Walter Freeman and Transorbital Lobotomies

In 1949, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz won a Nobel Prize for inventing the lobotomy, a treatment for mental illness that called for inserting a sharp instrument into holes drilled through the skull and destroying tissue in the frontal lobes. By then, physician Walter Freeman Jr., (father of neuroscientist Walter Freeman III, a leading consciousness researcher) had already begun carrying out lobotomies in the United States. In 1941 Freeman lobotomized the unruly, 23-year-old sister of John F. Kennedy; Rosemary Kennedy was so severely disabled after her lobotomy that she required care for the rest of her life. Freeman later invented the transorbital lobotomy, which involved slipping an ice pick past the eyeball, thrusting it through the rear of the eye socket and swishing it back and forth in the brain. In the 1950s, Freeman drove across the U.S. and Canada in a station wagon, which he called the “Lobotomobile,” performing as many as 25 transorbital lobotomies a day on patients at mental hospitals—often after knocking them out with electroshock therapy. Three patients at an Iowa hospital died on the same day after he operated on them, according to “The Lobotomist,” a 2009 documentary. Freeman nonetheless kept practicing lobotomies—as many as 5,000 in all–until 1967, when (as I have reported elsewhere) one of his patients died of a cerebral hemorrhage. In 1949 The New York Times hailed Moniz and other lobotomists for helping us “to look with less awe at the brain. It is just a big organ…no more sacred than the liver.” Until his death in 1972, Freeman insisted that lobotomies had helped most of his patients. But as the medical historian Edward Shorter has noted: “Freeman’s definition of success is that the patients are no longer agitated. That doesn’t mean that you’re cured, that means they could be discharged from the asylum, but they were incapable of carrying on normal social life. They were usually demobilized and lacking in energy. And they were that on a permanent basis.“

The Biggest U.S. H-Bomb Test Ever

On March 1, 1954, in a test code-named “Castle Bravo,” the U.S. detonated a thermonuclear bomb on Bikini Atoll, one of the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean. Physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the bomb was designed, estimated that it would have a yield equivalent to 5 million tons, or megatons, of conventional high explosives. The yield turned out to be 15 megatons, 1,000 times more than the fission bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The explosion gouged a crater more than a mile wide out of Bikini, ballooned into a fireball more than four miles across and spewed radioactive debris so high into the atmosphere that it ended up spanning the globe. Inhabitants of other Marshall Islands, 100 miles or more from Bikini, suffered from radiation poisoning, as did 23 men on a Japanese fishing boat, the “Lucky Dragon,” 80 miles from ground zero. One man on the Lucky Dragon died months after returning to port. Before Bravo, U.S. officials apparently worried that prevailing winds might carry fallout over inhabited areas but decided to proceed with the test. Bravo remains the biggest U.S. nuclear explosion, but its yield was less than a third that of the Tsar Bomba, detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961. Public concerns over these enormous explosions led to a ban on atmospheric testing in 1963, but the arms race continued. Today, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, eight nations possess a total of more than 20,000 nuclear weapons.

U.S. Syphilis Tests in Guatemala

From 1946 to 1948, American physicians funded by the National Institutes of Health deliberately infected 1,300 Guatemalan mental patients, prisoners, prostitutes and soldiers with syphilis and other venereal diseases. According to this 2011 BBC report, researchers infected subjects by supplying them with syphilitic prostitutes, by cutting their skin and rubbing bacteria into the wounds or by injecting the bacteria directly into the spine. The researchers gave some infected subjects penicillin to test the antibiotic’s efficacy but many others were left untreated. A leader of the research was John Cutler, who later participated in the infamous Tuskegee experiments, in which American doctors withheld antibiotics from black men infected with syphilis to study the untreated course of the disease. The Guatemala research took place while U.S. lawyers in Nuremberg were trying Nazi physicians for carrying out unethical experiments. In 2010 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized to Guatemala for the syphilis experiments and called them “clearly unethical.” You think?

Can a Brain Implant Make a Gay Man Straight?

The psychiatrist Robert Health, who headed the department of psychiatry and neurology at Tulane University from 1949 to 1980, did pioneering research on the potential of electrical stimulation of the brain to treat schizophrenia and other disorders. (I described the work of Heath and other brain-implant researchers in “The Forgotten Era of Brain Chips,” Scientific American, October 2005). In a paper published in 1972 in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Heath described an experiment on a 24-year-old male homosexual with a history of epilepsy, depression, and drug abuse. The man, whom Heath called patient B-19, was facing charges for marijuana possession when he agreed to serve as Heath’s subject. Heath drilled a hole in B-19′s skull and inserted an electrode in the septal region of his brain, which is associated with pleasure. B-19 could stimulate himself by pressing a button on a hand-help device. B-19, who according to Heath had never had heterosexual intercourse and found it “repugnant,” stimulated himself to the point of orgasm while watching a heterosexual porn film and, later, having intercourse with a 21-year-old female prostitute supplied by Heath. The patient “achieved successful penetration, which culminated in a highly satisfactory orgiastic response, despite the milieu and the encumbrances of the lead wires to the electrodes,” Heath wrote. One wonders what an institutional review board would say about Heath’s research today.

Dosing Kids with Psychiatric Meds

Are the days of ugly research over? If only. In the past two decades, American psychiatrists have been carrying out what is in effect an enormous clinical trial involving millions of children. Physicians are medicating children with stimulants such as Ritalin, antidepressants such as Prozac, anti-anxiety drugs such as Xanax, bipolar drugs such as lithium and antipsychotics such as Risperdal. “It’s really to some extent an experiment, trying medications in these children of this age,” child psychiatrist Patrick Bacon told producers of the 2008 PBS documentary “The Medicated Child.” “It’s a gamble. And I tell parents there’s no way to know what’s going to work.” As of 2009, more than 500,000 American adolescents and children, including toddlers younger than two, were taking antipsychotics, which “may pose grave risks to development of both their fast-growing brains and their bodies,” according to The New York Times. In Anatomy of an Epidemic (Crown, 2010), which I have written about previously, journalist Robert Whitaker presents evidence that psychiatric drugs may be hurting more children than they help. Since 1987, he reports, while prescriptions for children have soared, the number of patients under 18 receiving federal disability payments for mental illness has multiplied by a factor of 35. By this measure, the experiment does not seem to be working.

Please share your nominations for the “ugliest experiments,” in the comments section below.

Photo credits:
Walter Freeman Jr. (center) performing transorbital lobotomy in 1949: Bettman/CORBIS.
Castle Bravo fireball: Wikimedia Commons.
Syphilis blisters: Wikimedia Commons.
Robert Heath with patient: Tulane University.
Prozac: Wikimedia Commons.

My brother and I are, shall we say, competitive. I love whipping him in tennis or catching more blues than him. So naturally I felt envy as he reeled his thrashing fish in, right across my line of sight. Then, something happened that I had never seen in a half century of fishing on Nantucket. A great gray beast lunged out of the sea, seized Matt’s bluefish in its mighty jaws and plunged beneath the waves. I heard Matt’s line race out with a whine and ping as it snapped. “Did you see that?!” Matt bellowed.

I laughed, naturally, not only because Matt’s prize had been snatched, literally, away from him, but also because his reversal of fortune had been so delightfully dramatic. A seal had stolen his fish! I chortled again five minutes or so later when Matt, still muttering, tossed a new lure into the sea. A hirsute, whiskered head bobbed to the surface and remained there, looking at us. The seal was waiting for us to hook another meal.

Reports of gray seals—which can weigh as much as 800 pounds—stealing hooked bluefish and stripers off Cape Cod and Nantucket surfaced in 2008. The tactic makes sense. Bluefish are fast, but a seal can easily grab a hooked fish. Within a year, seals were filching fish as far away as Long Island Sound, 200 miles south of Cape Cod. Some seals are remarkably brazen. A YouTube video shows a gray seal lumbering onto a beach to snatch a fish that a man had already landed. “What the hell!” the fisherman yells as the seal, fish in its jaws, lunges back into the sea.

The seals’ predatory hunger for fish, it occurred to me later, is instinctual, an innate, inherited, adaptation, but their larceny is learned. A clever seal got the idea of stealing fish hooked by humans, and other seals, after observing his success, started imitating him. This cultural innovation, or meme, spread.

So what does the thievery of seals have to do with the violence of chimps? Here’s what. Over the past few decades, scientists have observed dozens of incidents in which male chimpanzees banded together and killed chimps from neighboring communities. According to a recent study by anthropologist Michael Wilson, reported on by Kate Wong, males from one group carry out raids when they can do so with little risk to themselves. “This tells us something about human evolution,” Wilson said.

Wilson was alluding to the claim of anthropologist Richard Wrangham—set forth in his book Demonic Males (Houghton-Mifflin, 1996, co-written with journalist Dale Peterson)—that the roots of human warfare extend back millions of years, all the way to the common ancestor that we share with chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives. The biologist Edward Wilson expresses support for Wrangham’s theory in his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth (W.W. Norton, 2012). So does another Harvard scientist, psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (Viking, 2011).

The evidence simply doesn’t support the claim that chimp raids and human wars stem from ancient, innate adaptations. As anthropologist Brian Ferguson pointed out last year in a stinging critique of what he called “the myth of innate depravity,” scientists did not observe a lethal chimp attack until 1974, 14 years after Jane Goodall started watching chimps in Tanzania. Chimp raids are rare; according to one estimate, a typical community carries out a raid every seven years. Some communities have never been observed engaging in intergroup raids.

Nor, as Wong noted in her post, have bonobos ever been observed killing each other. Bonobos, whose formal name is Pan paniscus, are just as closely related to Homo sapiens as the more common chimpanzee species Pan troglodytes. Why is it the violence of Pan troglodytes, and not the peacefulness of Pan paniscus, that, in the words of Michael Wilson, “tells us something about human evolution”?

The oldest evidence of lethal group violence among humans is a mass grave about 13,000 years old found in the Sudan, and this site is an outlier. The vast majority of evidence of human warfare is less than 10,000 years old. And although human history has been wracked by warfare, many societies, both prehistoric and modern, have avoided mass violence. Excavations have revealed that people settled in Abu Hureya, near the Euphrates River, 11,500 years ago, and lived there for millennia while leaving no signs of violence. Switzerland and Sweden have maintained their neutrality for the past two centuries even when wars raged around them. All this data is consistent with the view of war as a meme, or an “invention,” as anthropologist Margaret Mead put it—just like seals’ theft of hooked fish.

What about my compulsion to beat my brother when we are playing tennis or fishing? Or my love of victory and hatred of losing when I play hockey? My competitiveness is probably innate, inherited from my father. But just because many males are competitive, even aggressively so, doesn’t mean that we are, as Wrangham has claimed, “natural warriors,” who kill if we think we can get away with it. The sooner we reject this pernicious meme, which gives us an excuse for our warlike behavior, the better.

Photo credit: Seabird Ecological Assessment Network (SEANET).

I reacted in this way, at first, when Valerie told me about a 16-minute film, CatCam, showing at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, about a camera-wearing cat. If a video stars a cat, my interest is less than zero. I’m a dog guy, and there are already too many cute-cat images clogging the internet. Valerie persisted, pointing out that the cat had produced some cool images.

Finally I checked out CatCam, and I got hooked. The film tells the tale of Mr. Lee, a stray cat whom Juergen Perthold, a German engineer, and his wife adopted after moving to South Carolina in 2006. Curious about his cat’s wanderings outside the house, Perthold designed a camera, the CatCam, that hung around Mr. Lee’s neck and took photos and, later, video.

As Valerie told me, the CatCam images are amazing, like nothing I’ve ever seen. The photos show a snake coiling in grass, the inside of a drainage pipe, a tree-lined street on which a dog stands vigil, a bird feeder—all shot from several inches off the ground. One of my favorite shots, taken from underneath a car, shows a cat peering down at Mr. Lee from the car’s innards. In some images, we see Mr. Lee’s whiskers, or a chunk of his cheek, but for the most part we see not Mr. Lee but what Mr. Lee sees. The perspective is subjective, not objective, first person, not third person. It’s like a cat version of the 1999 film Being John Malkovich.

According to some European art-world types, the images captured by Mr. Lee’s CatCam are so strikingly original and beautiful that they rise to the level of art. Similar claims have been made for computer-generated pictures, music and poetry, which can be compellingly weird. Do such creations deserve to be called art? If so, who is the artist?

The CatCam also reminds me of the classic 1974 essay “What is it like to be a bat?,” in which philosopher Thomas Nagel ponders the solipsism problem. No sentient creature, Nagel points out, can really know what it is like to be any other sentient creature, because each of us is sealed inside the prison of his or her own consciousness. We can only observe each other—and other animals, such as bats—from the outside. Nagel notes that “in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us.” The same could be said about any human’s attempt to understand what it is like to be any other human.

The CatCam, which Perthold now sells, helps us know, or intuit, what it is like to be a cat. Imagine the insights that wild-animal researchers could glean from CheetahCams, KoalaCams, SeagullCams, SnailCams, PenguinCams, VampireBatCams. Given all the debate about whether chimpanzees are innate warriors, and bonobos innate peaceniks, I’d love to see what a ChimpCam or BonoboCam could tell us.

Valerie, when I ran these ideas by her, helped me see that placing cameras on wild animals would be unethical, because the downside for the wild animals would outweigh the upside for us. Not even the amiable Mr. Lee liked the CatCam at first. But what about humans wearing cameras to record their comings and goings? Some so-called “lifecasters,” notably the engineer Steve Mann, have been doing just that for decades. (Other lifecasters, such as Jennifer Ringley, turn cameras on themselves, but these objective, third-person recordings exacerbate rather than solving the problem of solipsism.)

PeopleCams would pose tricky technical, ethical and perhaps legal problems, and they would further erode what little privacy we have left in our increasingly exhibitionist era. But PeopleCams might, in principle, help us—and especially males and females, who, let’s face it, are as alien to each other as cats and dogs, or Martians and Venusians—overcome our mutual incomprehension. Perhaps, when the moment is right, I’ll run this idea past Valerie.

Postscript: I just ran my idea past Valerie. She responded: “I’ll tell you where you can put your camera.”

I’m nonetheless going out on a limb and guessing that science will never, ever answer what I call “The Question”: Why is there something rather than nothing? You might think this prediction is safe to the point of triviality, but certain prominent scientists are claiming not merely that they can answer The Question but that they have already done so. Physicist Lawrence Krauss peddles this message in his new book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press, 2012).

Krauss’s answer is nothing new. Decades ago, physicists such as the legendary John Wheeler proposed that, according to the probabilistic dictates of quantum field theory, even an apparently perfect vacuum seethes with particles and antiparticles popping into and out of existence. In 1990, the Russian physicist Andrei Linde assured me that our entire cosmos—as well as an infinite number of other universes—might have sprung from a primordial “quantum fluctuation.”

I took this notion—and I think Linde presented it—as a bit of mind-titillating whimsy. But Krauss asks us to take the quantum theory of creation seriously, and so does evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages,” Dawkins writes in an afterword to Krauss’s book. “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”

Whaaaa…??!! Dawkins is comparing the most enduringly profound scientific treatise in history to a pop-science book that recycles a bunch of stale ideas from physics and cosmology. This absurd hyperbole says less about the merits of Krauss’s derivative book than it does about the judgment-impairing intensity of Dawkins’s hatred of religion.

Philosopher David Albert, a specialist in quantum theory, offers a more balanced assessment of Krauss’s book in The New York Times Book Review. And by balanced assessment, I mean merciless smack down. Albert asks, “Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?” Modern quantum field theories, Albert points out, “have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.”

If you want a more satisfying exploration of The Question, check out Why Does the World Exist? by the science and philosophy writer Jim Holt, to be published this summer by W.W. Norton. Holt is neither foolish nor arrogant enough to claim that he or anyone else has answered The Question. Rather, he ponders and talks about The Question not only with physicists, notably Linde, Steven Weinberg and David Deutsch, but also with philosophers, theologians and other non-scientists. And why not? When it comes to The Question, everyone and no one is an expert, because The Question is different in kind than any other question posed by science. Ludwig Wittgenstein was trying to make this point when he wrote, in typically cryptic fashion, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”

In my favorite section of Holt’s book, he chats with novelist John Updike, whose work explored our yearning for spiritual as well as sexual fulfillment. Updike prided himself on keeping abreast of the latest scientific ideas, and one of his novels, Roger’s Version (Random House, 1986), features characters who debate whether science can displace religion as a source of ultimate answers. Updike told Holt that he doubted whether science would ever produce a satisfying answer to The Question. Science, Updike said, “aspires, like theology used to, to explain absolutely everything. But how can you cross this enormous gulf between nothing and something?”

The theory of inflation, Updike noted, which Linde and other theorists have promoted as a theory of cosmic creation, “seems sort of put forward on a smile and a shoeshine.” Updike, who died in 2009, a year after Holt interviewed him, toyed with the idea that, if there is a God, He created the world out of boredom. Thirty years ago, I had a, shall we say, experience that left me pondering a slightly different theological explanation of creation: If there is a God, He created this heart-breaking world because He was suffering from a cosmic identity crisis, triggered by His own confrontation with The Question. In other words, God is as mystified as we are by existence. This idea, which I divulged in The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and Rational Mysticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), is totally wacky, of course, but no more so, to my mind, than the preposterous claim of Krauss and other scientists that they have solved the riddle of existence.

Science has told us so much about our world! We now understand, more or less, what reality is made of and what forces push and pull the stuff of existence to and fro. Scientists have also constructed a plausible, empirically founded narrative of the history of the cosmos and of life on Earth. But when scientists insist that they have solved, or will soon solve, all mysteries, including the biggest mystery of all, they do a disservice to science; they become the mirror images of the religious fundamentalists they despise. Comte was wrong about how science is limited, but not that it is limited.

Now, perhaps because I’m a father and teacher (and hence, dare I say it, a role model), I’ve come to agree with Medawar, at least about social (as opposed to scientific) progress. I’m worried about the persistence of war and militarism, global warming and other threats to nature, extreme poverty and social injustice, AIDS and other diseases. I nonetheless believe that pessimism about humanity’s future is wrong, both morally and empirically. Morally because pessimism can undermine our efforts to solve our social problems. Empirically because our history shows that these problems are far from insurmountable.

A class I started teaching last fall—an exploration of Plato, Kant, Darwin, Marx and other titans of western civilization—presented me with the opportunity to make these points. Our readings included President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech in 1961, when he asked his fellow Americans to join him in the quest to end poverty, disease, tyranny and war. I polled my students on whether they thought these four goals were reasonable or just utopian fantasies that politicians invoke in speeches but no one really does or should take seriously. Every single student chose the utopian-fantasy option.  So young and so pessimistic!

I spent the rest of the class trying to change their minds by offering reasons why they should be optimistic. As I have noted recently on this blog and in The Chronicle of Higher Education, humanity has taken tremendous strides toward overcoming the scourges identified by Kennedy. Over the past two centuries, average standards of living have surged—first in Europe, cradle of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and then elsewhere—as a result of innovations in agriculture, transportation, communications and other key industries. Since the early 20th century, life spans have more than doubled to a global average approaching 70 years as a result of advances in the delivery and care of infants, improved treatment of water and sewage, better nutrition, vaccines, antibiotics and other medical and public-health measures.

The number of people living under democratic rule worldwide has risen from 12 percent in 1900 to more than 60 percent today. And contrary to the implication of news headlines about civil wars and insurgencies, drone strikes, terrorist attacks and other acts of group violence, our era is quite peaceful by historical standards. Annual war casualties in the past decade have been roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the annual rate in the second half of the 20th century and two orders of magnitude less than the rate in the first half of the century.

And let us not forget that as recently as the late 1980s, humanity faced the threat of a global nuclear holocaust that could destroy not just the U.S. and its archrival, the U.S.S.R., but all life on Earth. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended peacefully. Since then, the U.S. and Russia have slashed their nuclear arsenals almost in half, and President Barack Obama has kept his pledge to withdraw American troops from Iraq.

Yes, we still face enormous problems globally, and continued progress is by no means guaranteed. We may never entirely eradicate poverty, disease, tyranny and war, as JFK hoped. But given how far we’ve come toward creating a healthier, wealthier, freer and more peaceful world, surely we can go much further, especially if we reject pessimism and work to solve our problems. Journalist and peace activist Norman Cousins liked to say, “We don’t know enough to be pessimists.” I’d go further than Cousins: We know enough to be optimists.

One more thing: Our extraordinary capacity for envisioning and choosing—creating!—better futures for ourselves represents yet another refutation of the attacks on free will by neuroscientist Sam Harris, biologist Jerry Coyne and other hard-core determinists. History and science alike tell us that we should believe in free will, and a brighter future.

Addendum: To be fair to Harris, he’s optimistic about the prospects for ending war. Brian Lehrer of WNYC Radio recently asked Harris, “Do you think, in the context of your thinking about free will, that humans could ever abolish war?” Harris responded: “Yeah, I do. I think our violent tendencies are obviously difficult to rein in. But the reality of war, or the endurance of war, is the result of the fact that we do not have a regime of international law that is really enforceable.” You can hear the rest of Harris’s response, and responses by other pundits to the question of whether war can end, at http://soundcloud.com/brian-lehrer-show/sets/the-brian-lehrer-show-end-of.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

But Harris keeps intruding on my thoughts, in part because he keeps emailing me about his writings, and especially his new book Free Will (Free Press, 2012). Also, I admit to a certain voyeuristic fascination with Harris. I wonder, what crazy idea is he going to peddle next? Some of his righteous rants give me a perverse pleasure. I’m simultaneously irritated and titillated. I get the same feeling listening to Rush Limbaugh or Rick Santorum.

But I don’t know anyone who admires the ideas of Limbaugh or Santorum. Harris’s memes, in contrast, are infecting the minds not of right wing and religious cranks but of smart, knowledgeable people. Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, when he hosted a recent talk by Harris at Caltech, praised him for “cutting through all the obfuscation and getting straight to the point” about free will in his new book. The neurologist Oliver Sacks calls Free Will “brilliant and witty—and never less than incisive.” Michael. Oliver. Really?

Harris’s new book rates orders of magnitude higher on Amazon’s Best Sellers lists than my new book, The End of War (McSweeney’s, 2012), which concludes with a chapter called “In Defense of Free Will.” That rankles. If I criticize Free Will, will I actually counter Harris’s influence or enhance it? Might it look like, or perhaps even be the case, that I’m motivated by base envy rather than a noble desire to defend free will? But how can I not criticize Harris when he’s bashing an idea that I cherish? And promoting determinism, a philosophy that I loathe?

Then there’s the life’s-too-short issue: Harris’s new book is only 96 pages, but that’s still too long. I don’t have the time—I still haven’t done my taxes!—or the inclination to plow through the sort of grimace-inducing reasoning of which Moral Landscape was constructed. Wouldn’t my time be better spent whacking New York Times columnist David Brooks for buying the claim of evolutionary psychologists that we are “natural-born killers“? Or riffing on Immortality, the cool new book by Stephen Cave? Or trying to figure out, once and for all, where I stand on fracking?

And what can I say about free will that I haven’t said before? Maybe I can just focus on what Harris said at Caltech. He called free will not only an “illusion” but also a “totally incoherent idea” that contradicts what science tells us about how the world works. “The illusoriness of free will,” he said, “is as certain a fact, to my mind, as the truth of evolution.” This is one of Harris’s characteristic traits, flaunting his certitude like a badge of honor.

Harris asks us to consider the case of a serial killer. “Imagine this murderer is discovered to have a brain tumor in the appropriate spot in his brain that could explain his violent impulses. That is obviously exculpatory. We view him as a victim of his biology, and our moral intuitions shift automatically. But I would argue that a brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions, and if we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer’s brain, that would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it.”

Harris seems to be advancing a reductio ad absurdum, except that he wants us to accept the absurdum: there is no fundamental difference between me and a man compelled to kill by a brain tumor. Or between me and someone who can’t help washing his hands every 20 minutes, or someone who’s schizophrenic, or a babbling baby, or a newt, or a worm. I mean, if I’m not different from a guy who kills because a tumor provokes him into murderous rages, how am I different from anyone or anything with a brain, no matter how damaged or tiny?

Here’s the difference. The man with a tumor has no choice but to do what he does. I do have choices, which I make all the time. Yes, my choices are constrained, by the laws of physics, my genetic inheritance, upbringing and education, the social, cultural, political, and intellectual context of my existence. And as Harris keeps pointing out, I didn’t choose to be born into this universe, to my parents, in this nation, at this time. I don’t choose to grow old and die.

But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.

Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense.

But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world.

Some of us have a greater capacity to perceive and act on choices than others. The killer with a brain tumor, the schizophrenic, the sociopath, the obsessive-compulsive do not and cannot make decisions–or change their minds–in the way that I do. When I weigh the pros and cons of writing about Harris, my chain of reasoning is determined by the substance of my thoughts, not their physical instantiation.

Consider: When I watch the video of Sam Harris talking at Caltech, is it the electrons streaming through my MacBook, the photons impinging on my eye, the sound waves entering my ear that make me want to respond to Harris? Of course not. It’s the meaning of the video that stirs me, not its physical embodiment. I could have watched a DVD of Harris’s talk, or read a transcript, or listened to someone summarize his lecture over the telephone. And it’s possible that Harris’s words, instead of provoking me to write a critical response, could have changed my mind about free will, so that I decided to write a column defending his point of view. Of course, if I thought about it for a moment, I’d realize that the fact that Harris had changed my mind and hence my actions was evidence of my free will.

We are physical creatures, but we are not just physical. We have free will because we are creatures of mind, meaning, ideas, not just matter. Harris perversely–willfully!–refuses to acknowledge this crushingly obvious and fundamental fact about us. He insists that because science cannot figure out the complex causality underpinning free will, it must be illusory. He is a throwback to the old behaviorists, who pretended that subjective, mental phenomena—because they are more difficult to observe and measure than planets and protons—don’t exist.

Dwelling on Harris depresses me. All that brainpower and training dedicated to promulgating such bad ideas!  He reminds me of one of the brightest students I’ve ever had, who was possessed by an adamant, unshakable belief in young-earth creationism. I did my best to change his mind, but I never succeeded. I probably won’t change the minds of Sam Harris and other hard-core determinists either, but it’s worth a shot.

In Tucson Koch outlined a theory, jointly fashioned by him and Crick, that 40-hertz brain waves might be a key to consciousness. Although I was skeptical of that particular theory, I liked the hard-nosed, materialist, reductionist approach that Koch and Crick took toward consciousness. I also liked the quirky intensity that Koch brought to his scientific work.

This trait was on display in Tucson during an encounter between Koch and the philosopher David Chalmers, who proposed that consciousness is such a “hard problem” that it needs new approaches, such as one incorporating ideas from information theory. Confronting Chalmers at a cocktail party, Koch declared that Chalmers’s information-based theory of consciousness was untestable and therefore useless. “Why don’t you just say that when you have a brain the Holy Ghost comes down and makes you conscious!” Koch exclaimed. Such a theory was unnecessarily complicated, Chalmers responded dryly, and it would not accord with his own subjective experience. “But how do I know that your subjective experience is the same as mine?” Koch retorted. “How do I even know you’re conscious?”

Koch, who since Tucson has been my go-to source on neuroscience, is still chasing the white whale of consciousness, and he describes his quest in his marvelous new book Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press). Koch interweaves a brisk update on consciousness studies—with sidebars on zombies, brain-downloading, free will, neurons that recognize Jennifer Aniston, “consciousness meters” and information theory, which Koch now apparently views more favorably—with a memoir about his personal life, which has been turbulent lately. I emailed Koch—who is still at Caltech and is also the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which recently launched a major new initiative —with questions about his book and career.

Horgan: You seem to have written your latest book in an attempt to achieve catharsis. Did it work?

Koch: Yes, it did help me resolve a long-brewing conflict between my Catholic upbringing and faith on the one hand and my scientific view of the world on the other. And writing the book also helped me deal with a more personal crisis.

Horgan: Your late friend and colleague Francis Crick once told me that free will was an illusion. Do you share this pessimistic view?

Koch: Well, Francis was right in that the standard conception of free will, that has the soul hovering above the brain and making it “freely” decide this way or that, is an illusion. It simply does not work at the conceptual or empirical level However, more subtle readings of free will remain, as I discuss in my book. Yet we are all less free than we like to believe. What remains, though, is that I am the principal actor in my life, so I better take responsibility for my actions.

Horgan: Do you think consciousness will ever be really, totally, explained? Could the “mysterians” [who propose that consciousness is not scientifically solvable] turn out to be right?

Koch: There is no law that states that all phenomena will have an explanation that humans can apprehend or understand. But my gut feelings—based on the past several centuries of progressively ever more successful explanations of the natural world—is that there will be better and better answers to the puzzle of our existence. We are not condemned to wander forever in some sort of epistemological fog. We will know. We will understand consciousness.

Horgan: Can you tell my readers, briefly, what Integrated Information Theory is and why you think it may be the key to consciousness?

Koch: The Integrated Information Theory of consciousness of Giulio Tononi is a general and quantitative way to approach the problem of consciousness. Ultimately, science needs to explain why some systems—a healthy and awake human brain, for example—give rise to conscious sensations, to experience, while other biological networks—the immune system, for example—do not. We also need to answer questions about consciousness in severely injured brain patients, in new-born babies, in a fetus, in dogs and cats, frogs, bees and flies and in artificial creatures, in iPhones and the internet. And only an information-theoretical account of consciousness is rich and powerful enough to be able to answer those sorts of questions in a meaningful and empirically accessible manner.

Horgan: Will scientists ever crack the neural code? If so, could that lead to powerful, precise mind-reading and mind-control technologies?

Koch: Of course.  In some very concrete ways, neuroscience can do so already now. You can lie inside a magnet scanner and look at one of many possible YouTube videos, and cognitive neuroscientists can infer with reasonably good chances of success what sort of movie you’re watching from the blood flow pattern in your visual brain. This sort of capability will get ever more refined as time goes on.

Horgan: Is DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] supporting your research at Caltech because it wants to create bionic soldiers?

Koch: No

Horgan: I’ll take your word for it. Have you become a member of the Singularity cult? Because I would find that very depressing.

Koch: Most certainly not.  I have an article under revision right now that provides a quantitative argument for why the belief that we will understand the brain of a mouse, let alone that of a human, within a decade is as sound as the belief that the rapture is imminent.

Horgan: Phew. Has all your research into the brain given you any insights into—or control over—your own brain, emotions, behavior?

Koch: I have stopped eating the flesh of mammals and birds, as they too share the wonders of experience with us. We are all nature’s children. We all experience the pains and pleasures of life. Furthermore, the commodious literature on voluntary actions makes it quite clear that we are less free than we think we are, that our prior actions, beliefs and habits shape us in untold ways. This has made me more humble.

Horgan: Not too humble, I hope. Regarding your involvement in the new initiative of the Allen Institute for Brain Science: Do we really need another of these big brain research projects? How will this differ from, say, the Blue Brain Project?

Koch: The just-announced Brain Observatory initiative at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle is concentrating enormous resources (hundreds of millions of dollars in the first four years alone due to the unprecedented generosity of Paul Allen) and several hundred anatomists, physiologists, molecular biologists, computer scientists, physicists and engineers in a concerted team effort to understand the most complex piece of organized matter in the universe, the mammalian cerebral cortex.  Neuroscience is a splintered field. Some 10,000 laboratories worldwide are pursuing distinct questions about the brain across a panoply of spatio-temporal scales and in a dizzying variety of animal species, behaviors and developmental time-points. At any large neuroscience meeting, one is struck by the pace of discovery, with 50,000 or more practitioners heading away from each other in all directions, in a sort of scientific Big Bang. Although this independence is necessary, it has prevented neuroscience from entering a more mature phase, which would involve developing common standards and collaborative projects. Neurophysiologists are more likely to use each other’s toothbrushes than each other’s data and software; physiological results are hoarded and rarely made accessible online; molecular compounds and transgenic animals are shared only after publication. All of this has made comparisons across laboratories difficult and has slowed progress. We take a different approach. In particular, as in the past, all of our data, analyses, and atlases are freely available to anybody on the planet with a browser. Think of it as an experiment in the sociology of neuroscience. Only time will tell how successful this will be. Cheers

War-correspondent-turned-antiwar-firebrand Chris Hedges expressed this idea during a radio interview with Brian Lehrer of WNYC radio, NPR’s affiliate in New York City. For more than a month, Lehrer has been hosting discussions of my claim—spelled out in my new book The End of War—that war is not inevitable. On February 27 Lehrer went to the heart of the matter and asked Hedges, “Chris, is war inevitable?”

“Yeah,” Hedges responded. “Look, we are living through a time when there is no rational check on serious climate change. We are spending down our natural capital at an alarming rate. Issues as basic as water, and crop yields. I mean, the agronomists say that for every one degree rise in temperature there is a 10 percent loss of yields. Human societies, when they break down, when they don’t have access to basic commodities, will engage in aggressive behavior to attempt to survive. And with the shredding of Kyoto, the failure in Copenhagen, the utter blindness to address what the fossil-fuel industry is doing not only to the country but to the planet, I think in fact we are entering a time where there will be an increase in conflict, scrambling for deleted resources as groups, including nation-states, attempt to survive.”

This same idea has been cited by green leaders such as Bill McKibben and Lester Brown. In a recent essay in The Guardian, Brown argued that “in the Arab Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional level.”

Climate change will undoubtedly disrupt already strained water supplies in many parts of the world. The United Nations and other international organizations have organized World Water Day, held every March 22 since 1993, to draw attention to water shortages. The World Water Day web site warns that climate change “is expected to impact both rain-fed and irrigated agriculture, including feed and fodder for livestock, as well as forests and aquaculture…High latitude areas will see an increase in their potential, whereas regions near the equator will experience more frequent and severe droughts, excessive rainfall, and floods which can destroy crops and put food production at risk.”

Droughts have also been correlated, historically, with warfare among tribal people, from the Maricopa of the North American Southwest to the Bantu of South Africa, according to the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley. But a 1992 study of 186 societies, most of them pre-industrial, by the anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember found no evidence that scarcity of food, water and other resources leads inevitably or even usually to violent conflict.

As I explained a year ago in a column on the Embers’ research, the strongest correlate of warfare was a history of unpredictable natural disasters—such as floods, droughts and insect infestations—that disrupted food supplies. The Embers were careful to note that it was not the disasters themselves that precipitated war, but the memory of past disasters and hence the fear of future ones. Another correlate was a society’s distrust of neighboring societies. “Fear appears to be a common thread in the two obtained predictors of wars—fear of nature and fear of others,” the Embers concluded.

In other words, wars stemmed from factors that were primarily emotional, not ecological. Of course, societies in a region with a history of war also fear war itself; hence they arm themselves and even launch preemptive attacks against other groups, making their fear self-fulfilling. The irony—or tragedy—is that war often inflicts on us deprivation far worse than that which we feared.

Given the Embers’ finding of a link between war and fear, I worry about the warnings of antiwar liberals such as Hedges that climate change will trigger wars over water and food. Rather than inspiring people to install water-saving showerheads in their bathrooms and support alternative-energy research, alarmists such as Hedges might provoke voters to stockpile guns and ammo and support higher defense budgets.

A new report, “Global Water Security,” by U.S. intelligence agencies seems at first glance to support the forecasts of pessimists such as Hedges. The report states that over the next decade “water problems will contribute to instability in states important to U.S. national security interests.” Moreover, “as water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basins will increasingly be used as leverage; the use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives will become more likely.”

That sounds like bad news. But here’s the good news: “Historically, water tensions have led to more water-sharing agreements than violent conflicts.” The report notes that India and Pakistan have managed to reach water-sharing agreements in spite of their hostility toward each other; so have Israel and Jordan.

The report adds that “improved water management (e.g., pricing, allocations and ‘virtual water’ trade) and investments in water-related sectors (e.g., agriculture, power and water treatment) will afford the best solutions for societal and global water problems. Because agriculture uses approximately 70 percent of the global fresh water supply, the greatest potential for relief from water scarcity will be through technology that reduces the amount of water needed for agriculture.”

In other words, we are not facing “inevitable” conflict. We are facing, as always, a choice. When water shortages loom, nations vying for control of a river, say, may build up armaments, threaten each other and carry out pre-emptive strikes. Or they can join together in finding technological, economic and political solutions that provide greater long-term benefits to both populations. I wish Hedges and other talking heads would acknowledge our capacity to choose this latter option instead of claiming that we’re doomed to wage wars over water. I expect hawks who favor bigger defense budgets to indulge in fear-mongering, but doves should know better.

Image courtesy circumspecte.com and Wikimedia Commons.

Seeking insights into the incident, I emailed Roy Eidelson and Stephen Soldz, past-presidents of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, a non-profit that, according to its Web site, “applies psychological knowledge and expertise to promote peace, social justice, human rights, and sustainability.” I first encountered their work while researching a U.S. Army program “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.” Eidelson and Soldz are critical of CSF, which seeks to boost troops’ psychological resilience. Here are excerpts from their responses to my query about the Bales incident:

Eidelson: “Psychological difficulties—which can include erratic or impulsive behavior—are greater and more likely among those soldiers who have been deployed more often, those who have faced greater actual combat exposure, and those who have already experienced psychological trauma. Bales reportedly scores high on all three counts (and he seemingly didn’t want to deploy this fourth time), assuming there’s some validity to reports that he may have suffered from some degree of traumatic brain injury and possibly PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] as well. So it seems that there’s little question he could have been recognized as belonging to a ‘higher risk’ category for a range of detrimental behaviors (including both suicide and homicide). Part of the problem is that this is presumably also true of thousands of other currently deployed U.S. soldiers as well.

“So a key question is whether it is only in hindsight that we can realize that Bales would have been a good candidate for non-deployment after his three tours in Iraq, and a good candidate for psychological intervention based on his experiences there. But regrettably this type of decision reflects what could be considered a commonplace ‘conflict of interest’ situation between the Army’s mission and the welfare of an individual soldier (by the way, this is something that CSF fails to address). The Army wagered that the Afghanistan mission would benefit from Bales’ participation (despite any psychological vulnerability on his part), and they lost that bet in a huge way. At best, they simultaneously hoped that Bales’ deployment would not be harmful to him individually (as with any soldier in harm’s way). They were clearly wrong about that as well.

“Events with very low baseline probabilities, such as Bales’ massacre, are exceedingly difficult or impossible to predict with any accuracy—it’s far too likely that you’ll be wrong if you predict that a specific individual will do something like this if he has no history of having done so in the past. Whatever the most proximate immediate stressor was before the massacre, it presumably wasn’t sufficient on its own to lead to this horrific outcome—other conditions and pre-conditions were necessary as well. The easy prediction to make is that some soldier, somewhere, sometime, is going to pose a significant risk for doing something awful.

“The bottom line, I think, is that a universal program like CSF is not the answer in the Bales case anyway, in part because resilience training isn’t likely to overcome the effects of multiple deployments, significant combat exposure, etc. And it’s not at all clear that we would ultimately want a program that would miraculously accomplish that anyway, given the complex ethical issues involved in creating the ‘indomitable’ soldier.’”

Soldz had this to say: “This case is a profoundly disturbing illustration of an issue that is seldom mentioned by most writers on these wars, that among the major victims of the stress and psychological problems [such as PTSD] are not just the soldiers, their families, and the military and its mission (the usual victims), but the civilians under occupation…

“The military claims that aiding these civilians is a prime reason for the troops to be there, but protecting them is usually a secondary consideration. Troops are routinely taught that ‘the mission’ comes first. This is especially true with the field commanders, junior officers and non-commissioned officers, who, I’ve often been told by soldiers, tell those under their command, ‘The Geneva Conventions are fine, for training. But, in the field, do whatever it takes.’

“I think that the military would be better advised to spend more time working with troops on the difficulty and strain of occupying an alien land (as distinct from deployment stress) and on the centrality to the mission of humanizing and protecting civilians at all costs than on CSF type resilience programs. In order to humanize civilians, they would have to drop their simplistic ‘bad guys’ rhetoric and truly help the troops understand the profound ambivalence that Afghans often have toward foreigners who they may need, but who they also fear and resent. Working through an example of ‘how would you feel if Afghans invaded your neighborhood and how would you and your neighbors react’ could be far more valuable than CSF.

“A universal CSF-type program is extremely unlikely to deal in any positive way with extreme instances like the Bales case. Rather, one has to reduce their likelihood by reducing the stress through reduced deployments, greater steps to encourage stressed individuals to not redeploy. Unfortunately, the latter conflicts with the supreme importance of unit cohesion in allowing the military to function. ‘Loyalty’ to the unit and the mission has to be redefined to include not sending those who shouldn’t be sent.”

Here is my take on the Bales incident. We must certainly seek to identify factors—from the neurological to the economic–that can provoke soldiers into committing war crimes, so that the military can take steps to reduce the incidence of such acts. But we should also recognize that, whatever the proximate causes of the massacre in Afghanistan turn out to be, the ultimate cause is moral and political, and all Americans bear responsibility for what happened. As long as we accept that wars are a morally acceptable way to solve problems, soldiers will continue to commit atrocities, including the killing of women and children, because that’s what happens, inevitably, in wartime.

Photo of Robert Bales courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The doctor asked me when my last check-up was. Five years ago, I said, after I got a sports hernia playing hockey, but I feel fine. He nonetheless recommended a blood test for high cholesterol and other potential problems, a PSA test for prostate cancer and maybe a screen for colon cancer. No thanks, I said coldly, and left his office. Little did he know he was talking to an anti-testing nut.

As I reported last fall, men are 47 times more likely to get unnecessary, harmful treatments—biopsies, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy—as a result of receiving a positive PSA test than they are to have their lives extended, according to a major study.

As for screening for colon cancer, a new study allegedly finds merit in colonoscopies, a nasty, expensive procedure in which a physician sticks a cable tipped with a camera and clippers up your butt and snips off suspicious-looking lumps on the wall of your bowels. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved 2,602 patients tracked for up to 23 years after they had colonoscopies resulting in the removal of polyps. Twelve people in this group died of colon cancer, compared to an average of 25.4 people in the general population.

A New York Times editorial proclaimed that the study “ought to goad millions who are still ducking [colonoscopies] to get over their squeamishness.” The study ought to do no such thing. First of all, it was not a randomized clinical trial. The screened group might have been healthier to begin with than the non-screened group.

Second, the study looked only at death from colon cancer and not from all causes. The physician James Penston, a consultant to England’s National Health Service, argued in the British Medical Journal last October that all-cause mortality is a better measure of the value of screening, both because attributing cause of death can be unreliable and because screening itself can be harmful.

“Invasive procedures may have fatal complications, while overdiagnosis—that is, the identification and treatment of tumors that otherwise would have caused no disease—may also result in death,” Penston stated. According to Penston, meta-analysis of four randomized trials involving 300,000 people found that tests for bowel cancer did not reduce overall mortality rates.

Another analysis of British data on colon cancer, by the watchdog group Straight Statistics, concluded that screening 1,000 patients for 10 years will prevent two deaths from the disease. Meanwhile, colonoscopies lead to “serious medical complications” in 5 out of every 1,000 patients, according to a 2006 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Given these risks, my guess is that a rigorous examination of colonoscopies will find that their benefits do not outweigh their downside.

The New York Times, perhaps to offset its ill-considered editorial plug for colonoscopies on February 24, ran a rebuttal of sorts three days later from H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and author of Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health (Beacon Press, 2011). Welch wrote:

“Screening the apparently healthy potentially saves a few lives (although the National Cancer Institute couldn’t find any evidence for this in its recent large studies of prostate and ovarian cancer screening). But it definitely drags many others into the system needlessly—into needless appointments, needless tests, needless drugs and needless operations (not to mention all the accompanying needless insurance forms). This process doesn’t promote health; it promotes disease. People suffer from more anxiety about their health, from drug side effects, from complications of surgery. A few die. And remember: these people felt fine when they entered the health care system.”

Now that’s a healer who adheres to the ancient precept: First, do no harm. The next time a doctor urges me to get unnecessary tests, I’m going to email him Welch’s essay.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I first took a close look at treatments for mental illness in the mid-1990s while researching an article for Scientific American. At the time, sales of a new class of antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, were booming. The first SSRI, Prozac, had quickly become the most widely prescribed drug in the world. Many psychiatrists, notably Peter Kramer, author of the bestseller Listening to Prozac (Viking 1993), touted SSRIs as a revolutionary advance in the treatment of mental illness. Prozac, Kramer claimed in a phrase that I hope now haunts him (but probably doesn’t), could make patients “better than well.”

Clinical trials told a different story. SSRIs are no more effective than two older classes of antidepressants, tricyclics and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. What was even more surprising to me—given the rave reviews Prozac had received from Kramer and others–was that antidepressants as a whole were not more effective than so-called “talking cures,” whether cognitive behavioral therapy or even old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis, according to investigators such as the psychologists Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg. According to these and other researchers, treatments for depression and other common ailments work—if they do work—by harnessing the placebo effect, the tendency of a patient’s expectation of improvement to become self-fulfilling. I titled my article, published in Scientific American in December 1996, “Why Freud Isn’t Dead.” Far from defending psychoanalysis, my point was that psychiatry has made disturbingly little progress since the heyday of Freudian theory.

In retrospect, my critique of modern psychiatry was probably too mild. According to Anatomy of Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, psychiatry has not only failed to progress; it may now be harming many of those it purports to help. Anatomy of an Epidemic has been ignored by most major media. I learned about it only after Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and now a lecturer on public health at Harvard, reviewed Anatomy in The New York Review of Books last year.

As recently as the 1950s, Whitaker contends, the four major mental disorders–depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia–often manifested as episodic and “self-limiting”; that is, most people simply got better over time. Severe, chronic mental illness was viewed as relatively rare. But over the past few decades the proportion of Americans diagnosed with mental illness has skyrocketed. Since 1987, the percentage of the population receiving federal disability payments for mental illness has tripled; among children under the age of 18, the percentage has grown by a factor of 35.

This epidemic has coincided, paradoxically, with a surge in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs. Between 1985 and 2008, U.S. sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics multiplied almost fifty-fold, to $24.2 billion. Prescriptions for bipolar disorder and anxiety have also swelled. One in eight Americans, including children and even toddlers, is now taking a psychotropic medication. Whitaker acknowledges that antidepressants and other psychiatric medications often provide short-term relief, which explains why so many physicians and patients believe so fervently in the drugs’ benefits. But over time, Whitaker argues, drugs make many patients sicker than they would have been if they had never been medicated.

Whitaker compiles anecdotal and clinical evidence that when patients stop taking SSRIs, they often experience depression more severe than what drove them to seek treatment. A multi-nation report by the World Health Organization in 1998 associated long-term antidepressant usage with a higher rather than lower risk of long-term depression. SSRIs can cause a wide range of side effects, including insomnia, sexual dysfunction, apathy, suicidal impulses and mania–which may then lead patients to be diagnosed with and treated for bipolar disorder.

Indeed, Whitaker suspects that antidepressants—as well as Ritalin and other stimulants prescribed for attention deficit disorder—have catalyzed the recent spike in bipolar disorder. Relatively rare just a half century ago, reported rates of bipolar disorder have spiked more than 100-fold to one in 40 adults. Side effects attributed to lithium and other common medications for bipolar disorder include deficits in memory, learning ability and fine-motor skills. Similarly, benzodiazepines such as Valium and Xanax, which are among the drugs prescribed for anxiety, are addictive; withdrawal from these sedatives can cause effects ranging from insomnia to seizures, as well as panic attacks.

Whitaker’s analysis of treatments for schizophrenia is especially disturbing. Antipsychotics, from Thorazine to successors like Zyprexa, cause weight gain, physical tremors (called tardive dyskinesia) and, according to some studies, cognitive decline and brain shrinkage. Before the introduction of Thorazine in the 1950s, Whitaker asserts, almost two thirds of the patients hospitalized for an initial episode of schizophrenia were released within a year, and most of this group did not require subsequent hospitalization.

Over the past half century, the rate of schizophrenia-related disability has grown by a factor of four, and schizophrenia has come to be seen as a largely chronic, degenerative disease. A decades-long study by the World Health Organization found that schizophrenic patients fared better in poor nations, such as Nigeria and India, where antipsychotics are sparingly prescribed, than in wealthier regions such as the U.S. and Europe.

A long-term study by Martin Harrow, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, found an inverse correlation between medication for schizophrenia and positive, long-term outcomes. Beginning in the 1970s, Harrow tracked a group of 64 newly diagnosed schizophrenics. Forty percent of the non-medicated patients recovered—meaning that they could become self-supporting–versus five percent of those who were medicated. Harrow contended that those who were heavily medicated were sicker to begin with, but Whitaker suggests that the medications may be making some patients sicker.

A caveat is in order here. Whitaker does NOT claim that medications have no value and that no one should take them. In his talk at my school, as in his book, Whitaker acknowledged that many people benefit from psychopharmacology, especially over the short term. But he does believe that the drugs should be administered far more sparingly.

Several possible objections to Whitaker’s case against psychiatry come to mind. First of all, the recent surge in mental disability may stem not only from iatrogenic effects of medications but from other factors, notably a decrease in the stigma associated with mental illness, which has spurred more people to seek and obtain taxpayer-supported treatment and assistance. Also, patients who are heavily medicated may not fare as well over the longer term as patients who receive fewer drugs because the former are truly sicker (as Harrow suggested). In her review, Marcia Angell called Whitaker’s book “suggestive, if not conclusive.”

Anatomy has received other recognition. It won the 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Investigative Journalism. A review in New Scientist concluded that Whitaker’s arguments seem “far-fetched” at first but on closer examination “are worryingly sane and consistently based on evidence. They amount to a provocative yet reasonable thesis, one whose astonishing intellectual punch is delivered with the gripping vitality of a novel. Whitaker manages to be damning while remaining stubbornly optimistic in this enthralling and frighteningly persuasive book.” At the very least, Whitaker’s claims warrant further investigation. Check out his book and make up your own mind.

Image from Healingtalks.com.

That’s a fine principle, in the abstract, but my students and I agreed that in certain situations lying is excusable. Shouldn’t you lie if your girlfriend asks you if you like her new haircut? If your boss, who’s a vindictive bastard, asks your opinion of his new business plan? What about lying in order to reveal a plot that you believe imperils all of humanity?

That brings me to the latest scandal to emerge from the debate over global warming. Two weeks ago, an anonymous source distributed internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative organization, to journalists and bloggers. As reported on this site on February 15, the documents revealed, among other facts, that the Heartland Institute, as part of a larger strategy for undermining support for global warming, was supporting prominent skeptics such as physicist Fred Singer and geologist Robert Carter.

Last week, Peter Gleick, a global-warming researcher and environmental activist, admitted on Huffington Post that he had been the source of the documents. Gleick confessed that he obtained the documents by approaching the Heartland Institute under a feigned identity.

The incident has exposed a deep fissure not just between global-warming deniers and believers but within the green community. For example, the journalist Andy Revkin, author of the blog Dot Earth, deplored Gleick’s actions, for the following reasons:

“One way or the other, Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others. (Some of the released documents contain information about Heartland employees that has no bearing on the climate fight.) That is his personal tragedy and shame (and I’m sure devastating for his colleagues, friends and family). The broader tragedy is that his decision to go to such extremes in his fight with Heartland has greatly set back any prospects of the country having the ‘rational public debate’ that he wrote—correctly–is so desperately needed.”

Another blogger, Joe Romm of Climate Progress, granted that Gleick “committed a serious lapse of professional judgment and ethics. He is right to regret his actions and make a personal apology.” But Romm went on to demand that Revkin apologize for quoting global-warming sources who, according to Romm, have “been repeatedly debunked, the disinformers and confusionists.” Romm is referring not to deniers but to believers—such as Roger Pielke, a respected scientist–who do not accept the most extreme climate-change scenarios and solutions. To my mind, Romm is faulting Revkin—who is one of the most knowledgeable, conscientious, hard-working journalists I know–for doing his job well.

Gleick himself sounded contrite. He put it this way: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts–often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated–to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.”

Kant said that when judging the morality of an act, we must weigh the intentions of the actor. Was he acting selfishly, to benefit himself, or selflessly, to help others? By this criterion, Gleick’s lie was clearly moral, because he was defending a cause that he passionately views as righteous. Gleick, you might say, is a hero comparable to Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who in 1971 stole and released documents that revealed that U.S. officials lied to justify the war in Vietnam.

But another philosopher my students and I are reading, the utilitarian John Stuart Mill, said that judging acts according to intentions is not enough. We also have to look at consequences. And if Gleick’s deception has any consequences, they will probably be harmful. His exposure of the Heartland Institute’s plans, far from convincing skeptics to reconsider their position, will probably just confirm their suspicions about environmentalists. Even if Gleick’s lie was morally right, it was strategically wrong.

I’ll give the last word to one of my students. The Gleick incident, he said, shows that the “debate” over global warming is not really a debate any more. It’s a war, and when people are waging war, they always lie for their cause.

Image by Dave Burnham, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I wrote The End of War, published last month by McSweeney’s Books, to challenge this fatalism, which I believe is wrong empirically and morally. Empirically because research into war’s roots shows that deadly group violence is a relatively recent cultural “invention”—an especially vicious, self-perpetuating meme—that culture can help us overcome. Morally because our fatalistic acceptance of war as a permanent part of the human condition can impede efforts to achieve enduring peace.

As I explain in the book’s introduction, if readers end up agreeing with everything I say about war, well, groovy. But my goal as a writer has never been to convince readers that I’m right so much as to challenge them to reconsider their views. I’m hoping that my new book will jumpstart a conversation among pessimists, in particular, about why we fight and how we can stop.

This conversation, I’m happy to report, is now under way. “The Brian Lehrer Show,” which airs on WNYC, the National Public Radio affiliate in New York City, just launched a series of shows on whether war can end. The show is carrying out a survey on the question, “Is war inevitable?” You can respond with text, audio or video. I talked to Lehrer about my views last week, and he plans to explore the same topic with Barbara Ehrenreich and Chris Hedges—smart, knowledgeable journalists who are more pessimistic than I—on February 27.

I also discuss war on MSNBC’s “Dylan Ratigan Show“; the blog “The Last Word on Nothing” with the science journalists Thomas Hayden and Ann Finkbeiner; on Bloggingheads.tv with mega-pundit Robert Wright (who has been pondering the end of war for a long time himself); on “The Diane Rehm Show,” a nationally syndicated NPR show; and on the Web site “Big Think.” I list these and upcoming gigs related to my book on the “Appearances” page of my Web site, johnhorgan.org

One of my toughest and ultimately most rewarding conversations was on Reddit.com. At the urging—and with the help—of my son Mac, who digs Reddit, I threw myself into the Reddit mosh pit with a post announcing, “I am John Horgan, a science journalist who just wrote a book called The End of War… Ask me anything.” Things started badly. The site briefly crashed right after I posted, and some Redditers hammered me for my evasiveness and stupidity and even compared me to Woody Harrelson, who recently pissed off many Redditers. (Visit Reddit to find out why.) Others had smart, sharp questions and comments.

A Redditer named gmpalmer kept pressing me on what my core message is, and on what “new thing” I am “bringing to the table.” I replied that too many of us “view war almost as a consequence of forces of nature that are beyond our control, like earthquakes or typhoons or cancer. We attribute war to our genes, or original sin, or our tendency to produce more people than the earth can sustain. Hence our fatalism. My core idea is that this view of war is wrong, and contradicted by scientific studies of war. War is not something that happens to us. It is something that we choose to do, of our own free will. I don’t have any specific magical solutions for ending war, because there are none. War has many causes, almost too many, and so we must work against it on many fronts. But I do believe that all of us, especially in a powerful, militaristic democracy like the U.S., must take responsibility for war’s persistence as a crucial first step toward ending it once and for all. Whether this message counts as ‘new’ I don’t really know or care. But it is a message that I think people badly need to hear right now.”

Another Redditer asked what we should do when we are attacked or see someone else hurting others. I responded: “What do we do about groups that are hurting or threatening to hurt others? As in Syria? Libya? Serbia? Or Rwanda back in the 90s? How should we have responded to 9/11? To North Korea and Iran? Do we react violently or seek alternatives? I’d like to see us adopt ‘just-war’ policies that call for using violence only when absolutely necessary, and when the benefits seem to clearly outweigh the risks. No pre-emptive strikes. We could try out the so-called just-policing concept, which calls for an absolute prohibition against killing civilians and for bringing suspected bad actors to justice rather than killing them, if at all possible. But whatever choices we make, we should make them with the larger goal of ending war and militarism once and for all. We should somehow use force in a way that does not legitimize force for resolving conflicts in the future. I know this sounds vague, but an honest attempt to work within this highly restricted just war concept will help us achieve progress.”

If you’re not impressed with my ideas about why we fight and how we can stop, let’s hear yours! In spite of all our disagreements, every sane person—even the most cynical war mongers and profiteers, even Dick Cheney!—wants peace. If we have the will, collectively, to end war, we will surely find a way.

[Update on previous post: In "Let's Ban Research That Makes the Bird-Flu Virus and Other Pathogens Deadlier," I argued that scientists should not engineer pathogens to make them more lethal--as two teams did recently with the bird-flu virus—let alone write up their results for public consumption, because the risks outweigh the benefits. The World Health Organization nonetheless announced last week that the two teams would be allowed to publish their work in full. I sure hope I'm wrong.]

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

We don’t have to wait until science catches up to science fiction for this unjust dystopia to be realized. It’s happening now, in the United States, as a result of policies that favor the rich at the expense of un-rich. Scholars are confirming with empirical studies what Occupy Wall Street protesters have been saying: our system is unfairly rigged in favor of the haves, who keep pulling away from have-nots.

Education can help the poor climb their way to a higher socioeconomic status. But according to Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times, several studies have shown that “the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.”

Race plays less of a role than it once did in this widening chasm. A study published last year by sociologist Sean Reardon found that the difference between standardized test scores of blacks and whites has narrowed since 1960, while the difference between low-income and wealthy students has surged 40 percent. “We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s,” Reardon told The Times, “in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears to be more determinative of educational success than race.”

The simplest explanation for the divide is that the rich can afford to send their children to better schools, hire private tutors for them and give them other advantages. In 1972, affluent parents spent five times as much on their children, on average, as low-income parents; by 2007, that difference had almost doubled, to nine to one. “The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” sociologist Frank Furstenberg told The Times.

The federal tax code is also stacked against the poor. The code caps taxes on long-term capital gains and dividends at 15 percent, which is why Mitt Romney is taxed at a lower rate than a grade-school teacher. Far from being progressive, with percentages rising with income, the tax code is regressive in this key area. Those who work for a living pay more in taxes, percentage-wise, than those who live off investments.

Political scientist Andrew Hacker documents the depths of our inequality in “We’re More Unequal Than You Think,” in The New York Review of Books this month. He estimates that since 1985 “the lower 60 percent of households have lost $4 trillion, most of which has ascended to the top 5 percent.” U.S. economic policies, Hacker says, now serve as a “giant vacuum cleaner” sucking money from low-income people and showering it upon the rich.

Economists quantify the inequality of a society on a scale called the Gini index. If everyone has the same income, the Gini index is zero; if one person makes all the moola, the Gini index is one. The U.S. Gini index has risen from .359 in 1972 to .440 in 2010, an increase of more than 20 percent, Hacker reports. In contrast, the Gini index of socialist Sweden is .230.

Hacker notes that “in a not-so-distant past, families of modest means made enough to put something aside for their children’s college fees. That cushion is gone, which is why millions of undergraduates are now forced to take much larger loans. Adding interest and penalties, many will face decades paying off six-figure debts.” (I’m facing this financial challenge myself; my son is entering college next fall and my daughter a year later.)

The U.S. exemplifies the Matthew effect, a sociological term that alludes to a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

Our current presidential race features several Christian candidates—Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Romney—who seem to view the Matthew effect as the Eleventh Commandment. These men trumpet their religiosity and rectitude, and yet they advocate economic policies that benefit the rich and hurt the poor, violating the most basic rules of moral decency. Naturals must join together with rich people with a conscience to create a more economically just society.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, www.flickr.com/tracy_olson.

The H5N1 virus normally only infects humans who come into direct contact with infected birds; so far there have been no reported cases of airborne transmission among birds and humans. Of the 583 people known to have been infected with the virus, 344 have died as a result, a mortality rate of 59 percent. To be sure, many other infected people may have recovered without coming to the attention of medical authorities. But in comparison, the infamous flu pandemic of 1918, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide, had a mortality rate of two percent.

Last year teams from the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and from the University of Wisconsin at Madison each announced that they had engineered highly contagious versions of H5N1, which can be transmitted from one ferret to another through the air. The immune systems of ferrets are similar to those of humans. The Dutch team submitted its paper to Science and the Wisconsin team to Nature, but publication of both papers has been held up since December on the advice of a federal committee of experts, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.

“Our concern is that publishing these experiments in detail would provide information to some person, organization, or government that would help them to develop similar… viruses for harmful purposes,” the board announced in Nature and Science on January 31. Another concern is that the new virus could be accidentally released into the environment.

In a recent post, Christine Gorman of Scientific American revealed a bitter debate among scientists over the H5N1 research. Some insist that the H5N1 research performed by the two teams was dangerous and perhaps should never have been done. Others contend that such work is beneficial, because it can help epidemiologists anticipate—and develop vaccines and other defenses for—outbreaks.

Ron Fouchier, a member of the Dutch team, seems to hold both opinions simultaneously. When Fouchier publicly discussed the work at a scientific meeting last September, he defended its value but also called the ferret experiments “really, really stupid,” according to a report by Scientific American‘s Katherine Harmon.

The World Health Organization has scheduled a February 16 meeting to ponder the case of the engineered H5N1 and other research aimed at making pathogens deadlier. Here are some options for resolving the dilemma:

A: Disease researchers could continue experimenting and publishing their results without any restrictions. This option strikes me as far too risky, given the possibility that terrorist organizations such as Aum Shinrikyo or Al Qaeda—or simply a Unabomber-type nut-job with lab skills–might exploit such knowledge for nefarious purposes.

B: Researchers could only do work deemed by authorities to offer much greater benefits than risks, and publications would not disclose details that could be exploited by terrorists or others who might carry out biological attacks. Given the fluidity of information in the Internet era, this option might end up being virtually the same as option one.

C: The research could continue but only under secret, classified conditions in military facilities. This alternative would limit, if not eliminate, the potential for the research to help protect civilian populations; it would foster paranoia about U.S. intentions; and the dangerous information might leak out anyway.

D: Ban all research, open or classified, aimed at making pathogens deadlier. This is my “least-bad” choice, because I believe that the risks of research like the recent H5N1 experiments outweigh potential benefits. In general, I favor unrestricted research and communication, just as I favor free speech. But if scientists keep introducing more lethal pathogens into the world, the odds grow that one of them will be unleashed intentionally or accidentally. Moreover, if the U.S. keeps pursuing research into new strains of infectious disease, other nations and groups are more likely to do so as well.

My fears stem in part from the history of biological-warfare research, as detailed in accounts such as A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman (Random House, 2002). Such research, which has been carried out at least since World War II by the U.S., United Kingdom, Soviet Union, Japan and other states, has repeatedly led to releases of pathogens. In 1979, biological-warfare experiments in a Soviet facility in Sverdlovsk triggered an anthrax epidemic that killed 70 people.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the U.S. military sought to test the vulnerability of Americans to bio-attacks by releasing supposedly harmless bacteria in New York City, Washington, D.C., and other population centers. In 1950, a Navy ship sprayed Serratia marcescens over San Francisco; according to various published reports, the bacterium caused 11 cases of pneumonia, one fatal, in people with weak immune systems.

There have been at least 456 reported incidents, three fatal, in which workers at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. military’s main biological warfare facility, were infected by dangerous microbes. In 1989, researchers at Fort Detrick and a nearby facility were exposed to an Ebola virus, an event dramatized in the bestseller The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (Anchor, 1994). FBI investigators suspect that the anthrax-laced letters that killed five Americans in 2001 were concocted by a Fort Detrick biologist, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008.

In all these ways—and no doubt others that we can’t even imagine—programs that are supposed to protect us from diseases may end up hurting us. Nature already does all-too-good a job of inventing new microbes to sicken and kill us. Do we really want to bring more into the world?

Photo of Malaysian bird-flu workers courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I think our purpose is, or should be, to sow skepticism in students’ minds, to encourage them to doubt society’s dominant belief systems, whether political, economic, religious or scientific. After all, our certainty arguably gets us into trouble more than our skepticism does. When I look at our country and the rest of the world, I see fanatics, not the diffident, causing most of the mayhem. Hence I’m always on the lookout for works that can undermine my students’ faith, whatever forms it might take.

Lately, I’ve been urging them to check out the writings of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, (and a week ago I brought him to my school to give a talk). Just a few months ago, I thought I knew all I needed to know about Taleb. He was a guy who graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, made moola as a Wall Street trader and wrote a couple of books, notably The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007), a bestseller about the unpredictability of the stock market.

I knew some big shots were impressed with Taleb. New York Times columnist David Brooks credited Taleb with predicting the economic crisis of 2008. The Sunday Times of London ranked The Black Swan as one of the most influential books since World War II. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson called Taleb “idiosyncratically brilliant.”

But I still assumed that Taleb was basically a Wall Streeter who wrote about Wall Street for other Wall Streeters. Then I read The Black Swan, and I discovered that my assumptions about the book and its author had been wrong. Taleb is not a Wall Street guy. He is really a philosopher, or what used to be called a free thinker, devoted to figuring out the world.

In The Black Swan, Taleb explores the limits of knowledge, and not just economic knowledge but knowledge of all kinds. Taleb contends that scientists, engineers, doctors, economists, politicians, journalist and all of us overestimate our ability to comprehend and foresee events; our models of reality can never account for “black swans,” events that cannot be foreseen based on extrapolations from the past. Our excessive confidence in our knowledge can lead to all sorts of problems, including depressions, wars, nuclear meltdowns and medicine that makes us sicker.

Taleb rubs a lot of people the wrong way, understandably so. He can be almost comically arrogant and dismissive of other wisdom dispensers, including journalists and economists in general and Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman in particular. Taleb reminds me of one of his heroes, the philosopher Karl Popper, who was also mightily certain about his own uncertainty.

Perhaps because he is a more entertaining writer, Taleb pulls off the trick of being an egomaniacal preacher of epistemological humility more effectively than Popper. I often tell my students that their papers will be more compelling if they let their personalities shine through. The Black Swan exemplifies this kind of writing. The narrative is driven both by reason and by passion, and as a result it engages readers—or at least this reader—on all levels. The book is outrageous, angry, exuberant and very funny.

Taleb embeds his arguments in a kind of memoir, a tale of personal discovery. He begins by describing his childhood in Lebanon, during which he survived a civil war that made him acutely aware of life’s fragility. He also takes us through his experiences as a businessman and, even more, as a voracious reader, who responds on a personal, visceral level to other free thinkers, from Plato to Popper.  This is philosophy with heart and guts.

During his visit to Stevens, Taleb previewed his next book, Antifragility, which proposes how we can reduce the threat of black swans and reap their potential benefits—in the realms of engineering, medicine, business and politics as well as economics. Taleb defines antifragility (his coinage) as the capacity of a system to thrive in response to randomness, disorder, the unexpected—that is, black swans. As Ashley Hiller reports in my school’s student newspaper, The Stute, Taleb’s next book “promises to uphold the spirit of his work and elaborate on the same thought-provoking ideas he sparked with The Black Swan.”

Here’s a quote from the prologue of Antifragility, which should give you a sense of Taleb’s substance and style: “This book is about how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the impenetrable, the unseen, the non-understood, the opaque, the perplexing, and the inexplicable. Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness: you want to use it, not hide from it. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes my non-sissy attitude toward randomness and uncertainty.” Non-sissy uncertainty? That’s a message I’ll enjoy imparting to my students.

Photo by Sarah Josephine Taleb.

The Antarctic has received lots of press lately. Just over century ago, on January 17, 1912, Robert Falcon Scott arrived at the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had arrived there more than a month earlier. Scott and his men perished on their return journey, and ironically their failure is commemorated more than Amundsen’s success.

My expedition—compared to those of these rugged explorers, who relied on dogs, ponies and their own muscles for transport—was like a trip to the mall. Together with three other journalists, I flew in a cavernous C-130 military-transport plane from Christchurch, New Zealand, to McMurdo Station, a gritty American base perched on the edge of Ross Island. From the window of our plane, the Antarctic resembled an endless porcelain landscape, through which jagged black mountains protruded. I felt as though I was visiting not just another part of Earth but another planet.

Just a short tramp from McMurdo was Discovery Hut, built by Scott in 1902 during his first expedition to the Antarctic. The inside of the hut, cluttered with crates and cans of food, was eerily well-preserved, as though Scott and his men might burst through the door at any moment. During my 10-day sojourn (which took place in November, when the sun never sets), my colleagues and I were whisked around on snow cats and a helicopter.

Some other memories from the trip: Peering into the smoking maw of Mt. Erebus, an enormous active volcano. Swooping through a canyon in the Dry Valleys so narrow that I kept thinking the helicopter’s blades were going to strike the rock. Standing on an ice floe as a flock of Emperor penguins leaped out of the sea and waddled toward us, eyeing us with curiosity. Climbing straight down beneath the sea ice into a metal tube, through the windows of which I could see Weddell seals gliding through the frigid twilight.

The high point, however, was when a C-130 flew us from McMurdo to the South Pole’s Amundsen-Scott Station, where some 80 people lived and worked in a geodesic dome and other structures. On that day, the Pole was a balmy 44 degrees Celsius below zero (-47 Fahrenheit), almost 90 below (-130 F) with the wind chill. In the photo that accompanies this column, I’m standing next to the sign that marks the Geographic South Pole.

The Pole was also marked by a column, striped like a candy cane, with a mirrored ball mounted on top. Somewhere in my apartment is a hat, which I bought at Amundsen-Scott, bearing an embroidered likeness of that kitschy column. After our plane touched down, my journalistic colleagues and I watched in astonishment as member of the plane’s crew peeled off his jump suit, stripped down to his underwear and dashed around the column; we learned later that this ritual is required for crew members arriving at the Pole for the first time.

The U.S. National Science Foundation now spends more than $300 million a year to support scientific programs in the Antarctic, about $100 million more than when I visited the continent in 1992. This money is well spent, because it is helping us come to grips with riddles about our past and future. Astrophysicists at the South Pole, which has some of the driest, clearest skies on Earth, have sent balloons aloft to measure the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, just constructed at the Pole, could yield clues about the nature of mysterious “dark matter” thought to pervade the universe.

Biologists probing frozen Antarctic lakes have discovered new species of bacteria, which may provide clues to the origin of life on Earth more than four billion years ago. Geologists pondering ice cores and rocks have deduced that the Antarctic ice sheet, which to my eyes looked eternal, is anything but. During my visit almost 20 years ago, I learned that the sheet has fluctuated dramatically over the past few million years, and some scientists fear that global warming may shrink the ice enough to trigger a catastrophic surge in sea levels world-wide.

The period during which Scott, Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton and others trekked across the Antarctic has been called the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.” We still live in such an age, even if scientists–and journalists–no longer risk their lives in quite the way that those intrepid explorers did.

Humanity is, according to some measures, headed in the right direction. Since the cataclysm of World War II, there have been no comparable wars among major powers. The Cold War, along with the threat of global nuclear annihilation, ceased without bloodshed two decades ago. Since then, the number of international wars and civil wars has declined, and combat casualties have plummeted. The psychologist Steven Pinker and political scientist Joshua Goldstein, authors of books on the decline of armed conflict, proposed last month in The New York Times that war may be “going out of style.”

I share this optimism, with one big caveat: The U.S., which continues to cling to the atavistic adage that peace can only be assured by fighting and preparing to fight, remains a major impediment to a post-war world. We insist that we are a peaceful people, and yet we maintain a global military empire, with soldiers deployed in more than 100 countries. In the past decade we have been embroiled in two major wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as contributing to the recent bombing campaign against Libya.

Consider, moreover, these statistics from SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a respected, independent tracker of trends in conflict. The U.S. military budget has almost doubled in the past decade to $700 billion. If you include spending on nuclear weapons and homeland security, our annual outlays approach $1 trillion, which exceeds the defense budgets of all other nations combined. We spend more than six times as much on defense as China, our closest competitor, and more than 10 times as much as our former nemesis Russia.

The U.S. is also by far the world’s largest arms dealer. Our weapons sales, which according to SIPRI came to $247.2 billion in 2009, surpass those of all other nations put together. Just in the past month, U.S. officials signed off on fighter-plane sales of $29.4 billion to Saudi Arabia (a deal announced on Christmas Eve!) and $7 billion to Japan. The U.S. has also pledged to transfer $11 billion in tanks and other weapons to Iraq’s fledgling government. Some security analysts fear that these latter weapons, rather than maintaining the peace there, will simply help the Shiite-dominated government crush Kurds, Sunnis and other rivals for power.

The chasm between our nation’s rhetoric and behavior is embarrassing. We rail against Iran for allegedly trying to build a nuclear bomb while we maintain a stockpile of 8,500 warheads. We denounce tyrants such as Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad for killing civilians, and yet our own military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere often result in the deaths of innocent people. We carry out drone and commando assassinations in other countries, in defiance of international prohibitions against assassinations, and we imprison suspected enemies indefinitely without a trial. And yet we bristle when observers call us hypocrites.

We could help lead the entire world toward a more peaceful future if we backed up our dovish words with actions. For starters, we should cut our military budget in half, a level that would still be greater than the military spending of China and Russia combined. (The measly reductions recently proposed by the Obama administration, which would reduce by the budget by less than 10 percent over the next decade, are not nearly enough.) We should start recalling our troops from Afghanistan and other nations and stop peddling arms overseas. We should cease assassinating people with our robots and commandos. In tandem with these steps, we should seek more creative ways to prevent and suppress armed conflicts nonviolently.

Of the current crop of U.S. presidential candidates, only one, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, advocates deep cuts in our armed forces. Even disregarding Paul’s opposition to social safety nets such as Social Security and Medicare, which I view as triumphs of enlightened governance, I will not vote for him. My main objection to Paul is that he is too isolationist; he advocates pulling out of the United Nations, which in spite of its flaws helps reduce armed conflicts around the world through its diplomacy and peacekeeping operations.

Paul’s rivals for the Republican nomination, far from advocating reductions in defense spending, have called for increases. And Barack Obama has not exactly become the Peace President that many of us hoped for. In fact, while accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace two years ago—just nine days after he announced that he was sending 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan—Obama seemed to suggest that war is a permanent part of the human condition. He declared that “war, in one form or another, appeared with the first man” and that “we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.”

Our leaders—and would-be leaders—should repudiate this sort of fatalism. For inspiration, they might re-read a speech that President John F. Kennedy gave at American University in 1963, just months before his death. Kennedy pledged his commitment to the goal of “world peace,” which he defined as “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” He urged his young audience to reject the “dangerous, defeatist belief” that “war is inevitable, that we are gripped by forces that we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade—therefore they can be solved by man.” Demonstrating his sincerity, Kennedy announced that the U.S. would cease testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.

With this sort of courageous, visionary leadership, the U.S. can help make war between nations not only improbable but also inconceivable, as much so as war is now between Canada and the U.S., or even between New York and New Jersey. Most people find this scenario implausible, even impossible. But far from being a utopian fantasy, ending war should be a moral imperative.

I recalled that letter when I reviewed Triver’s book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life (Basic Books, 2011) for The New York Times. (I proposed “Everyone Is Self-Deluded But Me,” as a headline for the review, but the Times went with the bland “Why We Lie.”) I wanted to like the book, and I did. It’s a weirdly compelling hybrid of personal memoir and scientific treatise, which explores why we lie to others and to our selves. Natural selection, Trivers proposes, bequeathed us the gift of deception because it helped our ancestors do what they needed to do to propagate their genes, such as charming mates and tricking rivals. And we often deceive ourselves because those of us who are not sociopaths lie more effectively if we believe our lies.

I withheld one reservation about Folly. Trivers never really addresses an issue fundamental to any consideration of self-deceit. By what criteria do we decide that this person is fooling himself and that person isn’t? Or that we aren’t fooling ourselves? How can we distinguish truth from lies, or substantive claims from what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls “bullshit”? This is the same puzzle that has plagued philosophers from Plato to Karl Popper. Popper asserted that scientists must constantly test their theories against reality, by gathering observations and performing experiments. But as Thomas Kuhn pointed out, scientists, being emotional as well as rational creatures, often become so committed to a theory that they refuse to acknowledge contrary evidence.

Trivers touches on these conundrums when he turns his attention to science. His judgment of scientists can be, well, scathing. Science has succeeded, he notes, because of “a series of built-in devices that guard against deceit and self-deception at every turn,” and yet even scientists in the most rigorous disciplines are subject to, at the very least, an inflated self-image. Physicists “talk of producing a theory of everything and make other grand claims, but their social utility, in my opinion, is connected primarily to warfare,” Trivers writes. “Their major function has been to build bigger bombs, delivered more accurately to farther distances.” I disagree with that statement—just for starters, physicists have given us computers and a better understanding of the cosmos—but I get a kick imagining how some snooty physicists will react to it.

I agree with Trivers that scientists are especially prone to self-deception when they turn their attention to humanity itself. He proposes that “the greater the social content of a discipline, the more slowly it will develop, because it faces, in part, greater forces of deceit and self-deception.” Trivers notes that social sciences can all too easily be corrupted by moral, political and ideological biases. He takes predictable swipes at psychoanalysis, which he calls a “hoax,” and economics, which tends to be “blind to the possibility that unrestrained pursuit of personal utility can have disastrous effects on group benefit.” Yes, our current recession demonstrates as much.

Trivers concedes that evolutionary biology has spawned some harmful notions. As an example, he cites the odious claim of the Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz that a species will be more fit if only the strongest, most aggressive males mate with females. Trivers nonetheless insists that the social sciences can only benefit from incorporating evolutionary theory and genetics. He is especially harsh toward cultural anthropology, which he accuses of having “made a tragic left turn in the mid-1970s from which it has yet to recover (at least in the United States).” In other words, cultural anthropologists oppose biological accounts of human behavior for political rather than scientific reasons.

Actually, some cultural anthropologists, notably Clifford Geertz of Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, sincerely believed that sociobiology and other biological theories fail to account for human malleability and cultural diversity and go too far in reducing extremely complex behaviors to innate impulses. Trivers himself indulges in this sort of theorizing when he claims, in Folly, that we have “been selected to rape on occasion, to wage aggressive war when it suits us, and to abuse our own children if this brings some compensatory return benefit.”

He adds, “I embrace none of these actions.” Well, I’m glad that Trivers doesn’t “embrace” rape, war and child abuse, but I still have a problem with his assertion that these behaviors are innate. According to my reading, and that of many scientists, the evidence for his claim is not nearly as cut and dried as Trivers implies. For example, as I’ve argued in a previous column, the evidence strongly suggests that war is not a primordial instinct that we share with chimpanzees but a cultural innovation, a virulent meme that began spreading around the world about 10,000 years ago and still infects us.

Trivers is very hard on himself in Folly. He confesses to all manner of deceptions, intentional and inadvertent, that he has foisted on colleagues, wives, lovers, his children—and himself. But when he talks about science, he thinks that he is clear-eyed, and just knows how to tell truth from falsehood. Especially when he writes about evolutionary psychology and its critics, he’s all too confident in his ability to distinguish fools and knaves from sincere truth-seekers. This is a trait that he holds in common with other prominent proponents of evolutionary psychology, such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and David Buss. They love to accuse critics of ideological bias but fail to recognize it in themselves. I expected better of Trivers.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Forced to choose, I’d go with the alarmists, who at least are guided by science and concern about humanity’s long-term future. But some greens, notably Romm, are so shrill and hyper-partisan that they harm their own cause. Just as many voters yearn for a third party that transcends the fractious old politics, so I and many other people are eager to hear fresh, creative approaches to global warming and other enviro-threats.

That’s why I’m a fan of Ted Nordhaus (left in photo) and Michael Shellenberger, iconoclasts who run a think tank, the Breakthrough Institute, in Oakland, Calif. While most green—and anti-green—activists preach to the converted, Nordhaus and Shellenberger challenge basic environmental assumptions and values. Even if they don’t totally convince you, they should force you to reconsider your views on, for example, the debate over fracking.

In their 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism” and 2007 book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin Co.), they chastised greens for suggesting that perils such as global warming can only be addressed by curbing human progress. Economic development and technological innovation are essential, Nordhaus and Shellenberger argued, to help us overcome ecological crises.

I thought this message would resonate with faculty and students at the engineering school where I teach. And so in 2008 I brought Nordhaus and Shellenberger to my school to have a public conversation with Andy Revkin, then a New York Times reporter and now author of the influential Dot Earth blog. Later I chatted with Shellenberger on Bloggingheads.tv.

Now, I’m happy to report, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are back with an e-book, Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene (Breakthrough Institute, 2011), in which they and other thinkers–including the French philosopher Bruno LaTour, whose riff on Frankenstein gives the book its name–re-envision environmentalism in upbeat terms. What I like best about the book is its optimism, which I’m coming to believe is a prerequisite for progress. What follows is my email interview with Michael and Ted about their new book.

John: Love Your Monsters makes the argument that the Anthropocene, the age of man, is something we should embrace. What do you mean by that?

Michael: What we mean is that don’t have any choice. We are now the dominant ecological force on the planet and that means that we must ever more actively manage our environment. It is both a responsibility and an opportunity and it demands that we actually make hard choices. If we want more forests and more wild places, then we’ll need more people living in cities and more intensive agriculture. If we want less global warming, then we’ll need to replace fossil energy with clean energy, including a lot of nuclear energy. If we want to save places like the Amazon rainforest then we have to recognize that, over the next 50 years, a lot of the Amazon is going to be developed. The choices will come down to where we want development, and what we might save in the process.

John: In the introduction to Monsters, you say that environmentalism “has become an obstacle” to addressing global warming and other problems. What do you mean by that?

Ted: Environmentalists still imagine that solving those kinds of problems involves limiting the human footprint on the planet. But our footprint is everywhere. We are now, through our daily existence, modifying the environment on a planetary scale. The choices we face are not whether or not to modify the environment but how. We will exercise those choices through the ever more powerful social and technological tools and the enormous wealth and resources that we now have at our disposal. Environmentalism has long imagined that development, modernization and technology are the source of our problems, but they are now the only solutions. And, perhaps more to the point, there’s no going back to the Holocene. Even if human civilization chose to it couldn’t.

Michael: There is, but what’s at stake isn’t the survival of the human race but rather the quality of the global environment, our ecological inheritance and the costs—moral and financial—of environmental degradation. In many ways, Monsters is an effort to reconstruct a non-apocalyptic grounds for taking environmental action.

Michael: Absolutely. There is a new generation of environmentalists, and even some of the old guard has embraced this vision. We call them post-environmentalists in Monsters, folks like [Whole Earth Catalogue founder] Stewart Brand, [The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans author] Mark Lynas, and [The Guardian newspaper columnist] George Monbiot, who recognize that because human development is inevitable, we’re going to need lots of advanced technology, including nuclear, to reduce the risks of the Anthropocene.

John: How did you select contributors for Monsters?

Ted: After Break Through we discovered a much larger group of thinkers, mostly academics, some of whom knew each other and some of whom didn’t, who were working on similar problems. A big part of the reason we started Breakthrough Journal is because we thought their ideas deserved a larger audience, and because we wanted to be in a situation where we could work with these thinkers to fully develop our arguments. Monsters was an opportunity for us to take some of the best thinking we’ve come across on the new ecological challenges we face and put it all together in one place.

John: How does Love Your Monsters build upon the themes of Break Through?

Michael: One of the ways is Break Through‘s critique of the concept of nature as a closed, fragile system in a state of delicate balance, and constantly at risk of tipping into chaos. In Break Through, we observed that there is a difference between a false choice and a hard choice. In Monsters, the authors all in one way or another further elaborate what those hard choices look like.

John: When you think about the future of the planet, what is your biggest fear?

Ted: My biggest fear is that outmoded, irrational and self-defeating ideologies about nature and the market will get in the way of humans making the shared investments in technological innovation required to be responsible earth stewards. I worry that slow rates of innovation among renewables and popular fears of nuclear energy will mean continuing high uses of fossil fuels for decades to come.

John: What is your biggest source of optimism?

Michael: I think my biggest source of optimism is the progress made by the human species. We are a far more intelligent and humane species than we were 100 years ago—not to mention 200,000 years ago! When I hear people worry that because humans evolved on the veldt we don’t have it in us to manage large complicated systems, I think that’s ridiculous. We never stopped evolving—physically, culturally and intellectually. At bottom, I think humans are more than up for the task of being responsible Earth stewards.

Three years ago, my wife, who is a pagan, decided that our family should celebrate Winter Solstice. To be honest, I wasn’t eager to cram another event into our frantic holiday schedule. As a lapsed Catholic, I have a knee-jerk aversion toward rituals and other trappings of religion, whether Christianity or voodoo.

Nevertheless, an hour or so after nightfall on December 22, I dutifully pulled on my coat and boots, skidded down our icy driveway and tramped into a field bordering our property. Near a clump of skeletal trees on the field’s far side, I found a circle of stones enclosing a heap of sticks, which my wife and kids had gathered earlier that day. With the help of a chunk of artificial kindling, several sheets of newspaper and a dozen matches, I got the sticks burning, just before I spotted the candle lanterns of my wife and two children bobbing toward me.

We were only out there half an hour or so. The night was thumpingly cold, and smoke kept blowing in our faces. My six year old son Mac and four year old daughter Skye were more interested in pestering the fire with sticks than in listening to their parents’ makeshift creation stories about the Man on the Moon and other celestial beings. My daughter singed her hair, and the tip of her mitten melted.

Glancing up at the stars and full moon, I felt a sudden surge of wonder at the improbability of life. As a science journalist, I know that scientists don’t have a clue how our universe came into being, or why it took this particular form out of an infinitude of possibilities, including nonexistence. Nor does anyone know how inanimate matter on our little planet coalesced into living creatures, let alone creatures that could invent reality TV. Science, you might say, has discovered that our existence is infinitely improbable, and hence a miracle.

It is one thing to know intellectually that life is a miracle. It’s quite another to see this miraculousness. Saints and poets aside, most of us rarely do. The psychiatrist Arthur Deikman blames our pinched perception on two innate tendencies, which he calls instrumentality and automatization. Instrumentality is our compulsion to view the world through the filter of our selfish interests. Automatization is our propensity to learn tasks so thoroughly that we perform them with little or no conscious thought.

No doubt these traits have helped us survive. Automatization is a particularly attractive cognitive feature, because it allows us to carry out more than one task at the same time. We can fret over our plummeting 401Ks while driving our children to their school Christmas concert. Unfortunately, instrumentality and automatization make us prone to sleepwalking through life.

Every now and then, however, if we’re lucky, we do not see the world as something to be manipulated for our ends. This recognition, which Deikman calls deautomatization, is the goal of all contemplative traditions. When an aspirant asked the 15th-century Zen master Ikkyu to write down a maxim of “the highest wisdom,” Ikkyu wrote one word: “Attention.” The dissatisfied aspirant asked, “Is that all?” This time, Ikkyu wrote two words: “Attention. Attention.”

Spiritual practices such as meditation, yoga and prayer can help us pay attention. So can art, poetry and music. And so can religious rituals. This, I suspect, is why so many people who aren’t otherwise religious still celebrate holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah. We especially need these rituals in this most benighted of seasons, when we are prone to dwelling on life’s darker aspects.

The bugbear haunting Christianity and other faiths is the problem of evil. But sitting with my family in that circle of stones on Winter Solstice helped me see that birth, beauty, love and laughter also pose a problem. How could all this have come about? It’s a mystery, which no theory or theology can possibly dispel.

My family celebrates Winter Solstice every year now, along with Christmas and New Year’s. Even when it’s unseasonably mild, as it was four nights ago, I still look forward to returning to the warmth of our home and flipping through an album of photos from the year just past. Remember last winter when we visited Grandpa in Colorado, and your brother learned to snowboard and your sister got sick? Remember Harley the starling, who pestered the other birds in the aviary so much last summer that Mommy brought him in the house, where he drove Daddy crazy?

The kids may squabble over who gets to turn the pages. I’ll brood over a deadline, or plot how I’m going to ditch the family tomorrow to play pond hockey. But for at least a moment I’ll pay attention and see. I won’t know who or what to thank, but I’ll be grateful nonetheless.

Postscript: My wife and I were divorced last year. She, Mac and Skye now celebrate Winter Solstice without me.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Actually, the Higgs has long been a mixed blessing for particle physics. In the early 1990s, when physicists were pleading—ultimately in vain–with Congress not to cancel the Superconducting Supercollider, which was sucking up tax dollars faster than a black hole, the Nobel laureate Leon Lederman christened the Higgs “the God particle.” This is scientific hype at its most outrageous. If the Higgs is the “God Particle,” what should we call an even more fundamental particle, like a string? The Godhead Particle? The Mother of God Particle?

Lederman himself confessed that “the Goddamn Particle” might have been a better name for the Higgs, given how hard it had been to detect “and the expense it is causing.” A more fundamental problem is that discovering the Higgs would be a modest, even anti-climactic achievement, relative to the grand ambitions of theoretical physics. The Higgs would serve merely as the capstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the workings of electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The Standard Model, because it excludes gravity, is an incomplete account of reality; it is like a theory of human nature that excludes sex. Kaku concedes as much, calling the Standard Model “rather ugly” and “a theory that only a mother could love.”

Our best theory of gravity is still general relativity, which does not mesh mathematically with the quantum field theories that comprise the Standard Model. Over the past few decades, theorists have become increasingly obsessed with finding a unified theory, a “theory of everything” that wraps all of nature’s forces into one tidy package. Hearing all the hoopla about the Higgs, the public might understandably assume that it represents a crucial step toward a unified theory–and perhaps at least tentative confirmation of the existence of strings, branes, hyperspaces, multiverses and all the other fantastical eidolons that Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall and other unification enthusiasts tout in their bestsellers.

But the Higgs doesn’t take us any closer to a unified theory than climbing a tree would take me to the Moon. As I’ve pointed out previously, string theory, loop-space theory and other popular candidates for a unified theory postulate phenomena far too minuscule to be detected by any existing or even conceivable (except in a sci-fi way) experiment. Obtaining the kind of evidence of a string or loop that we have for, say, the top quark would require building an accelerator as big as the Milky Way.

Kaku asserts in The Wall Street Journal that finding the Higgs “is not enough. What is needed is a genuine theory of everything, which can simply and beautifully unify all the forces of the universe into a single coherent whole—a goal sought by Einstein for the last 30 years of his life.” He insists that we are at “the beginning, not the end of physics. The adventure continues.” Maybe. But I’m not hopeful. Whether or not physicists find the Goddamn Particle, the quest for unification, which has given physics its glitter over the past half century, looks increasingly like a dead end.

Almost 10 years ago, I put my money where my mouth is. The Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit that encourages long-term thinking, asked a bunch of people to make bets about trends in science, technology and other realms of culture. I bet Kaku $1,000 that by the year 2020, “no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” (Lee “loop space” Smolin was my original counter-bettor but backed out at the last minute, the big chicken.)

Kaku and I each put up $1,000 in advance, which the Long Now Foundation keeps in escrow. If civilization–or more importantly, the Long Now Foundation–still exists in 2020, it will give $2,000 to a charity designated by me (the Nature Conservancy) or Kaku (National Peace Action). In defending my bet, I stated:

“The dream of a unified theory, which some evangelists call a ‘theory of everything,’ will never be entirely abandoned. But I predict that over the next twenty years, fewer smart young physicists will be attracted to an endeavor that has vanishingly little hope of an empirical payoff. Most physicists will come to accept that nature might not share our passion for unity. Physicists have already produced theories–Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, nonlinear dynamics–that work extraordinarily well in certain domains, and there is no reason why there should be a single theory that accounts for all the forces of nature. The quest for a unified theory will come to be seen not as a branch of science, which tells us about the real world, but as a kind of mathematical theology.”

I added, however—and this is both mawkish tripe and the truth–that “I would be delighted to lose this bet.”

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A couple of decades ago, I made the mistake of faxing an ironic response to what I thought was an ironic faxed letter. The writer—let’s call him Tachyon Tad—had “discovered” a new physics, one that allowed for faster-than-light travel. In my reply, I told Tad that if he built a warp-drive spaceship, I’d love to hitch a ride. Dumb joke. For months, my fax machine churned out sheets covered with Tad’s dense elaborations of his theory and plans for a superluminal machine.

After that, I simply chucked cranky letters. What else was I supposed to do? I had neither the time nor wherewithal to find the flaws in their logic, any more than I could double-check the math that yields, say, quantum electro-dynamics or some spiffy new variant thereof. As a mere journalist, I relied on experts to do that for me, especially ones at fancy institutions like Caltech and Cambridge, who presumably had been thoroughly vetted. My job isn’t to uncover scientific truth, I told myself, but to report on what professional scientists think the truth is.

But cranks have always haunted me. Who, I wondered, are these people, toiling in feverish obscurity over their wildly ambitious theories? And how could I be so sure that Tad, say, is not a loon but a genius? Couldn’t he (and almost all the cranks who write me are male) be the real deal? What is the difference, really, between cranks and experts? Just as experts are often wrong, can’t cranks occasionally be right?

My friend Margaret Wertheim, an Australian-born science writer who unlike me has a degree in physics, couldn’t set these questions aside. In the early 1990s, she began collecting manuscripts from “outsiders,” as she calls them, and even corresponding with them. In 1995, when she was in Tacoma, Washington, to give a talk, she drove 30 miles to a trailer park perched on the edge of the Green River Gorge. There she met Jim Carter, owner of the trailer park, whose lavishly illustrated manuscript on “circlon synchronicity” had captured Wertheim’s imagination. (See the image above for an example of Carter’s graphic talent.) Carter’s theory, which began germinating in him when he was still a teenager in the early 1960s, explained all the “mysteries and paradoxes that have plagued physical science for centuries,” as he put it, in terms of circlons, which are springs made of smaller springs.

Carter turned out to be not a reclusive schizophrenic but a charming, ruggedly handsome husband and father. A self-taught jack of all trades, he was a former abalone diver, meteorite-hunter, gold miner and inventor. His most successful creation was the “lift bag,” an inflatable device with which the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and salvage companies resurrect sunken objects. To provide experimental evidence of his circlon theory, Carter cobbled together three trash cans, rubber sheets and a disco smoke machine into a contraption for blowing smoke rings. The experiment worked.

In her immensely entertaining new book Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything (Walker & Company), Wertheim tells the tale of Carter, who became her close friend, and embeds it within a history of outsider physics. She traces the phenomenon back deep into the 19th century, when the British mathematician Augustus De Morgan collected hundreds of examples of “paradoxers,” whom he defined as people who held views “apart from the general opinion” in science, mathematics and other fields. Just as modern cranks often declare that Einstein was wrong, so did 19th-century paradoxers tout the superiority of their ideas to those of Newton.

De Morgan pointed out that some paradoxers were mainstream figures. “From the ridiculous to the sublime is but a step,” De Morgan commented. “Which is the sublime, and which the ridiculous, every one must settle for himself.” The 17th-century scholar John Wilkins, a master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a founder of the Royal Society, speculated that wild geese were capable of flying to the moon. Newton, the supreme embodiment of scientific reason, filled his notebooks with all manner of wacky theological and alchemical conjectures.

Unfair, you say, to judge past masters from our modern vantage point? Some giants of 20th-century science were cranky, too, even by standards of their time. The famously hard-nosed quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli was fascinated by extrasensory perception and other paranormal phenomena. The chemist Linus Pauling spent his final decades insisting, in the face of strong counter-evidence, that massive doses of vitamin C could treat a wide range of disorders, from colds to cancer. (My mother, a Pauling devotee, doled out huge vitamin C pills to me and my siblings in the late 1960s.)

My favorite modern paradoxer was the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “big bang” (although he loathed the theory) and helped elucidate how light elements fuse into heavy ones in the cores of stars. He once tried to convince me that the AIDS virus was a U.S. military experiment that had gone awry, and that flu viruses came from outer space. To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The line between brilliance and looniness runs through every great scientist’s brain.

Great scientists are great because they discern patterns in the flux of nature that elude us ordinary mortals; we should not be surprised when some patterns turn out to be illusory. Indeed, whole fields can descend into crankiness. Wertheim serves up her philosophical punch line toward the end of her book, when she turns her attention to mainstream physics and cosmology. She shares my sense that some popular suppositions—notably the notion that reality consists of extremely tiny strings wriggling in hyperspaces of a dozen or more dimensions, or that our universe is just one of an infinite number of universes—verge on pseudoscience, because they are even less experimentally testable than Jim Carter’s circlon theory.

Wertheim calls a 2003 conference on string theory and cosmology “by far the most surreal physics event I have ever been to.” She likens it to “a sugar-fueled children’s birthday party or the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party,” with each presenter floating speculations that everyone else considered to be “unsupported by evidence and based entirely on arbitrary assumptions.” Far from fringe figures, the attendees included Stephen Hawking of Cambridge, Brian Greene of Columbia, Lisa Randall of Harvard and other stars of modern physics.

On the other hand, Wertheim is gently, affectionately skeptical of the outsider physicists, too. In the 1990s, she notes, Jim Carter and other outsiders formed an organization, the Natural Philosophy Alliance, which hosts events and maintains a Web site where, as Wertheim puts it, outsiders “can publish their ideas without fear of censure.” When Wertheim attended an NPA meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado, it reminded her of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964) by the psychiatrist Milton Rokeach. The book describes an experiment in which three schizophrenic patients, each of whom believed he was Christ, were introduced to each other in a mental hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Each concluded that the others were crazy.

Watching presenters at the Grand Junction meeting, Wertheim comments , was like “watching thirty Jesus Christs. Everybody had the Answer. Everbody was the One.” Yet given how far mainstream physics has drifted from empirical evidence, she suggests, perhaps we should judge all physics theories by their beauty, elegance and craftsmanship. And just as the art world occasionally embraces outsiders who lack formal training, so perhaps physics—and physics writers—should look more favorably upon the imaginings of autodidacts like Jim Carter.

So what do I do with my crank—I mean, outsider—mail now? As it happens, a couple are sitting in my inbox. One claims to have predicted the recent report (which I bet will not hold up) that neutrinos travel faster than light. Echoes of my old friend Tachyon Tad! I wish I could say I read these letters carefully, appreciating their unique aesthetic qualities, but I don’t. I still just delete them. I’m too busy working on my own fringe theories to help others with theirs.

[Author's note: This column is adapted from an essay published last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education.]

[Additional author's note: The spelling of "Ypsilanti" has been corrected.]

I’m a sucker for punishment, so I thought I’d try to explain, once again, my misgivings about Buddhism, in this heavily revised and updated version of my Slate essay (which was put through an especially tortuous editing process). Here it is:

In 1999, a flier appeared in my mailbox announcing that a local Japanese-American woman would soon start teaching Zen at my hometown library. If I believed in synchronicity, this flier’s arrival would have seemed a clear case of it. I had just begun researching a book on science and mysticism, and I had decided that for the book’s purposes—and my own well-being—I needed a spiritual practice.

Superficially, Buddhism seemed more compatible than any other religion with my skeptical, science-oriented outlook. The Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman once told me that Buddhism is less a religion than a method for fulfilling human potential, a method as empirical in its way as science. Don’t take my word for anything, Buddha supposedly said, just follow this path and discover the truth for yourself.

So I started attending meditation sessions in the basement of my town’s library, a castle overlooking the Hudson and finally the chapel of a Catholic monastery (where some of my classmates were nuns, who seemed much nicer than the ones I remember from my youth). I learned more about Buddhism by reading books and articles, attending lectures and conferences and, most of all, talking to lots of Buddhists, some famous, even infamous, others just ordinary folk trying to get by.

Eventually, I stopped attending my Zen sessions (for reasons that I describe in detail elsewhere). One problem was that meditation never really tamed my monkey mind. During my last class, I fixated on a classmate who kept craning his neck and grunting and asking our teacher unbearably pretentious questions. I loathed him and loathed myself for loathing him, and finally I thought: What am I doing here? By that time, I also had serious intellectual qualms about Buddhism. I concluded that Buddhism is not much more rational than Catholicism, my childhood faith.

One of Buddhism’s biggest selling points for lapsed Catholics like me is that it supposedly dispenses with God and other supernatural claptrap. This claim is disingenuous. Buddhism, at least in its traditional forms, is functionally theistic, even if it doesn’t invoke a supreme deity. The doctrines of karma and reincarnation imply the existence of some sort of cosmic moral judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with nirvana or rebirth as a cockroach.

Those who emphasize Buddhism’s compatibility with science usually downplay or disavow its supernatural elements (and even the Dalai Lama has doubts about reincarnation, a philosopher who discussed the issue with him once told me). The mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, when I interviewed him, compared meditation to a scientific instrument such as a microscope or telescope, through which you can glimpse spiritual truth. This analogy is bogus. Anyone can peer through a telescope and see the moons of Jupiter, or squint through a microscope and see cells divide. But ask 10 meditators what they see, feel or learn and you will get 10 different answers.

Research on meditation (which I reviewed in my 2003 book Rational Mysticism, and which is usually carried out by proponents, such as psychologist Richard Davidson) suggests how variable its effects can be. Meditation reportedly reduces stress, anxiety and depression, but it has been linked to increased negative emotions, too. Some studies indicate that meditation makes you hyper-sensitive to external stimuli; others reveal the opposite effect. Brain scans do not yield consistent results, either. For every report of heightened neural activity in the frontal cortex and decreased activity in the left parietal lobe, there exists a contrary result.

Moreover, those fortunate souls who achieve deep mystical states—through meditation or other means—may come away convinced of very different truths. Shortly before his death in 2001, the Buddhist neuroscientist Francisco Varela (a friend of Trungpa) told me that a near-death experience had showed him that mind rather than matter constitutes the deepest level of reality and is in some sense eternal. Other Buddhists, such as the psychologist Susan Blackmore, are strict materialists, who deny that mind can exist independently of matter.

Blackmore looks favorably, however, upon the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, which holds that the self is an illusion. “Where, exactly, is your self?” Buddha asked. “Of what components and properties does your self consist?” Since no answer to these questions suffices, the self must be in some sense illusory. Meme theory, Blackmore contends in The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 2000), leads to the same conclusion; if you pluck all the memes out of a mind, you will have nothing left. She even rejects the concept of free will, holding that there is no self to act freely.

Actually, modern science—and meditative introspection—have merely discovered that the self is an emergent phenomenon, difficult to explain in terms of its parts. The world abounds in emergent phenomena. The school where I teach can’t be defined in strictly reductionist terms either. You can’t point to a person or classroom or lab and say, “Here is Stevens Institute.” But does that mean my school doesn’t exist?

Then there is the claim that contemplative practice will make us gentler, more humble and compassionate. In Zen and the Brain (MIT Press, 1998), the neurologist and Buddhist James Austin proposes that meditation and mindfulness erode neural regions underpinning our innate self-centeredness. But given the repulsive behavior over the past few decades of so many gurus—including Chogyam Trungpa, who was an alcoholic womanizer and bully—you could conclude that mystical knowledge leads to pathological narcissism rather than selflessness. Instead of shrinking to a point and vanishing, the mystic’s ego may expand to infinity. Did Buddhism deflate the ego of Steve Job?

I’ve had a few experiences that could be called mystical. In The Faith to Doubt (Parallax Press, 1990), Stephen Batchelor, one of my favorite Buddhist authors (see my profile of him here), described an epiphany in which he was suddenly confronted with the mystery of being. The experience “gave me no answers,” he recalls. “It only revealed the massiveness of the question.” That was what I felt during my experiences, a jaw-dropping astonishment at the improbability of existence.

I also felt an overwhelming sense of life’s preciousness, but others may have very different reactions. Like an astronaut gazing at the earth through the window of his spacecraft, the mystic sees our existence against the backdrop of infinity and eternity. This perspective may not translate into compassion and empathy for others. Far from it. Human suffering and death may appear laughably trivial. Instead of becoming a saint-like Bodhisattva, brimming with love for all things, the mystic may become a sociopathic nihilist.

I suspect some bad gurus have fallen prey to mystical nihilism. They may also have been corrupted by that most insidious of all Buddhist propositions, the myth of total enlightenment. This is the notion that some rare souls achieve mystical self-transcendence so complete that they become morally infallible—like the Pope!  Belief in this myth can turn spiritual teachers into tyrants and their students into mindless slaves, who excuse even their teachers’ most abusive behavior as “crazy wisdom.”

I have one final misgiving about Buddhism—or rather, about Buddha himself. His path to enlightenment began with his abandonment of his wife and child. Even today, Tibetan Buddhism—again, like Catholicism—upholds male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. To me, “spiritual” means life-embracing, and so a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexual love and parenthood is not spiritual but anti-spiritual.

Buddhists often respond to my carping by saying, “You didn’t give Buddhism enough time! If you truly understood it, you wouldn’t say such stupid things!” And so on. String theorists and Freudian psychoanalysts employ this same tactic against their critics. I can’t fault these supposed solutions to existence until I have devoted as much time to them as true believers. Sorry, life’s too short.

Some of my best friends are Buddhists, and I enjoy reading and talking to Buddhist and quasi-Buddhist intellectuals, including all those I’ve mentioned above. I admire the open-mindedness and pacifism of the Dalai Lama. I sometimes drag visitors to my hometown to a nearby Buddhist monastery, which features a 40-foot statue of Buddha surrounded by thousands of mini-Buddha statuettes. A porcelain Buddha smiles at me from atop a bookcase in my living room. I like to think he’d grok my take on the religion that he founded. Remember the old Zen aphorism: If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Lynn Margulis was among the most creative challengers of mainstream Darwinian thinking of the late 20^th century. She challenged what she called “ultra-Darwinian orthodoxy” with several ideas. The first, and most successful, is the concept of symbiosis. Darwin and his heirs had always emphasized the role that competition between individuals and species played in evolution. In the 1960′s, however, Margulis began arguing that symbiosis had been an equally important factor–and perhaps more important–in the evolution of life. One of the greatest mysteries in evolution concerns the evolution of prokaryotes, cells that lack a nucleus and are the simplest of all organisms, into eukaryotes, cells that have nuclei. All multi-cellular organisms, including humans, consist of eukaryotic cells.

Margulis proposed that eukaryotes may have emerged when one prokaryote absorbed another, smaller one, which became the nucleus. She suggested that such cells be considered not as individual organisms but as “composites.” After Margulis provided examples of symbiotic relationships among living microorganisms, she gradually won support for her views on the role of symbiosis in early evolution. She did not stop there, however. Like Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, authors of the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis, she argued that conventional Darwinian mechanisms could not account for the stops and starts observed in the fossil record. Symbiosis, she suggested, could explain why species appear so suddenly and why they persist so long without changing.

Margulis’s emphasis on symbiosis led naturally to a much more radical idea: Gaia. The concept and term (Gaia was the Greek goddess of the earth) were originally proposed in 1972 by James Lovelock, a British chemist and inventor. Gaia comes in many guises, but the basic idea is that the biota, the sum of all life on earth, is locked in a symbiotic relationship with the environment–the atmosphere, the seas and other aspects of the earth’s surface. In fact, the biota chemically regulates the environment in such a way as to promote its own survival. Margulis was immediately taken with Gaia, and she joined Lovelock in promulgating the idea.

I met Margulis in May 1994 in the first-class lounge of New York’s Pennsylvania Station, where she was waiting for a train. She resembled an aging tomboy: she had short hair and ruddy skin, and she wore a striped, short-sleeve shirt and khaki pants. She dutifully played the radical, at first. She ridiculed the suggestion of Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins and other ultra-Darwinians that evolutionary biology might be nearing completion, in terms of not requiring any major additions or revisions. “They’re finished,” Margulis declared, “but that’s just a small blip in the 20th century history of biology rather than a full-fledged and valid science.”

She emphasized that she had no problem with the basic premise of Darwinism. “Evolution no doubts occurs, and it’s been seen to occur, and it’s occurring now. Everyone who’s scientific-minded agrees with that. The question is, how does it occur? And that’s where everyone parts company.” Ultra-Darwinians, by focusing on the gene as the unit of selection, had failed to explain how speciation occurs. Only a much broader theory that incorporates symbiosis and higher-level selection could account for the diversity of the fossil record and of life today, according to Margulis.

Symbiosis, she added, also allows a kind of Lamarckianism, or inheritance of acquired characteristics. Through symbiosis, one organism can genetically absorb or infiltrate another and thereby become more fit. For example, if a translucent fungus absorbs an alga that can perform photosynthesis, the fungus may acquire the capability of photosynthesis too and pass it to its offspring. Margulis noted that Lamarck has been unfairly cast as the goat of evolutionary biology. “We have this British-French business. Darwin’s all right and Lamarck is bad. It’s really terrible.” Margulis acknowledged that symbiogenesis, the creation of new species through symbiosis, is not really an original idea. The concept was first proposed early in this century by the Russian biologist Marachovsky. Similar ideas were set forth in the 1920′s by Ivan Emmanual Wallin in a book called Symbioticism and Origins of Species. “An absolutely beautiful, wonderful book that was totally ignored,” Margulis declared.

Before meeting Margulis, I had read a draft of a book she was writing with her son, Dorian Sagan, called What Is Life? The book was an amalgam of philosophy, science and lyric tributes to “life: the eternal enigma.” It argued, in effect, for a new holistic approach to biology, in which the animist beliefs of the ancients are fused with the mechanistic views of post-Newton, post-Darwin science. Margulis conceded that the book was aimed less at advancing testable, scientific assertions than at encouraging a new philosophical outlook among biologists. But the only difference between her and biologists like Dawkins, she insisted, is that she admitted her philosophical outlook instead of pretending that she didn’t have one. “Scientists are no cleaner with respect to being untouched by culture than anyone else.”

Did that mean that she did not believe science can achieve absolute truth? Margulis pondered the question a moment. She noted that science derives its power and persuasiveness from the fact that its assertions can be checked against the real world–unlike the assertions of religion, art and other modes of knowledge. “But I don’t think that’s the same as saying there’s absolute truth. I don’t think there’s absolute truth, and if there is, I don’t think any person has it.”

Then, perhaps realizing how close she was edging toward postmodernism, Margulis took pains to steer herself back toward the scientific mainstream. She resented depictions of her as a scientific feminist, who was trying to replace masculine concepts of nature with feminine ones. She conceded that, in comparison to such concepts as “survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw,” her symbiosis views might seem feminine. “There is that cultural overtone, but I consider that just a complete distortion.”

She rejected the notion–often associated with Gaia–that the earth is in some sense a living organism. “The earth is obviously not a live organism,” Margulis said, “because no single living organism cycles its waste. That’s so anthropomorphic, so misleading.” Lovelock encouraged this metaphor, she claimed, because he thought it would aid the cause of environmentalism, and because it suited his own quasi-spiritual leanings. “He says it’s an okay metaphor because it’s better than the old one. I think it’s bad because it’s just getting the scientists mad at you, because you’re encouraging irrationality.”

Both Gould and Dawkins have ridiculed Gaia as pseudo-science, poetry posing as a theory. But Margulis is, in at least one sense, much more hard-nosed, more of a positivist, than they are. Gould and Dawkins each resorted to speculation about extraterrestrial life in order to buttress his view of life on earth. Margulis scoffed at these tactics. Any proposals concerning the existence of life elsewhere in the universe–or its Darwinian or non-Darwinian nature–are sheer speculation, she said. “You have no constraints on the answer to that, whether it’s a frequent or infrequent thing. So I don’t see how people can have strong opinions on that. Let me put it this way: opinions aren’t science. There’s no scientific basis! It’s just opinion!”

She remembered that in the early 1970′s she had received a call from the director Steven Spielberg, who was in the process of writing the movie ET. Spielberg asked Margulis if she thought it was likely or even possible that an extraterrestrial would have two hands, each with five fingers. “I said, ‘You’re making a movie! Just make it fun! What the hell do you care! Don’t try to confuse yourself that it’s science!’”

Toward the end of our interview, I asked Margulis if she minded always being referred to as a provocateur or gadfly, or someone who was “fruitfully wrong,” as one scientist put it. She pressed her lips together, brooding over the question. “It’s kind of dismissive, not serious,” she replied. “I mean, you wouldn’t do this to a serious scientist, would you?” She stared at me, and I finally realized her question was not rhetorical; she really wanted an answer. I agreed that the descriptions seemed somewhat condescending.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she mused. Such criticism did not bother her, she insisted. “Anyone who makes this kind of ad hominem criticism exposes himself, doesn’t he? I mean, if their argument is just based on provocative adjectives about me rather than the substance of the issue, then…”  Her voice trailed off. Like other mavericks I have met, Margulis could not help but yearn, now and then, to be a respected member of the status quo, whose work merely confirmed the prevailing paradigm. But without courageous rebels like her, science would never achieve any progress.

Photo credit Wikimedia Commons.