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In the quest toward finding the correct theory of quantum gravity, physicists have been testing the holographic principle which, they say, is a key property of any valid theory of quantum gravity.

Scientists have found a new way to produce sugar from corn stalks and other crop waste, potentially opening a new pathway to sustainable biofuels.

As the search for geologic hydrogen - a potential clean source of energy beneath the ground - continues, some researchers are turning to mountains

An adaptation of cognitive behavioural therapy that focuses on mindfulness and tolerating distress has shown promise for relieving chronic pain

25 years ago, a $1 million reward was promised to anyone who could solve one of seven incredibly hard maths riddles. With only one of them now solved, what will it take to crack the rest?

The JWST continues to live up to its promise by revealing things hidden from other telescopes. One of its lesser-known observations concerns Free-Floating Planets (FFP). FFPs have no gravitational tether to any star and are difficult to detect because they emit so little light. When the JWST detected 42 of a particular type of FFP in the Orion Nebula Cluster, it gave astronomers an opportunity to study them more closely.

I’ve never read or listened to Ezra Klein, who does podcasts and columns at the NYT and elsewhere, but the impression I got from others was that he was wickedly smart.  I don’t listen to podcasts, his main metier, so I didn’t know. I have to say, though, that I’m not that impressed by the views he expresses in this 1.5-hour interview (bottom) with Ross Douthat, also of the NYT.

Douthat has been pushing his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, all over the place, including in the NYT and the Free Press . I’ve discussed some of his theses before on this site (see here), and, as you might imagine, I haven’t been a fan. Not only does he say that everyone has a longing for religion to fill their “god-shaped hole,” but he says that Roman Catholicism, which (not coincidentally) is his own religion, is the right faith—the way to a happy afterlife. And Douthat’s bought pretty much the whole Vatican hog, including the afterlife, Satan, assorted demons, purgatory, and angels. I was surprised to see that, released on Feb. 11, the book is only at Amazon position 2,825 this morning; I thought that—given his claim that Americans are longing for faith—his written lucubrations would be in the top 100 at least, since I’ve never seen a book promotion so relentless in the MSM.

But I digress. In the video below, Douthat and Klein, both eloquent and clearly smart people, make a great deal of the unevidenced: the things that science and “materialism” can’t explain and, therefore, constitute for both men evidence for either God or “something beyond materialism.” And I have to say that I was terrifically bored, but don’t let my reaction put you off.

Here are the YouTube notes by Klein with the timings of relevant parts.

I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation. It’s about religion and belief – at this moment in our politics, and in our lives more generally.

My guest and I come from very different perspectives. Ross Douthat is a Catholic conservative, who wrote a book called “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” I’m a … Californian. But I think everyone would enjoy this conversation — believers, skeptics and seekers alike. [JAC: I didn’t!]

Some questions touched on: Is the Trump administration Christian or pagan? How do Christian Trump supporters reconcile the cruelties of this administration with their faith? Can religious experiences be explained by misfiring neurons? Should organized religions embrace psychedelics? Can mystery provide more comfort than certainty?

And if you do enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Douthat’s new New York Times Opinion Audio show “Interesting Times,” available wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube.

The segments of the video (click to go to them):

0:00 Intro
1:11 Trump: man of destiny?
19:55 Political power, cruelty and Godliness
36:25 Religion and spirituality in the modern world
43:18 The mysteries of the universe…
49:31 Aliens! Fairies! (and some Catholic history)
58:25 Contending with uncertainty and evil
1:07:02 Psychedelic experiences
1:23:36 Official knowledge
1:36:02 Book recommendations

The NYT has a written transcript here (archived here). I did not read it exept to check the quotes, so my reactions below are based on listening.

I started listening 36 minutes in. after the politics were over, and Ceiling Cat help me, I made it to the end, but still required a stiff dose of Pepto-Bismol afterwards. But perhaps you want to listen to the politics, too.

So here’s the evidence that Douthat takes for the existence of the Christian (and Catholic) god. I’ll make no attempt to be cohesive here; I’ll just give my thoughts, Douthat’s and Klein’s assertions, and some quotes.

First, I was greatly disappointed to see Klein (who appears to be a slightly religious Jew susceptible to the “supernatural”) not pushing back on some of Douthat’s more extreme claims, including the existence of Jesus and an omnipotent loving God, of course, but also of angels and demons (he mentions the efficacy of exorcism), saints, life after death, and even trickster beings (“fairies”). Douthat’s primary evidence for God is the existence of people’s religious and spiritual experiences, which, he avers, have considerable overlap between different faiths. In other words, he bases the existence of his religion—and his being—on what people feel. To him that’s as strong, or even stronger, evidence than scientific evidence and materialism. But it’s nothing new. It’s popular now because it’s being pushed by the press as an “important” book.

In fact, Douthat and Klein both reject materialism, largely because it can’t explain these experiences and consciousness, as well as the existence of a world that, Douthat asserts, was “created with us in mind.” It makes me wonder why God created all those other lifeless planets. Is it for our amusement or wonder? And if there is life on some planets, was that also created by God, and did the aliens experience visitations by Jesus?

As Douthat says, “a new atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world and its complexity, in its unruliness, in the experiences people have, in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe”. . . and then mentions quant-mechanical entanglement and the many-worlds hypothesis as a speculations beyond materialism that makes his faith in God stronger. I don’t think a physicist would find these either non-materialistic or evidence for the divine. As in everything that both men espouse in this show, our failure to understand something gets figured into Douthat’s Bayesian statistic that raises the probability of God’s existence.

For Klein, the unexplainable experiences can be spiritual ones as well as religious ones. But Klein leaves no doubt that religious and spiritual explanations, as well as other phenomena that science doesn’t (yet) understand, are supernatural explanations, and “supernatural” means “nonmaterialistic.”

Douthat:

I mean the view that all of existence — life, the universe and everything — is finely reducible to matter in motion. That matter is primary and mind is secondary, rather than the other way around. I don’t mean materialism in terms of Madonna’s “Material Girl” or something like that — although the two can be connected.

He clearly thinks it’s the other way around (i.e. mind isn’t material), and firmly rejects the view—Klein seems to agree—that consciousness and the mind are nonmaterial phenomena that give Douthat evidence for God and Klein evidence for the supernatural. Douthat, it seems, is apparently unaware of the advances that science has made showing that consciousness is indeed a material phenomenon (for one thing, you can predictably remove it with anesthesia and then restore it).

Now to be fair, Klein, who apparently has tried drugs like ayahuasca, notes that predictable effects on the mind can also be effected by psychedelic substances, Douthat rejects this materialism, claiming that religious experiences are very different from psychedelic ones (having taken psychedelic drugs in the past, I have strong doubts about this, though I haven’t experienced Jesus). And, to further counteract this, Douthat argues that the religious experiences of all religions are pretty much the same.  As I recall from reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, this isn’t true, even for Western religion. I wonder, for example, if the religious experiences of a Buddhist monk living his whole life in a cave are the same as those of a Christian talking to Jesus. The only common factor is something beyond the worldly.

Giving a sop to other religions—though Douthat thinks that Roman Catholicism is the “right” one (and by that he clearly means you don’t go to heaven if you embrace the wrong one, don’t confess, don’t take communion, and the like)—he does say that all religions have a core set of “truths” that are pretty much the same. I doubt it.  Hard-core Muslims not only reject the divinity of Jesus or the necessity of believing in the tripartite God if you want to live in Paradise after death. And the morality of faiths is very different. If you’re an apostate Muslim, you should be killed, and you have to pray five times a day.  (I haven’t mentioned the cargo cults, which to me qualify as religions, too.)

Further evidence that Douthat adduces for God are the fact that the universe seems “fine tuned” for life (I won’t go into the many alternative explanations), and that a broken radio started playing spontaneously at Michael Shermer’s wedding with no materialistic explanation (I kid you not; read the transcript).

Now Douthat’s Achilles’s heel, which Klein mentions, is the existence of natural evil: childhood cancers, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like—things that kill innocent people for no obvious reason. These don’t evince an omnipotent or omniscient God. Why do they happen?

Douthat says we don’t know:

I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved.

I’m not here to tell you I’ve resolved the problem of evil. The problem of evil is a real problem. It’s a real issue. Again, I think it’s an issue that’s there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testaments.

So, although he hasn’t resolved this HUGE problem, Douthat is confident that it’s part of God’s plan. (What an evil God it must be to give children leukemia!).  Yet I see no difference between his view one one hand and his denigration of science for having confidence  that materialism will someday resolve the problem of consciousness on the other.  After all, science is making progress on consciousnes, but has made no progress in understanding the existence of natural evil. And it never will, for all we have are smart people like Douthat, and a coterie of theologians, who get paid to simply ruminate on the problem but, in the end, can make no progress. How can your mind tell you why God permits natural evil? Through a revelation?

And I’d like to ask Douthat this: “If the Chcristian God says that we can get to heaven only by believing in him (and going “through Jesus”), why doesn’t God make his presence more clearly?  He could, you know, and then everyone would have the “right” religion!”  And here I don’t mean “religious experiences,” but a physical manifestation that could be documented to such an extent that it can’t be doubted. (I give an example of this scenario in Faith Verus Fact.) God surely wants everyone to go to heaven, for he’s a good God, so why didn’t he show up in first-century Palestine. What happens to all those Egyptians and Babylonians?

At the end, Klein asks Douthat to recommend three books for the audience. Here they are:

Stephen Barr, “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith”

After” by Bruce Greyson (about the afterlife)

“Mind and Cosmos” by Thomas Nagel

Of these I’ve read only Nagel’s book, which is teleological without being religious and somewhat confused. You can find several critiques of the books by Big Minds online.

There are two big problems with this discussion. The first is Douthat’s uncritical embrace of Roman Catholicism and all its doctrine. And the mask slips a bit when he says this:

I don’t know what your metaphysical perspectives were as a kid. But I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins and believe that death is just the absolute end and never could be anything else.

I just think it’s, in fact, more probable than not that after you die, you will meet God, whatever God is, and be asked to account for your life and so on. And that’s not inherently comforting. It’s quite terrifying.

Well, what is comforting–or discomforting–need not be true.  But since neither Douthat nor Klein is a materialist, there is very little discussion about the evidence for Jesus, God, Satan, angels, demons, and so on. They are taken as a given, presumably evidenced through revelation or experience.

And that brings us to the second problem. Though Klein and Douthat are buddies, Klein does not push him hard on his views. It’s more a spiritual bro-fest than a discussion, which is perhaps why I found it so tedious. Douthat is making a name for himself even though he spouts the same old pieties (worse–he buys the whole Vatican hog)

Here are some quotes from a reader who called this to my attention.

Ezra Klein interviewing Ross Douthat. Klein hardly endears himself to rationality. But Douthat is talking about the reality of angels, demons, fairies, and that Christianity and Judaism being divinely founded – poor Buddhists left out… The NYTimes gives Douthat uncritical time. Shame on them for giving him prominence in the paper of record.

. . .Perhaps I am being harsh and insensitive to their friendship. But Klein’s failure to challenge RD’s belief in demons, angels, fairies, etc saddened me. Hence my “Klein hardly endears himself to rationality” comment.

If there is a religious revival going on, the juggernaut is being pushed by the mainstream media. I have no idea why save for the tiny flattening of the curve showing the proportion of “nones” over the last two years.

Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential to be used for the determination of electron antineutrino mass. The result is an important step paving the way for future antineutrino experiments.

Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential to be used for the determination of electron antineutrino mass. The result is an important step paving the way for future antineutrino experiments.

Graphene is a 'miracle material': mechanically extremely strong and electrically highly conductive, ideal for related applications. Using a unique method physicists have now made graphene drastically more stretchable by rippling it like an accordion. This paves the way for new applications in which certain stretchability is required (e.g. wearable electronics).

A new study shows that adding fruit and microbes to alfalfa, a protein-rich feed for livestock, improves fermentation and biogas production.

A new space mission is open for business. Last week, we got a look at science images from NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer) mission. The mission will now begin science operations, taking 3,600 unique images a day in an effort to create a 3D map of the sky.

The recent discussions about autism have been fascinating, partly because there is a robust neurodiversity community who have very deep, personal, and thoughtful opinions about the whole thing. One of the issues that has come up after we discussed this on the SGU was that of self-diagnosis. Some people in the community are essentially self-diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. Cara and I both reflexively said this was not a good thing, and then moved on. But some in the community who are self-diagnosed took exception to our dismissiveness. I didn’t even realize this was a point of contention.

Two issues came up, the reasons they feel they need self-diagnosis, and the accuracy of self diagnosis. The main reason given to support self-diagnoses was the lack of adequate professional services available. It can be difficult to find a qualified practitioner. It can take a long time to get an appointment. Insurance does not cover “mental health” services very well, and so often getting a professional diagnosis would simply be too expensive for many to afford. So self-diagnosis is their only practical option.

I get this, and I have been complaining about the lack of mental health services for a long time. The solution here is to increase the services available and insurance coverage, not to rely on self-diagnosis. But this will not happen overnight, and may not happen anytime soon, so they have a point. But this doesn’t change the unavoidable reality that diagnoses based upon neurological and psychological signs and symptoms are extremely difficult, and self-diagnosis in any medical area is also fraught with challenges. Let me start by discussing the issues with self-diagnosis generally (not specifically with autism).

I wrote recently about the phenomenon of diagnosis itself. (I do recommend you read that article first, if you haven’t already.) A medical/psychological diagnosis is a complex multifaceted phenomenon. It exists in a specific context and for a specific purpose. Diagnoses can be purely descriptive, based on clinical signs and symptoms, or based on various kinds of biological markers – blood tests, anatomical scans, biopsy findings, functional tests, or genetics. Also, clinical entities are often not discrete, but are fuzzy around the edges, manifest differently in different populations and individuals, and overlap with other diagnoses. Some diagnoses are just placeholders for things we don’t understand. There are also generic categorization issues, like lumping vs splitting (do we use big umbrella diagnoses or split every small difference up into its own diagnosis?).

Ideally, I diagnostic label predicts something. It informs prognosis, or helps us manage the patient or client, for example by determining which treatments they are likely to respond to. Diagnostic labels are also used for researchers to communicate with each other. They are also used as regulatory categories (for example, a drug can only have an FDA indication to treat a specific disease). Diagnostic labels are also used for public health communication. Sometimes a diagnostic label can serve all of these purposes well at once, but often they are at cross-purposes.

Given this complexity, it takes a lot of topic expertise to know how to apply diagnostic criteria. This is especially true in neurology and psychology where signs and symptoms can be difficult to parse, and there are many potential lines of cause and effect. For example, someone can have primary anxiety and their anxiety then causes or exacerbates physical symptoms. Or, someone can have physical symptoms that then cause or exacerbate their anxiety. Or both can be true at the same time, and the conditions are “comorbid”.

One main problem with self-diagnosis is that a complex diagnosis requires objectivity, and by definition it is difficult to be objective about yourself. Fear, anxiety, and neuroticism make it even more difficult. As a clinician I see all the time the end-results of self-diagnosis. They are usually a manifestation of the patient’s limited knowledge and their fears and concerns. We see this commonly in medical students, for example. It is a running joke in medical education that students will self-diagnosis with many of the conditions that they are studying. We discuss this with them, and why this is happening.

This is partly the Forer Effect – the tendency to see ourselves in any description. This is mostly confirmation bias – we cherry pick the parts that seem to fit us, and we unconsciously search our vast database of life experience to search for matches to the target symptoms. Yes, I do occasionally cough. My back does hurt at times. Now imagine this process with cognitive symptoms – I do get overwhelmed at times. I can focus on small details and get distracted, etc. With the Forer Effect (the most common example of this is people seeing themselves in any astrological personality profile), the more vague or non-specific the description, the stronger the effect. This makes psychological diagnoses more susceptible.

To make an accurate diagnosis one also need to understand the different between specific and non-specific symptoms. A fever is a symptom of an acute or subacute Lyme infection, but it is an extremely non-specific one as fevers can result from hundreds of causes. A targeted rash is a specific sign (so specific it is called pathognomonic, meaning if you have the sign you have the disease). (BTW – a symptom is something you experience, a sign is something someone else sees.) So, having a list of symptoms that are consistent with a diagnosis, but all non-specific, is actually not that predictive. But the natural tendency is to think that it is – “I have all the symptoms of this disease” is a common refrain I hear from the wrongly self-diagnosed.

Also, it is important to determine if any symptoms can have another cause. If someone is depressed, for example, because a loved-one just died, that depression is reactive and healthy, not a symptom of a disorder.

Further, many signs and symptoms are a matter of degree. All muscles twitch, for example, and a certain amount of twitching is considered to be physiological (and normal). At some point twitching becomes pathological. Even then it may be benign or a sign of a serious underlying neurological condition. But if you go on the internet and look up muscle twitching, you are likely to self-diagnose with a horrible condition.

An experienced clinician can put all of this into perspective, and make a formal diagnosis that actually has some predictive value and can be used to make clinical decisions. Self-diagnosis, however, is hit or miss. Mainly I see false-positives, people who think they have a diagnosis based on anxiety or non-specific symptoms. These tend to cluster around diagnoses that are popular or faddish. The internet is now a major driver of incorrect self-diagnosis. Some people, or their families, do correctly self-diagnose. Some neurological conditions, like Parkinson’s disease, for example, tend to have fairly easily detected and specific signs and symptoms that a non-expert can recognize. Even with PD, however, there are subtypes of PD and there are some secondary causes and comorbidities, so you still need a formal expert diagnosis.

With autism spectrum disorder, I do not doubt that some people can correctly determine that they are on the spectrum. But I would not rely on self-diagnosis or think that it is automatically accurate (because people know themselves). The diagnosis still benefits from formal testing, using formal criteria and cutoffs, ruling out other conditions and  comorbidities, and putting it all into perspective. I also am concerned that self-diagnosis can lead to self-treatment, which has a separate list of concerns worthy of its own article. Further, the internet makes it easy to create communities of people who are self-diagnosed and seeking self-treatment, or getting hooked up with dubious practitioners more than willing to sell them snake oil. I am not specifically talking about autism here, although this does exist (largely attached to the anti-vaccine and alternative medicine cultures).

There is now, for example, a chronic Lyme community who help each other self diagnosis and get treated by “Lyme literate” practitioners. This community and diagnosis are now separate from scientific reality, existing in their own bubble, one which foments distrust of institutions and seeks out “mavericks” brave enough to go against the system. It’s all very toxic and counterproductive. This is what concerns me the most about an internet fueled community of the self-diagnosed – that it will drift off into its own world, and become the target of charlatans and snake oil peddlers. The institutions we have an the people who fill them are not perfect – but they exist for a reason, and they do have standards. I would not casually toss them aside.

The post The Problem with Self-Diagnosis first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Being able to quickly pinpoint the location of events such as landslides and pyroclastic flows will help rescue efforts, say the team behind a new technique for doing so

She may have gotten her start as Houdini's sidekick, but Rose Mackenberg became a giant of unmasking fraudulent mediums.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Kids love dinosaurs. I know I certainly did. So much so that when I was in kindergarten and still hadn’t learned to read, I kept pestering my brother (5 years my elder) to keep bringing home books about them from the school library just so I could look at the pictures. He finally asked our mother to intervene and explain to me that they simply wouldn’t let him renew the same books every week.

And once kids—or adults, in the case of frequenters of the Creation Museum—get past taking The Flintstones as gospel, they want to know, “What killed the dinosaurs?” and “Why did those big dangerous dinos all die when so many other creatures survived?”

When I was growing up in the 1950s, the usual answer was that while they sure were big, as the late, great Muhammad Ali would say of his opponents, they “didn’t have a chaaaance” because they were just “too slow, too dumb,” and yes, “too ugly!” Smaller, but much smarter, nice furry mammals showed up on the evolutionary time scale and gobbled up the dinosaur’s eggs. After all, those newly arrived mammals were obviously superior in all but size—they had insulating hair rather than conductive scales, carried their young rather than laying eggs exposed to predation, and being warm-blooded, they were active and fast, while those dinos were coldblooded, slow, and so, opposite to Count Dracula, only active while the sun shined. And dino brains were kinda small—especially compared to their huge body size. But those mammals had much bigger brains relative to their much smaller body size! A Darwinian drama where the smart, little guys win, ready-made for an animated Disney drama (cue in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring) or a classroom film—Triumph of the Nerdy Mammalians.

There have been other explanations for Dino-geddon, before and since. We now know that the dinosaurs did not go extinct because:

• They just got too big. Why not? Because the biggest dinosaurs lived in the Jurassic Period (201.4 to 145 million years ago), which was millions of years before the geologically sudden mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, approximately 66 million years ago.
• The arrival of those smart little egg-eating mammals caused their extinction. Why not? Because mammals had actually coexisted with dinosaurs for 150 million years before Dino-geddon.
• They were thick-headed, but thin-shelled. Why not? Some of their eggs had thin shells, some thick. And living birds (whom we now know are their direct lineal descendants) and reptiles (collateral cousins) have survived quite well laying their own thin-shelled eggs.
• Climate change made the earth get hotter or colder—so all the dinosaurs hatched as males. (Sex is determined by outside temperature among living gators and crocs; too hot or too cold yields females, while males need the “just right” temperatures). Why not? It’s somewhat hard to test whether dinosaurs even had temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), but why did the direct ancestors of today’s TSD gators and crocs survive?
• The dinosaurs really were just too dumb! Why not? As best we can guess, the intelligence of various dinosaur species varied. But they all went extinct, not just the dumber ones. (Well, kind of. Their bird-brained relatives not only survived but thrived). And whatever their intelligence, they were certainly brighter than many other animal groups that did survive. And it wasn’t just dinosaurs—around half of the species living at that time went extinct.

As for the aforementioned, foreordained, straight-ahead Darwinian drama often shown in the schoolbooks of my time that started with a mindless amoeba at the bottom of the Scala Natura and progressed up ascending rungs of increasing intelligence and consciousness until modern man— usually, White and kinda Nordic—emerged at the top? Alas, as with most such stories, it just ain’t so.

We now know what actually did happen. In 1980, geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis, proposed that an asteroid collision wiped out the dinosaurs. Since then, evidence for their hypothesis has accumulated, as has evidence against the aforementioned alternatives.

So it wasn’t bad brains that got the big, dumb, ugly dinos. It was bad luck!

But what if that asteroid had hit some other piece of space junk and altered course just enough to miss hitting the Earth? Skeptic icon Stephen Jay Gould famously opined in Wonderful Life (1989), “Replay the tape [of life] a million times … and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”

Paleontologist Dale Russell with his Dinosauroid—a hypothetical, human-shaped theropod, invented during the early 1980s and sculpted by Ron Séguin (Photo credit: Canadian Museum of Nature)

Right? Well, maybe half right—but then, maybe not. Seven years before Gould declared that evolution (indeed, history) operated more on the basis of contingency than on necessity, paleontologist Dale Russell, Curator of Fossil Vertebrates at the Canadian Museum of Nature, had proposed, as a thought experiment, the possibility that some relatively brainier dinosaur lineage might have eventually evolved into a really big-brained dinosauroid that would have had forward-looking eyes, an erect stance, grasping hands, and big brains had that asteroid only missed Planet Earth. Why? Because of convergent evolution, that is, when two organisms look and/or behave in a very similar way, even though they’re only distantly related. And that means they’ve evolved those similarities independently rather than inheriting them from a common ancestor. Convergence in evolution happens regularly—as does non-convergence.

Here are a few examples:

• Sharks, dolphins, and the extinct ichthyosaurs each developed a streamlined body to swim far faster than any Olympian.
• Camera-type eyes evolved separately in mammals, and earlier in cephalopods (octopuses and squids).
• Some sort of opposable “digit” evolved separately in primates, opossums, koalas, giant pandas, and chameleons that allows for grasping—though the primates may have first evolved theirs to move through the trees. The giant panda hijacked a wrist bone so it could be used for grasping leaves. And only millennia later did humans hit upon using their opposable thumbs to type text messages.
• Flight—a major accomplishment in transformation of locomotion—evolved separately among insects, in the extinct pterosaurs, and in mammals (bats) and birds, only to be lost later when there was an advantage in doing so to assist in running (ostriches) or swimming (penguins).
• Echolocation is a pretty demanding feat of bioengineering. Yet it evolved separately among cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and bats.
• A form of bio-antifreeze evolved separately in Arctic fish and in Antarctic fish, which are only very distantly related.
• There are many more examples, including really unpleasant ones like stinging and blood sucking.

My personal favorite example of convergent evolution is Ankylosaurus (left) and Glyptodon (right). I had an Ankylosaurus in my childhood set of dinosaur models and was surprised to find out those two tank-like herbivores weren’t even distantly related when I first encountered Glyptodon in a textbook years later.

Ankylosaurus was indeed a dinosaur that lived from 160–65 million years ago; Glyptodonts, however, were mammals that lived only 38 million to 10 thousand years ago, of which Glyptodon is the best known species. Each had an armor-like carapace (like a Galápagos tortoise), large body size, stiff back, and club-like tail that the fossil record shows evolved to become stiff before the tip of the tail expanded into a dangerous weapon. Each evolved similar traits to take advantage of a particular ecological niche because despite the difference in time, there can only be a few good solutions to similar selective pressures.

So, play the tape only few times, and some of those times something very similar happens (though not always). The real questions then are not if convergent evolution can happen, but when, why, and how much it happens.

Not Necessarily the Same, but Similar

So if the asteroid had veered off just a little along the way, maybe some dinosaurs could have evolved higher intelligence and, starting with Troodon, evolved into something like Russell’s hypothetical forward looking, erect (which Troodon already was) and big-brained dinosauroid, with grasping hands that could have inherited the Earth. Even before Russell, another Skeptic icon, Carl Sagan, musing on extraterrestrial intelligence in The Dragons of Eden, speculated that, had they not gone extinct, one group of dinosaurs might have achieved the brain size and intelligence sufficient even to develop an octal numbering system, given their number of digits.

The point here is that Russell’s argument was a thought experiment to prompt us to consider what evolution is and how it works.

The Meaningful Measurement of Minds

Defining intelligence for humans is hard enough, and trying to measure it has been open to debate and criticism. But since neither extinct species nor ETs can take IQ tests how can anyone even speculate as to their intelligence?

Well, in the case of extinct species, but not ETs until and unless some UFOlogist produces the real remains of one, we often have their fossilized skeletons. Particularly instructive is the brain case—the cranial bones that once enclosed their brain. And from the brain case we can get an endocast—an internal cast of the brain once so enclosed. Sometimes we have to make an internal cast by inserting some rubbery material. But sometimes we get lucky and nature has already made an endocast through fossilization. The advantage here is that we not only have the overall size and shape of the brain, we also can determine the proportions occupied by the different brain areas (lobes) and in some cases even something about the extent of folding. And folding is important because it allows more brain matter to fit within a skull of given size.

So much for brain size, what about intelligence? Over the long haul of evolutionary time and the wide range of animal species we can observe a strong relation between neural size and neural complexity on the one hand and general behavioral complexity and adaptability on the other. And this is more so within a particular evolutionary lineage than when comparing across lineages. Of course, there will be exceptions for specialized abilities and the strength of the relation becomes harder to tease out if we try to compare individuals or groups within a given species.

Brain size, then, gives us one metric by which to estimate the intelligence of both living and extinct animals. But we know from observing living animals that brain size varies a lot just based on sheer body size. Given that neurons have a relatively uniform size across species, a more meaningful measure of neural complexity is brain size relative to body size. And that’s why for so long dinos have been considered so dumb. Despite their massive body sizes (as estimated from their fossilized skeletons) they had really minuscule brains (as approximated by endocasts). Well, at least most did.

Neuroscientist Harry Jerison developed an even more sophisticated and accurate measure termed the Encephalization Quotient (EQ). And from EQs it’s then possible to estimate the number of Extra Neurons. The Encephalization Quotient for a species is the ratio between its observed brain size (whether measured directly at autopsy/ necropsy or from an endocast) and the predicted brain mass for that species given its size and taxon. More technically, it’s predicted from a nonlinear regression across a range of related reference species. By comparing the measured EQ of a given species to the predicted EQ for an animal in its taxonomic group having its average measured body size, we can get a measure of its Extra Neurons. And Extra Neurons are like extra RAM in your computer or smart phone—the more of them you have, the more information you can process and the faster you can do so.

Ratios of Brain Size to Body Size & Encephalization Quotients for Various Species

As the figures in the table show, across a range of living species, the Ratios of Brain Size to Body Size and especially the Encephalization Quotients correspond pretty well with both our armchair estimations of the intelligence of living animals and with their behavioral complexity and learning capacity as determined by controlled experiments.

What about those dumb dinos? Well, the four-legged herbivores such as the well-known Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops, all fall below living gators and crocs (at about 1.0). But bipedal carnivores, a group that includes T. rex, have higher EQs. Some scientists have even claimed these carnivorous dinosaurs achieved EQs comparable to those of a baboon! More recent estimates have scaled those back to the crocodilian range. Troodon’s EQ ends up being possibly five times higher than that of your average dino. So, if the asteroid had missed, could dinosauroids have inherited the Earth?

The big problem for Russell’s thinking exercise is that dinosaurs likely had brains similar to birds. Assuming that their brains had the same avian nuclear type of pallial organization, rather than the mammalian-type cortical organization, no dinosaur could have achieved the brain complexity required for higher mammalian-type behavioral complexity. Or so it was assumed.

Mammalian cortical brains have a laminar architecture— they are arranged in layers, one atop the other. (Think plywood or chocolate seven-layer cake). Avian brains have a pallial or nuclear architecture—clusters of similar nerves separated by a mass of different type cells. (Think knots in a sheet of pine or meatballs in a large tray of spaghetti). The cortical organization of mammalian brains allows more layers to be packed in one on top of the other (like stuffing as many clothes in your suitcase as possible). With the brain cells close to one another, transmission is short, simple, and fast. And the layers can be folded, like squishing up a towel, so that you can fit even more in a given space. Avian-type brains, on the other hand, simply could not achieve the volume or the neural transmission speed required to support higher intelligence. At least that was the theory. However, as Albert Einstein is said to have said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice—in practice there is.”

If the asteroid had missed, could dinosauroids have inherited the Earth?

When inferring behavior, brain size, or even structure, let alone from the endocasts of extinct species, we only see through a glass darkly. Looking more closely at the actual behavior of living birds has now demonstrated that while most birds can fly, their minds are anything but flighty. Pigeons can distinguish cubist style paintings from impressionistic styles, crows not only make useful tools but pass on those skills to others, and parrots can learn words and use them to communicate with us. Pigeons can even be trained to communicate their differing internal experience upon receiving uppers, downers, or placebos—to another pigeon! Bird brains have now racked up so many cognitive accomplishments that some neuroanatomists have argued that the cortex-like cognitive functions of the avian pallium demand a new neuroanatomical terminology that better reflects not their differences but rather the homologies (similarities in function) between avian and mammalian brains.

So bird brains—and by implication smart dinosaur brains—are sufficiently high enough on the evolutionary scale and complex enough to allow for complex cognitive behaviors. And just how much neural complexity is required for complex cognition? Well, we now know that honeybees, who are insects with a vastly simpler nervous system, are able to discriminate Monet paintings from Picasso’s after extracting and learning the characteristic visual information inherent in each painting style.

Still, only humans can solve the mirror self-recognition test. OK, only humans and the great apes. Wait, only humans and primates—no, humans, primates—and elephants—and dolphins and killer whales. Actually, given the proper training, magpies can too. And so can those pigeons! And that’s for a test that uses visual stimuli. As with public opinion polls, the answer you get in an experiment may all lie in how you ask the question. Vision is a dominant sense for humans—and for those birds as well. Yet, as dog owners know, for canines—unlike humans or birds—olfaction is the dominant sense over vision. Before we can truly evaluate the intelligence of other species, we need to at least make an attempt at understanding the world as they experience it. And that’s just what one German biologist did.

Umwelts and the Enneadic Brain of the Octopus

Baron Professor Jakob Johann von Uexküll (1864–1944) was a German biologist whose research ranged from physiology to animal behavior. His most important contribution was introducing the concept of Umwelt and developing its importance for biology, specifically for the understanding of animal behavior. Literally translated as the “around world,” von Uexküll defined the Umwelt as the surrounding environment as perceived by a particular animal species given its specific sensory system. That concept has since influenced fields ranging from sensory and cognitive biology to environmental design engineering, cybernetics, semiotics, and even existential philosophy.

To better understand just what von Uexküll meant by the term Umwelt, consider some very relevant differences between dogs and people. First, dogs have only two-way (dichromatic) color vision, not three-way (trichromatic) vision like humans. Our eyes have three types of color receptors, termed cones, that allow us to recognize and identify a palette consisting of reds, blues, greens, and their combinations. Dogs, on the other hand, possess only two types of cones—blue and yellow. A dog’s Umwelt does not include the range of colors from red to green (along with blue) that we see but rather just shades of yellow, blue, and grey. Grass, for example, only appears yellowish or brown to dogs.

But dogs can smell so much more than we can. It has been estimated that dogs can smell anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 times better than humans. They have 40 times more smell-sensitive receptors, and their nasal cavities are far more complex thus amplifying their advantage in mere number of receptor cells. Some breeds, such as bloodhounds, that have been specifically bred for scent tracking are more sensitive sniffers than others. Those such as whippets and greyhounds, bred for visual tracking of fast-running prey, have sacrificed some olfactory for enhanced visual acuity, though even their sense of smell far exceeds ours.

And whereas vision is, well, line-of-sight, and transitory (out of sight, out of mind), smell is multidirectional (though affected by wind) and lasting. Even among us olfactorily-challenged humans, sensations of smell evoke some of our strongest and most enduring emotional reactions, from the sensual scent of a loved one’s perfume or cologne lingering on the pillow case to the stench of rotting garbage left uncollected on the big city street below. A mind that has evolved to handle predominantly olfactory input will construct a far different Umwelt than one built around overwhelmingly visual stimuli. And then there are the cetaceans, especially porpoises and dolphins, who construct their mental world based on auditory stimuli and whose motor responses have evolved to function in a different medium (water). While the canine olfactory Umwelt and the cetacean auditory Umwelt “map” to our human visual Umwelt, and vice versa, each “misses” a lot of the other two’s moment-by-moment experience.

Now suppose that not only are the sensory and motor systems of different species different, what if the unit that processes those inputs and generates their outputs to create their respective Umwelts is vastly different? Consider then the octopus, smartest of the invertebrates. They’re quite good at learning to get through mazes and they employ tools in constructing their well-known “gardens.”

The octopus has the highest brain size to body size ratio among those without a backbone and about as many total neurons as a dog. Instead of one brain, it has nine! Well, one generalized, central hub in the head and a smaller specialized processor in each of its eight arms, each with its own set of neurons. And if an arm is removed, the octopus can regenerate it! What might be their mental map of the world?

If the octopus could evolve human-level intelligence, would it think in terms of dichotomies of good versus bad or political liberal versus conservative the way we do? Or would the octopus have a much more nuanced enneadic view of things given its nine brains? Could distributed brains ever evolve the level of intelligence achieved by centralized brains?

Have we, as a byproduct of our great success as a species, dumbesticated ourselves?

Truly accurate and meaningful measurement and comparison of the intelligence of various species, living or extinct, would therefore have to take into account their entire Umwelt: their sensory inputs, motor responses, and the structure of the intellect that processes them. Until then, we’re left to deal with approximations. The more closely related the subjects we’re comparing, the more accurate the comparison.

Intelligence Costs, So Stupidity Sometimes Pays

If there is such an advantage to increases in intelligence over the course of evolutionary history, why are there any “dumb” animals left? The most basic and perhaps only law of economics is “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Since you can’t get something for nothing, getting one thing means giving up something else. And animal intelligence, like artificial intelligence, is very expensive, and the brain is the most energy-expensive organ in the body. Brain tissue uses 20 times the metabolic energy as an equivalent mass of muscle. Therefore, increases in intelligence must bring a significant selective advantage or they won’t take place and would not have taken place over the course of evolutionary history in so many lineages. But sometimes they don’t.

There indeed can be evolutionary advantages in being stupid. If an organism can get by with its existing intelligence, increases may actually decrease survivability. Perhaps that’s why about half of the domesticated species decreased their brain size compared to their wild ancestors. So domestication, as often as not, results in “dumbestication.” And what of the seemingly “smarter”—to our minds—domesticated ones? Are dogs such as Border Collies that humans can train to herd sheep and obey over 500 commands, using both words and hand signals, really smarter than wolves that successfully navigate much harsher environments, often outsmarting both people and dogs?

Consider that the average human brain size has decreased over the last 10,000 years, with our transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists. Being a hunter-gatherer calls for brains as well as brawn, and you’re regularly facing many life-determining novel situations compared to all those regular, repetitive days on the farm. Have we, as a byproduct of our great success as a species, dumbesticated ourselves, and, if so, is that still going on today? Does the relaxed selection pressure resulting from the benefits of modern technological society foster similar changes as our transition to agriculture? Clearly, evolving increased intelligence is not the sure and only path to survival and success, nor is such success guaranteed.

A Tale Told by an Intellect, Filled With Chance and Necessity

Nonetheless, over the course of evolution, there has been an increasing, self-perpetuating, competitive advantage to be derived from increases in neural complexity (which can be approximately, variously, though somewhat fuzzily estimated by brain size) and behavioral complexity (gauged in like manner through various tests of intelligence, reaction time, and cognition). Our best tests of intelligence involve the process of decontextualization—removing a stimulus from its immediate sensory meaning.

A prime example is when a set of arbitrary marks are used to represent sounds, and then some of those marks are used in a completely different context to represent concepts unrelated to those sounds. The equation E=mc2 is about as decontextualized as you can get. There’s nothing in those sounds or marks that directly represents energy, mass, and the speed of light, or the process of multiplying a quantity by itself, which can be represented geometrically by a shape called the square. Yet, that equation has certainly increased the power in humanity’s hand—enough to power or annihilate whole cities. Across human history, we see how our increased intelligence has been put to work to harness increasing amounts of that energy and turn that into increased levels of societal complexity.

And with that increase in intelligence, one hopes, there has been a similar competitive advantage in ever-increasing awareness of the environment, including and especially the minds of other individuals of our own group and of our own species, and with that in developing consciousness, and even conscience.

Illustration by Chris Wisnia for SKEPTIC

Alas, the race of life is not to get ahead—it’s to get ahead of somebody else. Another species, whether predatory or competing, another group, or an individual in the same group competing for food, range, or mates, rival relatives or siblings, even for resources in the womb in the case of twins and other multiple births. Differential outcomes depend on group and individual differences. And without individual differences, the very concept of intelligence itself would be meaningless—group differences being merely the aggregated individual differences.

Things didn’t have to happen exactly as they did, but given enough chances, either in various evolutionary lineages over the course of geological time—or even other places in the cosmos over the course of astronomical time—the odds are in favor of something very much, though by no means exactly, like that eventually happening somewhere sometime. Will Homo sapiens’ particular instantiation of “higher minds”—those with not only intelligence, emotion, consciousness, but possibly even conscience—ever encounter lesser, equal, or superior others before our evolutionary run runs out, whether through chance external encounter or necessitated by self-indulgent failure to use our intelligence?

The answer to that question lies less with scientists than with philosophers, to wit—

“Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.” —DEMOCRITUS“… or vice versa!” —YOGI BERRA

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