I thinked of science after I readed this piece.

People in the future will talk like morons.

Well, not quite. Despite all the valuable lessons the seminal film Idiocracy taught us, the new batch of articles in Nature looking at the evolution of language suggests a phasing out of irregular verbs that don't get used too often.

There's actually some powerful mathematics being leveled behind this research despite the deceptive fluffy feel to the findings, if you care to root around behind the curtain.

The term meme is about as old as I, but this feels like the kind of work that was just waiting to have a word so someone would have paid it attention. Er, payed attention?

There have been a number of research papers touting a connection between certain women's attraction to male sweat, but there appears to be better genetic validation over this phenomenon. As it turns out, there just might be some women out there who find the musky rancor from overclocking men to smell like a breezy spring day. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I'll let you go fish out your favorite instead.

Bom-bom-bom BOM BOM-BOM-BOM-BOMMMMMMMMM

Promiscuous Teleology and all the fixins

Why some adults resist science and biased kids.

A great article over at Edge.com gives some insight to why so many American adults resist scientific facts.

There are two common assumptions about the nature of this resistance. First, it is often assumed to be a particularly American problem, explained in terms of the strong religious beliefs of many American citizens and the anti-science leanings of the dominant political party. Second, the problem is often characterized as the result of insufficient exposure to the relevant scientific facts, and hence is best addressed with improved science education.

We believe that these assumptions, while not completely false, reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of this phenomenon. While cultural factors are plainly relevant, American adults' resistance to scientific ideas reflects universal facts about what children know and how children learn. If this is right, then resistance to science cannot be simply addressed through more education; something different is needed.

I hear those two explanation all the time from exasperated rational pals of mine; a retrograde 'Merican attitude inserted into an atrocious science education program MUST be the culprit to all these psychic friends networks and fossil hoax theorists. But you scratch that thought enough and it becomes apparent that such an answer is rather unsatisfying. Looking back at kids and suggesting we're predisposed for this kind of thinking gives better perspective.

Our intuitive psychology also contributes to resistance to science. One significant bias is that children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, four year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining"), a propensity that Deborah Kelemen has dubbed "promiscuous teleology." Additionally, when asked about the origin of animals and people, children spontaneously tend to provide and to prefer creationist explanations.

The panacea for this is of course, the scientific experiment. When one has a real world observation, those long stretch connections are easily shattered.

I love the conclusions, however.

In sum, the developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.

Science has a big appetite

A great article over at the NY Times about the biological basis for morality. It would seem much like our use of tools, sophisticated language and sociable nature, our primate cousins show the building blocks of what humans carried forth into a set of moral ideas.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal’s view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.”

It's a central tenet of conventional wisdom that religion is the source of our moral code. It is the same wisdom people draw upon when they want to put a Ten Commandments shrine on State property or keep two men from kissing. What happens when science suggests that morality came before religion?

The idea that biology would continue to demand more and more territory from philosophy as it has been doing to religion for so many centuries is bound to be controversial. Clearly, the philosophers have a stake in this, but I do agree with one of their assessments:

and that is that biological analyses cannot cross the gap between “is” and “ought,” between the description of some behavior and the issue of why it is right or wrong. “You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it,” said Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York University. “That’s not to discount the importance of what biologists are doing, but it does show why centuries of moral philosophy are incredibly relevant, too.”

You win this round, philosphers.

Is Folkpsychology like Countrypsychology?

A fantastic article in the NYT magazine from this weekend on the study of belief. There's all the bluster that Richard Dawkins and his ilk are pushing, sort of a dismissal of religion as 'misfiring', which is an awfully loaded word for a scientist to be throwing around. Beyond that is a layer of amazing cognitive biological studies that Scott Atran terms 'folkpsychology':

Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads.

A profound suggestion! Is being predisposed to belief in the supernatural a default mode for our brains? Do biological spandrels (like blood being red, a feature with a evolution-neutral value) serve as grist for such a system?

For those of us that hold rationalism in higher esteem than spiritualism, it's somewhat unpleasant to think of ourselves as recovering alcoholics - we need to be on constant guard of our reasonable sobriety lest we relapse into the allure of magical thinking and emotional comfort. Still, to me this is no different than any other high moral code we abide by or emotion we keep under check as to what is necessary or proper. Why should belief be any different than the willpower one needs to keep to a diet or maintain a budget?

We try to make sense of other people partly by imagining what it is like to be them, an adaptive trait that allowed our ancestors to outwit potential enemies. But when we think about being dead, we run into a cognitive wall. How can we possibly think about not thinking? “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote in “Tragic Sense of Life.” “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”

I can't say I've ever heard death put so nicely before.

The article is a bit lengthy but well worth the read if this kind of stuff tingles your belief-default brain. Atran's most recent book, In Gods We Trust, is worth the additional effort.

Brainmeats

Following up the recent articles about its role in smoking, the insula is making news again, this time with some interesting commentary.

All mammals have insulas that read their body condition, Dr. Craig said. Information about the status of the body’s tissues and organs is carried from the receptors along distinct spinal pathways, into the brain stem and up to the posterior insula in the higher brain or cortex.

As such, all mammals have emotions, defined as sensations that provoke motivations. If an animal is hot, it seeks shade. If hungry, it looks for food. If hurt, it licks the wound.

Certainly my dogs show a wide variety of emotions, but there's clear limits to more complex emotion behaviors like empathy, revenge or sacrifice. Sounds like there's a wealth of research around that little fatty dingle of brainmeat.

A Promethean Moment

Via my good pal Espo:

An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong

A fantastic read with ambitious goals. Can science assimilate that territory which has been held so strongly by philosophy and religion for so long?