Fairness

I'm just trying to internalize an interesting study coming out of the University of British Columbia, that tries to suggest that cultural forces, specifically market integration and religion allow societies to grow beyond individuals that are familiar with each other, such that people are generous to strangers. I suspect that this community size limit is above Dunbar's number, which is clearly a result of genetic heritage. The authors suggest that these forces are required for larger cohesive societies and that this goes against the conventional wisdom that our genetic heritage causes our behavioral fairness to strangers.
From the article. [J. Henrich et al., Science 327, 1480 (2010).]

These findings indicate that people living in small communities lacking market integration or world religions—absences that likely characterized all societies until the Holocene—display relatively little concern with fairness or punishing unfairness in transactions involving strangers or anonymous others. This result challenges the hypothesis that successful social interaction in large-scale societies—and the corresponding experimental findings—arise directly from an evolved psychology that mistakenly applies kin and reciprocity-based heuristics to strangers in vast populations (4, 5), without any of the "psychological workarounds" (42) that are created by norms and institutions. Moreover, it is not clear how this hypothesis can explain why we find so much variation among populations in our experimental measures and why this variation is so strongly related to MI [market integration], WR [world religion], and CS [community size]. The mere fact that the largest and most anonymous communities engage in substantially greater punishment relative to the smallest-scale societies, who punish very little, challenges this interpretation.

I also bought into the mentioned conventional wisdom and find the suggestion that kindness to strangers is cultural and not innate very surprising. Shocking even. Why can I empathize so much with strangers? Is it seriously because I exchange money and am from a society with a history of Christianity? I wonder if levels of charity can confirm any of this data. Does this research then also offer the opportunity to compare the effectiveness of different religions in their social cohesive power? Interestingly, as I understand it, the study only scored communities as having a religion if it was Islam or Christianity ie. tribal religions didn't count as religions. I am guessing therefore that pagan religions did not demonstrate a correlation to kindness to strangers. Obviously the data is pretty prone to tons of uncontrollable variables and the data itself doesn't look impressive (see above figure), but apparently the statistics are conclusive. (I'll trust the reviews at Science on this one). Also it is just a correlation, and therefore doesn't prove causality.

Great summary in the Economist.

Top 100 stupid christian quotes

Not sure if I should laugh or cry. These quotes were taken from forum posts. Obviously I don't want to disparage Christians, there are stupid people in every faith (or non-faith). But most of them relate to science, such as this one:

"Everyone knows scientists insist on using complex terminology to make it harder for True Christians to refute their claims.

Deoxyribonucleic Acid, for example... sounds impressive, right? But have you ever seen what happens if you put something in acid? It dissolves! If we had all this acid in our cells, we'd all dissolve! So much for the Theory of Evolution, Check MATE!"

Ontario Election Debates

The first leader's debate for the upcoming Ontario election went down yesterday.

- Watch the big three party leaders go at it here if you missed it.

- Also, you can get Green party leader Frank de Jong's debate responses here. He had to record his responses while watching the debate on TV all by himself since the Greens aren't big and powerful enough to get invited to the prom (ie debate).

Hopefully, if the citizen committee's recommendations on electoral reform are passed (referendum to occur on the upcoming ballot) the Greens will win a more representative share of seats and get to be heard alongside the cool kids in future electoral campaigns. Despite their traditionally poor electoral success, they represent unheard, but I think fairly common Canadian values.

As for my two cents, I could get behind any party that isn't proposing further cultural segregation of children by funding more religion-specific public schools. This is the ass-backward proposal of the Conservatives, whereas the Liberals and NDP are against this type of move. The Greens in my opinion the most progressive of all parties on the issue, calling for end to all public funding of religion-based schooling (meaning the elimination of the existing Ontario Roman Catholic school board).

In this day and age it's kind of frustrating to see that attention is directed at this issue instead of many other important ones (ie modernizing public transit to move Ontario cities away from our ridiculous reliance on cars). However I think the issue will linger as long as we in Ontario continue to hypocritically fund Roman Catholic education, a policy that really just does not belong in our secular and integrative multi-cultural society.

"Viruses" Rule the World: Dan Dennett on Memes, Consciousness and Religion

This mind-bending lecture from Tufts University philosopher/cognitive scientist Dan Dennett is a must-listen if you haven't already. Kicking it off with the genetic analogy of parasite-driven ant suicide, Dennett picks up where Dawkins left off with The Selfish Gene, expanding on the meme ("idea-gene") concept to demonstrate how Darwinian principles can help us to understand the spread and impact of culture and ideas. In particular, he uses this approach to ask why many people are willing to sacrifice their own life for certain ideas. This leads to a discussion of the religion virus, and it's interesting that he takes quite a different position on the issue than the extremist one currently favored by Dawkins himself. Also manages to get in some important points on the illusion of human consciousness. It's 20 minutes well worth it, I promise you. See his other TED talks for more detailed treatments of religion and consciousness.

PS - You don't have to take my word for it - look at that classic beard and decide for yourself whether the man isn't a wizard-scholar of the highest order...

Discussion: Religion as Bad Science

I was following an interesting email exchange at Impressions Bioblogiques regarding creationism vs. evolution. The discussion spans several posts that can be read here, here and here (anglophones be warned, the discussion and commentary are exclusively in french). As is usually the case, this turned into a debate-by-proxy about the existance of God. That got me thinking about whether the right questions were being applied (The proper argument for an atheist should be: 'God does not exist', not 'Evolution happened'. Using the latter to argue the former is a straw man argument.)

Of course, Science has a duty to interact with Religion when Religion makes scientific claims, and even more of a duty to take them on when those claims are false (Young earth creationism, for example). But the question of religion, or more specifically the existance of God, is not a scientific question. It is not a testable hypothesis, makes no predictions from that hypothesis, and is not falsifable. I had concocted a post asking whether religion can and should be held up to scientific scrutiny (beyond actual scientific claims it makes, as my example above) when I came across this discussion between Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss in Scientific American which covers much of the ground I was going to attempt to, but far more eloquently. At the very least, it's an interesting read.

Super Scientists

Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne and Bruce Banner are just a few famous comic book scientists, but what about the science behind the heroes? The Ontario Science Centre recently put together a Superhero Science Exhibit, which has since ended its run a the Toronto museum, but is currently on tour (no word on whether it's coming to Ottawa any time soon). There are plenty of books out there determined to analyze the plausibility of comic book physics, and this light BBC piece on the science of superheroes. For the real scoop on what gives all heroes their powers, check out this guy's theory. But if you're more interested in what your favourite hero believes than what he can do, or are just curious whether he or she is more likely a creationist check out this comprehensive list of superhero religious beliefs, some with very detailed evidence. Holy Batman, batman!