"I Can't Believe What I'm Seeing: A Springtime (Froggy) Miracle"

Death and Resurrection in nature, from NPR.

"Where Life Has Meaning: Poor, Religious Countries"

From Julie Beck in The Atlantic; my bolding:

Much ink, film, and many ones and zeros have been spilled on the topic of how to be happy lately. Science has given us some clues, often subdividing"happiness" into smaller parts: the importance of relationships and social connection, the positive effects of optimism.

This sort of research gets a lot of attention when it comes out, as unhappy or even just vaguely dissatisfied people clamor for a fix. Maybe if we can unravel all the threads of happiness’s snarled tapestry and see how they fit together, we’ll finally be able to weave our own lives into a reasonable facsimile thereof.

We’ve seen before that perhaps the most important thread—more important than diet or exercise or the easy but often-unfulfilling  happiness of a booze-soaked evening—is the feeling that your life means something, that you have purpose. How to get that, of course, is another knot to untangle.

A recent study in Psychological Science takes a global look at the quest for meaning, analyzing data from the Gallup World Poll to determine where people feel meaning, and how they found it. The survey data comes from 132 countries in 2007—the researchers specifically looked at self-reported meaning in life, religiosity, fertility rates, GDP, and suicide rates (from the World Health Organization).

Previous research has shown that wealthy countries typically rank higher on life satisfaction, which is not the same as meaning.  Satisfaction has to do with “objective living conditions,” the researchers say, which is why wealthy countries with relatively stable economies and political conditions rank higher. But meaning is more subjective.

The Gallup data showed that countries with lower GDPs ranked higher for meaning. Toward the top were Sierra Leone, Togo, Laos, and Senegal, all of which were in the bottom 50 countries in the world for gross domestic product per capita in 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. Poorer countries also had lower suicide rates.

This looks at first like another tally in the “money can’t buy happiness” column (though in a lot of ways, it can).  But the data also showed that richer countries were less religious than poorer countries. The researchers found that this factor of religiosity mediated the relationship between a country’s wealth and the perceived  meaning in its citizen’s lives, meaning that it was the presence of  religion that largely accounted for the gap between money and meaning.  They analyzed other factor —education, fertility rates, individualism,  and social support (having relatives and friends to count on in troubled times)—to see if they could explain the findings, but in the end it came down to religion.

 Even among countries with similar GDPs, the more religious ones reported higher levels of life meaning. For example, the U.S. and Ireland,relatively religious, wealthy nations, reported higher meaning than Japan and France, which were similarly wealthy, but less religious.

Taking the U.S. as an example, another Gallup poll from May 2013 found that 77 percent of Americans thought religion was losing influence in the U.S., but 75 percent thought the country would  be better off if more Americans were religious. Precisely in what way, it didn’t say. But based on the global study, it appears there’s something to be said for being given answers to the big questions, whether they are true perhaps less important than just having them, sparing yourself the agony of looking.

“Instead of relying on religion to give life meaning, people in wealthy societies today try to create their own meaning via their identity and self-knowledge,” the study reads. It then quotes Roy F. Baumeister’s book Meanings of Life, saying, “creating the meaning of your own life sounds very nice as an ideal, but in reality it may be impossible.” Maybe that’s what the proliferation of happiness literature, as well as the study of happinessis, at least in part: an attempt to create the meaning of our own lives.

Christianity and "The Righteous Mind"

I haven't read the book, but have been thinking in a general way about the moral categories in Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind:  Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion.  These categories are:

• Loyalty
• Authority
• Sanctity
• Caring
• Fairness

You can test your own ideas about these things at YourMorals.Org, at the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," which Haidt developed in doing this research.   Here's the results page from that site, including the bar graph below comparing my results with those of others:

The scale you completed was the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia. 

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained three questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity. 

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations - harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations.

This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.

In the graph below, your scores on each foundation are shown in green (the 1st bar in each set of 3 bars). The scores of all liberals who have taken it on our site are shown in blue (the 2nd bar), and the scores of all conservatives are shown in red (3rd bar). Scores run from 0 (the lowest possible score, you completely reject that foundation) to 5 (the highest possible score, you very strongly endorse that foundation and build much of your morality on top of it).

What's interesting to me about this goes back to something I read years ago in C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity; Lewis theorized that:

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no "swank" or "side," no putting on airs.

To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls "busybodies."

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, "advanced," but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned-perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine.

I don't agree with some of what he says here - I don't really find the "wives obedient to husbands" thing terribly convincing (and I don't have a dog in that fight!) - but I do find interesting that it so neatly splits the difference between the categories people tend to think in, as outlined in the "five foundations" above.

It reminds me, too, of what Robert Farrar Capon wrote in Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus:

Christian education is not the communication of correct views about what the various works and words of Jesus might mean; rather it is the stocking of the imagination with the icons of those works and words themselves.

It is most successfully accomplished, therefore, not by catechisms that purport to produce understanding but by stories that hang the icons, understood or not, on the walls of the mind. We do not include the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, because we understand it, nor do we omit the parable of the Unjust Steward because we can't make head or tail of it. Rather, we commit both to the Christian memory because that's the way Jesus seems to want the inside of his believers' heads decorated. Indeed, the only really mischievous thing anyone can do with the Gospel is insist on hanging only the pictures he happens to like. That's what heresy really is: picking and choosing, on the basis of my interpretations, between the icons provided to me. Orthodoxy, if it's understood correctly, is simply the constant displaying of the entire collection.

And that helps explain, I think, what religion - Christianity in particular, since it's the only one I know - is actually about:  it's giving the whole picture.  It splits every difference, and fills us out into complete human beings.

It is filling in the gaps we all have in our genes and instincts, and in our minds and hearts; it is teaching a wholeness and an integration by we do not naturally come.   It's working against our negative tendencies and encouraging and reinforcing our positives ones.

That is what "orthodoxy" is.  The amazing thing, in fact, is that it is so comprehensive, and can take account of, and work for, every kind of person.  (In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if it doesn't, it isn't "orthodoxy" at all.)

I started to think about all this because of an online discussion about "natural selection," during which I realized that not only has politics become a totalizing worldview, but so, too, has science - both at the expense of the knowledge of human nature and the human condition itself.   People seem to be becoming more and more distanced from themselves as they really are.  More on that later, probably. 

"Your Brain on Poverty"

A good article by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.   The logic here applies not only to poverty, of course, but to depression and mental illness generally - and to any kind of "bleakness" or brokenness, as mentioned in the Gawker quote:

In August, Science published a landmark study concluding that poverty, itself, hurts our ability to make decisions about school, finances, and life, imposing a mental burden similar to losing 13 IQ points.

It was widely seen as a counter-argument to claims that poor people are "to blame" for bad decisions and a rebuke to policies that withhold money from the poorest families unless they behave in a certain way. After all, if being poor leads to bad decision-making (as opposed to the other way around), then giving cash should alleviate the cognitive burdens of poverty, all on its own.

Sometimes, science doesn't stick without a proper anecdote, and "Why I Make Terrible Decisions," a comment published on Gawker's Kinja platform by a person in poverty, is a devastating illustration of the Science study. I've bolded what I found the most moving, insightful portions, but it's a moving and insightful testimony all the way through.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There’s a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there’s money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It’s more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that’s all you get. You’re probably not compatible with them for anything long-term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long-term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

When neuroscientists Joseph W. Kable and Joseph T. McGuire studied time, uncertainty and decision-making, they found that virtues like patience and self-control weren't as simple previous studies suggested. In the ubiquitous Marshmallow study, for example, kids who ate the treat quickly were deemed impatient and kids who waited had self-control and, on the whole, went on to lead more productive lives, the study found.

But rational self-control in the real world, Kable says, isn't so black-and-white. Perhaps you have enough patience to wait an hour for a train, or to lose one pound each week with exercise and dieting. That sounds responsible. But what happens if the train isn't there in 90 minutes? If you never lose weight and you're making yourself miserable with your diet? Maybe you should give up! "In this situation, giving up can be a natural — indeed, a rational — response to a time frame that wasn’t properly framed to begin with," Maria Konnikova summed it up for the Times.

As Andrew Golis points out, this might suggest something even deeper than the idea that poverty's stress interferes with our ability to make good decisions. The inescapability of poverty weighs so heavily on the author that s/he abandons long-term planning entirely, because the short term needs are so great and the long-term gains so implausible. The train is just not coming. What if the psychology of poverty, which can appear so irrational to those not in poverty, is actually "the most rational response to a world of chaos and unpredictable outcomes," he wrote.

None of this is an argument against poorer families trying to save or plan for the long-term. It's an argument for context. As Eldar Shafir, the author of the Science study, told The Atlantic Cities' Emily Badger: “All the data shows it isn't about poor people, it’s about people who happen to be in poverty. All the data suggests it is not the person, it's the context they’re inhabiting.”

"Lizards rewind the evolutionary clock but end up the same every time"

Interesting, from Ars Technica:

There’s no doubt that we’ve come a long way in our understanding of evolution since Darwin's time. However, there's still a lot we don’t understand about the processes of natural selection, adaptation, and speciation. One question in particular still looms over the field: how predictable is evolution?

On one side, biologists such as Stephen Gould have long argued that evolution is “utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable” due to all sorts of historical accidents and perturbations. "Wind back the tape of life," he wrote, and "the chance becomes vanishingly small" that evolution would proceed in precisely the same way, creating the same set of species. However, in recent years, more and more research has suggested that evolution may actually be quite predictable. New research in the journal Science strengthens this argument by identifying a group of islands where Gould's tape has been wound back multiple times, and evolution has created a near-carbon copy almost every time.

The Greater Antilles are chock full of small lizards called anoles; there are anoles that specialize on twigs, on grasses, and on various parts of trees. Lizards on each island exploit these same niches, and across the entire island chain, anoles that use a particular niche look nearly identical. Grass specialists in Cuba are dead-ringers for those in Jamaica, and anoles that specialize on tree trunks in Puerto Rico could be mistaken for those in Hispaniola or Cuba. The kicker is that each of these islands was colonized separately by just one species of anole. In the forty million years since then, anoles on each island have independently adapted in near-identical ways, right down to the shapes of their tails and the stripes on their sides.

Using various modeling techniques, a group of researchers have shown that this is not a lucky coincidence; instead, evolution may be surprisingly deterministic.

The scientists measured various attributes of 100 lizard species across the Greater Antilles, including measurements of their body size, tail length, limb length, and how many sticky toe-pads they have. After plugging these values into two different models—a Bayesian model and a four-dimensional principal components analysis—the results were clear: species on each island were more similar to those on other islands than would be expected by chance.

But has the whole radiation really repeated itself on each island? To tackle this question, the researchers modeled the “adaptive landscape” of each island, or the various configurations of traits that determine each species’ fitness. They found that there were specific combinations of traits that increased the anoles’ fitness, called “adaptive peaks,” and that anoles on each island tend to converge on these peaks. In these very similar habitats, there are a limited number of configurations that spell success for anoles, producing repeated sets of near-identical lizards.

Over the last 40 million years, there have been ample opportunities for lizards on the four islands to take different evolutionary paths: genetic drift, species invasions, and small climatic differences could have caused divergence. But despite these historical fluctuations, the anoles of the Greater Antilles have evolved in near-parallel ways provided they were occupying the same niche, suggesting that evolution may be more robust to these perturbations than Gould (and others) expected.

(This isn't to say that all the anole species were identical. On the larger islands, Cuba and Hispañola, there are some distinctive habitats that anole species have occupied that aren't shared by the other islands. Those habitats drove distinctive adaptations.)

This work is a remarkable example of convergent evolution on a very grand scale and is a pretty compelling evidence that in at least some cases, evolution can be remarkably deterministic. The Greater Antillean anoles are likely not an isolated case; the authors suggest that the diversification of African cichlids may offer similar evidence of evolution’s predictability. While random genetic mutations may be the fodder for natural selection over the long run, some aspects of evolution may not be very random after all.

HT Nick.

"The purgative way"

Here's an excerpt from Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America. There are four chapters in this book, covering Prayer, Marian Devotion, Confession, and the Eucharist; this excerpt is from the chapter titled "In the Court of Conscience: American Catholics and Confession 1900-1975," by James O'Toole.  I added the bolding.

For many, the familiar phrases of sermons they had heard on the subject [of Confession] rang true, and they described in glowing terms the sense of relief and joy that followed a visit to the confessional.  Dorothy Day - not, to be sure, an "ordinary Catholic" in any sense of the term, but a woman who, by her own account, had had some considerable experience with sin - remembered affectionately the "warm, dimly lit vastness" of the church as she waited her turn and the welcoming, "patient" attitude of her confessor.  Another mid-twentieth-century penitent said that he genuinely enjoyed going to confession because he found it an "individualized" procedure, in which the priest was "less interested in the guilt of the penitent than he is in helping the latter to avoid sin in the future."  Still another enthused over priests who "give you the impression that they have all the time in the world, that the only thing that matters is for you to  ... unburden your heart."  A woman who mentioned that there was a long line waiting behind her got a soothing response.  "At this precise moment," the kindly priest replied, "you are the only person in this church who matters."  Experiences of this sort could have a powerful emotional impact.   A character in a 1950 short story about a long-delayed confession left the box so moved by the feeling of "complete forgiveness and gentleness" that "his throat was choked and he felt close to tears."

The anonymity of the transaction appealed to most penitents and enhanced its potency.  In fact, parishioners probably worried more than they had to about the possibility of being recognized in the confessional.  Individual traits were masked by the darkness and by the whispering tones in which the sacrament was usually conducted.  Even more effective in obscuring the identity of penitents was the sheer number of confessions priests heard.  A confessor could not possibly remember particular people, a diocesan liturgical commission newsletter pointed out in 1966, "when he is faced with one hundred or more confessions" at once.  "you don't have much capacity for remembering the sins of any individual," another priest said frankly; "all the stories blur together" and all the voices "are like the one great voice of humanity."  A lay woman from Louisiana in the 1970s found all this "a great comfort," since she knew that she could say anything without fear of embarrassment.  A woman in Maine agreed:  "I feel shy and uncomfortable discussing my faults face to face with a fellow human being," she said, even a priest, and the darkness of the confessional was thus very welcome.  The clergy were no less glad to be spared having to see their penitents.  "It is much easier to avoid embarrassment in dealing with people outside of confession," said Gerald Kelly in his advice to "good" confessors, "when we have no confessional knowledge of them."

The salutary impact of confession may also have derived in part from the very fact that it was a difficult and serious business.  "Confession gives you that little rush," one appreciative lay man said, "that bit of fear that keeps you on your toes."  Fear had its uses, and many found in the sacrament echoes of familiar devotional themes.  The "purgative way" in the American Catholic spirituality, which Joseph Chinnici has described, stressed the benefits of doing things that were difficult, and many thought confession worthwhile for just that reason.  The priest who had encouraged the men of his parish to "do the manly thing" by going to confession was tailoring his message particularly for them, but priests often stressed the value of "heroic virtue" of penitents of any gender or age.  "Get the habit of doing things because they are hard," a counselor to teenagers said in 1949; "it will be difficult at first, but they will become easy as time goes on." .... The language of jails and trials proved remarkably resilient, and this reinforced both the sense of dread a penitent might feel before entering the box and the feeling of relief on leaving it.  The force of such imagery might even be missed if an individual abandoned the sacrament.  The narrator of John R. Power's Last Catholic in America gave up going to confession, but he was nonetheless wistful whenever he recalled the last time he had done so:  "I was never again to feel ... the exhilaration of rising from the spiritually dead.  Never again to be free from sin, free from sin, free from sin."

Perhaps because of its inherent difficulties, confession served as a badge of honor for American Catholics, one that stood out in sharp relief from non-Catholic alternatives.  In particular, it offered a striking contrast to Protestant and other "peace of mind" movements in the middle of the twentieth century.  For years, Catholic writers continued to trumpet remarks by Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1927 that Protestants should consider reviving a form of confession, not as a sacrament but rather as a system of counseling in which "the confession of sin and spiritual misery is met with sympathetic and intelligent treatment."  Catholics had no need of such a revival, since they were sure they already had it a purer and better form.  Other writers pressed the same point.  Without mentioning Norman Vincent Peale by name, the Paulist John Sheerin took on the best-selling author in 1951 and scoffed at those who thought that they could find a "rosy way of the Cross." Peale's techniques for self-realization and harmony with the divine were "religious in tone," Sheerin said dismissively, "but how soft and namby-pamby."  Others agreed that there was no getting around the "brutal and humbling" fact of human nature that confession underlined:  sometimes, it was necessary simply to admit "I have sinned" and to take the consequences.  Confession was "not a pleasing prospect; but then, the sacraments are not devices for making us pleasing to ourselves.  They make us pleasing to God."

“Heaven, Hell and Earth”

"Bridging Approaches to Mental Illness in Sierra Leone," at NYTimes.com:

War leaves all manner of scars, and the dusty towns in eastern Sierra Leone still bear the marks of a decade of civil strife.

Cities like Koidu, in the diamond-rich Kono district, were the site of many of the atrocities carried out by rebels backed by former President Charles G. Taylor of Liberia, Sierra Leone’s southern neighbor. Unfathomable acts like amputations lend a particularly gruesome hue to the murder, rape and terror that characterized the conflict.

“The history of the war is everywhere,” said Nyani Quarmyne, a Ghanaian photographer who visited last year. “There are bombed-out buildings all over the place. There are people wandering around with both their hands hacked off.”

It’s this kind of trauma, shared on such a scale — an entire nation — that can drive a person to madness. “One has a sense that there are a number of damaged people wandering around,” Mr. Quarmyne said. “How could there not be?” And, despite some improvements in the quality of life of the people of Sierra Leone, it still lacks effective ways to address chronic and profound corruption, poverty, unemployment and substandard health care.

And, not least, mental health care.

Mr. Quarmyne had previously worked in his native Accra, Ghana, to document the toll of mental illness. There, he met a Prague-based writer named Catherine Cooper who told him about the Wellbody Alliance, a clinic run by Dr. Mohamed Bailor Barrie of Sierra Leone and Dr. Dan Kelly of the United States. Mr. Quarmyne and Ms. Cooper made a trip there together. With the cooperation of Wellbody staffers and the consent of the patients’ family members, who were often present, they set out to understand the patients at the clinic, which blends the services of faith healers and so-called witch doctors with medicine-based psychiatry.

In a country where mental illness is widely stigmatized, and certainly not viewed in medical terms, it’s a pragmatic way to draw in patients. When the afflicted believe they married witches, were cursed by devils or swallowed evil snakes, appeals to empirical reason can seem naïve. There, mental illness is framed spiritually.

Nyani Quarmyne
Isata, the mother of a patient named Mohammed, who lives in an abandoned taxi, received medication for her son from Ahmadu Jalloh, the manager of the mental health program at the Wellbody Alliance clinic.

According to Mr. Quarmyne, this mixed approach worked reasonably well with the faith healer. “He’s a lovely man,” he said. “He would refer patients to the clinic, and in that way they received a mix of medical treatment as well as spiritual treatment from the faith healer.”

Not so with the witch doctor. Motivated, perhaps, by his ego, he seemed eager to demonstrate his powers. “He had, shall we say, a very robust belief in his abilities,” Mr. Quarmyne said. “At the same time, he was afraid that what the doctors really wanted to do was find out his secrets and steal them.

“There was a great deal of distrust or suspicion in that relationship,” he said.

That distrust frustrates the doctors’ efforts as very real needs go unmet. There was one patient who thought it was 2003, a year after the civil war ended, and who heard voices, planes and helicopters when there was silence. Another case saddened Mr. Quarmyne because the patient struck him as full of promise. Samuel (Slide 11), fiercely intelligent, creative and “remarkably articulate,” Mr. Quarmyne said, “had made it as far as university, which in many ways is a really significant achievement considering the background he’d come from.” But Samuel believed that he was Haile Selassie, the former Ethiopian emperor, and that he had gotten married in the underworld. He spoke of a figure he’d drawn on his wall as his spiritual tutor.

What Mr. Quarmyne also found unsettling was Samuel’s use of drugs, particularly marijuana. He had seen a great deal of cannabis use among mentally ill Ghanaians as well, and it struck a personal chord. Mr. Quarmyne felt that what separated him from them was arbitrary, yet decisive. “Coming from a background of relative privilege, there are a number of things that I look out and think, ‘Whoa, were it not for an accident of birth, it could be me under these circumstances,’ ” he said.

But few others seem to care. Mr. Quarmyne’s work is largely unfinanced, and his traveling partner, Ms. Cooper, has yet to find a publisher for her essay about Dr. Barrie’s and Dr. Kelly’s efforts. Besides the cultural obstacles, the clinic faces enormous logistical problems — maintaining a reliable supply of medications, for example, or trying to integrate its services, and psychiatry and counseling in general, with the larger Sierra Leonean health care system. “The unfortunate fact of it is, it’s not a sexy topic anywhere,” Mr. Quarmyne said. “Much less in this part of the world, where nobody wants to have anything to do with the mentally ill.”

Mr. Quarmyne’s photo series and Ms. Cooper’s unpublished essay are titled “Heaven, Hell and Earth,” reflecting the varying versions of medicine, well-being and spirituality they encountered in the Kono district. There is no electricity or running water in Koidu, and virtually no paved roads. Mr. Quarmyne spent his days hearing about the dark world, demons, sickness and horror. Water was fetched from a well, and at night, it was pitch black. “Some nights you would hear people singing spiritual songs at the home of the faith healer,” he said. “Other nights you would hear drumming and chanting, and nobody could tell you what it was.”

And there is nothing like total darkness to invite people to explore their own mental recesses. “Both Catherine and I went in there with very clear views of real versus unreal, normal versus not normal, if it’s between reality, superstition, etc.,” Mr. Quarmyne said. “And that got shaken up pretty well on this trip.”

Nineteen Sixty-four: Hypothesis Confirmed: "Knowledgeable Doubters" are Rare

Nineteen Sixty-four: Hypothesis Confirmed: "Knowledgeable Doubters" are Rare:

Back in 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life conducted a survey that concluded, “More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ.” At the time, I cautioned about interpreting the meaning of these results by noting that knowledge may not always represent belief (...also pointing out that even 59% of Protestants state a belief in Transubstantiation). I argued that, "Strangely enough, many Catholics believe what their Church teaches without realizing that their Church teaches it." Some commenting online scoffed at the idea that this could actually be the case.

At the time the data did not exist to test this notion. Now it does in the newly released landmark study American Catholics in Transition by William V. D'Antonio, Michele Dillon, and Mary L. Gautier (i.e., the famous senior research associate at CARA). This is the 5th book in this series of research that began in 1987.

In comparison to the Pew study, D'Antonio et al. find that half of self-identified adult Catholics (50%) are unaware that the Catholic Church teaches the following about the bread and wine used for Communion: "the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ." However, 63% of adult Catholics, regardless of what they think the Church teaches, believe that "at the Consecration during a Catholic Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Jesus Christ."

As shown below, this creates four groups. The largest are "knowledgeable believers," representing 46% of adult Catholics, who are aware of the Church's teachings about the Real Presence and say they believe these to be true. Additionally, there is another 17% who believe in the Real Presence but who are unaware that this represents a Church teaching. These are the "unknowing believers."

The second largest group is the "unknowing unbelievers" who do not believe in the Real Presence (i.e., they believe the bread and wine are only symbols) and do not know that this represents a teaching of the Church. There is something hopeful about this group, which represents a third of adult Catholics (33%). Even though they currently do not believe the Church's teaching, they may come to believe it if they knew and understood it better. Knowledge and belief of this may even bring more of them to a Catholic parish on Sundays.

What is rare, representing only 4% of adult Catholics, is someone who knows about the Church's teachings regarding the Real Presence and who states they do not believe this teaching to be true. These are the "knowledgeable doubters" (...note that this study uses the same methods of CARA Catholic Polls, e.g., anonymity, self-administered response without an interviewer, which limit social desirability bias).

What I have noted above is just one tidbit from American Catholics in Transition, which is an extraordinary piece of research.

There are often many anecdotes (or survey results based on small Catholic samples) thrown around about what is going on among Catholics from parish life to politics. This book provides some data that confirms and denies many of these anecdotes. It spends a good deal of time disentangling generational and gender differences. The latter providing some of the biggest surprises and concerns.

I am thankful to the authors for taking the time to test one of my ideas (...it helps when a co-author sits a few steps away!). I think there is some reassurance in their conclusion about the data above: "Among all Catholics who know what the Church teaches about the Real Presence, fewer than 1 in 10 (9 percent) say that they do not believe the doctrine." Now we know that lack of belief in the Real Presence is more a problem of religious education than of doubt.

"The Heart Grows Smarter"

David Brooks today, at NYTimes.com.  My bolding.

If you go back and read a bunch of biographies of people born 100 to 150 years ago, you notice a few things that were more common then than now.

First, many more families suffered the loss of a child, which had a devastating and historically underappreciated impact on their overall worldviews.

Second, and maybe related, many more children grew up in cold and emotionally distant homes, where fathers, in particular, barely knew their children and found it impossible to express their love for them.

It wasn’t only parents who were emotionally diffident; it was the people who studied them. In 1938, a group of researchers began an intensive study of 268 students at Harvard University. The plan was to track them through their entire lives, measuring, testing and interviewing them every few years to see how lives develop.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the researchers didn’t pay much attention to the men’s relationships. Instead, following the intellectual fashions of the day, they paid a lot of attention to the men’s physiognomy. Did they have a “masculine” body type? Did they show signs of vigorous genetic endowments?

But as this study — the Grant Study — progressed, the power of relationships became clear. The men who grew up in homes with warm parents were much more likely to become first lieutenants and majors in World War II. The men who grew up in cold, barren homes were much more likely to finish the war as privates.

Body type was useless as a predictor of how the men would fare in life. So was birth order or political affiliation. Even social class had a limited effect. But having a warm childhood was powerful. As George Vaillant, the study director, sums it up in “Triumphs of Experience,” his most recent summary of the research, “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”

Of the 31 men in the study incapable of establishing intimate bonds, only four are still alive. Of those who were better at forming relationships, more than a third are living.

It’s not that the men who flourished had perfect childhoods. Rather, as Vaillant puts it, “What goes right is more important than what goes wrong.” The positive effect of one loving relative, mentor or friend can overwhelm the negative effects of the bad things that happen.

In case after case, the magic formula is capacity for intimacy combined with persistence, discipline, order and dependability. The men who could be affectionate about people and organized about things had very enjoyable lives.

But a childhood does not totally determine a life. The beauty of the Grant Study is that, as Vaillant emphasizes, it has followed its subjects for nine decades. The big finding is that you can teach an old dog new tricks. The men kept changing all the way through, even in their 80s and 90s.

One man in the study paid his way through Harvard by working as a psychiatric attendant. He slept from 6 p.m. to midnight. Worked the night shift at a hospital, then biked to class by 8 in the morning. After college, he tried his hand at theater. He did not succeed, and, at age 40, he saw himself as “mediocre and without imagination.” His middle years were professionally and maritally unhappy.

But, as he got older, he became less emotionally inhibited. In old age, he became a successful actor, playing roles like King Lear. He got married at 78. By 86, the only medicine he was taking was Viagra. He lived to 96.

Another subject grew up feeling that he “didn’t know either parent very well.” At 19, he wrote, “I don’t find it easy to make friends.” At 39, he wrote, “I feel lonely, rootless and disoriented.” At 50, he had basically given up trying to socialize and was trapped in an unhappy marriage.

But, as he aged, he changed. He became the president of his nursing home. He had girlfriends after the death of his first wife and then remarried. He didn’t turn into a social butterfly, but life was better.

The men of the Grant Study frequently became more emotionally attuned as they aged, more adept at recognizing and expressing emotion. Part of the explanation is biological. People, especially men, become more aware of their emotions as they get older.

Part of this is probably historical. Over the past half-century or so, American culture has become more attuned to the power of relationships. Masculinity has changed, at least a bit.

The so-called Flynn Effect describes the rise in measured I.Q. scores over the decades. Perhaps we could invent something called the Grant Effect, on the improvement of mass emotional intelligence over the decades. This gradual change might be one of the greatest contributors to progress and well-being that we’ve experienced in our lifetimes.

About Confession

Let me point out, again, the quote from Tom Moran in his article about the Catholic church (my bolding):

I was born into a devout Catholic family, the fifth of nine children. And one of my earliest memories is learning the catechism from my father, a sales executive who was in the habit of going to church every day before work.

He read me stories about the adventures of a boy who was nicknamed “Raggie” because his family was too poor to buy new clothes. Each story had the same basic lesson — good Catholics look after those in need, just as Jesus did. And there is no shame in being poor.

Sign me up. I memorized the prayers, received the sacraments and felt ecstatically cleansed after monthly confessions. I was all in.

And let me quote from the RSA video I posted here a week or so ago, "The Truth About Dishonesty,"  too, while I'm at it.   The video is from a talk by Dan Ariely, "one of the world's leading voices on human motivation and behaviour." There are some really funny anecdotes about the small-scale cheating people do - and about our ability to rationalize it.  (For instance:  an illegal music downloader rationalizes his actions by saying that the bands want their music to be heard, and that he wasn't going to buy the recording anyway so nobody's being hurt, and that the label companies are evil, anyway.  As Ariely notes, he's making himself into a "freedom fighter" rather than somebody who illegally downloads music.)

So we asked, "What would get people to cheat less"?  "What would get rationalization to go down?"   "To [get people to] kind of scrutinize their own actions?"....

We went to UCLA and we asked about 500 students to try and recall the 10 Commandments.  But after trying to recall the 10 Commandments, when we gave them the same opportunity to be dishonest - nobody was dishonest.  In fact, even when we take self-declared atheists and we ask them to swear on the Bible - when we give them a chance to cheat, they don't cheat. 

So this suggests that there is something about reminders, that the moment we think about morality, even if it's not our own moral code, all of a sudden we are kind of supervising ourselves to a higher degree.  We're more thoughtful about our own actions....

We also looked at the Catholic Confession.  We went to talk to Catholic priests, and we said, "From an economic perspective, we don't understand Confession.  Please explain it to us."  We said, "If you can confess and be absolved, shouldn't you cheat more?  Shouldn't you cheat on the way to Confession?"  The priest said, no.

So here are 3 theories of how Confession might work.  One theory is that you think to yourself,  "I want to rob this convenience store - but I'll have to confess.  It will be unpleasant, the priest will think badly of me."  And this added cost makes the whole thing not worthwhile; we don't find any evidence for that.

Another possibility is like the 10 Commandments experiment I told you about.  You come out of Confession and you feel good and wonderful about yourself, and for a little while longer, you want to keep that feeling of being good.  We find some evidence for this.

But the most interesting version is the following.  When we give people hundreds of opportunities to steal and to cheat over time, what we find is that people are slightly dishonest: balancing "feeling good about myself, cheating a little; feeling good, cheating a little."  And then at some point, many people switch and start cheating all the time.  And we call this switching point the "What the Hell?" effect.  It turns out that we don't have to be 100% good to think of ourselves as good.  But if at some point, you don't think of yourself as good, you might as well enjoy it.....

Now, if people cheat a lot all the time, why would they ever stop?  If you think you're going to Hell, in the Catholic version, why would you ever stop?  But the Catholic Confession might have actually stumbled on this - something that might be a really good idea:  if you are cheating a lot, maybe you need to be able to open a new page.

So we did these experiments.  We do a non-Catholic kind of Confession, where people cheat a little bit, or they cheat a lot.  We give them a chance to say what they have done badly, we give them a chance to ask for forgiveness from whatever spirits they believe in - and what happens after they do these two actions together?  Cheating goes down.  Opening a new page does seem to be very successful - and this by the way is something I think religion figured out, and the question is, how do we put it into civic society?....People will transgress; there's nothing we can do about it.  How do we get people to feel clean again?

The first example above is purely subjective about the experience of Confession (yet pretty convincing, I'd say!) and the second was derived experimentally and empirically.  Both say exactly the same thing:  Confession offers people "a way to feel clean again," and so the ability to "open a new page."  (And, of course, millions of A.A. members have experienced this, too.)

It's fairly clear to me that, these days, many people are living in a fury of anger at other people, which comes - I think - from a toxic internal stew.   Look at the anonymous comments on any website that allows them, and what you see is rage.  Now, we live in one of the wealthiest societies in the world - and people who are venting their spleens online, anonymously (and even not), are mostly not the very poor or disenfranchised (who actually have a reason to be angry).  Most people are simply furious because they have no outlet for their pain.  People need a way to feel clean again - or, maybe, for the first time. 


Here's the video again:

"The Psych Approach"

This is David Brooks' column for today - and no surprise to many of us who've seen quite a bit of this; many people who end up in A.A. know everything about it.  In fact, I've always found it sort of amazing that some of the people I've met were able to survive at all - but it's always been difficult to convince the rest of the world about this. 

In the 1990s, Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda conducted a study on adverse childhood experiences. They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured.

The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking. People with an ACE score of 4 were seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults than people with an ACE score of 0. They were six times more likely to have had sex before age 15, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, four times as likely to suffer emphysema. People with an ACE score above 6 were 30 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Later research suggested that only 3 percent of students with an ACE score of 0 had learning or behavioral problems in school. Among students with an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51 percent had those problems.

In Paul Tough’s essential book, “How Children Succeed,” he describes what’s going on. Childhood stress can have long lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.

Tough interviewed a young lady named Monisha, who was pulled out of class by a social worker, taken to a strange foster home and forbidden from seeing her father for months. “I remember the first day like it was yesterday. Every detail. I still have dreams about it. I feel like I’m going to be damaged forever.”

Monisha’s anxiety sensors are still going full blast. “If a plane flies over me, I think they’re going to drop a bomb. I think about my dad dying,” she told Tough. “When I get scared, I start shaking. My heart starts beating. I start sweating. You know how people say ‘I was scared to death’? I get scared that that’s really going to happen to me one day.”

Tough’s book is part of what you might call the psychologizing of domestic policy. In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure, like poor neighborhoods, bad nutrition, schools that are too big or too small. But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning — the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.

Attention has shifted toward the psychological for several reasons. First, it’s become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress. Schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, are among the best college prep academies for disadvantaged kids. But, in its first survey a few years ago, KIPP discovered that three-quarters of its graduates were not making it through college. It wasn’t the students with the lower high school grades that were dropping out most. It was the ones with the weakest resilience and social skills. It was the pessimists.

Second, over the past few years, an array of psychological researchers have taught us that motivation, self-control and resilience are together as important as raw I.Q. and are probably more malleable.

Finally, pop culture has been far out front of policy makers in showing how social dysfunction can ruin lives. You can turn on an episode of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” about a train wreck working-class family. You can turn on “Alaska State Troopers” and see trailer parks filled with drugged-up basket cases. You can listen to rappers like Tyler, The Creator whose songs are angry howls from fatherless men.

Schools are now casting about, trying to find psychological programs that will help students work on resilience, equanimity and self-control. Some schools give two sets of grades — one for academic work and one for deportment.

And it’s not just schools that are veering deeper into the psychological realms. Health care systems are going the same way, tracing obesity and self-destructive habits back to social breakdown and stress.

When you look over the domestic policy landscape, you see all these different people in different policy silos with different budgets: in health care, education, crime, poverty, social mobility and labor force issues. But, in their disjointed ways, they are all dealing with the same problem — that across vast stretches of America, economic, social and family breakdowns are producing enormous amounts of stress and unregulated behavior, which dulls motivation, undermines self-control and distorts lives.

Maybe it’s time for people in all these different fields to get together in a room and make a concerted push against the psychological barriers to success.

This American Life recently did a segment on Paul Tough and his new book, too; very worth listening to.

Some of the skills mentioned above, BTW, are exactly what religion (and A.A.) are attempting to teach.    In addition, the "power greater than oneself" is a straightforward psychological means of throwing off some of that anxiety, by focusing on the larger picture, and finding the confidence of having support where there was none before.

It's what the Psalmist means when he writes:  "Thou art my strong rock, and my castle."

RSA Animate: "The Truth About Dishonesty"

This is pretty good! Worth watching just for the drawing, I think - but of course the content is what I'm mainly interested in here. The voice on the video is Dan Ariely's; he's a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke.  The part about Confession is especially interesting - and so is the thing about the banking crisis.



HT Brain Pickings.

"Does Religion Really Poison Everything?"

From The Chronicle Review, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  At last, somebody's decided to be a bit more reasonable about the whole thing.

When a moth flies at night, it uses the moon and the stars to steer a straight path. Those light sources are fixed and distant, so the rays always strike the moth's multilensed eyes at the same angle, making them reliable for nocturnal navigation. But introduce something else bright—a candle, say, or a campfire—and there will be trouble. The light radiates outward, confusing the moth and causing it to spiral ever closer to the blaze until the insect meets a fiery end.

For years Richard Dawkins has used the self-immolation of moths to explain religion. The example can be found in his 2006 best seller, The God Delusion, and it's been repeated in speeches and debates, interviews and blog posts. Moths didn't evolve to commit suicide; that's an unfortunate byproduct of other adaptations. In much the same way, the thinking goes, human beings embrace religion for unrelated cognitive reasons. We evolved to search for patterns in nature, so perhaps that's why we imagine patterns in religious texts. Instead of being guided by the light, we fly into the flames.

The implication—that religion is basically malevolent, that it "poisons everything," in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens—is a standard assertion of the New Atheists. Their argument isn't just that there probably is no God, or that intelligent design is laughable bunk, or that the Bible is far from inerrant. It's that religion is obviously bad for human beings, condemning them to ignorance, subservience, and endless conflict, and we would be better off without it.

But would we?

Before you can know for sure, you have to figure out what religion does for us in the first place. That's exactly what a loosely affiliated group of scholars in fields including biology, anthropology, and psychology are working on. They're applying evolutionary theory to the study of religion in order to discover whether or not it strengthens societies, makes them more successful, more cooperative, kinder. The scholars, many of them atheists themselves, generally look askance at the rise of New Atheism, calling its proponents ignorant, fundamentalist, and worst of all, unscientific. Dawkins and company have been no more charitable in return.

While the field is still young and fairly small—those involved haven't settled on a name yet, though "evolutionary religious studies" gets thrown around—its findings could reshape a very old debate. Maybe we should stop asking whether God exists and start asking whether it's useful to believe that he does.

Let's say someone gives you $10. Not a king's ransom, but enough for lunch. You're then told that you can share your modest wealth with a stranger, if you like, or keep it. You're assured that your identity will be protected, so there's no need to worry about being thought miserly. How much would you give?

If you're like most people who play the so-called dictator game, which has been used in numerous experiments, you will keep most of the money. In a recent study from a paper with the ominous title "God Is Watching You," the average subject gave $1.84. Meanwhile, another group of subjects was presented with the same choice but was first asked to unscramble a sentence that contained words like "divine," "spirit," and "sacred."

The second group of subjects gave an average of $4.22, with a solid majority (64 percent) giving more than five bucks. A heavenly reminder seemed to make subjects significantly more magnanimous. In another study, researchers found that prompting subjects with the same vocabulary made some more likely to volunteer for community projects. Intriguingly, not all of them: Only those who had a specific dopamine receptor variant volunteered more, raising the possibility that religion doesn't work for everybody.

A similar experiment was conducted on two Israeli kibbutzes. The scenario was more complicated: Subjects were shown an envelope containing 100 shekels (currently about $25). They were told that they could choose to keep as much of the money as they wished, but that another member of the kibbutz was being given the identical option. If the total requested by the participants (who were kept separated) exceeded 100 shekels, they walked away with nothing. If the total was less than or equal to 100, they were given the money plus a bonus based on what was left over.

The kicker is that one of the kibbutzes was secular and one was religious. Turns out, the more-devout members of the religious kibbutz, as measured by synagogue attendance, requested significantly fewer shekels and expected others to do the same. The researchers, Richard Sosis and Bradley Ruffle, ventured that "collective ritual has a significant impact on cooperative decisions."

See also a study that found that religious people were, in some instances, more likely to treat strangers fairly. Or the multiple studies suggesting that people who were prompted to think about an all-seeing supernatural agent were less likely to cheat. Or the study of 300 young adults in Belgium that found that those who were religious were considered more empathetic by their friends.

The results of other studies are less straightforward. A Harvard Business School researcher discovered that religious people were more likely to give to charity, but only on the days they worshiped, a phenomenon he dubbed the "Sunday Effect." Then there's the survey of how belief in the afterlife affected crime rates in 67 countries. Researchers determined that countries with high rates of belief in hell had less crime, while in those where the belief in hell was low and the belief in heaven high, there was more crime. A vengeful deity is better for public safety than a merciful one.

None of that research settles the value of belief, and much of it is based on assuming that certain correlations are meaningful or that particular techniques (like the one used in the dictator-game study) actually prime what researchers think they prime. And questions remain: How effective is religious belief, really, if it needs to be prompted with certain words? And is the only thing stopping you from robbing a liquor store really the prospect of eternal hellfire?

Still, a growing body of research suggests that religion or religious ideas, in certain circumstances, in some people, can elicit the kind of behavior that is generally good for society: fairness, generosity, honesty. At the very least, when you read the literature, it becomes difficult to confidently assert that religion, despite the undeniable evil it has sometimes inspired, is entirely toxic.

That is David Sloan Wilson's point, or one of them anyway. Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University, is an atheist (as was his father, the novelist Sloan Wilson) who is interested in finding out what religion does, from an evolutionary perspective, for individuals and societies. Why does belief in the supernatural cut across cultures, and why has it persisted for millennia? He took a crack at such dauntingly large questions in his book Darwin's Cathedral, arguing that religion bestows an array of evolutionary advantages on groups of believers.

Wilson is in his early 60s, thin, white-haired, excitable. You get the sense that he might bubble over at any moment, and sometimes he does, issuing a four-letter invective in the midst of a multisyllabic explication. His most recent book is The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time. There isn't much Wilson thinks Darwin can't do. The professor's Skype handle is "evostud."

In two blog posts, one in March and one in May, Wilson questioned whether Richard Dawkins "might fail to qualify" as an evolutionist for, among other shortcomings, ignoring research on the evolution of religion. He has scolded the New Atheists for a militancy he sees as equivalent to religious fundamentalism. Firing shots at Dawkins is old hat for Wilson. When he reviewed The God Delusion, in 2007, he called Dawkins "deeply misinformed" on evolution. (Dawkins replied that the purpose of the book was not to discuss "religion's possible evolutionary advantages.") In a recent interview, Wilson declared that Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists "don't understand the nature of the beast" and yet still "go on and on in a very ignorant fashion."

When asked for comment via e-mail, Dawkins sent a link to a blog post by Jerry Coyne, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and wrote that he had nothing to add to that "brilliant takedown." In the post, Coyne mocks Wilson as a whiner whose ideas have been ignored by mainstream scientists and who is "blinded by hubris." It's the kind of scorched-earth exasperation that has become Coyne's trademark. To drive the point home, he embeds a YouTube clip from Finding Nemo in which a pelican tells some annoying sea gulls to shut up. The sea gulls are, presumably, Wilson.

The substance of Coyne's criticism is that while Wilson is speculating about religion's origins, which Coyne sees as a quixotic endeavor, he and other New Atheists are on the front lines battling extremists, and that Wilson would do well to enlist. Coyne, in an interview, doesn't dispute the claim that religion might serve as a sort of societal glue, but he's not sure that's a point in its favor. "Does it bind a community together if they throw acid in the face of a schoolgirl?" he asks.

PZ Myers has sounded a similar note. Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris, writes the popular blog Pharyngula, which is subtitled "Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal." He has a generally low opinion of those who, like Wilson, equate evangelical atheism with evangelical Christianity, saying in a Reddit question-and-answer session that such people deserve "a good punch to the balls." He said it with a smile in the video, but it seemed as if he meant it.

He responded to Wilson by maintaining that only one word was required to prove that religion is more destructive than beneficial: women. "Those with eyes to see," Myers wrote, "can see for themselves that religion has for thousands of years perpetuated the oppression of half of our species," which is "reason enough to tear down our cathedrals." Some commenters were even more disdainful, like the one who branded Wilson a "hypocrite quisling."

Going tit for tat, though with a touch less venom, Wilson accused Myers of "not functioning as a scientist" on the subject of religion. "It's absurd for Myers to say that the impact of religion on human welfare can be understood merely by opening one's eyes," he wrote. Myers says that Wilson is advancing an overly benign portrait of faith in support of his pet idea. Wilson contends that Myers and the rest are fabricating a cartoon version of religion, one that doesn't grapple with the science, and deciding on the outcome (religion is bad) before the evidence is in.

Like Wilson, Scott Atran, an anthropologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research, is an atheist ("Yes!" he exclaimed when asked) and an evolutionist whose book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion was one of the first, along with Darwin's Cathedral, by Wilson, and Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer, to chart a course for the field (the first two books were published in 2002 and Boyer's in 2001). In his book, Atran, who also teaches at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, calls religion an evolutionary byproduct, a sort of cognitive accident. He's since modified his view to take into account the apparent culturally adaptive upside of faith. Atran, whose most recent book is about faith and terrorism, describes New Atheism as moronic. "I don't see anything in the New Atheists' work that tells us anything at all about religion," he says, "and I think their ad hominem attacks are ridiculous."

That view is echoed by Dominic Johnson, a professor of biopolitics at the University of Edinburgh, who has written about how the threat of supernatural punishment appears to enhance cooperation. The trouble, he says, is that the New Atheists have become the face of science. On one side, there is antiscience fundamentalism. On the other, there are pro-science New Atheists. "Whatever they say tends to be taken as the scientific perspective on religion, that it's representing the whole of science," Johnson says. "That's a problem."

Of course, you can hardly blame the New Atheists for their own success. They've been speaking out against religious extremism in all its malicious forms, whether it's states permitting pseudoscience in school curricula or suicide bombers angling for a post-mortem harem. By comparison, humble studies of who takes the most money from an envelope can feel trivial. But it's not the criticism of ecclesiastical overreach that bothers Wilson and Atran; it's the conflation of science and advocacy. Wilson supports efforts to destigmatize atheism, like the running feature "Why I Am an Atheist" on Pharyngula, and said so in his anti-Dawkins posts. Atran believes that "attacking obscurantic, cruel, lunatic ideas is always a good idea." It's proclaiming that religion is rotten to the core that they think is misguided.

That includes laying the blame for much of human conflict at the feet of the faithful. In a recent Science article, Atran and Jeremy Ginges, an associate professor of psychology at the New School, cite evidence suggesting that "only a small minority of recorded wars" have been mainly motivated by religious disputes (though making distinctions between religious and political causes is notoriously knotty). They complain in the article that the New Atheists are quick to remind everyone how fundamentalism fuels Al Qaeda but neglect to mention the role of churches in the civil-rights movement. The New Atheists are, according to Atran and Ginges, cherry-picking the horrors. "Science produced a nuclear bomb. Therefore we should throw away science," says Atran, to illustrate the baby-bathwater logic. "Sometimes it can be really noxious, and other times it can be quite helpful."

The bad blood between Wilson and Dawkins isn't only about religion. Wilson has, for decades, been an advocate of the theory of group selection: the idea that human beings (and other organisms) have genetic adaptations that benefit the group rather than the individual. That may not sound like cause for much of a quarrel, but if he is right it would require a rethinking of natural selection and a rewriting of textbooks, including The Selfish Gene, another Dawkins best seller. Group-selection theory is often dismissed as unnecessary because the behavior it supposedly explains, many biologists say, can be accounted for in other ways, like kinship selection (we sacrifice for our family to perpetuate our genes) or reciprocal altruism (we're nice to others so they'll be nice to us). Group selectionists counter that the math behind kinship-selection theory doesn't add up, and that there are behaviors that it simply can't explain.

The controversy waxes and wanes and lately has been experiencing a resurgence, in part because group selection has been embraced by E.O. Wilson, who is no relation to David Sloan Wilson except now as brothers in championing a highly contested theory. Dawkins, not surprisingly, panned the esteemed Harvard biologist's latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth, saying readers were forced to "wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory." Dawkins also made a list of scientists who agree with him. Wilson (E.O., not D.S.) replied that if science depended on polls, "we would still be burning objects with phlogiston and navigating with geocentric maps."

But while the addition of a scientific heavyweight to their numbers was a coup for group selectionists, another brand-name intellectual, Steven Pinker, recently published an essay laying out why he agrees with Dawkins that the siren call of group selection should be resisted. Group selection, he writes, has "no useful role to play in psychology or social science" and "refers to too many things."

It was group selection that sparked Wilson's interest in religion, which he called "the groupiest thing around" because of how effectively it knits believers together. But some others in the new field don't see how arguments over group selection have much to do with the evolution of religion. They espouse the fuzzier and less controversial notion of "cultural group selection," which skirts the question of a genetic preference for religion.

Whether this deserves to be classified as "group selection" is up for discussion (that is what Pinker meant by "too many things"). Atran sees genetic group selection as unlikely and not necessary to explain the evolution of religion. Richard Sosis, a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut and an author of the studies on cooperation at kibbutzes, thinks the debate is a distraction. The "assumed association" between the evolutionary study of religion and the theory of group selection is "unfortunate," he says.

Another source of friction is over where Wilson and some of his fellow scholars get money for their research. The John Templeton Foundation has been a generous backer of research into the evolution of religion. Wilson has received several of those grants, in the low six figures, as have others in the field. Templeton's stated mission is to answer "big questions," but it's been criticized by some scientists for its preference for research that blends religion and science. Winners of the foundation's annual Templeton Prize often have to defend their acceptance of the sizable (around $1.5-million) check. Dawkins has been critical of Templeton, as has Daniel Dennett, another New Atheist stalwart and best-selling author. Wilson and others say the money comes with no strings attached.

Among the New Atheists, Dennett has given the most attention to analyzing what religion does and how it came to be. He has written a book on that topic, though the tone is less investigative than prosecutorial. It begins by comparing religion to a lancet fluke, a type of parasite that invades the brains of ants. Later he calls religion an attractive nuisance, like a swimming pool stumbled into by an unwatched toddler. Even the title, Breaking the Spell, gives away the conclusion. In an interview, Dennett explains it this way: "One of the good reasons for studying religion is that it does so much harm, and it's worth trying to figure out how to control it."
As for where religion came from, Dennett surveys the theories, calling Wilson's "the best case to date" for the argument that religion fosters cooperation within groups, while also making plain that he isn't exactly on board. He writes that we're decades of research away from arriving at a conclusion on the provenance and usefulness of the divine.

Wilson and Dennett have been amiable adversaries in the past, though that friendship lately has been strained. While Dennett doesn't regard Wilson as an enemy, he's exasperated by his attacks on Dawkins. "I'm getting fed up with David," he says. Dennett also finds Wilson's prominence in the field overstated, and says Wilson tries to drum up cheap attention by going after New Atheists: "Is he the leading theorist? I wouldn't say so." Wilson chides Dennett for "not doing his homework" in Breaking the Spell, instead bashing what he doesn't understand.

Homework or no, Breaking the Spell was a best seller, while Darwin's Cathedral was not. If the conflict over the best scientific approach to religion is measured in popularity, the New Atheists would win with ease. As of this writing, PZ Myers has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter and Wilson has around 500. A YouTube clip of Dawkins tying Bill O'Reilly into knots has over four million views, while Wilson interviewing a fellow scholar, Michael Blume, on his findings about religion and fertility has around 300. Skewering God makes for better box office.

Wilson is trying to seize a piece of that limelight by engaging the New Atheists in a public back-and-forth and by starting an ambitious online magazine, Evolution: This View of Life, devoted to "anything and everything" about evolutionary theory. Other work is also under way. Dominic Johnson is leading a two-year, Templeton-supported project at the Center of Theological Inquiry to look at the "relationship between religion, culture, and human evolution," while Ara Norenzayan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, is writing a book on "how pro-social religions with watchful gods helped human groups scale up from small hunting and foraging bands to the vast, complex societies of today."

The New Atheists have deemed Wilson not only wrong but dull. Coyne writes that if Dawkins took Wilson's advice and discussed the evolution of religion in detail, it would make for a "long and boring lecture." Myers compares Wilson's communication skills with Dawkins's and finds Wilson sadly wanting. For Wilson, though, it's the New Atheists who have become a bore. If you've seen one video of Dawkins slaying a naïve believer, you've seen them all. If you've read one New Atheist anti-God tome, you know what the others will say. Wilson insists that trying to discover why we believe is more intriguing than the debate over whether anyone is up there looking down.

"Whales Show Signs of Coping With Man-Made Noise Underwater"

Whales Show Signs of Coping With Man-Made Noise Underwater - NYTimes.com

Scientists have long known that man-made, underwater noises — from engines, sonars, weapons testing, and such industrial tools as air guns used in oil and gas exploration — are deafening whales and other sea mammals. The Navy estimates that loud booms from just its underwater listening devices, mainly sonar, result in temporary or permanent hearing loss for more than a quarter-million sea creatures every year, a number that is rising.

Now, scientists have discovered that whales can decrease the sensitivity of their hearing to protect their ears from loud noise. Humans tend to do this with index fingers; scientists haven’t pinpointed how whales do it, but they have seen the first evidence of the behavior.

“It’s equivalent to plugging your ears when a jet flies over,” said Paul E. Nachtigall, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii who led the discovery team. “It’s like a volume control.”

The finding, while preliminary, is already raising hopes for the development of warning signals that would alert whales, dolphins and other sea mammals to auditory danger.

Peter Madsen, a professor of marine biology at Aarhus University in Denmark, said he applauded the Hawaiian team for its “elegant study” and the promise of innovative ways of “getting at some of the noise problems.” But he cautioned against letting the discovery slow global efforts to reduce the oceanic roar, which would aid the beleaguered sea mammals more directly.

The noise threat arises because of the basic properties of seawater. Typically, light can travel for hundreds of feet through ocean water before diminishing to nothingness. But sound can travel for hundreds of miles.

The world’s oceans have been getting noisier as companies and governments expand their undersea activities. Researchers have linked the growing racket to deafness, tissue damage, mass strandings and disorientation in creatures that rely on hearing to navigate, find food and care for their young.

The danger has long been a political football. In 2008, the Supreme Court heard a lawsuit by the National Resources Defense Council against the Navy over ocean noise; the court ruled that naval vessels had the right to test sonar systems for hunting submarines. But environmentalists saw a tacit victory in getting the nation’s highest court even to consider the health of sea mammals in a debate over national security.

The latest development took place at a research facility off Oahu — at an island where the opening shots of “Gilligan’s Island” were filmed.

Scientists there are studying how dolphins and toothed whales hear. In nature, the mammals emit sounds and listen for returning echoes in a sensory behavior known as echolocation. In captivity, scientists taught the creatures to wear suction-cup electrodes, which revealed the patterns of brainwaves involved in hearing.

The discovery came in steps. First, Dr. Nachtigall and his team found the animals could adjust their hearing in response to their own sounds of echolocation, mainly sharp clicks. The scientists then wondered if the animals could also protect their ears from incoming blasts.

The team focused on a false killer whale named Kina and sought to teach her a conditioned behavior similar to how Pavlov taught dogs to salivate upon hearing a bell.

First, the scientists played a gentle tone repeatedly. Then they followed the gentle pulse with a loud sound. After a few trials, the warning signal alone caused Kina to decrease the sensitivity of her hearing.

“It shows promise as a way to mitigate the effects of loud sounds,” said Dr. Nachtigall, founding director of the Marine Mammal Research Program at the University of Hawaii. “People are generally very excited about it.”

In May, Dr. Nachtigall and his colleagues presented the findings to acoustic scientists and groups meeting in Hong Kong, including the Acoustical Society of America. The team cited the protective deafening as a potential way to help sea mammals cope with noisy blasts from naval sonars, civilian air guns and other equipment.

In the future, the team plans to expand the research to other species in captivity and ultimately to animals in the wild. “We have a problem in the world,” Dr. Nachtigall said of the oceanic roar. “And we think the animals can learn this response very rapidly.”

Scientists unconnected to the mammal research called it important. “It’s a big deal,” said Vincent M. Janik, a prominent marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In an e-mail, he said it revealed a rare ability among the planet’s creatures.

More at the link.

"Addicts' Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control"

From NPR:

Many addicts inherit a brain that has trouble just saying no to drugs.

A study in Science finds that cocaine addicts have abnormalities in areas of the brain involved in self-control. And these abnormalities appear to predate any drug abuse.

The study, done by a team at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., looked at 50 pairs of siblings. One member of each pair was a cocaine addict. The other had no history of drug abuse.

But brain scans showed that both siblings had brains unlike those of typical people, says Karen Ersche, the study's lead author.

"The fibers that connect the different parts of the brain were less efficient in both," she says.

These fibers connect areas involved in emotion with areas that tell us when to stop doing something, Ersche says. When the fibers aren't working efficiently, she says, it takes longer for a "stop" message to get through.

And sure enough, another experiment done by Ersche's team showed that both siblings took longer than a typical person to respond to a signal telling them to stop performing a task. In other words, they had less self-control.

That's what you'd expect to find in addicts, Ersche says.

"We know that in people who are addicted to drugs like cocaine, that self-control is completely impaired," she says. "These people use drugs and lose control on how much they use. They put everything at risk, even their lives."

But the fact that siblings without drug problems also had impaired self-control offers strong evidence that these brain abnormalities are inherited, Ersche says.

And she says the finding also raises a big question about the siblings who aren't addicts: "How do they manage with an abnormal brain without taking drugs?"

Ersche hopes to conduct another study of the sibling pairs that will answer that question.

In the meantime, the findings about self-control have implications that go far beyond drug addiction, says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"Self-control and the ability to regulate your emotions really is an indispensable aspect of the function of the brain that allows us to succeed," she says.

That's because the part of the brain that decides whether to take a drug is also the part that helps us decide whether to speed through a yellow light or drop out of school, she says.

And this brain circuit seems to be involved in a lot of common disorders, she says.

"One of the ones that attracts the most attention is ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder], where kids are unable to control their response to stimuli that distract them," Volkow says.

Impulse control is also central to behaviors like compulsive gambling and compulsive eating, she says.

The new study shows it's possible to identify people who have inherited a susceptibility to these sorts of problems, Volkow says. And it should help researchers figure out how to help susceptible people strengthen their self-control, she says.

"Predetermination is not predestination," Volkow says.

The image above is captioned this way:

The red areas show gray matter that is abnormally increased in drug users. Blue shows gray matter that is abnormally decreased in drug users. Yellow shows white matter tracts, called fractional anisotropy or FA. FA is significantly reduced in both the drug users and in their siblings, which suggests that the white matter tracts work less efficiently.

This is one reason for the saying "It's the first drink that gets you drunk" - and why A.A. taught from the beginning that alocholics cannot drink safely, at all, ever. (EDIT: It doesn't explain - I'd thought it did at first, but no - the phenomenon of "craving" that gets activated upon alcohol - or drugs - entering the body of the addict. That, too, has been talked about in A.A. since the earliest days. Perhaps these things are related; it will be interesting to see what sorts of things are found in the future. I do wonder, though, if there's a bias in the research going in; scientists apparently believe that "lack of control" is the dominant problem here - but I don't think that's true. "Craving" is the issue - but of course, scientists studying these things are looking at them from their own point of view and may not realize that there are other things to look at, at all. Some addict has to let them know!)

It also doesn't explain the reason(s) that alcoholics continue to attempt to drink normally even despite all the anecdotal evidence that piles up around the disastrous effects of "the first drink" - except to say that most folks really do believe, every time they pick up a drink, that "This time, it'll be different." It also doesn't explain the reason(s) addicts feel the need to drink or take drugs at all; I wonder whether they will find that this "wiring" has other manifestations in that connection.

But, this is the first research evidence I've seen that does show a "hard-wired" connection to addictive behavior - even though people have been telling this story on an anecdotal level for decades (and possibly lots longer)!

What's really interesting, of course, is that A.A.'s approach doesn't deal with this hard-wiring at all; it long ago simply accepted empirical evidence for something it didn't have hard proof of, and dealt instead with the personality, and with the emotions.