Creationism

Naive moral Darwinism

PNRJ ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Feb 23 JDN 2460730

Impressed by the incredible usefulness of evolutionary theory in explaining the natural world, many people have tried to apply it to ethical claims as well. The basic idea is that morality evolves; morality is an adaptation just like any other, a trait which has evolved by mutation and natural selection.

Unfortunately the statement “morality evolves” is ambiguous; it could mean a number of different things. This ambiguity has allowed abuses of evolutionary thinking in morality.

Two that are particularly harmful are evolutionary eugenics and laissez-faire Darwinism, both of which fall under an umbrella I’ll call ‘naive moral Darwinism’.

They are both terrible; it saddens me that many people propound them. Creationists will often try to defend their doubts about evolution on empirical grounds, but they really can’t, and I think even they realize this. Their real objection to evolution is not that it is unscientific, but that it is immoral; the concern is that studying evolution will make us callous and selfish. And unfortunately, there is a grain of truth here: A shallow understanding of evolution can indeed lead to a callous and selfish mindset, as people try to shoehorn evolutionary theory onto moral and political systems without a deep understanding of either.

The first option is usually known as “Social Darwinism”, but I think a better term is “evolutionary eugenics”. (“Social Darwinism” is a pejorative, not a self-description.) This philosophy, if we even credit it with the term, is especially ridiculous; indeed, it is evil. It doesn’t make any sense, either as ethics or as evolution, and it has led to some of the most terrible atrocities in history, from forced sterilization to mass murder. Darwin adamantly disagreed with it, and it rests upon a variety of deep confusions about evolutionary science.

First, in practice at least, eugenicists presumed that traits like intelligence, health, and even wealth are almost entirely genetic—when it’s obvious that they are very heavily affected by the environment. There certainly are genetic factors involved, but the presumption that these traits are entirely genetic is absurd. Indeed, the fact that the wealth of parents is strongly correlated with that of their children has an obvious explanation completely unrelated to genetics: Inheritance. Wealthy parents can also give their children many advantages in life that lead to higher earnings later. Controlling for inherited environment, there is still some heritability of wealth, but it’s quite weak; it’s probably due to personality traits like conscientiousness, ambition, and in fact narcissism which are beneficial in a capitalist economy. Hence breeding the wealthy may make more people who are similar to the wealthy; but there’s no reason to think it will actually make the world wealthier.

Moreover, eugenics rests upon a confusion between fitness in the evolutionary sense of expected number of allele copies, and the notion of being “fit” in some other sense, like physical health (as in “fitness club”), socially conformity (as in “misfits”) or mental sanity (as in “unfit to serve trial”). Strong people are not necessarily higher in genetic fitness, nor are smart people, nor are people of any particular race or ethnicity. Fitness entails the probability of one’s genes being passed on in a given environment—without reference to a specific environment, it says basically nothing. Given the reference environment “majority of the Earth’s land surface”, humans are very fit organisms, but so are rats and cockroaches. Given the reference environment “deep ocean”, sharks fare far better than we ever will, and better even than our cousins the cetaceans who live there. Moreover, there is no reason to think that intelligence in the sense of Einstein or Darwin is particularly fit. The intelligence of an ordinary person is definitely fit—that’s why we have it—but beyond that point, it may in fact be counterproductive. (Consider Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, both of whom were geniuses and neither of whom ever married or had children.)

There is milder form of this that is still quite harmful; I’ll call it “laissez-faire Darwinism”. It says that because natural selection automatically perpetuates the fit at the expense of the unfit, it ultimately leads to the best overall outcome. Under laissez-faire Darwinism, we should simply let evolution happen as it is going to happen. This theory is not as crazy as evolutionary eugenics—nor would its consequences be as dire—but it’s still quite confused. Natural selection is a law of nature, not a moral principle. It says what will happen, not what should happen. Indeed, like any law of nature, natural selection is inevitable. No matter what you do, natural selection will act upon you. The genes that work will survive, the genes that fail will die. The specifics of the environmental circumstances will decide which genes are the ones that survive, and there are random deviations due to genetic drift; but natural selection always applies.

Typically laissez-faire Darwinists argue that we should eliminate all government welfare, health care, and famine relief, because they oppose natural selection; but this would be like tearing down all skyscrapers because they oppose gravity, or, as Benjamin Franklin was once asked to do, to cease installing lightning rods because they oppose God’s holy smiting. Natural selection is a law of nature, a fundamental truth; but through wise engineering we can work with it instead of against it, just as we do with gravity and electricity. We would ignore laws of nature at our own peril—an engineer who failed to take gravity into account would not make very good buildings!—but we can work with them and around them to achieve our goals. This is no less true with natural selection than with any law of nature, whether gravity, electricity, quantum mechanics, or anything else. As a laser uses quantum mechanics and a light bulb uses electricity, so wise social policy can use natural selection to serve human ends. Indeed, welfare, health care, and famine relief are precisely the sort of things that can modulate the fitness of our entire species to make us all better off.

There are however important ways in which evolution can influence our ethical reasoning, which I’ll talk about in later posts.

The real source of the evolution debate, part 2

PNRJ Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As I discussed in my last post, the propositions that people really object to are not evolution per se. They are distinct but conceptually related ideas, such as adaptationism, common descent, animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism.

In my last post I dealt with adaptationism and common descent; now its time for animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism.

Animalism

Next we must consider animalism, the proposition that humans are not “special”, that we are animals like any other. I’d like to distinguish two forms of animalism which are quite different but often confused; I will call them weak animalism and strong animalism. The former is definitely true, but the latter doesn’t make any sense. Weak animalism is the observation that human beings have the same biological structure as other animals, and share a common ancestry and many common traits—in short, that humans are in fact animals. We are all born, we all die; we all breathe, we all eat, we all sleep; we all love, we all suffer. This seems to me a completely unassailable observation; of course these things are true, they are essential to human nature, and they are a direct consequence of our kinship with the rest of the animal domain. Humans are not rocks or plants or empty space; humans are animals.

On the other hand, strong animalism is the claim that because humans are animals, we may (or should) “act like animals”, stealing, raping, murdering, and so on. It is true that all these behaviors, or very close analogues, can be observed in the animal domain; but at the same time, so can friendship (e.g. in chimpanzees), affection (e.g. in penguins), monogamy (e.g. in gerbils), and many other behaviors. The diversity of behaviors in the animal domain is mind-bogglingly huge. There are animals that can sever and regrow limbs and animals that can infest and control other animals’ minds.

In the only sense in which we are “just animals”, the fact justifies no moral claims about our behavior. This matter is not a trivial quibble, but a major factor in the evolution debate: Intelligent Design proponents made a similar complaint when they objected to Bloodhound Gang’s song “The Bad Touch” which includes the line, “You and me baby we ain’t nothin’ but mammals // So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”. This may make for entertaining music (and I’ve no objection to sex or even promiscuity and seduction per se), but it is highly fallacious reasoning, and it’s clearly hurting the public understanding of science. If you insist on saying that humans are “just animals”, you should be very clear about what this means; I much prefer to remove the condescending “just” and say “humans are animals”. For to say humans are just animals would be like saying the Earth is just a planet, or love is just a chemical reaction. If all you mean is that the example is an instance of a category, you don’t need the “just”; by saying “just”, you clearly are trying to assert some sort of equivalence between members of the category, one that would deflate the status of the particular example. Yet if you have to say it, it probably isn’t true; no one would point at a random rock and say “this is just a rock”—instead you point to the Earth and say “this is just a rock”, when in fact it is a very special rock. Humans are a very special animals, the Earth is a very special planet, and love is a very special chemical reaction (closely tied to that most mysterious of chemical reactions, consciousness). We are members of one vast animal family—indeed, one vast family of life—but we are most definitely the wisest and most powerful member.

I’m honestly not sure what I would do if I tried to “act like an animal”; I suppose I would be born, breathe, eat, sleep, love, suffer and die—but I was going to do these things anyway, whether I wanted to or not. Indeed, by weak animalism, humans are animals, and so by acting like human beings we are in fact acting like animals—the animal Homo sapiens.

Abiogenesis

Next comes abiogenesis, the proposition that living things came from nonliving things. Well, where else would they come from? The only way to deny this proposition is to say that living things always existed. (If God made life, he would have done so by being a living thing that always existed.) The problem with this idea is that it doesn’t really explain where life comes from, it only pushes its origin back into the infinite past. Scientists are making progress in using nonliving chemicals to produce replicating entities that are very similar to life, and inn 2010 scientists created the first all-synthetic bacterium, but to do it they had to use pre-existing bacteria to set up the reactions. This lends credibility to the idea that life came from nonlife, but in fact even this wouldn’t conclusively demonstrate abiogenesis; it would prove that life can arise from nonlife, but that doesn’t mean it did originally. The truth is, we really don’t understand much about the origin of life, and even less about the origin of the universe; but this does nothing to undermine evolution or even common descent. No one doubts the existence of gravity simply because we don’t know what caused the Big Bang!

Atheism

Finally, and most controversially, there is atheism. Theism is belief in a superhuman being that responds to prayers and performs miracles; atheism is the negation of theism. This is all atheism means; if you think it means something more than this—absolute knowledge that there cannot be a creator being, or no ultimate foundation for morality, or no meaning to existence, or whatever else—that isn’t atheism. An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in a personal divinity, someone who says that there are no superhuman beings that intervene in our lives. This is a fairly strong claim in itself, since if correct, atheism implies that religion as we know it—prayer, rituals, miracles, holy books—is utterly false. Deep philosophical religion, like that practiced by Einstein or Kant, remains intact; but the religion of churches, mosques and temples is completely undermined.

Evolution doesn’t imply atheism, but it does support it, in the following sense: Evolution answers the question of “Where did we come from?” without requiring God. Even before we knew about evolution, religion wasn’t a very convincing answer to that question; but we didn’t really have a better one—and now we do.

Yet atheism is clearly correct. This is something we can infer directly from a large body of scientific evidence. I’ve already addressed this topic in previous posts, so I’ll be brief this time around.

Maybe there is a kind of religion that could be reconciled with science; but it’s not a theistic religion. Perhaps there is a God who made the whole of the universe, set it running in perfect harmony to achieve some divine plan. This is called deism, and it’s a scientifically respectable position. But then, it is senseless to pray, since God isn’t going to change the divine plan on behalf of tiny creatures on a backwater planet of a backwater star in a backwater galaxy. It is plainly wrong to call such a being “he” or even “He”, since no being so vast and powerful could ever be properly described in the petty terms of a biological male—it would be like saying that gravity has testicles, energy conservation has a beard, or causality has a Y chromosome. I’m not sure we can even fairly say that God is a conscious being, for consciousness as we know it seems too vulgar a trait to assign to an entity of such vastness. In fact, the theologian Paul Tillich thought even existence a concept insufficient to describe the divine. It is foolish to look to ancient books to understand God, for its work is written from horizon to horizon in the fabric of the universe, and these ancient books are but pale shadows of its grandeur. It is naive to suppose that we are special beings created in God’s image, for God has made many millions of species on this planet, and probably countless more on other distant planets; furthermore, God’s process of production favors insects and bacteria and requires massive systematic death and suffering.

And even once we have removed everything we knew of religion, even this truncated theology suffers from an egregious flaw: Such a creator offers us no evidence of its existence. A deistic God is indistinguishable from the universe itself, definitely in practice and perhaps even in principle. I don’t really see the point in using the word “God” when the word “nature” captures what we mean much better. Saying “God is vaster than we can imagine, and of course by `God’ I mean the universe” strikes me as like saying “The Sun is powered by magical unicorn love, and of course by `magical unicorn love’ I mean nuclear fusion.”

And theism, religion as we know it, is philosophically and scientifically bankrupt. Imagine an airline pilot who lets go of the controls and prays to God to fly the plane; imagine a surgeon who puts down the scalpel and prays to God for the patients to be healed. That’s the sort of thing we would do if theism were true. It would make sense to do these things—it would be rational to do these things—under the presumption that there is a God who answers our prayers. You can’t escape this; if it makes sense to pray for your sick grandmother, then it doesn’t make sense for her to take medicine—because if God is in control, then chemistry isn’t. The fact that hardly anyone really would resort to prayer when an obvious and effective scientific alternative is available (and the fact that people who do are considered fanatical or even insane) clearly shows that theism is bankrupt, and that hardly anyone believes it confidently enough to actually live by it. No one except the craziest fanatics believes in God the way they believe in gravity.

I’m sure this book will be perceived as yet another “angry atheist” “attacking” “religious people”; on the contrary, I am a respectful and reflective atheist criticizing theistic religion. I respect religious people; I do not respect theistic religion. Indeed, I respect religious people too much to let them go on believing such ridiculous things. What glorious powers of human reason are wasted on such nonsense! If you believe in the subtle, abstract, inscrutable God of Einstein or Spinoza, very well. We disagree only about the most abstract matters, almost at the level of semantics (what you call “God” I prefer to call “nature”). Our beliefs and values are not only reconcilable but nearly identical.

On the other hand if you believe in a magical personal God, a God who writes books and answers prayers, then my criticism is indeed directed at your beliefs; I think you are mistaken, gravely, dangerously mistaken.

Atheism is a scientific fact.

Conclusion

Evolution is a fact. The Modern Synthesis of genetics and natural selection is among the most certain scientific theories ever devised; it is the unified field theory of life on Earth. The following claims may be controversial in our society, but they are also scientific facts: Living things are adapted to their environment by natural selection; all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor; humans are animals; life arose by natural processes; and theistic religion is false. You can accept these facts, or else you can live in denial.

Yes, in principle evolution is a theory that can be doubted, but in principle everything in science is a theory that can be doubted. If you want certain, undeniable truths, you will need to stay with logic and mathematics—and even then, you’ll need to be careful about your axioms. Otherwise, you must always be open to a thin sliver of uncertainty, a sliver that should be no larger for evolution than for gravity or photosynthesis. (Of the three, gravity is by far the least-understood.)

The convergence of scientific evidence in favor of evolution, a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, genetics, natural selection, common descent, adaptationism, weak animalism, and yes, even atheism, is so incredibly massive that we’d have to give up half of science to abandon these things. Any revisions we do make in the future will necessarily be minor, leaving the core of truth intact.

To doubt that rubidium decays into strontium at the same rate now it did a million years ago, you must explain how the fundamental laws of nuclear physics that we have verified to twelve decimal places are incorrect.

To doubt that cetaceans evolved from land mammals, you must explain why they breathe air instead of water and swim vertically rather than horizontally, unlike nearly everything else in the sea.

To believe in microevolution but not macroevolution, you must think that there is some mysterious force that prevents what has happened 100 times from happening an additional 100,000 times for the same reasons—for, if repeated many times, a 0.01% systematic change per century, a darwin of evolution (lowercase for a unit of measure, like the newton of force or the weber of magnetic flux), is more than enough to account for the transition from archaea to eukaryotes over 3 billion years, and vastly more than is needed to account for the transition from apes to humans over 5 million years. In fact, observed rates of evolution in the short term have reached the level of kilodarwins, thousands of darwins.

To doubt that life on Earth has changed and diverged over time you must ignore the most obvious facts about a remarkably rich and well-organized fossil record. There are no rabbits in Precambrian layers. There are no trilobites in Mesozoic layers. There are no primates in the Jurassic, and no sauropods in the Tertiary. There have never been a human fossil and a dinosaur fossil found in the same rock. Creationists like to claim that the fossil record sorted itself by size and lifestyle (as here), but in fact there are large and small, land and sea, in pretty much every layer of the fossil record—just not the same ones, because the organisms in lower layers died off and were replaced by the organisms in higher layers. Pterodactyls look a lot like a birds, come in roughly the same size ranges as birds, and seemed to live similar lifestyles, but you’ll never find the two buried together. Looking at the fossils, you can’t help but infer evolution; if God made the fossils, he must have wanted us to believe in evolution.

The real source of the evolution debate, part 1

PNRJ Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 9 JDN 2460716

The last few posts have been about evolution; but everything I’ve said in them has been very technical and scientific, and I imagine it is not very controversial or offensive to anyone. In fact, I would guess that anyone who believes in Creationism, upon reading my definition of evolution as “change in allele distribution in a population”, was thinking, “Of course we believe in that. But that’s not evolution.” Actually it is; evolution is change in allele distribution in a population. What people are objecting to isn’t really evolution.

There are however several propositions that people do object to, which are conceptually related, but not strictly implied by evolution. They are adaptationism, common descent, animalism, abiogenesis, and atheism respectively. They are all true—and in what follows I will offer a defense of each—but they are not necessarily entailed by evolution or the Modern Synthesis, and so they should be considered separately on their own merits. This post will deal with adaptationism and common descent, and I’ll save the others for a later post.

Adaptationism

Adaptationism is the principle that living organisms have the traits they do because these traits are adaptive, that is, that they are beneficial to fitness. It’s obvious that this isn’t completely true in every case; whales have hipbones despite having no apparent use for them, and the human appendix seems mostly useful for collecting toxins and occasionally exploding. There are also limits to how much an organism can change given its current structure; the emerging field of developmental evolutionary biology, or evo-devo, seeks to characterize these limits more precisely.

But in general, adaptationism is an incredibly powerful principle, one which makes sense of the diversity and complexity of life on Earth in a way no other theory can. Natural selection predicts that organisms will become more and more adapted over time; adaptationism is based on the fact that we have had plenty of time to adapt really, really well. In fact, it can be argued that adaptationism is really what evolutionary theory is about, that all this business about changes in allele distributions is useful but not really the point of the enterprise.

When we look at the world, we see that living things are extremely complex and well-suited to their environments; theologians used to say (in fact some still do) that this was evidence that living things were designed by a perfect God.

The problem with this argument was exposed almost immediately by David Hume: If complex things need designers, aren’t designers even more complex than what they design? But then, the designer needs a designer-designer, and the designer-designer needs a designer-designer-designer, and so on into an infinite regress! Another problem with this sort of Intelligent Design thinking is that it cannot explain the cases when adaptationism fails—in particular, why do so many species go extinct? Recently a theory of “Intelligent Recall” was proposed for this purpose; but this forces us to think of our designer as no more intelligent than a financial analyst or an automobile engineer! What kind of God would make mistakes in design?

And now we know better: The remarkable complexity and fitness of living organisms can be entirely explained by adaptationism. When we ask why dolphins have fins, why birds have wings, why centipedes have so many legs, why snakes are so long, or why humans have such enormous brains, adaptationism gives us the answer: organisms have these traits because having these traits benefited their ancestors. In some cases it’s pretty obvious how this would work (having fins lets dolphins swim faster, swimming faster has obvious benefits in catching fish and escaping sharks, so dolphin ancestors with more fin-like limbs survived better); in others we’re still working on the specifics (there is as yet no consensus on how humans got so incredibly smart compared to other animals); but in general adaptationism has explained a huge body of data that we couldn’t account for any other way.

Common descent

Common descent is the proposition that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor. This implies, in particular, that human beings share a common ancestor with other animals. The former is strictly stronger, and not quite as certain; at least in principle it could be that some broad classes of organism do not share a common ancestor, but nonetheless it would still be quite clear that humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. In practice nearly all biologists agree with the strongest form of common descent, that all living organisms on Earth share a common ancestor. Recently the biochemist Douglas Theobald mathematically compared this strongest form of common descent (universal common descent) with several other models of phylogenetic history, finding that universal common descent was the most probable result by a factor of at least 102000—a 2001-digit number. That is, scientists are 99.999,999,999,999,999,999… (on with 1,980 more nines!) percent sure that universal common descent is right. This is not hyperbole; it is mathematically precise. At this point any sliver of uncertainty left in universal common descent needs to apply to all of our fundamental knowledge of physics and chemistry; in order to be wrong about this, we’d need to be wrong about everything.

How are we so sure? Nature presents us with a very consistent pattern of observations that simply make no sense any other way. Traits in living things (and, we are increasingly finding, genes) have distinct patterns, structural similarities that exist between species irrespective of their lifestyle; we call these similiarities homologues. (Similarities that are due to lifestyle—e.g., both dolphins and fish have fins—are called analogues.) Dolphin skeletons are more like dog skeletons than they are like fish skeletons, even though dolphins live more like fish. Bat skin is more like human skin than like bird skin, even though bats live more like birds. The most parsimonious explanation is that these traits were passed on from some common ancestor—that dolphins and dogs have similar skeletons because dolphins and dogs are actually genetically related somehow, and they differ from fish because they are more distantly related.

Once we began to understand DNA, we became able to detect even more compelling homologues. Many kinds of mutation are completely ineffectual; some involve a change to DNA that doesn’t do anything, others swap out two amino acids that are essentially the same; in fact because of the way genes code for amino acids, it’s possible to have a change in a gene that isn’t reflected in the resulting protein at all. All of these changes have no effect on the organism, but they are still passed on to offspring. When you find two organisms that have the same trait (e.g. bats and birds both have wings), if that trait does something important (lets you fly), then maybe it’s just a similarity in lifestyle; if that happens we call it convergent evolution. But when we’re looking at a DNA sequence that doesn’t do anything, lifestyle can’t be the reason—it must be either common ancestry or pure coincidence. Statistical analysis can rule out pure coincidence, and then we are left with only one possibility: common descent. A third option often proposed by Creationists simply doesn’t work: A common designer of sharks and dolphins would not give one a cartilaginous skeleton and gills and the other a bony mammalian skeleton and lungs. There is no reason for dolphin skeletons to be more like dog skeletons than shark skeletons—except that dogs and dolphins share closer common ancestry to each other than they do to sharks.

There are thousands of traits and genes that we can use to assess these relationships. When we do this, we find a remarkably consistent organizational structure, a pattern of a few common ancestors diversifying into a wide variety of descendants—it looks a bit like a tree, so we call it a phylogenetic tree. In some cases there is ambiguity about which species are more closely related, and we need to gather more evidence. This is a normal part of evolutionary biology research.

One thing is not disputed: Humans share a common ancestor with apes. This is simply too obvious from the morphological and genetic homologues. Human and chimp DNA coincides 95-98\%, depending on how you count insertions and deletions.

A standard measure of genetic distance is the Nei distance; a larger Nei distance implies more genetic differences, which in turn suggests that the common ancestor was further in the past. (Exactly how it’s calculated is a bit too technical for this post.)

Humans and chimps have a Nei distance of 0.45. This similarity between humans and chimps represents a closer similarity than that between dogs and foxes, who differ by a Nei distance of 1.1. Almost anyone can see that dogs and foxes are related animals; so why is it so hard to believe that humans and chimps are related too?

Creationists often claim that we never find the transitional forms predicted by evolutionary theory, but this is simply not true. We do in fact see many transitional forms; feathered dinosaurs mark the transition from reptiles to birds, ambulocetids mark the transition from land mammals to cetaceans, therapsids mark the transition from reptiles to mammals, and a huge variety of hominids marks the transition from apes to humans. It’s important to understand what this means: transitional forms are not bizarre combinations of their descendant organisms, but fully-functional lifeforms in their own right that have descendants very different from one another. Just as your grandparents are not a combination of half of you and half of your first cousin, common ancestors are not simply half-and-half combinations of their descendant organisms. Ambulocetids are not half-deer/half-dolphin, they are somewhat deer-like yet somewhat dolphin-like mammals whose ancestors were on average slightly more deer-like and whose descendants were on average slightly more dolphin-like. Different traits changed at different times, generations apart: Ambulocetids began to swim before they lost their legs, and even modern dolphins haven’t lost their lungs or hipbones.


This is such a deep, marvelous truth that Creationists are missing out on: All life on Earth is part of one family. We are kin with the dogs and the cats and the elephants, with the snakes and the lizards and the birds, with the beetles and the flies and the bees, even with the flowers and the bushes and the trees.

The backfire effect has been greatly exaggerated

PNRJ core principles, heuristics and biases, Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

Sep 8 JDN 2458736

Do a search for “backfire effect” and you’re likely to get a large number of results, many of them from quite credible sources. The Oatmeal did an excellent comic on it. The basic notion is simple: “[…]some individuals when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs come to hold their original position even more strongly.”

The implications of this effect are terrifying: There’s no point in arguing with anyone about anything controversial, because once someone strongly holds a belief there is nothing you can do to ever change it. Beliefs are fixed and unchanging, stalwart cliffs against the petty tides of evidence and logic.

Fortunately, the backfire effect is not actually real—or if it is, it’s quite rare. Over many years those seemingly-ineffectual tides can erode those cliffs down and turn them into sandy beaches.

The most recent studies with larger samples and better statistical analysis suggest that the typical response to receiving evidence contradicting our beliefs is—lo and behold—to change our beliefs toward that evidence.

To be clear, very few people completely revise their worldview in response to a single argument. Instead, they try to make a few small changes and fit them in as best they can.

But would we really expect otherwise? Worldviews are holistic, interconnected systems. You’ve built up your worldview over many years of education, experience, and acculturation. Even when someone presents you with extremely compelling evidence that your view is wrong, you have to weigh that against everything else you have experienced prior to that point. It’s entirely reasonable—rational, even—for you to try to fit the new evidence in with a minimal overall change to your worldview. If it’s possible to make sense of the available evidence with only a small change in your beliefs, it makes perfect sense for you to do that.

What if your whole worldview is wrong? You might have based your view of the world on a religion that turns out not to be true. You might have been raised into a culture with a fundamentally incorrect concept of morality. What if you really do need a radical revision—what then?

Well, that can happen too. People change religions. They abandon their old cultures and adopt new ones. This is not a frequent occurrence, to be sure—but it does happen. It happens, I would posit, when someone has been bombarded with contrary evidence not once, not a few times, but hundreds or thousands of times, until they can no longer sustain the crumbling fortress of their beliefs against the overwhelming onslaught of argument.

I think the reason that the backfire effect feels true to us is that our life experience is largely that “argument doesn’t work”; we think back to all the times that we have tried to convince to change a belief that was important to them, and we can find so few examples of when it actually worked. But this is setting the bar much too high. You shouldn’t expect to change an entire worldview in a single conversation. Even if your worldview is correct and theirs is not, that one conversation can’t have provided sufficient evidence for them to rationally conclude that. One person could always be mistaken. One piece of evidence could always be misleading. Even a direct experience could be a delusion or a foggy memory.

You shouldn’t be trying to turn a Young-Earth Creationist into an evolutionary biologist, or a climate change denier into a Greenpeace member. You should be trying to make that Creationist question whether the Ussher chronology is really so reliable, or if perhaps the Earth might be a bit older than a 17th century theologian interpreted it to be. You should be getting the climate change denier to question whether scientists really have such a greater vested interest in this than oil company lobbyists. You can’t expect to make them tear down the entire wall—just get them to take out one brick today, and then another brick tomorrow, and perhaps another the day after that.

The proverb is of uncertain provenance, variously attributed, rarely verified, but it is still my favorite: No single raindrop feels responsible for the flood.

Do not seek to be a flood. Seek only to be a raindrop—for if we all do, the flood will happen sure enough. (There’s a version more specific to our times: So maybe we’re snowflakes. I believe there is a word for a lot of snowflakes together: Avalanche.)

And remember this also: When you argue in public (which includes social media), you aren’t just arguing for the person you’re directly engaged with; you are also arguing for everyone who is there to listen. Even if you can’t get the person you’re arguing with to concede even a single point, maybe there is someone else reading your post who now thinks a little differently because of something you said. In fact, maybe there are many people who think a little differently—the marginal impact of slacktivism can actually be staggeringly large if the audience is big enough.

This can be frustrating, thankless work, for few people will ever thank you for changing their mind, and many will condemn you even for trying. Finding out you were wrong about a deeply-held belief can be painful and humiliating, and most people will attribute that pain and humiliation to the person who called them out for being wrong—rather than placing the blame where it belongs, which is on whatever source or method made you wrong in the first place. Being wrong feels just like being right.

But this is important work, among the most important work that anyone can do. Philosophy, mathematics, science, technology—all of these things depend upon it. Changing people’s minds by evidence and rational argument is literally the foundation of civilization itself. Every real, enduring increment of progress humanity has ever made depends upon this basic process. Perhaps occasionally we have gotten lucky and made the right choice for the wrong reasons; but without the guiding light of reason, there is nothing to stop us from switching back and making the wrong choice again soon enough.

So I guess what I’m saying is: Don’t give up. Keep arguing. Keep presenting evidence. Don’t be afraid that your arguments will backfire—because in fact they probably won’t.

Are some ideas too ridiculous to bother with?

PNRJ cognitive science, heuristics and biases , , , , , ,

Apr 22 JDN 2458231

Flat Earth. Young-Earth Creationism. Reptilians. 9/11 “Truth”. Rothschild conspiracies.

There are an astonishing number of ideas that satisfy two apparently-contrary conditions:

  1. They are so obviously ridiculous that even a few minutes of honest, rational consideration of evidence that is almost universally available will immediately refute them;
  2. They are believed by tens or hundreds of millions of otherwise-intelligent people.

Young-Earth Creationism is probably the most alarming, seeing as it grips the minds of some 38% of Americans.

What should we do when faced with such ideas? This is something I’ve struggled with before.

I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to actively address and refute them—but I don’t think I’ve even once actually persuaded someone who believes these ideas to change their mind. This doesn’t mean my time and effort were entirely wasted; it’s possible that I managed to convince bystanders, or gained some useful understanding, or simply improved my argumentation skills. But it does seem likely that my time and effort were mostly wasted.

It’s tempting, therefore, to give up entirely, and just let people go on believing whatever nonsense they want to believe. But there’s a rather serious downside to that as well: Thirty-eight percent of Americans.

These people vote. They participate in community decisions. They make choices that affect the rest of our lives. Nearly all of those Creationists are Evangelical Christians—and White Evangelical Christians voted overwhelmingly in favor of Donald Trump. I can’t be sure that changing their minds about the age of the Earth would also change their minds about voting for Trump, but I can say this: If all the Creationists in the US had simply not voted, Hillary Clinton would have won the election.

And let’s not leave the left wing off the hook either. Jill Stein is a 9/11 “Truther”, and pulled a lot of fellow “Truthers” to her cause in the election as well. Had all of Jill Stein’s votes gone to Hillary Clinton instead, again Hillary would have won, even if all the votes for Trump had remained the same. (That said, there is reason to think that if Stein had dropped out, most of those folks wouldn’t have voted at all.)

Therefore, I don’t think it is safe to simply ignore these ridiculous beliefs. We need to do something; the question is what.

We could try to censor them, but first of all that violates basic human rights—which should be a sufficient reason not to do it—and second, it probably wouldn’t even work. Censorship typically leads to radicalization, not assimilation.

We could try to argue against them. Ideally this would be the best option, but it has not shown much effect so far. The kind of person who sincerely believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old (let alone that governments are secretly ruled by reptilian alien invaders) isn’t the kind of person who is highly responsive to evidence and rational argument.

In fact, there is reason to think that these people don’t actually believe what they say the same way that you and I believe things. I’m not saying they’re lying, exactly. They think they believe it; they want to believe it. They believe in believing it. But they don’t actually believe it—not the way that I believe that cyanide is poisonous or the way I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. It isn’t fully integrated into the way that they anticipate outcomes and choose behaviors. It’s more of a free-floating sort of belief, where professing a particular belief allows them to feel good about themselves, or represent their status in a community.

To be clear, it isn’t that these beliefs are unimportant to them; on the contrary, they are in some sense more important. Creationism isn’t really about the age of the Earth; it’s about who you are and where you belong. A conventional belief can be changed by evidence about the world because it is about the world; a belief-in-belief can’t be changed by evidence because it was never really about that.

But if someone’s ridiculous belief is really about their identity, how do we deal with that? I can’t refute an identity. If your identity is tied to a particular social group, maybe they could ostracize you and cause you to lose the identity; but an outsider has no power to do that. (Even then, I strongly suspect that, for instance, most excommunicated Catholics still see themselves as Catholic.) And if it’s a personal identity not tied to a particular group, even that option is unavailable.

Where, then, does that leave us? It would seem that we can’t change their minds—but we also can’t afford not to change their minds. We are caught in a terrible dilemma.

I think there might be a way out. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but I think what we need to do is stop taking them seriously as beliefs, and start treating them purely as announcements of identity.

So when someone says something like, “The Rothschilds run everything!”, instead of responding as though this were a coherent proposition being asserted, treat it as if someone had announced, “Boo! I hate the Red Sox!” Belief in the Rothschild conspiracies isn’t a well-defined set of propositions about the world; it’s an assertion of membership in a particular sort of political sect that is vaguely left-wing and anarchist. You don’t really think the Rothschilds rule everything. You just want to express your (quite justifiable) anger at how our current political system privileges the rich.

Likewise, when someone says they think the Earth is 6,000 years old, you could try to present the overwhelming scientific evidence that they are wrong—but it might be more productive, and it is certainly easier, to just think of this as a funny way of saying “I’m an Evangelical Christian”.

Will this eliminate the ridiculous beliefs? Not immediately. But it might ultimately do so, in the following way: By openly acknowledging the belief-in-belief as a signaling mechanism, we can open opportunities for people to develop new, less pathological methods of signaling. (Instead of saying you think the Earth is 6,000 years old, maybe you could wear a funny hat, like Orthodox Jews do. Funny hats don’t hurt anybody. Everyone loves funny hats.) People will always want to signal their identity, and there are fundamental reasons why such signals will typically be costly for those who use them; but we can try to make them not so costly for everyone else.

This also makes arguments a lot less frustrating, at least at your end. It might make them more frustrating at the other end, because people want their belief-in-belief to be treated like proper belief, and you’ll be refusing them that opportunity. But this is not such a bad thing; if we make it more frustrating to express ridiculous beliefs in public, we might manage to reduce the frequency of such expression.

How do we reach people with ridiculous beliefs?

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 16, JDN 2457678

One of the most unfortunate facts in the world—indeed, perhaps the most unfortunate fact, from which most other unfortunate facts follow—is that it is quite possible for a human brain to sincerely and deeply hold a belief that is, by any objective measure, totally and utterly ridiculous.

And to be clear, I don’t just mean false; I mean ridiculous. People having false beliefs is an inherent part of being finite beings in a vast and incomprehensible universe. Monetarists are wrong, but they are not ludicrous. String theorists are wrong, but they are not absurd. Multiregionalism is wrong, but it is not nonsensical. Indeed, I, like anyone else, am probably wrong about a great many things, though of course if I knew which ones I’d change my mind. (Indeed, I admit a small but nontrivial probability of being wrong about the three things I just listed.)

I mean ridiculous beliefs. I mean that any rational, objective assessment of the probability of that belief being true would be vanishingly small, 1 in 1 million at best. I’m talking about totally nonsensical beliefs, beliefs that go against overwhelming evidence; some of them are outright incoherent. Yet millions of people go on believing them.

For example, over 40% of Americans believe that human beings were created by God in their present form less than 10,000 years ago, and typically offer no evidence for this besides “The Bible says so.” (Strictly speaking, even that isn’t true—standard interpretations of the Bible say so. The Bible itself contains no clearly stated date for creation.) This despite the absolutely overwhelming body of evidence supporting the theory of evolution by Darwinian natural selection.

Over a third of Americans don’t believe in global warming, which is not only a complete consensus among all credible climate scientists based on overwhelming evidence, but one of the central threats facing human civilization over the 21st century. On a global scale this is rather like standing on a train track and saying you don’t believe in trains. (Or like the time my mother once told me about where an alert went out to her office that there was a sniper in the area, indiscriminately shooting at civilians, and one of her co-workers refused to join the security protocol and declared smugly, “I don’t believe in snipers.” Fortunately, he was unharmed in the incident. This time.)

1/4 of Americans believe in astrology, and 1/4 Americans believe that aliens have visited the Earth. (Not sure if it’s the same 1/4. Probably considerable but not total overlap.) The existence of extraterrestrial civilizations somewhere in this mind-bogglingly (perhaps infinitely) vast universe has probability 1. But visiting us is quite another matter, and there is absolutely no credible evidence of it. As for astrology? I shouldn’t have to explain why the position of Jupiter, much less Sirius, on your birthday is not a major influence on your behavior or life outcomes. Your obstetrician exerted more gravitational force on you than Jupiter did at the moment you were born.

The majority of Americans believe in telepathy or extrasensory perception. I confess that I actually did when I was very young, though I think I disabused myself of this around the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus.

I love the term “extrasensory perception” because it is such an oxymoron; if you’re perceiving, it is via senses. “Sixth sense” is better, except that we actually already have at least nine senses: The ones you probably know, vision (sight), audition (hearing), olfaction (smell), gustation (taste), and tactition (touch)—and the ones you may not know, thermoception (heat), proprioception (body position), vestibulation (balance), and nociception (pain). These can probably be subdivided further—vision and spatial reasoning are dissociated in blind people, heat and cold are separate nerve pathways, pain and itching are distinct systems, and there are a variety of different sensors used for proprioception. So we really could have as many as twenty senses, depending on how you’re counting.

What about telepathy? Well, that is not actually impossible in principle; it’s just that there’s no evidence that humans actually do it. Smartphones do it almost literally constantly, transmitting data via high-frequency radio waves back and forth to one another. We could have evolved some sort of radio transceiver organ (perhaps an offshoot of an electric defense organ such as that of electric eels), but as it turns out we didn’t. Actually in some sense—which some might say is trivial, but I think it’s actually quite deep—we do have telepathy; it’s just that we transmit our thoughts not via radio waves or anything more exotic, but via sound waves (speech) and marks on paper (writing) and electronic images (what you’re reading right now). Human beings really do transmit our thoughts to one another, and this truly is a marvelous thing we should not simply take for granted (it is one of our most impressive feats of Mundane Magic); but somehow I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say they believe in psychic telepathy.

And lest you think this is a uniquely American phenomenon: The particular beliefs vary from place to place, but bizarre beliefs abound worldwide, from conspiracy theories in the UK to 9/11 “truthers” in Canada to HIV denialism in South Africa (fortunately on the wane). The American examples are more familiar to me and most of my readers are Americans, but wherever you are reading from, there are probably ridiculous beliefs common there.

I could go on, listing more objectively ridiculous beliefs that are surprisingly common; but the more I do that, the more I risk alienating you, in case you should happen to believe one of them. When you add up the dizzying array of ridiculous beliefs one could hold, odds are that most people you’d ever meet will have at least one of them. (“Not me!” you’re thinking; and perhaps you’re right. Then again, I’m pretty sure that the 4% or so of people who believe in the Reptilians think the same thing.)

Which brings me to my real focus: How do we reach these people?

One possible approach would be to just ignore them, leave them alone, or go about our business with them as though they did not have ridiculous beliefs. This is in fact the right thing to do under most circumstances, I think; when a stranger on the bus starts blathering about how the lizard people are going to soon reveal themselves and establish the new world order, I don’t think it’s really your responsibility to persuade that person to realign their beliefs with reality. Nodding along quietly would be acceptable, and it would be above and beyond the call of duty to simply say, “Um, no… I’m fairly sure that isn’t true.”

But this cannot always be the answer, if for no other reason than the fact that we live in a democracy, and people with ridiculous beliefs frequently vote according to them. Then people with ridiculous beliefs can take office, and make laws that affect our lives. Actually this would be true even if we had some other system of government; there’s nothing in particular to stop monarchs, hereditary senates, or dictators from believing ridiculous things. If anything, the opposite; dictators are known for their eccentricity precisely because there are no checks on their behavior.

At some point, we’re going to need to confront the fact that over half of the Republicans in the US Congress do not believe in climate change, and are making policy accordingly, rolling drunk on petroleum and treating the hangover with the hair of the dog.

We’re going to have to confront the fact that school boards in Southern states, particularly Texas, continually vote to censor biology textbooks of their dreaded Darwinian evolution.

So we really do need to find a way to talk to people who have ridiculous beliefs, and engage with them, understand why they think the way they do, and then—hopefully at least—tilt them a little bit back toward rational reality. You will not be able to change their mind completely right away, but if each of us can at least chip away at their edifice of absurdity, then all together perhaps we can eventually bring them to enlightenment.

Of course, a good start is probably not to say you think that their beliefs are ridiculous, because people get very defensive when you do that, even—perhaps especially—when it’s true. People invest their identity in beliefs, and decide what beliefs to profess based on the group identities they value most.

This is the link that we must somehow break. We must show people that they are not defined by their beliefs, that it is okay to change your mind. We must be patient and compassionate—sometimes heroically so, as people spout offensive nonsense in our faces, sometimes offensive nonsense that directly attacks us personally. (“Atheists deserve Hell”, taken literally, would constitute something like a death threat except infinitely worse. While to them it very likely is just reciting a slogan, to the atheist listening it says that you believe that they are so evil, so horrible that they deserve eternal torture for believing what they do. And you get mad when we say your beliefs are ridiculous?)

We must also remind people that even very smart people can believe very dumb things—indeed, I’d venture a guess that most dumb things are in fact believed by smart people. Even the most intelligent human beings can only glimpse a tiny fraction of the universe, and all human brains are subject to the same fundamental limitations, the same core heuristics and biases. Make it clear that you’re saying you think their beliefs are false, not that they are stupid or crazy. And indeed, make it clear to yourself that this is indeed what you believe, because it ought to be. It can be tempting to think that only an idiot would believe something so ridiculous—and you are safe, for you are no idiot!—but the truth is far more humbling: Human brains are subject to many flaws, and guarding the fortress of the mind against error and deceit is a 24-7 occupation. Indeed, I hope that you will ask yourself: “What beliefs do I hold that other people might find ridiculous? Are they, in fact, ridiculous?”

Even then, it won’t be easy. Most people are strongly resistant to any change in belief, however small, and it is in the nature of ridiculous beliefs that they require radical changes in order to restore correspondence with reality. So we must try in smaller steps.

Maybe don’t try to convince them that 9/11 was actually the work of Osama bin Laden; start by pointing out that yes, steel does bend much more easily at the temperature at which jet fuel burns. Maybe don’t try to persuade them that astrology is meaningless; start by pointing out the ways that their horoscope doesn’t actually seem to fit them, or could be made to fit anybody. Maybe don’t try to get across the real urgency of climate change just yet, and instead point out that the “study” they read showing it was a hoax was clearly funded by oil companies, who would perhaps have a vested interest here. And as for ESP? I think it’s a good start just to point out that we have more than five senses already, and there are many wonders of the human brain that actual scientists know about well worth exploring—so who needs to speculate about things that have no scientific evidence?

How is the economy doing?

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457033 EST 12:22.

Whenever you introduce yourself to someone as an economist, you will typically be asked a single question: “How is the economy doing?” I’ve already experienced this myself, and I don’t have very many dinner parties under my belt.

It’s an odd question, for a couple of reasons: First, I didn’t say I was a macroeconomic forecaster. That’s a very small branch of economics—even a small branch of macroeconomics. Second, it is widely recognized among economists that our forecasters just aren’t very good at what they do. But it is the sort of thing that pops into people’s minds when they hear the word “economist”, so we get asked it a lot.

Why are our forecasts so bad? Some argue that the task is just inherently too difficult due to the chaotic system involved; but they used to say that about weather forecasts, and yet with satellites and computer models our forecasts are now far more accurate than they were 20 years ago. Others have argued that “politics always dominates over economics”, as though politics were somehow a fundamentally separate thing, forever exogenous, a parameter in our models that cannot be predicted. I have a number of economic aphorisms I’m trying to popularize; the one for this occasion is: “Nothing is exogenous.” (Maybe fundamental constants of physics? But actually many physicists think that those constants can be derived from even more fundamental laws.) My most common is “It’s the externalities, stupid.”; next is “It’s not the incentives, it’s the opportunities.”; and the last is “Human beings are 90% rational. But woe betide that other 10%.” In fact, it’s not quite true that all our macroeconomic forecasters are bad; a few, such as Krugman, are actually quite good. The Klein Award is given each year to the best macroeconomic forecasters, and the same names pop up too often for it to be completely random. (Sadly, one of the most common is Citigroup, meaning that our banksters know perfectly well what they’re doing when they destroy our economy—they just don’t care.) So in fact I think our failures of forecasting are not inevitable or permanent.

And of course that’s not what I do at all. I am a cognitive economist; I study how economic systems behave when they are run by actual human beings, rather than by infinite identical psychopaths. I’m particularly interested in what I call the tribal paradigm, the way that people identify with groups and act in the interests of those groups, how much solidarity people feel for each other and why, and what role ideology plays in that identification. I’m hoping to one day formally model solidarity and make directly testable predictions about things like charitable donations, immigration policies and disaster responses.

I do have a more macroeconomic bent than most other cognitive economists; I’m not just interested in how human irrationality affects individuals or corporations, I’m also interested in how it affects society as a whole. But unlike most macroeconomists I care more about inequality than unemployment, and hardly at all about inflation. Unless you start getting 40% inflation per year, inflation really isn’t that harmful—and can you imagine what 40% unemployment would be like? (Also, while 100% inflation is awful, 100% unemployment would be no economy at all.) If we’re going to have a “misery index“, it should weight unemployment at least 10 times as much as inflation—and it should also include terms for poverty and inequality. Frankly maybe we should just use poverty, since I’d be prepared to accept just about any level of inflation, unemployment, or even inequality if it meant eliminating poverty. This is of course is yet another reason why a basic income is so great! An anti-poverty measure can really only be called a failure if it doesn’t actually reduce poverty; the only way that could happen with a basic income is if it somehow completely destabilized the economy, which is extremely unlikely as long as the basic income isn’t something ridiculous like $100,000 per year.

I could probably talk about my master’s thesis; the econometric models are relatively arcane, but the basic idea of correlating the income concentration of the top 1% of 1% and the level of corruption is something most people can grasp easily enough.

Of course, that wouldn’t be much of an answer to “How is the economy doing?”; usually my answer is to repeat what I’ve last read from mainstream macroeconomic forecasts, which is usually rather banal—but maybe that’s the idea? Most small talk is pretty banal I suppose (I never was very good at that sort of thing). It sounds a bit like this: No, we’re not on the verge of horrible inflation—actually inflation is currently too low. (At this point someone will probably bring up the gold standard, and I’ll have to explain that the gold standard is an unequivocally terrible idea on so, so many levels. The gold standard caused the Great Depression.) Unemployment is gradually improving, and actually job growth is looking pretty good right now; but wages are still stagnant, which is probably what’s holding down inflation. We could have prevented the Second Depression entirely, but we didn’t because Republicans are terrible at managing the economy—all of the 10 most recent recessions and almost 80% of the recessions in the last century were under Republican presidents. Instead the Democrats did their best to implement basic principles of Keynesian macroeconomics despite Republican intransigence, and we muddled through. In another year or two we will actually be back at an unemployment rate of 5%, which the Federal Reserve considers “full employment”. That’s already problematic—what about that other 5%?—but there’s another problem as well: Much of our reduction in unemployment has come not from more people being employed but instead by more people dropping out of the labor force. Our labor force participation rate is the lowest it’s been since 1978, and is still trending downward. Most of these people aren’t getting jobs; they’re giving up. At best we may hope that they are people like me, who gave up on finding work in order to invest in their own education, and will return to the labor force more knowledgeable and productive one day—and indeed, college participation rates are also rising rapidly. And no, that doesn’t mean we’re becoming “overeducated”; investment in education, so-called “human capital”, is literally the single most important factor in long-term economic output, by far. Education is why we’re not still in the Stone Age. Physical capital can be replaced, and educated people will do so efficiently. But all the physical capital in the world will do you no good if nobody knows how to use it. When everyone in the world is a millionaire with two PhDs and all our work is done by robots, maybe then you can say we’re “overeducated”—and maybe then you’d still be wrong. Being “too educated” is like being “too rich” or “too happy”.

That’s usually enough to placate my interlocutor. I should probably count my blessings, for I imagine that the first confrontation you get at a dinner party if you say you are a biologist involves a Creationist demanding that you “prove evolution”. I like to think that some mathematical biologists—yes, that’s a thing—take their request literally and set out to mathematically prove that if allele distributions in a population change according to a stochastic trend then the alleles with highest expected fitness have, on average, the highest fitness—which is what we really mean by “survival of the fittest”. The more formal, the better; the goal is to glaze some Creationist eyes. Of course that’s a tautology—but so is literally anything that you can actually prove. Cosmologists probably get similar demands to “prove the Big Bang”, which sounds about as annoying. I may have to deal with gold bugs, but I’ll take them over Creationists any day.

What do other scientists get? When I tell people I am a cognitive scientist (as a cognitive economist I am sort of both an economist and a cognitive scientist after all), they usually just respond with something like “Wow, you must be really smart.”; which I suppose is true enough, but always strikes me as an odd response. I think they just didn’t know enough about the field to even generate a reasonable-sounding question, whereas with economists they always have “How is the economy doing?” handy. Political scientists probably get “Who is going to win the election?” for the same reason. People have opinions about economics, but they don’t have opinions about cognitive science—or rather, they don’t think they do. Actually most people have an opinion about cognitive science that is totally and utterly ridiculous, more on a par with Creationists than gold bugs: That is, most people believe in a soul that survives after death. This is rather like believing that after your computer has been smashed to pieces and ground back into the sand from whence it came, all the files you had on it are still out there somewhere, waiting to be retrieved. No, they’re long gone—and likewise your memories and your personality will be long gone once your brain has rotted away. Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots; when the tiny robots stop working the soul is no more. Everything you are is a result of the functioning of your brain. This does not mean that your feelings are not real or do not matter; they are just as real and important as you thought they were. What it means is that when a person’s brain is destroyed, that person is destroyed, permanently and irrevocably. This is terrifying and difficult to accept; but it is also most definitely true. It is as solid a fact as any in modern science. Many people see a conflict between evolution and religion; but the Pope has long since rendered that one inert. No, the real conflict, the basic fact that undermines everything religion is based upon, is not in biology but in cognitive science. It is indeed the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: We are our brains, no more and no less. (But I suppose it wouldn’t be polite to bring that up at dinner parties.)

The “You must be really smart.” response is probably what happens to physicists and mathematicians. Quantum mechanics confuses basically everyone, so few dare go near it. The truly bold might try to bring up Schrodinger’s Cat, but are unlikely to understand the explanation of why it doesn’t work. General relativity requires thinking in tensors and four-dimensional spaces—perhaps they’ll be asked the question “What’s inside a black hole?”, which of course no physicist can really answer; the best answer may actually be, “What do you mean, inside?” And if a mathematician tries to explain their work in lay terms, it usually comes off as either incomprehensible or ridiculous: Stokes’ Theorem would be either “the integral of a differential form over the boundary of some orientable manifold is equal to the integral of its exterior derivative over the whole manifold” or else something like “The swirliness added up inside an object is equal to the swirliness added up around the edges.”

Economists, however, always seem to get this one: “How is the economy doing?”

Right now, the answer is this: “It’s still pretty bad, but it’s getting a lot better. Hopefully the new Congress won’t screw that up.”