Rational Philosophy

Just because we’re superstitious doesn’t make it rational, or does it?

It’s been a wet week here in New York. On days when it might rain, I like to take along an umbrella to reduce, I hope, the chance that it will rain on me. This week I took an umbrella and still it rained. It hasn’t shaken my faith in my superstition.

John Tierney’s “Why Superstition Is Logical” makes a muddled and perhaps incomplete attempt at explaining the rationality of superstition. He begins with the example of a rational person irrationally resisting the temptation to set her watch to the correct time zone until the plane lands. He then discusses some circumstances in which superstition induces a positive psychological boost to “do the right thing.” To wit:

1. Students think that not doing their reading makes them more likely to be called on in class… so they do the reading.

2. People think that trading away a lottery ticket makes that ticket more likely to win… so they hold onto the ticket… obviously with much more of an upside potential than a trade.

3. An applicant to Stanford graduate school is less likely to get in if he goes around wearing a Stanford T-shirt… he may or may not get in, but he’s less likely to look like a jerk.

I couldn’t quite figure out how not having set one’s watch before an airplane disaster fell into the same category as these examples.

Interspersing these sets of seemingly divergent examples, Tierney inserted yet another intriguing piece of data related to superstition. He mentioned that negative outcomes have a subliminal tug. We recall the day we got caught in the rain much more readily and with much more emotion than we recall the days when we didn’t get caught in the rain. This leads us to believe that getting caught in the rain is the more likely outcome.

To all of which I have a couple of thoughts to add.

Let’s say that there’s a 50/50 chance that we’ll get rained on when we think we might get rained on. And let’s say that if we’re neither overly optimistic nor pessimistic we’ll sometimes take precautions against the chance of getting rained on and sometimes not. Naturally, if it looks like rain our precautions might include avoiding going outside, or taking the car instead of walking. On the remaining days, when we stick to our plan of going out and walking not driving, we’ve therefore, without superstition, increased the likelihood that we will get caught in the rain.

Here’s how that works:

Start with ten days. Five will be rainy, five won’t. Five days we’ll be optimistic and risk the rain. Five days we’ll be pessimistic and won’t risk the rain. Of the five pessimistic days, we’ll stay in one day, drive another day, leaving three days that we’ll carry an umbrella. This means that out of ten days, we avoid the risk of rain entirely on two days, (on average one of these will be rainy). This leaves eight days, four of them rainy four of them not rainy. But we’ll have our umbrella with us on just three of those days…

Even to get to an even chance, we need a little superstition.

Now to the other thought.

We recall negative outcomes for an evolutionary reason. They are learning experiences, cautions. All animals have evolved with this feedback mechanism. Or, perhaps more precisely, those that didn’t have died.

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 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.

How pride evolved as a beneficial trait… with drawbacks.

Over the years I’ve often landed on a great idea for an invention only to find out after the fact that it has already been invented. Audio historians now acknowledge that an inventor came up with the idea of recording sounds, and succeeded in doing so, more than twenty years before Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph. These same historians claim that this finding doesn’t diminish Thomas Edison’s achievement, because Edison went the extra step of replaying the sound he’d recorded, and because he apparently knew nothing of his predecessor’s work. While this perspective probably wouldn’t wash in a patent court, it certainly gives me a renewed sense of pride in my own innovations.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautogram captured sound in squiggles on a sooty piece of paper. Scott was concerned with visual sound representation rather than sound reproduction, and it wasn’t until a team of researchers unearthed examples of Scott’s recordings and deciphered them with hi-tech wizardry that his phonautogram was proven to have done what he claimed it did. We can now hear some of Scott’s recordings reproduced.

Scott lived to see Edison’s phonograph make a hit, and fumed at the fact that Edison got all the credit. “What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?” Scott wrote.

Reference sources differ on the primary meaning of the word ‘pride.’ Dictionary.com prefers to go with the negative connotation first “a high or inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.” Whereas the American Heritage dictionary takes a more charitable view, with “a sense of one’s own proper dignity or value; self-respect,” and relegating the sense of an inordinate opinion of one’s self-worth to fifth place in its list of meanings.

Before Edison’s invention, one could say that Scott felt pride in his achievement. After Edison’s famed achievement, Scott’s pride was hurt. He then displayed pride in the negative sense.

I wonder to what extent the two definitions of pride refer to the same philosophical concept revealed under different conditions.

Paleontologists have just dated a jaw fragment found in Europe pushing back evidence of the appearance of human ancestors in those parts from 800,000 to 1.1 million years ago. The bone was found along with remnants of stone tools and butchered animals.

The story of human evolution aches with the concept of valuing achievement. Above all others, two things drive us to achieve — the desire for preservation of ourselves and our like, and the drive to achieve for the sake of having achieved.

From an evolutionary perspective, the former motive will more rarely stretch the species into new areas of achievement. Instead, I would say that it follows rationally that we have evolved to feel an intrinsic sense of satisfaction in achievement for the sake of achievement, for the very reason that this would tend to accelerate the selection of this beneficial trait.

Getting back to pride.

We attempt to achieve because we are genetically predisposed to seek to achieve. We feel a sense of satisfaction in having achieved something, again, because we are genetically disposed to feel this. When someone belittles or seems to belittle our achievements we feel an attack and, if we’re sensitive, a diminishment of this sense of achievement, which then results in either a prideful defense of our value or a pained withdrawal from the attack.

When Edison received acclaim for his invention, Scott’s pride was hurt for two reasons — firstly, he felt that his invention hadn’t received its due attention, his achievement was retrospectively diminished. And secondly, even after he laid claim to the original idea, people chose to continue to heap praise on Edison, adding insult to injury.

Objectively, of course, it doesn’t really matter who had the idea first. So long as Edison didn’t steal the idea, which, apparently he didn’t. Both men were brilliant and inventive. But one can’t help empathizing with Scott’s sense of hurt pride.

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 the reproductive strategies of Komodo Dragons — what they tell us, and what they don’t. And a parallel in the trends of religious affiliation.

Neil Shubin, associate dean at the University of Chicago and the provost of the Field Museum, tries to shrug off objections to cloning as “unnatural” by explaining that female Komodo Dragons, and other species, can reproduce without the need for male fertilization. Shubin reasons that this phenomenon, reported in Britain and Kansas, in which the offspring have identical DNA to the mother, shows that we’re on shaky ground if we turn to nature to determine that cloning is unnatural. Since nature can encompass all kinds of odd survival mechanisms, Shubin argues, when it comes to survival, “anything goes.” But in his rush to eliminate nature as an infallible moral compass (a sensible intent, since, as he says, only humans have a sense of morality) Shubin unfortunately shuffles out of the door the question of what’s “natural.”

Shubin’s argument goes like this: Cloning happens in nature (through the phenomenon of virgin births). Therefore cloning can’t be said to be unnatural.

He has, of course, stooped to a very basic form of sophistry by taking two different ideas and equating them. Virgin birth in Komodo Dragons has evolved over millions of years as a survival mechanism when male fertilization is unlikely or difficult. When humans clone a species we deliberately achieve our means with mechanisms that haven’t evolved. That’s the whole point of applying science to cloning — to hoodwink nature.

In amongst this sophistry though, Shubin points out that male fertilization persists as by far the most likely form of reproduction in Komodos, despite the possibility of virgin birth, because it mixes up the gene pool of the offspring and in so doing allows for adaptation. (Passing on the same genes makes adaptation impossible.)

“Without variation,” as Shubin notes, “the world would be static and unchangeable, and species would gradually disappear as they failed to meet challenges…”

This put me in mind of a new survey on religion from the Pew Forum. In its survey of over 35,000 Americans (a relatively large sample), Pew found that “more than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all.” “The number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.”

I should quickly state that non-affiliated does not necessarily mean non-religious; overall about 10% claimed to be non-religious (1.6% atheist, 2.4% agnostic, and 6.3% secular unaffiliated).

I’ve spoken at length in other posts that statistics mislead and get misused. But here I want to say something that would, I believe, hold true even if the statistics told another story; it would just lead to a different prediction.

The decision to change one’s religious affiliation requires as a prerequisite some openness to the idea of change. In making such a change one must be prepared to let go of the old affiliation in favor of the new one. In this way the process is analagous to evolution. Just as the body of an organism responds to physical impulses, so, too, our consciousness responds to mental impulses. And just as the natural world would be static and unchangeable without variation, so, too, the world of ideas would be static and unchangeable without variation.

If we take the Pew statistics at face value, they indicate that the world of ideas has begun to bring about a move away from particular religious affiliation, particularly in young people. Depending on our own religious beliefs, we may wish this to be otherwise. But we cannot argue that the capacity for change, the flexibility and adaptability of beliefs is a healthy sign — it is the evolution of consciousness.

Now for the subjective, but rational, commentary: I am not surprised by the trend that is apparently revealed in the Pew survey. It tracks with similar surveys in Europe (although charting a less dramatic move toward secularism than Europe has seen). And it makes rational sense. Relgions started out as mechanisms by which people tried to make sense of the world. Inspired by doubt, wonder, and fear, early humans invested inanimate objects with the power of deities. Once these inanimate objects were more fully understood, the sense of the divine moved ever further from the tangible world until in more recent times it became invested in an unseen, unseeable, omnipotent but ultimately elusive deity (after all, what was left?)

The more people become aware and convinced that existence can be understood without recourse to a god, the more they will be to change and even let drop their religious affiliations.

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.

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Kosovo’s independence, Serbia’s reaction.

Do the roots of ethnic and national identification run particularly deep in the Balkans? Reading the latest news from Kosovo and Serbia, it seems so, but I guess not. No more deeply than in Chechnya, for instance, or Northern Ireland, or Darfur, or any of the many other flash-points around the world. But why do people feel so strongly about their ethnic and national identification that they’re willing to hate so deeply, fight so forcefully, and suffer so greatly to protect the concept of ethnic and political autonomy?

I’m not saying that people should not feel so strongly. They do, so there must be reasons. But what are those reasons and could we learn anything useful from understanding them?

Evolution rewards species and groups that survive. Social animals enhance their chances of survival by living together, protecting one another, and competing against other groups for the necessities of survival such as food and shelter. The stronger the group identification, the stronger the cooperation, and the greater the chances of group survival.

But, in people, the process of forming and belonging to groups has evolved into a highly complex and, from a biological and micro-social perspective, largely artificial (because it is a mental rather than tangible) trait. An Albanian living in the north of Kosovo consciously connects his or her allegiance to Albanians in the south of Kosovo, but while this conceptual grouping feels intensely related to his or her survival, it in fact bears no resemblance to the cooperation of a tight-knit group living in close proximity with its members contributing materially to one another’s well-being… Or, to be more exact, it resembles that tight-knit group only in as much as the Albanian in the north invests his allegiance with the Albanian in the south with the same kind of significance.

Our identification along lines of ethnicity and demography can’t be defended as an evolutionary survival mechanism. Ethnic conflicts deplete the world’s resources by commiting them to weaponry and defense forces and result in the deaths of millions.

A Serb in Mitrovica wishes to remain Serbian because he identifies with the concept of being a Serb; Kosovo independence does not necessarily reflect a change in his or her chances of living a healthy, happy and prosperous life. Likewise, the lot of an Albanian living in Mitrovica doesn’t necessarily improve because he is no longer part of Serbia. I’m stressing the word necessarily because obviously when people define themselves along ethnic lines there are indeed practical implications of a change in the majority ethnicity of the ruling body.

By reflecting upon the processes of evolution and its translation into concepts and feelings we immediately see that our minds fool us into drawing unnecessary divisions between ourselves and others, divisions that ultimately hurt us all.

From a practical perspective, what can be done?

We need to teach practical philosophy in school. By drawing up curricula that examine these kinds of connections between the nature of existence and its impact on our world of concepts we can begin to teach children how to see the world for what it is rather than for what it seems to be. This suggestion is no more radical than saying that children should be taught that the earth revolves around the sun even though it seems that the sun revolves around the earth.

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.

 

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Perhaps it is ironic to write about the philosophy of love on the eve of Valentine’s day. Why? Because love knows no time nor calendar, as Shakespeare probably once wrote and swiftly deleted. The predictability and premeditation of the modern Valentine’s day ritual conjures up something other than love — we buy flowers and make special efforts either because we don’t want to disappoint our loved one, or because we know we’ll be in the dog house if we don’t. The only other reason would be to deceive by kindly gestures. In other words, to increase our chances of winning affection.

Wikipedia suggests that Valentine’s day might have its roots in an ancient festival (predating the Valentine martyrs); a festival that Plutarch described as “noble youths running up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs.” This sounds like a lot more fun than a limp red rose and a bag of Hershey’s kisses.

But I’m a grumpy old curmudgeon, so don’t listen to me.

Then again, no lesser curmudgeon than Arthur Schopenhauer regarded love as

“more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.“

“What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation”

He is, of course, exactly right about the evolutionary role of romantic love. Romantic love has evolved as a powerful mechanism that attracts people sexually and psychologically so that they will perhaps reproduce.

I’m not sure I’d agree that it is more important than all other aims in a man’s life. Successfully reproducing and protecting and raising one’s offspring are undoubtedly at least as important as falling in love. But the point is well taken, it’s far from a frivolous pursuit. But we treat love frivolously, often, and seem to regard it generally as a mystery that shouldn’t be too deeply analyzed or questioned.

The psychological theory of love, and much of the therapy we pay for, rests on the notion that we’re attracted to certain people so that we can replay problematic relationships from our childhood; these fatal romantic attachments allow us to try to address those unresolved issues. But we could also surmise that we would find a way to replay our deep-seated childhood issues in any relationship.

If we accept that love has evolved through natural selection as a way of ensuring propagation of the human race, can we evaluate love rationally? Or are the ways of love too subtle and obscure to submit to rational analysis?

The answer seems to be that love cannot be reasoned into being, nor reasoned away. But with reason we can understand its place and respect its role.

Romeo, loving Juliet, could have reasoned that nature was giving him a strong hint about the genetic favorability of his coupling with this Capulet, but could have also understood that there were unfavorable aspects to the union. Armed with an understanding of love’s rational role in life, he might have concluded that a trip with the boys to the Amalfi coast would be just the ticket to resettle his hormones and avoid a tragedy.

And, conversely, avoiding love because it doesn’t seem appropriate or convenient can be a mistake in the other direction. If we ignore nature’s hint, we aren’t living up to our nature as human beings.

Understanding love doesn’t diminish its hold on us, but it may help us put love’s clutches into context.

On causality, with specific reference to the hatred of Hillary Clinton, and muscle fatigue.

When I first read Stanley Fish’s pieces about those who love or live to despise Hillary Clinton — All You Need Is Hate, and A Calumny A Day To Keep Hillary Away — I resisted the temptation to respond to Fish’s comments. After all, wasn’t he standing up for rationalism and logic? Wasn’t he speaking out against the rude jibes of the senseless masses? And didn’t Hillary deserve his defense?

But in the end I came to realize that I should respond. Again, I found in Fish’s purportedly rational column an absence of thoughtful inquiry. Couched in the language of rationalism, his analysis bashed the Hillary bashers without offering up a viable explanation for the phenomenon. Perhaps by understanding the reason for the hatred we can better counter it. “Perhaps nothing accounts for it,” Fish says, and again I feel myself confronting the same kind of lazy thinking that brought Fish to claim that the humanities as a field of study serves no purpose.

Does rootless ill-will toward Hillary engender the bashing, engendering more bashing? Or does the ill-will result from some other cause, with a side-effect being the bashing?

Research toward the causes of enlarged hearts has yielded interesting information about the way in which muscles fatigue. Scientists have found that when we use our muscles to the point of fatigue, they leak calcium. The calcium leaks cause weakness and stimulate an enzyme that eats away at the muscle fiber. When given a substance that blocks the calcium leaks, mice can swim and run further without experiencing muscle fatigue.

In considering whether there could be value in blocking calcium leaks to enhance athletic performance, Dr. Ligget, a heart-failure researcher says, “We have to ask whether it would be prudent to be circumventing this mechanism.”

Hear, hear. If we give evolution any credit we would have to think that creatures with muscles, ourselves included, experience muscle fatigue for good reason. The cause of muscle fatigue is not calcium leaks, it is the valuable feedback mechanism that has evolved to prevent us from pushing ourselves beyond exhaustion. (Being a person whose muscles tend to fatigue quickly, on the other hand, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some of those mice pills…)

Back to Hillary Clinton. Why didn’t Fish want to explore the possibility that the Hillary bashing is an end result of some other phenomenon? Clearly, this would bring him onto thin ice. He would need to confront the idea that perhaps there was a cause for it, whether it was rational or not, defensible or not. Effects must have a cause, after all.

Fear and anger cause hatred. With Hillary Clinton, I think the likely cause is fear, whereas with George Bush (Fish’s counter-foil) the cause is anger.

Why would we fear Hillary Clinton? Here are three reasons.
1. She has demonstrated ruthlessness.

2. She doesn’t hide her sense of superiority well.

3. She strives but fails to demonstrate that she is not ideologically rigid.

We find it difficult to express these fears rationally, in part because each of them has a perfectly acceptable and reasonable corollary — commitment, brilliance, and consistency. But we do fear the ruthless, those who hold themselves up as superior, and those who are rigid.
For good measure, here is why we would be angry with Bush.

1. He’s lazy when he has work to do.

2. He makes life and death decisions based on an arbitrary will to exert his power.

3. He’s ignorant but touts his sway over us.

What’s not to be angry at?

Sure, Hillary Clinton is committed, brilliant, and consistent. And Bush is a life loving, god fearing everyman. But, when we’re talking about the country’s highest office, we have good reason to fear the former and be angry with the latter.

Every effect begins with a cause. Just as our muscles fatigue to prevent us from overtaxing our bodies, so, too, we lash out with seemingly irrational hatred and bias when we fear or resent a greater ill. And, just as it would be good to spare our bodies the fatigue and wasting that comes from calcium leaks, so, too, it would be good to spare society the vitriol of hateful criticism by recognizing the onset of symptoms and directing our feelings of fear and anger toward a more constructive end.

On sexism, racism and any other ism: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Gloria Steinem; the importance of drawing distinctions, and the unfortunate side-effect of bigotry.

Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed yesterday — “Women Are Never Front-Runners” — shows that even a fervent anti-ismist can get tangled up in her own knitting. Ms. Steinem laments that Hillary Clinton faces an uphill struggle convincing voters that she’s a viable leader just because she’s a woman. Steinem contrasts Clinton’s task with Obama’s, arguing that Clinton has it harder. Although Steinem presents no evidence, I wouldn’t try to argue that she’s wrong. Unfortunately though, her thesis swells with the rhetoric of bias, ending with what’s supposed to be a rallying cry against isms ‘We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”’ And this would demonstrate lack of bias how?

Human beings have developed an extraordinary ability to draw distinctions and categorize the world around them. Consciousness requires that we do so. The first glimmer of consciousness rests on the awareness that there is a self and a non-self. From this primary and fundamental distinction we begin to separate the world into up and down, in and out, hot and cold, blue and pink, soft and hard… This ability has been honed to a fine point because it has provided an evolutionary benefit. The better able we were to draw distinctions, the more skilled we became at identifying safe foods to eat, suitable materials for clothes and tools and shelter, etc.

In another story today, brewers pursuit of ever hoppier beers and consumers pursuit of ever more gratifying flavor, gives an example of just how far we’re prepared to go along the road of differentiation and distinction. The whole enterprise of humankind rests to a large degree on the striving for new distinctions.

But the faculty to draw distinctions, while it can be trained or enhanced, is fundamentally indifferent to the nature of those distinctions. In other words, although some of us can’t distingush Bach from Hayden we can all distinguish a jackhammer from a songbird, a pen from a pencil, and our own cell-phone ring tone from everyone else’s. We draw distinctions so naturally that they become easy pegs for our murkier judgments.

This is where isms come in. When we derive arbitrary judgments from a characteristic, no matter how well distinguished that characteristic may be, we fall into the trap of the ism.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Identifiying her as a woman is not an ism. Saying she’ll make a better or worse leader because she’s a woman is an ism. There’s no rational basis for making such a connection. (We can easily find many examples of both men and women leaders who are wonderful and many who are awful.)

To get to an ism from a distinction we have to apply flawed logic and reasoning, or blind ourselves to logic and reason. Racism in all its forms, for example, requires the racist to suspend his or her faculty of reason. But why do we do that?

Isms are born of ignorance or fear. Either we are too ignorant to understand that our judgments are flawed, or we are afraid of some group that’s different from us, or of losing our power over them, or of being forced to recognize their equality.

The antidote to isms is reason and logic, persistenly, patiently, blindly, and tirelessly applied.

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.

PS. Of the IPAs I’ve tasted, my personal favorite is Smuttynose IPA. Highly recommended.

On the philosophy of newness.

When I turned on my radio at the start of the new year and listened to the litany of tragic news from around the world (most notably in Kenya and Pakistan), it crossed my mind to wonder whether things ever really change. Even a relatively tame story about the desire of some Scots to separate from England saddened me because it struck me as the undoing of a unifying force. Countries merge and split. People war and feud. The world over we repeat our mistakes from one generation to the next. Or do we?

That Barak Obama won Iowa’s Democratic primary yesterday is in itself momentous. That he won it with a unifying, hopeful message is inspirational. Barak believes in change. When I read Paul Krugman’s recent opinion that Obama was naiive in thinking that he could bring together the opposing voices in the country to achieve valuable progress, it gave me pause. Maybe Krugman was right, I thought, maybe Obama is naiive. But last night when I checked in and saw that Obama had won in Iowa, and this morning as I thought about what he’d done to win, I began to believe that Krugman is mistaken. From a position of weakness, the optimist can do little to sway cynical and self-interested entities (like drug companies). But from a position of power, with a strength of conviction and a willingness to exert influence, the optimist can achieve more than the pessimist could ever dream of.

It is only by looking at the way things shift over time that we can discern whether change and progress is really possible. That the radio reports attacks and riots doesn’t mean we’re living in a world of irretrievable conflict and violence. It means that there is still conflict and violence, for sure. But we need to compare this period to past periods to understand whether things are now worse, better or the same.

To take a small example: My daughter is fourteen. I could not imagine sending her out to work. But a hundred years ago (and even still in some parts of the world) children much younger were sent out to work.

Slavery, racial discrimination, sexual discrimination, bloody crusades, religious intolerance, capital punishment (in all states except Texas)… These things aren’t gone but they’re diminished, more globally deplored.

What we need to guard against is pessimism and relapse. David Brooks tells us not to be afraid that Huckabee won the Republican race in Iowa. Why should we not be afraid, I ask? Here is a man who doesn’t believe in evolution. This is a relapse that should make us not just afraid but determined to do whatever we can to stop him from prevailing in his quest to lead the country.