Science and religion

Are science and religion compatible? Science and religion are two different ways of acquiring an understanding of the universe we live in. Although the conclusions they reach at times contradict one another (as Galileo so famously discovered in Renaissance Europe[1], and as immunization clinic volunteers more recently discovered in Pakistan[2]), neither science nor religion is defined by its content, but rather by its methods. Hence the question: is it possible for both perspectives to be recognized as worthy human enterprises? Can an individual person be simultaneously engaged in both? I’ve encountered two reasonable answers.

The first, held by many intelligent friends of mine including several scientists, is that the two are “nonoverlapping magisteria[3]”, that is, they are tools for promoting understanding in entirely different domains of inquiry. One deals with the empirical, that which can be observed and quantified; the other deals with the spiritual, that which is so fundamental to the operation of physical reality that it cannot be examined by physical means. The neuronal membrane potential can be measured; G-d cannot.

The second view, favored mainly by those who prefer the term “atheist” to “agnostic”, is that religion is inherently flawed as a means of learning about the universe. Science is rigorous, self-correcting, open-minded, and perpetually skeptical, whereas religion is fuzzy, establishmentarian, dogmatic, and resistant to challenges. Truth is truth, they say, and one’s approach to ascertaining truth must make sense, in any domain. Religious faith, proponents of this view hold, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It is intellectually primitive at best, lazy or even dishonest at worst.

Neither view is likely entirely correct. The first ignores the fact that science specifically precludes faith: if it can't be demonstrated, or conversely, falsified, it can't be asserted. The second ignores the fact that many highly intelligent, thoughtful people hold religious beliefs. Carl Sagan, posthumous champion of the modern-day atheist (a distinction he might abdicate, were he still alive), quotes an anonymous religious leader in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World[4]:

“Honest religion, more familiar than its critics with the distortions and absurdities perpetrated in its name, has an active interest in encouraging a healthy skepticism for its own purposes… There is the possibility for religion and science to forge a potent partnership against pseudo-science. Strangely, I think it would soon be engaged also in opposing pseudo-religion.”

Does religion promote or discourage skepticism? If religious thinking does in fact permit questioning, doubt, and revision of cherished beliefs, then certainly a productive, progressive relationship with science is possible. But what form would that take? How does religious skepticism work? How does it resemble, and how does it differ from, the scientific method? I welcome any insights you might have.

---

[1] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/galileoaccount.html

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727330/

[3] http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html

[4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle/dp/0345409469

Albert Einstein's extraordinary brain

The most striking feature of Albert Einstein's brain is that the sylvian fissure ends abruptly as it progresses posteriorly, running straight into the postcentral sulcus. This means he didn't have a parietal operculum: the brain region responsible for higher-order somatosensory processing. As a result, his inferior parietal lobule, responsible for abstract spatial reasoning, was proportionally enlarged.

To see this for yourself, look at figure 1c below. The sylvian fissure is the horizontal groove running from the front (right) of the brain towards the back. Notice how, about a third of the way back, it turns up sharply. The resulting vertical groove is the postcentral sulcus, often an entirely separate structure.

Compare that to a more typical brain, where the sylvian fissure is much longer (but, in this case, still contiguous with the postcentral sulcus:

I don't see why this would matter, or if it even stands up to familywise error correction, but Einstein also had a low neuron:glia ratio in his left angular gyrus, part of the temporoparietal junction, an area involved in understanding other people's mental states.

Lay article

Scholarly article (pdf)

Solar ejections falling back to the sun

Solar ejections fall back to the surface, reined in by the sun's powerful gravity. Since the material is ionized (i.e., charged), it follows the sun's magnetic field lines, like iron filings in a kid's toy. Awesome. See Bad Astronomy for a more detailed explanation.

A new kind of astronomy

Article

In the general theory of relativity, Einstein postulated that big gravitational disturbances - like two orbiting neutron stars or the destruction of a planet - would generate gravitational waves, propagating outward like ripples on a pond. This isn't a totally crazy idea: lots of things work this way, such as light, sound, and ripples on a pond. What's intriguing about this idea is that if gravity works by warping space, it will generate waves that can be measured, and those measurements can tell us interesting things about the massive objects creating the waves. Since all of astronomy thus far has been based on electromagnetic waves (things like light, x-rays, radio waves, and gamma radiation), discovering gravitational waves and learning to interpret their physical properties will constitute a new kind of astronomy. And these guys think they can do it. Awesome.

How does it work?

Researchers use two long tunnels set at right angles to one another. They split a laser beam in two, sending one beam down each of the two tunnels where they bounce off of mirrors and return to the starting point. Since the two tunnels are exactly the same length, the two beams recombine where they started out.

But if the contraption is hit by a gravitational wave, ONE OF THE TUNNELS WILL SHRINK BY HALF AN ANGSTROM. First of all, SHRINKING TUNNELS. Second of all, half an angstrom is really really tiny. Not as tiny as the article says, but we're talking atomic level tiny here. And these guys are trying to measure it.

To give you an idea of how sensitive that is:

"The coast is more than 100km away but we can see the effect of the waves pounding on the North Sea shore on our instruments very clearly," said Lück. "Fortunately it is a highly rhythmical signal that is easy to remove from the output of our machines."

Cool.

Cool quotation about embodied cognition

From Michael Spivey's 2004 book, The Continuity of Mind:


"Indulge me while I recount a little anecdote that epitomizes, for me, the intimate role that the body plays in cognition. One day, I spent much of the morning and afternoon mulling over in my head different versions of a few sentences for a manuscript I was working on. I was somewhat frustrated with trying to find the right wording. Later, while sitting in the audience for a visiting speaker's lecture, the phrasing for those sentences suddenly fell into place. I quickly grabbed a pen and the back of an envelope, and scribbled them down just legibly enough that as long as I transcribed them onto my computer within 24 hours, I could probably decipher the chicken scratchings. Then, a brief, inexplicable, unidentifiable motoric urge came over me. For about half a second, I felt a dire need to carry out some unspecified motor movement that would safely preserve these precious sentences that I had finally, after several hours, found a way to arrange that was likable. Then the feeling was gone. I folded the envelope, tucked it in my pocket, and then continued to ignore the visiting speaker's words while my mind uncontrollably wandered to try to explore what that weird urge had been. By running some kind of mental inventory of my body, asking what limbs had wanted to move, I gradually localized it to my left arm. i am right-handed, so this seemed slightly odd. Then I felt the remnants of the motoric urge continue to localize themselves further, down my arm to my left hand. I wiggled those fingers, and two of them seemed to want to wiggle more than the others. My thumb and middle finger seemed somehow potentiated for action. But why? Then it hit me: My thumb and middle finger had wanted to press the Command and S keys on my keyboard to save those prized sentences! My left thumb and middle finger had participated in my powerful desire to preserve those much-pondered phrasings. That, for me, is the embodiment of cognition."

...or does it?

1. Make a 2x2 table
2. Rows: whether or not a correlation was found
3. Columns: whether or not a causal mechanism was ever demonstrated
4. Fill in table with all of the science ever done
5. Do chi-squared test
6. What did we learn?

The circumcision debates

It's a little hard for me, as a Jew, to say it, but I completely agree with this. Along with some other comments on the thread, it effectively demolishes all of the arguments for circumcision except for one - and I can sum that one up in one word: Tradition.

I'm pretty sure my future son's grandparents are going to disagree, probably vehemently.

Insomnia and existentialism don't mix

So here I am, at 2:50 am, reading me some internets because I can't sleep, when I stumble across this new Abstruse Goose. The implications are pretty frightening, and have left me feeling like a prisoner inside my own head.

Now I'll never get to sleep.

In other news, I recently discovered that Allie Bosch, the brilliant author and cartoonist behind Hyperbole and a Half, is EXTREMELY ATTRACTIVE. I have been struck in the face by a speeding train of ineluctable joy.

How I feel about religion today

Today, I was inspired by this, which sums up a substantial portion of my hopes, fears, beliefs, and ambitions. But I need to refine the last point.

If by "religion" you mean a sense of purpose that transcends the mundane, that instills in you a compelling desire to alleviate the suffering of your fellow man, and that binds you to your communities and families, then I support you.

If by "religion" you mean a rigid adherence to principles that have no foundation in reality, a dogma you use to justify the expression of your prejudices and fears, and a conduit for your thanatic impulses, then I do not support you.

We have the incredible gift of perception: we have senses that teach us the wonders of the universe, and brains that let us begin to make sense of the dizzying mystery of it all. I say we have these things, but perhaps we have been given them. If that's the case, then to shut our eyes and close our minds is the worst kind of ingratitude.

Stunning aurora

Yes, this is real life

XKCD - a neverending supply of quantum phys jokes

http://www.xkcd.com/967/

Belgian "coma" patient was misdiagnosed: actually paralyzed and fully awake

Article

I know this is old news, but read what the patient said about his experience! Horrifying.

When he woke up after the accident he had lost control of his body, "I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," he says.

"I became a witness to my own suffering as doctors and nurses tried to speak with me until they gave up all hope.

"I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me – it was my second birth. All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt."

The emotional cost of mind-wandering

Article here

A Harvard study came to the shocking, almost paradoxical conclusion that we spend about half of our time elsewhere.

It's been known for about ten years that a particular set of brain regions is more active when you're not paying attention to the world around you. This network, called the default mode network, consists mostly of areas along the brain's midline, and is utilized when a person is mind-wandering, ruminating about the past, or thinking about themselves.

The Harvard study, led by Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, also found that when in this state, people tend to be less happy. This is hardly a surprise, since self-reflection has been shown to be associated with negative emotion, and default mode network activity is associated with troubled, distracted states of mind such as worrying about the future and ruminating on the past.

The flip side of mind-wandering is more likely to produce positive emotions. Buddhists call it mindfulness; we call it paying attention. When our mental faculties are directed toweards processing sensory information and interacting with the world around us, we seem to be at our cognitive best. What activity, according to this article, is most likely to recruit people's full attention while they are engaged in it? You guessed it.

I just can't believe that participants were actually willing to answer the phone.

An atheist's rationale

From Reddit:

http://i.imgur.com/PxgR4.jpg

Self-recognition in the rhesus macaque?

Rhesus macaques routinely fail the mirror self-recognition task, the time-honored but beleaguered gold standard of self-consciousness. A new study claims to show that the rhesus is aware of its agency; that is, it recognizes its own actions as belonging to it.

I didn't read the study, mostly because it's not published yet (see J. J. Couchman in the July 2011 issue of Biology Letters), but the article about it makes some pretty bold claims about rhesus metacognition that seem a little premature - all the monkeys seem to be doing is forming an association between efferent motor signals and afferent visual input.

Of course, that association probably helps form the foundation for self-awareness in the first place. But even full-blown agency isn't sufficient for self-awareness. In fact, it might not even be necessary.

Human echolocation

I know, that's what I said. WHAT?

But apparently it's real. There are documented cases of blind people using echolocation, much like dolphins and bats would, to navigate their worlds. These people make clicking sounds with their mouths, and are able to decode the sound of the reverberations to determine the spatial locations of objects. Interestingly, they seem to be using the visually oriented parts of the brain to accomplish this distinctly auditory feat.

Here's a journal article on the subject.

When real life is so awesome, it looks fake

A rocket breaks the sound barrier in a cloud of ice crystals. Fast-forward to 1:50 if you're impatient.

Order and Chaos

If you've ever heard me spouting off excitedly about fractals, this is what I was talking about! Besides the beautiful image, make sure you read the caption.

Cognitive neuroscience and the wrong perspective

The position of cognitive neuroscience today is to watch this video and conclude that the school of fish has a mechanism for drawing circles around sharks.

Saying that the brain has evolved a mechanism for performing some particular cognitive function is missing the same point: such functions emerge from the interactions of millions of tiny interacting elements. These functions persist, phylogenetically speaking, because they serve an adaptive purpose. Cognitive neuroscience has fallen into the bad habit of starting with macroscopic function and seeking the mechanism, when we should be starting with the microscopic mechanisms and seeing what they can do on a global scale.

Edit: I just read about what John Dewey (1894) called the psychologist's fallacy: "to confuse the standpoint of the observer and explainer with that of the fact observed". Couldn't have said it better myself.

Einstein vs. Hawking - Rap Battle

This is nerd wit at its best... wow.