Obama taking stage at National Defense University

Here are some points that Obama made yesterday: First, he acknowledged the enormous costs of the post-9/11 U.S. wars both to Americans and others, including thousands of civilians killed by U.S. military operations overseas. Quoting James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” Obama asserted that the U.S. war against terrorism cannot be open-ended. “This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

Obama called for the repeal of the post-9/11 “Authorization to Use Military Force,” whereby Congress granted the President enormous power to combat terrorism. “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions,” he explained, “we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”

While defending the use of drone strikes, Obama said that the U.S. should try harder to bring terrorism suspects to justice rather than simply killing them, and to minimize civilian casualties caused by U.S. attacks. He recognized that U.S. attacks can enflame opposition to the U.S., and that ultimately foreign aid and other carrots are cheaper and more effective at reducing hostility to the U.S.

Obama, whose administration has been criticized recently for spying on reporters, recognized the vital importance of a strong, free media. Saying he is “troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable,” he called on Congress “to pass a media shield law to guard against government overreach.”

Obama called once again for the closing of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, where suspected enemies of the U.S. have been held without trial indefinitely and illegally. Guantanamo “has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law,” Obama said.

A high point of Obama’s speech was his off-the-cuff response to shouted objections of an antiwar activist to drone strikes that target unidentified males merely for suspicious activities, such as meeting in war zones. After the woman, Medea Benjamin, was escorted from the room, Obama said: “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to. Obviously, I do not agree with much of what she said, and obviously she wasn’t listening to me in much of what I said. But these are tough issues, and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong.” Yeah, words are cheap, but I like these words. The man actually listens to his critics.

Needless to say, I want Obama to take much more dramatic steps away from our current militarism. I’ve floated a few ideas on this blog: Slash the U.S. military budget, start closing U.S. bases overseas. Impose a moratorium on U.S. research and development of weapons and cut back on global arms sales. Renounce pre-emptive strikes, especially those that that will probably kill civilians. Promote nonviolent activism in regions of the world with social unrest.When contemplating armed intervention in, say, Syria, impose the end-of-war rule, which decrees that lethal force should only be employed in a way that is consistent with the ultimate goal of ending war and militarism.

There are so many things that a smart, courageous, imaginative leader can do to help move humanity toward a world without war! Call me a fool, but I still have hope that Barack Obama can become that leader.

Photo by White House photographer Pete Souza.

I stupidly neglected to mention an important reason to look askance at the initiative: its biggest funder is the Pentagon, more specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to the White House, Darpa is putting up $50 million, more than the National Institutes of Health ($40 million) and National Science Foundation ($20 million).

There’s nothing new about the militarization of brain science. Ten years ago, when I was writing an article on how information is encoded in the brain, Darpa was already a major funder of research on neural coding and neural prosthetics. Darpa program manager Alan Rudolph told me back then that the agency was interested in a wide range of potential applications, including “performance enhancement” of soldiers via either implanted or external electrodes linked to electronic devices.

One specific possibility, Rudolph told me, was a brain-machine interface that would allow soldiers to control a jet or other weapon system through thought alone, as in the 1982 Clint Eastwood film Firefox. In the film, the thought-control device utilizes external electrodes, but Rudolph said that electrodes could also be implanted in the brain. “Implanting electrodes into healthy people is not something we’re going to do any time soon,” Rudolph explained, “but 20 years ago no one would have thought we’d put a laser in the eye either. So this is an agency that leaves the door open on what’s possible.” Yes, Rudolph was talking about that familiar fantasy of science fiction, bionic soldiers.

So what’s changed over the past decade? Several things come to mind: First, major media have become less concerned about the militarization of brain science. A decade ago, conservative New York Times pundit William Safire worried that science might allow powerful institutions to “hack into the wetware between our ears.” Today, few prominent journalists question Darpa’s role in the BRAIN Initative. The best critique I’ve read is by physician/blogger Peter Freed, who asserts that Pentagon funding of the BRAIN Initiative fulfills President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the growing power of the “military-industrial complex.”

Second, as I have pointed out previously, neuroscientists are pursuing military funding much more eagerly and openly, as evidenced both by the BRAIN Initiative and by this 2009 publication of the National Research Council, Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications. Overseen by leading neuroscientists, including Floyd Bloom and Michael Gazzaniga, the report advises researchers how to tap into military funding. The report advocates “collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to employ neuropharmaceuticals for general sustainment or enhancement of soldier performance, and improving cognitive and behavioral performance using interdisciplinary approaches and technological investments.”

The third change over the last decade is that the Pentagon has become much cagier about its motives in supporting brain research. Darpa now claims that its primary interest in brain science is treatment of injured soldiers. As the White House put it, Darpa hopes that brain science will “dramatically improve the way we diagnose and treat warfighters suffering from post-traumatic stress, brain injury and memory loss.”

For a more candid look at the Pentagon’s long-standing interest in neuroscience, see Mind Wars by respected bioethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania. Originally published in 2006, the book was re-released last year with updated information. As I pointed out last fall, Moreno documents the Pentagon’s interest in neurotechnologies that can enhance soldiers’ capabilities as well as disabling and monitoring the minds of enemies.

Barack Obama has asked his Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to explore the “ethical, legal, and societal implications raised by [the BRAIN] initiative and other recent advances in neuroscience.” Let’s not leave it up to government officials and appointees—and neuroscientists–to weigh the pros and cons of neuroweapons. As William Safire, writing not just about neurotechnologies but biotechnology in general, warned more than a decade ago, we need “to get this far-reaching, soul-searching debate out of the ivory tower, onto the floor, onto the tube and into print until it penetrates every sentient being’s consciousness.”

Image: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Jason Richwine, author of "IQ and Immigration Policy"

After the study’s release, The Washington Post reported that Richwine asserted in his 2009 Harvard Ph.D. thesis, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” that the average IQ of U.S. immigrants “is substantially lower than that of the white native population.” Arguing that “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ,” Richwine added, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” Richwine proposed that IQ be considered as a factor for screening immigrants.

So there it is, a neo-eugenics program, proposed by a Harvard-minted scholar employed by a prominent think tank. The Heritage Foundation quickly distanced itself from Richwine, stating that the claims of his Harvard thesis “in no way reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation.” Richwine resigned from the foundation last week.

Some pundits applauded Richwine’s downfall and attacked his Harvard research. I especially like how The Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates compiled historical evidence that race is more a social than biological phenomenon. Others defended the premise of Richwine’s thesis—that genes account for at least some of the differences in IQ scores between different ethnic groups—and deplored attacks on him as threats to freedom of speech and scientific inquiry. Journalist Andrew Sullivan says that the “effective firing” of Richwine “should immediately send up red flags about intellectual freedom.”

These are the same sorts of things said in 1994 when Harvard researchers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued in The Bell Curve that programs to boost black academic performance might be futile because blacks are innately less intelligent than whites; and in 2007 when geneticist and Nobel laureate James Watson ascribed Africa’s social problems to Africans’ genetic inferiority. (Watson is also a former Harvard professor. What is it with Harvard? Could there be something in the drinking water?)

I’m torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine. For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture.

But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere–should simply be banned. I don’t say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value.

Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior. (See Post-postscript below.)

Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies.

Perhaps instead of arguing over the evidence for or against theories linking race and IQ we should see them as simply irrelevant to serious intellectual discourse. I’m sympathetic toward the position spelled out by Noam Chomsky in his usual blunt fashion in his 1987 book Language and Problems of Knowledge:

“Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like.”

Scientists and pundits who insist on recycling racial theories of intelligence portray themselves as courageous defenders of scientific truth. I see them not as heroes but as bullies, picking on those who are already getting a raw deal in our society. It’s time to put these destructive theories to rest once and for all.

Irony Alert: It just occurred to me that two recent films, The Great Gatsby and Django Unchained, feature villains who spout pseudo-scientific theories of white superiority. The films imply that these theories are ludicrous relics of our racist past and that no modern person could possibly believe them. If only.

*Clarification: Some readers may wonder what I mean by “ban,” so let me spell it out. I envision a federal prohibition against speech or publications supporting racial theories of intelligence. All papers, books and other documents advocating such theories will be burned, deleted or otherwise destroyed. Those who continue espousing such theories either publicly or privately (as determined by monitoring of email, phone calls or other communications) will be detained indefinitely in Guantanamo until or unless a secret tribunal overseen by me says they have expressed sufficient remorse and can be released.

**Clarification clarification: The above clarification has left some readers puzzling over whether my whole post was a joke. The clarification is obviously (I thought) sarcastic, and the rest of the post is obviously (I thought) deadly earnest. So what do I really mean by a ban? Here’s one possibility. Institutional review boards (IRBs), which must approve research involving human subjects carried out by universities and other organizations, should reject proposed research that will promote racial theories of intelligence, because the harm of such research–which fosters racism even if not motivated by racism–far outweighs any alleged benefits. Employing IRBs would be fitting, since they were formed in part as a response to the one of the most notorious examples of racist research in history, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972.

Post-Postscript: Scientific American has just published two excellent article on “stereotype threat,” which is a kind of reverse placebo–or “nocebo”–effect; victims of negative stereotypes may underperform because they believe the stereotype. See here and here. Some clever critics of my post might accuse me of hypocrisy, because these articles present esearch on race and  and should be subject to my proposed ban. Obviously I’m trying to eliminate research that reinforces rather than counteracting racism. I mean, Duh.

Self-plagiarism alert: Some of the material above is recycled from my 1999 book The Undiscovered Mind.

Photo of Jason Richwine from Jason Richwine/Facebook.

Best mind-scientist ever?

I was faulted for being too critical in those works, but in retrospect I probably wasn’t critical enough. My “Freud isn’t dead” argument went as follows: In spite of enduring vicious attacks since its inception, Freudian psychoanalysis endures as a theory of and therapy of the mind not because it has been scientifically validated. Far from it. Psychoanalysis is arguably analogous to phlogiston, the pseudo-stuff that alchemists once thought was the basis of combustion and other chemical phenomena.

Psychoanalysis endures because science has not produced an obviously superior paradigm to replace it. If psychoanalysis is phlogiston, so are all the supposedly new-and-improved mind-paradigms proposed over the past century, including behaviorism, cognitive science, behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience.

An effective mind-paradigm should produce effective treatments for mental illness, right? Countless new psychotherapies have emerged since Freud’s heyday, but studies have shown that all “talking cures” are roughly as effective as each other, or ineffective. This is the notorious Dodo effect. (Those of you who believe, like my Scientific American colleague Ferris Jabr, that cognitive behavioral therapy represents a genuine advance in psychotherapy should check out this new study, which concludes otherwise.) Antidepressants, neuroleptics and other drugs can provide short-term relief for some sufferers from mental illness, but on balance they may do more harm than good.

Here’s how bad things have gotten. Many prominent psychologists, such as Richard Davidson, are promoting meditation as a therapy for troubled minds, even though the evidence for meditation’s benefits is flimsy. Think about that a moment. In spite of all the supposed advances of modern science, some authorities believe that the best treatment for mental disorders might be the method that Buddha taught 2,500 years ago. That’s like chemists suddenly telling us that phlogiston theory—or something even older, like the ancient belief that all matter is made of earth, fire, air and water–was right after all.

I’m often accused of of being too negative, of seeing the glass of mind-science as half empty instead of half full. Actually, even describing the glass as half empty is far too generous. We don’t have a genuine science of the mind yet. The question is when, if ever, will we?

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

I owe my life to the mental health system, yet as a student of science, I have always been deeply ambivalent about the state of psychiatry. Through years of alternating conviction and doubt, of romanticizing, of stigmatizing and de-stigmatizing, I have been sure of this much: in a less enlightened time, I certainly would have been in worse shape. In the animated series Dr. Katz, comedian Emo Phillips says, “I don’t know if I believe in psychiatry… around 1820 if you were having mental problems they would manacle you inside a well and pour ice-cold water on you until you almost drowned. It’s too bad they didn’t have TV commercials back then, ‘cause, you know: Ask your doctor if being manacled to the inside of a well and almost drowned is right for you.”

While I’m grateful that no one has manacled me to the inside of a well, my psychiatrist and I remind each other regularly: the science of treating mental illness is still in its dark ages. Therapy is often ineffective. Medication is rudimentary. Our Bible—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM—is a joke. This is what I say regularly, anyway, so I was surprised to feel flushed with panic when I read that the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, is moving NIMH research “away from DSM categories.” This is more than just a decision about where to place research dollars. Fundamentally, the NIMH is reconsidering everything. That’s how it feels, anyway. It feels like what little I had to cling to has been ripped away from me. It feels like being abandoned.

I wish I could speak better of our time. Our therapy is all over the place. There are competing schools of thought, ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy. To complicate matters further, there are as many therapeutic personas out there as personalities, so even if you were to choose in advance a school of thought you deemed reasonable or promising, you never know what your therapist will be like.

Our drug treatments are crude. We stumble together, doctor and patient (that’s if you’re lucky enough to be working together), searching for a tolerable combination of meds: one to mitigate each specific core problem and one each to fix the side-effects of the first. Despite advances in neuropharmacology—we know the names of several key neurotransmitters, have an inkling of what they do normally, and we know the mechanisms by which some of these drugs act—we haven’t the foggiest notion why some drugs work for some people and not others. We don’t know why some drugs work for a while in one person and then quit working. We really don’t know why drugs designated for one purpose seem to be effective in completely different arenas—for example, it is historical accident buffered by only a primitive notion of mechanism that anticonvulsants double as mood stabilizers.

The one standard psychiatry had was the DSM. It’s where we stored our collective, agreed-upon (by a few select committee members) definitions and categories of mental illness. “How many weeks have you been unmotivated? More than two? Then you are clearly clinically depressed.” In the past several decades, we’ve seen the politics of homosexuality, transsexuality, and gender identity evolve in this manual. We’ve seen lumpers and splitters get their hands on the definitions. My affliction, manic-depression, comes in many flavors: Cyclothymia, Bipolar I and II, with further codes about the relative severity of the diagnosis. Usually, my doctor officially codes me 296.80, Bipolar Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. I’ve always said that I refuse to become defined by the label. And yet… sign insurance forms with it for over a decade and see how cozy 296.80 starts to feel.

Insel says patients with mental disorders “deserve better” (than the DSM), and I believe his plan to replace it with the new Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) is well-intentioned. RDoC focuses on genetic markers and hard neural and cognitive data. That sounds great. What worries me is that the paucity of such data leaves people like me—at least temporarily—out in the cold. When I was groping for answers in high school and college, I was disappointed every time my thyroid test results came back normal (abnormalities could have confirmed hypo- or hyperthyroidism). In high school they tested my blood hormone levels and found nothing. Each time the hard data came back free of anomalies, I felt more lost. Something was causing my symptoms, and they were not all even arguably “subjective”: surges of sleep deprivation and weight loss cycled with the reverse. There was no question there was a biological basis for my problems, and when doctors shrugged, I wanted to cry. (It was disturbingly easy, on the other hand, a few years later to rattle off a list of symptoms that aligned with the DSM and have doctors hand me the Bipolar diagnosis within twenty minutes.)

I’ve lamented the lack of a test for Bipolar disorder for sixteen years. I should feel relieved about the NIMH announcement, but I’m uneasy about what comes next. When will there be a test? Suppose there is a test, and I fail? How would that explain my life? For over five years, I questioned and resisted my diagnosis. It was three years before I consented to medication. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with it, but I finally have, and like it or not, it is part of my identity.

The whole field of psychiatry is stepping back to regroup. This is what I wanted. So why do I feel more scared than I did a week ago? I’m happy if we admit that our approach thus far has been confused, misguided, ill-advised, sometimes profit-driven, and reckless, but until a wholly changed psychiatry emerges from the RDoC approach, please, please, please let’s not stop trying to figure it out. –Jessica Reed

Photo: Jessica Reed, George Johnson (right) and John Horgan, Santa Fe, 2007.

Postscript from John Horgan: Ms. Reed is my guest here on this blog, so if you respond to her essay, please be respectful. I will delete rude and abusive comments.

Postscript from Jessica Reed: This was a personal, reflective piece. I was not speaking for anyone but myself. I certainly was not speaking for those who have experienced psychiatry by force. While my experience has not been entirely positive—I would need a book to cover the gamut of experiences I’ve had—on the whole it has been more helpful than harmful. I am fortunate to have a doctor who respects my decisions and whose expertise I respect. We consider ourselves a team, and he has never asked me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with. Probably more importantly, I am fortunate to have a supportive network of family and friends. Since we have found a framework to explain a lifetime of symptoms (the DSM “construct” called bipolar disorder), my family and friends have been better able to help me cope with a host of problems. If NIMH research is successful, this construct might one day be replaced by another explanation or set of explanations that are more physiologically based. I would welcome that. My point in this piece is simply that change can be painful.

Now, in a move sure to rock psychiatry, psychology and other fields that address mental illness, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health has announced that the federal agency–which provides grants for research on mental illness–will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Thomas Insel’s statement comes just weeks before the scheduled publication of the DSM-V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Insel writes:

“While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been ‘reliability’–each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

Insel said that the NIMH will be replacing the DSM with the “Research Domain Criteria (RDoC),” which define mental disorders based not just on vague symptomology but on more specific genetic, neural and cognitive data. But then, immediately after making this dramatic announcement, Insel added that “we cannot design a system based on biomarkers or cognitive performance because we lack the data.”

Hunh? So the NIMH is replacing the DSM definitions of mental disorders, which virtually everyone agrees are profoundly flawed, with definitions that even he admits don’t exist yet! What more evidence do we need that modern psychiatry is in a profound state of crisis?

Insel’s statement is also an implicit admission that there is no real theoretical basis for drug treatments for mental illness. As I have pointed out previously, drug treatments have surged over the past few decades, while rates of mental illness, far from falling, have risen.

Ironically, some pharmaceutical companies that have enriched themselves by selling psychiatric drugs are now cutting back on further research on mental illness. The “withdrawal” of drug companies from psychiatry, Steven Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Harvard and former NIMH director, wrote last month, “reflects a widely shared view that the underlying science remains immature and that therapeutic development in psychiatry is simply too difficult and too risky.” Funny how this view isn’t incorporated into ads for antidepressants and antipsychotics.

NIMH director Insel doesn’t mention it, but I bet his DSM decision is related to the big new Brain Initiative, to which Obama has pledged $100 million next year. Insel, I suspect, is hoping to form an alliance with neuroscience, which now seems to have more political clout than psychiatry. But as I pointed out in posts here and here on the Brain Initiative, neuroscience still lacks an overarching paradigm; it resembles genetics before the discovery of the double helix.

Since I became a science writer 30 years ago, I have heard countless claims about breakthroughs in our understanding and treatment of mental illness. And yet as the NIMH decision on the DSM indicates, the science of mental illness is still appallingly primitive. Instead of forming fancy new programs and initiatives and alliances, leaders in mental health should perhaps do some humble, honest soul searching before they decide how to proceed. And they should think of what’s best not for their professions or the pharmaceutical industry but for those suffering from mental illness, who deserve better.

Postscript: See two related followup posts: “Why Buddha Isn’t Dead–and Psychology Still Isn’t a Science,” by me; and “Bipolar Writer Comments on ‘Crisis in Psychiatry,” by Jessica Reed.

Photo: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/dsm-iv-tr.

Jim and I shared many of the same obsessions. We argued endlessly about the limits of science, whether physicists will ever find a final theory, whether super strings are the real deal or just science fiction with equations. Jim looked younger than many of my undergraduate students, but he was so smart that he really gave my brain a workout. Jim eventually earned a doctorate in mathematics and physics from Stevens and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Irvine, where he now teaches philosophy.

While working on his doctorates, Jim started writing about physics for Scientific American and other publications. His work attracted attention, and he signed a contract with a major publisher to write a book about physics and economics. The Physics of Wall Street is a thoroughly researched history of modern physics and finance, with lucid explanations of fractals, derivatives and other esoteric topics. It’s also a great read, filled with compelling characters, high drama and provocative ideas. I recently emailed Jim questions related to his book. Here is our exchange:

Horgan: You’ve studied both string theory and derivatives. Which was tougher to understand?

Weatherall: String theory.  No question.  Derivatives can get complicated, but I don’t think there are any deep mysteries behind how the various contracts work.  As I see it, the problems with derivatives stem from the fact that we price them using models that are based on assumptions and simplifications, and not everyone in the industry pays close enough attention to the details of those assumptions.   On the other hand, I do think there are mathematical problems connected to the social sciences that are just as difficult as any that arise in physics.  Didier Sornette, one of the physicists I interviewed for my book, told me that he was drawn to economics because the problems were so much more difficult than in physics!  But these problems aren’t really connected to derivatives contracts.

Horgan: Speaking of string theory, has it yielded any ideas that might help mutual fund managers?

Weatherall: Not that I know of—though Jim Simons, one of the co-founders of Renaissance Technologies, whose Medallion Fund is the most successful hedge fund ever, made very important early contributions to string theory.  So perhaps Medallion has drawn on some of his early work, though I doubt it.  (And Simons isn’t very forthcoming about Medallion’s strategies!)   That said, one of the ideas I talk about in the book, due to Eric Weinstein and Pia Malaney, is connected to high energy particle physics—specifically to Yang-Mills gauge theory, which is the basis for the Standard Model of Particle Physics.  Weinstein and Malaney, and some others such as Lee Smolin from the Perimeter Institute, have explored how the notion of “path dependence” in Yang-Mills theory might be used to construct a better measure of how cost of living changes over time.

Horgan: If physics can help economics, can it also help other social sciences?  Say, sociology and political science?

Weatherall: I think there are a lot of fascinating historical connections between physics and economics.  For instance, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in economics, Paul Samuelson, was deeply influenced by the work of J. Willard Gibbs, a 19^th century physicist who helped invent thermodynamics—and turn chemistry into a rigorous mathematical theory.  Building on Gibbs, Samuelson used notions like “equilibrium” and “entropy” to explain economic phenomena.  Meanwhile, the first Nobel laureate in economics, Jan Tinbergen, had a PhD in physics, and introduced the term “model” into economics, in analogy to its use in physics.  But I don’t really think it’s right to say that physics can help economics, so much as to say that there has been a rich exchange of ideas between physics and economics over the last century, and that financial professionals could benefit from learning to think about the relationship between their mathematical models and the world in the way physicists are trained to.  As for sociology and political science—I think that people like Nate Silver have recently shown us the power of predictive modeling of social and political phenomena.  He’s not a physicist, of course, but I think he’s deeply sensitive to the sorts of issues about modeling assumptions that I argue are so important.  (Of course, there’s a long history of mathematical sociology, political science, and psychology—Silver didn’t invent this!)

Horgan: Do you think a physicist—all other factors being equal–would make a good President?

Weatherall: If all other factors really are equal, and one person is a physicist, then yes I would prefer the physicist!  But I think being president is a pretty tough job, and I don’t know of any physicists who have all the other qualities I would hope for, such as great leadership skills and a deep understanding of the legislative process.

Horgan: In Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel Foundation, a mathematician named Hari Seldon invents “psychohistory,” a theory that accurately predicts the future of societies. Do you think psychohistory will ever be possible? I.e., can social science ever become as rigorous and predictive as, say, nuclear physics?

Weatherall: No.  But frankly, I am skeptical about the idea of a “final theory” in physics, too, both because I think it may be beyond our reach and also because it isn’t clear to me that such a theory would be very useful to us for the purposes we care most about.  A final theory of economics or of finance, or of sociology for that matter, seems even more far-fetched.  Indeed, the reason we have had any success in modeling in the social sciences is that we aren’t trying to find the ultimate predictive model.

But there’s another issue that comes up in this question, concerning rigor.  I think rigor is extremely important.  But I don’t think that the difference between economics and nuclear physics comes down to rigor, at least not in the way I think you have in mind.  If you read an economics textbook, you will see lots of mathematics, with axioms and theorems and fully rigorous proofs.  You would never find that in a nuclear physics textbook.   If anything economics is more rigorous than nuclear physics.  But rigor isn’t what you need if you want to come up with useful solutions to the problems we care about.  In fact, I think that some economists have been blinded by the rigor of their work: if the mathematics is right, the theories must be true.  But the relationship between mathematical theories and the world is more complicated than that.

Horgan: Why are you so critical of Nassim “Black Swan” Taleb’s view of financial modeling?

Weatherall: I sometimes wonder if, at the end of the day, Taleb and I disagree about anything (other than how to express ourselves).  He is absolutely right about the importance of black swans—events that are completely unforeseeable, and which change everything when they occur—and of so-called “fat-tailed” probability distributions, which help us account for the likelihood of extreme events.  But I think the considerations he raises, many of which I also discuss in The Physics of Wall Street, should make us cautious and modest in our attempts to understand complex systems such as financial markets.  I do not think they show that we should give up on mathematical modeling altogether.  No model is perfect, but surely thinking about how black swans can affect us will help us make our modeling better—not because we can ever account for every unforeseen possibility, but because the recognition that there are unforeseen possibilities can guide us in how to build extra caution into our practices.

Horgan: Of all the physicists who’ve delved into economics, who most impresses you?

Weatherall: This is a tough question.  The people I wrote about in The Physics of Wall Street are uniformly brilliant and creative, but they are all remarkable for different reasons, which makes it difficult to compare them.  On the one hand, there’s Ed Thorp, who proved mathematically that card counting can be used to beat blackjack, and then went on to start the first modern quantitative hedge fund.  I think he has an utterly unique way of applying mathematical reasoning to the real world that I find very impressive.  But then if you think of someone like Benoît Mandelbrot, who spent his whole career fighting uphill battles against the academic establishment as he tried to better account for the amazing complexity of the natural world (and financial markets), it’s hard not to be amazed.  So I don’t have a simple answer.

Horgan: The New York Times reviewer of your book harrumphed that “the world’s economic problems are far too complex to be reduced to a matter of physics and mathematics.” Your response?

Weatherall: Statements like this leave me speechless.  I don’t understand how anyone could think they know in advance which problems are impossible, and which are merely very difficult.  Mathematics is an extraordinarily powerful tool.  To simply dismiss its applicability to any subject out of hand seems silly to me—all the more so if the dismissal comes at the end of an otherwise positive review of a book that gives detailed examples of how physicists and mathematicians have made concrete contributions to our understanding of economic problems.  And of course, leaving physicists aside, there are lots of economists out there who are using mathematics to understand the world’s economic problems.  If tools from mathematics and mathematical modeling can’t help us understand the world’s economic problems, what else do we need?  Or is the idea that economics is simply beyond the ken of human understanding?  If it’s the latter, then I guess I am just more optimistic, or at least, I don’t think we gain much by throwing in the towel.

Horgan: Do you think economics could still be transformed by some paradigm-shifting genius—a future Hari Seldon—or will progress be incremental?

Weatherall: I would say I know more about finance than about economics more generally, so what I say here should be taken with a grain of salt.  But my sense is that economics is too varied a field for the paradigm language to apply very effectively: economics has long been characterized by competing “schools”, such as New Keynesianism, Post-Keynsianism, New Classicism, Austrian economics, etc.  And, especially since these tend to have political associations, it is hard to imagine a new idea coming in and leading to a complete revolution.  That said, there have been a few dramatic innovations in the last 60 or 70 years that have changed wide swaths of economics.  One is game theory, which was developed in the 1940s and 1950s by mathematical physicist John von Neumann, economist Oskar Morgenstern, mathematician John Nash, and others.  Game theory provided new mathematical tools for analyzing strategic scenarios, which proved extremely useful to economists.  Another is the introduction of ideas and methods from the behavioral sciences, spearheaded by people such as psychologist Daniel Kahneman.  This movement, known as “behavioral economics,” has successfully questioned many basic economic assumptions about rational action.  I think developments such as these are the closest we will come to paradigm shifts in economics—and yes, I think they are still possible!  Note, though, that these “revolutions” have both come from people trained in fields other than economics.  This provides some evidence of the potential for outsiders to make significant progress in economic thinking.

History abounds in challenges to peace-lovers, which I call damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dilemmas. Should American colonialists have violently resisted British rule? Should Lincoln have waged war to preserve the Union and end slavery? Should the U.S. and other nations have intervened when Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait in 1990? When Serbians carried out ethnic cleansing against Muslims in Kosovo? When Hutus started slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda? When China squashed Tibet’s attempts to gain independence? Let’s say that Nazi Germany had not invaded any other countries but had carried out its plan to exterminate all German Jews. Should other nations have attempted to stop the slaughter? When, if ever, is nonviolence less moral than violence?

These are the quandaries that just-war theory purports to answer. Just-war theory has a checkered history. One of its founders, the fourth century cleric Saint Augustine, was keen on holy wars waged by Christians against infidels. He argued that killing sinners and non-believers is righteous, because it stops them from sinning. This logic helped inspire the Crusades and European conquests in the Americas. Just-war theorists have also reasoned that war, because it is so awful, should be waged ruthlessly to end it as quickly as possible. This logic justified Sherman’s brutal devastation of the South during the Civil War; Churchill’s decision to bomb civilian populations in Germany; Truman’s choice to drop atomic bombs on Japan.

Virtually all modern warriors claim–and even believe–that their cause is just. Some wars, especially “humanitarian interventions” undertaken to help others, are clearly more just than others. But once wars begin, even warriors fighting for just causes often behave unjustly. The armed intervention of the U.S. and its NATO allies against Qaddafi two years ago demonstrates this truth. Bombs dropped by NATO planes killed not only Qaddafi’s troops but also civilians NATO was supposed to be protecting. The Libyan rebels, after gaining the upper hand in certain towns, reportedly killed civilians loyal toward Qaddafi, prompting reprisals from Qaddafi loyalists. This same terrible pattern has unfolded in Syria.

Quakers, Jains and other pacifists consider the concept of “just war” to be an oxymoron. Needless to say, I’m sympathetic toward this viewpoint. I believe that NATO’s intervention in Libya—like the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—was a mistake. But I certainly relate to the Obama administration’s empathy for and desire to help helpless civilians being attacked by a cruel bully. Could I have stood by if I had the power to stop, or try to stop, Qaddafi? What about Syria’s Assad regime?

I believe people have the right to defend themselves against violent attacks. We also have the right, and sometimes the duty, to help others being threatened by bullies. But given war’s terrible unpredictability, and its tendency to exacerbate rather than solving problems, we should do all we can to solve damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dilemmas nonviolently—or, if that fails, with minimal force. I don’t have any special formula for determining exactly when and how to use force. I just have a few simple—simplistic, some might say—rules.

First, we should heed the Hippocratic command to do no harm. In other words, whatever we do, we shouldn’t make a bad situation worse, which is just what the U.S. and its allies did in Afghanistan, Iraq and, arguably, Libya. We should stop using mines, bombs and other weapons that kill indiscriminately. That includes the drones that the Obama administration has deployed to carry out assassinations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and probably elsewhere.

Minimizing casualties, even of combatants, should be the highest priority. The manner in which police employ force should be the model. In the U.S. and most other democratic countries, police are legally required to avoid hurting civilians and even criminals. If police know that a psychotic, armed killer is holding hostages in a building, they don’t immediately bomb the building or storm it with machine guns blazing. In fact, they try to capture rather than kill the killer so that he can be tried by the justice system, as occurred last week in the case of the suspected Boston bomber. Often, this means that police patiently try to talk the criminal into surrendering without hurting his hostages.

The approach I’m advocating resembles the “just policing” philosophy of the theologian Gerald Schlabach. He sees three key differences between police work and conventional warfare. I’ve already mentioned two: Police officers place the safety of civilians above all other goals, and they strive not to kill criminals but to bring them to justice. The third difference identified by Schlabach is rhetorical. Whereas wartime leaders often employ charged, emotional language to rally a nation against the enemy, competent police officials seek to tamp down rather than inflaming emotions.

These rules are restrictive enough, but I have one more that, if followed, may result in even fewer armed interventions: Whatever our response is to a damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dilemma, we should formulate it with the larger goal of abolishing war, and even the threat of war, once and for all. This means that, if we employ violence, we must do so in a way that does not legitimize violence as a solution to problems. This may seem to be a tricky, even impossible, proposition, but police pull it off when they’re doing their jobs well.

The end-of-war rule demands that we consider not only the immediate consequences of our actions but also how they will be perceived by others. Will our actions be viewed as disproportionately violent? Will they provoke reprisals? Will our intervention, which we claim is purely altruistic, look to others like muscle-flexing? A demonstration of our nifty new stealth fighter or drone? A reminder to other nations around the world of our overwhelming military superiority? An attempt to seize oil reserves? Are our actions consistent with the principle that war is immoral and needs to be abolished? Or will they make it easier for other groups to justify their violence?

These questions are directed primarily at the U.S., which—let’s face it—is a major impediment to world peace. I love my country, but I am often embarrassed by the chasm between our lofty rhetoric and our actions. We denounce Al Qaeda, rightly, for the moral nihilism and illegitimacy that it demonstrates when it kills thousands of innocent American civilians. So how does the U.S. respond? By invading two countries and killing thousands of civilians who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

We claim to revere peace and human rights yet we embark on wars of choice, in which we treat alleged enemies and even innocent civilians cruelly. We pay lip service to the principles of national sovereignty and international law while secretly carrying out deadly drone and commando raids. We spend as much on arms and armies as all other nations combined, and we are by far the biggest arms dealers on the planet. We are guilty of shameful hypocrisy. If we practiced what we preached—if we showed through our actions that we recognize how wrong war is—we Americans could lead the entire world to an enduring peace.

Image: http://daddybrain.wordpress.com.

We Americans are justifiably outraged at the attacks in Boston, which killed three innocent people and injured many more. But over the past 12 years our own nation has killed and maimed thousands of innocent people while carrying out military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Estimates of war casualties are notoriously unreliable and should always be viewed with skepticism. But according to the reputable group Iraq Body Count, between 2003 and 2011 U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq killed 14,906 civilians, including at least 1,201 children.

Such killings continue. On April 8, The New York Times reported that an American airstrike in Afghanistan killed at least 10 children and wounded at least five women. The incident was not even major news; it ran not on the front page of the Times but on page eight, because incidents like these are common. How can we condemn the killings in Boston but excuse the killing of civilians by our soldiers in war zones?

One obvious response is that, unlike the Boston bombers, the U.S. pilots did not want to harm civilians. Their target was a Taliban commander. The U.S. military prefers not to kill civilians and often apologizes when it does. Intention matters, morally and legally; intention is what distinguishes murder from manslaughter. But if you keep doing something over and over again, at some point apologizing and saying you didn’t mean it becomes meaningless. Doesn’t it?

The U.S. clearly has a double standard for judging killing of civilians, but it’s not just that we value American lives more than non-American lives. Let’s say the second Boston bomber, who is reportedly from Chechnya, holes up in a house with civilians, including some of his family members. Will law-enforcement agents call in an airstrike to blow up the Bomber along with everyone else in the house? Of course not. The agents will do all they can to protect the lives of the civilians in the building—and even the life of the Bomber!

Police will try to capture alive the Bomber so he can be tried. If he cannot afford a lawyer, the U.S. will give him one. Even mass murderers receive all the benefits of our legal system, which shows what a great civilization, in the best sense of the word, we are. (For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to ignore our unjust detainment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay as an aberration.)

But consider this irony: We treat child killers here in the U.S. with more care than we treat children in Afghanistan and other war zones. We excuse the killing of civilians by U.S. troops by saying that in war bad things happen–as if war is like a plague or natural disaster, for which we are not responsible. Killing innocent people is inexcusable, whether they live in Boston or in Afghanistan. Terrorists and criminals and deranged maniacs kill civilians. A civilized nation doesn’t. Or shouldn’t. Ever.

Postscript: Some commenters below raise reasonable objections to my criticism of U.S. military actions, which often kill civilians. I am not a total pacifist, and I do not advocate unilateral U.S. disarmament. I accept that in some cases violence is morally justified to prevent greater violence. But the U.S. is now employing military violence and the threat thereof in ways that are immoral. I present ideas about the justified use of force in past posts on just-war theory, on U.S. drone strikes (see here, here and here) and in my book The End of War. My basic argument is that when contemplating the use of lethal force, we should consider whether our actions will perpetuate war and militarism or help us transcend them. We have a moral obligation to seek the end of war, once and for all.

Post-postscript: Susan Quinlan, an Oakland-based peace activist, recently sent me an email that raises a serious objection to an assumption I make above. Our exchange follows:

“Dear John, I agree that the hypocrisy of lamenting the deaths in Boston while ignoring the far greater destruction inflicted by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. deserves our attention. Having recently read a very thought provoking article that takes a different approach to the same issue, I feel inspired to challenge you on an area where I believe you could strengthen your argument. Your claim that U.S. law enforcement does all it can to protect innocent (and innocent until proven guilty) civilians struck me as untrue. ‘Will law-enforcement agents call in an airstrike to blow up the Bomber along with everyone else in the house? Of course not. The agents will do all they can to protect the lives of the civilians in the building—and even the life of the Bomber!’ I want to remind you of the bombing of the MOVE household (and surrounding neighborhood) in Philadelphia in 1985, or the hundreds (thousands?) of people—usually young people of color— who have been killed by police with relative impunity. Aiyana Jones, Oscar Grant, Allan Blueford, Kimani Gray, to name a few. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States]. I urge you to read Mia McKenzie’s article and consider how your article might be edited to acknowledge the experiences of people of color in this country. [See http://blackgirldangerous.org/new-blog/2013/4/22/hey-white-liberals.]

Susan Quinlan, BAY-Peace: Better Alternatives for Youth

Horgan: “Susan, you’re right. I’m talking about an ideal of U.S. law enforcement that is too often not met, especially when it comes to people of color. But most Americans were horrified by the MOVE bombing, which was a rare event, whereas few care about U.S. military bombing of civilians overseas, which is routine.”

Quinlan: “Yes the MOVE bombing was uniquely horrifying, but police violence is an every day part of life in this country—at least in communities of color. I’ll bet most high school students in any inner city today could name at least one unarmed person killed by the police. It’s hard to write for a national audience because our nation is so divided in this type of experience. However, even though your point was to shed light on the international abuse of civilians (something we all need to be reminded of!), McKenzie makes a clear case for the damage that is done when those of us who are less vulnerable to domestic abuse ignore the issue.”

Photo of Afghan children allegedly killed in U.S. air strike: Associated Press/Naimatullah Karyab.

Jim knows much about many things, but he is especially knowledgeable about the history of French science. That is the topic of his monumental new book The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime, co-written with Francois Regourd. Based on exhaustive research into original archival sources (which gave Jim an excuse to spend lots of time in Paris), the book yields disturbing lessons about the historical linkages of modern science to state power, colonialism and slavery. I recently asked Jim some questions about his book, the history of science and related topics:

Horgan: To what extent can we learn about the emergence of modern science by focusing on pre-revolutionary France?

McClellan: You wouldn’t think that Old-Regime France has much to do with anything except Old-Regime France, yet important stuff happens in the history of science in the period. Conceptually, intellectually, the long eighteenth century bridges the Scientific Revolution and more modern science in the 19th century and down to today. Organizationally, institutionally and in terms of emerging norms in science, pre-revolutionary France is remarkable and incomparable. The history of modern science runs through it.

Horgan: Are there any aspects of pre-revolutionary French science that especially fascinated you?

McClellan: How can anyone seriously be interested in this topic? Of course, I have found much that is fascinating and compelling, but for most people I might as well be talking about Ming dynasty horse farms.

Horgan: Ming dynasty horse farms sound fascinating, actually. So to what extent did early French science help to promote colonialism and slavery?

McClellan: Read our book! Science and medicine were virtually “means of production” facilitating the success of European expansion, colonialism and slavery. Conversely, Western science and the enterprise of science were enriched and expanded by dint of expanding outward with European and American economic and political imperialism.

Horgan: Is there such a thing as “pure” science? Science for its own sake? Or does science always serve the interests of some group?

McClellan: Well, there’s “pure” science in the sense of disinterested natural philosophy and the pursuit of inquiry into nature that is not looking for immediate, applied ends. What science knows and can say of the world abstractly today is a great human accomplishment. By the same token, only naïve realists like you, John, don’t subscribe to the notion of the social construction of knowledge made by human groups that have their own interests, practices and sociologies. No?

Horgan: I’m the one asking the questions here. Rumor has it that you studied under historian of science Thomas Kuhn at Princeton. Did he turn you into one of those postmodernists who think science never really achieves truth?

McClellan: I took two seminars with Kuhn and saw a fair bit of him over the years I was in graduate school. My dissertation director was the eminent historian of science, Charles Gillispie. Kuhn was a realist (of sorts), but realism and postmodernism are not incompatible. Kuhn and postmodernism are self-evidently correct that science cannot make true and lasting discoveries about nature because we are all stuck within our paradigms (taken loosely), language games, cognitive structures, etc. Is anyone actually seriously going to stand up and tell me something true that is not at the same time a human creation? Let him or her start by telling me what gravity is.

Horgan: Yeah, yeah. Save it for our next faculty lunch. Can history ever become a scientific field, perhaps by incorporating more mathematical modeling or concepts from neuroscience and evolutionary biology?

McClellan: We need to make the (elementary) distinction between “history” as what happened in the past versus “history” as the scholarly, intellectual discipline that seeks to inquire into the past and explain change in the past by pursuing debates and research. The latter is already quite multifaceted, with many of its elements and methods scientific, as in a social science. It can even be theory guided, but if you mean that history should or could be like physics, then I think not. But then most sciences aren’t like physics, either.

Horgan: Sometimes physics isn’t like physics, like when it’s peddling string theory. Final question: Do you think modern scientists and engineers can benefit from knowing more history of science?

McClellan: Not really. Stephen Brush’s old 1974 article, “Should the History of Science be Rated X?,” argued that knowing the history of science is positively harmful to the pursuit of research in science.

Horgan: Just found Brush’s paper online. Provocative! Next time I teach History of Science and Technology, I’m going to force my students to read it and blame you. Thanks, Jim.

Postscript: My Stevens colleague Garry Dobbins, a philosopher in the most profound rather than simply academic sense, takes exception to the proposition of McClellan/Brush that “knowing the history of science is positively harmful to the pursuit of research in science.” Garry writes: “Readers of Einstein’s autobiographical sketch in the Schilpp volume devoted to his work will note that this was NOT the view taken by Einstein, who credits his reading of Hume and Mach with having provided a fundamental stimulus to his thinking. Then there are the many references to the work of Descartes–whose account of space Einstein took over as his own–and Newton, scattered all through his work, demonstrating his awareness of and interest in the history of discussions of science. Einstein’s intimate friendship for many years with Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap points to my mind in the same direction. Perhaps this might be a topic for a debate at Stevens between the iconoclast McClellan–”history of science is an obstacle to doing science”–and the defenders of… shall I call them “the usefulness of historical study” crowd?”

Photo: http://crcv.revues.org.

First addendum: Some critics of my criticism pointed out that my arguments against the brain initiatives could be arguments for them. In other words, big, coordinated programs could help neuroscience advance not only by boosting funding but also by encouraging sharing of data and theories, development of common methods and terminology and so on. I asked for a response to this point from a critic of the U.S. brain initiative, Donald Stein, a neuroscientist at Emory University. He replied:

“We won WWII with a big organized (more or less) collaborative project. So, some of them do work.  It’s really about the concepts and paradigms that underlie this particular project. This notion of mapping the circuitry goes back to the middle of the 19th century, and the localizationist paradigm these folks are applying is basically the same albeit with some better equipment. They completely ignore the multiple levels of organization, signaling and functions that are ever changing—not to mention no mention of the tremendously important role of all the trillions of glial cells also hanging around in the brain with no specificity of connections but with huge effects on brain dynamic.  So, it’s not about big science, its about good (or bad) science. As Americans we love to think we can just throw technology at all the worlds problems and all will be well.  But at its best, the technology should follow the concept(s) and not the other way around. Hope this helps, Don.”

Second addendum: My Scientific American colleague Gary Stix just blogged on a new study, in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, that casts doubt on the reliability of published neuroscience findings. The study’s seven authors include epidemiologist John Ioannidis, who over the past decade or so has uncovered profound flaws in peer-reviewed reports in biomedicine and other fields. (See Ioannidis’s 2011 Scientific American article “An Epidemic of False Claims.”) The report by Ioannidis and other researchers (the lead author is Katherine Button of the University of Bristol) claims that many neuroscience results lack statistical significance and hence may be false or unreplicable.

The report states that “the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low. The consequences of this include overestimates of effect size and low reproducibility of results. There are also ethical dimensions to this problem, as unreliable research is inefficient and wasteful. Improving reproducibility in neuroscience is a key priority and requires attention to well-established but often ignored methodological principles.”

This finding bolsters the argument that the Big Brain Projects–by funneling precious resources toward paradigms supported by flimsy findings–are premature.

Image: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/

[Editor's Note: I recently forced students in my Seminar on Science Writing at Stevens Institute of Technology to write short responses to my book The End of War. Kimberly Parker, a sophomore majoring in mathematics, submitted the following essay, which so impressed and heartened me that I'm sharing it with readers of this blog. John Horgan]

Our class was recently asked whether or not we felt particle physics research should receive public funding. The majority of us were opposed, our reasons being that such research has no practical value. An instrument as sophisticated and expensive as a particle collider is surely a waste of a nation’s resources.

So it might come as a surprise that plans to build a synchrotron particle collider in Jordan have received overwhelming support from countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. Scientific discovery is not the only goal being pursued. Those involved hope that this installation, appropriately dubbed SESAME (for Synchrotron-Light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East), will open lines of communication between countries that would not normally work together, and possibly inspire peace.

In John Horgan’s The End of War, he argues that war can be eradicated by simply choosing peace. To support his argument he cites Muzafer Sherif’s famous Robbers Cave Experiment, in which twenty-two fifth-grade boys in a camp were divided into two groups, Rattlers and Eagles, and kept apart for a week, each group growing suspicious of the “others.”

When brought together to compete in games, the groups were alarmingly violent toward one another, having been “manipulated into hating and fighting.” However, once the groups were presented with problems that could only be solved by cooperating with one another, the violence ceased, and they eventually became friends. Sherif saw these interactions as evidence that “traditionally hostile groups can overcome their differences if they are bound together by [a common goal].”

This idea inspired Stanford University physicist Herman Winick more than a decade ago to suggest the synchrotron being dismantled in Germany be sent to the Middle East instead of being scrapped. In the same way that the boys in Sherif’s experiment could only rent a movie if everyone contributed money, a project as expensive as SESAME can only be achieved with funding from multiple countries.

As of 2012, Iran, Israel, Jordan and Turkey have agreed to make contributions of $5 million each to fund the project, which will be based in Jordan and is expected to open in 2015. Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority are willing to give $5 million and $2 million respectively, and Egypt and the United States are both considering making contributions. The project has also been donated spare parts from a number of countries following Germany’s example, and has received funding from the European Union (Science Diplomacy).

Being willing to fund the project is one thing, but can delegates from these nations, some of which have no diplomatic relations, actually work together in the same room? Despite the hostility between countries, the “atmosphere [in preparatory meetings] was amazingly calm and businesslike” (BBC). Scientists in this region have simply decided to forget their political differences in order to pursue their research. Can the “bridges of trust” built between these scientists have an effect on the entire region? Can scientific collaboration inspire peace?

If SESAME is a success, it will not be the first time scientific research has been used to improve international relations. CERN was established in the aftermath of World War Two, with the goal of rebuilding European science while inspiring peaceful collaboration between formerly warring nations. Throughout the Cold War, the East and West were able to maintain contact through CERN by focusing on pure research, excluding military science, and welcoming scientists from all countries. Today, scientists from over 100 nations have joined CERN, and it has inspired a number of similar projects around the world (Public Service Europe).  SESAME will be the first in the Middle East.

Just as the hostility between the Rattlers and Eagles at Robbers Cave dissolved in favor of cooperation, political differences in the Middle East are being ignored in favor of pursuing shared goals. The plans to promote peace and solidarity through scientific cooperation began in 1995 with a meeting in Egypt between the Egyptian Minister of Higher Education, and Eliezer Rabinovici, of MESC and Hebrew University in Israel (Science Diplomacy). Since then, SESAME has helped to foster relationships between scientists from multiple regions, and its completion is now a tangible possibility. These nations have achieved a great deal by simply choosing to cooperate in order to pursue what they could not on their own.

At this point, it does not matter whether or not SESAME produces world-changing research, as it has already done a remarkable amount of good in the region. Pursuing this common goal has inspired meetings between nations in spite of political tension, and the completion of this project may be an enormous step in choosing peace. So, is providing funding for this project a waste of the United States’ resources?

Works Cited: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20447422

http://www.sciencediplomacy.org/perspective/2012/synchrotron-light-and-middle-east

http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/477/cern-can-be-model-for-global-co-operation

Photograph of SESAME facility in Jordan courtesy sesame.org.jo/

Goaded by these optimistic claims, I decided to post thoughts about social science that I presented two years ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education. From its inception, social science–which includes economics, sociology, anthropology, political science and social psychology—has struggled for respect. In the early 19th century, French philosopher Auguste Comte proposed a scientific hierarchy ranging from the physical sciences at the bottom up through biology to the “queen” of sciences, sociology, at the top. A science of human social behavior, Comte contended, could help humanity make moral and political decisions and construct more efficient, just governments.

Comte, who spent time in a sanitarium for mental illness, had admirers–notably John Stuart Mill–but he was viewed by many of his contemporaries as a crank. He died in 1857 without ever landing a full-time university post or indeed any steady employment. Today, social science receives much less federal funding than the biological and physical sciences do. Social scientists are accused of being “soft,” of trafficking in theories so lacking in precision and predictive power that they don’t deserve to be called scientific.

Some social scientists—I’ll call them “softies”—shrug off this criticism, because they identify less with physicists and chemists than with scholars in the humanities. Stevens Institute is a case in point: Social science falls within the jurisdiction of the Stevens College of Arts & Letters, which also encompasses philosophy, history, literature, music and my own humble discipline, science communication. As far as I can tell, my social-science colleagues aren’t seething with resentment at being lumped together with the humanities folks.

Other social scientists, “hardies,” yearn for and believe they can eventually attain the same status as, say, molecular biology. Softies and hardies have been fighting for as long as I can remember. In 1975, for example, the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson contended in his blockbuster Sociobiology that social science would only become truly scientific by embracing evolutionary theory and genetics. Horrified softies denounced sociobiology as a throwback to social Darwinism and eugenics, two of the most noxious social applications of science.

The term “sociobiology” became so controversial that it is rarely used today, except by softies as an insult. Hardies nonetheless embraced the tenets of sociobiology. They tacked the term “evolutionary” to their fields—spawning disciplines such as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary economics—and churned out conjectures about the adaptive origins of war and capitalism.

More recently, as the prestige of neuroscience has surged, hardies have discovered the benefits of including magnetic-resonance imaging and other brain-scanning experiments in grant proposals, and they have attached the prefix “neuro” to their disciplines, yielding coinages such as neuroeconomics and neuroanthropology.

Hardies also emulate the hardest science of all: physics. Thus we now have econophysics, which models economic activity with concepts borrowed from fluid dynamics, solid-state physics and statistical mechanics. (For a terrific overview, see the aforementioned The Physics of Wall Street.) This alliance has especially deep roots: Comte sometimes used the term “social physics” in lieu of sociology. But modern researchers, unlike Comte, can run their complex mathematical models on powerful computers.

Softies look askance at the aspirations of hardies—with good reason. The recent recession provides a powerful demonstration of social science’s limits. The world’s smartest economists, equipped with the most sophisticated mathematical models and powerful computers that money can buy, did not foresee—or at any rate could not prevent—the financial calamities that struck the United States and the rest of the world in 2008. As philosopher Paul Feyerabend once said: “Prayer may not be very efficient when compared to celestial mechanics, but it surely holds its own vis-à-vis some parts of economics.”

Even when fortified by the latest findings from neuroscience, genetics, and other fields, social science will never approach the precision and predictive power of the hard sciences. Physics addresses phenomena—electrons, elements, electromagnetism, the nuclear forces, gravity—that are relatively simple, stable and amenable to precise mathematical definition. Gravity works in exactly the same way whether you measure it in 17th-century England or 21st-century America, in Zambia or on Alpha Centauri. Every neutron is identical to every other neutron.

In contrast, the basic units of social systems—people—are all different from each other; each person who has ever lived is unique in ways that are not trivial but essential to our humanity. Each individual mind also keeps changing in response to new experiences—reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, watching Lord of the Rings, banging your head on the ice while playing pond hockey, having a baby, teaching freshman composition. Imagine how hard physics would be if every electron were the unique product of its entire history.

Societies also vary markedly across space and time. France in 2013 is radically different than it was in Comte’s era. The United States today is quite different than it was a century, a decade or a year ago. Social scientists are chasing a moving target, one they can never catch. As anthropologist and archetypal softy Clifford Geertz once wrote, social scientists can construct only “hindsight accounts of the connectedness of things that seem to have happened: pieced-together patternings, after the fact.”

Here is the biggest difference between social and hard science: Protons, plasmas and planets are oblivious to what scientists say about them. Social systems, on the other hand, consist of objects that watch television; listen to the radio; read newspapers, journals, books, and blogs; and consequently change their behavior. In other words, social-science theories can transform societies if people believe in them.

Even Comte made his mark. His writings inspired the founders of the republic of Brazil and the motto on the nation’s flag: “Ordem e Progress” (Order and Progress). More significantly, Comte influenced Marx, whose social theory profoundly altered the course of human history.

So we are left with a paradox: Although social science is in many respects quite weak, it can also be extraordinarily potent in terms of its impact, for ill or good, on our lives. Think of all the harm done in the name of Marx—and of social Darwinist and free-market theorists, from Herbert Spencer to Milton Friedman.

But social scientists can improve the world, too. Those I admire most combine rigorous empiricism with a resistance to absolute answers. These are researchers like anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who examines the behavior of primates and early humans for insights into modern gender roles; economist Jeffrey Sachs, who seeks ways to reduce third-world poverty; or political scientist Gene Sharp, an authority on nonviolent social activism.

Social scientists are especially dangerous when they insist—and convince others—that they have discovered absolute truths about humanity, truths that tell us what we are and even what we should be. Hence social scientists—more than any other scientists—should be humble, or at least modest, in making claims.

Here’s a more specific suggestion: Social scientists should consider identifying not with the harder sciences or the humanities but with engineering.

I started my career writing for an engineering magazine, and now I teach at an engineering school, so I know and respect engineers. They don’t seek “the truth,” a unique and universal explanation of a phenomenon or solution to a problem. In fact, engineers would scoff at such a formulation of their work. They seek merely answers to specific, localized, temporary problems, whether building a bridge with less steel or a more efficient solar panel or a smartphone with a bigger memory. Whatever works, works.

In the same way, social scientists should eschew the quest for truths about human behavior. They should instead focus more intensely on finding answers to specific problems, whether our current economic woes, the inefficiency of our health-care system or our reliance on military force to resolve disputes.

In spite of its weaknesses, social science—when applied wisely—can do even more than the hard sciences to make the world a better place. Comte was right about that.

Photo: Dieter Drescher, Flickr.

In the neurosurgery ward of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Danny, a stocky 21-year-old college student wearing blue pajamas and sporting a wispy goatee, sits on a bed watching one photo after another flash on a laptop screen. Several macho movie stars appear in rapid succession, including Arnold Schwartzenegger, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, and Mr. T, the mohawk-ed brawler who plays Stallone’s rival in the boxing film Rocky III.

At first glance, one might guess that Danny has volunteered for a Hollywood survey: Who’s your favorite action hero? But the black cables emerging from the white turban wrapped around his skull hint at his role in investigating a profound scientific question: How do thoughts form in the human brain?

Danny suffers from epilepsy, and he has had electrodes temporarily implanted into his brain to monitor seizures; ideally, the electrodes will pinpoint the neural defect triggering his seizures so it can be surgically removed. During the week or so that the electrodes remain in Danny’s brain, he has volunteered to participate in experiments aimed at understanding the underpinnings of cognition. Such research is quite rare; for obvious ethical reasons, neuroscientists have few opportunities to gather data from deep inside a living human brain.

This particular experiment touches on one of the most challenging puzzles of neuroscience: How do brain cells recognize items as complicated as a toaster oven, the number nine, a zebra, Bill Clinton, or the film character Rocky? Are single cells like transistors in a computer, or pixels on a television screen, contributing just minute pieces of information that only when combined with the output of thousands or millions of other cells form the complex pattern that means Rocky? Or can a single neuron learn to recognize that face?

Most neuroscientists adhere to the pixel view of neurons, arguing that individual cells can’t possibly be clever enough to make sense of a concept as subtle as Rocky; after all, the world’s fastest supercomputers have difficulty performing that pattern-recognition feat. But Itzhak Fried, the neurosurgeon who implanted the electrodes in Danny’s brain and who leads this UCLA research program, believes he has found “thinking cells” in the brains of subjects like Danny. If he’s right, neuroscientists may be forced to overhaul their view of how the human brain works.

A true thinking cell should be able to recognize a person or fictional character even in many different guises. Danny is a big fan of Hollywood action heroes, especially Rocky; he owns DVDs of all four films in the series and never tires of watching them. So, amid the images that flash on the laptop screen, the research team has included shots that show Rocky running through the streets of Philadelphia, staring longingly at his girlfriend Adrian, or draped in the American flag after defeating his Russian rival. Now and then, to test whether a cell’s recognition cuts across sensory modes, Rocky or some other name is spelled out on the laptop screen or uttered by an eerie synthesized voice.

As Danny peers at the laptop, signals stream from more than 100 ultra-thin electrodes, each sensitive enough to detect the murmuring of a single cell—and into the cables that emerge from his head. The cables ferry the signals across the room to a cabinet crammed with amplifiers. A computer atop the cabinet displays the readouts from Danny’s cells as a series of multi-colored lines unfolding across a screen. Every now and then, a line jerks upward, as one of Danny’s cells sputters in response to an image or name. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, the Argentinian neuroscientist overseeing this research session, points to one especially energetic squiggle and whispers, “That’s Rocky.”

The vast majority of modern brain research involves technologies such as magnetic resonance-imaging, positron emission tomography, and electroencephalography. All measure neural activity from outside the skull. Figuring out how brains work with external scanners is like studying life on a cloud-shrouded planet with satellites. Implanted electrodes, by contrast, are like probes that drop down to the planet’s surface. Electrode studies of monkeys and other animals whose brains resemble ours have yielded valuable insights, but these creatures cannot describe their subjective sensations.

A handful of other hospitals are carrying out electrode research that piggybacks on the clinical treatment of patients with epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurological disorders. But no research program approaches UCLA’s in experience, sophistication, or published results, says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology who has been collaborating with the UCLA group since 1998. “There is no one technique that’s going to give you all the answers” to the riddle of cognition, Koch says. “But this is one that’s very, very good, and we’re getting better at it.”

Fried, the driven yet affable commander-in-chief of the program, founded it in 1992 after leaving Yale. Since then more than 100 of his epileptic patients with electrodes implanted in their brains for diagnostic purposes have volunteered as subjects for basic research. From the outset, Fried has been protective of his patients and their privacy; this is the first time he has allowed a reporter to watch him and his team at work.

Fried was born and raised in Israel, and he spends several months a year working at a hospital in Tel Aviv as well as at UCLA. He flew from Israel to Los Angeles on a Sunday, and during a three-hour operation on Monday he drilled ten holes in Danny’s skull and inserted the electrodes into his brain. The following day, wearing a white lab coat over aqua scrubs, Fried strode into a conference room packed with researchers who had gathered to discuss plans for Danny. The team included two undergraduates who flew here from the University of Pennsylvania, a few graduate students from UCLA and Caltech, a couple of postdocs, and two physicians.

Fried briskly provided background on the patient: Danny is a bright, friendly young man, he said, who is looking forward to working with the research team as a way to “break the boredom” of his hospital stay. “Okay, let’s get down to practical issues,” he continued in his distinctive Israeli accent. Rapid-fire, he queried the researchers on the status of their “paradigms.” He prefers that term to “experiments,” which might suggest electrodes had been implanted in Danny’s brain primarily for research rather than diagnostic purposes.

The discussion keeps returning to problems with data storage and analysis. Several researchers asked for upgrades in equipment for storing data—which the microelectrode experiments generate by the terabyte–and Fried said he’d see what he could do. The researchers also received detailed instructions on how to grapple with a major technical challenge: electrodes in patients’ brains often detect pulses from two or more nearby neurons at the same time, which may show up in the computer as one big signal. Quiroga has written a program that mathematically unravels overlapping pulses. The process, called cluster-cutting, makes it possible to extract more information from the data, at least in principle. But some of Quiroga’s colleagues were still trying to familiarize themselves with the fine points of what the team has dubbed “Rodrigo’s code.”

The researchers had prepared more than enough studies to keep Danny from becoming bored. One called for him to view computer-generated pictures of celebrities morphing into each other: Mr. T into Will Smith, and Sly into Arnie. The objective: to see if a cell that lights up for Sly fires more slowly as the photo gradually morphs into Arnie, or just abruptly falls silent. In other words, are face-recognition cells like simple on-off switches, or can they act like dimmers?

Another paradigm, called X-Cab, is designed to yield insights into how we navigate. More than a decade ago microelectrode studies of rats and monkeys revealed place cells that light up when the animals move to a particular spot in a maze. Previous versions of X-Cab, which involves driving a virtual taxi through a cyber-city, have confirmed that humans have place cells, too, as well as view cells that respond to specific landmarks, and goal cells that respond to the driver’s ultimate destination.

Arne Ekstrom, a UCLA postdoc, and Indra Viskontas, a graduate student, had made preparations for Danny to test drive a new version of the X-Cab program, which allows the driver to pick up and discharge passengers. Fried asked if they had made the changes he requested in the paradigm. “Almost all of them,” Viskontas replied, adding that she and Ekstrom “respectfully” disagreed with some of Fried’s requests and wanted to discuss them with him.

Fried nodded. “Any more questions?” he asked, scanning the room one last time. “If not, to work.”

Back in his office, Fried recalled how he ended up overseeing this unusual program. One of his role models was Wilder Penfield, the Canadian surgeon who carried out pioneering operations on epileptics in the 1950’s and 1960’s. After removing the skull-cap of patients, Penfield electrically tickled different spots of their brains with wires and asked them what they felt; because the brain lacks pain receptors, the patients needed no anesthesia. They could report feeling a tingle in their left forefinger, seeing a blue flash, hearing a low-pitched hum.

This procedure not only helped to guide Penfield’s surgical treatment of each patient; it also yielded clues to what different parts of the brain do. “Here was somebody who was really looking at the human mind,” Fried said, “but at same time he was helping a human being.” Fried’s method is much more refined than Penfield’s. Fried typically drills a dozen holes in the patient’s skull and inserts a dozen hollow macroelectrodes, which can detect large-scale electrical waves emanating from a seizure.

Protruding from the end of each macroelectrode are as many as ten flexible microelectrodes that can detect the pulses of individual neurons. The patient’s clinical status dictates the placement of the macroelectrodes. In Danny’s case, tests suggest that his seizures originate in his frontal lobes, so Fried inserted most of the macroelectrodes in that region. He embedded one macroelectrode in Danny’s hippocampus, a minute region that underpins memory and is often implicated in epileptic seizures.

The patient’s clinical health and comfort, Fried emphasized, take precedence over research objectives. Even the most carefully planned paradigm must be set aside if the patient becomes bored, tired, frustrated, gets a headache, or just wants to be left alone. Fried carefully screens prospective colleagues to ensure that they treat his patients like human beings rather than laboratory animals.

“The person who will not do well,” he said, “is a compulsive-obsessive animal physiologist who, if he doesn’t control all the variables, falls apart.” But Fried also said he believes that “there is a responsibility” to take advantage of these rare chances to learn more about the behavior of individual neurons, which he calls the building blocks of cognition.

Following Penfield’s example, Fried occasionally does studies that involve stimulating brain cells with minute electrical jolts. In 1998, he and three colleagues discovered that a female patient burst into laughter every time they stimulated a spot at the top of her brain called the supplementary motor area. Her hilarity was not just physiological; the woman felt subjective sensations of “merriment or mirth.” She displaying a syndrome known as confabulation—she invented reasons for her hilarity, telling the researchers at one point, “You guys are just so funny… standing around.”

But most of Fried’s findings, which he has described in more than a dozen papers in such leading journals as Nature, Neuron, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involve not electrically stimulating neurons but passively listening to their chatter as a patient performs various tasks. In one set of experiments, Fried, Koch, and Gabriel Krieman, a Caltech grad student, found cells that light up both when a subject looks at an image—of a baseball, say, or a woman’s face–and when he closes his eyes and recalls the image in his minds’ eye. The results provide the most convincing evidence yet that human perception and imagination share neural circuitry.

The experiments that have attracted the most attention are those supporting the existence of “thinking cells.” The possibility of such cells has been debated at least since the 1950s, when researchers found single neurons in the visual cortex of cats and other animals that respond to simple stimuli, such as lines oriented at a certain angle or moving in a specific direction or light of a particular wavelength. Some theorists wondered whether single neurons might also respond to much more complicated stimuli, such as specific people.

Once known as gnostic cells, after the Greek word for knowledge, they were dubbed grandmother cells in the late 1960s by neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lettvin meant to make fun of—if not to dismiss–speculation that single cells could be dedicated to recognition of family members or other individuals who loom large in an individual’s mental universe. In one paper, he joked that mother-smothered neurotics such as Portnoy, the hero of Phillip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, could be cured of their Oedipal disorders by having all the mother cells purged from their brains.

Many neuroscientists found it hard to believe that a single cell could recognize an inanimate object, let alone a human being. Even objects as simple as chairs, trees, or buildings come in an almost infinite variety of forms, and the same object looks different from different perspectives or in different contexts. Neuroscientists were therefore startled in the early 1970s when experiments on monkeys by Charles Gross of Princeton turned up cells that respond selectively to hands and faces–not specific faces but faces in general.

No one had really followed up on Gross’s findings, however, until the late 1990s, when Fried and his colleagues started reporting how epileptic patients reacted to various images. Some neurons were apparently smart enough to comprehend the highly abstract concept “non-human animal.” Their neurons fired when the patient was shown a picture of a tiger, eagle, antelope, and rabbit, but not when shown pictures of humans or inanimate objects. Other cells favored images only of food, or of buildings, or of human faces. Some cells responded to all faces, but others were picky, firing for male faces but not female ones, or scowling faces but not smiling ones—or, finally, faces of specific individuals.

One of the first neurons of this type was the so-called Bill Clinton cell, which was buried deep in the amygdala of a female patient. The cell responded to three very different images of the former President: a line drawing of Clinton laughing; a formal painting of him; and a photograph of him mingling with other dignitaries. The cell remained mute when the patient viewed images of other people, including male politicians and celebrities. Fried’s group found cells in other volunteers that responded in this same highly selective way to actors, including Jennifer Anniston, Brad Pitt, and Halle Berry.

One reason celebrities have played a prominent role in Fried’s experiments is that their photographs are often easier to come by than images of a patient’s own relatives. But as part of her dissertation project on biographical memory, the UCLA graduate student Viskontas has for several years been showing patients photographs of family members. Viskontas is reluctant to reveal details about her results, which have not been published yet. But she confirms that she has found neurons that respond to a particular relative: father, mother, brother, sister, grandfather, and, yes, grandmother. The experiments have also found cells that light up when a patient sees an image of himself. Call them narcissism cells.

Viskontas is wary of over-interpreting these results or others emerging from the UCLA program. She does not believe, for example, that they support the most extreme version of the grandmother-cell hypothesis, in which cells are exclusively and permanently assigned to one person, place, or thing. The past few decades, she adds, have revealed that brain cells are versatile, or “plastic,” changing their roles in response to new experiences. The UCLA experiments may not be detecting long-term memory but so-called working-memory, in which cells are temporarily assigned to the job of representing Grandma, Jennifer, Aniston, or Rocky only as a result of the stimulation provided by the experiment.

Koch isn’t so sure. It would make sense, he argues, for our brains to dedicate some cells to people or other things frequently in our thoughts. The larger significance of the UCLA experiments, he says, is that neuroscientists may have to change their view of neurons as simple switches, transistors, or pixels. Each neuron may be more like a sophisticated computer, running customized software. After all, individual neurons can receive input from hundreds of thousands of other cells, some of which inhibit rather than encourage the neuron’s firing. The neuron may in turn encourage or suppress firing by some of those same cells in complex positive or negative feedback loops.

What excites Koch most about the thinking-cell results is the possibility that they may illuminate a fundamental component of cognition. Our comprehension of the world, he says, requires that we ignore much of the data flooding in through our senses. When we turn on a TV or reminisce about a movie, our brains somehow instantly compress raw sensory data into meaningful concepts and categories. This feat may be accomplished at least in part, Koch says, by cells that represent not just this or that particular image of Rocky but “the platonic ideal of Rocky.”

Quiroga notes that a short story by a fellow Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, spelled out what would happen to us if we lacked this capacity for compression. “Funes the Memorious” tells the tale of a youth who, after falling from a horse and striking his head, becomes gifted, or cursed, with photographic recall of every minute experience. He is so overwhelmed by the infinitude of his perceptions that he retreats into a darkened room. “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract,” Borges writes. “In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details.” Unlike Danny, Funes had lost the capacity to perceive the platonic ideal of Rocky.

In Danny’s hospital room, weighty philosophical issues yield to more practical concerns, like getting a tray on rollers properly positioned over his lap. “I’m not an engineer, just a scientist,” Quiroga says apologetically as he struggles with the balky tray. He eventually succeeds with the help of Emily Ho, who is an engineer, and the team’s chief troubleshooter.

As other researchers come and go, Ho remains in Danny’s room, manning the amplifiers, computers, and other equipment. When the readouts from Danny’s microwires go haywire, Ho starts checking lights and other appliances that might be causing electrical interference. Within minutes she traces the problem to the remote-controller that Danny uses to make his bed go up and down. After she unplugs it, the readouts return to normal.

The atmosphere in the room is surprisingly cheery. One reason is the frequent presence of Danny’s father, Bill, owner of a carpeting business. Although silence reigns during experiments, so that Danny doesn’t get distracted, between sessions Bill teases both the researchers and his son. At one point, Ho, watching signals from Danny’s neurons scroll across a computer screen, tells him that he’s got “great brain cells.”

“Are you kidding?” Bill exclaims. “He’s got lousy brain cells!”

Danny grins, even more so later after his father fumbles a styrofoam container of Chinese food, sending chicken chunks skidding across the floor. “Who’s got the lousy cells?” Danny chortles.

Bill turns serious when asked why he and his wife agreed to let their son participate in these studies. “It’s a duty,” Bill says. Danny, Bill points out, has benefited because many other patients before him have volunteered to be subjects for research. In the future, people suffering from epilepsy or other brain disorders may benefit from what the UCLA team learns from Danny.

For his part, Danny says he enjoys hanging out with the scientists and doing the experiments–”as long as there’s no math.”

Image: Scientific American; Dan Saelinger; DOMINIQUE BAYNES (prop styling).

One opponent of this public-relations stunt was Torsten Wiesel, who won a Nobel Prize in 1981 for work on the neural basis of vision. When I interviewed him in 1998 for my book The Undiscovered Mind, he grumbled that the Decade of the Brain was “foolish.” Scientists “need at least a century, maybe even a millennium,” to understand the brain, Wiesel said. “We are at the very beginning of brain science.”

I recalled Wiesel’s irritable comments as I read about big new neuroscience initiatives in the U.S. and Europe. In January, the European Union announced it would sink more than $1 billion over the next decade into the Human Brain Project, an attempt to construct a massive computer simulation of the brain. The project, according to The New York Times, involves more than 150 institutions. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is reportedly planning to commit more than $3 billion to a similar project, called the Brain Activity Map.

Some scientists are criticizing these big initiatives in ways that remind me of Wiesel and the Decade of the Brain. The New York Times quoted brain researcher Haim Sompolinsky saying of the Human Brain Project, “The rhetoric is that in a decade they will be able to reverse-engineer the human brain in computers. This is a fantasy. Nothing will come close to it in a decade.”

The U.S. mapping project, neurologist Donald Stein told The Times, is based on a view of the brain that “is, at best, out of date and at worst simply wrong. The search for a road map of stable neural pathways that can represent brain functions is futile.”

Henry Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the leader of the Human Brain Project, has been bragging about his computer model, Blue Brain, for years. But as I pointed out three years ago, his computer simulations can’t perform any cognitive functions, such as seeing, hearing, remembering, deciding, so there is no way of telling whether they are capturing essential features of brains.

I compared the models of Markram and others to those plastic brains that neuroscientists like to use as paperweights. Another analogy is the “planes” that Melanesian cargo-cult tribes built out of palm fronds, coral and coconut shells after being occupied by Japanese and American troops during World War II. “Brains” that can’t think are like “planes” that can’t fly.

In spite of all our sophisticated instruments and theories, our own brains are still in many respects as magical and mysterious to us as a cargo plane was to those Melanesians. Neuroscientists can’t mimic brains because they lack basic understanding of how brains work; they don’t know what to include in a simulation and what to leave out.

Proponents of the big brain projects are comparing them to the Human Genome Project. There are two problems with that analogy. First, the Genome Project was an impressive technical achievement, but since its completion 10 years ago it has failed to deliver any significant medical breakthroughs. [See Postscript.] Moreover, the Genome Project built upon a basic understanding of genetics. Decades before the Genome Project was launched, researchers deciphered the genetic code, the set of rules whereby specific sequences of base pairs in DNA generate specific proteins.

Neuroscientists have faith that the brain operates according to a “neural code,” rules or algorithms that transform physiological neural processes into perceptions, memories, emotions, decisions and other components of cognition. So far, however, the neural code remains elusive, to put it mildly.

The neural code is often likened to the machine code that underpins the operating system of a digital computer. According to this analogy, neurons serve as switches, or transistors, absorbing and emitting electrochemical pulses, called action potentials or “spikes,” which resemble the basic units of information in digital computers.

But the brain is radically unlike and more complex than any existing computer. A typical brain contains 100 billion cells, and each cell is linked via synapses to as many as 100,000 others. Synapses are awash in neurotransmitters, hormones, neural-growth factors and other chemicals that affect the transmission of signals, and synapses constantly form and dissolve, weaken and strengthen, in response to new experiences. Researchers have recently established that not only do old brain cells die, new ones can form via neurogenesis.

Far from being stamped from a common mold, like transistors, neurons display a dizzying variety of forms and functions. Researchers have discovered scores of distinct types of neuron just in the visual system. And let’s not forget all the genes that are constantly turning on and off and thereby further altering the brain’s operation.

Assuming that each synapse in the human brain processes ten action potentials per second and that these transactions represent the brain’s computational output, then the brain performs at least a quadrillion operations per second. Some supercomputers have already exceeded this information-processing capacity, encouraging claims by artificial-intelligence enthusiasts—notably Ray Kurzweil and other members of the Singularity cult–that computers will soon become vastly more intelligent than their creators.

But the brain may be processing information at many levels below and above that of individual neurons and synapses. Indeed, some researchers suspect that each individual neuron, rather than resembling a transistor, is more like a computer in its own right, engaging in complex information-processing. Moreover, brains may employ many different methods of encoding information.

The first neural-code candidate was discovered in the 1920s by the British neurophysiologist Edgar Adrian. When Adrian increased the pressure on tactile neurons, they fired at an increased rate. This so-called rate code has now been demonstrated in many different animals, including Homo sapiens. But a rate code is a crude, inefficient way to convey information, akin to communicating solely by humming at different pitches.

Neuroscientists have therefore long suspected that the brain employs subtler codes. In so-called temporal codes, information is represented not just in a cell’s rate of firing but in the precise timing between spikes. For example, whereas a rate code treats the spike sequences 010101 and 100011 as identical, a temporal code assumes that the two sequences have different meanings.

On a more macro level, researchers are searching for “population codes” involving the correlated firing of many neurons. The late Francis Crick favored a code involving many neurons firing at the same rate and at precisely the same time, a phenomenon called “synchronous oscillations.” Others propose that information is carried not by spikes per se but by electromagnetic fields—generated by millions of electrochemical pulses–constantly sweeping through the brain.

So far, however, the evidence for any particular code remains tentative. The brain could utilize all these codes, or none. Complicating matters further, research on artificial cochleas and other prostheses suggests that brains may devise new codes in response to novel stimuli. Given all this confusion, you can see why some neuroscientists worry that cracking the neural code may take a long, long time. Maybe a century or longer.

Of all scientific fields, neuroscience has the most potential to produce revolutionary discoveries, with enormous philosophical as well as practical import. (Particle physics is so over.) Optimists will no doubt say that the Human Brain Project and the Brain Activity Map—by boosting funding and collaboration–might help us decipher the neural code, or codes. But I fear that these big, much-hyped initiatives will turn out to be as disappointing as the Decade of the Brain. Rather than boosting the status of neuroscience, they may harm its credibility.

Self-plagiarism alert: This post contains prose from several previous articles and from The Undiscovered Mind. These passages were so perfectly crafted that I didn’t see any point in trying to improve upon them.

Image: Saad Faruque,Flickr.

Postscript: Some readers challenge my claim that the Human Genome Project “has failed to deliver any significant medical breakthroughs.” Here’s what Nicholas Wade of The New York Times, whose reporting on genetics is if anything excessively positive, said in 2010: “Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits. For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project–to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments–remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.” Wade’s assessment still holds. The Genome Project was supposed to lead to gene therapies that could cure or treat diseases stemming from genetic mutations. Last summer, European health officials approved a gene therapy for a lipid-related disorder that affects about one in a million people. So far, not a single gene therapy has been approved for commercial sale in the U.S. I reiterate: the Human Genome Project has failed to fulfill its promise, and it had a much stronger scientific foundation than the new brain projects. Do I oppose funding for genetics and neuroscience? Of course not. The potential of this research is so vast that we can never stop supporting it, even if payoffs are slow in coming. But precisely because the research is so vitally important, it should be marketed honestly.

Post-Postscript: Henry Markram, in a comment below, criticizes my criticism of the Human Brain Project, for which he is “Coordinator.” He calls my views “nonsense” and “mind-boggling,” and he urges me and other critics to “elevate your discussion a little–it sounds like the house of Babylon…and just maybe we can get out of the dark ages here.” If I didn’t know Markram’s history, I might assume that his rant was posted by an imposter trying to make him look bad. But his comments recall his 2009 diatribe against Dharmendra Modha, leader of an IBM effort to model a cat brain. After Modha received some positive attention, Markram called the cat-brain model a “scam” that is “light years away from a cat brain, not even close to an ant’s brain in complexity. It is highly unethical of Mohda to mislead the public in making people believe they have actually simulated a cat’s brain. Absolutely shocking.” Okay, Modha was guilty of hype. But Modha’s hype pales beside that of Markram. Just months before he slammed Modha, Markram said at a TED Conference: “It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years.” He indulges in more hype in his comments below, calling the Human Brain Project “probably the most rigorously reviewed proposal in the history of grants.” I find it, well, mind-boggling that the European Union has invested more than $1 billion in a project led by someone with so little credibility.

Horgan: What have we learned about the placebo effect since Henry Beecher’s landmark 1955 work The Powerful Placebo?

Brown: Beecher’s paper put the placebo effect on the map, and his general proposition that the placebo effect is ubiquitous has withstood the test of time.  He also proposed, among other things, that there is a constant placebo response across conditions. 35.2 % improve with placebo was the figure he came up with. But since then, thanks to thousands of placebo-controlled clinical trials, we have learned that some conditions are far more placebo responsive than others.  Even among pain syndromes, which for the most part show robust placebo effects, there are differences: for example, post operative pain appears more placebo responsive then migraine headaches. About 40% of mildly to moderately depressed patients improve with placebo as opposed to only 10-20% of those with obsessive compulsive disorder. Irritable bowel syndrome is highly placebo responsive–about 40% improve with placebo–whereas only about 20% of people with chronic fatigue syndrome get better with placebo.  (I cover these issues in my book’s chapter on variations).

Since Beecher, laboratory based and clinical studies have identified some of the mechanisms behind the placebo effect. Expectation is the most widely studied. Both rigorously designed and controlled laboratory studies and clinical studies as well show that what one anticipates from a treatment has a profound impact on what one does experience. In the past decade a number of studies have shown that when people get placebo but believe that they’re receiving a medication they undergo some of the same brain changes that occur with the active medicine. (I go into the details in the chapter on expectation). The effect of expectation on response to placebo and other treatments seems to rest on a fundamental psychobiologic process (whatever that means). In the past 60 years we’ve also learned about the role of conditioning in the placebo effect and–a special interest of mine–the role of certain elements of the treatment situation and doctor-patient relationship in bringing about placebo effects.

Horgan: Haven’t clinical trials eliminated concerns that many modern medical treatments, when they work, are harnessing the placebo effect?

Brown: Although drugs need to demonstrate efficacy in controlled clinical trials in order to get FDA approval, many widely used treatments are not subjected to clinical trials, including psychotherapies, surgical procedures and all the alternative treatments. And once a drug gets FDA approval it can be used in a so-called “off-label” manner for any condition including those not studied in the clinical trials that led to approval. Most drugs are frequently used “off-label” for conditions in which their efficacy has not been carefully studied or studied at all. Even placebo-controlled trials are no guarantee that a drug that looks good is not deriving its benefit from the placebo effect; double blind clinical trials are not truly double blind. Even though they are designed to eliminate the bias that comes from knowledge about whether drug or placebo is on offer, almost invariably the investigators conducting the trial know, because of side effects, who’s getting what.

Placebo effects continue to be mistaken for treatment effects with troubling frequency. As just one example, vertebroplasty–injecting cement into a fractured vertebra–was widely used as a treatment for vertebral fracture from the early 1990s through the first decade of this century until a controlled trial showed that a sham (placebo) procedure (nothing injected) was equally effective in  reducing pain and disability.  (I discuss this particular study in the first chapter)

Horgan: Do you worry that raising the awareness of patients about the placebo will undermine patients’ trust in modern medicine?

Brown: It may cause people to wonder if their improvement is “just” a placebo effect and if the treatment they’re getting is not “really” working. But I believe that most folks trust their own doctors–if not doctors in general–and will believe what their doctors tell them about a treatment’s inherent effectiveness.

Horgan: Why do you focus in your book so much on psychiatry?

Brown: My original concept for the book was to look at the placebo effect in mental health alone. But as I started to do the research and write it I decided to look at the placebo effect more generally and go beyond psychiatric illness to medicine in general. Some of the focus on psychiatry derives from the original impetus for the book. I also focus on psychiatry because my own research on the placebo effect has been in depressive illness, and the condition in which the placebo effect has been most studied is probably depression. A good bit of what we have learned about the placebo effect in depression sheds light on the placebo effect in other conditions. It’s also the case that a number of psychiatric conditions are highly placebo-responsive. Also psychotherapy has a lot in common with placebo treatment; the relationship between the two is a matter of controversy and I wanted to tackle that issue. And finally, although I believe that the placebo effect is pertinent to all illnesses and treatments, as a psychiatrist my expertise and interests lie primarily in psychiatry.

Horgan: What are the implications of the placebo effect for psychiatry? Given the side effects of many psychiatric drugs, should psychiatrists prescribe placebo treatments more often for mental disorders?

Brown: Given the high rates of improvement with placebo–close to the rates with drugs–in some psychiatric conditions such as mild to moderate depression and panic disorder–and the side effects and expense of drugs, I think it does make sense for psychiatrists to prescribe  placebo treatments in some circumstances. The placebo could be a pure placebo—i.e., a sugar pill–or a nontoxic alternative therapy given to promote a placebo effect.  I go into the details of how to go about this and the ethical and clinical implications in the last chapter. Of equal importance, psychiatrists like all health professionals should apply what is known about mobilizing the placebo to enhance the benefit of all treatments.

Horgan: Do you agree with Jerome Frank [a prominent investigator of the efficacy of psychotherapy] that psychotherapists, like shamans and faith healers, are just harnessing the placebo effect?

Brown: I wouldn’t say “just”; the placebo effect can be pretty powerful and harnessing it is not a trivial intervention. But I do agree with Jerome Frank that psychotherapists, shamans and faith healers accomplish what they do by providing the common factors of treatment–the presence of a healing authority, a healing ritual, expectation of recovery, etc.–that are also found with placebo treatment, that promote a placebo effect, and that are probably the active ingredients of all the psychotherapies.

Horgan: Have your writings about the placebo effect in psychiatry gotten you in trouble with other psychiatrists?

Brown: In 1994 the journal Neuropsychopharmacology published a paper in which I proposed that in some circumstances depression should be treated with placebo. The paper was followed by invited commentaries from three psychiatrists, two psychologists and one internist. All but the internist freaked out over the idea–it was irresponsible, unethical, dangerous, etc. I would guess that some psychiatrists will object to what I say about the commonalities between psychotherapy and placebo, and others will object to and have objected to my position on the similarity in outcome between placebo and drugs for mild to moderate depression.  Oh well.

Photo: medindia.net

For a critical overview of meditation research, see a 2000 article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine,” which I discussed in my 2003 book Rational Mysticism. Author Jensine Andresen, now a religious scholar at Columbia, reviewed more than 500 papers and books on meditation published over the last half century. Andresen cautioned that there are thousands of techniques that could be categorized as meditation; it is virtually impossible to define the term in a way that does justice to this vast diversity.

Not surprisingly, she said, attempts to measure meditation’s neurological effects with brain-wave monitors, positron emission tomography, and other techniques have yielded widely divergent findings. Meditation has been “prodded and poked by a variety of technological apparati, with inconclusive results,” Andresen commented. For every report of increased activity in the frontal cortex or decreased activity in the amygdala, there is a conflicting finding.

Investigations of meditation’s therapeutic benefits have been equally inconclusive. Meditation has been linked to a dizzying array of benefits, including the alleviation of stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, substance abuse, hostility, pain, depression, asthma, premenstrual syndrome, infertility, insomnia, substance abuse and the side effects of chemotherapy. But many of these studies have been poorly designed, Andresen remarked, carried out with inadequate controls or no controls at all.

Andresen noted that meditation has been linked to adverse side effects, too, including suggestibility, neuroticism, depression, suicidal impulses, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, psychosis and dysphoria. In an implicit reference to the cultish context within which meditation is often taught, Andresen added that meditators may become vulnerable to “manipulation and control by others,” including “unscrupulous or delusional teachers.”

A similar picture emerges from the 2007 peer-reviewed report “Meditation practices for health: state of the research,” by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The report analyzed 813 studies of meditation and concluded that most were of “poor quality.”

The report stated: “Many uncertainties surround the practice of meditation. Scientific research on meditation practices does not appear to have a common theoretical perspective and is characterized by poor methodological quality. Firm conclusions on the effects of meditation practices in healthcare cannot be drawn based on the available evidence.” If your particular form of meditation makes you feel good, do it! But don’t kid yourself that its medical benefits have been scientifically proven.

Image: http://www.ophpen.org.

I have no doubt that for Lynch and many other practitioners, TM works; that is, it makes them feel better. “Better” can include anything from feeling calmer and less stressed to having a stronger sense of purpose, meaning and connection to other people and all of life.

Of course, by this criterion Scientology, Catholicism, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, the Hare Krishna movement, Unification Church and every other cult works. (Some readers may prefer the term “religion” for some of these institutions, but I view religions as cults that have achieved respectability, in some cases by abandoning extreme tenets.) After all, numerous studies have found a correlation between health and religious faith.

The question is, why do cults work? Why do they make adherents feel better? The obvious (to me) answer is that they harness the placebo effect, the tendency of our belief that something will benefit us to be self-fulfilling. Cults share many elements that seem designed to evoke potent placebo effects:

*Specialness. Each cult usually insists on its uniqueness and superiority to all rivals. It offers not just a path to knowledge and happiness but The Path. The cult holds out the hope that diligent adherents can achieve special states of being, called salvation, enlightenment, getting clear, etc. Followers are often encouraged to persuade others to convert.

*Supernatural Founder. Each cult insists that its founder—and sometimes its current leader–possesses revelatory knowledge and powers beyond those of ordinary mortals. This prophet, savior or guru is said to be infallible, enlightened, chosen by God, semi-divine or divine. Examples: Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Reverend Moon, the Dalai Lama, the Pope, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

*Rituals. Adherence to the cult often entails ritualized practices such as meditation, yoga, prayer, signing hymns to God, attending regular group services and so on.

*Secrecy. Some cults bind adherents together with secret knowledge. When I lived in Denver in the 1970s, I had friends who joined a cult called Divine Light Mission, which taught members meditation techniques that they could not reveal to outsiders. Each TM practitioner is also given a unique, secret mantra to repeat during meditation. I once pestered two friends who had learned TM to reveal their secret mantras. One finally told me, and the other blurted out in dismay that he had been given the same mantra.

*Money. We value what we pay for, so not surprisingly religions ask devotees to donate or tithe, and some, such as Scientology and TM, charge for spiritual training. Learning basic TM costs $1000, and advanced courses cost much more. In 2002, Lynch paid $1 million for an “Enlightenment Course” taught by Maharishi Yogi himself (who didn’t even teach in the flesh!). Sigmund Freud, who was no fool, insisted that payments were a crucial component of psychoanalysis. It’s a win-win situation for therapist and patient, guru and devotee.

Speaking of Freud and psychoanalysis, I’ve written about how different psychotherapies all produce roughly the same benefits, or lack thereof, an equivalence that has been dubbed “the Dodo effect.” The term refers to an Alice in Wonderland scene in which a dodo bird, after watching Alice and other characters run a race, announces, “Everyone has won, and all must have prizes!” The Dodo effect is consistent with the hypothesis that all psychotherapies harness the placebo effect. My guess is that the dodo effect applies to all cults as well as to all psychotherapies.

Cults and psychotherapies are hardly alone in exploiting the placebo effect. In his new book The Placebo Effect in Clinical Practice, psychiatrist Walter Brown of Brown University writes that “the history of medical treatment is largely a chronicle of placebos. When subjected to scientific scrutiny, the overwhelming majority of treatments have turned out to be devoid of intrinsic therapeutic effectiveness; they derived their benefits from the placebo effect.”

So here’s another question: What happens if you just practice one of a cult’s rituals—singing in a church choir, say, or eating peyote–without buying into all the claptrap about its supernatural specialness?

Journalist Claire Hoffman, who wrote the Times Lynch profile, apparently falls into this category. She learned TM as a child and still meditates twice a day “to deal with anxiety and fatigue and to stave off occasional despair.” But she doesn’t buy Lynch’s claim that if we all embrace TM it will “change everything, for everyone.” She calls her practice “something very simple, like doing yoga or avoiding dairy.”

Hoffman might get much stronger placebo effects if she had as much faith in TM as Lynch. The more you believe in the uniquely transformative power of your cult, the more you get out of it. The only price you have to pay is your rationality.

Photo of Maharishi Yogi courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Explaining his resignation, Sahlins told Inside Higher Education, “By the evidence of his own writings as well as the testimony of others, including Amazonian peoples and professional scholars of the region, Chagnon has done serious harm to the indigenous communities among whom he did research.” Sahlins leveled similar charges against Chagnon in 2000 in a review of Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney. Sahlins seems to be an old-style lefty peacenik, which isn’t easy in our militaristic, ultra-Darwinian age. (See also anthropologist Alex Golub‘s comments on the Sahlin resignation.)

Chagnon advocates have cited a 2011 paper by bioethicist Alice Dreger as further “vindication” of Chagnon. But to my mind Dreger’s paper—which wastes lots of verbiage bragging about all the research that she’s done and about how close she has gotten to Chagnon–generates far more heat than light. She provides some interesting insights into Tierney’s possible motives in writing Darkness in El Dorado, but she leaves untouched most of the major issues raised by Chagnon’s career.

But Dreger unwittingly highlights more ironies in a controversy chock-full of them: Dreger, who has defended Margaret Mead (as I did in a 2010 post) against the vicious attacks on her by anthropologist Derek Freeman, compares Freeman’s assaults on Mead to Tierney’s on Chagnon. Here’s one irony: Mead of course embodied the kind of progressive cultural anthropology that Chagnon supposedly opposed.

But as I said in my last post, Chagnon denied simplistic claims that warfare is a genetic, instinctive behavior. Chagnon also rejected the linkage of war to competition over food and other resources. This old Marxist idea has become popular lately among green activists such as Bill McKibben, but the evidence for it is poor, as I have pointed out previously. Chagnon found that Yanamamo tribes tended to be more warlike when they had more food, as if they had more energy for fighting.

Chagnon, when he’s being especially Chagnon-ish, likes to say that Yanomamo males fought over females, or as one of his sources put it, “Women women women women!” Illness leading to accusations of sorcery was another common trigger of violence. But in his 1992 book Yanomamo: The Last Days of Eden, Chagnon proposed that lethal raids were perpetuated by fear of war and desire for revenge. In other words, the primary cause of Yanomamo war was war itself.

He wrote: “Most wars are prolonged by motives of revenge stemming from earlier hostilities.” And: “Almost everyone, including the Yanomamo, regards war as repugnant and would prefer that it not exist. Like us, they are more than willing to quit—if the bad guys also quit. If we could get rid of all the bad guys, there wouldn’t be any war.” Of course, the “bad guys” say the same thing about their enemies. The implication is that we are trapped by our own self-perpetuating militaristic culture.

Mead presented a remarkably similar view of war in her 1940 essay “Warfare Is Only an Invention—Not a Biological Necessity,” which argued that war stems primarily not from instinct or resource competition but from war itself. War is “an invention,” Mead said, a cultural innovation, like cooking, marriage, writing, burial of the dead or trial by jury. Once a society becomes exposed to the “idea” of war, it “will sometimes go to war” under certain circumstances.

Some people, Mead stated, such as the Pueblo Indians, fight reluctantly to defend themselves against aggressors; others, such as the Plains Indians, sally forth with enthusiasm, because they have elevated martial skills to the highest of manly virtues; fighting bravely is the best way for a young man to achieve prestige and “win his sweetheart’s smile of approval.” For a more detailed defense of Mead’s theory, see my 2010 post, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory: “Margaret Mead’s war theory kicks butt of neo-Darwinian and Malthusian models.”

Final irony: Mead is a favorite whipping girl of modern sociobiologists, including some prominent defenders of Chagnon. Yet according to Dreger, Mead once “vocally objected to attempts to ban a session on sociobiology at a [American Anthropological Association] meeting that Chagnon had organized.” Maybe Mead–unlike other progressive cultural anthropologists, such as Marshall Sahlins–recognized Chagnon as, potentially, a kindred spirit.

Photos of Chagnon (top, with Yanomamo man) and Mead courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

First, some background. In the summer of 2000, The Times Book Review asked me to review Darkness and sent me galleys. The book was packed with allegations of misconduct by scientists and journalists scrutinizing the Yanomamo, a tribe of Amazonian hunters and horticulturalists. Tierney’s chief villain was Chagnon, whose 1968 book Yanomamo: The Fierce People depicted Yanomamo males as, well, savages mired in chronic warfare. Chagnon’s work was embraced by sociobiology and its repackaged successor evolutionary psychology, which emphasize the genetic underpinnings of warfare and other human behaviors and downplay cultural factors.

In Darkness, Tierney accused Chagnon of projecting his belligerent personality onto the Yanomamo and of inciting their violence. (Biologist Edward Wilson inadvertently lent credence to the projection charge when he noted, in a foreword to Chagnon’s 1992 book Yanomamo: The Last Days of Eden, that he “strikes many of his friends and colleagues as basically similar [to the Yanomamo] in personality: tough, feisty, courageous.”)

Tierney’s book made headlines even before it was published. In an edited excerpt in the October 9, 2000, New Yorker, Tierney suggested that in 1968 Chagnon and geneticist James Neel might have started or exacerbated a measles outbreak among the Yanomamo by giving them a flawed vaccine. Meanwhile defenders of Chagnon denounced Tierney’s book as a “hoax.”

I was still working on my review of Darkness when I received emails from five prominent scholars: Richard Dawkins, Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser. Although each wrote separately, the emails were obviously coordinated. All had learned (none said exactly how, although I suspected via a friend of mine with whom I discussed my review) that I was reviewing Darkness for the Times. Warning that a positive review might ruin my career, the group urged me either to denounce Darkness or to withdraw as a reviewer.

I responded that I could not discuss a review with them prior to publication. (Only Dennett persisted in questioning my intentions, and I finally had to tell him, rudely, to leave me alone. I am reconstructing these exchanges from memory; I did not print them out.) I was so disturbed by the pressure from Dawkins et al—who seemed to be defending not Chagnon so much as the sociobiology paradigm–that I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to be read and discussed, to get a hearing. After all, Tierney leveled what I found to be credible accusations against not only Chagnon but also other scientists and journalists.

My November 12, 2000, review of Darkness pointed out flaws, notably a lack of adequate evidence for the charges involving the 1968 measles epidemic. But I concluded that the faults of Tierney’s book were “outweighed by its mass of vivid, damning detail. My guess is that it will become a classic in anthropological literature, sparking countless debates over the ethics and epistemology of field studies.”

I have one major regret concerning my review: I should have noted that Chagnon is a much more subtle theorist of human nature than Tierney and other critics have suggested. In fact, Chagnon has never been as much of a genetic determinist as, say, Wilson or anthropologist Richard Wrangham, who have cited Chagnon’s work as evidence that warfare has deep biological roots. (See my rebuttal of this hypothesis here.)

I first interviewed Chagnon in 1988, after Science published his report that Yanamamo killers fathered more offspring than male non-killers. Chagnon was funny and profane. He called non-killers “wimps,” and he denounced his detractors as left-wing peaceniks clinging to the “myth of the noble savage.” But when it came to the theoretical implications of his work, he chose his words with surprising care.

Saying he had been falsely accused of claiming that there is a “warfare gene,” he denied that Yanomamo warriors are innately warlike. He noted that Yanomamo headmen usually employed violence in a controlled manner; compulsively violent males often did not live long enough to bear children. Yanomamo males engaged in raids and other violent behavior, Chagnon proposed, not out of instinct but because their culture esteemed violent behavior. Many Yanomamo warriors had confessed to Chagnon that they loathed war and wished it could be abolished from their culture.

Chagnon reiterated this view when I interviewed him for “The New Social Darwinists,” a critique of evolutionary psychology published in Scientific American in October 1995. He said he was disturbed at the degree to which some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists downplayed the role of culture in human behavior. I said he sounded like Stephen Jay Gould, a vehement critic of genetic explanations of human behavior. I meant to goad Chagnon with the comparison, but he embraced it. “Steve Gould and I probably agree on a lot of things,” Chagnon said. I included this quote in “The New Social Darwinists.”

Darkness in Eldorado did not reveal these subtleties in Chagnon’s thinking, nor did my review of the book. After my review was published, the editor-in-chief of The Times Book Review called to say he’d gotten many responses to my review but one stood out: a letter signed by Dawkins et al. The editor asked if I wanted to respond to the letter and I said sure. Here is an edited version of the exchange:

To the Editor:

In Darkness in El Dorado, Patrick Tierney accuses scientists of inciting lethal violence among the Yanomami and deliberately or negligently spreading a devastating epidemic among them. These are extraordinary charges, and call for a serious evaluation. Your reviewer, John Horgan, writes only that Tierney ”should have worked harder” to prove them. He failed to mention that the charges have been examined in detail and shown to be false. The National Academy of Sciences, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Santa Barbara, have consulted the historians, physicians, epidemiologists, filmmakers and anthropologists with firsthand knowledge of the events in Tierney’s book, and they have systematically refuted its accusations….” Richard Dawkins, Oxford, England. Daniel C. Dennett, Medford, Mass. Marc Hauser, Cambridge, Mass. Steven Pinker,
Cambridge, Mass. 
E. O. Wilson,
Cambridge, Mass.

John Horgan replies:

Richard Dawkins et al. are understandably concerned about the impact of Darkness in El Dorado on the reputation of Darwinian social science. But as representatives of that enterprise, they risk further damaging its reputation–and exposing themselves as defenders not of truth but of sociobiological dogma–by declaring that Tierney’s book has been ”systematically refuted.” The evidence they cite comes not from impartial evaluations of Darkness but from partisan attacks… Tierney’s book raises painful, embarrassing questions about how scientists and journalists have treated isolated, indigenous people. I believe that in the long run, science and journalism — and the human objects of their observations — will benefit if these questions are faced rather than suppressed. “

I still stand by that statement, and by my review of Darkness. I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon—unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics—rejects the view of war as an instinct. However else Chagnon is judged, science, I am confident, will eventually confirm his view of war.

Lethal "Switchblade" drone can fit in a backpack.

*The Obama administration has pledged to relax Federal Aviation Administration restrictions by 2015 to make it easier for the 18,000 U.S. law-enforcement agencies to deploy drones for surveillance and other uses. According to a report in today’s New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security has also offered grants to help police departments purchase drones, which are “becoming a darling of law-enforcement authorities across the country.”

*The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding research on “micro-drones” that resemble moths, hummingbirds and other small flying creatures and hence can “hide in plain sight,” as one Air Force researcher told me. The Air Force is now testing micro-drones at facilities such as the “micro-aviary” at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

*These micro-drones could be armed. The Air Force has produced an extrordinarily creepy animated video extolling possible applications of “Micro Air Vehicles,” which a narrator extols as “unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal.”  The video shows winged drones swarming out of the belly of a plane and descending on a city, where the drones stalk and kill a suspect.

*The U.S. military has already deployed a drone, called “Switchblade” (see photo), that has foldable wings and can be packed into a tube not much bigger than a loaf of Italian bread. Switchblade packs a grenade-size charge.

*The Obama regime has quietly compiled legal arguments for assassinations of American citizens without a trial, as reported recently by NBC News. The administration has already carried out extrajudicial drone assassinations of at least two American citizens, the alleged Muslim militants Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed in Yemen in 2011.

*The enthusiasm of the U.S. for drones has triggered an international arms race. More than 50 other nations now possess drones, as well as non-governmental militant groups such as Hezbollah. U.S. security officials are so worried about the threat of drone terrorism that they have carried out mock attacks in a program named “Black Dart.” Defense contractors such as Procerus Technologies are now developing software that will enable drones to track and destroy other drones.

Please read my National Geographic article for more details about drones. We are on the verge of a technological speciation event that could cause more harm than good. We must stay informed to make sure that drones are deployed for beneficial rather than insidious ends.

Photo: AeroVironment.

Veronica has quirky–that is to say, unpredictable—tastes. The best present I ever got her, the one she appreciated most, was a vegetable scrubber with “natural” (hemp? flax?) bristles. After hers got old and died, she couldn’t find a replacement, and then I noticed one in a cookware shop in my hometown. Veronica was ecstatic! At getting a vegetable scrubber!

Otherwise, my gifts to Veronica often disappoint her. So I was wracking my brains about what to give her this year when I read a New York Times Magazine Q&A with Ray Kurzweil. I had my usual kneejerk aversive reaction: Why the hell is the Times giving Kurzweil free publicity—again–for his scitech-cult nonsense! And how could Google make this guy director of engineering fer crissake! But then I started wondering: Could a Singularity-style technology, like a brain implant, help me solve my Valentine’s Day Dilemma?

The Valentine’s Day Dilemma is a synecdoche of sorts for the much larger problem of subjectivity, or solipsism. Both Veronica and I—and all sentient creatures—are locked in our own private worlds. We can send signals to each other, visual, auditory and tactile, but neither of us can ever really be sure what the other is thinking. There’s lots of guesswork involved in our signal interpretation, which inevitably leads to squabbles, disappointments and so on. The dismal downside of romance.

These sorts of problems could be overcome if Veronica and I were both equipped with Stimoceivers. That is the term that brain-implant pioneer Jose Delgado (whom I profiled for Scientific American in October 2005) coined a half century ago for devices that he inserted into the brains of bulls, monkeys and humans. His Stimoceivers could detect and transmit signals from neural tissue as well as feeding signals back to the brain via electrical stimulation.

Delgado’s devices were crude. The Stimoceiver I envision would be snazzy, broadband, AI-enhanced. It would make Delgado’s device—and all our current methods of romantic communication–look as primitive as smoke signals.

Stimoceivers could have all sorts of apps for specific tasks. For example, I’d like a gift-giving app that queries Veronica’s brain about what she really wants for Valentine’s Day. Replicas of Ancient Egyptian owl figurines? Peter Max Tarot cards? Dinner at that Peruvian vegetarian restaurant in the Village? The app could do an internet search to see if the gift is available, within my price parameters, and order it, make the reservation, etc. Easy peasy lemon squeezy (as Veronica likes to say).

The app could also design a customized card–sappy/funny/naughty, whatever would delight Veronica. She will pre-arrange the settings on her Stimceiver so that it responds to my queries without alerting her conscious self, so my gifts will be a surprise.

Other apps could ensure in various ways that our Valentine’s Day dinner goes smoothly. One app could express my romantic feelings for Veronica more eloquently than I can. Call it the Cyrano de Bergerac app. Another app could filter out negative thoughts I might have about Veronica. Not that I ever have negative thoughts, but just in case. The app could also block transmission of thoughts that aren’t really negative but that she might take the wrong way.

If Veronica starts talking about something that bores me, my Stimoceiver would commandeer my language and motor centers. I’ll nod, maintain eye contact and emit appropriate verbal responses while the bulk of my brain is composing another “Cross-check” column or @Horganism twaiku.

The Stimoceiver would have total data-recording and storage capability, to resolve any disputes that might arise if Veronica and I have different recollections of something, like last year’s Valentine’s Day: “I told you I hate white chocolate when you gave them to me last year!” “I distinctively remember you saying you love white chocolate!” Let’s check our shared Stimoceiver databases and see who’s right!

In fact, such petty disagreements would never even arise, because we would have apps that anticipate and resolve potential conflicts before they even rise to the level of our awareness. It would be like having teams of super-smart troubleshooters, who never get tired and cranky, working 24/7 on our relationship down in the basements of our psyches. Our technologically enhanced love will be perfect, harmonious, unblemished by human frailty. Every day will be like Valentine’s Day, except much, much better.

I can’t wait for the Singularity.

*”Veronica” responds: Here’s the problem with this idea, Mr. Science. If this Stimoceiver existed then personalities wouldn’t matter much, would they?  You could just implant a Stimoceiver in any physically healthy, good-looking specimen and: Whammo! The perfect boyfriend. And even then, relationships would get boring.  If all that mattered was that I actually get the right present, then I’d just buy it myself.  You’re eliminating the dance that makes life interesting.  And where’s the challenge?  Pretty soon we’re just those fat people in WALL-E zipping around on scooters and living in their minds. Be mine! “Veronica” XXOO

Image: Paul Loughridge, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lockwasher.

One source of my current concern is a freshman composition course I’m teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology. Last week, my students read an old Michio Kaku piece, which explains-celebrates dark matter, super strings, cosmic strings (remember them?), inflation and other physics phantasms. (Kaku’s essay is one of many fun, science-y selections in our textbook, A World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers, edited by Lee Jacobus.)

After my students and I chewed over Kaku’s style, we switched to substance. I asked if taxpayers should pay for research on particle physics and cosmology when the results will probably have no practical payoff. Out of 25 students, 24 said no, and the lone hold-out was ambivalent; he would support the research if the economy were stronger.*

The students didn’t want to fork over a slice of their future earnings for research that would not provide a “return on investment,” as one put it. Knowledge of what the universe is made of, where it came from and where it’s headed didn’t count as an adequate “return.” “The government shouldn’t pay for things that don’t directly benefit us,” one person said, as others nodded. “Let some billionaire support that stuff if he wants to,” someone else chimed in.

Around the same time, I was checking out responses to a question that science-book agent John Brockman just posted Edge.org: “What should we be worried about?” Brockman has been posing questions like this to his stable of professional eggheads, or Edgeheads, annually since 1998. Reading over responses to Brockman’s question, I was struck by how many Edgeheads are fretting over the future of particle physics in particular and pure science in general. Here are edited excerpts from Edge.org:

Lisa Randall, physicist: “I worry that people will gradually stop the major long-term investments in research that are essential if we are to answer difficult (and often quite abstract) scientific questions… The applications are not obvious so there has to be an underlying belief that finding the answers to deep and significant questions about how the universe evolved, how we evolved, what we are made of, what space is made of, and how things work is important. The ability to find answers to these questions is one of the characteristics that makes human beings unique and gives meaning to our lives. Giving this up for short-term ends would ultimately be a tragedy. In my specific field of particle physics, everyone is worried. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve been to two conferences within the last week where the future was a major topic of discussion and I’m at another one where it’s on the agenda. Many ideas are presented but my colleagues and I certainly worry whether experiments will happen.”

Peter Woit, mathematical physicist: “During the 20th century the search for a theory of how the physical world works at its most fundamental level went from one success to another… After centuries of great progress, moving towards ever-deeper understanding of the universe we live in, we may be entering a new kind of era. Will intellectual progress become just a memory, with an important aspect of human civilization increasingly characterized by an unfamiliar and disturbing stasis? This unfortunately seems to becoming something worth worrying about.”

Keith Devlin, mathematician: “Are we about to see advances in mathematics come to an end? Until last year, I would have said no. Now I am not so sure. Given the degree to which the advances in science, engineering, technology, and medicine that created our modern world have all depended on advances in mathematics, if advances in mathematics were to come to an end, then it’s hard to see anything ahead for society other than stagnation, if not decline.”

Steve Giddings, physicist: “[W]e face a crisis within the deepest foundations of physics. The only way out seems to involve profound revision of fundamental physical principles… The current problems at the foundations link to multiple big questions—and I fear it will be no small feat to resolve them.”

Lawrence Krauss, physicist: “There may be… new limits looming on our ultimate ability to probe nature—made manifest because of the truly remarkable successes of physical theory and experiment in the past 50 years—due to the accident of the circumstances in which we find ourselves living, which could, at least in principle, change the way fundamental science may progress in the future… Perhaps then, at the extremes of scale empirical science will reach its limits, and we will be reduced to arguing about what is plausible, rather than testing our ideas… I should conclude by stressing I do not believe that any of these possible limits will lead to the end of science itself, or even the end of physics, as some naysayers have proposed in the past. There are enough remarkable and perplexing aspects of the universe we can measure to keep us going for a very long time.”

To this naysayer, Krauss sounds like a man whistling past the graveyard.

I was mulling over the Edgehead comments when someone sent me a link to a Nature essay that was like the rotten cherry on a sundae of gloom. The title, “Scientific genius is extinct,” is misleading. Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist who studies scientific creativity, doesn’t claim that modern scientists aren’t as smart as their predecessors. He suggests, rather, that revolutionary discoveries are less likely today because scientists have already discovered so much.

“Our theories and instruments now probe the earliest seconds and farthest reaches of the universe,” he writes, “and we can investigate the tiniest of life forms and the shortest-lived of subatomic particles.” Hence scientists will produce no more “momentous leaps,” ideas that are truly surprising rather than “just extensions of already-established, domain-specific expertise.”

“Future advances are likely to build on what is already known rather than alter the foundations of knowledge,” Simonton adds. “One of the biggest recent scientific accomplishments is the discovery of the Higgs boson—the existence of which was predicted decades ago.”

Compare the concerns of Simonton and the Edgeheads to what I wrote 17 years ago in The End of Science. I argued that “given how far science has already come, and given the physical, social and cognitive limits constraining further research, [pure] science is unlikely to make any significant additions to the knowledge it has already generated. There will be no more great revelations in the future comparable to those bestowed upon us by Darwin or Einstein or Watson and Crick.”

Edgeheads and other pessimists, welcome to the end-of-science bandwagon.

*Clarification/confession: After polling my freshman comp class, I asked 40 students in two other classes whether they thought particle physics and cosmology should be supported by tax dollars, and about 1/3 said yes. Perhaps students in my freshman comp class were more hostile to theoretical physics because they had to read Michio Kaku’s essay–plus two other assigned pieces, my recent critique of his gee-whizzy proselytizing for particle physics and our $1,000 bet on the prospects for a unified theory.

On the other hand, science’s limits have never been more glaringly apparent. In their desperation for a “theory of everything”—which unifies quantum mechanics and relativity and explains the origin and structure of our cosmos—physicists have embraced pseudo-scientific speculation such as multi-universe theories and the anthropic principle (which says that the universe must be as we observe it to be because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it). Fields such as neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics and complexity have fallen far short of their hype.

Some scholars, notably philosopher Thomas Nagel, are so unimpressed with science that they are challenging its fundamental assumptions. In his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel contends that current scientific theories and methods can’t account for the emergence of life in general and one bipedal, big-brained species in particular. To solve these problems, Nagel asserts, science needs “a major conceptual revolution,” as radical as those precipitated by heliocentrism, evolution and relativity.

Many pundits calling for such a revolution are peddling some sort of religious agenda, whether Christian or New Age. Nagel is an atheist, who cannot accept God as a final answer, and yet he echoes some theological critiques of science. “Physic-chemical reductionism,” he writes, cannot tell us how matter became animate on Earth more than three billion years ago; nor can it account for the emergence in our ancestors of consciousness, reason and morality.

Evolutionary psychologists invoke natural selection to explain humanity’s remarkable attributes, but only in a hand-wavy, retrospective fashion, according to Nagel. A genuine theory of everything, he suggests, should make sense of the extraordinary fact that the universe “is waking up and becoming aware of itself.” In other words, the theory should show that life, mind, morality and reason were not only possible but even inevitable, latent in the cosmos from its explosive inception. Nagel admits he has no idea what form such a theory would take; his goal is to point out how far current science is from achieving it.

I share Nagel’s view of science’s inadequacies. Moreover, I’m a fan of his work, especially his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, a quirky take on the mind-body problem (which inspired my column “What Is it Like to Be a Cat?“). So I was a bit disappointed by the dry, abstract style of Mind and Cosmos. The book seems aimed primarily at philosophers and scientists—that is, professionals—rather than lay readers.

Nagel acknowledges that his attempt to envision a more expansive scientific paradigm is “far too unimaginative.” He might have produced a more compelling work if he had ranged more widely in his survey of alternatives to materialist dogma. For example, complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman has postulated the existence of a new force that counteracts the universal drift toward disorder decreed by the second law of thermodynamics. Kauffman suspects that this anti-entropy force might account for the emergence and evolution of life. Nagel mentions Kauffman’s theory of “self-organization” in a footnote but doesn’t elaborate on it. (I critiqued the field of complexity research in a recent column.)

According to the physicist John Wheeler, quantum mechanics implies that our observations of reality influence its unfolding. We live in a “participatory universe,” Wheeler proposed, in which mind is as fundamental as matter. Philosopher David Chalmers, Nagel’s colleague at New York University, conjectures that “information,” which emerges from certain physical configurations and processes and entails consciousness, is a fundamental component of reality, as much so as time, space, matter and energy.

I never took Chalmer’s hypothesis seriously—in part because it implies that toaster ovens might be conscious—but I would have appreciated Nagel’s take on it. (For a critique of the ideas of Wheeler and Chalmers, see my column “Why information can’t be the basis of reality.”)

Nagel touches briefly on free will, when he suggests that our moral and aesthetic choices cannot be reduced to physical processes, but I expected a deeper treatment of the topic. Many leading scientists, from Francis Crick to Hawking, have argued that free will is an illusion, as much so as God and ghosts. This perspective, it seems to me, stems from a cramped, hyper-reductive view of causality, which I wish Nagel had opposed more vigorously.

These qualms asides, I recommend Nagel’s book, which serves as a much-needed counterweight to the smug, know-it-all stance of many modern scientists. Hawking and Krauss both claim that science has rendered philosophy obsolete. Actually, now more than ever we need philosophers, especially skeptics like Socrates, Descartes, Thomas Kuhn and Nagel, who seek to prevent us from becoming trapped in the cave of our beliefs.

Lehrer alert: This review was originally published in the Canadian newspaper The Globe & Mail.

That is not to say that we shouldn’t question Diamond’s propositions about humanity. The chief value of his books—like those of Steven Pinker, Edward Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and other popular scientific synthesizers (all of whom I’ve criticized)—is that they provoke informed debate about major issues facing us: What are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Where do we want to go?

I’m not crazy, for example, about Diamond’s discussion of pre-state warfare in The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? He presents a kind of soft version of the claim of Richard Wrangham, Steven LeBlanc, Pinker and Wilson—the Harvard Hawks—that war was an affliction of pre-state societies that civilization helped to solve. As I have pointed out on this blog and in The End of War, the evidence for this thesis is flimsy; according to the archaeological record, lethal group violence dates back only about 10,000 years, making warfare far more recent than art, music, religion and other cultural inventions.

And yet Diamond’s discussion of war, in spite of my quibbles, is intelligent, informed, interesting. The same is true of his analysis of societies’ treatment of the elderly. Diamond devotes a chunk of World Until Yesterday to this subject, and he also focused on it when he spoke at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, last Friday.

The topic is urgent, given that throughout the industrialized world birth rates are falling while people are living longer. As a result, in the U.S. and other first-world nations, the elderly are the fastest-growing section of the population. “We have more old people and fewer young people than ever,” Diamond says.

Some traditional societies, Diamond notes, venerate the aged. In rural Fiji, for example, old people live with and are cherished by their children, who may even pre-chew food for their toothless parents. Diamond quotes a Fijian acquaintance who was “outraged that many old people are sent to retirement homes where they are visited only occasionally by their children. He burst out accusingly, ‘You throw away your old people and your own parents.’”

Diamond clearly sympathizes with this viewpoint. He criticizes the preference of companies for young job candidates; mandatory retirement rules, which are especially common in Europe; and a medical practice called age-based allocation of resources, in which hospitals give young patients priority over the old. He deplores the paucity of grey-haired, wrinkled actors in ads for soft drinks, beer and cars. “Instead, pictures of old people are used to sell adult diapers, arthritis drugs and retirement plans.”

Listing these indignities, the 75-year-old Diamond sometimes sounds like, well, a grumpy old man. He acknowledges that older people today “enjoy on the average much longer lives, far better health, far more recreational opportunities and far less grief from deaths of their children than at any previous time in human history.” Moreover, living in a nursing home is surely preferable (isn’t it?) to being abandoned, pushed off a cliff or buried alive, the fate of the old and infirm among many tribal societies.

Diamond loves the fact that in some illiterate societies the elderly served as valuable sources of information about rare events. He describes a Southwest Pacific island in which cyclones periodically wiped out crops and other domesticated food sources. After such disasters the young relied on old people to tell them which wild plants were edible. Today, Diamond points out, the young can learn so much from books and the internet that they don’t need the memories of elders. But that’s a good thing, right?

Diamond’s recommendations for improving the lives of the aged are also anti-climactic. He proposes that the elderly visit schools to tell students about wars, depressions and other historical events that they have witnessed first-hand. Grandparents could also stay busy taking care of their childrens’ children, replacing costly, unreliable babysitters and daycare centers. Reading this section I thought, What if grandparents don’t want to talk to bored, sullen teenagers or take care of squalling, unruly toddlers?

Diamond, to his credit, doesn’t pretend that his suggestions “will solve this huge problem” of aging. His goal is not to solve all of our enormous social problems but to draw our attention to them and challenge us to find better solutions. He succeeds. What more can you ask of a social scientist?

Photo credit: UCLA.

Postscript: In response to my two columns on Jared Diamond’s new book, I received the letter below from Stephen Corry, director of Survival International, an international tribal-rights organization. Corry also critiqued The World Until Yesterday in a column in The Daily Beast. Like Corry, I disagree with Diamond’s broad claims about tribal warfare, especially before the origin of states. But I stand by my assertion that Diamond’s treatment of tribal societies is far more subtle and respectful than Corry, Wade Davis and other critics claim. John Horgan

To the Editor: Jared Diamond, in his new book, The World Until Yesterday, makes two erroneous assertions which, if they go unchallenged, will set back by several decades the movement to secure for the world’s 150 million tribal people the right to exist, and be themselves, in the 21st Century.

The first, no less wrong for being a common prejudice, is that today’s tribal people are in effect living fossils, the last vestiges of human society as it once was. The obvious endpoint to this argument is that today’s tribes will in the end ‘evolve’, and ‘progress’, in the way everyone else has. This tired notion has been debunked by experts for years.

The second, and this one’s received remarkably little publicity, is that tribal people engage in constant warfare, and need the benevolent hand of the state to stop them killing each other. This will raise a hollow laugh in West Papua, an area Mr. Diamond knows well, where 100,000 Papuans have been killed by the Indonesian authorities since 1963.

If you think all this sounds a bit like the arguments put forward by missionaries, explorers and colonial governments from the 16th Century onwards, to justify the ‘pacification’ and conquest of ‘savages’ in far-off lands, you’re right.  And it’s just as harmful now as it was then.

Stephen Corry, Director, Survival International, San Francisco, CA