The honesty part that’s missing in the claims about quantum physics and consciousness:

The interpretations of quantum physics presented in movies like “What the Bleep,” which i have watched, and (presumably) “The Quantum Activist,” which i haven’t watched, are not supported by (almost all) quantum physicists or philosophers studying quantum mechanics. This includes at least one of the scientists featured in “What the Bleep,” David Albert (see here). I realize that Amit Goswami was trained as a physicist, yet his approach is
more philosophical than physics. It is critiqued by a fellow physicist, Victor Stenger, in “Quantum Gods” and in this essay. Also, the experiments in quantum mechanics are done at the scale of atoms or atom particles. Extending these experimental results to anything larger than an atom might not be valid (in the sense of external validity – the generalizability of study results).

Research in psychology points toward the importance of unconscious decisioning (see work by John Bargh, Timothy Wilson, and George Lakoff). There’s also considerable evidence for implicit biases that impact our judgments (stereotypes & system justification tendency) (work by John Jost and stuff around the Implicit Association Test). I have been trying to understand what needs are behind the wish that quantum physics somehow proofs certain spiritual beliefs. There seems to be something particularly “sexy” about it – maybe because it’s shrouded in mystery and some experimental results are mind-boggling. If we want a scientific grounding of the idea of connection, why not simply look at the theory of evolution? Evolutionary, we are all related to every living thing on this Earth. I wonder if the needs are hope and credibility, something that the theory of evolution might not hold despite its scientific grounding (see this Nova series). (I remember how inspired and hopeful i felt after “What the Bleep” until i started checking into JZ Knight and the credibility of the movie started to unravel).

I would enjoy hearing reactions, especially if you can share what needs are met for you when you watch movies like “The Quantum Activist.” Also, i would welcome feedback on how i presented this, as i realize that i am using a lot of words…

The other thing that is alive in me: Fatigue. I didn’t sleep well. Often waking up scared what reaction my email would garner. I realize now that i am so longing to be heard and accepted as i am even if i chose not to watch the movie because there is enough evidence for me that contradicts the claims made in the movie (based on the summaries i read on their website).

I am also sad because of my inability to get my point across in a way that it could be heard. I was wondering this morning why i feel so strongly about this. Yes, there is shared reality – as Michael Shermer puts it: If Amit Goswami’s claims are correct, he could jump off a building without getting hurt. And that is where i realized why i feel so strongly: Compassion. If i get hurt jumping off a building in Goswami’s interpretation that is because i must have fallen into “conditioned choice,” which leaves me feeling dismayed because i value compassion, which to me includes looking at the whole picture and acknowledging that there are things – like physical reality – that limit our choices. If we claim that there are unlimited choices, i fear that we end up blaming the victim because they were stuck in “conditioned choice.”

What did you “hear” me “saying”? What did you read me writing?

I know that there is still some mourning i want to do – mourning that i cannot lean into the unconditional love of a God/spirit/consciousness and the pain that has created in me. However, i also know that i can lean into the beauty of the need for unconditional love itself! How beautiful is that .

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Upon my return, i continued listening to Michael Nagler’s lectures on Nonviolence. In the third lecture he makes some startling claims. Well, they startled me at least. The one that prompted me to listen to this lecture again was that the science in “What the Bleep” is portrayed accurately. Uhm. No. It’s not, at least it’s not according to one of the scientists included in the “What the Bleep” infomercial. For some reason, quantum physics is sexy and i haven’t fully understood yet exactly why Nagler brings it out – it has something to do with his claim that sciences other than physics have to deal with diversity. Well, yeah. You don’t have to go to quantum physics to make that point. You could simply look at an evolutionary biologist’s work.

Nagler also does not acknowledge that the demolition hypothesis of the towers on 9/11 has been debunked by most scientists, except for a handful of conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t a governmental coverup that kept this story out of the limelight. It plain did not make much sense – even though it came from a physicist.

Finally, his most startling claim: Darwin was wrong. Nagler hastens to add that he doesn’t deny evolution but he does not specify exactly what he thinks Darwin was wrong about. Listening between the lines, it seems that Nagler claims that Darwin thought competition was at the heart of evolution. It wasn’t actually Darwin who emphasized the “survival of the fittest”. That emphasis is one of the myths that surrounds the theory of evolution – a myth that is all too helpful in maintaining the current status quo.

I’ve tried to figure out why all these claims bother me so much. Yes, there’s a wish for honesty, yet, this doesn’t seem to fully capture it. When i listened to the next lecture, i gained some clarity around my reactions. Nagler talks about the three consequences of the scientific view: Scarcity, determinism, and separateness. He ties determinism to not taking responsibility for our action, for example how the idea of corporate personhood takes away any personal responsibilities of the executive team. While i completely agree with Nagler that this lack of responsibility is a huge problem and that the personhood of corporations has created many of the issues we are facing, i got lost that this is tied to determinism. For one, claiming that consciousness is an expression of matter rather than a separate entity does not strictly lead to determinism. The manifestation of consciousness is likely much more involved than a straight line, so the claim “my neurons made me do it” won’t hold up even if we can ultimately reduce consciousness to something material. I then realized what bothered me the most in Nagler’s arguments: He was reinforcing us-vs-them thinking by splitting science into the “old” science (the Newtonian model, which leads to determinism according to Nagler) and the “new” science (quantum physics, which doesn’t). Old science is bad. New science is good. This creates an artificial separateness! And it’s actually scientifically incorrect: Quantum mechanics does not replace Newtonian physics, just like the theory of relativity didn’t replace it. It’s a matter of scale: Quantum physics explains some things better than Newtonian physics, yet there is a lot that the “old” science explains very well. (Additionally, physicist express worries about using quantum mechanics to say anything about consciousness – see the Albert quote).

And then i remember to look for the underlying needs: Nagler does not have a need for “bashing science.” He is interested in healing this world, giving us hope that nonviolence is possible, and focusing on interdependence. He is trying to find paradigms within science that can provide a framework for this. These underlying needs, including his dream, i share with Nagler. I disagree with the effectiveness of his strategy to use a pop-culture interpretation of quantum mechanics as the foundation. Further, dividing science into good and bad, ironically reinforces the separateness Nagler is so worried about. Inclusion of all the voices, especially those which might on the surface support the current dominant cultural paradigm, could provide a more credible foundation for a science of nonviolence – and ultimately for shifting our current cultural paradigm away from violence to nonviolence.

Alternative Sources for Learning about Nonviolence
Steve’s comment below reminded me that there are other options to learn about nonviolence than through Nagler’s work. Here are some options – please feel free to add more in the comments, i will compile them into this list:

• Miki Kashtan’s Gandhian Principles for Everyday Living (the link takes you to the fifth part, which contains references to the first 4 parts)
• The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict
• Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

Or as Caroline Simard puts it:

The problem with the biology argument that “boys are just more likely to be born good at math and science” isn’t that it’s not “politically correct” — it’s that it assumes that we can take away the power of societal influences, which have much more solid evidence than the biology hypothesis.

There are lots of responses to Tierney’s daring article: From scientists who practice science and those who study what women face within science. Large hat tip to the feminist philosophers!

The chapter I read was a reprint of an article by Daniel Lehrman originally published in 1953 critiquing Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior (the link opens a PDF to the full article, which is excerpted in the chapter in Cycles of Contingency). I would like to touch on a couple of things in response to reading the chapter: The relevance of Lehrman’s critique to current approaches, especially in evolutionary psychology, and the odd reluctance to adopt systems approaches.

Lehrman provides some interesting examples from animal studies that call into question Lorenz’s claim to innate behavior. His approach lends itself to generalization in answering the question: How do we want to explain the origins of behavior? And his critique seems to echo some of the concerns with evolutionary psychology. His approach can be gleaned from his example on the pecking behavior of chicks. Lorenz attributed this behavior to innate forces: The chicks are born with the tendency to peck; it might require just a bit of maturation. Lehrman points out that research by Kuo provides an explanation based on the embryonic development of the chick. The pecking behavior can actually be traced back to movements that developed while the chick was still unhatched. Hardly innate! The main point Lehrman makes: If we claim that something is innate, we stop the scientific investigation without fully understanding the origin of the behavior. This leaves out important – and fascinating – parts of the explanation because we think we’ve answered the question. As he puts it: “the statement “It is innate” adds nothing to an understanding of the developmental process involved” (30). I think this is also the danger of genetic/evolutionary explanations: If we explain mating behavior, for example, by tracing it back to supposedly genetic origins, we ignore potentially richer explanations that capture all the influences on the development of certain behaviors. I mentioned the development of lactose tolerance in adults briefly in a comment. Lactose tolerance is genetically driven but if we stop with the gene, we would miss that the tolerance in human adults developed only after agriculture became part of our culture. And apparently, it developed independently in several places – in some places with the same genetic change in others with different. Why? Again, the “genes did it” answer misses this question. The answer might be fascinating (I don’t know if scientists have figured this out yet…). Similarly with mating behavior: Maybe monogamy is not innate but so many humans live monogamous (or at least try to), there are obviously forces at play that go beyond the innate tendency. And even with genes themselves: What triggers certain genes to become active while others don’t? This is also very important for understanding certain diseases, such as hypothyroidism, which have a genetic component. But just having a genetic predisposition is not enough. Something must trigger the gene to start acting. It is very important to realize that neither Lehrman nor DST advocate “nurture” explanations. The key is to move beyond the nature-nurture schema, which includes giving up figuring out the percentage contribution of each, but to look for explanations of behavior that integrate all influences.

Lehrman’s article was originally published in 1953. And as Timothy Johnston points out in his introduction to the article, it largely fell on deaf ears. Researchers responding to Lehrman thought he just switched sides by contributing all explanatory power for behavior to learning (aka “nurture”). He does not: Again, he advocates leaving the innate/learning dichotomy behind. It’s not either-or; it’s always both. Similar patterns of reactions to systems advocates can be found in other areas as well. Anne Fausto-Sterling has called for using systems approaches since the mid-1980s. Then again very obviously in her 2006 Bare Bones articles. She suggests that we cannot understand the development of bones if we only look at genes, for example. She identifies seven systems that influence bone development, some biological/genetic, some environmental, all interacting. It is as if nobody heeded her call and she threw up her hands and decided to do the research herself because she is now actively doing research, following her proposal (of course, she might have planned this all along and I might be reading frustration into her “Bare Bones” article but…). A similar thing seemed to have happened with system-justification theory, an approach to explaining internalized stereotypes proposed by John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji in 1994. Their follow-up article written 10-years later reads just as much as a call for using systems-justification theory as the original article. It seems like the systems approach had not taken off. Why this reluctance to adopt systems theories? Systems approaches tend to be more complicated. It’s not just genes (with a little bit of environment or culture thrown in) or ego-justification (with some group-justification added). It is an interplay of various forces that combine to develop certain behaviors and/or traits. Maybe this complication makes these theories less attractive. They seem to make a lot more sense, though, at least to me. System-justification, for example, explains the “weird” phenomenon of people acting against their own self-interest: Even lower status groups, people discriminated against, act to maintain the status quo. System-justification captures this (maintaining the status quo requires that we justify the system). Of course, explaining that behavior pulls in the other systems theory: We need to look at the interplay of cognitive biases, such as resistance to change, and cultural forces, such as pressures to maintain a system, including oppression.

Developmental systems theory (DST) is an approach that does not answer the nature/nurture dichotomy. It overcomes it by suggesting that not only are both important as causal factors but that there is interaction between nature and nurture that make it impossible to look at each factor separately. Only a systems approach that integrates can truly explain the various influences. Note that this approach is no longer linear, as the approaches of EP are, for example, which give most weight to nature/genes with a dash of nurture. DST captures interaction: Genes impact the environment which impacts genes which impact the environment and so on. For an article that sketches how this might work, please check out Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “Bare Bones” articles (a PDF to Part I is here). She only gives a very broad overview of DST itself but the article is really DST in action, which might be a very good way of being introduced to a theoretical approach that requires a paradigm shift in our thinking.

The best introduction to DST is a book edited by Susan Oyama (who, I believe, is the researcher who introduced DST to biology), Paul Griffiths, and Russell Gray: Cycles of Contingency. Here are the major themes of DST as presented in Table 1.1 of that book:

1. Joint determination by multiple causes – every trait is produced by the interaction of many developmental resources. The gene/environment dichotomy is only one of many ways to divide up these interactants.
2. Context sensitivity and contingency – the significance of any one cause is contingent upon the state of the rest of the system.
3. Extended inheritance – an organism inherits a wide range of resources that interact to construct that organism’s life cycle.
4. Development as construction – neither traits nor representations of traits are transmitted to offspring. Instead, traits are made – reconstructed – in development.
5. Distributed control – no one type of interactant controls development.
6. Evolution as construction – evolution is not a matter of organisms or populations being molded by their environments, but of organism-environment systems changing over time.

Sounds complicated? Well, it is more complicated than the “genes (with a dash of nurture) are behind {insert your favorite trait}” approach. But so are organisms.

I agree with Frans de Waal who suggests that the troubles in evolutionary psychology (EP) stem from a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in general, which is hardly taught in U.S. schools (thanks to the religious wrong). Though the goal of EP is admirable – “to provide an evolutionary account of human behavior” – the approaches tend to ignore some important evolutionary aspects. De Waal identifies several mistakes made within EP: (1) Assuming that anything genetically influenced must serve a purpose; (2) investigating single traits out of context; (3) ignoring the norm/focusing on rare behavior; (4) ignoring evidence from other areas, primatology and neuroscience in particular. Based on an analysis by Jerry Coyne of Steven Pinker’s suggestions around a cognitive niche, we can add a few more problems: (5) we cannot exclude other theories through tests; and (6) the promising tests are ethically troublesome.

Let’s take a closer look at these more closely. There are many diseases that have genetic bases – for example thyroidism has at least some genetic aspects – but that does not mean that they have a purpose. In fact, evolution itself is purposeless – there is no ultimate goal. This is closely tied to problem 2: Often traits are side-effects of other characteristics, so if we only look at a single trait, we either miss the evolutionary significance or misconstrue it. De Waal gives the example of our upright posture. As anybody who has ever had back-problems knows, there is a cost to that posture. Obviously, it must have had some benefit for species survival, otherwise we would be on all fours. But it’s not a trait that by itself can be explained as evolutionary beneficial. Ignoring common behavior led evolutionary psychologists to the absurd (and offensive) claim that rape is evolutionary beneficial. Say what?!? Instead of trying to explain the minority behavior, we should look at what most people do: Not rape. Rape is also a good example for another troubling aspect of EP, which plays into problem 4: Ignoring evidence from other areas (see also this review of the book). In this case, psychology, sociology, or women’s studies could help us understand rape as something more complex as a “rape gene,” or whatever biological basis is claimed in that book.

As Anne Fausto-Sterling keeps pointing out – especially in her Bare Bones articles – we have to take a systems approach to explain human behavior (or bone structure, as Fausto-Sterling eloquently argues). Human behavior is too complex to reduce it to a gene or two. Rape could be viewed from a genetic and a power perspective, for example. Both de Waal and Jaak and Jules Panksepp call for evolutionary psychologists to look at the evidence from animal and brain sciences. EP seems rather enamored with the human animal and thus comes to conclusions that often contradict what we know from neuroscience, for example. Panksepp & Panksepp point out that much of our behavior is driven by parts of the brain that evolved long before homo was even on the scene, thus cannot be unique to humans. Similar points have been made by Elisabeth Lloyd and Marcus Feldman (the response by two evolutionary psychologists did not convince me).

Coyne points to genetic testing troubles. His arguments almost suggest that EP might be untestable, and thus unfalsifiable, because the DNA evidence is inconclusive – we cannot rule out alternate theories – and between species gene-transplant tests – promising to be more conclusive tests – might not be ethically feasible between primates and humans (though as some commentators pointed out, Coyne does not advance an argument for this).

Overall, the most troublesome critique of evolutionary psychology really comes from Fausto-Sterling, though she does not make this critique explicitly. EP ignores the interaction of lots of different factors. This will become clearer when I tackle the question “is coupling natural?”

If you know about any EP work that leverages system theories, please let me know! I really think that’s the way we need to approach the origin of human behavior… The Origins Project at ASU might be a step in that direction – it is very interdisciplinary (see also here).