Hard questions, easy answers. Today: Are religions naturally evolved?

A while back, I asked myself (and a colleague): could it be that religion is the product of evolution? After all, there is abundant evidence that people(s) make god(s), while the evidence for the converse is, uhm, spotty to say the least... Neither he (nor I) were totally clear on the answer. But now I think the question falls into the "sounds harder than it is" category. This apparently hard question has an easy (i.e., intuitively plausible but also, I think, correct) answer: Religions seem to answer the big questions, such as "what's it all about" quite well.
An evolutionary and systems theory explanation: Once your control system ("brains") get big enough, self-consciousness and other complications arise. And then you rather naturally ask questions such as "why am I here", "where do I come from", and "what's it all about". Big brains => self-aware then self-consciousness => trouble. But religion delivers the reassuring answers: Relax, it's all good. You're here for a purpose. In fact, the whole darn universe is made for you (in some religions, anyways) -- even god (or his son) looks just like you!! (Carl Sagan calls this "the human conceit" and quibs "oh my -- what a coincidence" ...) Of course Darwin delivered a major narcisstic injury, explaining away the need for the sky-daddy (even if he didn't like this repercussion himself).

So this explains it: We (having evolved large brains and asking the "big questions") want comfort and reassurance that all is good. Religion caters to that need. So say we all.

Daniel Dennett also studies and explains religion as a natural phenomenon in Breaking the Spell. Turns out that the evolutionary argument for religion has also been evoked to ask: If religion evolved naturally, then it must be good for something, right? We don't just evolve characteristics for nothing. So what's the purpose of having evolved religion? Dennett points out that the flu also naturally evolved. What's it good for? It's good at being copied and spread. I think the same applies for religion, but we have these additional levels of explanation: it's good at providing answers, makes you feel good about yourself and the world (restrictions apply: some traits make you feel really bad, you immoral sinner! But that's another story...); it can also help group cohesion, channel ideas, organize masses, etc. But above all, it gives you answers!

Next time: Religion, genes, and memes: Cui bono?

Your Hair as a Water Provenance Recorder

It's been said that Life is just one damned thing after another (Elbert Hubbard, 1856 - 1915) and similarly for history (another damned thing after another!) Some go even as far as suggesting that It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over (Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950).

Either way, provenance is the processing history of things. How one thing happened after another. Our DNA has a scrambled provenance record of how life evolved as the Great (really Awesome) Tree of Life. It's important and difficult to unscramble it. Which is why it's called science (or phylogenetics, evolutionary biology, etc. in particular).

Recently I heard an exciting talk by Evan Eichler on Human Genome Structural Variation, Disease and Evolution which, as I understand it, points to an evolutionary explanation of certain diseases:

• Bailey JA, Eichler EE. (2006). Primate segmental duplications: Crucibles of evolution, diversity and disease. Nat Rev Genet Jul;7(7):552-564.
• Sharp AJ, Cheng Z, Eichler EE. (2006). Structural variation of the human genome. Annu Rev Genomics Hum Genet 7:407-442. (PDF) (Supplementary Material)

Unscrambling the history of life and understanding details of the mechanisms driving and controlling evolution is a formidable task.

But there are also ways how history can be captured and recorded much more easily: Your usage of cell phones, credit cards, web browsing, email (and gmail in particular), doctor's visits, FasTrak passes over the Bay Bridge, and many other things leave wonderful e-traces behind that are being integrated, data mined, or just kept lying around for future generations to marvel at what kept us busy in our days.

There are also inbetweens: processes not acting on the time-scales of eons (e.g. how dinosaurs related to birds), nor of the quick heart-beat of eBay transaction. More like at the speed of have a cup of tea made from your local tap water. You are what you eat (in German even nicer: Man ist, was man isst) and what you drink. Turns some of what you drank is recorded in your hair: Hair Reveals Where Murder Victims Drank Water. For the science of it see the Feb. 25 online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in human hair are related to geography).

Are you a Gmail Transducer?

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan asks whether we have domesticated Corn, or whether Corn has domesticated us. Strange inversion of reasoning you might think. Isn't it evident that we are in charge, controlling where corn is grown, how much of it, etc? Sort of... and after all, we have free will, right?

So how is your free will coming along recently, as you are consuming a constant stream of incoming messages, reacting to it by producing a stream of outgoing message, slavishly following a Getting-Things-Done scheme?

Wikipedia says:

A transducer is said to transduce (i.e., translate) the contents of its input tape to its output tape, by accepting a string on its input tape and generating another string on its output tape. It may do so nondeterministically and it may produce more than one output for each input string. A transducer may also produce no output for a given input string, in which case it is said to reject the input.

Sounds familiar? Doesn't this idea of being a Gmail Transducer give the notion of Office Automation a totally new meaning? It used to mean that we tell the machine what to do. The tedious, repetitive stuff. But things change and life co-evolves with those changes. We have now perfectly adapted to our new, self-inflicted work environment. A toast to plasticity and adaptation! We have turned ourselves into the cogs of the meme replication networked mega-machine!

Welcome then to the Wonderful Life of gmail transduction -- and enjoy your stay!
And please don't forget to output a comment after you've input this message...

Dumbest Lies about Evolution. EVER.

... under the title "Evolution - For Skeptics, Cynics, and Believers Alike". What a bunch of clowns.
Or should the title of "worst lies about evolution" go to these guys?
This hurts my brain. A little "Mr. Deity" to the rescue! Episode 1 (Mr Deity and the Evil) is still the killer...
... a few minutes later ...
Ah.. feeling better already! Now a quick hop to Understanding Evolution and the world makes sense again!! Try for yourself ...