The Limits of Reason

The antipathy with which fundamentalists hold science and reason is difficult to understand. The emotional backlash, more storm than counter argument, often surprises. A simple statement can bring about the most strident denunciations, the pitch and timbre of the debate oscillating out of proportion to the content being discussed. Or so it seems. In the course of debating the truth, validity, utility, or relevance of certain topics, the nondogmatic must come to a point of fatigue by the seeming impossibility of finding common ground. At which time the debate either fizzles, the rationalist yields out of frustration, or the fundamentalist (of whatever stripe, on whatever topic) is ignored and bypassed. This last leads to a situation wherein the argument festers like an infection. It does not go away, often to the dismay of those watching and certainly to those who thought it without merit. You can flip this on its head and make the same claim in the other direction. At least, up to a point.

Consider the following statements:
  • (1) I am not descended from a monkey.
  • (2) God gave us dominion over the earth.
  • (3) Homosexuality is an abomination.
  • (4) The earth is only 6000 years old.
  • (5) The Bible is the inerrant word of God.
What is the one common, salient feature of each one of these statements? They are each one unqualified and utterly emotional statements. They are statements made in reference to personal belief, without reference to any external corroborative evidence or comparative context. They are, with the single exception of the Earth’s age, unanswerable in any reasonable way. Taken one at a time, therefore: (1) Of course you aren’t. It’s obvious. You’re descended from earlier generations of homo sapiens sapiens.

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Jim Webb’s heroic speech on the need for prison reform

In reading Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon, I learned the extent to which Senator Jim Webb has heroically spoken out on the need for prison reform. Webb certainly hits the nail on the head. Our current prison system is dehumanizing and it drains the public treasury. We can do much much better. Here are Webb's words:

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Greenwald picks up where Webb's quote (above) stops. This is a critical issue that needs immediate attention, for all of our good. We can do a lot better than arguing to lock up all the "bad" guys but then defining the "bad" guys simplistically and then making it all worse with the way we treat those "bad" guys.

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Charles Darwin’s exceedingly dangerous idea

In Darwin's dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel Dennett describes Darwin's idea as the "best idea anyone has ever had."

In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and a physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea.

What exactly was Darwin's dangerous idea? According to Dennett, it was "not the idea of evolution, but the idea of evolution by natural selection, an idea he himself could never formulate with sufficient rigor and detail to prove, though he presented a brilliant case for it." (42) Dennett considers Darwin's idea to be "dangerous" because it has so many fruitful applications in so many fields above and beyond biology. When Dennett was a schoolboy, he and some of his friends imagined that there was such a thing as "universal acid,"

a liquid "so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? With the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea-Darwin's idea-bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks are still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

(63) Darwin's idea is powerful, indeed. Many people see it as having the power to ruin the meaning of life.

People fear that once this universal acid has passed through the monuments we cherish, they will cease to exist, dissolved in an unrecognizable and unlovable puddle of scientific destruction.

Dennett characterizes this fear is unwarranted:

We might learn some surprising or even shocking things about these treasures, but unless our valuing these things was based all long on confusion or mistaken identity, how could increase understanding of them diminish their value in our eyes? (82)

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Diminishing races, growing family

In the January 22, and 2009 edition of Nature (available only to subscribers online), Aravinda Chakravarti explains that our simplistic notions of "population" and "race" will need to be revised as we enter the age of "personal genomics." Chakravarti teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Traditionally, we've used geological records to trace our family histories. We are now approaching a time where we will be able to use DNA databases. Whereas our traditional human records take us back several hundred years, our genomes will allow us to explore our ancestry for hundreds of thousands of years. Chakravarti argues that we will be entering unknown territory riddled with surprises and stretching the meaning of the word "family." How close knit is our human "family"?

All living humans are related via a set of common ancestors who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Other studies have since shown that the world beyond Africa was settled even more recently. From 100,000 years ago, descendants of our African forebears spread out to populate other continents . . . the striking implication of this is that all living humans are mosaics with ancestry from the many parts of the globe through which our ancestors trekked. In other words, each of us has around 6.7 billion relatives.

Chakravarti points out that our genealogy-based record-keeping is often riddled with error. It fails to indicate our interrelatedness to each and every other human being, for example. Further, evidence shows that at least one out of 20 people do not know the identity of their genetic father. Thanks to the falling cost of examining entire human genomes (Chakravarti indicates that it has fallen 1000- fold or more), we now have abilities we could only have dreamed of a few decades ago. Personal genomics might well destroy our simplistic notion of "race." Human populations are not intact groups. There is no such thing as genetically characterized racial categories. We are all "multiracial, related to each other only to a greater or lesser extent." Detailed surveys are making it clear that there is no such thing as a discrete racial group. Rather, it is clear that there is a "continuity in variation across the globe, not abrupt transitions between population-specific sequence patterns." Personal genomics would allow us to focus on individual human beings, instead of artificially constructed "racial" populations.

Genome-wide studies ... could result in the individual identity and kinship coming to define populations rather than the other way around. We could test once and for all whether genetic race is a credible concept. This would be tremendously exciting. It is bound to stir up our deeply held notions of who we are, where we came from, our history and thus our politics. .. . it may be time for science to reshape the views of society. By dismantling our notions of race and population, we may better appreciate our common shared and recent history and perhaps more importantly our shared future.

I recently posted on the topic of whether science should study race and intelligence. I think this would be a worthy topic of science (just as is every other potential field of study), but I warned that our current definition of "race" is horribly muddled. We need to get clear on this term, if that is even possible. I found Chakravarti's article to be a refreshing reminder that there might not even be a worthy scientific definition of "race." In fact, it might well be that, once we look carefully at the evidence, we will find that there are actually 6.7 billion "races" out there. Or is it more accurate to conclude that there is only one human race?

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Freedom of Speech as Religion

I think it should go without saying (but of course, nothing does) that anytime someone wants to protect something from "denigration" or other forms of criticism, we should all grab hold of our rights and hang onto them with a death grip. To put this case most eloquently, I offer the following.

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