The important things in life

In a comment a post below Oran Kelly states:

The findings are interesting, but I don't think the populace at large is going to have to rethink their assumptions about life.

Sometimes you need to be explicit, so here I will make clear what I believe is implicit in many of my posts because it is important in framing how I view people, and how I believe they think. For example, consider evolution. To some extent Science Blogs might be called Evolution Blogs, not only is there is a strong bias toward biology, but there is a strong bias toward discussing evolution and the Intelligent Design movement. Why is this? Because it is a controversy which is in the public eye. Does this mean evolution is important to people?

Perhaps. But, it is not important to people in the way that chemical engineering, or solid state physics or agronomics is. This is not to denigrate evolutionary science, I've already come clean and said I'd be sly in her service. Rather, I am pointing out that many fields of science are extremely important in a proximate sense to the human life, but, they do not warrant attention like evolutionary science. This reminds me of the fact that I was once chided by someone that in the end evolution wasn't important, and they were far more concerned with public misconceptions about the laws of thermodynamics. To which I responded, "Well, I invite you to start up a weblog devoted to clearing up the confusions on the laws of thermodynamics!" This invitation was not taken up. In fact, I would bet that there is more discussion of the laws of thermodynamics in the context of biology than in relation to physics! I was irritated in part because the individual in question was an active participant in the message boards of a weblog devoted in large part to evolutionary science...surely if it was not a subject of great interest they could profitably spend their time elsewhere?

Though I believe one can make a practical argument about the relevance of evolutionary science to our lives (medicine, animal breeding, etc.), it might be conjectured that the interest that it elicits and the storm it generates in the public forum is derived not from proximal concerns, but rather from ultimate and existential yearnings. This is apropos, as to some extent evolutionary science is specially preoccupied with ultimate explanations in the context of the adaptionist paradigm. Its grand nature is highlighted by claims made by its proponents such as Daniel Dennett, that evolutionary theory as elucidated by Charles Darwin is the most important discovery of the human species! In The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins asserted that evolutionary biology allowed one to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist." The philosopher of science Michael Ruse has been making the case of late that for many evolutionary science has become a religion of sorts.

What to make of all of this? I would offer that the reality is that for the vast majority of human beings' deep existential crises, the "God Shaped Hole" in our brains which looks back toward us with its thousand faces, leaves a minor cognitive footprint. I say this because I assent to the conclusions reached by cognitive anthropologists that the majority of our basal religious sentiments and beliefs are rooted in offline mental processes which are not culturally dependent or reflectively analyzed. It is in religion that one generally locates the nexus of ontological theorizing within a society, and from which individuals draw upon for the water that sates their existential anxiety. But, I would assert that for the vast majority of believers such existential anxiety is a nonissue. An individual like Soren Kierkegaard looms large in the pantheon of thinking believers, and so he leaps out from the texts of religious history, yet it is the more prosaic aspects of simple supernatural agency scaffolded by familial community, ritual and worship which are the true grounding for religion. The explicit formalized creeds enforced by clerics and the cogitations spewed forth by theologians are so much epiphenomena swimming on the surface of a far deeper pool of inuitive religiosity which is nonverbal and innate.

Did I just assert above that Islam, Christianity and Buddhism are lacking in substance, just word games generated for the benefit of a narrow and elite caste of specialists and dabblers? Yes. And yet sometimes the sheer and flimsy garb which we don has great significance, and so it is that the dry confressions and unintelligible formulae drawn up by a cognitively atypical elite have become group identity badges for the masses. I believe the God that resides within the minds of the believers is basically the same entity irrespective of confession and creed. But the reality is that individuals will kill on the basis of nonsensical formulae. Lack of substance does not imply a deficit of deadly style.

As a systematic complex of ideas and set of assumptions modern evolutionary theory is in some ways a counterpoint to axiomatic deduced theologies and creeds. Additionally, evolutionary theory is to some extent blatantly counterintuitive, it violates our sense of kinds, our natural folk biology. Of course to some extent Newtonian Mechanics violates our folk physics, but there are no great public controversies as to its veracity. I believe the contrasts are manifold. Unlike evolutionary science Newtonian Mechanics is easily verifiable, it is not historically embedded, and there is less scaffolding by framing assumptions (ie., the compelling logic of evolutionary biology is derived from a wide array of axioms and inferences). Additionally, evolutionary science tends to challenge many more of our folk intuitions than Newtonian Mechanics, ranging from folk biology to our Theory of the Mind, because it implicitly includes us within its rubric and confounds our category biases. Of course, this can be counteracted, the cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom has reported that many children who have Creationist intuitions can be trained into accepting the basic postulates of evolutionary science as they mature.

The problem is that many individuals do not accept the scientific consensus as they mature. I have offered a few reasons above, but, note that I left off any deep existential tensions or crises, rather, they are more banal and non-reflective variables. There is a wide variance in acceptance of evolution across nations, so that suggests that cultural factors are at play. I doubt, for instance, that FIlipinos have had their deep existential worries assuaged, or that they have studied evolutionary science to a greater degree than Americans. Clearly it seems that particular forms of institutionalized religion piggyback upon intuitive doubts as to the nature of evolutionary science to forward an alternative explanatory paradigm. Note that above I suggested that religion is basically satisfaction of mundane biases, beliefs and preferences. Nevertheless, there is also a powerful group identification tendency in human beings, and we organize according to easy to memorize creeds, or around communal rituals and forms. Many of the latter are tied to religions, ergo, there is a powerful identification with religion based on a host of disparate vectors which are bundled together in a relatively compact and emotionally appealing cognitive package. For whatever reason one of the vectors bundled together in the suite of traits within American conservative Christianity is a rejection of evolutionary science. Because to a great extent the public does not think upon evolutionary science, and ultimate explanations, it is not particularly difficult for it to reject Darwin's child if they believe it is a contradiction of their religious beliefs, which they do prize for a variety of reasons.

So, evolutionary theory is important, at least as a topic of discussion...but it is, at the same time, not important, not worth consideration, and so dismissible when viewed in the broad context of all values and priorities.

Update: A comment from another blogger. re: the commenter who complains about my typos...when someone pays me by the word, I do reedit copiously, but as I have other things going on, I only do one reread normally for a blog post. If you would like to sponsor me by offering a large donation:

(on the order of thousands of dollars so that I don't need to work for several months), then I guarantee you'll see a change.

Addendum: I have stated before that one of the major problems with many religionists is that they imbue their beliefs about the world with excessively deep ontological significance so that they are driven to rash action. I will have to modify what I exaclty mean by "ontological significance" in light of my blatant assertion that most people don't really address existential issues much in their everyday life. First, many of the religious extremists may be psychologically abnormal, in other iterations they might have been mystics. But, I think that's too pat, I think many people make ontological claims, and take affront putatively based on ontological grounds. Nevertheless, I suspect the real root of their offense is that the attack on their religion is an attack on their community, a group of people and a suite of values which they have emotional, rather than reflective, attachment toward.

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"Nevertheless, I suspect the real root of their offense is that the attack on their religion is an attack on their community, a group of people and a suite of values which they emotional, rather than reflective, attachment toward."

So the religious group is seen as a kind of kin group? That people take religious criticism as more of a communal/kin criticism has been my thought for a while. People aren't generally reflective about their beliefs, & their beliefs are very often the result of birth circumstances - being born into their faiths. Unquestioning loyalty for family and community, and by extension, toward their family's religion.

So the religious group is seen as a kind of kin group?

many religions explicitly use kin analogies in their terminology. so to some extent i think it is coopting those mental reflexes.

Suppose for a moment that both religion and skepticism (by which I mean a skeptisim of the claims of religion) are natural intuitive human responses. Some having one stronger than the other.

Wouldn't we expect religious folk to respond with a great degree of hatred and violence to skepticism and blasphemy in this case (because it represents a distinct threat) than if skepticism were bizarre-ly non-intuitive (with little chance of non-belief spreading)?

My surmise would be that active suppression is an indication of the intuitive nature, and thus the threat, of skeptical thought.

First, many of the religious extremists may be psychologically abnormal, in other iterations they might have been mystics.

I suspect that status is the driving force in suicide bombers. In another religious context they could be extreme pacifists.

The findings are interesting, but I don't think the populace at large is going to have to rethink their assumptions about life.
Good grief, Oran.
Technolgy is rushing on us like a tsunami. Right now we are learning to build nanomachines, assemblers based on the protein machines of RNA. We'll be able to stack molecules.

Soon we may recover Higgs Bosons. From the Economist.

WHEN the games of the XXth Winter Olympiad open in Turin on February 10th, the world's best athletes will assemble in a spirit of good-natured competition. At the same time, just across the Alps on the outskirts of Geneva, a group of the world's best physicists will be gathering at CERN, Europe's biggest particle-physics laboratory, for a bit of friendly competition of their own.

Dubbed the LHC Olympics, this meeting is the second of a series that brings together theoretical physicists of all stripes with some of their experimental colleagues to train for the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's newest and largest particle accelerator. The games themselves are a series of black-box challenges, each consisting of a realistic but simulated set of data from an accelerator experiment. Given a few months and some basic training in the computational tools of the trade, teams from universities around the world have been trying to unravel the underlying theories used to construct these data sets in time to present their results at the meeting.

The purpose of it all is to work out how best to handle the huge amount of data that the LHC will generate when it begins operating in the summer of 2007. Protons will travel around its 27km-long circular tunnel at 99.999999% of the speed of light, eventually crashing head-on inside one of four detectors and generating a shower of high-energy debris. The detectors themselves are designed to reconstruct the motionand thus the identityof each particle in this debris, for it is from such pieces that the fabric of reality is woven.

huge breakthrough for quantum physics and string theory.

My book this week-- Designer Evolution, a transhumanist manifesto.

transhumanism, gerontology research, nanotech, robotics, quantum physics, "evolutionary cosmology" (Susskind's Landscape), biotech, selfish germs, cognitive science....

I forsee a huge clash between Science and Religion. People will have to rethink a lot of things. ;)

Good grief, Oran.
Technolgy is rushing on us like a tsunami. Right now we are learning to build nanomachines, assemblers based on the protein machines of RNA. We'll be able to stack molecules.

Technology is one thing, theoretical/historical findings are another. If you read the orignal post, it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. I was talking about how findings with significant theoretical implications are presented to the public.

Frankly, though, I am also deeply skeptical about all millenarian enthusiasm, including technological determinist millenarian enthusiasm. For me, technology and society have a dialectical relationship.

Things will change in surprising and unsurprising ways; things will stay the same in surprising and unsurprising ways. But I think we can be assured that most people DON'T want their lives or thinking to be revolutionized, they will make great efforts to see that they aren't.

Does this mean a great science/religion war? I doubt it. More likely the two will both adapt and change to arrive at some kind of modus vivendi as they have over and over again over the last several centuries.

Oran, i do think religion will adapt, because, like Boyer and say, it is easier for most people to believe than to not belive. But traditional religions will have to adapt radically or expire. Within the next 30 years i predeict we are going to be able to create life from inorganic molecules, decode the electro-biochemistry of consciousness, and determine the beginnings of consciousness in utero.
All those things will present insupportable challenges to traditional religions, which will have to evolve(heh) radically, to accomodate them.

Lol, the war has already begun. See Sir Richard Dawkins, The Root of All Evil. ;)

sorry, like Boyer and Atran say...

So the religious group is seen as a kind of kin group?

boknekht, correct, memetic kinship. Some think religions evolved to spread kinship benefits among a larger class of memetic kin.
All religions can be modelled as CSSs, culturally stable strategies, a subset of evolutionarily stable stragtegies (ESS). See John Maynard-Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games.

And, Oran, religion declared war on Science long ago. See Galileo.
"And yet it moves..."

Technology is one thing, theoretical/historical findings are another. If you read the orignal post, it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. I was talking about how findings with significant theoretical implications are presented to the public.

Nope. Technology and theoretical/historical findings are both science. I'm a mathematician. I find Kurzweil's arguments compelling, and Maynard-Smith's intuitive.
For example, we'll be able to analyse the thought process of a homicide bomber, cure aging, fix genetic defects in utero, enhance homosapiens.

The war of religion on science is very old. I think the Pythagoreans were wiped out because they were heliocentric heretics, not so much because of their political affinity.

Transhumanism alone represents heresy for most religions.

the key re: religion & science is rate of change. most religionists do not make a big deal about in vitro/test tube babies anymore. the problem will be when multiple life-choice parameters start shifting in concert.... (this will not only be a problem for religion, but politics).

Then, my hypothesis is that the Singularity, when the rate of change approaches limit 1/x (aka infinity), after the knee in the curve, will make huge problems for the believers.
;)

Transhumanism sounds as space-cadetish as any New Age fad I've run across recently. It sounds like a religion, only without any grounding in common experience.

Razib, I think you may be underestimating a few things. One thing I question is your idea that everyday people don't contend with existential anxieties. Why do you think that's the case? So, working-class people never wake up in the middle of the night wondering what it's all about? The working-class people I've known seem to spend as much time and energy on fretting about mortality as anyone else.

Another thing I think you're underestimating is how satisfying the traditional religions can be. They offer time-tested, audience-pleasing, intuitively "right" accounts of life from a very large perspective -- something many people seem to crave. (I'd argue that we all have this hunger, and that we all fill it with something. Transhumanism, Hinduism, whatever.) A standard fact in the arts is that people need stories (just as they need representionalism in the visual arts). Stories are how people explain existence to themselves -- or maybe "explain" is wrong. Stories are how they account for existence. Personally I'd be far happier with "science" (is there any one such thing) if science found this fact interesting, if science admitted that religious accounts of existence are far more emotionally and imaginatively satisfying than scientific accounts, and if science decided to respect these two facts and investigate them. People aren't going wake up one day free from their need for satisfying stories. And, let's face it, science's account isn't very emotionally satisfying, or even very useful for most people on a day to day level. As Steven Pinker says about folk psychology, it "still has more predictive power when it comes to day to day behavioiur than any body of scientific psychology."

You might get a kick out of reading the books of Mark Turner. "The Literary Mind" is a good place to start, and is very short. His basic argument is that stories are how we account for things -- they're the basic building blocks of knowledge and comprehension, and they precede all other kinds. The uman need for satisfying stories isn't the enemy, it's basic to being human. Not only that, but there's no getting outside of it. The attempt to do so only results in other stories. Why not view religions (and their philosophies and mythologies) as extremely satisfying (at least for some people) time-tested stories?

Why not view religions (and their philosophies and mythologies) as extremely satisfying (at least for some people) time-tested stories?

Because they are not extrememly satisfying, time-tested HARMLESS/INNOCUOUS stories. ;)
Ask Sir Richard.

Michael, you seem suprisingly uniformed on transhumanism (well.... for you).
I know you can read, try this or this.
;)

Matoko: If all we're talking about is the rather low-level hostility (Gallileo was a high point of the fighting) there always has been between science and religion, then, so what? and why does this merit the term "war?" and what are we supposed to get excited about here? Obviously you're talking about something new happening. My point would be that things aren't going to change nearly as much as you seem to think, and the flexibility of BOTH science (to comply with socially enforced limits on development) and religion (to adjust in ways to allow new development) will probably surprise you.

Michael: The issue you address is essentially what Pinker is playing with in his little tribute to Dawkins.

I think he's dead wrong, though. Science should, as you suggest, recognize storytelling and religion for what they are--modes of explaining and lending meaning that have obvious power for people the world over. I do not think that science should shape itself to these modes, however.

Genes don't "want" anything as far as we know, and it only causes confusion when we insist on speaking as if they do. Someone else commented that psychology's failure to explain consciousness is evident in Pinker's willingness to completely evacuate volition and agency of any real meaning.

Science's explanations sometimes lack that satisfying quality because they are not stories at all, they describe processes. Sometimes extremely complex processes.

Someone is going to have to work on demonstarting these processes to regular people (the computer program that came with the blind watchmaker for instance). Translating science to the language of the roman a clef just isn't going to help.

Something else I thnk we should recognize: the stories provided by religion aren't all that good at what they're trying to do, and as Razib has been pointing out, people often don't believe them very strongly, any more than they believe a security blanket actually makes them safer.

In fact, I'd argue that A LOT of religious fervor is related not to one's personal satisfaction with the stroies religion provides, but rather the fear of what will happen if one's fellow man is not restrained by them.

I'd argue that science arises out of powerful natural impulses as well. And that these have always been in conflict to some extent with the religious ones. (I think Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy provides a fairly good model to test.) Pace Razib, as I cite another long-dead guy on a subject on which he is very current.

Anyhow, I'm workingn on a long response to Pinker which I'll be posting on my own little patch this weekend with any luck.

Oran -- I look forward to your response to Pinker. I'm not suggesting, though, that science shape itself to religion or storytelling, but that it 1) respect them (for their power) and 2) investigate them (they're interesting phenomena in their own right). I think one thing that's a major problem for science is exactly what you talk about: science keeps trying to break away from stories into pure description of processes. And, yknow, is that really possible? If it is, how long can it be sustained for? And do humans inevitably (and in the blink of an eye) push any such right back into storytelling? Personally, I think that any such attempt (and success) gets turned instantly into part of a story (and not just for civilians). It's also a reason science should be less hostile to religion and popular/folk accounts -- because what science offers in its place is something that most people in a practical sense are going to find unsatisfying.

A small aside: I think it's also why science 101 -- which is all the science 99% of people are going to get -- should be presented as narrative, and not as an intro to the lab. Elementary lab work is incredibly dull. It puts most people off science. (I was a science kid myself, yet when it became clear that you'd have to do 10 years of hard drudge work before you got to the fun, I balied.) Yet there's no reason semi-intelligent people shouldn't enjoy and learn a bit from well-done popular science books, and history-of-science books. It's a great story, after all.

Razib and I have traded thoughts about this kind of thing before. He may be right, or course. But I think it's a losing battle to try to convert the masses to science by insisting they come to understand it as scientists do. They just never will. (And being hostile to the stories they use to get through the day, and through their lives, is only going to put them off further.) But turn science into a great big fascinating story, and one that doesn't turn religion or folk wisdom into the bad guy, and I think you could win a lot of them over, or at least make them friendly and interested. Which would be a Good Thing.

While the average person doesn't think much about evolutionary science, or science in general for that matter, they do think about and live with the outcomes that science causes in their lives, such as in the fields of medicine, technology, and public policy. The battle between science and religion is important becuase ultimately whichever one wins will be the premise upon which our public policies are drafted, such as in the areas of education, medicine, and bio-technology. Policies in these areas will likely have a huge impact in the lives of the average person.

Dawkin's hostility is hardly low level. ;)
I made a comment about that with links, but it is being held for moderation. lol.

Michael, Ramez Naam is a transhumanist. Do you remember when he visited gnxp last year? The transhumanist manifesto is already running up against politics, ie the "bioethics" council, and Bush's proposed chimera/cloning ban. The Bush admin's been at war with science all along, cites: the schiavo effect, ID in schools, failed attempt to shape NASA science with the Deutsch appointment, ESCR funding, etc.

I should qualify that, at war with some kinds of science.
Nearly all politicians are pimping nanotech bigtime as the asnwer to all our fiscal woes....without actually understanding what nanotech is and how radically it will change our lives. ;)

But I think it's a losing battle to try to convert the masses to science by insisting they come to understand it as scientists do. They just never will. (And being hostile to the stories they use to get through the day, and through their lives, is only going to put them off further.) But turn science into a great big fascinating story, and one that doesn't turn religion or folk wisdom into the bad guy, and I think you could win a lot of them over, or at least make them friendly and interested. Which would be a Good Thing.

Sorry, just not that interesting to me. ;)

Look, Sir Richard is bitter and angry. He has a right. He's been writing brilliant stuff for years and years and gets no traction. Dennett tries to be deferential and subtle, but his arrogance creeps through. Me, I believe Boyer and Atran. Really, there's nothing us New Pythagoreans can do except playfully attempt to rearrange the belivers' skull furniture and hope for the occasional epiphany. ;)

lol.
from the book i'm reading--designer evolution.

Over the next decade or two it will become increasingly clear that all of biotechnology is but a small subset--albeit an important subset--of nanotechnology.

--Robert Freitas, world's leading pioneer (according to Kurzweil) in nanomedicine.