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“Isabel Behncke: “El pánico al contagio, a lo infeccioso, es uno de nuestros miedos más atávicos” [La Tercera]

“Isabel Behncke: “El pánico al contagio, a lo infeccioso, es uno de nuestros miedos más atávicos”

https://www.latercera.com/la-tercera-domingo/noticia/isabel-behncke-el-panico-al-contagio-a-lo-infeccioso-es-uno-de-nuestros-miedos-mas-atavicos/CR5VVF4IKZG5DKGK5CD4OXJBNM/

La primatóloga chilena, eminente por sus investigaciones en el Congo acerca del comportamiento social de los bonobos, afirma que la biología evolutiva puede ayudarnos a comprender tanto las causas de la pandemia como la manera en que reaccionamos a ella. Doctorada en Oxford y hoy miembro del Centro de Investigación de la Complejidad Social de la UDD, Behncke propone enfrentar la crisis con “ojo de ecólogo”. Nos serviría para pensar mejor -y moralizar menos- sobre los sacrificios que debemos elegir para mitigar distintas fuentes de sufrimiento.

(…)

La discusión actual sobre las zoonosis −las enfermedades que pasan de animales a humanos−, y que si el virus provino de un murciélago o de un pangolín, y que no puede haber mercados de fauna silvestre como el de Wuhan, tiene que ver con advertencias que se venían haciendo hace rato sobre el consumo de biodiversidad y la salud de los ecosistemas. Y si seguimos destruyendo los hábitats naturales, hay muchos animales más para futuras zoonosis. Esta pandemia, ciertamente, no va a ser la última.

(…)

La cuenta gigantesca que vamos a pagar ahora es el precio de no entender cómo funcionan esas barreras. Quizás porque ya no nos sentíamos parte de la red de la vida que compartimos con otros seres. Como dice Harari en el título de su libro, nos veíamos pasando de animales a dioses. Ya estábamos pensando en Marte, nos íbamos de acá. De algún modo, perdimos el respeto por nuestra casa. Y ha sido muy impresionante que un simple virus nos devuelva a la naturaleza en tan pocas semanas. Gastamos trillones de dólares en sistemas de defensa y nos tiene de rodillas una hebra de ARN.

(…)

Es que ahí hay una ironía profundísima: el virus nos obliga a ir en contra de lo que somos para poder protegernos de él. En ese sentido, uno podría decir que este es un virus brillante. A mí me tocó vivir en el Congo lo del ébola, que era mucho más mortífero, pero no tan contagioso, por su método de transmisión. El Covid-19, al matar poco y no tan rápido, se aprovecha muy bien de nuestro comportamiento social. Es como si dijera: “Yo sé que estos animales son incapaces de no interactuar entre ellos durante 14 días, están hechos para eso, así que me voy a quedar aquí piola y dejarlos hacer lo que siempre hacen para pasarme de un humano a otro”. Es un gran estratega, por lo menos. Y otro aspecto que la biología evolutiva puede ayudar a entender son los fenómenos de contagio a través de redes de interacciones. No solo de contagio biológico, también de ideas y de emociones. Como el pánico.

(…)

¿Dirías que la competencia entre la razón y el pánico pone a prueba qué tan sapiens somos en estas circunstancias?

Es que la dicotomía entre emoción y razón no nos ha servido de mucho, porque ser sapiens también es tener emoción, no las puedes disociar. Y si bien hay que decir con mucho énfasis que, por favor ,no cedamos al pánico, porque nos cierra cognitivamente y trae consecuencias graves, reconocer el rol del miedo en nuestra historia es útil para entender lo que nos está pasando. El miedo existe porque ha servido para algo. Y el pánico al contagio, a lo infeccioso, es uno de nuestros miedos más atávicos. En parte, estamos vivos porque tenemos ancestros que alguna vez vieron a alguien muy enfermo y dijeron “uy, qué horror”, y se alejaron. O sea, es muy comprensible que el coronavirus nos aterre más allá del cálculo racional. Porque si fuéramos tan sapiens, tendríamos una planilla Excel en la cabeza que nos diría que es mucho más probable morir de enfermedades cardiovasculares. Y les tendríamos terror a las hamburguesas. Pero como arrastramos miedos atávicos, no tenemos los miedos bien calibrados. Les tenemos más terror a los aviones que a los autos, lo que estadísticamente es absurdo. Y le tenemos miedo a la sangre, a las arañas, a las culebras, mucho más que a un auto. Así que sentir este pánico al contagio es un poco inevitable. Pero tenemos que ser conscientes de él y regularlo, porque darle rienda suelta es peligroso.

(…)

La experiencia, al menos, dice que las épocas de desastres muestran lo mejor y lo peor de la naturaleza humana. Lo que pasa es que la dicotomía entre cooperación y conflicto también es un poco engañosa. Las sociedades operan en muchos niveles de organización −el individuo, la familia, el barrio, la empresa, la nación, la sociedad global, etc.− y los ecólogos te van a decir que, para observar los fenómenos de la naturaleza es clave entender que en todos esos niveles hay cooperación y conflicto al mismo tiempo. Tú mismo eres un ecosistema -en tu cuerpo hay más bacterias que células humanas− dentro del cual hay muchos conflictos. Ahora, lo que sí tiende a ocurrir ante amenazas graves es que aumenta la cooperación en los niveles altos, los grandes bandos se agrupan. Y en las últimas semanas han surgido ejemplos de cooperación a gran escala, de coordinación colectiva, bastante interesantes. ¿Cuándo fue la última vez que la humanidad se agrupó bajo un mismo propósito, con la mayor parte de los humanos al tanto de eso? Pero también han saltado a la vista los conflictos de interés. Y la polarización política, por supuesto. Yo creo que nos serviría mucho, para tener una conversación más amigable, observar lo que está pasando con ojo de ecólogo, viendo sistemas complejos en acción.

(…)

Jonathan Haidt, un psicólogo social al que es muy interesante seguir, cree que ahora vamos a cooperar más porque en los desastres aparece lo mejor de las personas, pero también está diciendo que estas situaciones incrementan el moral disgusto, el asco moral. Así como los miedos atávicos, la emoción del asco es parte de nuestro repertorio evolutivo. Y existe el asco físico ante lo que percibimos como cochinada, como las fecas, pero también tenemos asco moral, y eso es lo que está aflorando en muchas de estas peleas. Hay gente que dice “usted es un asco, quiere salvar la economía y no le importa la vida”, o al revés, “usted piensa en los enfermos, pero no le importa la cantidad de gente que va a quedar sin sustento, qué aberración”. Ese sentimiento de repulsión moral es muy humano.”

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“Why Republicans Are Less Likely to View the Coronavirus as a Serious Threat” By Nigel Barber [The Human Beast/Psychology Today]

“Why Republicans Are Less Likely to View the Coronavirus as a Serious Threat

Survey results demonstrate that the two parties view the pandemic differently.

Nigel Barber Ph.D.
The Human Beast

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-human-beast/202003/why-republicans-are-less-likely-view-the-coronavirus-serious-threat

Political conservatives fear disease as more of a threat and are more fearful of dirt and contamination in a variety of contexts from using public restrooms to eating unfamiliar foods (1). They have greater disgust sensitivity. This phenomenon is interestingly demonstrated by the fact that conservatives are four times more likely to have a mudroom in their homes compared to liberals (2).

Conservatives manifest a high degree of submission to authority figures such as the head of state. They are deferential towards authoritarian leaders who tell them what they want to hear (according to research on Right Wing Authoritarianism, a personality trait very correlated with political conservatism (1). Perhaps the tendency to credit the views of authority figures in this instance is stronger than fear of infection.

The fact that this is a new threat may also be significant because conservatives are more closed to new experiences as they adhere to long-established social conventions (1).

The coronavirus may be interpreted differently by Republicans and Democrats because they belong to different demographic groups. Republicans tend to be rural, older, groups that may be less receptive to information on novel threats. The coronavirus is also more likely to strike in cities because they are travel hubs and reservoirs of infection.

But it is hard to avoid two probable explanations. The first is that liberals and conservatives are exposed to differing information pools. This is often because their social media news feeds, particularly those on popular sites such as Facebook, or Twitter, feed them with the sort of news that they enjoy reading.”

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Learning from Animals by Antoine Doré & Jérôme Michalon | About: Dominique Guillo, Les Fondements oubliés de la culture. Une approche écologique, Seuil, 2019 [La Vie des Idées]

“Learning from Animals

About: Dominique Guillo, Les Fondements oubliés de la culture. Une approche écologique, Seuil

________________________________

by Antoine Doré & Jérôme Michalon, 19 March

translated by Michael C. Behrent

https://booksandideas.net/Learning-from-Animals.html

https://www.amazon.fr/fondements-oubli%C3%A9s-culture-Dominique-Guillo/dp/2021383555

Neither the social sciences nor the natural sciences are currently invested in studying the cultural relations between humans and animals. If we are to understand them, we must reconsider all our categories, and free ourselves once and for all from the nature-culture divide.

To use the relationship between humans and animals to rethink culture: this is the goal of Dominique Guillo’s book. A sociologist and research director at the CNRS, Guillo offers a structured and thorough synthesis of more than a decade of research. A specialist in the history and epistemology of social sciences as they relate to life sciences, Guillo maintains that the way in which these two disciplinary domains have approached culture suffers from an identity bias, which prevents them from conceiving of the existence of cultures constructed by and between different animal species.

The identity bias diagnosis

Guillo devotes the book’s first three chapters to establishing this epistemological diagnosis. He gets the ball rolling with the natural sciences (behavioral ecology, ethology, and neo-Darwinian biology), in a first chapter that proposes a highly pedagogical synthesis of research from the past forty years on animal sociability and culture. First, we encounter the neo-Darwinians’ unusual definition of the social (i.e., behavior that seeks to perpetuate the genes of individuals other than their producers); then, an ethological definition of culture understood as a set of traits transmitted by social learning, rather than by the genetic mechanisms of natural selection.

(…)

Guillo thus calls for a better connection between the social and the natural sciences, as they seem to suffer from the same problem: their inability of studying culture except in terms of animal groups belonging to the same species (whether human or non-human). They suffer from a tropism or identity bias, apparent both in their research’s focus (intraspecific and intragroup relationships) and results (culture takes place solely between similar entities and accentuates their similarities to one another). Thus, according to Guillo, these “classic” approaches to culture proceed from (i.e., postulate) and produce (i.e., accentuate) shared identity. In a world in which understanding the interdependence of creatures as different as earthworms, whales, and molecules is becoming more and more crucial, identity bias constitutes a major epistemological obstacle.

(…)

This diagnosis of a forgetting of culture’s foundations, which is itself based on several omissions, is accompanied by over-adherence to the epistemology of the behavioral sciences. The sole definition of culture used and discussed in this book is borrowed from this discipline, as is Guillo’s key concept (social learning) and the regular appeal to “parsimony.” Furthermore, it is the social sciences rather than the behavioral sciences that the author holds responsible for the impossibility of a synthesis in the study of interspecific cultures. In contrast to what they assert, the social sciences are most inclined to validate the nature-culture dualism and the boundaries between disciplines, whether because of ideology or disciplinary loyalty. Conversely, sociobiology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology, by considering humans as one living being among others, abolish the frontiers between these dualisms and appear, in Guillo’s account, as progressive theories, while the social sciences are noticeable only for their conservatism. He notes, for example, that by restricting cultural phenomena to identity, the social sciences risk fueling the rise of “’identitarian’ political discourses” (p. 302).”

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“3 Reasons for the Rise of Fake News | Cailin O’Connor explains the shift in American politics By Walter Veit [Science and Philosophy, Psychology Today]

“3 Reasons for the Rise of Fake News

Cailin O’Connor explains the shift in American politics.

By Walter Veit

https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/3-reasons-for-the-rise-of-fake-news-f0095c652533

Walter Veit: You recently published The Misinformation Age together with your husband and fellow philosopher James Owen Weatherall. What motivated you to write this book?

Cailin O’Connor: Around the time of the Brexit vote and the 2016 election in the US, I was working on several projects in formal social epistemology — using models to represent scientific communities. Social epistemology puts a big emphasis on the importance of social connections to knowledge creation. At the same time, we were seeing some serious issues related to public misinformation through social media. Many responses to this misinformation seemed to focus on the role of individual psychology and reasoning in the spread of false belief. For instance, confirmation bias, where individuals trust evidence that supports an already-held belief, is obviously relevant. But we think that understanding social ties and behavior is even more important to understanding false belief. For that reason, we wanted to bring some of the most important lessons from social epistemology, and from models of scientific knowledge, to bear on these social problems.

Walter Veit: How do you explain that despite all the evidence, demonstrably false beliefs are able to spread and persist?

Cailin O’Connor: There are many reasons that false beliefs spread, often in spite of good evidence refuting them. One reason is that we all are used to trusting other humans as sources of information. This is, to some degree, a necessity. We certainly cannot go do the work ourselves to guarantee that all our beliefs are good ones. Even when we look to scientific journals for evidence supporting our beliefs, we are ultimately trusting others (the scientists who share their data). And sometimes even these good sources lead us astray. The social sharing of data is powerful, but always opens the possibility that falsity can spread. In addition, there are various social biases that can make us more or less likely to share false beliefs. For example, in our book, we talk about the role of conformity bias — when individuals want to conform their actions or beliefs to their peers — in sometimes preventing the spread of useful or accurate knowledge. Our heuristics for social trust, such as placing more trust in those who are more similar to ourselves, or who share our beliefs, can mislead.

(…)

This interview originally appeared in Psychology Today [Apr 17, 2019]”

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“A Global Health Crisis and the Storytelling Brain; the brain may have evolved for entertainment” by Michael Karson [Feeling Our Way | Psychology Today]

“A Global Health Crisis and the Storytelling Brain

The brain may have evolved for entertainment.

Michael Karson, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of Denver.

(…)

The brain is thus like the peacock’s tail, which evolved for its appeal to peahens, who presumably evolved increasingly discriminatory preferences for tails. But with brains, both sexes put selection pressures on each other to tell better stories. The brain being built for storytelling and story-appreciating rather than for rational thought or for remembering solutions to geographical problems explains a lot of our difficulties with rational thought and memory and turns our cognitive biases on their heads from geographical pathologies to reproductive strategies. Our poor memories, in this view, are not deficits in brain functioning any more than creative license in rewriting history is a deficit of Shakespeare’s in his Richard III or Henry V. It’s not a problem reproductively that we sacrifice accuracy for the story we are telling ourselves; the story is all.

(…)

 We are not animals built for truth-seeking but for face-saving and entertaining. To deploy critical thinking during a story is like interrupting a comedian and asking whether she is really married when she is trying to tell a joke about husbands. Also, of course, we were built to live in small groups, and in a social sphere of 90 people, you can just all agree on whom to take with a grain of salt when they are making claims about reality. Learning to read strangers was largely irrelevant.

This whole truth-seeking enterprise called science has been a remarkable success, responsible for living past forty in large measure, and for creating the kind of intellectual environment that gave rise to Netflix (which, I note, capitalizes on how our brains are built to appreciate stories). But science is an unexpected benefit of big brains, not their purpose. Brains were not built to do math any more than backs were built to sit all day at a computer or arms were built for throwing sliders. You can sit or throw baseballs until you injure yourself, but you can only forego storytelling for about a day before you fall asleep and start dreaming. Dreaming is the primary outlet of the storytelling brain, like having your own blog every night.”

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“The Problem with the Way Scientists Study Reason” by Sacha Altay [Nautilus]

“The Problem with the Way Scientists Study Reason

Psychologists studying reasoning extensively rely on logic and philosophy, and neglect psychology’s more natural ally: biology.

Sacha Altay is a Ph.D. student in cognitive science at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He works on argumentation, misinformation, and how we evaluate communicated information. Follow him on Twitter @Sacha_Altay.

http://nautil.us/blog/-the-problem-with-the-way-scientists-study-reason

(…)

Ethologists evaluate their experimental paradigm, or set-up, in light of its ecological validity, or how well it matches natural surroundings. An animal’s true habitat, and its evolutionary history, have always centered the discussion. In contrast, most experimental paradigms in human reasoning, such as the Cognitive Reflexion Test (CRT) or syllogisms, are based on logic or mathematics.

(…)

Psychologists studying reasoning extensively rely on logic and philosophy, and neglect psychology’s more natural ally: biology. The neglect stems in part from the ease with which humans can seem to understand one another. Our psychology is equipped with specialized cognitive systems, like theory of mind, that help us negotiate social life. We spontaneously attribute intentions, reasons, and beliefs to others. These heuristics help us to predict behavior, but they also parasitize our scientific understanding of the mind, blinding us to the necessity of using biology when studying ourselves.

(…)

Humans are, in other words, too familiar with one another. Fundamental laws of biology, like evolution by natural selection, are falsely believed to have weak constraints on human psychology—particularly for high-level cognitive functions, like reasoning. But the human brain, just like the turtle brain, has been shaped by millions of years of evolution. Reason is unlikely to have escaped its influence.

(…)

Our big brains likely evolved to solve tasks related to social interactions, not abstract logical problems. The Cosmides-Tooby selection task was ecologically valid; the first one wasn’t. Using the wrong experimental design, whether it’s the task itself or the stimuli, exposes researchers to many problems—the main one being that the results become hard to interpret. You don’t know if what you found reveals an interesting feature of the human mind—such as that human deductive reasoning is biased in the classical Wason selection task—or if it’s just a methodological artifact because the stimuli were not ecological.

(…)

But Hugo Mercier, who I work with at École Normale Supérieure, and Dan Sperber recently ventured there in their 2017 book, The Enigma of Reason. According to them, reasoning is not a capacity to correct false intuitions or solve problems. Nature is full of problems that organisms have to solve (like finding a mate, or food for dinner) and they constantly update their priors, or beliefs, about their environment in a broadly rational fashion.”

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“Does Science Lead to Atheism? Alex Rosenberg discusses his views on atheism, science, and Bas van Fraassen By Walter Veit [Science and Philosophy | Psychology Today]

“Does Science Lead to Atheism?

Alex Rosenberg discusses his views on atheism, science, and Bas van Fraassen.

Walter Veit

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/science-and-philosophy/202003/does-science-lead-atheism

(…)

Walter Veit: In your book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, you argue that there is not much reason to provide arguments against God’s existence. Nevertheless, you don’t shy away from debating creationists. Did you regret your discussion with William Lane Craig? I imagine that you might have received a lot of reactions from committed theists. Did you get any positive reactions or were you able to convince anyone of a naturalist worldview?

Alex Rosenberg: I said I didn’t need to provide arguments against god’s existence because there were already so many good ones, and lots of evidence against god’s existence too. The aim of the book was to sketch out what else we atheists should endorse, if we endorse atheism owing to scientific considerations. I debated Craig for the money and the chance to plug my book. I only wish I had taken a more mocking tone and had a lighter touch. There were some non-theists in the crowd, and I think I did move one or two people who reached me afterward by email.”

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Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kant Problem’: metaphysics, science, and art” by Stefan Forrester [Biology & Philosophy, 2020]

“Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kant Problem’: metaphysics, science, and art

Stefan Forrester

Biology & Philosophy volume 35, Article number: 27 (2020)

Published: 05 March 2020

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10539-020-09744-4

Abstract

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) has become famous, and perhaps infamous, for many reasons. Presently, he is probably most widely-known for his paintings of plants and animals in his very popular book, Art Forms in Nature, originally collected and published in 1904. However, in addition to Haeckel’s art, he is also well-known for his advocacy of Darwinism and Social Darwinism, for first coining the term ‘ecology,’ for having his work utilized by Nazi pseudo-scientists (Dombrowksi in Tech Commun Q 12:303–319, 2003), and for famously (perhaps fraudulently) producing drawings of animal and human embryos so as to confirm his biogenetic law (Gould in Nat Hist 109:44–45, 2000). Something Haeckel is not as well-known for today is the fact that he seemed to be both a strenuous critic of the metaphysical and moral philosophies of Immanuel Kant and yet also something of an adherent to Kant’s aesthetic views. In terms of metaphysics and morality, Haeckel sought to exorcise Kant’s ideas as much as possible from twentieth century views on science, humanity, and nature; however, in terms of aesthetic theory, Haeckel seemed to embrace a distinctly Kantian approach to art and artworks. This essay proposes to: (1) carefully examine Haeckel’s refutations of some of Kant’s central metaphysical concepts, (2) explore some of the, arguably Kantian, assumptions underlying Haeckel’s approach to aesthetics and his artistic practice, and (3) combine these two lines of inquiry into a portrait of Haeckel’s mind as one that is conflicted about the role Kantian philosophy, and more specifically Kantian noumena, should play in twentieth century science and art. This unresolved tension in Haeckel’s mind regarding Kant’s noumenal realm is what I propose to call his ‘Kant Problem’.

(…)

Haeckel’s refutations of Kantian metaphysics and morality

Ernst Haeckel had a complex relationship with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. While Haeckel respected Kant’s thinking and his position as a highly important figure in the history of ideas, he also wanted very much to dispute several of Kant’s central philosophical claims. Haeckel wanted to do away with much of Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics, and most of his ethical theory as well. It is clear that Haeckel studied Kant during his beginning years as a professor at Jena in the early 1860s. Robert Richards in his book The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought cites reliable evidence that Haeckel read Kant’s works with Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), the then rector of the University at Jena, and that Haeckel was also reading the works of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), a renowned Kant and Schelling scholar who worked to suffuse the sciences with philosophical ideals, much like Haeckel himself would do later in his career (2008). The important difference being that Humboldt sought to conjoin modern science with Kantian-style metaphysical concepts, whereas Haeckel thought that Kant’s views were incompatible with the progress of scientific knowledge and with a scientific worldview.

In his own philosophical works some 35 years later, such as The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study in Philosophical Biology (1905), and The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1901), Haeckel advocated vehemently for a kind of philosophical monism. A monism which set nature, i.e., scientifically-analyzable nature, as the one and only component of existence that encompasses and expresses all the properties of the universe, both physical and mental. Haeckel says clearly in Riddle of the Universe, “We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance” (pp. 33–34).Footnote3 The main idea of monism is generally that there is only one substance that has properties: nature. Moreover, for philosophers like Spinoza, this substance is also identical to God, they are one in the same thing, the substance in which all the properties of the universe inhere. Haeckel, interestingly, also refers to his version of monism as a thoroughgoing ‘practical materialism.’Footnote4 The most controversial consequence of this view is that it eradicates the metaphysical possibility for the supernatural. If we are to conceive of God, souls, angels, the afterlife, etc., as essentially a different kind of substance than nature, then they are all rendered philosophically impossible by Haeckel’s monism; partly because God et al. are defined as being non-natural, which means that by definition they cannot exist apart from nature, and also because non-natural entities are not subject to scientific analysis. On the other hand, the philosophical benefits of monism, Haeckel believed, were many. First, scientific monism finally rids the world of all forms of superstition and supernatural religious beliefs. Haeckel thought that this result would be a great boon to humanity, he says quite bluntly in The Wonders of Life, “For my part, I hold that superstition [here he is discussing the belief in miracles] and unreason are the worst enemies of the human race, while science and reason are its greatest friends” (p. 56). Second, Haeckel saw monism as laying the philosophical groundwork for a fully scientized understanding of both the external world we explore with our senses and the internal world we explore with our minds, both of which are, simply, nature. Furthermore, Haeckel claims that all of nature is governed by rigid, universal laws, and that only science and the scientific method allow us to discover these laws. Finally, Haeckel contends that non-Monist philosophical systems, like dualism, only serve to confuse and conflate the true nature of reality and lead us to make distinctions, e.g. between the body and the mind, where none actually exist.

(…)

Haeckel’s rejection of Kant’s metaphysical views comes from two directions: (1) Since the knowledge of noumena must be a priori and since there is no way for science, which is based solely on knowledge from sensation, i.e., a posteriori knowledge, to prove the existence of a priori knowledge, we must reject noumena if we are to maintain a scientific worldview. (2) If we were to accept the existence of noumena, that would amount to a kind of dualism about the mind and external reality, which is tantamount to just another form of spiritual superstition; a superstition that is philosophically grounded instead of faith-based, but a superstition nonetheless. Haeckel’s argument for his first thrust against Kant is basically that what Kant understood as reason, or the pure a priori faculty of the mind, is in fact something that physiological studies of the brain in Haeckel’s era has explained in purely scientific terms. Namely, that the vast collection of neurons in the brain are the physical basis for consciousness, and that the uniquely human faculty for understanding what appear to be a priori truths and concepts actually has an a posteriori basis in terms of how the human brain evolved. If we understand the a posteriori history of the human brain’s development, Haeckel argues, we will then be able to dispense with the idea that our perceived faculty for a priori truths (i.e., reason) is anything more than a scientifically measurable, a posteriori, phenomenon:

Kant regarded this highest faculty of the human mind as innate, and made no inquiry into its development, its physiological mechanism, and its anatomic organ, the brain….it was impossible to have at that time a correct idea of its physiological function. What seems to us to-day to be an innate capacity, or an a priori quality, of our phronema, is really a phylogenetic result of a long series of brain-adaptations, formed by a posteriori sense-perceptions and experiences (1905, p. 69).

Haeckel argues for the second prong of his attack by stating simply that any appeal to a reality beyond what can be perceived by the senses amounts to superstition regardless of whether it comes from a religion or a powerful philosophical thinker like Kant, “The sense world (mundus sensibilis) lies open to our senses and our intellect, and is empirically knowable within certain limits. But behind it [according to Kant] there is the spiritual world (mundus intelligibilis) of which we know, and can know, nothing; its existence (as the thing in itself) is, however, assured by our emotional needs. In this transcendental world dwells the power of mysticism” (1905, p. 68). In this quote I think we see Haeckel distilling down his frustrations with Kant’s metaphysics quite sharply. Haeckel implies here that Kant’s arguments for the noumenal realm amount to some sort of emotional appeal, or the idea that it is only as a result of our psychological need for a deeper level of reality beyond the phenomenal, that we are tempted to believe in a ‘mystical’ transcendental world at all. Nevertheless, since this emotional need is very strong, it manifests itself as very powerful religious, spiritual, and mystical beliefs and practices, all of which I think Haeckel would classify as forms of superstition. Kant’s views leave the door open for a spiritual realm that is distinct from the phenomenal world that comes to us through the senses and is thereby impenetrable to the methods and modalities of science. Accepting this “mundus intelligibilis” as an integral part of reality is, I think for Haeckel, a basic philosophical mistake that is tantamount to embracing superstition.

Moving now to Haeckel’s criticisms of Kant’s moral theory, those objections emerge directly from his criticisms of Kant’s metaphysics. Haeckel argues that once Kant left open the door to the “mundus intelligibilis” in his metaphysical theory, it was easier for him to import some traditional ethical assumptions through that door to function as the basis for his moral views, namely the notions of God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, i.e., Kant’s three archetypal ideas of reason. Thus the foundations of Kant’s moral theory, says Haeckel, rest on that same fundamental mistake of affirming the existence of the noumenal realm in addition to the phenomenal realm (the realm of science). Haeckel bemoaned the fact that most other philosophers and theologians in his day were still in Kant’s camp when it came to morals, stating, “They affirm, with Kant, that the moral world is quite independent of the physical, and is subject to very different laws; hence a man’s conscience, as the basis for his moral life, must also be quite independent of our scientific knowledge of the world, and must be based rather on his religious faith” (1901, p. 348). In this passage we begin to see a kind of crystallization of Haeckel’s fears about Kant’s decision to accept the noumena as real. As a result of these fears Haeckel’s purely philosophical objections to the phenomena-noumena distinction were not altogether well-formed. He objected to the noumena mostly on the grounds that they conflicted with his preferred worldview of monism. Haeckel did not necessarily attack the noumena on logical grounds as being self-contradictory or incoherent, thus he could not advocate for their elimination from metaphysics based only on reasoning. But now we see Haeckel showing us the damaging results of allowing the noumenal level of reality into the world. Basically, all of what Haeckel saw as the destructive impact of religion and religious belief was facilitated by the noumena. The most important areas of human experience: knowledge, morality, truth, and reality all become different sorts of divine mysteries because of the noumena. Moreover, the scientific study of nature (the phenomena) becomes inherently secondary and limited compared to the conceptual understanding of the noumena. In other words, with the noumena allowed into our worldview, science can play no role in some important areas of human experience, like morality. Instead, science must remain silent, and clearly, Haeckel wishes to argue that this result is detrimental to humanity.

Lastly, while still addressing Kantian morality, Haeckel repeats his strategy of attacking Kant’s views both philosophically and scientifically. In The Wonders of Life Haeckel claims that modern science has understood the human brain to such a degree that Kant’s appeal to the unique human faculty of reason no longer holds any weight. By studying the brain, science has rendered what Kant thought was a noumenal entity (reason) into a phenomenal entity (the brain). Therefore, there is no longer any need for noumena. Likewise, in Riddle of the Universe, Haeckel asserts that various modern sciences have either explained or dispelled all of Kant’s noumenal ethical concepts. Haeckel says that modern anthropology has “…dissipated [the] pretty dream…” (1901, p. 349) that all humans have an identical set of ethical faculties because they are based on the universality of reason. The study of other cultures has told us clearly, Haeckel argues, that peoples and cultures differ widely on what constitutes a good ethical person, and what constitutes good ethical judgment. He also claims that “comparative and genetic psychology” has shown that there cannot be a soul and that modern physiology has proven the impossibility of free will (Haeckel 1901, p. 349). Although Haeckel does not fill in much scientific detail about these claims, he clearly sees them as decisive arguments against Kant’s moral theory. The final blow from modern science that Haeckel deals to Kantian morality is that its central tenet, namely Kant’s much vaunted categorical imperative,Footnote5 has been replaced by the biological understanding of human beings as social creatures. Without going into too much detail, Kant thought that the categorical imperative could be proven using a “transcendental deduction of pure reason (see especially Part I, Book I, Chapter I of the Critique of Practical Reason). This deduction, being transcendental and not empirical, involves several noumenal ideas, such as the notion of the “good will”, “autonomy”, and “freedom of the will” to name a few. Hence, when Haeckel says, “[This]…shows that the feeling of [moral] duty does not rest on an illusory ‘categorical imperative,’ but on the solid ground of social instinct, as we find in the case of all social animals” (1901, p. 350), he is casting serious doubt on Kant’s use of noumenal ideas, going so far as to call them “illusory” in this context. So here, just as Haeckel earlier dispensed with Kant’s notion of the noumenal mind with neurology, he dispenses with Kant’s noumenal ethical notions with anthropology.”

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“The Taxonomy of Human Evolved Psychological Adaptations” By Niruban Balachandran, Daniel Glass [The Evolution Institute]

“The Taxonomy of Human Evolved Psychological Adaptations

By Niruban Balachandran, Daniel Glass

https://evolution-institute.org/the-taxonomy-of-human-evolved-psychological-adaptations/

This article accompanies a This View of Life Podcast with PsychTable co-founders Niruban Balachandran and Daniel Glass. Listen here: https://pod.link/1484281813

In 1992, the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby predicted, “Just as one can now flip open Gray’s Anatomy to any page and find an intricately detailed depiction of some part of our evolved species-typical morphology, we anticipate that in 50 or 100 years one will be able to pick up an equivalent reference work for psychology and find in it detailed information-processing descriptions of the multitude of evolved species-typical adaptations of the human mind, including how they are mapped onto the corresponding neuroanatomy and how they are constructed by developmental programs.”

Classification systems like the one Cosmides and Tooby envisaged indicate the maturity of a scientific discipline because they enable the organization and labeling of entities under observation (i.e., taxa). Like chemistry’s Periodic Table of Elements, zoology’s Linnean classification system, and psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the evolutionary behavioral sciences were still in need of a taxonomy of evolved psychological adaptations (EPAs)—which are defined as cognitive, emotional, behavioral, or perceptual traits that were functionally designed by the process of evolution by selection—such as the eyeblink, thirst, and startle responses.

However, by the start of the 21st century, evolutionary behavioral scientists had already proposed and amassed an international stock of hundreds of EPAs. Furthermore, other factors signaled that the timing was right for establishing a classification system for EPAs: an abundance of affordable global computing power, the explosion in web-based scientific collaboration and social networking, increasingly testable hypotheses, exciting new research methods from advanced neuroimaging to behavioral genetics, and the international emergence of a core of young, transdisciplinary researchers. Therefore, finding it unnecessary to wait until 2042 or 2092, Niruban proposed and published a taxonomy of human EPAs in 2011. We then teamed up in 2012, co-founding and announcing the launch of PsychTable.org together. It was a terrific moment.

(…)

As E.O. Wilson wrote, “To maintain the species indefinitely, we are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms, and the social sciences come to full flower, the result might be hard to accept.” Therefore, to address this imperative, our goals are fourfold:

1 – Increase awareness of the role evolution has played in shaping our minds, brain, and behavior.

2 – Create a simple and intuitive taxonomy of proposed and supported EPAs.

3 – Help identify gaps in current EPA research.

4 – Provide a reference tool for scientists, students, and laypeople studying human behavior.

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https://www.psychtable.org/ is, therefore, an open-science taxonomy devoted to uncovering the richness and complexity of our evolved human behavior. We hope it will help contribute to a fuller understanding of ourselves and our world. As W.D. Hamilton put it, “The tabula of human nature was never rasa, and is now being read.”

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“The neural processes behind our desire for revenge” [Neuroscience News]

“The neural processes behind our desire for revenge

Neuroscience News

https://neurosciencenews.com/revenge-neural-processes-15844/amp/

Summary: During a conflict between two groups, oxytocin levels increase, influencing the medial prefrontal cortex. This results in a greater feeling of empathy among the group and a desire to seek revenge on rivals. The findings shed light on how conflict contagion can occur in social groups.

(…)

The study suggests that the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin is increased during conflict between groups and influences the medial prefrontal cortex, the section of the brain associated with our decision-making activity. This leads to a greater feeling of love and empathy among a group and the desire to seek revenge when attacked by an outside group. The findings may help explain how a process called ‘conflict contagion’ can occur, where a conflict that starts between a few individuals ends up spreading among entire groups.

(…)

They found that the conflict encountered by the revenge group was associated with an increased level of oxytocin compared to the control group. Additionally, they saw that these increased levels of oxytocin predicted the medial prefrontal activity associated with ingroup pain. This activity in turn predicted the desire to seek revenge upon the outgroup, regardless of whether some of the individuals were directly involved in the conflict.

***

“A neurobiological association of revenge propensity during intergroup conflict”.

Xiaochun Han, Michele J Gelfand, Bing Wu, Ting Zhang, Wenxin Li, Tianyu Gao, Chenyu Pang, Taoyu Wu, Yuqing Zhou, Shuai Zhou, Xinhuai Wu Is a corresponding author, Shihui Han.

eLife doi:10.7554/eLife.52014.

Abstract

A neurobiological association of revenge propensity during intergroup conflict

Revenge during intergroup conflict is a human universal, but its neurobiological underpinnings remain unclear. We address this by integrating functional MRI and measurements of endogenous oxytocin in participants who view an ingroup and an outgroup member’s suffering that is caused mutually (Revenge group) or respectively by a computer (Control group). We show that intergroup conflict encountered by the Revenge group is associated with an increased level of oxytocin in saliva compared to in the Control group. Furthermore, the medial prefrontal activity in response to ingroup pain in the Revenge but not Control group mediates the association between endogenous oxytocin and the propensity to give painful electric shocks to outgroup members regardless of whether they were directly involved in the conflict. Our findings highlight an important neurobiological correlate of revenge propensity which may be implicated in conflict contagion across individuals in the context of intergroup conflict.