A new study reports that fMRI machines can roughly reconstruct the images of film clips that test subjects have been viewing.

What I found interesting was that the reconstructed images, while retaining the general shape of the original, seemed to replace the details with what to me seemed like the details of another image.

I came across this BBC report about some observations at CERN that suggested that neutrinos may be traveling faster than the speed of light. If this is true, it would mean that one of the pillars of modern science, the theory of special relativity, would have to undergo serious scrutiny.

I personally was not too excited by the news and was not even planning to comment on it but it seems to be causing a media sensation and several blog readers sent me clippings from various sources and asked for my opinion, so here it is.

I think that this result is unlikely to hold up and so am not too excited. The reason that I am underwhelmed is that I have been around long enough to recall many previous sightings of tachyons (the technical term for faster-than-light particles) that turned out to be false alarms. They are like Elvis sightings in that there is an initial flurry of excitement that then fades under closer scrutiny. The scientists who reported the recent events are aware of this history and are understandably cautious about making any grandiose claims. They can depend on the media to do that. If other research groups study this is some detail and the results hold up, then there will be cause for excitement. This will likely take a couple of years. Until then, I treat this with considerable skepticism.

So my present attitude is captured in this xkcd cartoon that I saw via Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write.

Sorry to be such a downer but if the history of science teaches us anything it is that the great and enduring theories of physics are never overthrown on the basis of a single experiment.

(An expanded version of a talk given at CWRU’s Share the Vision program, Severance Hall, Friday, August 26, 2011 1:00 pm. This program is to welcome all incoming first year students. My comments centered on the ideas in the common reading book selection Justice: What’s the right thing to do? by Michael Sandel. See part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

In the previous post, I pointed out that experiments with babies suggested that although the theory of evolution supports the idea that the desire for justice and fairness is part of our genetic makeup, it is also limited in that seems to stop with our relatives and immediate community or nation. It is not entirely limited, though. There are many examples in evolution of characteristics that evolved to serve one purpose but then get used for other purposes. Sex is a good example. The pleasure it gives served the purpose of encouraging procreation but now people indulge in it for pleasure alone. Similarly, although the desire for justice my have evolved within the domain of kin and the immediate community to benefit the propagation of genes, it can still drive our relationships with the broader community even when there is no genetic benefit.
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This time-lapse film of the Earth as viewed from the International Space Station is nice to see.

It also shows that the ISS and the shuttles did not fly as far out in space as people often think, being on average just about 225 miles up. So they are quite close to the Earth.

(An expanded version of a talk given at CWRU’s Share the Vision program, Severance Hall, Friday, August 26, 2011 1:00 pm. This program is to welcome all incoming first year students. My comments centered on the ideas in the common reading book selection Justice: What’s the right thing to do? by Michael Sandel. See part 1 and part 2.)

There is considerable evidence that the desire for justice and fairness is innate in us. In an article titled The Moral Life of Babies (New York Times, May 5, 2010) child development psychologist Paul Bloom describes how very young children have a strong sense of justice.

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.

He reports on experiments in which babies were presented with puppets who either helped or hindered other puppets.

In the end, we found that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for the good guy.
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We found that, given a choice, infants prefer a helpful character to a neutral one; and prefer a neutral character to one who hinders. This finding indicates that both inclinations are at work — babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost always showed this pattern of response.

Sometimes the babies were quite emphatic about their preferences.

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

The toddlers also watched pairs of puppets in which one puppet did a good or bad thing and the other puppet rewarded or punished the first. Of the four possible combinations of actions and consequences, toddlers overwhelmingly preferred the puppets that rewarded good acts and punished bad acts over puppets that rewarded bad acts and punished good acts. This showed that the babies were not basing their preferences on what they perceived as good or bad actions but viewed the actions in the context of the purpose they served. This is pretty sophisticated thinking about crime and punishment and justice.

The desire for justice is strong and biological but is limited. For example, toddlers tend to prefer people of their own races, who speak their own language and share their taste in food. Bloom writes that:

3-month-olds prefer the faces of the race that is most familiar to them to those of other races; 11-month-olds prefer individuals who share their own taste in food and expect these individuals to be nicer than those with different tastes; 12-month-olds prefer to learn from someone who speaks their own language over someone who speaks a foreign language. And studies with young children have found that once they are segregated into different groups — even under the most arbitrary of schemes, like wearing different colored T-shirts — they eagerly favor their own groups in their attitudes and their actions.

So are babies and little children racists? If you waggle your finger and go “kitchy-coo” at a baby of a different racial group, will it bite you? It might, but the babies are not making conscious decisions to prefer their own, which is the real mark of racism. They are simply reacting instinctively based on their biology. So biology seems to strongly suggest that our desire for justice, though it is biologically based on our long history of evolution, is also limited to our in-group. This difference in the way we treat in-group members versus the way we view those who are ‘out-group’ members can and does lead to all manner of strife and tribal behavior between communities, religions, castes, and nations.

So does the theory of evolution say that our biological desire for justice stops with our relatives and immediate community or nation? In the next and final post in this series, I will look at how we overcome that kind of parochialism.

(An expanded version of a talk given at CWRU’s Share the Vision program, Severance Hall, Friday, August 26, 2011 1:00 pm. This program is to welcome all incoming first year students. My comments centered on the ideas in the common reading book selection Justice: What’s the right thing to do? by Michael Sandel. See part 1 here.)

The primatologist Frans de Waal in his excellent book The Age of Empathy (2009) provides case study after case study of animals displaying a keen sense of justice and fairness, providing convincing evidence that these impulses are innate in us and arise from our common evolutionary history with other animals. In a newspaper article titled Morals Without God? he writes about his observations:

Chimpanzees and bonobos will voluntarily open a door to offer a companion access to food, even if they lose part of it in the process. And capuchin monkeys are prepared to seek rewards for others, such as when we place two of them side by side, while one of them barters with us with differently colored tokens. One token is “selfish,” and the other “prosocial.” If the bartering monkey selects the selfish token, it receives a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner gets nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewards both monkeys. Most monkeys develop an overwhelming preference for the prosocial token, which preference is not due to fear of repercussions, because dominant monkeys (who have least to fear) are the most generous.
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It is not only humans who are capable of genuine altruism; other animals are, too. I see it every day. An old female, Peony, spends her days outdoors with other chimpanzees at the Yerkes Primate Center’s Field Station. On bad days, when her arthritis is flaring up, she has trouble walking and climbing, but other females help her out. For example, Peony is huffing and puffing to get up into the climbing frame in which several apes have gathered for a grooming session. An unrelated younger female moves behind her, placing both hands on her ample behind and pushes her up with quite a bit of effort, until Peony has joined the rest.

We have also seen Peony getting up and slowly move towards the water spigot, which is at quite a distance. Younger females sometimes run ahead of her, take in some water, then return to Peony and give it to her. At first, we had no idea what was going on, since all we saw was one female placing her mouth close to Peony’s, but after a while the pattern became clear: Peony would open her mouth wide, and the younger female would spit a jet of water into it.

Such observations fit the emerging field of animal empathy, which deals not only with primates, but also with canines, elephants, even rodents. A typical example is how chimpanzees console distressed parties, hugging and kissing them, which behavior is so predictable that scientists have analyzed thousands of cases. Mammals are sensitive to each other’s emotions, and react to others in need.
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A few years ago Sarah Brosnan and I demonstrated that primates will happily perform a task for cucumber slices until they see others getting grapes, which taste so much better. The cucumber-eaters become agitated, throw down their measly veggies and go on strike. A perfectly fine food has become unpalatable as a result of seeing a companion with something better.

We called it inequity aversion, a topic since investigated in other animals, including dogs. A dog will repeatedly perform a trick without rewards, but refuse as soon as another dog gets pieces of sausage for the same trick. Recently, Sarah reported an unexpected twist to the inequity issue, however. While testing pairs of chimps, she found that also the one who gets the better deal occasionally refuses. It is as if they are satisfied only if both get the same. We seem to be getting close to a sense of fairness.

Can we assume that the human species has also inherited this biological predisposition to justice? Yes, because we are all linked by the great tree of life to all other species. If we go back far enough in our lineages, we will find a common ancestor for all of use, which makes us all effectively cousins, and so you can treat this occasion, where all of us have gathered together in this magnificent concert hall, as a family reunion where you are meeting long-lost relatives. In fact, if you and your pet dog or cat trace your lineages back about a hundred million years, you will find that you have a common ancestor, which is a nice thing to realize.

So given that the desire for justice is so widespread among so many different species, it is very likely that we have inherited the desire for justice from deep evolutionary times. In his book, de Waal concludes that studies in the fields of anthropology, psychology, biology, and neuroscience reveal that we are essentially group animals: “highly cooperative, sensitive to injustice, sometimes warmongering, but mostly peace-loving. A society that ignores these tendencies cannot be optimal.” (p. 5)

But is there any direct evidence that humans have a biological predisposition that makes them favor justice and fairness? Yes there is, and I will explore that in the next (and last) post of this series.

(An expanded version of a talk given at CWRU’s Share the Vision program, Severance Hall, Friday, August 26, 2011 1:00 pm. This program is to welcome all incoming first year students. My comments centered on the ideas in the common reading book selection Justice: What’s the right thing to do? by Michael Sandel.)

This year’s common reading book assumes that there is something fundamental about justice that makes its desirability self-evident. What the book discusses are three approaches to justice: the first based on the greatest happiness for the greatest number, the second on respect for the freedom of choice of individuals, and the third on the cultivation of virtue and the common good.

In this talk, I want to examine the very premise that justice is something desirable. What makes us think that people want or seek justice as an end in itself and that the only problem is how to implement that ideal in specific situations? For example, John Rawls’s model of justice (as elucidated in his book The Theory of Justice) assumes that when people are given the opportunity to design a society under the veil of ignorance so that no one knows what situation in life they personally will be placed in, they will create one that is based on the idea of ‘justice as fairness’. Is Rawls justified in assuming that? Is it self-evident that justice is such an obvious good thing that people will want to use it as a central organizing principle?
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A new study suggests that obesity is increasing in the US:

Currently, figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the prevalence of overweight and obesity in adults at about 66 percent. But lead study author Dr. Youfa Wang of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore says that if current overweight and obesity trends continue, 86 percent of Americans could be overweight or obese by the year 2030.

The standard measure used is the body mass index (BMI) that is obtained by diving your mass (measured in kilograms) by the square of your height (measured in meters). This website calculates it for those who use pounds and feet and inches. A BMI of 30 or over indicates obesity while 25 or over means overweight. The ‘normal’ (i.e., supposedly desirable) range lies between 18.5 and 25

The study’s authors also say that, “By 2048, all American adults would become overweight or obese.” I tend to be wary of this kind of extrapolation, especially when it involves human behavior. A self-correction usually sets in at some point.

Another study released around the same time projects figures that are not quite as high:

If obesity rates continue to climb in the U.S. as they’ve done in the past, about half of all men and women could be obese in 20 years, adding an extra 65 million obese adults to the country’s population.

The current figure of 66% of overweight and obese adults surprised me. Can it really be that two out of every three people are like that or is the cut-off for being overweight too low? One common comment I hear from overseas visitors is their initial surprise at the number of overweight people they see in the US. Have I simply got used to thinking of larger people as the norm after living in the US for so long?

One of the peculiar features of the coverage of people’s weight in the media is the appearance of headless torsos accompanying the stories. News stories on obesity will be accompanied by photos and videos of people from the neck down, an indication of the stigma associated with being overweight. In fact, overweight people are often subjected to gratuitously rude comments and made to feel as if they have some kind of moral failing.

Some are fighting back, saying that they do not see obesity as a disease or even a problem, and definitely not anything to be ashamed of or have to apologize for. They say that that is simply who they are and the rest of the population simply has to deal with it. They have rejected the idea that the word fat is some kind of slur requiring the use of euphemisms to soften it, and have embraced it and made it their own, the way that the gay community did with the word queer. They are fat and proud of it.

The Daily Show had a segment on the coverage of obesity some time ago, and interviewed some who see the campaigns against obesity and the drive to eat healthier as a sign of creeping fascism.

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