This essay from Robert Solomon in the Chronicle of Higher Education (paywalled) argues against the popular perception of existentialism as a pessimistic philosophy (a perception that has long mystified me) and in favor of existentialism as full of hope and possibility. I don’t really understand how working to find your own meaning in life is supposed to be so pointless compared to believing that everything is in the hands of a deity; to me it seems just the opposite, that creating your own meaning is much more rewarding than accepting that someone else, even a deity, decided it all long ago.

Robert Solomon was a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, and he wrote, among other things, a book called Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life; what I’ve read about it sounds promising and it’s in the stack of books in my bedroom awaiting my attention. It sounds like it’s in line with my own beliefs about how the lack of conventional religion does not need to mean a lack of meaning, values, or morality. What makes the Chronicle piece a bit poignant is that Solomon died on January 2 while traveling (he was 64; his death was due partly to a congenital heart condition). I’m glad he left at least some of his thoughts behind in his books.

A week or two ago I ran across a news item from Scientific American about how genetic differences between ethnic groups are probably accounted for by differences in gene expression in genes that are shared across ethnic groups, as well as by large-scale DNA differences between ethnic groups. The differences in gene expression are likely due to non-coding regions of DNA near the gene in question, which regulate the expression of the gene. One reason this is important is that it can help researchers figure out the genetic differences that lie behind different ethnic groups’ vulnerabilities to different diseases. In this particular study, researchers compared Asian and European populations.

My impression has been that genetic differences between ethnic groups are real, although there is no single marker that places people into discrete genetic groups, and that some diseases and conditions appear more frequently in one ethnic group than another (e.g., cystic fibrosis usually occurs in Caucasians, hypertension is more common among African-Americans than in other groups, and type 2 diabetes is more prevalent in Latin American and African populations). This news story from January 2005 describes a study at Stanford a few years ago that looked at the racial categories people used to identify themselves and found that those categories mapped very well to categories that could be identified genetically. Out of 3,636 people in the study, only 5 of them placed themselves in a category that did not match the ethnic group their DNA put them in.

I’m fascinated by population genetics, and what we can learn from our DNA about where we come from and how we got to be who we are. And from a practical standpoint, it can be useful to understand the origins of diseases that strike one ethnic group more than another, and in particular to figure out how to prevent these diseases. See, for example, Gary Paul Nabhan’s Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, in which he investigates differences in food preferences and health between various ethnic groups. I think he has a chapter in there on the Tohono O’odham people of southwestern North America and why they are so much more prone to obesity and diabetes when they eat the standard US high-calorie, high-carb, high-fat diet (not that it’s good for anyone), and how they can change their eating and exercise habits to reduce their risk of the disease.

So I was surprised to read the other day that race is a entirely a social construct, and that “there is no gene for race”. This was in some information I received about the Human Race Machine, which visited the Indiana University campus in Bloomington this past week. The machine scans people’s faces and then applies morphing algorithms to make them resemble faces from other races (I think you can choose from five or six: Caucasian, African, Indian, Middle Eastern, Asian, maybe another that I can’t remember). The experience is intended to help people realize the essential unity of the human race, despite superficial differences in skin color and facial features. How you get from there to the idea that the differences are not real and are not linked to any underlying physical cause is beyond me, and I’m extremely disheartened that someone evidently thinks that we can’t get across the message that race-based discrimination and hatred are wrong without tossing science aside to do it.

Obviously people have used racial differences as an excuse to rank populations in a hierarchy, to claim that one race (their own, of course) is superior to the rest and that members of other races are somehow not as human and do not need to be accorded the same rights, dignity, and freedom. That, of course, is purely wrong, but it’s not wrong because we’re really all genetically or physically identical. And genetic differences between races don’t negate the essential similarity of human needs and human rights across different populations.

Maybe as part of the maturation of our species we need to learn that genetic differences (which are statistically small but by no means trivial) are not about superiority or inferiority; instead, they tell our history and describe the entire spectrum of humankind on this planet. Race is not entirely a social construct; the hatred and ranking and subhuman status accorded to some races over the course of history are socially constructs. I would like to think we can attack those wrongs without jettisoning the science that’s teaching us about human diversity, the ways our bodies work and why they sometimes don’t. I remember a line from the original Star Trek series, from some discussion about the Vulcan ideal of IDIC (infinite diversity in infinite combinations). Spock said something about the way our differences can combine to create meaning and beauty. Isn’t that the essence of diversity? And don’t we have to acknowledge that the differences are real in order to truly value diversity?

If you immerse yourself in the early stages of learning a new language, you might start to lose your grasp on the old one for awhile; this phenomenon has the depressing name of “first language attrition”. Researchers from Spain and the US investigated what’s going on when this happens, and concluded that when people focus on words in the new language, they appear to be actively suppressing the memory of the old familiar words in their first language. This effect goes away when people become fluent in the second language (so it’s not a depressing zero-sum sort of thing, as it appears at first); perhaps it’s a useful brain strategy that helps cement the new language more firmly in memory by ignoring the old one temporarily.

You can read this article from Science Daily to learn more. I was amused at the intro to the Science Daily piece, which mentions one of the researchers musing about how it could be “possible to forget, even momentarily, words used fluently throughout one’s life.” Sadly enough it happens to me all the time, and not in the context of learning a second language either.

Every year Edge.org asks a variety of smart people a thought-provoking question and posts the brief essays they write in response. The question for 2007 is “What are you optimistic about and why?” You could browse for a long time through all the responses. A few of them stood out on first glance.

Some are optimistic about our political and environmental future. Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse) has used the phrase “cautiously optimistic” in several of his books, as I recall, and he uses it again in his essay about how “Good Choices Sometimes Prevail.” A few other people express optimism about our ability to make it through climate change and the upcoming oil crunch. Chris Dibona of Google is hopeful about the way freely available satellite images of Earth could help unveil political and environmental abuses and thus fuel informed protest of these abuses.

Others range through the inner space of human consciousness and the wider spaces of the universe. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller is optimistic that the accumulated knowledge of evolutionary psychology can teach us how to die well. MIT physicist Max Tegmark has some interesting thoughts on the rarity and significance of conscious life in the cosmos.

Some of the responders foresee good things for humankind’s social institutions. Biologist J. Craig Venter espouses what he calls “evidence-based decision making”, a fundamental element of scientific research, and is optimistic that it will spread beyond the scientific community; it surely sounds like a good idea to me. Anthropologist Helen Fisher is hopeful that marrying for love (rather than for reasons of power or property) might be gaining ground (although it seems to me like this is old news, at least in industrialized countries).

There are many more essays to browse through; these are just a few of the highlights. Happy reading, and best wishes for 2007!

Twice a day I have to cross a freeway bypass on foot; I’ve been doing this for over seven years so I’ve developed a technique for (and an attitude about) dealing with heedless drivers on the bypass who seem unaware that they share the planet with pedestrians. So I was intrigued by a news item at Seed Magazine about something called psychological traffic calming. This European traffic arrangement seeks to enhance safety in some urban areas by removing the barriers between cars and pedestrians (traffic lights, lane markings, signs, curbs) rather than reinforcing them as you might expect. The idea is that if drivers realize they are in an environment that includes pedestrians, they will slow down and drive more alertly and carefully, whereas when they are on a nice wide well-marked street that’s set off from the sidewalks, they think of themselves as being in a car-only environment and don’t worry so much about the bipeds in their midst. Basically the idea is to give drivers visual cues about their surroundings that shift them into a different frame of mind, so that they are mindful of people on foot rather than whizzing by oblivious to them. The article mentions some evidence that drivers slow down when they’re in an urban environment designed like this, but it doesn’t give any statistics for accidents.

Psychological traffic calming is mainly a European phenomenon but is starting to attract attention in the US. I’d be interested in seeing this in action. My gut reaction is that it would give me the heebie-jeebies (I don’t trust drivers that much). On the other hand, it does make sense that the reason the drivers on the bypass I cross are often dangerous is that they’re thinking in highway terms, which do not include pedestrians.

This story is a bit off the beaten path for Thinking Meat, but I’ve got to admit that waiting to get across that bypass every morning and evening does give me time to ponder how vulnerable the human body is, and how provisional and contingent the continuance of life (although I also have time to wonder if I should start carrying a paintball gun).

At Harvard, a Report of the Committee on General Education was released to faculty recently, and although I haven’t been able to find the report online yet, I am impressed with some thoughts about it that Steven Pinker shares in this opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson. He acknowledges the value of the report but addresses two areas of concern, one a proposed “reason and faith” requirement, and the other the lukewarm language about science that the report uses. Regarding the latter, Pinker has some wonderful things to say about the worth of science:

…it is a remarkable fact that we have come to understand as much as we do about the natural world: the history of the universe and our planet, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life.
…
Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.

That’s a pretty good summary of some of the key features of thinking meat’s place in the cosmos and some of the challenges it faces, and I was pleased that he went on to say that education consists of understanding those facts to the point that they are second nature. And in the spirit of celebrating some of the wonderful things the human mind is capable of, I’m going to take bloggers’ license to cover a couple of stories that are only very loosely related to the Thinking Meat theme, but that are so cool I really wanted to write about them.

The first is the news that came from NASA today about the discovery that water has likely flowed recently on the surface of Mars, at least briefly. Using images taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), scientists found evidence that water might have flowed down gullies on the surface sometime since a 2001 image was taken. You can read about it in this press release from JPL; there are before and after pictures that show the deposits that appeared since 2001 and are believed to have been left behind by flowing water. It’s another tantalizing bit of information in the story of the possibility of microbial life on Mars, which makes it plenty interesting.

It’s also fairly mind-boggling when you stop to think that we are capable of seeing this kind of change on the surface of another world so far away. I’m on a mailing list that receives weekly lists of the best recent images from Mars Global Surveyor (which fell silent recently after an amazingly long and productive life in which it returned more than 240,000 images of Mars), and I’ve been regularly amazed at the wonderful things we’ve learned about the planet, not to mention the fact that I can sit cozily on my couch and with a few keystrokes call up sights that the most intrepid explorer of earlier times could only dream of seeing. In my opinion, missions like MGS, the Mars rovers, Galileo (which studied the Jovian system well past the end of its original mission), and Cassini (which is currently studying Saturn and its moon) represent some of the best things that human beings are capable of.

Another story in the news this week is about an ancient astronomical computer that was discovered in 1900 in the wreckage of a ship that sank in 80 BC. The Antikythera mechanism, named for the island off the coast of which the ship sank, has intrigued historians of science for decades, who have tried to figure out exactly what celestial motions it calculated. A recent analysis using nifty new imaging techniques has revealed new features of the mechanism and a previously unknown function (it computed solar and lunar eclipses). In fact, the analysis shows that it was more complex and sophisticated than anything that was produced in the thousand years following its creation. Researchers have been able to essentially reconstruct the innards of the mechanism and figure out how it worked to a degree impossible before. The link I originally put here in 2006 is now behind a paywall, so I will anachronistically link to a 2015 write-up by Jo Marchant in Smithsonian Magazine. An Astronomy Picture of the Day shows the mechanism itself, in all its mute encrusted glory.

This story is exciting for several reasons. First, no one knew until now that anyone in 80 BC was able to create such a sophisticated device for recreating the motions of the sun, moon, and planets. Second, the fact that we now have techniques for figuring out the way it worked despite the fact that it spent 2,000 years on the bottom of the sea is pretty impressive. The curiosity and ingenuity of our species are evident in both achievements. Also, there’s something very moving about this ancient piece of astro-gear being brought to light and studied so many centuries after it was made. I find today’s astro-gear fascinating, especially the huge new telescopes built over the last 10–15 years (or the ones still under construction), and this early example of the art and science of astronomical instrumentation seems equally beautiful and impressive to me.

Twenty-five years ago, back when I still went to church, I fell in with a group of Catholic charismatics. I hadn’t even known there was such a thing; I was raised in a strictly traditional Catholic family and the idea of Wednesday night prayer meeting was itself faintly exotic to me. So you can imagine how I felt when I encountered the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, which people in this prayer meeting did regularly. (Oddly, though, the charismatics and my parents shared a strong social conservatism, despite their liturgical differences.)

I never knew what to make of glossolalia. I can picture my now ex-husband and I sitting beside each other on folding chairs in the church hall, exchanging furtive glances of astonishment and mild dismay the first time people burst into tuneful and lilting nonsense syllables. (What is the etiquette in such a situation, we wondered to each other later.) Most of the emotions people claimed to be feeling in the prayer group (a sense of divine love, a feeling of peace) frequently eluded me and in the end I think I figured that the whole thing was a mystery that I was never going to penetrate.

But that was before I gained my scientific sense of curiosity about what it was all about. Today it’s different, so I was interested in a recent story about glossolalia. Neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania have scanned the brains of people who were speaking in tongues to see which areas of the brain show increases or decreases in blood flow. Activity in the frontal lobes dropped compared to when the subjects were singing gospel songs, which indicates that the subjects had relinquished conscious control in some way, just as they felt they had. (I’m really curious, however, about how they were able to speak in tongues when they needed to.) A materialist like me would say that control has been passed to a different part of the brain, rather than to God. This press release talks about future work that will follow up on this research in an attempt to “demystify this fascinating religious phenomenon”. Which all makes perfect sense to me.

However, this excellent article in Slate quotes a New York Times article as saying that people who speak in tongues now have neuroscientific evidence for their claim that God is speaking through them. Seems like a huge leap to me. The Slate article talks about what it means when we find that our brain activity matches our first-person reports of what is happening to us—for example, when we feel we’re not in full intentional control and our brain activity reveals that indeed we are not, or when we report that we enjoy the taste of ice cream and brain scans reveal that by George, the pleasure centers are lighting up.

I’m interested in the neural correlates of emotional states because I want to know how the brain works and how it got to be that way. I don’t think we’re going to find evidence for God in there. Or rather, I think we’re going to find the mechanisms that produce our thoughts and feelings about God and reveal that we’re creating the whole thing inside our heads. This article is interesting because the author (who says he used to scan brains for a living) says that what would be compelling from a religious point of view is if our brains didn’t reflect the experiences we say we’re having (so we would have to wonder where our feelings of religious rapture came from). Until that happens (and I would be very surprised if it did), there’s really no particular surprise that what’s happening on the inside matches what we report on the outside. It’s just cool to figure out how it all works.

A study of vasotocin-producing neurons in birds reveals that birds that live in groups have more of that kind of neuron, and the neurons are more active, compared to birds that live in pairs. The neurons appear to be specialized in their response to situations depending on whether the situation involves positive interactions that are likely to increase affiliation, or negative interactions that are likely to bring about antisocial behavior. What constitutes a positive interaction varies depending on how social a bird is, and thus the activity of a bird’s vasotocin neurons is related to what type of social life the bird has (as a member of a colony, or as a loner with only a mate to keep it company). This article from ScienceDaily gives the details. This type of neuron appears in other animals, including us (although the analogous neurochemical in humans is vasopressin), so the results could tell us something about the neurological underpinnings of the human personality difference between introverts and extroverts.

As an introvert myself, I noticed that the words used to refer to the less social animals were negative (grump, misanthrope). OK, it’s just a press release, but I think it’s missing the point. Each bird is fairly nicely tailored to suit whatever kind of life it leads; I’m assuming there are environmental factors that influence which strategy (living in a colony or living with only a mate) is advantageous for a particular species. The closing sentence talks about possible implications for human behavior, although we don’t yet know how to “turn a misanthrope into a party animal.” For starters, introverts aren’t misanthropes; they just like their human contact in smaller doses than extroverts do. And why would you want to change them? Maybe there’s a role for introverts in the human world just like there’s an ecological niche for the less social birds. I’ll get off my introvert soapbox now.