Awesome Saturn

Today I found a 2006 unread issue of National Geographic in my pile of things-to-read, and I was floored by the incredible photos of Saturn taken in 2004 by the Cassini spacecraft. Don't forget the look at the entire gallery, including the photo of Saturn's icy moon Dione, profiled with Saturn's rings on edge (they are only 150 feet thick). Amazing photos! Galileo discovered Saturn's rings in 1610, but one is tempted to imagine what Galileo would have said had he seen these photos. Saturn, as big as 700 Earths, and orbited by at least 56 moons. One of those moons, Titan, was visited by "Huygens, a probe launched from Cassini. If that is not enough excitement for you, consider a second article in the same issue, this one called "Earth in the Beginning." It was a harsh environment, but we are survivors. Check out the gallery here, too, as well as the animations. Admittedly, these are reconstructions, but such a context it all brings home. . .

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Religion: It’s almost like being in love

You know how it is when someone is in the first throes of infatuation. We call it "love," but it's very different than the kind of relationship that eventually develops. Or doesn't develop. Think of all of those young couples "in love" who are at each other's throats only a couple years later. While they are in the romantic love stage, they are "caught up in the emotion." Their lover can do no wrong. Their lover is perfect. Their lover has no faults; oh, sure he or she has idiosyncrasies, but nothing that could possibly impede this relationship. At least not until the fairy dust settles and they are able to start seeing each other as flawed human beings, sometimes horribly flawed. Amazing as it seems, strong emotions can cause massive distortions in perceptions. They can make A look like Not-A. Strong emotions can also completely shut down our ability to think self-critically. How is it possible that perceptions and understanding can be massively distorted by emotion? How is it that a violent drunkard kleptomaniac can initially seem like a nice fellow? That's evolution at work. As Robert Wright once wrote in The Moral Animal, emotions are "evolution's executioners." We have deep instincts for falling in love, for losing control, for blinding ourselves to the other's faults so that we will make babies. I should restate this. It's not that evolution is trying to do anything at all. Evolution is not conscious and it has no plan. On the other hand, we are survivors at the top of a long branch of the tree of speciation. You and I and all of our ancestors have survived Nature's amoral pruning, millennium after millennium. We are extremely lucky that we evaded the weeding phase of breed and weed. The unrelenting reproductive urge, the one thing that every one of our ancestors had in spades, has been passed on to us or we wouldn't be here to ponder anything. ALL of our ancestors had it and acted on it: the compulsion to reproduce--the urge to merge. This ancient instinct is ubiquitous, even though, once in a while, a cigar is only a cigar. What is the most efficient way to make animals reproduce? How about this? Blind them to each others' faults and make them horny. [More . . . ]

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Why PZ is not a believer

PZ Myers has offered eight fairly solid reasons for not believing in god. Here is number 8:

There are always better explanations for unexplained phenomena than god: fraud and faulty sensory perception cover most of the bases, but mostly, if I see a Madonna appear in a field to bless me, the first thing I'd suspect is brain damage. We have clumsy, sputtering, inefficient brains that are better designed for spotting rutabagas and triggering rutting behavior at the sight of a curvy buttock than they are for doing math or interpreting the abstract nature of the universe. It is a struggle to be rational and objective, and failures are not evidence for an alternative reality. Heck, we can be fooled rather easily by mere stage magicians; we don't need to invent something as elaborate as a god to explain apparent anomalies.
I would tweak this eighth response. I don't think most believers have a generally malfunctioning ability to perceive, and I wouldn't attribute their willingness to believe to fraud, at least not fraud in any traditional use of that word (where intent to deceive is key). Rather, I suspect that the elaborate hyper-sensitive cognitive machinery that allows us to detect potential allies and facilitates the formation of social bonds with them is rigged to dim the perceptual abilities of 90% of us, based on perceived threats to social relationships we value. Thus, as I see it, the perceptual machinery isn't completely broken. Rather, it dims only when competing social cravings slap the "toxic" label on evidence that seems to be inconvenient to the formation or maintenance of a social group. This cognitive function dims our abilities to see and hear based on whether the things we might see or hear could damage treasured social relationships. It seems as though some sort of rough and ready mini-brain screens the world for our bigger better brain (at least in 90% of us). That mini rough and ready brain functions as a paranoid secretary who won't let calls come through to the boss because the secretary is over-protective. I discuss the connections between social cravings and inability to appreciate evidence, as well as some of the science that guides me in my views, in a series of posts I titled "Mending Fences."

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