On lying, fibbing, tricking and kidding.

My four year-old son is learning the nuances of deceit. When he's caught claiming that he didn't eat that piece of candy you said he couldn't have he says he was "just joking." His deceptions have a straightforward purpose — to get something that he wants which would otherwise be denied him, or to avoid responsibility for something that would incur his parents' displeasure. Transparent and predictable, his lies seem to come with the territory of being human. He's learning about the commodity of untruth, and its cost.

One would think that by the time a person has grown to adulthood he or she has learned that obvious, easily uncovered untruths have little value and come at a high cost, especially when you live in the public eye.

Hillary Clinton, one can presume, must understand, abstractly at least, the high cost of silly lies. And yet she trots them out as if she were a four year-old. (I'm not exculpating Barack Obama, but his lies at least seem to be in keeping with his general philosophy and purpose, whereas Clinton's sometimes confound us with their preposterous posturing.) Claiming to George Stephanopolous, for instance, that her support for summer gas tax relief was something other than just political pandering insults the intelligence of those who would vote for her.

Recent research into the psychology of lying suggests that people lie to deceive others or to deceive themselves. This research also suggests that lying to deceive oneself has an aspirational quality — the student who inflates his grade point average aspires to that grade point average, and, more often than not, will get closer to it over time.

Very often politicians lie because they aspire to be right. They lie to defend a position because they believe in their ability to hold correct positions. Hillary Clinton desperately wants to believe that her aspiration to the presidency is legitimate. Beyond anything else, a victory would validate her sense of her right to be center stage — politically and personally. When someone fights so desperately to win, it gives us a window into what they feel they have to lose.

Philosophically, deceit is a simple concept — the presentation of untruth in place of truth. We can quibble about what we mean by truth, about whether anything can be completely objective, but this is hairsplitting. When a student says his grade point average is 3.7 when it is really 3.1 this is deceit.

And deceit isn't confined to humans. The natural world abounds with deceit. Animals camouflage, impersonate, dissemble, trick… all with the aim of staying alive or furthering their genes.

Early philosophers such as Socrates and Plato focused a great deal of attention on the mechanics of deception and the antidote of reason. They did this because they felt that too often people were deceived by illogic. Clear, unfettered truth was the primary battleground of their philosophy.

Amazingly, many hundreds of years later, despite great advances in so many fields, we still don't teach our children the fundamentals of logic and reason as a matter of course. Until today, until right now, I've thought that this was simply an oversight. But I wonder now whether the battle that Socrates started isn't still underway. Perhaps it's a battle of humanity for humanity.

Here we have highly educated people fibbing like four year-olds. In Socrates' day, the sophists were aware of their deceptions, and they succeeded because people wanted to believe them. Just so today, the Clintons of the world know that they're dissembling, but people want to believe them. We like rhetoric. We like to think that the world might be something other than what it is. Reality is hard. The truth is unsavory. Let's go for a drive…

For a rational, science-based explanation of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On why we learn, and why it's not always a good thing.

The NY Times Science section features an article today on remarkable research scientists have been doing into the positive benefits and surprisingly negative side-effects of learning — "Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn't Always Better." The research arrives at a somewhat banal conclusion: When it comes to the evolving characteristics of living things, the benefits of learning will always be balanced against the benefits of other adaptations, so that species reach the best balance for them not necessarily the highest level of learning capability possible.

To paint a less arid picture of this finding, bees that capture just one type of pollen have adapted to recognize that type of pollen — it's of no use to them to be able to learn about other pollens. Whereas bees that need to gather nectar from many different kinds of pollens have evolved to be better learners because the ability to learn from their experiences with different species of plant benefits them.

The research struck me as remarkable in part because of the ingenious mechanisms the scientists had used to better understand learning processes in all kinds of unlikely organisms from the microscopic vinegar worm, Caenorhadits elegans, which can learn using its meagre brain capacity of 302 neurons, to more familiar research subjects like the fruit fly. The scientists selectively bred fruit flies that were better learners (this took fifteen generations) by hand selecting those with naturally better learning capabilities (the description of this process is worth a read all in itself). When they pitted larvae of these smarter fruit flies against larvae of regular fruit flies in a primitive survival challenge, the smarter fruit fly larvae fared poorly.

Then we have the two questions that the research teased up but didn't answer — why have human beings evolved to be such good learners? And in what situations might it be disadvantageous for humans to be better learners?

Before diving into these murky pools of inquiry, I'm inclined to explore the concept and origination of learning itself.

In the process of learning, an entity (let's not confine ourselves to living things) develops a new response to a stimulus. Simple as that. Better learners develop improved or refined responses more quickly.

It might help to consider a non-organic example: The most recent versions of Microsoft Office have had a built-in learning function. After you've executed the same keystrokes a few times under similar circumstances, the program can prompt you to ask whether you'd like to do that same thing every time those circumstances arise.

In a living organism, instead of keystrokes the stimulus could be something like tasting a new food. After tasting the food a few times and finding it good to eat the organism can learn to seek out the food. (The research scientists trained the fruit flies in the lab to unlearn the attraction of orange jelly by spiking it with quinine.)

I would argue that the concept of and possibility for learning follows inevitably from the fundamental principles of space and time. Every change in state in space over time results in a set of stimuli with corresponding responses. It is an intrinsic possibility of space and time that a feedback loop will accompany some set of stimuli and responses so that a certain response is reinforced over others. This is learning.

Jumping forward to living things, the learning process, to a certain point, gets reinforced because it produces better adapted organisms. (Just as the scientists bred better learning fruit flies, so nature breeds better learning organisms, so long as other survival mechanisms aren't disproportionately compromised.)

So, now we're back to the key questions: Why do people learn so well? And what are some of the limiting factors for us as learners?

Giving an accurate but unhelpful answer to the first question we could say that people evolved into such good learners because it served them well as a survival mechanism. But I'd like to present a more helpful hypothesis — human beings evolved to be better learners because for us getting smarter became its own feedback loop. The smarter people got, the less able we were to survive without being smarter still. Early humans developed tools and built shelter. This had the effect, over time, of reducing our ability to live without tools and shelter. We ventured into new lands, forcing ourselves to learn to live in those places. We gathered together into societies, forcing ourselves to learn how to live together.

This theory also goes toward providing an answer the question about what limits our learning. We can be pushing up against our limits in many ways — rely too much on your use of tools and what happens when you're without your tools? Rely too much on the protocols of human society and what happens when those protocols break down.

But again, there's perhaps a more subtle and direct answer to the question. What we really want to know is why we wouldn't want to be as smart as we possibly could be…

My wife's uncle is an incredibly successful man who disdains high intelligence. He opines that being too smart makes someone unhappy. It's difficult to argue with this as a general hypothesis; very smart people do tend to be unhappier than less brilliant people. Bertrand Russell, himself an exceptionally brilliant man, expressed this well when he said: "I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."

For a rational, science-based explanation of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the separate worlds of science and religion.

For what reads like a fluff piece, Cornelia Dean's portrait of evolutionary biologist and author Francisco J. Ayala manages to press some pertinent buttons. Specifically:

1. The title "Roving Defender of Evolution, And Room for God" might mislead. It seems to imply that Ayala speaks not just as a scientist but as a believer. But the piece closes as follows: "Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer. 'I don’t want to be tagged,' he said. 'By one side or the other.'"

2. Ayala makes some curious statements about evolution and evil. As Dean reports "If God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, [Ayala] said, 'then he is a sadist…'" And quoted Ayala from his book: "Evolution 'provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world.'"

3. And, in passing, Dean inserts this dramatic and non-trivial opinion: "'Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,' [Ayala] writes in the new book. 'It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.'"

The NY Times exhibits poor editorial judgment in publishing the piece under the chosen title. I don't know whether the Times is diluting its editorial expertise in the move to become an up-to-date on-line news resource. And I don't have an assiduous record of the editorial quality of the paper. But it's my passing impression that the mismatch between titles and content is happening somewhat frequently on-line. I don't ever recall it happening in the printed paper. The piece itself is less focused and on-point than one would expect from a top notch news source. In an Internet world overflowing with dubious content, these things matter enormously.

I'm fascinated by Ayala's equating of evolution with an explanation for evil. Given the sketchy coverage of Ayala's views and opinions, I'm guessing that he has much more to say on the subject. But from the little we have to work with Ayala seems to be saying that evolution lets God off the hook for being the source of evil.

This brings us to the third point. If science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge then on what basis can we cross-reference evolution and evil?

Here are my specific responses:

a. Religion is not a realm of knowledge, it is a realm of belief. In furthering human understanding and combating intolerance, we must resist the confusion of scientific and rational knowledge (which is grounded in a common and reproducible perception of the world we live in) from religious belief (which is not).

b. Evil is a human construct related to belief and doesn't "exist" other than as a concept. To casually conjoin the concept of evolution with the concept of evil overlaps science and religion in exactly the way that Ayala seems to decry.

c. I agree that denouncing religion in the name of science isn't particularly helpful. But neither is it helpful for a renowned scientist to use his scientific credentials to explicitly "make room" for religion while being coy about his own beliefs.

As a side note, moral concepts arise out of our experience of the world around us. Morality is our way of making sense of the way that life seems to operate. If we explore the origin of the concept of morality we find that it has its fundamental grounds in the principles of space and time. Working rationally we can define a moral framework that relies only on logic and promotes ideas about goodness that reflect life as it is not life as we've been told it should be. — I describe this approach in detail in my book - LIFE!

For a rational, science-based explanation of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On abstraction and the real world.

It's been nearly 150 years since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. The NY Times reports on a new exhibition that provides insight into Darwin's scientific life and work. We learn that Darwin, inspired by musings on the natural world around him, tested out his ideas on the plants in his garden. He cross-pollinated plants with complementary anatomical parts, for instance, and found that the hybrids were more robust than their parents.

Through his inspiration from life, experimentation with life, and abstraction from life, Darwin derived the theory of evolution, forever changing our understanding of the world we live in, and bringing scientific understanding forward in one huge leap.

My teenage daughter has the most difficulty with science and math when she's required to apply newly learned abstract concepts to "real world" problems. I expect she's not alone. A new study indicates that people learn abstract concepts more successfully if taught the abstract theory first rather than expecting them to learn by deduction from "real world" examples. The conclusion: "Real world" examples aren't as effective as a thorough briefing on the equations and theories concerned.

What surprised me about this article was not the conclusion (since it seems to make common sense — Darwin spent many painstaking years deriving his theories from real world examples, and the results are only obvious because he abstracted them!) but the realization that anyone ever thought that real world examples could effectively impart complex abstract knowledge. It's useful to tie abstract concepts back to real world examples, of course, but this step is tough and challenging because it requires the additional skills of distilling the pertinent information and understanding how to apply the appropriate theory.

Studies of language and reasoning underscore this lesson: Children who have no language for numbers can count up to three instinctively. Primates have the same skill. But with larger numbers our ability to count without language diminishes rapidly. As the article points out, language can help enormously in processing problems.

Mathematics and scientific concepts provide a rich, inclusive language that abstracts the concepts of space, time and causality: This language helps us process the abstracted workings of the real world. Without it we would be fumbling around anew with each new problem. As with anything in the real world, though, discerning and holding on to sound ideas and methods provides its own challenge. At each turn there are those who want to forge on on new paths, or turn back down old ones.

Footnote: When I wrote the back cover blurb for my book a couple of years ago I made the apparently extravagant claim that in its contribution to human understanding it was the most important book since Darwin's The Origin of Species. This offended some people. For a while I was embarrassed to have ever claimed such a thing. But today as I read about Darwin's methods and saw how he'd sketched out his evolutionary ideas, I felt a renewed sense of conviction that when we can understand how evolution relates to the fundamental principles of space and time we will have taken another big step forward. And I am still convinced that Life! achieves this feat.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Who do you trust, Jimmy Carter or Condoleezza Rice?

And which of them is happier?

Condoleezza Rice complains that Jimmy Carter has confused the middle east peace process by meeting with Hamas and Syria. Carter claims that without talking to Hamas there won't be a peace process, and that Syria is willing to move toward the west if given sufficient incentive.

Say what you will about Jimmy Carter but he is a man of integrity and courage. I have no doubt that he has confused the Bush administration's concept of the peace process. The key question seems to be whether he has done more harm than good. To answer this question we need to understand whether the Bush concept of the peace process ever was or is going anywhere.

I find myself asking the question: Why does Bush want peace?

And I find myself coming immediately to the answer: Because it would be an accomplishment that would make him feel good about himself.

Bush's presidency has always been about impressing people. He's wanted to impress Cheney and Cheney's powerful friends in the business world. He's wanted to impress his dad by ousting Saddam Hussein. He's wanted to impress historians by establishing some sort of legacy. What could be better than some success in the middle east peace process?

And then to Carter. Carter, it seems to me, had no ulterior motive for remaining involved in world affairs. Just as his desire to lead the country hinged and slumped on his desire wrest a better world out of what we had, so, too, his desire to work tirelessly for the cause of good has been, so it seems, prompted by the will to do good.
I realize that opinion isn't philosophy. But the point I'm making is that to reach conclusions on questions of better or worse one does need to explore motive.

In a process as delicate, painstaking, complex and treacherous as middle east peace it is reasonable to predict that any effort founded on the ego of the presumptive peacemaker will fail. Whereas, an effort founded on an ego-less attempt to do good, while it may also fail, at least has a chance of making progress.

What does any of this have to do with happiness?

Just look at the picture of Condoleezza Rice. Doesn't she look miserable?

Now what about Jimmy Carter?

Daniel Gilbert has been researching happiness. When asked what makes people happy, he says this: "We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends."

Carter is right to meet with Hamas. He is right to meet with Assad. Talking to someone doesn't mean you agree with them. It means that you are willing to hear what they have to say, and that you want to convey something to them. By shunning them you give them no choice but to maintain their position of antagonism.

Rice may be happier if she had more people to talk to.

On the negative swing in the Democratic primary campaign, global warming, and deconstruction.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania today, Barack Obama had this to say about the increasingly negative tone of the push for votes: "if you get elbowed enough, eventually you start elbowing back." He labels the cause — "elbowing" — and the effect — "elbowing back." I like Barack Obama, from what I know of him, and his analysis of the cause and effect of retaliation has some emotionally appealing weight to it — generally we don't like to be pushed around — but it makes me wonder about the psychology of retaliation in a presidential candidate.

As fears rise of dire consequences from global warming, so does the noise of debate about what each of us can and should do to respond. Michael Pollan argues that although personal choices to, for instance, walk instead of drive, eat less meat, plant our back yard, may seem to be ineffective ways to generate the desired effect, they form a critical part of the only response that can help save our ecology in the long term — a change in attitude.

And Stanley Fish, in a typically dogmatic piece, insists that deconstruction didn't change anything. After outlining the tumult in academia and the careers of academics post-deconstruction, Fish blithely dismisses the effect as something disconnected from its cause: "these effects, good and bad, happy and unhappy, did not flow from deconstruction as a matter of right and property; they were effects of which deconstruction just happened to be the occasion."

(Tangentially I wonder whether Fish's pattern of defending a hypothesis rather than challenging and investigating it has an overall beneficial result — because his topics and positions provoke thought and response — or not — since by lending the air of authority to his unswerving style, the Times does an implicit injustice to the practice of sound thinking… Unfortunately, I think, the latter.)

Nothing 'just happens' to be the occasion for an effect. Or, to put it another way, every cause is inevitably the occasion for its effect.

Obama speaks emotively but not convincingly when he says that Clinton's elbowing caused his elbowing. We all know that the response to an an elbow in the ribs can be for us to present our other ribs for more elbowing. To unpack Obama's words, what he meant was: "wouldn't you eventually do the same thing if someone was needling you?" And he's counting on most people saying, "well, yes, I believe I would."

It's a clever and appealing piece of rhetoric, but not an honest one. Obama knows that it would have been possible to keep the higher ground, but he's been advised that he needs to strike back, and perhaps he also feels that it's right to strike back. I, for one, would dearly like to know whether Obama believes this or not. How deep and strong is his belief in doing the right thing? That's the reason to want to vote for him.

Michael Pollan presents at a subtle and important insight into the cause and effect of global warming — if we don't change our attitudes, we won't change the outcome. In itself, his journalism acts as a cause of changing attitude, informing and swaying opinion. He arrived at his opinion through reading and reflection. His reading and reflection wouldn't and couldn't have happened without the work and reflection of scientists and educators who went before him… This chain of cause and effect leads us back to the evolution of human consciousness, which also leads us back to the cause of global warming. This is, all at once, ironic, comforting, and somewhat alarming. Ironic: Global warming and the hope for averting disaster have been caused by the evolution of human consciousness. Comforting: If we broke it, we can fix it. Alarming: If this can happen, what's in store for us next?

Philosophically speaking, the phenomenon of cause and effect is central to our cohesive experience of existence. Given the same conditions, we expect the same outcomes. Manifestations of existence (physical objects, energy fields, etc.) in time and space operate predictably to the extent that we have sufficient information to make those predictions. Even quantum mechanics results in predictable behaviors that reflect the probability of different outcomes.

We take cause and effect for granted. We're so accustomed to its operation that we find it hard to imagine the world working in any other way. Because of this, perhaps, I think that we devalue the all pervasive workings of causality. We allow ourselves to believe that a stand-in for a reasonable cause (elbowing) is good enough. And that a well defended opinion (a la those of Stanley Fish) is as good as a rigorous and skeptical exploration. But, fortunately, we also recognize the real thing when we see it.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On intuition and how it can fool us.

In pointing to the problems with what we think we deduce, Dan Ariely, (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions) points to a study showing that whether someone opts to donate his or her organs depends on whether the question asks them to opt-in or opt-out. People will tend to stick with the default presented to them. Not because they don't care, but because they care deeply but don't feel able to decide from fundamental principles.
Similarly, a mathematical analysis of the game show "Let's Make A Deal" reveals that people aren't very good at intuiting the correct answers to probability problems. When choosing between three options, knowing that one option is wrong affects the likelihood of one's secondary choice. On Let's Make A Deal, Monty allowed the contestant make an initial choice between three doors, behind one of which was a car, while behind the other two were goats. Monty would then reveal a goat behind one of the two doors that the contestant didn't pick. Should the contestant switch or stick? Does it make a difference to his chances of winning? Counterintuitively, the answer is that he should switch. This seems wrong but is born out by the math. (The "reveal" is constrained, effectively tipping off the chooser; if you switch, you win two out of three times; if you don't switch you win only one out of three times. When explained in this way — 2/3 plus 1/3 = 1, it makes sense, but that is not how it appears intuitively.)

How does this relate to sexism and misogyny? Nicholas Kristof asks whether the routinely brutal and discriminatory treatment of women in many societies is sexist or misogynistic. He gets a lot of comments on his post. But I think that Kristof and his responders maybe miss the point because it offends intuition. Kristof argues that perhaps ritual abuse and discrimination of women is sexist rather than misogynistic.

It seems to me that intuitively we look at the question from a neutral perspective — that women are routinely discriminated against and abused in a ritual fashion yields evidence of sexism or misogyny. But what if it were evidence of something else? Wouldn't this change the question?

Throughout the natural world, the male and female of the various species exhibit different behaviors. In some species the females raise the young. in others this is the task of the males. In some species the female is multi-hued and splendid, in others it is the male. In mammals, typically, females protect and nurture the young, men protect and feed the group. These are not sexist behaviors, since sexism is a conscious concept; the animals simply behave as they've evolved to behave.

Sexism and misogyny begin from but distort the neutral, natural concepts that differentiate females and males of the human species. But why does this happen at all? Humans exaggerate and conceptualize differences in ways that make them feel less threatened, more in control. Men traditionally exploit and codify the differences between the sexes to reduce their fear and feed their self-esteem. Likewise women do the same, but for the most part with less dramatic and harmful results.

Intuitively, we connect the ill-judged and harmful behaviors of abuse, control and humiliation with the concepts of sexism and misogyny, but they are more closely connected with the concepts of fear and defense. We exaggerate and exploit gender differences to counter our fears and bolster our defenses; this happens more readily in societies that have fewer less harmful mechanisms to bring about the same outcome. These defenses then become codified as socially accepted or tolerated or rejected concepts. Enlightenment, insight, education and social change are the only remedies.

Changing the way we think.

Last week I wrote about the implications of what happens to an animal's brain when you teach it to use a rake. I was fascinated and excited by the idea that the brain's genetics may be changed by the way it is used. What might this tell us about our capacity to change the way we think and react?

Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang write today about the brain's limited capacity for governing self-discipline. Research going back several years has shown that if you exercise restraint or self-discipline in one activity or area of your life, you will deplete your "self-restraint" resources and find it more difficult to remain disciplined in another activity. Complete a cross-word puzzle and you won't be able to resist dessert.

The studies implicate blood sugar as an important factor in restoring or maintaining self-restraint. Subjects performed better on disciplined tasks if they were allowed to replenish their blood sugar between those tasks. (If only Spitzer had had a glass of lemonade after a hard day in the legislature!)

But most fascinating for me the research has shown that one can increase one's self-discipline over time by exercising it. This likely (the article says "must") reflects "some biological change in the brain." "Even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity."

David Brooks uses insights from sports psychologist H. A. Dorfman's book The Mental ABC’s of Pitching to argue that the prevailing American emphasis on self-awareness and self-discovery has begun to shift back toward self-discipline and the idea of transcending onesself in one's work. Brooks, not unusually, doesn't provide any kind of specific context for his assertion, but his unearthing of Dorfman's ideas proves a fortuitous coincidence.

Brooks quotes from Dorfman's book: "Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt."

Combine this idea with the concept that we can, by exercising willpower and self-discipline, increase our capacity for it, and we have an even more powerful idea: we can choose to free ourselves from habits that inhibit our performance and self-satisfaction.

People, particularly young people, tend to rebel against the idea of excessive self-discipline. Too often the concept is fused with the idea of mindlessness or blind adherence to rules. Discipline can seem antithetical to freedom.

But we can distinguish between a reflexive adherence to habits, rules and regulations and the choice of adherence for the sake of improving self-discpline. One is passive and undirected, the other active and end-directed.

According to Dorfman, and supported by scientific research, it makes no difference whether we feel, in the moment, that we want to exercise self-discipline. If we act in a self-disciplined way we will increase our willpower. Just as we go to the gym to workout, whether we feel like it or not, we might be much more inclined to exercise self-discipline if we understand that it will make it easier for us to exercise more self-discipline in the future.

The same philosophy applies to other brain functions. If macaques and rodents in learning to use a rake exhibit changes in brain DNA, then we can postulate that people can experience changes in brain DNA by stretching the use of our minds.

(This theory comports with common sense (sophisticated mental tasks seem to make people more capable of performing sophisticated mental tasks) and studies that show brain exercise is linked with mental health in later life.)

For more rational, science-based explanations of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Or, how not to be a misanthrope.

OK, so Richard Branson owns, among other things, not one but two Caribbean islands. I learned this as I read that he recently brought together a bunch of other wealthy and influential people (Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister) to his British Virgin Islands retreat to get them thinking about what can be done to end or control global warming. There's money in it for them if they can find a commercially viable way to reduce global warming gases or produce an alternate source of greener energy, but the intent also seems to be on some level genuinely philanthropic.

David Brooks writes about the socially conscious entrepreneurs, wealthy, smart venture capital types who have begun to take a hard-nosed business approach to tackling the world's ills. Brooks proposes that the trend toward disaggregated problem solving and syndicated solutions is not only a sign of the times, but a trend worth fostering. Let them give it a go, he argues. And, by the way, they won't take no for an answer.

Contrast this with the behavior of the top bankers who have been making money hand over fist profiting from the risky securities that now threaten to bring down the financial markets. They keep the money they've made ramping up the risk, even if they share in the losses of the moment. The NY Times proposes that these profiteers should have "more skin in the game," (Krugman argues that the markets should be better regulated.)

Brooks notes that Microsoft's Bill Gates "fits neatly" into the category of business-like philanthropists. But Microsoft's wealth, and therefore Bill Gates' wealth, it could be argued, has been accumulated through selling overpriced, under-performing software to a captive market. It's nice that Gates is redistributing this wealth in socially-conscious ways. And he worked hard and demonstrated great skills in getting Microsoft where it is today. All credit to him. But the same single-minded determination to drive profit reveals itself in Gates just as it does in the Wall Street bankers. Microsoft is fiercely competitive, fastidiously greedy and has been sued for it.

All of which is a preamble to the question: Why are we philanthropic? And the counter-question, how do we stop being misanthropic?

Gates and Branson provide interesting studies. Both have turned their talents and accumulated wealth toward helping the world, but neither of them seemed to feel compelled to spread the joy on their way to accumulating that wealth. (Gates developed Windows not Linux, for instance.)

Having vast wealth obviously removes the hurdle of financing one's philanthropic ideas. But one also needs a charitable mindset, a desire to help people. Surely wealth doesn't do that for you? Otherwise we'd have far more philanthropists in the world.

A good proportion of us, perhaps most of us, tend toward the non-philanthropic, if not the downright misanthropic. I personally like the concept of helping people, for instance, far more than you would think if you looked at what I actually do for other people.

The answer seems to be insight, vision and belief. Branson, Gates and others of their ilk have taken advantage of the kind of perspective that you get when you're at the top of the heap. If you're in that position and choose to take in the view you can see a good deal further than the guy at the bottom of the hill, and you have a sense that since you climbed the hill, if you see something you want to change, you can do that, too.

For us mere mortals, a remedy for misathropy then may be to scramble our way up to the top of a nearby hillock (metaphorically speaking,) and cast about for something we might want to change.

Branson cleverly brought his guests to the Virgin Islands to remove them from the hustle of everyday life. By removing other influences, he allowed them to receive new ideas, to focus on his question about what they could do to save the world.

Seems like a pretty good idea to me, even if we can't get to the Virgin Islands. And with that thought in mind, since it's Friday and the second day of Spring, with blue, if cool, skies overhead, I think I'll head off to my own private island somewhere between the kitchen table and the back door, to contemplate what I can do to solve the problems of humankind.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On personal and public stress.

We tend to regard stress as something inherently bad. Doctors worry about it in their patients. Spouses worry about it in their spouses. Employers sometimes worry about it in their employees. But, as with most things, I would expect that some degree of stress every now and then may not be a bad thing. If we were to react to risky or troublesome situations without any stress, would we respond appropriately?

Researchers have uncovered a connection between the likelihood of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and particular gene variations. This outcome indicates that the body's stress responses have evolved over time and worked their way into our DNA.

Stress seems to be of help in its short term effect on our behavior. Stressful situations often require an urgent response. Stress spurs us to focus and act. Stress becomes harmful, perhaps, when it becomes chronic and unaddressed.

When life circumstances lead to recurring or constantly stressful situations the stress response ceases to be beneficial and becomes harmful. If the circumstances don't change, if we don't or can't extricate ourselves from the stressful situation despite focus and action, we begin to suffer. We tend not to recognize this as a problem, because chronic stress works in small bursts over a long period of time and acts on the body gradually.

In an example from recent news stories, Harvard ($35 billion), Yale ($22.5 billion) and many other universities have endowments of over $1 billion dollars. But as the senate begins to ask questions about what this money gets spent on schools have been somewhat tight lipped and not a little affronted. The school administrators are suffering short term stress at the thought of someone poking into their business.

But now that private school tution costs about $50,000 per year, many private school students and alumni (and their parents) face long term stress in figuring out how to repay student loans.

This brings us to the point that some stress remedies are personal — regular exercise, working to a reasonable household budget, taking time for onesself — and some are societal. The cost of private education seems to be a case in point. Generally speaking, the cost of private education has been going up so dramatically that it looms large in people's minds for years before a child goes off to college, and then looms large for many years afterward as the debt hangs over them.

Society is saddled with this stress and society, it seems, could and should be able to do something to relieve the stress.

I grew up and went to school in England where this stress is to all intents and purposes absent. College education costs very little unless you're well to do, and even then it doesn't cost a great deal.

Harvard, with its huge endowment, has been increasing its financial aid to students, and Harvard Law is now considering tution reduction that could amount to as much as $40,000 for law students who enter public service. This kind of step is aimed at encouraging more law students to enter public service by reducing the prospect of the stress brought on by large debt and small income.

The London University study on work stress indicates that we don't pay enough attention as a society to the long term impacts of stress. As we learn more about stress I expect that we will find that there are many examples of stress that is inherent in our way of living. Identifying such stresses and deciding upon reasonable ways to reduce that stress strikes me as a worthy and interesting challenge.

Until that time, our only recourse will be to recognize the presence and dangers of stress in our own lives, and work to reduce it.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life's meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.