Links and Comments: Modern Physics; Evolution and Strangers; Coming out in totalitarian societies; Elizabeth Kolbert on Mars

Posted on Monday 8 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Sunday’s New York Times has a “Gray Matter” essay on A Crisis at the Edge of Physics by Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser* is about whether the empirical method — validating theories via predictions and evidence — does not work for some modern scientific ‘theories’. Or perhaps those ‘theories’ don’t count as proper theories. The prime examples are string theory and supersymmetry, as the next steps beyond the standard model (which does not unify all four basic forces). If high-order ‘theories’ can solve this unification mathematically, but cannot be validated through any kind of evidence, what’s the point? The authors compare these ideas to Ptolemy’s epicycles, which similarly ‘explained’ the orbits of the planets without any kind of evidence, but were accepted for 1500 years. The resolution to this quandary may come with upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider, which potentially might discover the predicted supersymmetric particles.

*Gleiser is author of a recent book The Island of Knowledge: The LImits of Science and the Search for Meaning, which I have in my to-read stack, and seems to be about this issue in many manifestations. There are also books like Jim Baggott’s Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth, which claims science has already gone off the rails on these issues.

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And an interesting op-ed in Sunday’s LA Times by Robert Sapolsky [a biology professor at Stanford], The evolution of encountering, and embracing, strangers. (Beware the annoying ads that block the page for 15 seconds.)

For nearly all of human history, people lived in small hunter-gatherer bands, with some flow of individuals between neighboring bands that regularly encountered one another. In other words, your life was spent among people you knew.

But as has been explored by sociologists and psychologists, once humans developed proto-cities with thousands of inhabitants, starting around 9,000 years ago, something unprecedented occurred: We began to spend a lot of time around people we didn’t know very well at all.

Generosity and cooperation are common in small groups where everyone knows each other, but plummet when dealing with anonymous strangers. Thus…

…it is only when societies get large enough that people in them regularly encounter strangers that “Big Gods” emerge — deities who are concerned with human morality and who punish our transgressions. The gods of hunter-gatherers generally couldn’t care less whether we’ve been naughty or nice.

The point of his essay is that, upon seeing his son’s graduation from high school, he realizes the people in modern societies regularly *break* close social ties in order to move on — to move off to different cities, start a fresh life. It’s a process never experienced by our ancient ancestors.

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Heartbreaking story in NYT, North Korean Defector Opens Up About Long-Held Secret: His Homosexuality, about a man who defected from North Korea for reasons he wasn’t even aware of, except that he knew he felt no sexual attraction to his wife. Because he grew up

in the totalitarian North, where the government maintains that homosexuality does not exist because people there live with a “sound mentality and good morals.”

It wasn’t until he defected to South Korea that he understood that there was even the concept of homosexuality — though even in that country the topic is taboo.

And an analogous story also in NYT (and reproduced in the San Francisco Chronicle, and no doubt other subscribers), about transgender: Transgender Children’s Books Fill a Void and Break a Taboo.

Sam Martin was browsing in a Boston record store 23 years ago when an unusual photography book caught his eye. Mr. Martin flipped through its pages, which featured portraits and interviews with women who had become men, and started to cry.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not the only one,’ ” said Mr. Martin, 43, who started transitioning to male from female after he bought the book. “When I was growing up, I never saw people like me in movies or books.”

There is a range of human experience and perception that totalitarian societies, and religious conservatives in democratic societies, seek to suppress and deny — for what can only be characterized as socialistic reasons. Reproduce and multiply, for the good of society, for the good of the race. But it’s the arc of history, especially now in the internet age, and as the human race’s survival is relatively more assured than it was a century ago or a millenium ago, that these forces will give way to reality, to acknowledging the common humanity of such sexual minorities, and other minorities that have previously been marginalized over human history.

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Nice essay by Elizabeth Kolbert*, in the June 1 New Yorker, about Project Exodus: What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?

Nice essay that contrasts the practical difficulties of getting to Mars with the fantasies about getting there, and the potential consequences if we do.

“Humans carry biomes with us, outside and inside,” he writes. NASA insists that Mars landers be sterilized, but “we can’t sterilize ourselves.” If people ever do get to the red planet—an event that Conway, now forty-nine, says he considers “unlikely” in his lifetime—they’ll immediately wreck the place, just by showing up: “Scientists want a pristine Mars, uncontaminated by Earth.” If people start rejiggering the atmosphere and thawing the regolith, so much the worse.

“The Mars scientists want to study won’t exist anymore,” Conway writes. “Some other Mars will.”

With some discussion of Chris Impey’s new book Beyond: Our Future in Space, another book on my to-read stack.

*Kolbert is the author of The Sixth Extinction, winner of the Pulitzer prize and at least one other literary award IIRC as best science book of 2014; I read it on my plane flights a week ago and will write it up and summarize it here in the next week or so.

Posted in Evolution, Physics, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Modern Physics; Evolution and Strangers; Coming out in totalitarian societies; Elizabeth Kolbert on Mars

Upon Returning from a Wedding

Posted on Tuesday 2 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve tweaked a few passages in my Provisional Conclusions today, in light of attending a family wedding in a socially conservative state and observing first-hand a community that obviously thrives in the context of a traditional religious narrative.

What my thesis (my Provisional Conclusions) has to ‘explain’ is how apparently intelligent people can maintain such loyalty to [such obviously arbitrary and historically contingent] narratives of ideology and religion, and the sense of their special understanding of the will of God, despite the obvious facts that the universe doesn’t care and every other group of humanity feels just as confidant of their own superiority.

Part of the solution may be this: there’s no survival advantage in recognizing ‘reality’; those ideological and religious beliefs really do promote survival and perpetuation of the species.

So what I mean by ‘active consciousness’ (in my Provisional Conclusions) is a kind of maturity, an understanding of the protocols of survival and the need for those narratives, with an attendant understanding that those narratives are just stories we tell ourselves to get through the night, or through a life – that the universe outside the parameters of human existence operates by very different rules. It’s analogous to growing up and understanding where babies really come from, that the circumstances that created your life were largely arbitrary and circumstantial, and that your own town or sports team isn’t *really* the greatest one in the whole world. Even if you pretend they are, as everyone around you similarly pretends, as a matter of social cohesiveness (and a kind of group survival strategy).

Another part of the solution is understanding why it doesn’t matter to most people that most others in the world follow *different* narratives, i.e. different religions. *As long as they have a story to live by*, perhaps even to submit to, something that gives their life ‘meaning’, i.e. a narrative context that gives purpose to day to day life and the cycles of the generations – then that’s OK. In a sense it’s like speaking different languages. Relatively few people are insistent about their own languages being superior to all others, just as relatively few are much concerned about people subscribing to other religions. (Those who decline to follow a religion, however – those are the ones that bother people. How can they not subscribe to a narrative? They are loose cannons, unpredictable and nonconformist.)

It’s the people we call scientists and philosophers, mostly, who currently have this ‘active consciousness’ of understanding the reality of the universe as a thing above and beyond the protocols of human existence. This does not make them cold or inhuman; they are just as likely to have families and to love their children, to appreciate art and music and nature, as anyone else – just not, of course, in the context of a religious narrative that places themselves or their tribe as the center of all existence, the profoundly narcissistic idea that they are the reason the universe was created.

On the contrary; scientists will tell you there is great, deep gratification to appreciating the workings of the universe, to appreciating the context in which humanity exists, appreciating that humanity is a *consequence* (if not an inevitable one) of the operations of our enormous, ancient, cold, indifferent universe. This appreciation is all the more profound because it’s *true*, based on everything humanity has perceived and understood about the universe in which we live – in contrast to the self-flattering religious myths, tales imagined by ancient tribes who thought the world was flat, that most people live by.

It would be nice to think that the human race will gradually mature along these lines, as education expands and the religious tribes who resist such education are marginalized, but there’s little current evidence this might happen any time soon; on the contrary. The so-called ‘end of history’ described at the end of the 20th century (notably by Francis Fukuyama, who claimed that the liberal democracies and free market capitalism would spread around the world, and that would be that) was trounced by 9/11.

In the long run, however, I’m optimistic, and so is most science fiction. The arcs of social and technological history have had setbacks – but after every setback, humanity keeps moving forward, in a two steps back, five steps forward fashion. How science fiction writers have thought about these things is what I might explore, as I develop this blog and perhaps write a book around the framework of my Provisional Conclusions.

Posted in Culture, Evolution, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Upon Returning from a Wedding

Links and Comments: About religious parents shielding their children from reality

Posted on Tuesday 26 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

More about the Duggars’ insular worldview.

Gawker: Tell Your Duggar Tales: Did Michelle Duggar Get a Gay Crew Member Fired?

The family kept their children so sealed from exposure to the outside world that their ideas about big cities like LA or New York were caricatures, and the TV crew filming them was instructed to be very careful not to “taint their version of the world”. (And the gay member of the film crew, who mentioned the fact matter-of-factly, was removed from the crew.)

During this time, the Duggars had very limited exposure to what they called the “outside world” and so most of the crew members being from larger cities, we were all very surprised at how very little they knew or understood about places like New York, Los Angeles, and London. All of their perceptions of these places were the most exaggerated stereotype caricatures as if their only source of news was from locally produced religious cartoons from the 1980s. As in, LA is full of surfer dudes and Valley girls, and everyone in New York talks and walks like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, walks in packs carrying switchblades, spray paints graffiti at every turn, with the only safe haven oddly being the mighty Trump Tower. Yes, Trump Tower was Jim Bob’s go-to when talking anecdotally about the elegance of lavish and luxurious places. … They didn’t own a television or had an Internet connection at that time, so, really, next to second hand church gossip, the local newspaper was really their only link to anything outside of Arkansas. The producers of the show had instructed crew members to not ever engage in conversation on our own with Jim Bob or Michelle in fears that we may either say something normal that they would find objectionable or that they would say something to where we’d react funny because we weren’t used to their level of “unwordliness” I think it was put.

Many other links, (e.g. Jezebel, The Duggars Aren’t Just a Family, They’re a Cult and The Atlantic: All Unhappy Families: The Downfall of the Duggars, but the point is made.

Conservative Resistance:
“religious inculcation of children, and the shielding of them from outside influences that would threaten their parents’ worldview”

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The Atlantic: Which Contemporary Habits Will Be Most Unthinkable 100 Years From Now?

Answers include burning fossil fuels, driving, having a lawn. And Daniel Dennett suggests:

Unsupervised homeschooling. When we come to recognize that willfully misinforming a child—or keeping a child illiterate, innumerate, and uninformed—is as evil as sexual abuse, we will forbid parents to treat their children as possessions whom they may indoctrinate as they please. They may teach their children any religious creed they like, but only if they also teach the uncontroversial facts about the world’s religions so their children can make an informed choice when they grow up.

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Slate: Were You There? As a creationist kid, I was determined not to learn about evolution.

So can religious students understand evolution even when they think it conflicts with their beliefs? In my own experience, as a case study for a creationist learning about evolution, the answer is no. Rissler has it right.

What I learned at home and church was like a fog that the most basic principles of biology could barely cut through. In science class, details got lost in the mist.

During one of Wortman’s lectures on natural selection—involving different types of bacteria—I was doodling. Normally an attentive student, I deliberately tuned out of the class. The subject made me uncomfortable because the process of new species coming about via natural selection directly contradicted what my church and parents taught me about the origins of life. From one corner of my page of sparse notes, a cartoonish rendering of Wortman peered at me from behind oversized spectacles. Abandoning the portrait, I traced angular shapes that fit together like puzzle pieces and circled them with flowers and vines. Then Wortman caught me.

“What, do you think you know this already?” Wortman asked indignantly, leaning on my student desk where my incriminating notebook lay. “Could you take the test right now?”

I was mortified.

(Of course, this “were you there” question was likely not asked in history classes about the Civil War. But then, perhaps the entire universe was created 100 years ago, just before any of us were born, or perhaps 2 minutes ago, complete with all our memories of a past.)

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution, Human Progress, Morality | Comments Off on Links and Comments: About religious parents shielding their children from reality

How Science Works, Concerning that Retracted Gay Marriage Survey, and the Ironies

Posted on Monday 25 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

New York Times op-ed: What’s Behind Big Science Frauds?

Other links:

SFGate: Study retracted: 20 minutes actually CAN’T change a homophobe’s mind

The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova: How a Gay-Marriage Study Went Wrong

This concerns a report from a few weeks ago that I blogged about here — Links and Comments: Politics and Ideology; About Changing One’s Mind — concerning a series of in-person interviews with people about subjects including gay marriage. The results indicated that when the interviews were themselves gay, and had personal stories to tell, the interviewees often changed their minds, with lasting results. Somehow the personal connection made a difference. (The study included other topics, such as abortion, where the interviews had themselves had abortions, and explained the circumstances that led them to such a difficult decision.)

Now, suddenly, the lead author of that report has asked to retract its conclusion, because apparently the grad student who did the research cannot produce his evidence. Perhaps he faked it? Or something more complicated? That grad student plans a formal reply by the end of the month.

But this is how science works. Yes, scientists are people too, they are given toward mental biases such as confirmation bias, and there is huge pressure on grad students to produce results worthy of publication in prestigious journals.

But the fakers will be found out, whether they were deliberate or subconscious; that’s how science works. Results must be validated and reproduced. If not they will be corrected or withdrawn, as has happened here. For now.

(In contrast, when was the last time some religious pundit — insert any of dozens of names here — declared that he’d made a mistake, and his previous condemnation of this or that group was in error? Rather, see the current news about Mike Huckabee defending the Duggars. He has very different standards for those on his side and those on his other.)

Ironies:

In my earlier post I noted how this result challenged my provisional conclusion that most people simply cannot change their minds about anything. (Scientists supposedly are willing to, when evidence and studies shift, but even they sometimes have difficulty due to the psychological biases we are all given to.) This new development retracts the challenge to that conclusion.

And yet — here’s this huge political results in which a popular vote in Ireland has approved same-sex marriage (e.g. CNN), a circumstance unthinkable a decade or two ago.

What happened? Is it because people *change their minds*??

Or, perhaps, the march of history, the arcs of progress, depend on the old folks dying off and the younger generation, with a wider experience of the world and a great understanding of that world, take over?

Posted in MInd, Psychology, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on How Science Works, Concerning that Retracted Gay Marriage Survey, and the Ironies

Bodega Bay and The Birds

Posted on Sunday 24 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Today we took a mid-Memorial weekend day drive, from Oakland. We’d planned a drive up to the Russian River area, thinking to drive up the coast with a stop in Bodega Bay for lunch. We left at 11am; it took 4 hours to get to Bodega Bay. Partly due to traffic getting thru SF before the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly the slow drive (including some traffic) along Route 1, a beautiful drive once you’re along the coast, but not fast.

So we mosied around Bodega Bay and called it a day. We had oysters at Fisherman’s Cove, and a nice early dinner at Terrapin Creek Cafe Restaurant, which I am happy to plug.

Bodega Bay, of course, is the setting of the Hitchcock film The Birds, and I was fascinated to look around see if I could spot any specific locations. The only one I saw was the wharf area where, in the film, locals complain in a diner, Tippi Hedren is trapped in a phone booth as the birds attack, and this attack triggers a gasoline fire at a fill-up station. The wharf is still there, the diner greatly expanded.

We drove all the way around the bay, wondering if the house where Rod Taylor’s character (Mitch Brenner) lived actually existed. No sign of it.

Of course, there are any number of websites (and I have a book, somewhere, about film locations), that explain in great detail what scenes were shot where. E.g., this one, http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/birds.html, which explains that schoolhouse where the birds sat on power lines before attacking children was actually a few miles inland, not right above the bay as it seems in the film; and this one, http://www.bodegabay.com/index.php/visitor-info/articles-reviews-and-stories/41-the-birds-and-bodega-bay, which explains that the Brenner [Rod Taylor’s character] house was used only for exterior shots and has long since been demolished. (The interior scenes of this house and other scenes were filmed on soundstages back in LA.)

No surprise of course; all films of this era mixed live locations, usually with somewhat fictitious geography, and scenes filmed on sets in Hollywood.

But it was impressive to see the general area of Bodega Bay, and how it did overall resemble the locale of the film. I don’t have a conscious bucket list — but visiting this location is something I’ve long thought about, and am happy to have fulfilled.

Posted in Films, Personal history | Comments Off on Bodega Bay and The Birds

Links and Comments: The Duggars, and other Religious Matters

Posted on Friday 22 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve been only vaguely more aware of the Duggar family, who apparently host a reality show to show off their 19 children and their piety, than I was aware of the Duck Dynasty family a year or more ago when they were in the news, but haven’t paid any close attention to them. With the scandal in the past couple days of their oldest son having been charged with molesting several girls (including his own sisters!), it seems they’re just another in a growing list of sex scandals among far-right fundamentalists. So, hypocrisy from the right; yawn.

But what’s especially interesting about the Duggars is not just that their pious zeal leads them to actively campaign against gay rights (and impugn that gays are despicable people in general — given to molesting children!), but they apparently are an extreme example of the folks — examples come from all around the world — who shield their children from the outside world, from modernity in general, and one can only suppose anything scientific that would undermine or question their faith-based worldview.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate pities Josh Duggar. (With a photo of the family having lunch with Rick Santorum…)

A boy grows up in a controlling, cultlike family that rejects Enlightenment values and closes off much of the outside world. He is deprived of any conception of morality separate from a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. His intellectual and ethical development is stunted by reactionary, dogmatic views about gender and sexuality. He is told that women were made to be subservient to men, to be obedient to their masters. How should we react when it comes to light that this boy repeatedly molested young girls?
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Although TLC goes to great lengths to mask this fact, the Duggar family is a cult. They forbid their children from exploring outside ideas and expression, carefully monitoring every word and image they are exposed to. They forbid them from wearing shorts. They homeschool them in order to indoctrinate them with backward beliefs. They refuse to let their adult daughters kiss or hold hands before marriage and demand to read every text between their daughters and their suitors. They adhere to a fringe Christian movement called the “Christian patriarchy,” which commands total female submission to men and limited education for women. The Duggars do everything they can to control their children’s minds, then brainwash them with misogynistic dogma.

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Jerry Coyne, who just published a new book, did an interview with fivebooks.com recommending his five favorite books on “the incompatibility of religion and science” (which is the theme of his book). I’ve read one of these (Dennett), and have two others.

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Catching up with several articles last weekend at Salon.

  • The end of religion as we know it: Why churches can no longer hide the truth. Daniel Dennett has updated his book about closeted religious clergy… who go through the motions without anymore believing.

    Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

  • Richard Dawkins doesn’t “give a damn”: The big mistake he’s making about religion. The writer claims it’s more than about whether religious claims are ‘true’ (Dawkins’ mistake); it’s about

    Religions make all sorts of claims about the empirical world, almost all of which are false. Atheists are right to criticize these claims wherever they appear. But denying the truth claims of religion won’t suffice, because religion is about much more than truth; it’s about meaning, values, tradition, consolation, community, and transcendence. Dawkins flew right past this point in his response. That’s unfortunate.

    I disagree; this actually is the theme of Coyne’s book; it does matter, because in their zeal to cling to meaning and tradition, many faithful actively deny the reality of the world in which we live, to the extent of hobbling their own offspring (cf. the Duggars), but also actively imposing these views and blinders on the rest of society. Even if many religious people don’t take scriptural claims literally, it’s the minority who do who cause all the trouble, and who are a threat to the ongoing progress of an enlightened society.

  • And then Jeffrey Tayler takes on not just the Republican presidential candidates, who all pander to some degree or another to the faithful who form their base (though some of them — Cruz? Santorum? actually believe it all)– but also President Obama, for similar, if milder, pandering. This doesn’t surprise me; as I’ve said here, no politician gets elected to office anywhere, in any society, without appealing to the beliefs and prejudices of the common people. But it’s nice to see Tayler spell things out: Obama, Bush and Carson believe this nonsense? Our faith-addled, God-fearing leaders need to put superstition aside.

    But I won’t deal with the faith-imbued cretinism of the Republicans in this essay.  What concerns me now is what President Obama has just wrought to insult that most aggrieved (yet steadfastly growing) American minority, the advocates of reason, those who insist on evidence before accepting the truth of a given proposition, especially grand propositions about the origins of the universe and our species.

    Tayler takes apart Obama’s National Day of Prayer proclimation, in detail. The essay concludes:

    Religion is not some metaphysical conceit concerning only those who profess it; it menaces our national well-being and is dumbing down our people.  Faith has always stood on the wrong side of the quest for truth, starting most egregiously with Christian theologians objecting to “heresies” that posited nature following laws (an infringement on God’s “omnipotence”), the earth orbiting the sun, or humankind sharing kinship with other primates.  The last two “heresies” are alive and well: one out of five Americans believe the sun circles the earth, four out of 10 think God created humankind less than 10,000 years ago, and only 28 percent of teachers consistently teach evolution.  Surely a generation of heavily faith-polluted home-schooling plays into this, but so does God-friendly prattle proffered by politicians – including, of course, our Panderer-in-Chief and his Prayer Day Proclamation – an outrage to rationalists everywhere who expect the United States to set an example.
    …
    It’s long past time for Obama, and the pack of faith-mongering pols clambering to replace him, to realize this, and help America join the rest of the civilized world.

    H. L. Mencken once wrote of the “graveyard of the dead gods” and listed all those deities, from Resheph to Baal, Tezcatilpoca to Huitzilopochtli and dozens more, now forgotten.  Yet in their day, “To doubt them was to die,” noted Mencken, “usually at the stake.  Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels: villages were burned, women and children were butchered, cattle were driven off.”

    It’s time to dig one more grave – and fill it.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Progress, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: The Duggars, and other Religious Matters

Instant Insanity

Posted on Thursday 21 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Does anyone remember this? Wikipedia: Instant Insanity

This was a puzzle that was produced in the late 1960s, a stack of four plastic cubes, with the sides of each cube a seemingly random pattern of red, white, green, and blue sides. The object of the puzzle, once you unwrap it and scramble it, is to restack the cubes such that each side of the stack has all four colors. (Before you unwrapped it, the cubes were stacked in the solved solution.)

Here is the solution. These are front, right, left, and back colors. Start at the top, and there is only one cube that will fit each sequence.

blue red blue white
white green red green
red white green blue
green blue white red

I think I bought this puzzle when I was… 12 or 13, in 1967 or 1968. It was after our family had moved from southern California, to Cambridge, Illinois, a small Bradbury-esque town where we stayed for a few months in my grandfather’s house until my father bought a house in a Chicago suburb (Glen Ellyn), where we subsequently lived for three years while he worked as an engineering architect for what became known as Fermilab, and where I finished junior high school and started high school (at Glenbard East — everything is online these days!).

In my grandfather’s house in Cambridge, I brought home this cellophane-wrapped Instant Insanity puzzle, bought from the local drug store/soda fountain, Swan’s — which shows up now as a liquor store! — and where I wrote down and memorized the sequence of colors around each cube, the sequences I remember to this day.

That’s how much a geek I have always been.

(Years later was Rubik’s Cube. Another post.)

Posted in Personal history | Comments Off on Instant Insanity

Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: Our Best Presidents Are Flip-Floppers

Politicians are attacked for changing their positions due to political expediency — as Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a one-time biology major, has done about the teaching of creationism in schools, to appeal to his ignorant base — but changing one’s mind in reaction to new evidence should be a measure of intellectual integrity. (That’s how science works.) Of course, the link above is about how politicians do this for political expediency…

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The event of this week is the publication of Jerry Coyne’s long-awaited book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. Got my copy today. Its topics are familiar to me as themes of this blog, but it’s nice seeing all these issues summarized and encapsulated into a rigorously referenced and indexed volume. I’ll blog my own summary and responses in a week or so.

Coyne’s own distillation of the themes of this book formed this short essay at The Scientist:

But while science and religion both claim to discern what’s true, only science has a system for weeding out what’s false. In the end, that is the irreconcilable conflict between them. Science is not just a profession or a body of facts, but, more important, a set of cognitive and practical tools designed to understand brute reality while overcoming the human desire to believe what we like or what we find emotionally satisfying. The tools are many, including observation of nature, peer review and replication of results, and above all, the hegemony of doubt and criticality. The best characterization of science I know came from physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”

In contrast, religion has no way to adjudicate its truth claims, for those claims rest on ancient scripture, revelation, dogma, and above all, faith: belief without sufficient evidence. Is there one God, or many? Does he want us to work on the Sabbath? Is there an afterlife? Was Jesus the son of God? The problem, of course, is that faith is no way to decide what’s true. It is, à la Feynman, an institutionalized way of fooling yourself. Religion acts like science in making claims about reality, but then morphs into pseudoscience in the way it rejects disconfirming evidence and insulates its claims against testing. The toolkit of science is—and will remain—the only way to discover what’s real, whether in biology, physics, history, or archaeology. Religion can offer communality and can buttress morality, but has no purchase on truth.

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The Independent: All fiction follows one of six basic storylines, according to new research.

I recall Hemingway (or was in Heinlein?) said there are only three basic stories. Anyway, here is more evidence that I need to understand concerning my Provisional Conclusion about narratives — that we as human beings, our minds having been honed by evolution for survival, rather than accurate perception of the real world, interpret everything in terms of cause and effect, beginnings, middles, and ends — because our daily lives involve incidents that have consequences. And this is why we have such negative reactions to narratives (e.g. certain TV series) that don’t end as we think they should.

The most popular storyline, according this article:

What do the following novels have in common: Pride and Prejudice, Brideshead Revisited and Carry On Jeeves? Well yes, they’re all written in English by famous English authors, and they all feature characters and dialogue; but on the face of it, they’re completely different. Not to Professor Matthew Jockers from Stanford University, they’re not.

According to his computerised analysis, they’d all be examples of the “Man in a Hole” form of fiction – an emotional arc in which our hero/heroine starts out happy, hits a patch of unhappiness (Lizzie Bennett discovers her baby sister’s been seduced by the cad Wickham, Charles Ryder discovers his best friend Sebastian is a hopeless drunk, Bertie is tasked with stealing an embarrassing manuscript from a prospective father-in-law) and winds up happier and/or wiser at the end.

Prof Jockers suggests that 46 per cent of the world’s novels are variants of the Man in a Hole storyline. …

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There have been numerous articles in recent weeks and months about “triggering events”, about whether students in literature classes at universities, say, should be warned in advance that the various classic works of literature (Shakespeare, et al., et al.) that certain situations in these works might … upset them. That is, acknowledging the reality that many events in human history have involved murder, rape, sexism, and so on, which while hopefully will not affect any of these students’ lives, but which nevertheless actually happened in the past, might be troubling to their studies.

Here’s Jerry Coyne again, at New Republic, on this subject: Life Is “Triggering.” The Best Literature Should Be, Too.

The pathway of such trigger warnings—not just for sexual assault but for violence, bigotry, and racism—will eventually lead to every work of literature being labeled as potentially offensive. There goes the Bible, there goes Dante, there goes Huck Finn (loaded with racism), there goes all the old literature written before we realized that minorities, women, and gays weren’t second-class people. And as for violence and hatred, well, they’re everywhere, for they’re just as much parts of literature as parts of life. Crime and Punishment? Trigger warning: brutal violence against an old woman. The Great Gatsby? Trigger warning: violence against women (remember when Tom Buchanan broke Mrs. Wilson’s nose?). The Inferno? Trigger warning: graphic violence, sodomy, and torture. Dubliners? Trigger warning: pedophilia. 

Which is to say, the *whole point* of reading literature is to expose readers to other ideas and realities, about why other people have different ideas about what is true and proper, and while what you may upset about in any particular story is not something necessarily universal. Which leads us back to Coyne’s new book, about how science and faith have such different, and dramatically differently effective, methods for identifying what is real about the world.

Posted in Book Notes, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Flip-Flopping Politicians; Jerry Coyne’s new book; Six Basic Storylines; Trigger Events

Links and Comments: Decline of US Religion; Narrative in Science and TV Finales

Posted on Monday 18 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Major news this past week, covered by many sources.

NPR: Christians In U.S. On Decline As Number Of ‘Nones’ Grows, Survey Finds

Washington Post: Christianity faces sharp decline as Americans are becoming even less affiliated with religion

It’s often been noted that religiosity drops with rising economic conditions and educational levels, but this shift seems to be something different – the polarization of American politics, and the association of religion with retrogressive social policies.

And there have been several articles like this recently, pointing out how the modern Christian fundamentalist movement is an artifact, not of anything our ‘Founding Fathers’ did or intended, but on social and economic and political forces of the 20th century.

Salon: Christian fundamentalism is a capitalist construct: The secret history of American religion.

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Leonard Mlodinow, whose new book THE UPRIGHT THINKERS I just bought, has an associated op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago: It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science.

This is about how the common narratives about certain scientific discoveries — Darwin and the finches, Newton and the apple, Hawking and black holes [as depicted in the film The Theory of Everything] — are at best simplifications of much more complex and subtle events. To me this is about the human bias toward narrative — making complex events simple and easy to understand within some basic template.

We all run into difficult problems in life, and we will be happier and more successful if we appreciate that the answers often aren’t quick, or easy.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project summed up a recent study by saying that the negative effects of today’s ubiquitous media “include a need for instant gratification.” The Darwin, Newton and Hawking of the myths received that instant gratification. The real scientists did not, and real people seldom do.

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Along the same lines, an NPR story this morning by Shankar Vedantam, about how TV show finales (in particular last night’s Mad Men finale) affect, of all things, the stock market. It’s about how important narratives are to our lives, and how the endings of stories by characters we’ve come to identify with leave people in a kind of mourning, and thus more risk-averse.

Some psychologists have made the argument that for most of our evolutionary history, the only characters we saw around us were real people who were physically around us. … Today, a lot of the faces and voices we hear around us come from technology. And at a conscious level, we know those people are not actually in our physical presence. But at an unconscious level, the machinery in our brains, which evolved in this different time period, makes us feel as though these people are actually our real companions. And so this is why when people hear about scandals and gossip involving celebrities or politicians, we react to those scandals and that gossip as if we’re hearing about actual people in our lives when in fact we have no connection with those people whatsoever.

Posted in Human Progress, Narrative, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Decline of US Religion; Narrative in Science and TV Finales

Bad Astronomy, 1

Posted on Tuesday 12 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m currently reading through the eponymous book by the popular ‘Bad Astronomy’ blogger Phil Plait, now posting regularly at Slate.com, where he celebrates scientific breakthroughs and criticizes anti-science movements (anti-vaxxers, state-sanctioned teaching of creationism, etc.). His first book, which I’ll review more fully once I finish it, explores various misconceptions about astronomy (thus the title), from ideas about the tides to the illusion of the moon’s size near the horizon, to the moon landing ‘hoax’, to top examples of bad astronomy in Hollywood pictures.

Some of these, e.g. the moon illusion, I’m familiar with since my earliest reading — e.g. Martin Gardner’s Science Puzzlers, which I must have bought at a book fair in the 7th grade.

Which is to say, an underlying theme of this book, and of that old book, is how human intuition and perception can be misleading. (And thus one of my provisional conclusions.) A paragraph from Plait, page 86:

My point here is that often our perceptions conflict with reality. Usually reality knows what it is doing and it’s we, ourselves, who are wrong. In a sense, that’s not just the point of this chapter but indeed this whole book. Maybe we should always keep that thought in mind.

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