Same old, same old

Ethan Zuckerman argues here that homophilly -- the tendency for people to like people who are like them -- can lead to ignorance. This irritates me. Not because I disagree with it, in fact I think he has a point, just that it was something I wrote about in 2001 on a now-defunct website. The idea is that people will associate with people who share similar views and interets as them (among other things) and will also tend to read articles written by people who share their opinions. I suppose this is obvious. What is troubling about this tendency is that it is hard to explain from a psychological point of view. Of course there are explanations based on concepts such as 'identity' and 'self-esteem' but personally I find these unsatisfactory. To say, for example, that people associate with like-minded people in order to bolster their identity or to boost their self-esteem only rasises another question as to why our minds are designed with such fragile self-esteem or identity that it needs to be massaged by the present of similar opinion.

This is one of the reasons why I like evolutionary explanations, and I think the puzzle of homophily can be better answered by asking the question 'why would the mind be designed to want to associate with people who are like you?' How might this help us to leave behind more copies the genes that lead people to be homophilous (either directly, by having kids who survive to reproductive age or by our helping genetic reletatives in this regard).

The answer, I think, is quite simple and has two parts which are opposite sides of the same coin. The first is that associating with people like you reduces the possibility for conflict. People who have similar values and so on, are likely to want the world to be the same as you thus you are less likely to end up with conflicts relating to how the world should be. For example, people of the same political persuasion usually want to inhabit a similar world are are likely to work together to achieve that. People with different political beliefs want different worlds and this very fact can lead to conflict. The second, related, reason is that the more similar people are the more motivation one has to work in the interests of the other.

Of course, conflict can arise in even the most homophilous groups. This is because ultimately we have been designed to look after our own interests. (Before you draw breath to shout at your monitor of course I know that there are many examples of people acting altruistically and even laying down their lives for others, that is a very interesting subject that I will have to leave for another blog -- if I ever work out an answer). In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins makes an interesting observation regarding parasitism. He asks why selfish genes (usually) cooperate with one another when they find themselves in the same organism. Dawkins’s answer is that they cooperate because they all share the ‘interest’ of reproduction: all the genes of most organisms leave the host through the same exit point (the germ cells – sperm or eggs). Thus it is in each gene’s ‘interest’ that it cooperates with the others in maximizing its chances of achieving its goal of propagation; they are, in effect, all ‘playing for the same team’. If genes could propagate themselves by leaving the body by other, individual, routes then we would expect more conflict to occur. One reason why parasites are frequently harmful to the organism is that they often do not share the same exit point as the organism’s own genes.

Our own mitochonria (the power houses of the cells as biology teachers since time immemorial have called them) very probably started of as parasites -- they have their own private DNA, separate from "our" DNA which resides in the cellular nucleus. The theory goes that they gradually changed such that both mitochondial and cellular DNA now leave the body via the egg. At this point both share the same interest and 'cooperate' with one another.

So homophily has an upside: it potentially enables cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals. Evidence for this? So far it is weak (although someone might point me to relvant research). Research by Jens Binder and Andrew Howes at the university of Manchester suggests that the more diverse the friends on a persons social network site the more conflict the site owner reports. Perhaps more compellingly, in Marek Kohn's recent book on trust he cites evidedence that the most trusting societies tend to be those that are the most homogeneous. I hope it goes without saying that I report this as a research finding, rather than as a recommendation that we should attempt to socially engineer our societies by some system of ethic cleansing in order to increase societal trust: sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Homophily also has a downside which is the topic of Zuckerman's talk: it locks individuals into a system whereby they hear the same opinions over and over again to the point where whatever the opinion or value system happens to be to the extent that extreme and undesireably opinions can be normalised. In the eight-year old blog I mentioned above, I wrote of how the internet allows people with minority values in touch with one another. This is great if you happen to have a child who suffers from, say, Williams syndrome (a rare disorder affecting 1 in 10,000 live births) or depression. Such individuals can develop support networks and exchange tips and experiences with people whom they would be unlikely to bump into in the street. It also has a darker side allowing people with views that we might consider undesireable to meet, paedophiles for example (whether or not they happen to be radioactive as this hilarious 'news' item from the Daily Mail reports). Repeated exposure to such views can lead to such opinions being normalised.

The Internet may also, as Zuckerman argues in his talk and as my younger self argued in 2001, lead to individuals having a more restricted information diet. When reading a newspaper one's eye can be caught by articles one would not considered choosing to read. I concluded my article by suggesting that the Internet by reducing such serendipitous encounters can potentially narrow or experiences. But the internet has had enough negative press recently (see my previous blog posts on Susan Greenfield and Aric Sigman) and I do not wish to try and create a further moral panic (fat chance of that). I'm not even sure I believe it any more.

EDIT: (6/3/09) this paper (.PDF) suggests that if people are able to view the results of others in a problem solving exercise (analogous, I suppose, to using sites such as Delicious and Digg) then they tend to accept extant solutions rather than generate their own. Thus, they conclude, social bookmarking (etc.) sites can impeded creativity.

There is a Greenfield far away (but not far enough for me)

I fully agree with Andrew Howes's blog about Susan Greenfield's claims that social network sites 'infantalise the mind'. As head of the Royal Institute she has a remit to promote the public understanding of science, this has, I think two strands. First there is the promotion of the findings of science, keeping the public up-to-date on recent research in physics, biology, medicine, etc. in an easily understandable way. Second, there is the promotion of the actual process by which science operates. This would include hypothesis testing, the nature of control conditions, the process of peer review and so on and so forth. Dull stuff, but important I think. It is in this second goal that I think Baroness Greenfield has committed the most egregious piece of malpractice (which is what I consider it to be). 

Her pronouncements about social networking were filled so many with 'mays' and 'mights' and 'possiblies' that you could equally well -- from what she said -- draw the opposite conclusion to the one she drew. But in my limited media experience I know that the media are deaf to such words. When a scientist say "X may cause Y", the newspapers hear X unequivocably and definitely causes Y because I AM A SCIENTIST AND I HOLD THE TRUTH IN MY HANDS. 

I also love her description of social network sites, she says:

"My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment"

I suppose 'bright lights' could possibly describe some Myspace pages, but "buzzing noises"? Has ANYONE EVER heard a buzzing noise on a social network site?

Anyhow, Baroness Greenfield should, as a result of the above, be sacked from her role as head of the Royal Institution for singularly failing to abide by scientific strictures. On the  basis of no eviedence whatsoever she has attempted to promote herself by that most base of tactics, creating a moral panic. Two recent such scientifically derived moral panics were created by Andrew Wakefield who claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and Arpad Pusztai who claimed that genetically modified potatoes could damage the digestive system of rats. Both were sanctioned but *at least* in both cases the claims were based on data (very weak in the case of Wakefield, in the case of Pusztai it seems that his sacking from the  Rowett Rearsearch institute in Aberdeen was due to his employers being leant on by the Biotech company Monsanto). 

A friend of mine who knew the great evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith recounted a story about JMS's experience with the media (this was in the 70s and pertained, IIRC, to Horizon). He told my friend that once, when asked a question about sexual selection, he did what scientists usually do, listed the twelve most relevant theories and then discussed each one with respect to the available data. When the relevant part of the programme was broadcast some time later JMS was seen to launch into his tortuous theoretical analysis only for his voice to fade out and the narrator's voice to speak over it saying (as JMS recounted the story) "The professor then went on to say that men like women with big tits, and women like men with lots of money."

Scientists must communicate with the media, we have a responsibility to do so, after all it is public money that funds us, and who else is better placed to do the job? We must make things understandable, yet we must recognise that they want a good story (particularly the tabloids). We must therefore be aware of the interpretations that they are likely to place on our words and guard against it. We must not be misled into saying something to them just because we believe it will make them happy. Most importantly we must place our long-term reputations above short term gain, and the reputation of all science above all. 

Greenfield is a very media savvy cookie (charging between 5 & 10K for a public speaking engagement according to her agent's website) and as such she will know the impact that her words would've had.  As it turns out, most comment on blogs and in the broadsheets seems to take the line that she is a bit of a jerk, a great way of publicising science then Susan. 

Ta for that.

Transgressing the boundaries

I must extend my congratulations to Aric Sigman for exposing the weakness of the peer reviewing process in the manner of Alan Sokal. To recap: Alan Sokal, a physicist, was irked by postmodernists hijacking of quantum theory and misapplying in a half-arsed way to cultural studies. So he wrote a paper called "Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermaneutics of quantum gravity" and submitted it to a cultural studies journal called the Social Text. The paper was, as the title suggests, bullshit, but it nonetheless got published (and yes it was peer-reviewed). Thus Sokal neatly showed that the postmodernist Emperor was indeed not only naked but contemptuously waving it in our faces.

Now Aric Sigman has done the same thing. This time the target is The Biologist a peer-reviewed journal aimed to communicate research findings to the professional biologist and the interested lay-person. He submitted the article Well connected?: the biological implications of social  networking to the journal. A paper that tenuously connected the decline in social capital to an increase in various forms of physical and psychological illness (including heart disease, cancer and dementia). This is well-understood and not new. Sigman's genius was to state that the decline in face-to-face communication cause by people's increasing use of social media (such as SNS) was therefore tantamount to a one-way ticked to an early grave.  No evidence was cited for this conjecture becausei, of course, there isn't any but it sounds like it might be true. But would this get by the eagle-eyed reviewers? Mirabile dictu, it did the reviewers swallowed it whole.

Thanks Aric, you've done science a great service in showing just how flawed the process of publication is. And I know that any resemblance to Kevin Warwick is entirely coincidental.

Meath no more

Of the many amusing things that Douglas Adams gave us, my favourite in terms of sheer laugh-out-loudness was The Meaning of Liff which he co-wrote with John Lloyd. The premise of this book was that there are many phenomena that have no word to describe them while at the same "the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places." Adam’s and Lloyd’s genius was to use these words to solve the naming gap.

One of my (many) favourites was Meath

"Warm and very slightly clammy. Descriptive of the texture of your hands after the automatic drying machine has turned itself off, just damp enough to make it embarrassing if you have to shake hands with someone immediately afterwards."

This was good because it was bang on. Yes! Hand driers! That funny not-quite-dry-not-quite-wet feeling you get after using them. The automatic ones were worse than the manual ones, switching off at such a point to optimise the feeling of meath. But no more. Ladies and gentlemen: the Dyson Airblade.

James Dyson, inventor of the cyclone vacuum cleaner, an amphibious car with huge balloon wheels and a new type of wheelbarrow (this time with a single balloon wheel) has turned his attention to the tricky task of hand drying (suddenly I recall the chap from The Apprentice -- Syed was it? -- who had an all-over body drier for using after a shower, but I digress...).

Yes the Dyson Airblade is a contraption that you put your hands down into slowly withdrawing them at a constant speed while a powerful jet of warm air blasts your hands dry. It certainly works in the hand-drying department, but I feel there is another explanation for the future success of the Dyson Airblade. You see, James Dyson's greatest achievement with the bagless cyclone vacuum cleaner was not that it worked better than standard vacuum cleaners, but that he got men interested in vacuums. Vacuums were unsexy items that we begrudged spending money on -- I once promised my wife that I would dustpan-and-brush the floor every week, anything but spend my money on a bloody vacuum. But the DC-01 changed this. The same genius lies behind the Airblade. It's not that it gets men's hands dry; this was never a problem, because men didn't wash their hands in the first place. Now they merrily and apprehensively wash away just so they can poke their hands into the contraption, listen to the formula-one style whine as the turbo-fan hits 20,000 rpm and closely follow the instructions specifying that the hands are withdrawn slowly and at a constant velocity. Even the name 'Air Blade' conjures images of manly pursuits. A Samuri Warrior, perhaps, or a Honda Fireblade superbike.

Sadly, however, he has also killed meath.

Trust is a transitive verb

Following a talk I recently gave in Cambridge about online relationships talk turned, as it so often does, as to whether you can ever truly trust someone that you haven't met face to face. As it turns out my feeling is that you probably can but that is for a different post. The point I made there and the point I want to make here is that sometimes it just doesn't make any odds. Of course there are instances where people have been fleeced, bullied, phished, flamed and otherwise abused online. But the important point is in the title of this post trust is a transitive verb. Basically you don't just trust, or mistrust, you trust someone to do (or to not do) something even if you don't know what that thing is. Of course we do say in common language 'I trust you' which seems intransitive but it isn't really at the end of that sentence is a silent placeholder, an unspecified list of all the things that you do trust that person to do (or not do).

This is not an exercise in linguistics; this is a consciousness raising exercise (something I've always disliked, so I apologise for that).  Take the example of the phenomenon sometimes called 'the stranger of the train effect'. It has probably happened to most of us. We get on a train and we sit next to someone, and by the end of the journey the person has unburdened upon us a great deal of personal information about their divorce, say, or their mental illness or their worries about their drug-taking children. Stuff that they might only otherwise tell their closest friends. Or possibly not even their closest friends: friends can be dangerous things when interests collide (I'll come back to this).

Are they therefore showing that they trust us? Not at all, because trust is a transitive verb. They probably don't care who we tell about their problems, because we can do no damage with the information. If they tell their friends, their friends could break confidence and tell other people, severely damaging the storyteller reputation in the eyes of other friends, colleagues and family members. By telling us, they feel better about themselves, for 'getting it off their chest' and may even recieve some useful advice (and it is cheaper than therapy). In order to trust, there needs to be risk. If I climb a rockface I might trust the person holding the rope to not let me fall, if I tell a friend my embarrassing problem I trust him or her not to put this on Facebook. In each of these cases trust is important because there are potentially damaging consequences if confidence is not kept. In the case of the stranger on the train there are no consequences, so no trust is needed.

Returning to online. People often disclose a lot more online than they might do face to face (this is sometimes called hyperpersonal communication). People usually only disclose with close friends, so does this mean that people become closer online? That they trust them more? Possibly not, because again the disclosures may not matter. They don't know you or your friends, or your work colleagues or your family, and if you use inscruitible user names then they are not likely to either. People don't need to trust to disclose, if there is no risk there need be no trust.

Why we must take Stephen Jay Gould more seriously than we have before (and in a nice way)

Many evolutionary psychologists snort with derision when they are charged with creating "just so" stories about life in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA for short). They might then follow this up with a remark about old chestnuts and embark on a demolition of Stephen Jay Gould's famous criticism of the "Panglossian Paradigm".

But do you know. Although I have "snikwad" written through my bones like Blackpool rock (if you hold them up the wrong way round that is) I have always kind of harboured a suspicion that there was something in what Gould was saying. Whatever I think of the University of California Santa Barbara school of EvoPsych (Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, et al) they aren't the culprits. You see, although we evo folk haven't won the battle -- not by a long way -- evolutionary explanations are gradually becoming mainstream. I was at a Human Computer Interaction workshop recently and I heard researchers discussing the difference between communications between kin and non kin in terms of Hamilton's rule (well not exactly, but this what lay behind it). And folk from disparate areas of the research community are starting to speculate evolutionwise.

One the one hand this is to be welcomed. At last, we might think, we are getting through to the evolutionarily unenlightened; the non-Darwinian Muggles if you like. Yes it is nice that the rest of the world is catching on, and catching up, but we must be on our guard. Later I will give you some examples, but I have recently come across some terrible evolutionary theorizing. You know some good-of-the-group stuff (not David Sloan Wilson style multi-leveled selection style good-of-the-group stuff, but some seriously wrongheaded, seriously pants style good-of-the-group stuff).

We evo folk must not take this lying down. Just because someone seems to be on our side is no justification for us to let it slide. If evo psych is to be taken seriously, we must resurrect the notion of EEA style just-so stories and use it against these folk who are prepared to tell us that, for example, contagious yawning is adaptive because it tells the group that they should become more alert (and how does that work, exactly?)

!

The just-so argument, while misdirected as a general criticism of evo psych and sociobiology etc. is still useful in specific cases. And in such cases where we see evolutionary principles being misapplied we must use it. That is if its not already been broken by the the battering it received by our own fair hands.

Biology is not the opposite of morality

Interesting article here from New Scientist magazine. It describes research from Terry Burnham at Harvard investigating a game known as the Ultimatum Game. In the ultimatum game a person, called the proposer, is given a pot of money that he or she can share with another person, the responder, who then either accepts or rejects the offer. So, for example, if I had £10 I could choose to give you £2 keeping £8 for myself. If you accept then we both keep the money, if you reject my offer then neither of us get anything. It is interesting because I as the proposer has to ask myself "what is the minimum amount of money that you will accept?". If this sum is too low then I get nothing, if it is too high then I get less than I could have got (e.g. if I offer a sum of £8 then you will doubtless bite my hand off and I am left to ponder whether you would have accepted less leaving me with more.

In these kind of experiments, responders generally reject any offer less than 20% of the total (of which they are aware) and in many cultures a "fair" split of around 50-50 is achieved. (If you are interested, the Nash equilibrium of this game is where the responder rejects anything that gives the proposer anything at all, which means no one gets anything.)

Anyhow, the experiment described in this article shows that men with higher testosterone are more likely to reject an offer than is acceptable by a man with lower testosterone.

Interesting results.

However, I do have a moan about the way that the article is written (not by the researchers themselves but by a journalist) because it seemingly puts biology and morality at odds with one another.

For example:

"According to researchers, the finding demonstrates that our hardwired biology can cause us to make irrational economic decisions.

"But Terry Burnham at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, suspected that this irrational economic decision might have more to do with basic biology than moral convictions."

I'll leave aside my general dislike of the word "hardwired" used in contexts such as this and focus on the notion of irrationality. Irrationality is a difficult concept to pin down, not least because something can be irrational in one time frame and rational in another (and, of course, vice versa). My giving you a birthday present can seem irrational as I am transferring my resources to you, placing me at something of a disadvantage. However, if gift giving is seen in a wider context and over a longer time frame, it could be rational. Basically, gifts (and other acts of kindness) can be seen as investing money in a kind of insurance scheme that we all provide for one another. The name of this insurance system? Friendship. One way of viewing friendship is as an insurance system for times when we might really need help my gift giving (and all the other nice things I do for you) is one way of obtaining my ensuring that you will come to my aid when I am up to my neck in trouble.

Thus although the short-term consequences of giving might be irrational, its long-term effects might be perfectly rational. Evolutionarily speaking we have to ask, when we observe a behaviour X as irrational, can we imagine a condition under which it is, in fact, rational (in terms of reproduction and survival). We can then test whether this is actually the case by experimentation.

And then there is that weird contrast between morality and biology. It is not morality, rather it is biology. What does that mean? Most scientists are materialists (rather than, say, dualists) which means that they view mind as the result of matter ("matter in motion" as Thomas Hobbes put it as long ago as the 17th Century). Thus is morality is a product of mind it is necessarily a product of biology. QED, there is no contradiction.

None of the above is to deny the importance of culture because that is part of biology too. Culture is simultaneously out there and at the same time, in here.

Katherine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen that "human nature is what we were put on this earth to rise above" but I think that this is wrong. Morality is part of human nature; it has a purpose, it is for something, no matter how cryptic.

The Braigh, Isle of Lewis

Deleted bits from roots

NOTE: this is just some stuff that I cut out of the Roots post. I kind of like it (although it doesn't really go anywhere) so I've put it up as is, no one reads this stuff anyway, so hey!

My problem is as follows. Religion, defined loosely by a belief in some powerful and transcendent agent, is culturally universal. Every culture seems to have something that can be readily identified as religious belief. (This is NOT to say, of course, that every single individual in every single culture adheres to these beliefs.) Given this universality, a number of researchers have wondered whether religious belief is something that has an evolutionary explanation: is there any adaptive value in religion? We know that religious belief is somewhat heritable (some of the variation in belief is accounted for by genes) but is it adaptive? Well I'm not going to answer THAT question, but if you are interested Steven Pinker has a nice paper on it here. Sufficient to say that researchers disagree on this one, but most agree that adaptive or not there is something about human minds that leads them to believe in the transcendental. Even in the UK (where church going has decreased alarmingly) most say they believe in something even if they have little knowledge of what that something is. Religion might therefore be like language; something that is more properly thought of as being acquired rather than being learned. If other languages are around then children will learn the one they hear, but if there aren't, then they will just create their own. This seems to have happened in natural "experiments" such when deaf children were institutionalised in Nicaragua, or when children turn the pidgins spoken to the by adults into creoles (see here for more on this).

All of this suggests that a group of babies became isolated from all other human contact and (and here I stretch a point) managed to grow up into adulthood, they would more than likely have not just a language but also a religion (of some sort). (William Golding reflected on this point in The Lord of the Flies albeit with children rather than babies).

OK so if the above is all true (which is a moderately sized if I agree) is it possible to do anything about religion? If we try to ban religion (which is kind of what he seems to want -- at the very least he wants us to stop teaching it to children) would it work? Would it not be rather like trying to ban language? Or to take Kurt Vonnegut's memorable recollection in Slaughterhouse Five when he tells a friend that he is going to write an anti-war book his friend replies "why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?". Meaning that for all the good intentions war is going to happen whatever novelists might say.

If we think a little more about Dawkin's argument he appears to be making two claims that are logically separable.

1. Religion is bad because it is intellectually dishonest and "gets in the way" of a scientific understanding of the world which is, in his view, more interesting than the rather prosaic explations offered up by religious creation myths.

2. Religion is bad because it leads to cross-cultural conflict, dehumanising the other and legitimising murder, rape and genocide (see my earlier blog on disgust).

The first is his argument (and mine) against the intelligent designers and why they should be kept out of the science classrooms. The second is his argument against Osama Bin Laden, Ian Paisley and their various followers. But religions are currently struggling with both of these. There are an increasing number of Darwinian priests and there are certainly many from all religions who reject violence against the other. Dawkins's discussion with the Bishop of Oxford (a Christian who accepts scientific explanations of the origins of life and the universe) was revealing as Dawkins admitted that he almost had more understanding of the bible-belt fundamentalists than of the watered-down religion of the Christian left. The problem is, however, that if we assume that religion is like language (or glaciers), and we want to avoid 1 and 2, then perhaps this is the best we can hope for.

And my goodness it can be very good. Liberals will often shy away from the whole idea that one tells, instructs or teaches someone something. (Educational theorists will often talk about "negotiating knowlege" -- I kind of know what they mean, but I don't imagine when they are lost in a strange town they wind their window down and ask a passerby if they can between them "negotiate the way to the university").

Work things out for yourself, indeed. Be critical and do not blindly accept, of course. But this should not undermine the power of teaching.

Roots of all evil

I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins. As a writer on evolution he is second to no one, and this in a discipline that is unfairly blessed with good writers. I also value his role as a defender of the scientific method against creationists, intelligent designers, psychics, mystics and other frauds. But, I'm just not sure about his just-screened TV programme The roots of all evil?

I certainly agree with him that creationism and intelligent design have no place being taught alongside evolution in science classes. The reason is simple: they aren't science. The basic reasoning of intelligent design is as follows. Such-and-such is too complex to have arisen "by chance" (as if chance were all there were) so it MUST have been designed. And if it were designed then it follows that the designer was at least as intelligent and skillful as a human designer. The problem is, though, that this designer has to be more complex than the thing you are trying to explain, so it is not an explanation. So you replace a big problem with an even bigger one. This is bad science, but it still could, conceivably, be considered within the realms of scientific explanation (albeit violating one of sciences guiding principles of parsimony). Most IDers, do not take this path however, they argue that the designer is not in itself scientifically explainable because it exists outside the material world. The use of immaterial causes, causes that cannot, ultimately, be reducible to the various laws of physics, is strictly off limits to science which HAS to be founded these laws. So ID is NOT science because it violates the materialist principle that lies at the heart of all scientific explanation. Using gods in science is an absurdly slippery slope. Any time you come up against an apparently insoluble problem (and this happens frequently) you can simply posit a godly intervention and slip off out to the pub: job done.

No I don't disagree with Dawkins on this one.

The bit I am struggling with is captured by the title the programme; that religion is to blame for a great deal of the evils of the world. Religions, he argues have the unique ability to (1) foster hatred against "the other" and (2) provide individuals with the means to carry out atrocities with a belief in the universal right of their actions and the reward of reward in the afterlife.

Somehow I don't think that this stands up as an argument. Many atrocities (including genocide) have involved conflicts between religions, but it is also true that many have not. The industrial-scale genocide perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews, Gypsies and others during the second world war was not motivated by religion. Nor was the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda; Pol Pot's killing of 2 million Cambodians; and the ongoing conflict in Darfur doesn't cleave cleanly along a religious fault line.

So if not religion, what? Intriguingly given Dawkins's interest in all things evolutionary, the answer might lie in natural selection itself. Humans are not purely selfish (or at least if they are selfish it is not simple garden variety selfishness), indeed they frequently engage in many cooperative and altruistic behaviours with other individuals who are genetically unrelated to them. (Genetic unrelatedness is important since, evolutionarily speaking, giving to a relative is tantamount to individual selfishness as your genes are benefitting to an extent determined by how closely related the individual is to you.) And recent research has suggested that cooperation with others is motivated by moral emotions such as shame, guilt, awe, anger and so on. From this perspective morality evolved as a way of encouraging us to reap the rewards of joint activity with others; we cooperate because we fear the anger of others, wish to avoid the public shame of being identified as a defaulter, or wish to be held in esteem as a good cooperator (this last motivation is often suggested as a reason why we give to charity). There is also a dark side to morality. For reasons that evolutionists don't properly understand the ties that bind us together in our group can also lead us to have negative attitudes to other groups-- something that social psychologists have known for some time. In extreme cases, such as when resources are scarce, or we feel threatened by another group these negative attitudes can lead to violence or even murder usually motivated by emotions such as disgust and contempt for the "other" (see my previous post on the power of disgust).

So to conclude. I am arguing that religion is neither necessary nor sufficient factor for leading us to commit atrocities, what matters most is our evolutionary heritage. We can, in equal measure, be saints and demons; the root of all evil is not religion but natural selection and although there are those that would like to ban the idea, it is harder to see how one might ban the process.

Little Britain, genocide and the power of disgust

When I was a child there was a joke that went:

Q. "What's the definition of disgusting?"
A. "A tramp sitting on top of a compost heap, drinking diarrhoea through a sweaty sock."

Not particularly hilarious now, but at the time it never failed, although the resultant laugh was forced through a grimace; it was funny but it was also disgusting.

The psychology of disgust has a patchy history. Darwin considered it in his classic Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals and Freud used it as part of his theory of infant development (especially in relation to potty training), but it was largely ignored in mainstream psychology for most of the 20th Century. Recently, however, psychologists have started to reconsider this long-neglected emotion. In particular how disgust develops, its relationship to other emotions (such as the closely-related contempt) and why it evolved.

On the last point most researchers agree that disgust evolved as a mechanism to the prevent contamination by pathogens such as bacteria. And it is true that most of the things that elicit a digust response do tend to be things that normally present a risk of illness; bodily secretions, for example, or rotten meat. Although all cultures exhibit the disgust response (read more about this here) there is a large degree of variation in the objects of disgust. In some culutures insects and their larvae are considered delicacies (not just for celebrities on reality TV) and many Chinese find cheese disgusting. The reason for this is what is called the omnivore's dilemma. Unlike many other animals (for some reason giant pandas spring to mind) humans are capable of eating a wide range of foodstuffs. This flexibility in our diet bring great benefits (if one foodstuff is not available rather than starving we can switch to another) but it also carries a risk: how do we know that the new food item is not poisonous? One way is to fix to the diet according to what is available when we are young, this would prevent us from going off an eating something that might disagree with us. According to this theory, young children will try (pretty much) anything with diet becoming increasingly less flexible as we get older due to cultural learning.

A belief related to disgust is that of contagion. It is not necessary to actually touch a disgusting object in order to become contaminated by it, it can be had merely by touching something or someone who touched the object. This vicarous form of contamination is again illusrated by another childhood experience of mine. This time a "game" which probably didn't have a name but let's call it the "Jets" game.

The Jets game began when someone inadvertently (or intentionally!) touched a disgusting item: a dead bird, for example, or a dog poo. This "infected" person would then chase after the others attempting to touch them. Once contact had been made, the child that had been touched was "infected" and he or she would try to contaminate someone else and everyone else would try to avoid his or her touch. Interestingly once an infected person touched someone else they were no longer infected in sharp constrast to the truth of real contagion. If a child was tired of running, it was permissable for them to take a breather without fear of being infected, so long as they performed the following. (1) they crossed their arms in front of their chest -- Egyptian mummy-like -- moving them so that the tips of their fingers struck their shoulders repeatedly, (2) they repeated the word "jets". This thereby offered a form of immunity to infection for a limited time. The notion of contagion is again common throughout the world and was noted by Anthropologist James Frazer in The Golden Bough. Contagion is a powerful belief, so powerful that people will refuse to wear a (laundered) sweater that was reputed to have been worn by Adolf Hitler, and will baulk at the thought of drinking water than once contained a (dead and sterilized) cockroach.

As the joke at the top of this posting points out, disgust is closely related to humour, this is true for adults as well as children. The British comedy programme Little Britain relies on disgust for much of its humour. For example, the pensioner who spontanously and unknowingly urinates on the floor of whatever shop she happens to be in at the time, the psychiatric patient Anne who, among other things, licks her hand and wipes it down the faces of visitors and Maggie the WI woman who projectile vomits after (for example) tasting jam made by an Asian lady. Maggie is an interesting case because she bridges the gap between what is often called "core disgust" and more complex manifestation of the same (or at least similar) emotion.

We laugh at Maggie because her vomitting triggers our basic disgust response, but Maggie vomits because she is disgusted by ethnic minorities, homosexuals and other folk whom she considers "unsavoury" (not also that contagion plays a significant role, the jam she consumes has been contaminated by being made by someone she finds repellant). It has been suggested by Rozin and his colleague, Jonathan Haidt that the disgust mechanism is expanded from its initial domain of bodily products and rotten meat and used to invoke similar emotional responses towards people who are culturally and ethnically different from us. The paradigm case of this was the attitude of the Nazis towards the Jews in the first half of the last century, but this is by no means uncommon, as demonstrated by the Rwandan massacre, "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia and continuing conflict in Darfur. The website Genocide Watch identifies eight steps to genocide the third of which, dehumanisation, is relevant to my point here it states:

"One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder."

It can be seen that the powerful emotion of disgust (invoked by alliusions to vermin/disease, etc.) and the concomitant motivations to cleanse or purify can play a powerful role in ethnic conflict and genocide. The question is are these the very same processes that are at work? Is the part of the mind/brain responsible for maintaining the purity of the body the same part as that which is responsible for maintaining the purity of the culture/race? Or is it simply a metaphor? In Metaphors We Live By Lakoff and Johnson reveal a host of metaphors that we use to structure our world. Argument as war (I "attack your argument", you "defend your viewpoint"), time as money (spend time, waste time, save time) and various orientation metaphors ("up" is associated with happiness, consciousness and high status; down with sadness, unconsciousness, and low status) are so engrained in the way we think about the world that we hardly see them as metaphors but they are, nonetheless, only metaphors. No-one is arguing that the parts of the brain that engage when we think about real space are used in thinking about metaphorical spaces such as "waking up", "falling asleep" and so on.

I would also be interested to know why disgusting things can be so funny. The neuroscientist V.S Ramachandran suggests that we laugh as a signal to others that an event is inconsequential, a kind of "I'm OK" signal that might have evolved before language. This might explain why it is OK to laugh at people's misfortune, so long as they are OK at the end (as in the TV show You've been framed -- most of us don't find it funny if people really hurt themselves. If this is the case then disgusting things are funny when they are harmless, and the laughter signals this harmlessness to others. I'm not sure about this, but I don't know of a better explanation (actually I do have a rather different theory of humour which I will discuss in a future post).

So there we have it. Disgust is very serious (it protects us from contamination and seems to underpin xenophobic and racist behaviour) but it is also closely related to humour. BTW if anyone knows how you might suck diarrrhoea through a sock, sweaty or otherwise, keep it to yourself.

My first carp

No not the fish. Is it absolutely necessary that my profile displays my Astrological Sign and my Zodiac Year? Strange really, because for those who are into these kinds of things (you might have guessed that I am not) each is easy to derive from my date and year of birth, those that can't, presumably don't care (or are outwardly hostile, like me, to such nonsense).

While I'm here (and a little calmer now), I must admit that I do find it incredible that even purportedly "serious" newspapers like The Guardian and The Observer in the UK feel it appropriate to publish horoscopes. As we have just passed the (Western) new year, the papers have been full of multi-page predictions of the year ahead.

Why?

I suppose they just feel that they are giving the punters what they want and those of them, like me, who find such stuff mildly irritating will simply ignore them or, more likely, not even notice that they are there. Why doesn't an editor make a stand and make his/her paper a nonsense free zone; serious paper should, I feel, make a stand on such matters as they do on others things (e.g the Independent's notorious/famous support for the decriminalisation of cannabis some years ago).

Maybe they are just "giving people what they want" but this is, I think, wrong. Newspapers and other media should give the people what they think they need to have, and if the the folk don't like it they can go elsewhere for their sorcery.

An introduction

Hello

This blog is not going to be about me at all. Rather, it is going to concern itself with psychological reflections on the everyday (and not so everyday) world. As a psychologist I continually see events and phenomena that relate to many of the principles, theories and research and my goal is to burden you with these. I hope it will be interesting for you (maybe it will even be fun) for my part I want to make my internal dialogue global; there's not enough room in my modestly proportioned head for all of this stuff.