Rachel’s Musings

Timothy D. Wilson’s book Strangers To Ourselves provides compelling evidence for an adaptive unconscious, a part of us that evolved to make decisions for us. Wilson’s evidence came mostly from psychological experiments, which did not involve brain scans. There is also evidence from neuroscience for non-conscious decision making. The Wall Street Journal reports on several studies that found evidence in the brain of a decision made before it became conscious.

In one experiment with a small sample, researchers at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience found

signals [of brain behavior leading up to the moment of conscious decision] that let them know when the students had decided to move 10 seconds or so before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

Other researchers have shown similar predictive power from observing brain activity right before experiment participants verbalized their decision. They also found that different brain regions are involved during the preparation and the execution of a task. Already in the early 1980s, research was published that indicated that brain activity clearly preceded a conscious activity suggestion that an unconscious decision had been made before it became conscious.

Robert Lee Hotz, the WSJ science journalist, summarizes the implications of this research:

Such experiments suggest that our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut — not by thinking about them too much.

Wilson, for example, talks about letting the adaptive unconscious make decisions for us (p. 172):

The point is that we should not analyze the information in an overly deliberate, conscious manner, constantly making explicit lists of pluses and minuses. We should let our adaptive unconscious do the job of forming reliable feelings and then trust those feelings, even if we cannot explain them entirely.

Interestingly, the neuroscientists maintain that this does not preclude free will. Somehow because we’re studying how we think gives us free will. Hotz puts it this way:

All this work to deconstruct the mental machinery of choice may be the best evidence of conscious free will. By measuring the brain’s physical processes, the mind seeks to know itself through its reflection in the mirror of science.

“We are trying to understand who we are,” said Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, “by studying the organ that allows you to understand who you are.”

Daniel Dennett would agree with this assessment:

People have this strange antipathy for evolution and for materialism. They think that if evolution is true, then they’re just animals or automatons — that they won’t have freedom and they won’t have responsibility, and life will have no meaning. [...] On the contrary, it’s only when you understand life from an evolutionary point of view that you understand what our freedom really is. You realize that it’s real. It’s different and better than the freedom of other animals, but it’s evolved. It’s not supernatural.

The role of the adaptive unconscious is to help us make decisions, to sort through the millions of pieces of information we are absorbing constantly. Then we can use our freedom to make better decisions: We can consciously intervene in the unconscious decision process, though sometimes that leads to ineffective decisions, or we can decide to learn to utilize the process better in a manner similar to what Wilson suggested. Either way, we’re free to decide.

(Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels for the link to the WSJ article).

In a recent talk by Barbara Oakley, she summarized some of her findings from her book Evil Genes. Essentially, she wanted to talk about people who have difficulty getting in touch with themselves. Similar to a Point of Inquiry interview with her, Oakley started with the story of how her sister stole their mother’s boyfriend long enough to go to Paris with him, which had been their mother’s life-long dream, and then dump the guy. As Oakley was traveling in Europe, Milosevic was on trial in Den Haag. When he was asked about mass graves, he replied “I can’t hear you. My earpiece is not working.” That struck Oakley as something poignant in the behavior of people like Milosevic, Hitler, or her sister: They cannot hear what they don’t want to hear. To find out more, and especially to answer the question of motivation, Oakley started to research malignant narcissism, the personality disorder that seemed to describe these people best. Narcissists are known for their lack of empathy and their self-centeredness. To her surprise, despite all the talk about narcissism there was “no science there.” However, there are two personality disorders that are well researched: Psychopathy, which is also called antisocial personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

As an example of a psychopath, Oakley talked about a seven year-old boy who killed the family cat, hung it up in the foyer, and then hid to see his mother’s reaction when she walked in the door. Psychopaths enjoy watching people get hurt. They “can lie and con other people.” The most disturbing thing about psychopaths is that they cannot be identified easily: “they look just like we do.” And why are they doing these evil things? They are doing this “because things are weird differently in their brains.” They have a sluggish limbic system but other areas in their brains have unusually high functioning.

People with borderline personality disorder have an “impaired emotional toolkit” and “can do nasty stuff.” However, they often regret their troubled, hurtful behavior later. Some of the behavior characteristics Oakley mentioned:

• “Gaslighting:” Denying reality repeatedly until others start doubting themselves
• Projection and blame shifting: They “can’t accept they’ve done anything wrong,” so they blame someone or something else.
• It’s all about ME (narcissism): The “sense-of-self circuit is turned way up.” Narcissistic people see themselves as their “good cause,” and thus their selfish behavior “is really for a good cause.”
• Chameleon like behavior: They change their behavior depending on whom they are with.

Brainscans of people with BPD show an emotional over-responsiveness that explains why others feel like walking on egg shells around them. A person with BPD can seemingly unprovoked explode, yet their brains show that the provocation to them was strong because of their over-responsiveness.

These two personality disorders - borderline and antisocial - are spread fairly evenly amongst gender, though more women are diagnosed with borderline PD and more men with antisocial PD.

The confluence of these two disorders creates a unique disorder often called “borderpath.” Hitler is one of the most well-known representatives of this disorder. What makes Hitler so ’special’? He, like other borderpaths, had good looks, charm, and an exceptional memory. A good memory is one of the most important tools for climbing a social hierarchy. Oakley stressed that having those three traits does not make one a borderpath because they can also be found in people who did a lot of good. For example, although Hitler and Mussolini had remarkable memories, so did Roosevelt and Clinton.

Despite the title of her book and the talk, Oakley emphasized that “genes aren’t evil.” There is not one gene that is responsible for evil deeds (thus, we cannot simply remove that gene and be done with evil). “In fact, every single personality trait is influenced by genes,” she said, adding that “it takes thousands of genes to create our personality.” There needs to be “a confluence that unites in just the right way to get someone evil.” Oakley observed that “some of our worst genes are also responsible for our best things.” How our brain is wired can affect our personality. Yet, the brain has also remarkable plasticity, which allows us to make real changes in how our brain functions. For example, both anti-depressant drugs and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can physically change the way our brains work. The problem for borderpaths (and the people around them) is that they don’t think there’s anything wrong with them, so they do not embark on therapy. (In the Q&A that followed her talk, Oakley recommended Stop Walking on Eggshells as one resource for getting help when you’re dealing with someone with BPD).

The borderpath research raises the classic nature or nurture question. Oakley pointed out that on average “it’s 50/50:” On average, 50% of personality comes from nature and the rest is nurture. However, Oakley reminded us, if we “look at one person, things can be very different.” Orphans in Romania had been raised under Ceausescu without anything touchy-feelie. The tragic result were children with grossly delayed mental and motor development. Nurture had a profound effect on their development. Oakley’s sister is an example of a person with a personality disorder created mostly by nature. The sister had polio as a child, which affected her brain and contributed to her inability to connect to other people. This rewired brain caused her behavior, “it’s not something that she was consciously doing.” Clearly, the environment and genes act together to influence personality.

Oakley summarized her research by underscoring that our “brain’s wiring profoundly affects every aspect of our personality.” And “there is only a limited range of what we can change within,” especially since “some people have more free will than others.” People with borderline or antisocial personality disorders, for example, are wired so that they are mostly unable to change their behavior, especially because they do not perceive that there is a problem. Oakley finished by reminding us that “you can’t change others; you can only change yourself.”

During my exchange with Pat Frank in the comments to my post on the climate crisis, he raised a question about CO₂’s pollutant status. When I researched the question, I found a write up by Weather Underground that recounted the history of that question: It stems from a campaign founded by Exxon. An article on the Doubt Makers by Michelle Nijhuis describes how industries, starting with tobacco, use a similar tactic to create doubt: The climate science models are just too unreliable, therefore we don’t really have to do anything.

Doubt making goes back to the 1950s when the tobacco industry was advised to create doubt. From the Miller-McCune article (links from original):

The answer, [the PR consultant John Hill] and others at the meeting concluded, was not simply to assure consumers of cigarette safety or to question scientific findings. The industry would also produce its own science and use it to create uncertainty about the results of independent researchers.
[...]
More than four decades of collusion and disinformation by tobacco industry leaders created public doubt about the risks of tobacco use and secondhand smoke despite a rising tide of credible, consistent research connecting tobacco and disease. In an internal meeting in the late 1960s, a Brown and Williamson executive famously crystallized the industry strategy: “Doubt is our product.”
[...]
Yet the tobacco strategy’s greatest challenge — and, some would argue, greatest success — emerged with global climate change.

When nervous tobacco executives gathered at the Plaza Hotel in 1953, they faced a small handful of disturbing health studies. In the late 1980s, when leaders in the fossil-fuel industry began a concerted attempt to discredit climate science, they had to counter research already endorsed by U.S. presidents, high-level federal science committees and a solid and growing portion of the world’s scientists.

With the help of the tobacco strategy, they succeeded.

When the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its Third Assessment Report in 2001 — detailing “new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities,” fierce terms for a group of scientists — the interests that hoped to delay regulation of carbon dioxide emissions didn’t focus on these broad and solidly supported conclusions. Instead, they attacked a single, iconic, Cartesian graph of temperature over time.

The graph was nicknamed the “hockey stick” for its long, nearly flat start and abrupt upward turn — a turn that showed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade of the past 1,000 years in the Northern Hemisphere and that average temperatures were increasing rapidly.

The hockey stick graph looked very familiar… It’s not exactly the same graph but it sounds very close to Frank’s argument. I began to wonder who Patrick Frank is and more importantly, who might be funding his crusade.

Here’s the non-descript description from Skeptic Magazine:

Patrick Frank is a Ph.D. chemist with more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. He has previously published in Skeptic on the noble savage myth, as well as in Theology and Science on the designer universe myth and in Free Inquiry, with Thomas H. Ray, on the science is philosophy myth.

Well, that doesn’t say much. There isn’t any more information in the supporting material either. But googling “Patrick Frank chemist” provided a bit further information. Assuming I found the right Pat Frank, he works at Stanford as a Life Science Research Assistant for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (a clue was here).

I don’t know if Frank is part of the doubt makers. What I do know is this:

• Climate scientists do not agree with his assessment. (Also, see here and here).
• Skeptic magazine is not a peer-reviewed publication.
• He is spreading doubt about the causes of climate change by attacking graphs and models. (Also see here).
• Some of his arguments have been presented by industry in the past.
• He seems to have some uncomfortable bedfellows.
• I don’t see a motive for making up something like climate change. What would climate scientists have to gain?
• Just like for evolution, there is tons of evidence for climate change.
• Of course, science thrives on doubt and questioning, so in a lot of ways Frank is simply being a scientist.

What’s the evidence for global warming? Back to the Miller-McCune article (source link added):

And yet the political attack on the hockey stick — and myriad other attempts to inspire doubt about mainstream science’s conclusion that climate change was real — worked. A 2004 analysis by Naomi Oreskes, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, found that of more than 900 global climate-change papers published between 1993 and 2003, not a single paper disagreed with the big picture: The climate is indeed changing, and humans are largely to blame. Yet a 2006 ABC News poll reported that although 85 percent of those surveyed believe global warming is “probably” happening, more than 60 percent think scientists are still arguing about it.

Wrapping up the section of doubt making about climate change, Michelle Nijhuis asks the same question I asked Pat Frank (which he never really answered):

But the tobacco strategy can still claim victory: Instead of spending the last two decades debating and testing strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, Congress — and U.S. society — have engaged in an exhausting tussle over the science of climate change, even though its main outlines are firmly established. “Eventually, the science wins,” Michaels says. “But at what cost?”

What are the costs of denying our role in the changing climate? I’d say they are huge, especially when compared to the cost of doing something to reduce our carbon-footprint. Think of that as a modern version of the Public Works program, for example. Maybe we will have to spread some of our wealth to other countries - something that’s long overdue anyways.

Doubt making is not limited to climate change or tobacco either. The tactics employed by the intelligent design proponents are classic doubt making: asking to “teach the controversy” creates the illusion that there indeed is a controversy about evolution. This is a similar strategy that was used against climate science, though it is becoming less and less effective since climate change is obviously happening.

A post over at the Feminist Philosophers’ blog talks about an amazing woman, Alia Sabur, who is the world’s youngest professor in the history of academia. She also happens to be a Muslim. JJ ends her post stating that

in many Muslim countries women are a strong presence in science classrooms, as students and teachers.

This reminded me of an article I read in Free Inquiry about the dismal state of science in Muslim countries, written by a professor in Pakistan, which seemed to call into question any celebration of strong female presence. Either way, I was intrigued and tried to find information on women in science. I was looking for an international comparison of scientists in academia by gender. So far, I haven’t found much. In the process of looking I stumbled on a debate that took place in 2005: The Science of Gender and Science, a topic that I briefly mentioned earlier this year. As behooves the label dilettante, although I prefer the second definition, I abandoned my search for statistics and read the debate instead, which took me forever. This post has been a week or so in the making.

Both [Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke] presented scientific evidence with the realization and understanding that there was nothing obvious about how the data was to be interpreted. Their sharp scientific debate informed rather than detracted. And it showed how a leading University can still fulfill its role of providing a forum for free and open discussion on controversial subjects in a fair-minded way. It also had the added benefit that the participants knew what they were talking about.

As you may recall, in 2005, the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, caused a loud out-cry by remarking that maybe women are underrepresented in science because of innate ability differences. The Pinker-Spelke debate was intended to see what the science really says.

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Aside from Nancy Polikoff’s recently published book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, there is also an online statement calling for activists, especially in the LGBT movement, to move beyond marriage, which goes back to July 2006. It is an encouraging affirmation of all forms of relationships and families.

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal ­– for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.

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I just got the latest eSkeptic, a weekly email sent by the Skeptic Society. Michael Schermer has just edited a pamphlet for the (gasp) Templeton Foundation entitled “Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?”. Although I think that Schermer made the skeptic equivalent of a Faustian bargain, and with that gave Templeton false credibility, the question is interesting, especially in light of many religious-wrong groups’ argument that science undermines religion. Since Templeton has enough money, the essays are available for a free read online…

The full list of essayists includes:

On the “Yes” side

• Victor Stenger: Yes. Worse. Science renders belief in God incoherent.
• Steven Pinker: Yes, if by science we include secular reason and knowledge.
• Pervez Hoodbhoy: Not necessarily. You must find a science-compatible God.
• Stuart Kauffman: No, if we redefine God as creativity in the universe.
• Chrisopher Hitchens: No, but it should.
• Michael Shermer: It depends: belief no, God yes.

On the “No” side

• Mary Midgley: Of course not, belief in God is not a scientific question.
• Kenneth Miller: Of course not. Science expands our appreciation of the Divine.
• William D. Phillips: Absolutely not! Belief in God is not a scientific matter.
• Robert Sapolsky: No. Belief offers something that science doesn’t.
• Jerome Groopman: No. Not at all.
• Keith Ward: No.
• Christoph Cardinal Schönborn: No.

I agree with Victor Stenger’s answer and highly recommend his book God: The Failed Hypothesis. It makes a very good case on why science can indeed say something about the existence of God, though we have to carefully define God and set up clear hypotheses that can be tested. If we accept that premise, and Stenger makes a convincing case, we can test God’s existence like any other hypothesis. There is overwhelming evidence that the hypothesis of God’s existence is wrong. After reading Stenger’s book, I feel that any other argument is intellectually dishonest. Maybe I need to read Ken Miller’s answer…

I also like Steven Pinker (PDF) summary sentence at the end of his short but thorough answer:

Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.