Our mirror on morality by AC Grayling

AC Grayling (30th April 2008 New Scientist) suggests that study of brain functions may refute moral relativism (the view that there are no universal truths about what is right and wrong.) Maybe the basis of morality is shared by all humans. Studies by neurologists show that mirror neurons (eg. when someone yawns, we involuntarily yawn) may give us the ability to recognise what helps or distresses others. The ultimate basis for moral judgement may be hard-wired - and therefore universal. If this is so, even when customs differ, fundamental morality does not; and if two societies differ over what they consider to be moral, one of them must just be plain wrong.

Current research in neurology appears to be addressing one of the most vexing problems in moral philosophy: the problem of relativism. What neurology reveals about brain function might already have refuted relativism and established the ground for saying that the basis of morality is shared by all humans. If so, this is a truly major result.

Moral relativism is the view that there are no universal truths about what is right and wrong, but rather that what counts as such in each different society is determined by its own traditions, beliefs and experience. Since these can differ markedly among societies, it follows that different societies can have quite opposite views about what is right. And this, says the relativist, means there is no objective ground for deciding between them.

This view seems compelling when we consider such contrasts as different societies' views about, say, polygamy or homosexuality. The motive for relativism is the worthy one of avoiding the arrogance of cultural imperialism as practised by dominant societies in the past, as they colonised other peoples and imposed moralities upon them. Relativists wish to assert the equal dignity and validity of different societies and their moral outlooks, even when they clash with one's own.

The neurological research that undermines moral relativism concerns the function of mirror neurons in the brain. Located in the motor cortex, mirror neurons activate in sympathy with what their owner perceives in the activity and experience of others. When we see someone else acting in a particular way - smiling, yawning, weeping or grimacing, for example - the neurons associated with these actions in one's own motor cortex fire in response. Their activation provides a model of what that person is experiencing, giving us a form of direct insight into other people's states of mind.

This strongly suggests that the ability to understand others, read their intentions, interpret their emotional states, predict their behaviour and respond appropriately - the very basis of social capacity itself, and thus of morality - is linked to the involuntary modelling of others that mirror-neuron activity makes possible.

Some researchers hypothesise that malfunction in these neurons might be a factor in autism, one of whose major symptoms is the inability to engage socially with others. There are also strong links between mirror neurons and language capacity, humans' chief social tool.

The essential point is that mirror neurons underwrite the ability to recognise what helps or distresses others, what they suffer and enjoy, what they need and what harms them. This means that the ultimate basis for moral judgement is hard-wired - and therefore universal. So even when customs differ, fundamental morality does not; and if two societies differ over what they consider to be moral, one of them must just be plain wrong.

Green beards maybe made us religious

A trait doesn't have to have a direct survival benefit for it to be selected for by evolution. So long as it sends a signal to the opposite sex that you have gametes that are worth getting hold of, your reproductive fitness will increase and the trait will be selected for. It's called the Green-Beard Effect, after the popular description by Dawkins in his 1979 book “The Selfish Gene” (although the idea was first proposed in 1964). All it takes is that the genes that create the signal are linked to the genes that code for something that enhances your quality as a prospective mate. Sounds unlikely, but it can happen in theory (Janse & van Ballen, 2006) and seems to happen in practice (in Californian side-blotched lizards, for example)

What on earth does this have to do with religion? Well, Prof James Dow (an Anthropologist at Oakland University) has been modelling the evolution of religion, and in particular trying to figure out why one particularly peculiar feature of religion should have evolved: the propagation of beliefs about the world that conflict with reality.

As Dow points out:

One feature of religion that seems to stand out as non-adaptive is the belief in the existence of an unseen, unverifiable world. The existence of gods, spirits, and the like cannot be verified by the senses. A belief in them makes no sense from an common evolutionary point of view. The animal whose conception of the world is out of touch with reality should be eliminated by natural selection. The one whose mental images correspond most closely to the real environment should be one to survive. The primary problem of explaining how religion has evolved through natural selection is the problem of explaining the belief in unreal things.

But such a belief system could evolve if it has beneficial effect on social organisation. So he set out to investigate in an agent based model whether communication of unreal information (i.e. religious beliefs) could ever confer a survival benefit. Essentially, the model allowed for the co-evolution of culture and genetics, to see if communicating unreal information could help the agents get better at communicating real information.

The bottom line is it didn’t. No matter how Dow tweaked it, the agents who communicated unreal information died out. But that changed when he added the Green-beard effect. This suggests that only way that communication of religious beliefs could evolve is if it is a marker of something else that signifies increased reproductive fitness. Dow explains:

It is clear from the simulation runs shown here that the key to religion's evolution is in the greenbeard effect, the ability to attract adherents. The evogod simulation does not explain why people will give benefits to others who proclaim a reality that is unverifiable. However, it tells us that if they do give such benefits, the biological evolution of religious behavior can occur.

Commitment theory takes this idea one step further and proposes that the reason that people do give such benefits is that they perceive religious folk to be more trustworthy. The results of the evogod simulation support this theory; however they do not completely eliminate other motives for commitment. The attractiveness of unreal communicators might be due to their ability to imitate a kind parent (Kirkpatrick 2005), or to the display of some sexually attractive physical or mental ability, or all three of these types of attractiveness might be in play. The simulation does clearly show that religion cannot evolve simply by stimulating cultural communication. It has to have a quality that causes others to direct communication toward the the person who communicates the most religious ideas. It suggests further research on the motives people have for communicating with, and giving benefits to communicators of religious ideas.

Dow, J. (2008). Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11(2), 2.

Jansen, V.A., van Baalen, M. (2006). Altruism through beard chromodynamics. Nature, 440(7084), 663-666. DOI: 10.1038/nature04387

Einstein: religion is "childish superstition"

Sometimes Einstein is put forward as an example of an eminent scientist who was also a religious believer. What he did or did not believe has literally been the subject of books (Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion) , as well as websites and magazine articles. What he actually believed is complex and changed over time, but seems essentially to have been a vague spiritual feeling linked to strong humanist values (no life after death, no active deity).

But today there's something new to add to the mix: a letter he wrote in 1954 (a year before he died) to the philosopher Eric Gutkind. According to The Guardian, the letter has been in a private collection for 50 years, unknown to historians who have researched Einstein's life.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

More grist to the mill!

MPs set to allow hybrid embryo research

It looks like it will be a victory for humanist ethics in parliament over scientific research on embryos, according to a survey of MPs conducted by The Guardian. The Catholic Church has been mounting a campaign to pressure Catholic MPs to reject the Human Embryology and Fertilisation bill - despite the fact that they are a bit shaky on what, exactly, the ethical problem is (see Catholics on human-animal hybrids: basically they're yucky).

According to James Randerson, reporting in The Guardian:

The MPs polled by the Guardian were also in favour of three controversial aspects of the new bill, which has exposed deep divisions on ethical questions about genetic testing, parenthood and the sanctity of human embryos.

In March, Gordon Brown was forced to allow his party a free vote on these under pressure from three catholic cabinet ministers Paul Murphy, Ruth Kelly and Des Browne, who reportedly planned to vote against the government.

He goes on to say:

Many MPs are appalled by the way senior Catholic figures have tried to influence the debate. Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, felt the comments of Cardinal Keith O'Brien in his Easter sermon which likened the hybrid embryo proposals to "research of Frankenstein proportions" were offensive. "Imagine the way we would feel if a Muslim cleric tried to dictate how we vote," Salter said.

Which serves to further underline the point regularly found in surveys - that the average person wants religious authorities to stop interfering in politics. It looks like this attempt has backfired on the Catholic Church - perhaps they'll learn from it.

For the BHA perspective, take a look at The Embryology Bill: The BHA's Andrew Copson on BBC News 24.

Scientists Know Better Than You--Even When They're Wrong

by SciAm
Thanks to Tim DiChiara for the link via RichardDawkins.net

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-know-better-than-you&sc=rss

Scientists Know Better Than You--Even When They're Wrong
Why fallible expertise trumps armchair science—a Q&A with sociologist of science Harry Collins

If you take scientists at their word, human-induced climate change is well underway, evolution accounts for the diversity of life on Earth and vaccines do not cause autism. But the collective expertise of thousands of researchers barely registers with global warming skeptics, creationist movie producers and distrustful parents.

Why is scientific authority under fire from so many corners?

Sociologist Harry Collins thinks part of the answer lies in a misunderstanding of expertise itself. Like Jane Goodall living among the chimps, Collins, a professor at Cardiff University in Wales, has spent 30 years observing physicists who study gravitational wave detection—the search for faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime. He's learned the hard way about the work that goes into acquiring specialized scientific knowledge.

In a recent book, Rethinking Expertise, he says that what bridges the gap—and what keeps science working—is something called "interactional expertise".

Collins spoke recently with ScientificAmerican.com about his view of expertise; what follows is an edited transcript of that interview.

How did we get to the point where scientific authority is so easily challenged?
The high point of the authority of science was perhaps the 1950s. In those days one would see on the popular television programs a scientist wearing a white coat with license to speak authoritatively on almost any subject to do with science—and sometimes on subjects outside of science. But things go wrong in the progress of science and technology. If you see the space shuttle crashing, you can see that these guys in the white coats don't always get it right.

When you discover the jagged edges of science, you start to think, wait a minute—maybe scientists' views aren't quite as immaculate as we thought they were. Maybe ordinary people's views can weigh a little more. And I think there's some truth to this, but not as much as some of my colleagues think.

Having studied esoteric sciences from the outside, I know that ordinary people have no chance of grasping the details of them.

What's wrong with ordinary people weighing in on scientific subjects?
It is easy to imagine all sorts of horror stories if we abandon the idea that there are some people who know what they are talking about and some who don't.

Most scientific disputes that concern the public are at the cutting edge—the place where things are not completely certain. Examples are the safety of vaccines, the true importance of global warming, the effects of farming genetically modified food crops, and so forth.

Even now, in the U.K., the relatively dangerous disease of measles is becoming endemic as a result of a widespread consumer revolt against the MMR vaccine about 10 years ago. Parents believe that even though doctors assure them that vaccines are safe, those doctors may be wrong. Therefore, the parents think they are entitled to throw their own judgment into the mix. Quite a few social scientists are pushing this trend hard.

Why should the average person acknowledge that scientists might know better than they do?
It is possible to make an argument from the common sense idea that scientists know what they're talking about because they've spent much more time looking at the areas of the natural sciences that we're interested in. Normally, if somebody's spent a lot of time in an area, you'd tend to take their opinion as more valuable.

We believe that you can work out whether someone has the right scientific expertise and experience to make some sensible contribution to scientific debates. It doesn't mean they're right.

What you have to do is not sort out the people who are right and wrong; what you have to sort is the people who can make sensible contributions from those who can't. Because once you stop doing that, things go horribly wrong.

That seems like it cuts both ways. Are evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins fanning the flames in the way that they engage creationists?
Once scientists move outside their scientific experience, they become like a layperson. I'm not a religious person, but if I want to talk religion with someone, it won't be a scientist; it will be with someone who understands theology (who might be either an atheist or a believer). I believe people like Dawkins give atheism a bad name because their arguments are so crude and unsubtle. They step outside their narrow competences when they produce these arguments.

In our book we too criticize creationism's pretensions to be a science, but we don't treat it as a trivial problem. Our critiques of creationism are: (a) that it stops scientific progress in its tracks by answering questions in a way that closes off further research; and (b) that there is no real attempt to meld the approach with the existing methods of science. We know that the creationists say this is not true, but their hypotheses relate to books of obscure origin or to faith rather than to observation.

How do you distinguish the people who can and can't contribute to a specialized field?
The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can't express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge.

Is this where interactional expertise comes into play?
Interactional expertise is one of the things that broadens the scope of who can contribute. It's a little bit wider than the old "people in the white coats" of the 1950s, but what it's not is everybody. (Within science, lots of people have interactional expertise, because science wouldn't run without it.)

You did experiments to test your theory of expertise. What did you find?
The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group—but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group—you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.

If it's the case, then you're going to speak as fluently as someone who has been engaged in the practices. And if you can speak as fluently, then you're indistinguishable from an expert. It's what I like to call "walking the talk". You still can't do the stuff, but you can make judgments, inferences and so on, which are on a par.

We picked color-blind people because they've spent their whole lives immersed in a community talking about color. So we thought color-blind people should be indistinguishable from color-perceivers when asked questions by a color-perceiver who knew what was going on. And we demonstrated that that was in fact the case. Now we're planning to do another imitation test on the congenitally blind to see if they can perform as well as the color-blind.

You also found that gravitational wave physicists had a hard time distinguishing you from one of their own in a written test.
I thought it's my duty to put myself through this test and see if anybody can tell. I'm not claiming my interactional expertise is really good enough to pass for a physicist, so I had to put brackets around it. There were no mathematical questions allowed. But they did involve some pretty damn difficult questions, which I'd never encountered before and which really gave me a fright. And it turned out I could work out the answers.

You've spent the past 30 years studying gravitational wave physicists. What do you like about them?
They're my ideal kind of academic. They're doing a slightly crazy, almost impossible project, and they're doing it for purely academic reasons with no economic payoff.

I consider myself an academic who's made the bargain that I want to have an interesting life, and I'm prepared to have a little less status and a little less money as a result.

Nice guys finish first - in group selection, at least

Multilevel selection - the idea that evolution acts at several organisational levels - is a controversial idea that has been put forward to explain the evolution of behaviours like altruism (McAndrew, 2002). Although theoretically plausible, the controversy rages over whether it is of any practical importance, given that it will only work under restricted circumstances (large numbers of small groups that do not interbreed, Nowak 2006). David S Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral, is a champion of the idea that group selection can explain the evolution of religious behaviour.

Rick O'Gorman, in a paper co-authored by Wilson, has taken a look at the implications of multilevel selection for evolution of human behaviour (O'Gorman 2008). The paper looks at some of the evidence for this in the interactions between 'intrinsics' (people who value intimacy, community and personal growth) and extrinsics (people who value money, beauty and popularity). In head to head competition in economic games, extrinsics tend to outcompete intrinsics because they're more likely to act selfishly to get what they want. But when you put people together in groups of different compositions, and make the groups compete, the result's more complex. Groups with high numbers of intrinsics do better than those with high numbers of extrinsics, but within a group, the extrinsics still win out.

By itself, this doesn't mean that nice guys win. Within each group, the extrinsics are more successful, so they would reproduce faster (especially if the groups are not reproductively isolated). If group-selection did drive altruism, intrinsics would need to evolve ways to detect and punish these 'free-riders' - preferably by excluding them from the group.

So the authors review the evidence to show that this is exactly what happens:

... there is an extensive body of research showing that humans are willing to punish free-riders in public-goods situations. Moreover, it appears that humans will do so, even when the act of punishing is itself costly. Such altruistic punishment is evoked in controlled lab studies, where participants are anonymous to each other and do not interact more than once with any other participant, avoiding the possibility for reputation to be developed and for signals of future intent.

They go on to talk about the power of gossip as a tool to identify and share information about free riders, and the fear that people have of being gossiped about or ostracised.

They also look at the evidence for 'group-functional behaviour' - in other words, evidence that humans have evolved for optimal performance in a group. For example, there is some evidence that groups can make better decisions than the same numbers of individuals. The ground here is decidedly dodgy, though. It's clear that humans can do some tasks better in groups, but that doesn't require group-level selection. In fact, much of the optimisation for group behaviour could be learned, since all the test subjects will have been brought up in a a society dominated by interactions within groups.




McAndrew, F.T. (2002). New Evolutionary Perspectives on Altruism: Multilevel-Selection and Costly-Signaling Theories. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(2), 79-82. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8721.00173

Nowak, M.A. (2006). Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation. Science, 314(5805), 1560-1563. DOI: 10.1126/science.1133755

O'Gorman, R., Sheldon, K.M., Wilson, D.S. (2008). For the good of the group? Exploring group-level evolutionary adaptations using multilevel selection theory.. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 12(1), 17-26. DOI: 10.1037/1089-2699.12.1.17

Religion requires imagination

Why are so many humans religious? Some evolutionary psychologists (like Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool) have argued that it evolved, possibly via group-level selection, as a way of increasing reproductive fitness by promoting co-operation. Other, like Dawkins, argue that it's an evolutionarily neutral by-product of brain functions that evolved for other purposes.

At a conference last September Maurice Bloch, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, has taken an archaeological perspective and made a strong argument for the by-product theory (the proceedings of the conference have just been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B - so it's bona fide news, OK!).

Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died. (ABC News)

Basically, Bloch's idea is that once humans developed the power to imagine others in 'transcendental roles', it transformed the nature of human society - and brought religion along with it. Renfrew et al, in their commentary, say:

The transcendental social element requires the ability to identify and interact with each other not in terms of how people appear to the senses at any particular moment but as if they were something else: astronomers, magicians, priests or transcendental beings. According to Bloch, it is in those transcendental roles where the fundamental difference between human and, for instance, chimpanzee sociability lies. Moreover, the fundamental operation that underpins and makes possible this transcendental element of human sociality and by extension the phenomenon of religion is the capacity for imagination. Thus, it is only through understanding the neurological evidence for the development of this capacity and of its social implications that we will account for religious-like phenomena.

Once this is in place, the extension to imaginary roles of dead people and gods is inevitable:

"The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead, ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of essentialised groups," writes Bloch. "Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental." (ABC News)

This is why, according to Bloch, "religion is nothing special but is central":

Bloch argues that religion is only one manifestation of this unique ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.

"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society."

"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he says. (New Scientist)

It's not likely to be a full explanation - it seems likely that a theory of mind is also required to imagine the existence of supernatural agents.

Chris Frith of University College London, a co-organiser of a "Sapient Mind" meeting in Cambridge last September, thinks Bloch is right, but that "theory of mind" – the ability to recognise that other people or creatures exist, and think for themselves – might be as important as evolution of imagination.

"As soon as you have theory of mind, you have the possibility of deceiving others, or being deceived," he says. This, in turn, generates a sense of fairness and unfairness, which could lead to moral codes and the possibility of an unseen "enforcer" - God – who can see and punish all wrong-doers. (New Scientist)

But the basic conclusion remains - religion need not serve any useful function to have evolved. It could just be a by-product of our power to imagine.