The Proper Study Of Mankind

Thoughts on the Templeton Foundation

2010-06-29T14:27:00.007Z

It’s no secret that many atheists don’t much like the John Templeton Foundation (hereafter just ‘Templeton’), and have a pretty low opinion of people who accept Templeton funding and financial support. This theme cropped up in two recent blog posts – one by Jerry Coyne, the other by PZ Myers – and I want to make a few comments about both.

Coyne’s post was a response to a new website to be launched by Templeton, Big Questions Online. Coyne starts in characteristic style:

“Are you one of those indigent freelance writers, scrabbling hard to earn a pittance? Sick of magazines and newspapers that pay you jack? Well, your troubles are over—at least if you’re willing to churn out accommodationist pap. The John Templeton Foundation, through its credential-bending director of publications Rod Dreher, has announced that, if you’re willing to toe the party line, Templeton has big simoleons for writers.”

The details of the ‘pap’ writers will have to produce are provided by Dreher:

“[T]he Web publication the John Templeton Foundation will soon launch, Big Questions Online, will be paying good money for essays. We're interested in smart, insightful pieces on science, religion, markets, morals, and any combination of the four.”

Myers’ post is a long response to an essay by Ron Rosenbaum, who was one of this year’s Templeton Science and Religion Journalism Fellows. At the end, Myers writes:

“I'm not going to try to take apart every word in Rosenbaum's disjointed agglomeration of poorly thought out nonsense. But I will leave you with one little phrase from the article that tells you everything you need to know: “Having recently spent two weeks in Cambridge (the one in the United Kingdom) on a Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship…” Goodnight, Ron Rosenbaum.”

I don’t think I’m misreading Myers’ comment when I say that the implication is that anyone who has anything to do with Templeton is inherently untrustworthy (intellectually) and their views can be dismissed simply by virtue of that association.

Coyne’s short post admits of two possible readings. On one, he could be taken to be saying that writing about science, religion, markets or morals is to inevitably churn out accommodationist pap (otherwise it doesn’t make sense to cite the scope of the articles Templeton are interested in as evidence that putative contributors will be required to do so). But that would be crazy talk. Joseph Henrich, for example, is one of the world’s leading anthropologists, and uses a combination of ethnographic observation, mathematical modelling and experimentation to tease apart the basic factors shaping human behaviour (I haven’t done justice to his research with this summary; check his website out for more details).

A recent paper of Henrich and colleagues, published in Science, was entitled, ‘Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment’. The abstract reads as follows:

Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history.

Is this accommodationist pap, junk research that is of no interest to anyone but the devout wishing to reconcile science with religion? Of course not. Would I be producing worthless accommodationist garbage if I wrote a story about this sort of work for, say, Science or Nature? Again, of course not. So would it automatically become accommodationist pap if I wrote exactly the same thing for Big Questions Online? And what does writing about science, religion, markets and morals have to do with arguments about accommodationism? Indeed, Coyne seems to have moved away from principled arguments about accommodationism to simply smearing everything and anyone that has anything to do with Templeton (though as we’ll see below, his targeting of people is actually a bit selective). And if writing about science, religion, markets and morals – even for Templeton – is not intrinsically pap-worthy, then why does Coyne say, in response to calls for essays on these topics, that writers must be willing to “churn out accommodationist pap” or be “willing to toe the party line”? And finally, just what is the Templeton party line when it comes to science, religion, markets and morals? I’m genuinely interested to hear answers to these reasonable questions.

Of course, the real issue here is the Templeton Foundation – what it does, and what it’s about. The big sticking point, for writers such as Coyne and Myers, seems to be not merely the fact that many folk at Templeton hold religious beliefs, but that they argue for a compatibility between science and religion that Coyne, Myers and many others do not accept*. Richard Dawkins has criticised the organisation for trying to ride on the coat-tails of science, but I get the impression that the issue is really much deeper: that Templeton poses a threat to the conduct of science and the integrity of researchers who benefit from their funding. On the Edge website, Coyne wrote:

I absolutely agree ... that the Templeton Foundation corrupts science. It does this in two ways. First, it involves us in a dialogue that is designed to have a predetermined result: the reconciliation of science and religion. But when doing our own research, we are not committed to a specific outcome. Thus, if you're one of the many scientists who doesn't think that such a reconciliation is possible — at least not without mendacity, self-delusion, or cognitive dissonance — then it is unethical to take money from the Foundation. That is like taking money to attend a conference aimed at reconciling evolution with Intelligent Design, even if you do not think that they're compatible. (IDers think that they are.)

Second, it leads, as George Johnson has noted, to the appearance of a conflict of interest, even if the beneficiary is convinced that none exists. Even if a US Senator is predetermined by his own opinions to vote in favor of, say, drilling for oil in Alaska, it is nevertheless illegal and unethical for him to take personal money from the oil industry, and it looks bad to take campaign money from the oil industry. Scientists should be purer than Senators because it is our business to promulgate the truth, and all we have is our reputations as unsullied truth-seekers.

I am appalled at the Templeton Foundation dangling large sums of money in front of scientists. Why so much money? This can only serve, I think, to bend those people motivated by the prospect of gaining a million-plus dollars toward the will of the Foundation.

You’d have to be a bit of a moron to fail to see why someone might hold these concerns. But I think they may be a bit over-blown, and I’ll try to explain why. The first point, that anyone who doesn’t believe in a fundamental compatibility of scientific knowledge and religious belief is behaving unethically if they accept money from the Templeton, seems to go a bit far, for a number of reasons.

First, not everyone who receives Templeton funding does so in relation to work that is aimed at establishing this compatibility. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, for instance, is a leading social and cultural psychologist, and one of his research interests is in the long-neglected positive emotions. Hadit has received Templeton funding into positive psychology, but the published work that has arisen from this has nothing to do with reconciling science and religion, or even arguing for accommodationism.

Second, even if you disagree with Templeton about accommodationism or the fundamental harmony between science and religion, it does not strike me as unethical to work with Templeton. Here’s a parallel. Jerry Coyne, like me, has written for Science magazine – and the official line of its publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is accommodationist. Yet that didn’t prevent either Coyne or me for writing for them, and quite rightly. The purist attitude evident in refusing to accept money from someone with whom you do not entirely agree with is commendable to a degree, but I think it needs to be kept in perspective. I wouldn’t write for a racist publication or organisation, for instance – my ethical stance against racism would make me an unethical hypocrite if I did. Yet does it follow from that example that I shouldn’t write for anyone with whom I disagree on some point, whether it be foreign policy or domestic politics? Obviously not, otherwise I wouldn’t write for anybody. Similarly, if you only maintained friendships with people with whom you agreed 100%, you’d probably be pretty lonely.

So it clearly matters what the disagreement is about. A disagreement about whether some races are inherently superior to others is very deep moral disagreement, one that cannot be glossed over while conversation focuses on other things. But is a disagreement of whether science and religion can be reconciled a similarly profound moral issue, as opposed to an intellectual/epistemological issue? Is it the case that if someone believes in accommodationism, and you don’t, then that person’s is, like the racist, beyond the moral pale, and should therefore be avoided? This seems a little hard to swallow, but I’d be interested in arguments to show I’m wrong.

Coyne’s second point, that accepting Templeton funding creates the perception of conflict of interests, even where none really exists, also seems to be less significant in practice. In the case of the oil company and the senator, the oil company wants to pursue drilling and the senator is advocating drilling. But this one-to-one mapping of interests is not always, or perhaps even frequently, evident when it comes to Templeton funding: it’s not like Templeton has a single goal of arguing for accommodationism and only funds people who argue likewise. Haidt’s work on the positive emotions, for instance, is not a call for accommodationism, nor is it offered as proof of “spiritual realities” – it’s just basic psychological research.

The final point, about the temptations created by the prospect of large sums of money, calls into question the integrity of those who accept it. Yet I’m not really sure that Coyne or Myers want to go on the record and question the research and motivations of people such as Haidt, or Dacher Keltner (another researcher in positive psychology), or evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson who have received Templeton funding – or researchers such as Herb Gintis (a leading game theorist and behavioural economist) and Michael Gazzaniga (one of the world’s most famous neuroscientists), who have participated in Templeton projects. (I accept that the quality of their work and their fame is no guarantee that they do not bend their views to get Templeton money, or that they don’t hold bizarre views in other domains, but I’ve seen no evidence to support either assertion.) Of course, if Templeton was an inherently immoral organisation, then there would be cause for censure of these academics – but what evidence supports such an argument?

I want to return to the issue of the scope of Templeton’s funding interests, which I’ve already suggested go beyond simply giving people money to spout an accommodationist position. The organisation funds research into many areas that are part of standard academic research. For instance, the highly respected evolutionary biologist Gunter Wagner of Yale University was awarded a grant to study “genetics and the origins of organismal complexity” (a topic that should be right up Myers’ and Coyne’s street – and mine too, as you can see in this article). This sort of work is essential for understanding the topic of ‘evolvability’, a central issue in evolutionary-developmental biology. Wagner’s published work – which I heartily commend to you – has nothing to do with promoting a reconciliation between science and religion. It’s just good science, and we should be grateful that it’s being funded. Would Coyne be prepared to say that Wagner (or Haidt, or Keltner) has in some way acted unethically or been corrupted by accepting this grant? Has science lost out, or gained, by the availability of Templeton funding in this case? And if this case is beyond reproach, then why the blanket dismissal and ridicule of all Templeton-related activities? What about behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin of Kings College London receiving money to look into the genetics of high cognitive abilities? Or Paul Zak receiving funding to study the effects of oxytocin on social behaviour? Are all these researchers obligated to churn out accommodationist pap because they’ve received money from Templeton? And if not, then why does that logic apply to writers contributing to the Big Questions Online?

So I come back to the starting point. Why does Coyne suggest that doing anything related to the Templeton’s activities automatically imply that you have to write accommodationist pap, or toe a part line? Why does Myers think that the mere fact that someone has had something to do with Templeton mean that they can be written off? I understand that neither of these writers likes the idea of science and religion being compatible in a deep sense (i.e., not just that one mind can hold both scientific and religious beliefs), but I struggle to see how this translates into such vitriol against Templeton and its affiliates: remember, Coyne described the Templeton Fellowships as a "bribe" (Coyne did later say he didn’t really mean bribe – though it’s it not quite clear what he meant other than to smear the organisation), and Russell Blackford called Chris Mooney a "disgusting traitor" for accepting one such Fellowship.

I must be missing something. Perhaps Coyne and Myers will suggest I’m a mental defective who simply can’t see what’s really going on. Or perhaps they know things I don’t about how corrupting Templeton is on researchers, writers and science at large. I hope, however, that if they reply, they can refrain from the obvious temptation to attack me at my deepest integrity by suggesting that I’m simply auditioning for Templeton money. We need the debates to get beyond the ad hominems.

*I’m also an atheist who doesn’t believe that science and religion are fundamentally compatible: if you accept that the way we find out about the world is through observation and experiment, and that explanations must be couched in naturalistic terms that can be assessed empirically, then faith, revelation and authority seem to be off the cards. But it doesn’t follow from this position that I should be hostile to the work of Templeton, the researchers it funds, or the writers it supports.

The Evolution of Biological Innovation

2010-06-24T17:33:00.002Z

The theory evolution by natural selection, boiled down to its bare bones, is pretty simple. All it requires is that a few conditions be met among a population of animals or plants (or any other organism for that matter): competition for resources; variation in survival and reproductive success; and a system of heredity that ensures that some of this variation is passed on from generation to generation. We now know what Darwin didn’t, that genes underlie the transmission of much of the variation seen among organisms that affects how well they thrive, and whether they pass on their genes or not.

And so natural selection can be cast as an essentially algorithmic process: when there is genetic variation in a population of organisms, and some of this variation affects how well they get on in life, the population will evolve. As new genetic variants with beneficial effects arise, their bearers will do better, pass more copies of these genes on, and after a while most or all members of the population will carry the new genetic variant and its associated benefits.

So when thinking about if and when a population will evolve, genetic variation is a crucial issue. If there is none, then there is now raw material for natural selection to work on. Although there may be variation in the outward form or behaviour of the individuals in the population, and some of this may affect whether they stay alive and fecund, it won’t be passed on to future generations — thus short-circuiting the cumulative power of natural selection.

So the extent of genetic variation in a species or population is a crucial determinant of whether it will evolve, and how it will respond to new selective pressures. To capture this in a word, we might say that genetic variation drives the ‘evolvability’ of a species of population.

‘Evolvability’ was coined, perhaps surprisingly, as recently as 1987, by Richard Dawkins, the arch-phrasemaker who also brought us the ‘selfish gene’, ‘extended phenotypes’ and ‘memes’. And while it has sometimes been used to reflect the capacity for evolutionary change under the pressures of natural selection described above, it is nowadays more commonly used to mean something more subtle, perhaps more fundamental.

Evolvability, in its modern sense, generally refers to the capacity for genetic changes to produce adaptive changes in how organisms are built and behave — their phenotypes, in the biologists’ lexicon. The issue here is not the extent of genetic variation per se, but how this genetic variation maps onto phenotypic variation — that is, whether genetic variants produce phenotypic variants that are beneficial and can be passed on to offspring. This is the key to evolutionary innovation, and the emergence of new organismal designs. So rather than focusing on how much genetic variation is knocking around, researchers interested in understanding evolvability are increasingly looking to the factors that determine the ‘genotype–phenotype map’: for it is changes in the mapping functions that determine the relevance of whatever genetic variation is present.

This is all pretty abstract and theoretical, but I put some flesh on these ideas in a piece for New Scientist this week. It’s currently available to read in all its glory here. Check it out.

Oh what a lovely molecule!

2010-06-11T15:21:00.011Z

The continuing adventures with the astonishing hormone oxytocin

Oxytocin is small but remarkable molecule. It clocks in at just nine amino acids — compared to 524 for our blood’s oxygen carrier, haemoglobin — yet it packs a powerful punch. And where haemoglobin is tasked only with the relatively simple job of ferrying oxygen around the blood, the effects of oxytocin reach into some the deepest recesses of the human condition.

Oxytocin acts as both a hormone that circulates around the body and a neurotransmitter that regulates brain activity. Over the past 10 years, oxytocin has been implicated in some of the most fundamental aspects of social relationships, such as romantic love, trust and bonding: it helps create the strong bond between infants and mothers, reduces maternal stress, increases trust in economic games, and ameliorates anxiety.

Many studies have stressed the importance of tactile contact in regulating the effects of oxytocin. Touch is an important means of social communication for many mammals, and is frequently deployed to convey emotional states, such as friendliness and anxiety. And studies on rodents have suggested that direct tactile contact is indeed essential for activating the oxytocin system.
Yet along with physical contact, vocalisations — such as the squeaks of mice — are also an important means of social communication in a range of mammals. And oxytocin plays a key role here, too. Mice genetically engineered to lack the oxytocin gene produce fewer social vocalisations, show profound social deficits, and have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

This led Leslie Seltzer, Toni Ziegler and Seth Pollak from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to wonder whether such vocalisations could boost oxytocin levels. And while rats might be quite vocal, humans have taken this skill to an extreme. So the team looked at whether human speech alone could affect oxytocin levels.

Comforting words
Seltzer and colleagues enlisted more than 60 mother-daughter pairs for their study. All daughters were prepubescent but old enough to understand the experiment, and the experiment was limited to females to ensure the greatest degree of similarity and comparability between subjects, and also to connect their results to earlier work, most of which has focused on females. To test the hypothesis that the spoken word could cause the release of oxytocin, each poor kid had to speak and solve maths puzzles in front of an audience, a task well known to induce stress and the release of cortisol.

Then the kids were split up into three groups. One group was then reunited with their mothers for 15 minutes, who comforted them with hugs and soothing words; this comprised the ‘complete contact’ condition. Another group received a telephone call of the same length from their mothers (‘talk only’); the final third (the control group) watched an emotionally neutral film for 75 minutes (the other girls watched 60 minutes of the film after seeing or speaking with their moms, so that the effects of the film could be subtracted out of the analysis).

Their results — reported a few weeks back in Proceedings of the Royal Society B — support British Telecom’s slogan from the 1990s that “It’s good to talk”. In all the stressed-out kids, cortisol levels spiked, as to be expected. Yet in both the complete-contact and talk-only groups, cortisol levels returned to normal more rapidly than in controls. This was accompanied, in the experimental groups, with elevated urinary levels of oxytocin, whereas controls showed no rise in the hormone. And although the magnitude of these effects was greater with complete contact compared with a call alone, cortisol levels in both groups were statistically indistinguishable after an hour. In the absence of a comforting hug, a few words of support may do the trick in soothing a stressed-out soul.

To tend and defend
Another study on oxytocin, published in today’s issue of Science, explores its effects in males — and not as an anti-stress hormone but as the source of social solidarity. Humans are the social species par excellence. Yes, ants and bees and many other species in huge groups, but none cooperates with genetically unrelated individuals to the same extent as humans. This capacity for large-scale cooperation, and the altruism it is built on, is the key to the global success of humans over the past 50,000 years.

Yet altruism isn’t cast about indiscriminately. It is directed more towards members of variously defined in-groups (only a small percentage of whom will be relatives), and selectively withdrawn from perceived out-groups. This ‘parochial altruism’ may have emerged through the process of cultural group selection, in which groups fostering prosocial norms towards the rest of our group, and antagonism towards out-groups, led to greater success in inter-group competition.

Such cultural selection can also have effects on biology — a phenomenon biologists call gene–culture co-evolution. As famous example is dairy farming: among those populations that picked up the cultural habit of keeping cattle and using their milk, genes for digesting lactose beyond childhood became more valuable and spread, so we now see high levels of lactose tolerance in societies with a history of dairy farming, and low levels elsewhere. In the case of altruism, in-group amity and out-group enmity, a cultural milieu favouring in-group love could have placed a premium on biological mechanisms that promote this feeling.

So Cartsen De Dreu and colleagues decided to see whether oxytocin played any role in modulating parochial altruism. Their experiments, like so may that investigate altruism and inter-group cooperative dynamics, used simple economic games — and in this case, only males were included. The games they played went as follows. Each player was assigned to a three-person group (their in-group), which was paired up with another three-person group (the out-group). Each player was given 10 Euros, which they could either keep to themselves, or contribute to one of two common pools — a ‘within group’ pool and a ‘between group’ pool — after which the pooled money was to be split among members of each group.

These allocation options came with different economic payoffs for the parties involved. For every Euro contributed to the within-group pool, an additional 50 cents were given to each member of the player’s in-group, and so contributions to this pool measured ‘in-group love’ (a purely selfish player would keep all their money to themselves while hoping to free-ride on the contributions of their group members, of which they would get a share when the post was divvied up). Paying into the between-group pool also generated an extra 50 cents for each fellow in-group member, while also decreasing the money in the out-group by 50 cents per player, and so provided a measure of out-group hate.

Before playing this game, some participants received a shot of oxytocin, administered as a nasal spray. (This method has been used in previous studies, where it was shown to increase feelings of trust.) This hormonal boost had the effect of increasing in-group love, but had no consequences for out-group hate. 52% of players in the placebo condition behaved selfishly and did not contribute to the within-group pool, and only 20% showed in-group love. The single shot of oxytocin, however, switched this patter, and now only 17% of players acted selfishly, with 58% evincing in-group love. (Out-group haters comprised 28% of players in the placebo condition, and 25% in the oxytocin arm.) This warm glow of in-group love also moved those who scored more highly as selfish on questionnaires to contribute more to the in-group, so it’s the case that only those primed to cooperate respond to oxytocin in this way.

Other experiments suggest that the in-group love is driven less by hatred of the out-group and more by a desires to protect the in-group. Players played similar economic games, but this time the rules were manipulated so that in some conditions players could do particularly well by cooperating with their teammates, which is this case meant contributing a decent share of their endowment (this was the ‘greed’ situation). At the same time, the rules also allowed for the possibility that players would do particularly badly if they failed to work together cooperatively, while the out-group would gain a significant edge (the ‘fear’ condition). So some games were in greed and fear, other high in one and not the other, and some low in both. This enabled the effects of greed and fear on cooperation, and this interacted with oxytocin.

As expected, those given oxytocin showed more in-group love than those receiving placebo. But this effect was greatest when players were in a high fear situation — that is, when the possibility that their group would lose out heavily was salient. Meanwhile, no effect of greed was seen.

It needn’t have been this way. Parochial altruism could promote in-group love and, simultaneously, fuel aggression towards out-groups. But in these experiments at least, parochial altruism emerged as a ‘tend and defend’ philosophy: look after your own and protect them, but don’t go all out to get at out-groups. And as social philosophies go, it’s not the worst starting point in the world.

Torture, Inc.

2010-03-04T14:17:00.006Z

The story of how torture became part of standard operating practice at Guantanamo Bay is by now widely known (Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic has written extensively, and with great sense, about all these issues; a good place to start is with this open letter to George Bush). Details of the abuses meteed out to detainees such as Mohamed al-Kahtani and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of 9/11, are now in the public domain, and they make for grim reading. For months on end, Al-Katani endured a daily regime of four hours interrupted sleep, blaring music, stress positions, extremes of hot and cold, and an imaginative variety of humiliations and degradations, including a puppet show put on for his birthday in which he was depicted engaging in sexual acts with Osama Bin Laden. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, among other things, waterboarded more than 180 times in a single month.

In the case of al-Katani, some people have asked whether his treatment really amounts to torture — after all, he wasn’t electrocuted, he didn’t have his teeth pulled out or needles inserted under his finger nails. As one interrogator’s motto has it, “No blood, no foul”. Doubts have also been expressed as to whether waterboarding qualifies as a torture – though some of those who have voiced this doubt have revised their opinion after putting their money where their mouth is and voluntarily submitting to the procedure. What from a distance seems to be merely an unpleasant yet controlled experience is unbearably distressing when you’re strapped down with a towel over your face and water being poured onto that — as Christopher Hitchens will tell you.

Among all the moral and legal debates over the use of coercive interrogation techniques, and whether they add up to torture, the contribution of science has been overlooked. Yet psychologists and neuroscientists have much to say about the effect of various forms of ill-treatment, including those we recognise as obvious physical torture. I write about some of this work in a feature article in this week’s New Scientist magazine, which you can check here, along with an associated editorial.

The long and short of this research is that a variety of psychological manipulations and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) have similar, or worse, long-term effects on mental health as physical torture. If the immorality of torture depends on the consequences is has for human well-being, then there’s little scientific support to distinguish between torture proper and more justifiable, and less morally abhorent, forms of ‘torture-lite’ or ‘no-touch torture’ captured under the CIDT rubric.

There has also been an historical lack of scientific input about how to go about interrogations. Like advertising, interrogation has been touted as more of an art than a science (though social psychology would reject both of these diagnoses). Interrogation techniques have often developed in light of anecdotal evidence and have not been subject to scientific scrutiny.

Take the roster of techniques listed in the Army Field Manual. These are supposed, when administered according the Army’s guidelines, to be practically, legally and morally sound ways to get information out of detainees (though Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym of a former interrogator in Iraq, suggest that there are in fact loopholes that would permit some inhumane treatments). Leaving aside the legal and moral issues for a moment, we can ask, “On what basis do we have reason to think that these techniques work?”.

Very little, it turns out. Colonel Steven Kleinman — an officer in the US Air Force Reserve, interrogation trainer and an outspoken advocate of interrogation reform — says that “the principles, strategies, and methods set forth in the Army Field Manual on interrogation have never been systematically and objectively reviewed for their efficacy” (personal communication). As such, Kleinman - who has served as an interrogator in three military campaigns (Operations Just Cause, Desert Storm, and Iraqi Freedom) - argues that there is “vital need for true science to fill the massive gaps and correct the enduring myths/misunderstandings that surround the art of interrogation”. To address this shortcoming, Kleinman, working with an experimental psychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist, has reviewed these techniques in a paper to be published in the Defense Intelligence Journal. In short, they argue that “much of the material in the field manual lacks scientific support and, in some cases, may actually be counterproductive”:

“An example of the former is the assertion that capture shock presents an ideal moment to question a prisoner, allegedly because the trauma of capture will cause them to be less security conscious. Science demonstrates that people experiencing such trauma have difficulty in attending to questions or directions and often provide thoughtless answers. In addition, their ability to recall events accurately is severely diminished. As for the latter, the use of the approach known as Pride and Ego-Down (essentially belittling the prisoner in the expectation that he will answer questions in order to defend himself and his ego) will likely increase resistance, especially among members of ethnic groups (where under such emotional challenges and humiliation the individual feels a stronger bond with other members of the in-group and more disconnected from — and defiant toward — members of the out-group.)”

Such approaches are not the only ones available for carrying out interrogations, as Kleinman argues:

“We have a rich history of conducting interrogation correctly. The MIS-Y program in World War II focused on high-level German and Japanese military officers and government officials. The individuals selected to serve in this program were college educated, talented linguists, and intimately familiar with the cultural background of the prisoners they encountered. Rather than employing force, these interrogators used a host of stratagems and gambits that involved a culturally relevant relationship-building approach augmented by meticulous research that often gave the interrogator the appearance of possessing far more knowledge about the enemy than he really did. The result was a prisoner who no longer viewed the interrogator as an enemy and who was convinced that there was no need to protect information that he believed was already known to the interrogator.”

These historical considerations, along with the near-total absence of scientific support for more coercive approaches to interrogation, have led Kleinman and others to argue for a new approach to gaining information from human sources. For instance, in a paper written with Randy Borum, a terrorism expert at the University of South Florida, and Michael Gelles, a military psychologist, Kleinman has sketched out a new paradigm for “educing information” from detainees, one that draws on insights from social psychology and negotiation theory — and which would mark a return to the kinds of historically successful interrogation techniques Kleinman alludes to, but this time based on real-world data of efficacy.

Finally, Kleinman raises a number of cost-effectiveness issues that result from poor techniques for gathering intelligence information:

“If there is a bottom line, it is this: the U.S. Intelligence Community has an annual budget that exceeds $65 billion, with a substantial portion of that funding invested in research to support new generations of technical intelligence collection. At the same time, the U.S. Government has not sponsored true research into the art of interrogation since 1956 (discounting the misguided research by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s that involved drugs and hypnosis). The actual cost of a robust research agenda to develop a new generation of interrogation doctrine — one that is not only operationally effective, but also reflects the highest legal and moral traditions of the nation and is respectful of human rights —would be comparatively small (perhaps .001 percent of the annual Intelligence Community budget). The potential returns, however, could be nothing short of extraordinary. First, the small wars (e.g., counterterrorism and counterinsurgency) are intelligence-driven wars in which human intelligence — and especially interrogation — play an irreplaceable role. Research could facilitate much greater operational effectiveness and, as a result, higher quality and more timely intelligence information to drive policies and plans. Second, by refining methods toward the twin goals of both operational effectiveness AND respect for human rights, we may begin to 1) respond to the myriad challenges with far greater knowledge of the adversary and the nature of the conflict itself and 2) reverse the enduring strategic consequences of sponsoring a program that has involved the employment of coercive methods and instead begin to comport ourselves in a manner more consistent of our self image as a nation of laws and champion of human rights.”

All of which suggests that you don’t have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to oppose abusive treatment of terrorist suspects or insurgents, though a concern for basic moral standards will augment your case. A simple concern for national security, and a desire to spend money effectively in combating future terrorist attacks and, gets you to the same destination.

(Many thanks to Col. Kleinman for providing these illuminating comments, and, more importantly, for his continued role in trying to reform current interrogation practices.)

Is belief all it’s cracked up to be?

2009-08-09T11:26:00.002Z

The endless debates and arguments sparked off in recent years by the phenomenal success of books by the New Atheists — an irritating term to describe writers such as Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens — have a number of strands that are not always clearly disentangled. One thread of criticism, developed by writers such as Karen Armstrong, is that these authors have a childish, not to mention foolish, obsession with the beliefs of religious people. For Armstrong, this mistake finds a parallel in the obsessive defence of specific beliefs and doctrines by followers of religious traditions. The problem, in short, is that religion should not really be construed as a matter of belief, but should be seen as a form of practical knowledge, something you do rather than think. I’ve written a short piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free section following up the implications of this recommendation.

The evolution of disgust

2009-03-01T12:41:00.010Z

New reseaerch illuminates the path from "oral won't" to "moral don't".

Confronted with the worst excesses of human wickedness and moral depravity, we’re apt to respond not just with condemnation, but with deep and visceral revulsion. And the daily news provides all too many opportunities to observe the baseness of our fellow humans. When the horrendously brutal details of the short life of Baby P came to light last November, my mind struggled to understand not only how the child protection services at Haringey Council could have missed the abuse this poor child continuously suffered, despite 50 visits to his home over 2 years, but also how on earth anyone could possibly mete out such treatment to a defenceless baby (hardly an unusual thought, I appreciate). It’s incomprehensible, and revolting.

In such cases, our moral abhorrence or disgust is patently justified. Indeed, you’d suspect that anyone lacking such feelings on hearing this tragic story had a moral screw loose. More generally, moral revulsion has been advocated as a guide to moral judgment. On this view, there is wisdom in repugnance, which may express an intuitive understanding of actiosn, events and situations that the rational mind can’t fathom [1].

But moral disgust is a complex emotion. Perhaps more than any other, it is easily put to thoroughly immoral ends. Just as we physically push away disgusting food or objects in front of us, we emotionally and socially distance ourselves from those we view as disgusting. Research shows that people dehumanise extreme out-group members, such as vagrants, and are primarily driven by disgust when they do so [2]. Portraying social or ethnic groups in disgusting terms — as cockroaches or rats or even just as fat, greedy and greasy humans — is a frequent prelude to pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide [3]. Disgust has driven attitudes to interracial sex, and today is a still a potent force in shaping attitudes to gay sex, with knock-on effects on views about gay rights, particularly the right to marry [4].

Far from being an infallible or even reliable moral light by which to find our way, moral disgust is frequently the source of bias, prejudice and hostility. The disgusting are seen as less than human, and treated accordingly (and as history reminds us, people are all too willing to make people appear disgusting by forcing them to live in filthy, squalid, humiliating conditions so as to justify the mistreatment they will subsequently face).

The complexity of disgust as a social and moral emotion is reflected in its development, both through evolution and in individual development. Historically and developmentally, moral disgust follows on the coat-tails of core disgust – the revulsion experienced when you seen bodily fluids, a rotting carcass or dog shit on your shoe (or on the tyres of your bike, as is more often the case for me). And core disgust is itself a cognitively complex emotion.

For a start, it is more than just distaste or a felling of aversion towards something. As Paul Rozin, one of the pioneers of research into disgust, points out, disgust is a much more cognitive and emotional reaction that simple distaste, and draws on an understanding what food is and where it comes from [5]. Animals dislike and avoid certain tastes, but don’t qualify as having a genuine disgust response. This claim needs a bit of unpacking. Imagine I show you a sterilised cock-roach, and then dip it in a glass of lemonade using clean tongs. Would you sip the drink? Probably not, even if you’re thirsty. The drink will seem contaminated, and disgusting.

The notion of contamination, which is a complex cognitive evaluation, is an important part of the human disgust reaction, and is clearly more than just distaste. The lemonade, after all, will taste exactly the same after the cockroach dipping (that is, delicious — at least for those who, like me, have a sweet tooth). It will even be safe. But the feeling of aversion directed at the cockroach gets transferred to the harmless drink (similarly, people are often reluctant to eat chocolates shaped like turds). This doesn’t happen among other animals, nor in children under 5 to 7 years of age.

Similar notions of contamination and transference as found in core disgust (indeed, are hallmarks of a genuine disgust response) have also been found in the moral domain. Just as we are repulsed by the prospect of consuming foods or drinks contaminated by elicitors of core disgust, we also fear moral contamination. Studies show that people feel a bit queasy about the idea of putting on a sweater worn by Hitler (even if carefully laundered). What’s more, being forced to recall our own moral misdemeanours produces an urge to physically cleanse ourselves in an attempt to wash away the moral stain on our character.

Some researchers have suggested that much talk of moral disgust is merely metaphorical. There is general agreement that moral judgments related to actions that involve elicitors of core disgust — faeces, bodily fluids and offices, and certain forms of bodily contact — have a strong disgust element driving them. (It’s little wonder that people get so vexed about sexual morality.) But when we say we’re disgusted by the venality and irresponsibility of investment bankers, are we really experiencing a visceral feeling of revulsion, or just using a verbal tag to show off our disapprobation of their actions?

There are clues that this isn’t so, at least in some cases. Studies such as those on Hitler’s sweater provide one reason to doubt the metaphor hypothesis. If disgust and the associated ideas of moral contamination are just metaphors, why do people object to donning Hilter’s now-clean sweater? There is also some evidence that core disgust and moral disgust elicit similar physiological responses. Whereas anger tends to cause the heart rate beat faster, disgust — prompted by looking at a gory image, say — makes it drop. So what happens when people view an extreme moral out group, like the Nazis? Does their bodily response suggest that they are getting mad, or feeling revolted?

Jonathan Haidt, who has worked with Rozin and built on his ideas, paired up with graduate student Gary Sherman to address this question, using a variety of nasty video clips, as well footage of Nazi rallies, which subjects viewed while their bodily reactions where monitored [6]. Haidt and Sherman found that not only did people report being disgusted by the Nazis, their heart rates also told the same story. Strikingly, those who heart rates dropped the most also reported greater clenching of the throat, another disgust-related muscular response. (Brain-imaging studies also suggest that similar brain regions subserve both core and moral disgust.)

All of which leads to the following evolutionary and developmental scenario for the emergence of moral disgust. Initially, animals evolved a distaste response that guided them away from poisonous or otherwise harmful foodstuffs. In humans, this distaste foundation was built upon to create the more complex and cognitively demanding ‘core disgust’ domain, whose primary elicitors are things that practically all of us find totally gross (shit, piss, puke, snot, puss – I use these decidedly non-euphemistic terms to fire up your disgust response!). Combine this with the notion of contamination and the transference of bad properties of one type of object or matter to another, and now history begins to count: in assessing whether to eat or drink something, it isn’t just a case of whether it looks nice or smells fresh; its provenance matters, as does its history of contact with other disgusting things (this, lamentably, can even include people).

This core disgust system took a long while to evolve, and takes time to emerge through child development. But once in place, it has been co-opted by our social and moral psychology to serve new ends — principally to distance ourselves from the morally odious. Whereas core disgust originally protected the body against oral incorporation of dangerous things, the expanded concept of moral disgust enables us to protect our moral selves, at the levels of individuals and communities, from moral contamination and corruption. As Haidt frames it, the guardian of the body has taken on a new role as a guardian of the purity of our souls.

The link between the two domains, the oral and the moral, is captured in colloquialisms expressing condemnation of moral transgressions, like “His behaviour left a bad taste in my mouth”. Of course, this isn’t a literal claim, but what underlies it? The idea of an evolutionary and developmental trajectory from “oral won’t” to “moral don’t” has recently been tested by psychologist Hannah Chapman and colleagues at the University of Toronto, who argue that disgust related to oral incorporation is indeed similar to that experienced during moral judgement [7].

In a paper just published in Science, Chapman et al. report on experiments in which they had subjects look at images designed to elicit disgust (they depicted dirtiness, faeces, and insects, for example) and also to taste some salty, bitter and sour liquids [7]. They then compared the facial expressions associated with these actions with those elicited by being treated unfairly. The focus on facial expressions of emotion derives from the Darwin-inspired research on the cross-cultural and universal expression of certain basic emotions, which includes disgust. For disgust, the canonical facial response involves wrinkling the nose and raising the lips.

They found that all three conditions (images, clips and unfairness in the economic game) caused subjects to raise their lips and wrinkle their nose in a disgust-type manner (associated with activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face). These responses were related to self-reported disgust, but less so for self-reported anger or sadness.

These are intriguing findings, and I agree with the authors’ conclusion that they are “consistent with the idea that in humans, the rejection impulse characteristic of distaste may have been co-opted and expanded to reject offensive stimuli in the social domain.” But interpreting their findings is not entirely straightforward.

In an accompanying commentary, Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt and Katrina Fincher highlight some of the problems. They describe a three-tiered model of disgust psychology (shown below). In this model, there are, going from top to bottom, stimuli (potential disgust elicitors), a disgust-evaluation system, and a disgust output response (which in turn has nonverbal, behavioural and physiological elements). Some stimuli, such as bitter-tasting drinks, feed straight into the disgust output response. They use the direct distaste pathway common to many animals — and just as animals do not engage a disgust-evaluation system, neither to these basic stimuli in humans. Other elicitors of core disgust, such as cockroaches and certain sexual acts, are processed by the disgust-evaluation system (lacking in animals and young children), which then activates a disgust response.

Domains of disgust. The schematic represents routes by which eliciting situations may trigger the disgust output program. Those that run through the disgust evaluation system--which includes appraisal of the elicitor, feelings, and contamination ideation--trigger the full disgust emotion. Solid lines represent routes through which an elicitor can activate the disgust evaluation-output program. Dashed lines (green) represent direct elicitation of the disgust output program. The dotted line (brown) represents a metaphoric, indirect route. (Image copyright of AAAS)

It is when we move beyond moral transgressions involving aversive substances to more purely moral issues that things get a bit more complicated. As shown in the figure for the case of unfairness, such abstract issues could, in principle, drive the disgust response by various routes. First, they could feed into the disgust-evaluation system, like many other elicitors of core disgust, and trigger a response. Alternatively, they could directly activate the disgust response, in the way bitters tastes do. Finally, moral transgressions related to fairness rather than bodily functions could be associated with concepts or verbal tags that in turn directly activate the disgust response. (We should also ask whether, in any of these cases, the disgust response is really just a metaphor — although they might represent different types of disgust, are they not all a species of genuine disgust? I leave you to ponder that puzzler.)

Chapman and colleagues suggest that the disgust experienced when on the receiving end of unfair treatment is in some sense “the same” as that arising from classical elicitors of core disgust (e.g., cockroaches). If the Rozin–Haidt–Fincher model is on track, then this claim would only be true if unfairness is processed through a disgust-evaluation system. And that question isn’t settled by the current study. What is needed, according to Rozin and colleagues, are experiments that “examine the effects of a variety of elicitors on a variety of dependent measures (e.g., contamination, appraisals, and feelings)”.

There are some other issues that also need to be ironed out. Previous research has suggested that different sorts of moral violations are linked to different sorts of moral emotions. The anthropologist Richard Shweder has suggested that moral concepts broadly cluster into three families [8]. The ethic of autonomy deals with individual rights, and issues of justice and fairness. The ethic of community is more focused on adherence of group norms related to social stability. And the ethic of divinity draws on notions of bodily and spiritual purity, and the sacred and profane (an ethical domain that has atrophied in Western societies — whether this is a cause for celebration of lamentation is up for debate).

Haidt and Rozin have previously argued that violations of the domains of community, autonomy and divinity typically lead to the moral emotions of contempt, anger and disgust, respectively (they call it, rather neatly, the CAD Triad Hypothesis) [9]. According to this scheme, the unfairness in this study should have produced subjects who were more angry than disgusted, but possibly a mix of the two. This is plausibly what happened: raising of the upper lip, which Chapman and colleagues used as a principal measure of disgust, is also activated by anger. And so perhaps it is simply that elements shared with the disgust response were activated, rather than a full-blown disgust response prodded in action by a disgust evaluation of unfairness.

In any case, these ongoing explorations and debates continue to reveal the complexity of our emotional and moral lives. What is so strange is how unaware we typically are of all that’s going on when we’re making evaluations about the good or bad, the awe-inspiring or abhorrent, the commendable or condemnable. From the outside, moral disgust can look very simple (not to mention simple-minded): you look, you go ‘Yuk!”, and you say it’s wrong. But this simplicity hides the machinations of an evolutionarily and developmentally complex, and quintessentially human, moral emotion.

Notes
1. Kass, L. R. (1997). The wisdom of repugnance. The New Republic 216, 17–26.
2. Harris, L. T. & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low — neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychol. Sci. 17, 847–853.
3. Glover, J. (1999). Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Random House, London).
4. Nussbaum, M. (2004). Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ).
5. Jones, D. The depths of disgust. Nature 447, 768 (2007).
6. Haidt, J. & Graham, J. (in press). Social Justice Res.
7. Chapman, H. A., Kim, D. A., Susskind, J. M. & Anderson, A. K. (2009). In bad taste: evidence for the oral origins of moral disgust. Science 323, 1222-1226.
8. Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C, Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "Big Three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "Big Three" explanations of suffering. In Morality and Health (Brandt, A. & Rozin, P. (eds.) 119–169 (Routledge, New York).
9. Rozin, P., Lowery, L., Imada, S. & Haidt, J. (1999). The CAD triad hypothesis: a mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity). J. Personality Social Psychol. 76, 574–586.

Happy 200th, Darwin!

2009-02-12T10:17:00.004Z

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in the Tora Bora Mountains or somewhere similarly remote you’ll have heard that this is a big Darwin year. Not only is it the great man’s 200th birthday (today, February 12th), but November will also see the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species. (So now you have a reason to use the delightful word sesquicentennial).

There will, no doubt, be a deluge of Darwin-related retrospectives and Darwin-inspired speculation today as we celebrate the history of the greatest idea ever, and the man behind it. Science journals and magazines will naturally make the biggest noise. Nature, for its part, has put together a stellar issue around this anniversary, and I’m delighted to be able to say that I’m a part of it with a feature article on human nature, human universals and cultural diversity (see also the issue's editorial).

Trying to understand human beings in light of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection and descent with modification have been controversial from the get go. This approach fell out of academic favour for much of the 20th century (as an understandable reaction to excesses of biologically based theories of human behaviour and identity, from eugenics to the gas chambers of Nazi Germany), but started re-emerging in the 1970s and 80s under the guise of socio-biology, and then really hit the big time with the emergence of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s.

Evolutionary psychology has been misread, misunderstood, misrepresented and caricatured in a variety of ways. It has been denigrated as ‘just so’ story telling (after Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories in which he spins yarns about, for instance, why elephants got long trunks and leopards got spots). It has been lambasted as sexist, racist, right wing, genetically determinist, greedily reductionist, and flat out wrong.

Needless to say, I think much of this is massively misguided (see Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate for a thorough rebuttal of these charges). But that doesn’t mean I think that evolutionary psychology is flawless in all respects (and it’s an increasingly broad church, with its own internal disagreements). I fully accept the core message of evolutionary psychology: that we need to think about the innate, evolved structure of the human mind (human nature, in other words) in understanding human behaviour. The idea that we’re born as blank slate, which is one of the worst ideas in the history of psychology, has rightfully been slain, and I think evolutionary psychology has been an important aid to this (though the work of linguist Noam Chomsky and various developmental psychologists have also been crucial in this regard – indeed, the ideas and findings coming from these people have been enthusiastically picked up by evolutionary psychologists, who have drawn much inspiration from them).

At the same, the particular interests of evolutionary psychologists, and the intellectual climate that the field was initially a response to, has at times lead to a neglect of cultural variation, and processes of cultural transmission and evolution, in human behaviour. This is not, as I read it, the result of dogmatism on any side, but a genuine disagreement about how best to understand human behaviour, human nature and cultural variation.

Arguing against the ‘mainstream’ evolutionary psychologists (typically taken to be John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, David Buss, Steven Pinker, and various of their students) are a cadre of anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers. While most of them accept some of the core tenets of evolutionary psychology, and are not afraid to talk about an evolved human nature, they also want to get a much more detailed account of how culture interacts with this given nature to produce manifest behaviour. And it is these sorts of accounts that I run through in my Nature piece. It’s an exciting time to be thinking about human behaviour, human nature and culture, and I hope this little feature will convince you of that too.

Gracious giving and helping hands

2008-09-26T12:52:00.006Z

Two new papers on prosocial behaviour in monkeys suggest that giving to others can be self-rewarding, and also sensitive to situations.

Primates are particularly social species. Not only do they frequently live in large groups, but many also behave altruistically to members of their groups. Yet the factors that drive altruism and other-regarding behaviour remain unclear. One idea is that a feeling of empathy drives prosocial behaviour: a feeling of connectedness provides the motivational fuel to help others, which is in turn rewarded with a warm glow produced by activation of reward circuits in the brain (when humans do goof they tend to feel good, and show activation of reward-related brain areas).

Aside from exploring the subjective feelings produced by other-regarding actions, or the effects these have in the brain, another way to explore this empathic hypothesis is to look at how people or indeed non-human primates behave. If a systematic bias towards acting in ways that benefits others can be demonstrated, this would suggest that it is intrinsically rewarding or gratifying.

Research into the altruistic tendencies of chimpanzees has thrown up a number of conflicting findings. Early studies suggested that chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of others. Joan Silk and colleagues reported that chimpanzees were no more likely to choose an option that benefitted themselves as well as another familiar individual at no extra cost than they were to choose an option that benefitted just themselves (1). Similar results were found by Keith Jensen and colleagues, suggesting that chimpanzees are motivated solely by personal gain (2).

Later studies have complicated the picture. Chimpanzees, like young children, will help a human get hold of an object that is out of reach of the human but which the chimpanzee can move into a better position, particularly when this can be achieved with not too much effort (3 – described here). Chimpanzees will also help another chimpanzee get into a room to access food, even if the helper cannot benefit from the fruits (literally) of this act — that is, they help regardless of reward prospects (4). This suggests a motive for helping beyond concerns about personal gain, or a selfish cost/benefit analysis.

In a paper published in PNAS, Frans de Waal and colleagues have looked at giving behaviour in brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), to see whether there are any signs that empathy for others factors into social behaviour (5). It should be noted that these New World monkeys are much more distantly related to humans that chimpanzees, other African apes, and Old World monkeys. Nonetheless, they can provide insights in the motivational factors involved in altruistic behaviour, which may also apply to more closely related species, and indeed us.

In their experiments, de Waal et al. presented capuchins with a choice of two colour-coded tokens. Selecting one led to a reward solely for the subject (the selfish option) and nothing for a partner visible in a separate room, while choosing the other token produced a prosocial equal rewards for both the subject and partner. (The monkeys had previously been made familiar with such token choices related to different outcomes.)

If the monkeys were indifferent to benefitting their partners, then they would be just as likely to pick the selfish option as the prosocial – they choices would look 50/50, or random (there’s little reason to suppose that they would consistently pick the selfish option, unless they were particularly nasty, and observations in the wild do not suggest this). A bias towards the prosical option would, by contrast, suggest a concern with others. And this is just what de Waal et al. found. When capuchins were paired with known but unrelated individuals, they chose the prosocial option significantly more often than chance, and the effect was even stronger when the partner was a relative. The prosocial effect only disappeared when the partner was an unknown member of a different group.

In general, prosociality increased with the closeness of the relationship between subject and partner. From an empathy-based perspective, this makes sense, as we feel closer, and therefore more empathetic, towards family members, friends, acquaintances and strangers in that order. The capuchins were also more likely to look towards their partners when they were being prosocial, and to exchange more gestures of affiliation.

The kindness demonstrated in these studies was also shown to have limits. In a variant of this set up, the rewards we asymmetric, such that in choosing the prosocial option generated a reward for the subject (an apple) inferior to that given to the partner (a grape – capuchins are apparently particularly fond of this fruit!). Previous studies (again using grape rewards) have shown that capuchins are sensitive to unfairness in rewards for comparable efforts, and inequity was shown to be a factor in modulating giving behaviour in the current study. Preference for the prosocial option in the face of inequity in rewards failed to exceed chance, although came closest to doing so between relatives (so although inequity made the capuchins less kind overall, they were still kinder to kin).

The other paper by Jennifer Barnes and colleagues, published in Biology Letters, looked at helping from another perspective (6). These authors take the previous conflicting data on chimpanzee sociality and altruism to indicate that the cognitive operations underlying altruistic behaviour are context-dependent and sensitive to the particular details of a given situation. And it was these details they set out to explore.

The team ran two experiments. In the first, a capuchin monkey sat in a room connected to a small annex; in the annex, which was separated from the main room by a grid, sat a toy that an experimenter was trying to reach (see (a) in figure). While it was beyond the grasp on the human, the monkey could reach through the grid and pass the toy to the experiment. In one condition, the experimenter held a reward in their non-grasping hand, and in another they held up an empty hand (these were also subdivided such that half the time the experimenter flapped a hand around trying to reach the toy, while at other times they just held it limply in the annex). In all cases, the experimenter stared intently at the toy, and glanced up to the monkey from time to time. These conditions didn’t make much of a difference, and very few capuchins could be bothered to extend an arm through the grid and manoeuvre the toy into a suitable position for the experimenter, reward or not and irrespective of reaching behaviour by the experimenter.

In the second experiment, the set us was changed slightly: the grid separating the annex from the main room was removed, so the monkeys could easily walk into the annex to get hold of the toy (see (b) in figure). The conditions (reward/no reward, combined with reaching/no reaching behaviour) were repeated as in experiment 1.

Now things were different. In these trials, which were run repeatedly, all six monkeys in the study repeatedly handed the toy to the experimenter. This provided data that enabled the effects of reaching and reward to be analysed. Regardless of whether or not the experimenter was actively trying to reach the toy (over and above staring at it, and then the monkey), a reward made the monkeys help more than 95% of the time. By contrast, when there was no reward and the experimenter tried to reach the toy, monkeys helped a little over 50% of the time (and when there was no reward and no reaching this dropped to just over 30%).

These results suggest, in the words of the authors, that capuchins are “somewhat stuck on their own personal pay-offs”. In other words, capuchins seem to care more about what’s in it for them than the potential benefits their behaviour could bring someone (admittedly a human in the case). This contrasts with chimpanzees, whose helping behaviour (even when it comes to helping humans) seems to be based more on the desires and needs of their partner.

Barnes et al. propose that their findings point to a difference between the lineage leading to New World monkeys and that leading to the apes in the ability to incorporate the perspective of another in overcoming a self-centred bias.

References
1. Silk, J. B., Brosnan, S. F., Vonk, J., Henrich, J., Povinelli, D. J., Richardson, A. S., Lambeth, S. P., Mascaro, J. & Schapiro, S. J. Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members. Nature 437, 1357–1359 (2005). doi:10.1038/nature04243

2. Jensen, K., Hare, B., Call, J. & Tomasello, M. What’s in it for me? Self-regard precludes altruism and spite in chimpanzees. Proc. Royal Soc. B 273, 1013–1021 (2006).

3. Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science 311, 1301–1303 (2006). doi:10.1126/science.1121448)

4. Warneken, F., Hare, B., Melis, A. P., Hanus, D. & Tomasello, M. Spontaneous altruism by chimpanzees and young children. PLoS Biol 5, e184 (2007).

5. de Waal, F. B. M., Leimgruber, K. & Greenberg, A. R. Giving is self-rewarding for monkeys. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 13685–13689 (2008).

6. Barnes, J. L., Hill, T., Langer, M., Martinez, M. & Santos, L. R. Helping behaviour and regard for others in capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). Biology Letters 23 September 2008 [Epub ahead of print]

Two feet good...

2008-03-06T13:51:00.010Z

Along with a big brain, walking upright on two feet has often been taken to be a defining feature of the human line. In this week’s New Scientist I have a feature article on some recent ideas about why, and where, bipedality first arose. The ‘where’ question relates not to which part of the globe walking on two feet got going, but whether it was on the ground or in the trees.

What? Walking in the trees? It might sound counter-intuitive, but some researchers have recently been arguing for just this possibility, based on observations of the locomotor behaviour of orangutans. In the wild, orangutans not only move through the branches suspended by their hands, but occasionally ‘walk’ along branches while stabilising themselves by holding onto braches overhead. This ‘hand-assisted bipedalism’, the suggestion goes, could have been the precursor to bipedality in the human line.

It’s a controversial theory. Many other experts in human evolution argue that the fossil record clearly shows that the earliest humans show features of knuckle-walking ancestry. This, the counter-argument goes, points to a knuckle-walking ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas: while the latter species retained this trait, the human line evolved a commitment to bipedalism as it increasingly abandoned life in, and among, the trees.

As is so often the case in debates about the course of human evolution, more fossils are needed. It would also be good if researchers could arrive at some sort of consensus about what the existing fossils tell us. I suspect that academic rivalries, and prior theoretical commitments, make this prospect unlikely in the short term. But keep your eyes open.

There is an idea even more provocative than ‘tree-walking’ that I was unable to cover in my New Scientist piece because of space constraints. Aaron Filler, a spinal expert at Harvard University with a fascination with human evolution, has recently proposed that the evolution of bipedality has a much older, and much simpler, origin than previous account allow.

By studying the spines of many living and extinct mammals, including apes, Filer claims to have documented a series of changes leading to the upright spine typical of humans. And some of these are astonishingly old. Filler argues that the lumbar vertebrae of Morotopithecus bishopi, an ancient ape that lived more than 20 million years ago (some 7 million years before the split between orangutans and the other great apes), shows tell-tale signs that its owner was an upright biped.

And for Filler, this has little to do with trees or savannahs. Rather, changes to the spine might have arisen by mutations in ‘homeotic’ genes that orchestrate developmental processes. Small changes to such genes can produce big changes by affecting entire developmental cascades. Filler speculates that an ancient mutation may have produced an individual in a single generation with a lumbar region causing an upright posture – the first bipedal ape. And so orangutan tree-walking is derivative, not innovative. “Bipedalism in the arboreal orangutans is a vestige of their ancestry and not so much a harbinger of the human locomotor style,” says Filler. (Filler has a website based on his book expounding this theory at www.uprightape.net. Filler also has a video describing various forms of primate locomotion online here).

While I’m at it, here’s a cool video of gibbons showing off their arboreal parkour antics (this really needs to be watched with sound, as the mixed in music (Welcome To The Jungle, by Guns'n'Roses) really adds to the film).

Scientific Happenings on the South Coast

2008-02-20T15:19:00.004Z

Brighton, UK, is playing host to fourth annual science festival between 23 February and 2 March, and there is lots on offer for anyone living in the region and interested in a bit of brain food. You can browse the programme highlights here, and there are more detailed pages for the various events on the left-hand side of the page this links to.

You can catch Rita Carter on multiple personalities, Chris Frith on free will, Oliver Morton on how plants ‘eat the Sun’, Phillip Ball on nature’s patterns, Richard Fortey on life at the Natural History Museum and Marcus du Sautoy on the ubiquity and importance of symmetry, among many other talks and events. All in all, well worth checking out.

Evolution’s Engine

2008-02-14T15:32:00.005Z

The ongoing wars over the teaching of evolution (particularly in the US) have elevated into public consciousness an unlikely topic: molecular microbiology. Modern day creationists, rebranding themselves as ‘Intelligent Design theorists’, have made sweeping, not to say unfounded, claims about the limits on the power of evolution on the basis of a tiny nanomachine called the bacterial flagellum.

This complex structure, made of about 40 interacting proteins, is essentially an outboard motor that powers bacteria through their watery environment. At the heart of the flagellum is a rotary motor that drives a long, whip-like tail, which propels the bacterium as it spins round. It is a magnificent work of molecular engineering (see below).

For ID theorists, it is more than just awe-inspiring in its complexity and elegance. To them, it speaks of intelligent design. For tactical reasons the nature of this designer is often left unspecified. Yet the context of these claims makes it clear that a notion of a creator, of the kind found in Judaeo-Christian cosmologies, is lurking behind the scenes.

In essence, ID is a resurrection of an idea with an old pedigree: the ‘argument from design’ that the apparent plan and purpose in nature call for divine explanation. The most famous incarnation of this argument was bequeathed to us by English philosopher William Paley in 1802. Paley suggested the following thought experiment. Imagine that, walking across a heath, you stumble upon a pocket watch, and ask yourself “How did this object come into existence?”. A mechanical watch is a complex, highly engineered device, whose interacting parts contribute to the overall purpose of accurately telling the time. It is clearly massively unlikely that the components of the watch achieved their specific forms through natural processes, and then just happened to come together by chance – and then work to serve a useful purpose. No, the existence of watches requires the existence of skilled watchmakers. And by analogy, the wonders of nature reflect the efforts of a thoughtful, intelligent, purposeful creator*.

Of course, for evolutionary biologists there is no cosmic engineer or molecular draftsman drawing up plans as part of some biological hobby. The cumulative power of descent with modification — Darwin’s theory of natural selection, in other words — is the ‘blind watchmaker’ of evolution. No cosmic designer needed, thank you. As such, evolutionary-minded microbiologists, geneticists and molecular biologists have felt the need to step up to the charge that the bacterial flagellum is ‘irreducibly complex’, unevolveable, and in need of an intelligent designer to explain how it can exist.

The topic — explaining functional biological complexity at the molecular level — is, of course, of much broader interest. From a purely academic angle, irrespective of the political campaigning of IDists (or IDiots, as some say), the bacterial flagellum is exactly the sort of system we should be looking at the test and refine ideas about the various mechanisms, and specific routes, by which biological complexity arises.

And this is just what scientists have been doing in recent years. In this week’s New Scientist, I have a feature on what has been found, and what remains unclear, in flagellar research. Scientists do not claim to have wrapped up the story on flagellum evolution. But what is more interesting is the way recent scientific debates about the flagellum highlight the intellectual bankruptcy of ID theory. If you took the ID case seriously, you’d say “OK, the flagellum is irreducibly complex and could not have evolved – done.” You might then move onto the next difficult issue in evolutionary biology, and say the same.

The scientists I spoke with, by contrast, have a rather different epistemological approach. Yes, the evolution of complex molecular machines poses difficult questions, but that’s what makes them interesting and rewarding to study. And it’s not that evolutionists just want to club together to shout, “Look, the flagellum evolved – job done!”. They want to get some real explanatory purchase on the problem.

This concern with actually working out the details inevitably throws up different ideas, which other scientists then critically evaluate. Analyses are criticised, hypotheses scrutinised and conclusions questioned. This is the sign of healthy science in action; it leads to real insights and refined understanding. In short, the evolutionary approach is a genuinely testable theory, and a viable research programme. Falling back on ID, on the other hand, reveals an intellectual lack of nerve. Where evolutionary biologists face up to the mysteries the universe presents, and are prepared to put in the hard work required to crack them, IDists give up on trying to reach any sort of understanding whatsoever.

*’But who created the creator?’, you should rightly ask. We may reasonably suppose that a creator of biological splendour would be as complex and apparently ‘planned and purposeful’ as the biological ‘creations’ we want to explain. If so, the existence of this creator also needs explaining. To side step this in issue reflects an outrageous double standard: that complexity and apparent purposefulness and design in one domain (nature) require explanation – so much so that might even feel compelled to infer a cosmic creator from them — but that in another (creator gods) such features are a given. It’s no better than when someone points out one of our own double standards, and we weakly try to justify the inconsistency between the standards we apply to others and those deployed in our own conduct by saying “But you see, in my case it was different….”

For more on the flagellum, see:
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/04/flagellum_evolu_1.html

Natural-Born Killers?

2008-01-30T23:29:00.001Z

Lately I’ve been thinking about some of the darker facets of human nature, particularly the human capacity for killing each other. There’s enough going on around the world to justify sinking in to a reflective funk about this persistent and troubling behaviour, from rising gun crime on UK inner-city streets to Darfur Iraq and, more recently, Kenya. But I’ve had another reason for dwelling on the nature of the murderous mind: I have a feature article out this week in Nature on current trends in thinking about evolution, the brain, violence and murder.

As a species we’re built to compete for resources (money, sexual partners, status, power and so on), and from time to time the friction caused by everyone rubbing up against each other ignites an emotional explosion leading to murder. And we very likely have an evolved coalitional psychology that binds ‘us’ against ‘them’ in conflicts with outgroups (be they defined along national, religious or ethnic lines); the sparks created by abrasive groups pushing against each can all too easily set off an all-encompassing conflagration that threatens to burn down whole societies (you can fill in your own historical or contemporary examples here).

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Human history, as revealed by palaeontologists, archaeologists, anthropologists and criminologists, has always been plagued by violence and murderous mayhem, both at the inter-personal, one-on-one level, and also in terms of the death tolls exacted by tribal warfare. Yet on timescales from millennia to decades, things seem to be getting better. A much smaller percentage of the populations of modern democracies meet their end through murder of any kind than has been the case for most of the past 5,000 years (see my Nature article, and Steven Pinker’s essay in The New Republic, for more on this).

On the shorter timescale of decades things also seem to be on the up. For instance, the number of armed conflicts around the world, and the number of people dying in genocidal purges, is also on the decline. The Human Security Brief 2006, published by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, has documented a number of encouraging trends (though there is still, obviously, much progress to be made):

“Notwithstanding the escalating violence in Iraq and the widening war in Darfur, the new data indicate that from the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2005, the number of armed conflicts being waged around the world shrank 15% from 66 to 56. By far the greatest decline was in sub-Saharan Africa….The steep post-Cold War decline in genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians has continued. In 2005 there was just one ongoing genocide—in Darfur. In 1989 there were 10…The number of military coups and attempted coups fell from 10 in 2004 to just 3 in 2005, continuing an uneven decline from the 1963 high point of 25.” (These positive developments are tempered somewhat, the report notes, by increased international terrorism, and greater targeting of civilians in campaigns of political violence.)

In my Nature article, I try to draw out both the causes of violence and murder, and the reasons why they might on the decline over the long term. These are clearly enormous topics, and one could write a big book – or an entire bookshelf – trying to answer these questions, and still leave something important unsaid. In a 4-page feature, space constraints and the need for a coherent arc through the piece mean something has to give. One topic that I wasn’t able to go into in as much detail as I would’ve liked is the possibility that evolution has sculpted the mind to kill. So I’ll explore that idea in a bit more detail here.

Evolved Killers
Most evolutionary see murder as a by-product of our evolved minds, not as a behaviour that natural selection has sculpted humans to engage in. The business of getting through, and getting ahead in, life invariably brings people into conflict with one another. A colleague’s promotion may come at the expense of our own advancement; a competitor in the sexual market may monopolise the attention and affections of those we desire to have as our own; or a rival in the race for power, status and wealth may stand in the way of our goals. The risk that competition over material resources and reputation (which often serves to enhance the attainment of desirable resources) will escalate into murderous violence is particularly acute among men, who in common with many animal species have both more to gain and lose in the in the evolutionary game of successfully reproducing — and therefore greater incentives to place bigger, and riskier, bets at life’s table (essentially, the variance in reproductive output is greater among men than women, so that some men do really badly and others really well, whereas most women cluster around a similar average success) .

On the by-product account, the majority of murders happen when the normal brakes on aggression (fear of retaliation, empathy, and behavioural inhibition) are weak or temporarily overwhelmed by the momentum of an aggressive impulse: after a couple of beers, two hot-heads in a bar start trading insults over pool game, start fighting, take it to the parking lot, and one gets hit, falls, and smashes his head on a curb stone and dies.

And this failure to apply brakes on our aggression can also pose a threat to our supposedly nearest and dearest. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, have argued that men frequently use aggression and violence to control and coerce women, which perhaps surprisingly puts them on the same page as many feminists thoroughly antagonistic to evolutionary explanations of relations between the sexes. Occasionally, Daly and Wilson suggest, physical attempts by men to threaten, intimidate and punish their spouses (perhaps to make them think twice before leaving them for another man) occasionally result in “tragic slips” that leave the women dead.

Against this mainstream evolutionary account of homicide as a by-product of psychological mechanisms designed to facilitate completion and control of other people, David Buss, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Joshua Duntley, of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, have developed a much more ‘adaptationist’ argument [1-3]. According to their controversial homicide adaptation theory, natural selection has fashioned psychological mechanisms to produce homicidal behaviour in a wide range of contexts, and for a correspondingly diverse array of reasons.

Buss and Duntley are critical of approaches to violence that treat it as a singular phenomenon explicable by a single cause — a tendency toward competiveness and risk-taking, or a lack of emotional control and behavioural inhibition, say. The by-product account, contend Buss and Duntley, is too vague, too broad-brush, to be up to the task of explaining the myriad manifestations of murder. Instead, they argue that homicide – the killing of one person by another — covers a range of diverse behaviours, including infanticide, step-child killing, intrasexual rivalry homicides, mate killing, and warfare killing; and their homicide adaptation theory suggests that there is a cold, evolutionary logic to these diverse forms of murder.

Men, for instance, can eliminate a potential sexual rival, acquire his resources, gain access to his mate, ascend a status hierarchy, and send out a message about their readiness to use violence in defence their family and property through murder. Women can use killing to protect themselves against a violently overbearing spouse, or a threatening stalker, as well as eliminating potential mate-poaching females. Natural selection could even favour the killing of biological children in situations when, put in the cold calculus of evolutionary logic, the benefits to investing in the new child are outweighed by the costs, or unlikely to be realised (for instance, if times are tight and other kids are already on the scene, then investing in the newborn might be detrimental to the survival prospects of existing offspring; and if the baby is born deformed or otherwise unlikely to thrive, then further investment— and it is painful to write this — might be the biological equivalent of throwing good money after bad). As Duntley says, “Homicide can be such a beneficial solution to adaptive problems in certain, specific contexts that it would be surprising if selection had not fashioned mechanisms to produce lethal aggression.”

Given the impact and enormity of murder, it is little wonder it looms so large in literature, art and films. It also plays on our minds a worrying amount too, psychologists have found. Building on research by psychologists Doug Kenrick and Virgil Sheets into homicidal fantasies, Duntley and Buss have found that upwards of 90% of men, and more than 80% of women, have had a vivid fantasy about killing someone.

Of course, most people do not act on theses fantasies. And the fact that people fantasise about something does not prove that the act in the fantasy is part of our evolved psychology; many people (mostly teenagers and young men) have fantasised about playing video games, but nobody’s suggesting that gaming is part of human nature. (However, a fascination with pornography is also not something directly selected for over evolutionary time, and there is no evolutionary benefit today for a man to spend time alone with a magazine, or at his computer, rather than getting out and meeting real women; nevertheless, pornography is able to exploit the desire to see naked, sexualised human forms, and the mind has no defence against being tricked and aroused by 2-D images and not just 3-D people in the real world. So it is possible that the predilection so many men have for computer games is explicable by some similar ‘misfiring’ of evolved psychology in a modern context).

At the same time, homicidal fantasies, or ideation, can provide a window onto the murderous mind, just as sexual fantasies illuminate the sexual mind. It is not the existence of these fantasies per se, however, that impresses Buss and Duntley. Rather, it is the pattern of these fantasies. Buss, one of the pioneers of evolutionary psychological studies of human sexuality, draws an analogy with sexual fantasies. Romantic and sexual liaisons are enjoyable, so it is little surprise that fantasies about them preoccupy the minds of both men and women. What’s more interesting is the differences in the types of sexual fantasies that men and women engage in. According to Buss, these map onto the different sexual psychologies that men and women have evolved through eons of sexual selection.

The same holds for homicidal ideation. Not only do the sexes differ in the types of homicidal fantasies they typically entertain; these map onto the different situations in which killing would have been beneficial to men and women over evolutionary time, according to Buss and Duntley. So men frequently fantasise about killing other men who have dissed them or otherwise challenged their social standing (as well as men trying to steal their girl, or men who personally threaten them); women are often moved to homicidal thoughts by abusive boyfriends (although they too report thoughts of killing mate-poachers, a threat to both men and women).

While most people do not act out their homicidal flights of fancy, sometimes they do. Murder does not always result from inflamed passions ignited in the heat of the moment. For example, many men who kill their wives (for cheating on them, say) plan and think through the act before committing it. For Buss and Duntley, this doesn’t make sense according to the standard line in evolutionary psychology that spousal murders typically result from tragic ‘slips’ in men’s attempts to use violence to coerce and control women. On top of this, argue Buss and Duntley, the patterns of homicidal ideation and fantasy correspond to the actual patterns of killings recorded in crime statistics.

For Buss and Duntley, this adds up to some compelling evidence in favour of homicide adaptation theory over by-product accounts. As I mention in the text of the Nature piece, other evolutionary psychologists remain to be convinced. Curiously, evolutionary psychologists are often portrayed as eager to propose evolved functions for all aspects of human behaviour, seeing adaptation and function everywhere they look. Yet the response to homicide adaptation theory shows this is anything but the case. Many think that there is no need to propose separate adaptations for homicide on top of adaptations for aggression as part of the system of competition – murder occurs as a by-product, not as a result of evolutionary design (D&B would counter that this account is woefully under-specified as an explanatory theory of the actual data on homicides).

Even those who remain sceptical about the claims of homicide adaptation theory don’t reject the possibilities of adaptations for murder in principle. As I quote Daly as saying, “I wouldn’t want hitch my wagon to the by-product argument, but I don’t think anyone, including Duntley and Buss, has figured out a good way to identify the hallmarks of homicidal adaptation”. There is also a debate about what counts as an adaptation for killing. Take the case of infanticide. In many species, including langur monkeys and lions, males frequently kill the infants in groups they have recently joined, which eliminates competitor’s offspring and brings females into oestrus so the invading male can have offspring of his own. Anthropological studies have shown that human mothers sometimes kill their own offspring in predictable situations — such as when the baby is deformed or unlikely to thrive, or when current circumstances are poor for raising a child.

It might be objected that in the case of human infanticide, the death of the child usually results from the mother simply walking away, rather than a lethal assault. Unlike in the case of lion infanticide (by males, in this case), the behaviour in human is not routine, and nor does it involve a specific infanticidal act, such as a deadly bite. And while there are likely to be psychological adaptations for assessing the current situation or the prospects for the kid, Martin Daly suggests that this doesn’t require anything that “deserves to be called an infanticidal adaptation – it is a de facto infanticidal act if you just walk away.” Duntley and Buss, for their part, think it’s a mistake to focus on whether death results from neglect or direct action. “We argue is that if there is evolved psychological design that reliably produces the outcome of a dead body, then that is design for homicide,” says Buss.

There are clearly theoretical, empirical and conceptual threads to the debate over whether humans have an evolved psychology to kill in certain contexts and situations. Some people accept the case of adaptations for infanticide; others for the coalitional psychology of war (see Nature article). Not many would go as far as Buss and Duntley in proposing such a wide range of homicidal adaptations. But that’s how science progresses: by people putting forward bold hypotheses, which the scientific community then discusses, evaluates and tests. If homicide adaptation theory can come up with better, more specific predictions, about who should be expected to murder and when — and it claims it does — then we will have to confront the unsettling possibility that we are, in part, evolved killers. On the flip side, this recognition may lead to a better understanding of what drives people to kill, and improved strategies for preventing the frequently senseless loss of life at murderous hands. And that can’t be a bad prospect.

Notes
1. Buss, D. M. The Murderer Next Door: Why The Mind Is Designed To Kill (Penguin, New York, 2005).

2. Duntley, J. D. Adaptations to dangers from humans. In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (ed Buss, D. M.) p224–254 (Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2005).

3. Duntley, J. D. & Buss, D. M. The plausibility of adaptations for homicide. In The Innate Mind Volume 1: Structure and Contents (eds Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S.) p291–304 (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2005).

Pride and Preferences – Or How We Live With Our Decisions

2007-10-23T17:33:00.000Z

No one likes to admit to having made a mistake. Just look at all the politicians and business people who, with a mess on their hands and owing the public or shareholders an explanation, have uttered the famously weak cop out “Mistakes were made” – a rhetorical device that political consultant William Schneider has suggested we call the "past exonerative” tense. While acknowledging an error, the passive voice of the past exonerative distances the speaker from any causal role in their execution.

Realising — and, worse still, publicly admitting — that we have made an error of judgement, a bad call, or acted in a way we are less than proud of is frequently a painful experience. Whether it’s our choice of job, which political party we voted in, the stereo we bought, or how we responded to the homeless guy panhandling at the ATM, most us like to think that we’re intelligent, competent decision-makers and, in general, morally worthy people. When we’re confronted with evidence to the contrary, we feel a mental strain and discomfort that psychologists call cognitive dissonance – two dissonant cognitions, such as “I’m a smart consumer” and “I’ve paid my hard-earned cash for this crappy stereo”, are in conflict, and something has to give. Typically, the preferred cognition is preserved and the other discarded (1).

Since the notion was first put forward some 50 years ago, psychologists have made cognitive dissonance one of the most-studied mental phenomena around. And one thing is abundantly clear from this research: humans are equipped with a variety of dissonance-reducing mechanisms that enable us to live with our decisions, our actions and, ultimately, ourselves.

The study of cognitive dissonance has thrown up some paradoxical results. For example, people tend to prefer an outcome if they endure more hardship, pain or suffering to achieve that end. In one study, participants were more satisfied with a fraternity they joined the harsher the initiation into the fraternity, all else being equal. From the behaviourist perspective dominant when the idea of cognitive dissonance was first mooted, this makes no sense: why should an outcome associated with pain or suffering be deemed more rewarding than one reached through a less unpleasant route?

Seen through the lens of dissonance reduction, however, it makes more sense. As an intelligent, sensible person, we wouldn’t go through a painful or humiliating experience if it wasn’t worth the outcome – in this case joining the fraternity. The dissonance produced by the two cognitions “I am not an idiot who would suffer pointlessly” and “I underwent a severe hazing to join this fraternity” is resolved by declaring the fraternity to be worth joining – and the harsher the hazing, the better the decision (2).

One of the ugliest sides to cognitive dissonance comes to light in the self-serving rhetoric we use to justify prejudices. It is depressingly common that persecuted individuals and groups are dehumanised and made to appear as animals — by being kept cramped and naked and filthy in concentration camps, for instance. The victimisers then respond with disgust at the debased and depraved creatures they have created: “Look at these revolting people! How justified I am in treating them as animals!”.

Yet for all the importance of cognitive dissonance, the precise mechanisms by which we deal with discordant thoughts and feelings, and the ultimate purpose these mechanisms serve, are not well understood. One way to approach these issues to look at the origins and evolutionary roots if dissonance reduction in human children and nonhuman primates. And in a recent study published in Psychological Science, Louisa Egan, Laurie Santos and Paul Bloom have taken just such a comparative, developmental tack to the problem of cognitive dissonance (3).

Egan and colleagues, based at Yale University in Connecticut, devised two tests, one for children, the other for capuchin monkeys, each designed to reveal the reduction of cognitive dissonance in action. The specific kind of cognitive dissonance the authors explored in this study arises when an individual, usually an adult in most studies to date, is forced to choose one item from a set of equally desirable items. Prior to choosing, you have no strong preference for any particular item. Yet being made to choose an item – being forced to create a preference – is discordant with your feelings about the decision you faced. And so after the event, this dissonance is reduced by updating your preferences to reflect the decision you actually made. In the future, the preference generated by the forced choice will stick if the dissonance-reduction machinery has done its job effectively (that is, your new preference is for the selected item, explaining satisfactorily to yourself why you chose it).

In the children’s test, each child had to rate the desirability of animal stickers, which kids seem quite keen on, using a scale of increasingly smiley faces (a few kids were eliminated because they had difficulty with the rating system). The researchers then selected sets of three stickers that a given child had rated as equally desirable, and randomly labelled them as A. B or C. A and B were then presented to the child, who was asked to pick one to take home. Then, the unchosen option was offered up against C: so if A was initially picked out of A and B, then B would subsequently be offered alongside C, and vice versa.

The idea behind this test is as follows. The three stickers in each triad tested were all rated as equally desirable by the child, so there was no preference for one over another. Then the child is made to choose between two stickers of previously equal desirability (A and B). This sets up dissonance between ordinarily selecting things with the greatest utility (the most preferred) and, in this case, making a choice without a preference - dissonance between “Ordinarily picking according to preferences” and “Picking without preferences in this case”. The tension is resolved by unconsciously updating the preference to match the choice actually made, which enhances the perceived value of the chosen sticker and derogates the value of the deselected sticker. So if A is picked first, B is, after the fact, deemed to be a worse choice, thus explaining and justifying the decision just made: “I picked sticker A because sticker B is rubbish”. No dissonance there. Then when B is offered against C (stickers that were previously seen as equals), C will seem relatively more attractive. So when Egan and colleagues saw this pattern of choice, they took this as evidence of cognitive dissonance, and its resolution, in operation.

A similar test was also devised for capuchin monkeys, using M&M sweets of different colours instead of stickers. In addition, because monkeys cannot follow instructions the way a human child can, a different way of measuring preferences had to be used: how quickly they retrieved an M&M of a given colour from a testing chamber. Although the details are more complicated the logic is the same, and after the preferences for 20 different colours of M&M had been established, the capuchins were similarly presented with triads of M&M colours.

Both human children and capuchins showed sign of cognitive dissonance and resolution, as revealed by the pattern of preferences for stickers and M&Ms, respectively: in both cases, there was a greater-than-chance preference for C over the unselected option from the A-or-B choice. This clearly suggests that the basic machinery underlying cognitive dissonance, and the tools for making it disappear, are evolutionary old, and emerge relatively early in development (at the least, they don’t require extensive experience in weighing up preferences and evaluating decisions).

But a perhaps more interesting are the questions these findings raise about the function of reducing cognitive dissonance - just what does it achieve? An early suggestion was that it was simply the response to two competing cognitions, which might lead to mental paralysis if not resolved. Later researchers proposed that mechanisms for reducing cognitive dissonance exist to preserve our self-image as intelligent, competent, morally upstanding people.

Capuchin monkeys do not have a capacity for language, and human children are generally assumed to be cognitively much less sophisticated than adult humans. Yet as Egan et al. point out, their results suggest that either cognitive-dissonance reduction is mechanistically simpler than recent work on the subject has suggested and is not neccesarily related to preserving a complex self-image. The alternative would be to ascribe this sort of self-conception to both capuchins and children.

I think, however, that there’s a third way between the options of whether cognitive-dissonance reduction is mechanistically simple or the protector of a complex self-image - it can be both. One of evolution’s favourite tricks is to take some trait that evolved for one purpose and sculpt it to new ends. This process of co-option or exaptation occurred in the evolution of feathers (initially evolved for thermoregulation, than later exploited for flight); exaptation also enabled a sense of distaste, which is widespread in animals, to evolve in humans into ‘core disgust’ (elicited by bodily products, rotting meat and so on), which seems to have been built on through subsequent biological and cultural evolution into the complex cognitive state of moral disgust (the feeling you get when you think about Hitler, or a child molester, for example (4)).

Something similar might have happened with cognitive dissonance and strategies for its reduction. Rather than choosing between accepting dissonance-reduction as a simple process or accepting a complex inner life of monkeys, and perhaps we should conclude that monkeys retain a 'simple' dissonance-reductionmechanism that evolved in the primate line. Humans, by contrast, built on this simple mechanism and linked it to other processes, including those regulating our sense of self. And just as children take time to develop a full-blown disgust reaction (which is a cognitively complex reaction), and even longer to feel moral disgust, so too might children, like monkeys, initially make use of simple dissonance -reduction strategies, only later constructing the complex forms of dissonance reduction and ego preservation that we see in adults.

Notes
1. See Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris for an excellent overview of the literature on cognitive dissonance and the strategies and situations that call for the deployment of powerful dissonance-reducing strategies.

2. Cognitive dissonance and its subsequent resolution are not the only, or perhaps even the preferred, explanation for this behaviour. A similar phenomenon has been observed in pigeons: in one study, food that took more effort to obtain from a feeder was preferred over food associated with less effort. This result was explained by ‘relative hedonic contrast effects’ – that is, the difference between the feeling experienced trying to get the food and that of actually devouring the food. When feeders exert more effort to get a given food morsel, they experience a greater shift in their relative hedonic (pleasurable) status, so the same food seems better after a worse experience. The same good explain some or much of the findings on effort-justification in humans.

3. Egan, L. C., Santos, L. R. & Bloom, P. The origins of cognitive dissonance – evidence from children and monkeys. Psychological Science 18(11), 978–983 (2007).

4. Jones, D. The depths of disgust. Nature 447, 768–771 (2007).

PSOM Back To Life!

2007-10-23T17:24:00.000Z

After a long hiatus, PSOM is set to get going again. It’s been about a year since I last posted, and I should perhaps explain why I’ve not been blogging. Last December I left my job as an editor at the Nature Publishing Group to take up freelance writing full-time. Since then I’ve been busy writing as many features as I can, and I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to write on a wide range on great topics, from human evolution and Neanderthal genetics, to delusions in romantic love, the psychology of disgust, the biases and pitfalls inherent in decision-making, genetically engineering the immune system, and the causes of breast cancer. I have a few more pieces in press with various magazines, and I’ll post details as the articles become available.

Freelancing is a tough, and at times isolating, business, but if you have work it is greatly rewarding – you get paid to learn about important and interesting topics, speak to some of the best minds around, and then tell other people all about it (with the help of what have, in my experience, been excellent editors). At the same time, it’s not a route to riches and there’s a constant feeling that your efforts should be directed at earning an income – hence the ease of neglecting blogging. It’s time to return to this pursuit though, as it’s both gratifying and a good way of keeping on top of the research I’m interested in (though I can only cover a tiny amount of what grabs my attention – there are only so many hours in a day!).

Anyway, I’m kicking things off again with a piece on the origins of cognitive dissonance – one of the best-studied and most fascinating psychological phenomena of the past 50 years. Hope you enjoy.

See you here again soon I hope,

Dan.

Delusions of faith as a science - Henry Gee on Richard Dawkins

2006-10-30T13:47:00.000Z

Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature who has handled many of the most important papers on palaeontology over the past decade, has weighed in on Richard Dawkins’s latest polemic, The God Delusion, in an online column for Nature. I take issue with practically everything Gee says, but exploring the issues raised is a useful way of finding your feet in debates about religion, and the relation of religious thought to scientific thought. Gee’s piece is short and my response long because I think a number of confusions get run together in a very short space in Gee’s column, and it takes a while to unpack what I see as the errors. So here goes, taking it from the top (I suggest you read Gee’s column before going any further).

The column kicks of with a story of Dawkins’s boast of disabusing a young child of a belief in Santa using scientific reasoning. Gee suggests that for Dawkins to argue against the existence of Santa Claus, and to doubt his ability to speed round the world delivering gifts to all the good children in the world, on the basis of the current state of scientific knowledge is nonsensical. Gee writes:

Santa can do everything he claims provided he is a macroscopic quantum object. In this way he can be in as many places as he likes, provided that he remains extremely cold, and nobody is watching. Not only does this trounce Dawkins' objections, it also works better as a scientific hypothesis, because it accounts for more of the evidence: we now know why Santa is traditionally associated with cold places, and why he does his work while everyone is asleep.

It is hard to know what to make of this ‘rebuttal’. There are at least two readings of Gee here. One is that, strictly speaking, scientific knowledge does not refute the existence of Santa, because we can invoke some scientific ideas to render the Santa proposal plausible, even though the notion of Santa who consciously chooses who gets gifts and delivers them personally is hard to square with a macroscopic quantum object.

This response brings to mind religious apologists, recruited to defend positions of dogma that from time to time come under attack. The task of the apologist is often not to put forward a positive set of arguments to support the position they wish to defend, but merely to show that the position could, in some conceivable way, be possible. Gee does much the same. Santa, as traditionally conceived and presented to children, is a normal three-dimensional object (of not a normal man) who flies round the world in a reindeer-powered super-sledge dispensing his gifts. What we know about the world rules out such a possibility: it would take too long, Santa couldn’t carry all the gifts, and the reindeer would vaporise through heat friction at the speeds at which they would have to travel.

So what does it show to say, “Well, if Santa is a macroscopic quantum object, it all makes sense”? Not much. There’s no reason to suppose that there is an entity answering to the name of Santa, and therefore no reason to posit either a normal or quantum object that we can identify as Santa. And indeed, it’s not clear that the idea of a quantum mechanical explanation of Santa even makes sense; it might not be a scientific alternative at all, and in any case it is an extremely desperate and unconvincing proposal (think apologists again!). Furthermore, the macroscopic quantum object idea hardly makes better scientific sense of the gift-receiving phenomenon that we have to explain, for we know that parents put the presents under the tree for their kids. There is no reason to believe that Santa exists — there’s not even a need to suggest he exists! — and the current state of knowledge suggests that the object we normally call Santa — fat jolly man with a big white beard and a bright red suit — could not do what he is charged with doing. If a child believes that Santa exists, and he doesn’t believe that parents supply presents each year, then the child could be challenged by appealing to scientific facts (not that I’d recommend this — I’m not defending Dawkins’s debunking per se, but merely the intellectual justification for it). No wonder the lampoon isn’t cited in The God Delusion.

The other reading might go like this: scientific evidence and reasoning are not relevant to the child’s belief in Santa, and so Dawkins’s approach is as ridiculous as Gee’s idea, which on this reading is Gee being deliberately silly. In one sense, this is right: kids don’t believe in Santa on the basis of reasoned reflection – they believe in him because it’s one of the more benign cultural myths we pass on to our kids. But this doesn’t mean that scientific evidence is irrelevant to either the child’s reflection on a belief in Santa as the child grows up, or our assessment of the reasonableness (in the epistemological sense) of the child’s belief. The evidence offered up by science argues against the existence of Santa, and nothing argues for it – as the parents who supply the presents will readily tell you. So if this reading is correct, it has no import at all, other than to say “Kid’s don’t reason their way to a belief in Santa”. We know this; the question is whether a belief in Santa would be supported by the evidence.

Gee goes on to say “My intention was to show that Dawkins' use of science to question the existence of Santa is nonsense. The reason is that science and belief are two quite different things, and a child's conviction that Santa exists lies firmly in the latter camp.” Of course belief and science are different things. I can believe all sorts of things that may be true or false – there is cheese in the fridge, wasps sting, pixies live at the bottom of my garden – but they are not science. However, that doesn’t mean there is no connection between belief and science. If I believe that there is cheese in the fridge, there’s an easy way to find out: open to door and take a look (of course, if it’s quantum cheese it’s location may be everywhere and nowhere until its wave function collapses and gives it a definite location; I’m talking about standard cheddar here). This is a scientific approach to addressing whether my belief in the cheese in the fridge is on the money – scientific in the sense that the hypothesis ‘there is cheese in the fridge’ is held up to an empirical test that will be answered by the facts of the world. So scientific investigation can provide ground for believing things and not believing things, and those beliefs that are supported by empirical investigations of the world might be called scientific beliefs.

Again, we have to ask what Gee means and intends to convey when he says “The reason is that science and belief are two quite different things, and a child's conviction that Santa exists lies firmly in the latter camp”. Here my reading of the statement. There is a body of hard-won knowledge, theories and hypotheses that we call science, and the notion of Santa doesn’t have a place within its walls. Nonetheless, some children still believe in this entity. Which makes me ask: so what? People believe in all sorts of things that are rightly not part of the corpus of scientific knowledge because they do not, in fact, exist (pixies, for one). The fact that the Santa idea is not scientifically supported or even defensible is a reason not to believe in Santa, even as a child (perhaps a precocious one). Children cannot be expected to realise this, particularly when they’re probably designed to be credulous with respect to the claims of their parents. To get back to the issue, the fact that a child can believe in Santa, and that this belief is not in the domain of science (and for good reasons!), doesn’t tell us a thing about the validity of the child’s belief (validity in the epistemological sense – you’re entitled to believe the moon is made of cheese if you wish, no matter how wrong you are). Of course, the point about Santa is an analogy, but what’s the point of all this? To demonstrate that some people believe some things that aren’t supported by science? Quick, stop the press!

All this leads Gee to “contest [Dawkins’s] central assumption, that the existence of God (or, if you like, Santa) is a hypothesis that can be tested scientifically.” This idea seems to be the most troubling one to people who adhere to religious beliefs. I think there’s a simple reason why: to accept that the claims made by the various religions are hypotheses, whether they are intended to be so or not, opens up the possibility of their disproval, and religious belief is almost designed to be irrefutable (not because the case for religious beliefs is watertight – it’s designed to be irrefutable in principle). Now, I’m not religious, but what am I supposed to make of the claim that people have souls, or that God underwrites moral law, or that we go to heaven or hell (or whatever your preferred destination is) after death? Are they not claims – factual claims – about the way the world is? They’re not metaphors, are they? They’re not allegories, or merely the expression of hopes and desires, are they? No, the claim that humans have souls seems to me to be a scientific claim on a par with the existence of the ether through which light travels or the phlogiston theory of combustion. Both had currency for a while, and then were displaced by improved scientific explanations. As far as the soul goes, there is nothing in the findings of modern science that suggest we need to invoke the notion, and no good reasons offered by anyone else that we do, in fact, have souls.

More broadly, the claim that there exists a God or gods who created the universe and set it in a motion is surely about the way things once were, and why they are the way they are now. If modern cosmology offers a narrative of the universe that conflicts with religious accounts, we can’t seal off the latter in a protective space and say, “Oh, actually, the claims religions provide are not supposed to be empirical claims about the universe”. If they aren’t, what on earth are they? Dawkins suggests that if the universe was created by a benevolent entity with certain characteristics and interests, then we should expect it to look one way; if it is instead the result of the operation of blind, indifferent physical laws, then we would expect it to look significantly different. Looking at the world as it actually is therefore relevant to adjudicating between the competing visions. (Of course, the existence of terrible suffering, childhood cancer, natural disasters and so on, which seem prima facie cases of facts of the world that point in the opposite direction to a divine and beneficent creator, can always be explained away by clever rhetoric in the style of Gee’s Santa theory – but when what you say about the way the world is can be made compatible with any future state of the world, you’ve offered a pretty empty explanation.)

I’ve dealt with the first four paragraphs of Gee’s piece – phew! Let’s move on. Gee’s next gambit is this:

The whole point about faith is that it should not be subject to scientific investigation or attempts of proof.

Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter. Strangely, however, Gee follows this with:

Douglas Adams (Dawkins' late friend and author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) said, in the voice of God: "I refuse to prove that I exist, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." Given Dawkins' frequent quotation from Adams, it is odd that this most apposite of statements does not appear in The God Delusion.

Of course, with reasons and evidence in hand you don’t need faith (although it seems to me that the lack of reasons or evidence for God is the basis for insisting that belief in this entity should be based on faith!) The idea that beliefs based on faith are, according to the dictates of the faith system of which the beliefs are a part of, supposed to be immune from criticism, of either the rational or evidential kind, is not a point that is lost on Dawkins (he doesn’t need to quote Adams on this point, which in any case seems to contain an element of ridicule: what sort of a being demands that people believe in its existence, but refuses to provide any reason and instead insists that people take a blind leap of the mind and just say, “OK, I believe”; if I were that sort of God I’d have no respect for the people that did believe in me for no good reason). This protectionist notion of faith is one of the central issues that drives people like Dawkins and myself up the wall.

This is why. We all have beliefs about an almost limitless number of things. Some of these beliefs, such as the belief that the ground beneath our feet will remain solid, that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that an object falling towards us will continue until it hits us without intervention, operate beneath consciousness and are almost never questioned (at least the latter two seem to be part of our innate knowledge of physics). We also have beliefs that are more prominent in conscious reflection. These might include the belief that smoking causes cancer, that human activity is causing the planet to heat up, or that organisms evolved. In all these cases, people agree that your conclusions about the issue at hand should be based on reason and evidence – surely Gee wouldn’t publish a paper on evolutionary biology that offered mere assertions.
Then there is another set of beliefs that relate to the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts, fairies, the power of crystal healing, and the various Gods of the world’s major (and minor) religions (I suspect that being lumped in this category will upset some people, but stick with me for a moment). These are claims that certain things exist and exert a causal influence on the world. In that sense, they are claims to be assessed like any other claim (such that protons exist, or that gravity curves space-time)*.

Now, of course, Gee and other religionists will object at this point and say, “No, you’re definitely not supposed to evaluate my claim about God like you do other things – it’s a matter of faith!”. At which point I ask: how on earth do decide in advance what areas of knowledge you should to fence off under the protective veil of faith? And isn’t it odd that religious traditions say, “Believe this, but don’t question it”. Does it not sound like a scam to get people to believe things that are palpably not true? Can you imagine if you went to a used-car salesman and he said, “This car goes like a dream – but I’m afraid you can’t take it out for a test run, or examine the motor. Take my claim on faith, and please don’t question my claim with demands for evidence”. You’d run a mile.

Gee perhaps thinks that having beliefs based on faith is some sort of virtue, but from my perspective it’s about the most serious intellectual vice one could have. It raises so many problems it makes your head spin. What should I have faith in? The God of Judaism, the God of Christianity, the God of Islam? Thor? Poseidon? The tooth fairy? How does faith even get going (obviously from a developmental perspective it’s something usually drummed into kids). As an adult, if three people come to me with different claims about supernatural entities, each telling me to have faith in their claims, and each touting the virtues of faith, how could I possibly decide what to believe, except by thinking “Oooh, that sounds nice”? Fair enough if that’s how you choose what to believe in, but you must recognise that you are therefore communicating to everyone else that there is absolutely no reason to listen to you when you claim that your belief is true. (Of course, most people don’t go around telling everyone else what they think is true, and what other people should therefore believe, but intellectual integrity means that if someone says “I believe X” they are saying “I believe X to be true”, and should be willing to defend that position – or else they should just say, “I believe X but I don’t claim it’s true – I just think it sounds good”, but no one does this).

We’re not done yet. The idea that religious belief, being based on faith, is immune to rational or evidentiary criticism has an important corollary that religious folk should take note of. Making this claim is, in effect, removing yourself from the realm of reasoned and reasonable discourse. If I meet someone who says “I believe X, and this belief is based on faith, and I will not subject this belief to logical, rational and empirical scrutiny”, then there is absolutely nothing left for me to say in reply to continue the conversation about the belief. The person has just shut the door to a rational conversation – worse still, they’ve cut themselves free from the tether of rationality and are floating free in their own realm of faith-based beliefs. Of course people are entitled to do this, but they must recognise that it is an absolute dead-end to further conversation. Which is why it is almost impossible to seriously engage in debate with anyone who has faith-based beliefs about those beliefs (unless of course you agree with them already).

This has been long and perhaps a bit pedantic, but the issues really matter, and so I can cope with being accused of over-nitpicking.

*Gee makes what I see as a superfluous distinction between ‘believing’ and ‘subscribing’ when he says “I ‘believe’ in God, but also ‘subscribe’ to evolution”. I’m in no way suggesting that philosophical debates about the nature of beliefs and knowledge, and what constitutes either state, are easy or settled, but if we uncontroversially take ‘belief’, as used in it’s everyday context, to mean “accept a proposition as being true” then why the distinction? In cases about the empirical world, we all, Gee included, have a number of beliefs: that fire is hot, the ground solid, and what is in our fridge (and sometimes we’re right, and sometimes we’re proved wrong, in both everyday life and science). So on this reading, Gee ‘believes’ in evolution along with a bunch of other stuff. He also believes in God. So why not just say that? Is saying ‘subscribe to evolution’ supposed to denote a more provisional acceptance of this claim than of the existence of a God, which Gee ‘believes’ in? I don’t know.

Dawkins the Dogmatist?

2006-09-22T12:40:00.000Z

After reading Richard Dawkins’s new book, The God Delusion, Andrew Brown asks “who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad?” Are Dawkins’s ideas as daft as Brown suggests?

People are, quite obviously, driven to all sorts of acts for all sorts of reasons. People kill people for monetary gain, to eliminate competing sources of power, to exact revenge, and even to advance political causes that the killers think are just (this encompasses not just individuals but also governments that wage ‘just wars’ that will inevitably lead to the deaths of many people).

Brown’s review throws up the usual range of questions about the relationship of religion, and atheism, to behaviour, and the causal power of religion (or atheism) to induce people to acts of suicide and murder. Religion isn’t a necessary ingredient for these actions – but does that mean it’s irrelevant? And what about the role of atheism in motivating murderous behaviour? If religion is such a potent force in driving human behaviour, isn’t atheism just the same?

Brown writes:

Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it's nothing to do with their atheism. He devotes pages to a discussion of whether Hitler was a Catholic, concluding that "Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn't, but even if he was… the bottom line is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism."

Yet under Stalin almost the entire Orthodox priesthood was exterminated simply for being priests, as were the clergy of other religions and hundreds of thousands of Baptists.

Dawkins is suggesting that the motivation for certain ‘evil’ acts (not a word I like, but I think it’s clear that Dawkins means act that most of his readers would consider morally unacceptable) is sometimes religious belief, but that atheism does not have similar effects. Of course, this doesn’t mean that atheists don’t act immorally – presumably, according to Dawkins, when they do act in such a way it is not motivated by their atheistic commitments, nor is carried out in the name, or to advance the cause, of atheism. Brown responds with the line about Stalin killing the priests and the clergy. But what does this fact alone demonstrate? That an atheist committed mass murder – which tells us what? I’m no expert on Stalin’s reign, and so I don’t know what motivated his actions, but is Brown suggesting that his atheism per se was a decisive or contributing factor? It would seem so, when he writes “The claim that Stalin's atheism had nothing to do with his actions may be the most disingenuous in the book”. But what does Brown base the conclusion about the role of atheism in Stalin’s stunning inhumanity on apart from a correlation? If there is evidence that it atheism was a driving force, where is the evidence?

And there seems to be a bit of a double standard here. Brown seems irritated at Dawkins’s suggestion that religion can lead to terrible behaviour, but then tries to counter it with by showing that atheism can lead to bad behaviour. If it’s too simple to blame religion for bad behaviour, as Dawkins supposedly does, it should also be too simple to blame atheism, as Brown implies.

Brown also takes issue with the suggestion that religious fundamentalism is a causal factor in producing terrorist bombers:

[T]he definitive scientific study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win, has just been published by Robert Pape, a Chicago professor who has a database containing every known suicide attack since 1980. This shows, as clearly as evidence can, that religious zealotry is not on its own sufficient to produce suicide bombers; in fact, it's not even necessary: the practice was widely used by Marxist guerrillas in Sri Lanka.

Whenever people want to illustrate the lack of efficacy of religion in producing suicide bombers, they always cite the Tamil Tigers, who are inspired by a Marxism rather than an explicit religious agenda (indeed, may Tamils might be atheists). Again, we have to ask what this shows. Imagine that someone wrote a book on the dangers of smoking, and reviewers pointed out that not all smokers get cancer, and that non-smokers also get cancer. Would we say “See, smoking isn’t dangerous after all”. Of course not. The fact that smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting cancer isn’t the point. Smoking can still be an important cause of cancer – even the most important cause of cancer (I’m not saying it is) – even if people get cancer for other reasons. And so when people tried to get smoking banned in public places, or taxes increased to put people off smoking, we wouldn’t be entitled to say “But look, there are some other know causes of cancer, so leave smoking alone!”. It would still be appropriate to single smoking out, critically discuss it, and definitely withdraw government support for it (if there were, say, smoking academies).

As I said at the outset, people are motivated to action by all sorts of things, such as political, social and economic inequalities, and the clash of cultures and values (although this is easy to overplay, and can be become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy). In the absence of any commitments to a supernatural being or, alternatively, fully naturalistic worldview, people will continue to rape, pillage, murder, wage war and carry out genocides. Similarly, if everyone stops smoking, some people will still get cancer. The question is whether religion is a causal factor in organised acts of terrorism and other condemnable actions, such as the killing of abortion doctors (and also whether atheism has similar effects) – which is like asking whether smoking causes cancer, regardless of whether other things do too.

This is not just about whether certain beliefs and actions are present together. I think we have to pay some attention to explicit reasons people give for their actions (though I appreciate this is far from the whole story – we’re often blind to the non-conscious psychological processes that mould our behaviour). When soon-to-be suicide bombers record their farewell messages, they usually cite a complex of factors that have driven them to this point. Often top of the agenda is a sense of social, political and cultural injustice. Their actions are designed to make a point on behalf of a particular group of people (today most usually a religiously defined community: Muslims). But there is also an undeniable religious component to their actions, which is evidenced by the very language in which their justifications are couched. Pro-lifers that kill doctors in abortion clinics are not shy in citing their faith, and the moral commitments it entails, is support of their deeds. Can we really dismiss as a motivating factor what the people whose behaviour we’re trying to understand actually tell us? Why would we want to?

As the Tamil Tigers show, you don’t need religion to be a suicide bomber. The psychology of human coalitions is complex and can clearly be affected by a number of inputs, from favourite football team to familial, ethnic, national or religious affiliation. Ingroup/outgroup hostilities can be bred by all kinds of symbolic badges, behaviours and beliefs. But this simply does not mean that religion should not be discussed as an important cause of strife and conflict. If religion was not such an important causal factor in suicide bombers, why were none of the 9/11 or 7/7 bombers non-religious? Why does religion feature prominently in the video messages the bombers recorded? Why, when a play is put on in Birmingham, do Sikhs in particular, and not the local community generally, stage threatening protests? Why, when the Pope quotes a 14th century writer, do Muslims burn effigies, make calls for capital punishment for those who insult their prophet, and turn up with placards saying “Jesus is a slave to Allah” and “Islam will conquer Rome”? In contrast, why don’t atheists turn up every time there’s a religious speech with banners saying “Behead believers!”? When have you heard of a group of people getting together and killing another group, and then saying “We did this because they believe in a God and we don’t”? If religion isn’t an important factor in motivating suicide bombers, why aren’t atheists, many of whom agree with the political complaints of many of the bomber, equally represented among the bombers?

The capacity for humans to commit the most atrocious acts on the fellow humans is strong enough without the moral support of a religious framework. Of course conflict in the world wouldn’t disappear if religions evaporated. No would cancer if people stopped smoking. But that doesn’t mean religion, or smoking, isn’t harmful. Why is it, then, that people are so eager to try to get religion off the hook, and not criticise its potentially dreadful effects? Even if Brown is right to say that a thorough-going atheism is unnatural to humans, that doesn’t equate to support for maintaining religions, or the funding of religious schools by the government.

Dawkins might oversimplify the link between religion and murder and immorality (I haven’t read the book, so I’ll suspend judgement), but in response his critics tend to go too far in trying exculpate religion for its negative consequences. The reality is more complex than perhaps either suppose.

Tenacious Neanderthals

2006-09-18T22:54:00.000Z

Neanderthals, our closest relatives in the fossil record, might have survived for longer, and co-habited with modern humans more extensively, than previous studies have proposed, suggests a paper recently published online by Nature.

This year marks the sesquicentennial of the discovery of the fossilised remains of an individual that would become the prototypical, or type, specimen of a new species of human, Homo neanderthalensis. In 1856, lime quarry workers in the Neander Valley in western Germany recovered a number of fossils, including fragments of the cranium, of a human skeleton that was initially thought to be a diseased modern human. Later, as similar remains were found in other parts of Europe, the Neanderthals, as they were named in honour of their place of discovery, became accepted as a distinct, and extinct, type of human.

Neanderthal bones or their associated technology (including hand axes fashioned out flint) have since been found across Europe and into western Asia. Fossil remains bearing at least some of the distinctive features of Neanderthals are seen in bones 600,000 years old, although the full range of Neanderthal features don’t come together into the ‘classic’ Neanderthal form (such as the type specimen found in the Neander Valley) until about 100,000-200,000 years ago. The ancestors of Neanderthals (and of modern humans), H. heidelbergensis, lived in Africa, and about 600,000 years expanded into Europe and western Asia. This can be inferred from the trail of artefacts that they left across the newly inhabited continent. Stone tools, such as hand axes, first appear in archaeological sites around 1.7 million years ago in Africa, but then 500,000 years ago are seen all over the place in large areas of Europe. These technology-wielding people in Europe subsequently evolved into the Neanderthals (the stone tools used by the Neanderthals are called ‘Mousterian’ after the Le Moustier site in France).

The early humans that remained in Africa after the diaspora that led to the colonisation of Europe and the emergence of the Neanderthals later ventured out of Africa themselves, and into the Neanderthals’ range, sometime around 40,000-60,000 years ago. Anatomically modern humans had evolved in Africa roughly 160,000 years ago, but these later pioneers were also recognisably behaviourally modern, and the artefacts they made suggest a more complex culture and sophistication than either previous humans or Neanderthals. In fact, the presence of modern humans, or Cro-Magnons, in Europe is often inferred from the sorts of artefacts that are found in archaeological digs (and the same goes for the Neanderthals – it’s not just about bones). By about 45,000 years ago, modern humans lived in Europe and Asia.

Then something dramatic happened. Sometime within the past 35,000 years, after a good evolutionary innings, the Neanderthals stepped out of the evolutionary game, and modern humans went on, at least temporarily, to become masters of the sport of global dominance. Why the Neanderthals failed where the Cro-Magnons succeeded is a matter of intense debate. Potential explanations include a genocide by the Cro-Magnons against the Neanderthals, hostile climate, and the cultural superiority of the Cro-Magnons that gave them an edge in competition for resources and habitats. The notion that climate was the decisive blow to the Neanderthals has been re-asserted recently, but a problem with this idea is that Neanderthals seemed to have coped pretty well with climatic conditions that varied widely over a geologically rapid time frame (as quick as 1,000 years), and which could rapidly change glacial regions in to much warmer environments. Neanderthals managed with the challenges of climate for perhaps 30,000 years, so why did they stop coping after modern humans turned up?

One important issue to look at in exploring these explanations is whether Neanderthals and modern humans co-habited, and what the effects were of living together. The Neanderthals certainly disappeared after modern humans arrived on the scene, but how long was the overlap? A long period suggest that the modern humans didn’t suddenly wipe the Neanderthals through mass murderer, and could suggest that another factor did them in.

Like practically every question in human palaeoanthropology, this is a vexatious issue. Depending on which dates you rely on, and which sites you look at, the speed at which Neanderthals died out ranges from just 2,000 years in some places to 10,000 in others. These estimates are derived from the age of the earliest modern human remains (bone or artefact) and the latest Neanderthal in a similar location – both of which have potentially significant error bars. This makes the discovery of Neanderthal remains that are younger than previous finds very interesting, because it suggests that the Neanderthals persisted for longer and therefore died out more slowly – and so perhaps modern humans weren’t such a potent force after all (although you could perhaps draw the same conclusion about climate, and assume that any Neanderthals that survived later coped with the climate until modern humans came along).

Writing in Nature Clive Finlayson and colleagues report just such remains – of Mousterian artefacts, if not bones, in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar that they claim are at most 28,000 years old, and perhaps as young as 24,000 years. As the authors admit, this only allows a reasonable inference that Neanderthals inhabited the cave. But if this assumption is correct, and the dates accurate (which is contentious), then these findings push the date of the most recent Neanderthals a couple of thousand years nearer the present. The authors interpret this as evidence that Cro-Magnons were not such a potent evolutionary poison to the Neanderthals.

It is not clear, however, how significant these dates are, even if accurate. Perhaps modern humans weren’t in this outpost of southern Europe at the time, and the Neanderthals were surviving there just as they had done elsewhere in Europe, against the slings and arrows of outrageous climate change (perhaps Gibraltatr was a more hospitable locale, and that’s why they went there), until modern humans arrived and spoiled the party. Even if the general pattern of modern human contact with Neanderthals was rapid extinction of the latter, it seems reasonable to suppose that some areas would remained free of modern humans for longer than others, and that the dynamics of elimination of Neanderthals would have differed from region to region and across time. And so this find, remarkable as it is, seems to be compatible with the general idea that the evolutionary death knell for the Neanderthals was sounded by modern humans.

Future work will have to resolve the dating issues (John Hawks has a detailed discussion of some of the technical aspects of the find here), and assess the validity of the conclusions tentatively drawn from this study. But the contents of Gorham’s Cave are likely to provide another chapter in the increasingly long and complex book of human evolution.

For another good article on Neanderthals, this time their genome, see here.

Soap For The Soul

2006-09-10T23:53:00.000Z

The notion of spiritual and moral purification through rituals of physical cleansing such as baptism might be based on more than mere metaphor, suggests new research published in a recent issue of Science.

Religious traditions are rich with elaborate ceremonial rituals that the faithful undertake with deep symbolic reverence. Many of these rituals involve cleaning the body as part of the process of washing away moral stains on the soul. Perhaps the most obvious example in mostly Christian societies is the practice of baptism (which also forms part of the religious traditions of Sikhism and Mandaeanism).

If the ritual of baptism was just a metaphor for the remission and washing away of the sins of the soul, it wouldn’t much matter how the cleansing was achieved. But the different forms of baptism carry different symbolic messages: some baptism ceremonies merely demand that water be sprinkled onto the baptee’s head from above (representing the gift of remission from God above), whereas others go for full submission to denote the death and burial of Christ and his subsequent rise from the dead as the Holy Spirit.

At a theological level, the point of a baptism is not to give the recipient a good wash, nor is intended merely as a metaphor for washing away sins: it represents some of the core values and cherished beliefs of the religious community in which the ceremony takes place. But might there be deeper reasons why such cleansing rituals are so widespread at all? Could it be that actually getting cleaner during these acts of worship actually makes the recipient feel literally morally cleaner, and that’s why the idea of cleansing rituals so popular? The new study, by Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist, provide some tantalising results that we really do behave as if soap and water can wash away a moral transgression (without even bringing God into the picture).

How might this work? Well, a lot hinges on the role and function of the universal human emotion disgust. Disgust is a strange emotion in that it can be aroused by a both physical objects (rotting carcases, bodily fluids and waste products and so on) and also people’s behaviour (rape, paedophilia and so on), unlike, say, anger: it doesn’t make sense it be angered by a rock, even if you stub your toe on it (though I admit I’ve shouted at a fair few number of inanimate objects). Psychologists have suggested that disgust originally evolved as protective gateway to the mouth: a mechanism to prevent the ingestion of dangerous foodstuffs (people around the world produce the same sort of facial expression as part of the disgust response). Later, the domain of disgust enlarged to include the social and moral domains, such that moral disgust became a defence against contamination and corruption of the soul. This connection is partially revealed by the habit of using many of the same terms for physical states that elicit disgust (dirtiness) for those that arouse condemnation (dirty behaviour) as well.

In fact, experiencing physical disgust produces bodily responses, such as facial expressions, similar to those caused by considering an immoral act. Even overlapping parts of the brain are activated by the two types of disgust reaction. So if similar brain areas and psychological states are activated by moral transgressions and physical dirtiness, then perhaps the intensity of the former could be reduced by acts that reduce the latter.

Zhong and Liljenquist call the phenomenon of trying to reduce the negative feelings associated with threats to moral purity the ‘Macbeth effect’. Striving to secure the throne for her husband, Lady Macbeth kills King Duncan, and tries to frame his servants for the murder. Racked with guilt, a somnambulant Lady Macbeth attempts to wash imaginary stains off of her hands, crying “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” – wash away the blood, and the guilt will cleaned away too. The results of Zhong and Liljenquist’s study raise the potentially unsettlingly possibility that Lady Macbeth might have had more success in easing her conscience than we would ordinarily credit.

In the first experiment, Zhong and Liljenquist explored whether a threat to our moral self-image prompts a desire for physical cleansing. Participants were asked to dredge up an instance from their biographies in which they had either acted ethically or badly, and to describe the experiences associated with those recollections. They were then presented with a world puzzle of six word fragments presented like a partially completed game of Hang Man. Three of the fragments could be filled in to produce a word related to cleaning (W_ _ H, SH_ _ER, and S_ _P can be completed as wash, shower and soap, as well as wish, shaker and step). Participants who recalled an unethical deed from their past were more likely to complete these three fragments to form the cleansing-related words.

Previous studies have shown that subtle priming of a topic, below the threshold of awareness of consciousness, can make other words, concepts and behaviour related to the prime more likely to surface by increasing the accessibility of these concepts and behaviour. The increased accessibility of cleansing-related words, primed by a threat to moral self-image, suggests that the protective Macbeth effect really does exist.

The second experiments further probed the Macbeth effect: does this increased accessibility to concepts related to cleanliness actually relate to an increased desire to clean oneself? (It’s possible that the effect of word recall would be unrelated to any actual behaviour.) After being instructed to hand-copy a short written story, in the first person, that depicted either ethical or immoral behaviour, participants had to rate a series of supermarket goods. Some of the items, such as shower soap, toothpaste and cleaning products, were related to cleansing, whereas others, including Post-It notes, fruit juice and batteries, were not. In line with the proposed Macbeth effect, copying out the unethical theory had the effect of making cleansing products more appealing.

But again, expressed preferences are one thing, actual behaviour another. So Zhong and Liljenquist looked at whether, after being put through the set up in the first experiment, participants would prefer as a free gift a cleaning-type product (antiseptic wipe), over something with no cleaning connotations at all (a pencil, which had previously been shown to be an equally attractive choice in a control condition). Overall, those that had recalled some of their unethical behaviour preferred the antiseptic wipe, which again points to the operation of the Macbeth effect.

But this isn’t the end of the story. If the Macbeth effect exists, it’s likely to have some function, one that is fairly obvious: to protect our moral self-image, often a crucial guide to navigating our social and moral worlds. Other research has suggested that we strive to restore our moral identity after ethical transgressions, spurred on by the emotional consequences produced by reflecting on our actions. Sometimes this takes the form of making up for a bad deed with a compensatory good one. There is also evidence that merely contemplating a threat to some cherished value produces a desire to act so as to reassert that value.

If moral threats and damage to our moral self-image can be deflected and thwarted in ways that either reaffirm our values or restore on moral selves, perhaps they can be averted and fixed by more symbolic means that exploit the overlap between the domains of physical and moral disgust. So a key question is whether the bodily cleansing induced by threats to our conception of our moral selves actually has the proposed effect of reducing the magnitude of the threat, and its unpleasant consequences. Zhong and Liljenquist capped off their study by addressing this central issue.

In the final experiment, participants were again asked to recall a bad deed from their past. Half then washed their hands with an antiseptic wipe while the others didn’t, and all were asked to fill out a form surveying their current emotional state. Finally, they were asked whether they would donate their time, free of charge, to take part in another study for a desperate graduate student.

The negative feelings aroused by contemplating behaviour which the participants were not proud of would presumably have led to a desire (conscious or not) to make amends by doing something that expresses the moral commitments they would prefer to see in their self-image, or to otherwise erase the stain of moral impurity through an act of cleansing. In this set up, the cleansing option was forced on half the study subjects, which had the effect of reducing feelings of the negative moral emotions of disgust, regret, guilt, shame, embarrassment and anger (non-moral emotions were unaffected). Mere hand washing also reduced the likelihood of offering help to the student in dire straits – if you’ve cleaned your conscience, there’s no defect in the moral self-image to fix.

The implications of the Macbeth effect, and this demonstration of its power to influence moral behaviour, is potentially alarming, and leads to a counter-intuitive thought. If is often supposed that observance of religious practices and rituals forms a core component of an ethically grounded life. But these results plausibly point to an entirely different conclusion. If threats to the moral self-image of individual religious adherents can be countered through cleansing rituals rather than actually amending the moral offence, and if such rituals make compensatory moral behaviour after an ethical blunder less likely, then a religious life could, all else being equal, make the devout less moral! This is another empirical question, and it is likely that other factors will feed into the overt moral behaviour we observe.

In any case, physical cleansing, even if intended as a symbolic offering of commitment, seems a rather cheap and easy route to moral rectitude. But at least it might help make sense of how many ostensibly morally upstanding and devout followers of various religions can also be capable of living with themselves and a range of moral misdemeanours and sinful behaviours, sexual and financial*. And the celebrity pages are replete with cases of decadent, immoral stars who have renounced their wayward pasts, and been born into the glory of God’s kingdom through the miracle of baptism, all beneficiaries of the Macbeth effect. Perhaps for the faithful cleanliness really is next to Godliness.

*Of course, the religious aren’t alone in such self-serving attempts to restore moral integrity with a quick fix. We can all imagine the ruthless, atheistic businessman who rips of poor nations left, right and centre and then makes a seemingly large but to him insignificant donation to charity (tax deductible, of course) to assuage his guilt, which might not even be consciously acknowledged.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

2006-09-02T19:51:00.000Z

I’ve just watched a trailer for the new documentary Jesus Camp, which charts the rising trend of recruiting children into ‘God’s Army’ and instructing them on their moral duty to wage a Christian war on their enemies. And who might these be? Well, a clue is provided by one woman who says “There are two types of people in the world: those who love Jesus and those who don’t”. Without seeing the film it’s not clear whether she means the enemy are people who don’t believe in a God or Jesus (let alone love either of them), or those that believe in a different God and reject Jesus as salvation.

In any case, such a ridiculously simplistic dichotomy of humans into an enormous ingroup of Christians and an even bigger outgroup of non-Christians is a recipe for disaster. I recently wrote about parochial altruism, or the tendency to be more lenient towards our ingroup and less forgiving of outgroup members. This proclivity can be pernicious enough when groups are differentiated on the basis of relatively meaningless symbolic markers, such as which football team you support (and therefore what shirt you sport), or other social or linguistic differences. Add a deeply held and powerfully inculcated moral dimension to this, and the degree of ingroup–outgroup hostility will only flare up. If you truly and dogmatically believe that you and your kind are on the one true path to salvation, that your group alone is acting according to the moral dictates of your God and saviour, then it is only natural to take a tough line towards anyone that threatens the beliefs of your group, by either denying the existence of your God or towing the line of a different one.

Commentators and theologians are not blind to the harmful effects of stressing differences between religious groups, and often try to downplay the inherent conflicts created when religious communities come into contact with one another. But ecumenical attempts to persuade everyone to just get alone always ring a bit hollow to me. If religious adherents sincerely believe in their chosen (or inherited) faith and implicitly assume the their sacred texts are inerrant and infallible guides to living a good life, then there really is a clash between different religions. Christians should view Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and so on with suspicion (and likewise). They should feel that other religions, or the rejection of religion, pose a moral threat to the fabric of society. It’s hard to find a middle ground between moral positions that are taken to set in stone, based on ancient codes that are absolute and unchangeable.

My preferred strategy is to be open about the often-irreconcilable conflict between different religions — and to use this fact as a starting point for keeping religiously motivated moral prescriptions out of the spheres of social and public policy (education, the law, medicine and the like). If we’re going to try to strike a balance between the competing demands of different religious groups, we can’t use the frameworks of any given religion to do so (that would be pretty unfair, and create much marginalisation). Instead, we will have to make recourse to rational, secular, non-religious principles – using reason, argument and evidence to advance our claims. Although this will get up the noses of a number of people, it seems the only defensible way forward.

Of course, following such a course is no guarantee that everyone will get along. But that is not an inherent problem of a secular approach to structuring society; it would seem to stem more from the nature of the beliefs held by those in conflict. In any case, we already accept that the national policies adopted in democratic societies will leave a significant number of people with a grievance. For instance, British National Party members are no doubt annoyed that their views on immigration and the racial composition of the UK are not mainstream, and this has historically stoked conflict, but we don’t say “Well we’d better bring them to the table too, and incorporate their vision”. So too with religious groups. Just because they’ll be upset if society is run on secular line doesn’t mean they have the automatic right to be given power to influence the sort of societies we live in.

If people could be persuaded to drop some of the dogmatism of their belief, and accept that difficult social, cultural and political problems require open hearts and minds for their solution – essentially a rejection of the certainties and dogmatism to which they are accustomed – then perhaps a greater dialogue and understanding between groups could be achieved. This, no doubt, all sounds very ‘right on’, optimistic and perhaps even a bit naïve; but a greater understanding of the psychology underlying our moral judgements and social behaviour could provide our best hope for reducing the conflict endemic around the world, from the ‘Culture Wars’ of the US to the ongoing troubles in the Israel, Lebanon and the Middle East. We need to recognise that no one has the last word on how we should by virtue of adhering to the tenets of a holy book, and that different cultures and social groups can legitimately stress different aspects of the moral realm.

Cultural psychologists have suggested that moral issues cluster into at least three different realms: the ethics of autonomy (individual rights), the ethics of community (social codes) and the ethics of divinity (purity and sanctity*) [1]. It seems that at least some of the friction encountered when liberals clash with conservatives arises from the moral domains that they are most concerned with (the ethics of autonomy for liberals, and for conservatives an expanded domain that touches on the ethics of community and perhaps also divinity) [2]. Neither domain is necessarily better or more justifiable than the other, and recognising that our different cultural backgrounds may lead us further into one domain than another provides a jumping off point for truly trying to engage with the concerns and arguments of your ‘adversary’, whether liberal or conservative. Unless, of course, you’re absolutely certain that the morality you embrace is underwritten by God, the cosmic law giver, and that deviation from your moral path is an affront to your creator, a transgression punishable by eternal torment.

Productive conversations cannot take place between disputants that start from radically different and immovable moral positions. A bit more humility is required. We need to accept that we must listen to the arguments of other people, and possibly revise our stances in light of what they say. This cannot happen when two (or more) sincerely and held religious belief systems come into conflict (except perhaps for some very general claims, such as ‘killing is wrong’ – but you hardly need a religious basis for thinking that!). And this is why making children more fundamentalist -- more certain that anyone who thinks something different from them is an enemy to be thwarted, and certainly not persuaded by -- is a sure fire way to ensure that we all go to hell in a hand basket.

*The ethics of divinity are usually somewhat alien to many Westerners, especially of the non-religious variety, who typically occupy the two-dimensional plane created by the axes of ethics of community and ethics of autonomy. The ethics of divinity have been characterised in the following way:

“The ethics of divinity: divinity/purity violations. In these cases a person disrespects the sacredness of God, or causes impurity or degradation to himself/herself, or to others. To decide if an action is wrong, you think about things like sin, the natural order of things, sanctity, and the protection of the soul or the world from degradation and spiritual defilement.” [3]

Notes
1. Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M. & Park, L. The “Big Three” of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the “Big Three” of suffering. In Morality and Health (eds Brandt, A. & Rozin, P.) 119–169 (Routledge, New York, 1997).

2. Haidt, J. & Hersh, M. Sexual morality: The cultures and emotions of conservatives and liberals. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 31, 191-221 (2001).

3. Rozin, P., Lowery, L., Imada, S. & Haidt, J. The moral-emotion triad hypothesis: A mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, disgust) and three moral ethics (community, autonomy, divinity). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, 574-586 (1999).

Beware of the Others?

2006-08-24T23:53:00.000Z

New research published in Nature shows how biases towards members of our social group, and against those outside it, shape how generous we are to people and how we punish others for transgressing social norms.

Humans are socially sticky: we bond into cohesive groups that commonly share a common identity and, often, similar values. This applies to social circles and local communities as much as to nationality and global religious and political affiliation. Such unity can encourage people within the group to pull together, to help one another when in need – in short, to get along.

But there’s a downside to human ‘groupishness’: a mental division between members of the ingroup, to whom social and even moral obligations apply, and various outgroups, to whom they do not. People who live in different groups — geographical, social or ethnic — often treat outgroup members as ‘others’ (something viewers of Lost will be familiar with), frequently arousing enmity and stoking conflict. Note how groups really come into their own and pull together when pitted against other groups in the human speciality of war.

The ingroup–outgroup distinction has the power to distort and bias our attitudes towards outgroup members in pernicious ways. These prejudices are played out locally and globally on a daily basis. When supporters of our football team brawl with the other team’s, we can easily blame our opponents on starting the trouble “They always cause a ruckus, don’t they?”). When our country is at way with another, we’re justifiably retaliating against military aggression (“We’re merely defending ourselves against those lunatics across the border”). Behaviour of ‘our people’ that is deemed to be tolerable can be judged intolerable or immoral or worthy of punishment when people of other groups do the same thing.

The nature of human altruism (helping others), and the role of altruistic punishment (paying a cost to punish those that don’t help others) in establishing cooperation and a bases for sociality, are currently two of the most active areas of research in the behavioural sciences. Nearly every aspect of altruism and cooperation you can think of is being explored: how altruistic behaviour and willingness to punish non-altruists varies across societies with differing social systems (and also what universal trends underlie human altruism); how this variation relates to economic and demographic factors; how people respond to punishment for not cooperating, in both laboratory and real-world situations; the role of institutions that embody social norms of behaviour in maintaining cooperation; and what’s going on in the brain when we cooperate and defect in games of altruism with other human players.

One of the most crucial findings of this research is the extent to which people will incur a cost to punish non-cooperators, and how powerful a force this is in eliciting cooperation from those tempted to defect. Studies with economic games across the world have revealed that the degree to which people will take a monetary hit to punish the unequal division of a sum of money (provided by the experimenter) increases as the split becomes more unequal.

But this isn’t the whole story. Behind the general trend lurks much variation. Perhaps the most important way in which punishing behaviour varies is in the threshold of selfishness that elicits punishment from others. Players living in certain societies won’t punish until the outcomes of dividing money in economic games is grossly unequal, whereas other are much quicker to lay down the law. Some societies even have norms that lead to the punishment of unequal but hyper-fair splits of the money stash (so that the person controlling how much is given to another a player gives away more than 50%), which is something of a puzzle.

The new study addresses a different question, one about altruism, altruistic punishment and groupishness. Do we respond to transgressions of social norms by our ingroup differently than violation of those same norms by members of an outgroup? Are we more forgiving of the former and harsher on the latter by virtue of their group allegiance? The answer looks like a qualified ‘yes’.

Economists Helen Bernhard, Urs Fischbacher and Ernst Fehr took an experimental game called the third-party punishment game (3PPG) to Papua New Guinea to play among the indigenous people. In this version of 3PPG, games involved three players, A, B and C. At the start, the experimenter gave player A the sum of 10 kina (a good day’s wages in Papua New Guinea). Player A, also known as the Dictator, then had to decide an amount to give to player B, the Recipient (who simply received whatever the Dictator offered). Player C, the Third Party, then had a choice of imposing a punishment on player A (the Dictator) in light of what they had given to B (the Recipient). The punishment worked like this: when the Dictator received their initial 10-kina stash, the Third Part player was given 5 kina. The Third Party could then spend 0-2 kina to punish the Dictator, such that for every kina spent by the Third Party, 3 were lost by the Dictator.

Players for the 3PPG were recruited from two distinct and non-hostile indigenous groups, who were then mixed together in four experimental conditions. In one set of games, players A, B and C were from the same group (ABC); in the others, either A and B (AB), A and C (AC), or B and C (BC) were co-members of the same group.

What might we expect to see happening in these groups? Well, the ABC case is like many experiments that have revealed a willingness to punish those that violate norms of sharing — that is, Dictators that try to hog most of the cash for themselves are penalised by Third Parties, which leads many Dictators to revise their strategy (fairness pays more than greed when avarice is fined). So in the ABC game we’d expect to see high punishment by Third Party players for unequal splits and, anticipating this, Dictators would be more likely to offer more equal shares (punishing ‘sharing norm’ violators in this way helps maintain cooperation within groups in which people obey the norm of punishing the selfish). This prediction was fulfilled.

But what of the other conditions? Well if social norms apply to our groups, and serve to promote cooperation within the group, then there’s little need to them to outgroup members. We should neither extended the obligations we feel towards our ingroup brothers and sisters to the outgroup, nor expect them to show us the consideration they show each other. In the AB condition, the Third Party (C), being from a different group the Dictator (A) and Recipient (B), has no obligation to punish the violation of the norm for sharing if the Dictator’s offer is unfair (the punishing norm applies to other members of their ingroup, to promote cooperation within their own group), and no interest in doing so either (if this act of punishment induces the Dictator to be more generous in future, that benefit accrues to the Third Party’s outgroup). A similar logic applies to the AC and BC groups: in both cases, the presence of the outgroup would seem to reduce the propensity to punish (in the AC condition, the Third Party (C), seeing that the Recipient (B) is an outgroup member, does not expect the Dictator (A) to apply the sharing norm to the Recipient, and so would not punish; in the BC condition, the Third Party player does not expect the Dictator to obey the sharing norm for a similar reason).

The findings of the Bernhard et al. study don’t quite fit in with these predictions. Firstly, the same general pattern of punishment in response to unfair behaviour was the same across all conditions: people were more likely to punish as the split became increasingly unequal (to the Recipient’s disadvantage), and paid more to effect greater punishment the stingier the offer made by the Dictator (see figure). However, punishment was much stronger in the ABC condition than in either the AB or AC conditions.

The real anomaly lies with the punishing behaviour in BC, which was, surprisingly and contrary to the expectation stated earlier, higher than in ABC. The difference between BC and ABC is that in the latter the Third Party is a member of the same group as the Dictator, and this fact leads to lower punishment of (or greater lenience towards) the Dictator. The level of punishment seen in ABC is perhaps a sort of baseline for within-group tolerance for norm violation, which becomes more muted (less tolerant) for outgroup members. In the AB condition, which shows weak punishment compared with ABC and BC, it’s perhaps not so much that the Third Party is cutting the Dictator more slack, but is just not interested in incurring a cost to punish a violation of a norm among to people from a different group, among people of a different group.

So Third Parties are more lenient when the Dictator who violates a sharing norm is a member of their own group. The results also show that Third Parties are more willing to punish Dictators who violate the norms for sharing when the Recipient is an ingroup member (irrespective of the whether the Dictator is an in- or outgroup member). By asking the Dictators in the games what their subjective expectations were for receiving punishment for making low offers to Recipients, the researchers found that players expected just what happened. Another way of putting it is that people are much more protective of ‘victims’ of norm violations (in this case being offered an unfair amount) if they are from the same group as the punisher (that is, will be more likely to punish the interloping Dictator). Bernhard et al. call this differential treatment of ingroup and outgroup members, or narrowing of altruistic and protective tendencies ‘parochial altrusim’.

The flip side of the punishing behaviour in these games is how generous people were with other players in the first place. In general, transfers were higher when Dictator and Recipient were members of the same group, which the idea of parochial altruism would suggest. And Dictators were also less likely to make a truly egalitarian share with Recipients if the Third Party was a member of the Dictator’s group: they correctly anticipated that they’d be less punished than if they made the same offer to an ingroup rather than outgroup Recipient in the presence of the same Third Party.

The results of this study are somewhat subtle, and require a bit of getting your head around to see what they might mean. The authors make a number of points in this regard. The first is to note that in all conditions, with mixes of ingroup and outgroup members, there was at least some sharing (altruism) and some punishment (altruistic punishment). In other words, players extended egalitarian norms, even if in a sometimes diluted form, to outgroup members. This is perhaps a problem for theories that see altruism arising through the selective extinction of groups that are less cooperative, and therefore less successful in the long run. Such a process sees differing groups as competing entities, and so they not be expected to include outgroups within sphere of social norms.

The second relates to the unexpected finding of high levels of punishment in the BC condition (even higher than ABC). Without taking into account the factors that influence the balance of cooperation and conflict between groups, this finding is puzzling. One suggestion for it is that punishing an outgroup member who harms an ingroup member might enhance the security of the ingroup by sending out the message “You mess with one of us, you mess with us all”. Just like in gang culture, groups that are known to protect their own with a swift and aggressive response confer a degree of protection on each individual member, as no would-be outgroup aggravator want to bring trouble on their own head.

Although the difference standards to which ingroup and outgroup members were held in this study had no harmful real-world consequences, they are a reminder of how, in one another’s eyes, we are not all equal: some — our ingroup — are more equal than others . This bias, stoked by religious, political or territorial disputes, can easily lead to a moral distancing of ‘them’, and justify whatever actions are perpetrated in ‘our’ name — the consequences of which we all too frequently read about. Perhaps being aware of this potentially dangerous proclivity for parochialism in the social and moral realms, we can take steps to resist the urge and develop an expanded, more encompassing, social and moral framework.

Punishment: A Global Tour

2006-08-15T20:59:00.000Z

A while back I wrote about a paper that explored the role of punishment in maintaining cooperation among unrelated people — currently one of the hottest topics in the human behavioural sciences. But like most (but certainly not all) studies on punishment and cooperation, this research was done with Western subjects in a laboratory setting. Now anthropologist Joe Henrich and colleagues have published a study that looked at punishment and cooperation in diverse societies around the planet.

Henrich and other economists and anthropologists have previously studied how people play economic games in these same societies, and the results suggest that a propensity to punish those who don’t cooperate with us, and instead try to rip us off, is part of human psychology. But how willing people are to punish the greedy, and the costs they’ll incur to do so, differ from society to society. The new study probes this propensity a bit further.

The researchers collected data from more than 1,700 adults in 15 societies, which the authors claim span the full range of human production systems. Using favourites of studies on human cooperation and altruism – the Ultimatum Game (UG) and the Third-Party Punishment Game (3PPG) – the globe-trotting research team collected results that need to be explained by any theory of human altruism, whether based solely on genetic evolution or on gene-culture co-evolution.

In the UG, two players are allotted a sum of money, say $100 (or the local equivalent). Player 1, the Proposer, is told that they will decide how the money will be split between the two players, and can make an offer anywhere between zero and $100, in $10 increments. Player 2, the Chooser, has to decide, for each potential offer ($0, $10, $20 and so on) whether they’d accept the offer. The Proposer’s actual offer is then revealed, and if the Chooser has agreed to accept an offer of that level, the money is split as agreed and the game is over. But there’s a catch: if the Chooser rejects the offer at that level, both players walk away with nothing.

For a Chooser driven to maximise monetary gain (that is, to act in a materially self-regarding way), any offer should be accepted, as some money is better than no money. Seeing the logic of this, Proposers should offer the smallest amount possible, safe in the knowledge that this minimal offer will be snapped up.

So a theory based on pure rationality and self-regard would say. But this isn’t how people generally act. It is well known that Proposers routinely offer up to 50% of the cash pie, and Chooses tend to reject offers below 20%. In other words, people will forgo money (which, economically, is equivalent to incurring a cost) in order to make sure that others don’t unfairly benefit (that is, in order to punish people who behave unfairly and snatch themselves an unequal slice of the pie). This needs explaining, and the underlying reasons for this behaviour need to be incorporated into a larger theory of human cooperation, altruism and self-regard.

So behaviour in the UG is a measure of whether people willing to engage in costly punishment, and because there are only two players in the game Henrich et al. call this second-order punishment. In all of the populations studied, the degree to which people were willing to impose second-order punishment on another player increased as the proposed offer became more unequal – or more unfair, in common parlance. As the offers decreased from 50% to 0%, so too did the likelihood of accepting the offer. Overall, 56% of players rejected offers of 10% or less.

But this general trend masks much variation. In five populations — the Amazonian Tsimane, the Shaur of the Andes, an Isanga village, the Yasawa in Fiji and the Sambu in Kenya — just 15% of people rejected these low offers. At the other end of the spectrum, in four societies — Maragoli in Kenya, Gusil (?), rural Missouri (USA) and the Sursurunga in New Ireland — more than 60% rejected the same offers. Surprisingly, and in contrast to the behaviour of Western students (one of the study populations), 6 of the 14 non-student populations rejected unbalanced offers that were biased in their favour (offers above 50%). This is, prima facie, puzzling, and the rejection of such hyper-fair offers also needs to be explained by an adequate theory of human altruism.

Statistical analyses carried out by the authors revealed that the variation in behaviour in the UG across populations could not be explained by demographic or economic differences between them – we’ll get to what might in a moment. But before doing so, we should look at what was found with the other game, the Third-Party Punishment Game.

The 3PPG is basically like the UG with someone watching, but with some important differences. A pot of money is provided, half of which goes to the Watcher. As before, the Proposer decides on what to offer the Chooser. While the Chooser decides (in private) on the level at which they’ll accept and reject, the Watcher is asked to decide whether to pay 10% of the total stake (20% of their own pile) to punish the Prosper for the full range of possible offers — so the Watcher may say, “Anything less than 40% ($40) and I’ll punish”. This is how the punishment works. Let’s say that the Proposer offered $30 (and the Chooser accepts). Then the Watcher would punish the Proposer, and pay 10% ($10) to do so. This $10 buys the Watcher a ‘30% cost’ on the Proposer, so if there offer was accepted by the Chooser, they’d walk away with $70 minus 30%, or $49. The Watcher would walk away with $50 (their original stake) minus the $10 ‘punishment fee’, or $40, and the Chooser would get their $30.

What should a rational, self-regarding Watcher do in the 3PPG? Well, it would never make sense to punish a Proposer who made an unfair offer, as you’d always lose money this way, and never. But again, this isn’t how people act, and seem prepared to wage what Henrich et al. call third-order punishment. Overall, 60% of Watchers were willing to pay 20% of their endowment (which in these games represented half a day’s wages) to punish Proposers who offered nothing at all. And yet again there was variation: this figure dropped to ~28% among Tsiamne and Hadza (Tanzania) populations, and rose to more than 90% among the Gusil and Maragoli populations). Another statistical analysis suggested that these differences, like those in the UG, were not attributable to demographic/economic factors.

The authors also looked at behaviour in one final game, one that measured a propensity towards altruism and fairness, rather than punishing behaviour: the Dictator Game. This is the same as the UG except that Choosers in fact have no choice; they’re mandatory Accepters. Knowing this, and being therefore relieved of the threat of spiteful rejections by genuine Choosers, ‘offers’ by Proposers tend to be lower.

Taken the results together, what do they tell us about altruism, cooperation and punishment? Well, one theory of the origins of human altruism is that it’s the product of a co-evolutionary process involving genes (and the minds they help build) and culture and the social rules they prescribe. Social norms for punishing cheats can co-evolve with a psychological propensity to engage in punishing behaviour, and as a consequence stabilise cooperation (because people want to avoid the costs of being punished, and so play ball).

If this were true, then we’d expect to see that altruistic behaviour would correlate with punishing behaviour – and the results collected by Henrich et al. support this. In general, societies with high degrees of punishment also tend to harbour greater altruism.

Whether or not the gene-culture co-evolutionary model turns out to be correct, these sorts of real-world studies, and the results the produce, constrain and inform all theories of human altruism, and therein lies perhaps their greatest value.

It’s been a long time….

2006-08-15T20:57:00.000Z

I’ve had a bit of a break from blogging while I concentrated on a few other things, but I’m back on board again, and plan to make regular updates as before, although I’m sure you all managed just fine without PSOM for a while!

Cool site

2006-05-11T11:36:00.000Z

Just a short post to let you know about a cool site I found with links to many talks and radio shows featuring the likes of Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer, and also to say that despite the dearth of posts on this blog recently I haven’t quit – just been a bit distracted. More substantial posts will be reappearing shortly I hope!

Daddy, what did YOU do in the War on Evolution?

2006-05-03T14:23:00.000Z

A friend of mine who publishes Macmillan’s popular science books passed this onto me. It’s a poster by Michael Stebbins, the author of a recently published Macmillan book (Sex, Drugs and DNA):

http://www.macmillanscience.com/poster.htm

To cooperate or free-ride: picking the right pond

2006-04-23T10:46:00.000Z

Cooperation can get off the ground when people can punish cheats, and a new study shows that people choose environments that allow punishment over ones in which cheats go free.

Why do people get together and cooperate? Why do people not ruthlessly pursue their own selfish ends in a battle ‘red in tooth and claw’ in which only the fittest survive? One obvious answer is that cooperation –working as a team, contributing your fair share to a group project – can produce results unattainable through solo effort. Group living has many potential benefits. But cooperative groups are constantly under threat from cheats that want to exploit the system for their own ends – and if enough people do this, the benefits of cooperation come crashing down. A new study in Science by Özgür Gürerk and colleagues, along with an excellent commentary from Joseph Henrich, adds another piece of the puzzle of why and how people come together to form cooperative groups.

The problem of altruism and cooperation has long been a puzzle for evolutionary biology, and has given rise to a number of competing and complementary theories. Two of the most well known – William Hamilton’s theory of kin selection (directing help to kin), and Robert Trivers’s theory of reciprocal altruism (scratching the back of those who scratch yours) – explain much of the cooperation we see in the animal world. Kin-directed altruism is the most ubiquitous type of altruism, although surprisingly few solid examples of reciprocal altruism have been found among animals [1] (reciprocity (perhaps not in the form of direct reciprocal altruism) does, however, seem to be an important feature of human cooperation and altruism).

But when it comes to explaining human altruism these theories fall short of the mark. Humans direct help towards unrelated individuals in a scale unparalleled by any other species, and cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals, so kin selection is not really of much relevance here. And theoretical studies suggest that reciprocal altruism cannot stabilise cooperation in large groups. The scale and diversity of human cooperation requires something beyond these two explanations [2].

Public spirit
One type of cooperative endeavour that has been explored in great detail is the ‘public-goods game’. These games are designed to reflect public-goods dilemmas in the real world. A public good is anything which everyone can benefit from equally, such as clean air and rivers, or the National Health Service in the UK (which is at least in principle a public good!). The provision of public goods, such as generating sufficient funding for public broadcast stations, is often the product of collective action, and yield a benefit for everyone regardless of whether or not they contributed to the public good. Public-goods dilemmas arise because of an inherent tension in providing public-goods that results from the logic of collective actions. When you make an effort to recycle your waste, you’re contributing to a public good (a cleaner planet) that your neighbours benefit from as much as you do, even if they don’t recycle. Everyone wants this public good, and so has a motivation to contribute to its provision. But there is also a strong temptation to not bother going to the effort of recycling. So long as enough other people are contributing to produce the desired public good, you can direct your energy elsewhere in pursuits that benefit just yourself (or, in the case of donating to public radio/TV, spend your money on something else). This temptation to cheat, or free-ride, however, threatens to unravel the whole cooperative endeavour. If everyone adopts this logic, no one will contribute and you can kiss goodbye to the public good. So that’s the catch.

In spite of the problem of free-riding, groups of people do in fact cooperate - people do recycle, contribute to public broadcasts stations, donate blood, pay taxes and so on. Public-goods dilemmas have been brought into the lab and studied as games, and have confirmed common-sense observations that humans do have a propensity to cooperate - but only under certain conditions.

Public-goods games usually take the following form. A group of, say, 20 players are each given 20 monetary units (MU) by a benevolent experimenter. The players are then given the choice to contribute as many or few MU as they wish to a common pot, while keeping the rest for their private account. The MU in the pot are then counted up, and the experimenter, playing the role of banker, adds a proportion of the total in the common pot (perhaps doubling it). The common pot is then split up equally among the players, regardless of how much or little each player put in. So the maximum ‘profit’ can be made if everyone puts in all their chips, which in my example is doubled and then split (20 x 20 = 400; 400 x 2 = 800 = 40 MU per person after dividing). Such behaviour is a form of cooperation because it enables the group to achieve the best outcome possible (the highest profit for the group as a whole), and this benefit is shared among everyone. However, for profit-maximising individuals the best outcome would be for everyone else to contribute all of their MU and to contribute nothing themselves (19 x 20 = 380; 380 x 2 = 760 = 38 MU per person, plus the 20 the free-rider kept by not contributing, totalling 58 MU).

This game can be played round after round to see whether cooperation reigns, evaporates or never emerges at all. And it can also be tweaked in interesting way to reveal wrinkles on the face of cooperation. One crucial feature that can be added is the ability of players to punish free-riders. As in the game above, players get a stash of MU and contribute (or not) to a pot that is multiplied by some fixed percentage and then split evenly among all players. Then the crucial extra step is added. Each player receives information about what the others players contributed in the round (this can be done anonymously to explore (or eliminate) the role of reputation in public-goods games) – what they contributed and what they earned. Players then have the opportunity to punish people by imposing fines on them, but at a cost to themselves. Typically, For instance, a player might be able to impose a fine on another player of 3 MU at a cost to himself of 1 MU from his private account.

It turns out that when people have the opportunity to punish, they grab hold of it with both hands [3]. People don’t punish indiscriminately; they tend to punish free-riders or cheats – and take pleasure from it (this has been assessed both psychologically and neurologically). This has the effect of making it costly to free-ride and more attractive to cooperate, and public-goods games with punishment options can stabilise high levels of cooperation.

The power of punishment
Punishment in public-goods games raises further questions though. Although it makes sense to cooperate when there are punishers about, why bother to punish free-riders in the first place? Exercising the option to punish does not come for free. The punisher incurs a cost that non-punishing cooperators do not pay, but yet who nonetheless benefit from the higher levels of cooperation promoted by punishing acts. This kind of punishment has therefore been called altruistic punishment (altruistic to the group, not to the punished player, obviously!). Altruistic punishment seems to be a feature of human cooperation, but why do people do it?

In recent years, the idea of ‘strong reciprocity’ has gained increasing theoretical and empirical support as an explanation of the human tendency to cooperate with cooperators and to punish cheats. A strong reciprocator is an individual that “responds kindly to actions that are perceived to be kind and hostily toward actions that are perceived to be hostile” [4]. Modelling studies have shown that under certain conditions strong reciprocity can evolve and do well in competition with other more self-regarding strategies (that is, those that aim to provide the most individual benefit). Indeed, strong reciprocity is what evolutionary game theorists call an ‘evolutionarily stable strategy’ (essentially a strategy that can’t be beaten when common). But the evolution of strong reciprocity is based on different mechanisms than those underlying kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Whereas kin selection and reciprocal altruism can be explained by natural selection among ‘selfish genes’ that contribute to altruistic behaviour (and which are therefore examples of genetic evolution), the evolution of strong reciprocity is couched in terms of gene-culture co-evolution and cultural group selection (not biological gene selection).

This is why the definition of a strong reciprocator given above refers to norms – rules of social conduct that can differ from cultural group to cultural group. Different cultural groups can differ in their social norms on a wide range of issues, such as appropriate dress, rules of conduct with peers and acquaintances, and food rituals, as well as notions of fairness, justice, and right and wrong. (In public-goods games, people are punished for violating the fairness norm “contribute to public goods from which you’ll benefit”.) A society’s norms are not only stored in the minds of its people; they are also embodied in the institutions of the society, such as religious systems of belief, educational policies and practices, and government. The role of institutions, and the norms they sustain, are therefore likely to be an important part of the puzzle of human cooperation.

Institutionalised cooperation
The elegant new study by Özgür Gürerk, Bernd Irlenbusch and Bettina Rockenbach illuminates the effects of different institutions on cooperative behaviour, and more specifically how enabling people to choose the type of institution they are part of aids the evolution of cooperation. Gurerk and colleagues used the tried-and-tested public-goods game, but added a twist. A pool of 84 players were recruited for the study, in which they played 30 ‘rounds’ of the public-goods game, with three stages to each round. The novel aspect of this study came in the first stage, in which players could choose whether to play in a setting in which free-riding (defined in this study as contributing 5 MU or less in a round) went unpunished, or choosing one in which free-riders could be penalised by fellow players (that is, a condition in which players could exercise altruistic punishment). These different sets of rules can be thought of as basic ‘institutions’ (obviously of a narrow kind); Gürerk and colleagues call the condition in which punishing is possible the sanctioning institution (SI) and the punishment-free condition, quite reasonably, the sanction-free institution (SFI).

After choosing whether to play in SI or SFI, the game went as usual: the players contributed or not, and then the common pot was multiplied by a fixed percentage, and the MU divided out among the players (there was one common pot for the SI group and another for the SFI group – the MU were pooled and divided only within groups, not between groups. So one group could do better on a collective and per capita basis). In the SI condition, but not in SFI, players had the opportunity to punish. At the end of each round - after the MU had been counted up, multiplied, and doled out and players had received anonymous information about the behaviour of the other players - each player could impose a sanction on anyone else in the group. These sanctions could be either positive or negative. A positive sanction cost 1 MU to ‘award’ 1 MU to another player, and a negative sanction cost 1 MU to impose a 3 MU fine on another player. (In SI, after the money had been divided out, players just carried on with the next round.)

I’ve summarised some of key results in the table above (other trends and data are shown in the figures to the left and below). The results from the beginning were pretty straightforward: roughly one-third of players pick SI and the remaining two-thirds pick SFI. This might to be taken as an indication that most people have a propensity towards selfishness, and want to at least keep the option of free-riding open. In this study, the choice of institution was also related to how players behaved in the first round (that is, how cooperative (how much they contributed) or selfish (free-riding) they were). In SI, the average contribution in the initial round was 12.7 MU, but only 7.3 MU in SFI; and whereas nearly half of the players in SI contributed 15 MU or more (‘high contributors’), just over 10% were so inclined in SFI (see figure to the left). The incidence of free-riding tells the same story: whereas almost half of the players in SFI hitched a free-ride (43.4%), less than one-fifth did so in SI (16.1%). The majority of players initially opted for an institution in which punishment of free-riding was not a possibility, and then made little more than half of the monetary contribution of the minority who opted for a punishing institution (perhaps because they planned to contribute highly and to therefore expected to avoid punishment).

Cooperation does not seem to be the order of the day, and it seems unlikely that it would get off the ground given this inauspicious start. What’s worse, selfish free-riders initially do really well in SFI (averaging 49.7 MU in the first round). Perhaps even more depressingly, the higher average contribution of 12.7 MU made by players in SI (compared with 7.3 MU in SFI) does not yield a higher average payoff in the first round (38.1 in SI compared with 44.4 MU in SFI; see table). However, free-riding in SI is significantly less attractive than in SFI because many players in SFI impose fines on free-riders. And this has important consequences.

As in previous studies, without the threat of punishment hanging over their heads many people succumb to the temptation to free-ride in SFI. More people free-riding means less people contributing, which means that there’s even less reason to cooperate and contribute because other people are not doing likewise– a vicious cycle that leads to the unravelling of cooperation and a plummeting of contributions. By contrast, contributions in SI gradually increase, and free-riding drops (because of the cost of being punished). But remember the twist in this study: at the beginning of each round players choose whether to player in SI or SFI. So what happened after the initial split of one-third of players into SI and the other two-thirds into SFI?

Despite being initially wary of leaving SFI to join SI, by the end of the experiment nearly every player had switched to SI (92.9% by the end of the game) and was cooperating fully. At the same time, contributions in SFI steadily decreased until they hit rock bottom. The average contribution in round 30 of the experiment, the final round, brings home the difference in behaviours cultivated in SI and SFI: 19.4 MU in SI, compared with nothing in SFI.

The different ‘life histories’ of SI and SFI provide some clues about why people migrate from SFI to SI (despite initial aversion). One potential factor is imitation of successful players – those who gain the greatest payoff. Overall, players in SI do best (average over all rounds in SI = 18.3, and 2.9 in SFI), and so the policy of copying the most successful could explain why players eventually migrate from SFI to SI.

At the beginning of the experiment, however, free-riders in SFI are the most successful players (they reap the greatest rewards), and so imitation should lead to an increase in free-riders in the next round. In fact, this is just what was seen in round 2. But as time passes and SFI sees a decline in cooperative behaviour (because of the prevalence of free-riders), things change and selfishness starts to become self-defeating. From round 5 onwards, high contributors in SI earned more than free-riders in SFI. So imitation of successful players would then promote greater migration from SFI to SI – and again, this is what was seen. What’s more, players moving from SFI to SI tended to switch from free-riding to cooperation (as if they were maximising their payoff). Institutions, in other words, affect behaviour.

This is seen even more clearly when players behaviour on moving institution is examined in more detail. On migrating from SFI to SI, 80.3% of players increased their contribution in two consecutive rounds, and 27.1% have something of a ‘St. Paul moment’ on the Damascene road to SI, and switch from free-riding to full cooperation! Conversely, 70% of players reduce their contribution when leaving SI for SFI, and 20% switch from full cooperation to free-riding. As they say, when in Rome…

The wisdom of crowds
Imitation can explain some of the migratory behaviour of players from SFI to SI. Indeed, so too might rational choice approaches – players might be working out which is the best strategy, and then following the optimal strategy. These explanations face a problem, however: they don’t account for why players switching to SI why they adopt the strategy of strong reciprocators and then punish other free-riders and low contributors. The most successful strategy, from a selfish, self-regarding perspective, would be to contribute at a high level (and therefore avoid damaging punishment) but to avoid incurring the costs of punishing others. What actually happened in the experiment is that 62.9% of players adopted the punishment norm immediately after switching from SFI to SI. If contributing in the first place is a public good (because everyone benefits from it), then carrying the cost of punishing free-riders is a ‘second order’ public good: everyone else benefits from the higher level of contributions that the punisher induces, while the punisher shoulders the cost of punishing-. That is why it is called altruistic punishment.

There is yet another potential mechanism that could explain these results, one that features prominently in theories of cultural evolution, and gene-culture co-evolution: conformist transmission. Cultural information can be passed on in a number of ways – people can imitate those of high prestige or status, in the hope of picking up the skills, behaviour or knowledge that led to their elevated position. Alternatively, individuals can simply adopt or copy the most prevalent forms of behaviour or knowledge – conform to the norms of society, in other words. And humans certainly do conform. In a famous experiment published in 1951, Solomon Asch showed how people will often over-ride their own opinions and express a belief more in tune with a group consensus. Theoretical studies have since shown how conformist transmission of cultural norms can be a powerful force in cultural evolution.

In this study, as players switched from SFI to SI, so too did their behaviour. However, this isn’t explicable through simple imitation or payoff maximisation. However, a propensity to conform to the prevailing norms of the institution that you find yourself in can explain this behaviour. In a head-to-head competition between an institution that maintains norms of punishment of free-riders against one that doesn’t (which this study created), not only do people end up doing better in the SI group, but the whole group does better than SFI. In any case, the cost of following the punishment norm steadily decreases because the threat of punishment means that is there not much free-riding, and therefore not much need (or cost) to punish. So following such prosocial norms as punishing cheats carries only a marginal cost compared with self-centred norms.

The demonstration that the nature of institutions governing the way cooperation and punishment is regulated, and that the role of choice of institution favours those regimes that are more conducive to cooperation, sets the stage for a number of further questions to be explored. Joe Henrich mentions two in his commentary on this research: “What happens if switching institutions is costly, or if information about the payoffs in the other institution is poor? Or, what happens if individuals cannot migrate between institutions, but instead can vote on adopting alternative institutional modifications?”. Answering such questions might help in the design of institutions that foster cooperation on scales from the local to the global, and provide clues about what determines whether certain norms and institutions spread.

Notes
1. Hammerstein, P. Why is reciprocity so rare in social animals? A Protestant appeal. In Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation (ed. Hammerstein, P.) 83-93 (MIT Press, 2003).

2. See, for example, Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation (MIT Press, 2003) and Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (MIT Press, 2005).

3. Fehr, E. & Gächter, S. Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature 415, 137-140 (2002).

4. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. The economics of strong reciprocity. In Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (eds Gintis, H., Bowles, S. Boyd, R. & Fehr, E.) 151-191 (MIT Press, 2005).

The Path To Intelligence?

2006-04-03T20:11:00.000Z

New research suggests that it is not brain size that determines ‘braininess’, but the way that the brain develops.

According to the adage, sometimes the journey taken is more important than the destination reached. And now this seems to be true of brain development and intelligence. A paper in the current issue of Nature suggests that differences in intelligence as measured by IQ tests are related to how the brain grows to its final state (which, in this case, probably affects the destination too). The results show that different growth trajectories of a brain region called the cortex, and the rate of change in the thickness of the cortex at different points in development, vary with IQ. It is not the overall thickness of the cortex that relates to intelligence, as might have been supposed, but how the cortex develops.

Research on intelligence, and the comparison of IQ across individuals and groups, is a controversial field. Concerns have been raised about the validity of IQ tests to measure intelligence, and critics have also questioned whether there is a unitary cognitive faculty that can be identified as ‘intelligence’. What’s more, theories of intelligence and IQ testing have historically been misused by a variety of eugenicists and racists pushing particular ideological agendas. Studies on the genetic basis of intelligence are also seen by some as dangerous because they could, if misused (so the argument goes), undermine our general notions of equality and the drive to provide equal educational access regardless of supposed talent (the fear being that some might say “If some people are born stupid, why waste educational resources on them?” There are good reasons why such a comment does not follow from research on intelligence). The fear remains that modern researchers, if not explicitly abusing the concept of intelligence in this way, at least provide a basis for a supposedly scientific approach to discrimination and prejudice.

Although we should certainly take heed of historical precedents in intelligence research, some of the modern fears about such studies are surely misplaced (see Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate for a robust explanation of why these fears are largely unfounded). IQ tests that assess the three ‘Rs’ – reading, writing and arithmetic – do, however, seem to measure some aspect of cognition that is predictive of later skills and achievements that are widely considered, at least in Western societies, as bearing the hallmark of ‘braininess’, or high intelligence. And so research has continued on this tricky aspect of the mind from a variety of different directions.

Behavioural geneticists have used twin studies to work out the degree of heritability of intelligence (IQ scores), which usually comes out between 50-70%. This figure is often misunderstood, so a quick clarification is in order. Heritability measures the amount of variation in a trait than can be explained by genetic variation. So between 50-70% of the variation seen in IQ scores is attributable to genetic variation. It does not mean that for any given individual 50-70% of their IQ came from their genes, with the remaining coming from their environment; that doesn’t make any sense. Heritability doesn’t even measure the ‘strength’ of the genetic contribution (whatever that might mean) – a trait can have low heritability and yet still have an important genetic underpinning. Take the trait ‘leg number’ in humans. Nearly everyone will have identical genes for building legs, and so there is no genetic variation to explain any differences in leg number that we observe – differences will be attributable to environmental differences (accidents, disease or the presence of teratogenic drugs during development). But that doesn’t mean genetic effects are unimportant in leg development.

Assuming that IQ is related in some way to brain functioning, it is likely to have a genetic component: building a functional brain requires the orchestrated actions of thousands of genes and appropriate environmental inputs, and so building a brain of whatever intelligence will require genetic inputs. Heritability underscores this point by showing that some variation in IQ is attributable to genetic differences, which wouldn’t be the case if genes had no relevance to IQ (though, as noted, a low heritability wouldn’t rule a role for genes).

Given the underpinning assumption of much cognitive neuroscience, that the mind is what the brain does, we should expect to find brain correlates of IQ. Total brain volume is one potential candidate, but it correlates only modestly with IQ, at about 0.3. But the brain is anatomically, and, to a degree, functionally, specialized, so perhaps it is more promising to look at specific areas of the brain suspected of being linked to IQ.

So what areas of the brain might be the best bet to look at? The cortex is promising, as it is associated with higher cognitive functions – the sorts we usually identify as components of intelligence – and has also expanded disproportionately in human evolution (perhaps giving us the edge in cognitive prowess over our primate cousins). The cortex is a sheet of tissue that lies at the top of the brain, and its thickness can be assessed by brain-imaging techniques.

In the new study, Shaw and colleagues used brain scans to look at cortical development, and how cortical thickness changed, in 307 people studied from childhood to adulthood, and who were also tested for IQ (which is relatively stable during development). Overall, cortical thickness showed a weak correlation with IQ (0-0.1), when all ages were considered together. However, when the brain-imaging data and IQ were studied according to age group, a number of age-related correlations emerged. Perhaps surprisingly, cortical thickness was negatively correlated with IQ in early childhood – among young children, a thicker cortex correlates with a lower IQ. By contrast, in late childhood cortical thickness was positively correlated with IQ – thicker cortex correlating with higher IQ.

This is interesting enough, but an even more intriguing pattern was found. The study subjects were divided into different groups on the basis of IQ, into ‘average-‘, ‘high-‘ and ‘superior-intelligence’ groups. The typical pattern of cortical growth for each group was determined, and these were then compared. The results are shown in the figure to the left. What they show is that, perhaps paradoxically, children with ‘superior’ IQs typically have a thinner cortex at age 7 than children of average and high intelligence. But this relative lack of cortex is then cancelled out among ‘superiors’ (with no moral connotation!) as they undergo a period of cortex growth that is much more rapid than typically seen in people with average and high IQ. Having peaked at around 12 years, the cortex then begins to thin out more rapidly in ‘superiors’, and eventually converges in thickness to that seen in ‘averages’ and ‘highs’. (Those of high intelligence show a trajectory intermediate between that of the superiors and the averages.)

Another way of looking at the relationship between cortical thickness and IQ is to plot the rate of change of cortex thickness against age, again stratified by IQ in average-, high- and superior-intelligence groups. These results are shown to the left. Looking at the curve for the superior-intelligence group, the rate of change in thickness of the cortex is much more rapid than in the other two groups; this corresponds to the steep part of the blue curve in the first figure. The rate of change then levels out to that seen in averages and highs. Again, the averages show the smallest variation in rate of change in cortex thickness, with highs intermediate between average and superior. What both depictions show is that it is not how thick the cortex is at any given point that correlates with, and probably underscores, performance on IQ tests; rather, it is the developmental trajectory that the cortex is on that relates to IQ.

It is tricky to explain these patterns. It seems counter-intuitive that people with the highest IQs should start with the least amount of cortex. However, this study does not show what brain development has gone before. Both growth and thinning of brain areas are important for brain development, and ‘pruning’ of excess neurons in the brain underlies the emergence of many functional brain areas – like a sculptor removing excess material from a block of marble that deviates from the desired design (and a smaller sculpture may not be worse, or less complex and intricate, because of its size). So perhaps previous bouts of growth and pruning create a cortex around age 7 that is better ‘optimised’ for the task measured by IQ tests in superiors than in others. In superiors, the cortex then undergoes very rapid growth, followed by the fastest rate of thinning, leaving a cortex roughly the same thickness as in other people, but better at certain cognitive tasks.

But does this study say anything about the genetic determination of IQ? I think we should be cautious in drawing conclusions about this aspect of IQ development from this study. In talking about the results of this study, there is no reason to automatically invoke genetic factors over environmental factors in explaining the different cortical trajectories. It is likely, if not certain, that there are genes that are crucially involved in the development of the cortex; it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. And there may well be genetic variation that explains this variation in cortical development. But there could just as plausibly be environmental differences that explain the variation.

Let’s say IQ is determined by the cortical growth trajectory; then what determines the trajectory? It could be that people from a given environmental background – whether that be classified according to diet, educational stimulation, amount of play in childhood or whatever – tend to respond by moving towards one or another developmental pathway. Indeed, the authors of this study did find a correlation of 0.35 between IQ and socio-economic status.

And of course, there could, and are likely to be, interactions between genes and environment (and not in a simple linear, additive way). For instance, genetic differences might cause the initial set-up and growth of the cortex (or other brain areas) to differ in individuals. These differences could in turn make scholastic achievement more enjoyable (perhaps some people find it easier to remember things or can assimilate information more quickly), and so tend to lead towards the pursuit of those skills measured by IQ tests.

One other possible moral that could be drawn from this research is that it illustrates the importance of plasticity in development, rather than the execution of a genetic program for development. This is reasonable, and perhaps is an example of how the brain can be prepared to respond in certain ways in different environments (if environmental differences switch development onto different trajectories). Of course, genetic differences could be found to be the major factor in explaining cortical-growth differences. If so, plasticity shouldn’t really be contrasted with a genetic program for development – one set of genes might be correlated with a lower level of plasticity (the averages), and another with high plasticity (the superiors). But in both cases genes can underlie the very possibility of plasticity, with one set affording more than the other. If we take genes and plasticity to be placeholders for nature and nurture, we can see why the nature/nurture dichotomy is more imagined than real – each depends and utilises the other. As Matt Ridley says, nature acts via nurture. Genes can be selected for their capacity to contribute to the development of plastic developmental systems.

Future research might address these issues in more detail, but for the moment it seems safe to say that the metaphor of the ‘big’ brain for cleverness is misguided – the secret of intelligence probably lies in the dynamics of cortical development. Like life, the journey is at least as important as the destination.

Zombies Revisited: Correction and Clarification

2006-04-02T21:52:00.000Z

A while back I wrote about philosophers’ zombies, and I’ve had a bit of feedback to the effect that I misunderstood some of the positions I outlined, and drew the wrong conclusions from what was said. I realise now the mistakes I made, and want to briefly clear them up.

The most significant errors are in my discussion of David Chalmers, and his views on ‘functional’ and ‘biological’ zombies (see my earlier post for what I meant by these). Richard Chappell, in a comment on the previous post, says “You've got Chalmers completely wrong”. I think this is a little strong, but I certainly was wrong on some points. I claimed that Chalmers believes in the logical possibility of biological zombies and their nomological impossibility, which is correct (David Chalmers, personal communication), but I mistakenly suggested that he takes functional zombies to be nomologically possible, when in fact he doesn’t (although Chalmers argues that functional zombies, like biological zombies, are logically possible). I don’t think my discussion of Chalmers was very clear, and I misinterpreted what he was getting at in some of his responses to Sue Blackmore’s question in Conversations On Consciousness.

This was partly a failure to identify the proper focus of the discussion (which to be fair is not made explicit in the interviews with Blackmore – the distinction between logical and nomological is not made, for instance). I was suspicious of the power of mere logical possibility to tell us anything about the actual world we live in, so I was focusing on what was nomologically possible. But, according to Chalmers, the most interesting question for philosophers with regard to zombies is what is logically possible. I’m still unclear on why logical possibility is so interesting. It seems that all sorts of possibility are logically coherent, but their conceivability doesn’t seem to provide a reason to explain the presence or absence of these imagined possibilities in our world, which is the one we’re interested in explaining. But I’m open to being corrected on this.

Philosopher Gualtiero Piccinini has also suggested to me that Block’s reading of Chalmers is correct, and that I was therefore in error to suggest that Block has misread Chalmers, when I said “[Chalmers] does not seem to believe in the nomological possibility of what we’ve called a biological zombie, and so Block is wrong to say that this sort of zombie is what Chalmers does in fact believe in” (although I was correct that Block accepts the nomological possibility of functional zombies). Here’s what Block said:

“The second sort of zombie is a creature that’s physically exactly like us. This is [David] Chalmers’s zombie, so when Chalmers says he believes in the conceivability and therefore the possibility of zombies, he’s talking about that kind of a zombie. My view is that no one who takes the biological basis of consciousness seriously should really believe in that kind of a zombie. I don’t believe in the possibility of that zombie; I believe that the physiology of the human brain determines our phenomenology and so there couldn’t be a creature like that, physically exactly like us, down to every molecule of the brain, just the same but nobody home, no phenomenology. That zombie I don’t believe in, but the functional zombie I do believe in.”

I took Block to be saying that he rejects the nomological (and logical?) possibility of biological zombies, and further that Block thinks that Chalmers accepts the nomological possibility of biological zombies (which he doesn’t). Block is definitely saying that Chalmers accepts a conception of zombies that Block thinks should properly be rejected, and at the very least that must mean the nomological possibility of a biological zombie, and it seems to be this he has in mind (“the physiology of the human brain determines our phenomenology and so there couldn’t be a creature like that, physically exactly like us, down to every molecule of the brain, just the same but nobody home, no phenomenology”). But because Chalmers rejects this the nomological possibility of a biological zombie, I suggested that Block was wrong to say that this is the sort of zombie Chalmers in fact believes in. So I’m still a little bit lost by this response (though perhaps this isn’t the best characterisation of his position – Block can also be read here as arguing against the logical, not just nomolgical, possibility of a biological zombie, in which case the mistake he thinks Chalmers makes is to suppose that this is conceivable - which Chalmers does claim).

From the feedback I’ve had, and re-looking at what the philosophers said, my tally up should have been the following. Chalmers believes in the logical possibility of both functional and biological zombies, but rejects the nomological possibility of both (Chalmers says “I think that even a computer [in this world] which has really complex intelligent behaviour and functioning would probably be conscious” – in other words, a functional zombie is not nomologically possible). Block, contra Chalmers, accepts the nomological (and also logical) possibility of functional zombies, but not biological zombies (not quite sure what he thinks about the logical possibility of biological zombies). Searle accepts the nomological possibility of functional zombies, and the logical possibility of biological zombies, but rejects the nomological possibility of biological zombies.

So that’s what I should’ve said.

Richard Dawkins: Accidental Friend of Intelligent Design?

2006-03-27T21:46:00.000Z

Does Richard Dawkins really lend succour to intelligent design lobbyists? Only if you listen to the intelligent design advocates.

March has seen the publication of a new 30th-anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins’ classic The Selfish Gene, as well as a Festschrift edited by two former students, Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (now distinguished evolutionary biologists themselves, though Ridley (not to be confused with Matt Ridley) has perhaps focused more on textbook writing than research). Among all the praise being heaped on Dawkins as this anniversary is celebrated, a few dissenting voices are to be expected. And the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting has once again stepped up to the task (I responded to a previous column of Bunting’s, in which she trashed Dawkins’ recent two-part documentary The Root Of All Evil? here).

The latest piece is much more reasonable in tone than her previous attack, and makes a point that others have made, and which I expect many more will be sympathetic to: that Dawkins, and other evolutionary thinkers and atheists such as Dan Dennett, do a disservice to the battle against creationism and intelligent design — indeed, the charge is that they undermine the case for teaching evolution in classrooms, and provide support for the claims of religiously motivated groups that want evolution dropped from curricula.

Bunting points out that some intelligent design ‘theorists’ (yes, they’re sneering quotation marks) actually like having Dawkins around, so well does he serve their ends:

William Dembski (one of the leading lights of the US intelligent-design lobby) put it like this in an email to Dawkins: “I know that you personally don't believe in God, but I want to thank you for being such a wonderful foil for theism and for intelligent design more generally. In fact, I regularly tell my colleagues that you and your work are one of God's greatest gifts to the intelligent-design movement. So please, keep at it!”

And it’s not just intelligent design advocates who think that Dawkins and Dennett are bad for the argument for teaching evolution (and therefore good for the intelligent design movement):

Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: “Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level.” The nub of Ruse's argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: “If Darwinism equals atheism then it can't be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool.”

A whole bunch of issues are tied up in this one small paragraph (I’ll return to the legal aspect below). First, it’s not clear that Dawkins argues that Darwinism ineluctably leads to atheism, except in perhaps a qualified sense. For Dawkins, one of the best arguments for positing the existence of a creator, or God, is the argument from design: that the natural world provides evidence, through the existence of complex, intricate structures such as eyes and wings, of a designing hand. For Dawkins, natural selection blows this argument out of the water. So if you previously accepted God on the basis of the argument from design, then you can drop that because there’s a much better explanation for the apparent design in nature: natural selection. If this is the case, then you might not have any reason left for asserting the existence of a God. If I don’t believe that something exists, because I have no reason to, am I thereby denying this thing exists, or merely saying that although it could exist I have no reason to believe that it does, so I do not assent to the belief that it does? That is, is this atheism or agnosticism?

Well, logically I think it amounts to agnosticism – but in that case, we’re all agnostic about more things than we could ever enumerate. But if we not aiming for logical certainty (which we can never have about matters of fact, scientific claims included), but merely describing as ‘belief’ those claims we think highly likely to be true, then we might be more entitled to adopt the label of atheist. In this slightly weaker sense of atheism, evolutionary biology might contribute to atheism but does not necessarily lead to it: you could imagine that an inscrutable creator set the universe running, and allowed natural selection to do the heavy lifting of creating the diversity of life of earth (this might make the idea that humans were created in God’s image a bit tricky to sustain). But if this is so, then why are so many evolutionary biologists, and scientists generally (particularly the scientific elite), so often self-proclaimed atheists, in this weaker sense?

Bunting raises a separate point about the creationism/evolution ‘debate’, and responding to this helps, I think, address this question and show why the criticisms of Dawkins and Dennett are misguided:

Across the US, the battle over evolution in science teaching goes on. Just in the past month there have been bills in state legislatures in New York, Mississippi, Nevada and Arkansas promoting intelligent design. Last November the Kansas education board promulgated a new definition of science that allowed for supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. A school district in Kansas rebelled last month, accusing their board of “an utterly false belief that evolutionary science and the scientific method is based on atheistic philosophy. Promoting this false conflict between science and faith erects unnecessary barriers.” At the heart of many of these local controversies is the firmly held belief that Darwinism leads to atheism, indeed that it is atheism. Across the US, a crude and erroneous conflict is being created between science as atheism and religion.

We’ve now switched topics: from a conflict between evolution (and its supposed sequela, atheism) and theism (belief in God), to a conflict between science and theism in general or the claims of specific religions. Now I think there is a much stronger conflict in the second pairing than the first. Here’s why. You can – although I don’t advise it or think that it is necessary – to accommodate both evolutionary biology and religious beliefs (although I do think this requires a double-standard in your epistemology). I’m not entirely sure how people adopt both of these systems of knowledge to their own intellectual satisfaction, but my incredulity is not a strong argument against the possibility of the feat.

However, the conflict between science and religion, in contrast to evolution and theism, seems deeper. I’m not talking about the content of these respective bodies of knowledge, although there is certainly conflict there. I mean that they conflict in a much more fundamental way, in what they deem to be appropriate means of obtaining knowledge about the world, and what counts as a reasonable basis for belief. The empirical methods of science – measuring, collecting, experimenting, analysing – are utterly at odds with religious notions of revelation (through personal experience or scripture), and faith is the antithesis of empirical investigation. It is, for a non-believer like me, very hard to see how you can think that empirical methods are appropriate in the wide range of domains that scientists have applied them — working out the structure of atoms, sequencing genomes, sending people to the moon, unravelling the mysteries of the brain — and yet think faith is a useful or reliable route to knowledge in thinking about something as important as whether there is a creator and moral law-giver running the universe. If you accept faith, why not go the whole hog and abandon evidentiary standards altogether?

This isn’t just a flippant challenge: how do you demarcate between where you use faith, and where you use reason and evidence? Similarly, if you base your beliefs on evidence and rational arguments, you might well find (like I do) no reasons to suggest that God exists. And I think this is why the scientific elite generally tends towards atheism: not because the specific claims of their disciplines are utterly incompatible with a religious conception of the universe (you can always tweak your scientific and religious models to mesh with one another), but because of the approach to knowledge that they follow. Scientific investigation just doesn’t tend towards theism and belief in God, which even believers will acknowledge requires faith. For me, and for Dawkins and Dennett too, the reason evidence and rationality don’t lead to a belief in a God is that there isn’t one there to provide such evidence. But I wouldn’t bother getting into a long argument trying to prove a negative — that the evidence of modern science absolutely rules out any sort of creator. Science just makes such a creator redundant.

So I don’t agree that the conflict between science and religion is erroneous, and the existence of religious scientists doesn’t automatically refute this (I have in mind people such as Kenneth Miller, who robustly defends evolutionary biology against creationism, and yet at the same time is religiously devout). There could be any number of reasons that people, hold scientific and religious beliefs simultaneously: they don’t understand the nature of the epistemological conflict between science and religion; they ignore this conflict so that they can believe in an nice afterlife or a foundation for morality or whatever; and so on.

The legal point Ruse alludes to seems pretty weak. Just as not believing in UFOs doesn’t make me a UFOlogist of any stripe, so not believing in a God or the claims of any specific religion doesn’t make me theistic or religious in any sense. I’m simply not a theist — I’m an a-theist. So omitting God from discussions of how the world came to be is not analogous to the religious, faith-based conviction that you have to bring God into the picture (intelligent design, despite it’s claims to be an empirical ‘science’, is really a sophisticated attempt to sneak God in the back door as a prelude to the complete overturning of naturalistic science). You don’t need to invoke God to explain organic diversity because evolutionary theory does a much better job — so does that mean that it’s atheistic, and merely an alternative religious view? This has to be nonsense. You don’t need to invoke God to explain chemical reactions, or the motion of billiard balls, so are chemistry and physics fundamentally atheistic? Are they mere religious claims that, by Ruse’s logic, could be struck out of science classrooms because they infringe the separation of Church and state? You can see where this would lead: you couldn’t teach anything. The legal case against teaching religion because it's a de facto atheistic discipline, and therefore a religious doctrine just like any other, is very poor.

The problem is that Ruse’s complaint might seem superficially appealing to many people – Bunting included. But it seems more of a scare tactic: “Stop talking about your atheism, which we don’t like (for whatever reasons), and don’t stress the conflict between the scientific approach to gaining knowledge, and the faith-based prescriptions of religion, because we want both to exist in happy harmony”. I can see why people might want such an entente cordiale: it would be ridiculous to dismiss the insights of modern science, yet they want the moral or ‘spiritual’ anchor provided by religious belief (if you grant religious belief these powers, which I don’t). Citing the fact that Dembski likes Dawkins, so he must be bad for science, is no good. The reason Debmski likes Dawkins is that Dawkins is both an evolutionary biologist and an outspoken atheist, and often discusses the two together. Dembski, often addressing already religiously committed folk, can say “See what will happen if you let evolution into your life? You’ll end up a Godless heathen like Dawkins! Resist, resist, resist!”. But this is a cheap rhetorical trick, and Bunting, Ruse and others should not take their lead from Dembski.

The Conditions of Kindness

2006-03-13T22:32:00.000Z

A recent paper by Michael Gurven in Current Anthropology (1) explores how choices about whether help is given to others depends on how generosity is returned.

Asking a favour from a mafia don is not without its costs. It might get you out of a tight spot, or enable you to avenge an enemy, but it comes with burdensome strings attached. The time will eventually come when you are called on to return the favour, and you had better not think about reneging on your obligation.

Even among friends, the returning of favours, or reciprocity, looms large. Most people most of the time, of course, do favours for friends and are not motivated by the prospect of a profitable return on the altruistic investment – it simply feels good to help people we like. But when the flow of favours is unidirectional, we normally notice, and it doesn’t feel good. We feel taken advantage of, which prompts feelings of resentment and, taken to the extreme, can cause the breakdown of friendships.

In the early 1970s, Robert Trivers developed the idea of reciprocal altruism (2) to explain some of the puzzles of animal and human cooperation. The basic idea is simple: you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. Lets say I have a surplus of food today, and you’re going hungry. It hurts me less to give you something to eat than it benefits you (that is, although it might cost me 5 ‘health points’ to lose this food, you might get 10 points by receiving it, particularly if I’m relatively stated and you’re desperately hungry). Fast-forward to a time when the tables are turned, and I’m hungry and your larder is full: if you help me out, we’re square, and we’re both better off than we would have been if we had never helped each other (because we gained more benefit by being helped when we needed it than we lost out when we helped). In this way, a self-serving Darwinian creature can profit from entering into cooperative actions, provided it can discriminate cooperators from non-reciprocators.

The most famous (though not necessarily the best) strategy for getting reciprocal altruism off the ground is Tit-For-Tat (TFT). In this strategy, you cooperate on the first encounter with someone, and then do whatever he or she did on the previous round. So if they did not cooperate on the first move, you withold help on the next round. Likewise, if your partner cooperates, you cooperate on the subsequent move. Although TFT does well in reaping the benefits of cooperation, and of withholding help in some circumstances, it can be beaten by a range of other strategies. TFT, and reciprocal altruism in general, have limitations in explaining the long-term nature of human social interactions, and other routes to the evolution of cooperation are no doubt key to explaining human altruism.

In reciprocal altruism, the benefits of cooperation flow directly back to helpers from those they have helped before. But this needn’t be the case. Benefits can flow back to altruists can just as plausibly through indirect routes: A helps B, B helps C, and C helps A (3). If a reputation for being a good collaborator means that you get more opportunities to participate in profitable cooperative ventures, even if this is with individuals that only know of your character indirectly (through hearing of your reputation), then cooperation can pay, even in a selfish world. Such systems of indirect reciprocity are pervasive in human societies, and have even been proposed to constitute the core of moral systems (4).

A crucial feature of systems of reciprocity, and perhaps particularly reciprocal altruism, is that whether or not you give help is determined by what sorts of benefits you are going to get in return. Giving is contingent on subsequently receiving. According to reciprocal altruism, the reason that cooperation can emerge in a world of selfish egoists is that cooperation is not a zero-sum game: my gain is not necessarily your loss – we can both win. In a world of cooperators/reciprocators that shun cheats, it pays to be a cooperator.

The contingency at the heart of reciprocity can take a number of forms. For instance, giving someone some food might be contingent on getting the same quantity of food in return. Or it could depend of receiving the same proportion of the stock we gave away, regardless of the absolute amount returned. Giving might also be contingent on overall levels of exchange between whole families, rather than on an individual-by-individual basis. Alternatively, giving and sharing can depend on the amount of effort that people put into solving problems such as gathering food – it is one thing to do badly despite your greatest efforts, but another to do badly through sheer idleness. So we have here four types of contingency, what Gurven calls, in order, ‘quantity’, ‘standardised quantity’ (percentage), ‘frequency’ (of exchange between families), and ‘value’ (of effort put in or some other factor). Experiments at the interface of economics and psychology have, over recent years, provided support for the role of value in shaping what people think other people deserve out of group efforts, and Gurven’s study adds to this.

A number of theories have been put forward to explain the nature of human altruism, which stands out as an anomaly in the natural world because of the levels of help and cooperation between unrelated people in human societies. It is likely that the different theories explain different aspects of human altruism. However, they do differ in the types of contingency you’d expect to see in certain cooperative and altruistic actions, and so studying them can help determine which processes are operating in which situations.

Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to the different forms of contingency and their roles in regulating altruistic behaviour. So Michael Gurven, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, set out to explore these issues using data previously collected by Gurven and other anthropologists in two populations: among the Ache of Paraguay, and the Hiwi of Venezuela. Through a number of statistical analyses, Gurven demonstrates that contingency does play an important role in food sharing among these populations, and also that different forms of contingency operate in different contexts.

The Ache and Hiwi live in different ecological niches, and collect and consume a range of food types (for instance, the Hiwi lived near a river and therefore had access to fish). Gurven grouped food types together, and analysed the role of contingency in governing whether and how they were shared. The Ache diet was categorised into forest foods (such as meat and honey), ‘cultigens’ (such as sweet manioc, corn and sweet potatoes) and store-bought foods (such as bread and oil); Gurven also looked at contingency in ‘all food types combined’. Contingency among the Hiwi was examined by grouping food as meat, fish, ‘other foods’, which included fruit and roots, and ‘all foods combined’.

Gurven found strong evidence for contingency in sharing meat and fish among the Hiwi, although this wasn’t seen for resources grouped as ‘other foods’ (fruit and roots). On average, for every kilogram of meat given to another family 0.69 kg was given back; for other foods, the return rate drops to 0.08 kg for every kilogram given. Among the Hiwi, the form of contingency called ‘quantity’ was the most prominent in the exchange of meat and when all resources were considered together; ‘value’ had an effect similar in magnitude, though not quite as great. The transfer of fish among the Hiwi seemed to be predominantly contingent on standardised quantity (percentage).

Among the Ache, frequency and value contingency were most important for forest foods and cultigen transfer, and value stood out as an important determinant of giving when all foods combined were considered together.

The lack of contingency in the giving of non-meat (‘other’) foods is interesting – what is it about these resources that makes people share them differently? Roots and fruits, while making up more than 40% of the Hiwi diet, are the least transferred resources. A number of factors explain why giving of these foods is less contingent than for other resources, and why they are not shared much in the first place. First, the existence and location of fruit and roots, unlike animal game, is highly predictable. This means that there is low variability in the amounts of these resources that foragers return with (that is, collecting these resources is less subject to the vagaries of chance). Second, individuals typically gather fruits and roots at the same time, and are therefore usually stocked up or not at the same time. These two factors reduce the need to exchange these foods in the first place: you’re more likely to be without meat or fish than without fruit or roots.

These anthropological results tie in with studies in behavioural economics that reveal that people are motivated by notions of fairness based on labour input into collective actions. The notions of fairness built into human psychology give rise to, and are probably reinforced by, cultural norms that explicitly spell out what is fair and what is not. Gurven suggests that thinking about the types of contingent cooperation seen in his anthropological survey could “begin to bridge the gap between the short-term calculus of reciprocal altruism and the longer-term social relationships emphasized in cultural norms.”

It is important to recognise that although reciprocal altruism and TFT are highly contingent, the finding of contingency in the food sharing of the Hiwi and Ache does not mean they are engaged in a TFT strategy. It seems that the forms of contingency observed, and the motivations driving cooperative behaviour, are the product of psychological systems, buttressed and canonised by cultural norms (and also perhaps in part shaped by them), that promote long-term collaborations in a way that TFT cannot.

The value people attach to the effort other people put into collective actions, and their altruistic intentions, has, according to Gurven, been neglected in past explorations of human cooperation in the anthropological literature. Given the recurring importance of value-based contingency found by Gurven, more attention to value should be paid in future studies. In general, the behavioural outcomes identified by anthropologists and other students of the human social sciences need to be linked up with work on the psychological underpinnings of human cooperation. A problem as complex as human altruism is surely going to require a pluralistic, inter-disciplinary approach to clearly illuminate the multifarious facets of this perennial question.

Notes
1. Gurven, M. The evolution of contingent cooperation. Current Anthropology 47, 185-192 (2006).

2. Trivers, R. L. The evolution of reciprocal altruism. In Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers 18–51 (Oxford University Press, 2002).

3. Nowak, M. & Sigmund, K. Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring. Nature 393, 573–577 (1998).

4. Alexander, R. The Biology of Moral Systems (Aldine Transaction, 1987).

The Good Books

2006-03-10T08:05:00.000Z

The long-list for the Aventis Prize for science books has been announced.

Have Your Say

2006-03-06T22:44:00.000Z

I want to get some feedback on the stuff I’ve written for this blog to see whether I might do things differently, and I have a couple of questions. I’m interested in whether people think the posts are:

Too long and too detailed (or not detailed enough)
Too diverse in topic, making it hard to know whether you’re likely to find a new post of interest
Too infrequent, even given their typical length

If anyone wants to reply to these, or give any other feedback, you can e-mail me at danrbjones [‘@] hotmail [‘.’] com. Thanks.

Taking Stock

2006-03-06T01:52:00.000Z

This blog is approaching two months old, and I’ve posted a few entries now, but as they’re mostly long they disappear way off the bottom of the page, so I thought I’d sumamrise what I’ve posted so far, in reverse chronological order.

The most recent post is on two papers looking at the nature of collaboration and altruism in humans and chimpanzees.

Here’s my coverage of a paper on the evolution of sexual reproduction, one the enduring mysteries of evolutionary biology.

This post looks at the role of unconscious automatic psychological processes, and how they can sometimes lead to more satisfying choices than conscious deliberation.

I wrote a long essay about the philosophers’ zombies, a thought experiment designed to illuminate the nature of consciousness.

A post I wrote on the biology of race generated some feedback that I replied to here.

This post looked at how your level of empathy for people in pain can be affected by whether you think the victim is a fair person or not.

I took a look at the meanings of theism, atheism and agnosticism in this post.

I started this blog with a two-part review of Richard Dawkins’s two-part programme on religion, science an atheism, The Root Of All Evil?, here and here. I also replied to a review of the programme here.

With A Little Help From My Friends

2006-03-05T23:57:00.000Z

Two new papers in Science on the collaborative tendencies of chimpanzees and human infants shed light on the nature and evolution of cooperation and altruism.

Although the image of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’ has an established pedigree, and great popular resonance, the role of cooperation in nature has also been long recognised (1). The extreme form of cooperative behaviour that social insects, such as bees and ants, engage in, in which some individuals sacrifice reproduction seemingly for the good of the hive, posed problems for Darwin. But modern theories of the evolution of cooperation, such as W. D. Hamilton’s kin selection theory, and Robert Trivers’s idea of reciprocal altruism, have helped explain otherwise puzzling cooperative behaviour in a range of species.

But we humans stand out as an evolutionary anomaly because of our propensity to behave cooperatively or altruistically in situations that cannot easily be explained by kin selection or reciprocal altruism. Our altruistic acts often extend well beyond the confines of our nearest and dearest. We (well, some people at least) donate blood, give to charity, do voluntary work, and go out of our way to avoid affecting others with our pollution.

In fact, modern experimental results of how people behave with regard to others are increasingly leading to the view that humans are motivated by a genuine concern for others, and not merely disguised selfish interest, genetic or otherwise. At the very least, gene-based models of the evolution of cooperation might need to be augmented with studies of cultural evolution and gene–culture co-evolution (2).

There are many components to the human capacity for altruism and successful cooperation. Empathy is an important motivating factor in driving people to altruistic acts of help in response to seeing people in distress. It is also useful to have a sense of fairness, which helps to avoid being exploited in ‘collaborative’ acts. Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal have shown that Capuchin monkeys refuse to participate in ‘work’ if they see another monkey getting a better reward for the same labour. This effect is amplified if another monkey is openly rewarded for no effort at all in front of a working monkey (3). At a more basic level, organisms often need to understand the sort of help required by other individuals in need in order to act effectively. And if individuals are to engage in successful cooperative acts, it is useful if they can identify those with whom they can work well.

Monkey see, monkey do
The first paper in Science (4), from Alicia Melis and colleagues, looks at the last two skills in chimpanzees. The findings strongly suggest that chimps can understand when help is needed, at least in the experimental set-up used in this study, and what the appropriate thing to do is to solve the problem at hand. They also show that when selecting a partner for a cooperative endeavour, chimps pick individuals on the basis of whether they have previously had successful collaborations with them or not.

Part of the reason for exploring these skills in chimps is that, being our closest primate relatives, they can shed light on what mental faculties are unique to humans, and which are perhaps derived from a common ancestor with chimps. Faculties that are shared between chimps and humans are plausible candidates for the building blocks of human altruism, even if human social behaviour is transformed by cultural additions and modifications.

Melis and colleagues used an ingenious set up to explore the nature of collaboration in chimpanzees (see figure to the left). Two sets of experiments were undertaken. The first set looked at whether chimps recruited help more often when they needed it, and therefore whether they understood what needed to be done to solve the problem they faced. To test this, the researchers set up two experimental conditions.

In the first condition, food rewards were placed on a platform outside the test room (see figure above). A piece of rope was threaded through two loops on the food-bearing platform, and the ends extended into the test cage so that they lay 55 cm apart. A chimp (the subject) was then released into the test room. To get the food, the chimp merely needed to grab both ends of the rope, which were close by, and pull (if the chimp only pulled one end of the rope it would unthread through the loops). While the chimp pondered the problem, a partner chimp, visible to the subject, remained locked in a room adjacent to the test room. The lock to the room was a simple device. In any case, chimps had previously been introduced to the ‘pulling task’ to get the food, and also learnt to unlock the door to let another chimp out. So they could do one act (unlocking the door) in order to do the other (get the food). The researchers watched, waited, and observed what the subject did (this was called the solo condition).

In the second condition (called the collaboration condition), the ropes were placed 3 metres apart, so that the only way the chimp could get any food at all was by recruiting help from the locked-up partner to simultaneously pull on the rope (the chimps had shown they knew how to do this in training trials).

If chimps recruit help only when they need to do, so as to maximise the reward they get by acting alone, then they should have unlocked the partner more often in the collaboration condition than in the solo condition. And this is just what was found.

So this first set of experiments shows that chimps know when they need to enlist help, and when they can go it alone and reap more rewards for themselves. The second of set experiments shows that chimps can also enhance their likelihood of forming successful collaborations on the basis of previous experience with other chimps.

In this set of experiments, in addition to a partner in the same room as before, there was also a chimp in the second adjacent room. These two potential partners for the rope-pulling problem differed markedly in their skill at solving the task. The subject partner had previously had a limited number of interactions with both chimps independently in obtaining food from the platform. So the subject chimp, if it had learnt that one chimp was a better choice as a partner for solving the problem than the other chimp, would be expected to pick the better partner more often. And again, this is what was found. Interestingly, the chimps’ behaviour provided evidence that they were tracking the relative success of partners and updating their decisions on the basis of previous outcomes. The chimps basically followed a ‘win-stay/lose-shift’ strategy: if they were successful with a partner, they would pick the same chimp for the next trial, and if it was unsuccessful switched to the other (this wasn’t an absolute rule they followed, and there were exceptions).

So chimps seem to know whether they need help, and to know who to turn to when they do. It also shows that chimpanzees can adapt a new skill, such as unlocking a door, and use that to aid future collaborations (in setting a partner free to collaborate in getting food).

Of children and chimps
The second paper in Science (5), from Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, tackles a different set of questions. While the first paper, described above, reveals that chimps know when, and with whom, to engage in collaboration to maximise benefits to themselves, what about helping when you have nothing to gain? Humans do this all the time, from holding doors open for people behind us to picking up a book for somebody who drops one. And it is this tendency that Warneken and Tomasello explored in their experiments.

Human infants and three young chimps were used as the subjects in this study (the small number of chimps limiting the strength of conclusions that we can draw from this work). The infants were pre-linguistic 18-month olds, and they were presented with 10 situations in which an adult (a male experimenter in this case, and therefore a stranger to the child) needed help in some task. In one situation, the experimenter, while hanging up washing, drops a clothes peg, and pretends to be obstructed by the clothes wire so that he cannot reach the peg on the floor. The child can see what is happening, and can walk over, pick up the peg, and hand it to the experimenter. In another situation, the experimenter, carrying a stack of magazines, approaches a closed cabinet, and tries, unsuccessfully, to put the magazines into the cabinet but instead just hits the door. In this case, the child can walk over to the cabinet and open the doors. The 10 situations were grouped in to four categories, according to the nature of the situation presented to the child: out-of-reach, physical obstacle, wrong result, and wrong means.

The children were also tested in control conditions. In the experimental situation, the experimenter made it clear through facial expressions, bodily reactions and sounds that there was a problem, and that help was needed. In control conditions, the experimenter remained neutral and did not suggest that there was a problem.

Children were significantly more likely to help in the experimental condition in 6 out of the 10 situations – picking up clothes pegs and handing them to the experimenter, or putting fallen DVD boxes on top of a pile that the experimenter missed. As these children couldn’t speak or fully comprehend language, it is unlikely that they have merely learnt to help through verbal instruction, although social norms may well augment a tendency to help others (or, perhaps in some circumstances, curtail it).

The same studies were carried out with the three young chimps. Although the chimps tended to help in the situations in which an object was merely out of reach, they weren’t so forthcoming in tasks that required actions other than merely grabbing and passing. There are number of possible reasons for this discrepancy. Perhaps the children were simply more willing to help, and this expressed itself as greater help across a wider range of situations. Alternatively, the chimps might simply have been stumped by the problems posed – even if they had recognised that help was required, they might not have understood what the goal of the experimenter was or how to aid him. Children have pretty advanced cognitive skills, particularly in the social domain, from a young age, and this might have given them the edge in being able to provide help.

Time to sum up. Chimpanzees recruit help when they need it, and from the best available partners, suggesting that corresponding skills in humans have a perhaps ancient evolutionary origin. But chimps are not so good at providing help across situations that require different forms of help. Maybe this is because of cognitive limitations, or maybe because of altruistic limitations. Pre-linguistic children, however, are capable of recognising when someone else needs help in reaching some goal, and are willing and able to provide this help in a wide range of situations. This is a good foundation for producing adults that are also likely to provide altruistic help to others, including strangers. And this propensity can be enhanced through internalisation of social and cultural norms that promote prosocial behaviour.

But is this sort of behaviour completely non-selfish altruism? At first it would seem so, as the helper derives no immediate benefit. But that doesn’t mean there are no benefits, even if they are not immediately obvious. A reputation for being a good collaborator and an general altruist can do wonders for your social currency, and can enable you to participate in projects that might otherwise have been closed to you. In any case, a tendency to want to help is a crucial ingredient of human prosociality. The challenge still remains of fully fleshing out a theory of human altruistic behaviour.

Notes
1. See the contrasting views of ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, T. H. Huxley, and the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin.

2. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. The nature of human altruism. Nature 425, 785-791 (2003).

3. Brosnan, S. B. & de Waal, F. B. M. Monkeys reject unequal pay. Nature 425, 297-299 (2003).

4. Melis, A. P, Hare, B. & Tomasello, M. Chimpanzees recruit the best collaborators. Science 311, 1297-1300 (2006).

5. Warneken, F. & Tomasello, M. Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science 311, 1301-1303 (2006).

Why Sex Is Good (and not for the obvious reasons)

2006-03-04T01:52:00.000Z

A new paper in Nature helps explain why sex is so ubiquitous.

The existence of sexual reproduction is one of the great mysteries of evolutionary biology. It’s widespread, but there is no consensus on what benefits it confers over asexual reproduction, which seems to be a perfectly respectable way to go about reproducing (there are many asexual species, and some species have even gone from sexual to asexual reproduction). This is not for want of candidate explanations — it is just very difficult to get the relevant evidence to adjudicate between to competing theories (1). A recently published paper in Nature, from Ricardo Azevedo and colleagues, now provides some clues to explain the conundrum of sex.

So why is sex such a puzzle? In the 1970s, John Maynard Smith and George C. Williams independently explored the problems posed by sex, which Maynard Smith summed up as the ‘twofold cost of sex’. Jeremy Cherfas and John Gribbin have summarised the problem like this:

[I]magine a population of male and female animals happily reproducing by means of sex…Now imagine that a mutant female arises, that is, one who differs genetically from the bulk of the population. She can do without males and still have young. Her offspring will all be female who, like their mother, can reproduce without the help of males, by a process called parthenogenesis (from the Greek for virgin birth). Because she does not produce males, such a female would have twice as many daughters as the other females; and because only daughters put much effort into raising offspring the mutation would spread very rapidly indeed. Within a very few generations all the females will be asexual. There is the cost of sons, dramatically brought out into the open: they halve a female’s capacity to reproduce.

This drives home the message that females that reproduce parthenogenetically (or asexually) and produce more parthenogenetic females will, other things being equal, push out sexual reproducers. But the idea that sex halves a “female’s capacity to reproduce” is perhaps worth expanding on, as phrased like that it might be misleading.

Imagine a population of 100 females and 100 males. In this idealised population, each male mates with one female, and between them have two offspring, which the female raises. This occurs generation after generation. After 5 generations, a given female would have left 32 descendants, as would each male. Now imagine a parthenogenetic female, who through virgin birth can leave 2 females as descendants; again, after 5 generations, a parthenogenetic female would leave 32 descendants, which, in terms of counting offspring, is exactly the same as in the sexual situation. This makes it clear that it is not the capacity to reproduce per se that is halved by sex, or doubled by asexual (parthenogenetic) reproduction (that is, females on average will still leave the same number of descendants. Sex does, however, reduce the per capita reproductive rate, as sex requires that two individuals get together to make one offspring, whereas in an asexual situation each individual produces each offspring alone.

The cost of sex can be expressed in different though fundamentally similar terms: by considering the fate of genes influencing sexual and asexual reproduction (the strategy made so famous by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene).

Think of a simplistic model in which one gene determines whether a female reproduces sexually or asexually. Let’s assume that there are 100 females in a population (and 100 males), all of which reproduce sexually. Any given gene in a female has a 50% probability of being passed on to her offspring, so that all offspring are 50% related to their mothers and, of course, 50% related to their fathers. Now a mutant gene arises in a female that causes her to reproduce asexually. In this situation, she will be 100% related to her offspring (and the offspring will be 100% related to their mothers) — after all, she passes on all her genes to her offspring (and the mother is the only source of the offspring’s genes).

Such a gene for asexual reproduction would be present in 100% of her offspring, a guaranteed ticket to the future. This stands in stark contrast to the fate of genes in a sexual reproducer — only 50% of her genes would then be eligible for entry into future generations. For any given gene in a sexual species, including those determining whether to engage in sex or not, there is a 50% chance of being passed on. In other words, a gene for sex reduces by half the likelihood that it, and all other genes in the genome, will make it into the next generation. Therefore asexual reproduction increases by twofold the genetic representation of female genes in future generations; this, then, highlights the twofold cost of sexual reproduction. I’ve belaboured the point at bit, but it’s important to get clear on this.

In both the model suggested by Cherfas and Gribbin, and the ones sketched above, although the actual numbers of offspring left by females is the same in asexual and sexual populations, the proportion of asexual females relative to sexual females and sexual males will rise, and with it the genes for asexual reproduction instead of sexual reproduction. Extrapolated over time, the genes for sexual reproduction would be displaced by asexual variants and disappear, and all reproduction would be asexual. This leads to the same conclusion that Cherfas and Gribbin arrive at — namely, that producing sons is not in the genetic interest of females. So the problem of sex is the question of why sexual reproduction is so ubiquitous in nature. What benefits does it provide to offset its costs?

There are, as noted above, a variety of hypotheses as to what these benefits are. One strong contender is the ‘mutational deterministic hypothesis’, devised by Alexey Kondrashov (2), and it is this model that the current paper in Nature draws on.

The basic idea of the mutational deterministic hypothesis is that sex can bring harmful mutations present in two parents together in a single individual; if this individual then dies, this eliminates harmful mutations (deleterious mutations, in the argot of geneticists) from the population. Imagine a group of asexual organism reproducing away. Then a deleterious mutation arises in one individual. All descendants of this mutant will inherit the harmful gene, and carry the cost. The only way this cursed lineage can get rid of its bad ‘genetic load’ is to die out, or wait for the unlikely event of a mutation that exactly reverses the original deleterious mutation. If this lineage suffers another genetic hit, then it will be doubly afflicted, with as little scope for escape.

Sex changes this. Imagine two sexual parents, each of which carries one harmful genetic variant. If the parents have more than one offspring, then, through the lottery of sexual inheritance, some might inherit one, both or neither of the harmful mutations. The mutation-free offspring have clearly benefited from sex, and those that inherit one have fared no worse than under asexual reproduction. But what about those that get a double dose of bad mutations? What happens to them? Well, it depends on whether the effects of the mutations interact with each other, a process known as epistasis.

These genetic interaction can take a number forms. If there is no interaction, or neutral epistasis, then the combined effects of the two mutations will be the sum of the independent mutations (that is, if each mutation carried a cost of –5 ‘survival points’, having both would cost –10). Alternatively, the mutations can interact positively, or antagonistically (this nomenclature is a bit counter-intuitive, as antagonism sounds negative, so you have to pay attention!). In this case the combined effects cancel each other out to a degree, such that the overall effect may be less than the sum of the individual effects (say, anywhere between –9 and –6 survival points), or even their individual costs (anywhere between 0 and –4 survival points). Finally, the effects may interact negatively, or synergistically, in which cause the combined effect is greater than the sum (a lower number than –10 survival points: –11, –12 and so on).

If harmful mutations interact synergistically — that is, enhance the effects of each other — then sex can potentially pay the two-fold cost it imposes over asexual reproduction by purging lineages of harmful mutations. Here’s how. If possessing either mutation A or B alone merely lowers fitness (survival plus reproduction), these mutations may hang around in lineages for a while and continually lower the fitness of all individuals in that lineage, constantly dragging each individual down. Synergy between the mutations provides a way out of this. In the most extreme case, individuals that get a double dose, or multiple doses, of mutations are absolutely unviable, and die right away. In this case, a whole clutch of bad mutations can be wiped out in one go. At the same time, other offspring may, through the luck of sexual inheritance, be mutation free — in which case, the bad genes have be removed from that lineage. This is a potentially powerful benefit for maintaining sexual reproduction.

One obvious question in light of all this is whether epistatic interactions between mutations are typically positive, neutral or negative. The answer is that in experiments you see all sorts of interactions, which hasn’t exactly helped to clarify what role epistatic interactions might play in the evolution of sex.

Previous work using computational models of evolution has suggested that natural selection can shape the nature of epistatic interactions, so under some (artificial) selective regimes natural selection can favour positive (antagonistic) epistasis, and in another negative (synergistic) epistasis. One way that the evolution of epistasis can be affected is if the genomes of organisms — that is, their entire collection of genes — and the networks of protein products they encode are selected to be ‘robust’. Robust in this sense means being insensitive to the effects of mutations. Selecting for robustness affects the nature of epistatic interactions.

Robustness is a good design feature: if you’ve got a complex system with lots of interacting parts, you don’t want the fate of the entire system to be placed in the hands of every single part. It’s good to have some mechanism for coping when parts go wrong.

It turns out that if you select for robustness in computer simulations, you produce as a correlated response increased negative (synergistic) epistasis. Another way of saying this is that robustness is negatively correlated with the ‘direction of epistasis’: when robustness is positive, epistasis is negative (taking positive and negative to represent different directions)*.

Genomes in sexually reproducing species do not only need to be robust against mutations. They also need to be robust against the genetic shuffling that occurs between generations when sperm and eggs recombine and mix their genes, process that is characteristic of sexual reproduction. This is ‘recombinational’ robustness. It has been proposed that sexual reproduction, which essentially means more recombination, imposes stronger selection for genetic robustness than asexual reproduction does.

And this is where the new study comes in — it probes this very idea. It’s not an experiment, at least not in the sense of involving real organisms with real genes. Instead, the researchers have used a computational model of artificial gene networks to get some purchase on whether sex (or recombination) selects for increased robustness.

The details of the model used in the new paper are complicated, but a few salient points should be noted. The model basically simulates a population of individuals (actually gene networks), and there is a certain amount of genetic variation between ‘individuals’ for evolution to work on. Individuals can also mutate to create new variation, and in sexual versions of the population recombination between individuals (mixing up of parental genes) takes place.

This model has previously been shown to produce, or evolve, genetic robustness if the gene networks are selected on the basis of whether they produce stable patterns of gene expression. Genes encode protein products, and these can in turn affect the activity of other genes (and sometimes also the activity of the genes encoding them). Genetic networks evolve to produce patterns of gene expression that achieve functional ends, like building limbs and regulating our metabolism. If these are easily perturbed they’ll have difficulty producing the desired outcome. And so gene-expression patterns should be stable, or at least respond in appropriate ways when perturbed, to produce functional organisms, or at least functional gene networks. When gene networks that produce stable gene-expression patterns are selected for, robustness emerges — that is, the networks evolve the capacity to maintain stable patterns of gene expression if the face of perturbations.

In this particular application of the model, the role of recombination in producing robustness was explored, using gene networks selected for their capacity to produce stable gene-expression patterns. What’s more, the researchers also looked at whether recombination, through producing robustness, could influence the direction of epistatic interactions (that is, whether there were positive, neutral or negative) that evolved.

Because of the way the model was set up, populations should be subjected to selection for both mutational robustness (insensitivity to mutations) and recombinational robustness (insensitivity to the effects of bring genes into new combinations through genetic recombination).

By tweaking the model, Azevedo and colleagues were able to tease apart the effects of sexual reproduction on selection for mutational and recombinational robustness. They found that to the extent that mutational robustness evolved in sexual populations, it was not as a result of direct selection for this type of robustness. Instead, mutational robustness was found to be a correlated response to selection for recombinational robustness. So selection for recombinational robustness produces a correlated response of mutational robustness. Another important finding is that in sexual populations in which mutational robustness evolved, negative, or less positive, epistasis also evolved. As the authors conclude:

“Taken together, these results confirm that mutational robustness and negative epistasis both evolved in response to selection for recombinational robustness.”

There are obviously limitations to this study. Firstly, it is very simple compared to the complexity of the genomes of multi-cellular plants and animals. Secondly, recombination is already present in the model — so this, the central feature of sex, did not have to evolve but was already there. Perhaps in this regard the paper contributes more to our understanding of the maintenance of sex, rather than its origins.

However, it is an interesting thought that sexual reproduction seems to create conditions that favour its own maintenance. Perhaps sex evolved in part because recombination lead to the evolution of genetic robustness, enabling extremely complex genomes to evolve, and this robustness resulted in a correlated evolution of negative (or synergistic) epistasis. Then sex could deliver the benefits spelled out by the mutational deterministic hypothesis. The synergistic interaction of harmful mutations would enable sex to purge them from the genomes of sexually reproducing organism — and therefore to pay its way.

*This might seem odd. Let me explain if it doesn’t. Mutational robustness, or insensitivity to mutations, is a capacity to dampen down the harmful effects of mutations. So any mechanism that did that would seem to be associated with robustness. And that seems to be what positive (antagonistic) epistasis does — the harmful effects of combined mutations antagonise each other, and cancel one another out to an extent. This is a sort of damping down. But in fact negative epistasis is seen to emerge alongside robustness.

The reason for this is difficult to explain, but it seems to be a reliable finding. One possibility is that if genomes have on average only one or two mutations, then mutational robustness can evolve through positive epistasis for the smaller number of mutations. This has the effect of changing the shape of a graph plotting fitness against mutational load (if we assume that previously there was no directional epistasis - that is, neutral epistasis ). In fact, the new curve looks like a curve of negative epistasis, but from a different starting point. This isn’t, I realise, terribly helpful without some images. But in sum, genomes might evolve to be more robust to the presence of the small average number of mutations but pay the price of being less robust in the face of many mutations (thanks to Ricardo Azevedo for this point, personal communication).

1. A relatively accessible introduction to some of the ideas about the evolution can be found in: Cherfas, J. & Gribbin, J. The Mating Game: In Search of the Meaning of Sex (Penguin, 2001).

2. Kondrashov, A. S. Deleterious mutations and the evolution of sexual reproduction. Nature 336, 435–440 (1988).

Gut thinking

2006-02-20T00:10:00.000Z

We humans often pride ourselves on our rationality, and on our ability to make complex decisions through reasoning power. In recent decades, however, the role accorded to reason in driving our decisions and behaviour has been called into question by many psychologists.

Experiments have revealed that our decisions seem to be driven by an assortment of biases and heuristics — mental rules of thumb that help us get to a reasonable answer if a relatively short amount of time. And these heuristics need not be conscious. Indeed, another relevant trend in psychology has been a greater appreciation of unconscious processes in shaping our decision-making and behaviour. These are not unconscious desires or wishes in the Freudian sense, but processing rules that are not necessarily consciously monitored.

Much of the study of heuristics has highlighted the systematic ways in which human reasoning can veer into illogic. For instance, if you ask people how many words, in four pages of a novel, will have ‘ing’ as an ending, they typically give a higher number as an answer than if you ask how many words will have ‘n’ as the second-to-last letter in four pages from the novel (an example of what is called the availability heuristic, but I won’t go into detail here). And this does not make logical sense.

Similarly, what’s called the ‘representativeness heuristic’ can lead people astray. This is illustrated by looking at people’s answers to questions about the likely career of a hypothetical woman named Linda:

“Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”

After reading this description, people were asked to rank the likelihood of various possible future life outcomes for Linda, the most important two (for the purposes of the study) being ‘bank teller’ and ‘bank teller and active in the feminist movement’. Most people think that the latter possibility is more likely, even though it is statistically more likely that she would be just a bank teller, rather than both a bank teller and a feminist activist. This is known as the conjunction error, in which the occurrence of two independent characteristics is deemed more likely than one alone (and statistics says this isn’t so).

So much for how we actually reason: when it comes to thinking, we’re frequently far from logical. But what about when we put our mind to thinking about a decision or problem? Surely more thinking is better, and more likely to lead to the best solution or choice?

Well not according to some research published in last week’s Science. Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands have found that too much thinking can get in the way of reaching a good decision — perhaps counter-intuitively, this is even more true when the decision is more complex. Conscious deliberation seems to be better suited to making simple decisions, such as what brand of kitchen utensil to buy, but for the more complex and important decisions in life, perhaps such as buying a house or car, less thinking may mean a better decision.

In one set of experiments, participants were provided with a choice of four cars. The task was to pick the best car out of the range on the basis of details about four characteristics of the cars, such as mileage and legroom. Each person had four minutes to mull over the problem, and most participants picked the same car — the one that was in fact best on the basis of the listed attributes. In a variation of this experiment, the cars had 12 characteristics, making the decision-making process more complex because there were more factors to take into account. And this increased complexity of the decision was reflected in people’s choices: after four minutes thought, only 25% picked the car with the best attributes, or no better than merely picking at random. Perhaps understandably, a more difficult choice made for worse decisions.

In the final condition, the participants, after reading about the cars and the 12 attributes, were asked to solve anagrams for four minutes before making their choice of car. And the effect of this distraction? To increase their skill in identifying the best car — after taking their minds off thinking about the car by solving anagrams, more than half of the study subjects picked the best car. This suggests that at least in some cases less explicit, conscious deliberation, and a greater reliance on unconscious mental processes, can help make for better decision-making in complex situations.

Dijksterhuis and colleagues also explored this issue in a more real-life situation: shopping for simple items of clothes and kitchenware, compared with furniture shopping at IKEA (which, being a bigger investment, and relating to home design, can be expected to be a more weighty and complex choice to make). The researchers stopped shoppers leaving IKEA and the shop selling kitchen utensils and other smaller items, and asked them how long they had spent mulling over their decisions. They then called the shoppers up a couple of weeks later to see how happy they were with their purchases. Whereas the people that spent longer thinking the about their small purchases were generally happier with what they had bought, the reverse was true of IKEA shoppers — more thought led to a less satisfactory choice.

One possible reason for the poor performance when making more complicated decisions is that the brain can only keep so much information accessible to consciousness. So perhaps partial or muddled information gets factored into conscious decisions, which then turn out to be bad. This study illustrates that complexity might be a key factor determining whether conscious deliberation or something more gut-based (meaning not consciously thought through, and perhaps emotionally laden) is the most appropriate path to a decision.

But it would be rash to rule out the role of thinking altogether in coming to important decisions. It is quite possible that taking all the relevant information into account, rolling it around in your head for a while, and letting it be unconsciously processed may lead to good decisions. In fact, this is what Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist for his work on decision-making, says: “I would not advise people to buy a car or house without making a list. You will probably improve your intuitions by making a list [of pros and cons] and then sleeping on it.” Dijksterhuis agrees: for important decisions, he finds out the relevant facts and focuses his full attention on the decision. Then? “I sit on things and rely on my gut.”

This research might also illuminate the almost magical ability of doctors, fire-fighters and jazz musicians to make accurate on-the-spot decisions about medical care, plans of action, and note choice, for example. It is not that these people are better off for having less knowledge of information with which to consciously work, but that their expert knowledge can be accessed unconsciously and extremely rapidly, through years of experience and practise.

So next time you have a small decision to make, think about for a reasonable time, and go for it; for the bigger ones, have a think, weigh up the options, then think about something else for a while. When you come back to make your decision, it may just make the best choice (or at least one you’ll be happy with).

New book: No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

2006-02-15T12:45:00.000Z

A few years back, Judith Rich Harris, a psychology textbook writer unaffiliated with any university, published The Nurture Assumption, which suggested that the home environment provided by parents was of little effect in shaping the personality of their children – genetics, peer-group socialisation, and unique life events play the dominant role. Despite criticism from some quarters, the book was also endorsed by such luminaries as Steve Pinker (who actually wrote a forward to the book).

Now Rich Harris has a new book out, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, in which she apparently outlines a new theory of personality development, one that explains why we — even identical twins — turn out as individuals. The book isn’t available in the UK yet, but in the meantime here’s a review of the book.

The Zombic Hunch and the Limits of Thought Experiments

2006-02-14T00:31:00.000Z

Bring Out Your Dead

Few thought experiments in the philosophy of mind are as popular or famous as the philosopher’s zombie (although John Searle’s Chinese Room probably tops it). These aren’t the cannibalistic, but mercifully slow-walking, corpses of George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn Of The Dead. When philosophers talk about zombies they generally have in mind a being much like me and you in appearance and behaviour — in some instances identical — but lacking any inner mental life, any conscious glow, any feeling of what it is like to experience, say, the scent of a rose or the tang of lemon. But, being behaviourally just like an ordinary human, such a zombie would talk and act just as if they did have conscious experience. Perhaps for all you know me, and everyone other person on the planet, are zombies — it is part of the conception of a zombie that you couldn’t tell by observing our behaviour or by inspecting us physically — that is, the way we act and talk about the world (including our non-existent conscious experience) wouldn’t give our zombiehood away.

Some philosophers have suggested that the possibility, or at least conceivability, of zombies tells us something important about the nature of consciousness and its relation to our physiology, particularly the brain. Others respond that zombies are a confused notion, and have done more harm than good in directing our thoughts about the mind. In the recent book Conversations on Consciousness, Susan Blackmore discusses the possibility and likelihood of zombies with a number of leading philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists, and comparing their accounts can possibly shed some light on what’s going on in the debates.

In discussing zombies with Blackmore, philosopher Ned Block distinguishes between two senses of the philosopher’s zombie, which we might call the ‘functionalist zombie’ and the ‘biological zombie’. I’ll explain both shortly, after a little bit of background on what functionalism is, and the account it gives of the mind (I’ll quote from some good introductory books on the topic that are easily available).

The are many problems in the philosophy of mind, although the problem of consciousness is perhaps currently the most high profile (in the popular mind at least: the past decade has seen a proliferation of popular and semi-popular books on the subject). The are a number of features of mental states we might want to explain: some mental states are caused by states of the world; some mental states cause mental states; some mental states cause other mental states; some mental states are about things in the world; and some kinds of mental states are systematically correlated with certain kinds of brain states (Ravenscroft (2005)).

Functionalism addresses a number of these problems from a perspective that sits well with a materialist conception of the mind, although it is not logically committed to materialism (the idea that everything in the world — mental events and all — have a material, physical basis). In the current climate, in which may if not most philosophers and neuroscientists take the brain to be the material basis of the mind, functionalism has found a welcome home, and has become a major position in the philosophy of mind. However, a wide range of views on the mind–brain relation, and the nature of consciousness, are compatible with materialism, and so functionalism is not the only game in town. However, whatever it’s troubles, functionalism has been an extremely influential approach to the mind, and even its critics take it seriously.

Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996) say “Functionalists take mental states to be the internal causes of behaviour … Mental states are, according to functionalists, internal states within us, but we identify and name them by the effect the world has on them, the effects they have on the world, and the effect they have on the world by causing our behaviour.” Functionalism both helps explain, and derives support from, the fact that mental states can be multiply realised, which means that some states, say pain, can be produced by, or realised in, a number of different physical systems. The possibility of multiple realisation poses problems for theories that identify a given mental state, such as pain, with a certain physical state, such as the firing of C-fibres in the nervous system (although this isn’t neurologically plausible it’s a standard example in the philosophical literature). The claim of the identity theory here is that the firing of C-fibres is identical to being in a state of pain. However, other animals, such as lobsters, seem capable of being in pain states, so an identity theory that identified pain as firing of C-fibres would claim that lobsters must have C-fibres too. But let’s assume that lobsters don’t have C-fibres; they have D-fibres instead. If this is true, then pain can’t merely be the firing of C-fibres. Perhaps we might say that pain is the firing of C- or D-fibres, but then our idea of a mental state is extremely contingent on what we know about nervous systems across the animal kingdom. Functionalism provides an escape from this.

As Ravenscroft (2005) explains, “According to functionalism, C-fiber firing does the same job in me as D-fiber firing does in [lobsters]. On this view, to be in pain is to have an internal state which does a certain job. Which job is that? Very roughly, an internal state does the ‘pain job’ if it is caused by bodily damage and causes us to say ‘ouch’ and rub the sore spot. So according to functionalism, to be in pain is to have an internal state which is activated by bodily damage and which causes us to say ‘ouch’ and rub the sore spot. More generally, according to functionalism, to be in (or have) mental state M is to have an internal state which does the ‘M-job’.” It is important that these functional states have certain causal properties, properties determined by their inputs, how the state responds to the input, its output and its effects on other states of the systems.

Refuting Functionalism?

The idea of multiple realisation is in principle not limited to biological systems as a given functional state can in principle be underpinned by a non-biological machine – a computer, for instance. It has been suggested that a sort of Rube Goldberg device made out of cans, strings and pulleys could, in principle, replicate the functional states of the human brain. An early criticism of the functionalist approach was developed by Block, and is called the China Brain (which inspired the famous Chinese Room). In this thought experiment, everyone in the population of China (assumed to be about a billion, a number much lower, but vaguely in the ball park, of the number of neurons in the human brain) is given a phone. Everyone is also given a set of instructions that say that when a call is received from a given number, or numbers, another call or calls should be made to certain other numbers. In this way, each phone operator is imitating the functional role of an individual neuron.

Now, this is isn’t likely to be set up any time soon, but we can imagine it in principle. So once it was up and running, each phone operator would assume the functional role of a neuron, and collectively they would simulate the functional organisation of the brain. That is, the population would be in the same functional states as a human brain, given the correct inputs and rules of operation. So what if the phone operators were in the same functional state as the brain is when it has a mental state with the content ‘It’s raining’? Would the population of phone operators be in this mental state too? This isn’t about whether individual phone operators would believe that it’s raining, but whether the population of operators are in the functional state of believing that it’s raining – which functionalism is says it is.

It perhaps seems absurd to suppose that the population as a whole is conscious of the belief ‘It’s raining’ in some strange, disembodied state. The existence of a functional state representing the mental belief state ‘It’s raining’ seems insufficient for the conscious awareness of this belief. The problem of consciousness – the first-person perspective on the world, our subjective experience of the world, what it is like to be you, at your computer, as you read this – is indeed a tricky issue for functionalism, as it is for all theories of the mind. But problems in the philosophy of mind are not exhausted by the problem of conscious – in fact, some philosophers, such as Dan Dennett, believe that once the other problems of how the brain/mind works, then the supposed problem of consciousness will disappear. There won’t be an extra ‘something’ to explain when all the other aspects of the mind are explained.

Functionalism fares well in explaining a number of other features of mental states. For instance, it has an explanation of, or at least is compatible with, the following features on mental states that any theory of mind will hopefully address (see Ravenscroft (2005)): some mental states are caused by states of the world; some mental states cause mental states; some mental states cause other mental states; some mental states are about things in the world; and some kinds of mental states are systematically correlated with certain kinds of brain states. It’s not well-suited to explaining the problem of consciousness, as traditionally construed, but does the China Brain thought experiment refute functionalism as an approach to understanding these other aspects of the mind, as it is intended to? It seems perhaps obvious that the China Brain doesn’t have mental states similar in relevant respects to human mental states, but this is an intuition, not an argument, however strong (Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996)).

In any case, Block’s take on the China Brain thought experiment leads him to various conclusions. Block considers functionalism to be insufficient to the task of explaining the phenomenology of mind, and therefore can conceive of a being that is functionally similar to a human, even if physically different from humans, which lacks consciousness. This is a being that is functionally similar to us, like the China Brain was, but which lacks consciousness like the China Brain. This is Block’s notion of what I’ll call a functionalist zombie, and I’ll explore this type of zombie, along with biological zombies, and philosophers’ response to them in the next post.

Zombies And The Philosophers

Ned Block characterises the functionalist zombie as a “person who is functionally like us, but physically so different that this person doesn’t have the physical basis of phenomenology”. He cites the example of a human perhaps made out of silicon chips that were organised to embody functional states identical to those of a human. Block concludes that this being would lack the physical basis of phenomenology, and derives this conclusion from the China Brain thought experiment.

Block also describes a second sort of zombie, what I’m calling a biological zombie:

“The second sort of zombie is a creature that’s physically exactly like us. This is [David] Chalmers’s zombie, so when Chalmers says he believes in the conceivability and therefore the possibility of zombies, he’s talking about that kind of a zombie. My view is that no one who takes the biological basis of consciousness seriously should really believe in that kind of a zombie. I don’t believe in the possibility of that zombie; I believe that the physiology of the human brain determines our phenomenology and so there couldn’t be a creature like that, physically exactly like us, down to every molecule of the brain, just the same but nobody home, no phenomenology. That zombie I don’t believe in, but the functional zombie I do believe in.”

So that’s our starting point: the contrast between functionalist zombies and biological zombies (though this distinction might well be disputed on the grounds that the difference between a functional zombie that behaved intelligently and a creature that behaved in a similarly intelligent fashion but with the boost of consciousness is more imagined than real). Next, here’s how John Searle replies to being asked about zombies by Sue Blackmore, whose reply I’ve included:

“The zombie is really a philosopher’s invention, to imagine a machine or a creature that behaves the same as a person who is conscious but has no consciousness; and I think that makes sense; you can imagine such a thing; I can imagine that you really are a wind up mechanism and that you’re not conscious. It’s a good thought experiment to imagine the differences between ourselves, who have both consciousness and coherent organised behaviour, and the zombie that appears to have the same organised behaviour but does not have any consciousness, has no feelings.”
Blackmore: “Obviously it’s possible to imagine such a zombie, but are you saying that such a zombie could in principle exist?”
Searle: “In principle, sure.”

At first it seems like Searle is just referring to the functionalist conception of a zombie — “a machine or a creature that behaves the same as a person who is conscious but has no consciousness”. But by saying “I can imagine that you are really a wind-up mechanism and that you’re not conscious” he seems to be committing himself to the stronger idea, rejected by Block, of a biological zombie, a creature identical to a human but lacking consciousness. And what could be more identical to Sue Blackmore than the conscious Sue Blackmore? (If he didn’t have this in mind, how could he imagine Blackmore as a zombie, given that she such a zombie would be, in fact, biologically identical to the actual conscious Sue Blackmore? (Of course, we don’t know that Blackmore is really conscious; but Searle is saying that although he thinks that beings of with the kind of biology Blackmore has — humans — are conscious, it’s possible to imagine them as not conscious.) So to take Searle at his word, that he can imagine Blackmore as non-conscious, this strong reading seems fair. The possibility of this biological zombie is often taken to have an important implication: that if we can imagine creatures physically exactly like us, who must definitionally be in identical functional states, then mere functional states are not enough for consciousness. Therefore there is something extra, some special ingredient, that is part of the explanation of consciousness. Blackmore is quick to the chase:

Blackmore: “So as far as you’re concerned, then, there’s something extra; you could have a mechanism that did all this stuff, but it wouldn’t be really like us; it needs something extra, the conscious field or the rational agent or something like that, to make it be like us and have our kind of awareness. Is that what you’re saying?”
Searle: “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I think evolution probably could not have produced such a thing, because evolution produced us. You can imagine evolution producing beings that moved around on wheels instead of on legs; but for all kinds of reasons it’s unlikely that evolution would ever be able to produce that. Similarly, you can imagine evolution producing a well-organised zombie, but it’s unlikely; we just get this much more efficient mechanism if we have consciousness. However, you could, in principle at least, design machinery that could behave as if it were intelligent – that is, could behave in the same way as human beings behave; we’re nowhere near being able to do that, but in principle it’s possible.”

This response muddies the waters a bit in interpreting Searle. He starts by saying that he accepts the conclusion about ‘extra ingredients’ derived from his conception of the zombie thought experiment as discussed Blackmore This suggests that he takes the possibility of biological zombies seriously. This is surprising given the importance Searle places on the brain and its biological functioning in explaining consciousness, which he thinks makes brains conscious, and machines, which don’t have the right arrangement of matter, unconscious.

However, by saying that “I think evolution probably could not have produced such a thing, because evolution produced us”, he seems to suggest something different — at least inadvertently, perhaps. The design process of evolution through natural selection has produced complexly and improbably organised functionally adapted matter — from sub-cellular organelles to organisms — that serves functional ends. Some of this matter is arranged in such a way as to form conscious creatures, like us, and maybe other animals.

I take Searle to believe that the way evolution has operated, and the way it has put physical matter together, entails that consciousness exist. (Not that evolution necessarily entailed the emergence of consciousness, but that given that it put organisms together with our molecular composition, consciousness was inevitable. I say this because Searle believe that the brain in a sense ‘creates’ the mind, that mind is an emergent property of the brain perhaps like wetness is an emergent property of water. Given the molecular structure of water, and the operation of physico-chemical laws, water has the emergent properties associated with being a liquid. In a similar sense, the molecular organisation of the brain (human, at least), operating according to the causal laws of the universe, creates consciousness. Another system made out of different material, say a computer emulating mental processes, would lack consciousness — it hasn’t got the right stuff. This is what I take Searle to mean when he says “I think evolution probably could not have produced such a thing [a mechanism that did all this stuff, but it wouldn’t be really like us], because evolution produced us.”

But then Searle says “you can imagine evolution producing a well-organised zombie, but it’s unlikely; we just get this much more efficient mechanism if we have consciousness. However, you could, in principle at least, design machinery that could behave as if it were intelligent – that is, could behave in the same way as human beings behave; we’re nowhere near being able to that, but in principle it’s possible.” This suggests that Searle now means something else. It seems that he’s now talking about a creature that is not like us molecule for molecule (if it was, it’d be human and conscious). So perhaps Searle means a being potentially quite different from us physically — perhaps a silicon-based life-form, or of just very different biological design — but which was behaviourally similar, one that instantiated the same functional states of a human, but which was a zombie. This, it seems to me, is a rather different claim. On the first reading, it seems that Searle should reject the idea that Blackmore is a zombie, because of his views about the way that consciousness arises from the material composition of the brain. And on the second reading he should reject the possibility too, because he’s supposed to be talking about a functional zombie, which can’t substituted with a biological zombie that Blackmore would have to be if she were any type of zombie! To unpack that a bit, accepting the possibility of a functional zombie doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable to conclude that Blackmore could be a zombie, for if she were to be a zombie she’d have to be a biological zombie, and acceptance of the former doesn’t entail acceptance of the latter.

If this is correct, then the conclusions about the ‘extra ingredient’ needed to explain consciousness don’t follow, and zombies aren’t perhaps so good a thought experiment as Searle thinks.

The next philosopher I want to turn to is David Chalmers, alluded to by Block above and charged with believing in biological zombies. Here’s the relevant dialogue from Conversations On Consciousness (it’s quite long):

Blackmore: “Would you like to explain about zombies?”
Chalmers: “Sure. I think in the actual world, intelligent behaviour and consciousness very likely go together. So when you find a system which is behaving like me and talking like me – it’s probably conscious. But it seems that I could imagine a system which was behaviourally just like me, it walked and talked just like me, it got around its environment, but it didn’t have subjective experience. Everything was dark inside. This would be what philosophers like to call a zombie – a being entirely lacking consciousness.
Now such a being would be tremendously sophisticated. You couldn’t tell the difference from the outside, but there would nobody home inside. Here I am sitting talking to you. All I have access to is your behaviour. Now you seem like a reasonably intelligent human being, you’re saying articulate things that suggest a conscious being inside. But of course, the age-old problem is ‘how do I know?’. It’s at least logically consistent with my evidence that you are a zombie.
Now I don’t think you are, but the very logical possibility of zombies is interesting because then we can raise the question ‘why are we not zombies?’. There could have been a universe of zombies. Think about creating the world. It seems logically within God’s power (and of course the use of ‘God’ here is just a metaphor) to create a world which was physically just like this one with a lot of particles and compelx systems behaving in complex ways, but these were just androids. There was no consciousness at all.
And yet there is consciousness. So that’s been used by some people, including me, to suggest that the existence of consciousness on our world is a further deeper property of the world than its mere physical constitution.”

Chalmers seems to be saying that it’s only something behaviourally like us, not something like us molecule for molecule, that could exist and be lacking in consciousness. When he says “You couldn’t tell the difference from the outside”, he must be interpreted as meaning from a relatively cursory glance of the outside: if outside is taken to mean all types of physical examination and testing, and it’s molecular constitution and physiological operation were found to be identical to that found in humans, then it’d be a human, and we would therefore grant it consciousness (provided we grant the existence of other minds in humans). This gloss is supported by Chalmers’s response to Blackmore’s next question:

Blackmore: “So are you saying that you believe such philosopher’s zombies are possible and the fact that we have consciousness means that we have to add something to the explanation?”
Chalmers: “I think they’re probably not possible in the sense that no such thing could ever exist in this world. I think that even a computer which has really complex intelligent behaviour and functioning would probably be conscious. What is interesting though, is that it doesn’t seem contradictory to suppose, at least in the imagination, that someone, somewhere, in some possible world, could behave like me without consciousness. But our world isn’t like that. So that’s an interesting fact about our world!”

I take Chalmers to be saying that no zombie, in the sense Chalmers intends, could exist in our universe, because of the way it happens to be constructed. But in another possible world, constructed differently, they could. But the possible world Chalmers has in mind cannot be exactly the same as our world – elementary particle for elementary particle, atom for atom, molecule for molecule – as it wouldn’t be an alternative possible world, it’d be our world, which features the very conscious creatures (us) we were trying to imagine didn’t exist!

So Chalmers rejects the possibility of what I called a biological zombie, characterised by Block as “physically exactly like us, down to every molecule of the brain, just the same but nobody home, no phenomenology”. If ‘possible world’ means one that is exactly like our world, then we can ask what it’d mean to imagine such a world containing beings identical to us but without consciousness. It seems akin to saying that you could imagine a world like ours, built from the same elementary particles, fundamental forces and fields, but which didn’t feature mass or electromagnetic radiation or hydrogen. You might be able to say you can imagine such a world, but perhaps your imagination is running away from you there a bit. We might also claim to be able imagine a world identical to this one except that humans can fly by levitation (of course, if it were really identical, we couldn’t, as we don’t); but merely saying this doesn’t then raise interesting questions about why humans, in this world, don’t in fact fly. The mere fact that we think we can imagine this world with something ‘extra’ that enables levitation doesn’t mean that we then have to explain the absence of this ‘extra’ something in this world, or even consider it as a possible ‘extra’ that we could be in possession of. Similarly, the fact that we might — though few do — say that we can imagine identical beings but lacking in conscious, because they lack some mysterious extra ingredient, does not mean that there actually is an ‘extra ingredient’ in our world to explain.

It might be useful here to distinguish between logically possible worlds and nomologically possible worlds, and apply this distinction to the case of zombies. A logical possibility is a state of affairs that doesn’t contradict the laws of logic, and a logically possible world is one the description of which is not self-contradictory. The space of logically possible worlds therefore contains worlds very unlike ours, perhaps where things impossible in our world occur with regularity. A nomological possibility is a possible state of affairs that is consistent with the causal laws of the universe as we know them, and so a nomologically possible world is one that is consistent with the known laws of physics. Under this distinction, levitating humans might be a logical possibility, but they aren’t a nomological possibility. And what does the mere logical possibility of levitation entail for our views about our actual world? Little, in this case. And so why should the logical possibility of zombies be of much relevance to us? The nomological possibility of a zombie would be of interest, but arguing for such a possible being requires a fair bit of work, and is in fact rejected by the philosophers looked at here (with the possible exception of Searle, who seems to drift a bit between the two possibilities, logical and nomological).

Let’s get back to Chalmers. He does not seem to believe in the nomological possibility of what we’ve called a biological zombie, and so Block is wrong to say that this sort of zombie is what Chalmers does in fact believe in. This has implications for what Block claims Chalmers says the implications of zombies are. The sort of zombie Chalmers believes could exist is one that existed in a genuinely alternative possible world, behaved in an intelligent, organised and coherent manner in the pursuit of goals, even reported the possession of conscious experience, but did not have real conscious experience. One, in other words, that had internal functional states that guided intelligent behaviour — Block’s functionalist zombie. Block and Chalmers agree on the nomological possibility of functional zombies and the nomological impossibility of biological zombies. Which prompts Blackmore to ask:

Blackmore: “You say our world isn’t like that. Does this make you a functionalist? Are you saying that, in our world, anything that carries out a certain function must necessarily be conscious?”
Chalmers: “In some very broad sense I am a functionalist. I think that behaviour, and function, and consciousness go together. They are very tightly correlated and associated. But I am not a functionalist in the strong sense of saying that all there is to consciousness is the functioning. So people say that all we have to worry about is functioning and the behaviour and the talking. I think that is just manifestly false because of the direct data of subjective experience. We have correlation of the two without any kind of reduction of one to the other.”
Blackmore: “I want to get this absolutely clear because people talk about your views on zombies a lot. You saying that logically you can conceive of a world in which there would be intelligent-behaving creatures who went around saying like ‘I am conscious’ and ‘I’m experiencing red right now’ and so on, but didn’t have any subjective experience. But you think that in this real world we are in that’s not possible and anything that does these behaviours will necessarily be conscious.”
Chalmers: “That’s exactly right.”

This assent to Blackmore’s presentation of his view reinforces the interpretation of Chalmers’s view that I’ve sketched above. He accepts the nomological possibility of functional zombies, but rejects the nomological possibility of biological zombies.

So far, here’s the tally: Block and Chalmers both accept the nomological possibility of functional zombies, and Searle’s comments suggest that should too, if he’d accept the distinction between functional and biological zombies. Both Block and Chalmers reject the nomological possibility of biological zombies, and therefore reject the conclusions that supposedly follow from their mere conceivability, such as the need to postulate an ‘extra ingredient’ to explain consciousness.

So far one major philosopher has been notable by his absence: Dan Dennett, who doesn’t have much time for considering zombies, driven as it is, he considers, by the ill-founded Zombic Hunch:

“The Zombic hunch is the idea that there could be a being that behaved exactly the way you or I behave, in every regard – it could cry at sad movies, be thrilled by joyous sunsets, enjoy ice cream and the whole thing, and yet not be conscious at all. It would just be a zombie. Now I think that many people are sure that hunch is right, and they don’t know why they’re sure. If you show them the arguments for taking zombies seriously are all flawed, this doesn’t stop them from clinging to the hunch. They’re afraid to let go of it, for fear they’re leaving something deeply important out. And so we get a bifurcation of theorists into those who take the zombic hunch seriously, and those who, like myself, have sort of overcome it. I can feel it, but I just don’t have it anymore.”

I’m not quite sure whether Dennett rejects the nomological possibility of the functional zombie — if it behaved like we did, it’d be conscious like us, perhaps — and I leave that to others to address.

It’s time to summarise. I agree with Dennett that we should let go of the zombic hunch. If you believe in zombies, in the strong, biological, nomological sense, then this should be on the basis of an explicit argument — assent to belief in the possibility of these zombies seems to me more of a conclusion than a starting point for other conclusions to be drawn. As such, asking someone whether they believe in the possibility of zombies (after making sure exactly what you’re talking about!) is a useful diagnostic question in gauging their stance on the mind, but this stance has to be justified by a zombie-independent argument. After all, to avoid circularity you need to provide reasons for concluding that zombies are possible on the basis of your conception of the mind, rather than claiming that zombies are possible, then deriving an account of the mind that explains this possibility — and then using this to explain the possibility of the zombies that motivated your argument!

Notes

Blackmore, S. Conversations on Consciousness (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).

Braddon-Mitchell, D. & Jackson, F. Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Blackwell, 1996).

Ravenscroft, I. Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford, 2005).

Race Reprised, and the Difficulties of Debate

2006-02-05T21:03:00.000Z

A while ago I posted a on the vexed topic of race, and whether we can talk about race from a genetic perspective, prompted by posts on Mixing Memory and Fido the Yak. My essay wasn’t meant as an attack on MM or Fido, as Chris at MM clearly realised in his reasonable response to my post, but Fido seems to have taken umbrage at what I said – see his response in the comments section of my original post, and in a post on Fido’s blog in which I’m accused of being a racist, despite the fact that I have said nothing to support such an assertion. I want to respond to this unfair and serious charge, and some other issues, and I shall quote from both Fido’s comments on this blog and his own. Apologies if this means going over some familiar ground, and if the tone is somewhat more touchy than usual, but being called a racist is not something I take lightly.

In the comments section, Fido says:

If I believed Pinker meant to talk about human groups in way consistent with the groupings RPM [a blogger who commented on my original post, D.J.] points to, I would still say he is a racist, but I would be inclined to admit that the word could be taken in a less perjorative sense than is commonly understood.

Why would RPM’s groupings (and RPM has blogged on the reality of race here [D.J. I made an error here - it was someone else blogging on GeneExpression that wrote the post, sorry]), if adopted by Pinker, lead Fido to conclude that Pinker is a racist? Fido hasn’t provided any evidence that Pinker is a racist, and I think it’s an absurd claim — for the third time Fido, please back this charge up. And in response to my comments about finding support for Pinker’s use of the notion of race, Fido writes:

I don't understand who's supposed to be a contrarian fringe expert in this discussion. Cavalli-Sforza's vita and list of publications is quite impressive to me, though he has not to my knowledge published in Daedalus, and I am myself a contrarian fringe dilletante. So a big grain of salt there.

Well done Fido on being a “contrarian fringe dilettante”, that’s marvellous. However, I take responsibility for inducing this tone in Fido, because I omitted a crucial word in my parenthetical comment in the original post: ‘not’. So a crucial sentence should have read “But it doesn’t take much searching to challenge this idea (and NOT through selective picking of contrarian, fringe experts)…”), and I apologise for misleading readers, including Fido (who may have taken me to be implying that Fido was selecting fringe experts, which I was not). I meant to say that it was possible to challenge Fido’s comments about race, and indeed the AAA’s and AAPA’s, without resorting to quoting fringe experts, as the Republican party tends to do with the science of global warming (see Chris Mooney’s The Republican War On Science for more). The geneticists that work on the ancestry of human genes, their distribution across the globe and their clustering into geographic populations often have something to say that differs from what anthropologists might say (and I think this is part because of the different intellectual traditions of the respective disciplines, but I can happily let that slide for the moment). I agree that Cavalli-Sforza has an impressive research record, but there’s an irony in bringing him up again.

Cavalli-Sforza, as Fido no doubt knows, has said that “The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise”, so here’s an agreed authority supporting Fido’s view. Presumably Fido wouldn’t classify him as a racist too, right? Interestingly, Cavalli-Sforza was also one of the lead proponents of the Human Genome Diversity Project, intended to catalogue at least some of the nature of human genetic diversity. And what happened to this project? Well, luckily a book has been written on this topic (Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, by Jenny Reardon, reviewed in Nature). Here are some quotes from the Nature review:

“The Human Genome Diversity Project had a short and troubled life. The aim was to sample and preserve DNA from “isolated indigenous populations” before social changes rendered them useless for the purposes of answering questions about human evolution. But from its birth around 1991 to its unofficial death less than a decade later, indigenous-rights groups attacked the project as racist and neo-colonialist, branding it the ‘Vampire Project’ … Today research on human genetic variation flourishes, but under other rubrics and largely under the radar of Diversity Project critics.

As Jenny Reardon stresses in her book Race to the Finish, the project’s leaders were well-intentioned and had impeccable anti-racist credentials. So why did their effort draw unremitting hostility from groups representing indigenous peoples, some physical anthropologists and others? And could critics’ fears have been allayed without gutting the project? … To be tarnished with the brush of racism — especially given their personal histories — much have been galling. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza had been a trenchant critic of William Shockley’s claim of black genetic inferiority; Robert Cook-Deegan had a long record of involvement with Physicians for Human Rights; and Mary Claire King had worked with the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to identify children kidnapped during Argentina’s dirty war. But avowals of their good intentions did not mollify critics, and organizers eventually set about addressing specific concerns.” [action which was attacked along similar lines]

After some more history, the review concludes:

“The study of human genetic variation is now fashionable, but it is being pursued without the scrutiny of the deeper issues that Reardon believes essential to the pursuit of both a more reflective science and a more sensitive society. Funders have understandably tried to avoid the controversies that sank the Diversity Project. But the ironic result has been to narrow discussion of the issues at stake even further.”

It wasn’t actual racism that created fear and anger in the critics of the Diversity Project, nor a deep engagement with the underlying science, but misplaced concerns about what the project meant and would claim about human nature. Can Fido in good conscience really say that there aren’t reflections of these problems in our discussion? Physical anthropologists, one of Fido’s prosecution witnesses, are explicitly mentioned here, and not by chance either. Because of the history of the discipline of anthropology, anthropologists of many stripes have approached certain topics in certain ways, which have arguably been influenced by politically or ideologically motivated ideas about human nature, which I’ll come back to later.

There is a final twist in the story of Cavalli-Sforza. On the front of one his major books, there is a map of genetic groups derived from the sort of work Cavalli-Sforza has pioneered — a grouping that looks very much like the sorts of groups formed when you analyse genetic lineages on the basis of common heritage, which will often have a geographical correlate — the clustering of geographical variants that we’ve been discussing. Jonathan Marks, one of the panellists on the SSRC’s ‘Is Race Real?’ forum, cited favourably by Fido, has pointed out an irony in this (see also other pages on Marks’ site for criticisms of the Diversity Project, such as the charge that “The images it conveyed were colonialist, exploitative, and racialized”):

“The HGDP says that one of its aims is to show that "... in biological terms, there is no such thing as a clearly defined race.... Most importantly, therefore the results of the Project are expected to undermine the popular belief that there are clearly defined races, [and] to contribute to the elimination of racism...."
This quotation is from their summary document, on the web at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/morrinst/hgdp/summary93.html

And yet their literature has shown this figure [see map at top of blog] several times, with the caption “Four major ethnic regions are shown. Africans are yellow, Australians red, [Mongoloids blue], and Caucasoids green.” See, for example, The History and Geography of Human Genes, by Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza (Princeton University Press, 1995).”

So although Cavalli-Sforza has publicly rejected the notion of race, and Fido seems friendly to his analysis of human genetic variation, Cavalli-Sforza also seems to invoke genetic clusterings of the sort I’ve been alluding to, as Marks points out. Nwo there are obviously a number of ways to respond to this. Firstly, we could say that Cavalli-Sforza was being disingenuous, that he knew that he believed in race but publicly pretended he didn’t so as to avoid disapproval. Or we might more realistically say that although he rejected the usefulness of specific racial classifications, such as those commonly used in the US and Europe, he had a use for the notion of geographical variants (or human groups classified on the basis of common heritage, which will often have a geographical correlate), and just preferred not to call them races (even though this might go against the traditional use of race in evolutionary biology and taxonomy). So where does Fido now stand in relation to Cavalli-Sforza? Is he in the fold, or does he get kicked out for being a racist?

Fido’s blog makes some other different points:

When I included in Under the Sun a link to the Social Science Research Council's online forum Is Race Real?, it occurred to me that it would not do the job I wanted it do, namely, pass the question of "race" over to experts in the scientific study of human biological diversity. Now that blogger Dan Jones has taken issue with my post, I feel compelled to reiterate the distinction between Richard Lewontin's political beliefs on the one hand, and the scientific consensus that has built up around the question of "race" on the other. To that end, I now cite the American Anthropological Association's Statement on "Race", their Statement on "Race" and Intelligence, and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists' Statement on the Biological Aspects of Race. I stand by my claim that the consensus opinion among scientists is that race is "not a useful scientific concept. It doesn't describe observable human genetic variation with adequate precision, and it typically introduces more problems than it solves."

There are a number of points to reply to here. Fido suggests that Lewontin’s political beliefs (and I presume by extension those of other scientists) are separate from the scientific claims made about race, or are at least separable. Of course, this is how it should be, but I think it can certainly be contested that scientists’ views on issues as broad as human nature in general (including, but not exhausted by, such fields as behavioural genetics and evolutionary psychology) and specific topics such as sex differences and the concept of race have historically been so separate (and in both directions; people have erroneously asserted that there is a scientific justification for racism or other forms of discrimination and prejudice – think Social Darwinism). Many responses to these sorts of topics have been motivated by sincerely held and entirely understandable social and political concerns, as (not exclusively) documented by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (I don’t expect Fido to accept Pinker’s analysis, and I don’t expect that I could convince Fido either). Historically anthropologists have stressed the biological similarity of humans, which means that the variability of humans is to be explained in cultural terms, thus fitting in nicely with a blank slate, or nuturist, view of human nature, one that stresses the malleability of the human mind and behaviour, and our freedom from the constraints of biology. Of course, there is something in this, but I think there has been a tendency for sensitivity about discussing the biological basis of human differences, or the idea of such differences per se (whether related to sex or race or whatever), to cloud discussions of a number of important topics. Again, I don’t expect Fido to agree, and I can live with that (without further conversations we’ll have to agree to disagree for the time being), but I can’t live with being labelled a racist. Sociobiology was labelled as inherently racist and right wing, and E. O. Wilson was linked to eugenic and Nazi policies — these responses suggest less of an engagement with the arguments and more a loading of the topic with associations it shouldn’t, or needn’t, have.

Moving on to the statements from the AAA and AAPA, I also have a few remarks. Firstly, they’re from 1998 and 1996, respectively. That doesn’t make them wrong, of course, but it does mean that they do not take into account the explosion in genetics and genomics that has occurred in the intervening 8-10 years. Surely it is possible that their comments might need to be revised in the light of new evidence or new analytical tools (except of course if we rule of the possibility of race having a reality a priori, in which case why bother with an argument at all?). If we take race to mean not the racial classifications of any particular culture, but use it in a weaker sense, as denoting populations (that may be more or less geographical linked) that cluster genetically on the basis of common heritage, but not discretely, then what is Fido’s objection to the notion of race (or geographical variants for short — I assume we’re talking about the concept and not merely the name)? Is Fido claiming that the results summarised in the Scientific American article (which I cited because it’s easy to access, and accessible for other readers, as with the Daedalus essays) are just wrong? Sure, the genetic clusterings described in the SA article don’t fit neatly onto the racial classifications commonly used in the West, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about them as races (or geographic variants). Of if Fido thinks that it does, can Fido explain why, and why evolutionary biologists have been mistaken in using this term, interchangeably with geographic variants, in their work.

In any case, I don’t see how citing the AAA’s and AAPA’s conclusion, which is all Fido does, shows how these scientific conclusions are untainted by social or political ideology. What it shows is the public face presented by a professional scientific organisation (and I’m not implying that the public face is necessarily different from the private one), a point I’ll return to below.

In the comments section on my blog, Fido says:

It was a mistake, I now realize, to assume that people who read my blog and genuinely cared about the scientific description of human genetic diversity would be familiar, or have the ability and the gumption to make themselves familiar, with the American Antrhopological Association's Statement on "Race", and their Statement on "Race" and Intelligence, or the American Association of Physical Anthropologists' Statement on the Biological Aspects of Race.

Fido goes on to quote some of the AAA’s and AAPA’s statements:

“Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past” Further, the AAPA states, "There is no necessary concordance between biological characteristics and culturally defined groups. On every continent, there are diverse populations that differ in language, economy, and culture. There is no national, religious, linguistic or cultural group or economic class that constitutes a race. However, human beings who speak the same language and share the same culture frequently select each other as mates, with the result that there is often some degree of correspondence between the distribution of physical traits on the one hand and that of linguistic and cultural traits on the other. But there is no causal linkage between these physical and behavioral traits, and therefore it is not justifiable to attribute cultural characteristics to genetic inheritance." That is the consensus opinion of scientists who specialize in the study of human physical diversity. I have no wish to imply that the weight of expert opinion refutes Pinker; I mean to state it flat out.

Well, I agree with the first quote, as would Pinker and as would the geneticists I’ve been quoting in support of my position. So what’s its relevance? We’re talking about a subtler notion of race amenable to a type of analyses that wouldn’t have been possible when the AAA and AAPA statements were made. The second long quote is largely irrelevant, as accepting the claims of the geneticists I quoted does not entail any of the conclusions rejected in that quote. Talk about attacking straw men! Fido goes on:

As an aside, I repeat my view that the conventional wisdom among scientists is open to revision. It is not my intention to represent the scientific consensus as monolithic, dogmatic or otherwise etched in stone. My criticism is with the way Pinker and Leroi have gone about attacking the conventional wisdom. Strawman arguments and appeals to common sense racism do not cut it in my book.

One of Mr. Jones' more curious objections, indeed it may the substantive thrust of his post, is that reasonable people ought to "be able to discuss the science of race sensibly, without racist connotations." There is in fact no "science of race" among the modern sciences, but rather sciences of genomics, human population genetics, physical anthropology, and so on. However, if one wishes to buck the conventional wisdom by holding on to the claim that races exist and ought to be studied scientifically, then one is a racist by definition, a "scientific racist" to be precise. If you take that position, and the connotations of the word "racist" bother you, then you might take that as an indication that there's a problem with your choice of words. I certainly don't have the power to change connotative meanings, or to redefine "racism" to not mean "racism," and I don't have any solutions for those who want to be racists without being "racists." It's just not my cup of tea.

So if I don’t like the idea of being a racist, then I shouldn’t use the word race, because to use the concept/word race means that I’m automatically a racist? Is this for real? So if I believe that there are two sexes, then I must be a sexist, because believing in two sexes necessarily makes me a sexist? This is barmy.

Fido claims that the scientific consensus is that race is not a useful scientific concept (well it depends on your interests, obviously – it was scientifically useful in getting the drug BiDil approved by the FDA, regardless of whether the use of race was a proxy for a genetic or environmental basis of the different efficacy of the drug in self-identified blacks and whites). Fido also claims that if you do believe in race, in the weaker sense above, then you’re de facto a racist (with or without the modifier ‘scientific’). This is ludicrous, and suggests the sort of knee-jerk reaction that often goes with discussions of sensitive topics surrounding human nature (see The Blank Slate for a detailed history of such reactions). To be racist is, according to standard usage, to think that race is a primary determinant of physical and character traits (nothing I or Pinker or the scientists I discussed imply or endorse), or that some racial characteristics make some races inherently superior to other races; or to be prejudiced against people or groups on the basis of their race. Nothing that I’ve said makes me a racist in any of these senses, and if by scientific racist Fido means that I’m not merely a racist on the grounds of faith, but because of my faulty reading of the scientific literature, then Fido is way out of line. I’m not a racist in any sense, period, and Fido should exercise a little care and caution in bandying these terms about. And I don’t see the point of the stuff about connotative meanings, apart from as an exercise in sarcasm. If I don’t like the connotation of being a racist, don’t use the word race? If you don’t like the connotation of being a sexist, don’t use the word sex? And you don’t need to change word meanings, you just need to understand what the words mean. And finally, the implication that I want to be a racist without being called a “racist” is just way off the mark, as should hopefully be obvious by now — there is nothing that I’ve said that makes me a racist! If it’s not your cup of tea Fido, stop drinking, and don’t pour out cups for others!

And I think Fido is being disingenuous in saying:

“One of Mr. Jones' more curious objections, indeed it may the substantive thrust of his post, is that reasonable people ought to “be able to discuss the science of race sensibly, without racist connotations.” There is in fact no “science of race” among the modern sciences, but rather sciences of genomics, human population genetics, physical anthropology, and so on.”

I would’ve thought it was obvious I was using ‘the science of race’ as a rubric to cover those fields of study that are relevant to discussions of race. Fido is basically saying, “There is no such thing as race, and therefore there couldn’t be a study of it!” — this is the natural interpretation of the point of saying that there is no science of race on the basis of believing that race isn’t a real thing and that there is no scientific concept of race. Yet this begs the question of the validity of the race concept (more or less carefully defined) — and the scientists and work I alluded to are a challenge to this claim. Yes, the AAA and the AAPA have dismissed some ideas about race, but what they say doesn’t seem to affect the ideas and results I was trying to talk about — that is, these results don’t purport to assert what it is the AAA and AAPA wish to deny! The claims of the AAA and AAPA statements are quite broad, and so it is possible to agree with their broad conclusions and still continue to study races (or human groups classified on the basis of common heritage, which will often have a geographical correlate) in scientific terms. You can agree with the AAA and the AAPA, and also take into the account the research I mention — and not be a racist either.

So I ask Fido the following:

· To show that the results summarised in the Scientific American article are either invalid or to explain why can’t we use “genetic information be used to distinguish human groups having a common heritage and to assign individuals to particular ones”, what we might call races following evolutionary and taxonomical practice ‘races’ (or geographical variants – and if Fido is happy with geographic variants, but just doesn’t like the term race because it’ll make people think of the standard racial classifications, then can Fido explain why we’ve wasted so much time when Fido could have said, “OK, that sense of race is OK, but let’s not call it race”. I might well be persuaded with that line, and I think if I ever discuss race again I’ll define race as above and make sure it’s clear that this term is shorthand for this more subtle sense).

· To substantiate the claim that Pinker is a racist, that I am a racist, and that RPM is a racist.

That about wraps it up. I don’t expect that Fido will agree with much of what I’ve said, but it’s a shot at setting the record straight about whether my discussion of race makes me a racist or not, and what it means for others to talk about race, and why it’s still such a difficult notion to discuss.

[Addendum:

After writing this reply I came across another set of comments from Fido. There have been four in total: the original post on Fido’s blog; the reply in the comments section of my blog; in the second post on Fido’s blog; and the final set, which I came across late, which are a response to my announcing that I had written a post related to Fido’s original post! It’s the last set I’m replying to here:

Fido starts:

The point that interests me about Pinker's statement, and that prompted me to post "Under the Sun," is not the debate about how best to characterize human genetic diversity. My concern really is the suggestion that somebody's claim a to a common sense view of race should in any fashion serve as a rebutal to conventional wisdom among scientists. This is not to say that the consensus opinion of scientists is beyond critique, or that there aren't important disagreements in the area of human population genetics. I have already indicated that I believe the conventional wisdom is open to revision. My argument is that appeals to common sense are not appropriate in this context.

There is a question of expertise here, and if you were to argue that Pinker's expertise cannot be judged on the basis of this one statement or any excerpt from it, I would cede that point. And the question of whether Pinker routinely speaks authoritatively outside his area of expertise I would agree to set aside for the time being. There remains a curious argument about common sense and conventional wisdom which Leroi has put forward and Pinker has chosen to cite.

The argument about the strawman fallacy is key. Are we talking about "conventional wisdom," "Lewontin's opinion," or, in your words, the opinions of "Lewontin and company"? I cite the AAA and AAPA as additional authorities, if any were needed. On the matter of "race," the opinion ascribed to "Lewontin and company" rather represent the consensus view of scientists. If you think that the dominance of this view represents a case of ideological hoodwinkery rather than the product of decades of scientific study, I feel that the onus is on you to make the case. So I think I have done what I need to show that the "conventional wisdom" really is the "conventional wisdom," and that's all that I need to do to talk about the things that interest me.

OK, let’s start with what Fido originally said (in the first post on the topic):

“Steven Pinker's most dangerous idea is that "Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." It's not the sort of thing I'd have much to say about--when I want to learn about population genetics, I consult a population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, for instance, who would give me plenty of reasons to doubt that what Pinker says approximates anything I should pay attention to. But Pinker did make one interesting comment, and the fact that I believe he's a sexist, a racist and willfully ignorant of certain facts of evolutionary science shouldn't blind me to the possibility that he may have stumbled over an interesting idea. Pinker writes:

In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin's Fallacy: that because most genes may be found in all human groups, the groups don't differ at all. But patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups, and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense.)

Where to begin? I'm most interested in the contrast Pinker sets up between "conventional wisdom" and "common sense," but I must observe in passing that Leroi's op-ed and Pinker's abridged version of it represents a sterling example of the error in reasoning known as the straw man fallacy. Critical responses to Leroi can be found in this collection of essays put together by the Social Science Research Council.”

Anyway, what's this business about going against conventional wisdom in favor of common sense? Is that particularly scientific, or even reasonable? Common sense tells us that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Conventional wisdom among astronomers, at least since Copernicus, is that the earth orbits the sun while rotating on its axis once every twenty-four hours or so (a period astronomers call "mean solar time"--go figure). The common sense view of sunrises and sunsets is not invalidated by conventional astronomical wisdom, although with advances in technology, we see that it in some regards common sense, like conventional wisdom, is open to revision.

The quote from Pinker doesn’t show that he’s going against the conventional wisdom simply motivated by common sense, or that he sets up a contrast between them (it could be read into the quote I suppose). He’s making three claims: one, that a conventional wisdom has emerged that race does not exist; two, “that patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups”; and third, that “different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense”. It’s not because it’s common sense that it is opposed to the conventional wisdom, but just that the common sense idea happens to stand in opposition to the conventional wisdom.

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not particularly keen on the wording of Pinker’s quotation, and I don’t see why he needed to mention common sense at all, but that doesn’t mean I endorse Fido’s response either. The key points are that there is a scientifically defensible conception of race, and it doesn’t entail the racism Fido assumes it does.

Let’s get on to the strawman fallacy – that Pinker and Leroi are creating an imaginary foe. The targets of their comments about race are those who believe that race doesn’t exist, or that it is a useless concept and entails racism. Do such people exist? Yes, and include Fido, Lewontin, and the AAA and AAPA that Fido endorses – indeed, it is in citing these authorities that Fido says the refutation of Pinker “is the consensus opinion of scientists who specialize in the study of human physical diversity. I have no wish to imply that the weight of expert opinion refutes Pinker; I mean to state it flat out.” What Pinker means by conventional wisdom, and what Fido means by scientific consensus, are the same thing, and they both agree on what it says – that what the conventional wisdom/scientific consensus says about race conflicts with what Pinker/Leroi (and Mayr, Crow, Olson + Bamshad and many others) say about race – which is why there’s a debate (which Fido would like to end as a non-debate, because there is “no science of race”). Contrary to what Fido says, what is interesting about this debate is not the supposed contrast between “conventional wisdom” and “common sense”, but who is right about the nature of human genetic variation, and what this means in understanding human diversity – because there is no pitching of common sense against conventional wisdom. What on earth is the confusion about then?

I’m really at a loss as to why Fido’s “concern really is the suggestion that somebody's claim a to a common sense view of race should in any fashion serve as a rebutal to conventional wisdom among scientists” – Pinker did not advance this notion, and so it didn’t need addressing: to repeat, to say that scientific evidence refutes a conventional wisdom (one that denies something obvious to common sense) does not mean that you are saying common sense refutes or rebuts the conventional wisdom by some inherent superiority of common sense; it merely means that the rebuttal of the conventional wisdom by scientific evidence serves to reinforce common sense. It could easily go the other way (you could have a conventional wisdom that was in line with common sense, and then scientific evidence could undermine both). And lest I be misunderstood again, I’m not actually suggesting that scientific results completely support our common sense notions of race, whatever they are (as I said, in this case I’m not keen on the wording, although common sense isn’t strictly banned from my lexicon). I’m just responding to the claim that Pinker is setting up conventional wisdom against common sense.

And so the really interesting question is whether the scientific evidence and the conventional wisdom clash, and this is what Pinker, Leroi, myself, PRM and others have tried to talk about. Whether it not

Finally, when I wrote "I believe he's a sexist, a racist and willfully ignorant of certain facts of evolutionary science" (in a dependent clause, no less) I deliberately used the phrase "I believe" because I didn't particularly feel like carefully substantiating what in fact are my beliefs. We could examine my beliefs about Pinker, if you would like, but I think it's fair to say upfront that I recognize no professional or bloggerly obligation to be nice to Pinker, and my sensibilities about words like "racist" are decidedly not British.

This is an outrageous get-out clause “I can say what I like and you can’t ask me to justify what I say if I add ‘I believe’ before the claim”. To quote Fido, where to start? For a kick off, adding that your belief something that you express doesn’t diminish your commitment to it, or signify that you won’t offer reasons to make the claim and for which you assent belief in it, or that the belief is held in the absence of reasons (if it is this should be made clear so people know what they’re dealing with). And what is a belief other than something that you feel you can publicly justify, and that you have reasons for holding (otherwise why would you bother assenting belief in it?)? Beliefs are, or should be, those things we adduce reasons to hold — unless of course you think it’s OK to hold serious beliefs on some non-evidentiary basis. And what are we to make of the claim that Fido doesn’t “particularly feel like carefully substantiating what in fact are my beliefs” when it comes to a belief about something as serious as whether an influential public intellectual is a sexist or a racist? Why bring it up in a public forum if you’re not really interested in defending this position, and why think it isn’t incumbent on you to defend this claim? It seems a remarkable stance to take, and a flippant one to boot. And moving on to beliefs more generally, do you not feel like substantiating your belief in, say, evolution (if you believe that evolution has happened on earth, that is), merely because it’s a belief? Or is this not just a belief, however justified by reasons and evidence — do you have some sort of direct line to the truth, so that whereas you only ‘believe’ some things others you actually ‘know’, and the latter you’ll bother to defend? I assume Fido is making reference to a distinction between belief and knowledge, but the difference surely isn’t between having reasons on the one hand (in the case of knowledge) and not on the other (belief, which therefore doesn’t need substantiating) – reasons are crucial to both, and in fact claims to knowledge normally do not signify certainty, but belief held with a high degree of probability of being true because of the strength of the evidence and arguments in its favour. So it’s no good to say, “This is what I believe, and this is a serious charge against another person, but I have no obligation to carefully substantiate my claim because it is, after all, only a belief”. Fido, your blog is full of your beliefs – can we assume that you’re not really bothered to substantiate what you say on it because they are just that, beliefs? Can we take them with the big grain of salt you alluded to in response to my post?

End of Addendum]

Race - Fact Or Fiction?

2006-01-30T22:00:00.000Z

The excellent Mixing Memory recently had a post commenting, prompted by some comments from Fido the Yak, on MIT cognitive psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker’s remarks about group differences in his answer to the Edge Annual question . It’s a little old now, but I thought the questions they raised about Pinker’s comments, and the notion of race, provided reason enough to say a little these ideas, and to clear up some confusion.

Fido says, “I believe [Pinker’s] a sexist, a racist and willfully ignorant of certain facts of evolutionary science” (these are serious charges that warrant careful substantiation); Mixing Memory adds, “First of all, Fido gets Pinker exactly right. As I've said many times, Pinker has a nasty habit of speaking authoratatively about topics on which he is anything but an authority (like, say, gender differences in mathematical ability)… Like Pinker, I'm not an expert in genomics, or anything remotely related to genetics, but unlike Pinker, I'm not going to comment on the issues discussed in the forum as though I am an expert.” Both Mixing Memory and Fido mention a recent forum on race, where the experts set the record straight on race, supposedly. When Fido says, “when I want to learn about population genetics, I consult a population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, for instance, who would give me plenty of reasons to doubt that what Pinker says approximates anything I should pay attention to”, he gives the impression that the weight of expert opinion refutes Pinker. But it doesn’t take much searching to challenge this idea (and NOT [D.J. important corrective word added] through selective picking of contrarian, fringe experts), and in this post I’ll let the experts speak for themselves.

In 2002, Daedalus published two essays, one by Ernst Mayr, the other by James Crow, both on race.

Mayr was until his death the doyen of American evolutionary biology, and one of the architects of the evolutionary synthesis. This doesn’t make him infallible, but he’s not a crank either. Here’s some selected quotes from his essay:

“There is a widespread feeling that the word “race” indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as “there are no human races”. Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals … The terms “subspecies” and “geographic races” are used interchangeably in [the] taxonomic literature.”

James Crow is a distinguished and widely respected population geneticist; here’s some more extensive quotes from his essay:

“If we randomly choose a pair of bases from corresponding sites in two persons, 99.9 percent of the time they will be the same. This percentage depends only slightly on whether the two people are from the same or from different continents, from the same or from different population groups … Analysis of DNA allows us to measure with some precision the genetic distance between different populations of human beings. By this criterion, Caucasians and Asians are relatively similar, whereas Asians and Africans are somewhat more different. The differences between the groups are small–but they are real … Just as there are great differences among individuals, there are average differences, usually much smaller, between groups. Italians and Swedes differ in hair color. Sometimes the differences are more conspicuous, such as the contrasting skin color and hair shape of Africans and Europeans. But, for the most part, group differences are small and largely overshadowed by individual differences. Biologists think of races of animals as groups that started as one, but later split and became separated, usually by a geographical barrier. As the two groups evolve independently, they gradually diverge genetically. The divergences will occur more quickly if the separate environments differ, but they will occur in any case since different mutations will inevitably occur in the two populations, and some of them will persist… In much of the animal world, however, and also in the human species, complete isolation is very rare. The genetic uniformity of geographical groups is constantly being destroyed by migration between them. In particular, the major geographical groups – African, European, and Asian – are mixed, and this is especially true in the United States, which is something of a melting pot. Because of this mixing, many anthropologists argue, quite reasonably, that there is no scientific justification for applying the word “race” to populations of human beings. But the concept itself is unambiguous, and I believe that the word has a clear meaning to most people. The difficulty is not with the concept, but with the realization that major human races are not pure races. Unlike those anthropologists who deny the usefulness of the term, I believe that the word “race” can be meaningfully applied to groups that are partially mixed. Different diseases are demonstrably characteristic of different racial and ethnic groups. Sickle cell anemia, for example, is far more prevalent among people of African descent than among Europeans. Obesity is especially common in Pima Indians, the result of the sudden acquisition of a high-calorie diet to which Europeans have had enough time to adjust. Tay-Sachs disease is much more common in the Jewish population. There are other examples, and new ones are being discovered constantly. The evidence indicating that some diseases disproportionately afflict specific ethnic and racial groups does not ordinarily provoke controversy. Far more contentious is the evidence that some skills and behavioral properties are differentially distributed among different racial groups. There is strong evidence that such racial differences are partly genetic, but the evidence is more indirect and has not been convincing to everyone.”

We can at least conclude from these comments that the concept of race is not dismissed by all serious biologists; for sure, scientists such as Richard Lewontin and others reject the usefulness of the concept of race, but that view doesn’t win by default. Straight off we should be suspicious of the quick dismissal of the concept of race, and also the charge that Pinker is being ignorant, willfully or not, of evolutionary science. He might not agree with Lewontin and company, but that doesn’t automatically make him wrong.

However, without some clarification and qualification the claims of Mayr and Crow might be objected to (even with the clarifications and qualifications the claims might still be objectionable to some – reasonable people can disagree!). Here’s how Steve Olson and Michael Bamshad begin an article entitled ‘Does Race Exist?’ in Scientific American:

“Look around on the streets of any major city, and you will see a sampling of the outward variety of humanity: skin tones ranging from milk-white to dark brown; hair textures running the gamut from fine and stick-straight to thick and wiry. People often use physical characteristics such as these-along with area of geographic origin and shared culture--to group themselves and others into "races." But how valid is the concept of race from a biological standpoint? Do physical features reliably say anything informative about a person's genetic makeup beyond indicating that the individual has genes for blue eyes or curly hair?
The problem is hard in part because the implicit definition of what makes a person a member of a particular race differs from region to region across the globe. Someone classified as "black" in the U.S., for instance, might be considered "white" in Brazil and "colored" (a category distinguished from both "black" and "white") in South Africa.

Yet common definitions of race do sometimes work well to divide groups according to genetically determined propensities for certain diseases. Sickle cell disease is usually found among people of largely African or Mediterranean descent, for instance, whereas cystic fibrosis is far more common among those of European ancestry. In addition, although the results have been controversial, a handful of studies have suggested that African-Americans are more likely to respond poorly to some drugs for cardiac disease than are members of other groups.

Over the past few years, scientists have collected data about the genetic constitution of populations around the world in an effort to probe the link between ancestry and patterns of disease. These data are now providing answers to several highly emotional and contentious questions: Can genetic information be used to distinguish human groups having a common heritage and to assign individuals to particular ones? Do such groups correspond well to predefined descriptions now widely used to specify race? And, more practically, does dividing people by familiar racial definitions or by genetic similarities say anything useful about how members of those groups experience disease or respond to drug treatment?

In general, we would answer the first question yes, the second no, and offer a qualified yes to the third.”

The authors then go on to discuss some specific studies:

“One of us (Bamshad), working with University of Utah scientists Lynn B. Jorde, Stephen Wooding and W. Scott Watkins and with Mark A. Batzer of Louisiana State University, examined 100 different Alu polymorphisms in 565 people born in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Europe. First we determined the presence or absence of the 100 Alus in each of the 565 people. Next we removed all the identifying labels (such as place of origin and ethnic group) from the data and sorted the people into groups using only their genetic information.

Our analysis yielded four different groups. When we added the labels back to see whether each individual's group assignment correlated to common, predefined labels for race or ethnicity, we saw that two of the groups consisted only of individuals from sub-Saharan Africa, with one of those two made up almost entirely of Mbuti Pygmies. The other two groups consisted only of individuals from Europe and East Asia, respectively. We found that we needed 60 Alu polymorphisms to assign individuals to their continent of origin with 90 percent accuracy. To achieve nearly 100 percent accuracy, however, we needed to use about 100 Alus.

Other studies have produced comparable results. Noah A. Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard, geneticists formerly in the laboratory of Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University, assayed approximately 375 polymorphisms called short tandem repeats in more than 1,000 people from 52 ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. By looking at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, they were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians; inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. They were also able to identify subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each member's self-reported ethnicity.

The results of these studies indicate that genetic analyses can distinguish groups of people according to their geographic origin. But caution is warranted. The groups easiest to resolve were those that were widely separated from one another geographically. Such samples maximize the genetic variation among groups. When Bamshad and his co-workers used their 100 Alu polymorphisms to try to classify a sample of individuals from southern India into a separate group, the Indians instead had more in common with either Europeans or Asians. In other words, because India has been subject to many genetic influences from Europe and Asia, people on the subcontinent did not group into a unique cluster. We concluded that many hundreds--or perhaps thousands--of polymorphisms might have to be examined to distinguish between groups whose ancestors have historically interbred with multiple populations.

The human race
Given that people can be sorted broadly into groups using genetic data, do common notions of race correspond to underlying genetic differences among populations? In some cases they do, but often they do not. For instance, skin color or facial features--traits influenced by natural selection--are routinely used to divide people into races. But groups with similar physical characteristics as a result of selection can be quite different genetically. Individuals from sub-Saharan Africa and Australian Aborigines might have similar skin pigmentation (because of adapting to strong sun), but genetically they are quite dissimilar.”

Studying race isn’t just of mere intellectual interest – it can also prove useful in biomedicine:

“But the importance of group membership as it relates to health care has been especially controversial in recent years. Last January the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines advocating the collection of race and ethnicity data in all clinical trials. Some investigators contend that the differences between groups are so small and the historical abuses associated with categorizing people by race so extreme that group membership should play little if any role in genetic and medical studies. They assert that the FDA should abandon its recommendation and instead ask researchers conducting clinical trials to collect genomic data on each individual. Others suggest that only by using group membership, including common definitions of race based on skin color, can we understand how genetic and environmental differences among groups contribute to disease. This debate will be settled only by further research on the validity of race as a scientific variable.

A set of articles in the March 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine debated both sides of the medical implications of race. The authors of one article--Richard S. Cooper of the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine, Jay S. Kaufman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ryk Ward of the University of Oxford--argued that race is not an adequate criterion for physicians to use in choosing a particular drug for a given patient. They pointed out two findings of racial differences that are both now considered questionable: that a combination of certain blood vessel-dilating drugs was more effective in treating heart failure in people of African ancestry and that specific enzyme inhibitors (angiotensin converting enzyme, or ACE, inhibitors) have little efficacy in such individuals. In the second article, a group led by Neil Risch of Stanford University countered that racial or ethnic groups can differ from one another genetically and that the differences can have medical importance. They cited a study showing that the rate of complications from type 2 diabetes varies according to race, even after adjusting for such factors as disparities in education and income.

The intensity of these arguments reflects both scientific and social factors. Many biomedical studies have not rigorously defined group membership, relying instead on inferred relationships based on racial categories. The dispute over the importance of group membership also illustrates how strongly the perception of race is shaped by different social and political perspectives.

In cases where membership in a geographically or culturally defined group has been correlated with health-related genetic traits, knowing something about an individual's group membership could be important for a physician. And to the extent that human groups live in different environments or have different experiences that affect health, group membership could also reflect nongenetic factors that are medically relevant.”

In June 2005, the United States Food & Drug Administration approved NitroMed’s BiDil for the treatment for heart failure in African-Americans only. This was based on data showing greater benefit in self-identified black patients. Let’s assume that there is a genetic component this difference (it’s common for genetic profiles to affect the effects of drugs, as revealed by pharmacogenetics, although it could be an environmental factor). The enhanced effect in black compared with white patients is not the result of the fact that all black individuals have one version of a given gene and all white individuals have a different one – there aren’t these discrete genetic groups. It’s just that being black, by virtue of ancestry, means that you’re more likely to possess this given genetic variant, which is the view of race validated by Olson and Bamshad. Race here is just functioning as a proxy measure of genetic identity, but it’s just one of many possible levels of resolution for looking at humanity. Taking what we might call the Gray’s Anatomy approach, we might treat all humans as the same, so when they get condition X they receive drug Y. But the facts of human variation make a nonsense of this approach, and we have the tools to take a more fine-grained approach to matching drugs with genetic profiles. At the other extreme, the finest resolution we could achieve would be the complete genome sequence of every individual along with knowledge of it varies from every other genome. This is currently unfeasible. But there are intermediate levels of resolution, and race seems to be one. Of course, it would be best to identify the genetic underpinnings of the differential response to BiDil among blacks and whites, and to then test heart failure patients for the presence of these genes, prescribing BiDil to only those with the ‘right’ combination. If this could be achieved, the efficacy of BiDil would increase even further in this tightly defined group. But in the meantime, the facts of ancestry mean that the increased statistical likelihood that black individuals will carry genes that enhance response to BiDil can be used to bring benefit to heart failure patients or at least one race.

It’s time to summarise the case for race. Races are genetically distinct groups: there aren’t such groups to even begin to correspond to standard racial classifications. However, “be used to distinguish human groups having a common heritage and to assign individuals to particular ones”; “Given that people can be sorted broadly into groups using genetic data, do common notions of race correspond to underlying genetic differences among populations? In some cases they do, but often they do not.”. And race has apparent worth in medicine, as the DiBil case demonstrates.

Now, if you can accept the above, and then go back to what Pinker wrote, and what Armand Leroi wrote (on Edge and in the NYT), then I think it will seem a lot more reasonable, a lot less racists, and something worthy of at least thinking – not rejecting out of hand – even if you end up disagreeing on some or all points.

Thinking about race
Whatever your take on all this is, race is clearly an emotive, hot-button topic, and views on race are susceptible to ideological influence in a number of ways. Indeed, Lewontin’s ideological commitments have long been highlighted as colouring his scientific view of the world (a compliment he has returned to his critics). I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that I think that Lewontin is unduly ideological in his writings, and his views on some scientific topics are more motivated by a sincerely held concern for social justice than scientific truth (maybe some would see this as a good compromise, but here I’m assessing a scientific argument free from ideological commitments – but I suppose some will be imputed to me anyway by association with the views above). Jonathan Marks, who was on in the panel on race linked to above, has responded to evolutionary psychology with “Boy, this shit ticks me off” (a sentiment that Lewontin would echo), and this suggests an attitude that would also want to reject the idea of race (I realise this isn’t an argument, more a sociological observation). Interestingly, Mixing Memory also doesn’t like evolutionary psychology, or Steve Pinker in particular. I suspect that the same sort of general outlook motivates both the rejection of ev. psych. and the idea of race (“Yes”, will be the response: “They’re both a load of rubbish!”).

Responding to criticisms of the notion of race doesn’t require this sort of line of enquiry, but I think it’s important to identify why people might be driven by perhaps non-scientific reasons to reject certain findings or ideas (Pinker’s The Blank Slate is an extended attempt at just such an exercise, and also serves as a corrective to some of the misplaced fears surrounding the idea of human nature and the ideas of ev. psych. in particular; I have to say that I think Pinker is spot on here, but again that doesn’t really have anything to do with whether the argument about race is good or not). As I say, I’m trying to understand why people are so keen to reject certain ideas, even those they perhaps do not understand very well.

In the case of Mixing Memory one doesn’t have to look far. An earlier post on MM was entitled ‘I’m a racist: one cognitive scientist’s thoughts on racism part 1’. I’m really not trying to take a cheap shot here by merely putting the title in – the post is not a proud announcement of racist views, but a soul-searching examination of the pernicious effects of growing up in a racist climate even when you explicitly reject the racism you are surrounded by. It’s all commendable stuff. But it does provide a clue as to why MM is so sensitive about issues of race.

I didn’t grow up in an overtly racist environment, attended a mixed school, had and have black and Asian friends (I’m not saying, “See, I couldn’t be racist!”, just pointing out that mixing with people of different ethnicities to me was and is common), and now happen to have a Chinese girlfriend (well, British born, but of Chinese ethnicity). I’m concerned about racism and racial attitudes, but am relaxed about my racial attitudes, in that I really don’t think I have any racial hang-ups or latent racism (I know this could all be self-serving delusion, but I have no evidence that I’m racists and plenty of clues that I’m not!). Perhaps if I was writing from the deep South 40 years ago I would much more sensitive to talking about race, and might want to be able to comfortably ignore the findings of race being produced by science (imagine the science of today was available then). But this doesn’t make the science wrong. As understandable as it is that you don’t want racial differences to be highlighted and magnified because of the potentially harmful uses to which such ideas can be put is not an argument against the validity of the science of race. In any case, the ideas discussed above don’t justify racism at all, and in fact, as Pinker points out, it’s a pretty weak idea of racial equality that depends of the fact of genetic similarity (see Crow on related points) – we shouldn’t treat people well because they share the same genes us as, but because they’re humans and are deserving of the same treatment as ourselves regardless of how similar or different they are from us. And it’s always wrong to treat an individual as if they were an abstract average of the group you or they decide they belong to (whether that be based on race, sex, sexuality and so on).

Perhaps when we’re being listened to by racists we might want to avoid using the phrase ‘racial differences’, but among reasonable people we should be able to discuss the science of race sensibly, without racist connotations, and such discussions might have important health consequences, as the BiDil story illustrates.

A Dawkins Diary

2006-01-27T23:54:00.000Z

Richard Dawkins has a brief diary entry in The New Statesman that might be of interest.