Fwd: Edge 222: Alex (1976-2007); Jonathan Haidt -"Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Edge <editor@edge.org>
Date: 12 Sep 2007 19:07
Subject: Edge 222: Alex (1976-2007); Jonathan Haidt -"Moral  Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion"
To: Rhys Evans <wheresrhys@gmail.com>

Edge 222 - September 12, 2007

(7,375 words)

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge222.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------

ALEX (1976-2007)

[photo]

----------------------------------
The New York Times
September 10, 2007

Alex, A Parrot Who Had a Way With Words, Dies
By Benedict Carey

----------------------------------
EdgeLink: "That Damn Bird: A Talk with Irene Pepperberg"
Edge Video

[More]

---------------------------------------------------
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION
A Talk with Jonathan Haidt

It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems).

I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.


JONATHAN HAIDT is Associate Professor in the Social Psychology area of the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion, and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS: FINDING MODERN TRUTH IN ANCIENT WISDOM.

Jonathan Haidt's EDGE Bio Page

[More]

---------------------------------------------------
THIRD CULTURE NEWS
---------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 10, 2007

Evidence of Genetic Response to Diet
By Nicholas Wade

...Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard and an advocate of the tuber-eating thesis, said the amylase finding was a convincing insight into the different digestive physiology of people and chimps, but that the date of 200,000 years ago, derived from limited genetic information, was not old enough to give direct support to his ideas.

[More]

---------------------------------------------------
NEW SCIENTIST
September 6, 2007

Low-cost personal DNA readings are on the way
Peter Aldhous

"GENETICS is about to get personal." So proclaims the website of 23andMe, a Californian company that is gearing up to offer people a guided tour of their own DNA. For the superstars of genetics, it has already got personal. Earlier this week, genomics pioneer Craig Venter revealed an almost
complete sequence of his genome, while that of James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's double-helix structure, has been available on the web since late June.

Given that Watson's genome took almost $1 million to read, most of us won't immediately be following in his and Venter's footsteps. It isn't necessary to read your entire genome, however, to browse many of the genetic variations that may influence your health.

According to George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, the most pertinent information could be gleaned by sequencing the 1 per cent of the genome that codes for proteins. Thanks to the advances in sequencing technology, that might be done for as little as $1000 per person. "DNA chips", meanwhile, can scan your genome for common "spelling mistakes" for just a few hundred dollars. At that price, the era of personalised genomics is already dawning. "This is the year," claims Church.

To push the field forward, Church has launched the Personal Genome Project (PGP), in which he and nine other volunteers have signed up to have the protein-coding regions of their genome made available on the web, along with their medical records, photographs of facial features and the results of a questionnaire about their health and personal habits. Within a few months, he aims to start scaling up to 100,000 volunteers.

Church is also an adviser to both 23andMe - named for the number of chromosome pairs in the human genome - and Cambridge Genomics, two of the firms hoping to turn personalised genomics into big business. But is the world ready for their services? As well as raising questions about the protection of personal genetic data, there are concerns about how people will use information that, at this stage, even trained medical geneticists find extremely difficult to interpret.


[More]

---------------------------------------------------
TIME
September 6, 2007

Words Don't Mean What They Mean
Steven Pinker

In the Movie Tootsie, The character played by Dustin Hoffman is disguised as a woman and is speaking to a beautiful young actress played by Jessica Lange. During a session of late-night girl talk, Lange's character says, "You know what I wish? That a guy could be honest enough to walk up to me and say, 'I could lay a big line on you, but the simple truth is I find you very interesting, and I'd really like to make love to you.' Wouldn't that be a relief?"

Later in the movie, a twist of fate throws them together at a cocktail party, this time with Hoffman's character dressed as a man. The actress doesn't recognize him, and he tries out the speech on her. Before he can even finish, she throws a glass of wine in his face and storms away.

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

Sexual come-ons are a classic example. "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" has been recognized as a double entendre for so long that by 1939, James Thurber could draw a cartoon of a hapless man in an apartment lobby saying to his date, "You wait here, and I'll bring the etchings down."

The veiled threat also has a stereotype: the Mafia wiseguy offering protection with the soft sell, "Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it." Traffic cops sometimes face not-so-innocent questions like, "Gee, Officer, is there some way I could pay the fine right here?" And anyone who has sat through a fund-raising dinner is familiar with euphemistic schnorring like, "We're counting on you
to show leadership."

Why don't people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other's brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity--which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that
relationship.

[More]

---------------------------------------------------
TIMES LITERARY SUPLLEMENT
September 5, 2007

Bible belter
Richard Dawkins

There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists ("Of course I don't believe in a God with a long white beard, but . . ."). I hadn't met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, ". . . and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style".

Grayling's engaging caricature misses Hitchens's ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And "spray" suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the
whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and "theologians" ruefully discovered this during Hitchens's barnstorming book tour around the United States.

With characteristic effrontery, he took his tour through the Bible Belt states - the reptilian brain of southern and middle America, rather than the easier pickings of the country's cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts. The plaudits he received were all the more gratifying. Something is stirring in that great country. America is far from the know-nothing theocracy that two terms of Bush, and various misleading polls, had led us to fear. Does the buckle of the Bible Belt conceal some real guts? Are the ranks of the thoughtful coming out of the closet and standing up to be counted? Yes, and Hitchens's atheist colleagues on the American bestseller list have equally encouraging tales to tell..

[More]

---------------------------------------------------
THREE QUARKS DAILY
September 3, 2007

Monday Musing: Pinker's Thinkers

...It seems conventional when reviewing a book favorably to trot out a few petty criticisms to give the appearance of objectivity and balance. I shall commit no such crime and recommend the book as highly as I can recommend any book, without reservation. It ships on September 11th, but you can order it now. Buy it. And read it. You'll find yourself educated and entertained at the same time.

[More]

---------------------------------------------------
NEW SCIENTIST
September 1, 2007

What good is God?
Helen Phillips

Born to be moral

The idea that we have an innate sense of right and wrong has been brought to prominence again by the Harvard University cognitive psychologist Marc Hauser, with the publication of his book Moral Minds. He likens morality to language and its innate core to our innate sense of grammar. In other words, at the heart of human moral codes lie common rules and features that come hard-wired at birth.

Hauser suggests that each culture and generation learns to interpret the moral grammar slightly differently, but the rules, fixed in the biology of the brain, remain the same. One reason he believes this is that the origins of morality, altruism and fair play can be seen in our group-living primate cousins, in behaviours such as loyalty to kin, intolerance of theft and punishment of cheats...

...Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia used a hypnosis experiment to show how important emotions are. Under hypnosis, he induced people to feel disgust when they heard a couple of arbitrary words. When these words later came up in connection with moral dilemmas, the subjects judged certain scenarios to be wrong when people who had not been hypnotised did not. When asked to justify their choices, they could not do so to the researchers' satisfaction. Without knowing how or why, their emotions had altered their sense of right and wrong.

Brain-scanning studies have shown a link between damage to the brain regions that house the social emotions and a tendency to make aberrant moral choices. Still, there is more to morality than emotion. Most researchers now think that emotions influence the way our moral decisions are turned into actions or choices, rather than how the decisions are made in the first place. Other brain regions involved in empathy and attributing beliefs about intentions are important too.

[More]

-----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge222.html

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Copyright (c) 2007 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private  operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of  the Internal Revenue Code.

[If at any time you want your name to be taken off this mail list, please let us know.]
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@gmail.com

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2744173-13069806A@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL:  http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html


--
http://londonskyline.blogspot.com