With a wave of the hand: capitalism, history and genes, part II

I was pleased to see Gregory Clark's 'response' at Cliopatria to critical comments on his new book A Farewell to Alms. (Thanks to Sharon for lending me her scare quotes.)

And then I read it. And was less pleased.

Now, obviously, the 'you haven't read my book' defence upon which Clark relies rather heavily can be an effective one. Up to a point.

I, for one, have not read his book (nor did I claim to have), which is why my original critique concluded in the way it did, by hoping that my comments would help pose some 'questions' that Clark's readers should keep in mind with regard to his assumptions and framework.

As to those assumptions and that framework, Clark is also right, of course, that books and arguments can become badly mangled in brief reviews, even those, as Clark helpfully points out, in such prestigious publications as The Economist, the Financial Times and the New York Times.

Nobody, after all, is perfect.

However, Clark's defence becomes a bit more inexpensive (I'll avoid the more harsh synonym for the moment) when he suggests that all the critiques he has so far received are based merely based upon 'misapprehensions' due to 900 word reviews.

I, for one, linked to and quoted from a paper of Clark's (more than 60 pages; some 13,000 words) that appears to contain at least some of the fundamental arguments contained in his book.

Obviously, in a book one can flesh out and revise the materials that have been earlier developed in articles and papers; however: an argument based upon shaky foundations is not strengthened by adding height.

The book--as described in various places--sounded a lot like the essay, and that was the basis of my critique. This was sufficient information, I think, to raise relevant questions about at least the basics of Clark's thesis, questions that could have been answered directly and succinctly, had Clark decided to do so.

Instead, in his 'response'--alongside the 'read the book' defence--he makes an argument that can, I think, be described with some fairness as 'cheap':

The one thing that of course gets people most riled up is the possibility raised that there may be genetic differences between societies like China or England which had long experience with stable, settled capital intensive agrarian life, and those such as the Australian Aboriginals who had no such experience. Now, of course, when Jared Diamond made exactly this type of speculation at the beginning of Guns, Germs and Steel, based on nothing more than guesswork, it raised not a murmur as far as I know, because he was speculating that New Guinea tribesmen were likely smarter than Europeans as a result of this process. And if I had written a book confirming this, all would have been sweetness and light. People, it seems are not opposed to talking about possible genetic differences between groups. They just have very strong priors about what genetic differences they would like to see.

Here, Clark tries to brush off criticism as mere political correctness or, maybe, some kind of more general bio-phobia. He also succeeds in being enormously condescending by suggesting that people are simply getting 'riled up' (read: making purely knee-jerk, hysterical responses) by his argument rather than having more serious qualms about his approach and conclusions. So far, so predictable.

Undoubtedly, there will be people who reject his argument on these grounds, but, as I sought to point out, there are good methodological reasons to question Clark's emphasis on genetic change as the motive force behind capitalist development.

The reference to Jared Diamond is odd in this context and deserves a moment's thought. Diamond did indeed make what I think is an ill-judged 'speculation' about the greater intelligence of New Guineans than Westerners in the introduction to Guns, Germs and Steel. However, there are at least two reasons why Diamond's speculation is of somewhat different quality. (Clark really doesn't like this comment from Diamond: it also features in his 'Genetically Capitalist?' article.)

First, anyone who has read Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel would realise that Diamond's comments on Aboriginal intelligence are a brief digression (the key pages in the paperback version would be 18-22), are hedged in by Diamond's scepticism about the whole issue of measuring genetic-based intelligence, and, most significantly, play no further role in the rest of his relentlessly detailed, nearly-500-page argument. Indeed, one of the key insights of Diamond's work is that genetic difference (other than that perhaps related to disease resistance) is unnecessary in explaining enormous differences in social development. (One might say the same about what we understand about evolutionary psychology, but more on that anon...)

To imply that this speculative comment is somehow emblematic of Diamond's argument is...well, unfair and somewhat bizarre.

The second difference is related to the historiographical context in which Diamond brings up his thoughts on intelligence. Why is his speculation that hunter-gatherers might (as a 'possibility') be more intelligent less controversial? Well, that just might be because Diamond felt the need, before embarking on an argument to explain the historical emergence of Western dominance, to distance himself from the many previous arguments that approached the same question and were based on specious notions of biological superiority (and that did have some very 'strong priors' about what they were willing to see).

Furthermore, I think that people are automatically less suspicious of notions of genetic influences on intelligence when they are being claimed for groups other than the one to which the person making the claim belongs.

The fact that the radical constructionist fable about the blank slate has become more than tiresome doesn't mean that any old dodgy argument about genetic difference should get a free pass.

(And a third point occurs to me: what planet has professor Clark been living on? Diamond's book was greeted with far from universal acclaim, least of all in the historical profession. I've run across as many people who find Diamond's biogeographical approach as 'determinist' and 'eurocentric' as who admire it.)

In explaining cultural change, Clark continues:

you cannot rule out the possibility of genetics. That may have implications to some people that are profoundly distasteful. But if we commit when we study human history to only admitting accounts full of hope and uplift regardless of the data, then why bother collecting more data?

The Argument from Distaste, it's safe to say, is a variation on the PC defence noted above and can be ignored.

But here, maybe, I find at least some common ground with Clark, since I too am frustrated with scholarship (or science) that puts its activism before its rigour. I, too, think that we have to explore the way the world is rather than confuse that with the way we think it ought to be.

But not only am I doubtful about whether Clark has identified the way the world is, he seems to be making a blanket claim that cannot be sustained: that those who question his research are doing so simply because they don't like the results rather than because they pose serious methodological questions about his approach.

One of those methodological issues, to reiterate slightly from my earlier post, is that in arguing for a significant role for genetic change within historical time Clark is arguing against the extensive findings of evolutionary psychology.

Actually, no I'm wrong. He doesn't so much argue against them as simply ignore them.

As I mentioned, although there is an abundance of economics citations in his 'Genetically Capitalist?' paper, there is a notable dearth of natural science literature on gene-culture coevolution, population genetics, evolutionary psychology or neuroscience, fields that, we might think, are at least tangentially related to the argument he is making.

Now, I do not expect Clark to necessarily agree with evolutionary psychologists on topics such as, say, whether complex psychological adaptations are necessarily adaptive in present societies (their answer: often they are not) or whether they can be affected by selection over a matter of centuries (their answer: with all probability, no).

However, if he is going to include the genetic argument as a serious part of his argument, then he should engage with and address those fields (or at least read a few good summaries) somewhere in his 420 pages.

If it's not a serious part of his argument, then what is it doing there?

For those interested in an overview of evolutionary psychological perspectives, I recommend this chapter by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (PDF) from David Buss's Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. It is dense and long and contains thorough citations.

It also contains, for instance, observations like this:

Thus, humans are free to vary genetically in their superficial, nonfunctional traits but are constrained by natural selection to share a largely universal genetic design for their complex, evolved functional architecture. Even relatively simple cognitive programs must contain a large number of interdependent processing steps, limiting the nature of the variation that can exist without violating the program’s functional integrity. The psychic unity of humankind—that is, a universal and uniform human nature—is necessarily imposed to the extent and along those dimensions that our psychologies are collections of complex adaptations. In short, selection, interacting with sexual recombination, tends to impose at the genetic level near uniformity in the functional design of our complex neurocomputational machinery. (p.39)

This is only the conclusion of a rather detailed section, and if you choose to take a look at it, you will find that it contains extensive citations on the debate about the interaction between evolution and society.

Clark is free to disagree with such conclusions and assumptions, and I don't for a moment claim that evolutionary psychology is the last word on the matter.

Does it 'rule out the possibility of' genetics' (or, more specifically, Clark's claim of more recent genetic changes encouraging the transmission of 'middle-class values')? No, not absolutely. But saying that it is impossible to 'rule out the possibility' of something is very different than providing reasons to think it is a good idea to build an argument upon it. And one of the things that evolutionary psychologists have done is to provide many reasons why the kind of social change and cultural variability that Clark highlights is possible in the absence of genetic change.

If Clark has startling new data about genes, then that would be very welcome. But I doubt that he does.

Again, if this is a serious part of his argument, then he should have engaged with at least some of the (extensive, readable, not hard to find) literature that has sought to nail down precisely the kind of relationships between evolved nature and culture that he seems to be interested in.

He doesn't do this in the Times article. He doesn't do this in the 'Genetically Capitalist?' essay.

It is possible, of course, that Clark does address these things in his book, isn't it?

You know, the one we 'have to read' in order to critique in any way?

Well, unless his index is very sloppily put together (and I doubt Princeton UP would have allowed that to happen), it doesn't seem that the book contains any more discussion on these matters than his essay does.

I still don't have his book, but while the shelves at Amazon.com might be empty (but not for long!) the 'Look inside' feature is operative, and the index seems to suggest that, no, there is no effort to deal with the fields mentioned above. (Of course, while this evidence is convincing, I'm not 'ruling out the possibility' that a serious engagement with the relevant literature is hidden in there somewhere.)

The entry on 'natural selection' (which subsumes all references to 'evolution' and 'selection pressures') is mentioned on about 10 pages. There are no references to 'evolutionary psychology', 'gene-culture coevolution', 'Wilson, E. O.', 'Tooby, J.', 'Cosmides, L.', 'Pinker, S.' or 'sociobiology'. There are, for that matter, no entries for 'genes' or 'genetics'.

It may be, of course, that Clark doesn't really take the genetic aspects of his argument all that seriously. His Cliopatria response even suggests that this is likely. After making the intellectually handwaving arguments of read my book and critics are being PC he emphasises the other, non-gene-oriented contributions his book makes.

And maybe it does make those contributions. I don't know.

But while we're on those other matters, I am somewhat underwhelmed by Clark's ringing declaration that there is--amazing!--cultural variation throughout the world and history. If we were to read his book, we would find, for example:

that there is evidence of quite profound differences in the degree of impatience exhibited by people as we move across thousands of years of history from ancient Babylonia to England and the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. And that these differences are impossible to ascribe to anything other than basic changes, cultural or genetic, in how people behaved.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

The first sentence is hardly news: indeed, it was in 1939 that Norbert Elias identified a series of significant historical changes between the late medieval and modern periods with regard to things like manners, aggression, foresight and self-restraint. (And this was even within Europe.)

The second sentence says...well, nothing as far as I can tell, other than something like 'difference is caused by change'.

Uh huh.

Of the two options he mentions for why this might be so, the first has been extensively researched probably since historians started scribbling and the second, as I have argued, is either a serious claim (which requires more methodological homework) or a bit of intellectual handwaving.

And then there's this comment:

The book gives, I think, a strong argument for the idea that the economic history of pre-industrial societies has a powerful role in shaping their culture. That economics produces not just goods in the preindustrial world, but also culture.

I might be alone in this, but I wasn't aware that there was a need for such a 'strong argument' that economics affect culture.

I mean...wasn't there a little-known intellectual trend known, I think, as Marxism (it was started, I believe, by some obscure German bloke) that somewhat tepidly advanced this very proposition? I don't know, it's just a thought.

(If, using the 'Look Inside' feature at Amazon, you peruse the 'excerpt' from Clark's introduction you will find that 'wealth--and wealth alone--is the crucial determinant of lifestyles'. Interesting? Certainly. New? Hardly.)

Just to reiterate (in case any potential readers might not feel like combing through my previous post on this matter to find it), my critique is not based on a notion either that biology has no place in the analysis of history, society and culture. (I have argued the contrary.) Nor is it inspired by pique that Clark has discovered some kind of truth about human nature that violates my political principles. (While I think that giving serious consideration to human nature does in many cases have political consequences, these are not clearly left or right, contrary to what is often assumed.)

Instead, I think that--at least with regard to its 'Darwinian' aspects--his argument leaves a lot to be desired and is--as far as I can gather what it is from the shorter versions I have read--either not all that revolutionary or unconvincing.

As someone who would like to see more interaction between the natural sciences and the humanities, I find that to be worth discussing.

And that, I suppose, is where I'll have to leave it.

I would urge Clark, however, to be more willing to engage with his critics in ways that go beyond telling them to 'read the book' (there is no good argument that cannot be summarised effectively).

I was particularly disappointed to see a defence based on labelling those critics as, in essence, politically motivated (though it may be true in some cases). That argument is too easy to make and it comes across as deeply condescending.

But what do I know? After all, my book's still in stock.

I miss your hard edges, I miss your bone marrow

I heard a couple of songs from the latest Tunng album a couple of days ago (on Deutschlandradio Kultur) and was awestruck in that way that happens all too rarely when something comes on the car radio. (Actually, for traffic safety reasons, it's probably a good thing that it occurs only occasionally...)

This is from something earlier. It's beautiful.



'Woodcat' from Tunng.

Sunday readings

A few brief comments about some relatively random things I've noted in the last week:

1. An excellent article by Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker about Philip K. Dick. I had enjoyed a few of Dick's books and stories over the years, but I didn't really know that much about him. Gopnik packs a lot of insight into a relatively small space. I noticed myself nodding at a few bits in particular, such as that on Dick's shortcomings as a writer:

The trouble isn’t that Dick suffers by some school-marmish standard of fine writing. It’s that the absence of any life within the writing on the page ends up robbing the books of the vital force that pushes you past pages. As an adult reader coming back to Dick, you start off in a state of renewed wonder and then find yourself thumbing ahead to see how much farther you are going to have to go. At the end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences.

When I re-read Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep and Minority Report a few years ago, I had exactly this experience. Dick was full of amazing concepts, which is perhaps why his work has been so adaptable to film. Whatever weaknesses he had, though, he remains a compelling author, and Gopnik nicely puts his finger on what it is in the Dickian universe that appeals to me:

Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.

Yep.

2. An article at Stern (in German) made me aware of the somehow appalling Bible-themed toys available from one2believe. There are the slightly bizarre 'Messengers of Faith' action figures, for example, or the rather predictable 'Jesus Loves Me Bear'. There are also the 'Tales of Glory' figurine sets which allow your child, I suppose, to re-enact favoured stories from the bible such as 'Jesus walks on water' or 'Daniel and the lion's den'.

As ever, there is something very selective about this. What, no Sodom and Gomorrah playset? No 'Lot and his daughters' amongst the 'Messengers of Faith'? Where's the edifying tale of Abraham and Isaac? No figures for depicting the genocidal massacre of the Canaanites?

Of course, I suppose the violent religious action figure market has already been captured by the fine people at Jesus Christ Superstore ('Putting the fun back into fundamentalism and the laughter into sectarian slaughter').

But what should we make of the 'P31' dolls 'based on the biblical teaching of Proverbs 31' and designed 'to encourage young girls to pursue biblical womanhood'?

I don't imagine that this refers to the bit of Proverbs 31 which commands 'Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.' Nope, no 'Hooters' girls among these dolls.

No, they're aimed at the more Good Housekeeping aspects of said proverb, the ones that propose the proper role of women as their manly men's helpmeet and such.

(But there's also just bizarre stuff in that proverb, like this: 'When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet. She makes coverings for her bed; she is clothed in fine linen and purple.' Uh huh... nothing like red clothes to keep you warm....)

However...the first thing I notice about them is that their heads are rather too big for their bodies. They seem...seriously ill somehow.

God's will, I suppose.

3. An interesting but somehow disappointing essay by Freeman Dyson at Edge.org.

I agree with Dyson that there is plenty of need for those willing to think 'heretical' thoughts about the world, but I'm not so sure about his elevation of heresy into a value in itself. I mean...this seems to give comfort to creationism or to flat-Earthism. I'm not convinced that simply being contrarian is a valuable way of interacting with the world.

His scientific points are well taken in some ways, but when he moves beyond that he says some rather silly things:

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.

Now, debates about the specifics of global warming here or there, nobody can argue that American investment in fighting poverty or infrastructure has suffered mainly because of all that money going to fight global warming.

Dyson may be well meaning here, but I think he's very misguided.

There has been, I see, a more recent response to Dyson by Alun Anderson.


OK, I suppose that's enough for one Sabbath. Keep it holy, people.

Stuff your genes

While we're on the topic of genes (capitalist or otherwise), here for your reading pleasure is a contribution from The Wife on related issues.

***

In 1987, the French feminist Luce Irigaray had the following modest proposal for a potential exit route from the “patriarchal phallocratic order”:

In all homes and all public places, attractive images (not involving advertising) of the mother-daughter couple should be displayed. It's very damaging for girls always to be faced with representations of mother and son, especially in the religious dimension. I'd suggest to all Christian women, for example, that they place an image depicting Mary and her mother Anne in their living room, in their daughters' rooms, and in their own room. There are sculptures and easily reproducible paintings of them available.

Even though when I first read this statement, in the early 1990s (in the initial experimental stages of a doctoral degree), when I was still mildly sympathetic towards even the more abstruse forms of feminist thought, I felt somewhat ... disappointed by Irigaray's idea.

So this is all the Godmother of “feminism of difference” and then Director of Research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris could come up with as a death blow against patriarchy? A new billboard campaign? Christian devotionalia? Admittedly, Irigaray had other “practical suggestions” – her words – to make, but they were no less esoteric and, actually, far from practical. (E.g., “Between mother and daughter, interpose small handmade objects to make up for the losses of spatial identity, for intrusions into personal space.”)

Then as now my atheistic self shudders at the thought of being surrounded by big sisterish images of Mary and Anne. Granted, Irigaray suggests them as an option for Christian women who've seen a crucifix too many; nevertheless, one wonders whether a good starting point for a war against patriarchy wouldn't be a campaign against Christianity itself. And why, one might ask, would a feminist working within a staunchly secular system, where religion is an entirely private thing (unlike in Germany, where generations of schoolchildren grow up in the shadow of the cross), want to reinforce Christianity rather than undermine it?

I also was (and continue to be) more than vaguely disturbed by Irigaray's view of the human mind. Apparently, all it takes to create a feminist awareness are a few cunningly displayed mother-daughter images (which, in any case, seem to exist in abundance). But this idea – apart from revealing Irigaray's dismissive attitude towards women – smacks of brainwashing and invokes illustrations in biology textbooks, of Skinner's pigeons merrily picking away at their seeds, as well as passages from Brave New World. For a brief moment, we see the beast of behaviourism peep out from under the cosy blanket of constructionism, where it otherwise lurks unnoticed.

The end of the phallocratic patriarchal order?

In his erudite and witty attack on the “blank slate” psychology underpinning contemporary constructionism, Steven Pinker acknowledges the fascination of such an idea ... but then he tears it limb from limb. The jury is still out, of course, as to whether Pinkerian eloquence (and a whole bunch of science) can outgun the sheer utopian delights of constructionist thought.

How can you top the following quote, taken from the cover of Richard Lewontin's Biology as Ideology (though possibly not written by him): “our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit.”

“Any identity, daddy? Could I be Pol Pot then?”

Of course, even radical constructionists wouldn't go that far. After all, they tend to be right-thinking people confident that their Weltanschauung is the royal route to the best of all possible worlds – one free of psychopathic mass-murderers, megalomaniac dictators, or mean little capitalist bastards for that matter. Such is the dream of many a professional educator hell-bent on combatting social injustice through dubious measures, such as banning Legos from the grade-school classroom.

Little wonder, then, that even some of the milder claims of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology are deemed anything from unsexy to dangerous by self-proclaimed “radical” constructionists. For them, the belief that the human organism is meaningfully shaped by its evolutionary past is to adhere to a reductionist determinism that sees us all as Hobbesian robots. Selfish genes make for selfish people, they say. In a parallel universe, they might have a point. In this one, however, no serious sociobiologist or evolutionary biologist/psychologist would say such a thing. Nevertheless, the criticism arises again and again, like some horrible zombie meme that just will not die.

This, in a nutshell (or nucleus), is the tragedy of genes: their cuddle-factor is terribly low. They seem so hard, so edgy, so cold. It is difficult to integrate them into myths of benevolent symbiosis characteristic of some strands of evolutionary biology, especially those with an ecological slant. In an inspiring paper (PDF) on evolutionary biology and the pastoral imagination, Louise Westling of the University of Oregon has eloquently defended a Darwinian view of humans as part of nature rather than outside (and above it). Human beings not only exist in the world, sharing the environment with insects, birds and numerous smaller and larger mammals, they function themselves as host environments for countless forms of bacteria:

Six hundred species in our mouths neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies. Four hundred species colonize our intestines; without them we could not digest and absorb the food we eat .... Tiny creatures live all over our bodies, eating dead skin and performing many other kinds of housekeeping functions, as for example the microscopic lobster-like insects that infest our eyelashes and continually clean away the lubricants that would otherwise glue our eyes shut. As we move and breathe, we actively exchange nutrients and waste, energy and even atoms, with the air and things around us and the millions of creatures within us. Each person is a bipedal, mobile, and self-conscious community of living agents sharing an inner sea bound by the semipermeable extended surface organ of skin and given firm shape by bones. Armies of friendly microbes swim through our inner seas, scouting for and devouring invaders, cleaning the pipes, carrying freight. The “human” DNA that shapes and marks each of our unique selves is far less a proportion of the DNA in our body mass than that of our microbe friends. Even within our individual cells, the mitochondria that make our energy have their own, different DNA than that in our “human” chromosomes.

Oh brave new world that has such wonderful microbes in it!

Westling's facts are of course immaculate, yet what bothers me slightly is the style in which they are put. In her depiction, the bacteria living in and on every human body as restless busybodies enabling the upkeep of our complex organism. Housekeeping and cleaning, guarding and defending, they are fundamentally friendly, working for our benefit – a little like Cinderella's winged helpmeets in the Disney movie, holding up the clothes line so Cinderella can hang up the laundry, maybe whistling while working. Our friends, not our enemies, doing stuff us humans would do, bacteria even may be in the range of human communication.

From this perspective I could even envision feeling all warm and fuzzy about my mitochondria.

But note how the pastoral vision tips over into biocentrism towards the end, reinstating the distinction between humans and nature but reversing the hierarchy: nature good, humans bad – but not quite so bad as that nasty Mr Dawkins has been saying. Although for some ecocritics humankind comes pretty close to being the big bad wolf in an otherwise rather benign environment, they would never accept that suggestion if it came from the sociobiology faction.

Maybe it is impossible to think of the incessantly vibrant microdimension of the human organism in any other way than by anthropomorphising it. There is a deep level of existence scurrying about well beneath our conscious radar. And a good thing to, because were we to spend too much time thinking about it we would be too preoccupied with the fear and terror of it all: just getting through Westling's short paragraph above has its disconcerting moments. Mites and mitochondria represent human existence stripped of its sociocultural fictions, and this is a frightening fact.

The anthropomorphic fantasy also characterises the range of cuddly toys launched a few years back representing different more-or-less nasty microbes, from those that cause the common cold to the ones that bring us bubonic plague. The toys are advertised as "great learning tools for parents and educators." Educators? How ever would you use those in the classroom?

“If you see one of those one-eyed pink rabies viruses, run away as fast as you can.”

Or: "If you see a flesh eating virus, be nice to it – it can't help being lethal”?

But however useless these toys may be from an educational perspective, they do give me an idea for how to pimp the image of our old friend the gene. Here's my modest proposal in the spirit of Irigaray:

In all homes and all public places (and I mean all: really these things should be everywhere), attractive images (not involving advertising) of the gene should be displayed. It's very damaging for human being always to be denied representations of their friend, the double helix (especially in the religious dimension)....

And so on.

Sadly there are not all that many “sculptures and easily reproducible paintings” of the gene available (incidentally, images of Anne and Mary are not that easy to come by either: usually the two women come with baby Jesus attached -- art historians call this type of image "Anna selbdritt").

But this gap could be filled, ideally in the form of cuddly toys like the aforementioned microbes. We need genes in hot pink and peppermint green. Rather than cold hearted letter combinations let's give them comforting names, like Knut (“FOXP2” and “Hox” are good starts, and “D4DR” has a certain nostalgic Star Wars sort of ring to it, but we can do better!) I admit that there is a colourful stuffed double helix already (which can be accompanied by a bobble-headed Watson), but I have the sneaking feeling that children would not really want to snuggle up with that at night (certainly the child in the picture looks distraught).



Now that Mattel is going through a major crisis, the gene might in fact provide a nice opening for inventive and enterprising toy manufacturers. Any volunteers?

War is over

I am reminded by norm that today marks the 62nd anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

My father and mother, each in their own way, contributed to that end.

And I am reminded that I miss them both very much.

Some thoughts on evolution, history and capitalist genes...

I've been pondering the profile of historian Gregory Clark that appeared in the New York Times recently (via Cliopatria). To be honest, I find a lot of things bothersome not only about the article but also about Clark's argument itself. There seem to be a lot of people who find this work 'important' and somehow pathbreaking, but I have my doubts. And it doesn't seem that such doubts are being sufficiently raised.

The Times article, for instance, is an odd one. Some things are presented as new that don't seem all that revolutionary (as has been pointed out by Jason Kuznicki). Other arguments which are in some way new are not questioned as closely as they should be.

In particular, I refer to the 'Darwinian' claims made by Clark.

And let's be clear, these are the claims that have resulted in this book's being written up in the Times. (Garnering, therefore, attention that more mainstream cliometricians might sacrifice a limb for.)

It is curious, though, that in an article that spends so much time speculating about the genetic basis of social change there appears no commentary from people who might have something relevant to say about the matter: i.e., evolutionary psychologists or geneticists. (This is not, of course, Clark's fault.)

There have been, after all, at least 30 years or so of intensive scholarship trying to work out the extent to which biological factors influence social behaviour. Instead, the article relies on the comments of economists who, to be honest, seem a bit out of their depth when it comes to thinking about genes.

Now, I happen to find a lot of research and theory regarding what we might call the biological basis of behaviour to be very useful; indeed, I have recently argued at length that historians should take account of the increasing amount of insight into the human mind that cognitive and evolutionary psychology have provided.

So, unlike some, perhaps, I do not have trouble with Clark's argument because it's biological; instead, I doubt whether what biology his argument contains is understood and applied correctly.

And it is important to get it right, since I think it's high time that the humanities began breaking down the needless wall that has been built up between them and the natural sciences, and I think there's much to be gained by abandoning the more extreme versions of cultural theory and taking seriously again the concept of human nature.

However, in wrestling with these concepts myself (as evidenced in my recent article at Cultural and Social History on the 'limits of culture' as well as in an essay in the recently published Cultures of Violence) I think such cross-disciplinary borrowing should be done carefully.

And I'm not sure from the initial indications whether Clark is nearly as careful as he should be.

Neither is The New York Times. It is not, for instance, only 'many historians' who

have assumed that evolutionary change is too gradual to have affected human populations in the historical period.

Consider the field of evolutionary psychology, which--in alliance with a number of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists--has given a great deal of thought to the issue of how biology might affect behaviour. (An excellent and readable introduction is available in a 'Primer' written by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.)

One of its fundamental principles, for example, is that structure of the human psyche was fundamentally formed during the period in which our species lived as hunter gatherers, i.e., for about 99% of its existence. This doesn't mean that our behaviour or abilities are limited to the tasks undertaken in that period: we can do all sorts of things that were not 'selected for' by natural selection but which are fairly fundamental to modern life, such as reading, using a computer, or driving a car. (Many skills, though, are not fundamentally that different, as much of human life revolves around social skills and interactions that haven't changed all that much: i.e., evolutionary psychology is far less about hunting mammoths than about getting along in groups).

However, we required no additional genetic adaptations to do such things.

And, as far as evolutionary psychologists are concerned, post-stone age genetic change has been, at best, a negligible factor. As Tooby and Cosmides note:

Our species lived as hunter-gatherers 1000 times longer than as anything else. The world that seems so familiar to you and me, a world with roads, schools, grocery stores, factories, farms, and nation-states, has lasted for only an eyeblink of time when compared to our entire evolutionary history. The computer age is only a little older than the typical college student, and the industrial revolution is a mere 200 years old. Agriculture first appeared on earth only 10,000 years ago, and it wasn't until about 5,000 years ago that as many as half of the human population engaged in farming rather than hunting and gathering. Natural selection is a slow process, and there just haven't been enough generations for it to design circuits that are well-adapted to our post-industrial life. ('Primer')

It is not, of course, that those associated with 'evolutionary psychology' have a monopoly on arguments about biology.

Some researchers, particularly those asserting some form of 'gene-culture coevolution', have, in fact, emphasised the possibility of more 'recent' genetic change, cited examples typically being the development of lactose tolerance among some populations or the mutations in the sickle cell gene in populations in malarial regions.

One of the key figures associated with 'gene-culture coevolution' and 'sociobiology' is E. O. Wilson, who has done a lot more thinking about the connections between society and biology than most. Like most sociobiologists, Wilson has (wrongly) been depicted as imposing a 'determinist' and 'reductionist' model on human behaviour. (Although I don't agree with Wilson on everything, I highly recommend his book Consilience to anyone interested in the relationship between the humanities and sciences.)

I am open to the possibility that there might have been some genetic change over the preceding thousands of years (evolution, after all, has not ended).

It is also true, I think, that in some sense we only have as much culture as our nature allows.

But even Wilson, the arch-sociobiologist, who argues that culture might promote genetic change in the long term, concludes the following:

'While individuals within a particular society vary greatly in behavioral genes, the differences mostly wash out statistically between socieites. The culture of the Kalahari hunter-gatherers is very distinct from that of Parisians, but the differences between them are primarily a result of divergence in history and environment, and are not genetic in origin.' (Consilience, 155)

One reason for that last statement is that behaviour and thought result from complex assemblages of mental elements, and Wilson is clear about the level of generality on which the 'epigenetic rules' that shape our preferences operate:

'Genes do not specify elaborate conventions such as totemism, elder councils, and religious ceremonies. To the best of my knowledge, no serious scientist or humanities scholar has ever suggested such a thing. Instead, complexes of gene-based epigenetic rules predispose people in invent and adopt such conventions.' (Consilience, 181)

I would extend Wilson's reference to 'elaborate conventions' to Clark's 'middle-class values', and would, therefore, question just how 'serious' this claim is.

For instance, Clark's claims about adaptation (for his argument is basically an adaptationist one) seem to be somewhat confused. From the NYT article, we learn,

“Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution, man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world,” he writes.

It seems to me that the 'long agrarian passage' and the 'modern economic world' contain enough serious differences to make the alleged genetic adaptations to the former not entirely a preparation for the latter.

Keeping in mind Wilson's caution noted above, however, the adaptations in question seem to be the following:

“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,” Dr. Clark writes.

Now, leaving aside Clark's rather simplistic view of pre-modern social history (which would require another equally long post, so I'll spare you), he is presented in the NYT article as being undecided on the issue of whether these 'values' were being transmitted via culture or genes. There is something rather too offhand about his references to genes.

However, in his essay 'Genetically Capitalist? The Malthusian Era and the Formation of Modern Preferences' (available here, thanks to Steve for bringing it to my attention) there is somewhat less ambiguity (Subsequent references to 'GC').

The abstract will give you a solid sense of the argument, one part of which is:

The highly capitalistic nature of English society by 1800 – individualism, low time preference rates, long work hours, high levels of human capital – may thus stem from the nature of the Darwinian struggle in a very stable agrarian society in the long run up to the Industrial Revolution. The triumph of capitalism in the modern world thus may lie as much in our genes as in ideology or rationality. (GC, 1)

The recurring 'may' (just like the question mark in his title) leaves some wiggle room, but the genetic gist is clear enough in the body of the article: Clark's aim, I think, really is to argue that in some kind of very specific way, capitalism really is in our genes.

In making that argument, Clark makes a number of assumptions. This, of course, is fine, all historians do that. However, he seeks to support enormously weighty conclusions on rather shaky foundations.

For instance, a major part of Clark's argument seems to be that there was a general technological, social and cultural stagnation before 1800. (Sometimes it's technological, sometimes it's social; however, he jumps around rather rapidly between different kinds of measurements and standards.) He states that we can test empirically the question of

whether the average person in 1800 was any better off than the people of 10,000 BC on any dimension, and the answer is no. (GC, 10, emphasis added)

This extraordinary claim (life was not better 'on any dimension'?!) is based upon a comparison of calorie intake. But his data for England are based upon extrapolations from data about the poorest among the English and his comparison with the hunter gatherers comes from modern hunter-gatherers. These latter societies are, by definition, most likely the most successful hunter gatherers (since they are still around), but Clark uses them as a basis to make quite extravagantly general claims about hunter-gatherer life:

Primitive man ate well compared to one of the richest societies in the world in 1800. (GC, 15)

I think there is something to the argument--made convincingly by Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee--against the naively 'progressivist' view of agriculture (i.e., that it made everyone's lives better). But Diamond (who has a lot of experience with hunter-gatherers and has written extensively about the deep history of agriculture) considers that 'all those modern hunter societies have been affected by farming societies for thousands of years and do not tell us about the conditions of hunters before the agricultural revolution' (Third Chimpanzee, 167).

(I think they do tell us something about those conditions and they are a useful means of reaching broadly accurate conclusions about about life in the Pleistocene, but I think one has to be far more careful about reaching the far more specific conclusions that Clark does .)

([UPDATE]: Peter Ryley has posted a nice discussion of 'deep materialism' and Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. I too think it is an intriguing book.)

Now, I'm a humble cultural historian, and not as statistically competent as the cliometricians in my profession, but when someone takes a rather selective range of calorie intake figures from broadly diverse societies ('1,452 kilocalories per person per day for the Yanomamo, to a kingly 3,827 kilocalories per day for the Ache', GC, 15), uses them to create a median and lets this stand for the life of 'primitive man' I think it's fair to be more than a little sceptical. What if most hunter-gather societies were more like the Yanomamo than the Ache? Wouldn't this have a significant affect on the resulting median?

I don't know. But I suspect there is a lot more complexity (and uncertainty and margin of error) behind these figures than Clark suggests.

Clark's other key notion, according to the Times, seems to be that “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages”.

Now, again, I'm not an economic historian or a demographer. But a few things occur to me immediately.

First, real 'upper classes' tended to be vanishingly small in terms of their population. (The following info comes from The Peoples of the British Isles: A New History 1688-1870 by T.W. Heyck).

In eighteenth-century Britain, the titled aristocracy (with, say incomes around 8,000 pounds a year or even far more) made up less than two hundred families; adding in the big landlords of the gentry (with 1,000 pounds or more) brings us to somewhat more than 15,000 families, or less than 1.5 percent of the population, who possessed about 15 percent of the national income.

On the other hand, we have people who actually did most of the work in the country, from freeholders and tenant farmers to farm labourers. There were about 350,000 families who could be ranked among the freeholders and farmers, most of whom earned between 40 and 150 pounds a year. There were a further 400,000 families of 'cottagers' or 'paupers' earning around 6 or 7 pounds a year. There were also large numbers of labouring poor in the towns (and the towns, recall, only made up 20 to 25 percent of the total population) and an indeterminate population of beggars and vagrants.

There were also many in the 'middling ranks' but determining what that meant was difficult. As Paul Langford (in A Polite and Commercial People) has noted, 'the most elementary generalizations about it are difficult to sustain' and, based on rather fuzzy contemporary statistics, he suggests that anywhere between 20 and 40% might be considered in the 'middling ranks'. (61-63).

These admittedly come from a somewhat later period than the sixteenth and seventeenth century sample noted by Clark, but since he argues there were 'static living standards' before 1800, this shouldn't make much difference.

Clark is of course right to note some degree of 'downward mobility' for wealthier classes, and the historical problem of what to do with 'younger sons' (due to primogeniture) has long been of interest to English historians.

The big winners in England were the first-born sons, who generally inherited the estate as a whole. Many of those who did not inherit went into the expanding professions and became merchants: but Clark's claim seems to be that they also served to replace the working-classes, particularly in urban areas. As the Times article argues:

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

Now, Clark does seem to demonstrate--at least in the sample he's examining, which, considering the level of generality of his argument seems a bit small--that there was some downward mobility in the seventeenth century (GC, 34).

But there seems to be a logical problem with his argument connecting wealth to reproduction to capitalist genes.

Looking at the data from Clark's paper, while there may have been some downward mobility, it looks very incremental, as people moved from 'the rich' to the somewhat less rich.

However, the idea that the children of the aristocracy were turning into agricultural labourers is far fetched.

There was, of course, likely to be rather more mixing at lower levels, where the borders between the lower middle 'ranks' and the upper levels of the labouring classes could be somewhat porous.

But, in the absence of more significant mixing from the top to the bottom, Clark's argument seems a bit shaky.

Why? For the moment, let us grant (which I doubt we really can) some kind of genes which directly generate the middle-class values that Clark suggests they might. Even in this case, if the 'rich' were not sinking immediately down into the ranks of the poor (taking their money-making genes with them) then how, we might ask, did those rich genes make it to the lower classes?

If it was step-by-step, through the gradual process of downward mobility, then it seems we have a problem (or rather Clark does): those who are moving downward across the generations are unlikely to be in possession of the magic success genes. If they were, they wouldn't be ending up poorer and poorer every generation.

Alternatively, if the genetic mixing was between social levels that were much closer anyway (and this is likely the way it was happening), I'm not sure that one can make the argument (even based on Clark's questionable notion of a tight gene-success relationship) that this would have meant much, genetically speaking, since the people at each level would have been more genetically similar. (Again, taking as an assumption that the gene-success relationship is valid.)

Neither option bodes well for Clark's argument.

This is entirely overlooking the fact that the question of who remained at the very top of society, the aristocracy, was not decided by which child was necessarily the most 'successful' (or even by the question of competence), but rather by simple birth order and sex. The first-born son got it all. And, even if he were a relative moron, it was likely that in some way he would remain rich and an attractive marriage partner for some aspiring merchant's daughter.

Now, we also have to keep in mind that this whole issue of upward and downward mobility is taking place in a period of time that is at least 600 years or so long (Clark focuses on the period between 1250 and 1800.) Clark seems to see this period as one large Malthusian mass of 'static living standards' (GC, 37). And he may be right that there is a recognisable amount of continuity--certainly according to the numbers and factors he chooses to pay attention to.

However, this is also a period in which there were major social, political and cultural changes. This period, after all, includes the Black Death (which had a major impact on relationships between labourers and landowners), frequent struggles between monarchs and nobility, the development of trade, increasing exploration, several wars and changes in agriculture such as the increasing incorporation of farming into a market system and the furtherance of enclosures.

All of these factors affected the composition of the social elite, though for different reasons. One might be granted a peerage, for instance, for reasons that had little to do with capitalist success and rather more to do with simply being on the right side of a political squabble, making a good marriage or having success in war. (Just as losing one's wealth might have had to do with contingencies related to the above factors.)

'Wealth' and 'success' were being amassed in England in a variety of ways: slave trading, tobacco planting, empire building, monarch-bribing, textile weaving and goods trading (not to mention, at least in the earlier period, being good with a sword).

Which gene is it, precisely, that is going to promote success in all these different ways of getting ahead in life?

Evolutionary biology seems relatively clear on the point that adaptation requires strong environmental pressures leading in one direction. However, is it not likely that the turbulent period between the late middle ages and the beginning of the modern era and the variety of economic and social activities that led to success during it somewhat undermines the notion that genetic influences would have consistently been selected for leading to Clark's rather idealised version of the middle-class man?

After all, combined with the unlikelihood that 'downward social mobility' was sufficient to transmit rich peoples' genes from the tiny successful class at the top to the broad social base, at the bottom, just what were those who became rich as merchants trying to do with their hard-earned and saved money? That's right: become aristocrats. And being one of those involved a set of behaviours (enormous and wasteful conspicuous consumption among others) that was rather different than the ones Clark emphasises.

It involved a great expenditure to maintain that lifestyle to which so many wished to become accustomed.

Clark's wish to find some kind of consistent, steady genetic selection for particular traits that are particularly well-fitted to capitalism seems questionable on many grounds. It must also be noted, I think, that the bibliography of his 'Genetically Capitalist?' essay--while it contains a lot of interesting history, economics and anthropology--includes precious few references from the natural sciences that would back up his rather extravagant (yet somehow strangely off-hand) reliance on genetics.

The fact that societies around the world are making rapid changes to more market-based, free-enterprise systems in a generation or two (and the ability of second-generation immigrants from some of the poorest countries in the world to thrive in some of the richest) should make the obvious point that one doesn't need genetic difference to have social change and variety.

I prefer not to make too harsh a judgement of a book I haven't read, but based on the information in the Times article and Clark's essay, I think those who do read it should do so with a number of questions in mind.

In the preface to his new book (via here), Clark writes:

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."' Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. ...

I would concur with Clark on the 'dreary academic sins', and I would much rather interact with a a clear argument that is wrong than a muddled one that doesn't even contain enough content to be wrong.

I'm not sure, though, whether his argument is leading us toward light or toward a dead end. And it would be unfortunate if historians took Clark's questionable arguments as a definitive statement on what Darwinian perspectives on history and society potentially have to offer. Getting it too far wrong may not end up leading us forward but rather setting us back.

[Update] The story continues here.

(Not) too old to rock and roll...

Sincere Obscene Desserts congratulations to musician (and salmon farmer) Ian Anderson, who turns 60 today.

Jethro Tull was one of the important influences in my misspent youth, though that was already some time after the band were at their peak, creatively speaking (the 80s saw some good songs, but a little too much misguided experimentation with synths...but, hey, that was what the 80s were all about).

But albums such as Aqualung, Living in the Past, Thick as a Brick and Minstrel in the Gallery received heavy rotation on the old gramophone, and, I can testify that they were a great live band.

I even had a chance to speak to the band once...though I regret that I wasted that opportunity (through teenage nervousness) by asking a rather silly question. Sorry Ian.

For your listening pleasure, something from the early, bluesy days ('Back to the Family', 1969, in Stockholm).

A free lunch?

I have just noticed that a recent article of mine, 'The Limits of Culture? Society, Evolutionary Psychology and the History of Violence' seems to amongst the free content available for download from the journal Cultural and Social History.

Normally, you have to have a subscription to the journal (or be part of an institution that subscribes to it) to get access to its content.

For whatever reason, this issue is now free. (Article is here, click on 'view now' to get the PDF.)

The article's abstract:

Recent debates about the meaning and role of cultural history have focused on the relationship between 'culture' and 'society'. Some have taken this opportunity to position cultural history as a site of resistance to 'biological' explanations of human behaviour. In contrast, this article argues that 'biological' methodologies - particularly the perspectives of evolutionary psychology - can usefully contribute to the historical understanding of culture and social development. To this end, it outlines the fundamentals of Darwinist psychology, suggests options for interdisciplinary cooperation and uses the topic of interpersonal violence to explore the potential for uniting cultural, social and evolutionary psychological methodologies.

The article appeared in the 'debate forum'. I have received two very thought-provoking responses. They, along with my own reply, will appear later this year.

Happy reading.

Atheism Friday, follow up

My post last Friday pointing to PZ Myers's response to an interview of Alistair McGrath prompted its own substantial response from Rob Jubb in the comments. I wanted to write a short reply, but due to my usual problems with concision and brevity, it got rather long. So, I decided to make a regular post out of it, not least since formatting and linking are much easier.

Rob's comment required me to do some thinking, but I believe I understood what he was getting at. For ease of reference, here is his comment:

Although I don't know the precise details of McGrath's argument, if it is anything like what I guess it is - that not all phenomena are best explained using the set of tools associated with naturalistic scientific investigation, and hence, one shouldn't necessarily expect an adequate explanation of religious claims from such investigations - Myers just asserts the premise McGrath denies against him - when he says that everything is to be explained by naturalistic scientific investigation. That is not a filleting of McGrath's argument. I happen to think that McGrath's claim is true about some non-religious phenomena - a scientific explanation of the pleasures of reading a well-written passage in a novel does not seem the most useful or interesting way to describe that event - although I doubt it is true about religious premises. If Myers wants to argue against McGrath, he needs to engage with that.

Neither is the 'sometimes we posit currently unobservable entities/events as explanations of currently observable entities/events' a gotcha. At best for Myers, McGrath seems pointing out that belief in a god is compatible with a rejection of the premise I am attributing to him. This does not commit him to that claim. At worst for Myers, McGrath is pointing out a feature of explanation in general, rather than scientific explanation in particular; that it relies on unobserved entities - as we might infer my dislike of spinach from my refusal to eat spinach, despite the fact that I have not affirmed the claim that I dislike spinach, none of which is obviously a scientific explanation - to explain observed ones.

Ok. Well, McGrath's arguments can be taken from Myers's post in excerpts or in its full glory via the link he provides.

One of those arguments, precisely, is that scientific criteria cannot be brought to 'bear on' God. This is, I think, McGrath's main argument. Rob seems to accept this notion too, by suggesting an analogy: science cannot provide an interesting or useful 'explanation of' the pleasures of reading a novel.

It depends what is meant by 'explanation of', and it depends what McGrath means by 'bear on', both of which are rather vague terms.

Actually, that's not true in the latter case: McGrath must be referring to the existence of God. If he's just talking about what it feels like to believe, then I'm not sure why he's wasting so much breath on such a banal point.

Thus, this argument must have to do with telling us something about whether God exists or not. Moreover, it is also clear that McGrath does not simply believe in some kind of vague Deist-like God: he believes in the biblical, intervening, prayer-hearing God whose son died for our sins. (I'm not clear how literally he takes things like burning bushes and the Garden of Eden, so we can leave that to one side.)

Is it really true that science has no relevance ('cannot be brought to bear on', in a slightly modified grammatical form from the original) to this question?

Really? I would think that providing (testable, proven) explanations about the way the world (life, universe) works that do not require a god--and which contradict Biblical versions of creation, the existence of heaven, the occurence of miracles,etc.--would be very relevant indeed. (It's feasible--maybe--that one's 'religious' interpretation could be so watered down so as to not violate science: but then we're talking about something that McGrath (like most believers) does not believe.)

Once you're in the realm of things that exist in (or around) the world and have an affect on the natural world, you are in the realm of science.

Religious motivated scientists once looked for God in nature; however, natural science has made God superflouous in nature. So what people like McGrath try to do now is say (simply by saying) that God is beyond natural explanation. It's a cute rhetorical trick, but what proof is there behind it?

None.

I suppose that's the point: one can just say, well, 'God is beyond all that' and the statement itself contains what is presumed to be a Get-out-of-the-natural-world-free card that is impervious to all reason, logic and evidence (since they have by definition been excluded).

This is essentially what McGrath does in the Root of All Evil interview. To be honest, I find it a pathetic argument. I am aware that someone who is content with simply asserting that God is beyond reason is not going to be swayed by a reasoned argument.

If that's at the root of this discussion, then I suppose that's the end of it.

I don't accept, though, the analogy of this kind of argument with Rob's on the pleasure of reading. If he means only that science cannot completely capture what it feels like to enjoy literature then he's right, obviously. The same could be said of any other mental state.

However, it can explain quite an enormous amount of things related to that mental state, not least the organs or brain structures we have to allow us to feel pleasure in the first place. The status of those feelings is much more real (and either is now or will likely someday be measurable to a rather precise extent) than a hypothetical 'God'.

A naturalistic explanation of love may not capture what it 'feels like' as a subjective experience: but it can indeed (contrary to Rob's argument) be a very 'useful' and 'interesting' way to describe that feeling.

Not that it's the sort of language in which you'd want to write a song about it....

And when we communicate with one another about that experience, we'll use a different language than talking about how our neurotransmitters are doing. But I don't see the relevance to the issue of a deity. Unless one wants to claim that that existence is irrelevant. But then, I think, we face a much different discussion.

It seems to me, though, that Rob's response mixes an argument about the ability to explain the existence or functioning of a thing or process and the ability to fully capture what it means to experience it.

Take the example given about reading: no, science cannot (completely) explain what it feels like to read a pleasurable passage in a book. But we can all agree that he and the book exist, and we can explain what happens in a person's brain as he reads the book.

So, while there is a little bit of added mystery there about subjective experience -- though not all that much, since anyone who has experienced that joy has had a similar experience -- the question of existence (of the book, Rob, or Rob's brain) has not been raised in the same way as debating the question of God does.

And there, while science cannot explain (some kind of) God away with 100% certainty (as Dawkins and Myers, as good scientists, admit), I think it has made (and is making) that possibility seem vanishingly small.

The same is true of Rob's spinach analogy: we may not have positive proof of his dislike of spinach, but there's no question that he, the spinach and a human ability to like or dislike particular foods all exist. And all that without leaving the realm of science.

I continue to think Myers does a great job of slicing into the McGrath's rather fatty argumentation (hence I still think 'to fillet' was indeed the right verb).

I mean...read the interview! Almost immediately after saying that experimental science cannot tell us anything important about God, he says:

Therefore I think Dawkins must realize that he’s under as great an obligation to show that there is no God as, for example, a Christian is to show that there’s a God.

How, once he has, with a wave of his hand, dismissed the scientific method as not relevant to the question does McGrath propose that science should 'show' anything? Which magical evidence would he willing to accept as proof?

McGrath, obviously, wants to have his cake and eat it: he denies the validity of science saying anything about God and then claims that religion and science are under equal obligations of proof (thereby sneakily elevating religion onto the same playing field as science).

I find this to be very confused thinking. And I think Myers's responses are quite appropriate.

I think that Myers is also right to skewer McGrath's shallow references to science being 'in transit'. (I don't know what it is with my culinary metaphors...maybe I'm just hungry.)

Obviously, science changes, but this is such a facile claim, especially for someone who has claimed to have studied the history of science. New findings certainly make for revisions, but if he thinks that one day we'll suddenly find that evolution or Newtonian physics (within particular domains) will be discarded, he is, I think, peddling a very mistaken notion of science.

Science, at least, has set up clear parameters for proving and disproving its conclusions: where is McGrath's version of Haldane's 'rabbits in the Precambrian' that would disprove what he thinks?

Is there any clearly identified criteria for believing what he believes that you can see?

I can't see any, and it seems to me that he simply believes some combination of things that he chooses to and that his church tells him to.

He is, of course, free to believe nonsense. But, as Myers says:

Maybe Mr McGrath should try spending more time actually defending that nonsense convincingly than simply whining about the atheists who are picking on his beliefs…but I don't think he can do that, either.

And neither, truth be told, do I.

Thanks Rob, very much, for the thought provoking question.

Underappreciation

Via Bob Mould, I found a list, apparently compiled not long ago from suggestions by Rolling Stone readers, of the 25 most 'underappreciated' artists and bands.

It's a curious list in some ways, not least it's not clear what 'underappreciated' means.

How do you measure a musician's 'importance'? Inherent quality? Innovation? Influence on other musicians? Critical reception? Sales?

The related question is then: which combination of these factors leads to 'underappreciation'? Lots of influence and poor sales? Good sales figures but a lack of recognition by music writers? Great influence but poor name recognition?

By any measure, for instance, Bob Seger (#10 on the list) has been enormously 'appreciated': not only has he long been inescapable on 'classic-rock' radio in the US, but he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and his 'Old Time Rock and Roll' was named one of the Songs of the Century in some kind of recording industry music heritage poll. So, he seems plenty 'appreciated' to me.

I suppose one could claim his unappreciatedness by the fact that I don't think most rock critics would see Bob Seger's music as innovative or, necessarily, influential. I mean, he does what he does quite well, but was it ever really innovative?

We have the opposite situation with the number 1 'underappreciated' artist Tom Waits. Now, I love Waits's music, but I'm not sure he belongs on the list either: his fan base and airplay might be relatively small (compared to, say, Bob Seger), but, considering the kind of music he makes, I think it's safe to say he's not really aiming for mass appeal. Furthermore, his fans make up for their relative rarity thorough their devotion, and he's gotten an enormous amount of critical appreciation amongst people who really think about music. (The latter could also be said of many artists on the list, such as Wilco, Talking Heads and Sonic Youth.)

So, can we really say that Waits is 'underappreciated'?

I don't know. The Replacements (#2) might have more of a justification for being there, as might Hüsker Dü (#21), considering that they were 'influential' (at least on the development of a particular style of American 'college rock' which then became 'alternative' or 'indie' which came to dominate US Airwaves (alongside country and rap)) to a degree which did not match their sales or general name recognition. (Unlike, perhaps, the Pixies, who are not on the list.)

Anyway, it's all very complicated (and perhaps not all that important...though a perusal of the comments following the list at the Rolling Stone site shows that some people will argue musical taste with the vehemence that others reserve for issues like war and religion).

But if I had to spontaneously come up with a list of ten underappreciated artists, i.e., those who I think are creatively excellent but who remain relatively obscure in that their popularity does no justice to their quality (a relative and somewhat shifting measurement) they would be (without thinking about it too much and thus reserving the right to alter my opinion):

Robyn Hitchcock
The Mountain Goats
The Notwist
The Wedding Present
Yo La Tengo
Erdmöbel
Console
The Books
The Flaming Lips
The High Llamas

I've undoubtedly missed something...but what?

(I'm aware that this list is limited to the genre of slightly nerdy indie-electronic-psychedelia. Even within those categories, there are thousands of probably very good bands and musicians out there I've never heard of. Not to mention that I'm overlooking all the underappreciated ambient dub artists and Scandinavian death metal bands that I'm...well, not all that up-to-date on, actually. But hey, I like what I like.)

Atheism Friday: back-to-basics edition

Amidst all the rough and tumble of recent debates about belief and reason, it is sometimes possible to lose sight of the key issues involved. This is partly driven, of course, by the rather circuitous (read: desperate and flailing) logic that emerges from the realms of the faithful. Trying to respond makes nailing jell-o to the wall seem easy.

It is thus sometimes refreshing to have a nice, concise statement of the issues at stake, one that efficiently pierces the theological smokescreen.

It's even better to have two such statements.

First, at Pharyngula, P. Z. Myers makes such short work of Alistair McGrath that I almost feel sorry for the poor theology professor. Or, at least I would if he didn't have such a nice cushy job at Oxford despite having such breathtakingly banal thoughts. (If you think I'm being harsh on him, you can see him in full blither in this interview filmed for Dawkins's documentary The Root of All Evil.)

Myers always writes well and gets to the point very quickly, but this filleting of McGrath's arguments has something nicely elegant (and, as Geoff points out, practically surgical) about it.

I am, moreover, grateful to Dr. Myers for bringing this t-shirt explanation of Christianity to my attention:

Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

(Actually...that makes it sound far more interesting than it typically is...)

Second, for your listening pleasure, A. C. Grayling is interviewed at philosophy bites about atheism (or, as he prefers to call it--and I agree--'naturalism'), science, ethics and death. It's all of 12 minutes long, and it's full of all kinds of relatively basic-but-fundamental (and in many ways profound) insights. (Via Norm)

Enjoy!

Who Said German Politics Weren't Sexy?

Since a certain political crisis has reached the boiling point, I present without further ado, an insightful despatch from The Wife.

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At the risk of inviting a lot of shoulder shrugging indifference amongst the gracious readers of this blog, I comment today upon a minor scandal that has held the German political scene in suspense for some months now. It also gets a bit confessional at the end, so you might consider skipping it – I won’t mind.

In spring, the world learnt something about Horst Seehofer, member of parliament and a high-ranking official in the CSU, the Christian Social Union (the Bavarian ‘sister-party’ of the German conservatives…as is typical, the Bavarians have to have their own version of everything). The CSU has been exerting one-party rule over that somewhat idiosyncratic southern 'free state' of Bavaria—thereby ensuring, as they would have you believe, absolute moral purity—since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1948.

Anyway, earlier this year, it was revealed that Herr Seehofer had had an extramarital affair that was not only longstanding but also, rather inopportunely, fruitful.

The bouncing baby Seehofer in question has recently arrived; small though she may be, she’s caused her own little political tsunami. Seehofer’s impressive, if imprudent, virility has rocked the boat a bit, not only because the C in CSU is virtually synonymous with ‘Catholic’ but also because he had been spending most of 2007 vociferously pushing to ascend to the throne of the ‘free state’ when its current king, Edmund Stoiber, finally totters off into the sunset (muttering inanely like Lear on the heath).

For weeks on end the German yellow press and its readers held their breath: would Seehofer leave his wife or not? Then, at the beginning of July, the news trickled out: he will stay. Result: relief tinged with a mix of ‘told you so’ cynicism and disappointment. After all, since Seehofer’s political ambitions were already beyond repair, he might as well have done something brave for a change and gone the whole way for true love. Oh well, Edward VIII he ain’t.

Now, his former lover has spoken out. After a sassy new haircut and the application of a hefty layer of make-up (and, I would say, a close encounter with Photoshop), Fräulein F. holds her (rather wilting) little bundle of joy into the camera with one big maternal beam.

The intended message is clear: I’m a strong, sexy chick who can do it by myself (the Diana-strategy)! Dig this Horsty: this is what you’ve passed up by staying with your Missus (it IS the Diana strategy alright – Frau Seehofer even looks...neigh...a bit like Camilla). And much like in Diana’s case, it seems the otherwise uptight reading public is ready to accept this version of grrrl-power (don’t forget, in Bavaria, they roll those ‘r’s).

So far, so sordid.

However, I had an uncanny epiphany today, one of those six-degrees-of-separation stories that now and then enrich all our otherwise tedious lives. My realisation of who Fräulein F. is has brought forth my first real emotional reaction to this sorry little farce, a reaction somewhere between triumph and embittered disgust.

Triumph because the case has yet again confirmed what I’ve said all along: there’s something rotten in the state of Bavaria. And the overtly Christian Conservative is no less a mammal than the rest of us.

The embittered disgust derives from the double standard behind it all. And this is where it gets a little more personal.

The famous Fräulein F., would you believe it, grew up only one village away from mine in the rural nowhere of Northern Bavaria. Though I must admit she was certainly a medium-sized fish in our rather tiny pond: her father, in fact, was our village mayor (CSU, of course. Catholic, of course).

I remember only too well his neatly side-parted, bearded and stripe-tied image on the flimsy xeroxed newsletters through which this local council spread its Good News: births, deaths, meetings of the Landfrauen and the Frauenbund (groups providing excitement—or at least macramé—to farmers’ wives), and the officially-sanctioned binge drinking (with optional subsequent wife-beating) called the Männergesangsverein. Oh, and of course: those CSU-meetings.

Now, it’s obvious to me that the origins of this little Immaculate Conception were prepared by a powerful, but not so divine, force. I call it the Old Boys Network (copyright pending). In the fetid little swamp of Bavarian local politics, this is the motive force for just about everything.

Now that the CSU is getting ‘modern’, of course, the Old Boys have let a few chicks into their ranks, as Fräulein F.’s example—she was a personal assistant to someone in the sister-party CDU (aka, ‘the conservatives for those not blessed with being Bavarian’)—shows. It’s possibly in this nepotistic context, too, that she met Seehofer (though I like to imagine him dangling her on his knees at some dingy village festival in the 1980s—who knows I might have been an innocent bystander: somehow this makes me feel vaguely ill).

And the same nepotistic network that brought Fräulein F. and Herr S. together is now closing ranks around her and promoting her as a gutsy, albeit provincial, feminist who deserves all our admiration and support. (Just look at that baby beam!)

Hang on: didn’t she have a four-year affair with a married man? Which memory hole did that get thrown down? Where are the voices (and there are many of them…and they are loud) which are typically raised when such things happen outside the charmed circle of C-Party influence and regard? Where’s the comment from the man in white at the Vatican – who, like bloody Bono, has an opinion about everything – at a moment like this?

Fräulein F. was but a toddler when my mother proved her own feminist strength by—for good reason—filing for divorce and leaving said village with two kids in tow. It’s odd (no, actually, it’s more than odd, it’s infuriating) that people then (good, loyal and relentlessly moral CSU voters all of them) went on a veritable witch hunt against my mother, not only literally turning their backs on her (and my brother and me) in the street but also gleefully spreading hurtful and slanderous rumours.

Where was the yellow press then? Who offered her a glossy photo spread (and the attendant financial rewards of celebrity)?

Of course... my mother was ahead of her time – and not a bearer of a CSU membership card.

Or, of a CSU politician’s child.