Rational Philosophy

In writing yesterday’s post as I waxed on about Bush as a puppet I made a mistake. I realized this last night in the lucid wakefulness that comes between dreams. I allowed my reason to be swept away by my infatuation with the argument I was making. I made unsubstantiated and in some respects improbable claims about the degree to which Bush has been manipulated in his presidency.

I both gave Bush less credit than I truly believe he deserves (for being his own person) and correspondingly more credit than he deserves (for not being responsible for his administration’s blunders). Doubtless the truth lies somewhere between my accusations that Bush is no more than a stooge, and the opposite possibility that he’s largely steered the political and ideological course of his presidency.

I feel better now I have that off my chest.

The title of a New York Times piece on Obama’s Illinois State voting record misleads the reader: “Obama’s Vote in Illinois Was Often Just ‘Present.’” By using the word ‘Just,’ the Times implies that the vote of ‘Present’ must be some kind of lesser vote than ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Indeed, the piece investigates Hillary Clinton’s campaign claim that Obama’s voting record was softer than he’d like people to think. But instead the piece provides a compelling body of evidence and perfectly good rationale supporting the concept that Obama’s voting record, far from being weak, gives evidence of leadership and careful deliberation. The ‘present’ vote can imply leadership, register dissatisfaction, display a tactical approach. Statistics give the dots, joining them up requires context and detail.

So why did the New York Times choose that headline? It’s beyond me…

What do you know! I go back to the same story and the headline has been changed. “It’s Not Just ‘Ayes’ and ‘Nays’: Obama’s Votes in Illinois Echo,” it now reads. No doubt, after the story was posted, an editor spied the discrepant title and changed it.

In another story South Africa seems likely to elect Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma as its next president. As the article points out, Zuma, like most people and many great leaders, is far from perfect. Facing corruption charges and having been acquitted of raping an HIV positive woman, but admitting to having sex with her, saying she seduced him by wearing a short skirt and posing provocatively, and having also said he showered after having sex with her to reduce his likelihood of catching HIV, Zuma nevertheless seems to be popular because of his admission of human frailty rather than in spite of it.

Failure is a fact of life. Further, failure is a natural and inevitable part of existence. The path of the evolving universe, particles popping in and out of existence, gas clouds swirling, stars imploding, has been one of many unproductive paths and just a few fruitful ones. Life is the same way. The DNA of a living organism mutates blindly. Each mutation knows not what it might bring to the organism, something useful, something harmful, or something of no particular use or harm. Successful mutations we call adaptation. They are successful because they get passed on by natural selection; they hold no special quality other than the fortune of being favorably transmitted.

As human beings, however, we have the ability to conceive of success and failure, to foresee, or recognize and regret our error. It is an interesting parallel to reflect that if we recognize and face up to our errors and try to address them, we are performing our own task of natural selection and adaptation, we are mimicking life by choosing to improve ourselves.

Without our awareness of our frailty we would have no ability to effect positive change. This is why, I suspect, I feel relieved for having admitted yesterday’s failing, why my faith in the NY Times editorial process is reinforced by the change of a headline, despite the original blunder, and why South Africans recognize in Zuma, a flawed man, a leader who may have the power to effect positive change.

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.

Yesterday, I visited my wife’s uncle’s house to celebrate his son’s birthday. On the television, the Washington Redskins played the Philadelphia Eagles. I’m not much of a sports fan. I get caught up in World Cup soccer once every four years if the time zone works, or the occasional playoff or world series game, but, as men go, I’m pretty much on the non-sports-watcher end of the spectrum. It took me about three minutes to become interested in the game between the Redskins and the Eagles. I know neither team, neither record this season, none of the players, there was no social charge to the viewing event (the TV was on, but no one was really watching,) but there I am taking an interest, beginning to follow the commentary and how it relates to the drama of the game. Why? I was curious observing myself and amused each time I poked my head back into the den to catch up on the play.

Later in the day I was browsing philosophical blogs, checking out the competition and getting absorbed in some of the ideas. I came across a blog entry about watching sport. The blogger proposes that watching sport is perhaps not a rational activity and has no easy explanation. He tests and refutes various theories such as the watcher’s involvement in the beauty of game. With my own sport-watching experience so fresh in my mind, the post got me thinking.

Another data point: I grew up in England where “snooker” (a game somewhat similar to pool) gets a lot of TV viewers. Although I doubt he’d ever played the game, my grandfather would sit for hours in our living room watching “the snooker,” much to my annoyance, since he was monopolozing the one TV in the house. Snooker is hardly a sport (many players smoke and drink during the game — one of the players, a Canadian, I think,
had a doctor’s dispensation that permitted him to consume more than the officially allotted amount of alcohol during games to keep his hands from trembling). So, the question of why we watch sport can be generalized to one of why we watch (or listen to, or read about) games. (If you’re dubious about this generalization, consider those who watch chess or poker or bridge matches.)

Monty Python dramatized the humor in our obsession with watching games as apparently tedious as cricket (a cricket match can last five days with extended periods during which ostensibly nothing happens), with a sketch that took the form of commentary on Thomas Hardy writing a novel. (For those who’ve read Thomas Hardy’s novels, this is doubly amusing.) I urge you to follow this link and read a transcript of the sketch.

My theory is this: The dramatic element in games and sport compels us to follow them. The thrust and parry of competition, however tame in reality, becomes magnified by our psychological makeup.

Evolution tends to select those forms better able to survive. A great factor in our survival has been our capacity for abstract thought, for reasoning, strategizing, analyzing, outwitting or outmanuevering our competition. We’ve used this capacity to keep ourselves safer from dangerous predators, from enemies and rivals, from the harsh elements of nature. Without wanting to exaggerate the point, the process of living for conscious beings is like a game aimed at survival, a competition against forces that would have us not survive.

Games test our ability to prevail against challenges and odds. Sports do the same with the added demand of physical ability. Observing sports and games calls upon a deep part of our instinct; we analyze the angles, engage vicariously in the challenges the players face. This involvement can be so direct and emotional that we merge our desires and ambitions with those of the competitors. If our team loses, psychologically speaking, we lose.

I didn’t catch the end of the Redskins - Eagles game. When I stopped watching, the Eagles had just gone one point ahead in the fourth quarter, although the Redskins looked to have the edge in terms of ball play. But today I see that the Redskins lost badly, or the Eagles won handsomely, depending on which way you look at it.

My advice to sports-watchers who don’t like spending so much time in front of the TV is this — just try to avoid it; you’ll be happier for it. If that’s not possible, sit back and enjoy it; you’re engaging in an activity that, over many generations and in a more productive form, has enabled the human race to reach the point at which a man can sit back and watch football on a Sunday afternoon…

I buy coffee and a carrot muffin every day for breakfast from a “Pret” cafe in midtown Manhattan. As I do wherever I go, I strive to be pleasant when I get my breakfast. I see people being unpleasant sometimes and it makes me cringe. (Isn’t it less stressful to be polite and helpful and sympathetic to those with whom we come into contact? And, I should point out, Pret does a great job of attracting and training its staff to be polite and courteous, too.) In any case, this morning there were no carrot muffins out on the rack so I took a blueberry muffin instead. When I stepped up to pay, the person serving me recognized me, remembered what I typically purchase, and rang up a carrot muffin. When she realized that I’d settled for blueberry she went out of her way to hunt down a carrot muffin for me. (It was delicious.)

Republican Representative Deborah Pryce in announcing her retirement today had this to say about America’s increasingly media-driven campaigns of dirty politics: “I don’t think anything will change until Americans revolt and get it into their heads that they need to be informed voters instead of just listening to the paid political ads.” But she also freely admitted that she’d resorted to attack ads in order to hold onto her seat in last election, to the tune of $4.5 million. Which makes one wonder whether politicians don’t also need to do a little revolting of their own. The message though is that being nice, in politics at least, doesn’t pay off. That’s the prevailing wisdom. I’m not sure whether any politician has yet dared to be nice in the face of his or her rival’s nastiness.

Various religions have long taught the virtues of being nice, of not retaliating. The texts of Christianity (the religion with which I’m most familiar) stress the importance of being kind and peaceful even in the face of unkindness. Although, if I remember rightly from my attendance at church, long ago, as a boy, the religion seemed to attract a high proportion of petty, judgmental and holier-than-thou people. But I guess you can’t necessarily blame the teachings for the people they attract!

The 2001 movie Evolution, in amongst slapstick humor and great special-effects, teases up an interesting philosophical question. The movie’s premise: A meteor carrying the necessary genetic material for a very different form of life crashes into the earth. The new form of life has two characteristics that set it apart from the kinds of life forms with which we’re typically familiar: 1. Life evolves exponentially faster. 2. The species are uncompromisingly unpleasant and aggressive. I was fascinated by this second characteristic (made easier to observe by the first).

In the context of the movie, life can evolve even if the members of its various species behave with uncompromising aggression. But could this be true out in the universe? Does any principle indicate that we will get further by being nice?

Here’s a theory (one that I explore in greater detail in my book): Being nasty can help an individual survive in certain situations. It can help us get our coffee ahead of the next guy, or it can even make a difference between life and death — the killer instinct. But when we think about survival more broadly, in a family or social group, being nice starts to pay off. Being nice creates social bonds and payback. It leads to cooperation and sacrifice. I would argue that being nice is a much more enlightened practice than being nasty and one that pays great dividends over time.

If only politics could evolve to be more enlightened, too.

Judging by a report on the California wildfires, some residents seem intent on refusing to see things logically. They want the world to be other than it is. Angry that wildfires again have put their homes in danger they don’t accept any responsibility for continuing to live in what is a well-known and, for the forseeable future at least, incurably hazardous danger zone.

Another story got me wondering whether, as Merrill Lynch’s CEO, E. Stanley O’Neal steps down, those who have fostered ire at the company’s recently slumping stock price have stopped to consider what part O’Neal played in lifting that stock price in the first place. Under O’Neal’s more aggressive leadership, for instance, the company made $7 billion in 2006 using capital to trade for itself and clients, compared with $2.2 billion in 2002. The stock that recently slumped, slumped from a dramatic peak. Was O’Neal responsible for the slump but not the peak? Or was he the victim of those now in denial about whether they were getting what they asked for — a more agressive and therefore more volatile company. These are finance types, they surely know that it cuts both ways.

And President Bush, still in denial about his administration’s culpability for the lousy federal preparation for and response to hurricane Katrina, this week siezed the opportunity of California’s tremendous response to its wildfires to again shift Katrina blame from himself to the Louisiana governor. “It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead,” Mr. Bush said. (The same could be said of the White House, Mr. Bush.)

The concept of being in denial presents us with a curious psychological and philosophical circumstance. To be in denial one must be aware of the logic or reason of a situation, or at least aware that one could find such logic or reason, and suspend that awareness in order to act contrary to it. It is a willful refusal to accept reality.

As an evolutionary function, being in denial may be a technique that has helped us survive. When facing the reality of a situation means that we must admit that life isn’t worth living, it must have helped us as a species to be able to ignore the unhappy truth and carry on. In the course of human history countless millions of people’s lives haven’t been worth living and still aren’t today. People have put up with hopeless situations of drudge, oppression, hunger, war, drought, poverty, you name it, living wretched lives that ultimately end… well, wretchedly. If we had seen this for what it was and given up, we wouldn’t have survived long as a species.

Denying one’s perception of reality must mean that one creates and holds a conceptual framework of the world in one’s mind. This seems like a lot of work when you don’t have to do it. I’m an advocate for less denial and more reality in the cases cited above. It doesn’t help the California homeowner to deny that he or she has picked a lousy spot to live. Nor does it help the investor, employee or director of Merrill Lynch to ignore the fact that the leader they’re kicking out has been doing quite well by them up until recently. And although Bush can’t hope to salvage any political legitimacy at this point in his tenure, as a person he would do well to start admitting that, yes, even he can make mistakes.

Why sex makes sense.

Yesterday I posted a piece on new or renewed questions about why organisms reproduce sexually (as opposed to asexually). In short, no current theory can explain why organisms have evolved to reproduce sexually. Theories have been proposed — such as the desirabilty of high gene mutation rates to aid adaptation and resistance to parasites — but these theories haven’t been borne out through scientific analysis.

VS.

As I tried to clear my mind for meditation this morning on my subway ride to work, it occurred to me that perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why evolution led to such a broad and successful range of sexual reproducers, would it make sense instead to ask “why not”?

I’ll try to explain what I mean.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is often misparaphrased as “survival of the fittest.” (I almost did it myself, before I researched the origin of that phrase; Herbert Spencer coined it after he adopted, adapted and misused Darwin’s theory for his own purposes). If we look around us we see that the world is far from filled with absolutes. Instead, the various paths that life and evolution have taken have led to an enormous and bewildering array of living things. The number of types and subtypes of plants, animals, insects, etc., is dizzying.

Bdelloid Rotifers do very nicely without sex, but that doesn’t mean that we all need to. We’re not competing with Bdelloid Rotifers, we’re all just doing what we do until something comes along to stop us.

To couch this in more scientific terms, theories of gene mutation don’t need to explain why sexual reproduction is better than asexual reproduction as an evolutionary fork in the road. They just need to explain how it is that sexual reproduction is a viable evolutionary fork.

Mathematically, a new species will only fail to survive if the threats to its survival outweigh its ability to adapt and thrive. When the number of threats is low, the species doesn’t need to be a super-survivor, it just needs to be good enough.

The same is true within human society. We can’t all be superstars, supremely attractive, incredibly smart, strong, mature, creative, resourceful. But that doesn’t mean we can’t survive and lead a fruitful life, reproduce, create a genetic legacy. Just one clear look at the world around us demonstrates the futility in seeking to understand why, from an evolutionary perspective, a particular trait has survived. Why not? What was the force that would have stopped it from being perpetuated?

And given the amount of time most people spend thinking about sex and participating in it or wanting to participate, there would have to a fairly major turn of events to stop us continuing down this particular alley.

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.

Reports from a team of Cambridge scientists last week presented a theory explaining how an asexual organism (a tiny invertebrate pond-dweller, the bdelloid rotifer) has been able to survive 80 million years without sexual reproduction.

In a related article scientists from the University of Sussex show that the rate of mutation in a range of sexual organisms is lower than it would need to be if sexual reproduction occurs to guard against the harmful effects of mutation.

All of which seems quite new and interesting to those of us who haven’t been keeping up with the theories of evolutionary biology. But apparently the elusive evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction have been much hunted and seldom in clear view for quite some time.

I also read the first two parts of a fascinating essay by Errol Morris “Which Came First, The Chicken or The Egg.” Although it’s about photographs from the Crimean war, the Morris piece reminded me, as did the two science reports, that evidence and hypothesis make a far less solid foundation for our understanding of the world than it sometimes seems. Morris’s article also makes a powerful case for the importance of careful, methodical, skeptical inquiry. It may be a long time before we know as much about the wending path of evolution as we once thought we did. And for this reason what we think we know can’t tell us as much as we might hope.

But if we look through the other end of the telescope things become a little less dizzying. We can ask the question: Do we need to know the details of each stage and step of evolution to know that organisms evolve? If organisms evolve, what can this tell us about the purpose of evolution?

For the past few mornings when I’ve walked into my office and pressed the light switch, the lights have flickered on and then off. Only after repeatedly pressing the switch off and on again have they remained “on.” Through my experience I know enough about electrical circuits to deduce that there is a loose connection somewhere.

I don’t know very much about electricity. As far as I understand it, there’s a flow of electrical current (electrons). I couldn’t design a generator. I would be able to replace a light switch, but that’s about it. My point is that I don’t need to know about electricity to turn on a light. When I press the light switch, the lights generally come on.

The concept of evolution says that living organisms tend to improve their ability to survive by becoming better adapted for survival over time. Using the parallel of the light bulb, understanding that this happens doesn’t require us to know exactly how it happens.

I’m immediately struck by the thought of extinction. (Yesterday I was reading Mo Willems story about Edwina — the dinosaur who didn’t know she was extinct — to my son; highly recommended.) Species that become extinct at first seem to be counter-examples of evolution. But when we think again, we realize that they instead provide evidence that a species won’t survive if it is not well adapted to its environment.

Another possible counter-example: Genetic weaknesses. Genetic weakness that can be produced by in-breeding (either by cultural or social practice or by design). But this again supports the general concept that evolution works more effectively when such circumstances don’t interfere.

Generally then, we can say that as time passes organisms tend to become incrementally better adapted to their environment. This is actually a much narrower conceptual risk than to accept the specific details of the evolutionary process itself.

But I believe we can even take another step away from the whole question and ask whether the principles of space and time provide a philosophical basis for the concept of evolution. (An approach I pursue in my book LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive.)

The principles of space and time show us that things will continue to exist in space if their form remains stable over time. If we think about fundamental particles and the way the stuff of the universe has persisted we can understand that stable particles and stable conglomerations of matter predominate. The same is true of living organisms. The more stable and persistent organisms, the ones that evolve, survive, and adapt, tend to predominate over time. Extreme circumstances can produce counter-examples, but then statistics will take over again and evolution will tend to win out over time.

While it’s helpful to be skeptical, methodical, and careful, and remember that we know a lot less than we’d like to think we do; we also perhaps know a lot more than we sometimes care to imagine.

I’m not happy today. I don’t know why. But perhaps this is a good place to begin in thinking about the philosophy of happiness. I was going to write about the philosophy of depression, but that seemed too, well, depressing.

Arthur Schopenhauer (by all accounts, generally not a happy man) had this to say on the subject: “Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.” Goethe expresses a similar idea, but more gently: “Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.”

Happiness of course is a mental construct or concept that we use to describe a set of complex feelings, and this concept forms part of a spectrum that spans all degrees of happiness and unhappiness. As Carl Yung put it: “The word “happiness” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”

John Belushi said more or less the same thing as Jung — “I guess happiness is not a state you want to be in all the time” — but he pushes back toward the pertinent question of happiness as something that may have a purpose.

The study of happiness has received a lot of attention recently. But, as with most matters of psychological interest, those doing the questioning tend to be psychologists. One such study from a few years ago brings focus to the eternally false expectation that things will make us happy; returning to Goethe, we like to chase the ball of happiness, but when we catch up to it, we kick it off again. 

(I had a striking example of this in my personal life just last week. When we were expecting our first child three years ago, my wife and I discovered that we both carry a gene mutation for cystic fibrosis. When we became pregnant again over the summer, we therefore knew that there was a one in four chance that the baby would have cystic fibrosis. The worry about this consumed us. Yet last week when the tests showed that the baby would be fine, the all-pervasive happiness of the relief was quite short-lived. Here I am again, already depressed about something else.)

The problem with the study of happiness from a psychological perspective is that it tends to reveal more about the symptoms of happiness than it does about the purpose of happiness. To understand that purpose, we need to consider the concept from first principles.

Back to Schopenhauer. His definition of happiness as freedom from pain is compelling, because it is neat. “[Pain] is the positive element of life,” he says. A thought we can happily unpack to mean that pain compells us to do things that help us survive.

This is certainly part of the puzzle. We evolved pain receptors to help us refrain from doing things that would damage the living organism. And psychological (emotional) pain is simply an extension of the same phenomenon. To the extent that we can anticipate painful situations we tend to try to avoid them.

But it is surely not the whole answer. What Schopenhauer sought to exises from our analysis by referring all of happiness back to pain, was the potential for a positive purpose for happiness.

Camus evoked the concept of harmony to describe happiness: “But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?”

As life evolved, the more successful organisms would have been those that were able to effectively balance the functions within the living organism itself and between the organism and the outside world. Every evolutionary step or change succeeds or fails according to whether it brings about a more advantageous balance for the organism. This tendency toward balance reveals itself in all kinds of ways — the physical form of the organism (the giraffe’s long neck balanced with the height from the ground of its food), and the internal functioning of the organism (the short life span of the fruit fly, for instance, which allows it to mutate and adapt rapidly).

In human beings, the mental function takes this process of tending toward balance to a new place. Our mental functions, our processing of impulses and conscious decision making, tends to improve our ability to survive if it helps us to achieve balance. Happiness, however fleeting, is the evolutionary reward for achieving harmony and balance — a good meal, a pleasant experience, making love — all of these things produce the chemical reponse that we call happiness so that we will tend to want to do them again. Happiness is evolution’s form of positive feedback.

Why then have so many great minds decided that happiness is merely pain waiting to happen? Bertrand Russell perhaps can shed some light on this: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

 

 

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The bra, apparently, turns 100 years old today. Apart from a few dicey years when the poor things were getting burned left and right, the bra has enjoyed a pretty robust first century. That most women now wear a bra on a day-to-day basis seems unremarkable; but that easy conclusion struck me differently when I saw the news today of its relative youthfulness as a piece of clothing. It caused me to wonder about the philosophy of our societal relationship with the bra.

I’ve been told that women wear bras for two reasons: To present their breasts in a way that enhances or optimizes their appearance, and to support their breasts so that they will not sag as much or as early in later life.

Like so many of our practices in a society, wearing bras modifies our concept of what is normal or natural by revising or reassociating our concept of what is normal or natural.

The process is something like this: People draw an association between perky breasts and youthfulness and beauty. This is a reflection of an innate conceptual process that has evolved over the development of the species: sexual desirability during the period of prime fertility. Some person devises a mechanism (the bra) to enhance, both short term and long term, the perkiness and shapeliness of a woman’s breasts. Society extends the innate concept of perky breasts being associated with desirability during peak fertility. Now perky breasts become associated with desirability, regardless of peak fertility. We have coopted the innate concept and transformed it into an explicit abstract concept.

Does this kind of transformation serve society or the species?

That’s a much more difficult philosophical question to answer. One could say that it serves neither society nor the species because the conceptual link we’ve to some extent manufactured or extended between perkiness of breast and sexual desirability clouds and inhibits the functioning of the innate concept. Crudely put, it messes with the hardwiring of sexual desirability with fertility.

I don’t want to pick on the bra. It’s the same with so many other aspects of society and in so many areas. Us men shave our beards, clip our nose hair, or wear toupes. Men and women dye their hair. We often engage in physical exercise to enhance our physical appearance. The list is practically endless.

What’s interesting is that consciousness, almost like a disease, creates a rampant, chaotic and overwhelming system of concepts that control our lives and our responses to a degree that often shrouds or obliviates our innante reactions and responses.

As an adaptive mechanism, consciousness has certainly been an enormously powerful mental function; one that has permitted humans to further the ends of the human species with incredibly effective results. We live in naturally inhospitable areas in comfort. We have removed innumerable threats from natural predators, sickness and disease. We have systems for harnessing natural resources. We organize our societies in ways that permit the vast majority to benefit from the highly specialized work of the few, each of us contributing work in our specialty.

But all of this produces layer upon layer of insulation from the innate and non-conscious operation of the species. It also allows us to wreak harm and havoc without fully understanding or while ignoring the consequences (deforestation, global warming, warfare).

In contrast, the bra perhaps seems like a relatively harmless affectation of modern society, and one which many of us, on balance, would choose to continue to live with, notwithstanding its unnatural function.

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I saw a news clip today about a New York City stockbroker assaulting a fellow spinner in a spin class (he pushed him and his bike against the wall). The reason: he was enraged by the man’s grunting.

And yesterday I was introduced to the term “Dumbfounding.” As reported in the science section of the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, has proposed that human beings have an innate and pre-rational sense of judgment about right and wrong that evolved as useful to our survival, but leaves us “dumbfounded” when our rational mind can’t explain why we feel that something is abhorrent or wrong.

I would guess that the NYC stockbroker’s ire derived from a pre-rational response; when he wakes up tomorrow he’ll wonder how he could have been so enraged as to assault another person for grunting, and get himself into so much hot water in the process.

Haidt’s hypothesis concurs with my own thinking on the origin and evolution of our moral sense. In LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive I propose that our sense of morality has been baked into our genes through evolution, and came about for the very simple reason that if we are to persist as an organsim we need to react in certain ways that will help us survive (all of which I tie to the very concrete principles that shape the universe). This also gives us a very concrete basis by which to understand and discuss our sense of morality.

But upon reading about the poor stockbroker and his unfortunate victim I was struck again by something that occurs to me regularly. We live in a world, in a society, that has evolved very rapidly, and evolves ever more rapidly. We are evolved but we’re less evolved than sometimes we’d like to think. We step out into the world feeling that we are equal to its challenges, but it’s like stepping out onto a moving sidewalk. Whether it’s the grunting of a fellow spin class member, or a jittery stockmarket, or a pair of dirty socks left lying on the bedroom floor, we’re not always as psychologically well-equipped as the world demands. Our rational minds have created a mental world that has a dizzying range of customs, procedures, laws, etiquette, social and workplace demands, and underneath the surface our innate urges and responses sometimes can’t keep up.