Religion as byproduct of useful cognitive processes

This is an excellent talk by Andy Thomson on the biological and psychological origins of religion.

It’s also precisely my position on the matter. There are many people who argue that religion provides a direct evolutionary advantage — I find them unconvincing. Thomson is explaining how religion’s origin is indirect, as a byproduct of properties of the brain that we find useful in modeling our world and social interactions…and religion is a parasite that hijacks these traits to promote a caricature of these properties.

(via Richard Dawkins)

Clerical collar fails to instill goodness

But I thought religion helped people live a moral life! We’re going to have to really struggle to find an ethical rationale for this pastor’s monstrous behavior.

A Baltimore pastor who worked with developmentally disabled people was charged Friday with befriending a blind and disabled man in his care, then paying a hit man $50,000 in church funds for an execution so he could collect life insurance money.

Police say Kevin Jerome Pushia, 32, who worked for four months as an operations manager for the Arc of Baltimore before abruptly quitting in January, confessed to plotting to kill Lemuel Wallace.

Pushia told police he persuaded Wallace and “numerous” other mentally challenged individuals to list him as a beneficiary on insurance policies.

A terse notation in Pushia’s planning calendar for Feb. 5, the day after Wallace was found dead in a Leakin Park bathroom stall from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and back, reads: “L.W. project completed,” police said.

Errm, Pushia must have wanted the money so he could perform good works, and he was helping Lemuel Wallace to be happier in heaven with Jesus?

Maybe it would be easier to admit that religion is ineffective at imposing any kind of socially useful moral code, but is a handy disguise for the amoral among us.

Torture Sean Hannity?

When I heard that Sean Hannity had jauntily offered to allow himself to be waterboarded, I confess to a moment’s small, viciously gleeful anticipation. However, archy makes a good case for not doing it. After all, if it really is torture, and torture is wrong, and we argue that we shouldn’t even be doing it to putative terrorists…we also shouldn’t be doing it to the small, weak-minded, and stupid.

Minnesota once again embarrassed by Michele Bachman

Michele Bachmann gave a science lecture to congress. As you might imagine, this was a grand spectacle of stupidity.

Just a few things that jumped out at me (I’m sure you can find more by listening carefully, but I could not bear to pay too much attention).

  • She repeats over and over that CO2 is a natural gas. Yes, we know…no one is claiming otherwise. (Also, what would an “unnatural” gas be, anyway?) Nitrogen is also a natural substance, it helps plants grow, and we produce perfectly natural nitrogenous materials from our bodies — so does that mean that we should stop sewer services and allow everyone to wallow in their poop?

  • She claims that not one study has ever been produced to show that CO2 is harmful, and she goes further to claim that CO2 is a harmless gas. We could correct that in just a few minutes: give me a large tank of CO2 and a small room containing Michele Bachmann, and we’ll give her a personal experience.

  • The atmosphere is 3% CO2? Is she really that ignorant? It’s more like 0.03%. And again, no one is arguing that CO2 is evil — it’s that its concentration has distinct effects on the temperature of the planet, and that concentration is changing.

I apologize, world. We’ll try harder to get this loon out of office at the next election. Until then, could you all either just ignore her, or point and laugh?

(via Mock, Paper, Scissors)

Moral DNA?

Please, someone, tell the priests to go tend to their rituals and quit pretending to ha have any understanding of reality. A new archbishop has tried to use biology to argue for his archaic moral position, and I just want to slap him.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan yesterday said advocates of gay marriage “are asking for trouble,” arguing that traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA.

“There’s an in-built code of right and wrong that’s embedded in the human DNA,” Dolan told The Post in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, a week after becoming the New York Archdiocese’s new leader.

“Hard-wired into us is a dictionary, and the dictionary defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, please God, leading to the procreation of human life.

Every word an ignorant lie. There is no genetic basis for a moral code except, perhaps, in the broadest sense of intrinsic rewards for social behavior — Catholicism is not biologically heritable. There is nothing in us that hardwires simplistic monogamy — human cultures have had a wide range of different patterns of sexual behavior. And gay people do not have desires in defiance of their biological impulses, but as consequences of them.

Ah, well, I’m sure Timmy Dolan will go far in the Catholic hierarchy — it doesn’t reward intelligence or knowledge, and he’s got neither.

I am Pro-Test

There was a rally in LA for a group in favor of animal experimentation, Pro-Test, which also had a counter-rally by animal rights groups. You can guess which side I’m on in this debate: blocking experimentation on animals would kill biological research dead. The tactics of the anti-vivisectionists are also reprehensible and deserving of condemnation.

The Pro-Test group, an offshoot of an Oxford, England-based group founded in 2006, was organized by J. David Jentsch, a UCLA neuroscientist who was the target of a recent attack by anonymous animal-rights activists.  In the attack, Jentsch’s car was set on fire while it was parked in front of his Westside home.  (The FBI recently announced that a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible has been increased to $75,000.)  Jentsch, who researches schizophrenia and drug addiction, conducts tests on monkeys.  While he acknowledges that some monkeys are killed as part of his research, he maintains that they do not suffer.  Jentsch was expected to speak at today’s rally.

Most importantly, we’re biologists. We’re in this business because we have a passion for the organisms we study, not because we’re some kind of sick sadists. We’re also currently swaddled up to our ears in regulations and monitors to prevent abuses of the animals in our care.

Unfortunately, the article discussing this rally has associated with it a poll. This makes me rather cranky—it’s a serious issue worth discussing, so please, don’t slap a stupid internet poll on it. It just means that advocacy groups will push at the numbers as if they mean something. So, please, go forth and destroy this pointless metric:

Can medical research on animals be conducted humanely?

Yes — and I support it if the animals are treated well 27% (1872 votes)

No — it’s inhumane by definition and I don’t support it 73% (5049 votes)

Not sure <1% (4 votes)

Right wing inanity

How did we ever let these clowns run the country for so long?

  • John Boehner. No comment from me needed, let his own words speak for him.

    Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the Ohio Republican was asked what to describe the GOP plan to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, “which every major scientific organization said is contributing to climate change.”

    Boehner replied: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

  • We in academia are part of an insidious plot to promote Obama’s socialist agenda by teaching nothing but “community organizing” all the time. At least, that’s the impression you might get from right wing anti-academic freedom sites, as this quote might suggest.

    Google the phrase “college and university courses in community organizing” and you get 9,990,000 entries, at least as of today.

    One problem: the goon who did this search typed it into google without the quotes, which means that it returned every page where a college used the word “college” and a university used the word “university” and a community used the word “community”. Properly enclose the phrase in quotes, and the number of entries you get is…two.

The Republicans do make me despair of humanity, sometimes.

Interviewed in the Medford Mail Tribune

It’s a somewhat odd article in which I apparently attributed evolution to nothing but chance, since the only alternative is Design. This, of course, is not my view, but there’s enough other stuff in there to stir up controversy that maybe we’ll stir up a contentious audience.

There is, apparently, an intelligent design creationism proponent on the faculty of Southern Oregon University, and they got a few comments from him.

Professor Roger Christianson said there are alternative explanations of how diversity happened, and “people who believe in intelligent design feel the complexity of life is too great to come about by naturalistic forces.”

Christianson, an evangelical Christian, said he has brought up intelligent design and creation science in class to show the swing of the pendulum between the two schools of thought, and “I suggest the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

“I talk mostly about adaptation that can be seen from either point of view,” he said. “… I see the world as an evolving pot, with natural selection as the driving force, but I certainly don’t rule out that an intelligence or a creator is involved.”

Charming. Of course, my talk tonight is specifically a counter to that silly and ignorant notion that the fact that organisms are complex must imply that they were designed. And no, there aren’t two schools of thought: there are religious kooks on one side, and the scientific evidence on the other…and only in the minds of the deluded is the correct answer “somewhere in the middle”.

Experience tells me, though, that Professor Christianson will be nowhere near my talk tonight.