Rational Philosophy

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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Who am I? What am I? What is that?

In New York, many people who work in corporate environments also pursue artistic endeavors. If you ask someone what she does, she may say she’s a financial analyst, but that she acts in her spare time. I have a friend who introduces himself as an artist, even though that is not what he does to earn a living. In fact, he does not try to make a living by selling his artwork because he believes that would alter his artistic vision. For him, honesty in being is paramount; declaration of identity becomes a matter of trying to live honestly.

Florida has begun to respond to an alarming increase in unprovoked attacks on the homeless, many committed by young people. Warren Messner, who is serving a 22 year sentence for his part in the death of homeless man Michael Roberts, admits his culpability, but says, “I’m not a killer. I know that. A lot of people, they see this story and call us killers. I’m not a killer.”

Interviewed for the story, Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, indicates that the rising trend in violence against homeless people reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that “has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people.”

This would explain why Messner still doesn’t see himself as a killer. He regrets his crime, but can’t quite grasp the idea that he killed another person.

John Locke recognized that the concept of personal identity rests on our consciousness. But the label we ascribe to our identity has less to do with a consistent sence of self, and more to do with our relation of self to others. It is language-based. We use words to express the person we want to believe ourselves to be in the eyes of others, or who we want others to believe us to be.

My friend, for example, prefers to call himself an artist because this word corresponds most closely to the truth he wants to convey to others. He feels himself an artist. Therefore that is the word he uses. Messner does not want to call himself a killer because this term does not tally with his sense of himself; in Messner’s mind he is not a killer because the term “homeless person” corresponds to an inferior being, something less than a person.

Homeless advocates point out that as society curtails the rights and freedoms of homeless people it devalues society’s sense of the homeless. The term ‘homeless’ becomes freighted with new and dangerous meaning; it begins to mean ‘less than our equal.’ The same things happens with the label assigned to any group being persecuted or discriminated against.

For some reason I have connected this matter of identity with a story from the world of astronomy.

Astronomers and lay-astronomers have used a new and mind-bogglingly subtle technique (micro-lensing) to detect and analyze planetary systems thousands of light years from earth. Einstein predicted that massive objects curve space-time. His theory shows that the path of light waves will be bent as they pass by a massive object. This means that as two stars far out in space become briefly aligned, the light from the more distant star will be focused by the nearer star creating a sudden increase in intensity that astronomers now watch out for. By measuring fluctuations in the brightened light, astronomers can detect the existence of any large planets around the nearer star, since they will cause some additional brightness.

A report of one such event indicates the existence of a solar system possibly somewhat similar to our own about 5,000 light years from earth. Alan Boss, a theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said, “The fact that these are hard to detect by microlensing means there must be a good number of them — solar system analogues are not rare.”

The quest to detect life or the possibility of life on other planets seems to be inspired by two motivations: To satisfy our curiosity about whether other life exists, and to confirm our own identity as being alone or not alone in the universe.

Which does find us back, I think, at language and identity. Depending upon how we define the terms, we are either alone or not alone, either in our head, in our home, in our city, on our planet or in the universe. If we cannot treat our fellow human beings with respect as equals, we may as well see ourselves as a collection of individuals, discrete and disconnected. But, if we can understand that all life and all existence emerged and congealed out of the primordial energy soup, we become aware of the oneness of everything, and the danger of labels.

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.

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 senators, singers, and security officials. Or, judging books by their tables of contents.

With Mitt Romney’s last flip, his decision to take himself out of the presidential race, it seems a safe bet that we’ll have a senator in the White House (unless Bloomberg decides to run). Something of a phenomenon, this likely senate coup has people asking why senators, despite running often, haven’t often won their bids for the country’s highest office. A Times piece raises several possibilities — the baggage of voting records, the Washington-insider stigma, the lack of executive experience, the relative comfort of the senate. But, being forever on the lookout for an inherently rational explanation, I wonder whether something about wanting and winning a senate race doesn’t take significantly different qualifications from winning a presidential bid.

The senate is a buffer. The constitution encourages the senate to check the powers of other branches of the Federal Government (e.g., by ratifying presidential appointments).

Rationally then, those who seek a position in the senate (unless they have higher goals —Hillary Clinton, I think, viewed the senate as a stepping stone on her way back to the White House) seek to exert a moderating and deliberative influence. That’s very different from someone who sets his or her sights on leading a state as governor or leading the country as president.

But, as has been demonstrated in the current race, while being a senator doesn’t qualify you as a presidential contender, it doesn’t disqualify you either. Clinton may have ducked through the low gate of the senate on her way to a presidential bid, but voters have decided that senators Obama and McCain have qualifications for more than checking and balancing.

As for disqualifications, Grammy-nominated recording artist, Ledisi, reveals that she had about given up on her career after hearing repeatedly that she didn’t have the right look and the right sound to make it. It’s good to hear that in the music industry creating music that people want to listen to can still qualify one for success. (On a personal note, and if you’ll excuse the shameless plug, I was bouyed up yesterday to learn that nerdlitter, a music blog, selected a song of mine amongst its top thirty for 2007.)

And the story of government official Julie Myers who disciplined an employee for wearing an inappropriate, racially stereotyped costume had me scratching my head. The employee was counseled and forced out on leave while Julie Myers, who posed for a photograph with the man at the party after participating in awarding him the prize for the most creative costume, went on to nomination as a top ranking Homeland Security official. “I was not aware at the time of the contest that the employee disguised his skin color,” Myers wrote.

Either Myers is an idiot or a liar (or both). How she can be qualified to make decisions about immigration and deportation policy defies imagination.

Philosophically speaking, qualifications present an interesting set of concepts. A qualification begins by defining some essential skill or requirement for a given role. This immediately calls upon the concept of “that which is essential.” Very often we get into gray area over the difficulty of defining “essential.” This leads to ad hoc exceptions or exclusions.

Defining essential qualities for a leader, for instance, can be quite tricky. People lead in different ways. And people have many theories about what makes a good leader. Easier perhaps to define those qualities that disqualify a leader — like Myers being an idiot or a liar. But even being found out as a liar might not disqualify someone. Leaders lie all the time to gain strategic advantage. It’s not the lying so much as the “what” and “why” of the lying (as I explored in a post the other day).

And this perhaps brings us to the core difficulty of qualifications. When we define the essential attributes for success in a role, we find that they are necessarily recursive. To be a successful singer, the singer must be able to be successful as a singer. The singer need not necessarily even produce wonderful music (Celine Dione is a case in point).

To borrow from Beckett, ill seen, ill said, this then is the insight: Beware qualifications.

 

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On the impetus for reinvention.

Some of my shirts no longer fit me. Either my neck has grown or the collars have shrunk. I like my shirts, they’re familiar and worn-in, but sooner or later I know I have to let them go and get new shirts. As I sit here with my collar unbuttoned it occurs to me that life in general demands that we let go of things that no longer fit. Yesterday I wrote about Ireland’s move away from plastic shopping bags, catalyzed by the minister of the environment’s tax on shopping bags, but inspired by the conviction of the government, thoughtfully and firmly communicated to and adopted by society, that Ireland could do without plastic shopping bags.

This morning, as I dumped yesterday’s coffee grounds into a plastic garbage bag, I considered the plastic bag phenomenon from another angle: What if someone were to invent an alternative to plastic that was biodegradable and actually good for the environment? Surely that’s fanciful, I told myself. But if, several decades ago, we had factored in the future harm to the environment, perhaps we wouldn’t have been so quick to use plastic so widely and intensively. If environmental friendliness had been a key design criteria, plastic may never have got off the ground (or out of the test tube).

As society enters a post-industrial enlightenment we need new design criteria. Society needs to give scientists, inventors and corporations aspirations beyond the self-evident goals of cost-effectiveness and aesthetic appeal. With organic produce finding their way into mainstream supermarkets, WalMart’s commitment to selling more fluorescent light bulbs, hybrid cars becoming hip statements of eco-commitment, etc., we can see a new twist to the consumer economy. But it’s still a twist to the old rather than a wrench away toward the new. Companies, aware of consumer demand for products that satisfy the customer’s desire for environmental peace of mind, clamor to cater to a market niche. Whereas Ireland’s move away from plastic shopping bags represents a wholesale shift in consumer demand rather than a spotlight on a dedicated market segment.

And, as in Ireland, such wholesale shifts can only happen if supported by public policies and laws that embrace them and support them. On super-Tuesday it’s important to remember that we elect leaders and governments to represent our needs. And unless we are myopic, one of our preeminent needs as a society must be our own persistence and survival, not just for the next four years, but for many, many years to come. If we elect leaders who don’t care about issues of pollution, overflowing landfills, toxic waste, endangered species, destruction of natural habitats, global warming, and inhumane or dangerous farming techniques more than they care about reelection, then we’re voting for society’s demise.

The same appeal for reinvention can be made for government itself. We should see nothing sacrosanct in the form of government we already have. President Bush has interpreted his constitutional powers so broadly as to make a mockery of such interpretation and in doing so he’s set dangerous precedent. Those who drafted the constitution aimed for it to embody certain principles. Their drafting reflected desires of the forming nation. The challenges faced by America today are very different from those it faced back then. To move forward we need to be willing to look at where we are now — government rife with corruption, bullied along by special interests, arcane systems and institutions weighed down by habit and inertia. It’s great that the current election has generated such interest and excitement, but in many ways it’s politics as usual.

Do we have the system of government we need in order for our society to evolve as we want it to evolve? That’s the question we need to ask ourselves. Not just today but tomorrow and constantly. Because shirt collars get tighter, and the world changes. We can only survive if we’re willing to let go of the old and adapt.

On ideas that don’t meet at the ends: Catching up with the slippery Fish, and digging into Farmer’s flawed reasoning.

Last week I thought I had refuted Stanley Fish’s doubts about the value of the humanities. But it seems that I wasn’t alone in misunderstanding Fish’s point. Fish explains today that he was talking about the academic field of “the humanties” not about art, literature, philosophy, etc. themselves. Fish clarifies his argument: Do humanities courses change lives and start movements or have any other measurable value? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized? He admits that teaching humanties can be one way for people to learn critical thinking, and that it provides people with a better range of subjects for conversation. But he then dismisses these values as being far from the exclusive realm of humanties courses. Now that Fish has made himself clear, I still disagree with him.

Another educator, John Farmer, who teaches at Rutger’s Law School, argues that the criminal justice system isn’t necessarily the right place to pursue the war on terror. Farmer argues that the prosecutions of Jose Padilla and Hemant Lakhani take criminal justice into dangerous territory, toward endorsing the pursuit and prosecution of terror conspirators who have not yet done more than pursue. So far so good. Farmer’s making sense. But then he argues that this situation should be remedied by taking terror law enforcement out of the criminal justice system, permitting the government some mechanism for “preventive detention.” “Considering norms of criminal law and the paucity of evidence the government had at the time,” Farmer says, “its only alternative was to leave him free. Law enforcement should have had another choice.” Hmmm. So to prevent the erosion of our civil liberties we should permit indefinite detention without charges of those we have doubts about.

Stanley Fish puts forth a subtle brand of sophistry in his twin salvos against the usefulness of the humanities. And this sophistry seems to indicate an ulterior motive. Fish’s true motive isn’t relevant to proving him wrong, but I would guess that he likes the idea that his academic pursuit rises above the demands of demonstrating value. He reaches a passionate pitch when he states “the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value.” Fish prides his field of study on its “refusal to bow” to pragmatic ends, and, rhetorically, argues that this refusal supports the justification for its worth.

My short rebuttal (”bullshit”) still stands.

Fish’s sophistry is this: He starts with three questions about the humanities “what is the value of such work, why should anyone fund it, and why (for what reasons) does anyone do it?” to which he appends, without drawing a logical connection, the following tests — that if it has value, the value must be measurable, that unless the value is measurable it cannot claim funding, and that those who do it must have consistent, valid and measurable reasons for doing it. Fish then flops around quite happily having avoided answering his own questions.

1. A value need not be measurable for it to be a value. Heat was a value before mssrs Farenheit and Celcius devised their scales and methods of measurement. Or, to take an example more closely related, “justice” is a value that cannot be measured (can we count how many people are rightly convicted? Of course not.) Pleasure and cleverness are not measurable values, neither is academic interest.

2. Funding for academic study always involves some element of uncertainty. There is no logical connection between whether a field of study has a measurable value or not and its appropriateness for investment.

3. People do all kinds of things for the oddest reasons. Fish’s assertion that humanities professors don’t do what they do to impart value is, even if it is correct, entirely irrelevant. Perhaps the best reason that any educator can have for being in the teaching business is that they relish their subject area. Who wants a teacher focused on the value that the course is imparting, rather than the knowledge and enthusiasm for the material?

Fish is carefully stepping over the real reasons that the humanities have value. They have value in the same way that any academic field of study has value, in exploring the world we live in. Humanities studies the world of art and literature. I can thing of few things more intrinsically valuable than studying the way that the creative world lives within, alongside and outside the real world. To say that such study has no intrinsic value makes me want to plea for Fish to take a sabbatical.

John Farmer makes a less subtle blunder. The current administration has been stretching, bypassing and thwarting the criminal justice system to meet its own ends. Farmer is right in saying that we shouldn’t allow this. But to claim that instead we need a whole new arm to the judiciary so that the government can continue to confine, hold and interrogate people who perhaps intend to do harm, seems about as wrongheaded as you can get.

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On Stanley Fish’s views on the humanties, and congress’s obsession with baseball.

Stanely Fish has this to say about whether studying the humanties can change us for the better: “Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us? The answer in both cases, I think, is no.” Fish argues that the humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, but that this is OK, since “an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”

To which feel moved to give a short rebuttal (”bullshit”) but feel a sense of duty to respond with something longer and more thoughtful. Back to that in a minute.

The other matter that has me scratching my head again today is all the fuss in congress over baseball drug use. Perhaps this is one of those cultural or political gaps that comes from being born and raised elsewhere, but why on earth does the government feel it should spend taxpayers’ money investigating drug use in baseball? Roger Clemens has been desperately defending himself against the allegations in the recent report. And he should be held accountable if he’s sullied the name of baseball, but by the government?

How does this relate to Stanley Fish and his misapprehension of the value of the humanities? Well, you can find echoes of Kafka and Beckett and Heller in the congress’s pursuit of the baseball players abuses, just as you can find echoes of Kafka and Vonnegut and, yes, Heller again in the Bush administration’s press to invade Iraq and chronic abuse of human rights.

Over the weekend I saw “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Granted not a film of any great artistic merit, although effectively done, but it helps illustrate the point. I came out of the theater with a renewed sense of urgency about the value and hidden dangers of the political process, with a new sense of outrage at the current administration’s deliberate mishandling of the current war and manhandling of our rights. Could I have reached the same sense of outrage without the movie? Sure, but that’s not the point.

The humanities, along with news media, word of mouth, personal observation, government and independent reports, etc., give us a picture of the world we live in. In some cases, the humanities give us a picture that we couldn’t get in any other way (because it’s purely imaginitive or impressionistic or surreal). I would pose the reverse question to Fish. If humanities don’t serve a purpose, why do they exist?

We strive to create art because we want to represent something — an emotion, an impression, an urge, a feeling – that seems important to us. Art is the tangible manifestation of our humanity. Without art we have no tangible manifestation of our humanity. Some can live in such a world, perhaps, but most of us cannot.

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On the concept of free will and its application to personal development.

As I watched March of The Penguins with my family the other evening my wife asked whether the penguins, who spend months of each year huddled together in freezing conditions, gradually starving, ever wonder whether there’s something better out there. The film’s accompanying commentary (narrated by Morgan Freeman) often wanders into sappy projections of human psychology, ascribing human thoughts and feelings to the penguins, spoiling to some extent a fascinating documentary.

We can say with some degree of certainty that penguins do not conceive of choice in the same way people do. But how do people conceive of choice and is it an illusion?

As a teenager I was sure that there was no such thing as free will, no such thing as choice. It seemed obvious to me that any response to any stimulus must be pre-determined by environment and instinct. At the most fundamental level, our minds are complex but absolute mechanisms, sets of synaptic switches, and every “choice” is simply the next configuration of these switches determined by the configuration that came before as influenced by a new set of external stimuli.

In a way I still believe this, but I now think that it skips over an explanation for the concepts of free will and choice, and in doing so lets us abdicate responsibility for our actions or inactions.

Perversity, I think, provides one of the clearest ways to conceive of free will: Imagine someone sitting in a temperature-controlled room with a thermostat. The person can raise or lower the temperature in the room by adjusting the thermostat. If he’s cold he can make it warmer. If it’s hot, he can make it cooler. But, if he’s feeling perverse, he can make it colder when he’s cold or hotter when he’s hot.

It’s at this level that free will and choice have meaning. We conceive of a set of choices and decide to act or not act either according to what we feel we should do, or according to what we feel we shouldn’t do. (This is why perversity provides such a good mental template for the concept.) Being conscious and having access to abstract concepts, we can conceive of doing things that counteract our physiological and emotional instincts.
At the next level down a conscious choice may well reflect a pre-conditioned set of psychological and environmental switches, but that’s not the point. We encounter free will and choice as we conceive of an action or inaction and consider them abstractly, consciously.

Now, here’s the trick. We can train ourselves to reset our switches, essentially changing the current conditions of our psychology. You can read this post and go away with a newly set switch, a switch that will permit you to decide to change a behavior that you don’t like. You have then exerted free will and contributed to your own personal development.

The most important part of this insight is that the results of these changes can be cumulative and can snowball. A choice to practice yoga or start therapy or quit drinking, for instance, can lead to a whole new set of experiences that reset a whole bunch of switches in our minds. Small choices can lead to big changes.

This, I believe, is the level at which we experience free will. Acknowledging the power of choice, even if it is mechanistically illusory, can lead to profound and powerful changes that help us get more out of life.

(My book LIFE! contains a more searching discussion of these ideas.)

The New York Times Science section today summarizes a debate that’s more than 2,000 years old: Can we say that the universe reflects fundamental laws? As its hook, the article highlights the thoughts of Dr. Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State, who brought the debate to a rolling boil recently by opining that science was, to some extent, a matter of faith.

Despite all of the hoopla and the plethora of theories on the subject, it seems to me that we can satisfy ourselves about the nature of the universe as follows:

First, we can restrict our field of inquiry to the universe that we live in. Sure, it’s interesting to postulate what other universes may exist, but let’s explain the one we live in first.

Second, we can say that the universe operates according to the principles of space and time. (This is a pragmatic statement of fact; what other principles would it operate in accordance with?)

And here’s the most important part: Since principles are concepts, and since concepts don’t exist in the concrete, but only in the abstract, the principles that govern space and time must exist outside space and time. Space and time don’t create them, but must concur with them. (This leaves open the possibility that another universe may concur with other principles.)

I believe that this adequately addresses much of the uncertainty. (Quantum mechanics is simply another principle of space and time, perfectly maleable as an abstract concept, and nothing to get hung up on.)

With these founding ideas, we can make rapid and comprehensive progress in understanding our universe and our existence. (As I explain in my book.)

And when we read stories like the one from Detroit in which a seven year old girl was shot six times as she tried to shield her mother from an attack, or those from Iraq where the dire feuds between factions and attacks by insurgents continue to cause misery and mayhem, we realize that we yet have a lot to understand and address in our own universe without needing to go looking for others.

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The AP reports on the success of a Japanese team in making genetically modified mice that show no fear of cats. This demonstrates that mice fear cats instinctively, upsetting the more commonly held view that the fear is learned.

The scientists from Tokyo University found that the modified mice quite happily cosied up to the unmodified cats and played with them.

I’ve been reading a fascinating biography of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is getting a lot of play at the moment because of his role in insisting on the separation of church and state as America was being constituted. Jefferson, a Virginian, saw and felt the unfairness of a system in which religion gets forced on people. Fortunately for the country he was a persistent and forceful person who carried forward this conviction even when others would have been OK allowing some degree of intermingling.

Roger Cohen invokes Jefferson’s ideas in an opinion piece that counters Mitt Romney’s vapid criticism of European Secularism, echoing to some degree my own response the other day. Jefferson was an enlightened man. His father read the classics out loud to his family. He had a classical education at home and then at university. Jefferson had great sympathy for the enlightened movements of Europe, and considered anything short of a rational grounding for society unacceptable. In his native state, he reformed the laws of inheritance, for instance, because he thought them inherently unfair.

Jefferson, one can imagine, must be turning in his grave. As Europe has marched on to become widely secularist and for the most part enlightened, America has slumped into a nation riddled with weird zealotry and faith-based fervor, where politicians either make it in part because they genuinely appeal to the religious community or are cowed into pandering to that community. As I sit here, I can think of several reasons why this gap has opened up — the sheer size of America, isolating far-flung communities from the influence and challenge of rigorous thought, the psychological composition of the people who populated America — people came here seeking peace and prosperity trusting largely in their faith that God would provide, the long, lingering influence of slavery and segregation, which was propped up by the idea that whites were somehow better than blacks, a very irrational proposition. I’m sure there are many other potential explanations.

But, as I see it, the point is less how did this happen, and more, how will this change.

The NY Times reports on a new study that indicates that human evolution accelerated rapidly in the last 40,000 years. There’s debate about whether that acceleration has continued over the past 10,000 years, but the study brings with it some hope that we’re not done yet.

Back to those mice…

If mice are genetically programmed to fear cats, this tells us two things: First, that while environment can affect our thoughts and behavior, we start from a predisposition toward a certain psychology and physiology. (My fear of spiders, for instance, may have been influenced by my mother’s fear of spiders, but it was probably also an inherent fear.) Second, that mice evolved their fear of cats.

And if mice can evolve a fear of cats (which seems self-evident to my mind), then human beings can evolve to become more enlightened.

Did I skip a step or two? I fear I did.

1. Is it evolutionary progress to become more enlightened? If you question the answer to this, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

2. What evolutionary pressure will cause the human race to become more enlightened?

Again, I can come up with several theories in answer to the second question, and I’m sure you’ll find your own. All other things being equal, I think that women are more likely to find enlightened men attractive and vice versa. Who wants to be married to a cave-man? An enlightened man will also be more helpful around the house and with the kids, prompting the woman to be OK having more kids with him. And enlightened people are probably less likely to die stupid, meaningless deaths.

As I argue in my book we’ll one day look back on religious fundamentalism as an anomalous blip in the history of America. The Japanese modification of mice to fear no cats gives me fresh hope that American genes will adjust over time to fear no smiting from on high. At which point the Bushes and the Huckabees and the Romneys of the world will disappear from the political scene with a puff of enlightened smoke.