I have a little bit of a backlog of links that I think are interesting that I want to post about, so here is a short list:
(By the way I'm watching a super exciting hockey game! Canada and Switzerland are doing the post-OT shootout. Whoa! I've got a bunch of adrenaline and I've never even watched a hockey game before. It reminds me of spending summers and playing hockey with all the Canadians with Brent's hockey sticks.
The first is the sequencing of the full genomes of several Khoisan Africans. This is interesting because the genetic diversity within populations of Africans is greater than the genetic difference between a European and an Asian person. Classic founder effect, due to migrations of Africans into Europe, thus reducing the amount of genetic diversity in the descendent European populations. The African populations have existed at high numbers for many more generations than the European populations, allowing mutations (and thus overall genetic diversity) to accumulate.
The second thing that was compelling to me is an article about why religion is such a common behavior in humans across cultures and time. The question is whether religiousness confers some sort of selective advantage to humans (in other words, through history, humans that were religious produced more offspring and were more successful than those who were not), or whether something else was selected upon and religion is a byproduct of this other thing. The article wasn't terribly explicit about what this other thing could have been, but it has to do with social cohesion, group living, and cooperation, in addition to feelings of guilt and fear about defecting from the group.
Here is a choice quote from the original article:
"Religion is a set of ideas that survives in cultural transmission because it effectively parasitizes other evolved cognitive structures."
Here is the link to the original article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
I'll be astounded if any of the few people who actually take a gander at this blog read through this stuff! And of course, terribly impressed.
Also, this is super sad:
http://seedmagazine.com/slideshow/appetite_destruction/
5 comments:
hese rules cannot account for the variation in moral judgment observed. More specifically, in dozens of dilemmas, and with thousands of subjects, the pattern of moral judgments delivered by subjects with a religious background do not differ from those who are atheists, and even in cases where we find statistically significant differences, the effect sizes are trivial. In one particularly telling case, Huebner and Hauser [43] found that people who reported having a religious background were more likely to judge that they should sacrifice their own lives in order to save the lives of a greater number of anonymous others. This effect is what one would predict given the fact that many religions praise martyrdom. What Huebner and Hauser argued, however, is that although there are significant evolutionary pressures against such acts of radical altruism, religious pressures might lead people to offer this judgment because they believe it is the morally appropriate answer. What religion can do, and what political and legal institutions can do as well, is alter local and highly specific cases. And yet, they appear to have no influence at all on the intuitive system that operates more generally, and for unfamiliar cases.
I like this part of the article..as it made the most sense to me. The Moral Compass inside us all is a mystery to me. Why do some of us have it and some of us not?
By all means we should examine the roots of moral/religious impulses in whatever adaptive advantage they might have had (or the advantage of other traits that the moral/religious are piggybacking on). I have a hard time buying that this is the whole story, though. Evolutionary psychology provides some insight into the "how" of the development of humans' moral sense, but it by necessity has to stop short of a "why" this sense has any meaning at all. Strict naturalists might argue that the "how" means there is no "why" (morality has no metaphysical foundation; what we call morality is the result of strictly mechanistic processes that we might be able to alter if we find the right inputs), but as I think this article shows, this leaves naturalism in quite a bind.
Essentially, once you move from describing the process to interpreting its meaning, you immediately have to start borrowing metaphysical categories. Some, like Myers, seem to have thrown up their hands and declared that scientific knowledge is the only reliable knowledge there is. If this is true, there is no such thing as, say, human rights, only a set of pathways in most humans' brains that thinks that way because in some way it has helped us survive. In a great irony, evolution might have outdone itself. By evolving brains advanced enough to attach meaning to life (able to ask questions like what is the good? how should I live? what am I responsible for?), it has also produced brains that, by examining their evolutionary roots, debunk that meaning.
Fish's column points out that this sort of naturalism can't possibly make sense of our lives, and even if we go all the way of saying that all our normative life questions have no higher meaning beyond the movement of atoms that produces them, we run into logical problems (if my thoughts are just the movement of atoms, on what basis are my thoughts valid?).
Maybe it makes more sense to say evolution provides a set of mental and emotional capabilities in humans that are the means and tools to ends that lie outside the merely physical? If not, then things like love, the good, and right, are concocted fancies (useful, perhaps, but still concocted), and the only logical response, as Myers hints at, is to try to create a brave new world in which we try to direct our own evolution to better survive in the longer term. The despair, futility, and absurdity of such an attempt as imagined in much of our best art, to me anyway, suggests that our experience of life is only partially explained by the physical processes that provide the mechanisms of our sensations.
I'm not sure that I think the article is going after interpreting the meaning of the cognitive functions that benefited humans in the past.
I suppose any faith that I could be perceived as having would be that evolution forms and shapes things in ways beyond what we can actually fully grasp.
Some of the "why" questions can definitely be answered in part, at least in ways that make sense until something new comes along.
I'm not up on my evolutionary psychology or naturalism.
What I liked about this article is thinking about what it could have been in the past that conferred an advantage to human groups in the past.
I don't end up thinking too much about how my thoughts/feelings and the meaning of life are silly questions. Clearly if we are feeling them then they are valid in some way, even if it's only because they affect our actions and behaviors, which in turn affect other actions and behaviors. Even if it is just a pile of atoms, there are still consequences that we have to deal with, and if we feel that we are dealing with them and making "independent, free will" decisions, then maybe how we feel is the only important thing.
I agree that there are distinct questions here, and that the one the article addresses (how might have these traits come to be?) is a really cool one. Where I start wanting to object is when the Dawkins-Hitchens-et al camp (with whom, from what little of his I've read, Myers seems to belong) makes these questions and their supposed answers in evolutionary biology the foundation for a comprehensive worldview. I also agree that one can live a very good life only believing, as you say, that matters like love and morality are important if only because they affect all of us and our behavior. But I also want to put it out there that the fact that most people in most times and in most places have felt that they were important beyond their impact on our behavior might suggest that there actually is something "beyond" or "beneath" or "above" the merely physical facts of the world. (Also interesting how spatial metaphors, and contradictory ones at that, seem to be by far the most common we humans use to try to grasp at the indescribable).
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