Do we live in an age of reason?

Steven Pinker - TSA not cost effective at making us safer

PHOTOS - Genomes Environments Traits Conference 2013

Sharon Terry of Reg4all.org
Working to build a registry for patients with any and all diseases.
Emphasized the need to make clinical data "ours" not "theirs."
Photo by Kristopher Hite
 

Misha Angrist - Assistant Professor at Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy.
Misha was the fourth person to have his genome sequenced as part of the personal genome project.
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Jack Hitt author of "Bunch of Amateurs"
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Dr. Ed Wild of HDBuzz.net
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Robert Krulwich and Dorit S. Berlin, Ph.D. Dorit is principal investigator of the NIGMS Human Genetic Cell Repository.
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Sandra de Castro Buffington director of Hollywood, Health & Society
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Stephen Friend MD, PhD of Sage Bionetworks
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Stephen Heuser of eth Boston Globe and Steven Pinker - Harvard Professor of Evolutionary Psychology.
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Wally Gilbert - 1980 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry for seminal work on DNA sequencing methods
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

George Church and his gentle genome
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

George Church contemplates privacy issues surrounding personal genome data.
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Jeffrey Carrol of HDBuzz.net
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Stephen Friend has amazing green-rimmed specs.
Photo by Kristopher Hite Creative Commons attribution www.tompainesghost.com

Steven Pinker on Point of Inquiry

I live tweeted this event. See the resulting Storify below. I'm still playing with the best way to deliver a "Storify" via blog post. Let me know what you think of the "slideshow" format. Funny, you can hear iPhones vibrating with tweets during the recording :) Glad to know some of those were me!

The gang's all here: a killer thread

Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Stewart Brand.
 
These are just a few of the intellectual heavy-hitters you will find in one of the best conversations I have ever witnessed on the web. While most blog comment threads quickly degenerate into ad hominem mudslinging and and worthless tangential banter, the comment thread I speak of is a well curated invite-only debate about one of the most perplexing ideas in natural philosophy - the evolution of altruism. 

Here are some rousing excerpts from the conversation - 

In which philosopher Dan Dennett proposes using intellectual judo against intelligent design proponents by co-opting the very word "design" to explain the intricate molecular machines produced by natural selection.

I recently overheard a conversation among some young people in a bar about the marvels of the nano-machinery discovered inside all cells. "When you see all those fantastic little robots working away, how can you possibly believe in evolution!" one exclaimed, and another nodded wisely. Somehow these folks had gotten the impression that evolutionary biologists thought that the intricacies and ingenuities of life's processes weren't all that wonderful. These evolution-doubters were not rednecks; they were Harvard Medical students!  They hugely underestimated the power of natural selection because they had been told by evolutionary biologists, again and again, that there is no actual design in nature, only the appearance of design. This episode strongly suggested to me that one of the themes that has been gaining ground in "common knowledge" is that evolutionary biologists are reluctant to "admit" or "acknowledge" the manifest design in nature. I recommend instead the expository policy of calling nature's marvels design, as real as any design in the universe, but just not the products of an intelligent designer. There could be a good use for "designoid," to refer to the truly only apparent design manifest, for example, in all the complicated chemical apparatus that cartoonists draw when they need to illustrate a laboratory—it looks impressive to the naïve eye, but is just a nonsensical hodgepodge of tubes, bunsen burners, retorts and the like. That is apparent design; the design in nature, in contrast, is typically as good as, or even much better than, the designs we "intelligent" artificers have yet devised. They work really well, which is as good a criterion of design as any, in my opinion.

And in prophetic sweep Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, predicts horizontal gene transfer will be found to have broader influence on evolution than previously thought. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of horizontal gene transfer just think of updating your iPhone apps but on a genetic level.

My prediction is that new research in microbial ecology and evolution will change everything in how we think about genes and evolution. Because of the prevalence of "horizontal" gene transfer (by six different ways) in micro-organisms, they don't have Darwinian species, and their evolution looks Lamarckian—traits are acquired on the fly and passed on to offspring.
"Multi-level selection" is likely to extend downward below Darwinian species as well as upward into groups. Like everything in biology it will be messy and squishy. Simplistic Darwinian selection-by-mutation got pummeled by sexual recombination, chromosome doubling and tripling, kin selection, extended phenotype, endo-symbiosis (Margulis), regulatory genes, mitochondrial genomes, transgenic gene flow, and doubtless more to come.
The longer and closer you look, the gnarlier it gets, so far.

You can read the entire thread at The Edge where Steven Pinker started this particular conversation.

I have written about this debate here on Tom Paine's Ghost and for the World Science Festival.


One of the best summaries of the debate was written by my colleague Eric Michael Johnson for the Scientific American Blog Network. It is titled The Good Fight. Read it here. 

EO Wilson responds in NYTimes

In an opinion piece published online EO Wilson responds directly to his critics regarding his recent rethink of a long held tenet of evolutionary biology.  Wilson officially abandoned his long-held belief that cooperative and altruistic behavior among some organisms can be simply explained as a veiled selfishness (kin selection) in 2010. This came after a lifetime promoting the opposing view. In a controversial peer-reviewed Nature paper titled "the evolution of eusociality" Wilson explains why he thinks kin selection theory is insufficient to explain altruistic behavior and ought to be replaced with multi-level selection theory. With the publication of this paper Wilson and coauthors ignited a massive debate that has recently unfurled in popular media. Wilson explains.

A strong reaction from supporters of kin selection not surprisingly ensued, and soon afterward more than 130 of them famously signed on to protest our replacement of kin selection by multilevel selection, and most emphatically the key role given to group selection. But at no time have our mathematical and empirical arguments been refuted or even seriously challenged. Since that protest, the number of supporters of the multilevel selection approach has grown, to the extent that a similarly long list of signatories could be obtained. But such exercises are futile: science is not advanced by polling. If it were, we would still be releasing phlogiston to burn logs and navigating the sky with geocentric maps.

Though I may not accept multi-level selection theory currently I do like Wilson's point that "science is not advanced by polling."  As a citizen of a post-enlightenment democracy my hope is that all politics will eventually die at the hand of science. Politics is subject to rhetoric. Science in an idealized sense is immune to rhetoric. Science can be spun in all kinds of directions but at its core really is not subject to opinion. The existence of seasonal Antarctic ice layers measurable for nearly 740,000 years is indisputable. The existence of fossilized trilobites in Cambrian geologic formation is indisputable, the fact that you and I have nearly identical genetic code for hemoglobin molecules is indisputable. And so I am undaunted by this new debate in evolutionary theory. In the new version of the group selection vs. kin selection debate no one person's opinion will affect the validity of one over the other. 

Read EO Wilson's entire opinion piece here. See my previous coverage of this topic here and here. So far IMHO Steven Pinker has given the most complete analysis of the debate particularly the short comings of group selection theory.

Steven Pinker on Group Selection

"I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not. After all, group selection sounds like a reasonable extension of evolutionary theory and a plausible explanation of the social nature of humans. Also, the group selectionists tend to declare victory, and write as if their theory has already superseded a narrow, reductionist dogma that selection acts only at the level of genes. In this essay, I'll explain why I think that this reasonableness is an illusion. The more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it fits the facts of human psychology and history." 

                  ~Steven Pinker

In an article published at The Edge Steven Pinker addresses the recent dust-up in the debate between "new group selectionists" and "gene-selectionists." The former being spearheaded by biologists and social scientists like E.O. Wilson and Jonathan Hiadt, the later group lead by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. 

I have covered this emerging debate here at Tom Paine's Ghost and at the World Science Festival blog.

You can read Steven Pinker's essay here.

I think this debate comes down to conceptual semantics.  The observations of science really should not be limited by language.  Whether thinkers decide to call a gene "selfish" or "altruistic" the author is still assigning a false personality to a physical thing. A gene alone does not have "will" in either case. This is hard to accept but after reading Sam Harris' Free Will I can accept that free will is an illusion more readily. Darwin himself struggled with false anthropomorphism when he decided to use the word "selection" - as in natural selection. He went to great pains to point out that the natural process does not have any will to select. 

This debate will not be settled with words. It ought be settled on an agreement on which equations describe genetic fitness most realistically. After reading the infamous Wilson, Tartinia, Nowak Nature paper (including the 45-page-long prose-heavy supplemental) I am not convinced of Nowak and his fancy equations. It appears to me he is intentionally complicating the math to the point of obscurity.  Carefully reading the new equations he proposes to describe an individual's fitness I am left confused. This is unnecessary confusion inside a supplemental text (usually overlooked) behind a paywall.  It pangs of academic secrecy and I can not stand it. I hope the debate continues and these equations are scrutinized in public view! Bully to Steven Pinker for jumping in the ring.

Creating Freedom

Creating Freedom
  EPISODE ONE: the lottery of birth
                    a film by Raoul Martinez

Creating Freedom - Part 1: The Lottery of Birth (Trailer) from Creating Freedom on Vimeo.