A few days ago David Boxenhorn wrote the following, apropos of atheism and religion:

But maybe “communal irrational behavior” is the heart of the matter and “a supernatural agent” is just a side show?

His point was that Communism, for example, has many of the traits of a religion, but without a supreme being , and his suggestion was that a non-theistic definition of “religion” which included Communism would be more useful than the theistic one normally used.

Like Razib, but probably more so, I am a “Chamberlain secularist” who does not expect religion ever to disappear. I think that the term “communal irrational behavior” shows where secularists miss the point. The assumption is that a.) the rational course of action can always be known (i.e., is always rationally decidable), and b.) all good things come from rational actions. I don’t think that either of these propositions is true. Rational decisionmaking is a good thing, but sometimes very weighty, life-and-death decisions are rationally undecidable. Furthermore, large innovations or intiiatives are often not rational at the time they are made — in most but not all cases, playing safe is the most rational choice. (The exceptions would deteriorating situations where traditional ways have become unviable.)

A lot of what is called “communal irrational behavior” I would instead call “social highstakes gambling”. If you cherrypick the disasters (the Branch Davidians, Jonestown, etc.) you have an open-and-shut case against belief. However, if you look at some of the successful social gambles in history (the 1688 Glorious Revolution in England, the adventurism or “total committment rationality” of classical Athens, the Polynesian colonization of the South Pacific, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Christianity) you’ll find that a lot of those people were pretty fucking nuts. The colonization of the South Pacific is my model: fair-sized groups of people gathered all of their belongings and set off on the open ocean toward a destination which they had no reason to believe even existed. Most of them were never heard from again, but the lucky ones colonized Hawaii and New Zealand.

The rationalist assumption is that reality is known, and that progress is grounded on reason. But at any given point, key aspects of reality are unknown, and all enterprises are gambles. The winner of a high-stakes gamble profits enormously, but the losers (the majority, probably the vast majority) are destroyed. Don’t these gambles sound like mutations? Most mutations are harmful, some are neutral, and a very small number are beneficial. I am suggesting a social-history version of Donald Campbell’s “evolutionary epistemology”: blind social variation and selective retention (or, in Gould’s words, proliferation and decimation.)

Social gambling tends to be even crazier than individual gambling, because the followers tend to believe the prophets without really understanding them, so that the leaders’ errors can often be often magnified. But sometimes long-shot gambles work. And (as can be seen with the Mormons and the Hasids, for example) the craziest fanatics are often meticulously rational in significant areas of their behavior, and valuable technical innovations which are part of their grand scheme. The very craziness of a religion increases the selection pressures, thus forcing cult members to improvise survival strategies which prudent moderates would not need. (From this point of view, the down side of religion would just be its cost. There’s no free lunch, but on the net, a successful religion is beneficial).

Religions are a leading component of the cultural part of gene-culture coevolution. Crazy religions are mutants, and most mutants die — often because they kill their followers. But we cannot assume that the religions which have survived were rational at the time of their foundation. New religions never are; at the beginning they are always enormous blind gambles.

I don’t practice any religion. I’m a naturalist and anti-supernaturalist in belief, and I raised my son as an atheist. But I don’t expect religion ever to disappear, and not merely because people are stupid. A public religion arbitrarily decides rationally undecidable questions and thereby makes group life possible. Religion also gives hope to people for whom there is rationally no hope — and obviously this is a very ambiguous and sometimes poisonous gift. But this ungrounded hopefulness sometimes also does motivate genuinely productive social initiatives or experiments.

Jensen (1998) makes a point that is worth repeating:

The pernicious notion that IQ discriminates mainly along racial lines, however, is utterly false.

Jensen presents what should be a predictable pattern for a highly heritable trait:

Source % of Variance Average IQ Difference

Between races (within social classes)	14	30	12
Between social classes (within races)	8		6
Interaction of race and social class	8
Between families (within race and social class)	26	65	9
Within families (siblings)	39		11
Measurement error	5		4
Total	100		17

This can be demonstrated most clearly in terms of a statistical method known as the analysis of variance. Table 11.1 shows this kind of analysis for IQ data obtained from equal-sized random samples of black and white children in California schools. Their parents’ social class (based on education and occupation) was rated on a ten-point scale. In the first column in Table 11.1 the total variance of the entire data set is of course 100 percent and the percentage of total variance attributable to each of the sources6 is then listed in the first column. We see that only 30 percent of the total variance is associated with differences between race and social class, whereas 65 percent of the true-score variance is completely unrelated to IQ differences between the races and social classes, and exists entirely within each racial and social class group. The single largest source of IQ variance in the whole population exists within families, that is, between full siblings reared together in the same family. The second largest source of variance exists between families of the same race and the same social class. The last column of Table 11.1 shows what happens when each of the variances in the first column is transformed into the average IQ difference among members of the given classification. For example, the average difference between blacks and whites of the same social class is 12 IQ points. The average difference between full siblings (reared together) is 11 IQ points. Measurement error (i.e., the average difference between the same person tested on two occasions) is 4 IQ points. (By comparison, the average difference between persons picked at random from the total population is 17 IQ points.) Persons of different social class but of the same race differ, on average, only 6 points, more or less, depending on how far apart they are on the scale of socioeconomic status (SES). What is termed the interaction of race and social class (8 percent of the variance) results from the unequal IQ differences between blacks and whites across the Spectrum of SES, as shown in Figure 11.2. This interaction is a general finding in other studies as well. Typically, IQ in the black population is not as differentiated by SES as in the white population, and the size of the mean W-B difference increases with the level of SES.

Just a question…do you think it is worth $100 a year to subscribe to The Economist? I was a subscriber several years back and let it lapse mostly because I found that I wasn’t checking in every week.

A few weeks ago I watched Bloggingheads.TV which I found really amusing. Eric Alterman was in a discussion with someone named Bill Scher. I don’t know anything about Scher aside from the fact that he makes Jonah Goldberg seem really intellectual and a deep thinker (see their diavlog). But I was struck by the following exchange over foreign policy:

Alterman: “People in these countries don’t want us, they hate us, they hate everything about us, they hate the idea of democracy, it’s inconsistent with their vision of Islamic republics, which is what they clearly want. So you just like glossing over that, but I think that’s fundamental. I think the promotion of democracy in the Arab world creates anti-American terrorists.”

Scher: “Well, I mean, democracy in the broader sense, what kind of government do those people want. It doesn’t have to be Jeffersonian-“

Alterman: “I don’t want them to have the kind of government that they want. OK. I don’t want Jordan and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to have the kind of government that they want, because they will want to kill me with it!

I generally cheered for Alterman here. Whether you are an interventionist or not, the whole rhetoric about democracy and its universal appeal on both the Left and Right has gotten out of control. Whether there is a universal yearning for democratic freedom or not, its acceptance as a background assumption in the public discourse has become nearly religious. When someone like Alterman challenges it, you see a “deer in headlights” tendency. There are few counter arguments because people assume any contrary position is either absurd or immoral. These sort of dreamy tendencies are fine when you aren’t an imperial power that has to make real-politik decisions (e.g., Iceland?), but at this point bad decisions informed by fallacious assumptions can cost a lot, at home and abroad.

To make the world as you wish it to be, you must first comprehend how it truly is.

Most of you know I’m not very into politics…but I do have two political weblogs in my RSS which pound it hard, Matt Yglesias on the “Left” and Daniel Larison on the “Right.”¹ I humbly request that Robert Wright have these two face off on Blogging Heads, just to see if English will allow them to communicate in any intelligible manner (please note, Ross Douthat over at The American Scene reads and is read by both, so there is only one degree of separation).
1 – Quotations are for two reasons…Matt Yglesias has sometimes stated that he wishes he lived in Europe…so he could be a European liberal (as opposed to Social Democrat). So his liberalism is really a function of the current political landscape. Larison is so reactionary that he really transcends being boxed in as “right-wing.”

Sam Harris says:

I do not deny that there is something at the core of the religious experience that is worth understanding. I do not even deny that there is something there worthy of our devotion. But devotion to it does not entail false claims to knowledge, nor does it require that we indulge our cultural/familial/emotional biases in an unscientific way. The glass can get very clean-not sterile perhaps, not entirely without structure, not contingency-free, but cleaner than many people are ready to allow. One need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to experience the “ecstasies of Teresa” (or those of Rumi, for that matter). And those of us with the benefit of a 21st century education can be more parsimonious in drawing conclusions about the cosmos on the basis of such ecstasy. Indeed, I think we must be, lest our attachment to the language of our ancestors keep their ignorance alive in our own time.

Harris has been criticized by some secularists for his less than skeptical and critical attitude toward Eastern mysticism and supernaturalism which does not owe its existence to the followers of the One True God. But the reality is that I do not believe that Harris is an atheist in the way I am. I am a “cold atheist,” dead to the touch of religion or its attractions. I am not engaged in the world of humanity in the same way, and I do not exhibit the passion for my fellow man that Harris does, for if there is one thing that we know of him it is that he cares. And I believe his caring has driven him to a deep detestation of the myth of God, the father who has fled from our universe and gives us no succor but promises which remain unfulfilled. Evangelical Christians often say that their aggression in preaching their “Good News” is from love and altruism intent, would you not give a drowning man a helping hand and pull him up so that he could grasp at the glory of everlasting life? On a deep psychological level Sam Harris is, I believe, no different, he sees humanity drowning in false belief and he must witness. But do not confuse this for a coldness to religion and God, it is hot rage which motivates him, and Harris’ openness to Eastern mysticism suggest that he still seeks a way to save humanity from the drowning oblivion of materialistic naturalism.

Check out Derb’s latest column for NRO.

I’ve received a half dozen complaints about the slowness of the site due to the technorati widget, so I’ve removed it for now. I see an improvement in load time. Yay or nay?

Also, to the right you should see an RSS feed logo from feedburner. I’ve always had a feed, with a small link provided, but I figured that regular readers should really be encouraged to use this. Of course, the RSS won’t tell you which comment threads are hopping, but in terms of maximizing time utilization I think it’s a good move. You can always bookmark the Haloscan thread of interest (speaking of which, anyone know a better offsite comment service? I don’t like onsite comments because they are liable to take a site down because of repeated hits).

Finally, for those of you down with RSS, I highly recommend adding a few Google News queries to your feeds. For instance, I have genetics & evolution always updating in Google Reader (which has some downsides, but I like the total integration with my google home page). You can see the RSS links to the bottom left. The PLOS network also has an excellent set of feeds (page down) so you don’t need to keep checking on their site for new articles (other journals have them too, but I don’t find them as user friendly or value added).

It seems that “pathological” left-handedness and pedophilia might share a common origin in some early developmental disturbance(s), possibly a brain infection (or group of infections). I first read about the potential fitness costs that left-handers suffer in a passing remark of Harpending & Cochran (2006), although when I searched PubMed for “left-handed” and “longevity,” I found that the results have been somewhat inconsistent. However, a new study in Epidemiology on longevity and handedness in a large, representative sample of Dutch women (Ramadhani et al. 2007) confirms the earlier reports of decreased longevity among left-handers. The Hazard Ratios for left-handers vs. right-handers showed that lefties were more likely to die of all causes, and even more so for specific causes such as colorectal cancer and cerebrovascular diseases (PDF pp. 2-3):

Table 2 shows that, after adjustment for age, SES, BMI, and cigarette smoking status, left-handed women had a 1.36 times higher risk of dying from all causes than non-left-handed women. The adjusted HR for total mortality, after excluding the first 5 years of follow-up time, was 1.58 (95% CI = 1.03–2.42). With regard to cancer mortality, left-handed women had a 1.7 times greater risk of dying from any type of cancer (CI = 1.0–2.7), a 4.6 times higher risk of dying from colorectal cancer (1.5–14), and a 2.0-fold higher risk of dying from breast cancer (0.83–4.6). Handedness was weakly associated with overall mortality from diseases of the circulatory system (1.3, 0.54–3.3), although left-handed women had a 3.7 times greater risk of dying from cerebrovascular diseases than non-left-handed women. Left-handedness was not associated with mortality attributable to causes other than the above-mentioned.

A separate study from the same group of researchers (Ramadhani et al. 2006) also found that the severity of a bacterial meningitis infection correlated with handedness, such that those with stronger infections were more likely to become left-handed and lower in IQ. They note that since the infection happens before the other events, the former likely contributes to causing the latter (pp. 2528-9):

Fig. 1 shows that children with a meningitis severity score above the median had a 6.2 times higher risk of becoming lefthanded at school age compared to those below the median (95% CI 2.0–18.6). Furthermore, those who contracted meningitis below the median age of 1.8 years had a 12.3 times higher risk (95% CI 2.6–58.0) compared to a 5.9 times higher risk (95% CI 1.6–21.7) among children who contracted meningitis at older age.
. . .
More specific analyses on cognitive function are shown in Table 3, with left-handed children generally performing worse on the cognitive tests. Left-handed children had an almost seven points lower IQ (p = 0.018), a one point lower vocabulary score of WISC-r (p = 0.061), and an almost five points lower Beery score (p = 0.069) than their non-left-handed counterparts.

Turning next to handedness among pedophiles, Bogaert (2001) examined a Kinsey Institute dataset for the handedness data of 286 criminal pedophiles (those who had a victim of either sex under age 12). His findings, where NRH means Non-Right-Handedness (pp. 467-8):

Although the effects were small, it should be noted that a 5% difference means about a 30% change in NRH (e.g. 15.7% in pedophiles vs. 11.5% in controls).
. . .
In contrast, education is not related to the handedness/pedophilia relationship. Pedophiles had elevated NRH relative to controls with or without controlling for education. This result suggests that, even though pedophiles have a rate of NRH comparable to other offenders (or perhaps slightly higher), there may be a different mechanism underlying the handedness/pedophile relationship than the handedness/(general) criminality relationship. Thus, elevated NRH in pedophiles probably does not merely represent a ‘criminal/antisocial behavior’ tendency, because of, for example, general cognitive and/or educational difficulties. Instead, these data may indicate that elevated NRH in pedophiles reflects [Central Nervous System] abnormalities that, in part, directly affects their sexual preference systems (see [24] for a review of CNS abnormalities in pedophiles).

Next are two studies done by Cantor and colleagues. In the first, Cantor et al. (2004) examined men who were referred to a clinic for inappropriate sexual behavior, using phallometric responses (which measure penile arousal) to various erotic stimuli in order to divide the men categorically into pedophiles (those attracted to children under 12), hebephiles (those attracted to 12-16 year-olds), and teleiophiles (those attracted to adults). They found (p. 8):

The group differences did not change appreciably after the addition of the covariates [i.e., Age and Wechsler Full Scale IQ; agnostic], F(2, 294) = 6.31, eta^2 = .041, p = .002, and simple effects contrasts showed that both the pedophilia group and the hebephilia group reported significantly less right-handedness than did the teleiophilia group, t(294) = -3.51, eta^2 = .040, p = .001 (twotailed), and t(294) = -2.14, eta^2 = .015, p = .033 (two-tailed), respectively.

The researchers then used a continuous measure of sexual interest, namely the degree to which they become aroused when viewing different stimuli (p. 8-9):

The results indicated that, in general, measures of cognitive ability correlated negatively with sexual response to children and positively with sexual response to adults. Handedness, however, was significantly related to phallometric response to children, only. [From Table 4, partial correlation of arousal by prepubescent stimuli and handedness = -.13, p less than .05, where negative handedness indicates left-handedness; agnostic.] There was little evidence of association between the neuropsychological variables and sexual response to stimuli depicting pubescents in the laboratory.

They conclude that the relationship between handedness, cognitive ability, and pedophilia is that they are all caused by an early collection of brain perturbations, not that poor cognitive ability leads one (probabilistically) to develop pedophilic interests, since IQ was controlled for. Their follow-up article (Cantor et al. 2005) has two studies, the first of which was a successful replication of their previous findings. The second study classified patients categorically as right-handed or non-right-handed, in contrast to their continuous measure in the 2004 study, so that they could report Odds Ratios, making their results more comparable to those of other studies. By measuring penile arousal to stimuli involving adults, pubescents, and prepubescents, as before, the authors slotted the patients into those primarily attracted to one of the three age groups, as well as which sex they were most attracted to.

The relationship between sexual preferences and handedness was only significant for those attracted to prepubescents (although there was a trend toward lower right-handedness among those attracted most to pubescents), with or without controlling for IQ. Their Table II shows that after controlling for IQ in their logistic regression, the B-coefficient for age preference in predicting handedness was 1.26 (SE = .34), and the Odds Ratio was 3.54 (95% CI = 1.84–6.81), p = 0.0002. Next the researchers categorized the patients based not on their penile response to stimuli, but on their actual sexual offenses against others, again sorting by age and sex of the victim. At first, there was a trend in the same direction as the results obtained from measuring genital response, but the trends were not significant.

They thought that incest cases might be confounding the results — for exa
mple, men who commit crimes against intrafamilial individuals might be engaging in a facultative behavior similar to men who have sex with men in prison, rather than have obligate pedophilic preferences. After removing patients who had intrafamilial victims, the results became significant. In particular, their Table V shows that in a similar regression analysis as before, the best predictor of handedness was a preference for prebubescents, even controlling for IQ: B = 1.06 (SE = .47), OR = 2.9 (95% CI = 1.15–7.28), p = 0.02. Admittedly the results are less striking when measuring sexual preferences according to their actual sexual offenses than when measuring it by their arousal to erotic stimuli, but this may well be because the latter is a purer measure of preferences, since it doesn’t involve the vagaries of choosing and offending against a real person.

In sum, there is a significant relationship between non-right-handedness and pedophilic preferences, and this is likely the result of an early developmental disturbance to the brain. Since these studies were conducted in modern Western countries, things like lack of proper nutrition in the mother are probably not what’s going on. As hinted at in the study of meningitis and handedness, it is more likely that an infection causes the damage — these are one of the sources of environmental insults whose effects we still have yet to curtail, beyond ameliorating some of the more horrendous cases like smallpox. Of course, the pathogen responsible for non-right-handedness doesn’t have to be the same as that which causes pedophilia; the affected individual might have been born in an unusually high pathogen-load area, or have a weakened immune system in general, and so on.

One thing seems pretty clear, though: common cases of deviance from Darwinian fitness are most likely caused by environmental insults, with pathogens being the most obvious culprit (see Cochran, Ewald, & Cochran 2000 for the rationale). That result isn’t guaranteed a priori, but it is a far more reasonable “working hypothesis” for a particular case than imagining how, for example, pedophilia might have been adaptive in the past, or how it represents the tail of a distribution for “caring for children,” or how pedophilia-normal heterozygotes might enjoy a fitness advantage, and so on. Mental, financial, and time resources are all limited, so we should follow the course that all good detectives do: first look at the person you most suspect, based on the accumulated knowledge of similar past cases. Real life is not a Law & Order episode where the least likely culprit routinely turns out to be the one who dunnit. If they’re cleared, then move on to the exotic suspects.

Related: Left-handedness post from the archives.

References:

Bogaert, AF (2001). Handedness, criminality, and sexual offending. Neuropsychologia, 39, 465-9.

Cantor, JM, R Blanchard, BK Christensen, R Dickey, PE Klassen, AL Beckstead, T Blak, & ME Kuban (2004). Intelligence, memory, and handedness in pedophilia. Neuropsychology, 18, 3-14.

Cantor, JM, PE Klassen, R Dickey, BK Christensen, ME Kuban, T Blak, NS Williams, & R Blanchard (2005). Handedness in pedophilia and hebephilia. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 34, 447-59.

Cochran, GM, PW Ewald, & KD Cochran (2000). Infectious causation of disease: an evolutionary perspective. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43, 406-48.

Harpending, H & G Cochran (2006). Genetic diversity and genetic burden in humans. Infection, Genetics, and Evolution, 6, 154-62.

Ramadhani, MK, SG Elias, PA van Noord,DE Grobbee, PH Peeters, & CS Uiterwaal (2007). Innate handedness and disease-specific mortality in women. Epidemiology, 18, 208-12.

Ramadhani, MK, I Koomen, DE Grobbee, CA van Donselaar, A Marceline van Furth, CS Uiterwaal (2006). Increased occurrence of left-handedness after severe childhood bacterial meningitis: support for the pathological left-handedness hypothesis. Neuropsychologia, 44, 2526-32.

Bora sayeth:

Are you sure? How can a hierarchical, Chain-of-Being, authoritarian, sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, religious ideology be ‘normal’ when it does not understand the world correctly? Isn’t it maladaptive to hold erroneous views of nature (and human nature) and try to organize societies to fit that view instead of trying to organize societies in synch with our best understanding of the way the world really works?

(mild typos fixed)
There’s so much I could say, and yet I will leave it without a word….