I had never run across the concept of a wicked problem before yesterday, but I’m finding it to be a fascinating concept. A wicked problem has no single solution and is intricate, difficult to delimit or even define, and often inextricably linked to other problems. It’s about as different as can be from the kind of puzzle or math problem that has a single answer that can be reached by the careful application of reasoning; a wicked problem often requires an iterative approach to a solution, and a flexibility that recognizes the shifting nature of the problem. Examples of some big wicked problems include climate change, terrorism, dwindling oil supplies, and the US health care system. Wicked problems that are smaller in scope but equally baffling plague many companies and other institutions, judging by the amount of literature there is on the subject of managing this type of situation.

A lot of the information I’ve found about tackling wicked problems involves communication strategies for helping groups of people work together to understand the problem and come up with approaches to a solution (e.g., a couple of the methods are called Dialogue Mapping and Conversational Modeling). That makes a recent research project at Sandia National Laboratories particularly interesting. In this real-life study of a genuine problem that concerned them, Sandia employees and interns were asked to brainstorm ideas about the problem, either alone or in groups that pooled their ideas by contributing anonymously to a web site. Those who worked alone had no access to the ideas of their co-workers.

When you think about brainstorming approaches to a complex problem, you might think that the more brains you have, the better the ideas that will be generated (unless perhaps you’ve had to sit through too many fruitless or overlong meetings). However, in this case the ideas generated by the people who worked alone were rated by the organizers of the study as being better in terms of originality, feasibility, and effectiveness. One of the organizers pointed out that if online meetings are cheaper and shorter than face-to-face meetings, having people work alone might be even more cost- and time-efficient. (Not to mention that it gives the introverts like me a big break.) There’s a caveat toward the end of the press release to the effect that in some circumstances online or face-to-face interaction is still going to be needed. Still, this is a very interesting result, especially since it comes from a situation where people were dealing with something that presumably really mattered to them in their working lives.

This essay by biologist E.O. Wilson, published on the New Scientist site, is an excerpt from his afterword to an edition of four books by Darwin that was published a couple of years ago. The essay describes three viewpoints on humans and their place in the universe: a religious view that sees us as created by a deity; political behaviorism, which sees us as more or less perfectible blank slates that can be shaped to the culture’s needs; and scientific humanism, which is the bedrock of my own worldview. Scientific humanism sees us as products of evolution, and scientific humanism alone really sees us as what I call thinking meat—intelligent animals whose nature is a unique and complicated blend of animal necessity and mental activity. Wilson goes on to predict that religion and scientific humanism are likely to go on butting heads, finding neither agreement nor accommodation, because the differences between the two are increasing as we learn more and more about biology.

He says that there’s something about religion that “divides people and amplifies societal conflict”. This brings to mind something that a friend of mine pointed out once. Science tends to hone in on an answer to a particular question; alternatives are pared away by peer-reviewed experimentation and replication of results. At its best, scientific discoveries can not only narrow down the possible answers to a question, but unite disparate facts and observations by finding the underlying order. Religion, on the other hand, is a much more fragmented thing. I doubt there ever was a single religion or deity that everyone on the planet knew, and even religions that have dominated huge segments of the Earth’s population have been characterized by sects and divisions. I’m not sure why this is so, but I think it has to do with the purposes of religion and science. Religion is much more shaped to the needs of a particular community or mindset, whereas science is tuned to the objective facts to be observed in the world. Wilson points out that religion harms as well as benefits humankind, and closes his essay by wondering if scientific humanism might be able to provide the benefits without the social costs of religion. I guess first we have to wait and see if it ever becomes more than a minority viewpoint, and then see how it does.

So what exactly is a religion? More specifically, does the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (aka Pastafarianism) count? The CFSM grew from an amusing letter to the Kansas School Board that requested equal time in the science classroom for the views of the Pastafarians, who believe that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Any scientific evidence to the contrary is merely the result of tinkering done by the FSM’s Noodly Appendage. Funny, yes, but the board at the time was considering whether to include Intelligent Design in the Kansas science curriculum, and the letter makes the serious point that if ID is taught as science, what’s to prevent any other set of non-scientific ideas from forcing its way into the classroom too?

The CFSM is now an official parody religion with its own book of scripture (The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) and a largish cultural presence on college campuses and other hangouts of wise guys and science geeks. Or is it a real religion? This story from Live Science talks about the coverage of the CFSM at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. A panel will discuss Pastafarianism and its connection to the question of what makes a popular movement a religion. It’s a good question. Is Buddhism a religion, or Taoism? Both lack deities but focus on many of the same concerns as religions do. They’re both spiritual systems, I think, but I’m not sure if I’d call them religions. The CFSM is also in a sense concerned with what might very loosely be called spiritual matters, and it certainly shares some of the other features of religions (and it even has a deity).

It’s all tongue in cheek, so the CFSM is known to be a construct of the human imagination. I read a book years ago about an atheist who went to an Episcopalian church; as I recall, he was a little surprised to find others in the congregation who were atheists or agnostics. And I know there are people who call themselves “cultural Catholics”, who go to church for the community, the music, the traditions, but do not really believe what the church teaches about God and sin and so forth. (And certainly the drop in the size of Catholic families indicates a disconnect between official Catholic doctrine and Catholic behavior, even for those who are not cultural Catholics.) If people in mainstream religions can sometimes be fairly loose about their belief in the tenets of their religion, maybe Pastafarianism would count after all. I don’t really know how I’d define a religion, but I’m amused when I think of religious scholars addressing the question in the context of Noodly Appendages.

When I posted a few days ago about new books on the reading list, I said I’d have more to say about evolutionary psychology. So here’s an interview with one of the authors of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, a new book on evolutionary psychology by Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa, and Stephen Hoye. I’m sure the book is entertaining and thought-provoking, but I have some doubts about its content nonetheless.

The basic idea is that our brain evolved in a different environment than the one we live in now, and that long-vanished environment has left its traces in our behavior, which is often at odds with the world we really live in. Evolutionary psychology (EP) aims to figure out the ways our current behavior has been shaped by the pressure of selection in the past. EP can offer some fascinating analyses of how we got to be the way we are, and why we do things that don’t necessarily make sense now (the reason is often that those things used to make sense).

However, it’s worth noting that another recent book about EP, Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology by Robert C. Richardson, analyzes the explanatory power of EP and concludes that on the whole, EP doesn’t provide the kind of evidence that would be expected of arguments in other areas of evolutionary biology. I’m deeply interested in understanding how our brains and our behavior evolved, and I’m as intrigued as anyone by the kind of explanations evolutionary psychologists come up with, but a lot of the time I have to wonder how on earth they can prove their claims.

I haven’t read the Beautiful People book, but from what Satoshi Kanazawa says in this interview, it sounds like it may place a bit too much emphasis on the ways we’re “prisoner[s] to our hard-wiring”, as the interviewer puts it. This appears most glaringly to me in the two unanswered questions in EP that Kanazawa mentions at the end of the interview: Why do middle-class people in developed nations who have the resources to feed and raise larger families so often limit themselves to only two children? And why do people from big families not have small families themselves (since they have more siblings to share the load of passing genes along) and why do people from small families, or only children, have many children themselves (since they must make sure to get their parents’ genes into the next generation)?

Maybe there’s something I’m missing, but these questions seem to totally ignore cultural evolution, which is another strong force that influences our behavior. We’re more than just machines for passing along genes, and we are well able to control our behavior so that we act in the best interests of something other than blind reproduction. (In fact, some people consider that one of the most promising things about us.) Culture is of course constrained by our evolved capacities and limitations, but it does have a hand in shaping our behavior.

Another thing that bugged me about this interview is Kanazawa’s explanation of the history of evolutionary psychology. It’s not just that in 1992 a group of people decided to apply evolutionary ideas to human behavior; the roots of the field go back further than that (perhaps to E.O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology—maybe sociobiology and EP are not really the same thing, but they’re certainly closely related—or to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene). I know, this is just a short interview and we can’t expect a whole lot of detail or nuance, and maybe the book is more carefully written and rigorous than the interview would lead one to expect. But I have to admit that I’m not optimistic.

Maybe you remember the scene from The Big Chill where one of the characters praises the importance of a good rationalization. (Can you get through a day without one?) Rationalization, the art of justifying behavior that may not really be easily justifiable, is explained as a way for us to live comfortably with our decisions even in the face of evidence that they might have been flawed.

Being aware of facts that undermine the wisdom of a decision we’ve made—noticing a house in your price range in a better location, for example, right after you’ve closed on what you thought was your dream house—gives rise to cognitive dissonance, the effects of trying to hold onto two competing ideas about what we’ve done. So we banish the evidence against our decision, and decide to be happy with what we’ve got.

The assumption has been that this is a fairly complicated cognitive process that we’re more or less aware of, but this article from the New York Times describes some recent research that indicates we share the process with very young children and capuchin monkeys. Rather than assume more complicated mental gyrations in these less mentally sophisticated thinkers, the conclusion seems to be that perhaps our own acts of rationalization are less conscious and more automatic than we realized. Incidentally, I really like the graphic at the top of the article.

Those of you who know me personally have already heard my diatribes against Daylight Saving Time (DST), which luckily I have been able to avoid for the most part, until recently. I grew up mostly in Arizona, and then moved to Indiana, both of which are (or have usually been) sane enough to understand that for a given location, you get as much daylight as you get, no matter what you do, and it is up to individuals to decide how to make use of it. (A friend once described DST as being like cutting a foot off of one end of a piece of rope and tying it onto the other end, and thinking you’ve made the rope longer.)

Last year Indiana adopted DST, and this year the US as a whole extended DST, much to my irritation. The economic effects of the extension are still to be determined, but the effects on human circadian rhythms have not been very extensively studied. However, a recent European study addressed this question, examining how people’s sleep/wake cycles adjust to DST.

The conclusion was that circadian rhythms do not necessarily adapt well. People who are night owls are apt to have the most difficulty, in particular with the leap ahead by one hour in the spring. (I’m definitely a night owl and I do not at all like the onset of DST in the spring, so this made me feel a bit better. Maybe I’m not just a crank with a bee in my bonnet.) This article from Science Daily has more information. I especially like the description of the fall transition as the “release” from DST. That’s exactly what it feels like.

Altruism toward community members who are not related to you, with its implications of kindness and generosity, may be intertwined in human history with hostility toward members of other communities. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have used game theory and computer simulations to demonstrate that under the conditions our late Pleistocene and early Holocene human ancestors probably faced, neither agression toward outsiders and generosity toward unrelated people (parochial altruism) are likely to have been viable strategies by themselves, but they could have been successful together. Each strategy is in some sense costly (benefitting others who don’t carry your genes, in the case of parochial altruism, and taking time and energy and risking death in the case of aggression toward outsiders). But if parochial altruism bound a community closely enough together that it was more likely to succeed in its attacks against outsiders, then the two strategies could work hand in hand. You can read more about the research in this press release from Science Daily.

Note that this is talking about the past, and not about conditions today. This dynamic may be alive and well in the human psyche today; to anyone who’s been on the outside of a close-knit community, this link between solidarity and hostility is not as counterintuitive as it may sound. Being in, being “one of us”, is full of benefits, but if in some way you don’t fit the mold, you can in some cases quite easily become “one of them” and be ostracized or worse. But that doesn’t mean we have to live out this dynamic over and over. Not only do we have the power to understand and change our behavior, I think we may also find it imperative to do so in order to survive, in an age of nuclear and biological weapons and global problems that urgently require us to cooperate.

When I was younger, I could bounce back more easily from sleep deprivation; as I get older, it’s becoming harder to deal with a short night or worse yet, a series of short nights. My mind becomes muddy and my body feels sluggish. Studies have investigated the physical and cognitive effects of sleep deprivation, but not as much has been done to examine the emotional effects of sleep loss.

A recent study looked at 26 healthy volunteers, some of whom kept a normal sleep/wake schedule and some of whom had to stay awake for 35 hours. Then, while their brains were scanned with fMRI, both groups were exposed to images that started out bland and became increasingly emotionally disturbing. The sleep-deprived group showed much more activity in areas of the brain involved in processing emotions (the press release doesn’t say specifically which areas) compared to the group who slept normally. The press release also doesn’t say if the people were monitored in any other way for the strength of the emotion they were feeling (self-reporting, respiration or heart rate, etc.). (I’d be particularly interested in correlations with what people reported they were feeling.) At this point there’s no telling why this should be the case or how sleep might buffer the effects of emotional stimuli, but this is an interesting start. This press release from EurekAlert has more information.