I’ve never heard anything about this until just now (this is something quite distinct from conventional bioluminescence). Learn more here.

Religion Is a Potent Force for Cooperation and Conflict, Research Shows

The article discusses a paper by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges that describes religion as strongly fostering cooperation within human social groups, as a means of competing more successfully against other groups. We read:

Across history and cultures, religion increases trust within groups but also may increase conflict with other groups, according to an article in a special issue of Science.

“Moralizing gods, emerging over the last few millennia, have enabled large-scale cooperation and sociopolitical conquest even without war,” says University of Michigan anthropologist Scott Atran, lead author of the article with Jeremy Ginges of the New School for Social Research.
“Sacred values sustain intractable conflicts like those between the Israelis and the Palestinians that defy rational, business-like negotiation. But they also provide surprising opportunities for resolution.”

As evidence for their claim that religion increases trust within groups but may increase conflict with other groups, Atran and Ginges cite a number of studies among different populations. These include cross-cultural surveys and experiments in dozens of societies showing that people who participate most in collective religious rituals are more likely to cooperate with others, and that groups most intensely involved in conflict have the costliest and most physically demanding rituals to galvanize group solidarity in common defense and blind group members to exit strategies. Secular social contracts are more prone to defection, they argue. Their research also indicates that participation in collective religious ritual increases parochial altruism and, in relevant contexts, support for suicide attacks.

They also identify what they call the “backfire effect,” which dooms many efforts to broker peace. In many studies that Atran and Ginges carried out with colleagues in Palestine, Israel, Iran, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan, they found that offers of money or other material incentives to compromise sacred values increased anger and opposition to a deal.

… This dynamic is behind the paradoxical reality that the world finds itself in today: “Modern multiculturalism and global exposure to multifarious values is increasingly challenged by fundamentalist movements to revive primary group loyalties through greater ritual commitments to ideological purity.”

We’ve been making this point here for years: religion is a strongly adaptive feature of human social and cognitive architecture, an innate propensity for which is almost certainly the result of the action of group-level selection in our evolutionary history. As I’ve argued in these pages, I suspect (with sadness, given that I’m an unbeliever myself) that secularism is strongly maladaptive for human groups (see this post, and the comment thread here, for example).

The authors of the linked article nevertheless express hope that a better understanding of this dynamic may enable negotiators to work around it:

But Atran and Ginges also offer some insights that could help to solve conflicts fueled by religious conviction. Casting these conflicts as sacred initially blocks standard business-like negotiation tactics. But making strong symbolic gestures such as sincere apologies and demonstrations of respect for the other’s values generates surprising flexibility, even among militants and political leaders, and may enable subsequent material negotiations, they point out.

I doubt it. Have, for example, the West’s repeated prostrations before the global Ummah brought us anything but contempt? Have they brought us any closer to harmony in the Middle East? It hardly seems that way. Nor have well-intentioned pow-wows between the leaders of incompatible faiths ever achieved much of anything at all, so far as I can make out — as predicted by Pollack’s Law of Interfaith Dialogue (as first articulated back in May 2010):

To the extent that dialogue between any two religions is necessary, it is unproductive, and to the extent that it is productive, it is unnecessary.

I see no reason to imagine this principle will be superseded anytime soon.

“Good” Cholesterol Not So Good After All, New Study Shows

The revelation that high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, is the “good cholesterol” has suffered a major blow. A meta-study involving over a hundred thousand participants used two different strategies to see if genetic mutations that increased levels of HDL also decreased risk for heart disease. In both cases the answer was a resounding no. The researchers were shocked when they saw the data. Now it’s their turn to shock HDL proponents and drug companies looking to cash in on the HDL craze.

The study, which was published recently in The Lancet, is causing quite a stir in the field. As Dr. James de Lemos, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, told the New York Times, “I’d say the HDL hypothesis is on the ropes right now.” Dr. de Lemos was not involved in the study.

So what’s the story here? How is it possible that LDL/HDL dichotomy has propagated so powerfully through conventional wisdom that even the CDC refers to them as “good” and “bad” cholesterols and pharmaceutical companies like Abbot Laboratories are working hard to get in on the HDL cash cow?

Past studies have shown that much of what increases our risk for heart disease, like obesity, lack of exercise, smoking, and insulin resistance, is correlated with low HDL. It was a logical conclusion, then, that by increased HDL levels we could decrease those risks. But correlation doesn’t mean causation, and the takeaway conclusion from the current study is that decreased HDL is simply a sign of increased risk for heart disease but the level of HDL doesn’t actually affect heart disease.

Next, perhaps: LDL doesn’t cause heart disease, either.

Here’s the publisher’s summary over at Amazon:

For eighteen years, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have been part of a team revolutionizing the study of politics by turning conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they have to.

This clever and accessible book shows that the difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.

The central idea is hardly a new one: that the best approach to reverse-engineering the behavior of politicians is to assume that their primary motivation, and the criterion according to which all their decisions are made, is the acquisition and retention of power. But what the authors have done with this book is to use this idea to build a consistent quantitative and predictive model, based on the relative sizes of three coalitions: the general “selectorate”, a much smaller group of “influentials”, and most important of all, the “essentials”: that collection of individuals who must be kept happy in order for the leader to retain his grip on power.

The authors did particularly well, I thought, in their analysis of how different sorts of governments (as characterized by their relative coalition sizes) interact with each other, particularly as regards war and foreign aid. That chapter alone was worth the price of admission.

As is always the case with these ‘here’s-the-big-new-idea-that-explains-everything’ books, I found myself disagreeing with some of the tendentious conclusions and recommendations the authors presented in the final chapter — but I understand that everybody’s got an axe to grind, and none of it was enough to seriously detract from what I think was a very insightful and useful intellectual effort. Go and get a copy.

So far, there are three new installments. Have a listen here. And speaking of Derb, here’s a recent essay of his, also at Taki’s: Ridding Myself of the Day.

Fortunately, there are still a few pockets of resistance.

Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour.

It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process called quorum sensing. This works by constantly releasing signalling molecules into the environment while at the same time measuring the local concentration of these molecules.

This concentration rises as more creatures join the local population and so is an effective measure of population density. When the concentration rises over some threshold level, it triggers a different behaviour such cell division, pathogen production and nest building.

Now [Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge] say a similar approach provides a robust way to synchronise humanoid robots. The ideal approach to synchronisation is for each robot to have access to every other robot’s position. Instead, the quorum sensing approach gives, each robot access to a global variable such as the average position or average clock time. Each robot can also change this variable because it contributes to the average.

The idea is that if each robot attempts to synchronise with this global average, the swarm as whole should keep good time.

This insight seems applicable to much more than the dancing robots shown in the linked article. For example, the movement of the center of gravity of social and cultural trends over time surely involves some “quorum sensing” on the part of individuals, followed by “attempts to synchronize with this global average”.

In response to the news that the majority of babies born in the USA are now non-white, he emitted this:

Just read white birth rates overtaken by other races in the U.S.? Please let that be somebody’s idea of a sick joke! #rightorwrong

…followed by this:

Nothing against anybody else but this is kind of..our country. Yes or no?

… and, fatally, this:

I’m not a racist who believes in white privelege [sic] but I do believe very strongly in white power.

Stick a fork in him.

The exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling photos of nude toddlers, children, teens and adults, and an array of heated, flavoured and textured condoms rolled over wooden dildos. There’s also a ‘climax room’ with a round, low, leather bed, red curtains, a video screen showing animations of aroused genitals, and the voice of a man describing an orgasm.

Next to close-up photos of adult genitals are video screens using animations to explain masturbation.

Attendees are asked to write their own words for penis and vagina on a digital screen, and slang-terms like c— and pussy for female genitalia and c— for male body parts, are displayed above it in large letters.

There are listening stations with pre-written questions and push button audio answers.

Next to a printed question asking, ‘Why do many boys always want to have anal sex?’ sexologist Jamy Ryan responds that not all boys want to do it, but: “If you are comfortable trying that activity, go ahead and do it. It could be fun for you, but if you are not, you don’t really have to do it.”

Next to a question about pregnancy, the recording assures listeners that abortions are available at medical clinics and at 14 years old, you don’t need to tell your parents.

Seems to me the staid Great White North has changed a bit since I left in 1956. All for the better, I’m sure.

As noted here, I was lucky enough to do a record with Chuck long ago, and the lovely Nina and I saw him play just last summer at the bandshell near our home here in Brooklyn.

At the time of his death Chuck Brown was, by any honest measure, the funkiest man alive. I’m sorry he’s gone.

Churchill said this, once upon a time:

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.

Spoiler: Dr. Sowell thinks they tend to gum things up, too, if you don’t keep an eye on them.

The comparison is not ideal, because the first clip animates the concerto’s first movement, and the second one animates the third. Also, the first clip features a far better performance than the second, which is obviously the output of a computer playing a programmed version of the score.

Both animations use vertical position to indicate pitch, and scroll horizontally through the score so that the notes currently being played are always in the center of the screen. Both renderings also color-code the individual musical voices. And there the similarities end.

The first animation, which is graphically far more sophisticated, uses colored circles to represent each note, strung along lines that mark off the half-dozen or so separate voices. As each note is struck, it appears as a circle whose initial size indicates the duration of the note. Each circle shrinks at the same rate, so that it has just shrunk to zero by the time the next note is struck. The circles bubble up on the right side of the screen, have their moment in the sun, then rush off to the left — solid before they are struck, and hollow afterwards. The visual effect is lively and effervescent, and in particular the vertically stacked circles that mark off the quarter-note pulse throughout most of the piece have a beautifully propulsive effect. It’s a marvelous piece of work.

The second animation is far simpler, but clearer too: it’s a simple graphic representation of exactly the same sort that one might see on a MIDI display of the score. The notes are horizontal bars, with vertical position representing pitch, and horizontal extension representing duration. As each note plays, it is is highlighted, then goes dark again. That’s it! There’s none of the fancy eye-candy we had in the first clip: the expansion and contraction of the horizontal scale as the circles approach the center, the changing sizes of the circles to represent the lifespan of each note, the passage from solid to hollow circles as each note is played — but the eye is much better able to follow the representation of each note, and to connect the visual input with the music. As much as I admired the creative ingenuity of the first animation, I found the second to be more effective in bringing eye and ear together in a unitary experience.

Have a look. Which do you like better?

(Also: was Bach a genius, or what?)

Oh, and lest we forget: here’s another way of doing this sort of thing.

Have a look. An explanatory article is here, the scientific paper mentioned in the article is here, and a Wikipedia entry on the subject is here.

I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt Romney, and although a majority of blacks oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (the latest poll I’ve seen reported 55% opposed and 42% in favor), I doubt that this will cost Mr. Obama much, if any, of his lock on the black vote.

Interestingly, Mr. Obama also said that although he personally approves of same-sex marriage, he thought that decisions about its legality should be left to the States. (Indeed, this just happened yesterday, with North Carolina voters rejecting the idea by a wide margin.) I mention this because I can’t think, offhand, of any other examples of Mr. Obama endorsing this sort of federalism; it isn’t generally his style at all.

Another interesting question, what with a Mormon standing as Mr. Obama’s opponent this fall: what percentage of supporters of same-sex marriage would object to the legalization of polygamous marriages? On what principled basis can they do so?