October 2008 Archives

Why Children Like to Share
People are programmed to avoid inequality     -By Herbert Gintis

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, the grandfather of modern economic theory, referred to individual self-interest as "the first principle of pure economics." Until recently, economists routinely equated being rational with being selfish. The assumption was that, because humans are biological creatures, we'd been programmed by Darwinian evolution to put our own interests first--survival, after all, is a tough competition. As a result, even seemingly altruistic traits, such as giving money to charity or helping strangers in need, were seen as traits ultimately rooted in self-interest.

UCSB study finds physical strength, fighting ability revealed in human faces
by EurekAlert - RichardDawkins.net

For our ancestors, misjudging the physical strength of a would-be opponent might have resulted in painful -- and potentially deadly -- defeat.

Now, a study conducted by a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara has found that a mechanism exists within the human brain that enables people to determine with uncanny accuracy the fighting ability of men around them by honing in on their upper body strength. What's more, that assessment can be made even when everything but the men's faces are obscured from view....

Patricia S. Churchland - Athenaeum Library of Philosophy

Editor's opinion - Together with her husband Paul they are undoubtedly the leading philosophers of the modern age. Their publications are a must read for any philosophy student or seeker after knowledge.

WHAT SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS?
Patricia Smith Churchland
Philosophy Department,
University of California San Diego

I. INTRODUCTION:
Within the domain of philosophy, it is not unusual to hear the claim that most questions about the nature of consciousness are essentially and absolutely beyond the scope of science, no matter how science may develop in the twenty-first century. Some things, it is pointed out, we shall never ever understand, and consciousness is one of them (Vendler 1994, Swinburne 1994, McGinn 1989, Nagel 1994, Warner 1994). One line of reasoning assumes that consciousness is the manifestation of a distinctly nonphysical thing, and hence has no physical properties that might be explored by techniques suitable to physical things. ...

Being Altruistic May Make You Attractive -- Science Daily

Displays of altruism or selflessness towards others can be sexually attractive in a mate. This is one of the findings of a study carried out by biologists and a psychologist at The University of Nottingham...

Dr Phillips said: "For many years the standard explanation for altruistic behaviour towards non-relatives has been based on reciprocity and reputation -- a version of 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours'. I believe we need to look elsewhere to understand the roots of human altruism. The expansion of the human brain would have greatly increased the cost of raising children so it would have been important for our ancestors to choose mates both willing and able to be good, long-term parents. Displays of altruism could well have provided accurate clues to this and genes linked to altruism would have been favoured as a result."

Chimps: Not Human, But Are They People? | Wired Science from Wired.com

Some even suggest that chimpanzees and other great apes should be granted human rights. So argued advocates for Hiasl, a chimpanzee caught in an Austrian custody battle, and the framers of an ape rights resolution passed by the Spanish parliament. The question of rights is practically thorny -- how could a chimp be held responsible for, say, attacking another chimp? -- but the fundamental question isn't practical, but rather scientific and ethical. "They have been shown to have all kinds of complex communication and cognitive powers that are similar to humans," said Yerkes National Primate Research Center researcher Jared Taglialatela. "They have feelings, they have ideas, they have goals."

Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled?
By Paul Vallely  - The Independent

''A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation - it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently.

The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about creationism if pupils asked them he was deemed to have been advocating the idea that British schools should teach the idea that the world was magicked up (complete with fossils and ancient geology) just 6,000 years ago - and then tell pupils to make their own minds up between that and the theory of evolution to which the overwhelming scientific evidence points.

Mysterious DNA Found to Survive Eons of Evolution   By Clara Moskowitz  -LiveScience

Scientists have discovered mystery snippets of mammal DNA that have survived eons of evolution and yet have no apparent purpose. The finding reveals just how much we don't know about the secrets hidden in our genome and that of other animals.

Most genes change throughout evolution via mutations; useless ones eventually get weeded out of the population while the helpful modifications take hold. However, about 500 regions of our DNA -- the body's instruction code made up of base pairs of molecules -- have apparently remained intact throughout the history of mammalian evolution, or the past 80 million to 100 million years, basically free of mutations.

The rival to the Bible -- BBC NEWS

For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery, until it was found - or stolen, as the monks say - in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain.

Now these different parts are to be united online and, from next July, anyone, anywhere in the world with internet access will be able to view the complete text and read a translation...

[A]lthough many of the other alterations and differences are minor, these may take some explaining for those who believe every word comes from God. Faced with differing texts, which is the truly authentic one? Mr Ehrman was a born again Bible-believing Evangelical until he read the original Greek texts and noticed some discrepancies. The Bible we now use can't be the inerrant word of God, he says, since what we have are the sometimes mistaken words copied by fallible scribes. "When people ask me if the Bible is the word of God I answer 'which Bible?'"

Old Gender Roles With Your Dinner?    By Frank Bruni   - NYTimes.com

...Although the goal in many public places and in much of public life is to treat men and women equally, most upscale restaurants haven't reached that point.

Then again they haven't really tried all that hard. They've learned that ignoring gender is risky, and often foolish, because men and women approach and respond to restaurants in different ways, looking for different things.

A broad generalization? Absolutely. It's also nowhere near as true as it once was.

..."The truth," Ms. Bodie continued, "is that there is a difference. And in the service industry, it's your job to acknowledge it, predict it."

The Doctors Who Are Redefining Life and Death By William Saletan

Think being the next president would be a brutal job? Imagine being a transplant surgeon. You can't tell the parents of a dying kid when to pull the plug, but you have to be there, ready, the minute he expires. You have to wait until he's dead, but not so long that his organs become useless. You can give him drugs to keep his organs healthy, but you mustn't technically revive him. And you can't remove and restart his heart until it's been declared kaput.

'Intelligent' Computers Put to the Test  -- The Observer

Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes. In the 'Turing test' a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be 'thinking'...

Warwick said: 'You can be flippant, you can flirt, it can be on anything. I'm sure there will be philosophers who say, "OK, it's passed the test, but it doesn't understand what it's doing".'

One such philosopher is Professor AC Grayling of Birkbeck College, University of London. 'The test is misguided. Everyone thinks it's you pitting yourself against a computer and a human, but it's you pitting yourself against a computer and computer programmer. AI is an exciting subject, but the Turing test is pretty crude.'

Religion Makes People Helpful And Generous -- Science Daily

The investigators found complementary results across the disciplines:

• Empirical data within anthropology suggests there is more cooperation among religious societies than the non-religious, especially when group survival is under threat
• Economic experiments indicate that religiosity increases levels of trust among participants
• Psychology experiments show that thoughts of an omniscient, morally concerned God reduce levels of cheating and selfish behaviour
  

"This type of religiously-motivated 'virtuous' behaviour has likely played a vital social role throughout history," says Shariff, a Psychology PhD student. Shariff adds, "One reason we now have large, cooperative societies may be that some aspects of religion - such as outsourcing costly social policing duties to all-powerful Gods - made societies work more cooperatively in the past." Across cultures and through time, observe the authors, the notion of an all-powerful, morally concerned "Big God" usually begat "Big groups" -large-scale, stable societies that successfully passed on their cultural beliefs.

The study also points out that in today's world religion has no monopoly on kind and generous behaviour. In many findings, non-believers acted as prosocially as believers. The last several hundred years has seen the rise of non-religious institutional mechanisms that include effective policing, courts and social surveillance. "Some of the most cooperative modern societies are also the most secular," says Norenzayan. "People have found other ways to be cooperative - without God."

The Great Divide: How to Resolve the War between Science & Religion by Shawn K. Stover

More than a decade ago, Stephen Jay Gould wrote of science and religion as "non-overlapping magisteria," or "NOMA."1 He saw no conflict between science and religion, because he saw no overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise. According to Gould, science deals with the "empirical constitution of the universe," while religion encompasses the search for ethical values and spiritual meaning.

In her book Defending Science -- Within Reason, Susan Haack criticizes NOMA on the basis that it is vague and ambiguous.2 While she doesn't speculate on Gould's true "motives" for reconciling science and religion, she references H.L. Mencken's suggestion that reconciliation might be motivated by cowardice (a fear of provoking religious zealots) or inner doubts (brought on by an inability to completely rid one's self of deeply held religious beliefs).

James Rachels Lectures -- Jamesrachels.org

15 Powerpoint presentations from James Rachels.  Instructors who want to use them in their own classes may do so--we consider them in the public domain now.

How to Improve Your Self-Control -- PsyBlog

Temptation comes in many forms, often so potent, so animal, that it seems impossible to resist. Eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much or letting the heart rule the head. We get instant messages from deep in the gut that resonate through the mind, trying to dictate our behaviour. One of humanity's most useful skills, without which advanced civilisations would not exist, is being able to engage our higher cognitive functions, our self-control, to resist these temptations.