Public service announcement: Your brain lies to you

Samuel Wang and Sandra Aamodt (authors of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life) have a fairly interesting and useful piece in the NYT entitled "Your Brain Lies to You". None of this will be new to those familiar with the heuristics and biases research literature, but the article is certainly useful as a 'public service announcement': it's important to popularize the finding that we are fallible, liable to lapses of memory and subject to all sorts of biases. A representative paragraph from the article:

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

(See also: Wang and Aamodt's blog and their talk at Google).

I love xkcd

xkcd just rocks. Have a look at:



And then:

Freedom to blog

This isn't a political blog, but I've written about freedom of expression before and as a blogger, I care quite a bit about the freedom to blog. So I find it deeply upsetting that in numerous countries bloggers are in fact in jail for airing their opinions. As an article in this week's Economist explains:

Security officials who once scoffed at blogs, or ignored them completely in favour of bigger and more conspicuous targets, are now bringing their legal and other arsenals to bear. A common move is to expand media, information and electoral laws to include blogs. Last year, for example, Uzbekistan changed its media law to count all websites as “mass media”—a category subject to Draconian restriction. Belarus now requires owners of internet cafés to keep a log of all websites that their customers visit: in a country where internet access at home is still rare and costly, that is a big hurdle for the active netizen. Earlier this year Indonesia passed a law that made it much riskier to publish controversial opinions online. A Brazilian court has ruled that bloggers, like other media, must abide by restrictions imposed by the law on elections.

The chilling effect of such moves is intensified when governments back them up with imprisonment. From Egypt to Malaysia to Saudi Arabia to Singapore, bloggers have in recent months found themselves behind bars for posting materials that those in power dislike. The most recent Worldwide Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, a lobby group, estimates their number at a minimum of 64.

For those of you who haven't read it, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty provides an overwhelmingly strong case for freedom of expression. As Mill put it:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Video: The Hubble Deep Field

An awesome, Saganesque video is embedded below for your viewing pleasure.

Atheists who believe in God

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has just released the second part of their "US Religious Landscape Survey". While there is a bunch of good news (a good deal of tolerance, for one) there is one seriously odd finding: 55% of agnostics and 21% of atheists say they believe in God or a "universal spirit". Even more amazingly, fully 8% of atheists and 17% of agnostics said they were absolutely certain God existed. No, I'm not kidding. And in other news: 1 in 4 vegans eat meat, 1 in 7 pacifists are warmongers, 1 in 8 virgins have had coitus and 1 in 2 triangles are circular...

More seriously, here are the details: in question 16 of the full report (pdf) respondents were asked "What is your present religion if any?" 16.1% of the 35,556 individuals questioned replied "unaffiliated" (p. 210), that is, 5,048 (+/- 2% margin of error) individuals self-identified as either atheists, agnostics or someone who believes in "nothing in particular" (p. 177). Of the total number of respondents, 1.6% (or about 589 in absolute terms) said they were atheists, 2.4% (~853) said their were agnostic and 12.1% (~4302) said 'nothing in particular' (p. 217; note: I had to calculate the absolute Ns myself). Then, in questions 30 and 31, respondents were asked "Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?" and "How certain are you about this belief?" (p. 227-228). As I already said above, 21% of atheists (~124) and 55% of agnostics (~469) said they did so believe (p. 9) and, incredibly, 8% of atheists and 17% of agnostics said they were absolutely certain in their belief. A few more crazy statistics: 11% of atheists and 14% of agnostics say they "completely" believe in miracles while 6% of atheists and 7% of agnostics "completely" believe in angels and demons (p. 35). Perhaps most ridiculously of all: 3% of atheists said they think the Bible (or another holy book) is the literal word of God...

A couple of points: firstly, question 16 was 'What is your religion?" and question 30 was "Do you believe in a God or a universal spirit?" So some of those who self-identified as atheist or agnostic might have said yes to q. 30 due to the 'universal spirit' part and since that term is vague and left undefined, it's hard to tell what the answers mean. This explanation, however, is not the whole story: 6% of atheists and 14% of agnostics say they believe in a personal God, while 12% and 36%, respectively, believe in an "impersonal force" (p. 6). In other words, at least 6% of the self-described atheists and 14% of the self-described agnostics need a smack. Some people will no doubt think this result reflects badly on atheists: 'atheists are so silly and confused that they believe in God. Hallelujah!' Well, actually, no: this finding reflects badly on theists: an atheist, by definition, is someone who lacks a belief in God so those who self-identified as atheist and then said they believed in God aren't atheists, they're stupid or deeply confused religious people. That is, these people are theists who don't know what either atheism or agnosticism means.

I want to end on an optimistic note: one of the key findings of World Values Survey is that cultural change occurs through generational replacement, that is, the total incidence of some value or belief alters not because people change their minds, but because the incidence varies between generations and as the oldest generation dies, the total incidence changes as well. Take a simple example: if 5% of generation 1 but 15% of generation 2 believe homosexuality is an acceptable life choice, the total population's tolerance will increase as generation 1 dies and gets replaced by generation 2. (The idea is essentially the same in Max Planck's famous quote: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"). With generational replacement in mind, have a look at the following table:


Note how the proportion of people who say they're absolutely certain that a personal God exists is much lower in younger than older people: 57% of over 65's but only 45% of 18-29 year olds in the total population are certain in that way. The same pattern (with a couple of exceptions) holds for the religious sub-groups as well. In other words: young Americans are much more doubtful of God's existence. Now have a look at:

We again see the same pattern: 69% of those 65 and over, but only 45% of those between 18 and 29 say religion is very important to them. And again the pattern holds for the different affiliations: younger Americans, in other words, think religion is much less important than older Americans.

While the above data are suggestive, the first Religious Landscape Survey (pdf) contains very solid evidence generational replacement is happening. The report notes:

Important generational differences in religious affiliation are also evident. For example, one quarter of all adults under age 30 are not affiliated with any particular religion, which is more than three times the number of unaffiliated adults who are age 70 and older, and nine percentage points higher than in the overall adult population. (p. 36).

These conclusions are clearly borne out in the data:


Atheism and agnosticism is quite a bit more common among 18-29 year olds than among 65 year olds and over. Indeed, fully 25% of those in the youngest cohort are religiously unaffiliated, and the proportions follow the generational replacement pattern perfectly. The bottom line is clear: younger Americans tend to be significantly less religious than older Americans and, as time passes, the proportion unbelievers (and non-fundamentalists) should increase dramatically. Now that's good news indeed.

(I should note that in arguing generational replacement is occurring I have throughout assumed religious beliefs and values remain largely unchanged throughout people's lives. I have assumed, specifically, that younger people's relative irreligiosity is not due to their youth, that is, I have excluded a 'life stages' approach in which people become more religious as they age. This assumption, I contend, is reasonable: the World Values Survey has collected solid evidence that people's fundamental values and beliefs tend not to change after their early-20s. It's important to bear in mind nonetheless that there is room for disagreement here).

(Hat tip: Andrew Dellis).

Encephalon #48

Encephalon #48 is out at Neuroanthropology. Recommended submissions: John Hawks Anthropology Blog on the universal intuition of a logarithmic number line; Neurotic Physiology on out of body experiences; Greg Laden's Blog on the discovery that glial cells are functional; Pure Pedantry on symbolic thinking in capuchin monkeys; and Neurophilosophy on planning for the future in non-human apes.

That's a lot, I know... but Encephalon just seems to get better and better. This really was a great edition.

Follow-up: Darwin and Wallace

I blogged earlier this month about the relative fame of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. There is a very good recent article in The Guardian about the intellectual history of natural selection and Darwin and Wallace's contributions thereto. A key paragraph:

Indeed, historians argue that had it not been for Darwin, the idea of natural selection would have suffered grievously. If he had not been the first to develop natural selection, and Wallace had been the one to get the kudos and attention, the theory would have made a very different impact. 'In the end, Wallace came to believe evolution was sometimes guided by a higher power,' adds Endersby, who has edited the forthcoming Cambridge University Press edition of The Origin of Species. 'He thought natural selection could not account for the nature of the human mind and claimed humanity was affected by forces that took it outside the animal kingdom.'

(Via: RichardDawkins.net).

Reports from TAM

I'm slowly recovering from my huge disappointment at not being able to attend TAM 6... So how was the meeting this year? Well, I've come across four blog reports so far:

1. I posted Not Totally Rad's reaction already. (Bottom line: Neil deGrasse Tyson's talk was amazing).
   
2. Steven Novella shares his thoughts about TAM. (Bottom line: meetings of this kind are important and the skeptical movement is on the brink of entering the mainstream).
   
3. Phil "The Bad Astronomer" Plait summarizes his TAM experience. (Bottom line: Randi is Amazing, it was the best meeting ever and there were lots of red headed women).
   
4. Evan Bernstein also blogs his TAM memories. (Bottom line: it was great and the SGU panellists were treated like celebrities).
   

There will no doubt be more of these reminiscences coming out in the next week or so, I'll probably do a fellow-up post. Oh, and I'm so going to TAM 7. I'm going to beg, save, steal, do whatever it takes. I will be there.