A Leash of Hemp: Does our slow, overbearing consciousness mislead us about human nature?

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Running is a precious 30 or so minutes for me. It's a drug. If the pace and the light and the rock'n'roll in the earpods are just right, it's god. But today while I ran on the old railroad-turned-trail in our neighborhood, everything was more or less ungodly, more or less routine. As always, I passed by many walkers, cyclists, runners, dogs, cats, squirrels going the other direction. Most humans say hi or wave. I give the peace sign. I live in Peace Dale. I like words and peace and cute.

And as I'm apt to do, I meditate on the people I see, sizing them up, giving them roles, stories, assessing their general vibe, riffing on them until new thoughts hijack those neurons, which is frequent on a run. And I want to tell you about a specific people-passing incident from this morning because it illustrates, just in that fleeting, mundane, snapshot of a throwaway moment something much more profound, not just about human nature but about how we perceive it which folds back on the nature of human nature itself. (whoa)

He's about 50 yards away when I first notice him:  White, in his twenties, gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans, hood up over his hair, walking a dark-brown pitbull-looking breed. 

And I think to myself, I bet his dog's leash is made of hemp.

To me, all those traits I'm observing together scream 'leash of hemp.'

And sure enough, as the space between us narrows, I can see it's a leash of hemp. 

Naturally I'm thinking something like, See? See, politically correct world? Stereotypes can be true. Some biological and cultural traits cluster together predictably. Calm down everybody. It's just human nature! We vary predictably in many ways.

And nobody can argue against the fact that some traits do cluster and that you can predict some things about people based on things like their sex, their clothes, their age, their gait, their dog breed, ... 

Okay, cool. But whoa whoa whoa.

Did I really use all those observations to successfully predict the leash was made of hemp? Did I really just validate that stereotype about 'hemp dog leash people?' Did I really just support that theory (stereotypes are real, baby) by forming a hypothesis that ended up being correct?

Of course it could have been a coincidence, my correct guess. There are only so many kinds of dog leashes: Leather, acrylic, and hemp are the main ones I think. So, given a leash exists, the odds are pretty good that I'll guess what kind it is, regardless of what the guy or the dog look like who are tethered together by it. 

But that's not what I meant by my doubt. I'm wondering about something other than coincidence, something quite sinister.

I'm wondering whether I actually predicted the leash was made of hemp or if my brain tricked me into thinking I did.

I mean, don't you think it's suspicious that I caught myself predicting what the leash would be made of? Doesn't that seem weird?

I could, just as easily, have tried to guess his shoe or jeans brand, whether he was wearing a watch or not, if he was going to smile at me or not, harass me or not. Many things that I could see or experience upon closer proximity were available for prediction and, instead of any those things, I chose to predict the material of the dog leash.

Why? What was my consciousness up to?

Let's cut to the punchline: I don't think I predicted anything at all. Right after the whole thing went down, I caught my consciousness red-handed.[1] 

From as far away as I was, I could still have quite easily perceived that the leash draped and swung like hemp, and unlike leather or acrylic. I could also have very easily perceived the pale color, unlike the dark colors that acrylic and leather usually are.

So I could have known it was hemp without yet knowing it, consciously, since there's a delay between perception and consciousness.

And instead of coming to know 'hemp' from my immediate perception of it, I think my consciousness narrated my experience in such a way that I was predicting something I already knew! My consciousness made me believe that I had a clever hunch, a hunch that was consistent with a stereotype of this 'hemp dog leash person.'

Put another way, my consciousness was taking creative credit for the observations that the perceptive parts of my brain were already processing. Sounds a bit like some people you work with, doesn't it?

All this is happening in split seconds. It's not hard to imagine how my consciousness--since it's already very busy trying to constantly make sense of the world--could garble this input and the timing of it by inserting a narrative. It's not hard to imagine, given the delay between perception and consciousness, how my mind could mangle the more likely true story which was simply...

input-input-input (ad nauseam)

by editing it into a story of ...

input-prediction-input-I'mAGenius

OK. Besides how fascinating this cognitive delay is, with all its relevancy for studies of ESP, pre-cognition, magic tricks, and falling for them. Besides all the implications for the existence (or not) of free will ... since, if your consciousness is delayed, are you really deciding your life or are you just experiencing life and narrating it as if you're deciding it?

Aside from all those fascinating supernatural and existential implications, this is the kicker: This illusion stemming from our slow and overbearing consciousness probably affects how we relate to other human beings who we encounter every day.

See, the leash of hemp boosted my confidence in two things that are already boosting one another to begin with:

1. I think I'm good at predicting human nature.

2. I think human nature, especially in stereotyped and categorical terms, is predictable.

These two things may be true in many regards. But my experience, my little experiment, my leash of hemp, lead me to believe that 1 and 2 are stronger than they are and that they're realer than they probably are, in reality.

And a leash of hemp moment is just so exhilarating, at least for a scientist like me, when it's about traits untied to value, like leash material. It's a similar feeling you get once you're so familiar with the chimpanzees you're observing that you can predict, given a set of circumstances or time of day or whatever, what they'll do next, where they'll walk, climb, who they'll play with or groom. It's a real high.

But how about when those links, those predictions, are about value-laden traits like beauty, intelligence, sexual orientation, religious belief, violence? I'm more likely to believe stereotypes and my own abilities to predict human nature when it comes to these much more sensitive or much more volatile issues simply because I guessed that a dog's leash was hemp while running this morning.

A leash of hemp's no big deal when it's just about a leash of hemp,[2] but a taking a 'leash of hemp' about someone who's wearing a head scarf or a short skirt, about someone who speaks with a Southern accent or an educated accent, who goes to temple or to church, who has darkly or lightly pigmented skin? Maybe that's when we should humble our consciousness. Maybe that's when we should remind it that perception was there first. Maybe help it question whether it's really so smart. After all, maybe it already saw, heard, smelt what it so cleverly claims to have sensed, believed, predicted. Maybe it doesn't deserve the credit it's taking, thereby encouraging itself to apply its methods to other situations that require more nuance, more sensitivity, more observation, more time, actually getting to know a person, that whole human connection thing, you know?

It might feel like it, but we're not, objectively, human nature experts. We can be too easily tricked by our delayed and overbearing consciousness. We're too quick to be seduced by these split-second cognitive events that validate our intellect, our experience, and our beliefs all at once.[3]

Knowing this, being conscious of the lag between perception and consciousness, catching one's mind in the act, why is it still so hard to change our minds going into the future?

Maybe if leashes of hemp were more ubiquitous they'd serve as a nice gimmicky reminder about these illusions--dampening our habit of skyrocketing all the way up to "human nature" from a dog's leash. But would that really do any good? After all, skin colors, eye shapes, skirt lengths, accents... these things are ubiquitous and yet they clearly aren't gimmick enough to humble our consciousness, to help us remain skeptical of what each of us knows so well about human nature just from our itty bitty n of 1.

**

Related reading...

1. How stereotypes are reinforced and how they are broken, in the NYTimes: click here. 
2. Dan Dennett's stuff.
3. [a broad Scholar.Google.com search]
4. http://cogprints.org/838/1/BJP2web.html
5. http://behaviouralscience.net/2007/11/07/free-will-and-consciousness/
6. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-free-will-an-illusion
7. http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/staff/alexh/lab/
8. http://www.eaglemanlab.net/papers/StetsonetalNeuron2006.pdf
9. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/09/15/time-on-the-brain-how-you-are-always-living-in-the-past-and-other-quirks-of-perception/

[1] I thank running for opening my brain to such a thing--a good hypothesis considering how my most satisfying thoughts usually come during the 30 minutes of the day that I am pushing my body down the running trail.

[2] Unless you've got something against hemp, hippies, dogs, pitbulls, white people, men, hoodies.

[3] Implicit here is an assumption that all humans suffer from this delayed consciousness, that it's part of "human nature." oy, is it?

End of an era....and good riddance

J. Phillipe Rushton, the notorious 'race' scientist at the University of Western Ontario, has died.  His passing will be mourned by those who harbor racist ideas and seek scientific justification for them.  He will also be mourned by those who wish to stir the pot of ideological science that today, in the main, basically denies the reality of racial differences (except perhaps in the case of some disease susceptibility variation).  As with deniers of climate change or evolution, deniers of sound science will miss Dr Rushton.

Science needs to be open to ideas of all sorts, and mavericks are often treated as outsider heretics and denigrated as not playing with a full mental deck.  This is natural human behavior, but tribal intolerance should be resisted since, after all, some new ideas really are major advances.  But we should be intolerant towards ideas that sound good, adopt the right rhetoric, but simply do not respond to the evidence or reflect a sophisticated understanding of the science being invoked.

We won't belabor Rushton's racist theories except to say that he treated races as groups with group differences, stressed socially uncomfortable traits like group intelligence and sexuality differences, and used post hoc rationales to explain what he saw as differences.  He took present-day group trait distributions as if they were permanent and of evolutionary relevance.  Generalizations such as the assertions such as that mean genital size differs among continents, or mean IQ scores should be based on actual and strong evidence.  But even without knowing the data in such specific instances, one must recognize that average group differences in such traits are, a priori, to be expected.  Given the principles of how populations evolve over time, we would never expect continental populations to be exactly the same in any complex trait.  That would be so improbable as to be essentially impossible.

The observed differences are likely to be statistically 'significant' if samples are large enough, since different populations evolve independently in widely dispersed locations.  They have different genetic variation and environmental experiences.  But that does not mean that the differences are important, which is a totally subjective judgment.  Even Rushton rather sanctimoniously and patronizingly agreed that each continental population was well adapted to its locale.  As so often happens in this area, he was just calling the facts as he claimed to see them.  And he accepted a naive Darwinian dogma that attributes the differences to natural selection, which becomes a far stretch in the absence of any actual evidence.

Group differences need not in the main reflect genetic variation, but can be due to environmental variation, which is an elusive factor that changes over time and may--often does--swamp genetically based differences, especially for behavioral traits.  Also very important is the choice of traits to study.  Why genitals and IQ?  These are commonly used traits by racists that have strong emotional reactions.  What leads one to study them, if not a basically racist (in the negative sense of the word) intent?

Rushton noted that Africans have bigger genitals (at least males--we don't remember what he said about females, and don't care to check) and smaller brains than Asians, and are hence less intelligent and more sexually driven--stereotypes of modern times if there ever were any.  Not that long ago, the developed world considered northern Europeans to be barbaric dolts, and much more recently Asians were the ignorant coolies recruited to build our railroads.  Africans were childlike and didn't have souls, so we could enslave them.  You know the story.

Rushton had the usual sort of convenient Just-So natural selection theories, one, in this case, had to do with r and K selection--reproducing fast and not caring much for each offspring, or reproducing slowly and giving great child care.  Hypersexed individuals just want to rut away, while their Asian  contemporaries want to think more deeply (Confucius and all that, don't you know!).  This theory, even some of Rushton's fans have noted, didn't hold much water.  It's a convenient after-the-fact story.

The Irish?  They got rhythm!
Superficial, or even glib, users of evolution to prove social value judgments about groups of people, and attribute them to Nature's way are by no means new.  Like the 13th century scholar and Welsh aristocrat Gerald of Wales about the year 1200, who touring and writing about the then exotic Irish, wrote "The only thing to which I find that this people apply a commendable industry is playing upon musical instruments; in which they are incomparably more skilful than any other nation I have ever seen. ... unlike that of the Britons to which I am accustomed, is not slow and harsh,.."  Of course, much of what was written about the Irish's inherent barbarity was justification for conquest.  We pick this example because we just heard a discussion of Gerald's life on the BBC Radio 4's In Our Time and it seemed coincidentally apt.  The Irish got rhythm, the Brits?  Nah!
 
Generalizations about peoples, and the treatment of peoples as discrete categories are not an invention of Darwinian fervor.  They are common--and they're making a comeback in our resurgence of behavior/evolutionary genetics today.  They are applied to individuals and to groups, dressed in evolutionary rhetoric.  But at their heart they reflect convenient and naive use of evolutionary theory. History shows how such ideas, in science, religion, or other areas of human politics, can be very dangerous.   In that sense, to Rushton (his ideas, not his person) we can only say, good riddance.

The times I've seen Rushton on television have shown him, to me, to be rather a superficial dolt.  This is not because I find his ideas so utterly superficial.  There are people whose ideas are wrong, in my opinion, or even offensive, but who are at least thinking at a serious level and who actually do some science themselves.  Typical of mavericks such as Rushton, is that he sent a mass mailing (at least twice!) to thousands of scientists, of a digest of his book on this subject.  It is no different from a bible tract in this sense, and even contains the typical statements about how he is doing this because he's been repressed by the mainstream.  Creationists do this all the time, too.

But we must hasten to add that Rushton was just another superficial player in the evolutionary pat-story game.  Advocates on the other side, who deny the existence of human racial (that is, geographic) differences, invoke similar kinds of arguments, just as superficially and with just as much a covert, or even overt, sociopolitical agenda.  The problem is the lack of constraint on selective use of scientific theory or facts, by whichever side.  Anything one imagines he sees today, can be justified on the grounds of natural selection, since such arguments are usually not open to any  kind of proof.

Instead, tempered, sophisticated evocation of evolutionary principles are hard to come by, because it is just so very easy to make up stories about what might plausibly have happened, and then to believe that they are true.  Naturally, we adopt stories that fit other aspects of our worldview (see yesterday's post).  The type of story that predominates in any period cycles between Nature and Nurture, to put it in one common framework.  The fact is, Nature is difficult to understand in such simple terms, and we are far from knowing enough....and since evolutionary events occurred in the distant and nearly wholly unobserved past, the challenge to stick to what we can confidently say is the greater.

Social politics, which essentially means competition for social and economic power, are a part of the human reality.  We take sides, whether in savory or nasty ways, and we select any argument we can make to convince others of our rectitude.  But at least in science, we should do our best--do much better--to stay within what we know rather than what it is convenient to wish.

Science denial -- it may be closer than you think

We, as people of science, believe -- er, conclude -- that we have a worldview based on weighing the evidence. That's the definition of science.  Presumably most MT readers share the same worldview, or you wouldn't be here.  As such, we all most likely accept evolution, consider climate change to be real and the result of human action, don't treat our ills with homeopathy or attend fundamentalist churches, or even any church at all.  We practice some version of a 'scientific method,' whether based on extensive reading of the philosophy and history of science or a hazy recall of what we were taught in 4th grade.  We do this, but we also know that we (nor anyone else) don't know everything: we accept imperfect knowledge and we accept tentative theories as such, but we try to go with what the evidence suggests is most likely.

And yet, there's the problem of exactly what constitutes that  'evidence.'  Homeopathy may clearly be off our radar, but do you take vitamin C or zinc or echinacea when you have a cold?  Maybe your cold went away in 8 days this time rather than the usual 10.  Well, all colds go away, so how would you know if whatever you took helped?  Maybe you had a virus that caused an 8 day cold this time, but last time's virus caused a 10 day cold.  Well, so maybe you just conclude that it doesn't hurt to take vitamin C, so you'll just keep doing it when you have a cold, just in case.  Is that an evidence-based conclusion or is it faith?  Or perhaps faith that whether there are really are any benefits, there aren't any risks either--a subjective attitude towards evidence.

This is a trivial example, but how will you decide whether to have a mammogram or a PSA for prostate cancer or whether to take statins to lower your cholesterol, or which treatment is best for whatever you do get?  There is evidence for and against of all of these, based on peer-reviewed studies and state-of-the-art methodologies, and choosing to believe one -- based on...? -- means you've chosen to deny the science that supports the others.

How do we know that climate change is real?  We didn't go out and collect the evidence ourselves, and most of us, as biologists, aren't equipped to weigh the physics, climatology, and so on ourselves.  We don't make such judgments based on whether we have a fortunately mild winter where we live.  Instead, we have to trust that people we choose to believe have assessed the evidence and come to sound conclusions that we can trust.  So, yes, we take that on faith, too, even if we know that those who generated the data were fallible humans.

What about genetics?  It used to be that you could generally predict where someone would come down on genetic determinism by knowing his/her politics, and vice versa, but that's not so true anymore.  To some otherwise left-leaning scientists, genetics is providing some uncomfortable truths -- there are interpopulation genetic traces of histories of geographic isolation.  This to some comes awfully close to suggesting that race is a biological category, not the social construct as has been argued in the social sciences for decades.  So, to fit this evidence into their political worldview, a lot of geneticists are now saying that it's important to document genetic differences between populations in order to address social disparities in health, or to teach people that differences between populations are only skin deep.  This requires handling underlying structural issues such as defining 'population' properly and not going beyond that -- which  in evolutionary terms is largely a matter of sampling to get the data we want.

Are these evidence-based conclusions?  E.g., is genetics in fact going to address social disparities in health?  There's scant evidence of that to date.  Society may do it as a political and economic decision, but it will generally not be based on genetics.

And then there's the question of what genetics can tell us anyway.  Holly's post last week arguing against fear of knowledge was cheered by a lot of people who believe -- it's so hard to avoid that word -- that what companies like 23andMe have on offer is in fact valuable knowledge.  But, is that based on evidence?  Yes, carrier status is valuable to know so that people can make decisions about their risk of transmitting disease to offspring but 23andMe at least, as far as we can tell, offers only a handful of such tests.  Disease prediction and ancestry are their big sellers, and, well, Ken and I have blogged about what we think about those in the past, though people who believe in these tests don't agree with us, for whatever reason.  People with whom we'd probably share a lot in terms of our outlook on the world, on science, most of our understanding of the foundation of genetics and so on. But not on the quality of the evidence in this instance, and thus on whether direct-to-consumer companies are shilling, or should be selling what they are.  This of course doesn't make us right and everyone else wrong.  It just means we're either evaluating the same evidence differently or considering different pieces of evidence.

But, to make a point in a stark way: 23andMe sells update service concerning risk.  That implies that today's risk estimates are not so reliable -- that is, the evidence changes -- and that the revised bulletins you will get will be more accurate and hence worth the fee.  But we know that steady improvement in accuracy is not the case, for the historical reason that risks jump all over the place from study to study, and that biological complexity and environmental changes alter risk even if it can be accurately estimated--making that question itself moot--changes that are often greater then their current value.  Is the evidence actually homing in on Truth about risk?  It's hard to believe that it is.

What about IQ?  That's still an easy one -- left-wingers don't think it, if there is an 'it', is genetic in a major way, and right-wingers do.  In this case, there's a ton of evidence on both sides, and what we choose to believe is based on our worldview.  That's often the case, but not always.  Sometimes, particularly when the issue isn't laden with political overtones the way race and intelligence are, there's so much variation afoot that an issue can be overdetermined.  In other words, many different ideas can be fitted to the same data comparably well.  When there are too many contributing variables, the stability of estimates of their effects is simply too imprecise and unstable for solid prediction at present.  Sample sizes of enormous scale are required even to estimate many of the effects.

IQ is a good example.  There may or may not be population differences in average IQ as measured by some test.  Whether or not we agree about the test, the distributions overlap greatly, so the average difference, which is the kind of figure typically cited, doesn't tell the main story.  And the test results change for many reasons, not only that social and environmental factors are documentably very important.  We know, of course, of many genetic changes that greatly impair IQ scores (e.g., the causes of Fragile X or Down syndromes).  Clearly intelligence involves genes and must therefore be affected by genetic variation.  But that does not mean that in general an indivdiual's IQ can be predicted from knowing his/her genotype (indeed, if anything, it may be far better predicted by knowing parents' average IQ).  The issue is when people's potential is gauged socially by their test scores, or people are treated in ways that depend on their social or biological group.

A recent episode of an excellent BBC Radio 4 program, Analysis, broadcast on Sept 23, addressed this, discussing what they called "moral tribalism" and the issue of politics affecting the evidence we choose to accept, and it's well worth any scientist's time to listen to.  They point out that "we are all science deniers" when the science is uncomfortable.   It is no secret that science is part of human social endeavors, and it may be more objective than others, it is still highly subjective, political, and emotional.  That itself is uncomfortable, but worth examining.

Spent corn

Queen Anne's lace and ladybugs

Autumn bluebird and elm against the sky

Grace and beauty

Thanks so much, Holly, for your fine posts of the last week or so.  It's always a joy to have your contributions.  They're always clever, thoughtful and fun to read, but also it's just a joy to work with you.

Ken and I are still traveling.  His class went well -- it's astonishing that a class called "Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics" ever needs to be taught, and can be such an eye-opener.  We're taking a few days in Prague now, which is a city that one of our daughters, a violinist, returns to again and again, and that she has been urging us to see since she first went.

Our other daughter is a metalsmith, with an artist's eye and sensibility.  She lives in central Pennsylvania, and she brings her camera wherever she goes.  She has agreed to let us post some of her recent end-of-summer photographs, to take the Mermaid's Tale from here to our return with grace and beauty.  Thank you, Ellen.