The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility

TO BE NOTED: From the NY Times:

"The End of Philosophy

By DAVID BROOKS

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

The first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition. People are not discrete units coolly formulating moral arguments. They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

The second nice thing is that it entails a warmer view of human nature. Evolution is always about competition, but for humans, as Darwin speculated, competition among groups has turned us into pretty cooperative, empathetic and altruistic creatures — at least within our families, groups and sometimes nations.

The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons — along with new intuitions — come from our friends.

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself."

the yeast who cooperate do so because there is a slight benefit for themselves

TO BE NOTED: Via the Economist's View:

"MIT: Cooperative behavior meshes with evolutionary theory

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--One of the perplexing questions raised by evolutionary theory is how cooperative behavior, which benefits other members of a species at a cost to the individual, came to exist.

Cooperative behavior has puzzled biologists because if only the fittest survive, genes for a behavior that benefits everybody in a population should not last and cooperative behavior should die out, says Jeff Gore, a Pappalardo postdoctoral fellow in MIT's Department of Physics.

Gore is part of a team of MIT researchers that has used game theory to understand one solution yeast use to get around this problem. The team's findings, published in the April 6 online edition of Nature, indicate that if an individual can benefit even slightly by cooperating, it can survive even when surrounded by individuals that don't cooperate.

In short, the study offers a concrete example of how cooperative behaviors can be compatible with evolutionary theory.

Yeast may seem unlikely subjects for a study of cooperative behavior, but in fact they are perfectly suited to such studies, says Gore. Unlike humans, yeast have no emotions or thoughts that interfere with rational decision-making; their actions are solely driven by their genetic response to the environment.

"You can apply game theory to biological interactions and in some ways it's more broadly applicable than it is in humans," says Gore, the paper's lead author.

Game theory, traditionally employed by economists and military strategists, uses mathematics to predict individuals' behavior in certain situations.

Cooperators and cheaters

Working with MIT physics professor Alexander van Oudenaarden, also an author of the paper, Gore developed an experimental setup involving yeast sucrose metabolism. Sucrose is not yeast's preferred food source, but they will metabolize it if no glucose is available. To do so, they must secrete an enzyme called invertase, which breaks sucrose into smaller sugars that the yeast can absorb.

Much of that sugar diffuses away and is freely available to other yeast cells in the environment. In this scenario, yeast that secrete invertase are known as cooperators, while those that don't secrete invertase and instead consume the simple sugars produced by others are called cheaters.

If all of these simple sugars diffused away, with no preferential access to the yeast that produced it, then it would always be better to cheat, and the cooperators would die out.

The researchers observed that cooperating yeast have preferential access to approximately 1 percent of the sucrose they produce. That benefit outweighs the cost of helping others, allowing them to successfully compete against cheaters.

In addition, no matter the initial starting numbers of yeast in a given population, the microbes always come into an equilibrium state, with both cooperators and cheaters present. "It doesn't matter where you start. You always end up with equilibrium," says Gore.

This suggests that the yeast are playing what game theorists call a snowdrift game. The name of the game comes from a situation in which two drivers are trapped in cars behind a snowdrift. Each one can choose to get out and clear a path or stay put. If one driver does not shovel, the other must.

The best option is to "cheat" by staying in the car while the other driver shovels. However, the worst-case scenario occurs if both drivers cheat and no one gets home. Therefore, the best strategy is always the opposite of your opponent's strategy.

The same rules apply to the cheating and cooperating yeast: Like the driver who grudgingly gets out and shovels so that both she and her fellow motorist — snug inside his car — may continue on their journeys, the yeast who cooperate do so because there is a slight benefit for themselves. However, when most of the yeast are cooperating, it becomes advantageous for some individuals to cheat, and vice versa, which allows co-existence between cheaters and cooperators to arise.

Studies have shown that in the wild, yeast carry different numbers of copies of the invertase gene. This genetic diversity in the wild may be similar to the long-term coexistence of cooperators and cheaters observed in the laboratory, says Gore.

###

Hyun Youk, an MIT graduate student in physics, is also an author of the paper. This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation."

“Rather, these forces themselves depend on certain propensities of the human mind.”

TO BE NOTED: From SA:

Creationism Feels Right, but That Doesn't Make it So

Psychological researchers suggest that evolutionary thinking is unnatural

By Jesse Bering

Presently I’m attending a small symposium on “Belief and Reason” at Trinity College, Cambridge, being sponsored by the Perrott-Warrick Fund. It’s a rather intimate affair with mostly cognitive scientists discussing the latest research and theory on everything from paranormal beliefs to free will to the placebo effect. One of the standout talks Monday was by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who gave a presentation titled “Is Religion Natural?” He focused on the puzzling case of creationist beliefs.

As Bloom pointed out, many people believe that one’s acceptance of evolutionary theory boils down to whether that person was indoctrinated as a child by religious parents or educated by science-minded teachers. But it's not that simple. By her own accounts, even Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind from nineteen months of age*, spontaneously pondered, “Who made the sky, the sea, everything?” prior to being taught how to communicate. As a retrospective anecdote, the example should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they say—but if true, it’s quite something, since her linguistic isolation meant that Keller hadn’t a culturally transmitted concept of God to revert to but nevertheless intuited ‘someone’ had created the world.

For the past decade, University of Michigan psychologist Margaret Evans has been investigating why creationist thinking comes more easily to the human mind than does evolutionary thinking. “Persistence [of creationist beliefs] is not simply the result of fundamentalist politics and socialization,” writes Evans. “Rather, these forces themselves depend on certain propensities of the human mind.” According to Evans, the preponderance of creationist beliefs—as well as their recalcitrance in the face of logical science—is due in large part to the way our cognitive systems have (ironically enough) evolved.

As a scientist, Evans isn't so much interested in the metaphysical question of ultimate origins, but rather in the cognitive factors that influence and constrain our ability to think and reason about this existential problem. In her very important research, she's been mapping out how children’s reasoning about origins are influenced by particular developmental experiences, such as being raised by a professor of evolutionary biology versus a pastor at the local church. Or, more commonly, just by regular parents.

Evans has discovered that regardless of their parents’ beliefs or whether they attend religious or secular school, when asked where the first member of a particular animal species came from (say, a fox or a turtle), 5- to 7-year-old children give either spontaneous generationist (e.g., “it got born there”) or creationist (e.g., “God made it”) responses. By 8-10 years of age, however, children from both secular and religious backgrounds give exclusively creationist answers. Typically these answers are manifest as “God made it,” but often “Nature” is personified, seen as a deliberate agent that intentionally made the animal. It’s only among the oldest children she’s studied, the 10-12-year-olds, that Evans uncovers an effect of developmental experience, with children of evolutionary-minded parents giving evolutionary responses and those of evangelical parents giving creationist answers to the question.

In one of her writings, subtitled “Why Creationism is Here to Stay,” Evans states that “the theory of evolution is not something that arises intuitively, but rather requires a specific knowledge structure.” In other words, thinking like an evolutionist is hard work because, ironically, it works against the grain of evolved human psychology. Evolutionists will probably never outnumber creationists, Evans believes, since the latter has a paradoxical ally in the way natural selection has lent itself to our species’ ability to reason about its own origins.

According to Evans and other psychologists, including Deborah Kelemen from Boston University, there’s a very specific cognitive glitch that invades our rationalist thought whenever we’re pondering the subject of life’s origins, something those who do research in this area refer to as “teleo-functional thinking” (reasoning about the functional purpose of an entity or object in question). When scratching our heads over an artifact—with the end product before us, asking ourselves how it came to be—these scientists find that we tend to start off by trying to deduce what it’s meant for. If you’ve ever puzzled over an ambiguous gadget at the Sharper Image or some archaic device at the antique store or museum, asking yourself, “I wonder what that’s supposed to be for?” this is an example of your teleo-functional reasoning in action. Many times the various physical or architectural features of the object, what are called its “affordances,” give us clues as to its inherent purpose, or in other words what the designer of the object had in mind when creating it. An object with a handle, for instance, is meant for holding, while one with a hook is meant for hooking, and so on, and we interact with the object accordingly.

One thing you may also have noticed is that when we can’t figure out the purpose of something to our satisfaction, it can be very, very frustrating. As a teenager, I once made the strangest archeological find in the trunk of a hundred-year-old shagbark hickory tree that grew in the backyard of my family’s house in Ohio. Since it was nearly dead anyway and, furthermore, in a state of suspended decline in the direction of our roof, my father decided to have the tree felled. Its remains were then butchered into firewood and stacked neatly on our lawn. It was in this stack of wood, while sorting for kindling one winter, that I discovered something curious among the tree’s ruins, a tool of some sort—two conjoining iron segments, one resembling an anvil with an opening at its rounded end for the pivot joint of the other to sit in. It had come to be wedged into the tree when the land was still owned by a hardworking farmer rather than a housing developer, and a thick hide of bark and lignum had consumed it in the time since.

I never did find out what that tool was supposed to be for, much less how it wound up in the belly of an old hickory tree. But why is it so irritating for me, to this day, to be deprived of this answer? It could be that, as University of California at Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik suggests, this object and its elusive purpose serves as something of a sexual tease for me, only it’s not walking in front of me semi-naked and giving me that come hither look insomuch as it’s wearing the cognitive chastity belt of a brainteaser.

Gopnik argues that human beings have evolved an “innate explanatory drive” that motivates us to seek explanations similar to the way we’re motivated to achieve sexual climax. That is to say, for the sheer thrill and phenomenological bliss of it. Just as those few seconds in bed or on top of the washing machine feel naturally grand and put a smile on your face, so too does lighting upon that fleeting eureka moment in solving a mind-tickling problem leave you glowing. (OK, so maybe doing crosswords or Sudoku isn’t going to have you exactly biting your bottom lip and moaning in ecstasy, but you get the gist of Gopnik’s analogy.)

Physiologically speaking, says Gopnik, your brain is rigged up to chase these short-lived moments of pleasure: orgasm in the one instance because sex is nature’s feel-good ruse to get your genes out there, and explanation in the other because knowing why things work the way they do enables you to learn and therefore to make more adaptive responses in the future. The thing is, Gopnik points out, your explanation doesn’t actually need to be correct to get that burst of pleasure; you’ve just got to believe you’ve solved the problem. In any event, unless I ever spend a Sunday afternoon googling images from a search of “agrarian tool history,” then I’m not going to get much satisfaction whenever I think about my 19th-century hickory-encrusted artifact.

One important point made by researchers working in this area is that teleo-functional reasoning invokes our social cognition because it has us guessing what the person who’d originally conceptualized the object intended it to be used for. “Oh I see,” we’ll say, rotating some mysterious contraption in our hands and finally recognizing some hidden function for one if its doohickeys or thingamajigs, “how clever.” Of course for artifacts, or for that matter anything intentionally manmade, this type of thinking makes sense. People are indeed very clever at designing new objects that have a functional purpose. In fact one could even say we’re ingenious at devising solutions to problems this way. Just over the past few decades, more than 600 original patents have been awarded for bidets and bidet-related accessories and 400 for products meant to improve your croissant-baking skills. But when applied to human origins, Darwin’s mindless machine of natural selection obviates the need for an intelligent designer. Somebody needs to explain this to Rick Warren—Stat!

As far as I know, the type of psychological research and theories described above haven’t been given much consideration in the endless ‘intelligent design’ debates eating up the clock at many lively school board meetings. But since it shows how our minds give the Book of Genesis a generous (and rather unfair) handicap in science education dialogue, it may be wise to table such findings for discussion.

In this new column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature. Sign up for the RSS feed or friend Dr. Bering on Facebook and never miss an installment again.

*Correction (3/20/09): When this story was originally posted, it incorrectly stated that Helen Keller was born deaf and blind."