Book Review: The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver

Five stars out of five.

I remember watching the TV series Quantum Leap years ago, starring Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell who traveled through time and lived at the whim of ever-changing Bayesian probabilities. Whatever predicament they encountered has associated chance of solution or death as spit out by Stockwell’s computer named Ziggy. As the conditions changed, say, a bad guy presents himself, Stockwell would translate the changing probabilities: “Ziggy says you have a 85% chance of dying.” With a bad guy vanquished, it would change, “Ziggy now says you have only a 15% chance of dying.”

Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise explains the phenomenon of prior probability that subsequently changes with conditions that was first presented as Bayes Theorem three hundred years ago. Silver is a professional poker player who made his “f**k you” money by selling software to analyze baseball statistics. Recently he became a phenomenon of sorts by successfully predicting all 50 state elections in 2012 and currently writes the always informational “five-thirty-eight” blog for the New York Times.

The Signal and the Noise is a more comprehensive discussion of Bayesian probabilities and how they affect almost everything humans do. An engineer friends says that every high school kid should read Silver’s book just to get an idea of how probability works and to hone critical thinking skills. I cannot disagree.

Okay, Silver is concerned with more than the theory of Thomas Bayes, he begins by discussing the huge explosion of data available to humans beginning with the Gutenberg printing press and evolving to the electronic databases today. He also points out that humans are unduly flawed because we too often seek confirmation of our own ideas instead of critically parsing all this information. Political pundits are notorious for

stoking the confirmation biases of their customers, which has been shown by the likes of Dick Morris and Karl Rove claiming to “have the math” only to be embarrassingly wrong on the outcome of recent elections. But they aren’t embarrassed-- they aren’t paid to be correct, only to confirm bias.

Silver also uses the baseball player Dustin Pedroia as an example of the failure of Big Data. On paper, or more accurately, using computer stats, a guy like Pedroia should never have made it into Major League baseball: he’s too small, too slow, not a very powerful hitter and can’t throw very well. Instead of failing, Pedroia is an all-star and a winner. What gives? There are intangibles, data is never able to be completely known. All the stats in the world cannot always be interpreted perfectly.

Separating what’s important (the signal) from confusing interference (the noise) is the key to forecasting any natural event or human phenomenon. We are good at forecasting some things like weather and hurricanes, but poor at predicting other things like earthquakes and terror attacks. Silver is an excellent explainer of how we know things and the limitations of that knowledge. He uses a wide-ranging array of interesting stories: from bird flu and climate to Donald Rumsfeld and poker. Refreshingly, I find no ideological or political preferences in his discussion.

This book is highly recommended.

Congratulations, Dr Oz !!

Quack of the Year !!

[Video here]

Book Review: Straw Dogs, by John Gray

Heaven and Earth are impartial

They regard myriad things as straw dogs

The sages are impartial
They regard people as straw dogs

--Verse 5, Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu

[As Derek Lin translates, straw dogs are ceremonial figurines used by ancient Chinese and then cast away after the ritual. At once precious only to be discarded later. As Lin states, “this is a vivid imagery that compares life itself to the ancient ritual. The progression of life is like the ritual being conducted in proscribed sequence. While this is happening we are like straw dogs at the center of it all, experiencing this interesting ritual called life. Eventually, life comes to an end just as the ritual must come to an end. Our bodies can no longer contain life and are discarded.”]

This is my review of John Gray’s Straw Dogs, a book that had been recommended to me a while back and I just now read for the first time. Gray (not to be confused with the Mars/Venus guy) is  known as a Thatcher conservative in Britain who has aimed his intellect away from politics and economics and towards philosophy in recent decades.  

For some reason I had assumed this was a novel, but rather it is a short non-fiction work that gives a very cursory overview and critique of philosophy dating from the ancient Greeks to Christianity to the Enlightenment and the modern nihilists and everything in between. Gray, often called the skeptic’s skeptic, sometimes has a scolding tone directed at believers and non-believers alike, even calling atheism a belief system and an off-shoot of Christianity (referring to it as “post-Christian”).

Gray does not view humans as anything special, sees god merely as a human invention, has no place for salvation, and calls morality a disease-- so far so good-- but then he declares that evolution does not progress (who ever said it did?) and has a chapter entitled "Non-progress" which is a dissatisfying finale that fails to define "progress" and seems to miss the entire point of evolutionary science, namely, that it has no direction or purpose.

One potential value of the book is Gray's whirlwind summary of famous thinkers such as Heidegger, Kant, Plato, Descartes, Aquinas, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, among others. I’ll concede that my knowledge of these gentlemen (no women are mentioned) is limited but he seems to be fairly well-versed and the review is interesting, like a Cliff notes version of philosophical history-- and it’s not surprising that Gray  presents these views only to disregard them as incomplete and useless because they put humanity at the center of philosophy.  The nihilist’s nihilist...which makes me wonder why he bothered to write the book in the first place except to display his intellectual muscle (something a true nihilist wouldn’t bother doing.)

One issue I have regards Gray’s treatment of science and evolution and E. O. Wilson specifically.  At one point he remarks on E. O. Wilson’s quote about humans having acquired the ability to consciously alter evolution in the modern age: using reproductive technologies, choosing numbers of offspring and genders and, in the future, myriad other genetic traits. Wilson states that evolution has become ‘volitional.’ Gray has a problem with this concept and implies that Wilson has made some grand proclamation about humans controlling evolution. My understanding of Wilson’s work is that nobody is more humble about humans’ ability to control nature than he is and he eschews the anthropocentric view of creation.

Gray has a point about much of science being co-opted to benefit humanity at the expense of the rest of nature. We have torn up the planet for fossil fuels, plowed over habitat for farmland, polluted great bodies of water, melted the polar ice-caps (arguably) by liberating CO2 into the atmosphere. We have put all living things at risk of nuclear holocaust. As the number of humans grows past 9 billion the petri dish known as earth becomes more strained with the greatest species extinction since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Ironically, this dire Neo-Malthusian scenario was proffered by E. O. Wilson himself in Consilience long before Gray’s treatise, but while Gray’s point about Wilson’s use of the word “control” is valid it is taken out of context of Wilson's body of work and thought.

Gray sometimes seems to confuse science with the uses of science.  Pure science has no dog in the fight between nature and humanity. Real scientists are merely observing nature and describing its characteristics: fossils, DNA, antibodies, antigens, nuclear reactions, disease, electromagnetism, etc... Yes, much of science has been co-opted for the immediate perceived benefit of humanity, but that is not so much a testament on science as on the technologies that have resulted from scientific discovery and the human consumers who buy such technologies. Pfizer may call chemists who formulate drugs to lower our cholesterol “scientists” but they are really derivative technicians using the scientific observations made by purists.

I can point to scientist after scientist who slave away at discovering the chemical reactions that began life or how sea creatures become luminescent or studying the flora of a desolate island with no intention of marketing a product to humans or improving our stake at survival. Pure science has no humanist goal, although certainly a (relatively small) percentage of the vast number of scientific advances have been co-opted for human use and proponents of scientific funding often misuse human benefit as an excuse for social funding.

Gray also says that science has not benefited humanity with anything significant, stating that pre-scientific hunter-gatherers had a better quality of life, even if their lives were not as long. I suppose it depends on how one would define  “benefit” or “improve” and if someone can argue that sewers, clean water, antibiotics, vaccines and modern anesthesia have not benefited humanity, then I have nothing more to say.  Gray’s argument is that science has not conquered mortality-- we still die eventually-- and so all the advances of modern science have left us with nothing substantive. Fair enough, but that is not to say there have been no benefits or improvements at all as we generally define “benefit” and “improve.”

There are other problems, too: Gray contends that Darwinism and Einsteinian relativity are not falsifiable and therefore not “science” according to Karl Popper’s definition. Huh? Methinks Gray does not really understand science. These theories have withstood the test of falsification via untold numbers of trials and observations.  If any single observations has ever been inconsistent with, say, speciation by natural selection then all of Darwin's opus would be tossed in the trash heap. Nothing of the sort has ever happened. Test after test, observation after observation, in fields as disparate as chemistry, ecology, ethology and genetics have proven over and over that Darwin was spot on.

In general, Gray’s demeanor is condescending, chiding straw-man scientists for not being scientific, scolding humanists for ignoring the consequences of their actions as if he has calculated all the  permutations of outcomes and discerned that humanism is misguided. Gray sounds like an asshole, and while I can appreciate his pessimism, Gray comes across as a pedantic holier-than-thou dick. (Maybe I do too, but this isn't about me.)

Here’s my take: Years ago I read a book by Derrick Jensen called A Language Older than Words which I remember as an emotional paean to nature and a lamentation regarding humanity’s destruction of the planet.  Jensen compared humanity’s treatment of earth with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his father.  We are conveniently blind to or quickly forget the anguish we cause for various reasons related to preservation of self or species.  If we were to feel the requisite sorrow we cause other humans or animals or the planet in general the pain would be too much to bear.  I cannot do justice to Jensen’s heartfelt book-length disgorgement in this paragraph, but suffice to say that he does a better job than Gray does at portraying humans as cosmically inconsequential and on-balance harmful to the rest of planetary life.  

John Gray’s Straw Dogs is a hyper-intellectual castigation of the human species.  He is judgemental. Derrick Jensen, likewise, is judgemental towards humanity. I guess I don’t get why these writers are so hard on Homo sapiens, after all we are just playing out our evolutionary-determined hand, preserving our species in the immediate future, prolonging our lives, adding offspring to the subsequent generation. That’s what our DNA is programmed to do.  Sure, maybe we are making the planet uninhabitable for our and other species in the distant (40 years? 1000 years?) future, but who really knows? Evolution has not programmed us to worry about what will happen beyond the next generation, has it?

E. O. Wilson famously backtracked on the  pessimism in Consilience to consider that humans may eventually use their powerful collective intellect to figure out how to save the planet from destruction and prolong the Homo sapiens existence. Cynics and fellow scientists disregarded this later work as a bone thrown to the readers, a sell-out to optimists in order to move more books and remain popular. So be it, the world needs booksellers too.

Regardless how thoughtful and responsible we are,  Homo sapiens will be gone someday and we may take most of the currently known species with us. But the earth will be populated with other species evolved to the changed humanless habitat, that is what evolution dictates. Even the worst human-caused potential scenarios-- global climate change run amok or nuclear holocaust-- would most likely bring about changes in the habitat that would benefit some other species: maybe an organism that thrives in a low level radioactive environment.  Or maybe the earth will be just a hulking lifeless rock. Oh well, the universe needs hulking lifeless rocks too. With 7 billion other galaxies I’m reasonably sure the legacy of life will continue somewhere.

Acolytes of Al Gore can call for some dramatic change in human understanding about the use of fossil fuels, but don’t expect anyone anywhere to voluntarily reduce their standard of living for a perceived threat to the planet in the distant (40 years? 1000 years?) future. The Atlantic Ocean could be lapping at the 10 th floor of the Empire State building but Iowans will still want to drive tractors, eat hamburgers and make more babies that do the same.

Gray, with all his nihilistic intellectualization, is a show-off. And being a show-off is a form of what Buddhists call attachment, which leads to suffering, yada yada yada. (Hey, I’m not above it; all beings suffer,  as writing-- and certainly reading-- this review is sure to prove.)  A good friend (House) serendipitously recommended reading the Tao Te Ching with interpretation by Derek Lin about the time I was finishing Gray’s Straw Dogs, and it dovetails quite nicely with the thesis.  

I may write a longer review of Lin’s outstanding work later, but pertinence to the current discussion has to do with what the Tao means. Usually translated as “The Way”, Lin points out that, more accurately, it means “The Way Things Are”, i.e., the essence. My interpretation is that when Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching it was a premonition of Walter Cronkite’s catchphrase: "And that's the way it is", just a humble attempt to present reality in an understandable form. No judgment, no remorse.

While the Buddha later incorporated the grim recognition about suffering, Lao Tzu’s treatise is really a more uplifting statement about what little control (free will) humans have and we are best served by relaxing into the palm of the universe.

We can intellectualize all we want, we can try to predict and ruminate about what it all means and find blame and cast aspersions, but at the end of the day we have no idea what it all means.  I’m re-reading Jensen’s Language Older Than Words and I’m also halfway through Lin’s Tao Te Ching. My gut tells me that they will be more satisfying than John Gray’s book, and I intend to give some updates.

I’ll finish with a further quote from Lin’s interpretation of Verse 5 regarding straw dogs:

“The Tao does not play favorites. The rain waters the weeds and orchids equally; the sun shines on everyone with the same brightness and warmth despite variations in individual merits. The sage, emulating the Tao, also regards everyone in the same egalitarian light-- none higher and none lower.”

Church of England Finally Apologized to Darwin

In honor of Darwin's birthday, let's remember how religion is always wrong (except when they are occasionally accidentally correct) and sometimes they are magnanimous enough to apologize later.

When Darwin's work on the theory of evolution came out, the church attacked him vociferously. Now, 126 years after his death, The Church of England has apologized to Darwin:

Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of 'faith seeking understanding' and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well. (Source)

Does the universe have a purpose?

Okay the first minute is the most important. The last minute or so just conjectures about the irrationality of any purpose. Hey, if there is a Supreme Being who are we to know why It waited 14 billion years to make humans?

No, the real issue is that IF there is a purpose then how the hell can any one human know better than any other human what that purpose is? There is no empiric evidence of a purpose. If a purpose exists humans obviously don't  know it.... by definition.

Okay, the Holy Spirit can imbue us with the *feeling* of a purpose. Yes, that can be. We have a word for this: Emotion.  I have no doubt that some humans have a feeling that the universe has a purpose just like some humans might feel that the Cubs are a good baseball team.

It happens, but it's not based on anything observable in reality.

Preventing Unintended Pregnancies by Providing No-Cost Contraception

Significant reductions in both teen pregnancies and abortion were accomplished by providing comprehensive contraception counseling and the reversible birth control method of choice.

From Obstetrics and Gynecology (the Green Journal):

OBJECTIVE: To promote the use of long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) methods (intrauterine devices [IUDs] and implants) and provide contraception at no cost to a large cohort of participants in an effort to reduce unintended pregnancies in our region.

METHOD: We enrolled 9,256 adolescents and women at risk for unintended pregnancy into the Contraceptive CHOICE Project, a prospective cohort study of adolescents and women desiring reversible contraceptive methods. Participants were recruited from the two abortion facilities in the St. Louis region and through provider referral, advertisements, and word of mouth. Contraceptive counseling included all reversible methods but emphasized the superior effectiveness of LARC methods (IUDs and implants). All participants received the reversible contraceptive method of their choice at no cost. We analyzed abortion rates, the percentage of abortions that were repeat abortions, and teenage births.

RESULTS: We observed a significant reduction in the percentage of abortions that were repeat abortions in the St. Louis region compared with Kansas City and nonmetropolitan Missouri (P<.001). Abortion rates in the CHOICE cohort were less than half the regional and national rates (P<.001). The rate of teenage birth within the CHOICE cohort was 6.3 per 1,000, compared with the U.S. rate of 34.3 per 1,000.

CONCLUSION: We noted a clinically and statistically significant reduction in abortion rates, repeat abortions, and teenage birth rates. Unintended pregnancies may be reduced by providing no-cost contraception and promoting the most effective contraceptive methods.

MY COMMENT: D'uh. 

Western societies that have the lowest rates of unintended teen pregnancies all have comprehensive health care and contraceptive counseling that begins at an early age. The ridiculously obvious implication for the United States is that all the moralizing and religious bullshit in the world doesn't lower abortion rates one bit, but education and birth control do.

As an example, Roman Catholics are destined to go to hell yet they abort fetuses and use birth control at the exact same rate as the general US population. Abortion cannot be mandated away neither by law nor even eternal damnation. 

Obamacare  holds the greatest promise for our nation attaining more reasonable rates of unintended pregnancies that cripple young people financially and medically.   

Note that this study used comprehensive counseling and did not just hand out birth control pills.

Nobel Prize given for advances in adult stem cell science

Reuters:

As far back as 1962 Gurdon became the first scientist to clone an animal, making a healthy tadpole from the egg of a frog with DNA from another tadpole's intestinal cell. That showed that developed cells carry the information to make every cell in the body - decades before other scientists made world headlines by cloning the first mammal from adult DNA, Dolly the sheep.

More than 40 years later, Yamanaka produced mouse stem cells from adult mouse skin cells by inserting a small number of genes. His breakthrough effectively showed that the development that takes place in adult tissue could be reversed, turning adult tissue back into cells that behave like embryos.

Stem cells created from adult tissue are known as "induced pluripotency stem cells", or iPS cells. Because patients may one day be treated with stem cells from their own tissue, their bodies might be less likely to reject them.

"The eventual aim is to provide replacement cells of all kinds," Gurdon's institute explains on its website.

"We would like to be able to find a way of obtaining spare heart or brain cells from skin or blood cells. The important point is that the replacement cells need to be from the same individual, to avoid problems of rejection and hence of the need for immunosuppression."

MY COMMENT: The implication of this technology is that the ethical squeamishness of using embryonic stem cells is mitigated, and, in fact, autologous donor cells (same person) also obviates the need for immunosuppression and therefore may be superior in practice. 

Mars Rover

Jerry Coyne has some videos about "Curiosity", the Mars rover which is set to land in August.





Phenomenal feat of engineering. More here, and the comments are always enlightening although mostly by biologists.

Neil Armstrong presents new footage

In an odd circumstance the usually reclusive Neil Armstrong agreed to an interview with, of all groups, the Australian Certified Practicing Accountants.


The video is here and contains actual footage (starting at 2:30) of the moon landing next to a recent Google Moon mock-up. This is presented in part to answer conspiracy enthusiasts who deny the moon landing ever occurred, but it is also a remarkable video in its own right.


The absolute coolest part of the video is that Google Moon shows the remains of the lunar module still in place (at about the 6:30 mark...it's a brief glimpse and goes unmentioned by Armstrong but worth the trouble).


From a write-up in the UK Guardian we learn that Armstrong's father was an auditor which may answer the question why the astronaut gave his exclusive to a CPA group.


Link to the entire hour-long interview video is here. 

Coyotes: Masters of Evoltion

From Sci Am:


"Researchers have long known the coyote as a master of adaptation, but studies over the past few years are now revealing how these unimposing relatives of wolves and dogs have managed to succeed where many other creatures have suffered. Coyotes have flourished in part by exploiting the changes that people have made to the environment, and their opportunism goes back thousands of years."


Read the entire article.

Is God a testable hypothesis?

Victor Stenger

Is God a testable hypothesis? Victor Stenger says that the supernatural is indeed testable, and shows that science speaks to this issue on a regular basis as well it should. In Science and Religion Today, Stenger says:

The rationale usually given by those who reject any role for science on religious matters is that science concerns itself, “by definition,” solely with natural phenomena. Since the supernatural is unobservable, then, they assert, science has nothing to say about it.

However, while supernatural entities may not be directly observable, any effects these entities might have on the material world should manifest themselves as observable phenomena. Anything observable is subject to scientific inquiry. On the other hand, if the supernatural has no observable effects on the natural world, then why even worry about it?

In recent years, right under the nose of the NAS, reputable scientists from reputable institutions have vigorously pursued several areas of empirical study that bear directly on the question of God and the supernatural. Any one of these experiments was capable of providing evidence for at least some aspect of a world beyond the material world. I will mention just two.

Teams of scientists from three highly respected institutions—The Mayo Clinic and Harvard and Duke universities—have performed carefully controlled experiments on the medical efficacy of blind, intercessory prayer and published their results in peer-reviewed journals. These experiments found no evidence that such prayers provide any health benefit. But, they could have.

For my second example, over a period of four decades extensive investigations have been made into the phenomenon of near-death experiences in which people resuscitated from the brink of death report a glimpse of “heaven.” Despite thousands of such reports, not a single subject has returned with new knowledge that could be tested by further investigations. No prediction has been made of some future catastrophe that later occurred on schedule, and not for lack of opportunity given the many natural disasters—earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornados—of recent years. Similarly, no divine revelation has provided an answer for any currently unanswered question in science, history, or theology, such as the where in the universe we will find extraterrestrial life or the location of Noah’s Ark.

Jerry Coyne references Stenger’s piece and he notes:

Jerry Coyne

Now it’s harder to test one-off interventions like the supposed resurrection of Jesus, but everything we know about nature suggests that dead people can’t come back to life, and there’s no independent evidence for this outside the Gospels. And if you show that the more frequent interventions of God are bogus, one naturally begins to suspect the one-off miracles as well.  Even when one-off miracles are tested, like weeping Jesus statues or the Shroud of Turin, they, too, fail to pass the test of divinity.

... [Stephen Jay] Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” brand of accommodationism works only with deistic religions that posit a hands-off God.  And, in the West, that kind of religion is found only among well-fed theologians and extremely liberal believers.

Of course, Stenger and Coyne are correct. I would add that every observation supports the lack of supernatural interaction in our physical world. Whether the children actually saw Virgin Mary at Fatima quickly becomes a matter of faith, but our immense history of observable phenomena tells us that more mundane explanations are much more likely.

Holy books have such a marked resemblance to fictional literature, and such literature is so pervasive in human experience that it’s hard to countenance any other explanation but fiction for the existence of the Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita, et al. We have no problem concluding that the Odyssey was manufactured in Homer’s brain, and the X-Files was borne out of imagination, yet so many accept similar stories as factual with no reliable evidence.

Scale of the Universe

From quantum foam to pistol stars and beyond! Click on the picture and let it load:

(hat tip Jay)

QOTD

Quote of the day:




"I tend I to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution. Religious belief and the firm adherence to it—and the intense dislike of apostates, people who abandon it—has a very important biologic origin, probably through natural selection, namely the cohesion of the group and the persuasion of people to be more altruistic."  --- E.O. Wilson, biologist.

Revealing the Origins of Life

Watch Revealing the Origins of Life on PBS. See more from NOVA scienceNOW.

TED: Animations in molecular biology

Book review: Catching Fire, by Richard Wrangham

Five Stars.


This book was recommended by an evolutionary biologist and is written by an evolutionary biologist and primatologist but the Dewey decimal system in the library categorizes it as a cooking book. Admittedly, I was a bit disconcerted to find it next to Anthony Bourdain's latest tome, but Catching Fire is a gem: easy to read and presents a simple hypothesis with exquisite supporting evidence regarding the social and physiological evolution of hominids.


The basic premise is that Australopithecines developed the ability to process food by mashing and pounding 2.5 million years ago which led to the transition to Homo habilis, the "handyman", who had a larger brain and shorter gut.  The evolution was effected by easier digestion of food which enabled habilines to extract more energy from food sources.  Homo habilus learned how to control fire about 1.9 million years ago which brought about relatively rapid evolution to Homo erectus, a robust species marked with even greater cranial size and short, efficient gut.  This efficiency of calorie extraction allowed greater cognitive ability but also the ability to travel long distances.  Fire affects food in ways that make it easier to digest and therefore more calories are available.


We are evolved to eat cooked food as evidenced by our short gut and the development of taste for cooked food.  Other primates such as chimpanzees also prefer cooked meat although they have not evolved specifically to eat cooked food.  Wrangham hypothesizes that this is due to the easier digestion and the higher caloric extraction from cooked and processed food versus raw food.  He gives a fairly detailed and worthwhile description of how various food sources are affected by mashing and cooking...take that Bourdain! 


Fire also allowed hominids to live on the ground since it afforded greater protection from predators and led to migration across savannahs, increasing the available habitat.  Homo erectus was a robust and long-lived species that survived over a million years in harsh, predator-filled environments.  They lost their hair/fur since they were able to sit and sleep by fire; this enabled them to dissipate heat when running and allowed long distance running.  Fire changed the social relationships between sexes and communities enabling beneficial division of labor and shaping the roles we still have to some degree today.  It all started with the control of fire. 


Darwin recognized the control of fire as "probably the greatest [discovery], excepting language, ever made by man," and Wrangham develops this thesis with strong supporting evidence from anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies as well as observations of lower primates.  


Wrangham discusses the biochemistry of food calorie availability and remarks that the current system of calorie determination is flawed since it does not take into account the processing of food.  Cooked meat contains denatured protein which is easier to digest than raw meat.  Likewise, cooked vegetables and seeds are easier to digest and therefore contain more available energy than raw food.  Wanna lose weight? It's simple, eat raw food which burns more calories in digestion for the fewer calories that are liberated.


Catching Fire is an intriguing, well-written book which answers a lot of questions about how and why we enjoy food and how fire affected nearly every aspect of our physical and social evolution.  It's a short readable book, and gets my highest recommendation. 

Evolutionary Tree of Life

For a larger gif, go here.

We should vote on what's true, it's the American way

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The evolution of self-deception

British evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has a forthcoming book entitled The Folly of Fools (US) in which he calls for a "new science" dealing with the how and why of self-deception, mainly because it's so prevalent and psychology has not come up with a theory.  From an interview in the New Scientist: 

You argue that we deceive ourselves all the time, but why do we do it? 

One reason is to better deceive others. Deceiving consciously is cognitively demanding. I've got to invent a false story while being aware of the truth, it's got to be plausible, it cannot contradict anything you already know or are going to find out and I've got to be able to remember it so that I don't contradict myself.

This takes concentration and I may give off cues that I'm lying. If I try to slip something by you I may not be able to meet your gaze. For linguistic cues, there are more pauses and fillers while I try to come up with my story. I'll choose simple action words and avoid qualifiers. Another thing that gives us away us is the effort to control ourselves. Let's say I'm coming to a key word in a lie. I tense up, but tensing up automatically raises my voice. That's a very hard thing to fight.

So believing the lie yourself can help with this cognitive burden? 

Yes. If I can render all or part of the lie unconscious I can remove the cues that I'm deceiving you. So that's one kind of general reason to practice self-deception: to render the lie unconscious, the better to hide it.

Trivers says that such self-deception can lead to better social success and thus more offspring, the hallmark of any genetic benefit.  Of course there are costs as well, but the overall effect must be that self-deception has net benefit. 

In your new book you get into some quite serious stuff about how self-deception fuels warfare and other evils...

Regarding warfare, if you can get the group believing the same deception, you have a powerful force to impose group unity. And if you've sold the population a false historical narrative, say "the German people need room in which to live", then it's relatively easy to couple marching orders to the delusion.

Tell me about the relationship between self-deception and religion.

It's complex. At one extreme you could say religion is complete nonsense, so the whole thing is an exercise in self-deception. I was raised as a Presbyterian and I occasionally attend. I stand back and I read the creed that I was taught as a child and it's utter, utter nonsense. But could it have spread so far by self-deception alone? Religion has been selected for. It has given many benefits to people - health benefits, cooperative benefits. So I take an intermediate position.

Again, my bete noir... he does not define religion!  But I'll assume he means the organization of communities around sacred ideas.  Trivers is a quirky, eccentric scientist but this latest is sure to promote some thought.  My question is how we come up with more universal ideas of what is sacred that all human communities can agree upon and leave out the supernatural mumbo jumbo, ie, a secular religion.  I realize Trivers probably will not delve into this topic but the first step is certainly realizing that humans are masters of self-deception and religion-- the prototype of human self-deception-- is certainly part of our biology.

Mulch-a-Matic will destroy it