A Mindful Miasma

While I am in media res of a post about my latest read, I thought I'd throw this mish-mash out as it pertains to certain ideas that have either come up recently or always somewhere in the back of my mind. Edge recently asked folks "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?" and I've found some of the answers very interesting.

Regular readers here know that I am no fan of the paranormal. I find psychic readers distasteful at best and to be outright frauds at worst. People who disagree with me on this have issued veiled threats and blatant ones; I've recently been called names, had it intimated that I am a foe of diversity, and been pop-psychoanalyzed; and, of course, it was only a matter of time before two commenters proved Godwin's Law by comparing me to Nazis. And so it was nice to read Susan Blackmore's answer to the question posed by Edge:

I joined the Society for Psychical Research and became fascinated with occultism, mediumship and the paranormal — ideas that clashed tantalisingly with the physiology and psychology I was studying…I did the experiments. I tested telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance; I got only chance results. I trained fellow students in imagery techniques and tested them again; chance results. I tested twins in pairs; chance results. I worked in play groups and nursery schools with very young children (their naturally telepathic minds are not yet warped by education, you see); chance results. I trained as a Tarot reader and tested the readings; chance results.

I did more experiments, and got more chance results. Parapsychologists called me a "psi-inhibitory experimenter", meaning that I didn't get paranormal results because I didn't believe strongly enough. I studied other people's results and found more errors and even outright fraud. By the time my PhD was completed, I had become a sceptic.

Race is a big issue in my life. The last time I wrote about it can be found here. The Dulcinea, who is bi-racial, and I argue about what race is on occasion. Biologist Mark Pagel's answer to the question above bears on our discussions.

Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. We are on average about 99.5% similar to each other genetically. This is a new figure, down from the previous estimate of 99.9%. To put what may seem like miniscule differences in perspective, we are somewhere around 98.5% similar, maybe more, to chimpanzees, our nearest evolutionary relatives.

The new figure for us, then, is significant.

…like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations — including differences that may even correspond to old categories of 'race' — that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem. This in no way says one group is in general 'superior' to another, or that one group should be preferred over another. But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations.

I fear that we're not prepared for such discussions. What do you think?

In a related vein is the response by Nicholas Christakis who now believes culture can change our genes.

I once thought that we internalized cultural factors by forming memories, acquiring language, or bearing emotional and physical marks (of poverty, of conquest). I thought that this was the limit of the ways in which our bodies were shaped by our social environment. In particular, I thought that our genes were historically immutable, and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.

I now think this is wrong, and that the alternative — that we are evolving in real time, under the pressure of discernable social and historical forces — is true.

Evidence has been mounting for a decade. The best example so far is the evolution of lactose tolerance in adults…A similar story can be told about mutations that have arisen in the relatively recent historical past that confer advantages in terms of surviving epidemic diseases such as typhoid. Since these diseases were made more likely when the density of human settlements increased and far-flung trade became possible, here we have another example of how culture may affect our genes.

This has been very difficult for me to accept because, unfortunately, this also means that it may be the case that particular ways of living create advantages for some, but not all, members of our species. Certain groups may acquire (admittedly, over centuries) certain advantages, and there might be positive or negative feedback loops between genetics and culture. Maybe some of us really are better able to cope with modernity than others. The idea that what we choose to do with our world modifies what kind of offspring we have is as amazing as it is troubling.

With our state legislature considering a statewide smoking ban and the groundswells for bans here in Madison of plastic bags and bottled water at public events building, I find myself thinking about Steven Pinker's recent piece in the NYT's called "The Moral Instinct". The following bit really resonated with me when considering all of the bans my representatives in government are considering:

Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral.

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

But the article isn't merely about preferences transmogrifying into moral issues. Instead, it's about where morals come from. Pinker write about five moral spheres and how they potentially form the basis of our moral instinct.

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it’s bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture.

It's a fascinating read about some very nascent ideas of our moral sense.