Religion Doesn't Kill People; People Kill People

I recently caught Robert Wright talking to Charlie Rose about his book "The Evolution of God". I thought he had some interesting things to say, though I haven't read the book. You can check it out the interview for yourself here.

His basic point is that religion is not the root of all evil (ie Sept. 11, Iraq war) as the neo-atheist totalitarians Dawkins and Hitchens would have you believe. He argues that religious doctrines evolve to meet the basic biological needs of their followers. He points out the fact that scriptures of all religions are full of obvious contradictions that give them the flexibility to adapt to changing enivronments. When leaders need to rally the troops to "kill the infidels", the appropriate scripture verse is at hand. Likewise when it's time to "love all men as God's creatures" a different verse from those same scriptures provides justification.

If not religion, what is the root of all evil? Wright alludes to what I think is a much more scientific explanation. Human behavioiur is simply driven by competition for finite resources. In this respect, we are no different than any other living organism. When our bellies are full and survival is a given, we all get along. Everyone can be part of the in-group. Philosophers write about the virtues of tolerance. When conditions are not so good and people start to starve, it's another story. Every man for himself. Tribalism rules the day. The all encompassing in-group breaks down and leaders of smaller tribes look for rationale to villify and exterminate the others. In good times or bad, religious scriptures provide group cohesion by justifying whatever behaviours the circumstances demand.

I'm not totally sure this is what Wright was getting at, but it's my interpretation. The behaviour of all living organims, humans included, is governed by basic survival, not by cultural cues. Don't buy it? Try witholding a meal or two from your cat...then try it with a human child...and watch peaceful co-existence go out the window. Sure we like to blab a lot about WHY we do certain things. It's the will of God, or whatever. We humans are the blabbiest much of monkeys to ever walk the Earth. Our painfully acute sense of self- and social-awareness demands that we constantly talk about everything we do and why we do it. We are moralizers, justifiers and rationalizers. But being self-aware and telling all about it does not equal self-determination. Ask Hannibal Lecter. The evolutionary chain of causation that determines our behaviour is not altered just because we loud-mouthed humans have the capacity to provide a self-affirming running narrative to anyone who will listen.

Wright's second major point is that religions currently need to and can re-invent themselves to promote harmony in a globalized society. He seems to think the way to get to a more scientifically correct religion is to put purpose back into evolution. That is, evolution unfolded as it did because God rigged up the universe to make it so. He makes this argument in a recent NYT piece. Evolutionary biologist Larry Moran is skeptical (more here); and it's hard not to agree with him. There is no evidence that evolution is directional (what about convergent evolution?). But is there evidence that it isn't ("junk" DNA)? I think this one ends in a draw.

Anyhow regardless of what you think about God, I think it's OK and even desirable for scientists to tolerate religion rather than try to exterminate it from the planet. And shift their attention away from cultural noise and back to the serious biological problems humanity faces. Feeding the world...population control...the end of oil...any takers? I can hear Hitchens already..."Hmmm...that sounds hard...can't we just go back to using big words to make fun of Creationists and blame them for all the problems?"

The Gospel According to Darwin

Lest our minds become preoccupied with the tribulations of the laboratory, and should our consciousness perchance stray from the great path of wisdom that hast been lain out afore us by the prophet Darwin, let us reflect upon this week's reading from the Scriptures of biology:

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility."

A Reading from the Book of Darwin.

- Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species. Chapter VI - Difficulties of the Theory. Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication.

I Knew Jesus Was Cool!

Jesus takes down two bouncers on his way into the bar, drinks a bottle of JDs and picks up two women in less than 60 seconds, showing obvious signs of superior Darwinian fitness. Naturally, God gets jealous.

Bayman is A God: Nature.com

A recent bayblab discussion on the topic of open publishing apparently caught the attention of our friends over at the Nature Publishing Group. First, Hilary from Nature Precedings jumped in with excellent commentary and discussion on this post. Now, in a post on NPG's blog Nascent (Nature's blog on web technology and science), Timo Hannay firsts blasts PRISM (as did we) and then goes on to cite one of my more provocative comments on the topic and has this to say about it:

"Some people are just too quick to assume base motives, and employ words like "boycott" as if they were punctuation marks. Also, let's be honest, sometimes open access publishers have stoked these flames to their own PR ends. For me, this cynical and wrongheaded mindset reached its apotheosis (so far) in a comment on this blog post, which suggested that — wait for it — scientists should boycott NPG for having set up the free preprint server and document-sharing site, Nature Precedings:

'[G]ood call on Nature preceedings being designed to fail - I totally agree, had the same thought. I think it's Nature's effort to sandbag open publishing. Scientists and open publishing supporters should be crying bloody murder on this. I suggest a boycott of Nature preceedings. Hell maybe even the rest of Nature journals...'

Yeah, right, that would be good for open access..."

My gut reaction was that I just got bitch-slapped by someone at Nature, but I wasn't totally sure because so many big words were used (damn those writers and their big dictionaries). Naturally I immediately dictionary.com-ed the hell out of his post to figure out what he was saying:

a·poth·e·o·sis /əˌpɒθiˈoʊsɪs, ˌæpəˈθiəsɪs/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[uh-poth-ee-oh-sis, ap-uh-thee-uh-sis] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun, plural -ses /-siz, -ˌsiz/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[-seez, -seez] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation.

1.	the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god.

2.	the ideal example; epitome; quintessence: This poem is the apotheosis of lyric expression.

Hmmm. Elevation to the rank of a god. Ok, I can take that. Now let's look at the context, I seem to remember something from high school about meaning and context. Hmmm...

"cynical and wrongheaded mindset reached its apotheosis"

So, I'm the god of cynical wrongheadedness. Ok maybe not the best god if one had one's choice, but still, a god's a god.

Seriously though, I thank Timo for taking the time to clarify his position and respond to our provocations. Whether or not one believes the the NPG is seriously dedicated to open publishing as a corporate entity, he and others (see Hilary from NPG Precedings' comments on this post) demonstrate that some individuals within the organization are very dedicated to modernizing scientific publishing. His post and is worth reading. Hopefully I will muster up a more challenging response to his arguments in the future...

God is not great

That is the title of Christopher Hitchen's new book. While I can't say that I admire Hitchens as much as Dawkins, in fact he is a bit obnoxious, I do enjoy seeing him debate. On a recent tour for his book, he's decided to do his debates in the bible belt, taking the enemies of reason head-on.

In Dawkins' review of his book, here is what he had to say about Hitchen's debating skills:
"I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, “. . . and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”.
Grayling’s engaging caricature misses Hitchens’s ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And “spray” suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline."

I think Hitchen's should come debate with John Torry, before the conservatives start including ID in out science books.

Global Warming Still Happening: James Hansen Strikes Back on Climate Data, Scores Points for Team God

In a newly-released statement, James Hansen, NASA scientist responsible for their temperature data, explains "what's really going on" with recent headlines that described errors in reported climate data and raised concerns regarding the realities of global warming. Yes, says Hansen, we made errors, the blogger told us about them, and we corrected them. The corrections are insignificant he claims, (see fig.) and were blown out of proportion by the conservative media in an effort to enable "the royalty" in power to go on destroying the Earth. In fact, he says, we already knew that 1998 wasn't the warmest year on record, and they reported this previously. He should've just stopped with the data ("Just shut up James. You had me at no significant difference). But no. The latter half of the letter is a fervently emotional rant about, "usufruct (WTF?), gorillas, captains of industry, court jesters and how Hansen is just working to save "Creation". Freaky.

Hey, I appreciate the man's passion and I'm all in favor of individuals and industries taking responsibility for their impact on the environment. But it would be nice to see scientists approach the issue with a balanced, objective perspective, not as Crusaders fighting to protect God's creation from Satan's evil oil-hungry minions. I don't care what God or Satan think. I just want some reality please. And don't tell me your too busy defending God's domain to get your data straight.

Left-Handedness is the Pinnacle of Evolution

Enough with the molecular reductionism. We all know it's fun to theorize and hand-wave about the molecular basis of life, but of course real biologists ignore molecules and go right to the in vivo models. And what have we learned about the evolution of left-handedness from these more relevant human studies?

• Left-handed men are worth more to society than right-handers, as evidenced by the fact that their salaries are 26% higher.
• Left-handers get their own special scissors, because they are better at arts and crafts.
• The QWERTY keyboard was designed specifically for lefties, with all the important letters on the left, becuase left-handers are the only ones who have thoughts worth typing.
• Bike helmet straps designed for right-handers, because lefties more co-ordinated and don't need to wear helmets.
  
• The leaders of the most successful empires of human history were left-handed - most of the British Royal family, Alexender the Great, Charlemagne, Julius Caesar and Napoleon were lefties. This obviously contributed to their success and TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION. For example Napoleon taught all his soldiers to be kick-ass left-handed swordsmen and based his military strategy around this special ability...the rest is history.
• George Bush Sr. (the smart one) is left handed. George Bush Jr. (the illiterate one who invaded Iraq) is not.
• In music, Jimi Hendrix was left-handed and the greatest guitar player to ever live.
• The most intelligent two humans ever born were left-handed. Albert Einstein and Leonardo DaVinci.

You might ask, why then, if left-handedness is superior and therefore under positive selection, are there currently much fewer lefties than right-handers around? Actually this has nothing to do with evolution. The true reason for this discrepancy is that God is jealous of left-handers because they are better than him in all ways, which he did not intend when he first began to direct the evolution of humans. He therefore banded with the right-handers, convincing them to form a right-handedness conspiracy in an effort to wipe out the lefties. It is well known that the church persecuted left-handed children as "devil-spawn", and school-masters tried, with significant success, to beat the left-handedness out of young children. The church also refused to marry left-handed "agents of satan", directly leading to diminished reproductive success.

Fortunately, enlightened lefties like Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Jack the Ripper, Benjamin Franklin, Fidel Castro, Gandhi, Buzz Aldrin, Ted Koppel, Bart Simpson, Ross Perot, Tom Cruise (in Mission Impossible), Rocky Balboa (especially in part III), Rambo (the original) and Bob Dylan refused to cave to oppression and fought to overthrow the church's dominance of society, establish human rights and develop more just societies. As a result, human evolution has been freed from the reign of the right-handed conspiracy, and the frequency of lefties has been on the rise for the past sixty years (see fig below). Obviously, left-handedness is superior and that is why life evolves to be left-handed, not just at the molecular level, but the important ones too (although there is an outside chance that it may be caused by global warming).





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