Yes, the abandonment was recounted in “E.O. Wilson’s Theory of Altruism Shakes Up Understanding of Evolution” by Pamela Weintraub. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson’s 1975 Sociobiology was thought to give evolutionary psychology some respectability. Wilson, who learned his trade studying social insects, promoted the idea of kin selection – that people are genetically programmed (“bred into their bones”) to behave in socially constructive ways in order to help the genes they share with others get passed on. For example, a woman looks after her sister’s children to help the genes she shares with her sister get passed on. And she looks after her new neighbour from Rangoon’s children to help … hey, … wait a minute. So the scientific world Read More ›

Re British science czar John “grossly intolerant” Beddington facing off against scholar and political correctness zapper Frank Furedi  – both angling off original science thinker Freeman Dyson: Set me thinking. When I was young (yes, forty years ago), two issues my paper explored were breastfeeding and palliative care.

Fashionable? Haw. Read More ›

In a review of a very interesting-sounding book on information systems through the ages, beginning with African drumming (James Gleick:  The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood), Freeman Dyson discusses information theory. The story of the drum language illustrates the central dogma of information theory. The central dogma says, “Meaning is irrelevant.” Information is independent of the meaning that it expresses, and of the language used to express it. Information is an abstract concept, which can be embodied equally well in human speech or in writing or in drumbeats. All that is needed to transfer information from one language to another is a coding system. A coding system may be simple or complicated. If the code is simple, as Read More ›

Frank Furedi, author of On Tolerance: The Life Style Wars and foe of political correctness in academic life, replies powerfully to science czar “Intolerance” Beddington at Spiked (21 February 2011). Comparing Beddington’s protective views on homosexuality with the hostile ones shown by Ryszard Legutko, leader of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party, he writes,

No doubt Beddington also feels intolerant towards Legutko’s views on homosexuality. Yet what is truly fascinating about these two crusaders against tolerance is that although they have diametrically opposed viewpoints on gay rights, they are at one in their affirmation of the ethos of intolerance. The targets of their intolerance might be different, but they share the worldview of the bigot. Legutko is offended by the sight of gay and lesbian people dressed up as nuns and priests, while Beddington objects to people he disagrees with masquerading as scientists. The casual manner with which European public figures celebrate intolerance is testimony to the censorious and illiberal spirit that now dominates political life across the continent.

He also offers a three-minute focus on a key point of history:

The idea that we should not be tolerant of problematic ideas, or indeed of any beliefs other than our own, dominated the political culture of pre-Enlightenment Europe. It is important to note that until the seventeenth century, it was intolerance rather than tolerance that was upheld as a virtue. So when Beddington declares that ‘we should not tolerate what is potentially something that can seriously undermine our ability to address important problems’, he is adopting the dominant narrative of late medieval Europe. In that medieval outlook, heretical beliefs represented such a danger to society that the only virtuous response was to silence them. Intolerance was seen as a marker of moral virtue. As late as 1691, the French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet boasted that Catholicism was the least tolerant of all religions, stating: ‘I have the right to persecute you because I am right and you are wrong.’,

[adding] Read More ›

In “Beddington goes to war against bad science” (Research Fortnight , 14-02-2011), John Dwyer and Laura Hood advise us that

Selective use of science ‘as bad as racism or homophobia,’ and

Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington is stepping up the war on pseudoscience with a call to his fellow government scientists to be “grossly intolerant” if science is being misused by religious or political groups.In closing remarks to an annual conference of around 300 scientific civil servants on 3 February, in London, Beddington said that selective use of science ought to be treated in the same way as racism and homophobia. “We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality…We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method,” he said.

Beddington said he intends to take this agenda forward with his fellow chief scientists and also with the research councils. “I really believe that… we need to recognise that this is a pernicious influence, it is an increasingly pernicious influence and we need to be thinking about how we can actually deal with it.

Some thoughts:

😉 There is no shortage of gross intolerance in the world. I was surprised that Beddington cited the nearly defunct Ku Klux Klan, and not the very active Muslim brotherhoods, whose tolerance for gays is justly famous. Indeed, the extent to which Beddington is right could in part be gleaned from the fact that the Middle East, where gross intolerance is celebrated, leads the world in science. Oh wait, it doesn’t. A Muslim friend tells me that his culture’s progress in science stalled precisely when intolerance became a virtue and people were no longer permitted to think for themselves. Read More ›

It is good to see the growing impatience of religiously motivated pseudo-science. Too often science has been, and continues to be, religion’s handmaiden. In fact it is surprising there hasn’t been a stronger backlash. But now it may be coming on too strong—the backlash may be more of whiplash. Witness Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington’s recent remarks:  Read more

Norbert Smith, a.k.a. “Doc Gator”, author of Passive Fear and many children’s books has edited a collection of essays called Sacred Cows in Science, mostly on controversial issues in science: Science was at one time defined by its method. Carefully controlled experiments, provisional conclusions, and considered debate once defined the field. But those days have passed. Today, science is defined by public policy statements, consensus, and a set of metaphysical assumptions that cannot be directly tested. Students are told that science is in conflict with “faith” or, worse yet, that faith operates in a different “magisterial” with no real application to the world we inhabit. I have an article in the collection on neuroscience, sense, and nonsense.

In “A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life” (February 21, 2011), New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye sounds like a man who knows a comic scene when he sees one: Two dozen chemists, geologists, biologists, planetary scientists and physicists gathered here recently to ponder where and what Eden might have been. Over a long weekend they plastered the screen in their conference room with intricate chemical diagrams through which electrons bounced in a series of interactions like marbles rattling up and down and over bridges through one of those child’s toys, transferring energy, taking care of the business of nascent life. The names of elements and molecules tripped off chemists’ tongues as if they were the eccentric Read More ›

Earlier, I had mentioned the problem created by negative expert opinion, when dealing with children who are missing all or parts of their brain. A friend kindly sent me this in response, from one of the Cambridge Journals. Note the line in the abstract below, “The relative rarity of manifest consciousness in congenitally decorticate children could be due largely to an inherent tendency of the label ‘developmental vegetative state’ to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology (1999), 41: 364-374 Copyright © 1999 Mac Keith Press Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy D Alan Shewmon MD a1c1, Gregory L Holmes MD a2 and Paul A Byrne MD FAAP a3 a1 Pediatric Neurology, UCLA Read More ›

Here I commented on the reality of human crowds, as I have experienced them: Largely passive waves, moving along, but intelligently anxious to hurt no one. The harmlessly mentally ill are simply tolerated. Occasional boors (and couples who insist on airing private business in public) suffer social reproach. Given the multicultural diversity of the setting with which I am familiar, I suspect that this is the normal approach of humans under some territorial stress, but not under any other kind of stress. The Toronto (Canada), subway crowd is not a lynch mob or a riot, just tens of thousands of people heading in the same geographical direction all at once, but all to different eventual destinations.

In response, here, commenter Zephyr adverts to the work of a serious researcher of crowds, work that certainly illuminates my own decades-long experience (in an admittedly peaceful part of the world). Some perceptions of crowds may be coloured by too much emphasis on the behaviour of lynch mobs. Anyone on the Toronto subway last Friday night was using it only to get somewhere else. Comparisons to herds are perverse. We’re not a herd. Everyone has an individual destination, but when crammed together, we must act as a passive crowd.

Given the low human population of Stone Age man, I am sure that the “evolutionary psychology” explanation of the individual selective genetic advantage enjoyed by enormous, compacted passive crowds will be “interesting.”

All this said, a commenter here, responding to this at Salvo, writes,

I imagine though to a religious person, and Christians especially, these line of questioning could be seem rather threatening, and maybe that’s the real reason for such animosity to EP from Ms O’Leary.

Whaa?? Read More ›

In his 1987 seminal work entitled Impossibility In Medicine  the American psychiatrist Jean Goodwin presented to the world the following acutely insightful vista of the brain: “Despite many assertions to the contrary, the brain is not “like a computer.” Yes, the brain has many electrical connections, just like a computer. But at each point in a computer only a binary decision can be made—yes or no, on or off, 0 or 1. Each point in the brain, each brain cell, contains all the genetic information necessary to reproduce the entire organism. A brain cell is not a switch. It has a memory; it can be subtle. Each brain cell is like a computer. The brain is like a hundred billion computers Read More ›

here: Every cell a densely populated ocean. I’d be interested to know whether wave mechanics can be used to interpret many of the behaviours of life forms.

Last Friday night, I was crammed tight into the Toronto subway along with thousands of other warm bodies moving slowly north. The train slowed to inchworm pace and we received a message: Personal injury at track level. You know as well as I do what that means. Everyone did. Thousands of us were dumped out against a chill north wind at the city’s central intersection (Yonge & Bloor), milling around, waiting for shuttle buses that rarely came. A great opportunity for violence, right? You know, competition, selfish genes, survival of the fittest … Nah. There was none. A few crazy people were yelling at themselves and a splitting couple was yelling at each other. People passively cleared whatever space was Read More ›

A friend writes to advise me of a “vicious” review by Scott Atran of Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in the most recent issue of National Interest, which – he tells me – otherwise focuses on foreign and defense policy. Atran, an anthropologist connected with U Michigan, doesn’t like Harris anyway, I gather, because the latter wouldn’t dismiss the effects of laboratory research into telepathy and telekinesis. Atran, for his own reasons, doesn’t think that “science” is in any position to determine morality. Harris tells us: “I find reasons for hope” because “moral progress seems to me unmistakable. . . . Consider the degree to which racism in the United States has Read More ›

(targeting customers of the more familiar bodice-ripper and cherry-chomp brands)

David Brooks, who used to know tripe when he saw it, now gives us this, praising pop evolutionary psychology:

Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophyA core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

Yes. There is a name for that: fascism

Fascism, at heart, is a belief that surrendering to an emotion engendered by an idea can bring about an earthly utopia. In politics, the idea is usually appears as a messianic leader, but in current psychology, anyone with some neuroscience training can generate these visions using machines, drugs, or narratives that get published as research on human subjects.

And it is always very difficult, at best, to explain to people that, on Earth, utopia is the trade name for hell.

Anyway, Brooks unintentionally outlines the problem better than any detractor could by retailing this loathsome love story: Read More ›