My New Project – Cognitive Science Book on False Dichotomies

I haven’t mentioned this to many people until now, but I’m in the early stages of writing a book. I will be focusing on about two dozen false dichotomies that ill-define us. Much of my research involves cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition, but I will touch on many other areas too. Even though I’m just getting started, the process has been both exhilarating and exhausting. Two months ago, when I hit the go button on this project, I didn’t appreciate that this would turn out to be perhaps the most challenging project of my life—these ideas are spilling out of my computer and permeating many other parts of my life, including my practice of law, my art and conversations I’ve been imposing on close friends and random strangers. Throughout my life, I’ve often been told that I’m “different” in that I often crave conversation that challenges me. I've been told that I'm severely allergic to chit chat. I plead guilty to that, and it feels like this allergy is getting worse. It's difficult for me to stop thinking about this project these days.


My outline is currently 100 pages and it will probably get a lot longer before I start trying to distill and wrestle it into a couple dozen digestible chapters. I’m been actively outlining my book for two months. Reviewing the literature has often been like drinking out of a fire hydrant, even though I’ve been given a big assist from the past. I’m repeatedly feeling grateful that the younger version me decided to A) audit dozens of credit hours of graduate level cognitive science classes at Washington University and B) write about many of these topics for twelve years at this website. I wouldn’t have had the audacity to undertake this project without both of these investments. I conclude this even though I can now see that many of my prior writings were naïve and wrong-headed.

I’m lucky to be in a position to dedicate substantial chunks of uninterrupted time to this. It sometimes even feels like a calling, which sounds so terribly self-important. To temper this self-confidence, a voice in my head often whispers that this endeavor is only for my own satisfaction and that I don’t have anything of substantial value to add to ongoing vigorous worldwide conversations by numerous brilliant writers who have made careers doing deep dives into the human condition. That might be correct. We’ll see, but I’m still going to give this a try.

Why does this project speak to me? Once you wrap your head around the past several decades of research of cognitive scientists, once you are no longer merely passively enjoying these concepts, something transformative happens. Once you start breathing these concepts, feeling them in your bones and muscles, almost everything changes, and it can sometimes be scary. I remember a conversation 20 years ago with a close friend. We were discussing a paper I wrote on the role of attention on moral decision-making. I will never forget that look she gave me.

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Read more about the article Walk in the Garden

Walk in the Garden

I can see the stone wall of the Missouri Botanical Garden from my front porch. It often beckons to me. Though my walks are often brisk, I bring a camera to slow me down to catch a brilliant color, an engaging pattern or a playful reflection. Sometimes, I sit for 5 or 10 minutes and try to meditate. IMG_0266 MBG Music night At the MBG, there's people watching, of course, and this often causes me to think of the people I care most about--how could this not be the case in such a beautiful place? IMG_0358 MBG Music night But the two things come to my mind almost every time I visit the garden:

1. David Attenborough's "Private Life of Plants." (It's about the only thing I keep my VCR for - it's not available in Zone 1 on DVD). It's a beautiful video series that blurs the line between flora and fauna, when plant growth is run in fast-motion.

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How Europeans evolved into tall white-skinned milk-drinkers

Fascinating research shows that the traits of light colored skin and the ability to digest lactose (found in milk) as adults evolved recently:

First, the scientists confirmed an earlier report that the hunter-gatherers in Europe could not digest the sugars in milk 8000 years ago, according to a poster. They also noted an interesting twist: The first farmers also couldn’t digest milk. The farmers who came from the Near East about 7800 years ago and the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes 4800 years ago lacked the version of the LCT gene that allows adults to digest sugars in milk. It wasn’t until about 4300 years ago that lactose tolerance swept through Europe. When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.
Further research shows that being tall or shorter can each have advantages in different environments:
[S]election strongly favored several gene variants for tallness in northern and central Europeans, starting 8000 years ago, with a boost coming from the Yamnaya migration, starting 4800 years ago. The Yamnaya have the greatest genetic potential for being tall of any of the populations, which is consistent with measurements of their ancient skeletons. In contrast, selection favored shorter people in Italy and Spain starting 8000 years ago, according to the paper now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Spaniards, in particular, shrank in stature 6000 years ago, perhaps as a result of adapting to colder temperatures and a poor diet.

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Why there are not any civilizations without temples – Video featuring Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt explains why there are not any civilizations without temples, starting at minute 14 of this video. This is the 2013 Boyarsky Lecture at Duke University. About 10,000 years we went from an almost instantaneous transition from hunter-gathers to Babylon. A huge part of our evolutionary development is this newly learned ability of humans to circling around sacred objects (religious and political objects are two dominant examples) in order to form teams. As we circle around, we generate a social energy that knits the social fabric, but also encourages Manichean thinking--us versus them, blinding us to our own faults and faulty thinking. No shades of gray are allowed when we are intensely groupish. This kind of groupish thinking is radically incompatible with scientific thinking. Science is squeezed out, replaced by sacred objects, groupishness and authoritarian obeisance. At min 24, Haidt gets to the crux of his talk. Those of us who focus on the "care" (empathy) foundation of morality, often circle about it bonding with others like us, rejecting and denigrating the impulses and ideas that tend to drive those who are politically conservative.

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Progress on the origin of life?

From News.Mic:

One of the most challenging questions in basic biology and the history of evolution and life stems from the unknown origin of the first cells billions of years ago. Though many pieces of the puzzle have been put together, this origin story remains somewhat murky. But a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge believe they've accidentally stumbled on an answer, and a very compelling one at that.

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