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We are like birds
Hello all,
One of the questions we get asked often at our Ask an Atheist table is, “Why get together?”—Why have a group at all? So we all don’t believe in the same thing – so what? Why not get on with our lives and do something else with our time?
The answer, at least on some level, is that getting on with our lives means living our lives, and part of living, for humans, means being part of a group. It’s very important for us, as people, to know that we belong somewhere, that we have friends we can count on to understand us and be there for us.
We are social animals, just like dogs, just like elephants, just like birds. We need each other to be happy and be fulfilled. But even more fundamental than that, we need each other to live. Take birds as an example: Why do birds fly in formation?
Canadian geese flying in a V-formation
Research shows that, while evolutionarily unintentional, bird flight formations are not random: Flying in a formation of 25, each bird can increase its range by 71% (!) versus flying alone. This works because each bird (except the front one) flies in the upwash from the wingtip vortices of the bird ahead of it. Migrating birds rotate which bird takes the front position so that none are unfairly doing all the work of holding up the formation. Military aircraft also fly in formation because—aside from the advantage of maintaining visual contact—formations improve fuel efficiency.
As social animals ourselves, we get similar advantages by living in a group. Some animals, like cats, get along just fine living alone, hunting and finding shelter on their own. But we found a different evolutionary niche, and as a result, we’re able to accomplish so much more than cats. Cats will never walk on the moon unless we bring them there. Cats will never explore the bottom of the ocean, or know what stage fright is like before giving a talk in front of a group of their peers.
In his beautifully-written book “The Origins of Virtue,” which I highly recommend to anyone reading this, Matt Ridley tells us that evolutionary self-interest—survival of the fittest—and mutual aid are not at all incompatible. As the publisher puts it, “Our cooperative instincts may have evolved as part of mankind’s natural selfish behavior–by exchanging favors we can benefit ourselves as well as others.” But this is not a cold and calculating process. Natural selection has favored authenticity as a virtue, and we are quite adept at recognizing and regulating those who seek to benefit by keeping too-close track of who owes what. Indeed, as Mizzou anthropologist Craig Palmer puts it, a virtuous act is nearly synonymous with a pro-social and selfless act, and an non-virtuous act with a selfish and antisocial act.
Milton Friedman, the famed Nobel Prize-winning economist, based on an essay by his friend Leonard Read, used a pencil a symbol of human cooperation—not just for the sake of taking handwritten notes, but for the sake of harmony and even world peace:
The reason that atheists get together is that we can accomplish more by doing so. Not just in terms of activism and education—although this is also true—but because, like birds, we need each other. Sometimes there is nothing more useful in the world than a hug, or just being in the presence of people whom you know won’t judge you for not believing in an imaginary friend. Sometimes all you need is a smile from someone who understands what you’re going through. And that is what SASHA is.
If you take away one thing from this post, let it be this: If you’re an “internet atheist,” know that Reddit is great, blogs are great, YouTube videos are great, philosophy books are great. But if you’re reading this, you’re human, and being part of a group is really where we shine our brightest. Join a local group. If you’ve been to a local group meeting and it wasn’t for you, tell the group or group leaders why. We want to be here for you. If you want a group with more women in it, say so. If you want a group with more people your age in it, say so. If you want a group that does different activities besides Skeptics in the Pub, say so. There are lots of types of groups and lots of varieties of groups, but the most important thing is to be part of one. There are benefits to you that you might only begin to realize if you’re not a regular member, most of them emotional, or to reclaim the word from the religious, spiritual.
If you need help finding a local group, you can leave a comment with your city and I’ll do my best to help you find one. The Secular Student Alliance has a list of groups here. American Atheists also maintains a list of over 1,000 groups here, and the Center for Inquiry has a database of centers in the US and around the world here.
I hope that you’re having a good day!
Until next time,
Dave
Dave Muscato is the 2012 Writing Intern for the Secular Student Alliance in Columbus, Ohio. He is also Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou studying economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday and twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com. Opinions posted here do not necessarily reflect the views of MU SASHA, the Secular Student Alliance, nor the Humanist Community at Harvard.
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Where do morals come from? Brother Jed is at it again…
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Hello all!
Brother Jed posted a transcript of his opening statement from his Monday debate with Brandon Christen on his Facebook profile. In it, he repeated, nearly verbatim, an argument he made during his debate with me last April (see the 7-minute mark or so). We went over this last year quite thoroughly (I thought), and I’m disappointed to see he’s still trotting out the same, already-refuted argument. This appears to be, it seem sto me, a textbook example of intellectual dishonesty on his part.
Here’s the relevant bit to today’s post:
If there is no God, who or what is the source and foundation of morality? Morals deal with right and wrong in our interpersonal relationships. Morals are personal; the source of morals must be connected with a personal God, who himself is a subject of moral obligation and who chooses to use his great powers morally.
Atheists affirm that all that exists is matter, energy, space and time. The problem for atheism is that these elements are not enough to support the existence of morality. Matter, energy, space and time are impersonal and non-moral. How does the personal come out of the impersonal? How does the moral come from stuff that is non-moral?
Men universally have a sense of moral obligation. “I ought; I ought not.” What is the source of moral obligation?
How, in a world which is ultimately the product of time, chance and material particles, did there come to be such things as moral obligations?
The existence of moral obligations makes more sense in a universe in which the ultimate reality is a moral Person than it does in a universe where persons are a late and insignificant by product of impersonal forces. The notion of morals requires a Moral Governor that Moral Governor is the God of the Bible.
I hardly know where to start with this. Here is what I have to say about it:
”Atheists affirm that all that exists is matter, energy, space and time.”
I think you’re 1) confusing atheists with metaphysical naturalists and 2) forgetting that matter=energy and space=time.
“The problem for atheism is that these elements are not enough to support the existence of morality. Matter, energy, space and time are impersonal and non-moral. How does the personal come out of the impersonal? How does the moral come from stuff that is non-moral?”
You asked this exact same question last year at Speakers’ Circle and again during our debate last April, Jed. I have already given you a sufficient scientific response. I have recommended to you books that thoroughly answer this using abundant evidence. Your question is not a mystery to scientists and hasn’t been a mystery to scientists for quite awhile now; in fact the answer to this question is the point of an entire field of science called sociobiology. Some of the bigger names in research in this field are E.O. Wilson, Frans de Waal, Robert Axelrod, and Samuel Bowles. Others you might want to read, if you actually want to know the answer to this question rather than just sound profound for continuing to raise it to people who haven’t heard it before, are Michael Shermer and Matt Ridley. Again, I have already told you all of this.
I think you just like to say the phrase “late and insignificant by product of impersonal forces.” Just because morality is a byproduct of impersonal forces does not mean that it’s insignificant. That’s a claim YOU’RE making, not a claim scientists have made.
You insist – and persist – in attempting to paint the origin of morality like it’s some huge mystery that has no possible earthly explanation, and therefore MUST have come from your god, while simultaneously completely ignoring the scientific explanation I repeatedly provide to you every time you bring this up.
Do you just not care that science has actually answered this question?
Evolution is sufficient to explain morality in cooperative animals, humans included. We have WAY more evidence than the minimum to demonstrate that this is the case. I recommend the books “The Origins of Virtue” by Matt Ridley and “A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution” by Samuel Bowles if you are actually interested in the scientific answer to your question, “How does the moral come from the stuff that is non-moral?” This is an extremely well-documented concept in science.
Again, to be absolutely clear, how morals arise naturally from impersonal forces is NOT a mystery for scientists. Just because you don’t understand (or refuse to look at) where morality came from scientifically does not mean that, therefore, natural elements are insufficient to explain it.
What you are saying here is known in logic as an argument from incredulity. You are essentially saying, “I don’t understand how morality could have come about naturally. Therefore, morality must not have come about naturally.” This is a fallacy. We can readily show how morality comes about naturally, and in fact have done this in abundance in controlled settings. There’s LOTS of absolutely fascinating research that combines the game theory of economics with evolutionary biology to demonstrate it quite readily, in fact.
I would really love for this to be the last time we go through this dog & pony show, but I have a feeling you’re not even going to read this, let alone read the books I recommended. I like you, Jed, but you’ve been stuck on this idea that morals must have come from a god for at least several years now. Do you continue to raise the question because, after considering the evidence, you find the scientific explanation insufficient [in which case, what are your scientific objections]? Or have you just not even looked into it? The latter is my guess.
If you want to know where morals came from, read “The Origins of Virtue” by Matt Ridley, so we can finally put this to bed. Where morals came from is not a mystery to science, and it has nothing to do with your god. Science has answered this question; it’s time to put this to bed.
Until next time!
- Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
A child molester talks about gullibility & church-going folks
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A friend of mine, who is a pediatrician and a pastor at a local church, posted this article today on his Facebook wall with the comment, “Great reminder about pedophiles.” The quotation below comes from that article:
I considered church people easy to fool… they have a trust that comes from being Christians. They tend to be better folks all around and seem to want to believe in the good that exists in people. I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.
These words were spoken by a convicted child molester, according to the article, which was quoting clinical psychologist Anna Salter, and author of the book Predators, Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders.
SASHA contributing writers Seth Kurtenbach and Brandon Christen have both written about gullibility on this blog before, but I think it’s worth talking about more. In his book The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer talks about our natural tendency to be obedient. There are strong evolutionary fitness advantages to this historically: If your dog wants to run & play in the street, listening to you call him back over could easily save his or her life. Dogs simply don’t understand how dangerous cars can be as well as we humans do, and it’s in their best interest to obey us when it comes to hanging out in the streets we have built.
Similarly, if as a tot, you decide you’re curious about what’s over the edge of that cliff, there’s an obvious fitness advantage to listening to your parents when they yell “No!” while they come running to stop you. Going the other way, there’s a strong fitness advantage to eating vegetables, even if you dislike the taste, and you should listen to your parents when they tell you to do it.
But, parents are not right about everything. Specifically, if your parents tell you that there’s a magical man in the sky who watches everything you do, and who will reward you for doing good or punish you for doing bad — even when your parents aren’t looking — you can, and should, question this. I’m talking, of course, about Santa Claus 
Is religious belief rooted in gullibility? Can religious belief be explained simply as a lack of skepticism, if we are naturally selected to believe, and it is easy to hijack that sense of obedience? As someone once put it, “Religion was invented when the first conman met the first fool” (Mark Twain, attributed). And if you’ve never seen the movie The Invention of Lying, you should!
Your thoughts appreciated.
Until next time!
- Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Dave Muscato on Dr. Andrew Bernstein, Religion, and Morality
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Hello all,
I gave a talk, “Why Blasphemy Matters,” at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg on Monday (90 miles from Columbia). I look forward to giving the talk to more campus groups in the future. This was only the second time I’ve given that particular talk, and although I think it went well, I also think I can improve it. More about that another time: I found out that a philosopher named Andrew Bernstein would be in town the following evening giving a talk called “Religion vs. Morality.” I decided to stay in town an extra day so I could attend.
As it turns out, the Objectivist Club at UCM had scheduled a dinner with Dr. Bernstein before his 8 PM lecture, and I had the fortune of sitting next to him while we all ate. Dr. Bernstein, or Andy, teaches philosophy at SUNY Purchase. He is an objectivist and proponent of Ayn Rand’s work, as well as a philosopher (and novelist) in his own right. He’s written several books about capitalism, philosophy, and objectivism, lectures internationally, and he also wrote the Cliff’s Notes for Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
Me with Andrew Bernstein (on left)
At dinner, topics ranged from the current crop of Republican candidates (he plans to vote for “whichever sorry candidate the Republicans nominate”) to how to get into grad schools (his advice: Where you studied isn’t as important as what you have to say). I told him that although one of my majors is economics, I really know relatively little about market forces, capitalism, international trade, finance, etc, compared to most econ majors. I’ve taken a few required courses in those sorts of things, but my interest is game theory. I study altruism and the evolution of morality, especially its interplay with the history of religion, using the tools from behavioral economics & economic modeling. I admitted that this was my first real exposure to what objectivism is all about. He told me that his talk is not about religion AND morality, but more specifically religion VERSUS morality: in his estimation, an either/or proposal. I thought, this should be interesting!
At 8 PM, I joined an auditorium of people on the UCM campus as Angel Munoz Gomez Andrade, the president of the Objectivist Club, introduced Bernstein. Watching Bernstein speak is a real treat: He has a thick New York accent and a raw, passionate tone. Throughout his speech, he spoke with his hands as much as with his voice. The way he rapped his fingertips on the podium, shifted his weight when weighing what to say next, and stood on his toes to emphasize his points immediately brought to mind Al Pacino’s passion and mannerisms. An audience member, during the Q&A, said that he, lacking a philosophy background himself, had trouble following Bernstein on some of the more complex philosophy, but I found myself having the opposite experience: I think Bernstein has a remarkable ability to take complex philosophical ideas and illustrate them with digestible examples in such a way that they are readily understandable [disclosure: I'm minoring in philosophy].
The purpose of Bernstein’s talk, as stated above, is to argue that religion and morality are fundamentally at odds. Religion, because it is necessarily founded upon faith, requires irrational thinking, which Bernstein argues necessarily leads humans away from our values, and results in nothing short of death. There are certainly historical examples of this — he mentioned faith healing a few times, and the abysmal life expectancy of the third-world versus the first-world today. He argued that morality is, in so many words, whatever helps living things achieve their values, which (objectivism argues) are necessarily dictated by nature. These values are neither subjective in the social-consensus sense, nor the individual “whim” sense, nor the religious sense (via sacred text or divine revelation). According to objectivism, we need only look to the facts of what nature has presented to us in order to determine our values: There is, in fact, no need for subjective disagreement on what we “should” value or strive toward, because nature has already spelled out for us what is good and what is bad, whether we consent to it or not. We are living creatures, and what is “good” is whatever promotes life, and what is “bad” is whatever does not.
Dr. Andrew Bernstein presenting on "Religion vs. Morality" at the University of Central Missouri
I’m reminded of Craig Palmer (Mizzou anthropologist) and Lyle Steadman’s (ASU professor emeritus) definitions concerning moral behavior for humans living in groups: Morality is roughly synonymous with pro-social behavior, and immoral behavior is roughly synonymous with antisocial behavior (see their 2010 book The Supernatural and Natural Selection: The Evolution of Religion). A human being in complete isolation is incapable of moral or immoral action, following this line of thinking: Anything s/he does is morally justifiable if it’s a means toward the end of his survival, by virtue of the very fact that lacking are any other living things to harm in the process.
Objectivism, as I understand it, has this to say about the matter: Natural selection has provided every living thing with some sort of tool (insofar as it is necessary, given its biological niche) to aid in its survival. For an elephant, that might be its massive size, thick hide, tusks, etc. For an elk, this might be its antlers and speed. For a tiger or wolf, claws & teeth. Nature has also “provided” (selected for) fur coats to protect some animals from cold climates. In the case of elephants, huge floppy ears are very important for temperature regulation: They have lots of surface area and LOTS of blood volume, such that the elephant can flap its ears to cool down the temperature of its blood, as another example.
What is “good” or “bad” when we’re talking about these animals behavior? Well, what’s “good” for a tiger or an elephant or mushroom or mosquito or bacterium is whatever aids it in its “mission” to survive and reproduce. Moral reflection or indeed consciousness at all is actually unnecessary for this. Any living thing will, quite naturally, do whatever it needs to do in order to survive and reproduce (else go extinct). What’s “good” is what leads toward this, and what’s “bad” is what leads away from this.
In the case of humans, natural selection actually took away our survival mechanisms (claws, sizable canine teeth, fur coats, etc) some time ago. Ancient primates gave up claws for nails a very long time ago (65-85 million years), and we still have a hint of canines and body hair, though nothing even close to that of our ancestors. What we do have, what nature has provided to us via selection, is something far more interesting, and far more useful, in exchange: rational, thinking brains. These are our survival tools. They allow us to innovate, to invent technologies, and to increase our efficiency. We don’t need claws; we have hand-axes (for an EXCELLENT discussion of the importance of hand-axes to human evolution, see Matt Ridley’s beautifully-written The Rational Optimist). As time went on, ancient humans further innovated to produce hafted axes (axes with handles), spears, arrowheads, and much later, metal bladed weapons, etc.
We don’t need costly (in terms of energy input/output and time invested) guts & digestive systems; we have fire. In fact, we are the only animals that cook our food: By doing so, we are basically outsourcing a large fraction of our ancestors’ digestive process. By investing fewer calories (less energy) in growing and maintaining a complex gut, natural selection was able to divert that energy into growing more complex brains, instead, and the process went ’round and ’round in a magnificent evolutionary upward spiral of exponential innovation. From controlled fire (and therefore bigger brains) came an increased ability to ward off predators and stay warm, especially at night (meaning even less need for caloric investment in muscle mass and large, powerful jaws, and less need for temperature regulation via thick body hair), which led to even more freed-up calories for investment in bigger brains, and so on and so on, until we get to anatomically modern humans some 200,000 years ago.
What’s “good” when it comes to humans specifically? According to my understanding of objectivism, it’s not determined by a god (divine command theory), nor by societal consensus (moral relativism), nor by the individual: Values are dictated to us by nature, intrinsic in the fact that we are living things. What’s “good” is whatever helps us get closer to living up to those values. Except for rare suicidal cases, humans (like all living things) naturally value survival, and except in (relatively) rare cases, humans (like all living things) naturally value reproduction. This is more-or-less a restatement of the biological imperative. According to objectivism, as I understand it, this is sufficient to resolve Hume’s is-ought problem. There are other proposed resolutions to this problem, for example, Sam Harris also claims that science [the application of reason to evidence] can answer moral questions in The Moral Landscape.
The argument for reason as the best tool for achieving human values (or any living thing’s values, for that matter), therefore, neatly falls into place. By rejecting all forms of irrationality — religion included — we are necessarily left with the path of least resistance toward the end of attaining that which [nature has determined] is of value to us. The application of reason, Bernstein argues, is the most efficient, healthiest, and most direct way to reach our goals. Since these goals are dictated by nature and emphatically not subjective, it is an open-and-shut case.
Religion, because it embraces faith (and is, by definition, irrational), is therefore directly at odds with life itself. According to Bernstein, “Religion is a philosophical system based in faith, not reason,” and it necessarily includes an unquestioning obedience to God. Religion views humans as sinful, and a failure to obey God is at the very core of what it means to be immoral, from the perspective of religion. This is so fundamental to the Abrahamic religions that it’s in fact the very basis of sin itself, illustrated by the Fall of Man.
As a student of anthropology, I strongly disagree with this definition of religion, although admittedly “religion” is notoriously difficult to define, and Bernstein was upfront about this being a purely working definition. Some religions (e.g. theistic Satanism) place zero emphasis on obedience to God or indeed encourage disobedience as permissible behavior. Note: I’m not talking about LaVey Satanism here; LaVey explicitly denounced “devil worship” or the idea of praying to Satan, and LaVey Satanists are generally atheists. In fact, atheistic Satanism can, I think, rightly be called “ethical egoism with ritual.” Other examples of religions lacking a necessity of obedience to “God” are Buddhism, Taoism, and many American Indian religions. In the case of Buddhism, the Eightfold Path is a rough stand-in for a revealed text from a god, and in the case of Taoism, the idea is to live in harmony with reality through compassion, moderation, and humility. Although supernatural elements are present in each system, a rule-giving god is conspicuously absent, and disobedience is not immoral per se.
Bernstein’s working definition of religion is sufficient for the Abrahamic religions in this context, but I don’t think he adequately makes the case against all religion, just religions that require obedience to a god (which, admittedly, is most of the ones we’re worried about in practice).
During the Q&A, an audience member asked if there was room for faith in any of this. He said that he is a farmer and gave the example of having faith that it will rain within a certain window of time when choosing exactly when to plant his crops. He cited weather patterns over the last few decades as informing his choice of when to plant. Bernstein rightly pointed out that the farmer, then, is not depending on faith — there is no supernatural element present there. I wanted to add to this that perhaps a better way to word it might be that the farmer doesn’t have faith that it will rain: He has confidence that it will, in the scientific sense (evidence informing probability). This is very, very different from trust (an emotion) and faith (non-evidence-based belief), and we should take care to correct people who use the word “faith” when they mean “confidence.” If evidence is leading to your belief, you are, by definition, confident. There’s a big difference, and I applaud Bernstein on pointing this out.
My other main objection is that Bernstein, while simultaneously praising Scandinavia’s rational, secular approach to the rejection of irrationality, doesn’t seem to give credit where credit is due with regard to the success they have had in the application of liberal-leaning public policy. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc has some of the healthiest people on the planet in terms of nutrition, lifespan, and other factors for which he earlier criticized the Dark Ages for lacking . Phil Zuckerman, in Society Without God: What The Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, makes strong arguments for why life in Scandinavia is downright heavenly (har har) for rational people, and atheists especially: Aside from long lifespans, they have some of the lowest abortion rates, divorce rates, murder rates, illiteracy rates, corruption rates, etc. Yes, they have very high tax rates, but health care and college is accessible to anyone who wants it (as I understand it). Looking at GDP per capita, a favored metric by Bernstein (who quoted these figures several times throughout his talk), is not necessarily an optimal way to compare the living conditions in one country versus another. While after-tax income of course measures “lower” in countries with high tax rates (and I of course admit the obvious role Pigovian taxes play on disincentivizing innovation), if tax-funded services are provided in lieu of direct income, if this is not accounted for in one’s metric, an individual’s actual standard of living may be more-or-less unaffected, even as the GDP per capita falls. This is why other metrics have come into favor over GDP per capita, which is easier to calculate but provides less information about the overall picture. More informative metrics are, for example, the Gini coefficient (based on the Lorenz curve), the Human Poverty Index (a composite index which accounts for literacy, unemployment, probability of falling below the poverty line, and the probability, at birth, of surviving to age 60), among others. GDP per capita as a metric, perhaps most importantly, only very weakly accounts for life satisfaction and experienced utility (see my previous article on welfare economics here).
I strongly agree with Bernstein’s overall message that religion and morality cannot peaceably coexist. In the words of Sam Harris, “The problem of faith is that it is a conversation-stopper. As long as you don’t have to give reasons for what you believe, you have effectively immunized yourself against the power of human conversation. You hear religious people say things like, ‘There’s nothing that can be said that will change my mind.’ Just imagine that said in medicine. If there’s nothing that can be said that will change your mind, if there’s no evidence or argument that can be educed, that proves that you are not any state of the world into account in your beliefs. The problem with this is that when the stakes are high, we have a choice between conversation and violence.” Bernstein made essentially the same point in his talk, that giving credibility to faith necessarily results in an irreconciliable struggle for (theoretically!) rational animals like us.
Bernstein is a strong public speaker, a good conversationalist, and extremely knowledgable in his field. I recommend him to any campus group interested in guest lectures about objectivism, reason/rationality, or why religion is harmful to societies.
Until next time!
- Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Face blindness and mysteries
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So, today’s article is a bit more personal than most. I’ve been sick the last few days and haven’t posted much, so to make up for it, and to warn you, today’s article is hella long and not for everybody. But, I do hope it will be useful. I will of course include some cool science and tie it all back to religion. I hope you enjoy 
If you’re looking for a short and to-the-point description of what face blindness is, try this link instead.
As some of you know, I have something called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in the majority, and I hope that after reading this article, you’ll have a better understanding of people like me.
Face blindness is, in some ways, similar to color blindness. Color blindness is more perhaps accurately called color vision deficiency – an inability or decreased ability to perceive differences in colors. There are many excellent websites about color blindness and I don’t intend to reinvent the wheel, so I’ll just recommend this one if you’re interested. The point is that being colorblind does not mean you can only see in black & white (monochrome), nor does it mean that you can’t see colors at all, or even that you can’t see certain colors at all. Some people are affected less than others, for example, and colorblindness is more-or-less independent from visual acuity (whether you need glasses or not). Colorblind people are not stupid; they are not disabled (unless their job depends foundationally on their ability to perceive differences in colors, e.g. jewelry graders), and it’s not a matter of “trying.” They are simply physically unable to do it.
There are different types of color blindness, but let’s take one kind, protanomaly, as an example. Protanomoly is also called “red-weakness.” If a picture’s worth 1,000 words, this example by Paul Martin can probably do a better job than I can:
In the image on the left, someone with normal vision sees violet or purplish berries. In the image on the right, we see what someone with protanomaly would see. Since these people have a deficient or in- ability to see red wavelengths specifically, and because purple is a combination of blue light and red light, anything purple just appears to them as blue. An object that a person with normal vision would process as strictly red – say, the maple leaf on the Canadian flag – would appear as the commensurate shade of grey to someone with protanomaly. This type of colorblindness affects about 1% of males (colorblindness is more common all around in men than women).
It’s surprisingly common for people to live their lives just fine without ever realizing they are colorblind at all. Different saturations of red simply appear to be different shades of grey, and so they CAN tell the difference between light and dark red, etc. But from their perspective, the same shades of red vs grey are indistinguishable. Since they have never been able to see through someone else’s eyes (unless they’ve had an eye transplant), and since this is (almost always) due to a congenital birth defect, they just never know the difference and don’t realize those colors even exist. Unless someone else realizes it and points it out, they may never even notice they’re not seeing the same thing as everyone else. They more or less have to take other people’s word for it. We’ll come back to the significance of this in a moment.
So, what’s face blindness, then?
Face blindness is pretty much the same idea, except that instead of certain colors looking grey, people’s faces all look the same. And by all the same, unlike with colorblindness, I mean blurry, or perhaps more accurately, nondescript. If you want to imagine what it’s like, and you wear eyeglasses, this is actually pretty easy to simulate. Try going to a dinner party or skeptic’s meeting or some other gathering where you know mostly everyone there, and just take off your glasses. Depending on how bad your uncorrected vision is, you may not even be able to tell your significant other apart from a complete stranger until s/he says something out loud, and then you would be identifying his voice, not his face.
Face blindness is like that, except only with faces, and only with “whole” faces. If I focus on one part of your face, I can see it just fine. I can see your eyes, and your hair, and your nose, and your chin, if I look directly at them. But when I take a figurative step back and try to look at your “whole” face, it just doesn’t register very well.
You would not believe the social consequences that come along with a diminished ability to recognize faces. It is extremely common for faceblind people to lose friends, job opportunities, love interests, etc because other people don’t understand why the faceblind person is so “arrogant.”
For example, say you (reader) and I know each other – say we are Facebook friends, perhaps we have had two or three extended conversations after SASHA meetings, say we’ve even been out to dinner together with a group of friends or something. Now say you and I pass each other in a semi-crowded hallway one day – say, there are 8 people present, including the two of us. Our eyes meet briefly, and I look away and keep walking as if I don’t know you – because as far as I know, you are a stranger. You think, “What an ass! He didn’t even say hello!” You never talk to me again, and I have no idea why. And since I have no idea who you are, or even that I did anything wrong, I can’t apologize, either.
If there is one thing I hope you take from this article, here it is:
I ran across this picture on a blog article someone had written about her own face blindness, and even though I am sitting alone in this room while writing, I said, “YES! THANK YOU!!” aloud when I found it. This image so fittingly communicates what I wish people understood about being faceblind. The website author, Anni Taylor, has a pretty mild case of it. There are some people who literally are unable to recognize themselves in the mirror and freak out, thinking someone else is in the room, if they catch a mirror image of themselves unexpectedly. Like me, Anni’s case is mild enough, and her coping mechanisms sophisticated enough, that she did not realize she had face blindness until she was an adult (poking through some of her other articles, she seems to be in her 30s and just found out she has face blindness a year ago).
Because there is a spectrum of severity, it’s not uncommon for people to be unaware that they qualify as having it, if it’s not bad enough to interfere too terribly with their lives. I would say in my case, I’m about in the middle. I can say this with some confidence because several years ago, I participated in a study on face blindness through the Prosopagnosia Research Group at Harvard University (www.faceblind.org is their research site), which took about 25 hours over 6 weeks. I learned a lot from the study – mainly, that this is more common than I realized (it’s estimated that 2.5% to 10% of the population qualifies as having at least mild cases of it), and that though I have it much worse than I thought I did, I don’t have it NEARLY as bad as some people.
The main thing that struck me is to what extent my methods of identifying other people are abnormal, compared to how non-faceblind people identify each other. What also has struck me is how common my methods of identifying other people are among other faceblind people. As I understand it, the way that normal people identify each other is the same way that I identify my left hand as belonging to me: It is more-or-less effortless, instantaneous, and you rarely second-guess yourself, unless you are extremely drunk. You “just know” that you know someone. You can see someone from across a room, even someone you’re not expecting to see, and know that this person is someone you know. I’m not talking about remembering how you know them or what their name is – everyone is forgetful about those things from time to time. I mean the actual flicker of recognition when you see them and think, “Oh, you!” is thoughtless: As soon as you lay eyes on their face, your brain tells you that it’s someone you’ve met before.
This is drastically different than the way it works for me. For me, it’s more like being a detective who has to crack the case quickly, because there’s a bomb that’s about to go off or something. Every second counts, and especially in a crowd, I have less than a second to decide if I know you or not before you will feel insulted if I fail to acknowledge you as a non-stranger.
Why don’t I just treat everyone I make eye contact with as though we know each other, to be on the safe side, you ask? Tell you what: Why don’t you go to the mall for an hour, try that out, and let me know how it goes! 
If I smiled a big smile, waved, and said “Hi!” to literally every person I made eye contact with, I would probably look like a total nut, in addition to spending fairly all of my time saying hi to people. Being overly nice to strangers “just in case” you know them already actually makes the problem worse, and exponentially so. The reason is that if you do this, you will end up making a lot of acquaintances, whom you will be expected to remember the next time you see, as well (remember having met them before, not their names, I mean). No, the only practical solution for a faceblind person like me is to figure out, as quickly as possible, whether I need to treat a person as someone I am expected to already know, and stall while I figure out who they are, or if it is acceptable to treat them as a stranger and carry on with my day.
There is a complicated but precise way to do this; it’s something that I figured out when I was very young, out of necessity. I’ve had many years of practice doing it, so I’m pretty quick about it, but the method hasn’t changed. I was in my early 20s when I learned that most people do not do this. Basically, my top priority when encountering someone in public is deciding if you are a stranger or if you are someone I am supposed to know already. The timer starts once we make eye contact, and I have roughly ½ to ¾ of a second before they will start feeling insulted if I get it wrong. This applies anywhere there are random people (malls, restaurants, campus, etc) where I might run into someone I know.
The decision tree looks like this:
Click to enlarge.
So, once I’ve established that you’re not a stranger, I can start trying to figure out who you actually are. The main thing for me here is TIME. The longer I can stall, the better my chances of figuring it out. This is a double-edged sword, though, because the longer I drag out our interaction to try to get more clues about who you are, the more insulted you will be if I don’t “remember” chatting with you later, if I fail to identify you correctly.
Sometimes I can skip the first flowchart entirely, if I already know that we’re not strangers. For example, at SASHA meetings, I know that (mostly) everyone there is someone I have met before, and even for new people, I want to meet them and I greet them warmly, so worrying about avoiding eye contact, etc does not apply. Or, if I am meeting a group of people at a restaurant (e.g. when I attend Columbia Atheist meetings, which usually have about 20-30 people), it’s just a matter of figuring out who is who.
The “Not a stranger, but who?” mental flowchart looks like this:
Click to enlarge.
Oh hey, if you think going through these steps in your head literally hundreds of times a day must be mentally exhausting, you’re right!
This is why I always go to the same restaurant (if you’ve hung out with me personally, you know which one it is) and always go to the same bar/hangout (ditto): It drastically narrows down the number of people I risk running into unexpectedly. It’s why I almost never go to malls or walk around campus without pretending I’m texting. It’s why I LOVE it when I remember to bring nametags to SASHA meetings. It’s why I like picking people up in my car when we hang out, instead of meeting them there. (By the way, the worst possible nightmare for a faceblind person is being asked to meet somewhere crowded, and you getting there before they do). Some people with prosopagnosia develop very serious anxiety problems, social withdrawal, and even become total recluses to avoid having to deal with it. I adore people; I love my friends and there is pretty much nothing I enjoy about life more than the company of people I care about, so I am very fortunate that the worst of it, for me, is the mental juggling of who’s-who and the occasional pissed-off/gone forever friend.
One of the reasons I like to travel so much (not counting perhaps a dozen day-trips to other cities, I went on 4 extended roadtrips last year) is that when I’m in a new city, I’m under no pressure to recognize ANYONE. I can treat everyone as a stranger and there are no social consequences, as far as risking lost friends. Let me clarify that this doesn’t mean I am mean to people — quite the contrary. I smile at everyone; I chat with shop-owners and locals, and I enjoy making new friends. If you know me in person, you know that I really try as hard as I can to be a sweet guy. When I say I can treat everyone as a stranger, I mean that I don’t have to hide from them, because oh, you might be someone I know, waiting to spurn me if I fail your unintentional pop-quiz. Don’t get me wrong: I do not blame people who have gotten pissed at me for “ignoring” them, and I completely understand that none of my friends actually desires to do this to me. I want to make it clear that I am not upset about the friends I have lost through misunderstandings about this, unfortunate as it is. Like the picture says above, “I am not ignoring you on purpose.”
Now, as frustrating as this is, I do recognize that it could be a lot worse. Some people who are more severely affected than I am are unable to tell if others are even making eye contact with them in the first place – the entire face simply does not register. For me, I can see your eyes if I focus my attention on them, but your face does not “click” as familiar. I do not understand and have not experienced the sensation of someone seeming familiar and recognizing someone effortlessly and instantly. I can do it if I’m expecting to see you and you’re wearing clothes I know are yours and you have a hairstyle I know is yours, etc. But as long as I can remember, identification of other people I know has always been a conscious inference on my part. And like any inference, because it is based on available evidence, I could find out that I’m very wrong as the conversation progresses.
What’s it like to be faceblind? Let me give you some examples. Once I was supposed to meet my then-girlfriend at a car dealership – there was a big Humane Society fundraiser, and several hundred people were gathered outside the building waiting for it to start (the dealership was raffling off a car). I texted my girlfriend and asked her where she was waiting, and she told me she was right inside the side door of the showroom. I went to the side door–it was a big glass door– but didn’t see her, so I thought I should check inside. There was a woman in the way of the door, so I asked (politely) for her to move so I could get in. She said, “Very funny.”
On another occasion, I was taking a Latin class at Mizzou with about 20 other students. I always try to get to know at least one person the first week, and exchange email addresses if possible, so that we can share notes if either of us is sick or has to miss a day. I generally wait until the second or third class to do this, so I can feel out who takes quality notes and who doesn’t. So, on the first day, I met a really cool woman, another student, and we had a nice chat. Later in the day, I had an English class, and met another student, who seemed really nice as well. At the end of the third Latin class, I asked my new friend about exchanging emails for note-sharing purposes. She was happy to and we did. Later in the day, I had my third English class, and asked my other new friend about exchanging emails for note-sharing purposes. Unlike the girl in my Latin class, she was visibly perturbed, and I quickly said, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to; it’s just something I do in every class. I can get someone else.” She said, “No, it’s not that. I already have your email.” We’d been chatting all week, in both classes, without me realizing that these two friends were actually the same person. That is not the only time that has happened, by the way.
Face blindness is usually congenital, although it can also develop later in life through brain injury or trauma (lesions, cancer, stroke, or other diseases that damage brain tissue, etc). Interestingly, there is a whole part of the brain, called the fusiform face area (hereafter FFA), whose only function seems to be processing visual input of faces specifically. It seems that recognizing faces is so important to our evolutionary history that humans developed a bigger and more complex version of this section. The FFA is a subsection of the fusiform gyrus, which itself is part of the temporal lobe in Brodmann Area 37.
Because the area affected is so very specialized, people who are faceblind can do things you might not expect, despite our difficulties with faces. For example, most of us have zero trouble distinguishing between, for example, photographs of very similar rocks, or types of cars, or telling pets apart, or identifying, for example, my laptop from my brother’s identical make & model laptop (well, to be fair, mine does have a huge sticker that says “ATHEIST” all across the front!). But faces, they just do not register. This has some interesting consequences: I sometimes have trouble watching television shows because it’s annoying trying to keep the characters straight. I like the show How I Met Your Mother, as one example, but I often have trouble telling apart Ted and Marshall when everyone is seated at their table at the bar – I have no trouble when they’re standing, because Marshall towers over Ted, and I have no trouble with Barney, because he has blonde hair. I sometimes confuse Robin and Lily, although Lily’s hair is longer and redder, so I’m usually okay, especially if there is dialogue and I can use their voices to help tell them apart, etc.
So, I promised I would bring this back ’round to religion. Remember when I said colorblind people, who have never experienced the color red, more or less just have to take other people’s word for it that “red” actually does exist?
The reason I bring this up is that I’ve, more than once, heard this argument used as “proof” of supernatural claims. I have heard people say things along the lines of, “Some people can feel the Holy Spirit/Allah/the Tao/etc, and some people can’t. Just because YOU can’t feel it doesn’t mean WE’RE imagining it. Isn’t it possible that we just have some sort of 6th sense, which allows us to perceive this, that you lack?”
My response is this: Yes, it’s possible. But here’s how I know you’re making it up, even though I don’t necessarily think you’re doing it with a conscious intent to deceive: If I were colorblind, I could take a rose and show it to someone and say, “I’m colorblind. Can you tell me, what color is this rose?” and that person will say, “It’s a red rose.” Then I could take that same rose and grab another random person and say, “Hey, I’m colorblind. What color is this?” And that person will say, “It’s red.” And I could bug yet another random person and say, “Hey, can you tell me what color this rose is?” And that person will also say, “Dumbass; it’s red.” Then I’d say, “Oh, sorry; I forgot to mention I’m colorblind.” Then Person #3 would say, “Oh, I’m sorry for calling you a dumbass. Still red, though.” You get the picture.
I could do this 100 times and get at least 95 people to give me the exact same answer with complete agreement. (The other 5 would be the same people who say that the Earth is bigger than the Sun, or colorblind themselves).
The way I know the religion analogy flunks is that if I ask 100 random people what the word “god” even means, it would be unprecedented, to my knowledge, if they could all agree just on that, let alone which god, how many, whether s/he/it/they require baptism, or virgin sacrifices, or meditation, or suicide via cyanide-spiked Flavor Aid . I have heard, with a straight face, religious people tell me that “everyone has their own interpretation of who God is.” You know what it means when everyone has their own interpretation? It means no one has any frickin’ clue. God is a life force? God is energy? God is love? God is justice? God is an old Caucasian man with a white flowing beard and an outreached hand? When I was really little, I used to think God looked like one of the Emperor’s Royal Guards from Return of the Jedi:
The guys in red, I mean. Don't ask me why. I have no idea where that came from. I was like 5.
The fact is, when no one can give you a straight answer, that tells you that nobody has a straight answer. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Lawrence Krauss said, “Scientists love mysteries.” The problem with religion is that it insists it has the answers when, in reality, it doesn’t. I’m not saying science always does, but at least science is working on it, and at least science is consistent, and at least science only trusts it’s conclusions insofar as they are supposed by the available evidence, and at least science has the self-doubt necessary to refrain from taking offense when it is subjected to critical inquiry. This is how progress is made.
I hope today’s post has been useful for you. Until next time!
For a more-thorough and more-personal treatment of today’s subject matter, try this free online e-book by a man with severe face blindness named Bill Choisser.
Links to additional articles about face blindness from the New Yorker, Time Magazine, and Wired.
And finally, to you non-faceblind folks, here are some ways you can make things easier on faceblind people like me!
- When you see us in public, just help us out with your name!
- That’s it! Really! There is nothing wrong with our memories; we just can’t recognize faces!
- If you know someone is faceblind, and you’re with a group of people, kindly help us out by quietly telling us who everyone is
- If we see you in public unexpectedly, and we ignore you, just remember: We’re not ignoring you on purpose - you’re our friends and we love you; our brains just don’t process faces right.
Until next time!
Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Medicine: Where Real Miracles Happen Every Day
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This came up when I googled "kidney stone." I don't know why.
Why is this man’s partner upset at him? Although she lets him in on the mystery at the end, imagine if she was an imaginary, invisible god instead of his partner. Lacking any surefire way to communicate with her, the best he could do would be try to apologize or offer sacrifices whatever he might have done to offend her. This is more or less the basis of the practice of sacrifices in various world religions, from the Aztecs and Mayas of the ancient Americas, to the deserts of the ancient (and current) Middle East, to the “offerings” of cash in churches, mosques, and synagogues around the world.
Deep down, even though we may do our best to live ethical lives, we’ve all done at least one thing we’re not proud of. Naturally, we’re seeking forgiveness for the things we wish we hadn’t done. We want to be told that we’re still a good person and that life goes on. It’s easy to anthropomorphize nature, and once you cross that line, it’s even easier to believe that some agency is keeping track of our wrongs, if we don’t know better. At that point, all we’re “waiting” for is someone to come along and tell us that this “God” is pissed, and you can make it all better by giving your money to “God” (although, of course, in practice, it really goes to the person claiming knowledge about how to make it all better). I consider this tactic the height of immorality. In the words of John B. Hodges, “Religion… gives a moral blank check to those bold enough, dishonest enough, to claim to speak for God.”
And it does feel good to do something to pay back our wrongs. When we hurt someone, we want to make it up to them. When we’re not able to do that, it feels wrong to just shrug and say, “Guess I’m off the hook then.” Somehow, it feels more moral to do something to say we’re sorry, even if we know, rationally, that they’re independent.
As humans, we like having answers to our questions. We like being right and having a sense of understanding about our environment. This makes sense – what we don’t understand is scary and potentially dangerous, so it’s in our best interest to try to figure it out as best we can. When it comes to detecting patterns in nature, evolution designed us to be paranoid, not accurate. This is, I think, one of the most important realizations in all of scientific inquiry. We have this desire to “just do something” when bad things are happening, even if our actions are useless or even when they actually worsen the situation. We don’t like feeling powerless and the idea that “things just happen” can be scary. I understand that.
But that doesn’t mean that karma is real, that fate is real, that everything happens for a reason, nor that there is a pattern to everything. We are excellent at detecting patterns – too good at it, actually.
I think as a society, we could make amazing progress on a vast array of social, political, and economic problems if we required all high school students to take introductory statistics, probability, and philosophy of science. I am continually dismayed at how few people, scientists even, understand the problem of induction, or understand basic concepts in epistemology and the philosophy of science like the difference between a fact, a theory, a hypothesis, a law, a model, and a proof. This is something we can fix, if we decide to.
In closing, I want to thank everyone out there who has paved or is paving the way for science to help us solve our problems. I certainly appreciate the knowledge and abilities of the medical staff who have helped me the past few days, and I sincerely say, thank scientists for painkillers. You guys are awesome.
- Dave
mail@davemuscato.com
(573) 424-0420 cell/text
Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
Follow Dave on Google+
Follow Dave on Twitter
Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current,NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!
Game Day a success! And now for something completely different…
Welcome to the official MU SASHA daily blog!
First time here? Read this.
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Hello everybody!
Our Game Day on Wednesday was a blast. About 20 SASHA members gathered ’round for Ergo, Axis & Allies, Uno, Settlers of Catan, and others. Due to the same room-scheduling snafu as last week, we do not yet know where our meeting will be next Wednesday, but I will post here and on the Facebook group as soon as I find out!
Ergo: An onotological competition using Boolean logic, for 4 players
Gamers be gamin'
More gameplay
As I’m a few days behind on the (cough: daily) blog, I’m going to write a rather in-depth article for today to make up for it: And now for something completely different, I also wanted to round out today’s post with a video explaining, in less than 4-and-a-half minutes, some damning evidence that we (humans aka Homo) share a common ancestor with the other great apes (chimps aka Pan, gorillas aka Gorilla, and orangutans aka Pongo).
First of all, and I hope this isn’t news to anyone reading this, but if you ever hear the argument, “If humans evolved from monkeys, how come monkeys are still around?” the correct response is, “Nobody’s claiming humans evolved from monkeys. Modern humans and modern monkeys are cousins; we both evolved from a common ancestor.”
Data from Jared Diamond's book "The Third Chimpanzee." Red squares indicate branching points.
That’s like asking, “If England colonized America in the early 17th century, why is England still here in the 21st century?” The answer is, because the entirety of England did not pick up & move to the New World… Those that left to colonize the New World became the ancestors of modern US natives (along with other immigrants along the way), and those that stayed behind became the ancestors of modern English natives. They may have even been close blood relatives once upon a time.
A parallel can be drawn with more familiar kinship terms:
The white numbers in the red boxes indicate the coefficient of relatedness r to the orange "self." r is defined as 2 times the Coefficient of Inbreeding, which is defined as the probability that the alleles at a particular locus chosen at random from two individuals are identical by descent. This has direct application to Hamilton's Rule and JBS Haldane's fantastic joke, "I would lay down my life for 2 brothers or 8 cousins."
Picture two brothers, both young men straight men without any biological children (but the desire for them) living in England in the year 1606. One brother goes to the New World to help settle the Jamestown colony, one brother stays behind in England. They each become fathers & start their own families a few years later, and after you fast-forward 400 years to the present day, not only do their respective great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren have completely different accents and dialect vocabularies from each other, but probably different politics, perhaps different religions, different last names, even different hair, eye, and/or skin colors, depending on with whom their ancestors bred along the way. It’s unlikely, if two people from each end of these respective genetic lines passed each other on the street, they would even have any clue they were at all related. And since their last common ancestor is separated from them by 13 generations, that would make them 12th cousins, and you’d frankly be hard up to even call them “related” in any meaningful sense. Consider that the relatedness coefficient of siblings is 50 (explained below). For each generation back you have to go in order to find a common ancestor, you divide by 4 (1st cousins = 12.5, etc). Therefore, the relatedness coefficient of 12th cousins is 0.00000298. I think that after 5 zeroes, you’re safe in calling them random strangers.
My favorite thing to study is altruism. This has huge applications to evolution as well. The science behind this is just more and more fascinating the more you look into it. Why do people (and other animals) self-sacrifice? Why do we sometimes risk harm & cost to ourselves in order to harm others (aka spite)? If we see someone in trouble, why do we have an instinctual urge to be charitable toward people, even people we do not necessarily “know,” even at sometimes great monetary or personal risk to ourselves? Why are we so much more charitable toward people in geographic proximity to us, even when they are in less trouble than others who may be in much greater need of our charity? Why do we just “know” that altruism and socially-promoting behavior is virtuous? Why do we just “know” that selfish and socially-demoting behavior is villainous?
“Kin selection” refers to apparent strategies in evolution that favor the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, even at a cost to their own survival and/or reproduction. At first blush, charity/altruism seems to be something natural selection would not favor. What possible advantage could it confer to the giver, to give away their (finite) resources? As it turns out, there are many, especially once religion enters the scene, which is the part that fascinates me the most. In economic anthropology (and other fields, namely evolutionary biology), there is a concept called signalling theory. The idea is that you communicate information about yourself (the agent) to someone else (the principal) by doing or displaying certain “expensive” things or behaviors, whether calorically or monetarily or however else. Let’s take a labor example:
When two applicants apply for the same job, the potential employer is at a disadvantage when choosing between them. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that the only thing this employer is interested in is intelligence — say, for sake of example, that the company is a complex systems logistics consulting company . The reason the employer is at a disadvantage is that the applicants know much more about how intelligent (or unintelligent) they really are than the employer could possibly know. As the employer (principal) in this scenario, how could we find out who would be a better fit for the job?
We could ask them how smart they are, but that’s not very precise, and there’s no way to know if they are lying. We could have them take an IQ test, but that would be costly and time-consuming, especially if you had a lot of applicants. A much faster way would be to look at costly signals:
What’s on their résumés? Say that Applicant A has a master’s in mathematics from Oxford and Applicant B has an associate’s degree in Communications from the University of Phoenix. And just like that, we have (very high confidence that we have) our answer. Frankly, it’s expensive to get a master’s degree from Oxford. I don’t just mean financially; I mean that it takes years of your life, a huge investment as far as not only brainpower but determination and tenacity, and assuming this company is based in the USA, that means our applicant moved overseas, presumably as an investment in going to such a great school. Assuming neither candidate is lying on his/her résumé, you can’t fake that kind of dedication and hard work. And that, in a nutshell, is costly signalling.
There are all sorts of examples of costly signalling in nature: The guy driving the Ferrari to feel sexier, the peacock investing huge numbers of calories into growing & maintaining his tail feathers (“I’m so badass/good-looking that I don’t have to worry about evading predators, and I’m so good at hunting/persuading-humans-to-feed-me that I don’t have to worry about preserving my calories for lean times; I grew these tail feathers to impress YOU, baby”), etc.
There are also ways to cheat at signalling, which is where the REAL fun comes in when you start to look at this from a game-theory perspective: Did she really go to Oxford, or did she lie on her résumé? Can that guy really afford the Ferrari, or does he have a 7-year loan at 10% interest (and no equity in his house) in order to fake it? Is that a real Rolex? The best costly signals are signals that are hard to fake. It’s easy to fake a Rolex, which is why not many drunk people at bars are very impressed by them. But it’s much harder to fake owning a Ferrari – even to get a loan for one requires some serious income – and we tend to pay more attention when someone pulls up in one than when we see someone wearing a Rolex, just like we pay more attention to someone with chiseled six-pack abs than we do to someone with a Gold’s Gym swipe card on their keychain, even though they could very well be the same person. It’s easy to fake being interested in physical health in order to impress a date, but pretty expensive (though not impossible) to fake the effort it takes to actually get six-pack abs (witness “abdominal liposculpture”: All you need is about 3 months and $25,000… and look at that; they even offer financing!).
To get back on topic, the point is, evolution is a fascinating topic with applications all over the map. There is so much evidence for evolution – in phylogenetics, anatomy (vestiges are, in my opinion, one of the biggest blows to “intelligent design”) – biogeography, fossil evidence/homologies, virology, not to mention the OBSERVED INSTANCES OF SPECIATION! - that disbelieving evolution is akin to disbelieving, at some point in the past, you were situated inside someone’s womb. I know this is a fallacy, but frankly, it’s ridiculous to believe that evolution isn’t true. Just in case, though, here’s the video I mentioned above, as promised:
I hope you all have a wonderful Friday, and I’ll catch ya next time!
- Dave
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Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, he posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.
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Helpful resources:
Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org
YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup
Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick
and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too! 
DIY Science: Build Your Own Molecular Phylogeny
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Greetings, friends. My name is James. Today, I’m going to turn everybody who reads this blog into an evolutionary biologist in a few easy steps. How will I do that? Simple: I’m going to teach you how to make your very own evolutionary tree using DNA sequences. I’ll start by answering some basic questions.
“What is an evolutionary tree?”
An evolutionary tree, or phylogeny, is a graphical representation of the relatedness of organisms. A phylogeny is made up of bifurcating (spitting into two) branches joined together by nodes. They can be built using physical characteristics (morphology) or molecular sequences (DNA, RNA, or protein). These trees can compare different species, different individuals or populations within a single species, or even different genes within the same organism. Read more…
Embarrassed by PZ!? I think not.
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Moshe Averick, a creationist rabbi, posted a blog entry the other day, asking if we atheists are embarrassed by PZ Myers. His assumption is based off a criticism that PZ gives of Intelligent Design in one of his talks. PZ uses an analogy to show how complex things can come about through natural processes. The analogy he uses is that of driftwood on a shore, a complicated mixed-up pile of driftwood that a person probably could not recreate without looking at it. He juxtaposes this with a brick wall, which has a purpose, is much simpler than the pile of driftwood, and was intelligently designed by man.
Averick’s problem with this, which he struggles to accurately explain, is that PZ is using a straw-man argument. Averick states:
In any case, no self-respecting ID theorist would ever use the term “complexity.” The terms that are always used are “functional complexity” or “specified complexity.” In other words, complexity that achieves some pre-determined goal, complexity that clearly functions towards a specific purpose. The argument is that “functional complexity” and “specified complexity” clearly are the result of intelligent intervention. A pile of driftwood is immediately recognizable for exactly what it is; a random, disorganized, purposeless collection of….well, driftwood! To describe this argument as flawed logic would be misleading; we first would have to dignify it by labeling it as some form of logic in the first place. It is not flawed logic, it is simply ridiculous.
For the moment I will the fact that Intelligent Design proponents do use the term “complexity” and that “functional complexity” or “specified complexity” are therefore, not the always used. I will give him, that PZ Myers’ analogy does not address these “special” forms of complexity. This is, however, no reason to be ashamed of PZ. As I stated earlier, the ID community frequently uses the term complexity without these modifiers, which I have just heard about in this article (Granted, I don’t do much research on Intelligent Design, as I prefer my fiction reading to include more adventure). This would be a straw-man if PZ was directly addressing Averick, or people who regularly use these term, but that is not the case.
Furthermore, these “special” forms of complexity do nothing to help the Intelligent Design Proponent’s cause. They now also have to show that life is complex in a way that “achieves some pre-determined goal”. In order to do so, it would really seem like some consciousness would have to exist already in order to desire such a goal. If so, they must now prove God’s existence, or at least that of a consciousness that created life and wants it to achieve this unknown goal. Both of these seem to be unlikely conclusions to come to given the evidence we are provided with, and in Averick’s own opinion, we should not ignore fact and logic in favor of an agenda.
To answer Rabbi Averick’s question, No, I am not ashamed of PZ Myers. I am in fact proud to have such an intelligent man supporting the causes of skepticism and rational inquiry. In fact, I see nothing in your post that actually gives reason one should be ashamed, unless you think that his use of the word “Fuck” is reason to be ashamed of him. In which case , Fuck no! I am a bit fucking fond of the word myself.
Finally, if you think that functionally or specifically complex things are proof of something having been created, perhaps you should consider that the concept of God seems to clearly function towards a specific pre-determined goal, much like a brick wall…
Granted, brick walls aren’t intended to prevent rational thought.
Tony Lakey, President of MU SASHA, is a sophomore at Mizzou majoring in philosophy & minoring in sociology. He posts updates to the SASHA blog every Friday (He plans to anyway)
Review: “What Darwin Got Wrong,” part 2
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The first chapter of WDGW lays out the structure of the so-called ‘modern synthesis,’ which construes natural selection as a two part, single dimensional process: First, genetic mutations arise randomly; second, external environmental factors ‘select’ phenotypes. The authors bring evidence from genetics to bear on this model. They argue that the internal elements of the process are hardly random, and that much of the evolutionary process rides on non-random internal constraints at the genetic level.
Much of the support for their claims comes in the form of quotes from contemporary geneticists, to the effect that much of the ‘filtering’ occurs internally, rather than externally through the organism’s environment. They likewise criticize the idea that variations in one trait are independent from heritable variations in other traits, arguing instead that the packaging of traits within the chromosome is messily interconnected (this is my poor attempt at a summary).
The authors spend much time discussing evolutionary development, or evo-devo. I found some of this discussion fascinating, particularly regarding the idea that entire life cycles are the the objects of evolutionary forces, not merely the adult forms. Rather than the organism’s adult form being the primary phenotype that undergoes selective pressures, evo-devo regards each developmental step as part of the filtering process, from the fertilized egg to the adult.
Much of the material in chapter one is technical, and I found it rather difficult to follow. I’ve re-read it several times, but I still do not grasp all of the arguments.
Chapter two zooms out, so to speak, from gene complexes to entire genomes and more complex systems. The authors continue to emphasize the role internal constraints play in the evolutionary process. They point to the robustness of ‘master genes’ and gene networks, which offer alternative explanations for evolutionary change. Rather than the random phenotype generation plus external filter model, they push a model of shifting internal networks and structures not easily influenced by the environment to any great degree. They take the primary targets of their criticism to be gradualism and adaptationism, of which I know Dawkins and Dennett are champions. I’ll say more about chapters two and three in the next post.
