God, shmod! Again...

I was going to bitch about the idiotic, religious ending of the otherwise really great movie 'I am Legend' (and the ending is probably a consequence of the fact that it is an adaptation from an older film, but that's really no excuse: if you adapt the setting, the characters and the advertising, why not the shallow ethics?), but instead, I'm simply going to give you a link to a talk by Sam Harris, philosopher and neurologist, called Believing the Unbelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World.

And seriously: you believe a certain book is the absolute truth because the book itself says it's the absolute truth?
Smooth...

Alweer vreemd

Oorstokjes heten nu wattenstaafjes en mogen niet meer in de gehoorgang of de neus worden gestoken. Die vijf andere lichaamsopeningen daarentegen...

[Edit: in Van Dale staat bij 'wattenstokje' (synoniem van) echter 'staafje met watten aan de uiteinden, gebruikt om de oren te reinigen'. Maar ondertussen vraag ik me vooral af hoeveel mensen die dingen te diep in hun lichaam geploft hebben...]

What else is new?

Let us consider just one aspect of human nature: race. Again and again in modern literary studies, ideas of race are traced to particular historical origins, not entirely coincidentally the period the critic in question happens to focus on. But in evolutionary studies the explanation digs deeper. There has been much work done on multi-level selection, that is, natural selection occurring at the level of the gene, or the cell, or the organ, or the individual organism, the family, the group, the species, the species and its symbionts, or the whole ecosystem.²⁶ Cooperation at one level can develop because it allows those entities (whether cells or organs or individuals) that cooperate well to supplant other entities that either do not cooperate at all or not so well; their superior capacity for cooperation allows them to out-compete and ultimately oust those who do not cooperate so well. Within-group cooperation, in other words, evolves through competition against out-groups; "in-group amity" is at the expense of "out-group enmity."²⁷ In many social species from ants to hyenas, dolphins and chimpanzees, recognition of out-groups, of others from the same species who belong to different groups, operates by sight, scent or sound, and it can trigger fierce antagonism and conflict. In the human case for instance differences between languages and dialects and accents can clearly mark group boundaries.

But John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, two founders of evolutionary psychology, wondered why humans should notice race so much, because after all during the time the human psyche was evolving in Africa, race would have been useless as an identifier, since most proto-humans would never meet anyone of a different race. "Noticing people's sex and age, on the other hand, would make good sense: these were reliable if approximate predictors of behavior. So evolutionary pressures may well have built into the human mind an instinct"—modified by local culture, of course—"to notice sex and age, but not race." But why should race also keep appearing as a natural classifier?

Perhaps, Tooby and Cosmides reasoned, "race is merely a proxy for something else." In the Pleistocene, "one vital thing to know about a stranger is 'whose side is he on?' Human society, like ape society, is riddled with factions—from tribes and bands to temporary coalitions of friends. Perhaps race is a proxy for membership in coalitions," and people "pay so much attention to race in some countries because they instinctively identify people of other races as being members of other tribes or coalitions."

Tooby and Cosmides set up an experiment. Subjects were shown a series of pictures each associated with a sentence putatively spoken by the person in the picture. At the end, they saw all 8 pictures and all 8 sentences, and had to match each statement to the right picture. It was the mistakes that mattered, since these indicated how the subjects had mentally classified people. As expected, age, sex, and race were strong clues: the subjects would misattribute a statement made by one old person to another old person, or a statement by one black person to another black person. Then the experiment introduced another possible classifier: coalition membership. This was revealed purely through the statements made by the people depicted, who were taking two sides of an argument. Quickly the subjects began to confuse two members of the same side more often than two members of different sides. Revealingly, this largely replaced the tendency to make mistakes by race, though it had virtually no effect on the tendency to make mistakes by sex. As Matt Ridley comments in reporting this: "Within four minutes, the evolutionary psychologists had done what social science had failed to do in decades: make people ignore race. The way to do it is to give them another, stronger clue to coalition membership. Sports fans are well aware of the phenomenon: white fans cheer a black player on 'their' team as he beats a white player on the opposing team." Ridley adds: "This study has immense implications for social policy. It suggests that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, that racism can be easily defeated if coalition clues cut across race, and that there is nothing intractable about racist attitudes. It also suggests that the more people of different races seem to act or be treated as members of a rival coalition, the more racist instincts they risk evoking." He concludes with the moral that, "the more we understand both our genes and our instincts, the less intractable they seem."²⁸

26. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

27. Richard Alexander, in Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 138.

28. Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), pp. 265–66.

Source: Brian Boyd - Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural approach