In the United States there is now a serious debate over whether those accused of being racists are actually suffering from delusions which require treatment by the state, including the use of anti-psychotic medication. Dr Alvin Poussaint of the American Psychiatric Association has said, ‘If we want to do any kind of prevention, psychiatrists have to know and believe themselves that this is a serious mental disorder.’ Another psychologist, Dr William von Hippel, even claims to have located the part of the frontal lobes in the brain that makes people racist. Von Hippel has argued that, especially among older people, changes to the brain’s structure result in loss of ‘cognitive ability’ to be tolerant.

Ah, Al Pouissant. An idealogue disguised as an MD. This is exactly the kind of thing he would come up with.

The APA discusses a lot of things that never see the light of day. "Serious debate" or not, I doubt this one will make it to future versions of the DSM-IV. Pure speculation, here, not inside knowledge -- it's conceivable they may end up defining some sort of obsessional/delusional disorder in which the racist beliefs become so persistent and intrusive that they interfere with the person's normal functioning. That's one formula used in the past for addressing problematic variants in human desires/beliefs.

But my bet would be they'll leave this alone. It would undermine a lot of hate crime legislation, not the result proponents are probably looking for.

There you go! There are some smart people at the APA.

I wish these articles would also point out that delayed childbearing, or increased spacing between births, can achieve the same population-slowing results as limiting the total number of children.

Simplified numerical example: if every woman has female twins at age 20, after a hundred years each woman will have produced 64 descendants. With the same rules, if the age of delivery is 25, she will have produced 30 descendants. If the age is 30, by 100 years there will be only 14 descendants.

This is one part of what happens in developed countries: we don't just have fewer babies, we have them later in life (probably because the opportunity cost is so high). If less developed countries feel they have to be coercive, I wish they'd consider the effect of timing, not just total children.

I wonder how much of this is survey error (people mistakenly check the wrong box, misunderstand questions or options, etc). Usually survey margins of error are cited as somewhere around +/- 2%.

This survey found that 79% of Americans believe there is a God, and that 66% are absolutely certain this is true.

Why does this depress me? Because it really does. I guess it's the "absolutely certain" part.

Most of the European countries still have state support for religion, producing a compromised and impaired church in which few believe very strongly.

Very true. And many of the former Soviet countries, where Christianity was once forcibly discouraged, saw a huge resurgence in religiosity in the nineties. In religion, whatever the government touches -- whether atheism or Christianity -- seems to become repellent.

I meant the "why does this depress me" as an actual question. Meaning, your visceral reactions tell you a lot about your beliefs. I'd like to think I'm tolerant, but am I really? To what extent am I viscerally repelled by a certain kind of faith? Can I justify it?

When I read the 66% statistic, it depresses me -- not the "God" part, but the absolute certainty. The capacity to make a statement like that, of absolute certainty about anything, implies a way of thinking about the world I find problematic and anti-scientific. You can say that you "absolutely believe" in something -- but "absolute certainty" is, to me, quite different. Oddly, I'm okay with faith, even complete and total faith -- but not with this expression of "certainty." It seems diagnostic of a way of thinking I have had bad encounters with, rather than being a problem in and of itself where religion is concerned. I would probably feel the same (I would hope) about an atheist who expressed absolute certainty that there is no God.

As for the point about harm -- I certainly see your point, there have been discussions on this issue before on this site. I do think there's harm in scientific ignorance, because everyone gets one vote in this country, both at the national and local level. Everyone is subject to jury duty, no matter how scientifically illiterate. People's understanding of science and "certainty" affects what gets taught in our schools, what kind of technology is legal, and who is condemned and acquitted in court.

From my own experience, however reliable that may be, I think there is a lot of social pressure to not say anything against religion. This makes surveys pointless.

Excellent point -- according to the link, this study was done specifically to get around the social pressure bias, by administering the survey via computer rather than over the phone or in person. Whether that accomplished the goal or not, I don't know, but usually this method does increase reporting of "undesirable" activities/beliefs.

Four out of five of my writing samples were scored male (by wide margins). Not very accurate.

Seriously, I really am female.

I think that one of the reasons social democracy has survived in Scandinavia is that all those peoples are sort of stodgy, humorless, and moralistic about corruption, cheating, etc. There are many cultures which admire successful conmen and successful crooks, but not Scandinavia.

Moralistic, yes -- but humorless, no way. Oh, okay, maybe the Finns. Personally, I get all my humorlessness from my American side of the family :)

Thanks, Razib, for your basic point ("More than g").

Most research suggests that drug addicts are basically self-medicators and are taking drugs to make up for chemical imbalances in their brains.

This is true, but the other side of the story is also that taking drugs that stimulate the reward centers of your brain can alter those pathways -- and that these physiological changes underlie much of what we call "psychological addiction," the strong craving/desire for the drug that persists even years after physical withdrawal symptoms have disappeared. This appears to be why most people relapse, not because of physical withdrawal. They can get through detox and rehab, but the cravings remain overwhelming, and they eventually give in.

I have to dig to get my sources on this, they're collected in a pharmacology textbook I just reviewed. But the point is that, although many addicts have a genetic/psychological predisposition to drug abuse (leading to self-medication for what's often theorized to be a "reward deficit," or chronic anxiety, depression, etc.), the process appears to be able to go both ways. Drugs may cause long-term changes in the brains of otherwise normal people, and may tip them into drug-seeking behavior.

Sorry for the tags. Guess HTML doesn't work.

"I know plenty of people with addictions-the vast practical difficulties in their life come from the illegality of their addictions not the addictions themselves."

I do understand you point, Martin. At the same time, alcoholics tend to express a different viewpoint.

In pharmacology generally, some medications are felt to be safe to sell over the counter. These are rarely entirely harmless -- aspirin and tylenol can kill you, but they're so commonly used, and so widely beneficial, that the cost/benefit analysis favors letting them be sold without a prescription. Other medications must be sold with a prescription, because the ordinary consumer is not in a position to make an informed choice about when it's appropriate to use them.

Recreational drugs can easily fit within this same framework. Sometimes the legalization/criminalization discussion ends up in an all-or-nothing impasse. But there's plenty of precedent for different kinds of regulation for different kinds of biologically active substances, depending on their potential for harm, and potential for benefit - or at least harmless use.

Criminalizing marijuana makes no more sense to me than criminalizing alcohol. But I wouldn't legalize heroin any more than I'd want digoxin, insulin, or chemotherapy meds sold without a prescription.

Although we could get into a whole discussion about prescribing narcotic drugs for registered addicts -- this subject is being turned on its head by the use of buprenorphine, or "bupe," as a better substitute for methadone.

Just to add that I do understand the distinction between making a substance illegal for all uses, vs. a subtance that is legal, but tightly regulated. There's a reasonable discussion that can be had about making heroin available by prescription to registered addicts (to be injected on-site, to prevent black market reselling). I'm not saying right or wrong, but reasonable.

My point is that this case may not need to be made, if we have developed better alternate medications (i.e., buprenorphine) for long-term maintenance of addicts.

But when there's a tightly regulated market, there will always be a black market. So unless you're prepared to make now-illegal drugs as freely available and widely advertised as aspirin or Bud Lite, some legal enforcement is necessary to maintain the boundaries of regulation. It's hard to defend this kind of free availability for drugs that are potentially lethal (cocaine, heroin), without essentially saying there should also be no regulation of poisons or prescription medications.

I think a more reasonable goal is to shrink the size of that black market demand by creating some form of reasonable regulation for marijuana, and siphoning off hard-core heroin addicts into medical maintenance programs that actually do what addicts need them to do -- manage cravings as well as physical withdrawal.

But imprisonment just for taking drugs (of whatever kind) appears to me so profoundly unjust that I can't support it, regardless of the consequences.

It sounds like our arguments have a great deal of overlap, and one of the main areas of discussion has to do with who gets punished for which actions (users, sellers, neither, or both). Not a trivial issue by any means, but just trying to isolate the point of controversy.

If we are going to to take a more medicalized approach then where is the evidence that such an approach will work?

This is an excellent question, and the research is being done -- some preliminary results already out there, some coming in. If any addictions researchers are out there and have this info at your fingertips, drop a note.

Part of the reason for failure of rehab programs in the past is the problem of treating not just the physical withdrawal, but also the cravings -- which have a biological reality in the brain, but have been relatively resistant to pharmacological treatment. But this is an area of intense investigation and drug development.

Just to reference my note above, here's the most recent New England Journal article on buprenorphine:

Office-based treatment of opiate addiction with a sublingual-tablet formulation of buprenorphine and naloxone.

There was an excellent article about this in the New York Times a while back:

New Drug Promises Shift in Treatment For Heroin Addicts (registration required)

This is not meant to answer the fundamental question about the efficacy of the medical model, but simply to document info.

Another well-accepted treatment for addiction is for cigarette cessation -- the use of the nicotine patch/gum, often in combo with drugs like Zyban, which tend to reduce nicotine cravings. Not perfect, but shown to reduce rates of relapse when compared to no treatment.

Sorry about the links:

New Drug Promises Shift in Treatment For Heroin Addict

Office-based treatment of opiate addiction with a sublingual-tablet formulation of buprenorphine and naloxone.

Since many talents have a developmental window, the current educational timeline makes no sense -- for math, or anything else.

The ability to learn content -- like social studies, history, the capitals of the states -- is a lot less time-sensitive than the ability to acquire complex skills and develop innate talents. For example, it still baffles me that most schools put off second languages until middle school, when the developmental window for new language fluency is more or less closed. If you want your child to learn French, start teaching her in first, not sixth, grade.

But I admit language is somewhat different from math. All kids learn language with brilliant fluency, when compared to just about any older teenager/adult. On the other hand, some kids will struggle with long division their entire life, no matter how early their math education began. So with math, it seems more a matter of identifying special individual talents, and letting them advance at different speeds.

Having grown up in one of the Scandinavian countries, I think their total absence of academic tracking is a significant factor holding them back from technical brilliance. No matter how much of a math genius you are in Norway or Sweden, you'll be stuck in ninth grade doing worksheets that include basic fractions. You all progress as an indivisible group, and someone, somewhere in class, just doesn't it and never will. The pained, bored, tortured look of the lone math prodigy in our class said it all.

[i]Well, not always, especially if it's their second language. I recall a study showing that Canadian boys in bilingual education suffered a higher rate of learning disabilities than the general population.[/i]

Eric, I know the studies you're talking about. In general, I oppose bilingual education because I think it interrupts the acquisition of the student's new native language -- exactly because it fails to make use of the rapidity with which any normal child will become fluent in a second language, if given the chance to immerse herself.

So bilingual education is a different kettle of fish. I wouldn't advocate teaching American kids French by sending them to a school that was taught half in French, half in English -- because it's too disruptive to other educational goals. It seems plausible that this kind of language chaos might also affect the speed with which the child develops the use of language "as language."

But I would advocate that the three hours a week spent in sixth grade to teach kids French pronunciation should instead be moved to the first grade, when the neural flexibility to learn that pronuciation still exists.

True bilingualism is probably best achieved by sequential immersion in respective cultures -- allowing one language to be dominant each time. Which describes my own life. But that's not a goal most parents have (or probably should have) for their kids, if they already speak the dominant language in their culture. Passable pronunciation and syntax in a second language is more of an achievable goal, and shouldn't interfere with development of the first language.

The religious argument with scientists often focuses on astronomists and physicists, those concerned with the big, mysterious "Out There. " But when they're talking about what's missing from the sciences, religious advocates often end up coming back to our emotions and inner life. Happiness, love, awe: science can't explain them, so this shows there must be something unknowable, higher than ourselves, involved in our daily lives, making us feel good or bad, know right from wrong.

Maybe physical science can't explain these feelings. But I always think, how about reading a little neuroscience too? The following quote from the article caught my eye:

"Here is the chief defect of scientists (I mean those who take the sciences as an ideology rather than as a discipline): an unwillingness to admit that there is anything outside their realm. But there is. You cannot squeeze consciousness, beauty, affection, or Good and Evil from physics any more than you can derive momentum from the postulates of geometry: no mass, no momentum. A moral scientist is thus a contradiction in terms. (Logically speaking—in practice they compartmentalize and behave as well as anyone else.)

Thus we have the spectacle of the scientist who is horrified by the latest hatchet murder but can give no scientific reason why. A murder, after all, is merely the dislocation of certain physical masses (the victim’s head, for example) followed by elaborate chemical reactions. Horror cannot be derived from physics. It comes from somewhere else. "

Well, let's see. Where to start. Affection and overwhelming feelings of love can be induced by stimulating the nucleus accumbens of the deeper recesses of the emotional brain, or administering oxytocin at just the right time, in the presence of another person.

The fellow-feeling that is encompassed by the word "horror" -- visceral revulsion at suffering in another creature, so you almost feel the suffering yourself -- also is a concept that can be broken down into component parts. Each of these components is easily managed by the mammalian brain, without any higher intervention.

Social animals likely evolved these emotions for survival within a group, not for discussions on theology. When the emotional circuitry that governs them goes wrong, the result is often a social outcast with few descendants.

There's a terrific cognitive psychologist at the Queen Square Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in London, Dr. James Blair. He studies people who lack the normal capacity for empathy, in particular the sense of horror at another person suffering: patients with anti-social personality disorder. These are true psychopaths, in the real, technical sense of the word.

Dr. Blair's research is quite elegant, and there's no way I can summarize all of it. But he has found a few striking abnormalities in the functional brain circuitry of
More....