Irritate In Chic Bug: Notes on Four Articles

I. A year ago in National Geographic David Dobbs published a piece on "Restless Genes" in human history, and I recently re-read it. What marvelous science writing. Two models of "genes" and the expression of curiosity, restlessness, and risk-taking in history are put forth: a gene called DRD-4 has been implicated in learning and reward and it modulates dopamine, the most basic endogenous "reward" neurotransmitter. We all want a little dopamine fix every now and then. Actually, closer to now.

But researchers have repeatedly noted a variant on the gene, DRD-7R, seems highly correlated with history's risk-takers: people who are eager to explore new places and drugs, try new relationships, including sexual ones. They seem more eager to try new foods and ideas. They seek change and adventure and they were the ones who lit out for the frontier, the new territory. In non-human animals the maverick gene DRD-7R relates to more exploration of territory and novelty-seeking. In humans it's also related to ADHD. Chuaseng Chen of UC-Irvine has done research showing the DRD-7Rs are found more concentrated in migratory cultures than in settled ones. Other research suggests that DRD-7Rs wither in settled cultures: they need a cultural outlet for their expression of restlessness and neophilia.

                                      four explorers on the Nimrod expedition to the
                                      South Pole. Harrowing! Shackleton is the second
                                      from the left.

But it's not that simple: the macro-version of the gene story here is explained in Dobbs's article by evolution and population geneticist Kenneth Dodd of Yale, who was part of the team that first isolated the DRD-7R variant 20 years ago. He says the picture is far more complex than one gene variant giving rise to the various Ages of Exploration. There must be a group of genes involved, and furthermore: for the pioneering types to do their thing, the culture needs to have produced tools and incorporated other traits for the novelty-seekers first, which has led to this macro picture of human innovation and exploration: DRD-7R is an exciting feature in the story of human derring-do, but we first needed genes that built limbs and brains like we have! If you're going to be the first to mount an expedition to walk out of the known territory and over those hills in the distance to see what other tribes may live there, you needed long legs (like we have) and hips configured and conducive to long walks (like we have). It helps to have dextrous hands to grasp and manipulate tools (like we have), and it no doubt helped to have a very large but slow-growing brain that spent a lot of time imagining possible behaviors and playing games between 3-18 years old. (That's all of us, virtually.) As Dobbs writes, "Our conceptual imagination greatly magnifies the effect of our mobility and dexterity, which in turn stirs our imagination further." Feedback loops inside of feedback loops, churning and seeking, spreading information and firing more imaginations.

But read the article if you haven't already. You'll get accounts of Captain Cook and Ernest Shackleton, mutant genes for tolerating lactose, and pioneering Quebec logging communities. And what was most fascinating to me: the latest research on how people who live on all those tiny islands in the South Pacific got there. I was used to reading Out of Africa stories that headed north and "made a left" toward southern Europe...probably because of my ego? That would be my ancestors's earliest route out of Africa. But others made a right, and that has made all the difference.

II. In May of 2013 a study in Psychological Science appeared, conducted by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and UC Santa Barbara, which studied attitudes about redistribution of wealth among men in Denmark, Unistat, and Argentina, all of which have welfare systems very different from each other. A high correlation was found between men with strong upper body strength who disliked redistributive schemes (welfare ideas) and men with less upper body strength, who favored more redistribution. The researchers think there may be something quite ancient (and unconscious?) in political ideology. When I read the piece I realized I had intuited their findings a long time ago, but it was only intuition. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides were involved in the study, and I still find their book The Adapted Mind most interesting among the books that Stephen Jay Gould charged were "Darwinian Fundamentalism." An earlier version of this study appeared in late 2012, and Natasha Lennard, one of writers at Salon that I find not-execrable, articulated my thinking fairly accurately HERE.

                                         So. Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where a
                                         disagreement over Kant led to a shooting

III. Last September, a story appeared out of southern Russia which appealed to a dank corner of my own sense of mordant humor: two guys in their twenties were waiting in line for beer at an outdoor event in a beautiful city, Rostov-on-Don. The topic of Immanuel Kant came up and there was a fierce disagreement over some aspect of the philosopher well-known for his writings on ethics and a universal morality within humankind. Things escalated and one guy shot the other in the head with an air gun, sending him to the hospital but not killing him. The assailant faces 20 years, and the author of this brief article suggests 20 years is a long time to better get to know Kant's ideas about ethics and morality. The short piece is HERE.

IV. So there was apparently this star male philosophy professor who seduced a beautiful and brilliant student. Rumors and gossip raged, then she began to show her pregnancy. It was a huge scandal, and the student's uncle's anger was boiling at the professor. The professor thought the best thing to do would be to marry the student. She was against this. But they did anyway, in secret. The results of improprieties around sex were so scandalous the professor hid his new bride in a nunnery. Then the uncle had some thugs break in to the professor's house and cut off his penis while he was sleeping; an earlier version of Bobbitizing a guy. (The most unkindest cut of all. But of course I'm horribly, clangingly biased.) The professor, now a eunuch, took up a life in a monastery. He and his wife exchanged letters for the rest of their lives and these letters have kept scholars busy ever since.

You may have heard of the professor and his student: they were Abelard and Heloise, and the action took place 900 years ago. I mention it because I enjoyed reading this book review by Barbara Newman of a new edition of versions of the letters. I hadn't known about dificilio lectio, which says, when faced with anomalous and competing versions of the "same" text that had been copied by hand by scribes, choose the "more difficult" one, because it's more likely to be authentic. This seems like a proto-inchoate intuition about information theory, in which longer messages, when passed from person to person via memory, get shorter.

I find it very intriguing that Heloise may have been a sort of 21st century feminist, according to one reading of translations of her letters.

Another Promiscuous Neurotheologist Post (But This One Gets Shanked Into the Chomskyan Rough)

Go ahead and skip this video of Harvard Professor Marc Hauser, but if you do you'll miss out on a bit of Irony. It's 3 minutes, 40 seconds:

Getting back to trying to figure out how religion came about and how it related to moral thought, Hauser at Harvard and Prof Illka Pyysiainen (don't even ask about pronouncing his name) of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (and their teams) worked on this problem. The posited positions seem to have been that 1.)We can either think of religion as an adaptation that solved the problem of cooperation among non-genetically related peoples when the tribe got big enough; or 2.) Religion evolved as a by-product of pre-existing cognitive capacities.

Position #1 and its adherents seem to think that the Cooperation Model means there is no morality without religion, although there seem to be a few who like the Cooperation Model but shy away from this "hard" position about "morality" as we know it today.

Position #2 and its adherents see religion as merely one way of expressing one's own moral intuitions.

Note that both assumptions make religious experience a brain experience solely and do not address the existence of any sort of Gaseous Vertebrate of Astronomical Weight and Heft (or: gee ohh dee).

My "intuition" says that, if I'm forced to choose one of the two positions, I'd go with #2, because I grew up irreligious and yet seem to have a modern Industrialized World adult's view of morality that fits in well enough that I'm not ostracized or shunned or forced into exile. I have friends. I'm kind to strangers and my loved ones know I love them. I'm not writing this from a SuperMax prison, where I'm doing Life plus 900 years for some cartoonishly heinous act, like taking over a kindergarten and slitting the throats of all the bunny rabbits and making the kids watch it, and then raping Ms. Schoolmarm in front of little Francine and Billy and Jared and Sally. Or masterminding a secret terrorist bombing of Cambodia.

[Oh wait a minute: that second thing really was done by a guy who's not only not in prison, but he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about Irony!]

Actually, I have no dog in that fight. I think all that will come of it are speculative narratives couched in as much social scientific study as the researchers can muster, the result being, depending on your proclivities, Just-So stories, or Edifying Discourse. I remain agnostic about the origin of religion but enjoy reading the attempts to travel in time to find the Origins. I take a pragmatist's view: what do I find good to think about?

A short precis of the Hauser/Pyysiainen paper appeared HERE. The paper was originally published in Trends In Cognitive Sciences on 8 February, 2010. Pyysiainen and Hauser looked at some plenitude of  studies on moral intuition and were impressed that people from many diverse religious backgrounds, and some people with no religious upbringing or affiliation? They all had no trouble in making moral judgments when faced with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. Ipso facto: people don't need a particular religious background in order to make sound moral judgments. And Hauser/Pyysiainen go to the position I'm guessing they had when they went in: religion emerged from pre-existing cognitive modules.

I thought Pyysiainen was appropriately conciliatory towards religion in his quote from the article in Science Daily: "However, although it appears as if cooperation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilizing cooperation between groups."

Hey, that's why these guys get the Big Bucks, eh?

The Kicker
Marc Hauser published this paper with his Finnish colleagues while, it turns out, Harvard was doing a five-year investigation on him, for charges of various academic frauds. Around six weeks ago, Harvard finally wrapped it up: Hauser - once an academic star, a favored lecturer at Harvard, prolific publisher, and one of John Brockman's Third Culturalists - was found guilty of scientific misconduct. He fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and "conducted experiments in factually incorrect ways." He's no longer affiliated with Harvard. (See HERE for Harvard's findings, and HERE for Hauser's response to the Federal Office for Research Integrity's findings.

For a long and insider's fascinating take on this whole episode see Charles Gross's piece from The Nation from late last year. It seems a fairly rare event when the grad students helping the star Professor turn the Prof in. When they do, it often taints the grad students and makes their life as future scientific researchers very difficult, but this time it does not seem to have harmed the students.

                        Professor Chomsky, most influential linguist of the 20th century, and
                        I think, a bad influence on now-fallen Marc Hauser. Chomsky's
                        reaction to Hauser's resignation, which happened long before
                          Hauser was convicted of academic fraud, is HERE.

The Chomsky Connection
Even though I copped to picking the Hauser/Pyysiainen of the two choices (due to no formal religious upbringing), when I read the piece and saw Hauser's name attached, I had already read he was under a long investigation. And, to be honest, I had become quite biased against his stuff - which ranged over an impressively large biological/philosophical/psychological terrain - because I'd followed him initially as a Chomskyan, who believed in Cartesian rational modules in the mind that get tripped by being in this world and then Do Whatever.

(No talk about neurons or neural circuits or the embodied brain, that's for damned sure! Although, to be fair, I think Hauser would've loved to have seen Chomsky go for more neuroscience...or at least be more open-minded to primatological findings, but he simply could not. Chomsky would not. Why? Because then the syntactical walls come a' tumblin' down, the whole Idealized Universal Grammar schmeer gets canned when you must deal with The Continuum of chimps and birds and singing Neanderthals to neurons and real stuff. Not diagrams.)

Indeed, Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch appear to have talked Noam into co-publishing a paper on the origin of language when, after a lifetime of dodging the issue, Chomsky put his name to a paper on the subject, if only to stop the charges that Chomsky appeared to think that Language arose in an instant, like the Big Bang or Yahweh saying "Let there be light."

A large chunk of Hauser's now-gone academic career seems to have been to extend the Chomskyan model of thinking about linguistics to the realm of Evolutionary Psychology. Indeed, Hauser seems to have been quite gung-ho about Edward O. Wilson's "consilience" project, but claiming it for a sort of Cartesian/Chomskyan intellectual empire.

Now obviously, I've veered way off course from the topic of neurotheology and into the politics of academia, but I couldn't help it: the Irony was too much. Forgive me?

I could could on and on about Hauser and what I consider the 18th century view Chomsky has infected some of academia with (and longtime readers of the OG know I've typed a lot on Noam and I actually love the Man), but to suffice and for further delvings: see George Lakoff's talk on "Philosophy In The Flesh" and then some of his Third Culturalist's responses to Lakoff's 21st century ideas about the embodied human mind. This goes back to March of 1999. Notice Hauser's response, then skip down to see how Lakoff (Chomsky's bete noir in Linguistics; they loathe each other) responds to Chomsky acolyte Hauser's non-understandings.

[For some other blogspew: it could be argued that John Rawls has as much to do with "Nativist" ideas in academia as Chomsky does.]

One of Hauser's books was titled Moral Minds and I have not seen any data about his publisher removing the book from bookstore shelves, as was done to Jonah Lehrer when it was found he'd fabricated quotes about Bob Dylan in his book Imagine. But Hauser still plans to go on and publish in the field of evolutionary psychology/cognitive neurobiology. One article has his next book being titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste For Being Bad, and it should be...interesting. (NB: I refrained from using "Ironic" yet again!) In an article on the Hauser debacle in USA Today, of all places, I noted big-time primatologist Frans de Waal's worry that maybe much more of Hauser's data was cooked than what the investigators looked at. De Waal accuses Harvard of covering up too much for Hauser, possibly damaging the field of animal behavior...

A Head Test: How is Hauser different from Lehrer? And does knowing Hauser made up stuff, etc: does that change how you think of this particular paper on the origin of religion?

Going Out With Hauser
I will let Hauser's quote on morality from Science Daily carry this one out:

"It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we discuss in our paper, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence."

Amen, Hauser. And have a good life.