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Edge
204 — March 5, 2007 |
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A NEUROSCIENCE SAMPLING
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Darwin's
God In the world of evolutionary biology, the question is not whether God exists but why we believe in him. Is belief a helpful adaptation or an evolutionary accident?
God has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was 10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in Baltimore. "God exists," he wrote in black and orange paint, "or if he doesn’t, we’re in trouble." Atran has been struggling with questions about religion ever since — why he himself no longer believes in God and why so many other people, everywhere in the world, apparently do. ... Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, "belief in hope beyond reason" — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science.... ...The magic-box demonstration helped set Atran on a career studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were doing back in the ’80s. Today, the effort has gained momentum, as scientists search for an evolutionary explanation for why belief in God exists — not whether God exists, which is a matter for philosophers and theologians, but why the belief does. This is different from the scientific assault on religion that has been garnering attention recently, in the form of best-selling books from scientific atheists who see religion as a scourge. In "The God Delusion," published last year and still on best-seller lists, the Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins concludes that religion is nothing more than a useless, and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. "Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful," Dawkins wrote. He is joined by two other best-selling authors — Sam Harris, who wrote "The End of Faith," and Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University who wrote "Breaking the Spell." The three men differ in their personal styles and whether they are engaged in a battle against religiosity, but their names are often mentioned together. They have been portrayed as an unholy trinity of neo-atheists, promoting their secular world view with a fervor that seems almost evangelical. Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain. Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity? And if scientists are able to explain God, what then? Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away? Are the nonbelievers right, and is religion at its core an empty undertaking, a misdirection, a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind? Or are the believers right, and does the fact that we have the mental capacities for discerning God suggest that it was God who put them there? In short,
are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did
that happen? |
THE letters WYSIWYG may have helped immeasurably in closing the gap between the computer and the real world, letting you know that when you look at a properly formatted document on screen, what you see is what you get. That may be good enough for your résumé, but not for Richard Foreman, who in his 39 years as the director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the East Village has steadfastly maintained an artistic vision in which WYS is not in the least WYG. So do not go to "Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!" by Mr. Foreman expecting art to mirror life. .... ..."Too much theater arranges thing so that people are led on a journey that reinforces the emotional habits of their lives," Mr. Foreman said, sitting in the book-infested SoHo loft he has shared with his wife since they bought it for a song in 1970. "For many years I’ve said that stories hide the truth." His preference, he said, for his own life and his own brand of theater, is "hovering on the edge of understanding, waiting to see what direction it goes in." ... ..."The moment things get too slick or well done, it becomes a system, and then you’re imprisoned by it. This way it’s a little awkward, but it makes me hover in the realm of possibility, which is where I like to be." |
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MARC
HAUSER: Audio: We devote a full episode of our weekly podcast, SciPod, to exploring Marc Hauser's work on the "moral organ" and what it means to our notions of justice and fair play. Listen to it here (mp3 format). In a hospital emergency room, five critically ill patients desperately need organ transplants. A healthy man walks in. Should the doctors remove his organs to save the sick five? Most people will respond in milliseconds with a resounding "No way". Now imagine an out-of-control train about to run down five workers standing on the track. There's a fork ahead, and throwing a switch could divert the train to another line on which there is only one worker. It's the same question - should we sacrifice the one to spare the other five? - yet most of us would say "yes" just as quickly. How do we make these lightning moral judgements? In his latest book, Marc Hauser argues that this ability is evidence that we are born with an innate moral faculty. He sat down to talk good and evil with Ivan Semeniuk. ... |
Hey, guys, can't you give atheism a chance? Yes, it is true that "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins has been on The New York Times best-seller list for 22 weeks and that "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris can be found in virtually every airport bookstore, even in Texas. So why is the new wave of books on atheism getting such a drubbing? The criticism is not primarily, it should be pointed out, from the pious, which would hardly be noteworthy, but from avowed atheists as well as scientists and philosophers writing in publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, not known as cells in the vast God-fearing conspiracy. ... Scientists and philosophers criticize two authors as lacking knowledge of theology. ...Finally, these critics stubbornly rejected the idea that rational meant scientific. "The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism," Mr. Nagel wrote. "We have more than one form of understanding," he continued. "The great achievements of physical science do not make it capable of encompassing everything, from mathematics to ethics to the experiences of a living animal. We have no reason to dismiss moral reasoning, introspection or conceptual analysis as ways of discovering the truth just because they are not physics." So what is the beleaguered atheist to do? One possibility: take pride in the fact that this astringent criticism comes from people and places that honor the honest skeptic’s commitment to full-throated questioning. |
Those who wonder what cutting-edge scientists might ponder outside of their classrooms and laboratories need wonder no more. In What We Believe But Cannot Prove, "intellectuals in action" speculate on the frontiers of science, both hard and soft (p. ix). Skeptics, however,should not be deceived by the title. An ample majority of the more than 100 teasingly short essays included will sate the intellect's appetite for both facts and reasoned theory. John Brockman's new collection features the world's most celebrated and respected scientists and their musings on everything from human pre-history to cosmology and astrophysics, from evolution to extraterrestrial intelligence, and from genetics to theories of consciousness. Regardless, What We Believe But Cannot Prove offers an impressive array of insights and challenges that will surely delight curious readers, generalists and specialists alike. Science is intimidating for the vast majority of us. But John Brockman has grown deservedly famous in recent years for his ability to lure these disciplines and their leading practitioners back to Earth where terrestrials are afforded all-too-rare opportunities to marvel at the intellectual and creative magnificence of science in particular, and at our species' immeasurable potential in all pursuits more generally. |
Even after decades of research into artificial intelligence, machines still don't think like human beings. Marvin Minsky, the discipline's founding father, refuses to give up hope. His solution is to make machines more emotional - and feelings, he says, are simpler to model than rational thought. He talks to Amanda Gefter about the need for emotional machines, the inner workings of the human brain, and the future of AI Many people are disappointed at the lack of progress in AI since the 1980s. Why so little headway? In the early years of computing, we found it easy to program machines to solve problems that people regarded as difficult, such as designing efficient aeroplane wings, playing chess, or diagnosing heart attacks. But none of those programs could do the things that people regard as relatively easy - such as making a bed, babysitting or understanding a story from a children's book.It is much the same today. Each program has only one specialised skill, and when anything happens that isn't expected the computer produces absurd results or gets stuck in an endless loop.In contrast, humans rarely get totally stuck because we have many different ways to deal with each situation or job. So whenever your favourite method fails, you can usually find a different approach. For example, if you get bored with one particular job, you can try to persuade someone else to do it or get angry with those who assigned it to you. We might call such reactions emotional, but they can help us deal with the problems we face. You call your new book The Emotion Machine. Is that because you're convinced that computers need emotions to help them think in the same way as people? Yes and no. The goal of the book is to try to explain what gives people their unique resourcefulness so that we can make our machines more versatile. We all grow up with the idea that emotions and thinking are quite different things, that thinking is basically simple because it is mainly a matter of rational logic, whereas emotions are far more complex and mysterious. I take the opposite view: that emotional states are usually simpler than most of our other ways to think. |
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J. Craig Venter: God Didn't Have Computers
Craig Venter explains that he can do a better job with genetics than God because he uses a computer. |
CLIFFORD PICKOVER likes to contemplate realms beyond our known reality. A futurist and science writer with a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University, he is the author of 37 books on topics as diverse as computers and creativity, art, mathematics, human behavior and intelligence, religion, time travel and alien life. ... ...'After you die, will the world remember anything you did?'' asks the book at its start. Among the individuals celebrated in the book are the author Truman Capote and the composer John Cage, who achieved, Mr. Pickover said, a kind of immortality by leaving some of themselves behind in their work. Capote created the nonfiction novel, ''In Cold Blood,'' in which true facts are told in story form, dramatically reinventing the scope of nonfiction writing. Cage composed a silent symphony. Mr. Pickover calls these individuals ''chameleons.'' ''Do you know what chameleons are?'' he asked in an interview at his home in Yorktown Heights. ''They are lizards famous for their ability to change their skins to an amazing variety of colors. They are odd creatures with eyes that can survey their world with nearly 360-degree vision.'' The people in his book are chameleons because they looked in many directions, were constantly changing, and flaunted their flamboyant colors, he said. All creative people are lateral thinkers, Mr. Pickover said, able to let their minds and imaginations drift from the mainstream to the tributaries where serendipity may await. ''I sometimes aspire to being one of the chameleons,'' he said. ''In my book I often have one mental eye on a person while the other is considering related quirky facts.'' |
In this interview, Rucker leads us through complex, technology-rich, multi-leveled worlds that teach us about how the world works through the eyes of a mathematician, a scientist, and a humorist. RU: There’s been some talk about parallel universes within the context of science and math and so forth. And I’m sure you have some thoughts and can tell us a little bit about how people have thought about this in the actual world. RR: There are a number of theories. A theory that I’ve drawn on recently comes from a scientist named Lisa Randall. She wrote an interesting book called Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. There’s this problem in physics with the fact that gravity is weaker than the other kinds of natural forces. Its basic intensity is dialed down really low. And physicists wonder — why isn’t it similar? And she has this explanation. Maybe there’s this other brane, as they call it – there’s a membrane, and part of reality is over there. And somehow it’s siphoning off some of our gravity. I like that idea of parallel universes. It’s sort of a specialized physics use of the parallel universe idea. The one that’s used in more fiction is the old quantum mechanical model that whenever something could randomly go this way or that way, maybe it goes both ways, and then both the universes exist. |
In a larger sense, social cognition is an extreme example of a broader issue in biology of mind, and that is social interaction in general. Even here we are beginning to make some rather remarkable progress. Cori Bargmann, a geneticist at the Rockefeller University, has studied two variants of a worm called C elegans, that differ in their feeding pattern. One variant is solitary and seeks its food alone; the other is social and forages in groups. The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. If you move the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm, it makes the solitary worm social. A
NEUROSCIENCE SAMPLING
Introduction
— JB ERIC R. KANDEL is University Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia and a Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2000. He is the author In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. |
A NEUROSCIENCE SAMPLING I list here four major accomplishments in neuroscience in the past year that have inspired me. I begin by saying that in a field as broad and as deep as neuroscience, it is difficult to select simply four contributions. I therefore consider this a sampling of the contributions that drive my optimism rather than a true selection of the top four. Moreover, I have simplified the task by dividing the field into four areas: Molecular Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Neuroscience of Psychiatric Disease. Molecular
Neuroscience. The discovery of the double
helix by Watson and Crick in 1952 gave rise to a central dogma
in molecular biology, according to which genes (encoded
in DNA) give rise to messenger RNAs which encode proteins,
the workhorses of the cell. The discovery a few years ago of
microRNAs, a class of small non-coding genetic elements that
control the translation of target messenger RNAs, highlighted
a new layer of gene regulation downstream from DNA. MicroRNAs
have been described in numerous species across the evolutionary
spectrum, and there are thought to be about 500 different microRNAs
encoded in the human genome. Although microRNAs are very
short (only 21 nucleotides long), each is thought to bind to
a number of different messenger RNA targets. Thus
they may have a very profound effect on gene action in both
the human brain and in simpler experimental animals. The existence
of microRNAs has been known for several years but only recently
has it become recognized that they are particularly important
in the nervous system where they serve, among other functions,
to regulate synaptic strength—the effectiveness with
which one neuron communicates with another. Systems
Neuroscience. In the late 1960s and 1970s,
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel gave us the initial insight
as to how the early input stages of the cerebral cortex process
and transform the incoming visual messages. This gave us our
first insight of how an image—say, an image of a face
or a landscape—is first deconstructed and then reconstructed
in the brain. In all living creatures, from simple animals
to people, knowledge of space is central to behavior. We live
in space, we move through it, we explore it, and we defend
it. Space is not only important but it is fascinating because
unlike other sense modalities, it is not analyzed by special
sensory organs like the eye for seeing or the ear for hearing.
This has raised the question, How is space represented in the
brain? Immanuel Kant, the great German idealist philosopher
argued that the ability to represent space is built into the
mind. He argued that people are born with principles of ordering
space and time. These are part of what he called the categorical
imperatives. When other sensations are elicited such as visual
sensations of objects, or auditory sensations of melodies,
or touch experiences, they are interwoven automatically in
specific ways with space and time. We remember people and events
in a spatial context. Because we do not have a special organ
dedicated to space, the representation of space is the cognitive
sensibility par excellence. It is the binding problem write
large. The brain must combine inputs from several different
sensory modalities and then generate a complete internal representation
that does not depend exclusively on one input. The brain commonly
represents information about space in many areas in many different
ways and the properties of each representation vary according
to purpose. Cognitive
Neuroscience. When you and I talk to one another,
we not only know the contents of our own mind but we also have
a sense of the content of what the other person is thinking
and how they are reacting. We have, so to speak, a sense of
the social expectations of the situation and the kinds of ideas
that the conversation brings forth in the colleague with whom
we are communicating. During the past year several important
studies have localized aspects of this function in the cerebral
cortex. First, Rebecca Saxe has found that there is a specific
area in the brain at the junction between the temporal and
parietal lobes that encodes aspects of the theory of mind.
It becomes active when a person entertains ideas about another
person’s possible responses to our actions. This new
finding extends a series of important findings from Rizzolatti’s
group in Italy which first showed that there are certain cells
in the premotor areas of parietal cortex of the monkey that
respond not only when a monkey picks up a peanut but also when
the monkey sees another monkey or a human being pick up a peanut.
These cells are called mirror cells because they respond not
only to personal action but in an imitative way to the action
of others. In addition to showing a cellular basis for a theory
of mind, these cells also illustrate that the motor systems
have cognitive function. Imaging experiments by Ramachandran
have shown that this area is present in people, and that it
appears to be disturbed in patients with autism. Neuroscience of Psychiatric Disease. A major source of optimism is the emergence of an empirical, evidence-based psychotherapy. There are now a number of excellent studies that show that mild to moderately severe depression, as well as fear-based anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders, respond to different versions of psychotherapy that are designed to focus not on deep underlying conflict but on the management of specific symptoms. The best established of these is cognitive behavioral therapy, first introduced in the 1970s by Aaron Beck at the University of Pennsylvania. In the
late 1950s, when Beck began his investigations, depressive illness
was commonly viewed as a form of introjected anger. Freud had argued
that depressed patients feel hostile and angry toward someone they
love. Because patients cannot deal with negative feelings about
someone who is important, needed, and valued, they handle those
feelings by repressing them and unconsciously directing them against
themselves. It is this self-directed anger and hatred that leads
to low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness. |
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher |
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