It had a great line-up: Steven Rose, Douglas Hofstader, Maxine Sheet-Johnson, Timothy Ingold, and a host of Danish scholars whose work we can now all expore. The three days of the conference each addressed a different theme: Brain Plasticity, Awareness and Intentionality, and Beyond Dualisms.

You can read the Introductory Statement on the conference. Here’s one paragraph from the end:

Neuroscience seems to have learned from its critics. Reductive and neurocentric positions have to give way to the ideas that the plastic brain is capable of learning for life, and that both bodily movement as well as social activity leaves clearly formed traces in the development of the brain. Whenever we pray, learn to ride a bicycle, or read a book, the brain changes. The brain is not destiny. Are there no limits, human and neurobiological, to how much we can learn and to the extent that upbringing might effect changes in the brain?

The best thing is that you can get the videos from all the talks. So here is Steven Rose on The Future of the Brain – Promises and Perils of the Neurosciences (preceed by an intro to the conference), Jesper Morgensen on Any Limits to Neuroplasticity?, and Tim Ingold on The Social Brain.

You can access the entire program and all the videos at the Great Expectations conference website.

And so I have, exploring recommend pieces over at Whispered Words. Cassandra Claire’s The Very Secret Diaries on the Lord of the Rings made me laugh and laugh. Greyworlf’s Kirk/Spock And In the Darkness Bind You was erotic, intense, and well-written, a classic of slash according to Whispered Words.

But today I want to expand on what I thought was a throw-away line in that post, and connect it to some of what Greg wrote about in his post on ethnography, hard-wired assumptions, and sexuality in SurveyFail Redax. (For more on SurveyFail, see Rough Theory; you can also follow the controversy in more detail through the links rounded up at Anti-Oppression Linkspam Community.)

The throw-away line was this: “But nature/nurture is dead (except perhaps in slash?).”

Today I am making it the punchline. Slash can save the day for nature/nurture.

Nature versus nurture refers to the debate of genes versus environment, human nature versus culture, of our animal side versus our civilized side, and so forth. As Greg said, it’s a very old theme in Western thought. In SurveyFail, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam operated from a restricted and dichotomized view of nature versus nurture, where nature, dictated by evolution and primitive brain circuits, dictate sex differences and sexual interests. Here’s how Greg put it:

In their responses to some of their critics, Gaddam offers the blanket explanation that, ‘When we talk about the ‘oldest parts of the brain’ [the subcortical regions], it is in the context of the tectonic tussle between these and the prefrontal cortices that give rise to the peaks of our culture and the terrain of our behavior.’ Daniel points out that Gaddam describes an opposition in the brain between the ‘oldest’ pre-cultural, primitive elements and these newer cortices that produce culture; nature v. culture played out in brain layers.

Slash can change that. Not by having nature and nurture meet in a bar (though if someone knows some slash on that, by all means leave a comment!), but in how slash works as an imaginative process.

Quite simply, nature vs. nurture is an oppressive division. Slash reworks the relationship between nature/nurture in ways that help us in our thinking and that are closer to the actual reality of how nature/nurture works.

I want to focus first on the “/” itself. Here’s the relevant piece from the Fanlore wiki.

The term ‘slash’ refers to the virgule (or forward slash) that links two names in a slash pairing—for example CharacterA/CharacterB… Needing a way to refer to all such pairings and the entire genre of writing, [writers] referred to them and it as “/”… This was in the early eighties. When verbalizing this punctuation mark in conversation (from the early eighties on), it was, of course, said out loud as “slash.” Eventually (primarily in the mid- to late-eighties) the term itself (“slash”) started appearing in print. That is, fans wrote or typed “slash” and not “/”.

But the meaning of the “/” has changed and expanded since then. People started to do slash, in the sense of imaginative, erotic writing with all sorts of pairings, not just the standard Kirk/Spock or other male/male combinations. Fanlore highlights two general meanings of the “/” now:

“It’s only slash if it’s about a non-canon (or ‘unconventional’) relationship.”
“It’s only slash if they were both straight before they met each other.”

So instead of nature vs. nurture, now we have nature/nurture in a non-canonical relationship. And nature and nurture aren’t straight anymore. They don’t mean what the big-wig intellectuals (and other media producers) want, for example, a straight heterosexual coupling of genetics and environment. Now it’s based on what we can imagine, not what we assume.

Let me give an example of the old nature vs. nurture. Steven Pinker is a good character for nature, with his Daedalus article, Why Nature and Nurture Won’t Go Away. He argues strongly against a blank slate view, and gives us evolution, genetics, and innate traits – his “human nature.” (Also, his flowing locks, who could resist?!)

As for nurture, I’m going het. Judith Butler is my character, since she was used in eruthos’ excellent rebuttal to Ogi Ogas, and then became a point of discussion in Greg’s post. (I know, I know, I’m so traditional.) Here, our supposed “natures” are culturally constructed and regulated through ideologies and discourses. Rather than acting out genetic imperatives, we act out cultural dictates, performing them through the “regularized and constrained repetition of norms.”

Oh, it’s all so brilliantly 90s. Just so When Steven Met Judith.

Isn’t it in desperate need of some slash?

What has me particularly excited about “nature/nurture” is that the slash keeps in play some basic concepts that people use all the time. In his article, Pinker is right that “holistic interactionism” doesn’t quite cut it. It is rather like anthropologists’ standard line, “it’s complicated.” Not a good communications strategy. It gets worse when we try to talk about interactionism. One of the leading approaches is called developmental systems theory. I know, your eyes already glazed over.

But take a fraught sexual relationship and say, “it’s complicated.” Everyone gets that! Even better, their eyes lit up.

Slash rescues nature/nurture. Rather than some vast array of complex explanations, slash brings the focus back on nature and nurture, and the inevitable relationship between them. And it does so in all the unconventional, radical, inventive ways that slash signifies.

That brings me back to that first set of stories, The Very Secret Diaries. Suddenly all sorts of potential relationships emerge between the Lord of the Rings characters. Yet the Diaries have their own forms (“Sam will kill him if he tries anything”). Both relationships and forms are not limited to the canonical presentation, to good vs evil or nature vs. nurture. In these stories even the Balrog and Gandalf can get it on!

This imaginative approach is actually closer to what the science tells us, where epigenetics and brain plasticity have fundamentally undercut an innatist view of biology and scholars like Susan Bordo and Anne Fausto Sterling have emphasized the importance of actual bodies in our understanding of gender and its construction.

But slash is not just about the “/”, the unconventional relationship. It’s also about reimagining the principle characters. Slash overturns the compulsory roles we imagine for nature and nurture.

Take the story And In the Darkness Bind You. Rather than Kirk as passionate and Spock as rational (a traditional nature/nurture pair), each explores new aspects of being and acting. Spock turns reflective and emotional rather than logical, Kirk is consumed by guilt and unrealized possibilities. Through what they experience and do, Kirk and Spock take form outside any standard characterization. And their story is grounded in the concrete details of sex, of bodies and wetness and emotions engaging, not ideas about what sex is for (Pinker) or how it is performed (Butler).

Again, this is closer to how things actually work and how we need to imagine those workings. I have advocated for the importance of experience and behavior, for example, the everyday brain and our everyday life or the role of embodiment in health. Greg does much the same with his work on balance. Anthropologists have already reworked our ideas of human “nature,” recognizing that culture is part of human nature, whether it’s a two-million year tradition of tool manufacture or our chimpanzee cousins and their rich behavioral traditions. Our understandings of “nurture” are next, of understanding how biology and human development play central roles in how culture works. Culture as systems of symbols and as discourse is just so Spock.

So here’s another way to see nature/nurture. Nature and nurture lust for each other. They want to get it on. They couple, in the most unconventional and non-traditional ways you can imagine. They always couple, even if they are still “nature” and “nurture.”

As Joan Martin writes, “Slash is a wonderfully subversive voice whispering or shouting around the edges and into the cracks of mainstream culture. It abounds in unconventional thinking. It’s fraught with danger for the status quo, filled with temptingly perilous notions of self-determination and successful defiance of social norms.”

In this sense, slash and nature/nurture is about women’s imaginative reworkings of two central male characters in Western civilization. And that’s a good thing.

For more, see the previous posts in the Slash and SurveyFail Series

Sex, Lies and IRB Tape: Netporn to SurveyFail “These particular researchers make everything worse. First comes their incredibly naïve and prejudiced assumptions about fanfiction and the people involved. As numerous people pointed out in response to Ogi Ogas’ shemale comparison, the logical equivalent for slash is not shemales but men who enjoy reading about two women engaged in lesbian sex (a rather standard feature in most male-oriented porn).”

SurveyFail Redax: Downey Adds to Lende “Like so many other human brain functions, sexual desire stretches through these layers, triggering processes that link together ‘oldest’ and ‘newest’ parts of the brain. Like I said, this is erotica: written, visually-processed, imagined, arousing, sexually stimulating… a cascade of stimuli and effects (with plenty of loops and doubling backs) that combines different brain functions.”

There are only a few websites I could find covering the relationship between mental health and global warming. They look at how certain aspects of the decline of mental health in the future will be attributable to the increase of global warming.  At best, these are passing comments in articles about general health concerns.

I have to admit, I’m more into preventative medicine than medical prophecy.

Global Warming, greenhouse gases, climate change, these are all with us today. We are past the point of any hope of prevention, but we must look to possibilities of minimising the damage and sequestering the problem. Being anxious about the problem, is obviously not going to be good for anyone’s mental health and general wellbeing. But working towards solutions will.

My biggest concern with contemporary neuroscience and psychology is the lack of awareness about the influence of context in the operations of the brain. It is what pulled me out from neuroimaging and neurobiology laboratories and out into the world of ethnographic fieldwork. It was my sneaking suspicion that mental disturbances, particularly those prevalent in developed countries, are linked in shape and form to our environmental and socio-cultural context.

My experiences in several countries lead me to affirm that if we have a narrow window upon the world, a restricted perception of and limited attention to the world, then our mental health and everyday wellbeing is less robust. People who I have met, who have widened the world they live in by living in an expanded universe of attention, perception and consciousness are quite often much healthier and happier. I have very much come to agree with the Buddhist notion that “With your thoughts you create the world.”

Maybe some of you can see where I am going with this. Global Warming, in a poetic sense can be thought of as a symptom of a distorted style of mental health that has neglected the world that our thoughts have created. The world we create feeds back upon the thoughts we have. The reiterative causality between brain and culture is spiralling towards an uncertain future. It’s time to step outside of the spiral for a second, and assess where we want to go, and the kind of people we want to be when we get there.

Now, not all the happiest people I know are doing something about climate change, and not all the people I know who are concerned about climate change are the perfect example of mentally balanced. But I have seen, and do see, that contributing to the social and environmental world, in the best way you know how, will bring positivity into your life. It might be the simple act of picking a piece of rubbish up, using a recyclable coffee cup, walking to the train station rather than driving, or even hanging washed clothes out on a clothes-line rather than drying them in an electric drier. Positive reinforcement people! Feel good about contributing something to the world you live in; the world you create with your thoughts!

My take-home message is: Look after your environment, and you will be looking after your mind too!

A ream of Clark’s papers can be found here. A review of Michael Wheeler’s book, Reconstructing the cognitive world: The next step, written by Leslie Marsh can be downloaded here. We’ll come back to Andy Clark’s work again in later posts.

I must admit a certain morbid fascination with how one of my favorite streams of thought — embodied cognition — would fare combined with cultural evolution — an area of scholarship that, well, to put it nicely, is uneven (before you get all defensive, let me just stop you with one word: mimetics). It’s sort of like watching one of your good friends get hit on by a sleazy guy at a bar. She looks happy, but you’re sort of cringing at the chance that she might actually take him home. In spite of this instinctual cringe, this special edition of Philosophical Transactions has some really interesting work on cultural evolution, especially because many of the pieces focus tightly on the enormously problematic issue of cultural transmission.

Michael Wheeler and Andy Clark: emergent modularity v. strong instructionism

Wheeler and Clark (p. 3565) highlight at the onset that there is an inherent tension between the understandings of cognition in embodied cognition and in evolutionary psychology. From embodied cognition, we get a model of human cognitive development as ‘a kaleidoscope of complex ratchet effects [that] fuel the flexible and, to a significant degree, open-ended character of thought and action.’ In contrast, the vision of the brain from evolutionary psychology ‘has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to some ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness, with an attendant focus on upon the limitations and cognitive biases that result.’ Whereas embodied cognition models the brain as a product of dynamic interplay among processes at different time-scales — evolutionary, developmental, and immediate –, evolutionary psychologists tend to assume the existence of underlying, enduring structures in the brain, shaped by natural selection and encoded (even where we cannot find evidence) in genetic structures.

If I had to pin down my biggest problem with evolutionary psychology, I think Wheeler and Clark hit it square on the head here, far more eloquently and rationally than I have been able to manage. To say it bluntly, on the subject of brain, the views from embodied cognition and evolutionary psychology, at least in their simplest forms (we’ll complicate these in a minute) couldn’t be more opposed: emergent v. innate, learned v. programmed, contingent v. inevitable, consistency as a product of systems v. assumption of universal ‘nature’.

Wheeler and Clark’s critique of much of evolutionary psychology and the ‘massive modularity’ hypothesis is far reaching and substantial, but the authors do a great job granting space to these positions and integrating the strongest insights from evolutionary psychology. They’re surprisingly even handed and balanced, which really changes the tone of much of the discussion (Jerry Fodor, in contrast, is positively molten in his scathing critiques of those who take modularity theory into evolutionary psychology, perhaps because they’ve claimed him as one of their inspirations). There’s a lesson in this for this author as well…

For example, Wheeler and Clark discuss how massive modularity proponents are not strictly or necessarily wedded to any simple argument for universal human psychology because environmental mechanisms may be necessary to trigger the emergence of functional modules or may be, in contrast, ‘disabled’ by developmental dynamics. What then are evolutionary psychologists arguing for if not ‘universal human nature’?

The answer, nicely isolated by Buller (2005), is an evolved species-wide set of genetically specified developmental programs that (i) determine how the emerging human phenotype responds to critical environmental triggers and (ii) control processes such as genetic switching. It is at that level that strict universality (allegedly) holds, and at which our evolved human nature is (allegedly) to be found. (Wheeler and Clark, p. 3567)

For these theorists, innate developmental programs interact with variable environmental input to produce the manifest cultural, cognitive, and behavioural variation observed in humanity.
[By the way, Buller's work is an excellent discussion and critique of evolutionary psychology, deftly but perhaps confusingly referencing in the title, Adapting Minds, the seminal work of evolutionary psychology, Adapted Minds.]

Rather than simply advocating that ‘modularity’ be tossed on the scrap-heap because of the dispiriting results of collaboration with evolutionary theory up until now, Wheeler and Clark advocate ‘remoulding modularity’ to coincide with a more sophisticated, empirically plausible vision of both brain dynamics and human evolution. Drawing on work on ‘modularization’ (such as Kamiloff-Smith 1992) they argue for ‘emergent modularity,’ a model that accounts for brain tissue specialization and functional isolation in the brain without excessive pre-determination or design. Instead, relatively simple proclivities — things like attention to salient information — help the brain ‘bootstrap’ itself up into some very specialized structures by focusing developmental dynamics on specific environmental input.

In addition, Wheeler and Clark pry apart the assumption that any evolutionary treatment of the brain must necessarily focus on domain specific (narrow purpose) brain functions (like the proverbial ‘snake detector,’ ‘face recognizer,’ or ‘language module’). They profile a number of researchers who suggest that general cognitive mechanisms might prove to be an evolutionary advantage. The reason that this is crucial is that it demonstrates that there’s simply no reason to yield to simplistic evolutionary psychology arguments that assume strict modularity must flow from any evolutionary treatment of the human brain. The connection has to be demonstrated as it is simply not logically necessary. Conceding the evolution-must-lead-to-modularity argument, in my opinion, has led to many anthropologists pulling away from evolutionary insights on the human brain, a position that is simply untenable, but is understandable given the way massive modularity theorists have used evolutionary explanation.

Wheeler and Clark are not denying the importance of genes; far from it, they are simply trying to remove the assumption of strict ‘instructionism,’ the idea that a phenotypic trait is wholly encoded in genes, from discussions of genetic ‘coding.’ Wheeler and Clark don’t just want to swing the pendulum back too far in the direction of considering traits to be dynamic, developmental, and emergent, a position they find excessively ‘liberal’ on the question of genetic contributions to phenotype. The goal: ‘if we can successfully navigate between the Scylla of strong instructionism and the Charybdis of excessive liberality, we would potentially have access to such an account [taking both genetic and cultural inheritance into account, that is]. Allied with the concept of emergent modularity, that result would do much to effect a rapprochement between our alternative visions of evolved human cognition’ (p. 3571).

An alternative: neuroconstructivsm

Wheeler and Clark discuss niche creation, a concept we’ve been over before at Neuroanthropology (see, for example, Daniel’s recent post on the work of Agustín Fuentes). For those of you who’ve just arrived at the party, an example of niche creation that Wheeler and Clark reference is ‘when beaver offspring inherit both the dam that was communally constructed by the previous generation and the altered river flow that that physical structure has produced’ (p. 3571). One generation shapes the environmental niche in which they live, affecting the survival and selection of subsequent generations.

Wheeler and Clark argue that researchers pursuing embodied cognition will find strong allies among those theorists who are taking Kevin Laland, John Odling-Smee, and their colleagues’ discussion of ‘niche creation’ into the realm of cognitive ecological niches, because the cultivated niche becomes both a source of developmental input for the emergent modules in the brain and a vehicle of cultural transmission. And humans are extraordinary manipulators of their own ecological niche. As Wheeler and Clark write:

For rampant niche construction yields a rapid succession of selective environments, and hence favours the (biological) evolution of phenotypic plasticity. Hominid minds, Sterelny suggests, are adapted to the spread of variation itself. To cope with such variability, we are said to have evolved powerful forms of developmental plasticity. These allow early learning to induce persisting and stable forms of neural reorganization, impacting our range of automatic skills, affective responses and generally reorganizing human cognition in deep and profound ways. The upshot is that ‘the same initial set of developmental resources can differentiate into quite different final cognitive products’ (Sterelny 2003, p. 166). (Wheeler and Clark 2008:3565)

Wheeler and Clark describe the extended space we use when thinking as an example, such as how we may manipulate physical objects to help us to classify and order them, or how we parse complex cognitive problems into shorter ones and using some material means to note intermediate results. ‘Non-organic props or aids’ to our memory and cognitive abilities can then become a channel of cultural inheritance that not only supplements our mental faculties, but also shapes the next generation’s (and our own) cognitive development. To continue our example, the techniques that I learn to conduct calculations not only affect my own brain, they become the lessons that I visit upon my children’s brains when they are in crucial formative stages of development; my technique for expanding mental abilities becomes my children’s environmental niche for honing intellectual skills.

We could add myriad examples of other forms of cognitive crutches that become part of our brains’ development niche, including such brain-shaping cultural artifacts as language, literacy, visual art and decoration, electronic media, music, games, rich and varied material culture (and even insulation from some parts of material reality), and on and on and on… A tool in the hand of their creator, most of these have long-ago become relatively predictable and permanent parts of our developmental environment, shaping ‘human nature’ in profound ways, a fact only driven home in the horrifying cases where children are deprived of these channels for cognitive inheritance and formation.

What Wheeler and Clark do that I have never been able to accomplish (well, one of the many things) is that they highlight so clearly the crucial role of cognitive niche creation and, after outlining how this concept might play a role in evolution, chart a way to a reconciliation between embodied cognition and evolutionary theory. Their perspective, they call ‘neuroconstuctivist’ (after the work of Mareschal and colleagues 2007a, 2007b).

Following conversations with Daniel this weekend, I might prefer ‘neuro-cultivation’ when talking to my anthropology colleagues, but only because ‘constructivist’ has more baggage than a Hilton heiress in our field that I’d prefer to avoid (such as ‘social constructionism’ in its more radical forms). But I can live with ‘neuroconstructivist’…

This doesn’t mean that Wheeler and Clark are too conciliatory toward those who want to see the human brain as a Swiss Army Knife of predetermined tools. They argue that niche creation combined with an evolutionary perspective yields a very different neuroconstructivist account of human distinctiveness:

For what is special about human brains, and what best explains the distinctive features of human intelligence, may be precisely their ability (courtesy of extended development and extensive neural plasticity) to enter into deep, complex and ultimately architecture-determining relationships with an open-ended variety of culturally transmitted practices, endowments and non-biological constructs, props and aids. Perhaps it is because our brains,more than those of any other animal on the planet, are primed to seek and consummate such intimate relations with non-biological resources that we end up as bright and as capable of abstract thought as we are. If so, our distinctive universal human nature, insofar as it exists at all, would rather be a nature of biologically determined openness to deep, learning- and development-mediated, change. (p. 3572)

This neuroconstructivist account of ‘human nature’ places no limit on its variation, unlike the innatist assumptions in modularity theory. The genetic changes that gave us the modern human brain generated ‘a cognitive machine intrinsically geared to self-transformation, artefact-based expansion and a snowballing/bootstrapping process of computational and representational growth’ (p. 3572).

In other words, Wheeler and Clark map out a path toward reconciliation between evolutionary theory and interest in the brain that isn’t the same one — massive modularity, instinct, universal grammar, etc. — that seems now to be so out of step with both contemporary evolutionary theory and brain sciences. The result is really outstanding and thought provoking, and I can’t recommend the article highly enough if you can get your hands on it.

The abstract of the piece is:

Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness, with an attendant stress upon the limitations and cognitive biases that result. On the face of it, this suggests either a tension or, at least, a mismatch, with the symbiotic dyad of cultural evolution and embodied cognition. In what follows, we explore this mismatch by focusing on three key ideas: cognitive niche construction; cognitive modularity; and the existence (or otherwise) of an evolved universal human nature. An appreciation of the power and scope of the first, combined with consequently more nuanced visions of the latter two, allow us to begin to glimpse a much richer vision of the combined interactive potency of biological and cultural evolution for active, embodied agents. [abstract here]

References

Buller, David J. 2005. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Amazon listing)

Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. (Amazon listing)

Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1992. Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press. (Amazon listing, Google books preview)

Mareschal, Denis, Mark Johnson, Sylvain Sirois, Michael Spratling, Michael Thomas and Gert Westermann. 2007a. Neuroconstructivism – I: How the Brain Constructs Cognition. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.

Mareschal, Denis, Sylvain Sirois, Gert Westermann, and Mark Johnson. 2007b. Neuroconstructivism – 2: Perspectives and Prospects. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sterelny, Kim. 2003. Thought in a hostile world: The evolution of human cognition.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Amazon listing)

Wheeler, Michael, and Andy Clark. 2008. Culture, embodiment and genes: unravelling the triple helix. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363(1509): 3563-3575. doi 10.1098/rstb.2008.0135 [abstract here]

So they want to recruit some anthropologists, neuroanthropologists, and other related ilk to take the Moral Sense Test. They need you! Otherwise the test, promoted on a philosophy site, will only get philosophy type answers. While we know that both philosophers and anthropologists can give screwy answers about moral questions, the burning question is: will they give different screwy answers?

Eric assures me the moral dilemmas will do just that, create dilemmas. But you have the power to decide! (Well, assuming your mind just doesn’t freeze up.) Plus you’ll get 15 to 20 minutes of edu-tainment, becaue that’s how long the test takes.

So mosey on over to the test site for your Moral Sense. Eric and Fiery send their splintered, burning thanks!

Shortly afterwards, Vaughan proposed “hard wired” as one of the worst psychobabble terms. For me, the fixation on biological determinism is the larger, and worse, cultural concept behind that. So I propose leaving behind biological claims for identity. It just gives us claptrap like the opening lines from the New Scientist news report, “Brain scans have provided the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait.”

Compelling evidence? While there is interesting work on biology and sexuality (the LA Times covers some of it), there is plenty to doubt about the present work, as the Neurocritic points out quite well here and here. This sort of work represents bad brain science: reported claims overreaching the evidence, an often notable lack of comparative work and appropriate controls, little longitudinal analysis, and on and on.

The worst thing about it? The science, whatever it turns out to be, cannot take us from is to ought.

To add my two anthropological cents, human sexuality is varied. Trying to shoehorn sexuality into one socially and politically charged box just does not work well from an anthropological point of view. As one example, men in some cultures go through different life stages, and in some of those stages homosexuality is the normal way of being, whereas at other times heterosexual relations are the norm. To speak personally, I’ve known people who have had an array of partners in their lives, individually recreating what cultures like the Etoro have shown us ethnographically.

On the neuroplasticity and experience/behavior side, this type of approach generally leaves out something every consenting adult knows. Sex matters! The experience of a sexual encounter helps shape our desires, our pleasures, our associations.

But there is something that matters more to me, and most of the people I know, than sex. LOVE. All this debate about cerebral asymmetries and biological determinism misses the human point. Love matters.

Who cares whether sex between whatever combination of men and women is or is not natural? Love makes a much bigger difference in people’s lives. Love between two committed partners, love of a parent for a child, love of family and friend and groups finding common bond.

Love holds us together, whereas the debates over how gay our brains may or may not be aims to divide us, to heighten identity politics at the expense of those experiences and behaviors whose impact lasts longer. We sacrifice the strength of intimacy to proclaim the supposed facts of science.

There are those who will say that knowing the nature of the problem (how easy to slide from one sense of the problem to another) will help us make better determinations about what to do, that more information will lead to better decisions. Or that being able to claim the mantle of biologically innate will help in the fight against the other side.

I would counter that these sorts of assertions cut entirely against the grain of the society we have built, whether that is a liberal vision of equality before the law or a conservative vision that government should not dictate people’s private choices. But that vision gets sacrificed at the altar of proclamations of moral superiority and the exercise of vindictive power.

Science, with its claims of facts and evidence, steps so easily into that arena, declaring this and that truth. In doing that, the scientists are forgetting what matters, both about science and about human experience.

I’ve watched both talks, more than a half hour of my finite lifespan that I will never get back (okay, I’ve wasted part of my finite life doing worse… I think), so I need to unburden myself. I think ‘memetics’ is one of the bigger crocks hatched in recent decades, hiding in the shadow of respectable evolutionary theory, suggesting that anyone who doesn’t immediately concede to the ‘awesome-ness’ of meme-ness is somehow afraid of evolutionary theory. Let me just make this perfectly clear: I teach about evolutionary theory. I like Charles Darwin. I have casts of hominid skulls in my office. I still think ‘memetics’ is nonsense on stilts on skates on thin ice on borrowed time (apologies to Bentham), as deserving of the designation ‘science’ as astrology, phrenology, or economic forecasting.

What’s hard for me to understand is that I LIKE some of Daniel Dennett’s work, and I can’t cite Dennett’s other work confidently when he has picked up a ‘meme franchise,’ and is plugging away with the ‘meme’ meme, making it appear that I’m down with this later material. Blackmore, on the other hand, is a reformed para-psychologist, so she’s, at worst, made a lateral move in terms of respectability. I get particularly irritated during her talk because I think she does an enormous disservice to Darwin’s Origin of Species, but I will try not to late my irritation show too much (even though our regular readers know I won’t be able to manage). I wasn’t going to really heap scorn on Blackmore until I read her own account of TED on the Guardian’s website; gloves are now off.

But I digress, back to the content of the concept and Vaughn’s comments…

Vaughn argues that:

The concept of memes is controversial, not least because it’s hard to see exactly what empirical predictions follow from the theory. Rather than a set of specific hypothesis, it’s really a different framework with which we can re-interpret aspects of culture.

What particularly annoys the critics is the idea that cultural ideas are subject to a Darwinian-style process of selection and (presumably) evolution.

As a critic of memes, I agree with Vaughn to some degree; for example, even Bruce Edmonds argued that memetics had produced limited empirical research in the last edition of the Journal of Memetics before it went into a deep sleep (from which someone is trying to awaken it. Shhh… let it sleep…).

But I would suggest that Vaughn’s single reason for critics’ annoyance severely under-represents the many, varied, and significant reasons that some of us loathe ‘memetics’ (I speak here only for myself, not for Daniel, who may not have the same severe twitch I develop around talk of ‘memes’). Worst of all, memetics sucks the air out of the room for a serious consideration of the ways that culture, knowledge, technology, and human evolution might be interrelated. That is, like a theory of humours and vapors in illness, it provides pseudo-explanations in place of just getting the hell out of the way of serious thought. Memeticists often, perhaps intentionally, seem to generate confusion between what they are doing and what Gerald Edelman christened ‘neural Darwinism,’ a very different discussion of the physiology of neural conditioning; it’s unfortunate guilt by association for the latter, which seems to be grounded in actual evidence.

So, why do I hate the concept of ‘ideas replicating from brain to brain.’ After all, I work on physical education and imitative learning; shouldn’t I be happy that memetic theory places such a premium on imitative learning? What is my problem!? Ah, let me count the problems… I’ll just give you 10 Problems with Memetics to keep it manageable.

1) Reifying the activity of brains

In spite of what some undergrad writers seem to think, the subject of a sentence matters, as does the verb. So when one says, like Blackmore, that ‘ideas replicate from brain to brain,’ we have to ask about the implications of this sentence. Is it plausible, controversial, or just plain daffy? To argue that ‘ideas’ are an agent that ‘replicates’ suggests several layers of reification that I think are profoundly crippling to memetic theory.

If ‘culture’ is already a bit of a reification (treating as a ‘thing’ a complex of heterogeneous behaviors or concepts), ‘meme’ is a kind of mondo-reification. It is attributing to a human behavior, not just a thing-like status, but causal thing-like status (‘the meme made me think that’ or ‘the meme made me do this’). If I come to you and say, ‘The doing made me do something,’ you’d look at me like I was a bloody idiot. But that’s what a ‘meme’ is; a reification of a human behavior posited as the cause of human behavior. Sure, there’s a loopy, pseudo-existentialist ring to arguing that the ‘doing made me do’ something, but it’s hardly a solid place to start a supposedly ‘scientific’ theory.

2) Attributing personality to the reification of ideas

This reification issue with memes turns into a full-blown hare-brained robot conspiracy theory by the end of Blackmore’s talk because of the characteristics she attributes to memes; that is, it’s one thing to reify a concept, it’s another thing to start attributing it a whole complex personality, drives, desires, and levels of different reification. For example, Blackmore says the following about ‘temes’ (technological memes, a new type of replicator even scarier than memes):

But it’s dangerous: temes are selfish replicators, they use us to suck up more resources to produce more computers and more things. Don’t think we created the Internet, that’s how it seems to us.

Uhhhh… Susan, so we didn’t create the Internet? ummmm… who did? While mildly problematic to reify memes, now she’s attributing the cause of concrete, observable things (networks of information flow through fibre optic cable with a very clear history) to a dubious second-order abstraction (not even the memes, but the temes of the memes). Worse still, is Blackmore suggesting that the Internet created us or that it threatens to take control of us? If so, then we are truly in the realm of daft, science fiction free-association, beyond simply the silliness of mistaking a metaphor for a reality. Now she’s afraid of her own metaphors.

3) Doesn’t ‘self-replicating’ mean replicating by one’s self?

There are problems with defining even a gene as a ‘self-replicating’ structure, like, if DNA is so self-replicating, why is it so chemically inert? In actuality, the reason we can pull DNA from old bones is because, in the absence of complex cellular mechanisms, DNA just sits there, kind of doing nothing. Oh, okay so it’s not soooo ‘self-replicating’ that it can actually, well, replicate by its, err…. self….

If defining gene as ‘self-replicating’ is playing a little free with the details, defining meme, as ‘self-replicating’ beggars the imagination it’s so stupid. That’s right, the ditty that you keep singing is really replicating itself in your brain…. Arguing this reveals so little understanding of how brains work, especially how hard it is for ANY pattern to repeat completely. That is, even repetitive action typically involves constant changes in patterns of neural activation; maintaining consistency requires constantly shifting neural resources, even slightly, to take account to changes even in the organism itself.

Moreover, ‘self-replicating’ means, by definition, replicating by itself. Has anyone, ever, anywhere, seen an idea ‘replicate’ itSELF? Although this may seem like a semantic point, I think it’s a bigger logical problem with reifying culture as ‘memes’ and then attributing agentive power to the memes (which, by the way, is a concept created by a person, Richard Dawkins, in spite of Dennett’s assertion that the meme has autonomy).

4) The term ‘meme’ applied to divergent phenomena

Calling an idea a ‘meme’ gets around the enormous problem of incommensurate phenomena in the same category. For example, during Dennett’s talk, he refers to the following as ‘memes’: very abstract general concepts (‘justice,’ ‘freedom’ — note: I’m not sure we’d even agree on the definitions of these), political-economic philosophies (‘communism’ — note: you couldn’t even get proponents to agree on a definition), even whole religions (Islam, Catholicism — note: again, you couldn’t even get all adherents to agree on what these are). In addition, in other sources, we’ve seen memeticists refer to single ideas, strings of idea, melodies, and a host of other things as ‘memes.’ Even the most cursory glance reveals serious problems of scale; is a meme a single idea, a chain of ideas, a system of ideas, or an entire worldview? Fortunately, if you just keeping saying ‘meme’ you might be able to ignore the fact that not everyone in the room agrees what you’re on about.

Blackmore tries to finess this problem: memetics is a ‘much maligned science’ (*cough* … science? errr… ‘theory,’ maybe…). A meme isn’t an idea, she says. No, it’s ‘that which is replicated.’ If the definition of ‘gene’ were this circular, would be in deep shit in terms of genetic medical research. Blackmore goes on to use the example of the way a chap in the audience has his glasses hung around his neck; IF he copied it from someone else, it’s a meme. (And if he didn’t copy it, it’s not a ‘meme’?) Then there’s a brilliant moment when she ‘can’t seen any interesting memes’ in the audience… but I thought memes were everywhere, that we were swimming in a sea of memes.

5) Could memes transfer stably?

If Blackmore actually studied cultural reproduction, that is, where culture is being taught, learned, and corrected, she might be more sensitive to the fact that transmission is fraught with ‘transcription’ errors (I hesitate to use the term ‘transcription’ because it dignifies the whole ‘meme=DNA’ metaphor which memeticists are abusing like a borrowed mule). Even teaching might demonstrate how utterly improbable it is that ANYTHING gets copied accurately (my wife is marking final exams as I speak, and trust me, she doesn’t think of humans as perfect idea-copying machines). Sure, my daughter may sing the Kraft Vegemite jingle after she sees the commercial, but is she really getting the melody right? We all know myriad examples of even songs and melodies winding up with garbled lyrics.

Without stable transmission (and no plausible mechanism of meme transmission to match DNA transcription), meme transmission would be a chaotic process, with no certainty that ‘successful’ memes would be transmitted stably. As Blackmore herself argues, for natural selection to work, you need heredity, and it’s not at all clear that cultural materials are ‘inherited’ with integrity. In fact, one could plausibly argue that one of the most difficult choke points for memes is transmission itself; almost like a form of ‘sexual selection,’ cultural, behavioral, or intellectual transfer will impose their own sorts of pressures. For example, if students routinely simplify complex ideas, the memetic transfer has a kind of simplifying drag.

6) A host will not evolve traits in order for parasite to benefit

Over at Ionian Enchantment, Michael Meadon also writes about the Susan Blackmore video, and he offers a number of serious criticisms, including the idea that memes drive brain development. As he writes:

The serious logical error comes in when she argues, amazingly, that humans have big brains in order to copy memes. That is, she argues there is a “memetic drive” favoring brains that are better at copying memes completely independently of genetic evolution. Language, on this view, is a parasite which we only later “adapted to”. How such a process is meant to operate I have no idea. Why would selfish genes altruistically code for proteins that build bigger brains to help selfish memes replicate? I can see how memetic evolution could take off as a by product of increased intelligence brought about by biological evolution; I simply can’t see how memetic evolution could cause larger brains to evolve in the absence of a biological fitness benefit.

That is, unless a trait is beneficial in natural selection to the host, the parasite is not going to get evolution to create a better host for its own benefit. If the meme is truly a parasite, then there’s no way that the human brain is going to grow for the good of the meme.

7) Trivial examples as analogy to ideological change

A recurring problem in memetics theory is triviality being used to explain serious issues. Although she’s attempting to be funny, Blackmore uses the example of folding toilet paper so that the end forms a point as an example of the global spread of a meme. This example is supposed to explain something serious, like the spread of a religion. The same thing with the example of an advertising jingle. These simplistic examples are then argued to be analogous to something like Christian conversion or the spread of capitalism, as if getting a jingle stuck in your head is like undergoing a major religio-ideological or political-economic social transformation.

Dennett compares memes to lancet flukes, a parasite that takes over the brains of ants so that it can use the body of the ant even though the behavior is suicidal for the ant. He then compares this to ‘dying for an idea,’ whether that ‘idea’ be communism, capitalism, justice, freedom, Catholicism, or Islam. Is ‘Catholicism’ really ‘an idea,’ like an advertising jingle or a concept (like ‘memes’), or is it really something a hell of a lot more complex, including a social system of status, a community, behaviours, multiple ideas, desires, modifications of basic emotions, and a host of other things? That is, is Catholicism (or Islam or communism) like a gene? As a Catholic school boy and an avid reader of Marx, I can, with some confidence, say that neither are ‘an idea’; they are a lot of ideas, behaviors, even social relations, with long histories, marked transformations, and whole social worlds connected to them. We talk about ‘dying for an idea,’ but it’s a sloppy metaphor for what is really much more complex.

8 ) Gradual cultural transmission not like infection

The metaphor of ‘infection’ is another one that gets used in memes, as it is clear that memes must have some sort of Lamarkian dimenions. Dennett, for example, argues that ideas, like the lancet fluke, are infectious. Is Dennett saying that the jingle from the Kraft Vegemite commercial has really taken over my brain and is forcing me to do its bidding? And if the Kraft Vegemite jingle has my brain, does that mean that it has eradicated the other memes trying to seize my brain? And will I commit suicide to reproduce the Kraft Vegemite jingle? Or will my exploding brain infect other people with the Kraft Vegemite jingle like some virulent melodic ebola virus?

Okay, maybe I’m mocking the metaphor of infection, but I think that the hooky jingle that gets stuck in our brain is actually a pretty rare phenomenon (in addition, usually a fair bit of creativity and craft has gone into producing that jingle). Most ideas don’t reverberate inside our heads like the unstoppable Kraft Vegemite jingle; usually, a single exposure to an idea is not adequate for it to become firmly lodged in our brains and perfectly reproduced. Religious conversion, for example, is not often an instantaneous event, like a bolt on the road to Damascus or a viral infection; rather, it is a gradual change, often in stages. Why? Because a religion is not a ‘single idea’ like an ideological gene. But given this gradual establishment of ideas, then all sorts of other factors are going to affect whether or not we end up accepting and reproducing ideas.

9) Objective ‘science’ inconsistent with normative judgments about memes

If memes are successful at reproducting in our brains, than how can they be abused or misused, as Dennett worries about in his talk. Can an ant ‘misuse’ a lancet fluke? If a meme were really like a gene, it wouldn’t matter which variant of the idea got reproduced (in part because, aside from transcription errors and mutations, genes transfer stably). There’s this strong stream of judgment in both Dennett and Blackmore that’s inconsistent with evolutionary theory.

Dennett, for example, argues that ‘toxic ideas’ are like the pathogens brought be explorers to the New World. He suggests radio stations are ‘memes’ (but aren’t melodies memes, so wouldn’t stations be like dirty door knobs?), and that Western memes are wiping out indigenous ideas around the world. It’s memes versus memes, not changed economic systems, uneven access to technology and media, and forms of symbolic domination. Dennett argues that ‘we’ (presumably all those attending TED or watching the podcasts) have an ‘immunity’ to all the ‘junk’ that ‘lies around the edges of our culture’; pornography ‘for us’ is a ‘like a minor cold,’ but for people without ‘immunity,’ pornography is potentially fatal.

Dennett asks, How do we tell the ‘good memes’ from the ‘bad memes’? We don’t have to worry because memetics, the ‘science of memes,’ is ‘morally neutral.’ Ideas are like the HIV virus; the way to deal with it is to do science, to understand how and why ideas spread. We should encourage the spread of ‘relatively benign’ versions of the most toxic memes… I find the account incoherent, fluctuating between supposed ‘scientific’ neutrality and extreme normativity. The problem is that, without any sort of social or political theory (it’s just memes versus memes out there), there’s really no logical ground for Dennett or Blackmore to make the judgments about good and bad memes that they seem so likely to make. It’s one reason that Blackmore’s critique becomes completely mad at the end of the talk — she has a sense of moral outrage, but she singles out robot ‘temes’ that might eradicate us as the great threat. In a world of profound economic inequality, inadequate educational systems, massive health problems, ecological dangers, and the like, her fear would be comical, if I weren’t livid.

The end of Blackmore’s talk descends into a chaos of wild ideas — self-replicating ‘temes’ (technological memes), life on other planets, robot replicators taking over for humans. The bizarre turn might appear unusual if you assumed Blackmore was a rational evolutionary theorist or psychologist, but remember, she started off as a para-psychologist.

10) Resistance to memetics is not ‘anti-Darwinism’; Darwinism not a religion

Finally, I resent the argument that Dennett makes, that all those who resist memetics are ‘anti-Darwinist’ or afraid of the implications of Darwin’s ideas. I’m more than comfortable with Darwin’s contribution to evolutionary theory, especially natural selection, and I think his works (not just Origin of Species) were remarkable, but I don’t adhere to ‘Darwinism’ as if it were a scholastic faith.

It’s not ‘Darwinism’ that I support, like it’s a cult or a form of thought that I must follow religiously; I believe that ‘Darwinism’ is only useful in that it is a theory that provides hypotheses to be tested, a powerful explanatory framework that explains some (though not all) phenomena. That is, when Dennett argues that some people are insufficiently Darwinist because they don’t want to apply ‘Darwinism’ to the world-wide web or Hoover Dam, I feel like he’s treating ‘Darwinism’ as a one-size-fits-all über-explanation. That’s not science — that’s a cult. In fact, most people who study evolution argue that there a LOT of things that must be added to ‘Darwinism’ to get modern evolutionary theory (like, say, ooooh, genes…). So for Dennett to argue that it’s sufficiently ‘Darwinist’ to believe in memes, he’s stuck with a massive problem; a) Darwin didn’t know about genes, and b) Darwin certainly never mentioned ‘memes.’ So, then, Darwin wasn’t sufficiently ‘Darwinist’?

But worse, does Blackmore really believe in ‘Universal Darwinism’ as she argues? Is she even listening to herself? Does Darwinism explain the culinary arts? Fractals? Astrophysics? The development of animation? Royal marriages? Reality TV? Which direction water goes down the toilet? I’m not just being facetious — Blackmore’s position is simply incoherent.

Even the notion that Darwin had the ‘best idea anyone every had’ (Blackmore’s line, not mine), that the idea ‘explains all design in the universe’ (again, NOT my line — the word ‘design’ alone makes me cringe), suggests that Darwin’s insight was a kind of creation or invention when I think it’s better to describe it as a perception, or an analysis, or an insight. Darwin’s discussion of natural selection was not just a ‘great idea’; it was a ‘great observation.’ Darwin was a scientist. That’s what made his thinking great. He observed closely and fit theories to data, accepting when observations required overturning accepting ways of thinking. In fact, ‘Creation’ was a ‘great idea,’ too. Sucks that it doesn’t line up with observable facts. But that’s the way the creationist cookie crumbles.

Susan Blackmore: an irony-free blogger

One irony in all this is that Susan Blackmore, a veritable fountain of fuzzy-headed ideas, goes after Jill Bolte Taylor for some bits in her account of surviving a stroke and paralysis on Blackmore’s own blog account of TED. (Daniel liked to some material on Jill Bolte Taylor by Leslie Kaufman in Wednesday Round Up #13.) Blackmore thinks Jill Bolte Taylor’s ideas… errrr, memes, are not good ones, but she’s worried that they’ve escaped into the congenial environment of the internet, where they’ll have an undeserved additional lease on life. She writes:

The disquiet I feel about this is, I think, that scientific ideas must compete to be accepted. Within science, and at scientific conferences, the valid ones win by experiment and peer review, and the false ones are weeded out. In the great wide word of the web, and with easy access to podcasts, false ideas may thrive because of fine presentation or moving emotional manipulation. Taylor’s was precisely that.

Obviously, Blackmore’s irony meter is on the blink; the Journal of Memetics declared its own demise in 2005, including a number of obituaries for the whole concept (note: the JoMemetics site currently has all of its links broken). As Blackmore herself says, sometimes even the critique of experiment and peer review isn’t enough to put to rest a lousy idea. Jill Bolte Taylor’s account is a personal reflection on an experience, in contrast; we can be forgiven if we cut her some semiotic slack, especially talking about such an intensely personal experience. In contrast, Blackmore calls for the scientific review which has repeatedly found the meme concept wanting. I’d say it’s sort of like the pot calling the fruit bowl, ‘black.’

Credit:
Cartoon by the very funny, and very generous, Hugh MacLeod, gaping void cartoons, from the back of a business card, and he offers them under a Creative Commons license. This cartoon, ‘The Hughtrain,’ is great, but I’ll try to post some more over the coming weeks.

The presentations and discussions covered a wide range of topics, ably summarized and linked at the beginning of the transcript, including the physiology of beliefs and brains in meditation and prayer from Newberg and the revolution in brain research and neuroscience and soft-core Buddhism from Brooks. The discussion was also wide-ranging, going over issues such as Is religious Darwinism valid? and Brain physiology in party politics. As befits a Pew gathering, there is a considerable amount of attention focused on religion, atheism, and the like.

Newberg covers a lot of his take on the biology of belief as well as imaging research he has done on people praying or meditating. Here’s an excerpt on belief:

So our brain is trying to put together a construction of our reality, a perspective on that reality, which we rely on heavily for our survival, for figuring out how to behave and how to act and how to vote. But again, the brain is filling in a lot of gaps and helping us think certain things that may or may not really be there… So what are beliefs? Again, I apologize, but I always come at this from a scientific perspective. I am defining beliefs biologically and psychologically as any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that a person consciously or unconsciously assumes to be true. The reasons I define beliefs in this way are several-fold. One is that we can begin to look at the various components that make up our beliefs. We can talk about our perceptions. We can talk about our cognitive processes. We can talk about how our emotions affect our beliefs. And we can also look at how they ultimately affect us. Are we aware of the beliefs we hold? Or are they unconscious? And which ones are unconscious and which ones are conscious?

And an excerpt connecting belief to the practice of religion.

The practices and rituals that exist within both religious and non-religious groups become a strong and powerful way to write these ideas into our brain. Again, go back to the idea that the neurons that fire together, wire together. The more you focus on a particular idea, whether it is political or religious or athletic, the more that gets written down into your brain and the more that becomes your reality. So that is why when you go to a church or a synagogue or a mosque, and they repeat the same stories, and you celebrate the same holidays that reinforce that, you do the prayers, and you say these things over and over again, those are the neural connections that get stimulated and strengthened. That is a strong part of why religion and spirituality make use of various practices valuable for writing those beliefs strongly into who you are.

Brooks aims to place these sorts of ideas into a social and cultural context.

I think the bottom line is there is this incredible revolution going on in brain research. To me, it’s a bit like the revolution of psychology or psychiatry that Freud started, except for this time I think it’s correct… [T]his tremendous revolution in neuroscience and related fields is going to have the same effect on culture and the way we think about human nature and religion and everything else. That’s what I’m going to talk about; not so much the science, but what I think are some of the themes driving the science that will spill out and are spilling out into the general culture. The bottom line of it all is we are now discovering the tremendous power of the unconscious, of the levels of cognition we’re not consciously aware of, that shape our thoughts. If you look at behavioral economics, if you look at neuroscience, if you look at psychology, if you look at field after field, in theology, in literary criticism, people are taking this template of unconscious cognitive processes and applying it to how we think.

And he makes a good neuroanth point:

One [change] is the plasticity of the brain, the incredible adaptiveness, the fire-together, wire-together idea that we’re not hardcore driven by material things, that we’re wired to adapt to environment and that the nature-nurture distinction is a bogus one, and that therefore, this plasticity makes it a less material, less predetermined organ.

Finally Brooks’ ultimate implication:

I think this is where the whole field of research will lead us as a society, it recognizes the power and reality of spiritual processes. But I would say in general, the literature treats any specific belief system as completely arbitrary. It knows that we have these beliefs. It knows that the mind is really good at making up stories. Some people in Jerusalem a few thousand years ago made up one story, another guy made up another story, there are still other stories. But it treats all of these stories as completely the same and arbitrary. I think if you read the research, you will see there is no reason to think one religion is any different or any better than the other. Where the research winds up ultimately is, frankly, at Buddhism, the idea that the self is this dynamic process. There is some generic spirituality that may or may not be tethered to a higher being, and importantly, to the idea that we are social creatures. There is no such thing as one individual brain. Our brains are all merged together in a series of ultimate feedback loops.

And those are just pieces of their talks, to say nothing of the interesting discussion, so check it out if you have the time and the inclination. In the meantime, I’ll be doing one or another of my ultimate feedback loops–playing a video game, writing, or musing.

Hauser wants to argue for a universal moral module (or at least emotions) while Morris is the relativist. Hauser mentions the categorical imperative and selfish genes. Morris mentions social psychology and interpretations. In their explanations they talk past one another.

But what’s interesting is that the best part of their conversation revolves around the conjunction of people and context. This people/context conjunction is a universality both miss. Given how people and contexts and their interactions vary, it’s also relative.

I think Morris and Hauser miss understanding what they agree upon because we haven’t built a very good framework to give people like Hauser and Morris other ways to talk and to think.

Here’s what I mean, starting with an excerpt from Hauser: “When the Nazis got together to exterminate the Jews, from their perspective, wanton killing of Jews was not wrong. It was perfectly right because Jews were ‘the other.’ You map a distinction by recruiting the most powerful and violent emotions you can—disgust, hate. You call the other parasitic vermin to recruit the most incredible imagery. Once you do that, the emotions wreak havoc and you feel perfectly justified exterminating the other. So this is where I think some the universality comes in.”

For Hauser, the universal are the emotions, whereas groups are comprised by “partiality.” But what if Hauser also recognized the process of mapping as universal, and not just the particular cultural content? We map social distinctions; that is the start of the process of recruiting imagery and emotions, then leading to justifications and behaviors.

Or Morris. He is speaking of documents found at Auschwitz, notes which indicated the need to hide the name of “gas chamber” on architectural drawings. “[I]t made me think that morality is the combination of two things: ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘I’m sorry I got caught.’ There are two things always operating. There’s you, and then there’s what the world thinks of you.”

Again, an approach that considers the person and the context, which seems to me a universal phenomenon in its own right, but which applies very differently in Auschwitz or in his film The Thin Blue Line.

Salman Rushdie, who has joined the Emory faculty as a Distinguished Writer in Residence (one month a year), said something quite relevant in recent cover story in Emory Magazine. In speaking about the debate over hard-wired morality, universal human rights and society, Rushdie said, “I think in order to create a liveable society… you basically need two things: freedom of expression and the rule of law. Without the rule of law, you get warlords and gangsters, and without the freedom of expression, you can’t have any other freedoms. Why have freedom of assembly if you can’t say what you think? The reason I think that’s a universal right is because we are a language animal. We are an extraordinarily verbal, linguistic species, which explains itself, discusses itself, understands itself, through the use of language.”

We are both a language animal and a species which discusses and explains (or interprets) itself. People can assemble, each with a sense of right and wrong (however formed); but they need a context to express it freely for that to really make a difference.

Jones takes us through “hot morality,” morality guided by intuitions and emotions and not universal laws, drawing on the work of Jonathan Haidt. Then we get “the tale of two faculties,” highlighting the dual processing view (emotion and cognition) of Joshua Greene. Finally we get “A Moral Grammar” via Marc Hauser. Hauser gives us a moral code based on three principles derived from 5000 people who have taken the Moral Sense Test worldwide via Internet (no snarky comments as Greg might say):

• The action principle: harm caused by action is morally worse than equivalent harm caused by omission.

• The intention principle: harm intended as the means to a goal is morally worse than equivalent harm foreseen as the side-effect of a goal.

• The contact principle: using physical contact to cause harm to a victim is morally worse than causing equivalent harm to a victim without using physical contact.

Crucially, the researchers also asked participants to justify their decisions. Most people appealed to the action and contact principles; only a small minority explicitly referred to the intention principle. Hauser and colleagues interpret this as evidence that some principles that guide our moral judgments are simply not available to, and certainly not the product of, conscious reasoning. These principles, it is proposed, are an innate and universal part of the human moral faculty, guiding us in ways we are unaware of. In a (less elegant) reformulation of Pascal’s famous claim that “The heart has reasons that reason does not know,” we might say “The moral faculty has principles that reason does not know.”

Jones then gives us a long take on Hauser’s work with John Mikhail covering how a moral grammar might work. It’s the most interesting piece of the article. While I don’t agree with the innate stance per se (Lakoff‘s embodiment can give us much the same thing in this case), the focus on processes and components is important.

Such models usually posit a number of key components, or psychological systems. One system uses “conversion rules” to break down observed (or imagined) behaviour into a meaningful set of actions, which is then used to create a “structural description” of the events. This structural description captures not only the causal and temporal sequence of events (what happened and when), but also intentional aspects of action (was the outcome intended as a means or a side effect? What was the intention behind the action?).

With the structural description in place, the causal and intentional aspects of events can be compared with a database of unconscious rules, such as “harm intended as a means to an end is morally worse than equivalent harm foreseen as the side-effect of a goal.” If the events involve harm caused as a means to the greater good (and particularly if caused by the action and direct contact of another person), then a judgement of impermissibility is more likely to be generated by the moral faculty. In the most radical models of the moral grammar, judgements of permissibility and impermissibility occur prior to any emotional response. Rather than driving moral judgements, emotions in this view arise as a by-product of unconsciously reached judgements as to what is morally right and wrong.

Just as an innate, universal grammar for languages doesn’t entail that all people will speak the same language, the idea of a universal moral grammar should not be taken to imply that systems of ethics will be the same the world over. For example, the grammar for language might say that all grammatical sentences must contain a subject, a verb and an object, but leave open which order they must appear in. So some languages, such as English, settle on a subject–verb–object order, and others, such as Japanese, on subject–object–verb.

Hauser argues that a similar “principles and parameters” model of moral judgement could help make sense of universal themes in human morality as well as differences across cultures (see below). There is little evidence about how innate principles are affected by culture, but Hauser has some expectations as to what might be found. If the intention principle is really an innate part of the moral faculty, then its operation should be seen in all cultures. However, cultures might vary in how much harm as a means to a goal they typically tolerate, which in turn could reflect how extensively that culture sanctions means-based harm such as infanticide (deliberately killing one child so that others may flourish, for example). These intriguing though speculative ideas await a thorough empirical test.

A full account of our moral psychology will also have to explain the variation in people’s moral intuitions. Why do a minority of people think it is morally permissible to push the man in the Footbridge dilemma? Part of the answer is that people are likely to differ in the way their brains balance up affective or emotional responses with rational calculations. Such differences could result from as yet unidentified genetic factors or aspects of the environment and culture that tweak a common universal set of moral foundations.

Jones then turns to “Moral Cultures,” noting first that social norms and the structures of social life can shape morality but not going too far beyond the statement “Morality is a social phenomenon.” He then turns to Richard Shweder’s work on the three overlapping domains of morality worldwide: “the ethics of autonomy (individual rights and fairness), community (respects for tradition, authority and group loyalty) and divinity (sanctity and purity of the soul).”

Rather than exploring the rich anthropological and psychological synthesis Shweder brings us (here‘s one relevant essay), we get Haidt’s five-domain expansion: “the world’s diverse moralities are built on top of five psychological foundations, each primed to detect and react emotionally to transgressions or violations of different moral concerns: harm to, and care, of individuals; justice and fairness; in-group loyalty; respect for authority/tradition; and issues of purity and sanctity.”

No such morality article today could be complete without some in-fighting between liberals and conservatives. So here we’ve got the (almost) ending:

There is also evidence that the different moral structures built on the universal five foundations are related to different emotional dispositions of conservatives and liberals. Recent work by David Pizarro and Yoel Inbar of Cornell University, in collaboration with Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, has explored how the morally charged emotion, disgust, which is frequently evoked by transgressions in the domain of purity, relates to these competing social orientations. The researchers found that the more disgust sensitive a person is, the more likely they are to hold conservative views on a range of social issues. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this link was strongest for the hot-button topics of abortion and gay marriage, views on which are heavily affected by attitudes to bodily purity.

Paul Rozin’s work on disgust (both embodied and sociocultural) might have given us a better model to think of disgust as something neuroanthropological, and how disgust then links to morality. Still, in the end, the Jones piece strikes me as marking several steps forward from how sociobiology and evolutionary psychology might take on morality. But the main assumption of innate/evolved/hard-wired hampers the overall impact of the research, just as the lack of appreciation of how anthropological processes reach even into the things that we might think of as basic components. If technically we know how to manipulate the genetics of plants for agricultural effect, then culturally we know how to manipulate the brains of people for moral effect. It just happens that this process is just as “unconscious” as a lot of the psychology discussed by Jones.