Steven Pinker on Bloggingheads.tv

So, I just saw an interesting interview on Bloggingheads.tv. It's a recent one where Steven Pinker is being interviewed by science journalist, Robert Wright.

It's a longer interview (about an hour long), but it covers various milestones throughout his career. Of course, with it being Pinker, much of the conversation revolved around the human capacity for language. There's an interesting segment where he discusses his disagreements with the linguist, Noam Chomsky. And then there's some discussion of evolutionary psychology, the logic of science and our perception of reality, and even a little bit of quantum mechanics (well, not a serious discussion of quantum theory, but it's used as an example of how reality is really counterintuitive). The interview ends with a discussion of the new project he's working on. It's a book on violence, and how violence is actually decreasing world-wide, despite our intuitions. He's been working on this book for a while it seems. You may even remember a post of mine covering this topic from over two years ago!

Well, anyways, I'm posting the interview below, check it out:

Gladwell on Colbert . . .

Malcolm Gladwell was recently on the ColbertReport, discussing his new book: What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. It is a book of essays that he wrote for the New Yorker. He's one of my favorite writers, so I'll definitely have to pick up the new book sometime.

The interview is pretty good, though it seems that perhaps Gladwell was a little nervous (he seemed a little tripped up when Colbert asked if he was a Christian). But I think Colbert took it easy on him. Check out the video below:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Malcolm Gladwell
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor U.S. Speedskating

Symphony of Science

Wow! Have you heard of the Symphony of Science?

This might be old news to some of you, but it's new to me (I found out through pharyngula, of course).

The Symphony of Science is a musical project "designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form." The project is the brainchild of electronic musician, John Boswell. He takes audio/video samples from various lectures and/or educational programs and mixes them against his original compositions. His songs feature clips from Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and even Bill Nye the Science Guy. One track, "A Glorious Dawn," was recently released on vinyl through Third Man Records (indie record label founded by Jack White of the White Stripes) for the 75th anniversary of Carl Sagan's birth. This is actually my favorite track, and am posting the video below (all videos, lyrics, and mp3 downloads can be found at the home site . . . check it out!):

Free Copy of The Origin . . . . from Ray Comfort?

So, for those of you not "in the know," Ray Comfort (yes, the creationist with the banana routine) has printed 100,000 copies of his own edition of The Origin of Species, with a "special" introduction of course. Well, today Comfort and his followers gave out their propaganda at various universities and colleges across the country. And guess what? Yep. I got my own copy too!

Yep, there were people passing them out today at the University of Kentucky. One of my grad school buddies was able to secure a copy for me, haha (Thanks Dave!). The "special" introduction is hilarious!

Oh, by the by, if they came to your campus today, and you received a copy, then send a picture to The Primate Diaries. According to Pharyngula, Eric Michael Johnson (blogger at The Primate Diaries) is putting together a collage "of smirking evilutionists with Comfort's folly."

A TEDtalk with Oliver Sacks!

Oliver Sacks, the famous British neurologist, recently gave a talk at TED concerning the topic of hallucinations.

Dr. Sacks is probably best known for his popular books in which he describes case studies of his patients with intriguing neurological disorders. One of my favorites is: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. And then you probably know: Awakenings, which was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. I believe his most recent book is: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition, in which Dr. Sacks examines the effects of music on the brain.

Well, this TED talk is about hallucinations. Well, not just hallucinations, but a particular type of disorder that causes hallucinations called, Charles Bonnett Syndrome. This is a disorder in which people who are blind experience visual hallucinations, and people who are death experience auditory hallucinations. It's very interesting. Apparently the syndrome is common, occurring in about 10% of the blind population, though it is probably under-reported.

These people are not crazy. They are perfectly sane, healthy individuals. The syndrome seems to occur in people who are blind from macular degeneration. What seems to be happening is that, as the structures that gather sensory information gradually break down, the visual/auditory parts of the brain go in hyper-drive. They are over-working, and the brain is trying to make sense of the jumbled mess of activation. Well, Dr. Sacks describes it a lot better, and includes some funny stories (including one about a woman who hallucinates Kermit the Frog). I'm posting the talk below, so check it out:

Dawkins on Colbert!

Now for something a little more cheerful.

Richard Dawkins was on the Colbert Report last night promoting his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. It's a new book that synthesizes the evidence for evolution in a manner that is simple and easy to understand. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Check out the clip:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Richard Dawkins
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

Margo Wilson (1942 - 2009)

I recently learned over the weekend, through the Human Behavior and Evolution Society email listserv, that Professor Margo Wilson died due to complications with lymphoma. This is very sad news.

Margo Wilson was a professor at McMaster University in Canada. And she was a pioneer in the field of evolutionary psychology, along with her longtime collaborator, Martin Daly. She was a past president of HBES and founding editor of the society's flagship journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. And she was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Wilson might be best known for her classic work on homicide, in collaboration with Daly. Their influential book on the topic analyzes historical and anthropological data from around the world through an evolutionary framework. They argued that the most common type of homicide (that between two conflicting young men who know each other) is a by-product of behavior that is selectively advantageous for controlling the reproductive behavior of women.

She has also done some interesting work on the "Cinderella effect." The Cinderella effect describes phenomena wherein step-parents mistreat their step-children at much higher rates than their mistreatment of their own genetic offspring. This effect is robust across cultures and stays strong, even controlling for socioeconomic factors. For instance, they found that children in the UK were 100 times more likely to be beaten by stepfathers than by genetic fathers.

She has done great work in the field, and has helped build a strong foundation on which evolutionary psychology could grow, and her death is a significant loss to the field.

Darwin Lectures at UK!

Okay, I can't believe my wife beat me to it . . . well, on second thought, maybe I can.

Anyways, the University of Kentucky will be paying tribute to Darwin this October with a lecture series that's about a week long! Woo!

The Gaines Center of the Humanities is sponsoring this year's Bale Boone Symposium entitled: Science, Humanities, & Culture in the Wake of Darwin. There will be a host of great speakers, including Ken Miller, who I've heard talk before at a Darwin Day festival back in 2005 when I was still at VCU. I think that he does an excellent job of discussing the fact of evolution, and I will be glad to get to hear him again. Another talk that I think will be quite interesting is from Jonathan Gottschall (a professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College) entitled: Darwin in Wonderland: Evolution and the Science of Story. Looks like it'll be great fun!

All talks are within the student center at 6pm, are free, and open to the public! Here's a copy of the flyer for more details. My wife and I will be there, you should go too!

On a similar note, V. Betty Smocovitis, Biologist from the University of Florida, will be presenting a lecture titled Rhapsody on a Darwinian Theme: Darwin in Song and Musical Production this week! It will be on Thursday, Sep. 24 in the Lexmark Rm in the Adm. Bldg at 3:30 pm. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend this lecture, as I have to teach . . . :(

But you may want to go nonetheless!

Lastly, the IdeaFestival is happening this week in Louisville, KY. It starts on Tuesday and runs through Saturday. It's an event that happens in Louisville (I think every year, but I'm not sure) where great thinkers and innovators come to speak. I like to compare it a bit to the TED talks. Well, anyways, you can check out the agenda on their site. It looks like there will be some pretty good talks there too, so I encourage you to go, if you plan to be in Kentucky this week. Tickets are a little pricey, as it's much like a conference, but you can purchase tickets for individual events if you just wanted to see one or two of the talks. Check it out!

The End of Summer

Wow, the summer is practically OVER!! School starts next week! Oh noes!

Ah well, I hope that everyone out there reading this has had an enjoyable summer.

I know, I know . . . I haven't posted much over the past couple months (I skipped the whole month of July even!). Well, I've either been too busy to think about my blog, or I've been out of town and rarely around a reliable internet connection.

Probably the coolest, or at least most interesting, thing that I've done this summer was participate in the 4th annual Summer Institute in Social Psychology (SISP) hosted by Northwestern University and sponsored by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the National Science Foundation. SISP is a selective program of intensive courses and workshops geared towards students who are early in their graduate careers in personality and social psychology. The courses that I participated in were the Biological Basis of Social Behavior and Personality course and the Meta-Analysis course. Needless to say, the experience was great! I really learned a lot, and the summer institute has helped me generate and/or solidify numerous ideas that I can now incorporate into my own research (though two weeks is not enough time to really become an expert with these methods, so I will definitely need more experience if I wish to pursue them further). It's even got me started thinking about possible post-docs that I may want to pursue in the future (but that's still a long ways away, haha).

But anyways, I've met a lot of new friends and possible collaborators, many interested in the same questions that I myself am interested in. The program even included a trip to downtown Chicago! (a city to which I have never been!) It was great! For any social/personality grad students out there reading this, I really do recommend participating in one of these SISP programs. You'll gain knowledge of some of the most up-to-date theory and methods in the field and you'll get to know a lot of new people, do networking, and form collaborations (many of these people will be future superstars in the field!).

Other than SISP, I've taught a summer lab on social psychology research methods, worked on my research, watched A LOT of movies, made a couple trips back "home" to Virginia and to North and South Carolina, and participated in a book club that my grad student buddies and I recently begun. The book club is going well, and I think that it's really a good idea. It's really hard to read stuff for "fun" when you are in graduate school, and this type of club kind of forces you to do it (otherwise discussion will not go well). So far we've read Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture which were both pretty good. Naked Economics was really my first reading on economics and I thought that it was generally a good read as an introduction for the layperson. (Please see Medicine for Melancholy for a more detailed review, if interested.) Female Chauvinist Pigs was a more alarming book about the social problem of "raunch culture." Books I'm reading now include: Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life and Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human. Perhaps I will eventually write up a review of one or two of these books . . . we'll see.

One last note. My wife recently started a blog called, Deconstructing the Flower, which focuses on modern feminist issues, and it might be of interest to some of you. I'm also linking it on my sidebar, under "Friends." So if feminism and/or women's issues is a concern or interest of yours, please visit her blog and enjoy!

Steven Pinker, George Church, Anne Wojcicki, & Linda Avey on Charlie Rose

Hello all! I hope that everyone is having a great summer so far!

I was browsing the Edge website and came across a link to a Charlie Rose clip featuring Steven Pinker, George Church, Anne Wojcicki, and Linda Avey (I guess that you could have gotten that from my title, right?). It's about the Personal Genome Project, which I've mentioned in previous posts.

Anyways, it's a pretty good discussion about the importance of the project and about how having open access to people's genomes will open up many opportunities for researchers in developing new ways of analyzing the influence of genes on behavior.

Well, I'm posting the clip below. Check it out, and enjoy:

Hard-Wired Morality

This looks interesting.

University of Colorado, Boulder ecologist, Marc Beckoff, and philosopher, Jessica Pierce, have written a new book (Wild Justice) that examines morality as an adaptive strategy for helping aggressive and/or competitive species to live together in groups. Morality, in the form of empathy, cooperation and reciprocity, provides what Beckoff calls, the "social glue," for group living.

The authors cite evidence from around the world and across a variety of species, from mice to elephants, that support the claim that animals have an innate sense of fairness and empathy. For instance, experiments with rats have shown that they will refuse to obtain food if their actions will protect other rats from being harmed. As well, in play, dominate wolves will self-handicap and allow lower ranked wolves to bite them. Additionally, neurological evidence is presented that shows how some species have structures in their brains that are similar to those "empathy" areas in human brains.

This is a very interesting topic, and I just might have to put this book on my summer reading list. I agree that what we call morality today probably started out as an adaptive strategy for group living, because social networks were so important for survival across species. And as such, evidence for this "social glue" should be abundant in nature.

Such evidence for a hard-wired morality could have strong implications for us humans. For one, morality is often seen as a philosophical and/or religious concept. It sometimes seems like scientists have no business talking about moral issues. But this book could show that one doesn't need religion to explain while we feel empathy for others, have urges to be honest, and want to protect others from harm. Such feelings could be . . . dare I say it . . . instinctual. Yet I'm not sure whether I would agree that animals can tell the difference between right and wrong, not in the abstract sense that we mean those concepts. I really liked what Emory primatologist, Frans de Waal, said on the topic:

"I don't believe animals are moral in the sense we humans are – with well developed and reasoned sense of right and wrong – rather that human morality incorporates a set of psychological tendencies and capacities such as empathy, reciprocity, a desire for co-operation and harmony that are older than our species. Human morality was not formed from scratch, but grew out of our primate psychology. Primate psychology has ancient roots, and I agree that other animals show many of the same tendencies and have an intense sociality."

Really cool, exciting stuff. Guess I'll have to pick the book up sometime.

Bridging the gap between the Humanities and the Sciences

So it's been a couple weeks since my last post. You know how it goes, classes ending, submitting grades, finishing papers, etc. And let's not forget the importance of taking a much needed rest from work!

Well, not too much is going on now . . . besides teaching the lab sections for summer courses and working on summer research projects. Anyways, the other day I was browsing the Edge website and came across this page celebrating the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's lecture on the "Two Cultures," that is the culture of the literary intellectual and the culture of the scientist. At the time, the two cultures were seen as divided camps of thinking. Those in the humanities were viewed as the true intellectuals (i.e., those in philosophy, literature/poetry, art, the social sciences, etc.). And the expectation was that scientists had very little to say about culture, the human experience, or human nature.

50 years later, Seed Magazine asked members of the "Third Culture" (i.e., those bridging the gap between the humanities and the sciences) whether the two cultures are still divided today. Visit the link and check out the videos. They're pretty good, and quite short (6-10 mins.). Overall, the answer seems to be that the two cultures are not as divided as once was and is more like a continuum from one pole to the other. Advancements made in the science of the mind have especially contributed to bridging this gap. It has helped changed how we think about those abstract concepts (e.g., human nature, religion, even beauty). As well, it is young scholars who are becoming more and more interested in collaboration among different fields of inquiry.

Below are the videos from Harvard psychologists, Steven Pinker and Marc Hauser. Enjoy!:

Why We Believe in Gods - Evolutionary Psychology and Religion

There was a lecture recently posted on richarddawkins.net (though I found out about it through pharyngula) that might be of interest for some of you.

It's a talk by Dr. Andy Thomson, (a psychiatrist from back home in Virginia!) concerning religion from the perspective of evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It's quite a nice (and I think convincing) lecture. Essentially, his thesis is that religion is a cultural artifact or byproduct (like music) that has hijacked specific traits/modules in our brains that once provided a selective advantage for living in a social world (SCI anyone?). Of course, I cannot do his argument justice. You will have to watch it (if you haven't already) and decide for yourself. Though, remember, it's a normal academic talk . . . so it's about an hour long . . . but there's a brief Q&A near the end. The video is posted below, check it out and see what you think:





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By the by, if you are not all video-ed out and you have some interest in that work by Simon Baron-Cohen, which Thomson mentioned, then check this video from the Edge website out! Besides being the brother of Sacha Baron-Cohen, Simon is a brilliant psychologist from the University of Cambridge. His work mostly concerns research on autism and theory of mind. The talk posted on the Edge site is about his experiments on how people can read the emotional expressions of others just by looking at their eyes. Specifically, he's examining sex differences on whether women can read emotional expressions from people's eyes quicker than men.

Well, that's about it. There's your two for one! Enjoy!

self-presentation

This week’s readings on the self seemed to concern a more classic topic than previous weeks, and that is the idea of self-presentation. In general, we like to manage the impressions that we give to others. We like to appear favorable. As well, we’ll even manipulate the impressions of others to make them appear unfavorable. For instance, Gilbert and Silvera found that people will try to hinder others by “overhelping” them. If a target person that we do not favor is performing on a task that is rather simple, or easily performed, we’ll likely help this person achieve his/her goal in order to undermine his/her competence. So, in effect, the target person will seem incompetent because he/she received help on an easy task.

Not to sound repetitive, but self-presentation makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, especially if Kurzban’s idea of the self (the SCI) is an accurate representation of reality. If the self is a collection of modules that help us function in a social world, by manipulating others, then self-presentation fits in as one tool we use to manipulate others. As I stated before, we manipulate the representations of ourselves to appear favorable to others, and we manipulate the representations of others to make them appear less favorable. An important motive that seems to be behind self-presentation is belongingness and acceptance, but it is by no means the only motive. As the SCI would predict, the activation of multiple modules will differentially affect self-presentation. In support of this notion, Griskevicius et al. found that activating self-protection versus mating goals will differentially affect whether we conform to a group or not. When people are primed with self-protection goals, they generally conform to group attitudes/norms. This is because fitting in with groups often proved to be beneficial for protection. At the same time, priming men with mate goals will make them less likely to conform to group attitudes, as being perceived as independent and differentiated from the group could potentially lead to greater reproductive success. Women on the other hand were more likely to conform, as agreeableness is often cited as a sought after quality from men. I do wonder which goal would have precedence over the other though. If self-protection and mate goals were each activated simultaneously, how would that affect conformity? Would people be more likely to conform because self-protection goals are stronger?

We also learned that self-presentation seems to depend on self-regulatory energy. It takes energy to control our self representations, as well, when our energy has been depleted, we are less likely to control them. Interestingly, representations that are familiar (overly practiced) do not deplete regulatory energy. For instance, obeying gender rules is usually familiar to us, so it doesn’t take energy to obey them. This is very reminiscent of the formation of implementation intentions, and lends support to the notion that perhaps forming implementations intentions will not endanger one to becoming thoroughly depleted. Thinking back on the Griskevicius work, it must take energy to not conform to group behavior. Will the activation of mate goals be hindered by regulatory depletion? Or will the mate goals be so familiar that their effects on self-regulation be minimal? Just some questions to think about I guess.

Citations for further reading:

Cialdini, R.B., & De Nicholas, M.E. (1989). Self-presentation by association. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 57, 626-631.

Gilbert, D.T.,, & Silvera, D.H. (1996). Overhelping. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 70, 678-690.

Griskevicius, V., Goldstein, N.J., Mortensen, C.R., Cialdini, R.B., & Kenrick, D.T. (2006). Going along versus going alone: When fundamental motives facilitate strategic (non)conformity. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 91, 63-76.

Tice, D.M. (1992). Self-concept change and self-presentation: The looking-glass self is also a magnifying glass. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 63, 435-451.

Vohs, K.D., Baumeister, R.F., & Ciarocco, N.J. (2005). Self-regulation and self-presentation: Regulatory resource depletion impairs impression management and effortful self-presentation depletes regulatory resources. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 88, 632-657.

Social Neuroscience and the Self

The studies from this week’s readings examined the self from a social neuroscience perspective. There were some pretty interesting findings in general, but I think the most important implication of all the studies is that the “self” can be linked back to physical/biological structures. For instance, Gailliot (along with my advisor and their colleagues) observed that acts of self-regulation actually deplete blood glucose levels. And Kelley et al. even found that self-referential (comparing traits to ourselves) thought is related to the deactivation of unique areas of the brain (the medial prefrontal cortex). It’s possible that this area is related to the processing of unique self-knowledge. These findings help remove the self from just being some abstract, theoretical concept, and instead shows how the self is linked to our evolutionary development.

We can also view threats against the self through brain imaging. Eisenberger et al. have shown that social exclusion is linked with activation of the same brain areas that are activated for physical pain. This has significant implications for how important belongingness was for us during our evolutionary development. Our social pain system has co-opted the physical pain system. When we feel exclusion, we really feel pained. It makes sense. Not only is having one pain system suited to deal similarly with physical and social pain more efficient/resourceful, but feeling pained after exclusion is a good way to motivate one to avoid social exclusion. It’s likely that those early humans who were not motivated to avoid exclusion were at a significant survival disadvantage. I think that this also goes in hand with Kurzban’s perspective of the self, in that the self-system evolved in order for us to succeed socially. I wonder then if those self-referential areas (the MPFC) in the brain developed at the same time as when the social pain system started to co-opt the physical pain system.

Another cool finding came from Neiss et al., who were able to link the relationship between self-esteem, executive function and negative affect to genetic influences. Generally, they found that people with low self-esteem had greater negative affect. As well, people with low executive function (self-regulation) had greater negative affect. And they also found that the relationship between self-esteem and affect mediated the self-regulation/affect link. Lastly, genetic factors accounted for a significant portion of variance (38 - 44%) in self-esteem, executive function and negative affect, though the largest contributing factor was due to the non-shared environment. Overall, they concluded that the executive self did not display a genetic or environmental link with negative affect above that shared with self-esteem. This makes sense to me from the sociometer/SCI perspective as well. If we developed our sense of self as a means for succeeding socially, and our self-esteem acts as a guage for our social worth, then negative feelings that come out of an inability to self-regulate should only arise when the regulation issue is connected to social worth (which will be gauged by the self-esteem). So when our self-regulation is low, and we have increased negative affect, it should be because our self-esteem is low too. Very cool.

There is one comment that I have wondered about though. They stated that genetic influences explain 30 – 50 % of the variance in self-esteem usually. I wonder what implications this has for the sociometer hypothesis. If self-esteem is just a guage for our social worth, then I would hypothesize that most of the variance in self-esteem (if not all) would be explained by non-shared environmental factors (i.e., whether we’ve been threatened with exclusion).

Citations for further reading:

Eisenberger, N.I., Liberman, M.D., & Williams, K.D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302, 290 - 292.

Gailliot, M.T., Baumeister, R.F., DeWall, C.N., Maner, J.K., Plant, E.A., Tice, D.M., Brewer, L.E., & Schmeichel, B.J. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 325-336.

Kelley, W.M., Macrae, C.N., Wyland, C.L., Caglar, S., Inati, S., and Heatherton, T.F. (2003). Finding the self? An event-related fMRI study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Neiss, M.B., Stevenson, J., Sedikides, C., Kumashiro, M., Finkel, E., & Rusbult, C.E. (2005). Executive self, self-esteem, and negative affectivity: Relations at the phenotypic and genotypic level. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 4, 593– 606.