beach, being able to bike to work." Mr. Tirrell cringes when location is mentioned. "We're continually fighting the idea that's the only thing we have to offer," he says. Regardless, he is excited that his chemical-engineering program, which is considered a top-10 department, won out over some higher-ranked programs. "Part of my pleasure in attracting him is the fact that it shows it's not a no-brainer that you're going to go to MIT." Mr. Squires says that ultimately the interdisciplinary focus of Santa Barbara made the difference. At Santa Barbara he plans to keep working with other researchers -- no matter what department they're in. "Not quite fitting anywhere has its advantages," he says. "It means you can kind of fit everywhere." From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 8 22:01:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 18:01:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Runner's World: How Many Calories Are You Really Burning? Message-ID: How Many Calories Are You Really Burning? http://www.runnersworld.com/article/printer_friendly/0,5046,s6-197-0-0-8402,00.html If you think running and walking both torch the same number of calories per mile, you better put down that cookie by: Amby Burfoot A few months ago I got into an argument with someone who's far smarter than I am. I should have known better, but you know how these things go. Needless to say, I lost the argument. Still, I learned something important in the process. David Swain is a bicyclist who likes to ride across the country every couple of years. Since I spend most of my time on my feet, I figured I could teach him something about walking and running. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to Swain's Ph.D. in exercise physiology, his position as director of the Wellness Institute and Research Center at Old Dominion University, and his work on the "Metabolic Calculations" appendix to the American College of Sports Medicine's Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription. Both Swain and I are interested in the fitness-health connection, which makes walking and running great subjects for discussion. To put it simply, they are far and away the leading forms of human movement. Every able-bodied human learns how to walk and run without any particular instruction. The same cannot be said of activities such as swimming, bicycling, skateboarding, and hitting a 3-iron. This is why walking and running are the best ways to get in shape, burn extra calories, and improve your health. Our argument began when I told Swain that both walking and running burn the same number of calories per mile. I was absolutely certain of this fact for two unassailable reasons: (1) I had read it a billion times; and (2) I had repeated it a billion times. Most runners have heard that running burns about 100 calories a mile. And since walking a mile requires you to move the same body weight over the same distance, walking should also burn about 100 calories a mile. Sir Isaac Newton said so. Swain was unimpressed by my junior-high physics. "When you perform a continuous exercise, you burn five calories for every liter of oxygen you consume," he said. "And running in general consumes a lot more oxygen than walking." What the Numbers Show I was still gathering my resources for a retort when a new article crossed my desk, and changed my cosmos. In "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running," published last December in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, a group of Syracuse University researchers measured the actual calorie burn of 12 men and 12 women while running and walking 1,600 meters (roughly a mile) on a treadmill. Result: The men burned an average of 124 calories while running, and just 88 while walking; the women burned 105 and 74. (The men burned more than the women because they weighed more.) Swain was right! The investigators at Syracuse didn't explain why their results differed from a simplistic interpretation of Newton's Laws of Motion, but I figured it out with help from Swain and Ray Moss, Ph.D., of Furman University. Running and walking aren't as comparable as I had imagined. When you walk, you keep your legs mostly straight, and your center of gravity rides along fairly smoothly on top of your legs. In running, we actually jump from one foot to the other. Each jump raises our center of gravity when we take off, and lowers it when we land, since we bend the knee to absorb the shock. This continual rise and fall of our weight requires a tremendous amount of Newtonian force (fighting gravity) on both takeoff and landing. Now that you understand why running burns 50 percent more calories per mile than walking, I hate to tell you that it's a mostly useless number. Sorry. We mislead ourselves when we talk about the total calorie burn (TCB) of exercise rather than the net calorie burn (NCB). To figure the NCB of any activity, you must subtract the resting metabolic calories your body would have burned, during the time of the workout, even if you had never gotten off the sofa. You rarely hear anyone talk about the NCB of workouts, because this is America, dammit, and we like our numbers big and bold. Subtraction is not a popular activity. Certainly not among the infomercial hucksters and weight-loss gurus who want to promote exercise schemes. "It's bizarre that you hear so much about the gross calorie burn instead of the net," says Swain. "It could keep people from realizing why they're having such a hard time losing weight." Thanks to the Syracuse researchers, we now know the relative NCB of running a mile in 9:30 versus walking the same mile in 19:00. Their male subjects burned 105 calories running, 52 walking; the women, 91 and 43. That is, running burns twice as many net calories per mile as walking. And since you can run two miles in the time it takes to walk one mile, running burns four times as many net calories per hour as walking. Run Slow or Walk Fast? I didn't come here to bash walking, however. Walking is an excellent form of exercise that builds aerobic fitness, strengthens bones, and burns lots of calories. A study released in early 2004 showed that the Amish take about six times as many steps per day as adults in most American communities, and have about 87-percent lower rates of obesity. In fact, I had read years ago that fast walking burns more calories than running at the same speed. Now was the time to test this hypothesis. Wearing a heart-rate monitor, I ran on a treadmill for two minutes at 3.0 mph (20 minutes per mile), and at 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.0, and 5.5 mph (10:55 per mile). After a 10-minute rest to allow my heart rate to return to normal, I repeated the same thing walking. Here's my running vs. walking heart rate at the end of each two-minute stint: 3.0 (99/81), 3.5 (104/85), 4.0 (109/94), 4.5 (114/107), 5.0 (120/126), 5.5 (122/145). My conclusion: Running is harder than walking at paces slower than 12-minutes-per-mile. At faster paces, walking is harder than running. How to explain this? It's not easy, except to say that walking at very fast speeds forces your body to move in ways it wasn't designed to move. This creates a great deal of internal "friction" and inefficiency, which boosts heart rate, oxygen consumption, and calorie burn. So, as Jon Stewart might say, "Walking fast...good. Walking slow...uh, not so much." The bottom line: Running is a phenomenal calorie-burning exercise. In public-health terms--that is, in the fight against obesity--it's even more important that running is a low-cost, easy-to-do, year-round activity. Walking doesn't burn as many calories, but it remains a terrific exercise. As David Swain says, "The new research doesn't mean that walking burns any fewer calories than it used to. It just means that walkers might have to walk a little more, or eat a little less, to hit their weight goal." What's the Burn? A Calorie Calculator You can use the formulas below to determine your calorie-burn while running and walking. The "Net Calorie Burn" measures calories burned, minus basal metabolism. Scientists consider this the best way to evaluate the actual calorie-burn of any exercise. The walking formulas apply to speeds of 3 to 4 mph. At 5 mph and faster, walking burns more calories than running. Your Total Calorie Burn/Mile Your Net Calorie Burn/Mile Running .75 x your weight (in lbs.) .63 x your weight Walking .53 x your weight .30 x your weight Adapted from "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running," Medicine & Science in Sport & Exercise, Cameron et al, Dec. 2004. From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 8 22:01:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 18:01:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Human-Non-Human Primate Neural Grafting Message-ID: Science Policy: On Human-Non-Human Primate Neural Grafting http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050909-6.htm The following points are made by M. Greene et al (Science 2005 309:385): 1) If human neural stem cells were implanted into the brains of other primates what might this do to the mind of the recipient? Could such grafting teach us anything of value for treatment of neurological injury and disease? Could we change the capacities of the engrafted animal in a way that leads us to reexamine its moral status? These questions have gained significance since publication of research involving grafting human neural stem cells into the brains of fetal monkeys [1]. In 2004, the authors formed a multidisciplinary working group; two plenary meetings over 12 months provide the basis for this report. 2) There is considerable controversy (reflected within the discussion group) over the likely value of interspecies stem cell work for progress toward therapies [2]. We cannot graft human neural stem cells into human beings solely for experimental purposes, even if they will lead to human therapies. Group members arguing for the value of research on human cells in non-human primates (NHPs) pointed out that because the aim is to learn about human neural stem cells it makes most sense to use human lines. The fact that available NHP lines are few and poorly characterized [3] is an additional reason to use human lines. Another consideration is the need to assess candidate human cell lines for viability, potential to differentiate, and safety with regard to such possibilities as tumor formation. NHPs may be appropriate for in vivo screening. 3) Skeptics argued that differences between humans and NHPs could render results uninterpretable and that the preferred path for many questions is to study NHP neural stem cells in NHPs. Assessments of the scientific merit of the research must form and develop along with the field itself. 4) The authors unanimously rejected ethical objections grounded on unnaturalness or crossing species boundaries [4]. Whether it is possible to draw a meaningful distinction between the natural and the unnatural is a matter of dispute. However, stipulating that research is "unnatural" says nothing about its ethics. Much of modern medical practice involves tools, materials, and behaviors that cannot be found in nature but are not unethical as a consequence 5) Another concern is that human to non-human primate (H-NHP) neural grafting is wrong because it transgresses species boundaries [5]. However, the notion that there are fixed species boundaries is not well supported in science or philosophy. Moreover, human-nonhuman chimerism has already occurred through xenografting. For example, the safety and efficacy of engrafting fetal pig cells has been studied in people with Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease without moral objection. Indeed, some have suggested that porcine sources may be less morally contentious than the use of human fetal tissue. Merely because something has been done does not prove it right. However, the authors see no new ethical or regulatory issues regarding chimeras themselves. 6) The central challenge is whether introducing human cells into NHP brains raises questions about moral status. A variety of reasons have been given for according different moral standing to humans and NHPs. In the Abrahamic traditions, humans are set apart by God as morally special and are given stewardship over other forms of life (Genesis 1:26-28). For Kantians, human capacities for rationality and autonomy demand that we be treated as ends in ourselves. Mill finds, in the richness of human mental life, an especially fecund source of utility. Singer, although strongly defending equal consideration of nonhuman interests, argues that self-awareness affects the ethically allowable treatment of a creature by changing the kinds of interests it can have. 7) In conclusion: The authors support the National Academy's recommendation that H-NHP neural grafting experiments be subject to special review. The authors agree that such review should complement, not replace, current review by animal-use panels and institutional review boards. The authors further recommend that experiments involving H-NHP neural grafting be required, wherever possible, to look for and report changes in cognitive function. Explicit data collection on cognition and behavior will help to ensure that ethical guidelines can be developed appropriately as the field advances. References (abridged): 1. V. Ourednik et al., Science 293, 1820 (2001) 2. J. S. Robert, Bioessays 26, 1005 (2004) 3. K.-Y. F. Pau, D. Wolf, Reprod. Biol. Endocrinol. 2, 41 (2004) 4. P. Karpowicz, C. B. Cohen, D. van der Kooy, Nat.Med. 10, 331 (2004) 5. F. Fukuyama, Washington Post, 15 February 2004, p. B04 Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: NEUROBIOLOGY: ON NEURAL STEM CELL INTERACTIONS The following points are made by A.E. Wurmser et al (Science 2004 304:1253): 1) The ability of stem cells to both self-renew and differentiate into many different cell types enables these versatile cells to generate and repair tissues and organs. Yet studies of the fruit fly Drosophila and of mammalian skin, intestine, bone marrow, and brain reveal that these inherent stem cell features are tightly regulated by the cells and proteins that constitute the extracellular environment (or "niche") that stem cells inhabit (1). For example, Shen et al. (2) have demonstrated that endothelial cells (ECs) that are enriched in the niche occupied by neural stem cells (NSCs) regulate NSC proliferation and induce these stem cells to become neurons in vitro. 2) It is well established that NSCs are not randomly distributed throughout the brain, but rather are concentrated around blood vessels (3-5). This location places NSCs in close proximity to the ECs that line blood vessels, facilitating communication between these two cell types (3-5). To test the degree of intercellular communication between NSCs and ECs, Shen et al (1) cultured NSCs and monitored changes in their behavior when ECs were brought into close proximity (2). These investigators maintained cultures of mouse embryonic NSCs (derived from the cerebral cortex of 10- to 11-day-old mouse embryos) by adding fibroblast growth factor-2. Under these conditions, NSCs proliferated slowly and many of them exited the cell cycle, choosing to differentiate instead (2). However, when NSCs were cocultured with ECs their proliferation rate doubled, resulting in the formation of large interconnected sheets of undifferentiated cells. 3) One aspect of the Shen et al strategy was to introduce ECs into NSC cultures by means of transwell inserts. The pores of the transwells were too small to allow cell-cell contact between NSCs and ECs, but were large enough to enable signaling factors secreted by ECs to diffuse into the NSC cultures. Remarkably, the removal of transwells containing ECs triggered the coordinated differentiation of proliferating NSCs into neurons. Only 9% of NSCs unexposed to ECs expressed mature neuronal markers, compared with 31 to 64% of NSCs exposed to the EC transwells. This trend also was observed with cultured NSCs derived from the subventricular zone of adult mouse brain (2). Thus, signaling molecules secreted by ECs induced a shift in the mixed population of proliferating and differentiating NSCs, pushing them toward self-renewal while simultaneously priming them for the production of neurons. References (abridged): 1. E. Fuchs et al., Cell 116, 769 (2004) 2. Q. Shen et al., Science 304, 1338 (2004) 3. T. D. Palmer et al., J. Comp. Neurol. 425, 479 (2000) 4. A. Capela, S. Temple, Neuron 35, 865 (2002) 5. A. Louissaint et al., Neuron 34, 945 ( 2002) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: NEUROBIOLOGY: ON HUMAN NEURAL STEM CELLS The following points are made by Pasko Rakic (Nature 2004 427:685): 1) Neural stem cells are a focus of strong interest because of the possibility that they could be used to replace neurons that have been damaged or lost -- perhaps as a result of injury such as trauma or stroke, or through neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease. These stem cells can give rise to neurons and their supporting cells (glia) and it is hoped that something akin to neural stem cells in the adult human brain could be stimulated to generate replacement neurons. 2) Non-mammalian vertebrates, such as the salamander, can regenerate large portions of their brain and spinal cord, but humans have evidently lost this capacity during evolution. Therefore, most research on neural stem cells is carried out on mammals such as rodents, which are genetically closer to humans. However, although mammalian genomes may be similar, this similarity masks vast species differences in the way the brain is organized and in its capacity for regeneration and susceptibility to environmental insults. The failure of brain repair in clinical trials based on the promising results seen after the use of similar procedures in rodents is sobering testimony to the importance of such species-specific distinctions. 3) Human neural stem cells behave differently from their rodent equivalents in culture(1), but direct study of human brain tissue by Sanai et al(2) demonstrates additional significant and clinically relevant species-specific differences. A large number of postmortem and biopsy samples reveal two basic findings. First, neural stem cells that can potentially give rise to neurons, as well as to two types of glial cell (astrocytes and oligodendrocytes), are situated in a region of the forebrain known as the subventricular zone. Second, a pathway known as the rostral migratory stream -- which in adult rodents contains neurons that migrate from the subventricular zone to the brain region concerned with sensing smell -- is absent in humans. 4) In adult mammals, including humans, the subventricular zone (more commonly known as the subependymal zone[3-5]) contains cells that have the characteristics of glial cells and that can generate neuronal cells in culture. Sanai et al(2) show that in adult humans these "glial progenitor cells" form a prominent layer, or ribbon, that is restricted to a specific region in the brain that lines the lateral cerebral ventricle. This region is also present in non-human primates, but it is thinner and less well delineated than in humans(4). References (abridged): 1. Ginis, I. & Rao, M. S. Exp. Neurol. 184, 61-77 (2003) 2. Sanai, N. et al. Nature 427, 740-744 (2004) 3. Lewis, P. D. Nature 217, 974-975 (1968) 4. McDermott, K. W. & Lantos, P. L. Brain Res. Dev. Brain Res. 57, 269-277 (1990) 5. Weickert, C. S. et al. J. Comp. Neurol. 423, 359-372 (2000) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 10 02:02:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:02:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The History of Chromosomes May Shape the Future of Diseases Message-ID: The History of Chromosomes May Shape the Future of Diseases http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30gene.html By [3]CARL ZIMMER The common ancestor of humans and the rhesus macaque monkey lived about 25 million years ago. But despite that vast gulf of time, our chromosomes still retain plenty of evidence of our shared heritage. A team of scientists at the National Cancer Institute recently documented this evidence by constructing a map of the rhesus macaque's DNA, noting the location of 802 genetic markers in its genome. Then they compared the macaque map to a corresponding map of the human genome. The order of thousands of genes was the same. "About half of the chromosomes are pretty much intact," said William Murphy, a member of the team, now at Texas A&M University. The other chromosomes had become rearranged over the past 25 million years, but Dr. Murphy and his colleagues were able to reconstruct their evolution. Periodically, a chunk of chromosome was accidentally sliced out of the genome, flipped around and inserted backward. In other cases, the chunk was ferried to a different part of the chromosome. All told, 23 of these transformations took place, and within these blocks of DNA, the order of the genes remained intact. "It's fairly easy to see how you can convert the chromosomes from the macaque to the human," Dr. Murphy said. This new macaque study, which is set to appear in a future issue of the journal Genomics, is just one of many new papers charting the history of chromosomes - in humans and other species. While scientists have been studying chromosomes for nearly a century, only in the last few years have large genome databases, powerful computers and new mathematical methods allowed scientists to trace these evolutionary steps. Scientists hope that uncovering the history of chromosomes will have practical applications to diseases like cancer, in which rearranged chromosomes play a major part. Scientists have known for over 70 years that chromosomes can be rearranged. With a microscope, it is possible to make out the banded patterns on chromosomes and to compare the pattern in different species. Scientists discovered that different populations of fruit fly species could be distinguished by inverted segments in their chromosomes. Later, molecular biologists discovered how cells accidentally rearranged large chunks of genetic material as they made new copies of their chromosomes. By the 1980's, scientists were able to identify some major events in chromosome evolution. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, for example, while chimpanzees and other apes have 24. Scientists determined that two ancestral chromosomes fused together after the ancestors of humans split off from other apes some six million years ago. But a more detailed understanding of how chromosomes had changed would have to wait until scientists had amassed more information. The mystery could not be solved with data alone. Deciphering the history of chromosomes is like a fiendishly difficult puzzle. One well-studied version of it is known as the pancake problem. You have a stack of pancakes of different sizes, and you want to sort them into a neat pile from small to big. You can only do so by using a spatula to flip over some of the pancakes. Even a dozen pancakes make this a viciously hard problem to solve. "Flipping chromosomes is a lot like flipping pancakes," said Pavel Pevzner of the University of California, San Diego. In the mid-1990's, Dr. Pevzner and Sridhar Hannenhalli of the University of Pennsylvania invented a fast method for comparing chromosomes from two different species and determining the fewest number of rearrangements - the equivalent of pancake flips - that separate them. They introduced the method with a series of talks with titles like "Transforming Cabbage Into Turnips" and "Transforming Mice Into Men." "That opened the floodgates," said Bernard Moret of the University of New Mexico. Scientists have used methods like Dr. Pevzner's to study different groups of species. Dr. Pevzner himself joined with Dr. Murphy and 23 other scientists to analyze the last 100 million years of mammal evolution. They compared the genomes of humans to cats, dogs, mice, rats, pigs, cows and horses, using a program developed by Harris A. Lewin and his colleagues at the University of Illinois, called the Evolution Highway. The program allowed them to trace how each lineage's chromosomes had become rearranged over time. They published their results in the July 22 issue of Science. The scientists found some chromosomes barely altered and others heavily reworked. They also discovered that the rate for rearrangements was far from steady. After the end of the Cretaceous Period, when large dinosaurs became extinct, the chromosomes of mammals began rearranging two to five times as fast as before. That may reflect the evolutionary explosion of mammals that followed the dinosaur extinctions, as mammals rapidly occupied new ecological niches as predators and grazers, fliers and swimmers. More puzzling is the fact that different lineages became rearranged faster than others. "The dog's chromosomes have been evolving at least two to three times cats' or humans'," Dr. Murphy said. "And the mice and rats have been going even faster than the dogs." (Rodents are by no means the record holder. A 2004 study found that sunflower chromosomes have been rearranging about three times as fast as rodents'.) The new results raise questions about how evolution makes chromosome rearrangements part of a species' genome. In many cases, these mutations cause diseases, so natural selection should make them disappear quickly from a population. But scientists have also documented some rearrangements that are not hazardous or that are even beneficial. This year, for example, scientists discovered that some Northern Europeans carry a large inverted segment on one of their chromosomes. This inversion boosts the fertility of women who carry it. Chromosome rearrangements may also play a role in the origin of new species. Scientists often find that closely related species living in overlapping ranges have rearranged chromosomes. The mismatch of chromosomes may make it impossible for the two species to hybridize. As a result, the rearrangements may then spread through the entire new species. But Dr. Murphy isn't willing to speculate whether rodents have a faster rate of chromosome rearrangements because of the way they form new species. "There really isn't enough genome sequence to be sure," he said. The Science study and the newer study on macaques suggest that chromosomes tend to break in certain places, a hypothesis first offered by Dr. Pevzner in 2003. "Genomes do not play dice," Dr. Pevzner said. "Certain regions of the genome are being broken over and over again." It is too early to say why these regions have become break points, said Evan Eichler of the University of Washington, who was not involved in the mammal study. "There's something about these regions that makes them hot, and we have to figure out what that hot factor is," he said. Dr. Eichler argues that it is important to figure out what that is because a number of human congenital diseases are associated with chromosome rearrangements at these same break points. "Here you have a beautiful connection," he said. "The same thing that causes big-scale rearrangement between a human and chimp or a gorilla, these same sites are often the site of deletion associated with diseases." Some of these diseases involve chromosome rearrangements in a fertilized egg, leading to congenital disorders. Cancer cells also undergo large-scale chromosome rearrangements, often at the same break points identified in the recent evolution study. "We could have inherited some weaknesses in our genome that we have to understand and deal with medically," said David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "And that has to do with the history of how our genome is built." From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 10 02:02:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:02:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much Message-ID: Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30profile.html [International comparisons, please! The U.S., I think, will fall close to the regression line on I.Q. It's way above it in per capita income. It would be fun to regress per capita income against both I.Q. and scientific literacy. My bet it that the addition to the coefficient of correlation will be very slight.] By [3]CORNELIA DEAN CHICAGO - When Jon D. Miller looks out across America, which he can almost do from his 18th-floor office at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, he sees a landscape of haves and have-nots - in terms not of money, but of knowledge. Dr. Miller, 63, a political scientist who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at the medical school, studies how much Americans know about science and what they think about it. His findings are not encouraging. While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert," he said in an interview. Most of the rest "don't have a clue." At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process. Over the last three decades, Dr. Miller has regularly surveyed his fellow citizens for clients as diverse as the National Science Foundation, European government agencies and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. People who track Americans' attitudes toward science routinely cite his deep knowledge and long track record. "I think we should pay attention to him," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, who cites Dr. Miller's work in her efforts to advance the cause of evolution in the classroom. "We ignore public understanding of science at our peril." Rolf F. Lehming, who directs the science foundation's surveys on understanding of science, calls him "absolutely authoritative." Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century. At one time, this kind of ignorance may not have meant much for the nation's public life. Dr. Miller, who has delved into 18th-century records of New England town meetings, said that back then, it was enough "if you knew where the bridge should be built, if you knew where the fence should be built." "Even if you could not read and write, and most New England residents could not read or write," he went on, "you could still be a pretty effective citizen." No more. "Acid rain, nuclear power, infectious diseases - the world is a little different," he said. It was the nuclear power issue that first got him interested in public knowledge of science, when he was a graduate student in the 1960's. "The issue then was nuclear power," he said. "I used to play tennis with some engineers who were very pro-nuclear, and I was dating a person who was very anti-nuclear. I started doing some reading and discovered that if you don't know a little science it was hard to follow these debates. A lot of journalism would not make sense to you." Devising good tests to measure scientific knowledge is not simple. Questions about values and attitudes can be asked again and again over the years because they will be understood the same way by everyone who hears them; for example, Dr. Miller's surveys regularly ask people whether they agree that science and technology make life change too fast (for years, about half of Americans have answered yes) or whether Americans depend too much on science and not enough on faith (ditto). But assessing actual knowledge, over time, "is something of an art," he said. He varies his questions, as topics come and go in the news, but devises the surveys so overall results can be compared from survey to survey, just as SAT scores can be compared even though questions on the test change. For example, he said, in the era of nuclear tests he asked people whether they knew about strontium 90, a component of fallout. Today, he asks about topics like the workings of DNA in the cell because "if you don't know what a cell is, you can't make sense of stem cell research." Dr. Miller, who was raised in Portsmouth, Ohio, when it was a dying steel town, attributes much of the nation's collective scientific ignorance to poor education, particularly in high schools. Many colleges require every student to take some science, but most Americans do not graduate from college. And science education in high school can be spotty, he said. "Our best university graduates are world-class by any definition," he said. "But the second half of our high school population - it's an embarrassment. We have left behind a lot of people." He had firsthand experience with local school issues in the 1980's, when he was a young father living in DeKalb, Ill., and teaching at Northern Illinois University. The local school board was considering closing his children's school, and he attended some board meetings to get an idea of members' reasoning. It turned out they were spending far more time on issues like the cost of football tickets than they were on the budget and other classroom matters. "It was shocking," he said. So he and some like-minded people ran successfully for the board and, once in office, tried to raise taxes to provide more money for the classroom. They initiated three referendums; all failed. Eventually, he gave up, and his family moved away. "This country cannot finance good school systems on property taxes," he said. "We don't get the best people for teaching because we pay so little. For people in the sciences particularly, if you have some skill, the job market is so good that teaching is not competitive." Dr. Miller was recruited to Northwestern Medical School in 1999 by administrators who knew of his work and wanted him to study attitudes and knowledge of science in light of the huge changes expected from the genomic revolution. He also has financing - and wears a yellow plastic bracelet - from the Lance Armstrong Foundation, for a project to research people's knowledge of clinical trials. Many research organizations want to know what encourages people to participate in a trial and what discourages them. But Dr. Miller said, "It's more interesting to ask if they know what a clinical trial is, do they know what a placebo is." The National Science Foundation is recasting its survey operations, so Dr. Miller is continuing surveys for other clients. One involves following people over time, tracing their knowledge and beliefs about science from childhood to adulthood, to track the way advantages and disadvantages in education are compounded over time and to test his theory that people don't wait until they are adults to start forming opinions about the world. Lately, people who advocate the teaching of evolution have been citing Dr. Miller's ideas on what factors are correlated with adherence to creationism and rejection of Darwinian theories. In general, he says, these fundamentalist views are most common among people who are not well educated and who "work in jobs that are evaporating fast with competition around the world." But not everyone is happy when he says things like that. Every time he goes on the radio to talk about his findings, he said, "I get people sending me cards saying they will pray for me a lot." From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 10 02:02:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:02:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Runners World: Should You Run Naked? Message-ID: Should You Run Naked? http://www.runnersworld.com/article/printer_friendly/0,5046,s6-187-0-0-6844,00.html Nothing came between ancient Olympians and their performance. Were they onto something? by: Amby Burfoot If you ask me, the ancient Olympians were a lot smarter than we are. They had the good sense to run, jump, and throw in the nude. When you put anything between your skin and the environment--like shorts and a singlet, for example--you only decrease your body's cooling efficiency (even if you're more...comfortable in certain areas). The so-called "modern" Olympians of 1896 were smarter than us, too. They did their running, jumping, and throwing in April. Some athletes complained about the chilly, damp weather, but Spiridon Louis gave thanks to Zeus all the way to his (clothed) marathon victory in 2:58:50. Unfortunately, Olympic Marathons have been getting hotter ever since. The 1900 Olympic Marathon started at 2:36 p.m. under a 95-degree Parisian sun. Twelve years later, in Stockholm, a Portuguese runner died in the sweltering Olympic Marathon. Many of us remember Gabriele Andersen Schiess staggering across the finish line in the 1984 Women's Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles. In Athens this month, both the men's and women's marathons will start at 6 p.m., when average temperatures are in the mid-80s, though the city has a record August high of 109. And the marathoners will be running on black asphalt that has been simmering for 12 hours. "It's a terrible disservice that the marathoners will be forced to compete in conditions where they can't perform their best, and could actually hurt themselves," says Dr. William Roberts, medical director of the Twin Cities Marathon and president of the American College of Sports Medicine. To help athletes deal with the Athens weather, the U.S. Olympic Committee has been holding educational meetings since last September, when it organized a conference called "Heat, Humidity and Air Pollution: What to Expect in Athens 2004." In May, the top U.S. marathoners gathered in Colorado Springs for the latest update. "We believe the heat actually opens the window of possibilities for our marathoners," says U.S. men's Olympic distance coach Bob Larsen. "We'll leave no stone unturned in our search for scientific approaches to running in the heat." The lessons learned by the marathon team will also work for you. Here are some of the highlights. Heat Acclimation Many years of heat acclimation research have convinced most experts that you can do a good job of adjusting to the heat in eight days, a better job in 14, and perhaps better still in 21. The last physiological variable to adapt is your sweat rate, which takes eight to 14 days to reach maximum efficiency. Other, faster responders include increased plasma volume, decreased sodium concentration in the blood, decreased heart rate while running, decreased perceived exertion, and increased running economy. U.S. track athletes will be given the chance to attend a pre-Olympic training camp on Crete about two weeks before they move to Athens. The runners will follow a heat-training protocol outlined by Randy Wilber, Ph.D., of the USOC sports sciences department, who suggests the following: First run in the morning or evening cool; then move to warmer times of the day; finally, increase the length and intensity of your midday workouts. Perhaps no runner has thought more about heat training and racing than Alberto Salazar. Before the 1984 Olympic Marathon he traveled to the U.S. Army Labs in Natick, Massachusetts, to get tested in a heat chamber (where sweat production is measured) and learned to chug two quarts of fluid before every workout. But then he crashed. He now believes he did too many hard 20-milers in the heat. "I was exhausted from the first step of the marathon," he says. He finished 15th in 2:14:19. Today Salazar is coaching Dan Browne, one of the 2004 U.S. marathon qualifiers. He plans to have Browne do occasional workouts in a Nike heat chamber and to cut back on the intensity of his speedwork. "No one's going to run 2:06 in Athens, so we don't have to worry about training for that pace," Salazar says. Hydration Everyone knows drinking fluids is supposed to help you run faster. But you have to slow down to grab your drinks. America's Steve Spence worked on this dilemma when he was training for the hot, humid World Championships Marathon in Tokyo in 1991. Spence set up a water table on his local track, and then practiced drinking while running intervals at faster-than-marathon pace. "I figured if I got good at taking my drinks at this pace, it would come easy in the marathon," he says. Spence claimed the bronze medal. A couple of months ago, Alan Culpepper, another 2004 marathon qualifier, visited the Gatorade Sports Science Institute in Illinois to get a better idea of his sweat production and hydration needs. When he ran for an hour in a heat chamber cranked up to 85 degrees, he sweat 1.4 liters. He also learned that he is a salty sweater. "I'm much more aware now of my drinking and sodium needs," Culpepper says. "I feel more prepared to handle the heat challenges in Athens." Superhydration Storing extra water would be nice, but runners aren't camels. Still, two simple substances seem capable of promoting superhydration: common salt and glycerol, a liquid supplement. A New Zealand study presented at this year's American College of Sports Medicine meeting showed that well-trained runners who prehydrated with a heavily salted drink were able to exercise 20 percent longer in 90-degree weather than when they prehydrated with a minimally salty beverage. Not all glycerol studies have shown an improvement in hydration status or endurance performance, but a two-year-old study with Olympic distance triathletes produced convincing results. In a randomized, double blind, crossover study in 87-degree conditions, the triathletes slowed down much less with glycerol than without it. "Glycerol lets you increase the amount of standing water on board," says U.S. marathon guru David Martin, Ph.D. "It's nice to have that extra amount during a long, hot race." Spence readily admits he used glycerol in Tokyo, Keith Brantly says he used it in his best marathons, and Salazar says Browne will probably test glycerol to see how it works for him. Cool Vests In January, a team from the University of Georgia studied college distance runners covering 5-K in a 90-degree heat chamber with and without ice vests to cool their core before their efforts. The "precooled" runners finished 13 seconds faster, which is more than the gap that will separate many gold-medalists and fourth-place finishers in Athens. Recently, the folks at Nike Sport Research have been working to design an improved cooling vest that places more of the body's surfaces closer to larger volumes of ice. Only field hockey players have tested it (successfully, Nike says), but Lance Armstrong and Paula Radcliffe were both trying the vest in early summer. Cool Clothing You already know that a white shirt will absorb less heat than a black one. And for the past decade you've read about the amazing advances of breathable microfibers. But wait, those shirts are designed to keep you warm and dry in the winter. Do you really want that on a hot summer's day? Nope. So four years ago Nike produced a shirt that several U.S. runners wore in the Sydney Olympics. This white shirt sat off the skin on small bumps (allowing air to circulate), was constructed of a large fishnet weave (more air circulation), didn't absorb sweat (leaving it on the skin to cool you via evaporation), and was made of recycled plastic bottles. Home run! Too bad Nike called the shirt the Stand-Off Distance Singlet (because of the way it stood off your skin), which sounded too much like a shirt with a body-odor problem. This year Nike has produced something called the Nike Sphere Cool Marathon Singlet, with aerodynamic seam placement, mesh construction, and patent-pending "Zoned Venting" technology. But give me a Stand-Off Distance Singlet, and I'll show you a really great hot-weather running shirt. Here's my advice to the U.S. marathoners: Bring your scissors to Athens and cut your racing singlet as short as you can. Research by exercise physiologist Timothy Gavins, Ph.D., has shown that "the chimney effect" can improve body cooling. This refers to air moving up the bottom of your untucked shirt and out the top. Or just run naked. You'll be reconnecting with your Olympic forebears, increasing your chances of a medal, and giving a big boost to NBC's Olympic TV ratings. From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 10 02:02:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:02:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Runners World: Should You Run Naked? Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 11:52:51 +0200 From: Amara Graps Reply-To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List To: wta-talk at transhumanism.org Subject: [wta-talk] Runners World: Should You Run Naked? Beyond sports - There are many many reason for why I think peeling off the clothes is a good idea. Here I repost something I sent to the extropians three years ago. Amara Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 03:42:48 +0100 To: extropians at extropy.org From: Amara Graps Subject: Beingness Sender: owner-extropians at extropy.org Reply-To: extropians at extropy.org Spike wrote: > Regarding public nudity, there is a prominent nude beach near where > I grew up, just north of Kennedy Space Center, Playalinda beach. [...] > on the most perfect beach weather days. But the last thing one > will see after starting that hike and the first thing one will see at > the other end are countless naked people. That would be fine, > except for the fact that the kinds of people who generally go nude > on the beach are exactly those who you would really prefer not to > see naked. Ever. Not even in ones worst nightmare. Now now Spike. Naturist beaches and resorts are freedom, in an ultimate sense. What better way to see the marvelous variety of shapes and sizes in which the the human body manifests itself? Social roles, economic classes, sex roles reduced or removed, and we can be who we are, simply. "If it were perfectly natural to go nude, we'd all be born that way." General Naturist/Nudist Information http://www.mbay.net/~cgd/naturism/nlink01.htm Being and Nakedness http://www.naturistplace.com/ REC.NUDE FAQ: Naturist Site Reports: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/nude-faq/beaches/ The following pieces are from: Humorous Introduction to Naturism http://www.netnude.com/main/intro.html#intro {begin quote} Nobody knows for certain exactly how many naturists there are in the world, but the numbers of those enjoying a clothes optional lifestyle appear to be increasing. Unfortunately, naturism still carries a stigma, born largely of ignorance of the truth. To some naturists are well meaning but slightly dotty individuals, who meander naked through wooded glades, pausing in catalogue poses behind strategically placed leaves. To others, they are immoral hedonists, congregating in mixed groups to enjoy pleasures of the flesh in orgy situations not seen since Caesar hung up his laurels. Or they are perverts trying to corrupt the 'normal'way of life. As with the majority of prejudices based on lies, misunderstandings and half-truths, the reality of life for the average naturist is very different indeed. I COULD NEVER BE A NUDIST ANYWAY - JUST LOOK AT MY BODY! That's the whole point though. Naturism isn't about looking at bodies - naturists are not exhibitionists. It's just about enjoying the freedom that a clothes optional atmosphere brings. Naturism is about accepting the human body for what it is - nothing to be ashamed of. So the men don't need to hit the gym for six months, buffing their muscles to within an inch of their lives in order to gain entry. And the women don't have to look like Baywatch babes. The media is largely responsible for promoting this idea of body perfection, but the truth is that the vast majority of people do not now, nor are they likely to ever resemble this false ideal. So for naturists there is no such thing as too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too hairy. Nobody's going to comment on the size or shape of your breasts or critically evaluate your genitalia. And if you have any surgical scars or other distinguishing marks you needn't worry - ignore them just like everyone else will. For most people, their initial discomfort disappears very quickly, once they realize they are not being judged on their appearance. BUT WHAT DO PEOPLE GET OUT OF IT? IF IT'S NOT ABOUT SEX, JUST WHAT IS IT ABOUT? It's about relaxation, freedom from restriction - and to a very large degree, it's about honesty. Naturists are judged on their personalities alone. They take away the trappings that most of us have around us every day. They have less to 'hide behind'. This is very healthy, because it means that friendships are built on truth - as people get used to being open with each other, there is less temptation to embellish![...] Being nude can also be incredibly relaxing. The feeling of air, sun and water on the skin is a terrific stress reliever. [...] IT CAN'T BE HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN THOUGH, SURELY. On the contrary, children who grow up in a naturist environment usually have far fewer hang-ups than other kids. Once again, they are not being subjected to premature sexual situations - they grow up around other children and adults, understanding that the body is not something to be hidden and ashamed of. They know anatomy of the human body, and it is less of a 'taboo' to be explored at the earliest opportunity. There are fewer incidences of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and criminal behaviour amongst nudist children than amongst other children. WHERE WOULD I PUT MY SUNGLASSES!? As for the sunglasses, well friends have found that nipple rings are the perfect holders for their Ray Bans. If you don't fancy body piercing, though, a small bag slung around your neck or carried with you is the perfect repository for your small change and other necessities. {end quote} From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 10 02:06:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:06:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: A Chilly Climate on the Campuses (several articles) Message-ID: A Chilly Climate on the Campuses (several articles) The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.9.9 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b00701.htm FORUM A Chilly Climate on the Campuses Rarely has the climate on college campuses seemed such a cause for concern. Over the summer, two broad coalitions issued major new statements reaffirming academic freedom and autonomy. The American Council on Education and 27 other higher-education organizations said they were responding to university presidents, who need guidance in the face of increasing challenges to those principles. Almost concurrently, the presidents of 16 major universities around the world, also citing constraints on intellectual discussion, brought out their own statement reaffirming academic rights and responsibilities. The American Federation of Teachers weighed in too, calling for stronger opposition to recent attempts to involve the government in university business. Scientists warn that antiterrorism measures and public controversy over such issues as stem-cell research and evolution are making it more difficult to conduct and share research. Historians worry about the rapidly increasing level of classification of government documents. Foreign students and scholars say they face new obstacles in the wake of September 11 to studying, teaching, and publishing in the United States. At the same time, conservative students and scholars are calling attention to the hostile climate they say they have long felt on campuses. The campaign by David Horowitz, a leading conservative activist, for an "academic bill of rights" that he says would promote intellectual diversity has garnered nationwide attention, and variations of the measure are making their way through several state legislatures. An organization of concerned parents, NoIndoctrination.org, has begun to post allegations of bias against students in the classroom on the World Wide Web. What is notable is not that so many people are talking about a big chill, but that so many different people -- representing very different perspectives -- are doing so. Scientists see efforts to promote the teaching of intelligent design as a threat to their intellectual integrity; religious believers say they and their beliefs are still unwelcome in the academic marketplace of ideas. The president of Harvard touches off a firestorm with remarks about women's aptitude for science -- a sign to many of his critics of the chilly reception women find on campus, to his defenders that some topics are off limits today. Jewish students complain of anti-Israeli bias among professors; scholars in Middle East studies say they are being harassed by pro-Israel groups. Affirmative action, immigration, ethnic studies, gay studies -- the topics spark more and more public controversy. Some professors suggest they are censoring their comments on them. Is today's intellectual climate chillier than it once was? If so, for whom? Why? The Chronicle asked a number of commentators for their views. ------------------ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b00702.htm Freer for Some, More Inhibited for Others By ROBERT M. O'NEIL Close observers of American higher education are regularly asked to assess the campus climate for free inquiry and expression. Their responses tend to be disappointingly eclectic -- disappointing, that is, to those outside the academy who seek a simple answer. Any honest appraisal of the current condition of campus speech is mixed, an amalgam of good news and bad news. Some sectors of American campuses seem freer to speak than ever before, while others may be inhibited to a degree not seen in quite some years. The resulting paradox largely accounts for the news media's fascination with the issue. Three groups have benefited from increased tolerance and attention. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual students and faculty members, who until recently revealed their sexual orientation and related views at grave risk, may not yet be free of artificial constraints, and are surely not fully accepted at all institutions. Yet, even at the highest levels of administration, they are more widely accepted than in the past. Much the same can be said of politically conservative students, whose views were not always welcome, especially during times of political turmoil like the Vietnam War era. Through the efforts of concerned national groups like NoIndoctrination.org, and of advocates like David Horowitz and his allies -- who include legislators, alumni, and other policy makers -- the far-right end of the campus political spectrum now seems better protected in speaking freely on national policy, course offerings, fee-allocation rules, and most other topics. Finally, and ironically, among the beneficiaries are those who utter sexist, racist, or homophobic remarks. Mercifully, the speech-code mania of the late 80s and early 90s has abated. Offensive slurs and the like may be no more acceptable these days than ever, but they are less likely to be proscribed by campus rules. Informal constraints do and should exist, including condemnation by senior administrators, but such uncongenial people need not be punished or banished. There are also some prominent casualties in the current mixed climate. Some outspoken liberals who have been Horowitz's targets have clearly felt constrained by legislative interest in his academic bill of rights, and by direct inquiries in several states into allegedly biased classroom dialogue. Notably inhibited on many campuses are those who hold deeply emotional views on either side of Middle East tensions. Whether pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, strident critics of American policy risk being labeled "an enemy of ____" or "anti-____" simply for making a strong public statement about current events in this profoundly troubled part of the world. Least definite among dimensions of the current intellectual climate is speech related to September 11, the Iraq war, and other national-security issues. Outspoken antiwar professors have, for example, fared better than one might have anticipated four years ago. Plaintiffs in suits challenging the USA Patriot Act and other measures seem to have suffered no reprisals. Yet foreign scholars, even from relatively nonsensitive parts of the world, have found this country less hospitable than it was before September 11, and even their ability to collaborate on research projects with American scientists is now subject to growing constraints. On this one point, the jury is very much still out. Robert M. O'Neil is founding director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and a professor of law at the University of Virginia. _________________________________________________________ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b00703.htm The New McCarthyism By JONATHAN R. COLE A rising tide of anti-intellectualism and intolerance of university research and teaching that offends ideologues and today's ruling prince is putting academic freedom -- one of the core values of the university -- under more sustained and subtle attack than at any time since the dark days of McCarthyism in the 1950s. As professors are publicly savaged for their ideas, often by outside groups, colleges are coming under pressure to fire them or control what they say in the classroom. Witness the furor last year over a purported "documentary" by the Boston-based David Project, Columbia Unbecoming, that charged professors with anti-Israel bias, or the Orwellian efforts by the national group Students for Academic Freedom that -- in the name of ending the alleged politicization of the academy -- attempt to limit legitimate scholarly discourse. As political ideology trumps scholarly consensus, the government is undermining the peer-review system and the norms of scholarship. Conservative ideologues in Congress, for example, are trying to place political appointees on committees to monitor area-studies programs; the Bush Administration and its followers on Capitol Hill and in statehouses are trying to intimidate professors whose work on topics like global warming or the transmission of HIV calls into question administration priorities. Such arbiters of truth are selectively bullying professors by investigating their work or threatening to withdraw federal grant support for projects whose content they find substantively offensive. In resisting stem-cell research and supporting teaching intelligent design along with evolution, they have cast doubt on scientific expertise and legitimated the latest form of anti-intellectualism in America. The USA Patriot Act allows the government to secretly monitor what students and faculty members read or transmit over the Internet; and the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 places such extraordinary constraints on laboratory scientists that some of our most distinguished immunologists are abandoning important research -- for example, on vaccines to prevent smallpox, anthrax, and West Nile virus -- that could help deter terrorism. Foreign students and researchers from scores of nations are finding it increasingly difficult to obtain visas to study or work in the United States, disrupting the flow of the best talent to American universities. The current attacks on academic freedom are not the only threats to free discussion in the university: Too many subjects, like those related to identity politics and challenges to reigning academic dogma, are also considered off limits. The result is that it has become increasingly difficult within the academy itself to have an open, civil debate about many topics. Scholars and scientists are often exercising their right to remain silent rather than face the potential scorn, ridicule, sanctions, and ostracism that challenging shoddy evidence and poor reasoning on politically sensitive topics can invite. Why does that matter? Universities remain perhaps the last sanctuary for the relatively unbridled and unfettered search for truth and new important ideas. Without a climate of free inquiry, creativity and discovery will suffer. Today American research universities are the single most important source for major new discoveries that improve the health and social and economic welfare of people around the world. Tie a tourniquet around that free flow of intellectual energy, and we will halt the production of knowledge that is necessary for conquering disease and poverty and for improving the quality of everyday life. The sad fact, however, is that few academic leaders and prominent members of their faculties are rising to the defense of academic freedom. Where is the Robert Hutchins of today, who protected the idea of the university against ideological foes during the 1940s and 1950s? As Hutchins said, it is "not how many professors would be fired for their beliefs, but how many think they might be." It is time to recognize the seriousness of the current attacks, analyze carefully the bases for them, scrutinize evidence on their incidence and consequences, and organize a defense of the university against those intent on undermining its values and quality. Jonathan R. Cole is a university professor and former provost and dean of faculties at Columbia University. ______________________________ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b00801.htm The Ideological Corruption of Scholarly Principles By MARK BAUERLEIN To listen to the professoriate and the scholarly organizations, one would think that a purge was being readied. The sullen alarm, the feverish visions of witch hunts, the "chill" -- it's the Red Scare all over again. The most protected labor group in our time, tenured faculty members, regards conservative sallies as nothing less than the harbinger of "New McCarthyism." But however much they raise the specter of persecution, there is a difference. People lost jobs and reputations 50 years ago. Today the attack on left-of-center bias doesn't jeopardize anybody's job, and to be criticized by the right is a distinction. Has anyone been materially damaged by NoIndoctrination.org or the American Council of Trustees and Alumni? So why are professors upset? Because something is, indeed, threatened: the ideological grip of liberals and leftists on campuses. Under the public eye, they can no longer propagate their viewpoints as if they possessed the only rational and moral approach to cultural or political matters. That is a reasonable limitation, but it strikes professors as a predatory incursion -- which just shows how insulated professors are. They've lived too long without challenge, and the dissenting voice comes off as evil-spirited or stupid. So much conformity has an institutional effect: Liberal and leftist beliefs are so abiding that they have sunk deep into academic practices and acquired a disciplinary sheen. That conversion of ideological belief into scholarly principle was exemplified by Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, in a defense of liberal bias at an American Enterprise Institute symposium last February. In anthropology, he explained, the focus lies "on questioning religious and cultural myth, particularly myth that celebrates national, cultural, or racial superiorities." He continued, "Sociologists tend to inquire on the origins of inequality as a source of alienation," while political scientists "focus on questions of legitimacy" and historians "look at progress frequently in terms of overcoming inequalities of the past." Each of those tendencies, Bowen acknowledged, matches progressivist or liberal premises, with scholars playing adversarial roles. How easily they slide into measures of competence! What if a graduate student in history argued in a job talk that what has been termed "progress" has, in fact, introduced new and pernicious forms of inequality? His work wouldn't be recognized as authentic history. Hence an ideological judgment may be expressed as a disciplinary one. Disciplines should be based on subject matters and rules of evidence, not on agendas such as questioning social hierarchies. Once professors began to make certain political aims essential to the disciplinarity of humanities and social-science disciplines, they institutionalized their politics and impoverished their campuses. Here is where conservatives, libertarians, and traditionalists have felt a chill for decades. When the professoriate worries as much about bias at the root of disciplines as they do about conservative proposals for balance in the classroom, then we can take their reactions seriously. Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University. _____________________________________________________________ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b00802.htm We Are Part of the Problem By MARC H. BRODSKY Recent responses by scholarly societies, professional organizations, publishers, and professors to what they perceive as government restrictions or public disapproval illustrate the adage that the most effective censorship is one that is self-imposed. That's a real danger for scientific discourse today. Consider reactions to the threat to freedom of speech posed by regulations that the U.S. Department of Treasury issued through its Office of Foreign Assets Control (known as OFAC). The regulations, which have a long history, authorize the president to impose trade embargoes against nations deemed to be enemies. In 1988 Congress explicitly exempted "informational materials" from such regulations, subsequently making it clear that it did not intend to stop publishers, directly or indirectly, from importing or exporting information protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Despite that, in 1999 the Treasury Department's office ruled that editing and other steps normally taken by publishers with imported information from embargoed countries were not exempt from regulation. Alerted by the government in 2003, some publishers sought interpretation of how much processing, like editing and peer review, they might do with manuscripts from embargoed countries. The Treasury Department reiterated its unfounded regulations on editing imported materials. But instead of challenging the regulations, several publishers -- academic, professional-society, and commercial -- censored themselves and stopped handling articles and books from Cuba and Iran. Even I, a firm advocate of free speech unfettered by government regulation, at first found myself parsing OFAC statements and rulings. But upon reflection, I said to myself and my colleagues that such an exercise was a waste of time, as the rulings clearly contradicted well-established freedoms and supporting legislation, as well as my mission to disseminate scientific information. We needed to continue publishing and to challenge OFAC in court. Nevertheless, many respectable organizations persisted in self-censorship, even after OFAC, subsequent to our court challenge, backed down by issuing a general license (but still insisting it had the authority to issue regulations). Even now, some publishers, out of fear, still occasionally censor themselves. Similarly, while some scientists have stood up to religious groups that present "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution, too many have not. Today some religious conservatives, in the guise of a nonexistent scientific controversy, advocate presenting intelligent design in school science courses as just as valid as evolution -- which they claim is only an unproven theory. Evolutionary theory is well-documented science. Intelligent-design advocates have many fallacies and hypocrisies in their arguments, but nevertheless there is an insidious result: self-censorship by some academics and schoolteachers. Rather than explain to their students that evolution is one of science's most valuable and well-established bases for scientific progress, they withdraw from the fray, fearing pressure from religious groups -- and even the White House -- that seek a role for religious alternatives in the science classroom. I fear that such chilling pressure is winning in a struggle over scientific discourse today. What this means is that academics must reflect on their basic mission. They need to avoid letting pressures from government and others lead them to self-imposed steps that would undermine the dissemination of correct and valued science. Marc H. Brodsky is executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics and chair of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. ___________________________________________ Rights for Some People, Not Others By CHON A. NORIEGA For those of us who study minority issues, today's intellectual climate is -- as it has always been -- contentious. But it's becoming chilly in new, and frightening, ways. Within an hour of releasing a policy brief on noncitizens and voting in California, our Chicano-studies center here in Los Angeles received a deluge of fax and e-mail messages and telephone calls. Most expressed unbridled hatred and disgust for the report, its author, and our center, vowing to fight our alleged campaign "to turn the United States into Mexico." And oh yes, they promised to ask the state to cut off our funds. Both talk radio and anti-immigration groups continued the effort for several months before turning to other incidents. What had we done? The report -- written by Joaquin Avila, an expert on minority voting rights who had twice argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court and been awarded one of the MacArthur Fellows Program's "genius grants" -- drew upon recent census data that showed an increasing number of California cities with large noncitizen adult populations. Avila acknowledged the limited prospects for political integration in the state, but nonetheless recommended further debate and research on noncitizen participation in local government. That included neighborhood councils, but also voting for local office, something that already occurs in Chicago, New York City, and Maryland. While some of those who protested were open to reasoned debate, most contented themselves with comments like, "Mexicans need to learn birth control." Perhaps more troubling, everyone (including the news media) conflated noncitizens with "illegals," conveniently ignoring the status of legal resident. In the process, they quickly slid into assuming that only U.S. citizens were entitled to civic participation or protection of the law. What was most surprising was that those who contacted us -- even those who made explicit threats -- signed their names and, in some cases, provided their phone numbers and addresses. No one wanted "balance" on this issue; they simply wanted us to go away and were confident they spoke for all Americans and taxpayers (assuming the two were the same). If there is a chill taking place on the campuses, it stems from those kind of presumptions: Some people have rights -- including freedom of expression -- and others do not. One of the consequences of this turn is that the public university is now seen as the advocate, if not the author, of the research its faculty members produce, rather than as a site for presenting, examining, and challenging ideas. The CNN host Lou Dobbs exemplified that attitude when he criticized our report: "And it has the imprimatur of UCLA, one of the nation's most respected universities, calling for voting rights for illegal aliens?" Of course, protests against immigrant and minority rights are nothing new. Several colleagues have spoken to me matter-of-factly about the filing-cabinet drawers where they keep angry letters they have received over the decades. One still receives hate mail for a study noting that more than half of all births in California are now to Latinos, as if he were personally responsible! What is new is that recent critics are more emboldened: An organized sector of the electorate, with significant access to the mass media, prefers to silence public efforts to study the profound demographic changes and social disparities in our society. If those efforts succeed, our society will fly backward into the future, like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, our gaze fixated on a past that will seem like "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage." Oddly enough, that effort to restrict knowledge and rights is touted as a vision of progress. Chon A. Noriega is a professor of film, television, and digital media and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, and editor of Aztl?n: A Journal of Chicano Studies. ______________________________________________ The Chill Is Nothing New By GREG LUKIANOFF There is a chill on campus, but that's nothing new. For decades, campus speech has been chilled by speech codes and other attempts to prevent expression that might offend. Some would like to imagine that the excesses of "political correctness" are ancient history, but repression in the name of tolerance hasn't gone anywhere. Oppressive speech codes are not only still around -- they have actually multiplied, even after numerous court decisions declared them unconstitutional. Within the past year, college students have been punished for such things as expressing a religious objection to homosexuality and arguing that corporal punishment may be acceptable. Students in Illinois were told they could not hold a protest mocking affirmative action. Christian students in Florida were banned from showing The Passion of the Christ. A student in New Hampshire was expelled from the dorms after posting a flier that joked that female students could lose weight by taking the stairs. Those are just a few examples. The riskiest speech on campus is still religious or conservative expression or satire of the university's values. Another longstanding source of the campus chill is as old as college itself: the desire of administrators to avoid public criticism. Instances from the past few years are, again, easy to find. Several institutions, including Harvard Business School, have reprimanded student journalists for being critical of the administration. A University of Oklahoma faculty member was marginalized and relegated to a basement office, apparently for creating an "uncollegial environment" that happened to include blowing the whistle on university impropriety. At Shaw University, a professor was summarily fired for criticizing the administration. The growing bureaucratization of colleges also contributes to the chill. To avoid liability, campus policies banish speech to tiny "free-speech zones" and regulate pamphleteering, romantic relationships, and countless other aspects of academic life. Unfortunately, recent legal decisions in Massachusetts, California, and Illinois have confused what were once clearly distinct student rights and administrative duties, threatening to make matters worse. What is relatively new, however, is the public backlash against the academy. That has been provoked by comments like those of a University of New Mexico scholar who quipped on September 11, 2001, that "anyone who can bomb the Pentagon has my vote"; of a Saint Xavier University faculty member who condemned an Air Force cadet as a "disgrace"; and of a professor at Columbia University who called for "a million Mogadishus" in Iraq. And who hasn't heard of Ward Churchill, of the University of Colorado, who likened the victims of September 11 to Adolph Eichmann? The University of Colorado was absolutely correct, however, when it concluded that speech like Churchill's is fully protected. As student-rights advocates have argued for decades, free speech means nothing if it does not include the provocative, unpopular, or even offensive. Unlike other threats to campus candor, those cases have truly caught the academy's attention -- perhaps because faculty members now see their free-speech rights in question. While decrying increased public scrutiny, higher education has been hesitant to accept that it might share the blame for the erosion in public confidence. Those inside the academy may see their institutions as paragons of enlightenment, but the outside world increasingly views them as bloated corporations with frightening power over their children's future. Now that the cost of top colleges has skyrocketed to more than $40,000 a year -- close to what the median American household makes annually -- the very least students should be able to expect is that their basic rights be respected. There are certainly new and potentially serious threats to free speech presented by the Patriot Act, intellectual-property law, and dangerously vague legislative proposals. But colleges could do much to restore their credibility and prevent greater "outside interference" by confronting the free-speech problems that have plagued them for years. The academy would do well to remember: The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Greg Lukianoff is the director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. __________________________________ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b01002.htm The Uncertain Consequences of Political Pressure By MICHAEL B?RUB? Is it becoming more difficult to speak openly on campus or to share information? I think so, and I fear that untenured and adjunct faculty members are the most vulnerable. In the past two years, we've seen a national campaign on the part of conservative activists to get state legislatures directly involved in academic oversight. That campaign is being conducted under the banner of "intellectual diversity," and one of its goals is to investigate instances of liberal "bias" in classrooms. Conservatives, who have become increasingly outraged at the fact that most college faculty members tend to be liberal, have promoted a couple of recent studies purporting to show that liberals actively discriminate against conservative scholars in hiring and promotion, just as we allegedly discriminate against conservative students in the classroom. How conservatives intend to combat the liberal tilt of some fields -- especially in the arts and humanities -- remains unclear, since they do not seem to be encouraging promising young conservatives to undertake graduate study in such fields. Of course, conservatives have been complaining about liberal campuses at least since the publication of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, in 1951. But since September 11, 2001, liberalism has been on the defensive throughout the country, and some right-wing pundits have gone so far as to speak of liberals as traitors and enemies. Indeed, it seems to me that many of the "movement conservatives" who make up the Republican base are animated less by opposition to specific liberal beliefs -- like support for stem-cell research or affirmative action -- than by a more general opposition to pockets of political independence. Independent journalists, independent judges, independent filmmakers, independent professors -- all are anathema. So the ravings of a Ward Churchill, who compared the victims of September 11 to Nazis, are seen as emblematic of the professoriate as a whole (whereas I consider them simply the ravings of Ward Churchill). In my own state, David Horowitz has succeeded in getting the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to approve, along party lines, HR 177, a bill that creates a select subcommittee to determine, among other things, whether "students are graded based on academic merit, without regard for ideological views, and that academic freedom and the right to explore and express independent thought is available to and practiced freely by faculty and students." The subcommittee will hold hearings and conduct investigations until June 30 of next year (and possibly until November 30). An amendment to the bill provides that faculty members be given at least 48 hours' notice of any allegation against them before a hearing, and that they be allowed to testify. It's clear from the political rhetoric, however, that although the bill emphasizes providing students with an academic environment conducive to learning, the people who wrote and passed it don't seem too worried about whether African-American or gay students enjoy such an academic environment for learning. No, they're thinking about conservative students bringing allegations against liberal professors, and they've kindly offered those liberal professors 48 hours' notice and the chance to face their accusers. The truly curious thing about the bill is that it may not wind up pitting libertarian students and fans of the free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek against leftist professors who allegedly want the state to run our lives, and it may not target professors working on race, gender, or sexuality. Instead, according to reports I've seen, the constituency that seems most pleased by HR 177 is the local religious right, some of whom see it as their best chance to get intelligent design taught in biology classes. They draw strength from Horowitz-inspired initiatives like the one in Pennsylvania, just as they are inspired by President Bush's recent endorsement of intelligent design, and they view it as a way to combat the Darwinist "bias" of the natural sciences. So it's not clear, just yet, how this attempt at legislative "oversight" will play itself out. Michael B?rub? is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. __________________________________ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b01101.htm The Pernicious Concept of 'Balance' By ELLEN WILLIS Demands for more political "balance" on the campuses are one of the scarier developments in today's intellectual climate. David Horowitz's campaign for a misnamed academic bill of rights and the related legislative initiatives it has inspired aim not to enhance academic freedom but to discredit the university as an independent institution. "Balance" is a pernicious concept, implying as it does both that all ideas are equally valid and that they can be unproblematically defined in academe as liberal or conservative -- especially by outside observers who have only passing knowledge of what is being said or taught. Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college -- that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home -- is redefined as a problem. To a radical right that feels entitled to dominate not only government but all social institutions, the academy is a particular irritant: It not only allows liberals and leftists to express their views, but provides them with the opportunity to make a living, get tenure, publish books, and influence students. Indeed, the academy is inherently a liberal institution, in the sense that it is grounded in the credo of the Enlightenment: the free pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for its own sake. But the right's charge that the professoriate is dominated by liberals requires some, pardon the expression, deconstruction. For the right, "liberal" has become an epithet -- roughly equivalent to the "Godless Communist" of an earlier era -- that applies to anyone who is not a conservative Republican or a Christian fundamentalist. Most people who are attracted to academic life fit that definition for fairly obvious reasons: We prefer reading, writing, and research to business; care more about job security than the chance to get rich; and are comfortable with (secular) Enlightenment values. The balance-mongers make much of polls purporting to reveal that most professors vote Democratic, but that says less about the liberalism of professors than about the fact that what used to be the right-wing lunatic fringe is now the Republican mainstream. As a practical matter -- no matter how much proponents of balance protest that they are merely trying to raise awareness of this issue -- redressing the "underrepresentation" of the far right in academe requires coercion: the intimidation of offending liberal professors by students or infiltrators who monitor their classes, and pressure on legislative officials, donors, and trustees to influence faculty hiring decisions and the curriculum. That said, it is equally important to acknowledge serious internal obstacles to intellectual freedom and diversity on the contemporary campus. The real political debates in academe have mainly to do not with voting behavior but with the social implications of scholarly and pedagogical methods and disciplinary paradigms. And those debates are too often settled, or stifled, by the ubiquitous tendency of academic departments to exclude or marginalize scholars whose approach diverges from prevailing orthodoxy. While conservatives talk as if that practice is confined to the academic left, in fact the disciplinary police are often profoundly conservative. Economists' exclusion of dissenters from free-market libertarian orthodoxy; psychologists' ostracism of psychoanalysts; philosophers' marginalizing of those who emphasize social and political rather than linguistic problems -- all contribute to a pervasive positivism that silences critical thinking about the present socioeconomic system. Nor is the phenomenon absent from the hard sciences: It may be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a biologist working on something other than the genome to get a job or a grant these days. All these pressures for conformity come at a time when the mainstream public conversation has diminishing space for serious social criticism. Trade publishers by and large refuse to publish it; leading review media tend to ignore it; fewer and fewer periodicals feature it. There is increasing disdain for the essay, the traditional vehicle for much social critique. The need to make a living has pushed more writers into the academy (whether they are really suited for it or not). Now good academic jobs are drying up as universities hire fewer tenure-track faculty members. That, too, is chilling. Ellen Willis is a professor of journalism and director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. ________________________________________ The Death of John Stuart Mill By STANLEY KURTZ For conservatives it's been tough to speak openly on campus for decades. Knowing the politics of my field (anthropology), and mindful of Stanley Fish's 1990 call to bar some members of the National Association of Scholars from curriculum and tenure committees at Duke University, for years I avoided joining the association. When I finally threw caution to the wind (still carefully directing mailings to my home, not college), I discovered that my clever association chapter in Boston used envelopes with no external identification. That reminded me of how, during the McCarthy era, my father had to get his subscription to the leftist I.F. Stone's Weekly delivered to an empty apartment. Consider postcolonial studies, one of the most influential paradigms in today's academy. Begun by the late Edward Said, ostensibly as a theory-inflected political analysis of colonialism, postcolonial studies in effect has introduced a new form of blacklist. Said attacked numerous prominent scholars and intellectuals as anti-Muslim bigots in league with "the Zionist lobby." Chastising them with imposing the colonial stereotypes of "Orientalism," he found them guilty of daring to note connections between some strains of contemporary Islam and terrorism. His followers have used the label to tar their opponents, thus enabling a takeover of substantial parts of the academy, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Nowadays, in Middle East studies, postcolonialists are everywhere, while the generation of successors to scholars whom Said attacked, like Bernard Lewis, has been lost. Further, entire subfields are defined by their politics. In anthropology, it is typical to see job listings calling for a specialist in "critical-race theory," "medical justice," "critical-medical anthropology," "gender and social justice," "postcolonial studies," or just plain "critical theory." All those are open code for someone on the left. Leftist professors treat mere calls for balance as suppression of speech, usually saying they are defending liberal principles. Yet many of those same professors junked John Stuart Mill's classic defense of the marketplace of ideas -- the need for multiple and clashing intellectual perspectives -- long ago. Like Said, they follow Michel Foucault in dismissing the call for intellectual balance as a ruse of power. Such scholars rationalize their near-total dominance of the academy by picturing it as the last beleaguered redoubt of an embattled left. After all, Republicans control the White House, Congress, and soon perhaps the courts, they reason. So why can't we control the academy? With only narrow Republican majorities in our political system, each party is compelled to debate and compromise with the other. How is that a justification for an academy where you can sooner find a military recruiter on campus than real debate? The erstwhile campus marketplace of ideas has been bought out by a monopoly. Mill is dead, and the professors killed him. And now that students and the public have complained -- now that the problem has been named by continuing complaints in the blogosphere, empirical studies of faculty bias, and student protests at Columbia and other universities -- the academy cries foul. Those who for years have trashed liberalism appeal to it -- as if their hiring practices and intellectual manners embodied a sort of Millian paradise. Too late. Liberalism now lies with their critics. Stanley Kurtz is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributing editor at the National Review Online. ________________________________________ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b01202.htm Religious, Philosophical, and Socioeconomic Diversity By CAROL M. SWAIN I have found myself an outsider in a place that values conformity. What makes me an outsider are my roots in the lower class, my strong Christian faith, and my race. The chill I feel on campus is that of an accomplished woman who, more often than not, finds herself devalued. Navigating a campus is difficult if your path, like mine, is nontraditional. When I first entered college as a high-school dropout with a GED, I encountered professors who warned me that I would not perform as well as other students. I defied their expectations. Now, as a professor who has five degrees and several prizes under my belt, I find myself an outsider for new reasons. As a born-again Christian since 1999, I have encountered overt and subtle forms of intimidation. Often this takes the form of openly disparaging remarks made by colleagues about the intelligence of believers. There is hostility directed against anyone who refuses to conform to the prevailing ethos of his or her institution and to the secularized liberal elites who decide who and what has value. I have watched helplessly as bright, conservative students are victimized again and again by faculty members who use the power of grading to push them toward conformity. Those students who fight back usually end up with reduced grade-point averages and fewer opportunities to matriculate at elite professional institutions. I believe institutions of higher learning can, and should, do better. Many operate in ways that reveal no real desire for diversity or inclusion beyond the visible differences of gender and race. They have little interest in diversifying their faculties in terms of political philosophy or religious beliefs. Instead, the elite institutions, with which I am most familiar, have seemingly decided that they are in sole possession of the intellectual knowledge, values, and insights needed to train future leaders -- and that such knowledge is secular and material. Never mind that the great universities of our nation, from Harvard on down, were in most cases founded by God-fearing men and women with different perspectives from today's. Institutional leaders should urge faculty and staff members to reject ideological conformism, and they should honor forms of diversity now neglected, including religious, philosophical, and socioeconomic diversity. If universities are to be true to their educational missions, they must cease and desist from their tendencies to exclude. Alas, the recent high-profile focus by activists such as David Horowitz on this longstanding issue is long overdue. Carol M. Swain is a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Veritas Institute for Racial Justice and Reconciliation. _________________________________________________ http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i03/03b01301.htm Academic Freedom or Government Intrusion By AMY GUTMANN In preparing students for lifelong learning and democratic citizenship, today's great universities are more open than ever to intellectual diversity. Students learn to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries when they examine issues like AIDS and global terrorism from the multiple perspectives and with the methodologies that faculty members bring to the classroom. Why, then, the perception of a chill among people who complain that certain views are not allowed full expression on our campuses? Perhaps it derives from the fact that universities are considering some of the most controversial issues of our time, like the ethics of stem-cell research and the future of the Middle East. Moreover, we are living at a time when the right and left are quick to seize upon flash points -- a single course, a controversial article, an isolated incident -- to take the full measure of a faculty member or a university campus. More broadly speaking, it is easy to forget that American colleges and universities derive their greatness not by echoing the conventional views of society, carrying the partisan banner of governments, or giving aid and comfort to purveyors of prejudices. Rather, they do so by protecting the freedom of professors and students to read widely and explore topics in all their complexity, to think critically and debate issues where there are grounds for reasonable disagreement, and to imagine and express new ideas and new worlds without fear of reprisal or retribution. Many of the most powerful critiques of society, along with compelling solutions to the world's seemingly intractable problems, have issued from university scholars and students. Is there, then, a problem? If so, how should we rectify it? Not by outside regulation, as some critics urge. Guided by established procedures of self-governance, universities must be steadfast in their commitment to the principles of academic freedom -- which is not a license to suppress student dissent or engage in partisan proselytizing in the classroom. Upholding academic freedom does require universities to furnish a safe haven for free inquiry and discussion. And it recommends that we provide a respectful hearing to all debatable opinions and to external criticisms of the academy, rather than dismiss those who question us as "barbarians at the gates," against whom we must close ranks. We must also make a better effort to describe the nature of faculty-student interactions. We should begin by explaining that we teach young people both to think critically and to support their arguments with reasons, regardless of which way the political winds are blowing on the campus or off. Students in any class may not feel comfortable being challenged by a viewpoint with which they strongly disagree. But neither should they ever feel inhibited or afraid to disagree with their professors. For two decades, I taught a course on ethics and public policy that dealt with the controversial topics of our time, such as terrorism, abortion, affirmative action, and bioethics. My students knew that agreeing with me on a given issue would have no bearing on how I treated or graded them. Those who brought solid evidence and original thinking to bear on their arguments, and who responded effectively to the strongest counterarguments, earned the highest grades. For their part, instead of making their case through reasoned arguments in academic forums, some critics of higher education are promoting legislation to regulate professors. In doing so, they are violating the spirit of academic freedom and threatening to poison the collegial atmosphere of robust and respectful debate that has enabled American universities to contribute so much to our democracy. By demonstrating our steadfast commitment to protecting the freedom of faculty members and students to engage in vigorous discourse across the political spectrum without government interference, we can prevent the threat of a chill from becoming a devastating frost. Amy Gutmann is president of the University of Pennsylvania. From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 10 02:06:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:06:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sigma Xi: Brain-Based Values Message-ID: Brain-Based Values http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/44445 [26]Patricia S. Churchland The Ethical Brain. Michael S. Gazzaniga. xx + 201 pp. Dana Press, 2005. Envision this scene: Socrates sits in prison, calmly awaiting execution, passing the time in philosophical discussions with students and friends, taking the occasion to inquire into the fundamentals of ethics: Where do moral laws come from? What is the root of moral motivation? What is the relation between power and morality? What is good? What is just? Ever modest, Socrates confesses ignorance of the answers. The pattern of questioning strongly hints, however, that whatever it is that makes something good or just is rooted in the nature of humans and the society we make, not in the nature of the gods we invent. This does not make moral rules mere conventions, like using a fork or covering one's breasts. There is something about the facts concerning human needs that entails that some laws are better than others. From the time of Socrates to the present, people have sought to give a natural basis for morals--that is, to understand how a moral statement about what ought to be done can rest on hard facts, albeit facts about conditions for civility and peace in social groups. How can ethical claims be more than mere conventions? How can such claims be rooted in facts about human nature but have the logical force of a command? Developments in evolutionary biology have helped to explain the appearance of moral motivation in humans and in other eusocial animals--animals that display behavior involving cooperation, sharing, division of labor, reciprocation and deception. In these species, various forms of punishment (shunning, biting, banishing, scolding) are visited on those who threaten the social norms. Ethological studies help us appreciate that, at a basic level, human social behavior has much in common with that of other species. Developments in neuroscience hold out the promise of extending the naturalistic perspective to aid in the understanding of how the brain and its circuitry underlie the capacity to learn social norms and to behave in accordance with them. Many of us ponder the possibility that discoveries about brain function and organization will challenge the conventional wisdom on which our system of justice relies and will allow us to see more deeply into the biology of social behavior, including moral behavior. In his new book, The Ethical Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga takes an unflinching look at the interface between neuroscience and ethics, and offers his own thoughtful perspective on some of the tough questions. As a graduate student at Caltech, Gazzaniga studied under one of the towering figures of neuroscience, Roger Sperry, whose lab pioneered research into the cognitive effects of cutting the fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres (a procedure used to treat intractable epilepsy). Ingenious testing of these so-called "split brain" patients revealed that their two brain hemispheres operated independently, each hemisphere acting almost like a distinct person. These were profoundly important results, both for philosophy and for neuroscience. Gazzaniga went on to explore the neurobiology of higher mental functions--attention, memory, choice, consciousness--more generally, always with a philosophical question biting his heels. He currently serves on the President's Council on Bioethics. Thus it is especially fitting that he should now pen his thoughts on neuroethics. The most fundamental neuroethical issue concerns free will and responsibility. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is a causal machine. Consequently, deliberations, beliefs, decisions and ensuing behavior are the outcome of causal processes. Typically, the causal processes leading to awareness of a decision are nonconscious. The "user illusion," nevertheless, is that a decision is created independently of neuronal causes, by one's very own "act of will." Some philosophers--usually called libertarians--resolutely believe that voluntary decisions actually are created by the will, free of causal antecedents. Like flat-earthers and creationists, libertarians glorify their scientific naivet? by labeling it transcendental insight. Gazzaniga, like many a philosopher, realizes that it would make a mockery of the criminal justice system if the accused could escape punishment simply by pleading that the brain is a causal machine and hence he or she lacked free will. So when and how ought we to hold people responsible for their behavior? Gazzaniga's answer has two components: First, he claims that we hold a person responsible, causality notwithstanding, so long as his or her behavior was unconstrained--so long as the person could have done otherwise. Second, Gazzaniga identifies responsibility as a social, not a neurobiological, property. His point is that our institutions for assigning responsibility derive from the need to maintain and protect civil society, which must figure out suitable criteria for when and how to punish those who violate the rules. Gazzaniga sums up his solution to the problem of free will by saying that "the brain is determined, but the person is free." The logic of this brain/person duality is not particularly compelling, or even coherent, yet as Gazzaniga's writing implies, it may be in our collective interest to live by this dualistic legal fiction. The obvious test of the "let's pretend" solution is to see whether it can specify relevant criteria for distinguishing between those who could have done otherwise and those who could not have, and between those cases in which mens rea (literally, a guilty mind) obtains and those in which it does not. (Mens rea is a criminal law concept requiring proof that the mental state of the accused was such that he or she committed the crime purposely, knowingly, recklessly or negligently; strict liability, in which state of mind has no relevance, is fairly rare in criminal law.) Here, however, the wheels fall off Gazzaniga's solution. Worried that ever-cunning defense attorneys will try to extract more exculpatory mileage out of neuroscience than the facts can support, Gazzaniga magnifies the incompatibility of responsibility as applied to persons and the causality that governs functions of a person's brain. He says, "The issue of responsibility . . . is a social choice. In neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible than any other for actions." This implies that there are no relevant factual differences between someone with, say, obsessive-compulsive disorder and someone who can resist impulses. Can this conclusion be right? As the British neuroscientist Steve Rose has pointed out, badness, just as much as madness, involves the brain. The flaw in Gazzaniga's argument is that although responsibility is assessed in a social context, the capacity to learn social norms and the capacity to act in accordance with them are matters of individual brain function. It is precisely because an important difference exists between a normal brain and the brain of someone who is seriously demented or unreachably deluded that such people are not considered responsible for crimes they might commit. Moreover, judicial institutions rely on threat of punishment to deter. The late maturation of the prefrontal cortex (with reference to neuronal density, synaptic density, dendritic length and myelination) means that the brains of mature adults are critically different from those of young children--which almost certainly accounts for the child's more modest ability to appreciate the consequences of his or her choices and to resist temptation. Satisfied that the brain/person duality is workable, Gazzaniga pushes the hypothesis further. He says that because assignment of responsibility is a social matter, not a matter of fact about the brain, neuroscience cannot possibly "settle" whether a person is responsible. Granted, determining legal responsibility is complicated, and neuroscientific knowledge cannot be substituted for knowledge of the law and of community standards. What kicks up sand, however, is the unfortunate choice of the word settle. Neuroscientific evidence can surely be relevant, even if the disposition of the case is settled by members of a jury whose brains follow some form of constraint-satisfaction algorithm. Yet Gazzaniga resolutely insists upon the stronger point: Neuroscientific data are not even relevant. Why not? His reasoning goes like this: As a group, schizophrenics, for example, are no more prone to violence than individuals in the general population. Ditto, he says, for people with prefrontal lesions. If a given schizophrenic, Mr. Jones, kills someone, it is mere theater to display his brain scans in court, picking out some abnormality or other as "the cause" of his homicidal behavior. There are no relevant differences that neuroscience knows about that can explain why Jones killed, but Smith (also schizophrenic) did not. Not everyone with low glucose levels engages in violence; not all citizens raised in an inner-city hell become drug dealers; not all premenstrual women beat their children. We can assume there are differences in the brain, but whatever these differences happen to be, they are not, he believes, relevant to determination of responsibility. Why? Because there is no "responsibility" area whose functionality can be examined through a scanner or with electrodes--not now, not ever. Responsibility is a social construct, not a brain function. This point, he believes, holds generally--for schizophrenics, for patients with prefrontal cortex lesions, and so forth. And for good measure, he suggests that the insanity defense itself is too imprecise and problematic to be of practical value. It is widely expected that neuroscience has, or soon will have, something to say about competence to stand trial, about whether the mens rea condition has been met and about appropriate sentencing. Thus Gazzaniga's bold thesis raises important concerns. I share his worry that defense attorneys and hired experts from neuroscience may get out in front of what current science can honestly say--it's bad enough that venal psychiatrists have sown wholesale distrust of their discipline by selling their "expertise" to the highest bidder. On the other hand, perhaps Gazzaniga overstates the case. Consider the Virginia man who at around age 40 became obsessed with child pornography and eventually molested his eight-year-old stepdaughter. He had no previous history of pedophilic inclinations, and his interest in child pornography completely disappeared with the surgical removal of a tumor of the frontolimbic system, which had invaded the hypothalamic area of his brain. Along with other appetites, sexual drive is regulated in the hypothalamus. Some months later, when the tumor grew back, his preoccupation with pornography returned, only to vanish again with repeat surgery. Because the waxing and waning of his sexual compulsions corresponded to the waxing and waning of the tumor, his was not a standard molestation case. So long as his limbic structures are tumor-free, it seems rather pointless to punish him for a pornographic pursuit that was alien to his character. Punishment would not make sense either as deterrence or as retribution. Consider a more complicated discovery. In a landmark longitudinal study in New Zealand that followed the lives of about 500 men from infancy to about age 26, a significant subpopulation showed a strong and unmodifiable disposition to engage in antisocial behavior, including irrational and self-destructive violence. Genetic analysis revealed that most of the men in that subpopulation carried a mutation for a particular enzyme, monoamine oxydase A (MAOA). The enzyme metabolizes three neuromodulators (serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, all of which are relatively concentrated in prefrontal areas of cortex), thereby inactivating them. Environment was also a factor: In the group with the MAOA mutation, the criteria for adolescent conduct disorder (a measure of antisocial behavior) were met in about 85 percent of those who had been severely maltreated as children, in about 38 percent of those who had probably been maltreated and in only about 22 percent of those who had not been maltreated. Among those who did not carry the MAOA mutation but had been severely maltreated, only about 42 percent had the conduct disorder. These findings are preliminary, and further research is needed on the exact nature of the effect of early maltreatment on the circuitry affected by low MAOA levels. Still, on the face of it, the capacity of maltreated children with the MAOA mutation to acquire and act on social norms appears to be diminished. If Gazzaniga is right, however, these data are irrelevant to determining responsibility. The fact that the men are irrationally violent means that society needs protection from them--fair enough. Even so, it is important to distinguish between custody and punishment. Why? For the sake of the integrity of the institution of justice, because as a social institution, the criminal sanction depends on broad social support to keep functioning properly. When the criminal sanction is applied to cases that violate common beliefs about fairness--to young children, for example--support is replaced by resistance and reform. In order to be broadly accepted, the legal fiction that the brain is determined but the person is free will have to make peace with the widespread conviction that because of brain abnormalities, we are not all equally masters of our fate. On other bioethical issues, Gazzaniga is just as forthright. The book begins with a discussion of the medical use of embryonic tissue and the debate over whether a blastocyst (which is a ball of a few hundred cells) is a person. This section is thoughtful, clearheaded and informed by developmental neuroscience. One fallacy Gazzaniga exposes depends on the common idea that graded differences block principled legal distinctions. In the version referred to as the fallacy of the beard, the logic goes like this: If we cannot say how long a man's whiskers must be to qualify as a beard, we cannot distinguish between a bearded man and a clean-shaven one. Although this form of argument fools nobody on the topic of beards, it has been seductively employed elsewhere, especially regarding embryos. Criticizing the blastocyst-as-baby argument, Gazzaniga sensibly points out that we can draw a reasonable, if imperfect, line. When a distinction is needed, we devise laws that draw one, typically erring on the side of caution, given prevailing community attitudes. There is no precise moment at which a child becomes an adult, or a blastocyst becomes a sentient person, but reasonable humans unencumbered by superstition can nonetheless come together to "draw a line," and we can redraw the line when the facts merit a revision. Eighteen as the age of majority is not the perfect line for all adolescents, but on the whole it works well enough. Gazzaniga also presents an eloquent defense of personal choice in end-of-life matters, while recognizing that there are bound to be fundamental differences across people regarding euthanasia. Most people understand the concept of brain death and see the wisdom in equating death with brain death. In large part, this acceptability may be owed to personal experiences concerning the remarkable benefits conferred by organ harvesting. Other topics covered, if not fully, then sufficiently well to provoke thought, concern the neurobiological and evolutionary explanations of religious beliefs, in all their amazing variety and conflicting manifestations. Gazzaniga discusses also the remarkable nature of autobiographical memory, and the susceptibility of memory to suggestions, reconstruction, invention and wholesale confabulation. Because it is brief, compelling and free of technical jargon, the whole book can be easily read during a transcontinental flight. At a time when intellectuals may feel cowed by the heavy hand of the fervently religious, it is a relief to see that Gazzaniga neither shies away from controversial opinions nor waters them down so as to offend nobody. At the same time, he is respectful of moral convictions that do not line up with his own. His opinions are delivered not as dogma but as part of an ongoing reflection and conversation, in which seeing all sides of a moral problem is itself regarded as a moral achievement. Reviewer Information Patricia Smith Churchland is University of California President's Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author most recently of Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy (2002). [32]A letter on Patricia Churchland's use of the term "libertarian" in a review of The Ethical Brain, and a reply from Churchland References 26. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AuthorDetail/authorid/1501;jsessionid=aaadH7i1yL4II9 32. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookshelfLetterTypeDetail/assetid/46005;jsessionid=aaadH7i1yL4II9 From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 10 02:06:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 9 Sep 2005 22:06:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sigma Xi: A letter on Patricia Churchland's use of the term "libertarian" in a review of The Ethical Brain , and a reply from Churchland Message-ID: A letter on Patricia Churchland's use of the term "libertarian" in a review of The Ethical Brain , and a reply from Churchland http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookshelfLetterTypeDetail/assetid/46005;jsessionid=aaadH7i1yL4II9 Letter to the Bookshelf A letter on Patricia Churchland's use of the term "libertarian" in a review of The Ethical Brain, and a reply from Churchland July 26, 2005 To the editor: In reading through the book review "Brain-Based Values," by Patricia Churchland (July-August 2005), I was astonished to see that she has named a subset of philosophers, who believe that voluntary decisions are created only by the will, "libertarians." She then likened these so-called libertarians to naive flat-earthers and creationists. I have no idea to whom she is referring, but as a lifelong libertarian and a 30-year member of the Libertarian Party, I would like to set the record straight. Libertarianism is a social, political and economic philosophy grounded in the liberal political ideas that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries and upon which the founders of our nation based much of the design of our system of government. In essence, we believe that the use of government force should be strictly limited to its legitimate role in the justice system and national defense and that individuals should be given maximum choice in their actions as well as responsibility for those actions. In the economic sphere, our beliefs are best expressed in the works of Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. And, while he denies the label libertarian, Robert Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia expresses the libertarian philosophy quite thoroughly. This is not exactly a naive group. I highly recommend them to your readers, and particularly to Ms. Churchland. It has been my experience that, in general, libertarians are more sophisticated than average, both politically and scientifically. Whoever this group of philosophers are, they most assuredly are not libertarians. Malcolm Johnson Lapeer, Michigan Patricia Churchland replies: Thank you for your note. I do apologize for the confusion. In the context of free will discussions, philosophers use the term libertarian as I specified. I do think this is a most unfortunate use, however, and for exactly the reasons you point out. By using it that way, philosophers have created an ambiguity, to no good purpose. I should have inserted a comment to clarify that the philosopher's sense of libertarian as used in free will discussions has NO relation to that term as used in a political context. As it happens, I share many of the views of libertarians (political, not free will) and have been a great admirer of John Stuart Mill for as many years as I have been studying philosophy. Best wishes, Patricia Smith Churchland, Chair UC President's Professor of Philosophy University of California San Diego La Jolla CA 92093 From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 11 22:15:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:15:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: One Last Recipe From Mother, for the Good Death Message-ID: One Last Recipe From Mother, for the Good Death http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/health/30case.html By LARRY ZAROFF, M.D. My mother was liberated when she was 80. She and my father had been married some 60 years when he died. Up until then - Eastern European, patriarchal - he controlled her life and everyone else's that he could. Her space was small, limited. She, a good wife, tolerated, had a capacity for hard work and adversity. Now she was free at last, and she knew it. As if she had made up a list of what she really wanted to do all her married years, she leapt into a new life. She took over the real estate business, better at the work than he was. The company prospered and so did she. In her 80's, she passed her driver's test. She picked up the phone, called everyone, soon becoming the mainframe, a communication catalyst and the database for her extensive family and friends of all ages. Everyone who knew my mother wanted to stay in touch. She had an endless supply of common sense, and sound advice balanced by love. And she traveled from her home near Washington to visit her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren throughout the country. At 92, still living alone in her house, she flew to California to see her newest great-grandchildren and to teach my son the secrets of her famous Jewish recipes. I remember the seminar: she at the head of the stove, turning the potato latkes, while Jonathan took notes and videotaped the lesson. She then masterfully went on to explain the nuances of her kreplach, sweet and sour cabbage and, Jon's favorite, chopped liver. The class lasted two hours during which she did not tire, perhaps knowing that the documentation was important, a legacy. She returned to Washington and two weeks later survived a devastating heart attack, destroying enough of her heart muscle so that she was restricted to bed. My sister had her transferred to a rehabilitation center near her home in Baltimore. She did not do well there. When I called to suggest that she be readmitted to the hospital for intensive [3]therapy, she refused. When I encouraged her to eat, she remarked, "I have eaten enough." I said that my wife and I were coming to see her. "Wait a few days, don't make two trips" was her response. I disagreed, "We are coming now." Arriving in Baltimore late that night, we immediately went to the rehabilitation center. My mother moved in and out of a coma, but without a doubt she spotted me. Shortly afterward, she died. Quietly without pain. Now, knowing her well - not as well as she knew me - I am certain she did not want us to make a second trip. For her to cause her family any inconvenience was out of the question. Her plan was to die as soon as she saw us, goodbye and funeral in one package. We doctors are taught to cure, to heal, when possible to restore patients to a full and active life in society. We are also taught, if we cannot establish health, to allow patients a good death. But we pay little attention to what dying patients owe their loved ones. Leo Tolstoy understood this. In his novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," the protagonist, dying slowly, makes life miserable - complaining, criticizing, screaming - for his family until the last day, when he realizes that they love him. He then understands what he owes his wife and children: a good death. In the end he dies quietly, blissfully, a good death for him and his family. From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 11 22:16:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:16:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Senses: Do You Hear What I Hear? Well, Maybe Not Message-ID: The Senses: Do You Hear What I Hear? Well, Maybe Not http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/health/30head.html By ERIC NAGOURNEY People who are tone [3]deaf - not your run-of-the-mill bad shower singers but those who truly cannot hear or produce musical tones - are actually processing the sounds differently in their brains, researchers reported yesterday. The researchers, writing online in Annals of Neurology, said they found the problem in the right side of the brain. The study was led by Isabelle Peretz of the University of Montreal. The researchers, using an EEG to measure brain activity, said they could instantly detect an abnormal response when a tone-deaf person heard a note. Tone-deafness, formally known as amusia, may occur in as much of 4 percent of the population, the study said. A person can be born tone deaf or develop the problem as a result of injury or illness. Amusia is related to speech and reading disorders like [4]dyslexia and dysphasia. A better understanding of it may help doctors devise treatments for people with the other problems, the researchers said. For the study, 8 tone-deaf adults and 10 others were connected to an EEG and asked to listen to a series of musical tones. Half the time, one of the notes was pitched up or down. The volunteers were asked to say when they heard a change. The study found that the brains of amusic volunteers did not respond to small changes in pitch that caused changes among the other volunteers. When the pitch changes were bigger, the study found, the amusic brains "overreacted." The researchers said more study was needed to narrow down where in the brain the problem was taking place. References 3. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/deafness/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 4. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/dyslexia/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 11 22:16:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:16:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] THES: IQ claim will fuel gender row Message-ID: IQ claim will fuel gender row http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2024132&window_type=print Thes Higher Educational Supplement Phil Baty Published: 26 August 2005 Men are more likely to win Nobel prizes and other academic distinctions because they are more intelligent than women, according to a study to be published in a leading research journal. In a paper that will reignite the academic row over genetic differences between men and women, two prominent psychologists will argue in the British Journal of Psychology that men have larger brains and higher IQs than women, which makes them better suited to "tasks of high complexity". The paper's lead researcher is Paul Irwing, senior lecturer in psychology at Manchester University. The co-author is Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, who has caused outrage in the past with claims that white people are more intelligent than black people. Dr Irwing said: "My politics are rather different from Richard's and I would prefer it if we were wrong." But he said that he had resolved to put "scientific truth" above his personal political conflicts and potentially even his reputation. The researchers concluded that there was a very strong case that men not only have larger brains but have a higher IQ than women, by about five points. The paper will argue that while many academics have denied any IQ difference, those who acknowledge a difference argue that it is too small to be significant, or "not worth speaking of". Dr Irwing said: "We do not think that a five-IQ-point difference can be so easily dismissed." He said that the difference meant that there were a much higher proportion of men with higher IQs. There are 3 men to each woman with an IQ above 130 and 5.5 men for each woman with an IQ above 145, according to Dr Irwing. "These different proportions of men and women with high IQ scores may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds, such as chess grandmasters, Fields medallists for mathematics, Nobel prizewinners and the like," he said. The researchers acknowledge that women outnumber men at nearly every level of educational achievement, PhD level being the sole exception. The paper will argue that there is evidence that at the same level of IQ, women are able to "achieve more" than men, "possibly because they are more conscientious and better adapted to sustained periods of hard work". The paper also cites a previous study that concluded that IQs in the region of 125 are adequate to "ascend to all levels in the labour market". "The small male advantage (in IQ) is therefore, likely to be of most significance for tasks of high complexity, such as complex problem solving in mathematics, engineering and physics," Dr Irwing said. The research is bound to cause a furious backlash. Professor Lynn had already caused controversy after claiming in a letter to this month's The Psychologist that Cambridge University psychopathologist Simon Baron-Cohen had "reached the same conclusion" as he had on gender. This week, Professor Baron-Cohen said: "I wish Professor Lynn had read the relevant section of my book, The Essential Difference, which concludes that overall intelligence is not better in one sex or the other." phil.baty at thes.co.uk From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 11 22:16:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:16:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: 'Men cleverer than women' claim Message-ID: 'Men cleverer than women' claim http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/education/4183166.stm Published: 2005/08/25 09:57:24 GMT [e-mails to the BBC included.] Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women. A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests. Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn claim the difference grows when the highest IQ levels are considered. Their research was based on IQ tests given to 80,000 people and a further study of 20,000 students. 'Widening gap' Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, told the Today programme on BBC Radio Four the study showed that, up to the age of 14, there was no difference between the IQs of boys and girls. "But beyond that age and into adulthood there is a difference of five points, which is small but it can have important implications," he said. "This is against a background of women dramatically overtaking men in educational attainment and making very rapid advances in terms of occupational achievement." The academics used a test which is said to measure "general cognitive ability" - spatial and verbal ability. As intelligence scores among the study group rose, the academics say they found a widening gap between the sexes. There were twice as many men with IQ scores of 125, for example, a level said to correspond with people getting first-class degrees. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. Nobel prize-winners Dr Irwing told The Times the differences "may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds, such as chess grandmasters, Fields medallists for mathematics, Nobel prize-winners and the like". The paper will argue that there is evidence that at the same level of IQ, women are able to achieve more than men "possibly because they are more conscientious and better adapted to sustained periods of hard work". Earlier this year, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, sparked controversy when he suggested at a seminar that one reason men outperformed women in maths and science was genetics. Several guests walked out of the conference after hearing the comments. Dr Summers, who has apologised repeatedly for his remarks, said later that the shortage of senior female academics was partly caused by child-minding duties, which restricted working hours. What is your reaction to this research? Are men more intelligent than women? Send us your comments using the form below. My reaction, coming from a family with a tradition of women who achieve very highly in maths and sciences, is weary disgust. Yet again, what is intelligence? Who is defining it? Have these researchers looked at IQ levels below the average, at gender differentials among prison inmates? Let's have these included for balance, please. Julia Blincoe, Southampton, England All this discussion is fairly irrelevant. Men and women have different and also some similar skills but we are all genetically programmed for survival, together. Basically we need teamwork and to be able to work to each other's strengths and minimise our collective weaknesses in order to make any progress in future. Divisive talk about who is better than who is pointless and smacks of political correctness. Richard, Worksop I think that this study is probably true in a lot of cases, but this is because young girls change their ideals from learning. They start to have maternal thoughts of children and emotional attachment to partners. Therefore they neglect high learning for their natural development of nurturing. In general though I think women are equal to men, but in different roles. Darrell Beck, Jacksonville, Florida Modern IQ tests are no longer biased at all. They have been re-designed to be taken by anyone in the world, with any kind of education (or no education). Before the tests are rubbished, maybe we can establish if they are of the modern variety? I for one am getting tired of the media continually men-bashing and portraying men as incapable. It's nice to have some evidence to the contrary once in a while. Nigel, UK The only thing IQ tests prove is how good you are at doing IQ tests. Matthew, Cheshire, UK Let's not ignore the fact that researchers believe about 20-25 IQ points are influenced by environmental factors. And the fact that test scores are adjusted for gender anyway as males tend to score higher on some factors and females on others. This is not a pure measure of intelligence, but a human-devised Western (and usually male and white) instrument. Flo, Malvern, England I do not believe, on average, that men are more intelligent than women. I'm convinced we often find more men at the extremes like in academia or indeed in the work place simply because we still live in a male-driven society. Women think differently from men, that I do agree with, but more intelligent? From my 'empirical analysis' I find this unlikely. Jason Robinson, Cambridge To throw in another possible factor, remember also the competitive aspect of IQ tests: the average man is possibly more likely to treat a measurement of his mental capacity as a chance to prove himself; the average woman may not push herself as hard as she does not consider the result quite so important. Anne, London, UK I scored relatively high in an IQ test when I was a child. Since then I have done many many many very very very stupid things in my life. I still wonder what that test has to do with intelligence or understanding at all. Alex, Wien, Austria I'm surprised that an academic journal is even considering this publication. A 'scientific' study that only takes into account one measure of intelligence that is well known to be biased towards white European males really shouldn't be taken seriously. I suspect the editor of the journal is male. Maria, Sheffield It really does amuse me that some men need to keep creating these tests to prove to themselves that they are more capable than women. I don't read about a rush of women psychologists doing the same thing. Maybe the women know the truth anyway or maybe they just don't care. Hazel, Sheffield I hope this taken for exactly what it is. A scientific study. Most of these things have little or no bearing on everyday life for most of us. However, as a man, it is nice to hear something positive about us for once. Nick Spiers, London I can easily see this as being true. However, it would be interesting to also look at the bottom IQ levels and see which sex has more at that level before making any judgements. Given that that sections of the media are so keen on denigrating men, and the advertising industry is so addicted to portraying men as buffoons and women as intelligent, perhaps this might re-adjust the balance a little. I find that although many of the women I've known are more socially intelligent, their general knowledge has always been abysmal, hence this being no surprise. Huw Morgan, Cardiff, UK I suspect the tests were formulated to play to men's strengths. Perhaps the tests were even set by men. IQ tests have long been recognised as skewed towards white men of European origin, why do we continue to pay attention to them? IQ tests still don't measure the different ways that intelligence can manifest itself, and until they do, they will continue to provide fodder to those who seek to re-establish man's 'superiority' over women. Roanne, Derby, UK I don't think men are more intelligent than women on average. However, from personal experience I would say that the distribution of intelligence in men is more extreme, that is to say, there are more exceptionally clever men than women, but there are also more exceptionally stupid men than women. Robin, Oxford, IKL It has long been accepted that IQ tests are gender-biased: they are designed by men to test 'male intelligence', such as spatial awareness. They simply do not cover all aspects of intelligence. Therefore it is no surprise that a test designed by men, and a study carried out by men, has found that men are 'more intelligent' than women. Jenny, London If your report is accurate, what this study actually shows is that men are better at IQ tests than women. This is not (necessarily) the same as saying men are cleverer than women. That would require rather more criteria than just an IQ test. Phil Evans, Keele, UK I have the impression that society allows men to develop skills in a focussed way, with less time reserved for repetitive care tasks. IQ can be improved in this way. It is not set and fixed at birth. If men hone skills at the expense of good housekeeping or social responsibilities, perhaps they are granted the time to develop the extra five points where women spend more time looking after house/kids/husband/parents/friends. Marjoline, The Hague, Holland From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 11 22:16:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:16:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Women cleverer than men, says MP Message-ID: Women cleverer than men, says MP http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4079653.stm [Note the date. Mr. Mencken certainly thought so, at least that women were far more intelligent than men in what mattered. No woman, he said, would be so dumb to want to be a lawyer or a stock broker.] Last Updated: Wednesday, 8 December, 2004, 16:13 GMT GCSE students after receiving their results Girls are getting more top grades than boys at GCSE and A-level Women are brighter than men, according to the Labour chairman of the Commons education committee. Huddersfield MP Barry Sheerman said there was a "danger" of being obsessed about how boys were doing at school. His comments followed a committee discussion about whether girls or boys found it easier to learn to read. "My own personal view is that women are brighter than men," the MP said, adding that women now earned on average more than men as middle managers. First class? He said: "We should celebrate this, shouldn't we? The brightest kids are coming through and they happen to be women." In recent years girls have consistently outperformed boys at all levels of the education system. The "gender gap" at GCSE level in England, Wales and Northern Ireland this year was 5.3 percentage points at grades A* and A and by 8.4 points at grades C and above in girls' favour. Boys' performance had improved more than girls', however. This was even more noticeable at A-level. Even so, 23.7% of girls' entries achieved A grades, compared to 21% of boys'. Ninety-five per cent of boys' entries were passes, against 96.8% of girls'. More young women than men go to university. Schools define many more boys than girls as having special educational problems - which some researchers argue means the schools are failing to meet boys' needs. 'Wrong schooling' In the latest major international study of the performance of 15-year-olds in maths, reading and science tests, boys out-performed girls in almost all of the 40 countries involved in maths. In reading, girls had "significantly higher average performance" in all countries except Liechtenstein. The biggest gap was in Iceland. Science showed the smallest average gender gap, with boys doing a little better. American educational researchers William Draves and Julie Coates have argued that it is not boys who are the problem but schools. While boys are developing the skills they will need in the "knowledge jobs" of the future, schools are still preparing students for a past industrial age, they have said. SEE ALSO: [47]Boys 'fighting back' in A-levels 18 Aug 04 | Education [48]Top grades rising again for GCSEs 26 Aug 04 | Education [49]Finland tops global school table 07 Dec 04 | Education [50]Will boys always be boys? 28 Feb 04 | Education [51]GCSE 'gender gap' sparks concern 22 Aug 02 | Education [52]Addressing the gender gap 22 Aug 02 | Education RELATED INTERNET LINKS: [53]Education committee The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites TOP EDUCATION STORIES NOW [54]Teachers welcome lesson plan deal [55]Boy charged in school arson probe [56]Muslim image 'must change' [57]Icelanders speak up for language References 47. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3577868.stm 48. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3597490.stm 49. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4073753.stm 50. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3494490.stm 51. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2208547.stm 52. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2208596.stm 53. http://www.parliament.uk/commons/selcom/edemhome.htm 54. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4200238.stm 55. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4202844.stm 56. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4197218.stm 57. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4201706.stm From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 11 22:20:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:20:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Yeditoth Internet: Rabbi: Hurricane punishment for pullout Message-ID: Rabbi: Hurricane punishment for pullout http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3138779,00.html 5.9.7 [What has Pat Robertson blamed for the hurricane? I haven't heard.] Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef: Hurricane Katrina result of Bush's support for disengagement, failure of New Orleans' black residents to study Torah. `This is the punishment for what Bush did to Gush Katif,' rabbi says Zvi Alush Hurricane Katrina is a punishment meted out by God as a result of U.S. President George W. Bush's support for the Gaza and northern West Bank disengagement, Shas spiritual leader and former Chief Sephardic Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said Tuesday. Notably, the rabbi chose to openly declare what many ultra-Orthodox believers have said for a while now, namely that recent naturally disasters in the U.S. are a direct result of American support for the pullout. Punishment from God? New Orleans (Photo: AP) In his weekly sermon, the rabbi said: "There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn't enough Torah study... black people reside there (in New Orleans). Blacks will study the Torah? (God said) let's bring a tsunami and drown them." "Hundreds of thousands remained homeless. Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God," said the rabbi, who already found himself in hot water in the past following controversial remarks of one kind or another. Yet Rabbi Ovadia was not done there, and proceeded to explain in detail why Americans deserved the Hurricane. "Bush was behind the (expulsion of) Gush Katif," he said. "He encouraged Sharon to expel Gush Katif...we had 15,000 people expelled here, and there 150,000 (were expelled). It was God's retribution ..God does not short-change anyone." "He (Bush) perpetrated the expulsion. Now everyone is mad at him...this is his punishment for what he did to Gush Katif, and everyone else who did as he told them, their time will come, too," the rabbi said. Ovadia concluded: "Where can evil escape to from God? Its time will come and it will be slapped on the head." Knesset Member Eliezer Cohen (National Union) dismissed Ovadia's comments in a talk with Ynet. "I know meteorology well enough not to believe such rubbish," he said. Meanwhile, Knesset Member Ronny Brison said: "What, God is cross-eyed? He metes out punishments at the wrong place? We're sick and tired of Rabbi Ovadia's primitive worldview. He already did his part, he can remove himself from public life." Ilan Marciano contributed to the story From checker at panix.com Sun Sep 11 22:20:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:20:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bart D'Hooghe and Jaroslaw Pykacz: Quantum Mechanics and Computation Message-ID: Bart D'Hooghe and Jaroslaw Pykacz: Quantum Mechanics and Computation Foundations of Science (2004) 9: 387-404 [Sorry about my inability to reproduce the equations. I can supply the PDF next week. This is a terribly important article. It argues that quantum computing can potentially become far more powerful than any mannter of parallel processing done with classical computers.] ABSTRACT. In quantum computation non classical features such as superposition states and entanglement are used to solve problems in new ways, impossible on classical digital computers. We illustrate by Deutsch algorithm how a quantum computer can use superposition states to outperform any classical computer. We comment on the view of a quantum computer as a massive parallel computer and recall Amdahl's law for a classical parallel computer. We argue that the view on quantum computation as a massive parallel computation disregards the presence of entanglement in a general quantum computation and the non classical way in which parallel results are combined to obtain the final output. KEY WORDS: quantum computation, parallel computers 1. INTRODUCTION The theory of quantum computation has its roots in the year 1982 when Feynman (1982, 1986) pointed out that a simulation of a quantum system on a classical computer requires a number of resources (in time and space) exponentially increasing with the size of the system. Indeed, a composite quantum system is described in the tensor product of the Hilbert spaces used to represent the subsystems such that the number of basis vectors increases exponentially with the number of subsystems. However, a simulation performed on a genuine quantum system will not suffer from this exponential overhead due to its intrinsic quantum nature. Deutsch extended the ideas of Feynman by defining the Quantum Turing Machine (Deutsch, 1985) as a universal computation device based on the rules of quantum mechanics. The analogue of the classical Shannon bit is the qubit, i.e., a bi-stable state quantum system (photon, spin 1/2 particle, ...) which is mathematically represented in a two-dimensional complex Hilbert space. If the register of a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (Belgium). quantum computer contains N qubits, then according to the rules of quantum mechanics the state of the register is represented in the tensor product of N two-dimensional Hilbert spaces, one for each qubit. The running of the quantum computer corresponds to a unitary evolution of the state of the quantum register, after which a final measurement is made to read the output. It is possible to show that a quantum computer is a universal computation device, i.e., any computation that can be performed on a classical computer can also be performed on a quantum computer. The paper of Feynman already suggests that a quantum computer can perform certain computational tasks faster than any classical computer can, e.g. the simulation of a quantum system. Deutsch and Simon discovered problems the solving of which on a classical computer is impossible (Deutsch, 1986; Deutsch and Jozsa, 1992; Simon, 1994), but which can be solved on a quantum computer running a quantum algorithm. Although very important from a theoretical point of view, one could still consider these examples as rather academic and without any practical meaning. This changed as the quantum algorithms of Simon and Deutsch inspired other quantum algorithms which could solve interesting?problems, such as Shor's factoring algorithm (Shor, 1994) and Grover's database search algorithm (Grover, 1996). These new quantum algorithms showed that building a quantum computer would not only be important from an information-theoretical point of view, but also for practical?applications. Shor's factoring algorithm can factor integers in a time polynomial in the size of the input such that this algorithm could break a commonly used cryptography system, namely the RSA encryption method which relies on the computational hardness to factor a number into its primes (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, 1978). Grover's search algorithm can search a database in a time proportional to the square root of the size of the database, in contrast with a classical computer requiring an average search time linearly depending on the size of the database. Despite the fact that the physical implementation of a quantum computer still encounters great technical difficulties, already some preliminary results have been obtained by building quantum computers with a limited number of qubits, demonstrating the validity of some of the most important quantum algorithms, e.g., Shor's factoring algorithm was run on an NMR quantum computer (Vandersypen et al., 2001) to factor the number 15 in its primes 3 and 5. The question to what extent a quantum computer can solve certain problems faster than classical computers is the topic of the theory of quantum information and complexity, e.g., Bernstein and Vazirani (1993). In this paper we focus on the presence of genuine quantum features, such as quantum superposition and entanglement, in a quantum computation. In the first section we give a brief overview of the basics of quantum computation. We recall the notion of a qubit as the unit of information as the quantum counterpart of the classical Shannon bit. Already for a quantum computer containing a few qubits it is possible to study some simple quantum algorithms, and we analyze to what extent the presence of quantum superposition states is necessary in order to obtain a computational speed up compared to a classical computer. As a specific example, we discuss Deutsch problem. We show that the phase of the state vector of the quantum register is not totally irrelevant, but contains information about the evaluated function value. In the third section, we comment on the view on quantum computation as a massive parallel computation. We recall Amdahl's law for classical parallel computers which defines an upper bound in the possible speed up using a parallel computer. Next, we study to what extent this law is applicable in the realm of quantum computers and discuss the validity of the interpretation of a quantum computation as a massive parallel computation. 2. HOW A QUANTUM COMPUTER WORKS 2.1. Computation?is?a?Physical?Process? In this paper we follow a physical view on computation since any actual computation is always performed by some real physical system. The input is encoded by a suitably chosen initial state of the register of the computer, after which a processor induces changes of the state of the register according to some algorithm till the final state of the register is obtained and the algorithm stops. The reading of the output of the computational process corresponds with measuring the final state of the register. In this framework (computers as physical devices with a state evolution described by the algorithm) classical and quantum computers can be studied on the same footing, namely as physical devices with a certain set of possible accessible states and state evolutions induced by running the algorithm. Depending on the nature of the accessible states and possible state evolutions, the physical device which runs the computation is then called either a quantum computer or a classical computer. Classical computers are characterized by a register that is a set of bi-stable classical physical systems (switches, wires, magnets, etc.) able to store binary units (bits) of information: '0' or '1', called the 'classical Shannon bits'. The processor forces a transition of the initial state of the register to the final state according to an algorithm which obeys the laws of classical physics. Therefore, a classical N- bit register can be in only one of its possible 2N states at a time and a classical processor forces its transition to another such state, which is described mathematically as the action of Boolean functions on bit strings. Quantum computers on the other hand have registers which are sets of bi-stable quantum physical systems (two-level atoms, spin-1/2 particles, photons in orthogonal polarization states, etc.) able to store quantum binary units (qubits) of information. The state of each qubit is represented by a vector in a two-dimensional complex Hilbert space. It can be a superposition of two orthogonal states |0> and |1>which form a 'computational basis' of this Hilbert 10 space such that |0>=and |1>= and which may be 01 thought of as representing 'classical' values '0' and '1'. Using Dirac notation, we denote the state of a qubit |q>as: |q>=c0 |0>+c1 |1>,c0,c1 .C, |c0|2 +|c1|2 =1 A quantum N-qubit register can be not only in any of the 2N 'classical' states: |0>=|00 ...0>,|1>=|00 ...1>,...,|2N -1>= |11 ...1>, but also in any superposition state |.>: 2N-12N-1 |.>= ci |i>,c0,...c2N-1 .C, |ci|2 =1 i=0 i=0 The processor forces a transition of the initial state of the register to the final state according to the laws of quantum mechanics, which is described mathematically as the action of unitary transformations on the (superposition) state |.>of the quantum register. Therefore, a quantum processor can in a single run perform a unitary transformation simultaneously on each 'classical' state |i>that is in the superposition state |.>. Hence, running a single quantum processor on this superposition state of classical inputs could be interpreted as the running of a huge family of parallel processors, which is the essence of the famous 'quantum parallelism', a view on quantum computation on which we comment in more detail in the last section of this paper. If, in order to read the output, a measurement is performed on the quantum register in a final state .f :2N-12N-1 |.f>= di |i>,d0,...d2N-1 .C, |di|2 =1, i=0 i=0 the state of the register collapses into one of its 'classical? states |i>with probability |di|2. A 'good' quantum algorithm often uses superposition in the input state and a well-chosen unitary evolution such that the output state of the quantum register has a very large probability to be the 'classical' state corresponding to the correct solution of the problem. For instance, in Grover's database search problem one has to find in a database an entry for which a certain proposition holds. For each input, an oracle can be called to tell whether the proposition holds or not. Starting from a superposition of all the classical states as the initial state of the quantum register, running Grover's algorithm transforms this initial state into a state in which the component corresponding to the entry with the searched property has maximal amplitude. In some cases a quantum computation can even yield the correct outcome with certitude, e.g., for Deutsch problem and Grover's quantum search on a database with two entries. In general, a quantum computation only gives the correct outcome with a certain probability because the final measurement is probabilistic. However, verifying a 'candidate solution' obtained by a quantum computation is often computational easy, and by repeating the quantum computation a number of times one can increase the probability of obtaining the correct outcome arbitrarily close to unity. It should be remarked that quantum information is of an entirely different nature than classical information. This not only follows from the presence of superposition states and entanglement in the quantum register, but also from the no-cloning theorem discovered by Dieks (1982) and Wootters and Zurek (1982), which implies that the state of the quantum register cannot be copied without destroying the original state. Amongst others, this implies that a quantum computation is a very delicate process. It is also one of the reasons why it is so difficult to build a quantum computer with a large number of qubits, since decoherence naturally arising in a quantum computation can not be countered by copying the state of the quantum register a number of times to compensate decoherence effects by redundancy. To solve decoherence problems special error correcting techniques have been developed, e.g., Calderbank and Shor (1996). 2.2. Unitary?Evolutions?of?the?Quantum?Register?by?Quantum?Gates? During quantum computation, the state of a quantum register changes by unitary transformation. Since the set of possible unitary transformations of an N qubit system is infinite, in principle an infinite number of possible state evolutions could be considered for the quantum register. However, universal sets of m-qubit gates have been found, such that any unitary transformation for the N qubit register can be decomposed in a succession of unitary gates working on only a limited number (m) of qubits. Actually, already a two qubit gate together with the single qubit phase operations form a universal set of gates (DiVincenzo, 1995), i.e., any quantum circuit can be implemented up to arbitrary precision using these gates. This not only makes it much easier to grasp the running of a quantum computer in terms of the two qubit and single qubit phase operations, but also suggests that some of the characteristic features of a quantum computer can already be demonstrated by two qubit algorithms. As we have already mentioned in the introduction, any classical computer can be simulated by a quantum computer. This means that any classical gate can be simulated in a quantum computation using a number of universal quantum gates. On the other hand, there are quantum gates without any classical analogue, e.g., the phase gates which act on the phase of a qubit (there is even no classical analogue for the phase of a qubit, since the classical Shannon bit can only have value '0' or '1' and does not have a phase), or the 'square root of NOT'. As an illustration we briefly present some of the well-known quantum gates, see e.g., Nielsen and Chuang (2000) for more. Since quantum gates correspond to unitary transformations, they are completely defined by the matrix representation in a(n arbitrary chosen) basis of the tensor product Hilbert space in which the state vector of the quantum register is represented, i.e., the computational basis. The Hadamard transformation acts on a single qubit and transforms a 'classical' state (|0 . or |1>) into a superposition state. Its matrix representation is given by: 1 11 H =v 21 -1 such that H|0>= |0>v+|1. and H |1>= |0>v-|1. . Also H-1 = H, 22 so the inverse of the Hadamard gate is the Hadamard gate itself: H |0>v+|1. =|0. and H |0>v-|1>=|1. . Another single qubit gate is the 22 phase shift gate. Using Pauli matrices: 01 0 -i 10 sx = ,sy = ,sz = 10 i 00 -1 the phase shift gates are given by: cos .i sin .cos . sin . ei. 0i.sx = i.sy = i.sz =,e ,e -i.i sin . cos . - sin . cos . 0 e The quantum analogue of the classical NOT gate is the quantum NOT gate which inverts the value of a qubit: NOT |0>=|1. , NOT |1>=|0 . with matrix representation given by: 01 NOT = 10 The 'square root of NOT' is a quantum gate which has no classical analogue: v 1 - ii 11 + i 1 -i NOT == 21 i 2 -i 1 vv andis suchthat NOT NOT = NOT. The Controlled NOT gate (CNOT) is a two qubit gate which induces a NOT on the 'target' qubit when the 'control' qubit has value 1. If for a two qubit state |a,b. the qubit a denotes the control bit and the qubit b the target bit, the action of CNOT is defined as CNOT |a,b>=|a,b . a>, with . addition modulo 2, and the matrix representation of CNOT is given by: .. 1000 .. 0100 ..CNOT = . 0001 . 0010 Together with the phase operations acting on a single qubit, the CNOT gate forms a universal set of gates (Barenco et al., 1995), such that any unitary transformation can be expressed in terms of these universal gates. Actually, any two qubit gate inducing entanglement between the two qubits in the quantum register, together with the single qubit phase operations, forms a universal set of gates (Dodd et al., 2001; Bremner et al., 2002). 3. A QUANTUM ALGORITHM USING TWO QUBITS 3.1. Deutsch?Problem? Let us consider the following formulation of Deutsch problem (Deutsch, 1986; Deutsch and Jozsa, 1992). Given a {0,1}-valued function f defined on a two-point domain, for simplicity let it also be {0,1}, determine with a single call of the black box (which calculates the function f and will be called 'oracle') whether the function f is constant or balanced. Clearly, this problem cannot be solved on a classical computer, since a classical computation requires the value of f to be calculated in both points, after which the two values can be compared to determine whether the function f is balanced or not. However, this problem can be solved by a quantum computer. Let a quantum register containing two qubits be prepared in the input state .0: .0 =|0>v + |1>.|0>v - |1>=|00>+|10>-|01>-|11 . 22 2 We assume the existence of an oracle represented by a unitary transformation Uf such that calling the oracle transforms an input state |xy . into the state Uf |xy>=|x( y . f (x)) . with . being the addition modulo 2. Applying this transformation to the state .0 we obtain: |0f(0)>+|1f(1)> - 0f(0) - 1f(1) Uf (.0) = 2 with f (i) = f (i) . 1. After Uf a Hadamard transformation is performed on the first qubit. Let us consider the two possibilities, namely f constant or balanced. If f is constant, f(0) = f(1) , and the state of the two qubit quantum register can be rewritten as ( H . 1) Uf (.0) = ( H . 1) |0f(0)>+|1f(0)> - 0f(0) - 1f(0) 2 |0>+|1>|f(0)> - f(0) = ( H . 1) v . v 22 =|0> . |f(0)>v - f(0) 2 such that if the function f is constant the first qubit is |0>. ? If f is balanced, f(1) = f(0) . 1 = f(0), f(1) = f(1) . 1 = f(0), and the state of the quantum register can be rewritten as: ( H . 1) Uf (.0) = ( H . 1) |0f(0)> + 1f(0) - 0f(0) -|1f(0) . 2 |0>-|1>|f(0)> - f(0) = ( H . 1) v . v 22 =|1> . |f(0)>v - f(0) 2 such that if the function f is balanced the first qubit is |1>. Therefore, in a quantum computation with one call of the oracle the problem whether f is constant or balanced is solved by measuring the state of the first qubit: if the first qubit is 0 the function f is constant, if the first qubit is 1 the function f is balanced. It looks as if the quantum computer can calculate both values f(0) and f(1) parallelly and compare them simultaneously. However, the quantum computater cannot answer a question about the actual value of f(0)or f(1). If the function f is constant, we still do not know whether ( f (0), f (1) ) =(0,0) or ( f (0), f (1) ) =(1,1) . Similarly, if f is balanced we still have two possibilities, either ( f (0), f (1) ) =(0,1) or ( f (0), f (1) ) =(1,0) . As we show in next subsection, the knowledge about the actual values f(0)and f(1) is encoded in the phase of the state vector of the quantum register. 3.2. What?about?the?Phase?? Let us note that |f(0)>-f(0) =(-1)f(0)(|0>-|1>).The state of the quantum register can be transformed into a 'classical state' (i.e., the qubits assume only values zero or one) by applying a Hadamard gate on the second qubit. In the case that f is constant, the state .fc of the quantum register is given by: .c =(1 .H)( H .1)Uf (.0) =(1 .H) |0>.|f(0)>v-f(0) f 2 =(1 .H) |0>.(-1)f(0) |0>v-|1>=(-1)f(0) |0>.|1 . 2 Analogously, if f is balanced, the state .fb is given by: .b =(1 .H)( H .1)Uf (.0)=(-1)f(0)|1>.|1> f In both cases, reading the first qubit yields the answer to the problem of Deutsch. If we could measure the phase of the final state vector of the two qubit register, we could also answer the question about the actual value of f(0) . Indeed: if f(0) =0, then (-1)f(0) = 1 and no phase shift occurs. If on the other hand f(0) =1, then (-1)f(0) =-1 which corresponds with a phase shift of p, since eip =-1. Further, knowing the value of the first qubit, i.e., knowing whether the function f is constant or balanced, we could immediately obtain the value of f(1) as either f(1) = f(0),or f(1) = f(0) . 1.Hence in both cases, f being constant or balanced, knowledge about the phase of the state vector of the register and the value of the first qubit would determine the value of f(0)and f(1).This shows that in the quantum computation solving Deutsch problem knowledge about the actual value of f(0)has been absorbed into the state vector of the quantum register. Therefore, after a single?call of the oracle, the state vector of the quantum register contains information about the function values in both points. Nevertheless, since it is not possible to measure the absolute phase of a state vector, no knowledge about the function value f(0)(and consequently f(1)) can be obtained by application of this algorithm. 3.3. Product?States?in?Deutsch?Algorithm? Let us rewrite some of the expressions in Deutsch algorithm applied to function defined on two points only, to show that in each step of the computation the state of the quantum register is a product state (see Arvind, 2001). Clearly, the initial state is a product state (of superposition states for each qubit). Since |f(1)> - f(1) = (-1)f(1)(|0>-|1>), after calling the oracle, the state of the quantum register is given by: |0f(0)>+|1f(1)> - 0f(0) - 1f(1) Uf (.0) = 2 . . . . . . f (0) f (1) |0> . |f(0)> - +|1> . |f(1)> - = 2 |0> . (-1)f(0)(|0>-|1>)+|1> . (-1)f(1)(|0>-|1> ) = 2 (-1)f(0)|0> + (-1)f(1)|1>|0>-|1 . = v . v 22 which is again a product state. Since the Hadamard gate acts on a single qubit, it can not entangle the qubits such that after applying the two Hadamard gates as described in the previous subsection we obtain again a product state, either (-1)f(0)|0>.|1 . if f is constant, or (-1)f(0)|1>.|1 . if f is balanced. Therefore, during this Deutsch algorithm the state of the quantum register can always be written as a product state. Hence this quantum algorithm does not use quantum entanglement, but rather exploits the possibility of the individual qubits to be in a superposition state, such that the state of the register is a product of superposition states. Since this Deutsch algorithm does not use entanglement, it could be run on a classical optical system making use of interference between optical signals, such that a 'classical qubit' is encoded in the polarization of a (classical) light beam (Arvind, 2001). On the other hand, two qubit quantum algorithms exist which do require the use of quantum entanglement (Arvind and Mukunda, 2000) such that the absence of entanglement in Deutsch two qubit algorithm is not typical for two qubit quantum computation. Moreover, it has been shown (Arvind, 2001) that the Deutsch Jozsa algorithm for three or more qubits involves entangled states, such that its implementation using these 'classical qubits' becomes impossible. Although in a general quantum algorithm entangled states are used, a classical digital computer has no access to the superposition states used by any Deutsch algorithm such that Deutsch problem still can be considered as a good example of quantum computation outperforming classical bivalued computation. Another example of computation 'outperforming' classical (single processor) computation is parallel computation. In the next section, we discuss the maximal speed-up possible for classical parallel computers and comment on the intuitive view of quantum computation as a massive parallel computation. 4. INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM COMPUTATION AS A PARALLEL COMPUTATION 4.1. Amdahl's?Law?for?Classical?Parallel?Computation? The main idea behind parallel computing is to divide the computational work among a number of processors, whose combined effort will perform a task faster than a single processor. Amdahl (1967) realized that the speed-up which can be obtained by making a computation parallel has an upper bound, such that adding more parallel processors does not result in a further speed-up of the computation. Ideally, dividing the work among k processors will decrease the computation time by a factor k 1 . However, in general not all work can be performed parallel, and the computation contains a serial part. Let T (k) be the time needed to perform the calculation by k parallel processors, and T(1) the time needed for a single processor. The speed-up S (k) is defined as the ratio of T(1) and T (k): T(1) S (k) = T (k) Let us split the computation into a serial part S and a parallel part P which can be divided among the parallel processors. The speed up S (k) using k parallel processors is given by: T(1) Ts +Tp S (k) = = T (k) Ts +Tkp which shows that even for k .8the speed up has an upper bound given by: Ts +Tp Tp S(8 ) ==1 + Ts Ts Clearly, the serial part of the computation puts an upper bound to the possible speed-up using a parallel computer. In practice, the situation is even worse, since this formula does not take into account the extra work needed to divide the parallel part of the computation between the parallel processors, nor the extra time needed to transport the data between the processors and combine them to obtain the final output. Nevertheless, this expression already gives some idea of the feasibility and the amount of possible speed-up using a parallel computer. This expression is known as Amdahl's Law (Amdahl, 1967) and yields the maximal possible speed-up using a parallel computer. 4.2. Quantum?Computation?as?a?Massive?Parallel?Computation?? In this section we analyze some of the main differences between a quantum computer and a classical parallel computer. Let us first explain in what sense a quantum computation could be interpreted as a parallel computation. Let us consider the case that for each classical state of the register a computation has to be performed (e.g., the value of a function) and that each computation takes a time tc independent of the input. On a classical computer with N bits there are 2N classical states such that this calculation would take a time 2Ntc, which increases exponentially with N, the number of bits. A quantum computer can perform this calculation in a single run applying a unitary transformation to the superposition of the classical states in the input. Let tq be the time necessary to run the quantum algorithm. To obtain a parallel computer which is as fast as a quantum computer, a speed-up of S (k) = 2Ntc/tq is needed. In the maximal parallel situation and if tq ? tc, k = 2N parallel processors are necessary, since according to Amdahl's law the speed-up is given by: . T(1) Ts + Tp 0 + TpSk = 2N = . = = = 2N T 2N Ts + 2TNp 0 + 2TNp which shows that under these assumptions the calculation on a parallel computer with 2N processors is as fast as on a quantum computer. In this sense, a quantum computer is as powerful as a parallel computer with as many parallel processors as there are classical input states. However, this view on quantum computation as a massive parallel computation is not completely correct. First of all, in order to obtain quantum speed-up in a general quantum computation unitary gates have to be used which entangle the qubits (Jozsa and Linden, 2002). Therefore, a classical state of the register (which is a product state) is in general transformed by the quantum gates into an entangled state, i.e., a non-classical state. In a real classical parallel computation, classical states are always mapped into other classical states, with Boolean functions describing the action of the classical gates. In a quantum computation, classical states are mapped onto entangled states, with unitary transformations describing the action of the quantum gates. Hence the view on a quantum computer as processing each classical input separately in a massive parallel computation is invalid because now the classical states become entangled. Secondly, in a classical parallel computation the 'parallel results' are classical?states?of the parallel registers, and the final output is obtained by combining the results in a classical way, i.e., using classical (deterministic) logic. In a quantum computation, the 'parallel results' are state?vectors?which need to be combined in a quantum way, namely by superposition in which the phase?of the superposed state vectors is important. Finally, a more philosophical remark. In a classical parallel computation all parallel results are 'actual', i.e., the state of each parallel register can be measured without disturbing the computation. In a quantum computation the final state of the quantum register (before the measurement to read the output) is in general a superposition of classical states. If one performs a measurement to obtain the output of the quantum computation, one can only observe the register in a classical?state with a certain probability. In this sense, the superposition state itself is never 'actualized' in a measurement. Due to the no-cloning theorem, this 'potential' status is irreducible. A fortiori, the quantum 'parallel results', i.e., the state vectors in the superposition, can also only be considered 'potential' and 'intermediate parallel results' cannot be measured without disturbing the quantum computation. Taking into account these important differences between a quantum computation and a classical parallel computation, we argue that a quantum computation should not be viewed as a kind of massive parallel computation in the classical sense (and obeying Amdahl's law), but really should be regarded as a new kind of computation, on a physical device with non classical features such as superposition states and entanglement. 5. CONCLUSIONS A quantum computer which has access to non classical states can allow a computational speed-up impossible on a classical computer. For example, using product states of superposition states of the individual qubits, Deutsch problem can be solved with a single?call of the oracle on a quantum computer. We showed that the state vector of the quantum register contains complete?information about the function values in both points, i.e., the phase of the state vector is not irrelevant. In general, a quantum computation also uses entangled (i.e., non product) states. This lead us to argue against the view on a quantum computer as a massive parallel computer because of the presence of entanglement in a general quantum computation and the crucial difference between the ways in which classical and quantum information is handled, e.g. the no-cloning theorem forbids storing intermediate results without disturbing the quantum computation. Also, the output of a classical parallel computation is obtained by combining the parallel results using classical logic. In a quantum computation the parallel results are state vectors which are combined in a quantum way, namely by superposition in which the phase is important. A classical digital parallel computer has no access to superposition states which are used by the quantum algorithm to solve Deutsch problem with a single?call of the oracle. No matter how many parallel processors a classical computer contains, it can not solve the problem making only a single?call to the oracle. This illustrates the fact that quantum computers are a totally new kind of computers which are more powerful than classical parallel computers, even if these have as many parallel processors as there are classical states in the quantum register. In a sense, a quantum computer should be regarded not as a massive parallel but rather as a superposing?and entangling?parallel computer. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Part of this paper was prepared during the joint Polish-Flemish Research Project 007/R97/R98 and the financial support provided within this Project is gratefully acknowledged. Bart D'Hooghe is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research -Flanders (Belgium). REFERENCES Amdahl, G.M.: 1967, Validity of the Single-Processor Approach to Achieving Large-Scale Computing Capabilities. AFIPS?Conference?Proceedings,?Spring? Joint?Computing?Conference?(Atlantic City, N.J., Apr. 18-20). Reston, VA: AFIPS Press, 30, 483-485. Arvind: 2001, Quantum Entanglement and Quantum Computational Algorithms. Pramana?Jr.?of?Physics?56: 357-365; available as e-print: quant-ph/0012116. Arvind and N. Mukunda: 2000, A Two-qubit Algorithm Involving Quantum Entanglement. e-print: quant-ph/0006069. Barenco, A., D. Deutsch, A. Ekert and R. Jozsa: 1995, Conditional Quantum Dynamics and Logic Gates. Phys.Rev.Lett.?74: 4083-4086, e-print: quantph/9503017. Bernstein, E. and U. Vazirani: 1993, Quantum Complexity Theory. Proc.?25th? ACM?Symp.?on?Theory?of?Computating, 11-20. Bremner, M.J., C.M. Dawson, J.L. Dodd, A. Gilchrist, A.W. Harrow, D. Mortimer, M.A. Nielsen and T.J. Osborne: 2002, A Practical Scheme for Quantum Computation with Any Two-qubit Entangling Gate. Phys.?Rev.?Lett.?89: 247902; e-print: quant-ph/0207072. Calderbank, A.R. and P.W. Shor: 1996, Good Quantum Error-Correcting Codes Exist. Phys.?Rev.?A?54(2): 1098-1106. Deutsch, D.: 1985, Quantum Theory, the Church-Turing Principle, and the Universal Quantum Computer. Proc.?Roy.?Soc.?London?A400: 97. Deutsch, D.: 1986, Three Connections between Everett's Interpretation and Experiment. In R. Penrose and C.J. Isham (eds.), Quantum?Concepts?in?Space? and?Time.?Oxford: Clarendon Press, 215-225. Deutsch, D. and R. Jozsa: 1992, Rapid Solutions of Problems by Quantum Computation. Proc.?Roy.?Soc.?Lond.?A 439: 553-558. Dieks, D.: 1982, Communication by EPR Devices. Phys.?Lett.?A?92: 271. DiVincenzo, D.P.: 1995, Two-bit Gates are Universal for Quantum Computation. Phys.?Rev.?A?51: 1015-1022. Dodd, J.L., M.A. Nielsen, M.J. Bremner and R.T. Thew: 2001, Universal Quantum Computation and Simulation Using Any Entangling Hamiltonian and Local Unitaries. e-print: quant-ph/0106064. Feynman, R.: 1982, Simulating Physics with Computers. Int.?J.?Theor.?Phys.?21: 467-488. Feynman, R.: 1986, Quantum Mechanical Computers. Found.?Phys.?16: 507. Grover, L.K.: 1996, A Fast Quantum Mechanical Algorithm for Database Search. Proceedings?of?the?28th?Annual?ACM?Symposium?on?Computing, 212. Jozsa, R. and N. Linden: 2002, On the Role of Entanglement in Quantum Computational Speed-up. e-print: quant-ph/0201143. Nielsen, M.A. and I.L. Chuang: 2000, Quantum?Computation?and?Quantum? Information.?Cambridge: University Press. Rivest, R.L., A. Shamir and L.M. Adleman: 1978, A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems. Communications?of?the?ACM?21?2: 120-126. Shor, P.W.: 1994, Algorithms for quantum Computation, Discrete Logarithms and Factoring. Proc.?35th?Annual?symposium?on?Foundations?of?Computer?Science, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 124. Simon, D.: 1994, On the Power of Quantum Computation. In FOCS'94, 116-123. Journal version available at SIAM?J.?Comp., 1997, 26(5): 1474-1483. Vandersypen, L.M.K., M. Steffen, G. Breyta, C.S. Yannoni, M.H. Sherwood and I.L. Chuang: 2001, Experimental Realization of Shor's Quantum Factoring Algorithm Using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Nature?414: 883-887. Wootters, W.K. and W.H. Zurek: 1982, A Single Quantum Cannot be Cloned. Nature?299: 982-983. Departement?Wiskunde?Bart D'Hooghe Vrije?Universiteit?Brussel? Pleinlaan?2? 1050?Brussel? Belgium? E-mail:?bdhooghe at vub.ac.be? Instytut?Matematyki?Jaroslaw Pykacz Uniwersytet?Gda?nski? Wita?Stwosza?57? 80-952?Gda?nsk? Poland? E-mail:?pykacz at delta.math.univ.gda.pl From checker at panix.com Wed Sep 14 01:28:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:28:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] VDare: Steve Sailer: Charles Murray Re-enters Great American Inequality Debate Message-ID: Steve Sailer: Charles Murray Re-enters Great American Inequality Debate http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050828_murray.htm 5.8.28 [14]Steve Sailer Archive Charles Murray Re-enters Great American Inequality Debate By [17]Steve Sailer Social scientist [18]Charles Murray, the co-author of the [19]1994 bestseller [20]The Bell Curve, is perhaps America's premier [21]data analyst. His 1984 book [22]Losing Ground provided the [23]intellectual impetus for the successful 1996 welfare reform law. His 2003 work [24]Human Accomplishment is a delightful statistical romp among the most [25]eminent scientists and artists in global history. Now, Murray is back with a landmark essay, "[26]The Inequality Taboo," in the September issue of [27]Commentary. The printed text alone totals 7,500 words, and the web version contains over 10,000 additional words of notes and sources. If published just by itself, Murray's 1,500-word [28]Footnote 44 would rank as the crucial statement on the recent trends and future prospects of the white-black IQ gap. Known among his friends for his remarkable judiciousness, Murray is a rather sensitive soul. The foul calumny he has been [29]subjected to over the last eleven years must have been tiresome. Murray hadn't crafted an essay about IQ since his little known (but important) [30]1999 effort reporting the then latest results of the enormous military-funded National Longitudinal Study of Youth look at IQ and life outcomes. This year, however, the [31]absurd denunciations visited upon Harvard president [32]Larry Summers for offering what Murray calls "a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about [33]innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics," persuaded Murray that intellectual discourse in America had decayed so shamefully that he needed to return to the fray. "[34]The Inequality Taboo" consists of three parts: bullet A defense of Summers's discussion of why brainiac math nerds are more likely to be male than female; bullet An updating on the last decade's worth of new findings on the white-black IQ gap; bullet And a ringing call to Americans to start discussing honestly the group differences that we see every day: "What good can come of raising this divisive topic? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. What we do know is that the [35]taboo has crippled our ability to explore almost any topic that involves the different ways in which groups of people respond to the world around them--which means almost every political, social, or economic topic of any complexity." Murray suggests that both high-end male-female cognitive differences and the white-black IQ gap appear to be more or less "intractable"--he writes: "Whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins." Murray's defense of Summers is well-done, although the [36]stupidity and [37]bad faith of the attacks on the Harvard president were so blatant that [38]lesser analysts managed to make most of Murray's points [39]last winter. One interesting fact that Murray doesn't mention is that the much-demonized IQ researcher [40]Cyril Burt was the first to determine that women were equal to men in intelligence. British psychometrician [41]Chris Brand writes: "[I]n 1912, the British psychologist Cyril Burt overturned Victorian wisdom by finding males to have the same average general intelligence as females (using the new [42]Binet tests from France), [and] this finding was replicated in countless investigations (and qualified by the observations that males have a wider range of IQs--thus producing more geniuses and more mental defectives--and that adolescent boys only temporarily lag behind adolescent girls in mental development)." The majority of psychometricians, including, most notably, [43]Arthur Jensen, support Burt's finding of mean gender equality. (However, [44]Richard Lynn has a paper coming out [45]arguing that men average a third of a standard deviation--or five points--higher in IQ). Nor is there any dispute that, just as Summers said, at the [46]extreme right edge of the Bell Curve, from which Harvard's [47]math and science professors are drawn, there are more men than women. One of the most newsworthy aspects of "The Inequality Taboo" is Murray's view that the [48]white-black IQ gap may have narrowed slightly in recent years. According to Murray's article, the three most recent re-normings of major IQ tests came up with a mean white-black gap of 0.92 standard deviations, or 14 points. That doesn't sound like much of a change from the one standard deviation (15 points) racial gap that IQ realists have been talking about for decades. But, in reality, they've been intentionally understating the traditional size of the difference. A 2001 [49]meta-analysis of eight decades of data suggested a 1.1 standard deviation gap (16.5) points. So, if this new 14 point gap found in the three recent re-normings holds up as more data comes in, we may have seen some significant progress on this massive social problem. Currently, though, the evidence remains far from clear. Murray writes in a [50]footnote: "Forced to make a bet, I would guess that the black-white difference in IQ has dropped by somewhere in the range of .10-.20 standard deviations over the last few decades. I must admit, however, that I am influenced by a gut-level conviction that the radical improvement in the political, legal, and economic environment for blacks in the last half of the 20th century must have had an effect on IQ." Murray is too honest, however, to skip over the other, more disturbing, possibility: that the [51]greater fertility of lower IQ women has had a dysgenic and/or "[52]dyscultural" effect. Murray has calculated that 60% of the babies born to black women who began participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1979 were born to women with IQs below the black female average of 85.7. Only 7% were born to black women with IQs over 100. I hope that the improved nutrition, health care, and other environmental enhancements that have allowed African-Americans to come to dominate [53]basketball, [54]football, and [55]sprinting in recent decades have also driven up black IQ scores more than the tendency of intelligent black women to [56]remain childless has driven them down. But the overall situation remains murky. It needs more research than is currently being funded. Does part of the white-black IQ gap have a genetic basis? Murray suggests an experiment that might prove conclusive: "To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. In the past, studies that have attempted to test this hypothesis have had no accurate way to measure the degree of admixture, and the results have been accordingly muddy. The recent advances in using [57]genetic markers solve that problem. Take a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then use genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as 'white' or 'black,' but along a continuum. Analyze the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum. The results would be close to dispositive." I bet, however, that Murray's critics won't rush to [58]fund this study and put their money where their mouths are. In his coda, Murray says: "Thus my modest recommendation, requiring no change in laws or regulations, just a little more gumption. Let us start talking about group differences openly--all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of [59]Italians and [60]Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between [61]Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of [62]Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the [63]poor and non-poor that could inform policy for [64]reducing poverty." Sounds like the table of contents for VDARE.com! Murray concludes: "Even to begin listing the topics that could be enriched by an inquiry into the nature of group differences is to reveal how stifled today's conversation is... Let us stop being afraid of data that tell us a story we do not want to hear, stop the name-calling, stop the denial, and start facing reality." I'm sometimes asked why I come up with more new insights than the typical pundit. (Here's a [65]list of four dozen things I've either discovered myself, accurately forecasted, or scooped the rest of the press about). It's not because I'm smarter. It's because I just tell the truth. The great thing about truths is that they are causally connected to all the other truths in the world. If you follow one truth bravely, it will lead you to another. In contrast, lies, ignorance, and wishful thinking are dead ends. The Great American Inequality Debate is in one of those dead ends. Charles Murray--and we here at VDARE.COM--are trying to rescue it. [Steve Sailer [[66]email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and [67]movie critic for [68]The American Conservative. His website [69]www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.] References 14. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 17. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 18. http://www.isteve.com/2003_QA_with_Charles_Murray_on_Human_Accomplishment.htm 19. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/bell_curve_10yr.htm 20. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684824299/vdare 21. http://olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Reviews/HumanAccomplishment.htm 22. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465042333/vdare 23. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/lm_pr_address.htm 24. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006019247X/vdare 25. http://www.amconmag.com/11_17_03/review.html 26. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html 27. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html 28. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html#_edn44 29. http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/People/Murray/bc-crit.html 30. http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/cmurraybga0799.pdf 31. http://www.vdare.com/francis/050124_harvard_women.htm 32. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050220_summers.htm 33. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050306_summers.htm 34. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html 35. http://www.vdare.com/pb/gambler_dan.htm 36. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050220_summers.htm 37. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050306_summers.htm 38. http://www.isteve.com/2005_National_Post_Summers_Harvard.htm 39. http://www.isteve.com/2005_Education_of_Larry_Summers.htm 40. http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/burtaffair.shtml 41. http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol3no2/cb-boasa.html 42. http://www.psych.umn.edu/psylabs/CATCentral/Binet.htm 43. http://www.isteve.com/jensen.htm 44. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183166.stm 45. http://www.vdare.com/misc/mercer_050106_silly.htm 46. http://www.isteve.com/2005_National_Post_Summers_Harvard.htm 47. http://www.vdare.com/pb/purpose_of_tenure.htm 48. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/no_excuses.htm 49. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001029349 50. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html#_edn44 51. http://olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/MarchingMorons.htm 52. http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33726/ 53. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/march_madness.htm#hoops 54. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/limbaugh.htm 55. http://vdare.com/sailer/lynch_mob.htm 56. http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm 57. http://www.isteve.com/2002_How_White_Are_Blacks.htm 58. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pioneer.htm 59. http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/basta.htm 60. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/fischer.htm 61. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/risky_transactions.htm 62. http://www.vdare.com/fulford/racial_rape.htm 63. http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/murray-poor?embedded=yes&cumulative_category_title=Charles+Murray&cumulative_category_id=Murray 64. http://www.vdare.com/francis/culture_of_poverty.htm 65. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/08/return-of-second-istevecom-panhandling.html 66. mailto:steveslr at aol.com 67. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iSteve-movies/ 68. http://www.amconmag.com/ 69. http://www.isteve.com/ 70. http://www.vdare.com/asp/donate.asp From checker at panix.com Wed Sep 14 01:30:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:30:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Patricia A. Williams: The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist Message-ID: Patricia A. Williams: The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist Theology and Science, Vol. 3, Issue 2 (2005), pp 133-43. [Responses appended.] The historical Jesus seems to have known about human nature as described by evolutionary psychology. He addresses the dispositions of human nature that evolutionary psychology says are central: resources, reproduction, relatedness (kinship), and reciprocity. In doing so he answers Aristotle's question, how can human beings flourish? His answer opens a window onto the divine. Patricia A. Williams is a philosopher of biology and philosophical theologian who writes full-time on Christianity and science. Her recent books include, Doing Without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (2001) and Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What you Can do about it (2001). Her mailing address is PO Box 69, Covesville, VA 22931. Her e-mail address is theologyauthor at aol.com; website www.theologyauthor.com. ----------------- I have argued in Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin that Christian doctrines of original sin are only partly true and that most Christian doctrines of the atonement are flatly false.1 These doctrines depend on the historicity of Adam and Eve, and science shows us that Adam and Eve cannot be historical figures. In my more recent book, Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What You Can Do About It,2 a work based on historical Jesus scholarship, I argued further that Jesus did not perceive his own death as a sacrifice for sin; indeed, he did not consider sacrifices for the forgiveness of sin necessary. Since these arguments undermine doctrines previously considered central to Christianity, they appear to make Jesus irrelevant. However, to draw that conclusion would be wrong. I argue here that Jesus is relevant at least in part because he is an astonishingly perceptive evolutionary psychologist. As such, he answers Aristotle's famous ethical question, "how can human beings flourish?" and offers us a window onto the divine. To answer Aristotle's question or, indeed, questions in ethics in general, requires a theory of human nature. We need to know who we are before we can figure out how to flourish. Now, for the first time in history, we have a scientific theory of human nature. It is evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology emerged in the early 1970s. Now the subject has its own textbook,3 a plethora of laborers in its vineyard, and considerable empirical support. Moreover, evolutionary psychology is rooted in sociobiology, a scientific theory that has had great heuristic value and made successful predictions about the social behavior of other animals for almost 40 years. The four central concepts of evolutionary psychology derive from sociobiology and they are well established. They are the four R's of human nature and much of the rest of nature as well: resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity. Human nature's four Rs People pursue resources. To survive, all organisms must do so. People reproduce. To continue the existence of their gene line, all mortal creatures must do so. These two Rs, resources and reproduction, are essential to the continued existence of the organic world. For sexually reproducing organisms like ourselves, sex is also essential (although not for every individual). Relatedness as such is, of course, essential too. Reproduction produces related organisms, by definition. Here, however, relatedness refers to inclusive fitness, the concept at the foundation of sociobiology. In classic evolutionary theory, an organism is fit if it survives to reproduce. In sociobiology, fitness moves from the individual organism to include its close relatives. In inclusive fitness theory, organisms help close relatives survive to reproduce. The classic case is parents helping dependent offspring grow to maturity. Biologists from Darwin on knew that organisms also help organisms other than offspring, but they did not know why. Sociobiology explained why. Organisms help close relatives because close relatives carry copies of the helper's genes. It turns out that the most accurate way to view evolution is from the point of view of the gene, and the evolutionary goal is to get as many copies of one's genes into the next generation as possible. An organism does this by reproduction, certainly, but also by helping most those relatives most likely to be carrying copies of its genes. Many organisms know who their close kin are?by smell, by sight, by sharing a common nest or mother, and by chemical cues. Of course, none knows about genes. None needs to. All an organism needs to be able to do is to recognize and help its relatives. Inclusive fitness theory permits helping behavior that is not ultimately egocentric or even a hidden form of egocentricity. The helping organism need not expect help in return for its aid because its reward is built into the situation. In return for helping relatives, the organism gets more copies of its genes into the next generation. Of course, it does not know this, so it cannot be behaving selfishly. Finally, for organisms that can recognize individuals and remember them and their deeds of help and harm, reciprocity becomes salient. Reciprocity entails equal exchange and may occur between organisms that are not kin. Reciprocity is egocentric: the helper expects help in return and in an amount equal to the help given. Few animals have the memories requisite to engage in reciprocity, but we do. We are creatures who reciprocate. Much of our lives are devoted to the exchange of goods and favors, and much of our justice system exists to enforce reciprocal relationships like contracts and marriages. The sense that reciprocity is justice underlies the legalization of the death penalty for murder. Few people doubt that the continued existence of the organic world on Earth is good and, so, logically the things that make its continuance possible are good. This entails that the four R's are good, but suppose we re-label them. If we engage in them too vigorously, the pursuit of resources becomes greed; of reproduction, lust; of relatedness, nepotism; and of reciprocity, justice for me and my group, to the exclusion of justice for you and your group. As the pursuit of resources is the most basic need of any organism, so greed is the simplest excess. It entails hoarding more than a person needs, sometimes to the direct detriment of the person, as when we eat to the point of obesity, but also to the detriment of society, as when the economic system is such that a few become ludicrously rich while the many remain poor. Lust is more complex, for it involves two sexes, and evolutionary psychology demonstrates that, because of their biological roles, male and female differ in their sexual desires. By definition, males produce smaller sex cells. This means that, with a few interesting but irrelevant exceptions, male organisms invest less in their offspring than females. In mammals such as ourselves, females make an additional investment, for they carry and nourish their offspring internally for a period, and then feed them milk their bodies make. With his small investment, the man can walk away from a pregnancy he has caused without great loss, even if his child dies, but the woman loses greatly if her child dies, for she has invested greatly. Usually her best evolutionary strategy is to continue investing until her child is able to take care of itself. The result of these differences is that men's best evolutionary strategy is to impregnate many women, whereas a woman's best strategy is to be impregnated by a healthy, prosperous man who will devote his resources to their children. The result after millions of years of evolution is lustful males and sexually cautious females, on average. Marriage complicates the picture further. If a man is to spend his adult years investing his resources in his wife's children (there are marriage systems where this is not the case, but they are not relevant here), he needs to be certain that they are also his children. Therefore, he must guard against his wife's adultery. Millions of years of evolution have produced jealous males who will punish women vigorously for adultery?sometimes brutally, sometimes fatally. Thus, evolution has burdened women doubly. On average, women invest more than men in offspring and on average men punish women more than they punish each other for adultery. Put simply, men lust more; women suffer more. Nepotism is even more complex, but it is easier to explain. Dependent children need their parents' special love and support in order to survive to adulthood, so special parental love is necessary and good. However, it does not end when the child becomes an adult; indeed parents continue to love their children more than they love other people's children?and therefore more than they love other people?for the life of the parent. However, special love for adult relatives easily becomes nepotism (unfair favoritism). If pursued systematically, it becomes tribalism and, reversed, may result in discrimination against or even murder of non-relatives or members of other tribes. It can turn into genocide. Most complex of all is reciprocity. Although Aristotle knew nothing of sociobiology, he built much of his ethical theory on giving others their due. Being familiar with sociobiology, Richard D. Alexander4 and Matt Ridley5 both explicitly developed ethical theories that place reciprocity at the center of ethics. Yet reciprocity is a double-edged sword. It may call for justice in the abstract and justice for others, but often it cries for justice for myself, for my kin, for my group. Reciprocity endorses an eye for an eye. It recommends vengeance. It may also give rise to paranoid vigilance that keeps asking whether the exchange has really been equal. Was I cheated? Again? Greed, lust, nepotism, and justice exclusively for oneself and one's group are the main vices that spring from the four R's. However, the four R's produce virtues too. The virtue that uses resources is generosity, the ability to give resources freely to others. From the desire for reproduction, love springs, the sort of love that sweeps ego aside and encourages the lover to enhance the beloved's welfare. The reproductive desire results in love for people who are not close kin. The virtue founded on relatedness is love also, a steady love for relatives that we can transfer from relatives to all others by symbolizing all people as related. Reciprocity can beget friendships and other relationships of equality, a personal caring that does not keep a ledger of gain and loss. It, too, might develop into generosity and love. Thus, evolution has given us enormous potential for both good and evil, and it has provided a wide range of choices, from egocentricity that seeks the destruction of others to generosity and love that seek to further their welfare. We are remarkably flexible and free. That is the primary reason we find it so difficult to answer Aristotle's question about how to flourish. If we have such a range of desires and can engage in such an enormous number of activities, then which are those that best promote our flourishing? Therefore, to answer Aristotle's question, we need to know about the four Rs, which are the central themes of human nature. We need to recognize their centrality in our psychological makeup and to know their potential to lead us into vice and virtue. Finally, we need to grasp how best to handle them so that all people may flourish. Without knowing anything about Aristotle?not to mention evolutionary psychology!?these things are precisely what the historical Jesus knows, discusses, and enacts. Jesus and the simplest R's The figure known as "the historical Jesus" is neither the Jesus of the Gospels, who is many contradictory persons, nor the "real" Jesus, whoever that would be. Whoever it was, we cannot recover him now. The historical Jesus is a scholarly reconstruction that most Jesus scholars base primarily on the synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Some scholars also use the Gospel of Thomas, which was recovered with the discovery of ancient documents at Nag Hammadi in 1945. All Jesus scholars also use other historical materials that inform them about the situation in Palestine from about 200 BCE to 100 CE. These materials include Greek and Roman archives, the works of Josephus and other ancient scholars, the Hebrew Scriptures, Jewish intertestamental literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the findings of archaeology. Most scholars exclude the Gospel attributed to John because they think it contains very little historical material going back to Jesus. As philosopher of historical methodology Raymond Martin notes in his book on the works of outstanding Jesus scholars, the historical Jesus scholars are professional historians doing expert work that meets the standards of modern scholarship.6 John P. Meier explains their methodology at length,7 and Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar explain it more succinctly while also laying out clearly how and why historians view the Gospels as they do.8 The Jesus I refer to is the scholars' reconstruction. The main effect of using their reconstruction here is to restrict the passages of scripture I discuss to those the scholars think go back to the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus perhaps says more about the use of resources than about any other subject. He speaks about resources in short sayings like "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear" and "Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them" and "Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these" (Luke 12:22, 24, 27 NRSV). Jesus says God takes care of them and will take care of us. He says we spend too much time worrying and working over resources. He tells stories like that of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19 ? 26). The rich man, who dressed and dined lavishly, ignored poor, sick Lazarus at his gate. After both die, the rich man finds himself in hell, staring at Lazarus in heaven. Here Jesus emphasizes our common humanity and the skewed distribution of resources in the ancient world, where the rich got rich by exploiting the poor. Those who neglect their less fortunate neighbors, who consider their own wealth a sign of their favor in God's sight and poverty and sickness signs of disfavor, are wrong. We live together, and we cannot flourish separately. Perhaps the most poignant of the stories scholars attribute to Jesus concerns an unnamed farmer who is blessed with such abundant harvests he decides to tear down his already full barns and build bigger ones to hold his burgeoning produce. Jesus calls him a fool, for he will die that night, and he cannot take his carefully conserved resources with him (Luke 12:16 ? 20). Perhaps he should have considered the lilies and ravens or the suffering poor and used his wealth rather than hoarding it. The Gospels tell us little about what Jesus thought about sex. Moreover, Jesus scholars think the few sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels that deal with sex are not certain to go back to the historical Jesus. The main exception is Jesus' prohibition of divorce (Matt. 5:31 ? 32). In Judaism in Jesus' day, women could not divorce their husbands, but husbands could divorce their wives, often for trivial reasons. At the same time, women depended on men for protection and income. A woman without a husband was in trouble, and a divorced woman was tarnished goods. Thus, Jesus' prohibition of divorce protected women. In a different culture, he might have offered different protection?say, equal pay for equal work or heavy penalties against men for spousal abuse. The point of the prohibition is not that divorce is wrong but that women need protection from the power men want to exercise over them, as evolutionary psychology suggests. From the point of view of legality, Jesus' prohibition of divorce is inconsistent with his usual laxness about laws; legal consistency would expect him to allow divorce. However, his prohibition of divorce is consistent with his tendency to protect the disadvantaged, whether the poor, the sick, children, or women. In prohibiting divorce, Jesus was protecting women. His concern for the equality of women appears again in a story about a woman caught in adultery, currently recounted in the Gospel according to John (7:53 ? 8:11). Although found in John, the narrative is not thought to be originally part of John's Gospel: the style is not John's and the passage is not in some of the earliest copies of John that we have. It also floats around in John and even shows up in early versions of other Gospels. Yet it is attested by early church historians and is consistent with other deeds and sayings known to come from the historical Jesus. Scholars think it probably goes back to Jesus. The narrative tells of some men bringing before Jesus a woman who, they claim, they have caught in the act of adultery. They ask whether she should be put to death by stoning, as the law required. Jesus replies that the sinless man should throw the first stone, and the men slowly depart, leaving the woman to live. This story fits evolutionary psychology perfectly. Evolutionary psychology says that men are more lustful than women are but, at the same time, they want to stop their women from committing adultery and may be brutal in order to do so. The story says the men caught the woman in the act. If so, they necessarily caught the man in the act as well, but he is nowhere to be found. The men want to punish only the woman, despite the fact that the Torah calls for the deaths of both parties (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). Jesus, knowing men's hearts, says okay, stone her if you are sinless, and the men retire, their own lust exposed. Again, Jesus is protecting women and making the battle between the sexes more equal than the men had wished. Less certain to go back to the historical Jesus is the story about the Samaritan woman with whom Jesus converses at the well in Samaria. The story is only in John's Gospel (4:5 ? 42). Yet it is consistent with what scholars know about Jesus, who behaved in ways his society disapproved. He talks to the woman in public, not acceptable behavior for a Jewish man, and she is a Samaritan, member of a group that Jews despised. It turns out that she has had several "husbands," that is, lovers, but although Jesus knows this, he does not withdraw from the conversation. He does not appear to condemn her illicit sexual behavior. The other almost certain item scholars know about Jesus regarding sex is that he was celibate. Among Jews, whom the Torah commanded to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28), Jesus' celibacy might seem unlikely. However, many of the prophets were celibate, and John the Baptist and those members of the Jewish sect of Essenes who lived in the wilderness probably were as well. Yet Jesus never praises celibacy, and his leading disciple, Peter, is married (Mark 1:30). Nothing more is known about Jesus' attitude toward reproductive relations except that he seems to have liked and protected children, and many women were among his followers and were active among the first generation of Christians, so he must have welcomed them into the group around him. Considering how aroused people get about sexual/reproductive relations the world over, Jesus seems amazingly calm and unperturbed. He calls a married man to be his leading disciple, yet remains celibate. He cares for children, yet has none of his own. He does not get excited about illicit sexual relationships, yet protects women from men's brutality toward them in the crucial issues of adultery and divorce. Indeed, concerning the two least complicated Rs, resources and reproduction, Jesus advises us to be at ease. About resources, he suggests we behave more like other animals, not worrying so much about the future but enjoying the fruits we have today. The prayer attributed to him says, "Give us this day our daily bread" (Matt. 6:11 NRSV) rather than asking for a good harvest to store away. Yet Jesus is not an ascetic. On the contrary, he parties enough to be accused of drunkenness and gluttony (Matt. 11:19). Jesus seems to steer a middle course, and this suggests that he is insufficiently attracted to this R either to pursue or to reject it. He uses resources without being possessed by them. His attitude toward reproduction is similar, except that he seems to have studied this chapter of his evolutionary psychology textbook even more carefully. Knowing of men's lust and their desire to control women's reproduction, brutally if necessary, he tries to protect and help women, making the reproductive relationships equal. Other than that, his attitude seems to be "take it or leave it." Again, he is insufficiently attracted to this R either to pursue or to reject it. Jesus and the other R's To understand Jesus on the other two R's?relatedness and reciprocity?requires some knowledge of Judaism in Jesus' day. The Jews had two ancient beliefs. They believed God had chosen them out of all the nations on Earth to be God's special people, and they believed God had promised them a particular piece of land, that it was God's holy land, and that they were to live on it and to cultivate it as their own. Yet in the first century, Jews were scattered across the Roman Empire and beyond, and Rome was sovereign over the holy land where Jews thought only God should reign. Most Jews who cried for justice wanted to drive Rome out of God's land, their land. A newer belief about chosenness invaded Judaism about the time of the Exile. Some Jews thought God had chosen only a remnant of the Jewish people and had doomed all other Jews. This remnant theology often included apocalyptic eschatology, the idea that the end of the age was near and that it would culminate in holy and devastating war led by God's messiah and fought by his angels and the holy remnant against the Romans and the condemned Jews. In the end, God would establish justice, that is, God would vindicate the remnant and destroy the other Jews and the gentiles who did not convert to worship of the Jewish God. Moreover, all twelve Jewish tribes, including the ten that had disappeared centuries ago, would assemble in the holy land along with the (good) Jews from the Diaspora. These exclusivist and violent beliefs caused three centuries of sporadic civil war among the Jews, when Jews murdered other Jews and called it God's justice. The civil wars culminated in the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Jewish themes, then, were land (resources), kinship (relatedness), and justice (reciprocity seen as self-vindication), all under the aegis of the one and only God. (Other Jews had apparently been reading evolutionary psychology, too.) Given Jewish circumstances, these themes provided a recipe for self-destruction. Self-destruction arrived via civil war and Roman exasperation. Jesus stepped into this stew as an itinerant preacher. His career began with John the Baptist (Mark 1:1 ? 11) who was preaching by the Jordan River, announcing the forgiveness of sins through baptism. In this, John was not following Torah, which commanded sacrifices in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus' indifference toward the Temple, symbol of Jewish chosenness, relatedness, and covenantal reciprocity with God, implies that he was not attracted to these Jewish themes. Relatedness, in particular, was not high on Jesus' list of sacred subjects. In an extremely well attested incident (Mark 3:31 ? 35), Jesus was talking with his close disciples and friends when his mother and brothers approached and asked to see him. When Jesus' disciples told him his family was outside, Jesus not only refused to see them but also disowned them. He stated, instead, that his friends were his family. In so far as Jesus was unmarried, he also rejected the relatedness that comes with children and in-laws. As a good evolutionary psychologist, he knew that families are naturally hierarchical and promote nepotism. Jesus wanted to emphasize equality and the common kinship of all people. His emphasis on our common kinship stands in stark contrast to the Jewish claim that all Jews were related and special in God's sight because all were the offspring of one man, Abraham. Abraham, they claimed, was their father. Jesus referred to God as father, not Abraham. God, of course, in Jewish theology, is creator of all, the father of all people, not merely the Jews. Jesus tells stories about fathers in which the father represents God. In the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11 ? 32), a younger son asks for his inheritance before his father dies, then goes off and violates Jewish law, finally tending pigs, animals the Torah calls unclean. He even envies the pigs. When, broke and hungry, he returns home hoping to become one of his father's servants, his father embraces him, forgives him, and throws a feast for him, much to the chagrin of the prodigal's elder brother who has faithfully remained home and served their father well. If this father represents God, Jesus is implying that God loves and saves the unfaithful as well as the faithful. This is not remnant theology. It is not reciprocity, either. Indeed, the father seems generous to a fault. Jesus seems well aware of the human desire for reciprocity and its offshoot, justice, and he constantly discourages seeking them. Well known are his short sayings denigrating the Torah reciprocity of an eye for an eye. The sayings suggest, instead, that if people batter one cheek, turn the other; if they sue for a coat, give them a cloak also, and if they force a person to go a mile, go two (Matt. 5:38 ? 41). These statements all reject reciprocity. Jesus also tells stories that portray reciprocity and justice negatively. The prodigal son is one such story. It depicts the elder brother as wanting justice. He is angry about his father's embrace of his brother, even after the father assures him that all the father has is his (Luke 15:31). He repudiates and perhaps envies the father's generosity even after the father tells him that he will lose nothing by it. An even more relevant story is that of the day laborers (Matt. 20:1 ? 15). Jesus tells of a landowner who hires some laborers early in the morning and promises them a day's wage?a fair wage, probably, since they accept it. He hires others later, some as late as evening. When time comes to pay the laborers, he pays the late-hired a whole day's wage, and those hired earlier complain. The landowner wants to know what their complaint is. They received the agreed wage. The landowner did not cheat them. Nevertheless, they feel resentful. They expected reciprocity to be the rule the landowner would use to pay his workers. Instead, the landowner displayed generosity, and his generosity angered them. First century history tells who the angry figures represent. They typify the remnant theologians and their followers who expected God to repay their faithfulness with victory and vindication and condemn all the unfaithful, which is to say, all the Jews who disagreed with them. Repeatedly, Jesus rejected reciprocity in favor of generosity and forgiveness. The rabbis had suggested that a person should be forgiven three times. The Gospels report that Jesus recommended seven (Luke 17:4), a symbolic number standing for wholeness or completion. The most extreme report has Jesus saying to forgive 77 times (Matt. 18:22). A figurative doubling of completion or infinity seems to be implied. This is probably Matthew's emendation, but the idea of infinite forgiveness apparently goes back to Jesus. Jesus was wiser than those who want to make ethics center on reciprocity. He knew that placing reciprocity at the center of ethics generates ruinous results. Reciprocity justifies vengeance. It stifles generosity. It encourages self-centeredness, self-righteousness, and paranoia. Borrowing from the Torah, Jesus recommends a better way: love your neighbor; love, he says, is the heart of the Torah and the prophets (Matt. 22:39 ? 40). Love is generous; love forgives; love helps others and casts out fear. In contrast, reciprocity is egocentric. Placing it at the center of ethics encourages people to guard their own interests and mistrust other people. In doing so, it leaves them lonely and fearful, and therefore they seek groups that emphasize conformity, enforce strict rules, and proclaim their own self-described goodness while denouncing outsiders' evil. Jesus knew such people and such groups?the remnant theologians and their followers. He looked around him and saw that a strong emphasis on reciprocity does not lead to a flourishing life. Yet Jesus embraced equality for the poor and powerless. The concept of egalitarianism might spring from reciprocity, but they are not the same. Jesus seems to think that the rich might give to the poor without asking return, and husbands might treat their wives with the same equality they offer to their fellow men. Jesus and the Divine To say that Jesus was an excellent evolutionary psychologist is not to claim that he knew anything about evolution. He was probably a typical Palestinian Jew of his time in his knowledge of the world. He would have known the Torah said God created the world in six days and created Adam and Eve as the first human beings. Jesus probably would not have known much history except as the Hebrew Scriptures represent it, and he would have known no science. Nonetheless, he had remarkable insights into human nature as evolutionary psychology discloses it and profound solutions on how to cope with it, based on compassion, especially for the powerless. His slogan might have been "equality, not reciprocity," which amounts to generosity by those who have power and wealth to those who have neither. Jesus represents God's generosity this way: God gives without requiring return. The Gospels tell us that the divine touched Jesus at his baptism and, after that, he exorcised the possessed, healed the sick, and forgave sinners. Josephus, too, says Jesus was "a doer of wonderful works." 9 Wonderworkers were said to work by divine agency, and there seems little doubt that Jesus was close to God, filled with the divine, a "spirit person," to use historian Marcus Borg's term. Jesus himself felt he was close to the divine. He prayed frequently, sometimes all night, and he called God "father." His insights into human nature and his solutions to the problems it poses for human flourishing probably came from the divine source. If so, Jesus may be for us a window onto the divine. Jesus spoke of love, generosity, and forgiveness. In doing so, he spoke of the nature of God. Christian atonement theology has claimed that Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice for sins. Jesus, it claims, died to satisfy God's need for justice?a God, it also claims, who has no needs. An innocent man had to die to pay for the sins of the guilty because God required that justice be done. Such is atonement theology. It does not take much insight into the nature of justice to grasp the injustice of killing the innocent to forgive the guilty. The God who allegedly commanded such a deed ruled by reciprocity and had a stingy soul. This is not Jesus' God. Jesus says that God is generous, so generous it angers those whose ethics rest on reciprocity. God is not a God of reciprocity, of contracts and covenants. Nor, according to Jesus, does God demand sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. The Gospels never show Jesus sacrificing at the Temple. They introduce him as a disciple of John the Baptist, who does not sacrifice at the Temple either. Instead, John baptizes for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus, too, forgives sins without requiring sacrifice?or even baptism. Jesus did not think God requires sacrifices in order to forgive sins. Indeed, Jesus says God gives us what we need when we ask for it. In one of his stories, he tells of an evil judge whom a widow importunes so strenuously he decides her case in her favor (Luke 18:1 ? 5). The story is about an evil judge, not a good one, and yet when asked, he gives what is wanted. How much more then, would Jesus' God, a generous, fatherly God, give what we ask, including forgiveness? In summary, the historical Jesus was an evolutionary psychologist who told us how to flourish in a world where human beings evolved, yet where divinity pervades human life. We flourish, he says, not by egocentricity, with its greed, lust, nepotism, and self-seeking justice, but by love, with its generosity and forgiveness. Since greed and generosity, egocentricity and love arise from the four R's, we have the capacity to choose greed or generosity, egocentricity or love. Jesus asks us to choose love, to act like God rather than like evolved creatures caught in evolutionary overdrive. Jesus says not to be so self-concerned, so harried, and so vigilant. The fifth R, he says, is "Relax." Notes 1. Patricia Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). 2. Patricia Williams, Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What You Can Do About It (Philidelphia: Xlibris, 2001). 3. David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999). 4. Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979). 5. Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). 6. Raymond Martin, The Elusive Messiah: A Philosophical Overview of the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999). 7. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 1, Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 8. Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993). 9. Falvius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, III:3, in The Complete Works of Josephus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 1981). --------------------------------- A Response to Patricia A. Williams' "The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist" Richard F. Carlson and Jason N. Hine We wish to thank The Rev. Bill Maury-Holmes for his insightful suggestions in the preparation of this manuscript. Richard F. Carlson is Research Professor of Physics at the University of Redlands. He is editor of the book, Science and Christianity: Four Views (2000). Jason N. Hine has worked in the area of science and Christian faith for a number of years. Recently he co-led the seminar, "What Can We Teach Our Children About Dinosaurs?" Patricia A. Williams' essay centers on her assertion that the "historical Jesus" (as defined by the work of the Jesus Seminar) exhibited personal characteristics consistent with an understanding of human nature as described by evolutionary psychology. This relatively new enterprise describes human characteristics in terms of David Buss' four "R's": Resources, Reproduction, Relatedness (kinship), and Reciprocity.1 After showing that each R generally contains a spectrum of characteristics, Williams attempts to identify Jesus' position along each spectrum by citing incidents and sayings from the Gospels. We have a few quibbles that we will mention here but not pursue. Williams states that she uses the results of the Jesus Seminar in her characterization of Jesus.2 Yet over half of her Gospel references have been given gray or black classifications by the Seminar (gray or black implying that the sayings in question are most likely not Jesus' words). Two other quibbles relate to Williams' statement that Jesus did not perceive his own death as a sacrifice for sin and her comments on Christian atonement theories. Each of these is worthy of a response, but we have chosen to concentrate on Williams' evaluation of Jesus' character in terms of Buss' four R's. We see Williams' essay as a useful, interesting, and fanciful way to view Jesus. However, we wish that she had followed her own ideas just a bit further. By successfully demonstrating how Jesus' character is consistent with evolutionary psychology, Williams places him in a box of dimensions specified by the four R's. We feel that Jesus' character surpasses the four R's in a number of remarkable ways. While Williams briefly explores intimations regarding the divinity of Jesus in the final section of her article, we find her presentation to be inadequate. Our goal is to highlight areas where we would like to have seen Williams take her ideas further. We will refer to much of the same evidence as used by Williams from the Gospels. In some cases, we provide additional evidence from the Gospels, which for the most part falls under Jesus Seminar categories of red or pink (most likely the sayings of Jesus) or occasionally gray (probably not said by Jesus but close to his ideas).3 As does Williams, we will use black references in a very limited way (black, in the opinion of the Jesus Seminar, implies that Jesus did not say it, as it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition).4 In doing so we hope as much as possible to compare oranges to oranges (maybe we should say red grapefruit to red grapefruit). Our understanding is that, when presented with earthly problems, Jesus succeeded in incorporating God's will in his response. Another way of putting this is that Jesus' response was both horizontal (human to human) and vertical (human to God). As indicated by Williams, Jesus' response to every situation was based on "the unmatched quality of God's love, generosity, and forgiveness." 5 The problem is we feel that Williams could have done more to demonstrate this when considering his responses to people or situations. In her discussion of Jesus and his attitudes to the issue of Reproduction (one of the four R's), Williams cites the account of the adulterous woman.6 The religious leaders brought the adulterous woman to Jesus thinking that there were only two possible ways he might respond ? either uphold the Law and condemn the woman to death, or allow her to live and thereby break the Law. However, Jesus' response did not come from among this set; rather his action was profoundly perceptive, wise, and loving. Williams claims that Jesus' intention was to provide protection for women by exposing the lust in the woman's accusers. We agree that this is the main thrust of the narrative. Clearly, Jesus cared for and forgave the adulterous woman, and one may infer from this that Jesus cares for all women. However, more than this, Jesus' response also demonstrated care for the woman's accusers?he did not seek to humiliate them but rather his response served as an invitation to engage in serious self-reflection, and thus the door was left open for any of the accusers to come to Jesus later. Further, Jesus' action here would have likely had a similar effect on each woman and man in the crowd. Even today, his response invites personal reflection, illuminates our shared struggle with sin, and demonstrates the love of God through what is termed "grace"?the free and divine gift of mercy, acceptance, and favor. Hence, we feel that Jesus' approach stretches the scope of what evolutionary psychology considers possible. The next R we examine is Relatedness or kinship. Williams, in asserting that "Relatedness, in particular, was not high on Jesus' list of sacred subjects," 7 cites an "extremely well-attested incident (Mark 3:31 ? 35)",8 a passage rated as gray by the Jesus Seminar scholars. Here Williams sees Jesus as rejecting his family. Referring to his family, she states, "Jesus not only refused to see them but also disowned them." 9 Yes, it is possible to infer from this that Jesus is rejecting his family here. However, our understanding, supported by Williams herself several sentences later, is that Jesus was expanding on what he considers his true family to be?" Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:35?NRSV). Elsewhere in Mark 7:9 ? 13 (black by the Jesus Seminar) Jesus affirms the command to "honor your father and mother" (Matt. 19:19?gray) by condemning the Pharisees' and scribes' use of the Corban offering in order to relieve themselves of the obligation to support their parents. Like Williams, in the Gospels we too see a consistent theme of Jesus' concern for and acceptance of society's rejects, e.g. the blind beggar, the Samaritan woman, the prostitute, tax collectors, in short?the "lepers" of that society. We conclude that an expanded view of relatedness was very high on Jesus' list of sacred subjects, again in line with but stretching the conceptual boundaries of evolutionary psychology in a way that provides us a glimpse of God's all-inclusive love. We next turn to Williams' treatment of the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11 ? 32?pink by the Jesus Seminar) and to other Gospel examples she cites in her discussion of another R?Reciprocity.10 Here we affirm Williams' conclusion that, in terms of relationships with others, Jesus rejected reciprocity and instead constantly exhibited extreme generosity, forgiveness, friendship, and love in his teaching and his relationships with a wide array of people. In terms of the fourth R, Resources, we disagree with Williams' characterization of Jesus as being "at ease" and "not worrying"11 about resources. On the contrary, we see Jesus as one who was concerned about the wise and generous use of resources (e.g. see Matt. 25:14 ? 28?pink- and Mark 10:17 ? 22?gray). We feel that Jesus' command to "not worry" (Luke 12:29?gray) about resources is to be understood as an important step in seeking God's kingdom (Luke 12:31?black), a proper prioritization of Relatedness vs. Resources, not as Williams puts it, a general indifference toward resources on the part of Jesus. In closing, we feel that Patricia Williams is addressing a topic of crucial importance: understanding the person of Jesus. This is crucial, because we feel that our clearest understanding of God is through the person of Jesus. In addition, we feel Williams is moving in a helpful direction as she relates the insights of evolutionary psychology to the historical Jesus in a way we see as light-hearted, yet full of opportunities for greater insight into the divine. Jesus not only goes beyond the horizontal (human to human) categories of the four R's, but he also exhibits a vertical (human to God) aspect of his character that stretches the boundaries of evolutionary psychology toward the positive extremes exhibited by God through Jesus. We hope that Williams and others will continue to explore these new ideas further. Notes 1. David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999). 2. Williams' essay above, 136. 3. Robert S. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels, The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 36. 4. Ibid. 5. Williams essay, 142. 6. Ibid., 138. 7. Ibid., 140. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 139. --------------- Was Jesus an Evolutionary Psychologist? Joshua M. Moritz Joshua M. Moritz is a Ph.D. student in Theology and Science at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and Managing Editor of Dialog: A Journal of Theology. His undergraduate and professional background is in evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology. In her article "The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist," Patricia Williams casts Jesus in the role of a bio-psychological counselor and seer whose understanding of human nature turns out to be precisely that of the modern field of evolutionary psychology. There is no latent anachronism here, but rather, Williams is pointing out that the Jesus of history understood what makes human beings get up in the morning, what drives us, and what makes us tick. According to Williams, evolutionary psychology posits four primary factors that motivate and orient the vast majority--if not all--of human behaviors: resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity. The historical Jesus, as she understands him, addressed each of these areas of human life, and in so doing revealed a remarkable intuition, which parallels the findings of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Such intuition, concludes Williams, was indeed a product of Jesus' connection with the Divine, and through this connection, he revealed to his followers the egalitarian nature of God. His teachings about this God may empower human beings in the present to establish egalitarian communities and enable them to flourish. In this article, I wish to briefly respond to Williams' essay and her use of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology as they relate to theological anthropology. To begin with, I want to express my appreciation for Williams' work in this area. She has consistently pointed out the difficulties which modern evolutionary biology poses for many classical Western Christian doctrines--such as atonement theology's reliance on "the Fall without the Fall," 1 the doctrine of original sin based on the combination of Lamarckian inheritance and a historical fall, and the problem of evil.2 These problem areas, which Williams develops should be preeminent as constructive theology continues to strive to make itself intelligible in a world dominated by scientific self-understanding. I also am grateful for Williams' attempts to integrate constructively the work of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology into theological anthropology, and her subsequent reformulation of various ancient Christian doctrines in light of these disciplines, which pronounce much on human nature. Her theological engagement with these bio-psychological fields is refreshing because there has been a tendency in the humanities to make light of the findings of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, and to construct their ideas into caricatures and straw men that are then easily vanquished.3 This happens even though many scholars in the Philosophy of Biology maintain that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are legitimate extensions of the Neo-Darwinian theoretical framework.4 That being said, I would like to raise several questions and concerns with Williams' essay and her related work. While I agree with Williams in her acceptance of the basic guiding principles of evolutionary psychology--that it is very likely that certain heritable and adaptive human behaviors have been honed by natural selection, and that there are specific cognitive mechanisms resulting from evolution by natural selection which underlie such human behaviors--I must question Williams' uncritical acceptance of the opinions that are championed by these disciplines. Williams treats evolutionary psychology and sociobiology as though they 'have arrived' despite the large number of sympathetic, yet valid critiques of these fields.5 Among other things sociobiology and its descendent evolutionary psychology have been criticized on account of their genic selectionism, genetic reductionism, determinism, and atomism,6 their assumption of massive modularity in the brain, their hyper-adaptationism7 and their confusion regarding moral categories.8 I have not found any citation of such criticisms in Williams work on this subject. She only goes so far as to mention that there is controversy surrounding sociobiology "because it applies to us," and "because some sociobiologists have been inept with metaphors, sowing considerable confusion."9 There is no discussion of the more fundamental criticisms of the methodological and biological assumptions of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology's practitioners. Evolutionary psychology and its predecessor sociobiology claim that humans have a generic nature and that this nature is rooted in our biology--particularly in our genes. Since our genes, as they have evolved to adapt to a specific environment, are the foundation and unconscious directors of our behavior, such behaviors should be seen in light of the ultimate evolutionary purpose and goal of our genes--namely "to get as many copies of one's genes into the next generation as possible." 10 Contained in this ambiguous behavioral inheritance bequeathed to us by our genes are predispositions in the vast majority of humans towards murder, infanticide, child abuse,11 divorce, infidelity,12 pornography,13 xenophobia,14 treating women as commodities,15 rape,16 and even genocide.17 To ensure that each gender gets their maximal fitness reward calculated in genes that make it to the succeeding generation, men are by nature sexually promiscuous and competitive, and women are by nature "coy" and parentally nurturing.18 When our "selfish genes" are in the driver's seat, such is to be expected, and while exceptions may exist, they are just that--exceptions. Cue Jesus. Into such a world of ethically sordid genetic pre-dispositions embodied in immoral animals enters the historical Jesus who, in effect, tells humans to live contrary to their genetically inherited nature. Jesus calls us to "deny ourselves" and in so doing deny to our genes the fitness rewards which they so fervently long for. For the sake of the Kingdom of God, we must be willing to minimize our inclusive fitness and forsake those who share the greatest percentage of our own genes. In fact, our genes are not to be seen as more important than the genes of a total stranger--even those of an unrelated Samaritan or Gentile. We are to spend our precious resources on those who offer us no fitness benefits whatsoever: widows past reproductive age, orphans who are not our kin, the poor who cannot benefit us materially, the sick--who may even harm our own health and fitness potential, and prisoners--who cannot be trusted to reciprocate. Men are called to resist the urge to "diversify their genetic portfolio" and women are called to trust in God for their material resources rather than in their husbands or mates.19 Humans are, in fact, asked to adopt an extremely unstable evolutionary strategy by throwing out reciprocity all together--" give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back and lend, expecting nothing in return." 20 The road of the cross which the life of Jesus paves for those who would follow, is a sure evolutionary dead-end--the ultimate self-extinction event. Williams says that such behavior and the wisdom of Jesus "fits evolutionary psychology perfectly." 21 but what does she mean by this? If she means that Jesus understands human nature as it is perceived at the tail end of our evolution and that he calls us to resist the very same dark tendencies bequeathed to us by evolution, then she is right. Christian morality demands a "revolution or a reversal of those priorities" which are given to us by nature.22 Where does such moral courage come from if it is not within human nature? Is it pure grace from the realm of the Divine that actually alters our evolved nature? Or, is it an effort of the will which is transformed once one is encountered by the life and example of Jesus? Either answer poses a dilemma for evolutionary psychology because both behavioral scenarios are outside of its explanatory purview. If we are altered by super-nature, then the categories of nature are no longer adequate. Alternatively, if human nature has enough behavioral wiggle room so that humans may act in ways which are not genetically predisposed, and even in ways directly contrary to our genetic predispositions, then such evolutionary psychological talk of genetic predispositions loses its scientific scope and robustness. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain altruistic behavior in terms of inclusive fitness in the context of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies, but such explanations lose their relevance when the object of investigation thrusts aside the "things of this world" to pursue an eschatologically stable strategy instead. Deeper than this dilemma, though, is evolutionary psychology's foundational assumption of the "selfish genes" view of evolved biological reality. This "gene's-eye view" of evolution, which Williams presupposes,23 is far from being a safe assumption. In fact, this is precisely the area where many biologists from various sub-disciplines find the most intractable problems relating to the future direction and success of evolutionary research.24 There is a growing consensus that there is a variety of levels of selection in evolution.25 The notion that "naked genes" are the target or primary level of selection, while at first broadly accepted, has since then been "severely criticized, and even its original supporters have now moderated their claims." 26 Such genic selectionism, which is fundamental to the explanatory framework that under-girds evolutionary psychology and its theory of inclusive fitness, is also called into question by genetic pleiotropy27 and "the interaction of genes controlling polygenic components of the phenotype."28 Furthermore, investigations into the roles played by symbiosis,29 self-organization,30 neutral evolution,31 historical and developmental constraints,32 epigenetics,33 and generic principles in evolution34 have demonstrated that other forces are at work both in the generation of evolutionary novelty, and the way in which biological information is inherited. Natural selection and the genocentrism it entails is no longer the sole fiddler bowing the tune of evolutionary change, but now appears to be joined by a symphony of other evolutionary mechanisms each playing at different tempos and in different keys. Conclusion These developments, when taken together, pose a serious obstacle to the future advance of any general theory of evolutionary psychology. While an evolutionary psychology is certainly still possible it will have to be a much mediated evolutionary psychology which can no longer speak of a generic human nature as such, but rather, must aim to describe only elements of human nature that have a definite genetic corollary. Occasions of altruism in nature will no longer create a research problem for this epistemically humbled and less imperialistic evolutionary psychology, and the moral "performance gap"35 between what we are and what we ought to be will lose much of its mysterious quality when considered within a thoroughly supplemented and expanded Neo-Darwinism. Was the Historical Jesus an evolutionary psychologist? He certainly knew enough about human nature to know that selfish motives--if not always selfish genes--orient much of our behavior. Jesus was also familiar, however, with the nature of the Divine, and he knew enough about God's nature to recognize that the One in whose image humans have been made is not far from us when we walk by faith. Notes 1. A phrase coined by Robert John Russell. For Russell's discussion of the problem of "Fall without the Fall" see Robert J. Russell, "Theology and Science: Current Issues and Future Directions," 2000, Part II, Section E, Redemption, Evolution and Cosmology, http://www.counterbalance.net/rjr/erede-body.html. See also Robert J. Russell, "Is Evil Evolving?" Dialog: A Journal of Theology 42:3 (Fall 2003): 311. For Williams' discussion see Patricia Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001); and Patricia Williams, "Sociobiology and Original Sin" Zygon 35:4 (Dec 2000). 2. Patricia Williams, "Evolution Sociobiology and the Atonement," Zygon 33:4 (1998); Patricia Williams, "The Problem of Evil: A Solution from Science," Zygon 36:3 (2001). 3. Such critiques of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology where the actual views of these disciplines are exaggerated or misrepresented are, Richard C. Lewontin, Steven P. R. Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); and Hilary Rose and Steven P. R. Rose, Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Harmony Books, 2000). For a critical review of the latter which points out several misreadings of evolutionary psychology see Daniel Jones, "Alas Poor Higgs," British Medical Journal, 322 (24 March, 2001), 740ff. http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/322/7288/740#13672 . 4. See, for example, Michael Ruse, "I see sociobiology, the study of animal social behavior from an evolutionary perspective, as a natural and an unforced growth and development from orthodox and established neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology. This being so I suggest that because neo-Darwinian biology is a genuine and fruitful branch of science, the respect that it deserves should automatically be transferred to sociobiology." Quoted in Peter Saunders, "Sociobiology: A House Built on Sand" in Evolutionary Processes and Metaphors, Mae-Wan Ho and Sidney W. Fox eds. (New York: Wiley, 1988) 290. 5. See Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, Chapter 13 in Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); The Evolution of Minds: Psychological and Philosophical Perspective, Paul Davies & Harmon Holcomb, III, eds. (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001); Jaak Panksepp and Jules B. Panksepp, "The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology," Evolution and Cognition, 6:2, 108 ; Elisabeth A. Lloyd, "Evolutionary Psychology: The Burdens of Proof", Biology and Philosophy 14 (1999): 211 ? 233; Paul E. Griffiths, 'Evolutionary Psychology' in The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Sahotra Sarkar and Jessica Pfeifer eds. (New York: Routledge, 2005). For a criticism that aims at some of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology's more foundational assumptions see Peter Saunders, "Sociobiology: A House Built on Sand." 6. See David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) 374 ? 378. 7. Stephen J. Gould, "More Things in Heaven and Earth" in Alas Poor Darwin. 8. David Sloan Wilson, Eric Dietrich, and Anne B. Clark, "On the Inappropriate Use of the Naturalistic Fallacy in Evolutionary Psychology," Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003): 669 ? 682. 9. Williams, Doing Without Adam and Eve, 124. 10. Williams, this issue, 134. 11. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine, 1988). 12. Helen Fisher, The Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992). 13. "Evolution has built into every red-blooded male a desire to find 'Pornotopia'--the fantasy land where 'sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of more tender feelings and encumbering relationships, in which women are always aroused, or at least easily arousable, and ultimately are always willing' (Symons, p. 171). The entire cosmetics, fashion, and pornography industries are attempts to create Pornotopia here on Earth". Frank Miele, "The (Im)moral Animal: A Quick & Dirty Guide to Evolutionary Psychology & the Nature of Human Nature," Skeptic 4:1 (1996): 42 ? 49. See also David Buss, The Evolution of Desire (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 49 ? 60. and Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 187 ? 200. 14. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), 253 ? 54. 15. Daly and Wilson, Homicide 188 ? 189; Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 126. 16. Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, The Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 17. John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 144 ? 146. 18. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Sex, Evolution and Behavior (Boston: Willard Grant, 1983), 78 ? 79.; Robert L. Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985), 207; Carl-Adam Wachtmeister and Magnus Enquist, "The Evolution of the Coy Female ? Trading Time for Information," Ethology 105:11 (November 1999): 983 ? 992. 19. Frank Miele, "The (Im)moral Animal," 43; See Jesus' response to "Is it lawful to divorce for any reason?" Matt 19:3 ? 12, and see Mark 10:2 ? 12 and John 4. 20. Luke 6:30 ? 35. 21. See Williams, this issue, 138. 22. John Hare, "Is There an Evolutionary Foundation for Human Morality?" in Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 190. 23. Williams maintains "that the most accurate way to view evolution is from the point of view of the gene" (this issue, 134). She thus appears to adhere to the genic selectionism of G. C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, and Richard Dawkins. 24. See Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Linda Van Speybroeck, and Dani De Waele, "Epigenetics: A Challenge for Genetics, Evolution, and Development?" Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 981 (2002): 1 ? 6. 25. Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, "Individuality and Adaptation Across Levels of Selection: How Shall We Name and Generalize the Unit of Darwinism?" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96:21 (October 1999):11904 ? 11909. 26. Ernst Mayr, "The Objects of Selection," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 94:6 (March 1997): 2091 ? 2094. 27. This is where multiple, often seemingly unrelated, phenotypic effects are caused by a single altered gene or pair of altered genes. See Jonathan Hodgkin, "Seven Types of Pleiotropy" International Journal of Developmental Biology 42 (1998): 501 ? 505. 28. Ernst Mayr, "The Objects of Selection," 2092. 29. Lynn Margulis, "Symbiogenesis and Symbioticism," in Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis, Lynn Margulis and Ren? Fester eds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991). 30. Stuart A. Kauffman, "Self-Organization, Selective Adaptation and its Limits: A New Pattern of Inference in Evolution and Development," in Evolution at the Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science, David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 184 ? 185; and David Depew and Bruce Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 446. 31. Motoo Kimura, "Recent Development of the Neutral theory Viewed from the Wrightian Tradition of Theoretical Population Genetics," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 88:14 (July 1991): 5969 ? 5973 ; Motoo Kimura, "Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level," Nature 17:217 (129) (Feb 1968): 624 ? 626; Motoo Kimura, "The Rate of Molecular Evolution Considered From the Standpoint of Population Genetics," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 63:4 (August 1969): 1181 ? 1188. 32. For the historical constraints see Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London , Series B, 205:1161 (1979): 581 ? 598. For a discussion of Developmental Systems Theory see Susan Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths, and Russell D. Gray, Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 33. See Van de Vijver, Van Speybroeck, and De Waele "Epigenetics: A Challenge for Genetics, Evolution, and Development?" For a critique of the selfish genes understanding of evolution from an epigenetic standpoint see especially Richard von Sternberg, "On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic Epigenetic System," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 981 (2002): 154 ? 188. See Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 34. See Ricard Sol? and Brian Goodwin, Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology. (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 35. For a discussion of the gap between what we actually do and what morality demands of us see John Hare (cited above). -------------------- Jesus and Evolutionary Psychology, Two Agendas Howard J. van Till Howard J. Van Till is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Calvin College, Michigan, USA. His works include Portraits of Creation: Biblical and Scientific Perspectives on the World's Formation (1990) and The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens are Telling us about Creation (1986). Patricia A. Williams posits the provocative thesis that the historical Jesus' knowledge of human nature--as he experienced it and engaged it 2000 years ago--closely matches the understanding of human nature now offered by evolutionary psychology. This thesis does not entail any frivolous conjectures that Jesus was supernaturally informed about biological evolution or about a scientific psychology based on evolutionary considerations. Rather, the thesis posits that the historical Jesus, a typical Palestinian Jew in his knowledge of the world and unaware of anything resembling modern science, nonetheless "had remarkable insights into human nature as evolutionary psychology discloses it." As I see it, this is a reasonable and modest thesis that can be tested by a comparison of what we know (or at least have good reason to believe) about Jesus' perceptions of human nature and what modern evolutionary psychology offers us regarding its scientific understanding of human nature. Williams summarizes the four central concepts of evolutionary psychology, as derived from sociobiology, in her list of "the four R's of human nature and much of the rest of nature as well: resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity." Before offering any thoughts regarding a comparison of Jesus' knowledge of human nature and "the four R's of human nature" that Williams draws from evolutionary psychology, I must express a bit of puzzlement concerning the grounds for the similarity thesis that Williams posits. Suppose that Williams is correct (and I am content to let evolutionary psychologists judge whether or not that is the case) to say that evolutionary psychology's assessment of the four major foci of human behavior can be captured in this list of four R's. Suppose that Williams is also correct (and I am content to let scholars of the historical Jesus judge whether or not that is the case) to characterize Jesus' knowledge of human nature as focused on those same four behavioral concerns. Would that provide a sufficient basis for concluding that Williams is warranted in positing that Jesus' knowledge of human nature closely matches the understanding of human nature offered by evolutionary psychology? That is, would Williams be warranted in concluding that Jesus is relevant today partly "because he is an astonishingly perceptive evolutionary psychologist?" I do not see how the case can be settled on the similarities so far granted. Williams may well be correct in drawing parallels in what the historical Jesus saw 2000 years ago and what modern evolutionary psychology now sees as the principal concerns of human nature. However, as I understand it, the primary concern of evolutionary psychology is not merely to list those basic concerns, but rather to posit explanations for those behavioral foci as products of the entire evolutionary process. However, if the positing of evolution-based explanations constitutes the core of the modern science of evolutionary psychology, then the appropriateness of drawing close parallels between Jesus and evolutionary psychology must, it seems to me, be called into question. The historical Jesus offered no explanations of the sort that would interest evolutionary psychology. Jesus, on the contrary, expressed numerous moral and ethical judgments on the manner in which humans ought to act in response to those basic drives for resources, reproduction, relatedness, and reciprocity. To summarize what we have observed so far: even if it is the case that Jesus and evolutionary psychology agree on their identification of the primary concerns that characterize human nature, there is a vast difference in what they offer in response. Evolutionary psychology offers scientific explanations for the origin and presence of the four R's as products of our evolutionary history. Given what cognitive psychology perceives to be core human concerns, evolutionary considerations suggest ways to understand how humans came to be this way. Jesus, on the other hand, offered moral or ethical principles that would encourage humans to choose behavior (whether consistent with evolutionary influences or not) that is "good" by the standards of divine intention for our living as God-conscious creatures. In other words, while it may well be argued, as Williams does, that Jesus and evolutionary psychology proceed because of similar views of human nature, they have radically differing agendas driving their interests in reflecting on the primary foci of human behavioral concerns. Evolutionary psychology's concern for explaining the historical roots of the four R's cannot easily be equated with Jesus' concern to provide moral or ethical guidance in choosing ways to act on those four drives. Evolutionary psychology offers a theory about human behavior and its roots in the practical need for species survival. Jesus posited no such theory, but instead exemplified sound moral and ethical value judgments on behavioral choices, judgments rooted in his extraordinary awareness of the divine intention for human life. Perhaps I am being too critical. Perhaps Williams never intended to make the strong equation that I have just criticized. Perhaps I need to take more seriously Williams' expressed concern to demonstrate that, despite her contention that Jesus "did not perceive his own death as a sacrifice for sin," and despite the fact that this would seem to "undermine doctrines previously considered central to Christianity" and thereby "appear to make Jesus irrelevant," Jesus is nonetheless just as relevant today as ever. Why? Because his understanding of human nature equipped him to offer relevant answers to Aristotle's ethical question, "How can human beings flourish?" True, evolutionary psychology focuses on technical aspects of how human behavior affects human survival and reproduction, while Jesus focused on matters of acting in accord with the divine will for human moral and ethical behavior, but both express a concern for identifying the sort of human behavior that improves the probability for the flourishing of the species. Perhaps I should be content with Williams' case with the continuing relevance of what Jesus said and did. In fact, I think Williams' case for the high degree of relevance that the words and deeds of Jesus still have was eloquently made. Am I ready, then, to set my misgivings aside and accept Williams' references to Jesus as "an astonishingly perceptive evolutionary psychologist?" I must admit that I continue to have reservations about statements worded in this way. One way to express my hesitancy is to note that although Williams appears to justify this language by noting that Jesus and evolutionary psychology share a common agenda in dealing with the question, "How can humans flourish?" I think we need to explore whether or not the term "flourish" is being used in the same way for both. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, what does it mean to flourish ? Stated as bluntly and succinctly as possible, for a species (or some higher order of categorization) to flourish, means to be reproductively successful over an extended time as a member of an ecosystem in some reasonably stable environment. It is about numbers, about numerical success, about survival. Maintain a stable or growing population, or your category of organisms goes extinct. Flourish, or vanish. Life is tough. Adapt or die; a purely pragmatic reality. From the standpoint of what Jesus said and did, however, what does it mean to flourish ? I would suggest that the species-survival criteria supplied by evolutionary psychology might be seen as necessary, but by no means sufficient from Jesus' standpoint. To flourish as a God-conscious creature would, I believe, sometimes require choosing behavior that conforms to the divine will in spite of the fact that it would fail to contribute to reproductive success. By the moral and ethical standards exemplified by the life and death of Jesus (whether or not these accomplished anything toward atonement for sin), flourishing as a human species is not simply a matter of numbers. On the contrary, Jesus sometimes exemplified behavioral choices that were radically contrarian in nature. In the extreme, Jesus paid the ultimate price of life itself by choosing right behavior over the biological goal of flourishing. I would not go so far as to say that Jesus advocated a generalized disregard for flourishing as a reproductively successful species, but it seems evident that Jesus did advocate the recognition of situations in which reproductive success was to be given secondary, not primary, status. Williams rightly recognizes this in noting that each of human nature's four R's can be pursued with such excessive vigor as to become a vice. Excessive pursuit of resources becomes greed or gluttony. Obsession with reproductive activity becomes lust or abuse of power. Unqualified valuation of relatedness becomes destructive exclusivism. Compassionless application of reciprocity becomes an excuse for vengeance. Jesus spoke and acted in a way that demonstrated such excesses to fall outside the divine will for human behavior. Hence, to engage in a bit of Williams-style commentary, Jesus "knew when to set evolutionary psychology aside and to make behavioral choices on the basis of divine calling rather than on the probabilities for reproductive success." I was especially struck (positively) by Williams' comments on the dangers of compassionless reciprocity in which she called attention to the remarkable and ironic contrast between the example set by Jesus and the distorted portrait of God that has become the display piece of substitutionary atonement theology. Williams says it with great eloquence. "Jesus spoke of love, generosity, and forgiveness. In doing so, he spoke of the nature of God. Christian atonement theology," alternatively, "has claimed that an innocent man had to die to pay for the sins of the guilty because God required that justice be done . It does not take much insight into the nature of justice to grasp the injustice of killing the innocent to forgive the guilty. The God who allegedly commanded such a deed ruled by reciprocity and had a stingy soul. This is not Jesus' God." Would that more contemporary Christians could see what Williams here points out. Seeing this demands no knowledge of evolutionary psychology, however. A sense of justice that transcends the scientific agenda will do. What about the fifth R? Recall Jesus' advice for life, "Be not anxious ." Live by love. Do not be driven by the egocentrism inherited from our evolutionary past. Do not allow yourself to distort any one of the four R's by becoming obsessed with its unqualified satisfaction. In a word, Relax. Great idea. That is the next item on my "to do" list. -------------------------- Counter-response on "The Fifth R: Jesus as Evolutionary Psychologist" Patricia A. Williams Patricia A. Williams is a philosopher of biology and philosophical theologian who writes full-time on Christianity and science. Her recent books include, Doing Without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (2001) and Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What you Can do about it (2001). Her mailing address is PO Box 69, Covesville, VA 22931. Her e-mail address is theologyauthor at aol.com; website www.theologyauthor.com. I am grateful to the editors for the privilege of receiving responses to my article and the opportunity to reply. I also appreciate the sincerity and thoughtfulness characterizing the responses. I might add that evolutionary biology is conceptually difficult; it is a field in which experts make mistakes, and much sociobiology is conceptually confused, partly because it seems a favorite playground for atheists who are ideologically driven. Finally, historical Jesus scholarship is broad, deep, and varied, so one needs to dine, not snack. Keeping it all straight is difficult. Even I make mistakes. Therefore, it may be best to begin by explaining the project I pursue in my books and essays. I want to integrate science, theology, and spirituality. As I come from a Christian background, that generally means I engage some aspect of Christianity. My first step is to take the best, most central, most accepted scientific findings to establish a firm foundation in the sciences. My second is to pursue the best biblical scholarship, especially scholarship on the historical Jesus, Christianity's central figure and a prophet in two other world religions. Thus, two critical, rational enterprises stand at the center of my work. Third, I seek the best in Christian spirituality, which I presently think Quakerism represents. (Quaker theology also smoothes some theological and scriptural issues.) Then I try to integrate them. Some examples from my treatment of science may help. When I discuss cosmology, I avoid string theory or many-worlds theory. Although they may be cutting-edge research subjects, they currently lack mathematical proof and empirical evidence. In biology, I center on the theory of evolution by natural selection since it is the foundational theory of biology. This is not to deny that other mechanisms for evolution exist. Indeed, I consider genetic drift significant in speciation.1 In sociobiology, I concentrate on kin selection (inclusive fitness), because it lies at the heart of sociobiology and is well established theoretically and empirically. For evolutionary psychology, I focus on dispositions applicable to as many organisms as possible, (the exception in the 4Rs being reciprocity, which although not uniquely human, is central to human relationships as it is not to those of other animals). I might add, against Carlson and Hine's assumption that I borrowed the terminology from David Buss, the expression "the four R's" and the arguments for the four R's being fundamental originate with me. To understand where the responders have erred, it will help to return to the basics. Van Till discusses evolution in terms of species survival. Evolution does not promote species survival. On the contrary, natural selection is a negative mechanism, promoting no one's survival, only eliminating the unfit. Evolution depends on three things: that more organisms come to be than survive to reproduce, some characteristics vary, and some of these are inherited. Populations change over time (evolve) because organisms that die before they reproduce fail to pass their characteristics on to future generations, and these characteristics vanish from the population. Meanwhile, mutations may add novel characteristics. Species can be selected (go extinct--contrary to Moritz's assumption, I am not a single-level selectionist and certainly not a genetic-level one), but natural selection cannot promote their survival. Indeed, most have gone extinct, so it fails to promote their survival. On the whole, however, the theory of evolution applies to individuals and their kin and is always local, that is, characteristics fit in one environment will not be so in others. This means evolution cannot promote the flourishing of species. I doubt Jesus promotes it, either. I doubt he thinks that broadly. Rather, his widest interest seems individual and community flourishing in a non-egalitarian but God-suffused world. Van Till assumes sociobiology has a single focus, the explanation of certain behaviors by means of the theory of evolution. In fact, it has three foci. The first, begun by W. D. Hamilton in 1964,2 was to explain biologically altruistic behavior by means of inclusive fitness theory. The second, prominently promoted by Robert Trivers from 1971 and 1972,3 was to predict animal social behavior (including human social behavior) from inclusive fitness theory. The third has been to gather empirical evidence to support or refute the predictions. The third and last has occurred almost since Hamilton published, was famously summarized by E. O. Wilson in 1975,4 and has become a project of evolutionary psychology in recent years. In calling Jesus an evolutionary psychologist, I credit him with understanding by (divine?) intuition and astute observation that human nature is disposed (not determined!) to follow the 4Rs that lie at the foundations of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Given Jesus' lack of scientific knowledge, he could not have been doing anything more. Since Moritz fails to find citations in my theological writing to critics of sociobiology, and no explicit criticisms of it, he concludes I accept it uncritically. My theological works do ignore its critics, for I think engaging in intra-scientific squabbles inappropriate in a theological context. However, in a lead review in the Quarterly Review of Biology,5 I criticize selfish gene theory and the idea that sociobiological explanations of behavior provide total explanations. However, in my theological works, I do something different. I interpret sociobiology in a non-reductionist, non-determinist, non-egocentric way, usually without explicitly condemning its reductionist, determinist, and selfishness-promoting proponents who, I think, misconstrue the evidence. I am especially disturbed that Moritz cloaks me in the determinist mantle when I say in summary of human nature's four R's in my article, Thus, evolution has given us enormous potential for both good and evil, and it also has provided a wide range of choices, from egocentricity that seeks the destruction of others to generosity and love that seek to further their welfare. We are remarkably flexible and free. That is the primary reason we find it so difficult to answer Aristotle's question about how to flourish. If we have such a range of desires and can engage in such an enormous number of activities, then which are those that best promote our flourishing? I emphasize choice and freedom. There is no taint of determinism here. Indeed, I find more tendencies toward the assumption of genetic determinism in the responses to my article than I do in my article. Moreover, without citing sociobiology's critics, I explicitly argue against determinism for an entire section in my Doing without Adam and Eve.6 As for "natural selection and the genocentrism it entails [being] no longer the sole fiddler" (Moritz), it never was. Charles Darwin, lord of the theory of evolution, invokes the inheritance of acquired characteristics to aid it, then sexual selection.7 Ernst Mayr, king of the new synthesis, recognizes sexual selection, the Baldwin effect, symbiosis, and genetic drift.8 E. O. Wilson, prince of sociobiology, includes morphological and physiological differences and environmental contingencies.9 A review of the most thoroughly studied genus in the world, Drosophila, adds premating isolation.10 Moreover, we now possess empirical proof that environments restructure organisms' brains, including adult human brains.11 Many things shape organisms and their behaviors. Many people shape historical Jesus scholarship. It is not limited to the Jesus Seminar. Although I respect the Jesus Seminar and find its two volumes12 handy for checking out black, gray, pink, and red sayings and deeds, I nowhere rely on it to tell me which sayings go back to Jesus as Carlson and Hine assert. In contrast, I say I will "restrict the passages of scripture I discuss to those the scholars think go back to the historical Jesus." I have written a book, mentioned in the article, on the historical Jesus13 with a bibliography listing 42 references to works of 35 Jesus scholars and historians of the two first centuries. I compiled that list five years ago, and I have continued reading. In an essay such as "The Fifth R," to summarize such extensive scholarship is impossible. However, to offer one example here, most other scholars think the passage Carlson and Hine mention that the Jesus Seminar colors gray, Mark 3:31 ? 35, goes back to Jesus. If Carlson and Hine researched further in the Seminar's The Five Gospels, they would find even the Seminar colors the parallels in Matthew 12:46 ? 50 and Thomas 99 pink. The event occurs in two sources, Mark and Thomas, so it meets the scholarly criterion of multiple attestation. Matthew and Luke (8:19 ? 21) retain it from Mark, their source for it, so it must have been well known. Moreover, it also fits the strong scholarly criterion that events and sayings embarrassing to the Jesus movement are likely to go back to Jesus. For a son not to honor his mother breaks one of the Ten Commandments, and in the Jesus movement after Jesus' death, some of his family members became his followers. Their change of heart must have aroused criticism of their earlier unbelief. Why include such an embarrassing incident in your narrative unless it is so widely known that excluding it appears fraudulent? Carlson and Hine also comment that I am dealing with the person of Jesus and putting "him in a box of dimensions specified by the four R's." This is false. I am interested in his insights into human nature, God, and ethics. I think he was a person of integrity and, so, his insights probably reflect his character, but his character is not the subject of "The Fifth R" and certainly not limited to the four R's--no one's is. The four R's at most represent some basic human dispositions. Carlson and Hine also misquote me. I never use the expression, "the unmatched quality of God's love, generosity, and forgiveness." Thus, I am unlikely to do "more to demonstrate this." Moritz seems to think the fifth R is "Rebel"14 and jettison the four R's. On the contrary, it is "Relax." In a wonderfully coined phrase, he calls the rebellious approach "an eschatologically stable strategy " to distinguish it from evolutionarily stable strategies. In contrast, I think "Relax" is probably stabilizing for the species. Other species follow evolutionary strategies and go extinct, so evolutionary strategies remain stable only temporarily. Based on the history of other species, if we follow evolutionary strategies, we will go extinct, too. Perhaps there is a better way. Jesus may offer it. Nonetheless, "Relax" does not entail rejecting the four R's. As I note in the article, Jesus is not an ascetic, but is accused of drunkenness and gluttony, enjoys the company of women and children, and calls a leading disciple who is married. Pursuing the four R's inordinately through greed, lust, nepotism, and justice for oneself to the exclusion of others destabilizes community and, so, diminishes human wellbeing. Such pursuits lead to wars that, in the contemporary world, may not only result in the extinction of our species but also the annihilation of life on Earth. Inordinate rebellion against the four R's also promises extinction. Best follow Van Till and make "Relax" the next item on the "'to do' list." Finally, Van Till comments that knowledge of evolutionary psychology is not required to understand that God's killing the innocent in order to forgive the guilty is unjust. I agree. I think evolutionary psychology sheds light here not by explaining justice, but by explaining the attractiveness to many Christians of a God who insists divine justice be satisfied. Theirs is an anthropomorphic God, built from our basic, evolved dispositions. Relaxed as he was about the four R's, Jesus could reflect, instead, a God of generosity and mercy. Notes 1. Patricia A. Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 108 ? 115. 2. W. D. Hamilton, "The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour I and II," Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1 ? 51. 3. Robert L. Trivers, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," The Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35 ? 57 and "Parent-Offspring Conflict," American Zoology 14 (1972): 249 ? 264. 4. E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). 5. Patricia A. Williams, "Of Replicators and Selectors," The Quarterly Review of Biology 77 (2002): 302 ? 306. 6. Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve, 143 ? 148. 7. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, [1859] 1964) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1871] 1981). 8. Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 9. Wilson, Sociobiology. 10. Jeffrey R. Powell, Progress and Prospects in Evolutionary Biology: The Drosophila Model (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 11. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: Regan Books, 2002). 12. Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993) and Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: Polebridge Press, 1998). 13. Patricia A. Williams, Where Christianity Went Wrong, When, and What You Can Do About It (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2001). 14. As, famously, in Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 215, "We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators [genes]". From checker at panix.com Wed Sep 14 01:28:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:28:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Einstein and Quantizing Chaos Message-ID: Theoretical Physics: Einstein and Quantizing Chaos http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050902-6.htm The following points are made by A. Douglas Stone (Physics Today 2005 August): 1) At the 11 May 1917 meeting of the German Physical Society, Albert Einstein (1879-1955), then a professor at the University of Berlin, presented the only research paper of his career that was written on the quantization of energy for mechanical systems.[1] The paper contained an elegant reformulation of the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization rules of the old quantum theory, a rethinking that extended and clarified their meaning. Even more impressive, the paper offered a brilliant insight into the limitations of the old quantum theory when applied to a mechanical system that is nonintegrable -- or in modern terminology, chaotic. Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) cited the paper in his historic thesis on the wave properties of matter,[2] as did Erwin Schroedinger (1892-1987) in the second of his seminal papers on the wave equation for quantum mechanics.[3] But the 1917 work was then ignored for more than 25 years until Joseph Keller independently discovered the Einstein quantization scheme in the 1950s.[4] Even so, the significance of Einstein's contribution was not fully appreciated until the early 1970s when theorists, led by Martin Gutzwiller, finally addressed the fundamental difficulty of semiclassically quantizing nonintegrable Hamiltonians and founded a subfield of research now known as quantum chaos. 2) Even today, Einstein's insight into the failure of the Bohr-Sommerfeld approach is unknown to the large majority of researchers working in quantum physics. It seems appropriate, in this centennial of Einstein's miracle year, to put the achievement of his obscure 1917 paper in a modern context and to explain how he identified a simple criterion for determining if a dynamical system can be quantized by the methods of the old quantum theory. 3) Einstein's paper was titled "On the Quantum Theorem of Sommerfeld and Epstein." In his title, Einstein was acknowledging physicist Paul Epstein, who had written a paper relating the Sommerfeld rule to the form of the constants of motion. Epstein's name has not survived in the context of the Sommerfeld rule, and the quantization condition discussed by Einstein is now referred to as either Bohr-Sommerfeld or WKB (Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin) quantization. 4) Although Einstein's antipathy to certain aspects of modern quantum theory is well known, there appears to be a renewed appreciation this year of his seminal contributions to quantum physics. With his introduction of the photon concept in 1905, his clear identification of wave-particle duality in 1909, his founding of the quantum theory of radiation in 1917, and his treatment of the Bose gas and its condensation in 1925, Einstein laid much of the foundation of the theory. He commented to Otto Stern, "I have thought a hundred times as much about the quantum problems as I have about general relativity theory." We should add to his list of illustrious achievements another advance, modest on the scale of his genius, but brilliant by any other standard: the first identification of the problem of quantizing chaotic motion.[5] References (abridged): 1. A translation of the paper appears in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein , vol. 6, A. Engel, trans., Princeton U. Press, Princeton , NJ (1997), p. 434 2. L. de Broglie, PhD thesis, reprinted in Ann. Found. Louis de Broglie 17, 22 (1992) 3. E. Schroedinger, Ann. Phys. ( Leipzig ) 489, 79 (1926) 4. J. B. Keller, Ann. Phys. (N.Y.) 4, 180 (1958). An initial version of the paper was published by Keller as a research report in 1953. See also J. B. Keller, S. I. Rubinow, Ann. Phys. (N.Y.) 9, 24 (1960) 5. J. B. Keller, SIAM Rev. 27, 485 (1985) Physics Today http://www.physicstoday.org -------------------------------- Related Material: THEORETICAL PHYSICS: QUANTIZATION OF A PENDULUM SYSTEM The following points are made by Ian Stewart (Nature 2004 430:731): 1) A central problem in modern physics is to find effective methods for quantizing classical dynamical systems -- modifying the classical equations to incorporate the effects of quantum mechanics. One of the main obstacles is the disparity between the linearity of quantum theory and the nonlinearity of classical dynamics. Recently, Cushman et al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2004 93: 024302) analyzed a quantum version of the spring pendulum, whose resonant state was first discussed by Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), and which is a standard model for the carbon dioxide molecule. 2) Cushman et al demonstrated that when this system is quantized, the allowed states, or eigenstates, fail to form a perfect lattice, contrary to simpler examples. Instead, the lattice has a defect, a point at which the regular lattice structure is destroyed. They demonstrated that this defect can be understood in terms of an important classical phenomenon known as "monodromy". A quantum-mechanical cliche is Schroedinger's cat, whose role is to dramatize the superposition of quantum states by being both alive and dead. Classical mechanics now introduces a second cat, which dramatizes monodromy through its ability always to land on its feet. The work affords important new insights into the general problem of quantization, as well as being an example of the relation between nonlinear dynamics and quantum theory. 3) The underlying classical model here is the swing-spring, a mass suspended from a fixed point by a spring. The spring is free to swing like a pendulum in any vertical plane through the fixed point, and it can also oscillate along its length by expanding and contracting. The Fermi resonance occurs when the spring frequency is twice the swing frequency. The same resonance occurs in a simplified model of the two main classical vibrational modes of the carbon dioxide molecule, and the first mathematical analysis of the swing-spring was inspired by this model. 4) Using a modern technique of analysis known as reduction, which exploits the rotational symmetry of a system, Cushman et al demonstrated that this particular resonance has a curious implication, which manifests itself physically as a switching phenomenon. Start with the spring oscillating vertically but in a slightly unstable state. The vertical "spring mode" motion quickly becomes a "swing mode" oscillation, just like a clock pendulum swinging in some vertical plane. However, this swing state is transient and the system returns once more to its spring mode, then back to a swing mode, and so on indefinitely. The surprise is that the successive planes in which it swings are different at each stage. Moreover, the angle through which the swing plane turns, from one occurrence to the next, depends sensitively on the amplitude of the original spring mode. 5) The apparent paradox here is that the initial state has zero angular momentum -- the net spin about the vertical axis is zero. Yet the swing state rotates from one instance to the next. Analogously, a falling cat that starts upside down has no angular momentum about its own longitudinal axis, yet it can invert itself, apparently spinning about that axis. The resolution of the paradox, for a cat, is that the animal changes its shape by moving its paws and tail in a particular way. At each stage of the motion, angular momentum remains zero and is thus conserved, but the overall effect of the shape changes is to invert the cat. The final upright state also has zero angular momentum, so there is no contradiction of conservation. This effect is known as the "geometric phase", or monodromy, and is important in many areas of physics and mathematics. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: QUANTUM PHYSICS: ON NANOMECHANICAL QUANTUM LIMITS The following points are made by Miles Blencowe (Science 2004 304:56): 1) In the macroscopic world of everyday experience, the motions of familiar objects such as dust particles, bumblebees, baseballs, airplanes, and planets are accurately described by Newton's laws. According to these classical laws, the trajectories of the objects can in principle be measured to arbitrary accuracy; any uncertainty in their motion is due to the imprecision of the measuring device. In contrast, in the microscopic world of atomic and subatomic particles such as the hydrogen atom and the electron, the probabilistic laws of quantum physics hold sway. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle limits the precision of simultaneous measurements of the position and velocity of a particle. And there is the superposition principle, which allows a particle to be simultaneously in two places. This latter principle is responsible for the interference pattern produced on a detection screen by a beam of particles that have passed through a sufficiently narrow-ruled grating. Such interference patterns have been observed even for beams of molecules with mass over 1000 times that of a hydrogen atom (1). 2) Ever since the laws of quantum mechanics were first established early last century, physicists and philosophers have been occupied with the problem of how the macroscopic classical world emerges from the microscopic quantum world (2). Is there an actual boundary between the two, where some as yet undiscovered fundamental physical law governs the transition from quantum to classical behavior as the system size and/or energy scale increases? Or is classical physics just an approximation to quantum physics, even at macroscopic scales, so that if we were to try hard enough in our experiments, quantum behavior would be observed in the motion of macroscopic mechanical objects? 3) LaHaye et al (3) have described an experiment whose goal is to test Heisenberg's uncertainty principle on a vibrating mechanical beam that is about a hundredth of a millimeter long. While such a beam is tiny by everyday standards, it is equivalent in mass to about 10^(12) hydrogen atoms, certainly belonging well outside the traditional, microscopic quantum domain. The work of LaHaye et al comes hot on the heels of a recent related experiment(4). While neither experiment has quite reached the necessary sensitivity to test the uncertainty principle, they come much closer than all previous efforts. 4) Under normal conditions, a mechanical beam will undergo classical thermal Brownian motion, vibrating in a random way as it is buffeted by the air molecules as well as the fluctuating defects in the beam. As the beam is cooled and the surrounding air is expelled, the thermal Brownian motion will decrease in amplitude, until just the irreducible quantum zero-point fluctuations of the beam in its lowest energy state remain. This zero-point motion is a consequence of the uncertainty principle that prevents the beam from being in a state of absolute rest. The temperature below which the beam must be cooled in order to freeze out the Brownian motion is related to the beam's resonant frequency. The frequency of the beam used by LaHaye et al(3) is about 20 million cycles per second (20 MHz), and the lowest temperature to which they manage to cool the beam is about 60 millikelvins (mK). This is not quite cold enough, however; a 20-MHz beam must be cooled to about 1 mK in order for the zero-point motion to be comparable to the Brownian motion. On the other hand, a smaller beam with a much higher frequency of about 1 billion hertz (1 gigahertz, or GHz) was recently demonstrated (5). Such a beam would only need to be cooled to about 50 mK for the quantum zero-point and classical Brownian motions to be comparable in amplitude, close to the lowest temperature that LaHaye et al(3) achieve in their experiment. References (abridged): 1. L. Hackermueller et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 90408 (2003) 2. A. J. Leggett, J. Phys. Condens. Matter 14, R415 (2002) 3. M. D. LaHaye et al., Science 304, 74 (2004) 4. R. G. Knobel, A. N. Cleland, Nature 424, 291 (2003) 5. X. M. H. Huang et al., Nature 421, 496 (2003) Science http://www.sciencemag.org From checker at panix.com Wed Sep 14 01:28:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:28:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge: John Horgan: In Defense of Common Sense Message-ID: John Horgan: In Defense of Common Sense http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/horgan05/horgan05_index.html All these theories are preposterous, but that's not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends. IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE By John Horgan Introduction John Horgan, author of The End of Science, and feisty and provocative as ever, is ready for combat with scientists in the Edge community. "I'd love to get Edgies' reaction to my OpEd piece -- "In Defense of Common Sense" -- in The New York Times", he writes. Physicist Leonard Susskind, writing "In Defense of Uncommon Sense", is the first to take up Horgan's challenge ([10]see below). Susskind notes that in "the utter strangeness of a world that the human intellect was not designed for... physicists have had no choice but to rewire themselves. Where intuition and common sense failed, they had to create new forms of intuition, mainly through the use of abstract mathematics." We've gone "out of the range of experience." Read on. -- [11]JB JOHN HORGAN oversees the science writings program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science and Rational Mysticism. [12]John Horgan's Edge bio page [13]THE REALITY CLUB:[14] Verena Huber-Dyson, [15]Robert Provine, [16]Spencer Reiss, [17]Daniel Gilbert, [18]John McCarthy, [19]Leonard Susskind respond to John Horgan. [20]Horgan replies. _________________________________________________________________ IN DEFENSE OF COMMON SENSE As anyone remotely interested in science knows by now, 100 years ago Einstein wrote six papers that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics and relativity, arguably the two most successful theories in history. To commemorate Einstein's "annus mirabilis," a coalition of physics groups has designated 2005 the World Year of Physics. The coalition's Web site lists more than 400 celebratory events, including conferences, museum exhibits, concerts, Webcasts, plays, poetry readings, a circus, a pie-eating contest and an Einstein look-alike competition. In the midst of all this hoopla, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of Einstein's legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible. In the pre-Einstein era, T. H. Huxley, aka "Darwin's bulldog," could define science as "nothing but trained and organized common sense." But quantum mechanics and relativity shattered our common-sense notions about how the world works. The theories ask us to believe that an electron can exist in more than one place at the same time, and that space and time -- the I-beams of reality -- are not rigid but rubbery. Impossible! And yet these sense-defying propositions have withstood a century's worth of painstaking experimental tests. As a result, many scientists came to see common sense as an impediment to progress not only in physics but also in other fields. "What, after all, have we to show for ... common sense," the behaviorist B. F. Skinner asked, "or the insights gained through personal experience?" Elevating this outlook to the status of dogma, the British biologist Lewis Wolpert declared in his influential 1992 book "The Unnatural Nature of Science," "I would almost contend that if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn't science." Dr. Wolpert's view is widely shared. When I invoke common sense to defend or -- more often -- criticize a theory, scientists invariably roll their eyes. Scientists' contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity; hence the appeal, perhaps, of dubious propositions like multiple-personality disorders and multiple-universe theories. The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists. Needless to say, I reject that position, and not only because I'm a science journalist (who majored in English). I have also found common sense -- ordinary, nonspecialized knowledge and judgment -- to be indispensable for judging scientists' pronouncements, even, or especially, in the most esoteric fields. For example, Einstein's intellectual heirs have long been obsessed with finding a single "unified" theory that can embrace quantum mechanics, which accounts for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, and general relativity, which describes gravity. The two theories employ very different mathematical languages and describe very different worlds, one lumpy and random and the other seamless and deterministic. The leading candidate for a unified theory holds that reality stems from tiny strings, or loops, or membranes, or something wriggling in a hyperspace consisting of 10, or 16 or 1,000 dimensions (the number depends on the variant of the theory, or the day of the week, or the theorist's ZIP code). A related set of "quantum gravity" theories postulates the existence of parallel universes -- some perhaps mutant versions of our own, like "Bizarro world" in the old Superman comics -- existing beyond the borders of our little cosmos. "Infinite Earths in Parallel Universes Really Exist," the normally sober Scientific American once hyperventilated on its cover. All these theories are preposterous, but that's not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends. Common sense -- and a little historical perspective -- makes me equally skeptical of grand unified theories of the human mind. After a half-century of observing myself and my fellow humans -- not to mention watching lots of TV and movies -- I've concluded that as individuals we're pretty complex, variable, unpredictable creatures, whose personalities can be affected by a vast range of factors. I'm thus leery of hypotheses that trace some important aspect of our behavior to a single cause. Two examples: The psychologist Frank Sulloway has claimed that birth order has a profound, permanent impact on personality; first-borns tend to be conformists, whereas later-borns are "rebels." And just last year, the geneticist Dean Hamer argued that human spirituality -- surely one of the most complicated manifestations of our complicated selves -- stems from a specific snippet of DNA. Although common sense biases me against these theories, I am still open to being persuaded on empirical grounds. But the evidence for both Dr. Sulloway's birth-order theory and Dr. Hamer's "God gene" is flimsy. Over the past century, moreover, mind-science has been as faddish as teenage tastes in music, as one theory has yielded to another. Everything we think and do, scientists have assured us, can be explained by the Oedipal complex, or conditioned reflexes, or evolutionary adaptations, or a gene in the X chromosome, or serotonin deficits in the amygdala. Given this rapid turnover in paradigms, it's only sensible to doubt them all until the evidence for one becomes overwhelming. Ironically, while many scientists disparage common sense, artificial-intelligence researchers have discovered just how subtle and powerful an attribute it is. Over the past few decades, researchers have programmed computers to perform certain well-defined tasks extremely well; computers can play championship chess, calculate a collision between two galaxies and juggle a million airline reservations. But computers fail miserably at simulating the ordinary, experience-based intelligence that helps ordinary humans get through ordinary days. In other words, computers lack common sense, and that's why even the smartest ones are so dumb. Yes, common sense alone can lead us astray, and some of science's most profound insights into nature violate it; ultimately, scientific truth must be established on empirical grounds. Einstein himself once denigrated common sense as "the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18," but he retained a few basic prejudices of his own about how reality works. His remark that "God does not play dice with the universe" reflected his stubborn insistence that specific causes yield specific effects; he could never fully accept the bizarre implication of quantum mechanics that at small scales reality dissolves into a cloud of probabilities. So far, Einstein seems to be wrong about God's aversion to games of chance, but he was right not to abandon his common-sense intuitions about reality. In those many instances when the evidence is tentative, we should not be embarrassed to call on common sense for guidance. [Editor's Note:[21] First published as an Op-Ed Page article in The New York Times on August 12th] [22]LEONARD SUSSKIND Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stanford University IN DEFENSE OF UNCOMMON SENSE Leonard Susskind Responds to John Horgan [susskind100.jpg] John Horgan, the man who famously declared The End of Science shortly before the two greatest cosmological discoveries since the Big Bang, has now come forth to tell us that the world's leading physicists and cognitive scientists are wasting their time. Why? Because they are substituting difficult-to-understand and often shockingly unintuitive concepts for "everyman" common sense. Whose common sense? John Horgan's (admittedly a non-scientist) I presume. The complaint that science -- particularly physics -- has lost contact with common sense is hardly new. It was used against Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, and even today is being used against Darwin by the right wing agents of "intelligent design." Every week I get several angry email messages containing "common sense" (no math) theories of everything from elementary particles to the rings of Saturn. The theories have names like "Rational Theory of the Phenomenons. Modern science is difficult and often counterintuitive. Instead of bombastically ranting against this fact, Horgan should try to understand why it is so. The reasons have nothing to do with the perversity of string theorists, but rather, they have to do with the utter strangeness of a world that the human intellect was not designed for. Let me explain. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, physics dealt with phenomena that took place on a human scale. The typical objects that humans could observe varied in the size from a bacterium to something smaller than a galaxy. Similarly, no human had ever traveled faster than a hundred miles an hour, or a experienced a gravitational field that accelerates objects more powerfully than the Earth's acceleration, a modest thirty two feet per second per second. Forces smaller than a thousandth of a pound, or bigger than a thousand pounds, were also out of the range of experience. Evolution wired us with both hardware and software that would allow us to easily "grock" concepts like force, acceleration, and temperature, but only over the limited range that applies to our daily lives -- concepts that are needed for our physical survival. But it simply did not provide us with wiring to intuit the quantum behavior of an electron, or velocities near the speed of light, or the powerful gravitational fields of black holes, or a universe that closes back on itself like the surface of the Earth. A classic example of the limitations of our neural wiring is the inability to picture more than three dimensions. Why, after all, would nature provide us with the capacity to visualize things that no living creature had ever experienced? Physicists have had no choice but to rewire themselves. Where intuition and common sense failed, they had to create new forms of intuition, mainly through the use of abstract mathematics: Einstein's four dimensional elastic space-time; the infinite dimensional Hilbert space of quantum mechanics; the difficult mathematics of string theory; and, if necessary, multiple universes. When common sense fails, uncommon sense must be created. Of course we must use uncommon sense sensibly but we hardly need Horgan to tell us that. In trying to understand the universe at both its smallest and biggest scales, physics and cosmology have embarked on a new age of exploration. In a sense we are attempting to cross a larger uncharted sea than ever before. Indeed, as Horgan tells us, it's a dangerous sea where one can easily lose ones way and go right off the deep end. But great scientists are, by nature, explorers. To tell them to stay within the boundaries of common sense may be like telling Columbus that if he goes more than fifty miles from shore he'll get hopelessly lost. Besides, good old common sense tells us that the Earth is flat. Horgan also complains about the lack of common sense in cognitive science, i.e., the science of the mind. But the more psychologists and neuroscientists learn about the workings of the mind, the more it becomes absolutely clear that human cognition does not operate according to principles of common sense. That a man can mistake his wife for a hat is-well-common nonsense. But it happens. Cognitive scientists are also undergoing a rewiring process. Finally I must take exception to Horgan's claim that "no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories [string theory and cosmological eternal inflation] as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge." Here I speak from first hand knowledge. Many, if not all, of the most distinguished theoretical physicists in the world -- Steven Weinberg, Edward Witten, John Schwarz, Joseph Polchinski, Nathan Seiberg, Juan Maldacena, David Gross, Savas Dimopoulos, Andrei Linde, Renata Kallosh, among many others, most certainly acknowledge no such thing. These physicists are full of ideas about how to test modern concepts -- from superstrings in the sky to supersymmetry in the lab. Instead of dyspeptically railing against what he plainly does not understand, Horgan would do better to take a few courses in algebra, calculus, quantum mechanics, and string theory. He might then appreciate, even celebrate, the wonderful and amazing capacity of the human mind to find uncommon ways to comprehend the incomprehensible. _________________________________________________________________ [23]JOHN McCARTHY Computer Scientist; Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Stanford University [mccarthy100.jpg] John Horgan pontificates: "But computers fail miserably at simulating the ordinary, experience-based intelligence that helps ordinary humans get through ordinary days. In other words, computers lack common sense, and that's why even the smartest ones are so dumb." Horgan regards a lack of common sense as an intrinsic characteristic of computers; I assume he means computer programs. However, much artificial intelligence research has focussed on analyzing commonsense knowledge and reasoning. I refer to my 1959 article "Programs with common sense", my 1990 collection of articles "Formalizing common sense", Erik Mueller's forthcoming book "Commonsense reasoning", and the biennial international conferences on common sense. I fear John Horgan would find this work as distressingly technical as he finds physics. Common sense has proved a difficult scientific topic, and programs with human-level common sense have not yet been achieved. It may be another 100 years. The AI research has identified components of commonsense knowledge and reasoning, has formalized some of them in languages of mathematical logic, and has built some of them into computer programs. Besides the logic based approach, there have been recent attempts to understand common sense as an aspect of the human nervous system. Research on formalizing common sense physics, e.g. that objects fall when pushed off a table, are not in competition with physics as studied by physicists. Rather physics is imbedded in common sense. Thus applying Newton's F = ma requires commonsense reasoning. Physics texts and articles do not consist solely of equations but contain common sense explanations. When Horgan says that string theory is untestable, he is ignoring even the popular science writing about string theory. This literature tells us that the current untestability of string theory is regarded by the string theorists as a blemish they hope to fix. _________________________________________________________________ [24]DANIEL GILBERT Psychologist, Harvard University [gilbert100.jpg] Horgan's Op-Ed piece is such a silly trifle that it doesn't dignify serious response. The beauty of science is that it allows us to transcend our intuitions about the world, and it provides us with methods by which we can determine which of our intuitions are right and which are not. Common sense tell us that the earth is flat, that the sun moves around it, and that the people who know the least often speak the loudest. Horgan's essay demonstrates that at least one of our common sense notions is true. _________________________________________________________________ [25]SPENCER REISS Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine [reiss100.jpg] Surely Susskind is joking: "Why, after all, would nature provide us with the capacity to visualize things that no living creature had ever experienced?" Art? Music? Heaven? God? The Red Sox win the World Series? Science fiction, for chrissake! Buy the man a drink! This is the kind of stuff that gives scientists a bad name. _________________________________________________________________ [26]ROBERT R. PROVINE Psychologist and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland; Author, Laughter [provine100.jpg] Hunter-Gatherers Make Poor Physicists and Cognitive Neuroscientists: Horgan 0, Susskind 1 Horgan continues to expand his franchise that is based on the technique of assertively posing provocative and often reasonable propositions. The boldness of his assertions earns him an audience that he would not otherwise achieve. But as in The End of Science, he picks a fight that he is not prepared to win and never delivers a telling blow. Susskind effectively exploits a basic weakness in Horgan's thesis, the fallibility of common sense, especially in scientific context. Researchers working at the frontiers of many sciences use mathematical and theoretical prostheses to expand the range of phenomena that can be studied, escaping some of the limits of their evolutionary history and its neurological endowment. The startling truth is that we live in a neurologically-generated, virtual cosmos that we are programmed to accept as the real thing. The challenge of science is to overcome the constraints of our neurological wetware and understand a physical world that we know only second-hand and incompletely. In fact, we must make an intuitive leap to accept the fact that there is a problem at all. Common sense and the brain that produces it evolved in the service of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, not physicists and cognitive neuroscientists. Unassisted, the brain of Horgan or any other member of our species is not up to task of engaging certain scientific problems. Sensory science provides the most obvious discrepancies between the physical world and our neurological model of it. We humans evolved the capacity to detect a subset of stimuli available to us on the surface of planet Earth. Different animals with different histories differ in their absolute sensitivity to a given stimulus and in the bandwidth to with they are sensitive. And some species have modes of sensation that we lack, such as electric or magnetic fields. Each species is a theory of the environment in which it evolved and it can never completely escape the limitations of its unique evolutionary history. But the problem of sensing the physical cosmos is even more complicated, because we do not directly sense physical stimuli, but are aware of only their neurological correlates. There is not, for example, any "blue" in electromagnetic radiation, pitch of B-flat in pressure changes in the air, or sweetness in sucrose. All are neurological derivatives of the physical world, not the thing itself. Neurological limits on thinking are probably as common as those on sensing, but they are more illusive -- it's harder to think about what we can't think about than what we can't sense. A good example from physics is our difficulty in understanding the space-time continuum -- our intellect fails us when we move beyond the dimensions of height, width, and depth. Other evidence of our neurological reality-generator is revealed by its malfunction in illusions, hallucinations, and dreams, or in brain damage, where the illusion of reality does not simply degrade, but often splinters and fragments in unanticipated ways. The intellectual prostheses of mathematics, computers, and instrumentation loosen but do not free our species of the constraints of its neurological heritage. We do not build random devices to detect stimuli that we cannot conceive, but build outward from a base of knowledge. A neglected triumph of science is how far we have come with so flawed an instrument as the human brain and its sensoria. Another is in realizing the limits of common sense and its knowledge base of folk wisdom. _________________________________________________________________ [27]VERENA HUBER-DYSON Logician; Emeritus Professor, University of Calgary [huber-dyson100.jpg] IN PRAISE OF EVOLVING COMMON SENSE It seems to me that John Horgan in his Edge piece "In Defense of Common Sense" is confusing "common sense" with "prejudice". The human capacity for common sense reasoning is undergoing an evolutionary process as science and technology are progressing. Just look back over the last two millennia for spectacular illustrations of this pretty obvious observation. Presumably Mr. Horgan watches TV, uses his personal computer and takes airplanes to get places he cannot reach on foot nor by his questionably commonsensical motor car. If he does not know how to fix whatever trouble his car may come up with -- like some people do -- he really should not drive it. To some of my colleagues the telescope serves as the extension of their vision to others the cloud chamber extends the reach of their cognition, just the way his car serves Mr Horgan to get around. In the cloud chamber we witness effects of events too small to see directly. Oh there are so many wonderful illustrations of this evolution of the human cognitive faculties. Ideas, models, conjectures acquiring reality by circumstantial evidence and repeated reasoning become part of our life; as they get entrenched our common sense expands through familiarity. Sometime our notions have to be adjusted, or some, like the idea of the ether, become obsolete. That too is progress. Common sense that refuses to evolve becomes prejudice, or bigotry to use a more bold expression. I have seen quite a bit of scientific evolution in my time. In my childhood the planetary model of the atom was the way we were thinking of matter; now it has become a metaphor or a handy tool, useful under certain conditions. The same is about to happen with strings. We have learned to think more abstractly, we do not really need to think of strings as wiggly worms much too small to see. We have become quite adept at mathematical modeling. I'd love to be around to see the evolution of cognition happening ever so much faster. Even the men in the street are keeping pace. Let us not encourage spoil-sports like Mr Horgan. _________________________________________________________________ [28]JOHN HORGAN My modest defense of common sense as a guide for judging theories -- particularly when empirical evidence is flimsy -- has provoked a predictable shriek of outrage from Lenny Susskind. His attempt to lump me together with advocates of intelligent design is more than a little ironic, since in rebuking me he displays the self-righteous arrogance of a religious zealot damning an infidel. Moreover, as a proponent (!!) recently acknowledged in the New York Times, string theory and its offshoots are so devoid of evidence that they represent "a faith-based initiative." Susskind urges me to "take courses in algebra, calculus, quantum mechanics, and string theory" before I mouth off further about strings. In other words, I must become a string theorist to voice an opinion about it. This assertion recalls the insistence of Freudians -- another group notoriously hostile to outside criticism and complaints about testability -- that only those fully indoctrinated into their mind-cult can judge it. Susskind's protestations to the contrary, string theory can be neither falsified nor verified by any empirical test. At best, experiments can provide only necessary but insufficient evidence for components -- such as supersymmetry -- of certain variants of string theory. That is why in 2002 I bet the physicist Michio Kaku $1000 that by 2020 no one will be awarded a Nobel prize for work on string theory or similar quantum-gravity theory. (I discuss the bet with Kaku, Lee Smolin, Gordon Kane, and other physicists at [29]"Long Bet"). Would Susskind care to make a side bet? As to the other respondents: John McCarthy merely confirms my assertion that computer programmers have failed to simulate common sense -- except that McCarthy expends many more words to make his point than I do. And like Lenny Susskind, Robert Provine and Verena Huber-Dyson merely point out that many scientific theories violate popular, common-sense intuitions about nature and yet prove to be empirically correct. No kidding. I said just that in my essay. The question that I raised -- and that all these respondents have studiously avoided -- is what we should do when presented with theories such as psychoanalysis or string theory, which are not only counterintuitive but also lacking in evidence. Common sense tells me that in these cases common sense can come in handy. References 12. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/horgan.html 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/opinion/12horgan.html 22. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/susskind.html 23. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/mccarthy.html 24. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/gilbert.html 25. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/reiss.html 26. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/provine.html 27. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/huber-dyson.html 28. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/horgan.html 29. http://www.longbets.org/12%3Ehttp://www.longbets.org/12 From checker at panix.com Wed Sep 14 01:29:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:29:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PLoS Medicine: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False Message-ID: PLoS Medicine: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10%2E1371%2Fjournal%2Epmed%2E0020124 Volume 2 | Issue 8 | AUGUST 2005 John P. A. Ioannidis Summary There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research. John P. A. Ioannidis is in the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Ioannina, Greece, and Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Department of Medicine, Tufts-New England Medical Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. E-mail: jioannid at cc.uoi.gr Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist. Published: August 30, 2005 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 Abbreviation: PPV, positive predictive value Citation: Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124 ______________________________________________________________________ Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies [[24]1-3] to the most modern molecular research [[25]4,[26]5]. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims [[27]6-8]. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. Here I will examine the key factors that influence this problem and some corollaries thereof. Modeling the Framework for False Positive Findings Several methodologists have pointed out [[28]9-11] that the high rate of nonreplication (lack of confirmation) of research discoveries is a consequence of the convenient, yet ill-founded strategy of claiming conclusive research findings solely on the basis of a single study assessed by formal statistical significance, typically for a p-value less than 0.05. Research is not most appropriately represented and summarized by p-values, but, unfortunately, there is a widespread notion that medical research articles should be interpreted based only on p-values. Research findings are defined here as any relationship reaching formal statistical significance, e.g., effective interventions, informative predictors, risk factors, or associations. "Negative" research is also very useful. "Negative" is actually a misnomer, and the misinterpretation is widespread. However, here we will target relationships that investigators claim exist, rather than null findings. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. As has been shown previously, the probability that a research finding is indeed true depends on the prior probability of it being true (before doing the study), the statistical power of the study, and the level of statistical significance [[29]10,[30]11]. Consider a 2 ? 2 table in which research findings are compared against the gold standard of true relationships in a scientific field. In a research field both true and false hypotheses can be made about the presence of relationships. Let R be the ratio of the number of "true relationships" to "no relationships" among those tested in the field. R is characteristic of the field and can vary a lot depending on whether the field targets highly likely relationships or searches for only one or a few true relationships among thousands and millions of hypotheses that may be postulated. Let us also consider, for computational simplicity, circumscribed fields where either there is only one true relationship (among many that can be hypothesized) or the power is similar to find any of the several existing true relationships. The pre-study probability of a relationship being true is R/(R + 1). The probability of a study finding a true relationship reflects the power 1 - b (one minus the Type II error rate). The probability of claiming a relationship when none truly exists reflects the Type I error rate, a. Assuming that c relationships are being probed in the field, the expected values of the 2 ? 2 table are given in [31]Table 1. After a research finding has been claimed based on achieving formal statistical significance, the post-study probability that it is true is the positive predictive value, PPV. The PPV is also the complementary probability of what Wacholder et al. have called the false positive report probability [[32]10]. According to the 2 ? 2 table, one gets PPV = (1 - b)R/(R - bR + a). A research finding is thus more likely true than false if (1 - b)R > a. Since usually the vast majority of investigators depend on a = 0.05, this means that a research finding is more likely true than false if (1 - b)R > 0.05. [33][table_thumb.gif] [34]Table 1. Research Findings and True Relationships What is less well appreciated is that bias and the extent of repeated independent testing by different teams of investigators around the globe may further distort this picture and may lead to even smaller probabilities of the research findings being indeed true. We will try to model these two factors in the context of similar 2 ? 2 tables. Bias First, let us define bias as the combination of various design, data, analysis, and presentation factors that tend to produce research findings when they should not be produced. Let u be the proportion of probed analyses that would not have been "research findings," but nevertheless end up presented and reported as such, because of bias. Bias should not be confused with chance variability that causes some findings to be false by chance even though the study design, data, analysis, and presentation are perfect. Bias can entail manipulation in the analysis or reporting of findings. Selective or distorted reporting is a typical form of such bias. We may assume that u does not depend on whether a true relationship exists or not. This is not an unreasonable assumption, since typically it is impossible to know which relationships are indeed true. In the presence of bias ([35]Table 2), one gets PPV = ([1 - b]R + ubR)/(R + a - bR + u - ua + ubR), and PPV decreases with increasing u, unless 1 - b =< a, i.e., 1 - b =< 0.05 for most situations. Thus, with increasing bias, the chances that a research finding is true diminish considerably. This is shown for different levels of power and for different pre-study odds in [36]Figure 1. [37][10.1371_journal.pmed.0020124.g001-M.jpg] [38]Figure 1. PPV (Probability That a Research Finding Is True) as a Function of the Pre-Study Odds for Various Levels of Bias, u Panels correspond to power of 0.20, 0.50, and 0.80. [39][table_thumb.gif] [40]Table 2. Research Findings and True Relationships in the Presence of Bias Conversely, true research findings may occasionally be annulled because of reverse bias. For example, with large measurement errors relationships are lost in noise [[41]12], or investigators use data inefficiently or fail to notice statistically significant relationships, or there may be conflicts of interest that tend to "bury" significant findings [[42]13]. There is no good large-scale empirical evidence on how frequently such reverse bias may occur across diverse research fields. However, it is probably fair to say that reverse bias is not as common. Moreover measurement errors and inefficient use of data are probably becoming less frequent problems, since measurement error has decreased with technological advances in the molecular era and investigators are becoming increasingly sophisticated about their data. Regardless, reverse bias may be modeled in the same way as bias above. Also reverse bias should not be confused with chance variability that may lead to missing a true relationship because of chance. Testing by Several Independent Teams Several independent teams may be addressing the same sets of research questions. As research efforts are globalized, it is practically the rule that several research teams, often dozens of them, may probe the same or similar questions. Unfortunately, in some areas, the prevailing mentality until now has been to focus on isolated discoveries by single teams and interpret research experiments in isolation. An increasing number of questions have at least one study claiming a research finding, and this receives unilateral attention. The probability that at least one study, among several done on the same question, claims a statistically significant research finding is easy to estimate. For n independent studies of equal power, the 2 ? 2 table is shown in [43]Table 3: PPV = R(1 - b^n)/(R + 1 - [1 - a]^n - Rb^n) (not considering bias). With increasing number of independent studies, PPV tends to decrease, unless 1 - b < a, i.e., typically 1 - b < 0.05. This is shown for different levels of power and for different pre-study odds in [44]Figure 2. For n studies of different power, the term b^n is replaced by the product of the terms b[i] for i = 1 to n, but inferences are similar. [45][10.1371_journal.pmed.0020124.g002-M.jpg] [46]Figure 2. PPV (Probability That a Research Finding Is True) as a Function of the Pre-Study Odds for Various Numbers of Conducted Studies, n Panels correspond to power of 0.20, 0.50, and 0.80. [47][table_thumb.gif] [48]Table 3. Research Findings and True Relationships in the Presence of Multiple Studies Corollaries A practical example is shown in [49]Box 1. Based on the above considerations, one may deduce several interesting corollaries about the probability that a research finding is indeed true. Corollary 1: The smaller the studies conducted in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Small sample size means smaller power and, for all functions above, the PPV for a true research finding decreases as power decreases towards 1 - b = 0.05. Thus, other factors being equal, research findings are more likely true in scientific fields that undertake large studies, such as randomized controlled trials in cardiology (several thousand subjects randomized) [[50]14] than in scientific fields with small studies, such as most research of molecular predictors (sample sizes 100-fold smaller) [[51]15]. Corollary 2: The smaller the effect sizes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Power is also related to the effect size. Thus research findings are more likely true in scientific fields with large effects, such as the impact of smoking on cancer or cardiovascular disease (relative risks 3-20), than in scientific fields where postulated effects are small, such as genetic risk factors for multigenetic diseases (relative risks 1.1-1.5) [[52]7]. Modern epidemiology is increasingly obliged to target smaller effect sizes [[53]16]. Consequently, the proportion of true research findings is expected to decrease. In the same line of thinking, if the true effect sizes are very small in a scientific field, this field is likely to be plagued by almost ubiquitous false positive claims. For example, if the majority of true genetic or nutritional determinants of complex diseases confer relative risks less than 1.05, genetic or nutritional epidemiology would be largely utopian endeavors. Corollary 3: The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. As shown above, the post-study probability that a finding is true (PPV) depends a lot on the pre-study odds (R). Thus, research findings are more likely true in confirmatory designs, such as large phase III randomized controlled trials, or meta-analyses thereof, than in hypothesis-generating experiments. Fields considered highly informative and creative given the wealth of the assembled and tested information, such as microarrays and other high-throughput discovery-oriented research [[54]4,[55]8,[56]17], should have extremely low PPV. Corollary 4: The greater the flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Flexibility increases the potential for transforming what would be "negative" results into "positive" results, i.e., bias, u. For several research designs, e.g., randomized controlled trials [[57]18-20] or meta-analyses [[58]21,[59]22], there have been efforts to standardize their conduct and reporting. Adherence to common standards is likely to increase the proportion of true findings. The same applies to outcomes. True findings may be more common when outcomes are unequivocal and universally agreed (e.g., death) rather than when multifarious outcomes are devised (e.g., scales for schizophrenia outcomes) [[60]23]. Similarly, fields that use commonly agreed, stereotyped analytical methods (e.g., Kaplan-Meier plots and the log-rank test) [[61]24] may yield a larger proportion of true findings than fields where analytical methods are still under experimentation (e.g., artificial intelligence methods) and only "best" results are reported. Regardless, even in the most stringent research designs, bias seems to be a major problem. For example, there is strong evidence that selective outcome reporting, with manipulation of the outcomes and analyses reported, is a common problem even for randomized trails [[62]25]. Simply abolishing selective publication would not make this problem go away. Corollary 5: The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Conflicts of interest and prejudice may increase bias, u. Conflicts of interest are very common in biomedical research [[63]26], and typically they are inadequately and sparsely reported [[64]26,[65]27]. Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable [[66]28]. Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. This seemingly paradoxical corollary follows because, as stated above, the PPV of isolated findings decreases when many teams of investigators are involved in the same field. This may explain why we occasionally see major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention. With many teams working on the same field and with massive experimental data being produced, timing is of the essence in beating competition. Thus, each team may prioritize on pursuing and disseminating its most impressive "positive" results. "Negative" results may become attractive for dissemination only if some other team has found a "positive" association on the same question. In that case, it may be attractive to refute a claim made in some prestigious journal. The term Proteus phenomenon has been coined to describe this phenomenon of rapidly alternating extreme research claims and extremely opposite refutations [[67]29]. Empirical evidence suggests that this sequence of extreme opposites is very common in molecular genetics [[68]29]. These corollaries consider each factor separately, but these factors often influence each other. For example, investigators working in fields where true effect sizes are perceived to be small may be more likely to perform large studies than investigators working in fields where true effect sizes are perceived to be large. Or prejudice may prevail in a hot scientific field, further undermining the predictive value of its research findings. Highly prejudiced stakeholders may even create a barrier that aborts efforts at obtaining and disseminating opposing results. Conversely, the fact that a field is hot or has strong invested interests may sometimes promote larger studies and improved standards of research, enhancing the predictive value of its research findings. Or massive discovery-oriented testing may result in such a large yield of significant relationships that investigators have enough to report and search further and thus refrain from data dredging and manipulation. Most Research Findings Are False for Most Research Designs and for Most Fields In the described framework, a PPV exceeding 50% is quite difficult to get. [69]Table 4 provides the results of simulations using the formulas developed for the influence of power, ratio of true to non-true relationships, and bias, for various types of situations that may be characteristic of specific study designs and settings. A finding from a well-conducted, adequately powered randomized controlled trial starting with a 50% pre-study chance that the intervention is effective is eventually true about 85% of the time. A fairly similar performance is expected of a confirmatory meta-analysis of good-quality randomized trials: potential bias probably increases, but power and pre-test chances are higher compared to a single randomized trial. Conversely, a meta-analytic finding from inconclusive studies where pooling is used to "correct" the low power of single studies, is probably false if R =< 1:3. Research findings from underpowered, early-phase clinical trials would be true about one in four times, or even less frequently if bias is present. Epidemiological studies of an exploratory nature perform even worse, especially when underpowered, but even well-powered epidemiological studies may have only a one in five chance being true, if R = 1:10. Finally, in discovery-oriented research with massive testing, where tested relationships exceed true ones 1,000-fold (e.g., 30,000 genes tested, of which 30 may be the true culprits) [[70]30,[71]31], PPV for each claimed relationship is extremely low, even with considerable standardization of laboratory and statistical methods, outcomes, and reporting thereof to minimize bias. [72][table_thumb.gif] [73]Table 4. PPV of Research Findings for Various Combinations of Power (1 - b), Ratio of True to Not-True Relationships (R), and Bias (u) Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias As shown, the majority of modern biomedical research is operating in areas with very low pre- and post-study probability for true findings. Let us suppose that in a research field there are no true findings at all to be discovered. History of science teaches us that scientific endeavor has often in the past wasted effort in fields with absolutely no yield of true scientific information, at least based on our current understanding. In such a "null field," one would ideally expect all observed effect sizes to vary by chance around the null in the absence of bias. The extent that observed findings deviate from what is expected by chance alone would be simply a pure measure of the prevailing bias. For example, let us suppose that no nutrients or dietary patterns are actually important determinants for the risk of developing a specific tumor. Let us also suppose that the scientific literature has examined 60 nutrients and claims all of them to be related to the risk of developing this tumor with relative risks in the range of 1.2 to 1.4 for the comparison of the upper to lower intake tertiles. Then the claimed effect sizes are simply measuring nothing else but the net bias that has been involved in the generation of this scientific literature. Claimed effect sizes are in fact the most accurate estimates of the net bias. It even follows that between "null fields," the fields that claim stronger effects (often with accompanying claims of medical or public health importance) are simply those that have sustained the worst biases. For fields with very low PPV, the few true relationships would not distort this overall picture much. Even if a few relationships are true, the shape of the distribution of the observed effects would still yield a clear measure of the biases involved in the field. This concept totally reverses the way we view scientific results. Traditionally, investigators have viewed large and highly significant effects with excitement, as signs of important discoveries. Too large and too highly significant effects may actually be more likely to be signs of large bias in most fields of modern research. They should lead investigators to careful critical thinking about what might have gone wrong with their data, analyses, and results. Of course, investigators working in any field are likely to resist accepting that the whole field in which they have spent their careers is a "null field." However, other lines of evidence, or advances in technology and experimentation, may lead eventually to the dismantling of a scientific field. Obtaining measures of the net bias in one field may also be useful for obtaining insight into what might be the range of bias operating in other fields where similar analytical methods, technologies, and conflicts may be operating. How Can We Improve the Situation? Is it unavoidable that most research findings are false, or can we improve the situation? A major problem is that it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what the truth is in any research question. In this regard, the pure "gold" standard is unattainable. However, there are several approaches to improve the post-study probability. Better powered evidence, e.g., large studies or low-bias meta-analyses, may help, as it comes closer to the unknown "gold" standard. However, large studies may still have biases and these should be acknowledged and avoided. Moreover, large-scale evidence is impossible to obtain for all of the millions and trillions of research questions posed in current research. Large-scale evidence should be targeted for research questions where the pre-study probability is already considerably high, so that a significant research finding will lead to a post-test probability that would be considered quite definitive. Large-scale evidence is also particularly indicated when it can test major concepts rather than narrow, specific questions. A negative finding can then refute not only a specific proposed claim, but a whole field or considerable portion thereof. Selecting the performance of large-scale studies based on narrow-minded criteria, such as the marketing promotion of a specific drug, is largely wasted research. Moreover, one should be cautious that extremely large studies may be more likely to find a formally statistical significant difference for a trivial effect that is not really meaningfully different from the null [[74]32-34]. Second, most research questions are addressed by many teams, and it is misleading to emphasize the statistically significant findings of any single team. What matters is the totality of the evidence. Diminishing bias through enhanced research standards and curtailing of prejudices may also help. However, this may require a change in scientific mentality that might be difficult to achieve. In some research designs, efforts may also be more successful with upfront registration of studies, e.g., randomized trials [[75]35]. Registration would pose a challenge for hypothesis-generating research. Some kind of registration or networking of data collections or investigators within fields may be more feasible than registration of each and every hypothesis-generating experiment. Regardless, even if we do not see a great deal of progress with registration of studies in other fields, the principles of developing and adhering to a protocol could be more widely borrowed from randomized controlled trials. Finally, instead of chasing statistical significance, we should improve our understanding of the range of R values--the pre-study odds--where research efforts operate [[76]10]. Before running an experiment, investigators should consider what they believe the chances are that they are testing a true rather than a non-true relationship. Speculated high R values may sometimes then be ascertained. As described above, whenever ethically acceptable, large studies with minimal bias should be performed on research findings that are considered relatively established, to see how often they are indeed confirmed. I suspect several established "classics" will fail the test [[77]36]. Nevertheless, most new discoveries will continue to stem from hypothesis-generating research with low or very low pre-study odds. We should then acknowledge that statistical significance testing in the report of a single study gives only a partial picture, without knowing how much testing has been done outside the report and in the relevant field at large. Despite a large statistical literature for multiple testing corrections [[78]37], usually it is impossible to decipher how much data dredging by the reporting authors or other research teams has preceded a reported research finding. Even if determining this were feasible, this would not inform us about the pre-study odds. Thus, it is unavoidable that one should make approximate assumptions on how many relationships are expected to be true among those probed across the relevant research fields and research designs. The wider field may yield some guidance for estimating this probability for the isolated research project. Experiences from biases detected in other neighboring fields would also be useful to draw upon. Even though these assumptions would be considerably subjective, they would still be very useful in interpreting research claims and putting them in context. Box 1. An Example: Science at Low Pre-Study Odds Let us assume that a team of investigators performs a whole genome association study to test whether any of 100,000 gene polymorphisms are associated with susceptibility to schizophrenia. Based on what we know about the extent of heritability of the disease, it is reasonable to expect that probably around ten gene polymorphisms among those tested would be truly associated with schizophrenia, with relatively similar odds ratios around 1.3 for the ten or so polymorphisms and with a fairly similar power to identify any of them. Then R = 10/100,000 = 10^ -4, and the pre-study probability for any polymorphism to be associated with schizophrenia is also R/(R + 1) = 10^ -4. Let us also suppose that the study has 60% power to find an association with an odds ratio of 1.3 at a = 0.05. Then it can be estimated that if a statistically significant association is found with the p-value barely crossing the 0.05 threshold, the post-study probability that this is true increases about 12-fold compared with the pre-study probability, but it is still only 12 ? 10^ -4. Now let us suppose that the investigators manipulate their design, analyses, and reporting so as to make more relationships cross the p = 0.05 threshold even though this would not have been crossed with a perfectly adhered to design and analysis and with perfect comprehensive reporting of the results, strictly according to the original study plan. Such manipulation could be done, for example, with serendipitous inclusion or exclusion of certain patients or controls, post hoc subgroup analyses, investigation of genetic contrasts that were not originally specified, changes in the disease or control definitions, and various combinations of selective or distorted reporting of the results. Commercially available "data mining" packages actually are proud of their ability to yield statistically significant results through data dredging. In the presence of bias with u = 0.10, the post-study probability that a research finding is true is only 4.4 ? 10^ -4. Furthermore, even in the absence of any bias, when ten independent research teams perform similar experiments around the world, if one of them finds a formally statistically significant association, the probability that the research finding is true is only 1.5 ? 10^ -4, hardly any higher than the probability we had before any of this extensive research was undertaken! References 1. Ioannidis JP, Haidich AB, Lau J (2001) Any casualties in the clash of randomised and observational evidence? BMJ 322: 879-880. [79]Find this article online 2. Lawlor DA, Davey Smith G, Kundu D, Bruckdorfer KR, Ebrahim S (2004) Those confounded vitamins: What can we learn from the differences between observational versus randomised trial evidence? Lancet 363: 1724-1727. [80]Find this article online 3. Vandenbroucke JP (2004) When are observational studies as credible as randomised trials? Lancet 363: 1728-1731. [81]Find this article online 4. 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http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0006-3444%281957%29044%5B0533%3AACODLS%5D2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PMED-0020124-B33&sitename=PLOSONLINE 111. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-citation-links&doi=1359-5229%282001%29006%5B0193%3ATCFP%5D2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PMED-0020124-B34&sitename=PLOSONLINE 112. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0028-4793%282004%29351%5B1250%3ACTRASF%5D2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PMED-0020124-B35&sitename=PLOSONLINE 113. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-citation-links&doi=0098-7484%282005%29294%5B0218%3ACAISEI%5D2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PMED-0020124-B36&sitename=PLOSONLINE 114. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-citation-links&doi=1520-5711%282003%29013%5B0675%3ACOMFET%5D2.0.CO%3B2&id=JOURNAL-PMED-0020124-B37&sitename=PLOSONLINE From checker at panix.com Wed Sep 14 01:30:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:30:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In Chimpanzee DNA, Signs of Y Chromosome's Evolution Message-ID: In Chimpanzee DNA, Signs of Y Chromosome's Evolution New York Times, 5.9.1 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/science/01chimp.html By [3]NICHOLAS WADE Scientists have decoded the chimp genome and compared it with that of humans, a major step toward defining what makes people human and developing a deep insight into the evolution of human sexual behavior. The comparison pinpoints the genetic differences that have arisen in the two species since they split from a common ancestor some six million years ago. The realization that chimpanzees hold a trove of information about human evolution and nature comes at a time when they and other great apes are under harsh pressures in their native habitat. Their populations are dwindling fast as forests are cut down and people shoot them for meat. They may soon disappear from the wild altogether, primatologists fear, except in the few sanctuaries that have been established. Chimpanzees and people possess almost identical sets of genes, so the genes that have changed down the human lineage should hold the key to what makes people human. Biologists suspect that only a handful of genes are responsible for the major changes that reshaped the apelike ancestor of both species into a human and that these genes should be identifiable by having evolved at a particularly rapid rate. The comparison of the human and chimp genomes, reported in today's issue of Nature, takes a first step in this direction but has not yet tracked down the critical handful of genes responsible for human evolution. One problem is the vast number of differences - some 40 million - in the sequence of DNA units in the chimp and human genomes. Most are caused by a random process known as genetic drift and have little effect. For now, their large numbers make it difficult for scientists to find the changes caused by natural selection. But another aspect of the comparison has yielded insights into a different question, the evolution of the human Y chromosome. The new finding implies that humans have led sexually virtuous lives for the last six million years, at least in comparison with the flamboyant promiscuity of chimpanzees. Some 300 million years ago, the Y chromosome used to carry the same 1,000 or so genes as its partner, the X chromosome. But because the Y cannot exchange DNA with the X and update its genes, in humans it has lost all but 16 of its X-related genes through mutation or failure to stay relevant to their owner's survival. However, the Y has gained some genes from other chromosomes because it is a safe haven for genes that benefit only men, since it never enters a woman's body. These added genes, not surprisingly, all have functions involved in making sperm. The scientific world's leading student of the Y chromosome, David Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., has been seeking to understand whether the Y will lose yet more genes and lapse into terminal decay, taking men with it. The idea of the Y's extinction "was so delicious from the perspective of gender politics," Dr. Page said. "But many of my colleagues became confused with this blending of gender politics with scientific predictions." Two years ago, he discovered a surprising mechanism that protects the sperm-making genes. Those genes exist in pairs, arranged so that when the DNA of the chromosome is folded back on itself, the two copies of the gene are aligned. If one copy of the gene has been hit by a mutation, the cell can repair it by correcting the mismatch in DNA units. The 16 X-related genes are present in only single copies. Dr. Page and his colleagues thought the chimpanzee genome might show how they were protected. To their surprise, they report in Nature, the protection was not there. The chimp Y chromosome has lost the use of 5 of its 16 X-related genes. The genes are there, but have been inactivated by mutation. The explanation, in his view, lies in the chimpanzee's high-spirited sexual behavior. Female chimps mate with all males around, so as to make each refrain from killing a child that might be his. The alpha male nonetheless scores most of the paternities, according to DNA tests. This must be because of sperm competition, primatologists believe - the alpha male produces more and better sperm, which outcompete those of rival males. This mating system puts such intense pressure on the sperm-making genes that any improved version will be favored by natural selection. All the other genes will be dragged along with it, Dr. Page believes, even if an X-related gene has been inactivated. If chimps have lost five of their X-related genes in the last six million years because of sperm competition, and humans have lost none, humans presumably had a much less promiscuous mating system. But experts who study fossil human remains believe that the human mating system of long-term bonds between a man and woman evolved only some 1.7 million years ago. Males in the human lineage became much smaller at this time, a sign of reduced competition. The new result implies that even before that time, during the first four million years after the chimp-human split, the human mating system did not rely on sperm competition. Dr. Page said his finding did not reach to the nature of the joint chimp-human ancestor, but that "it's a reasonable inference" that the ancestor might have been gorillalike rather than chimplike, as supposed by some primatologists. The gorilla mating system has no sperm competition because the silverback maintains exclusive access to his harem. Frans B. M. de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta said he agreed with fossil experts that the human pair bonding system probably evolved 1.7 million years ago but that the joint ancestor could have resembled a chimp, a bonobo, a gorilla, or something else entirely. The scientists who have compared the whole genomes of the two species say they have found 35 million sites on the aligned genomes where there are different DNA units, and another five million where units have been added or deleted. Each genome is about three billion units in length. The chimp genome was completed in draft form in December 2003 by the Broad Institute in Cambridge and Washington University in St. Louis. Statistical tests for accelerated evolution are not yet powerful enough to identify the major genes that have shaped humans. "We knew that this was only a beginning, but from a general standpoint we have captured the vast majority of the differences between human and chimps," said Robert H. Waterston of the University of Washington, Seattle, the senior author of the report. The genome of a third primate, the orangutan, is now in progress and will help identify the genes special to human evolution, he said. At the level of the whole animal, primatologists have uncovered copious similarities between the social behavior of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, some of which may eventually be linked to genes. But this rich vein of discovery may be choked off if the great apes can no longer be studied in the wild. "The situation is very bad, and our feeling is that by 2040 most of the habitat will be gone, except for those little regions we have set aside," Dr. de Waal said. From checker at panix.com Wed Sep 14 01:30:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:30:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There? Message-ID: But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/arts/design/29mons.html By [3]SARAH BOXER Is the super-intelligent, super-popular god known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster any match for the prophets of intelligent design? This month, the Kansas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to allow teaching alternatives to evolution like intelligent design (the theory that a smart being designed the universe). And President Bush and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee both gave the thumbs up to teaching intelligent design. Long before that, Bobby Henderson, a 25-year-old with a physics degree from Oregon State University, had a divine vision. An intelligent god, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, he said, "revealed himself to me in a dream." He posted a sketch on his Web site, [4]venganza.org, showing an airborne tangle of spaghetti and meatballs with two eyes looming over a mountain, trees and a stick man labeled "midgit." Prayers to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, his site says, end with "ramen," not "amen." Then, Mr. Henderson, who says on his site that he is desperately trying to avoid taking a job programming slot machines in Las Vegas, posted an open letter to the Kansas board. In perfect deadpan he wrote that although he agreed that science students should "hear multiple viewpoints" of how the universe came to be, he was worried that they would be hearing only one theory of intelligent design. After all, he noted, there are many such theories, including his own fervent belief that "the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster." He demanded equal time in the classroom and threatened a lawsuit. Soon he was flooded with e-mail messages. Ninety-five percent of those who wrote to him, he said on his Web site, were "in favor of teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in schools." Five percent suggested that he would be going to hell. Lawyers contacted him inquiring how serious he was about a lawsuit against the Kansas board. His answer: "Very." This month, the news media, both mainstream and digital, jumped in. The New Scientist magazine wrote an article. So did Die Welt. Two online encyclopedias, Uncyclopedia and Wikipedia, wrote entries on the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The Web site [5]Boingboing.net mounted a challenge: "We are willing to pay any individual $250,000 if they can produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster." Now, Mr. Henderson says on his Web site, "over 10 million people have been touched by His Noodly Appendage." But what does that mean? When push comes to shove, will the religion that has come to be known as Pastafarianism do what it was intended to do - prove that it is ridiculous to teach intelligent design as science? Mr. Henderson, who said in an e-mail message that his divine vision was induced by "a lack of sleep and a mounting disgust over the whole I.D. issue," has wit on his side. His god not only resembles human brains (proof, a fan writes, that "we were created in His image") but also looks like the kind of bacteria that proponents of intelligent design hold up as too complex to be the work of evolution alone. Two dozen academics have endorsed the pasta god. Three members of the Kansas board who already opposed teaching intelligent design wrote kind letters to Mr. Henderson. Dozens of people have posted their sightings of the deity (along with some hilarious pictures). One woman even wrote in to say that she had "conceived the spirit of our Divine Lord," the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while eating alone at the Olive Garden. "I heard singing, and tomato sauce rained from the sky, and I saw angel hair pasta flying about with little farfalle wings and playing harps," she wrote. "It was beautiful." The Spaghetti Monster, she went on, impregnated her and told her, "You shall name Him ... Prego ... and He shall bring in a new era of love." Parody is a lot of fun. And parody begets more parody, especially on the Internet. It's contagious. But has anyone ever converted to a parody religion? The history books show that parody isn't always the smartest strategy when it comes to persuasion. Remember Galileo? Some recent scholars say that it may not have been his science so much as his satire, "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems," that got everyone steamed up. Under threat of death, Galileo ended up recanting his view that the earth revolves around the sun, and had to wait 350 years for vindication. And yet the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster flourishes. It even has schisms. A rival faction, based on SPAM (Spaghetti & Pulsar Activating Meatballs), has formed. And there's bickering, Mr. Henderson said in an e-mail message, about whether the god is made of spaghetti or linguini. Those people, he noted, "give me a headache." References 3. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=SARAH%20BOXER&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=SARAH%20BOXER&inline=nyt-per 4. http://venganza.org/ 5. http://Boingboing.net/ From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 15 01:35:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:35:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Runner's World: How Many Calories Are You Really Burning? Message-ID: How Many Calories Are You Really Burning? http://www.runnersworld.com/article/printer_friendly/0,5046,s6-197-0-0-8402,00.html If you think running and walking both torch the same number of calories per mile, you better put down that cookie by: Amby Burfoot A few months ago I got into an argument with someone who's far smarter than I am. I should have known better, but you know how these things go. Needless to say, I lost the argument. Still, I learned something important in the process. David Swain is a bicyclist who likes to ride across the country every couple of years. Since I spend most of my time on my feet, I figured I could teach him something about walking and running. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to Swain's Ph.D. in exercise physiology, his position as director of the Wellness Institute and Research Center at Old Dominion University, and his work on the "Metabolic Calculations" appendix to the American College of Sports Medicine's Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription. Both Swain and I are interested in the fitness-health connection, which makes walking and running great subjects for discussion. To put it simply, they are far and away the leading forms of human movement. Every able-bodied human learns how to walk and run without any particular instruction. The same cannot be said of activities such as swimming, bicycling, skateboarding, and hitting a 3-iron. This is why walking and running are the best ways to get in shape, burn extra calories, and improve your health. Our argument began when I told Swain that both walking and running burn the same number of calories per mile. I was absolutely certain of this fact for two unassailable reasons: (1) I had read it a billion times; and (2) I had repeated it a billion times. Most runners have heard that running burns about 100 calories a mile. And since walking a mile requires you to move the same body weight over the same distance, walking should also burn about 100 calories a mile. Sir Isaac Newton said so. Swain was unimpressed by my junior-high physics. "When you perform a continuous exercise, you burn five calories for every liter of oxygen you consume," he said. "And running in general consumes a lot more oxygen than walking." What the Numbers Show I was still gathering my resources for a retort when a new article crossed my desk, and changed my cosmos. In "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running," published last December in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, a group of Syracuse University researchers measured the actual calorie burn of 12 men and 12 women while running and walking 1,600 meters (roughly a mile) on a treadmill. Result: The men burned an average of 124 calories while running, and just 88 while walking; the women burned 105 and 74. (The men burned more than the women because they weighed more.) Swain was right! The investigators at Syracuse didn't explain why their results differed from a simplistic interpretation of Newton's Laws of Motion, but I figured it out with help from Swain and Ray Moss, Ph.D., of Furman University. Running and walking aren't as comparable as I had imagined. When you walk, you keep your legs mostly straight, and your center of gravity rides along fairly smoothly on top of your legs. In running, we actually jump from one foot to the other. Each jump raises our center of gravity when we take off, and lowers it when we land, since we bend the knee to absorb the shock. This continual rise and fall of our weight requires a tremendous amount of Newtonian force (fighting gravity) on both takeoff and landing. Now that you understand why running burns 50 percent more calories per mile than walking, I hate to tell you that it's a mostly useless number. Sorry. We mislead ourselves when we talk about the total calorie burn (TCB) of exercise rather than the net calorie burn (NCB). To figure the NCB of any activity, you must subtract the resting metabolic calories your body would have burned, during the time of the workout, even if you had never gotten off the sofa. You rarely hear anyone talk about the NCB of workouts, because this is America, dammit, and we like our numbers big and bold. Subtraction is not a popular activity. Certainly not among the infomercial hucksters and weight-loss gurus who want to promote exercise schemes. "It's bizarre that you hear so much about the gross calorie burn instead of the net," says Swain. "It could keep people from realizing why they're having such a hard time losing weight." Thanks to the Syracuse researchers, we now know the relative NCB of running a mile in 9:30 versus walking the same mile in 19:00. Their male subjects burned 105 calories running, 52 walking; the women, 91 and 43. That is, running burns twice as many net calories per mile as walking. And since you can run two miles in the time it takes to walk one mile, running burns four times as many net calories per hour as walking. Run Slow or Walk Fast? I didn't come here to bash walking, however. Walking is an excellent form of exercise that builds aerobic fitness, strengthens bones, and burns lots of calories. A study released in early 2004 showed that the Amish take about six times as many steps per day as adults in most American communities, and have about 87-percent lower rates of obesity. In fact, I had read years ago that fast walking burns more calories than running at the same speed. Now was the time to test this hypothesis. Wearing a heart-rate monitor, I ran on a treadmill for two minutes at 3.0 mph (20 minutes per mile), and at 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, 5.0, and 5.5 mph (10:55 per mile). After a 10-minute rest to allow my heart rate to return to normal, I repeated the same thing walking. Here's my running vs. walking heart rate at the end of each two-minute stint: 3.0 (99/81), 3.5 (104/85), 4.0 (109/94), 4.5 (114/107), 5.0 (120/126), 5.5 (122/145). My conclusion: Running is harder than walking at paces slower than 12-minutes-per-mile. At faster paces, walking is harder than running. How to explain this? It's not easy, except to say that walking at very fast speeds forces your body to move in ways it wasn't designed to move. This creates a great deal of internal "friction" and inefficiency, which boosts heart rate, oxygen consumption, and calorie burn. So, as Jon Stewart might say, "Walking fast...good. Walking slow...uh, not so much." The bottom line: Running is a phenomenal calorie-burning exercise. In public-health terms--that is, in the fight against obesity--it's even more important that running is a low-cost, easy-to-do, year-round activity. Walking doesn't burn as many calories, but it remains a terrific exercise. As David Swain says, "The new research doesn't mean that walking burns any fewer calories than it used to. It just means that walkers might have to walk a little more, or eat a little less, to hit their weight goal." What's the Burn? A Calorie Calculator You can use the formulas below to determine your calorie-burn while running and walking. The "Net Calorie Burn" measures calories burned, minus basal metabolism. Scientists consider this the best way to evaluate the actual calorie-burn of any exercise. The walking formulas apply to speeds of 3 to 4 mph. At 5 mph and faster, walking burns more calories than running. Your Total Calorie Burn/Mile Your Net Calorie Burn/Mile Running .75 x your weight (in lbs.) .63 x your weight Walking .53 x your weight .30 x your weight Adapted from "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running," Medicine & Science in Sport & Exercise, Cameron et al, Dec. 2004. From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 15 01:35:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:35:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The American Prospect: The Right Fight Message-ID: The Right Fight http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10140 It took the Bush administration to bring a truce between the postmodern left and the scientific community. By [2]Chris Mooney Web Exclusive: 08.15.05 Circa 1996, many of the nation's intellectuals could be found chattering about the famous "Sokal hoax." Remember that? It all began when New York University physicist Alan Sokal submitted an [5]article to the left-wing academic journal Social Text that basically amounted to gibberish. It essentially argued that physical reality does not exist: It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality,'' no less than social "reality,'' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge," far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities . The article had a giveaway title: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Coming from a physicist, this should have raised serious red flags. Nevertheless, Social Text was stupid enough to publish the thing, and then Sokal [6]exposed the hoax in Lingua Franca magazine. On the one hand, this was a pretty mean trick to pull on poor Social Text. On the other, editors unable to distinguish real physics from spoof physics probably shouldn't be publishing articles arguing against physical reality. At any rate, Sokal claimed his objectives were thoroughly constructive. He wanted, he said, to shake the academic left out of its postmodern torpor and force its leading intellectuals to recognize that jargony articles and a general tone of relativism and subjectivism weren't helping anybody -- certainly not the oppressed people of the world. "For most of the past two centuries," Sokal wrote, "the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism . Theorizing about 'the social construction of reality' won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics, and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity." The Sokal hoax hit liberal academia like a thunderclap and prompted many a gloat from scientists. It went hand in hand with books like [7]Higher Superstition, an all-out attack on the perceived anti-science obscurantism of the academic left. For many pro-science liberals as well as many anti-campus conservatives, the notion slowly took hold that there were a lot of out-of-touch left-wing academics, nestled in secluded universities, who were conducting a campaign against scientific knowledge in obscure journals through excessive quotation of Foucault and Derrida. Even at the time, however, the quest to root out anti-science tendencies in academia seemed a strange deployment of resources. After all, the Gingrich Republicans had just taken over Congress, set out to radically slash science budgets, and preached denial about global warming. If there was a war on science afoot, university professors probably weren't the leading culprits. Certainly they weren't the most powerful ones. Indeed, despite some undeniable academic excesses, the "science wars" were always somewhat overblown. The sociological, historical, philosophical, and cultural study of science is a very worthwhile endeavor. If scholars engaged in such research sometimes take a stance of agnosticism toward the truth claims of science, perhaps that's simply their way of remaining detached from the subject they're studying. But it doesn't necessarily follow that these scholars are absolute relativists, to the extent of thinking that concepts like gravity are a mere matter of opinion. Social Text founding Editor Stanley Aronowitz has himself written that "[t]he critical theories of science do not refute the results of scientific discoveries since, say, the Copernican revolution or since Galileo's development of the telescope." When it comes to the field of science studies, meanwhile, much scholarly work in the area lends itself not to left-wing attacks on science but rather to defenses of science from forms of abuse prevalent on the political right. To cite just one example, leading science-studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff's 1991 book, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers, presents a potent critique of demands for unreasonable levels of scientific certainty before political decisions can be made, especially when it comes to protecting public health and the environment. So perhaps it's no surprise that the science wars of the 1990s have almost entirely subsided, and, as the scientific community has increasingly become embroiled with the Bush administration across a wide range of issues (from evolution to climate science), a very new zeitgeist has emerged. The summer issue of The American Scholar, a leading read among academic humanists and the literary set, provides a case in point. "Science matters," blazons the cover. Inside, Editor Robert Wilson explains to readers that although "the attack on science has always been our game the enemy of our enemy is most definitely not our friend." The right's attack on science, Wilson continues, "is an attack on reason, and it cannot be ignored, or excused, or allowed to go uncontested." With those words, I think it's safe to say that peace has officially been made in the science wars of the 1990s. And not a moment too soon. The evolution deniers (and other reality deniers) are gathering momentum. On matters like this, the university community -- composed of scientists and scholars alike -- really ought to be on the same page. Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for [8]Seed Magazine and a columnist for The American Prospect Online. His first book, [9]The Republican War on Science, will be published in September. His daily blog and other writings can be found at [10]www.chriscmooney.com. References 2. http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?name=View+Author§ion=root&id=174 3. http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10140 4. http://www.prospect.org/web/start-email.ww?id=10140 5. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html 6. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801857074/103-4828884-6127823?v=glance 8. http://www.seedmediagroup.com/ 9. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465046754/chriscmooneyc-20/103-4828884-6127823 10. http://chriscmooney.com/ From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 15 01:35:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:35:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nature Neuroscience: Book Review: The Ethical Brain Message-ID: Book Review: The Ethical Brain Nature Neuroscience 8, 1127 (2005) doi:10.1038/nn0905-1127 http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v8/n9/full/nn0905-1127.html Reviewed by: Charles Jennings Charles Jennings is at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Harvard University, 42 Church Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. charles_jennings at harvard.edu Michael Gazzaniga is a leader in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and since 2002 he has been a member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics. In a group dominated by conservatives, Gazzaniga is sometimes a dissenting voice, for example, in his support for embryonic stem cell research. His work on split-brain patients has profound implications for understanding the neural basis of self, and his presence on the council has brought a neurobiological perspective to many current bioethical controversies. The Ethical Brain is a wide-ranging, yet short and readable, summary of his views. Gazzaniga is a technological optimist, with little patience for the vague 'slippery slope' arguments that are often invoked by those who worry about where biotechnology is leading us. A deeper concern?articulated, for example, by fellow council member Michael Sandel?is that the desire to manipulate human nature is a form of hubris that threatens to undermine our appreciation for life's gifts. Gazzaniga, however, will have none of this. He welcomes the prospect of genetic enhancement, prolongation of lifespan, memory pills and so forth, arguing that humanity's innate moral sense will always guide us to use our powers wisely. I would like to think he is right, but I did not always find his arguments persuasive. A case in point is his discussion of sex selection. In some Asian countries, notably China, a cultural preference for boys, combined with easy access to methods for sex determination and selective abortion, has led to a large distortion of birth ratios. Gazzaniga acknowledges the potential concern, but because some US fertility clinics are now starting to discourage sex selection, he concludes that humans can be trusted to do the right thing in the long run. Maybe so, but I am less sanguine than Gazzaniga about this massive biotechnological experiment, and about the world's largest country soon having 15 million young men unable to find marriage partners. Gazzaniga's faith in human destiny is based in part on his belief in a biologically based universal morality, and his discussion of this idea is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. He argues that our sense of right and wrong has been shaped by evolution, and that there consequently exists a core of moral instincts that are shared across all societies. Religious traditions, in his view, represent attempts to explain and validate these biological instincts. Our brains have a strong tendency to form beliefs as a way of making sense of the world, and as Gazzaniga's own work has emphasized, these are often confabulated on the basis of limited evidence, yet refractory to change once formed. As an explanation of religious faith, this viewpoint is surely anathema to many conservatives, but Gazzaniga (who was raised Catholic) shows no animosity toward religion, which he regards as a natural aspect of human biology. Gazzaniga hopes that a deeper understanding of our shared moral instincts and their biological basis could help to overcome ideological conflicts between different belief systems. This is an appealing idea ('biology good, ideology bad'), even though only a chronic optimist could think that universal education in cognitive neuroscience will lead to world peace. A skeptic might counter that our brains come prewired not only for moral reasoning but also for prejudice, tribalism, warfare?less attractive but no less universal aspects of human societies. Moreover, the scientific evidence for a moral instinct is based largely on simple test scenarios in which decisions have immediate and visible consequences for another individual. Although people tend to show similar responses on such tests, most real-world dilemmas are not like this. It seems unlikely that divisive societal debates on questions such as abortion or capital punishment could ever be resolved by an appeal to biology. Perhaps the most pressing issue in neuroethics is how (if at all) neuroscience should inform the justice system, and Gazzaniga devotes several chapters to this topic. The central problem is this: if decisions are made by the brain, a physical object that obeys physical laws, in what sense can they be considered 'free'? But if people are constrained by their brains, how can we hold them responsible for their actions? This quickly leads to problems, of course; if defendants could be acquitted simply by arguing "my brain made me do it," the entire justice system would collapse. Gazzaniga's proposed solution is to argue that responsibility is "a social construct that exists in the rules of a society [but not] in the neuronal structures of the brain." Yet I did not find this argument convincing. The justice system, held together by moral rules and concepts of accountability, is an emergent property of large numbers of brains. It may be dauntingly complex, but that does not put it beyond the realm of scientific study. Indeed, social neuroscience is an emerging field of research, and neuroimagers can now examine the mechanisms underlying not only people's own moral decisions, but also their perceptions about the accountability of other individuals. Gazzaniga is understandably concerned about neuroscience being drawn into the courtroom, but he acknowledges that it is inevitable. The challenge for neuroethicists, then, will be to help lawyers sort the wheat from the chaff, to recognize valid arguments for exculpation or leniency, while rejecting the abuses that will surely become increasingly tempting to defense counsels as brain science continues to advance. The Ethical Brain is not the last word on these difficult issues, but it does provide a clear and useful introduction to the field. Gazzaniga's fans include Tom Wolfe, who gives the book a cameo role in his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, where it appears as recommended reading for a college course. In this case life would do well to imitate art?The Ethical Brain would be an excellent introduction for anyone who is interested in learning more about 'the next big thing' in bioethics. From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 15 01:35:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:35:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Anthropic Reasoning Message-ID: Cosmology: On Anthropic Reasoning http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050909-1.htm The following points are made by M. Livio and M.J. Rees (Science 2005 309:1022): 1) Does extraterrestrial intelligent life exist? The fact that we can even ask this question relies on an important truth: The properties of our Universe have allowed complexity (of the type that characterizes humans) to emerge. Obviously, the biological details of humans and their emergence depend on contingent features of Earth and its history. However, some requirements would seem generic for any form of life: galaxies, stars, and (probably) planets had to form; nucleosynthesis in stars had to give rise to atoms such as carbon, oxygen, and iron; and these atoms had to be in a stable environment where they could combine to form the molecules of life. 2) We can imagine universes where the constants of physics and cosmology have different values. Many such "counterfactual" universes would not have allowed the chain of processes that could have led to any kind of advanced life. For instance, even a universe with the same physical laws and the same values of all physical constants but one -- a cosmological constant Lambda (the "pressure" of the physical vacuum) higher by more than an order of magnitude -- would have expanded so fast that no galaxies could have formed. Other properties that appear to have been crucial for the emergence of complexity are (i) the presence of baryons (particles such as protons and neutrons); (ii) the fact that the Universe is not infinitely smooth, allowing for the formation of structure (quantified as the amplitude of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, Q); and (iii) a gravitational force that is weaker by a factor of nearly 10^(40) than the microphysical forces that act within atoms and molecules -- were gravity not so weak, there would not be such a large difference between the atomic and the cosmic scales of mass, length, and time. 3) A key challenge confronting 21st-century physics is to decide which of these dimensionless parameters such as Q and Lambda are truly fundamental -- in the sense of being explicable within the framework of an ultimate, unified theory -- and which are merely accidental. The possibility that some are accidental has certainly become viable in the context of the "eternal inflation" scenario [1-3], where there are an infinity of separate "big bangs" within an exponentially expanding substratum. Some versions of string theory allow a huge variety of vacua, each characterized by different values of (or even different dimensionality) [4]. Both these concepts entail the existence of a vast ensemble of pocket universes -- a "multiverse." If some physical constants are not fundamental, then they may take different values in different members of the ensemble. Consequently, some pocket universes may not allow complexity or intelligent life to evolve within them. Humans would clearly have to find themselves in a pocket universe that is "biophilic." Some otherwise puzzling features of our Universe may then simply be the result of the epoch in which we exist and can observe. In other words, the values of the accidental constants would have to be within the ranges that would have allowed intelligent life to develop. The process of delineating and investigating the consequences of these biophilic domains is what has become known as "anthropic reasoning".[5] References (abridged): 1. P. J. Steinhardt, in The Very Early Universe, G. W. Gibbons, S. Hawking, S. T. C. Siklos, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1983), p. 251 2. A. Vilenkin, Phys. Rev. D 27, 2848 (1983) 3. A. D. Linde, Mod. Phys. Lett. A 1, 81 (1986) 4. S. Kachru, R. Kallosh, A. Linde, S. P. Trivedi, Phys. Rev. D 68, 046005 (2003) 5. A. G. Riess et al., Astron. J. 116, 1009 (1998) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: COSMOLOGY: ON THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE The following points are made by Lawrence M. Krauss (Nature 2003 423:230): 1) The recognition, in the light of observational data, that Einstein's infamous cosmological constant might not be zero has changed almost everything about the way we think about the Universe, from reconsidering its origin to re-evaluating its ultimate future. But perhaps the most significant change in cosmological thinking involves a new willingness to discuss what used to be an idea that was not normally mentioned in polite company: the "anthropic principle". 2) This idea suggests that the precise values of various fundamental parameters describing our Universe might be understood only as a consequence of the fact that we exist to measure them. To paraphrase the cosmologist Andrei Linde, "If the Universe were populated everywhere by intelligent fish, they might wonder why it was full of water. Well, if it weren't, they wouldn't be around to observe it!". 3) The reason that physicists have been so reluctant to consider the anthropic principle seriously is that it goes against the grain of current attitudes. Most physicists have hoped that an ultimate physical explanation of reality would explain why the Universe must look precisely the way it does, rather than why it more often than not would not. Into the fray has entered James Bjorken. In a paper (Phys. Rev. D 2003 67:043508) entitled "Cosmology and the Standard Model", Bjorken proposes a new "scaling" approach, based on well-established notions in particle theory, for exploring how anthropically viable a small cosmological constant might be. 4) The realization that an extremely small, but non-zero, cosmological constant might exist has changed the interest of physicists in anthropic explanations of nature precisely because the value it seems to take is otherwise so inexplicable. In 1996, physicist Steven Weinberg and his colleagues Hugo Martel and Paul Shapiro argued that if the laws of physics allow different universes to exist with a cosmological constant chosen from an underlying probability distribution, then galaxies, stars and presumably astronomers might not ultimately evolve unless the cosmological constant were not much larger than the one we apparently observe today. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: The "cosmological constant" is a mathematical term introduced by Einstein into the equations of general relativity, the purpose to obtain a solution of the equations corresponding to a "static universe". The term describes a pressure (if positive) or a tension (if negative) which can cause the Universe to expand or contract even in the absence of any matter ("vacuum energy"). When the expansion of the Universe was discovered, Einstein apparently began to regard the introduction of this term as a mistake, and he described the cosmological constant as the "greatest mistake of my life". But the term has reappeared as the proposed source of apparent accelerated cosmic expansion. -------------------------------- Related Material: ON QUINTESSENCE AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT The following points are made by P.J.E. Peebles (Nature 1999 398:25): 1) Contrary to expectations, the evidence is that the Universe is expanding at approximately twice the velocity required to overcome the gravitational pull of all the matter the Universe contains. The implication of this is that in the past the greater density of mass in the Universe gravitationally slowed the expansion, while in the future the expansion rate will be close to constant or perhaps increasing under the influence of a new type of matter that some call "quintessence". 2) Quintessence began as Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda. It has negative gravitational mass: its gravity pushes things apart. 3) Particle physicists later adopted Einstein's Lambda as a good model for the gravitational effect of the active vacuum of quantum physics, although the idea is at odds with the small value of Lambda indicated by cosmology. 4) Theoretical cosmologists have noted that as the Universe expands and cools, Lambda tends to decrease. As the Universe cools, symmetries among forces are broken, particles acquire masses, and these processes tend to release an analogue of latent heat. The vacuum energy density accordingly decreases, and with it the value of Lambda. Perhaps an enormous Lambda drove an early rapid expansion that smoothed the primeval chaos to make the near uniform Universe we see today, with a decrease in Lambda over time to its current value. This is the cosmological inflation concept. 5) The author suggests that the recent great advances in detectors, telescopes, and observatories on the ground and in space have given us a rough picture of what happened as our Universe evolved from a dense, hot, and perhaps quite simple early state to its present complexity. Observations in progress are filling in the details, and that in turn is driving intense debate on how the behavior of our Universe can be understood within fundamental physics. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: Active vacuum of quantum physics: This refers to the idea that the vacuum state in quantum mechanics has a zero-point energy (minimum energy) which gives rise to vacuum fluctuations, so the vacuum state does not mean a state of nothing, but is instead an active state. If a theory or process does not change when certain operations are performed on it, the theory or process is said to possess a symmetry with respect to those operations. For example, a circle remains unchanged under rotation or reflection, and a circle therefore has rotational and reflection symmetry. The term "symmetry breaking" refers to the deviation from exact symmetry exhibited by many physical systems, and in general, symmetry breaking encompasses both "explicit" symmetry breaking and "spontaneous" symmetry breaking. Explicit symmetry breaking is a phenomenon in which a system is not quite, but almost, the same for two configurations related by exact symmetry. Spontaneous symmetry breaking refers to a situation in which the solution of a set of physical equations fails to exhibit a symmetry possessed by the equations themselves. In general, the term "latent heat" refers to the quantity of heat absorbed or released when a substance changes its physical phase (e.g., solid to liquid) at constant temperature. The inflationary model, first proposed by Alan Guth in 1980, proposes that quantum fluctuations in the time period 10^(-35) to 10^(-32) seconds after time zero were quickly amplified into large density variations during the "inflationary" 10^(50) expansion of the Universe in that time frame. From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 15 01:36:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:36:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Human-Non-Human Primate Neural Grafting Message-ID: Science Policy: On Human-Non-Human Primate Neural Grafting http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050909-6.htm The following points are made by M. Greene et al (Science 2005 309:385): 1) If human neural stem cells were implanted into the brains of other primates what might this do to the mind of the recipient? Could such grafting teach us anything of value for treatment of neurological injury and disease? Could we change the capacities of the engrafted animal in a way that leads us to reexamine its moral status? These questions have gained significance since publication of research involving grafting human neural stem cells into the brains of fetal monkeys [1]. In 2004, the authors formed a multidisciplinary working group; two plenary meetings over 12 months provide the basis for this report. 2) There is considerable controversy (reflected within the discussion group) over the likely value of interspecies stem cell work for progress toward therapies [2]. We cannot graft human neural stem cells into human beings solely for experimental purposes, even if they will lead to human therapies. Group members arguing for the value of research on human cells in non-human primates (NHPs) pointed out that because the aim is to learn about human neural stem cells it makes most sense to use human lines. The fact that available NHP lines are few and poorly characterized [3] is an additional reason to use human lines. Another consideration is the need to assess candidate human cell lines for viability, potential to differentiate, and safety with regard to such possibilities as tumor formation. NHPs may be appropriate for in vivo screening. 3) Skeptics argued that differences between humans and NHPs could render results uninterpretable and that the preferred path for many questions is to study NHP neural stem cells in NHPs. Assessments of the scientific merit of the research must form and develop along with the field itself. 4) The authors unanimously rejected ethical objections grounded on unnaturalness or crossing species boundaries [4]. Whether it is possible to draw a meaningful distinction between the natural and the unnatural is a matter of dispute. However, stipulating that research is "unnatural" says nothing about its ethics. Much of modern medical practice involves tools, materials, and behaviors that cannot be found in nature but are not unethical as a consequence 5) Another concern is that human to non-human primate (H-NHP) neural grafting is wrong because it transgresses species boundaries [5]. However, the notion that there are fixed species boundaries is not well supported in science or philosophy. Moreover, human-nonhuman chimerism has already occurred through xenografting. For example, the safety and efficacy of engrafting fetal pig cells has been studied in people with Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease without moral objection. Indeed, some have suggested that porcine sources may be less morally contentious than the use of human fetal tissue. Merely because something has been done does not prove it right. However, the authors see no new ethical or regulatory issues regarding chimeras themselves. 6) The central challenge is whether introducing human cells into NHP brains raises questions about moral status. A variety of reasons have been given for according different moral standing to humans and NHPs. In the Abrahamic traditions, humans are set apart by God as morally special and are given stewardship over other forms of life (Genesis 1:26-28). For Kantians, human capacities for rationality and autonomy demand that we be treated as ends in ourselves. Mill finds, in the richness of human mental life, an especially fecund source of utility. Singer, although strongly defending equal consideration of nonhuman interests, argues that self-awareness affects the ethically allowable treatment of a creature by changing the kinds of interests it can have. 7) In conclusion: The authors support the National Academy's recommendation that H-NHP neural grafting experiments be subject to special review. The authors agree that such review should complement, not replace, current review by animal-use panels and institutional review boards. The authors further recommend that experiments involving H-NHP neural grafting be required, wherever possible, to look for and report changes in cognitive function. Explicit data collection on cognition and behavior will help to ensure that ethical guidelines can be developed appropriately as the field advances. References (abridged): 1. V. Ourednik et al., Science 293, 1820 (2001) 2. J. S. Robert, Bioessays 26, 1005 (2004) 3. K.-Y. F. Pau, D. Wolf, Reprod. Biol. Endocrinol. 2, 41 (2004) 4. P. Karpowicz, C. B. Cohen, D. van der Kooy, Nat.Med. 10, 331 (2004) 5. F. Fukuyama, Washington Post, 15 February 2004, p. B04 Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: NEUROBIOLOGY: ON NEURAL STEM CELL INTERACTIONS The following points are made by A.E. Wurmser et al (Science 2004 304:1253): 1) The ability of stem cells to both self-renew and differentiate into many different cell types enables these versatile cells to generate and repair tissues and organs. Yet studies of the fruit fly Drosophila and of mammalian skin, intestine, bone marrow, and brain reveal that these inherent stem cell features are tightly regulated by the cells and proteins that constitute the extracellular environment (or "niche") that stem cells inhabit (1). For example, Shen et al. (2) have demonstrated that endothelial cells (ECs) that are enriched in the niche occupied by neural stem cells (NSCs) regulate NSC proliferation and induce these stem cells to become neurons in vitro. 2) It is well established that NSCs are not randomly distributed throughout the brain, but rather are concentrated around blood vessels (3-5). This location places NSCs in close proximity to the ECs that line blood vessels, facilitating communication between these two cell types (3-5). To test the degree of intercellular communication between NSCs and ECs, Shen et al (1) cultured NSCs and monitored changes in their behavior when ECs were brought into close proximity (2). These investigators maintained cultures of mouse embryonic NSCs (derived from the cerebral cortex of 10- to 11-day-old mouse embryos) by adding fibroblast growth factor-2. Under these conditions, NSCs proliferated slowly and many of them exited the cell cycle, choosing to differentiate instead (2). However, when NSCs were cocultured with ECs their proliferation rate doubled, resulting in the formation of large interconnected sheets of undifferentiated cells. 3) One aspect of the Shen et al strategy was to introduce ECs into NSC cultures by means of transwell inserts. The pores of the transwells were too small to allow cell-cell contact between NSCs and ECs, but were large enough to enable signaling factors secreted by ECs to diffuse into the NSC cultures. Remarkably, the removal of transwells containing ECs triggered the coordinated differentiation of proliferating NSCs into neurons. Only 9% of NSCs unexposed to ECs expressed mature neuronal markers, compared with 31 to 64% of NSCs exposed to the EC transwells. This trend also was observed with cultured NSCs derived from the subventricular zone of adult mouse brain (2). Thus, signaling molecules secreted by ECs induced a shift in the mixed population of proliferating and differentiating NSCs, pushing them toward self-renewal while simultaneously priming them for the production of neurons. References (abridged): 1. E. Fuchs et al., Cell 116, 769 (2004) 2. Q. Shen et al., Science 304, 1338 (2004) 3. T. D. Palmer et al., J. Comp. Neurol. 425, 479 (2000) 4. A. Capela, S. Temple, Neuron 35, 865 (2002) 5. A. Louissaint et al., Neuron 34, 945 ( 2002) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: NEUROBIOLOGY: ON HUMAN NEURAL STEM CELLS The following points are made by Pasko Rakic (Nature 2004 427:685): 1) Neural stem cells are a focus of strong interest because of the possibility that they could be used to replace neurons that have been damaged or lost -- perhaps as a result of injury such as trauma or stroke, or through neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease. These stem cells can give rise to neurons and their supporting cells (glia) and it is hoped that something akin to neural stem cells in the adult human brain could be stimulated to generate replacement neurons. 2) Non-mammalian vertebrates, such as the salamander, can regenerate large portions of their brain and spinal cord, but humans have evidently lost this capacity during evolution. Therefore, most research on neural stem cells is carried out on mammals such as rodents, which are genetically closer to humans. However, although mammalian genomes may be similar, this similarity masks vast species differences in the way the brain is organized and in its capacity for regeneration and susceptibility to environmental insults. The failure of brain repair in clinical trials based on the promising results seen after the use of similar procedures in rodents is sobering testimony to the importance of such species-specific distinctions. 3) Human neural stem cells behave differently from their rodent equivalents in culture(1), but direct study of human brain tissue by Sanai et al(2) demonstrates additional significant and clinically relevant species-specific differences. A large number of postmortem and biopsy samples reveal two basic findings. First, neural stem cells that can potentially give rise to neurons, as well as to two types of glial cell (astrocytes and oligodendrocytes), are situated in a region of the forebrain known as the subventricular zone. Second, a pathway known as the rostral migratory stream -- which in adult rodents contains neurons that migrate from the subventricular zone to the brain region concerned with sensing smell -- is absent in humans. 4) In adult mammals, including humans, the subventricular zone (more commonly known as the subependymal zone[3-5]) contains cells that have the characteristics of glial cells and that can generate neuronal cells in culture. Sanai et al(2) show that in adult humans these "glial progenitor cells" form a prominent layer, or ribbon, that is restricted to a specific region in the brain that lines the lateral cerebral ventricle. This region is also present in non-human primates, but it is thinner and less well delineated than in humans(4). References (abridged): 1. Ginis, I. & Rao, M. S. Exp. Neurol. 184, 61-77 (2003) 2. Sanai, N. et al. Nature 427, 740-744 (2004) 3. Lewis, P. D. Nature 217, 974-975 (1968) 4. McDermott, K. W. & Lantos, P. L. Brain Res. Dev. Brain Res. 57, 269-277 (1990) 5. Weickert, C. S. et al. J. Comp. Neurol. 423, 359-372 (2000) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 15 01:36:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:36:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] U.S. Dept. of State: How to Identify Misinformation Message-ID: How to Identify Misinformation http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jul/27-595713.html How can a journalist or a news consumer tell if a story is true or false? There are no exact rules, but the following clues can help indicate if a story or allegation is true. * Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory? * Does the story fit the pattern of an "urban legend?" * Does the story contain a shocking revelation about a highly controversial issue? * Is the source trustworthy? * What does further research tell you? Does the story fit the pattern of a conspiracy theory? Does the story claim that vast, powerful, evil forces are secretly manipulating events? If so, this fits the profile of a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are rarely true, even though they have great appeal and are often widely believed. In reality, events usually have much less exciting explanations. The U.S. military or intelligence community is a favorite villain in many conspiracy theories. For example, the Soviet disinformation apparatus regularly blamed the U.S. military or intelligence community for a variety of natural disasters as well as political events. In March 1992, then-Russian foreign intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov admitted that the disinformation service of the Soviet KGB intelligence service had concocted the false story that the AIDS virus had been created in a US military laboratory as a biological weapon. When AIDS was first discovered, no one knew how this horrifying new disease had arisen, although scientists have now used DNA analysis to determine that "all HIV-1 strains known to infect man" are closely related to a simian immunodeficiency virus found in a western equatorial African chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes troglodytes. But the Soviets used widespread suspicions about the U.S. military to blame it for AIDS. ([1]More details on this.) In his book 9/11: The Big Lie, French author Thierry Meyssan falsely claimed that no plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Instead, he claimed that the building had been struck by a cruise missile fired by elements within the U.S. government. No such vast conspiracy existed and many eyewitness accounts and evidence gathered on the scene confirmed that the hijacked airliner had struck the building. But, nevertheless, the book was a best-seller in France and has been translated into 19 languages, demonstrating the power that even the most groundless conspiracy theories can have. ([2]More details on 9/11: The Big Lie.) Does the story fit the pattern of an "urban legend?" Is the story startlingly good, bad, amazing, horrifying, or otherwise seemingly "too good" or "too terrible" to be true? If so, it may be an "urban legend." Urban legends, which often circulate by word of mouth, e-mail, or the Internet, are false claims that are widely believed because they put a common fear, hope, suspicion, or other powerful emotion into story form. For example, after the September 11 attacks, a story arose that someone had survived the World Trade Center collapse by "surfing" a piece of building debris from the 82^nd floor to the ground. Of course, no one could survive such a fall, but many initially believed this story, out of desperate hope that some people trapped in the towers miraculously survived their collapse. ([3]More details on this.) Another September 11 urban legend is that an undamaged Bible was found in the midst of the crash site at the Pentagon. In reality, it was a dictionary. But, if a Bible had survived unscathed, that would have seemed much more significant, and been seen by many as a sign of divine intervention. ([4]More details on this.) Since 1987, the false story that Americans or others are kidnapping or adopting children in order to use them in organ transplants has been widely believed. There is absolutely no evidence that any such event has ever occurred, but such allegations have won the most prestigious journalism prizes in France in 1995 and Spain in 1996. ([5]More details on this.) This urban legend is based on fears about both organ transplantation and international adoptions, both of which were relatively new practices in the 1980s. As advances in medical science made organ transplantation more widespread, unfounded fears began to spread that people would be murdered for their organs. At the same time, there were also unfounded fears about the fate of infants adopted by foreigners and taken far from their home countries. The so-called "baby parts" rumor combined both these fears in story form, which gave it great credibility even though there was absolutely no evidence for the allegation. In late 2004, a reporter for Saudi Arabia's Al Watan newspaper repeated a version of the organ trafficking urban legend, falsely claiming that U.S. forces in Iraq were harvesting organs from dead or wounded Iraqis for sale in the United States. This shows how the details of urban legends can change, to fit different circumstances. (More details in [6]English and [7]Arabic.) Highly controversial issues AIDS, organ transplantation, international adoption, and the September 11 attacks are all new, frightening or, in some ways, discomforting topics. Such highly controversial issues are natural candidates for the rise of false rumors, unwarranted fears and suspicions. Another example of a highly controversial issue is depleted uranium, a relatively new armor-piercing substance that was used by the U.S. military for the first time during the 1991 Gulf War. There are many exaggerated fears about depleted uranium because people associate it with weapons-grade uranium or fuel-grade uranium, which are much more dangerous substances. When most people hear the word uranium, a number of strongly held associations spring to mind, including the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, nuclear reactors, radiation illness, cancer, and birth defects. Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples' minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world "uranium." For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is. (More details on depleted uranium in [8]English and [9]Arabic.) Another highly controversial issue is that of forbidden weapons, such as chemical or biological weapons. The United States is regularly, and falsely, accused of using these weapons. (More details on this in [10]English and [11]Arabic.) In the same way, many other highly controversial issues are naturally prone to misunderstanding and false rumors. Any highly controversial issue or taboo behavior is ripe material for false rumors and urban legends. Consider the source Certain websites, publications, and individuals are known for spreading false stories, including: * [12]Aljazeera.com, a deceptive, look-alike website that has sought to fool people into thinking it is run by the Qatari satellite television station Al Jazeera * [13]Jihad Unspun, a website run by a Canadian woman who converted to Islam after the September 11 attacks when she became convinced that Osama bin Laden was right * [14]Islam Memo (Mafkarat-al-Islam), which spreads a great deal of disinformation about Iraq. (More details on Islam Memo and Jihad Unspun in [15]English and [16]Arabic.) There are many conspiracy theory websites, which contain a great deal of unreliable information. Examples include: * [17]Rense.com * Australian "private investigator" [18]Joe Vialls, who died in 2005 * [19]Conspiracy Planet Extremist groups, such as splinter communist parties, often publish disinformation. This can be especially difficult to identify if the false allegations are published by front groups. Front groups purport to be independent, non-partisan organizations but actually controlled by political parties or groups. Some examples of front groups are: * The [20]International Action Center, which is a front group for a splinter communist party called the [21]Workers World Party * The [22]Free Arab Voice, a website that serves as a front for Arab communist Muhammad Abu Nasr and his colleagues. (More details on Muhammad Abu Nasr in [23]English or [24]Arabic.) Research the allegations The only way to determine whether an allegation is true or false is to research it as thoroughly as possible. Of course, this may not always be possible given publication deadlines and time pressures, but there is no substitute for thorough research, going back to the original sources. Using the Internet, many allegations can be fairly thoroughly researched in a matter of hours. For example, in July 2005, the counter-misinformation team researched the allegation that U.S. soldiers in Iraq had killed innocent Iraqi boys playing football and then "planted" rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) next to them, to make it appear that they were insurgents. Using a variety of search terms in "Google," a researcher was able to find the [25]article and photographs upon which the allegations were based. Because weapons did not appear in the initial photographs, but did appear in later photographs, some observers believed this was evidence that the weapons had been planted and that the boys who had been killed were not armed insurgents. The researcher was also able to find [26]weblog entries (numbered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the commanding officer of the platoon that was involved in the incident and another member of his platoon. The weblog entries made it clear that: * the teenaged Iraqi boys were armed insurgents; * after the firefight between U.S. troops and the insurgents was over, the dead, wounded and captured insurgents were initially photographed separated from their weapons because the first priority was to make sure that it was impossible for any of the surviving insurgents to fire them again; * following medical treatment for the wounded insurgents, they were photographed with the captured weapons displayed, in line with Iraqi government requirements; * the insurgents were hiding in a dense palm grove, where visibility was limited to 20 meters, not a likely place for a football game, and they were seen carrying the RPGs on their shoulders. Thus, an hour or two of research on the Internet was sufficient to establish that the suspicions of the bloggers that the weapons had been planted on innocent Iraqi boys playing football were unfounded. Finally, if the counter-misinformation team can be of help, ask us. We can't respond to all requests for information, but if a request is reasonable and we have the time, we will do our best to provide accurate, authoritative information. Created: 27 Jul 2005 Updated: 27 Jul 2005 References 1. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-777030.html 2. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jun/28-581634.html 3. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/survivor.htm 4. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bible.htm 5. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive_Index/The_Baby_Parts_Myth.html 6. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/14-475342.html 7. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-191292.html 8. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-107572.html 9. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-329204.html 10. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Mar/11-723838.html 11. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-315186.html 12. http://aljazeera.com/ 13. http://www.jihadunspun.net/ 14. http://www.islammemo.cc/ 15. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Apr/08-205989.html 16. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-401696.html 17. http://www.rense.com/ 18. http://www.vialls.com/ 19. http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/ 20. http://www.iacenter.org/ 21. http://www.workersworld.net/wwp 22. http://www.freearabvoice.org/ 23. http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Apr/08-205989.html 24. http://usinfo.state.gov/ar/Archive/2005/May/13-401696.html 25. http://www.nogw.com/download/2005_plant_weapons.pdf 26. http://www.roadstoiraq.com/index.php?p=361 From checker at panix.com Thu Sep 15 01:37:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:37:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Origin of Invasive Species Message-ID: The Origin of Invasive Species New York Times, 5.6.12 (note date) http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=9A0DE5D71638F931A25755C0A9639C8B63 By Richard Conniff OUT OF EDEN An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion. By Alan Burdick. Illustrated. 324 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25. FOR the past few years, I have been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a 10-foot-tall alien -- growing thick as toothpicks in a box, just outside my door. Late in summer, I thrash through the marsh to coat the blades of the phragmites reed with herbicide. (Some environmentalists endorse this; others abhor it.) In midwinter, I attach a rope to each end of a board and use it to trample down the dead stalks. (Politically correct, but Bruegelesque, or possibly Chaplinesque.) Sometimes, when I lurch out of the grass, sweating, muddy and in a spirit of high ecological dudgeon, my dog, Maggie, backs away growling. (''Who is this and what is he doing in my territory?'') Phragmites, a handsome European reed with a feathery crimson plume, got dumped on the coast of New England in heaps of 19th-century ship ballast. It has choked almost every wetland east of the Mississippi. But in my little pocket of coastal marsh, I have opened up the landscape again and made room for the native grasses and cattails I remember from childhood. I have also made room for nesting mute swans, another invader. (Should I coddle the eggs and stop them from reproducing? Please do not advise.) I am also acutely aware that if I lay off for a season or two, the phragmites will come booming back. The natural world has gone wildly astray, through the kindness of human beings, and there isn't any good way to put it right again. Should we even bother trying? It turns out there are lots of people who are obsessed, dismayed and perhaps also occasionally made demented by invasive species. Often, they fight noble battles they know they are doomed to lose. In ''Out of Eden,'' the science writer Alan Burdick travels the world to chronicle their intriguing, undervalued lives, and those of the species that trouble them. ''The greatest threat to biological diversity is no longer just bulldozers or pesticides but, in a sense, nature itself,'' Burdick writes. Since its accidental introduction to Guam, the Australian brown tree snake has extirpated nine native bird species, sending three to extinction. One of the last remaining pairs of another species hangs on only because the nest is now barricaded behind electric wires, with branches pruned back to keep snakes from creeping in from nearby trees: ''The couple looked trapped in its safety, like those people in Manhattan who secure their apartments with eight locks on the front door.'' Alas, the couple also suffered from ''sexual disharmony,'' and small wonder: one night, researchers with traps caught seven snakes at the door. Because of its knack for hitchhiking in freight containers and aircraft landing gear, the brown tree snake may yet set up shop in Hawaii or San Diego or even South Florida. Thousands of other invasive species, many of them of more benign or even beautiful varieties, already surround us. They herald an era of ''creeping sameness,'' called by one scientist ''the Homogecene.'' Tourists freshly escaped from the howling depths of winter may delight in the birdsong and the tropical vegetation in Honolulu. But everything around them, another scientist tells Burdick, ''is introduced'': ''Not a single plant, none of the lowland birds in Hawaii are native.'' We are turning the world into ''a McDonald's ecosystem,'' with the same species living roughly the same way everywhere. Burdick is best describing the minute details of this change: how does the onslaught of new species affect Hawaii's native forests? The answer comes partly from studying fruit fly species and obscure soil dwellers like springtails and mites that also date back as far as the forests. We meet Hawaiian drosophilists who ritually stopper specimen vials with torn aloha shirts, to distinguish themselves from mainlanders who still use telltale cotton balls. We encounter a parasitologist who ''would be more comfortable . . . doing pretty much anything other than talking. If he were a bird, he might be a night heron . . . liable to stand there blinking in the illumination of a flashlight, then dart away.'' We go underground with a burly entomologist, Frank Howarth, who listens to the distinctive love songs sent out by different native species of the tiny insects called plant hoppers, which dwell in caves and lava tubes. (Howarth once discovered a new species on the property of Loretta Lynn and named it Oliarus lorettae, after her.) The plant hoppers tap out their songs along the rootlets of a native tree; Burdick likens them to human lovers making a crosstown phone call. Unfortunately, that tree is being supplanted by an invasive tree species with different roots, resulting in something like a subterranean silent spring: ''The singers are growing mute,'' Burdick writes, ''each one marooned on the island of itself, unable to communicate, to mate, to sustain its end of evolutionary conversation.'' A KIND of unnatural selection at the hands of introduced species is apparently commonplace, with the luckier native species managing to survive through accelerated evolution. In 1968, before introduced mosquitoes caused a malaria pandemic, some native birds in Hawaii used to sleep any which way, leaving themselves exposed to mosquito bites. By 1986, those birds had been weeded out, leaving only birds that slept with their legs tucked under their bodies, their bills and faces buried in the fluffed feathers on their backs. In Australia, toxic cane toads introduced from the Americas have favored the proliferation of snakes with mouths too small to swallow them. Burdick tries to make the case that nature is adaptable enough to handle the changes in our topsy-turvy world. When scientists figure out how to isolate the problem and interpret all the variables, it appears, for instance, that even having 500-pound feral pigs rooting through the forests of Hawaii may not do the permanent damage conservationists fear. Instead of causing local extinctions, he writes, ''most successful invaders simply blend into the ecological woodwork. . . . To the local eye, biological diversity seems to have increased. Isn't that a good thing?'' Maybe Burdick is simply trying to avoid the hazards of environmental alarmism, but surely this goes too far. It doesn't square with the evidence he has diligently accumulated: What about the Australian tree spreading rapidly through the Everglades that ''draws in so much water through its roots that it essentially converts open marsh habitats . . . into . . . dry land''? What about the European green crab, which ''single-leggedly crushed the soft-shell clam industry north of Cape Cod''? And how about, shortly after a cholera epidemic in South America in 1991, ships dumping ballast water that released the same strain of cholera bacteria into oyster beds at Mobile Bay in Alabama? The argument that many, or even most, invasive species cause no harm risks encouraging a ''What, me worry?'' attitude in a public already too complacent about environmental change. Henry David Thoreau once defined weeding as the business of ''making invidious distinctions with the hoe.'' But in the science of ''invasion biology,'' the distinctions about what to keep in and what to weed out sometimes really matter. Burdick's account of the researchers who struggle with this largely thankless work is graceful and inviting. He would have written a better book, though, if he had made a more cogent case for why, every now and then, we need to cough up the money to buy those workers a better hoe.hAndrew Solomon's ''Noonday Demon'' received a National Book Award in 2002. He is currently writing a book about families grappling with traumatic difference. From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Sep 9 03:21:54 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2005 23:21:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Congressman Ron Paul on Iraq Message-ID: <16335524.1126236115012.JavaMail.root@mswamui-bichon.atl.sa.earthlink.net> HON. RON PAUL OF TEXAS BEFORE THE US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES September 8, 2005 Why We Fight Many reasons have been given for why we fight and our youth must die in Iraq. The reasons now given for why we must continue this war bear no resemblance to the reasons given to gain the support of the American people and the United States Congress prior to our invasion in March of 2003. Before the war, we were told we faced an imminent threat to our national security from Saddam Hussein. This rationale, now proven grossly mistaken, has been changed. Now we?re told we must honor the fallen by ?completing the mission.? To do otherwise would demean the sacrifice of those who have died or been wounded. Any lack of support for ?completing the mission? is said, by the promoters of the war, to be unpatriotic, un-American, and detrimental to the troops. They insist the only way one can support the troops is to never waver on the policy of nation building, no matter how ill-founded that policy may be. The obvious flaw in this argument is that the mission, of which they so reverently speak, has changed constantly from the very beginning. Though most people think this war started in March of 2003, the seeds were sown many years before. The actual military conflict, involving U.S. troops against Iraq, began in January 1991. The prelude to this actually dates back over a hundred years, when the value of Middle East oil was recognized by the industrialized West. Our use of troops to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was the beginning of the current conflict with Muslim fundamentalists who have been, for the last decade, determined to force the removal of American troops from all Muslim countries-- especially the entire Arabian Peninsula, which they consider holy. Though the strategic and historic reasons for our involvement in the Middle East are complex, the immediate reasons given in 2002 and 2003 for our invasion of Iraq were precise. The only problem is they were not based on facts. The desire by American policymakers to engineer regime change in Iraq had been smoldering since the first Persian Gulf conflict in 1991. This reflected a dramatic shift in our policy, since in the 1980s we maintained a friendly alliance with Saddam Hussein as we assisted him in his war against our arch nemesis, the Iranian Ayatollah. Most Americans ignore that we provided assistance to this ruthless dictator with biological and chemical weapons technology. We heard no complaints in the 1980s about his treatment of the Kurds and Shiites, or the ruthless war he waged against Iran. Our policy toward Iraq played a major role in convincing Saddam Hussein he had free reign in the Middle East, and the results demonstrate the serious shortcomings of our foreign policy of interventionism that we have followed now for over a hundred years. In 1998 Congress capitulated to the desires of the Clinton administration and overwhelmingly passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which stated quite clearly that our policy was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. This act made it official: ?The policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein.? This resolution has been cited on numerous occasions by neo-conservatives as justification for the pre-emptive, deliberate invasion of Iraq. When the resolution was debated, I saw it as a significant step toward a war that would bear no good fruit. No legitimate national security concerns were cited for this dramatic and serious shift in policy. Shortly after the new administration took office in January 2001, this goal of eliminating Saddam Hussein quickly morphed into a policy of remaking the entire Middle East, starting with regime change in Iraq. This aggressive interventionist policy surprised some people, since the victorious 2000 campaign indicated we should pursue a foreign policy of humility, no nation building, reduced deployment of our forces overseas, and a rejection of the notion that we serve as world policemen. The 9/11 disaster proved a catalyst to push for invading Iraq and restructuring the entire Middle East. Though the plan had existed for years, it quickly was recognized that the fear engendered by the 9/11 attacks could be used to mobilize the American people and Congress to support this war. Nevertheless, supposedly legitimate reasons had to be given for the already planned pre-emptive war, and as we now know the ?intelligence had to be fixed to the policy.? Immediately after 9/11 the American people were led to believe that Saddam Hussein somehow was responsible for the attacks. The fact that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were enemies, not friends, was kept from the public by a compliant media and a lazy Congress. Even today many Americans still are convinced of an alliance between the two. The truth is Saddam Hussein never permitted al Qaeda into Iraq out of fear that his secular government would be challenged. And yet today we find that al Qaeda is now very much present in Iraq, and causing chaos there. The administration repeatedly pumped out alarming propaganda that Saddam Hussein was a threat to us with his weapons of mass destruction, meaning nuclear, biological, and chemical. Since we helped Saddam Hussein obtain biological and chemical weapons in the 1980s, we assumed that he had maintained a large supply-- which of course turned out not to be true. The people, frightened by 9/11, easily accepted these fear-mongering charges. Behind the scenes many were quite aware that Israel?s influence on our foreign policy played a role. She had argued for years, along with the neo-conservatives, for an Iraqi regime change. This support was nicely coordinated with the Christian Zionists? enthusiasm for the war. As these reasons for the war lost credibility and support, other reasons were found for why we had to fight. As the lone superpower, we were told we had a greater responsibility to settle the problems of the world lest someone else gets involved. Maintaining and expanding our empire is a key element of the neo-conservative philosophy. This notion that we must fight to spread American goodness was well received by these neo-Jacobins. They saw the war as a legitimate moral crusade, arguing that no one should be allowed to stand in our way! In their minds using force to spread democracy is legitimate and necessary. We also were told the war was necessary for national security purposes because of the threat Saddam Hussein presented, although the evidence was fabricated. Saddam Hussein?s ability to attack us was non-existent, but the American people were ripe for alarming predictions by those who wanted this war. Of course the routine canard for our need to fight, finance, and meddle around the world ever since the Korean War was repeated incessantly: UN Resolutions had to be enforced lest the United Nations be discredited. The odd thing was that on this occasion the United Nations itself did everything possible to stop our pre-emptive attack. And as it turned out, Saddam Hussein was a lot closer to compliance than anyone dreamed. It wasn?t long before concern for the threat of Saddam Hussein became near hysterical, drowning out any reasoned opposition to the planned war. The one argument that was not publicly used by those who propagandized for the war may well be the most important-- oil. Though the administration in 1990 hinted briefly that we had to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait because of oil, the stated reasons for that conflict soon transformed into stopping a potential Hitler and enforcing UN resolutions. Publicly oil is not talked about very much, but behind the scenes many acknowledge this is the real reason we fight. This is not only the politicians who say this. American consumers have always enjoyed cheap gasoline and want it kept that way. The real irony is that the war has reduced Iraqi oil production by one-half million barrels per day and prices are soaring-- demonstrating another unintended economic consequence of war. Oil in the Middle East has been a big issue since the industrial revolution, when it was realized that the black substance bubbling out of the ground in places like Iraq had great value. It?s interesting to note that in the early 20th century Germany, fully aware of oil?s importance, allied itself with the Turkish Ottoman Empire and secured the earliest rights to drill Iraqi oil. They built the Anatalia railroad between Baghdad and Basra, and obtained oil and mineral rights on twenty kilometers on each side of this right-of-way. World War I changed all this, allowing the French and the British to divide the oil wealth of the entire Middle East. The Versailles Treaty created the artificial nation of Iraq, and it wasn?t long before American oil companies were drilling and struggling to participate in the control of Middle East oil. But it was never smooth sailing for any occupying force in Iraq. After WWI, the British generals upon arriving to secure ?their? oil said: ?Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.? Not long afterward a jihad was declared against Britain and eventually they were forced to leave. The more things change, the more they stay the same! Too bad we are not better at studying history. After World War II the U.S. emerged as the #1 world power, and moved to assume what some believed was our responsibility to control Middle East oil in competition with the Soviets. This role prompted us to use our CIA, along with the help of the British, to oust democratically elected Mohammed Mosadeh from power in Iran and install the Shah as a U.S. puppet. We not only supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, we also supported Osama bin Laden in the 1980s-- aggravating the situation in the Middle East and causing unintended consequences. With CIA assistance we helped develop the educational program to radicalize Islamic youth in many Arab nations, especially in Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviets. We even provided a nuclear reactor to Iran in 1967-- which today leads us to threaten another war. All of this has come back to haunt us. Meddling in the affairs of others has consequences. Finally, after years of plotting and maneuvering, the neo-conservative plan to invade Iraq came before the U.S. House in October 2002 to be rubber-stamped. Though the plan was hatched years before, and the official policy of the United States government was to remove Saddam Hussein ever since 1998, various events delayed the vote until this time. By October the vote was deemed urgent, so as to embarrass anyone who opposed it. This would make them politically vulnerable in the November election. The ploy worked. The resolution passed easily, and it served the interests of proponents of war in the November election. The resolution, HJ RES 114, explicitly cited the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998 as one of the reasons we had to go to war. The authorization granted the President to use force against Iraq cited two precise reasons: 1. ?To defend the national security of the U.S. against the continuing threat posed by Iraq and? 2. ?Enforce all relevant United Nations Council resolutions regarding Iraq.? Many other reasons were given to stir the emotions of the American public and the U.S. Congress, reasons that were grossly misleading and found not to be true. The pretense of a legal justification was a sham. The fact that Congress is not permitted under the Constitution to transfer the war power to a president was ignored. Only Congress can declare war, if we were inclined to follow the rule of law. To add insult to injury, HJ RES 114 cited United Nations resolutions as justifications for the war. Ignoring the Constitution while using the UN to justify the war showed callous disregard for the restraints carefully written in the Constitution. The authors deliberately wanted to make war difficult to enter without legislative debate, and they purposely kept the responsibility out of the hands of the executive branch. Surely they never dreamed an international government would have influence over our foreign policy or tell us when we should enter into armed conflict. The legal maneuvering to permit this war was tragic to watch, but the notion that Saddam Hussein-- a third world punk without an air force, navy, and hardly an army or any anti-aircraft weaponry-- was an outright threat to the United States six thousand miles away, tells you how hysterical fear can be used to pursue a policy of needless war for quite different reasons. Today, though, all the old reasons for going to war have been discredited, and are no longer used to justify continuing the war. Now we are told we must ?complete the mission,? and yet no one seems to know exactly what the mission is or when it can be achieved. By contrast, when war is properly declared against a country we can expect an all-out effort until the country surrenders. Without a declaration of war as the Constitution requires, it?s left to the President to decide when to start the war and when the war is over. We had sad experiences with this process in Korea and especially in Vietnam. Pursuing this war merely to save face, or to claim it?s a way to honor those who already have died or been wounded, is hardly a reason that more people should die. We?re told that we can?t leave until we have a democratic Iraq. But what if Iraq votes to have a Shiite theocracy, which it looks like the majority wants as their form of government-- and women, Christians, and Sunnis are made second-class citizens? It?s a preposterous notion and it points out the severe shortcomings of a democracy where a majority rules and minorities suffer. Thankfully, our founding fathers understood the great dangers of a democracy. They insisted on a constitutional republic with a weak central government and an executive branch beholden to the legislative branch in foreign affairs. The sooner we realize we can?t afford this war the better. We?ve gotten ourselves into a civil war within the Islamic community. But could it be, as it had been for over a hundred years prior to our invasion, that oil really is the driving issue behind a foreign presence in the Middle East? It?s rather ironic that the consequence of our intervention has been skyrocketing oil prices, with Iraqi oil production still significantly below pre-war levels. If democracy is not all it?s cracked up to be, and a war for oil is blatantly immoral and unproductive, the question still remains-- why do we fight? More precisely, why should we fight? When is enough killing enough? Why does man so casually accept war, which brings so much suffering to so many, when so little is achieved? Why do those who suffer and die so willingly accept the excuses for the wars that need not be fought? Why do so many defer to those who are enthused about war, and who claim it?s a solution to a problem, without asking them why they themselves do not fight? It?s always other men and other men?s children who must sacrifice life and limb for the reasons that make no sense, reasons that are said to be our patriotic duty to fight and die for. How many useless wars have been fought for lies that deserved no hearing? When will it all end? Why We Should Not Fight Since no logical answers can be given for why we fight, it might be better to talk about why we should not fight. A case can be made that if this war does not end soon it will spread and engulf the entire region. We?ve already been warned that war against Iran is an option that remains on the table for reasons no more reliable than those given for the pre-emptive strike against Iraq. Let me give you a few reasons why this war in Iraq should not be fought. It is not in our national interest. On the contrary, pursuing this war endangers our security, increases the chances of a domestic terrorist attack, weakens our defenses, and motivates our enemies to join together in opposition to our domineering presence around the world. Does anyone believe that Russia, China, and Iran will give us free reign over the entire Middle East and its oil? Tragically, we?re setting the stage for a much bigger conflict. It?s possible that this war could evolve into something much worse than Vietnam. This war has never been declared. It?s not a constitutional war, and without a proper beginning there can be no proper ending. The vagueness instills doubts in all Americans, both supporters and non-supporters, as to what will be accomplished. Supporters of the war want total victory, which is not achievable with a vague mission. Now the majority of Americans are demanding an end to this dragged-out war that many fear will spread before it?s over. It?s virtually impossible to beat a determined guerrilla resistance to a foreign occupying force. After 30 years the Vietnam guerillas, following unbelievable suffering, succeeded in forcing all foreign troops from their homeland. History shows that Iraqi Muslims have always been determined to resist any foreign power on their soil. We ignored that history and learned nothing from Vietnam. How many lives, theirs and ours, are worth losing to prove the tenacity of guerilla fighters supported by a large number of local citizens? Those who argue that it?s legitimate to protect ?our oil? someday must realize that it?s not our oil, no matter how strong and sophisticated our military is. We know the war so far has played havoc with oil prices, and the market continues to discount problems in the region for years to come. No end is in sight regarding the uncertainty of Middle East oil production caused by this conflict. So far our policies inadvertently have encouraged the development of an Islamic state, with Iranian-allied Shiites in charge. This has led to Iranian support for the insurgents, and has placed Iran in a position of becoming the true victor in this war as its alliance with Iraq grows. This could place Iran and its allies in the enviable position of becoming the oil powerhouse in the region, if not the world, once it has control over the oil fields near Basra. This unintended alliance with Iran, plus the benefit to Osama bin Laden?s recruiting efforts, will in the end increase the danger to Israel by rallying the Arab and Muslim people against us. One of the original stated justifications for the war has been accomplished. Since 1998 the stated policy of the United States government was to bring about regime change and get rid of Saddam Hussein. This has been done, but instead of peace and stability we have sown the seeds of chaos. Nevertheless, the goal of removing Saddam Hussein has been achieved and is a reason to stop the fighting. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no biological or chemical or nuclear weapons, so we can be assured the Iraqis pose no threat to anyone, certainly not to the United States. No evidence existed to show an alliance between Iraq and al Qaeda before the war, and ironically our presence there is now encouraging al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden to move in to fill the vacuum we created. The only relationship between Iraq and 9/11 is that our policy in the Middle East continues to increase the likelihood of another terrorist attack on our homeland. We should not fight because it?s simply not worth it. What are we going to get for nearly 2,000 soldier deaths and 20 thousand severe casualties? Was the $350 billion worth it? This is a cost that will be passed on to future generations through an expanded national debt. I?ll bet most Americans can think of a lot better ways to have spent this money. Today?s program of guns and butter will be more damaging to our economy than a similar program was in the 1960s, which gave us the stagflation of the 1970s. The economic imbalances today are much greater than they were in those decades. Eventually, we will come to realize that the Wilsonian idealism of using America?s resources to promote democracy around the world through force is a seriously flawed policy. Wilson pretended to be spreading democracy worldwide, and yet women in the U.S. at that time were not allowed to vote. Democracy, where the majority dictates the rules, cannot protect minorities and individual rights. And in addition, using force to impose our will on others almost always backfires. There?s no reason that our efforts in the 21st century to impose a western style government in Iraq will be any more successful than the British were after World War I. This especially can?t work if democracy is only an excuse for our occupation and the real reasons are left unrecognized. It boils down to the fact that we don?t really have any sound reasons for continuing this fight. The original reasons for the war never existed, and the new reasons aren?t credible. We hear only that we must carry on so those who have already suffered death and injury didn?t do so in vain. If the original reasons for starting the war were false, simply continuing in the name of those fallen makes no sense. More loss of life can never justify earlier loss of life if they died for false reasons. This being the case, it?s time to reassess the policies that have gotten us into this mess. What does all this mean? The mess we face in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the threat of terrorism within our own borders, are not a result of the policies of this administration alone. Problems have been building for many years, and have only gotten much worse with our most recent policy of forcibly imposing regime change in Iraq. We must recognize that the stalemate in Korea, the loss in Vietnam, and the quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan all result from the same flawed foreign policy of interventionism that our government has pursued for over 100 years. It would be overly simplistic to say the current administration alone is responsible for the mess in Iraq. By rejecting the advice of the Founders and our early presidents, our leaders have drifted away from the admonitions against entangling alliances and nation building. Policing the world is not our calling or our mandate. Besides, the Constitution doesn?t permit it. Undeclared wars have not enhanced our national security. The consensus on foreign interventionism has been pervasive. Both major parties have come to accept our role as the world?s policeman, despite periodic campaign rhetoric stating otherwise. The media in particular, especially in the early stages, propagandize in favor of war. It?s only when the costs become prohibitive and the war loses popular support that the media criticize the effort. It isn?t only our presidents that deserve the blame when they overstep their authority and lead the country into inappropriate wars. Congress deserves equally severe criticism for acquiescing to the demands of the executive to go needlessly to war. It has been known throughout history that kings, dictators, and the executive branch of governments are always overly eager to go to war. This is precisely why our founders tried desperately to keep decisions about going to war in the hands of the legislature. But this process has failed us for the last 65 years. Congress routinely has rubber stamped the plans of our presidents and even the United Nations to enter into war through the back door. Congress at any time can prevent or stop all undue foreign entanglements pursued by the executive branch merely by refusing to finance them. The current Iraq war, now going on for 15 years, spans the administration of three presidents and many congresses controlled by both parties. This makes Congress every bit as responsible for the current quagmire as the president. But the real problem is the acceptance by our country as a whole of the principle of meddling in the internal affairs of other nations when unrelated to our national security. Intervention, no matter how well intended, inevitably boomerangs and comes back to haunt us. Minding our own business is not only economical; it?s the only policy that serves our national security interests and the cause of peace. The neo-conservatives who want to remake the entire Middle East are not interested in the pertinent history of this region. Creating an artificial Iraq after World War I as a unified country was like mixing water and oil. It has only led to frustration, anger, and hostilities-- with the resulting instability creating conditions ripe for dictatorships. The occupying forces will not permit any of the three regions of Iraq to govern themselves. This is strictly motivated by a desire to exert control over the oil. Self-determination and independence for each region, or even a true republican form of government with a minimalist central authority is never considered-- yet it is the only answer to the difficult political problems this area faces. The relative and accidental independence of the Kurds and the Shiites in the 1990s served those regions well, and no suicide terrorism existed during that decade. The claim that our immediate withdrawal from Iraq would cause chaos is not proven. It didn?t happen in Vietnam or even Somalia. Even today, the militias of the Kurds and the Shiites may well be able to maintain order in their regions much better than we can currently. Certainly the Sunnis can take care of themselves, and it might be in their best interests for all three groups not to fight each other when we leave. One thing for sure: if we left no more young Americans would have to die for an indefinable cause. Instead, we have been forcing on the people of Iraq a type of democracy that, if implemented, will mean an Islamic state under Sharia? law. Already we read stories of barbers no longer being safe shaving beards; Christians are threatened and forced to leave the country; and burqas are returning out of fear. Unemployment is over 50%, and oil production is still significantly below pre-war levels. These results are not worth fighting and dying for. In this war, like all others, the propagandists and promoters themselves don ?t fight, nor do their children. It?s always worth the effort to wage war when others must suffer and die. Many of those who today pump the nation up with war fever were nowhere to be found when their numbers were called in the 1960s-- when previous presidents and Congresses thought so little about sending young men off to war. Then it was in their best interests to find more important things to do-- despite the so-called equalizing draft. The inability of taxpayers to fund both guns-and-butter has not deterred those who smell the glory of war. Notoriously, great nations fall once their appetite for foreign domination outstrips their citizens? ability or willingness to pay. We tried the guns-and-butter approach in the 1960s with bad results, and the same will happen again as a consequence of the current political decision not to cut back on any expenditure, domestic or foreign. Veto nothing is current policy! Tax, borrow, and print to pay the bills is today?s conventional wisdom. The problem is that all the bills eventually must be paid. There?s no free lunch, and no free war. The economic consequences of such a policy are well known and documented. Excessive spending leads to excessive deficits, higher taxes, and more borrowing and inflation-- which spells economic problems that always clobber the middle class and the poor. Already the suffering has begun. A lackluster recovery, low paying jobs, outsourcing, and social unrest already are apparent. This economic price we pay, along with the human suffering, is an extravagant price for a war that was started with false information and now is prolonged for reasons unrelated to our national security. This policy has led to excessive spending overseas and neglect at home. It invites enemies to attack us, and drains the resources needed to defend our homeland and care for our own people. We are obligated to learn something from the tragedy of Katrina about the misallocation of funds away from our infrastructure to the rebuilding of Iraq after first destroying it. If ever there was a time for us to reassess our policy of foreign interventionism, it is today. It?s time to look inward and attend to the constitutional needs of our people, and forget about the grandiose schemes to remake the world in our image through the use of force. These efforts not only are doomed to fail, as they have for the past one hundred years, but they invite economic and strategic military problems that are harmful to our national security interests. We?ve been told that we must fight to protect our freedoms here at home. These reasons are given to make the sacrifices more tolerable and noble. Without an honorable cause, the suffering becomes intolerable. Hiding from the truth, though, in the end is no panacea for a war that promises no peace. The most important misjudgment regarding Iraq that must be dealt with is the charge that Muslim terrorists attack us out of envy for our freedoms, our prosperity, and our way of life. There is no evidence this is the case. On the contrary, those who have extensively researched this issue conclude that the #1 reason suicide terrorists attack anywhere in the world is because their land is occupied by a foreign military power. Pretending otherwise and constantly expanding our military presence in more Arab and Muslim countries as we have since 1990 has only increased the danger of more attacks on our soil, as well as in those countries that have allied themselves with us. If we deny this truth we do so at our own peril. It?s not unusual for the war crusaders to condemn those who speak the truth in an effort to end an unnecessary war. They claim those who want honest reasons for the enormous sacrifice are unpatriotic and un-American, but these charges only serve to exacerbate the social unrest. Any criticism of policy, no matter how flawed the policy is, is said to be motivated by a lack of support for the troops. Yet it is preposterous to suggest that a policy that would have spared the lives of 1900 servicemen and women lacks concern for the well being of our troops. The absence of good reasoning to pursue this war prompts the supporters of the war to demonize the skeptics and critics. They have no other defense. Those who want to continue this war accuse those who lost loved ones in Iraq, and oppose the war, of using the dead for personal political gain. But what do the war proponents do when they claim the reason we must fight on is to honor the sacrifice of the military personnel we lost by completing the mission? The big difference is that one group argues for saving lives, while the other justifies more killing. And by that logic, the additional deaths will require even more killing to make sure they too have not died in vain. Therefore, the greater number who have died, the greater is the motivation to complete the mission. This defies logic. This argument to persevere has been used throughout history to continue wars that could and should have ended much sooner. This was true for World War I and Vietnam. A sad realism struck me recently reading how our Marines in Afghanistan must now rely on donkey transportation in their efforts at nation building and military occupation. Evidently the Taliban is alive and well, as Osama bin Laden remains in this region. But doesn?t this tell us something about our na?ve assumption that our economic advantages and technical knowledge can subdue and control anybody? We?re traversing Afghan mountains on donkeys, and losing lives daily in Baghdad with homemade primitive bombs. Our power and dominance clearly is limited by the determination of those who see us as occupiers, proving that just more money and sophisticated weapons won?t bring us victory. Sophisticated weapons and the use of unlimited military power is no substitute for diplomacy designed to promote peace while reserving force only for defending our national interests. Changing our policy of meddling in the affairs of others won?t come quickly or easily. But a few signals to indicate a change in our attitude would go a long way to bringing peace to a troubled land. 1. We must soon, and Congress can do this through the budget process, stop the construction of all permanent bases in Iraq and any other Muslim country in the region. Think of how we would react if the Chinese had the military edge on us and laid claims to the Gulf of Mexico, building bases within the U.S. in order to promote their superior way of life. Isn?t it ironic that we close down bases here at home while building new ones overseas? Domestic bases might well promote security, while bases in Muslim nations only elicit more hatred toward us. 2. The plans for the biggest U.S. embassy in the world, costing nearly 1 billion dollars, must be canceled. This structure in Baghdad sends a message, like the military bases being built, that we expect to be in Iraq and running Iraq for a long time to come. 3. All military forces, especially on the Arabian Peninsula, must be moved offshore at the earliest time possible. All responsibility for security and control of the oil must be transferred to the Iraqis from the United States as soon as possible, within months not years. The time will come when our policies dealing with foreign affairs will change for the better. But that will be because we can no longer afford the extravagance of war. This will occur when the American people realize that war causes too much suffering here at home, and the benefits of peace again become attractive to us all. Part of this recognition will involve a big drop in the value of the dollar, higher interest rates, and rampant price inflation. Though these problems are serious and threaten our freedoms and way of life, there?s every reason to work for the traditional constitutional foreign policy that promotes peace over war, while not being tempted to mold the world in our image through force. We should not forget that what we did not achieve by military force in Vietnam, was essentially achieved with the peace that came from our military failure and withdrawal of our armed forces. Today, through trade and peace, U.S. investment and economic cooperation has westernized Vietnam far more than our military efforts. We must remember initiating force to impose our will on others negates all the goodness for which we profess to stand. We cannot be fighting to secure our freedom if we impose laws like the Patriot Act and a national ID card on the American people. Unfortunately, we have lost faith and confidence in the system of government with which we have been blessed. Today too many Americans support, at least in the early stages, the use of force to spread our message of hope and freedom. They too often are confused by the rhetoric that our armies are needed to spread American goodness. Using force injudiciously, instead of spreading the worthy message of American freedom through peaceful means, antagonizes our enemies, alienates our allies, and threatens personal liberties here at home while burdening our economy. If confidence can be restored in our American traditions of peace and trade, our influence throughout the world would be enhanced just as it was once we rejected the military approach in Vietnam. This change in policy can come easily once the people of this country decide that there is a better way to conduct ourselves throughout the world. Whenever the people turn against war as a tool to promote certain beliefs, the war ceases. That?s what we need today. Then we can get down to the business of setting an example of how peace and freedom brings prosperity in an atmosphere that allows for excellence and virtue to thrive. A powerful bureaucratic military state negates all efforts to preserve these conditions that have served America so well up until recent times. That is not what the American dream is all about. Without a change in attitude, the American dream dies: a simple change that restates the principles of liberty enshrined in our Constitution will serve us well in solving all the problems we face. The American people are up to the task; I hope Congress is as well. From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Sep 11 16:26:57 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 09:26:57 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Saudia Arabia May Already Be At Peak Oil Or Past It Message-ID: <13423610.1126456017487.JavaMail.root@mswamui-chipeau.atl.sa.earthlink.net> Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy by Matthew R. Simmons In 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert discovered a grand illusion in the American oil industry. For tax purposes, he noted, American oil companies regularly delayed the declaration of new oil reserves by years and even decades. The result was a false impression that new oil was being found all the time. In fact, discoveries had peaked in 1936. Based on this observation, Mr. Hubbert predicted that American oil production would peak in 1969. He was wrong by one year. We briefly produced 10 million barrels a day in 1970 but have never hit that level since. Even with the addition of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, American production has slipped to eight million barrels a day -- which is why we import 600f our oil. Across the oil industry, the uneasy feeling is growing that world production may be approaching its own "Hubbert's Peak." The last major field yielding more than a million barrels a day was found in Mexico in 1976. New discoveries peaked in 1960, and production outside the Middle East reached its high point in 1997. Meanwhile world demand continues to accelerate by 3% a year. Indonesia, once a major exporter, now imports its oil. The Saudis claim to have huge oil reserves. Do they really? Before an uneasy feeling grows into full-blown pessimism, however, one must consider the supposedly vast oil resources lying beneath Saudi Arabia. The Saudis possess 250f the world's proven reserves. They routinely proclaim that, for at least the next 50 years, they could easily double their current output of 10 million barrels a day. But is this true? Matthew R. Simmons, a Texas investment banker with a Harvard Business School degree and 20 years' experience in oil, has his doubts. In "Twilight in the Desert" (John Wiley & Sons, 422 pages, $24.95), Mr. Simmons argues that the Saudis may be deceiving the world and themselves. If only half of his claims prove to be true, we could be in for some nasty surprises. First, Mr. Simmons notes, all Saudi claims exist behind a veil of secrecy. In 1982, the Saudi government took complete control of Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Co.) after four decades of co-ownership with a consortium of major oil companies. Since then Aramco has never released field-by-field figures for its oil production. In fact, no OPEC member is very forthcoming. The cartel sets production quotas according to a country's reserves, so each member has reason to exaggerate. Meanwhile, OPEC nations are constantly cheating one another by overproducing, so none wants to publish official statistics. As a result, the world's most reliable source for OPEC production is a little company called Petrologistics, located over a grocery store in Geneva. Conrad Gerber, the principal, claims to have spies in every OPEC port. For all we know, Mr. Gerber is making up his numbers, but everyone -- including the Paris-based International Energy Agency -- takes him seriously, since OPEC produces nothing better. The Saudis, for their part, obviously enjoy their role as producer of last resort and feel content to let everyone think that they have things under control. Yet as Mr. Simmons observes: "History has frequently shown that once secrecy envelops the culture of either a company or a country, those most surprised when the truth comes out are often the insiders who created the secrets in the first place." Mr. Simmons became suspicious of Saudi claims after taking a guided tour of Aramco facilities in 2003. To penetrate the veil, he turned to the electronic library of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, which regularly publishes technical papers by field geologists. After downloading and studying more than 200 reports by Aramco personnel, Mr. Simmons came up with his own portrait of Saudi Arabia's oil resources. It is not a pretty picture. Almost 900f Saudi production comes from six giant fields, all of them discovered before 1967. The "king" of this grouping -- the 2000-square-mile Ghawar field near the Persian Gulf -- is the largest oil field in the world. But if Saudi geology follows the pattern found elsewhere, it is unlikely that any new fields lie nearby. Indeed, Aramco has prospected extensively outside the Ghawar region but found nothing of significance. In particular, the Arab D stratum -- the source rock of the Ghawar field -- has long since eroded in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The six major fields, having all produced at or near capacity for almost 40 years, are showing signs of age. All require extensive water injection to maintain their current flow. Based on these observations, Mr. Simmons doubts that Aramco can increase its output to anywhere near the level it claims. In fact, he believes that Saudi production may have already peaked. Is he right? Mr. Simmons's critics say that, by relying on technical papers, he has biased his survey, since geologists like to concentrate on problem wells the way that doctors focus on sick patients. Still, the experience in America and the rest of the world shows that oil fields don't last forever. Prudhoe Bay, which was producing 1.2 million barrels a day five years after being brought on line in 1976, is now down to less than 400,000. The mystery of Saudi oil capacity bears an eerie resemblance to Saddam Hussein's apparent belief that his scientists had developed weapons of mass destruction. Who are the deceivers and who is the deceived? No one yet knows the answers. But at least Matthew Simmons is asking the questions. (Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2005) From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Sep 11 19:41:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 12:41:31 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] A New Day in America Message-ID: <2679861.1126467691511.JavaMail.root@mswamui-backed.atl.sa.earthlink.net> A New Day in America The odds are pretty good that in the coming elections the Republicans will return to minority party status. While the Republican years have been good for the top 20% of Americans, they have not been so good for the rest of us. The mass of Americans has probably been too patient and too slow to learn that right-wing rule is not good for them, but I think they are finally beginning to understand that. It is too late for the Republicans to do much to change that view. The remaining items on their agenda will only reinforce the impression that they intend to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The Republicans will be leaving us with a massive hangover of problems caused by their intent and by their neglect. Our national balance sheet is a wreck. In order to repair it we will have to repeal Bush???s tax cuts and possibly increase taxes on the top 20% in order to recover the money was improperly given to them. Both individuals and corporations agree that the health care crisis is getting worse. The people and companies who are presently entrusted with this vital public utility are not solving the problem, and it is time to consider a European solution to this problem. We do not know for sure whether the energy price run up is due to greed or due to competition for a declining resource. We do know that we are paying a lot more at the gas pump and we are all wondering what our winter heating bills will look like. Collectively and as individuals we will have to get as serious about this as we were in the 1970???s. It is possible that we have gone past the point of no return, but I am not giving up and I hope that you won???t either. Our best hope is to act together to make things better. Steve Hovland San Francisco September 11, 2005 From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 17 01:27:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:27:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Victor Davis Hanson: Why We Must Stay in Iraq Message-ID: Victor Davis Hanson: Why We Must Stay in Iraq http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/02/AR2005090202678_pf.html 5.9.4 Vietnam is once again in the air. Last month's antiwar demonstrations in Crawford, Tex., have been heralded as the beginning of an antiwar movement that will take to the streets like the one of 30 years ago. Influential pundits -- in the manner of a gloomy Walter Cronkite after the Tet offensive -- are assuring us that we can't win in Iraq and that we have no option but a summary withdrawal. We may even have a new McGovern-style presidential "peace" candidate in Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold. America's most contentious war is being freely evoked to explain the "quagmire" we are supposedly now in. Vietnam is an obvious comparison given the frustration of asymmetrical warfare and savage enemies who escape our conventional power. But make no mistake, Iraq is not like Vietnam, and it must not end like Vietnam. Despite our tragic lapses, leaving now would be a monumental mistake -- and one that we would all too soon come to regret. If we fled precipitously, moderates in the Middle East could never again believe American assurances of support for reform and would have to retreat into the shadows -- or find themselves at the mercy of fascist killers. Jihadists would swell their ranks as they hyped their defeat of the American infidels. Our forward strategy of hitting terrorists hard abroad would be discredited and replaced by a return to the pre-9/11 tactics of a few cruise missiles and writs. And loyal allies in Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, along with new friends in India and the former Soviet republics, would find themselves leaderless in the global struggle against Islamic radicalism. The specter of Vietnam will also turn on those who embrace it. Iraq is not a surrogate theater of the Cold War, where national liberationists, fueled by the romance of radical egalitarianism, are fortified by nearby Marxist nuclear patrons. The jihadists have an 8th-century agenda of gender apartheid, religious intolerance and theocracy. For all its pyrotechnics, the call for a glorious return to the Dark Ages has found no broad constituency. Nor is our army in Iraq conscript, but volunteer and professional. The Iraqi constitutional debate is already light-years ahead of anything that emerged in Saigon. And there is an exit strategy, not mission creep -- we will consider withdrawal as the evolution to a legitimate government continues and the Iraqi security forces grow. But the comparison to Vietnam may be instructive regarding another aspect -- the aftershocks of a premature American departure. Leaving Vietnam to the communists did not make anyone safer. The flight of the mid-1970s energized U.S. enemies in Iran, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Central America, while tearing our own country apart for nearly a quarter-century. Today, most Americans are indeed very troubled over the war in Iraq -- but mostly they are angry about not winning quickly, rather than resigned to losing amid recriminations. We forget that once war breaks out, things usually get far worse before they get better. We should remember that 1943, after we had entered World War II, was a far bloodier year than 1938, when the world left Hitler alone. Similarly, 2005 may have brought more open violence in Iraq than was visible during Saddam's less publicized killings of 2002. So it is when extremists are confronted rather than appeased. But unlike the time before the invasion, when we patrolled Iraq's skies while Saddam butchered his own with impunity below, there is now a hopeful future for Iraq. It is true that foreign terrorists are flocking into the country, the way they earlier crossed the Pakistani border into Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, and that this makes the short-term task of securing the country far more difficult. But again, just as there were more Nazis and fascists out in the open in 1941 than before the war, so too there were almost none left by 1946. If we continue to defeat the jihadists in Iraq -- and the untold story of this war is that the U.S. military has performed brilliantly in killing and jailing tens of thousands of them -- their cause will be discredited by the stick of military defeat and the carrot of genuine political freedom. All this is not wishful thinking. The United States has an impressive record of military reconstruction and democratization following the defeat of our enemies -- vs. the abject chaos that followed when we failed to help fragile postwar societies. After World War II, Germany, Italy and Japan (American troops are still posted in all three) proved to be success stories. In contrast, an unstable post-WWI Weimar Germany soon led to something worse than Kaiser Wilhelm. After the Korean War, South Korea survived and evolved. South Vietnam, by contrast, ended up with a Stalinist government, and the world watched the unfolding tragedy of the boat people, reeducation camps and a Southeast Asian holocaust. Present-day Kabul has the most enlightened constitution in the Middle East. Post-Soviet Afghanistan -- after we ceased our involvement with the mujaheddin resistance -- was an Islamic nightmare. So we fool ourselves if we think that peace is the natural order of things, and that it follows organically from the cessation of hostilities. It does not. Leave Iraq and expect far worse tribal chaos and Islamic terrorism than in Mogadishu or Lebanon; finish the task and there is the real chance for something like present-day Turkey or the current calm of federated Kurdistan. Have we forgotten that Iraq before the invasion was not just another frightening Middle East autocracy like Syria or Libya, but a country in shambles -- not, as some will say, because of international sanctions, but thanks to one of the worst regimes on the planet, with a horrific record of genocide at home and regional aggression abroad? As the heart of the ancient caliphate, Iraq symbolized the worst aspects of pan-Arab nationalism and posed the most daunting obstacle for any change in the Middle East. Thus al Qaedists and ex-Baathists alike are desperate to drive us out. They grasp that should a democratic Iraq emerge, then the era of both Islamic theocracies and fascist autocracies elsewhere in the region may also be doomed. Our presence in Iraq is one of the most principled efforts in a sometimes checkered history of U.S. foreign policy. Yes, there is infighting among the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis, but this is precisely because Saddam Hussein pitted the sects against each other for 30 years in order to subjugate them, while we are now trying to unite them so that they might govern themselves. The United States has elevated the formerly despised and exploited Shiites and Kurds to equal status with the Sunnis, their former rulers. And from our own history we know that such massive structural reform is always messy, dangerous -- and humane. So, too, with other changes. It is hard to imagine that Syria would have withdrawn from Lebanon without American resolve in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor would either Pakistan's A.Q. Khan or Libya's Moammar Gaddafi have given up on plans to nuclearize the Middle East. Saddam's demise put pressure on HosniMubarak to entertain the possibility of democratic reform in Egypt. These upheavals are, in the short term, controversial and volatile developments whose ultimate success hinges only on continued American resolve in Iraq. There is no other solution to either Islamic terrorism of the sort that hit us on Sept. 11, 2001, nor the sort of state fascism that caused the first Gulf War, than the Bush administration's easily caricatured effort to work for a third democratic choice beyond either dictatorship or theocracy. We know that not because of pre-9/11 neocon pipedreams of "remaking the Middle East," but because for decades we tried almost everything else in vain -- from backing monarchs in the Gulf who pumped oil and dictators in Pakistan and Egypt who promised order, to "containing" murderous autocrats like Saddam and ignoring tyrannous theocrats like the Taliban. Yes, the administration must account to the American people for the radically humanitarian sacrifices of American lives we are making on behalf of the freedom of Kurds and Shiites. It must remind us that we are engaging murderers of a sort not seen since the Waffen SS and the suicide killers off Okinawa. And it must tell us that victory is our only option and explain in detail how and why we are winning. The New York Times recently deplored the public's ignorance of American heroes in Iraq. In fact, there are thousands of them. But in their eagerness to view Iraq through the fogged lens of Vietnam, the media themselves are largely responsible for the public's shameful lack of interest. A few days ago, while the networks were transfixed by Cindy Sheehan (or was it Aruba?), the United States military, in conjunction with Iraqi forces, was driving out jihadists from Mosul -- where the terrorists are being arrested and killed in droves. Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, who had worked for months to create an atmosphere of mutual understanding on the city's streets, was severely wounded as he led his men to clear out a terrorist hideaway. The jihadist who shot him -- who had recently been released from Abu Ghraib -- was not killed, but arrested and given medical care by U.S. surgeons. Not long before he was wounded, Lt. Col. Kurilla had delivered a eulogy for three of his own fallen men. Posted on a military Web site, it showed that he, far better than most of us, knows why America is there: "You see -- there are 26 million people in Iraq whose freedom we are fighting for, against terrorists and insurgents that want a return to power and oppression, or worse, a state of fundamentalist tyranny. Some of whom we fight are international terrorists who hate the fact that in our way of life we can choose who will govern us, the method in which we worship, and the myriad other freedoms we have. We are fighting so that these fanatical terrorists do not enter the sacred ground of our country and we have to fight them in our own backyard." Amen. Author's e-mail: [2]author at victorhanson.com Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of the forthcoming "A War Like No Other" (Random House). From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 17 01:27:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:27:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Book World: Class Struggles Message-ID: Class Struggles Book World, 5.9.4 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090101762_pf.html Stories from the front lines of American schools reveal the world beneath policy debates. By Eric Hoover In 1983, a national panel of education experts released the report that launched a thousand headaches. The document, "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform," warned that public schools were foundering. The nation's jaw dropped, and politicians promised improvements. Two decades later, they're still promising. But the bickering over reforms is ceaseless. Take the No Child Left Behind Act, the controversial federal law requiring schools to show annual progress on state tests taken by students in grades 3 through 8. Supporters say the get-tough program promotes high standards and accountability; critics say the plan is too rigid and out of step with reality. Who's right? And how do such big questions relate to struggles in school systems near you? Satisfying answers rarely come from politicians and wonks, who dwell in a fog of slogans and statistics. But welcome are those authors who find the pulse of human drama in the education trenches. The experiences of students, parents, teachers and administrators in American schools make compelling stories, full of heroes, villains and conflicts. A School House Divided A girl named Pineapple poses the question that haunts Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (Crown, $25). "What's it like," the black sixth grader asks the white author, "over there where you live?" Like other students in this sweeping report, Pineapple attends a public school where minorities make up nearly 100 percent of the enrollment. Her curiosity about whites, who attend schools in an unknowable "over there," speaks to the racial divide that Brown v. Board of Education attempted to bridge a half-century ago. Kozol, a best-selling education writer, argues convincingly that de facto segregation endures in urban school systems from Seattle to the South Bronx. His firsthand reporting reveals districts in which schools are separate and unequal. He relays insights from poor students who learn in buildings where ceilings leak, rats scurry, and toilets don't flush. In these ramshackle places, which often lack enough books, desks and qualified teachers, the drumbeat of school-accountability measures sounds hollow. In an effective series of anecdotes, Kozol asserts that standards-based reforms turn poor schools -- with the fewest resources to teach the skills those tests measure -- into mindless educational factories. He warns that high-stakes tests threaten to turn low-income students into "examination soldiers" who do not so much acquire knowledge as regurgitate facts. He provides statistics that suggest the much-touted reforms have failed to close the so-called achievement gap between white and minority students. And he cites data showing the gaps between per-pupil spending in predominantly white urban school districts and districts that serve mostly minority students. In a chapter called "Deadly Lies," the author predicts that until students from different economic backgrounds attend schools of equal quality and resources, No Child Left Behind will not shrink but expand "the vast divide between two separate worlds of future cognitive activity, political sagacity, social health and economic status, and the capability of children of minorities to thrive." A call for activism, The Shame of the Nation firmly grounds school-reform issues in the thorny context of race and concludes that the nation has failed to deliver the promise of Brown. Power to the Parents Bribes, lies and scandals are part of education's ugly underbelly, Joe Williams reveals in Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education (St. Martin's, $24.95, forthcoming in October). Williams, a veteran education reporter, makes full use of his journalistic skills in this blistering analysis of public-school politics. (Friends of teachers unions, take cover.) Vivid anecdotes about administrators skimming from school budgets and teachers-of-the-year getting fired because of their expensive seniority support his case that the goals of education bureaucrats often conflict with the interests of students. "As a society," Williams writes, "we are dismissing the needs of individual students to protect a romantic notion of public education whose very core is consumed with meeting the needs of adults first and foremost." Occasionally, these valid structural critiques of "the system" lapse into broad-brush criticisms of the "education cartel." But his frustrations, grounded in accounts of bureaucracy run amok, echo those of many parents. Even so, Cheating Our Kids hits an inspirational note with its instructive explanation of how parents, business leaders and activists from both ends of the political spectrum helped bring school choice to Milwaukee in the 1990s, allowing low-income families to send their children to private schools at the public's expense. The tale proves that dedicated citizens who demand a better education for their children can move the mountains known as politicians. Unconventional Wisdom Everybody knows that reducing class sizes in public schools improves the quality of education. But where did they get that idea? Not from Jay P. Greene's Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe about Our Schools -- And Why It Isn't So (Rowman & Littlefield, $24.95). Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, challenges 18 popular assumptions in this accessible, data-driven polemic. The attacks come fast and furious against popular beliefs about class sizes, graduation rates and underperforming schools. Greene argues that public schools receive adequate funding, countering Kozol's "anecdotal reasoning" that there are spending gaps between urban and suburban schools. He also argues persuasively that voucher programs do not harm public schools, as some critics of school-choice contend. His arguments stick close to the numbers compiled from numerous education studies, and, generally, Greene makes strong cases that would keep even education-policy gurus on their toes. Still, all the numbers in the world won't end the debate over what's true. Just ask your favorite teacher what he or she thinks about the elaborate statistical analyses behind the following statement from Education Myths : "It is simply not the case that teachers are less richly rewarded for their work than those in similar professions." Daydream Believer In Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education (Riverhead, $24.95), Chris Whittle, the maverick businessman who became an education insider, describes his vision for American schools in painstaking detail. Whittle is the former owner of Esquire magazine and the founder of Edison Schools, a company that manages 157 public schools in 19 states and educates 70,000 students. Naturally, the author promotes splicing the private-sector's DNA (think free-market competition) into the traditional education system. Whittle's blueprint calls for radical new curricula, massive educational research-and-development efforts, and better training and pay for teachers and principals. He imagines students studying independently, freed from the constraints of regimented class schedules. "We are still operating in a type of Charles Dickens mindset," Whittle writes, "believing that these young, half-civilized things called children must be literally whipped into shape, if not by a stick then by a never-ending schedule." The detailed business strategies in Crash Course may cause drowsiness in some casual readers, and the 37-page leap into the year 2030 may puzzle others. But the scale of Whittle's imagination and his disarming optimism make this a refreshing companion to gloomier education tomes. Pragmatism 101 My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (Cornell Univ., $24) is the true tale of an anthropology professor who became a fly on the dorm-room wall. Rebekah Nathan (a pseudonym for Cathy Small of Northern Arizona University, recently unmasked by the New York Sun) enrolled as an undergraduate student at the university where she teaches, moved in with her subjects and took classes for two semesters. Her goal was to understand the mysteries of modern students, including why they snooze in classes and skip assigned readings. A few distracting scholarly digressions aside, Nathan engagingly observes that many students care little about intellectual matters and see their university as a career greenhouse. No revelations there. But that campus life is no "Animal House" may come as a surprise. Juggling classes, assignments and jobs demands survival skills, the professor discovers. The key to sanity: "controlling college by shaping schedules, taming professors, and limiting workload." My Freshman Year provides some keen insights into the causes of students' fierce pragmatism. For one thing, debt often drives their career aspirations and, in turn, their choice of majors and extracurricular pursuits. Colleges, Nathan argues, must adapt to those 21st-century realities: "Educational policy . . . cannot afford to rely on inaccurate or idealized versions of what students are." But understanding students is not the same as sympathizing with them. Nathan's vow to lighten students' loads by assigning them less reading sounds like blasphemy to this bookworm. My Freshman Year provides a long list of what ails college students, but a short list of remedies. ? Eric Hoover is a senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education. From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 17 01:27:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:27:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Liberalism: the Fuel of Empires? Message-ID: Liberalism: the Fuel of Empires? The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.9.2 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i02/02a01901.htm 2 political scientists at Princeton help revive debate on how European liberals of centuries past viewed colonialism and imperialism By DAVID GLENN It is one of the most troubling puzzles in the history of political thought: Why were some of Europe's early liberal theorists -- the people who imagined and promoted tolerance, universal suffrage, the rule of law, and minimal government -- also enthusiastic supporters of European colonization, conquest, and empire in Asia and Africa? John Stuart Mill, author of On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, spent 25 years working for the British East India Company in the mid-19th century. He believed that India and other "barbarous" nations "have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be to their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners." Alexis de Tocqueville, among the century's most sophisticated proponents of democracy, argued during the 1840s that it was urgently necessary for France to subjugate and colonize Algeria. Through much of the 20th century, political theorists and intellectual historians largely ignored that element of classical liberals' thought, focusing instead on their abstract arguments for liberty or their campaigns for domestic reform. (Tocqueville's voluminous writing on Algeria was virtually forgotten in the English-speaking world.) And when these liberals' pro-imperialist arguments were acknowledged, they were sometimes dismissed as simple hypocrisy. More recently, some left-wing scholars have argued that -- far from hypocrisy -- the liberals' imperialist adventures reveal something essential about liberalism itself. The Enlightenment's calls for universal human liberty, according to this argument, have always contained a Eurocentric and potentially racist understanding of what human societies should look like. Such discussions are no longer confined to the margins of postcolonial studies. With the end of the cold war's international order -- not to mention the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- the question of empire has moved close to the heart of legal and political theorists' preoccupations. The past 15 years have seen a flourishing of sophisticated explorations of liberalism, conquest, and international justice. No Simple Formulas Two of the most visible exponents of this new wave in empire studies are Jennifer Pitts and Sankar Muthu, who met as graduate students at Harvard University a decade ago and who are now assistant professors of politics at Princeton University. Along the way, they got married. In Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton University Press, 2003), Mr. Muthu examined the brief period in the late 18th century when several prominent liberal theorists -- notably Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried von Herder -- were skeptical toward, and in some cases actively campaigned against, European colonialism. Ms. Pitts's new book, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005), explores the very different mood of the mid-19th century, when most leading liberals, Mill and Tocqueville among them, sat comfortably on the imperialist bandwagon. As those divergent projects suggest, Ms. Pitts and Mr. Muthu are not offering simple formulas for decoding intellectual history. Liberal theory, they argue, contains the seeds of both pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist arguments. "There's no necessary connection between liberalism and empire," Mr. Muthu says. "Whether a liberal thinker had a positive or a negative conception of empire depends on a whole range of other factors." The two young scholars propose that a close reading of liberalism's encounter with empire can help us make sense of certain sticky problems that have always confronted liberal political philosophy. "There isn't a strong theoretical source within liberalism for making claims about who should be included and who should be excluded from a given political community," says Ms. Pitts. "And that creates all kinds of problems for liberal theory in the context of debates about migration and other foreign-policy questions." Political philosophers are now joining forces with intellectual historians, legal scholars, and other social scientists in new attempts to wrestle with those questions. The work of Ms. Pitts and Mr. Muthu is near the center of those discussions, says Iris Marion Young, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, who organized a 2004 conference on empire at which the two Princeton scholars spoke. "In history and literary studies, work on colonialism and postcolonialism has been going on for 20 years," Ms. Young says. "But in philosophy and political theory, this kind of investigation, asking the questions that Pitts and Muthu ask, has only begun to happen recently. There's a general feeling that it's about time that we started to look at these things." Paternal Liberals Are moral arrogance and contempt for cultural "backwardness" built into liberalism's DNA? In a celebrated 1994 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, in London, the political theorist Bhikhu Parekh argued that the tendency toward imperialism runs very deep in the liberal tradition. Parekh argued that not only Mill, but also contemporary liberals like Joseph Raz, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin, have promoted a political vision that is "missionary, ethnocentric, and narrow, dismissing nonliberal ways of life and thought as primitive and in need of the liberal civilizing mission." The following year, Uday Singh Mehta, a professor of political science at Amherst College, published Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press). He argued that liberal thinkers have habitually (but not universally) fallen into the trap of treating unfamiliar cultures as if they were simply several steps behind the West in an inevitable march of economic and cultural progress. Mill, for example, was fond of using metaphors of childhood when discussing India. In one essay, he wrote of "the successive states of our society through which the advanced guard of our species has passed, and the filiation of these states on one another -- how each grew out of the preceding and was the parent of the following state." Mill's universalism, Ms. Pitts says, "takes a particular idea of what full human flourishing is, which is very much based on European culture, and projects it as the endpoint for all societies." Mill's 18th-century liberal predecessors, by contrast, offered a subtler and more nuanced account of societies' cultural and economic differences. "[Adam] Smith and his contemporaries would look at unusual or apparently disturbing practices and ask, Why might that exist in a particular society?" Ms. Pitts says. "There was much more interpretive generosity when dealing with alien cultures." The shift from the relative generosity of Smith's era to the more arrogant posture of Mill's generation is a question that animates Ms. Pitts's book. One answer is that the liberals of the earlier period generally felt more beleaguered and were less emotionally invested in their societies' institutions. In the French case, especially, Mr. Muthu points out that pre-revolutionary liberals "were deeply critical of their own societies, and of what might be described as European civilization. The last thing that they would have envisioned as just would be a wholesale effort to spread those institutions abroad. A thinker like Diderot thought of his own society as being deeply morally corrupt, monarchical, ruled by a hereditary nobility and a hypocritical church. Why would you want to spread that around the world?" Matters of National Pride By the middle of the 19th century, however, liberal reforms and popular upheavals had made both France and especially Britain more democratic and less corrupt. Those shifts lifted what Ms. Pitts calls "the civilizational self-confidence" of that era's liberals -- which in turn made it easier for them to endorse efforts to impose European governance on the rest of the world. Tocqueville's case was more complicated than that of Mill, who maintained a sunny optimism about imperialism's progress. Even when he harshly criticized particular British practices in colonial India, he argued that they were essentially innocent mistakes. Tocqueville, on the other hand, was highly attentive to the violent repression and corruption that accompanied French settlement in Algeria. He continued to support it until nearly the end of his life, however, partly because he believed that, if not France, some other European country would colonize northern Africa. "Tocqueville had deep doubts that empires were civilizing projects, and he acknowledged their inevitable brutality," Ms. Pitts says, "and yet he still forcefully advocated for Algerian colonization. That's somewhat chilling." Neither Mill nor Tocqueville endorsed the theories of biological racism that were commonplace in the 19th century. In that sense, their thought remained distinctly liberal. In 1850, Ms. Pitts recounts in her book, Mill condemned Thomas Carlyle's "damnable" arguments for black inferiority, especially the notion "that one kind of human beings are born servants to another kind." She adds, however, that the racist ideas of the 19th century probably did affect the air that Mill and Tocqueville breathed. Adam Smith had written during a period of widespread "religious ideas about human unity," Ms. Pitts says, but "the prevalence of the biological ideas in this later period meant that differences among human groups were much more emphasized than human uniformity. "Difference was so heavily emphasized that even if one opposed the biological arguments, thinkers like Mill would talk about the differences among human groups as very deep-seated -- not biologically, but culturally." Going Global Ms. Pitts and Mr. Muthu are expanding their studies of liberalism's ambiguous dance with empire. She is at work on a book on early debates about the foundations of international law, and he is studying 18th-century anxieties about global commerce. "Around 1800," Mr. Muthu says, "antislavery activists began to point out that global commerce ties consumers and producers together, and that consumers could be complicit in exploitation. That's the sort of argument that interests me." He is especially curious to assess how and why a few intellectuals extended that consumer-based argument into a general dread of global commerce, while other reformers saw globalization as potentially positive. Neither Ms. Pitts nor Mr. Muthu expected to work this territory when they entered graduate school at Harvard in the early 1990s. In an early course, Ms. Pitts was intrigued by the fact that Edmund Burke, a relatively conservative thinker who was skeptical of democracy, was a vocal and passionate critic of Britain's imperial designs on India. She was later heavily influenced by Richard Tuck, a British scholar who joined Harvard's faculty in 1997. (Mr. Tuck was trained at the University of Cambridge, which is a hotbed of historians of political thought.) Mr. Muthu, for his part, arrived at Harvard knowing that he wanted to study Enlightenment thinkers' implicit beliefs about anthropology and human differences. "But the more I worked on 18th-century political thinkers' writings on those questions," he says, "the more obvious it became that many of the arguments were crafted for explicitly political ends -- that is, either to support or to oppose imperial and commercial projects abroad." He realized that he needed to look at the question of empire. The two scholars' work has also been shaped, of course, by their friendship. They became a couple less than two months after meeting each other. "We've been students of the history of political thought together for essentially the entire time that we've been doing work in the field," Mr. Muthu says. "People often ask, What's it like to be a couple, and both doing work in this kind of area? And, in a way, it's difficult for me to answer that question. This is the way that it's always been." "I'm sure we influence each other's views on political theory and political thought in all sorts of ways that I would not be able to reconstruct, that I'm not consciously aware of," he adds. "But we also just naturally tend toward the same sorts of questions," Ms. Pitts says. "I often wonder whether that's the case," Mr. Muthu says, glancing at Ms. Pitts across their living-room couch, "or whether that's the result of the fact that we end up influencing each other. It's very difficult to know what's cause and what's effect." The two have never done any collaborative writing together, but Ms. Pitts says that they would like to do so someday. "It's extremely helpful, and I very much take it for granted," Mr. Muthu says, "that when I'm working on some set of issues, that I can turn to Jennifer and ask her opinion of something." "Or just when I feel like I've run into a brick wall, and I need some fresh infusion of ideas, to hand the draft over," Ms. Pitts says. Both of them feel lucky to have wound up in the same department. (Alongside their book projects, they are shifting into a slightly slower gear. Their first child was born in June, and they will each take a semester of leave this year.) They hope that their historical work can -- without losing sight of nuance -- shed light on contemporary battles. "When I've taught these texts to undergraduates," says Mr. Muthu, "they're sometimes shocked at what they see as the deep affinities between contemporary arguments over Iraq, for instance, and the kinds of arguments made about conquest and intervention 200 years ago. One of the things that I try to do in these courses is to show that there's been a long and intriguing history to these kinds of dilemmas that face citizens and policy makers. These kinds of struggles and deep philosophical differences can be found in past centuries as well. "These are not recent developments." From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 17 01:27:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:27:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Daily: Fitness trumps cholesterol as key to heart health Message-ID: Fitness trumps cholesterol as key to heart health http://qnc.queensu.ca/story_loader.php?id=43184cb927d49 5.9.2 (Kingston, ON) ? Being physically fit can dramatically reduce men?s deaths from heart disease ? even when their cholesterol rates are high, says Queen?s researcher Peter Katzmarzyk. His new study to be published Tues. Sept. 6 by Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association shows that, regardless of their cholesterol level, men can cut by half their risk of dying from cardiovascular disease if they are physically fit. Other Queen?s members of the team, from the School of Physical and Health Education, are Chris Ardern and Ian Janssen. Researchers Timothy Church and Steven Blair from the Cooper Institute Centres for Integrated Health Research in Dallas, Texas, are also on the team. The primary aim of the study was to analyze the effectiveness of last year?s modifications to the guidelines from the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III (NCEP ATP III) for lowering bad (LDL) cholesterol to predict death from cardiovascular diseases. ?We wanted to find out if the new guidelines could identify men at risk for cardiovascular disease,? says Dr. Katzmarzyk. ?We confirmed that the guidelines do accurately identify men at risk not only of disease, but also at risk of cardiovascular death. We also discovered that fitness is important across the board ? at every level of cholesterol.? Results also suggest that within a given risk category, physical fitness is associated with a greater than 50-per-cent lower risk of mortality. In this study, physical fitness was four to five, 30-minute segments of activity per week: equivalent to walking 130 to 138 minutes per week. Researchers analyzed the cardiovascular risk factors and cardio-respiratory fitness of 19,125 men ages 20 to 79, who were treated at a preventive medicine clinic from 1979 -1995, prior to the revised treatment guidelines. Using the new ATP III classifications: ? 58 per cent of the men would have met the criteria for being ?at or below LDL (bad) cholesterol goal?; ? 18 per cent would have met the criteria for ?therapeutic lifestyle change? ? meaning diet, physical activity and weight management could lower LDL; and ? 24 per cent would have met the criteria for ?drug consideration? for lowering LDL. There were 179 deaths from cardiovascular disease over more than 10 years of follow-up. Overall, compared to men who met the acceptable LDL level under the revised guidelines: ? Men who met the criteria for therapeutic lifestyle intervention had twice the risk of cardiovascular disease death; and ? Men eligible for aggressive cholesterol-lowering therapy had almost seven-times the risk. ?Lowering the threshold for consideration of cholesterol-lowering drug therapy for those at high risk will ultimately save lives and also have important implications for the healthcare system,? says Dr. Katzmarzyk . The research was partly funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Contacts: Nancy Dorrance, Queen?s News & Media Services, 613.533.2869 Lorinda Peterson, Queen?s News & Media Services, 613.533.3234 Attention broadcasters: Queen?s has facilities to provide broadcast quality audio and video feeds. For television interviews, we can provide a live, real-time double ender from Kingston fibre optic cable. Please call for details. From checker at panix.com Sat Sep 17 01:42:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:42:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Los Angeles Times: Men, women and Darwin Message-ID: Men, women and Darwin http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-envtpsych29aug29,0,6625346,print.story?coll=la-home-health RULES OF ATTRACTION Men, women and Darwin Can evolutionary psychology take the mystery out of how we meet and mate? By Julia M. Klein Special to The Times August 29, 2005 THREE years ago, Robert Kurzban spotted an advertisement for a service called HurryDate, offering an evening of thre