The sacred places of people who are not religious

I've been reading more of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis, including Chapter 9, titled "Divinity With or Without God." Haidt's travels through India led him to conclude that divinity and disgust were located on the same axis. As evidence of this, consider that throughout the world, cultures hold that divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times. The relevant practices include "food, body products, animal's, sex, death, body envelope violations and hygiene." Haidt found that people recruit disgust "to support so many of the norms, rituals and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves." (Page 186). To know that which is sacred, identify that which elicits disgust and travel the opposite direction:

If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that "cleanliness is next to godliness." If you don't perceive this third dimension, then it is not clear why God would care about the amount of dirt on your skin or in your home. But if you do live in a three-dimensional world, then disgust is like Jacob's Ladder: it is rooted in the earth, and our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven--or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow "up."

Haidt, an atheist Jew, is not suggesting a particular path to that which is Divine. He is certainly not concluding, for instance, that religion is the only path to that which is divine.  Rather, he is emphasizing that we all have a sense of what is sacred to us, what is "divine," and we justify it in various ways.  He cites Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, agreeing with Eliade that "sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of "crypto-religious" behavior." He specifically cites Eliade's conclusion that even a person who is committed to a "profane existence" has

privileged places, qualitatively different from all others--a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

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Boy monkeys prefer boy toys

There's no gender socialization in monkeys, right? Then why are the boy monkeys (vervets and rhesus) preferring "boy" toys to "girl" toys? The two sets of experiments have been reported by Psychology Today:

In 2002, Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University and Melissa Hines of City University in London stunned the scientific world by showing that vervet monkeys showed the same sex-typical toy preferences as humans. In an incredibly ingenious study, published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Alexander and Hines gave two stereotypically masculine toys (a ball and a police car), two stereotypically feminine toys (a soft doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed dog) to 44 male and 44 female vervet monkeys. They then assessed the monkeys’ preference for each toy by measuring how much time they spent with each. Their data demonstrated that male vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the masculine toys, and the female vervet monkeys showed significantly greater interest in the feminine toys. The two sexes did not differ in their preference for the neutral toys.

I wish they had reported the actual results in this short article. They did report that the boy rhesus monkey preference for "boy" toys was "strong and significant." See also, this related post: Boys' Toys

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What Darwin did not know, but you do.

I have Darwin on my mind these days, perhaps because tomorrow is Darwin Day. To celebrate Darwin Day, I sat down to read the February 2009 edition of National Geographic, which, according to the front cover, features an article entitled "What Darwin Didn't Know." Once you get inside the magazine, however, you'll see that the main article is actually entitled "Darwin's First Clues." It is an extraordinary article setting straight some of the misconceptions about the manner in which Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection. You can read that article online here. you can also watch a short introductory video by writer David Quammen, who explains that Darwin "is a man who just will not go away," and whose ideas are not only still relevant, but "central" to the field of biology. If you read this article, you'll see that Darwin's first clue toward evolution occurred not in the Galapagos, but three years earlier on the northern coast of Argentina, where Darwin found fossils of giant sloths. You read about his numerous fossil finds of giant mammals, "extinct Pleistocene giants." Quammen's article points out that, for all of his gifts, Dawn was not a comparative anatomist. For this reason, he entrusted much of that work to others, including John Stevens Henslow, a botanist at Cambridge and Richard Owens, "an up-and-coming authority on extinct mammals." Darwin was certainly aware of the implications of the diversity and distributions of the flora and fauna he studied. The fact that fossils of giant extinct mammals could be found in the same places as still-living relatives suggested the idea of "relatedness and succession among closely allied species" rather than a God who had specially created species, placing them on the planet in arbitrary locations. Darwin's explanation was certainly "more economical, more inductive and more persuasive than the creationist scenario."

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Richard Dawkins discusses natural selection with Randolf Nesse

Richard Dawkins has recently released a new set of videos packaged under the title "The Genius of Charles Darwin." This series features physician Randolph Nesse, who is the author of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, a book I've discussed in previous posts. This video is the first of a series of five uncut videos featuring Nesse that Dawkins has made available (see Youtube.com for the next four videos). You can also view the entire series straight through from the site of Richard Dawkins. In this video, you'll hear Dawkins and Nesse discussing "design" (including poor design), randomness (note the example of the jar of only copper coins), Darwinian medicine, the toxic environment we've created for ourselves and path dependence. Nesse would like every medical textbook to have an extra paragraph of explanation regarding each human illness or frailty (e.g., back pain): how was it that natural selection left this condition as it did? In this video, Nesse also explains that the body is not a machine. He comes to this conclusion because the body does not have "blueprints." There is no such thing as a "normal genome." A genome is merely a collection of genes that work. Thus, the genome is not a blueprint and the body is thus not a machine. For more on this metaphor, see here.

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Reading On The Rise

According to this report, reading is on the rise in America for the first time in a quarter century. It's difficult for me to express how pleased this makes me. Civilization and its discontents have been in the back of my mind since I became aware of how little reading most people do. To go into a house---a nice house,well-furnished, a place of some affluence---and see no books at all has always given me a chill, especially if there are children in the house. Over the last 30 years, since I've been paying attention to the issue, I've found a bewildering array of excuses among people across all walks of life as to why they never read. I can understand fatigue, certainly---it is easier to just flip on the tube and veg out to canned dramas---but in many of these instances, reading has simply never been important. To someone for whom reading has been the great salvation, this is simply baffling. Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures. Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities.

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