"I don't want to die in a nuclear war"...

...well, who does?

Happy Darwin Day!

Danger: Unreadable Flying Objects

We've had a rather nice, quiet time here in the OD household over the holidays so far (though it's been a bit too drearily rainy outside).

It's been good to withdraw from the world a bit, perhaps except for catching up on the latest terrorist panic: is it just me, or is it a particularly sad comment on the state of the world when one of ABC News's biggest recent scoops seems to be publicising pictures of 'a singed pair of underwear with a packet of powder sewn into the crotch'?

Our retreat into the domestic cave has been accompanied by trying to focus on some of the real-world writing we need to do, hence the relative hiatus in any light blogging recently.

Which may continue; we'll see.

But I felt the urge to break radio silence tonight while reading Steven Shapin's lengthy LRB article on Darwin Year 2009.

Not after reading the article, I stress, since I haven't finished it yet.

I may not ever, in fact.

An distant early warning blip sounded in my mind when visitors to the Galapagos were referred to as 'tourists making scientific haj'; a few more followed when Shapin recounts the majority of Darwin Year events in a tone of condescending mockery.

The alarms rang a bit more loudly when Shapin--apparently approvingly--offers another quote:

‘Every age moulds Charles Darwin to its own preoccupations, but the temptation is hard to resist,’ Philip Ball noted in the Observer. ‘In the early 20th century, he became a prophet of social engineering and the free market. With sociobiology in the 1970s, Darwinism became a behavioural theory, while neo-Darwinist genetics prompted a bleak view of humanity as gene machines driven by the selfish imperatives of our DNA.’

Beyond question, the first part is generally right, and, indeed, Darwinism has been misused in all kinds of ways.

Still, the sweeping reference to 'bleak' views of humanity and the 'selfish' imperatives of DNA caused me to nearly throw the paper across the room. I'm used to people making this reference who haven't managed to get past the title of Dawkins's 1976 book, but Shapin is a historian of science, so I'm assuming he has.

But one of the underlying aims of Shapin's article is to reveal the shocking true agenda of many of the Darwin enthusiasts over the last year--Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett prominent among them--i.e., to promote atheism.

Which Shapin apparently thinks is foolish, judging by his sarcasm:

The International Darwin Day Foundation, acting as publicist and clearing house for hundreds of the year’s global events, is administered by the American Humanist Association, a secularist pressure group which defends the civil liberties of the endangered species of the American godless, and hands out annual awards to its chosen ‘Humanist of the Year’ (past winners include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker). For the Darwin Day Foundation (whose advisory board includes Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker), as for other sponsors, Darwin Day is less about a historical figure than an occasion for extending versions of scientific materialism and rationalism to ever new cultural domains, encouraging an appreciation of ‘science and the role of humans in developing the Scientific Method that permitted the acquisition of an enormous amount of verifiable scientific knowledge, that is now available to modern humans’.

One can almost hear the phrase 'militant atheist' echoing in the background.

Shapin raises the the hoary old straw-man 'panadaptationist' critique (originating with Stephen Jay Gould) of Dawkins, Dennett and Pinker which verges into his letting us know that he Disapproves Strongly of evolutionary psychology (EP); unfortunately, he demonstrates as much subtle knowledge of that as he does of The Selfish Gene, summed up by his quip that it basically means 'Nature beats up nurture all the time.'

I know that EP's not everybody's thing; it's a wide-ranging field, most of it quite interesting and sensible, some of it a bit batty.

But I happen to be reading a fair amount of EP and EP-related material at the moment while preparing for an article that The Wife and I are working on, and--as is all too often the case--it bears little resemblance to the caricatured intellectual Gleichschaltung Shapin (like others) depicts.

(I may be feeling a bit touchy on this point, as I found out only yesterday about the death a few months ago of Margo Wilson, who, with her husband Martin Daly, was a pioneer in EP perspectives, especially on homicide. Her work has been important and inspirational to me over the last decade or so, and it is careful, subtle and methodologically rigorous...like most of the serious academic work in EP that I've read, in fact.)

At about this point, Steven Pinker is referred to as 'EP Thought Leader'.

At about this point, I could not resist throwing the paper across the room.

I don't have the energy to deal with this at any further length. I'm used to reading (or rather avoiding) this kind of crap at Comment is Futile, but I hold the LRB (perhaps naively) to a higher standard.

I'm almost tempted to make a new year's resolution: only to read and comment on things in my personal life that make me happy.

Judging by recent experience this would, however, mean that I would mostly be writing about The Wife, horror films, heavy metal and handguns.

And I'm not sure how much of that you all could all stand.

What's in a name?

Susan Blackmore observes that along with genes and 'memes', there is a new 'replicator' of information:

There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying machinery: computers and servers rather than brains. But are all three critical stages carried out by that machinery?

What to call it, as Boing-Boing asks:

She doesn't have a name for it, but it's related to the difference she sees between memes and digital information.

And New Scientist even has a contest.

Well...denes, obviously. (Or maybe 'demes' if you want to vary the variant rather than the original.)

Darwin for afters

Someone just dropped by having found us while looking for 'Darwin themed desserts'. (Yeah, we get an astounding amount of visitors looking for tasty treats here. They must be so disappointed.)

Anyway, may I recommend, perhaps, glazed beetle?

Or some crunchy frog?

Saints and scholars

Thank you, Guardian, for getting it so wrong, today of all days....

'Secular saint' is up there with 'evangelical atheist' amongst my least favourite terms.

For a corrective, see Dale's evaluation of Darwin's writing, which concludes:

Then again, maybe Charles Darwin could not help but write so eloquently. He was, after all, not a saint.

Exactly.

‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’

As we have for the past couple of years, we join some of our friends in marking the 200th birthday of one of the more remarkable individuals our species has brought forth, Charles Darwin. (And, this year, we'd suggest you also raise a glass to the equally aged Abraham Lincoln, who was not only a remarkable primate himself but who has long been especially regarded -- by one of us -- as a fellow Illinoisan.)

I have little to add to the general festivities, other than, perhaps, to again post this image of Darwin, which I like since it shows him a bit younger and less austere than most portraits.


He's sans beard, you'll note, but the extraordinary sideburns hint at the (ahem) tangled bank to come.

There will be countless articles on Darwin today, but I thought one at the New York Times by Nicholas Wade was worthwhile.

It concludes:

Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”

Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.

And, once again, here's the closing sentence from the Origin of Species, which I always like to imagine being read in the voice of James Earl Jones.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

From Jacques Demy to Charles Darwin in nine paragraphs

After the drama and violence of yesterday's post, here's something more soothingly emotional to celebrate the end of the old, as well as the beginning of the new year. We all deserve it, for 365 days is a long time and not all of those days were happy. Still, all told, 2008 was a good 'un for us (which is why we are in absolute agreement with Harald Martenstein, who is reluctant to let the old year go over at Die Zeit).

One of the several movies that we managed to watch during and after the holidays was Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I think that there is nothing in the history of cinema comparable to Demy's "films in song", which differ from the characteristic climactic musical outbursts of your ordinary (Hollywood) musical in so far as in them all dialogue is sung.

Les Parapluies is unashamedly bittersweet, as this crucial encounter between Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) -- who works in her widowed mother's twee umbrella shop -- and her boyfriend Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) -- a car mechanic who has just received his draft notice -- documents:



Now, that draft notice is nothing to joke about, as the film is set during the Algerian War, and indeed Guy later on ends up in North Africa, where he witnesses the death of his comrades and is wounded himself. The lovers' apparently vehement reaction is therefore not entirely inappropriate.

What follows, however, is not so much tragic (in a Romeo and Juliet kind of way) as sobering, in fact almost banal: while Guy is in Algeria the lovers drift apart, even though Geneviève is pregnant with his child. Her matchmaking mother, acting on the principle that time is a great healer, exploits the growing distance between the lovers (which is not least due to Guy's perfunctory correspondence). She encourages her daughter to marry a wealthy diamond merchant who, earlier in the film, fell for Geneviève at first sight. His virtue and devotion is signalled by his willingness to marry the pregnant girl despite her predicament. Guy returns from the war, briefly sinks into deepest despair but is jolted from this period of drunken debauchery by the death of his aunt (who conveniently leaves him all her belongings). He comes to terms with his loss of Geneviève, marries Madeleine, a young, sensible (though pretty) woman who has been adoring him quietly for a long time, and uses his inheritance to set up his own business.

Years later, Guy and Geneviève have a chance encounter at his petrol station:



The film is fantastically colourful and charmingly camp, but far from a poorly developed sentimental tear-jerker, as has been claimed. There is something uncannily true about Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, all technicolor frivolity notwithstanding. Yes, this is a silly boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl story but, hey, don't we all know that song?

What is most striking, however, is the calculating ruthlessness with which nearly all characters act in the film -- in a way that reminded me of far more naturalistic literary contexts, novels by Thomas Hardy or George Gissing, for example. Upward mobility is a major theme for Demy, in whose candy-coloured universe of cooing and crooning love is a very fragile thing indeed, always overshadowed by the powerful influence of human self-interest. Don't be fooled by Geneviève's pastel-coloured twinsets and ballet flats -- in evolutionary terms, the woman is a doe-eyed predator not unlike Elfride Swancourt in Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes. The mild-mannered Madeleine, too, follows a successful mating pattern of her own, unconsciously turning her passive self-abandonment into a costly signal of her general worthiness. Guy's love for her, finally, seems to be determined by a -- ultimately, I guess, reproductive -- pragmatism that is no less self-interested than his previous despondency.

Which all makes Les Parapluies of Cherbourg the perfect film to ring in the Darwin Year (and I don't mean this in a spiteful way at all). I'm convinced that it's healthy and sobering to remind ourselves at every opportunity that our grand gestures, noble emotions and high-falutin' ideals typically have very humble roots: the very basic needs and interests of the human animal, of which we, sadly, often fail to render ourselves aware.

To quote the man himself:

[W]e must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man [1871]).

On that note: have a good Hogmanay, ye animals. May your 2009 be happy, healthy and humble!

Splinter removal, part 1

It's funny when people with whom you generally agree suddenly say things that are not only wrong, but wrong in a special kind of nagging way that gets under your skin and prevents you from focusing on anything else. I've had this experience a couple of times in the last few days or so and thought that a quiet Sunday evening might be as good a time as any to finally dig these little intellectual splinters out of my finger before they get infected.

But they're on different topics, so I thought I'd split them up into two posts.

Who knows, I might even get to the second one sometime.

The most recent was just today, in fact, in the form of Nick Cohen's column 'Darwin's no help on the origin of greed'.

It's partly built around a visit to the Natural History Museum's Darwin exhibit, and about the first half of it is fine enough. But then it turns into an attack on evolutionary psychology, which is about the point where that nagging splinter broke the skin.

Look, I don't think that evolutionary psychology (or sociobiology, or behavioural ecology, or Darwinian psychology, or any other name for or variation of the field) has all the answers, and I'm well aware that there are many examples of sloppy, silly, pseudo-scientific evolutionary reasoning out there.

The thing is, most serious people who advocate some version of evolutionary thinking about human thought and behaviour would probably say the same thing.

To spare a much longer post that I'm really not up to tonight, let me just address three problems with Nick's essay. (Leaving aside the silly title, which I'm not going to blame him for, since I know that sub-editors are often to blame for such things.) Partly what's disappointing about them is that they're not even original problems, but rather pretty much smell like the usual poo flung at evolutionary psychology (EP).

First, he creates a strange straw man in which EP is portrayed as a band of mad scientists who claimed they could explain everything with a few handy theories, thereby making all other forms of knowledge obsolete. Now, while it wouldn't be hard to find a few overly enthusiastic proclamations about the potential of the field, if you've spent much time actually reading EP articles or books on specific topics, you will, actually, find a lot of fairly sober-minded and well-balanced efforts to contribute usefully to whatever topic is under study.

I know the literature on violence better than other areas of EP, and I just can't say that I've seen anything like the hubris that Cohen alleges. What I have seen a fair amount of, on the other hand, are polemics by humanities scholars and social scientists responding to EP who manage to mis-read assertions such as 'biology plays an important role in behaviour X' as something like 'biology is the only factor in behaviour X'. For some such scholars (The Wife and I have each had personal encounters of this kind), even the suggestion that something other than 'culture' (often ill-defined) or 'society' (sometimes ditto) plays any kind of significant role in making us who we are (or shapes our interaction with culture and society) is anathema.

If there's any hubris to be found, I think Nick's looking in the wrong place. He should hang out with cultural studies people more often.

Second, Cohen revives the 'just-so stories' slander against EP: i.e., the notion that evolutionary psychologists simply spin random myths about evolutionary adaptations that cannot be evaluated or weighed against other, competing theories. This is a long-standing accusation that has been addressed several times. The best refutation, however, is to actually read some serious EP writing. Like that from Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who have mainly worked on homicide and whose carefully argued, logically thought-out, theoretically consistent and relentlessly evidenced work inspires me every time I return to it.

Daly and Wilson bring me to my third problem: Cohen argues that even if EP claims are true, they are simply trite . He cites, among other things, a claim he heard an evolutionary psychologist make at some public get-together once, that 'step-parents were more likely to murder children than natural parents who shared a child's DNA' .

Clearly, what he said about comparative murder rates was right. Equally clearly, the overwhelming majority of step-parents do not murder their stepchildren. His sociobiological truth is thus no help to social workers trying to save the life of the next Baby P.

Daly and Wilson are in fact the originators of the work that Cohen's referring to. It is absolutely true that step-parental murder of children is rare (something that Daly and Wilson acknowledge); however, their findings have suggested that the per capita rate of killing of children by stepfathers is likely to be more than 100 times greater than by genetic fathers.

Is this finding 'no help' in understanding the risk factors in child muder? Really?

As to 'Baby P': there is no general theory of human behaviour that is going to allow any bureaucratic agency to always prevent whatever Bad Thing they are tasked with preventing. This is a terrible argument against pursuing further understanding of human psychology: by Cohen's standard, any knowledge which doesn't provide a foolproof solution in every situation is deemed useless.

And that doesn't make any sense to me.

Moreover, I strongly think that Cohen underestimates how even some solid, scientifically grounded banality might be a useful thing. There are some truly kooky theories out there in the humanities about what makes people think and act the way they do. Many of these are rooted in a fairly radical (though often not explicit or even conscious) cultural-constructionist paradigm.

The reassertion of a meaningful human nature is gaining traction in the humanities and social sciences (at least so far as I can judge from here, partly from the mostly open-minded responses I've received to my own contributions to the debate), and I think it has the potential to have a lot of beneficial effects. Some of them might just sound a bit like common sense. Maybe there's something...unspectacular?... about this, but given lack of earth-bound logic and abundance of exciting-but-wacky theory lurking around in some of the more esoteric regions of academia, unspectacular will do just nicely, thank you.

In short: I find that there's good and there's bad evolutionary psychology out there, but I think as carried out by its actual practitioners (none of whom actually seem to have been consulted in Cohen's essay) it is far more humble, rigorous and relevant to understanding human life than Cohen's--surprisingly slapdash--column suggests.

I'd be plenty happy for him to disagree. But only if he demonstrates that he's read some of it.

OK, that other splinter will have to stay embedded till tomorrow. G'night.

[UPDATE]: Part 2 now available.

The brain, the Buddha, and the ever-baffling David Brooks

It is hard to describe the true awfulness of David Brooks's current column in The New York Times, other than to say that it fleetingly inspired the wish that I had never learned to read. For all the problems that might have brought with it, I would at least have been spared his tortured logic, torrential non sequiturs and curious talent for combining smugness with ignorance.

It's unclear what Brooks is trying to achieve in 'The Neural Buddhists': he starts out by launching an attack on the 'militant materialism' of some 'self-confident researchers' in the natural sciences and then ends his essay by stating that he's not taking sides but merely trying to anticipate where 'the debate is headed'. In between, he doesn't actually say very much that makes sense.

Brooks kicks off his anti-materialist meanderings with references to a...novelist. I admit that I never read the Tom Wolfe essay he cites, 'Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died'. (I enjoyed The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...reading it, I mean...but haven't read anything else.)

I still haven't given it sustained attention; however, even a quick glance through it has lowered my expectations almost exponentially. Wolfe, you see, is fond of depicting scientists' views as comparable to religious dogma. Certain notions, he claims, are 'devoutly believed' by neuroscientists. Of E. O. Wilson, (or, as he dubs him, 'the new Darwin') he quips: 'no one ever believed more religiously in Darwin I than he does.'

I am not fond of such arguments.

It goes downhill from there, as Wolfe mixes real science with pseudoscience and can't even seem to keep his sciences straight. (Although he correctly notes that E.O. Wilson is a zoologist, he then identifies him as a key figure in neuroscience, and then--later--points out again that he is not a neuroscientist, as if this were some kind of revelation of a sinister scientific fraud.)

And when I see the glib association of the term 'evolutionary psychology' with the phrases 'genetic determinism' and 'hardwired to be polygamous' then I switch off pretty much immediately, as it is then apparent that the person who floats these accusations hasn't actually read much (if any) evolutionary psychology.

He even cites renowned nut-bag Michael Behe as a serious scientific critic.

Although I'm not impressed with Wolfe's knowledge about science, at least he sometimes has a way with words. The same cannot be said of Brooks's clunky prose, but that's not something I want to go into now.

No. What bothers me is that Brooks has apparently no idea what he's talking about and nonetheless gets to flaunt his ignorance in the pages of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers. (He's not the only problem on that score, obviously: why anyone wants to know what Maureen Dowd thinks about politics is beyond me.)

A favourite Brooks tactic seems to be assembling lists in which the first few items are halfway plausible but then--somewhere in the middle--he crosses the line into assertions of a very different character. It would appear that Brooks would like to think that the credit won through making a few comments that are not completely bonkers will carry him through to the end of the paragraph.

Consider his description of what he takes to be the materialist world-view (or, perhaps, just that of 'hard-core' materialism, which may or may not be Brooks's real target, it's hard to tell):

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness.

So far, not so bad, actually, even if the 'arises from' doesn't quite sound so right when it comes to atoms ('is composed of' sounds better to me, but I'll leave that one to the physicists in the audience). However, what immediately follows is this:

Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

Keep in mind, Brooks is here essentially summarising a 12-year-old essay by a novelist to describe scientific materialism.

Apart from that, all three of the last three assertions demonstrate a serious misunderstanding of materialist views that, at least as far as I can tell, are pretty mainstream.

The status and functioning of 'free will' is a vexed issue, true; however at least one fairly well-known hard-core materialist has written a whole book about its evolutionary (and very material) basis.

In any case, whatever capability we have to decide and act wilfully is going to be material in the end. (Though many people seem to have a hard time understanding this, as has been pointed out in these pages before.) This kind of free will is going to be a different one than anything based on the notion of a supernatural 'soul'--and, yes, it might be far more limited than we might hope--but to claim that materialists simply think it an 'illusion' is facile. (Of course, it is in generating clever-sounding shallowness that Brooks's true talent lies.)

Once again, the 'hard-wiring' bit is a non-starter: all serious neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is essentially interactionist, taking into account innate predispositions that can be profoundly influenced by the environment.

By stating that 'religion is an accident', Brooks hauls out that old misunderstanding that evolution is a 'random' process. Which it is not.

But he compounds the incoherence of his argument by--in the very next sentence--arguing that the 'materialist view' is that 'people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems.' (Emphasis added.)

You can't have it both ways David: either something is 'accidental' or 'evolved'.

Furthermore, there is no single materialist view of the origins of religion. Indeed, much of the debate among 'materialists' about the origins of religion is to try to comprehend whether it provided some kind of evolutionary advantage (say, to groups) or whether it is essentially a side-effect of other evolutionarily shaped capabilities and predispositions (e.g., the tendency to imbue inanimate objects with agency).

But here we see the seeds of another Brooks tactic that, over the course of his essay, grows into a big ugly weed: the creation of a strange and non-existent division between 'hard-core materialists' and some putative other group that Brooks never names. (We might call their world-view 'soft-core materialism': materialism without the naughty bits, perhaps.)

In any case, although there is disagreement among scientists about the reasons for religion, what all materialists would tend to argue, David, is that many of the core claims of religion are not true. And this is a point to which we'll have to return.

Channelling Wolfe, again, Brooks says that the central 'assertion' of what he's challenging is this: 'everything is material and "the soul is dead"'.

The various scientific research that Brooks comments on, however, is not merely based on an 'assertion': an 'assertion' is a more like a statement that starts out 'god wants us to...' or ends with '...because God/Jesus/Allah/Zeus tells me so'. The notion that the universe--and all our mental activity and experiences--is fundamentally material has rather more evidence behind it than mere assertion. (See several centuries of materialist inquiry.)

I would like to think that Brooks understands this. And indeed, he then moves on in his column to cite some empirical neurological work that, he thinks, challenges 'hard-core materialism'.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.

[Brief note to Brooks: materialism does not require thinking people are machines, 'mysterious' is not a synonym for 'supernatural' and neurons are...you guessed it...material. OK, back to the babbling.]

Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Groovy.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

OK, the amount of Pure Stupid piled up here poses a serious danger of collapsing in on itself and causing injury, so be careful.

It's not that each of Brooks's statements is all wrong; however, gathered together into an argument that supposedly challenges materialism, they suggest strongly that Brooks doesn't understand the term he's critiquing or the science that he's citing.

I will pass quickly over the comment about 'selfish genes' and the fact that it reveals that Brooks hasn't actually read the book that it is not-so-subtly referring to. I have commented on this mistake before. Quite recently, in fact. (For his part, Dale has already taken a textual baseball bat to Brooks on this point. For that and for the reference to Brooks's wisdom, I am grateful.)

Let's keep this simple: if there are 'universal moral intuitions' and 'deep instincts' that are shared among all representatives of Homo sapiens (and I think there are many good reasons to think so), then this can only be the product of a common psychology that is fundamentally material.

Certainly, they are experienced and developed according to environmental circumstances (um...which are also material), social relationships and inherited accumulations of culture. But, David, your evil 'materialists' have been talking about this for decades.

Finally, Brooks wanders into some very strange territory and turns all spiritualist. This is never a good sign. Observing that 'Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states' (whatever the fuck that means), he points to (um, materialist) research that shows how 'transcendent experiences' can be measured.

That is true, and that research sounds very interesting.

However, see if you can make any sense of the following sentence:

The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

Consider this carefully: does the ability of the brain to generate feelings mean--in any way--that it has the ability to 'transcend itself'? What does this mean?! And what of the 'larger presence' (nice word that, 'presence'...mmm...so vague, so yummy...so meaningless) that 'feels more real'.

It seems quite clear what all that research points to: the powers of the imagination.

Brooks, however, seems to forget that talking about the mental states that the brain can generate does not say anything--nope, not a damned thing--about any phenomenon outside of the brain.

This would be, you would think, be easy. A no-brainer even.

But Brooks thinks that this 'new wave of research' will not comfort 'militant atheism'. (Ah, 'militant atheism'. Another lovely term. Have we heard it before? I believe we have.)

No:

Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

It was at this point that my own brain nearly caused me to spit out my coffee this morning.

What does this mean? What does this mean? What, David, does this fucking mean?!

I'm at a loss, as 'the literature' that Brooks recommends people read ('if you want to get up to speed', he blithely and somewhat condescendingly says...David, some of us are already up to speed thank you and waving fondly to you from the passing lane) seems to have very little to do with 'neural Buddhism' and everything to do with the materialism that Brooks began his essay condemning.

Apparently based on these authors, he observes that 'certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion', namely:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions.

With certain qualifications, the first point is unobjectionable (but also not incompatible with materialism). The second point also seems sensible: and, again, appears a thoroughly materialist statement.

The third point, however, is reminiscent of Brooks's comment above about transcendence:

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love.

The first half is mostly fine (though 'sacred' is a terribly vague word): we are, obviously 'equipped' to be capable of having certain mental experiences that are emotionally power. (If we weren't, we wouldn't have them and we would not be having this discussion.)

But what does he mean when he says that these experiences lead us to 'transcend boundaries'? Which ones? How? Is he talking about connecting with a 'presence' outside the mind again? If so, what is this presence? Can he provide any proof of it?

No, outside of his own mental ouija board obviously he can't. Which leaves us in the realm of feelings, which leaves us--however flooded and drenched with love we might be--stuck in our embodied brains.

Maybe this is, you know, kind of a drag (though I'm OK with it, actually), but it seems to be reality.

And then there's this:

Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Which is all nice and inclusive and everything, but it kind of reminds me of the things I've heard stoned people say, usually at about 3 a.m. Other than that, I can only ask: if you're going to be this vague about 'God', why use that term if what you're actually talking about is the universe.

I'm baffled, moreover, about how Brooks arrived at these conclusions based on the authors he recommends.

OK, Jonathan Haidt, as I've discussed, has some questionable ideas about religion and group selection, even while he has some very interesting (and thoroughly materialistic) ones about moral psychology. (Marc Hauser--one of those on Brooks's list--has criticised Haidt for 'bad evolutionary reasoning' with regard to the former, though praises his work on the latter.) I can't imagine Brooks getting much reassurance from someone like Michael Gazzaniga, who has emphasised how much of our thought and action is automatic: the mental 'interpreter' module he posits is one that often is devoted to developing rationalisations for actions we have already taken.

Furthermore, like the others on his list, Gazzaniga and Hauser are both dyed-in-the-wool materialists when it comes to the question of where our mental processes come from. All of them, I think, would immediately note Brooks's sloppy sleight-of-hand rhetorical trick, shifting between noting feelings of transcendence and claiming some kind of factual transcendence.

Of course, those feelings of transcendence can be quite powerful.

As evidence, just look at how successfully Brooks transcends logic and sense:

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

'That was the easy debate'? Is Brooks convinced that 'the faithful' have won that debate? Easily?

Again, it is worthwhile drawing attention to a fundamentally wrong-headed tactic used here, where Brooks refers to 'people who feel the existence of the sacred'.

Feelings are one thing, and if you want to define 'sacred' as meaning something like 'the experience of awe or joy' or 'the feeling of being at one with the universe', then, yes, that is very possible and interesting and might be achieved via many routes (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll being just three of them).

But note the tricky insertion of 'existence of' in there, which makes Brooks at least sound like he's suggesting some actual connection with something outside of our skulls.

Having not defined at all the points at which he suspects science and Buddhism 'overlap', I've no idea what he's on about at this point.

But I do know that his conclusion is, by turns, both batty and bathetic:

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.

Oh, man: joining hands!? Is Brooks gunning for a Templeton Foundation grant or what?

As to the 'new movements', he may be on to something. There just might be a series of movements emphasising self-transcendence (whatever that means). Maybe. Sometime in the future. Maybe they'll refer to themselves by some trendy label such as...oh,...I don't know...'New Age'. Yeah, that's a good one.

Keep your eyes open in case such a movement might arise. Sometime.

David Brooks certainly has his finger on the pulse of our times, I tell you.

Nonetheless, he seems to have overlooked the fact that a great deal of present-day religious movements do, in fact, put a great deal of stock in divine law and revelation. They might pose, I think, far more of a 'real challenge' to our world than the 'hard-core materialists' Brooks warns us about.

Perhaps I have been too harsh on Brooks. He does, as I've pointed out, say a few things that are not completely dumb. And he comes up with a few profound things at the very end of his column:

We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

Oh yeah. Big effects, I tell you. Well spotted, David.

And he's certainly right about one thing:

I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me.

Truer words, better evidenced, were rarely spoken.

What the hell am I doing?

One of the questions that Norm asks contributors to his profile series is 'What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate?' Like many of the other questions, that's a tough one all right.

The answer I gave -- 'To promote both the use of rational thought and the awareness that people are not fundamentally rational' -- is far from perfect (or even profound) perhaps, but it does more-or-less express what has become a guiding principle of mine.

It has at least the benefit of being both parsimonious and symmetrical, as each side of this particular outlook has a single source:

Do we need to promote rational thought? Yes, why, just look at all the crazy shit people do?!

Are we, deep down, fundamentally rational beings? No, why, just look at all the crazy shit people do?!

What is more, given the sheer volume of said crazy shit, I get to see my beliefs confirmed on a daily basis.

That is nice.

It's helpful now and then, though, to discover that at least some of the views I hold have a more firm grounding in what has succinctly and pithily described as 'earth-logic', something from which all too many people's thinking achieves escape velocity.

Last week, Elizabeth Kolbert had an interesting article in the New Yorker on a related point. In 'What was I thinking?', she looks at a couple of books on research being done on the irrational bases of behaviour. She focuses on 'behavioural economics' in the form of Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions.

I've not read it, but I like the gist of his arguments.

He claims that his experiments, and others like them, reveal the underlying logic to our illogic. “Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic,” he writes. “We all make the same types of mistakes over and over.” So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, he contends, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors.

With regard to a somewhat different sphere, 'The Moral Instinct', by Steven Pinker, appeared at the New York Times, summarising a variety of work on the issue of where people's moral beliefs come from. Confronting the assumption that morality is (simply) imposed through learning and imitation, he points to research suggesting a far more intuitive understanding of moral concepts that underlies a large part evaluating right and wrong.

At least a certain portion of culture, then, appears as a result of the effort to find post-hoc rationalisations for what we think anyway. (That certainly explains a lot of blogging...)

Like a lot of Pinker's writing, the article is a mixture of effective summary, brilliant insight and sometimes careless quips. (For instance: I'm not convinced that arguments about the environmental impact of, say, S.U.V.s are necessarily based on personal moral abhorrence about 'over-indulgence'. One does not need moral priggishness to critique personal wastefulness, merely an understanding that individual behaviour multiplied by hundreds of millions of individuals can have an enormous impact.)

Also like a lot of Pinker's writing, it is enormously compelling. He observes:

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

One of the researchers mentioned by Pinker is Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a curious article at Edge: 'Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion'. I say 'curious', because its first part (up to about page six on the printed version) is a fascinating and convincing look at the intuitive nature of moral judgements and the unconscious causation of most behaviour whereas its second half is a much less convincing critique of 'New Atheism' .

This is one of the best bits, at least with regard to the topic I'm discussing here:

Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. You can't understand the river of fMRI studies on neuroeconomics and decision making without embracing this principle. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds.

Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week. And I do agree with Marc Hauser that these moral intuitions require a lot of computation, which he is unpacking.

Hauser and I mostly disagree on a definitional question: whether this means that "cognition" precedes "emotion." I try never to contrast those terms, because it's all cognition. I think the crucial contrast is between two kinds of cognition: intuitions (which are fast and usually affectively laden) and reasoning (which is slow, cool, and less motivating).

And there's another conclusion that is also important:

The basic idea is that we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation. (Emphasis added)

And this, I think is a key point: our psychologies are about use, not truth.

Haidt's article is fairly lengthy, as are the responses to it by David Sloan Wilson, Michael Sherman, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and Marc Hauser. So, this posting is an entirely too brief summary of what that discussion is all about.

Much of that discussion focuses on the much weaker part of Haidt's paper, where he tries to apply his empirical conclusions to the 'New Atheism'.

I'll simply direct you to the responses by Myers and Harris on that topic.

But I also think that Haidt's efforts to link religiosity to the current effort by some people to rehabilitate 'group selection' are unconvincing.

Hauser makes a very good point about this:

This is bad evolutionary reasoning, and the kind of speculation that ultimately led Gould and Lewontin to have a field day with loose just-so stories. But there is more. Just because there is variation doesn’t mean it will be selected. It has to be heritable variation. One has to show that the belief systems are genetically passed on in some way, or one has to argue for cultural selection, which is an entirely different affair, at least at the level of mechanism and timing of change. I don’t see any evidence that the observed variation in beliefs is heritable in a genetic sense. (Emphasis added)

Neither do I, and there are other problems with group selection in the sense that Wilson and others seem to be trying to revive. This is not a new spat: Geoff made some good observations about another Dawkins-Wilson tiff on a similar topic last year.

(Hauser's point about heritability is also germane, of course, to Gregory Clark's recent speculations about the genetic basis of capitalism. I commented here, here, and here.)

It seems clear to me that while Haidt is right to point out the benefits that might accrue to those who are well integrated into their communities, he is mistaking those benefits as being purely religious in nature. (This is partly what Myers rebukes him for.)

Moreover (and this comes out in Sam Harris's response), Haidt seems to be basing his view of religion largely (or maybe even exclusively, as far as his empirical evidence goes) on the relatively contained, civilised, reformed -- in short, tamed -- version that you find in some parts of the modern world and not the less cheerful versions of it so common in much of the past and present.

Finally, I think the issue of 'benefit' (are religious people 'happier') is a different -- and far less interesting -- one than that of 'truth' (do gods exist). It's mainly the latter question that the recent best-selling atheist authors have confronted; however, even on the issue of the former one, Haidt's view of religion seems oddly one-sided.

Anyway, the topic of intuitive judgements seems difficult to escape these days.

Just this morning I ran across Momus using Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink to think about the great deal of information we can gain from the briefest of impressions:

Gladwell calls this "thin-slicing" and explains that "as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience". This might sound lazy, but there's something rather elegant -- and sometimes startlingly acute -- about it. "In a psychological experiment, normal people given fifteen minutes to examine a student's college dormitory can describe the subject's personality more accurately than his or her own friends." It's why I always scribble down my first impressions of a new city within minutes of arriving. It's not just that first impressions are lasting, they're also some of the most penetrating thin-slices you'll ever get. "Reality", said Willem de Kooning, "is a slipping glimpse".

And our minds present us a view of that reality (in most cases) that is useful rather than truthful.

Finally: Some digging around has brought up a couple of very interesting-looking articles on this topic by John Bargh -- whom Haidt mentions -- that I've not managed to read yet: 'The Unbearable Automaticity of Being' (pdf) and 'What Have We Been Priming All these Years?' (pdf).

What all of these insights mean for topics of interest at this blog -- namely, the study of history and literature -- is a challenging question.

Last year, in 'The Limits of Culture?', I at least tried to make a start on thinking about how evolutionary psychology might be integrated into historical studies with regard to the topic of violence. (The article, by the way, is FREE for download. I mention this only because articles in most academic journals are not...and also because, as Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the opening paragraphs of her New Yorker article, the word 'free' has a profound affect on the human psyche. I'm trying to start a stampede... Also note: occasionally, the IngentaConnect site seems to pitch a fit and either never load or tell you that the content is not there. It is. Just keep trying. Or get in touch if you can't.)

Responses to the article can be found here and here; my response to the responses here. Access to these latter bits, however, will require either that you be affiliated with some kind of institution that subscribes to such online content or that you cough up some bucks first. Sorry. As in so many things, as the man said, TANSTAAFL.

Ain't it the truth.

Being...aware.

Damian Thompson, at Counterknowledge, draws our attention to a lecture scheduled today at UCL as part of 'Islamic Awareness Week' at the university.

The talk, entitled “the Collapse of the Evolutionary Theory”, was originally booked for the Darwin Lecture Theatre but, after protests from scientists appalled at the insult to Charles Darwin’s memory, has now been moved – to another UCL lecture theatre.

Quite apart from what kind of 'awareness' this is supposed to promote (other than that of how pathetic religion can be), it is a shame that the university is now providing a platform for the scheduled speakers.

As Thompson observes:

The publicity material says: “Dr Oktar Babuna and Ali Sadun Engin are from the Science Research Foundation, which produces the Harun Yahya series of books and DVDs. They will provide an insightful view into the reality of evolution and the shaky grounds upon which several of the theories are based.”

Insightful? Let me tell you a bit about Harun Yahya. It’s the pen name of a series of writers flooding the Islamic world with books and DVDs that present Darwinism as part of a diabolical conspiracy. This is a particularly poisonous form of counterknowledge.

I have in front of me a book by Harun Yahya called The Dark Clan, which explains that evolutionary science is inspired by “a dark clan behind all kids of corruption and perversion, that controls drug trafficking, prostitution rings”. Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.

Yahya's silly-but-slickly-produced Atlas of Creation found its way to The Wife's university department last year, so I got to have a look at the book sent round the world. (Though it was apparently not sent to everyone.)

I'm happy that UCL moved the lecture out of the Darwin Lecture Theatre. It would have been a travesty.

(As previously noted, the same building contains an excellent -- if tiny -- zoology museum. They deserve your support.)

Darwin Day 2008

It is Darwin Day, once again, and I have nothing entirely new to add to the festivities.

Other than to point once again to this amazing handwritten graphic, in which Darwin helped himself to work out the beautiful, elegant and highly explanatory theory of descent with modification. As Richard Dawkins has observed, there are few theories that have given more bang for so little buck.

(Our Richard didn't put it quite so vulgarly, of course.)

It's difficult to know what to do on Darwin Day (Does one dance? Eat something special? Get drunk?), other than to mention that it is Darwin Day.

I can't think of a better thing to do than to support those humble institutions that promote real knowledge about science and evolution in particular.

One of my personal choices is the Grant Museum of Zoology in London. There is a personal connection there, as I often stay in Bloomsbury when I'm in that city and the museum is then right around the corner. It's a tiny place, crammed with skulls, bones and preserved critters of all varieties. But it's quite a lovely little oasis for quiet contemplation in a city that is increasingly hectic, superficial and loud.

They also allow you to 'adopt' a specimen. I've done this for one of their axolotls, about which I've come to feel quite attached. So please go and see him if you have a chance.

And, if you feel so inclined, become a member yourself.

Happy Darwin Day!

Evolving views

At Reason, there's an interesting survey by Ron Bailey of U.S. presidential candidates' views on evolution.

The dividing line between the two parties is relatively clear on this issue, which is not surprising. Of course, all candidates express some kind of Christian belief--if they didn't, they would not, of course, be viable candidates--so even the relatively rational Democrats seem to be adopting one variation or another of the (wrong-headed) NOMA principle.

Which is not what I'd prefer, but given the strictures of acceptable American political discourse, I'll take what I can get.

There are a few slightly disconcerting notes on the Democratic side, though. Some candidates haven't even expressed an opinion. Barack Obama, for instance. As Bailey points out, it may be that he hasn't been asked. (Christopher Hitchens, however, recently took a look at the church to which Obama belongs and found enough grounds for concern.)

Trying to combine religious belief and scientific rationalism requires intense forms of mental contortion in the best conditions: being a politician in America (where, Obama quipped, 'more people...believe in angels than they do in evolution') is far from such a context. (Note: it seems he's right.)

So, OK: I'm uncomfortable with all the well-meaning spiritualist blubber coming from the Dems, but I'm pretty sure that at least science classes would be safe with one of them at the helm.

Speaking of mental contortion, though, the comments on Bailey's article (and responses to an earlier confirmation of Ron Paul's apparent creationist leanings) are instructive.

As I've noted, there are many elements of libertarian thinking which are appealing; however, nearly all of my personal encounters with self-described libertarians have been disappointing or disturbing. (There are exceptions, such as one Dale pointed me to. He also eloquently and thoughtfully responded to my thoughts here.)

And if the comments at Reason are any thing to go by, the movement has a problem, as it seems to be substantially composed not of thoughtful rationalists but rather of naively pathological anti-staters, conspiracy theorists, committed creationists and global warming deniers. Many of them are people who also seem to spend an awful lot of time screeching at the slightest heresy and debating who may and who may not call themselves a 'libertarian'.

Which, I think, is very grown up.

So much for free-thinking rational scepticism.

Not that this is surprising: their enthusiasm for Paul's highly troubling candidature is telling enough. (Via Cliopatria and Pharyngula.)

The Democratic candidate with the best answer on the evolution issue is former Alaska senator Mike Gravel, (who has about as much chance as winning the nomination as I do):

When LiveScience asked the senator if he thought creationism should be taught in public schools, Gravel replied, "Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial....My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they've got a mental problem. We can't afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I'm concerned."

As it should be. (Though, of course, he may be right: all on its own that psychiatric bill might make any of the candidates' health-care proposals prohibitively expensive.)

The Language of Cranes

Over at richarddawkins.net there is an excellent essay by Daniel Dennett on the possibility of understanding human creativity in Darwinian terms. In it, he expands on his famous “crane” and “skyhook” metaphors. Although the essay is foremost an intervention in the cultural evolution debate, it also touches upon other important issues. Among them is the question why it is so difficult to reconcile the humanities with a Darwinist perspective – to which it also, albeit only implicitly, provides some kind of an answer.

To recall: Dennett uses the metaphor of the crane to capture the painstaking mechanisms of R[esearch] and D[evelopment] through which human creativity is tried, tested and expressed. Its processes and scope derive from a naturally sculpted mental structure and thus have a solid grounding in evolutionarily relevant functionality. “Skyhooks,” by contrast, are explanations plucked out of thin air, suspended from nowhere and hence in all likelihood metaphysical. While Darwinians adhere to the former, anti-Darwinians endorse the latter.

From this distinction derives the “mutual suspicion” that Dennett detects between “Darwinians” and “Anti-Darwinians”:

Darwinians suspect their opponents of hankering after a skyhook, a miraculous gift of genius whose powers have no decomposition into mechanical operations, however complex and informed by earlier processes of R and D. Anti-Darwinians suspect their opponents of hankering after an account of creative processes that so diminishes the Finder, the Author, the Creator, that it disappears, at best a mere temporary locus of mindless differential replication.

Dennett’s notion of “genius” is materialistic to the core: “It is important to recognize,” he points out, “that genius is itself a product of natural selection and involves generate-and-test procedures all the way down.” And it is precisely for that reason that a Darwinian point of view may lead to a critique of “the old essentialist, Cartesian perspectives” that uphold a more metaphysical concept of art and creativity.

Now all this sounds strangely familiar, although we are used to hear the terminology from a very different camp. After all, “anti-essentialism” has been one of post-structuralism’s many rallying cries. In this context, it has tended to mean the denial of any form of reality (material, biological) outside of textual/discursive constructions.

To a naive observer it would seem that Darwinians and post-structuralists might here find a source of strategic solidarity, based on the old wisdom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The potential is there: I mean, don’t the words Dennett uses to describe the fears of the anti-Darwinian camp, even echoing Roland Barthes’ famous proclamation of the “death of the author”?

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. (“The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text, 146.)

Somehow, however, people who would quite happily use this citation as a springboard for a nifty little literary deconstruction are irritatingly wary to go the whole hog and rethink their anti-essentialism from the Darwinian angle suggested by Dennett. On the one hand, this has to do with an all too frequent general distrust, in the humanities today, of the very concept of explanation. On the other, it might also be down to the fact that – for all its avowed anti-essentialist street cred – much post-structuralism, deep down, remains essentialist in its inability to part with the last vestiges of a human specialness divorced from “nature.”

Hence Dennett is slightly myopic in suggesting that a Darwinian’s only enemies are old-school essentialists dreaming their Romantic dream of creative genius: the people who believe in “the Author,” his (of course) intentions and the good old spark of (often divinely inspired) superhuman creativity. For, as said Darwinian is bravely battling that lot, he or she is simultaneously obliged to ward off critics from the opposite faction at the same time.

Here, a brief report from my frontline:

I have an ongoing debate with a dear colleague and friend of mine who considers herself a “radical constructionist” – a stance which for her not only appears to be an academic identity but also the royal road to a better world. Our discussions tend to follow a predictable pattern: after the ritualistic opening gambits (she suggests that I might be a “biological reductionist,” I point out the thin line between benevolent constructionism and totalitarian social planning), we inevitably agree that the solution might lie somewhere on the level of the individual.

While this kind of shift of focus is entirely in keeping with the (i.e.: my) Darwinian perspective, it creates a troubling dilemma for my post-structuralist friend. According to her theory, culture supersedes nature as the power determining human identity and society; however, she also – like most other self-avowed post-structuralists – is adamant that individual agency can subvert and transcend cultural limits. Needless to say that the terms “individual” and “agency” on which these perspectives are based, are never really defined. How culture gets processed, how agency manifests itself, and what ends individuals seek (whether consciously or not) with their actions are questions that are not so much accidentally overlooked as deliberately avoided.

In this critical context, crane-like explications that might go a very long way towards solving these questions are rejected as banal, deterministic and positivistic. At the same time, the cultural determinism posited against them poses a problem in itself: where does it differ from the “determinism” typically laid at the door of biology? Some post-structuralists quite elegantly skirt this problem by slipping in a few skyhooks into their otherwise anti-essentialist line of argument – for instance by the use of esoteric concepts such as “individual agency.” We’re culturally determined, but not quite – and this “not quite” must not be investigated. Never. Ever.

The discussions I have with my colleague tend to reach their absolute nadir when I not only ask The Questions That May Not Be Asked, but also make suggestions as to how to answer them, usually by tentatively bringing in adjectives like “Darwinian” and “evolutionary.” By my friend’s embarrassed silences whenever I do so, I realise that to ask “why” and “how,” especially in conjunction with said adjectives, is about the biggest intellectual faux pas one can commit these days. And this is usually the point when we stop talking shop and start telling each other what we did at the weekend.

Coming back to Dennett’s “mutual suspicion,” it seems to me that the most important intellectual battlefield is not between Darwinians and Cartesian essentialists, but rather between the deep, complex and differentiated anti-essentialism that a Darwinian perspective would allow and its more shallow and contradictory post-structuralist counterpart. Right now, it would seem that the latter represents the intellectual and moral majority in Western academia. And I while I appreciate that, after decades of producing tortured prose flagellating the Cartesian paradigm, too many critics resist opening up to different world views, I find their resistance annoyingly unproductive. I really am fed up with having to waste the little time that I have on this planet reiterating the same old (to me obvious) truths.

But I suppose I'll have to.