The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century

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The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century In 1959 C. P. Snow delivered his now-famous Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures,” a reflection on the academy based on the premise that intellectual life was divided into two cultures: the arts and humanities on one side and the natural sciences on the other. Since then, a third culture, generally termed “social science” and comprising the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and psychology, has grown in importance. Jerome Kagan’s book describes the assumptions, vocabulary, and contributions of each of these cultures and argues that the meanings of many of the concepts used by each community are unique to its methods because the source of evidence contributes to meaning. The text summarizes the contributions of the social sciences and humanities to our understanding of human nature and questions the popular belief that biological processes are the main determinant of variation in human behavior. Jerome Kagan is a developmental psychologist, a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and emeritus professor at Harvard University. He has received the Distinguished Scientist Awards from the American Psychological Association and the Society for Research in Child Development. Jerome Kagan has written several books dealing with the assumptions of the social sciences. He is best known for his research on moral development, infant cognition, and temperamental biases in children.

The Three Cultures Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century

Jerome Kagan Harvard University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521518420 © Jerome Kagan 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2009

ISBN-13

978-0-511-51800-3

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-51842-0

hardback

ISBN-13

978-0-521-73230-7

paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Preface

page vii

1. Characterizing the Three Cultures 2. The Natural Sciences

1 51

3. Social Sciences 1

104

4. Social Sciences 2

168

5. The Humanities

222

6. Current Tensions

245

Notes Index

277 301

v

Preface

On a gray March afternoon in 2006 I saw a copy of C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures on a shelf above the location of the two books I was searching for in the cavernous Widener Library at Harvard. Recalling the debate it provoked when published more than fifty years ago, and aware that I was looking for a theme to probe during the coming summer, I added it to the pair of books I had come to borrow. After reading Snow’s essay the following weekend, it became clear that the changes in the sciences and research universities over the past half-century had rendered Snow’s analysis a bit archaic, and a comparison of his views with the current reality seemed to be a worthwhile pursuit. The most obvious change was the ascent of big science projects in physics, chemistry, and molecular biology that required expensive machines and teams of experts with varied talents and motives. The typical scientist during my graduate years went to the basement of the university building where the shop was housed and constructed himself, or had built by the department’s technician, whatever apparatus was required for an experiment designed and run by the faculty member or with the help of a graduate student who assisted with the gathering and analysis of the evidence and the writing and rewriting of a paper reporting an interesting result. Two minds and four hands, often with no outside funds, performed all the work. Under these conditions the pride savored if the experiment were successful, or the blend of frustration and sadness if not, was restricted to a pair of agents. v ii

viii

Preface

These emotions are seriously diluted when hundreds of experts design experiments to be executed by teams visiting the international space station, preparing the Hadron Collider for probes that might reveal new particles, documenting the human genome, or studying the brain with magnetic scanners. The joy or pain felt in these settings is dispersed among many, not unlike the mood of the bank managers who bundled and sold thousands of mortgages to hedge funds in order to reduce the risk of any one of them defaulting. The observations produced by the machines of big science have changed the ease of imagining the concepts invented to explain the mysterious signals they produced. Strings oscillating in ten dimensions, the Higgs boson, and genetic drift in a population are examples of concepts that are more difficult to imagine than concepts like bacteria, planetary orbit, molecules, or genes. A majority of scientific ideas, from Galileo to Mendel, were friendly to the human capacities for imagery and, therefore, easier to understand and to explain to a curious public. The machines created two additional problems. Their high cost meant that investigators needed large grants from the federal government and/or private philanthropies, and only the small number of fortunate investigators working at settings with these machines would be able to make important discoveries. Thus, a young, ambitious scientist had to be at the right place in order to enjoy the advantage of these magical, powerful probes. This situation created a division between the small number of privileged investigators and the majority interested in the same question who happened to be too far from the action. The odds of a monk in an isolated monastery making a major discovery in genetics are far lower today than they were when Mendel experimented with pea plants. It did not take long for deans and provosts to appreciate that their physicists, chemists, and biologists were bringing large amounts of overhead monies to their institutions, and they felt an obligation to reciprocate the kindness by allowing them more relaxed teaching

Preface

ix

responsibilities and a bit more respect. Predictably, many natural scientists interpreted their new status as justly earned, and a few began to display some arrogance in their pronouncements. Snow had celebrated the natural scientists because he thought the products of their research would reduce world hunger and perhaps hasten international peace. He did not anticipate the narrative that history composed during the next two generations. Each university campus in Snow’s era was a family with which many faculty members identified. When the federal government and philanthropies became major sources of research funds, hosting conferences in exotic places, many scientists shifted their primary loyalties from their institutions to these generous organizations. The asymmetry in the largesse available to natural scientists, compared with that accorded social scientists and humanists, created status differentials that eroded collegiality and provoked defensive strategies by the two less advantaged cultures. The social scientists, whom Snow had ignored completely, had enjoyed a moment of exuberance, from about 1940 to the 1970s, when it was thought that their ideas might solve some of the stubborn problems that plagued society, especially mental illness, crime, alcoholism, and the high failure rate of school-age children growing up in economically compromised families. However, the crude synthesis of Freudian concepts with the more empirically rigorous ideas of behaviorism, on which that faith had been based, were too weak to carry their hopes to fruition. Eventually the scaffold collapsed, leaving social scientists without a protective theoretical cloak to cover their wounds or an ideological guide for the next investigation. The next cohort of social scientists, therefore, split into two groups. One rushed to join the natural scientists by studying the relations between brain activity and psychological phenomena. The biologists welcomed these new recruits, assuming they would adopt their language and conform to their rules. The larger group, who had chosen the social sciences because of a love affair with the mystery of human motives, thoughts,

x

Preface

or emotions, rather than a curiosity about any aspect of nature that would yield its secret to a powerful mind, chose to study the complex, messier problems disturbing the public’s serenity. Unfortunately, they were handicapped by a lack of powerful methods appropriate to the task and resembled farmers with pitchforks and hoes trying to grow fruit trees on a dry plateau. The scholars who had chosen philosophy, literature, or history took a more severe beating because they were not privy to the generous grants that brought many millions of dollars to their campuses. Moreover, the public, aided by the media, had become persuaded that the answers to society’s serious problems could be provided only by natural scientists. When the postmodernists, such as Derrida and Foucault, attacked the claims made by members of their own intellectual family, the loss of confidence among humanists became catastrophic. The civil protests of the 1960s, which Snow did not anticipate, contributed to an ethic of political correctness in which justice began to compete with individual merit. Deans, research review committees, and honorary societies decided it was important to try to divide their rewards in rough correspondence to the population proportions for gender, ethnicity, and region of the country. Fairness was to be added to talent and motivation as a relevant criterion when promotions, honors, and grant funds were allocated. All of these events sculpted new structures and procedures that Snow might not recognize. Newton would have been astonished. I had written favorably on Bohr’s suggestion that the meaning of every scientific concept depended on its source of evidence. The natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities often used the same word to name different phenomena, and therefore a word could have different meanings in the three communities. Many failed to appreciate that the neuroscientists’ understandings of the terms “consciousness,” “fear,” and “memory” were not shared by social scientists or humanists using the same vocabulary. Thus, scholars and the larger public

Preface

xi

had to be reminded that each of the intellectual communities had something important to contribute to an understanding of human nature and societies. These reflections motivated this brief book, which had three primary goals: to analyze the meanings of the vocabularies used by the three cultures, to describe and critique the seminal assumptions the three communities bring to their work, and, finally, to list each group’s unique contributions. The first chapter considers the differences among the cultures in their vocabularies, mental tools, and balance of interest in patterns or single features; the influence of history on problems probed; and, finally, the motive hierarchies of each group. The second chapter analyzes the natural sciences, especially their four seminal premises, their wish to avoid an entanglement with ethics, their insistence on minimizing the differences between humans and other animals, the challenges to their prior hegemony, and the ambivalence among youths interested in natural science toward research that requires team cooperation. The next two chapters on the social sciences consider the initial reluctance to regard collectives as legitimate phenomena, the problems with their metrics and methods, the loss of confidence following the dramatic advances in biology, the problems surrounding the formal models of economists, and also the significant contributions of social scientists. The penultimate chapter explains the loss of status among humanists following the ascent of the social sciences and the postmodernist challenge to the validity of claims based on narratives, as well as their seminal contributions to an understanding of the human condition. The final chapter describes the recent disturbing developments in the university, especially the diluted identification with the institution, the crass search for celebrity, and the confusion over the current mission in undergraduate education. The final pages turn skeptical by asking whether life on this planet is better today than it was 200 years earlier and fails to arrive at an unequivocally affirmative

xii

Preface

reply. The text ends with a plea to all three communities to recognize the special forms of enlightenment each brings to a world of diverse societies. I hope readers will find something of interest in an effort that taught me more than I anticipated when I took Snow’s paperback from the library shelf. I thank Robert Le Vine, Steven Reznick, and Jay Schulkin for comments on the full text, Gerald Holton for a critique of the chapter on the natural sciences, and David Warsh for patiently re-reading many versions of the section on economics. I am indebted to Nancy Snidman, Paula Mabee, and Sabiha Imran for help with manuscript preparation; to Eric Schwartz, now at Princeton University Press, for being my advocate with the Syndics at Cambridge University Press; and to Terry Kornak for editing of the text.

1 Characterizing the Three Cultures

The influential British novelist and science administrator C. P. Snow, who had trained as a natural scientist, published a lecture delivered in Cambridge University in 1959 titled “The Two Cultures.” The lecture and the fifty-one-page book that followed provoked heated discussion because of its brash dismissal of the humanities as an intellectual mission lacking in rigor and unable to contribute to the welfare of those living in economically underdeveloped regions. Not surprisingly, humanists resented Snow’s allegations that world peace and prosperity would profit from training more scientists and engineers and fewer historians, philosophers, and literary critics. Three years later, F. R. Leavis, an admired literary critic at Cambridge University, delivered an unusually harsh, occasionally impolite, rebuttal that caricatured Snow as a failed chemist, incompetent novelist, and social commentator who was ignorant of the world’s serious problems. Snow composed his essay as America was about to experience an extraordinary expansion in higher education that led to a fourfold increase in faculty (from 250,000 to more than 1 million) and a sevenfold increase in students to a total of 15 million, compared with only 50,00 Americans who were attending colleges in 1870.1 These changes were due primarily to the establishment of new community colleges and rising enrollments in state universities trying to accommodate the many World War II veterans who, assisted by the government’s decision to subsidize their education in gratitude for their service, 1

2

The Three Cultures

chose to attend college rather than return to the working-class jobs held by their fathers. There was a proportionate swelling in the funds available for research and in the numbers of scientists, research administrators, practitioners, journalists, and teachers managing, utilizing, disseminating, or teaching the products of science. More than 5 million scientific papers were published worldwide from 1992 to 2002, and 40 percent of that very large number were written by American investigators.2 Most youths who choose a life in science in 2009 do not appreciate that the term scientist (as distinct from a physician or philosopher), as well as the opportunity to pursue a research career independent of one’s social class or ethnicity, are less than 170 years old. These facts, combined with a public that had become more skeptical of select scientific claims and the idealistic depiction of scientists as pure of motive in their pursuit of truth, invite a re-examination of Snow’s bold thesis. Although the primary concerns, sources of evidence, and concepts remain the most important nodes of difference among natural scientists (physicists, chemists, and biologists), social scientists, and humanists, the three communities vary on six additional dimensions less pertinent to their epistemologies. (I consider the investigators who study the biological bases for, or evolutionary contributions to, animal or human behavior as natural scientists.) The nine dimensions follow:

1. The primary questions asked, including the degree to which prediction, explanation, or description of a phenomenon is the major product of inquiry 2. The sources of evidence on which inferences are based and the degree of control over the conditions in which the evidence is gathered 3. The vocabulary used to present observations, concepts, and conclusions, including the balance between continuous

Characterizing the Three Cultures

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

3

properties and categories and the degree to which a functional relation was presumed to generalize across settings or was restricted to the context of observation The degree to which social conditions, produced by historical events, influence the questions asked The degree to which ethical values penetrate the questions asked and the conclusions inferred or deduced The degree of dependence on external financial support from government or industry The probability that the scholar works alone, with one or two others, or as a member of a large team The contribution to the national economy The criteria members of each group use when they judge a body of work as elegant or beautiful

Most intellectual efforts consist of three components: (1) a set of unquestioned premises that create preferences for particular questions and equally particular answers, (2) a favored collection of analytical tools for gathering evidence, and (3) a preferred set of concepts that are the core of explanations. A naïve observer who held no premises about the nature of solid objects might conclude that the bottom half of a pencil resting in a half-filled glass of water had been bent by the liquid. Social scientists and humanists share more premises, analytic tools, and concepts, as well as more of the other criteria in Table 1, than each does with natural scientists. Natural scientists emphasize material processes, minimize the influences of historical and cultural contexts and their associated ethical values, and are primarily concerned with the relations between a concept and a set of observations. Social scientists and humanists resist awarding biology too much influence, rely heavily on semantic networks and, therefore, are often as concerned with the relations among a set of semantic terms as they are with the relation between a concept and evidence, and frequently seek answers that affirm or disconfirm an

4

The Three Cultures Table 1. Comparison of the three cultures on nine dimensions

Dimension

Natural Scientists

Social Scientists

Humanists

1. Primary interests

Prediction and explanation of all natural phenomena

Prediction and explanation of human behaviors and psychological states

An understanding of human reactions to events and the meanings humans impose on experience as a function of culture, historical era, and life history

2. Primary sources of evidence and control of conditions

Experimentally controlled observations of material entities

Behaviors, verbal statements, and less often biological measures, gathered under conditions in which the contexts cannot always be controlled

Written texts and human behaviors gathered under conditions of minimal control

3. Primary vocabulary

Semantic and mathematical concepts whose referents are the material entities of physics, chemistry, and biology, and assumed to transcend particular settings

Constructs referring to psychological features, states, and behaviors of individuals or groups, with an acceptance of the constraints that the context of observation imposes on generality

Concepts referring to human behavior, and the events that provoke them with serious contextual restrictions on inferences

4. The influence of historical conditions

Minimal

Modest

Serious

5


Dimension

Natural Scientists

Social Scientists

Humanists

5. Ethical influence

Minimal

Major

Major

6. Dependence on outside support

Highly dependent

Moderately dependent

Relatively independent

7. Work conditions

Both small and large collaborations

Small collaborations and solitary

Solitary

8. Contribution to the national economy

Major

Modest

Minimal

9. Criteria for beauty

Conclusions that involve the most fundamental material components in nature inferred from evidence produced by machines and amenable to mathematical descriptions.

Conclusions that support a broad theoretical view of human behavior.

Semantically coherent arguments described in elegant prose.

implicit ethical ideal. However, the meanings of the concepts used by the three groups deserve special attention because the communities use different sources of evidence.

Three Vocabularies The meaning of a sentence, for speakers and listeners, is based on the actual events that are named, as well as the network of ideas that was the origin of the statement. The meaning of the declaration, “The bulls

6

The Three Cultures

were beaten yesterday” depends on whether the referents for bulls were animals or the Chicago basketball team. The three cultures represent language communities that impose distinct meaning networks on their important concepts and, like the dispersed Indian groups of fifth century Meso-America, compete with each other for dominance. One of the insights of the twentieth century, due in large measure to Ludwig Wittgenstein, is that the meanings of most statements are not transparent. Application of this idea to a scientific proposition implies that meaning depends on the specific observations to which a statement refers, and, therefore, the procedure that generated the evidence and the web of meanings that define a theory. The vocabularies of each culture contain a number of concepts with technical definitions that are of primary interest to only one group (e.g., gluon and transposon for natural scientists, attribution error and gross domestic product for social scientists, and antinomy and historical era for humanists). The vocabulary of psychoanalysts attributed a unique meaning to energy that was neither the one implied by the Chinese concept ch’i, nor the meaning physicists understood in the principles of thermodynamics. But the three cultures also use terms with exactly the same sound and spelling that have different meanings for each culture, even though the scholars may not recognize that fact. The terms fear, capacity, arousal, memory, and count are examples. The meaning of “fear” in T. S. Eliot’s line: “I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust” is not the meaning intended by the social scientist who writes that “The heritability of realistic fears is less than the heritability of unrealistic fears,” nor the meaning understood by the biological scientist who states that “Rats that stop moving when they hear a tone that had predicted electric shock are in a state of fear.” Even though the poet, psychologist, and biologist use the same word, each is naming a distinctly different phenomenon. Eliot was naming the subjective feeling that pierced consciousness when he reflected on the value confusion and spiritual emptiness that


7

permeated Europe after World War I. The psychologist was referring to the answers of adults filling out questionnaires asking them about their sources of worry. The biologist was describing a rat’s immobility in response to a conditioned stimulus that had signaled an unpleasant event in the past. Eliot could have used the word angst; the psychologist could have used the word worry, and the neuroscientist could have used the term vigilant. The descriptions of a hypothetical person called Max make this point clearly. Natural scientists would use a vocabulary that referred to features like bone density, glucose level, blood flow, and electrical currents in body and brain. Social scientists would describe Max’s identifications with his family, gender, ethnicity, and nation; the shame he feels as an American over the deaths of innocent Iraqi citizens; and childhood memories of family holidays at the seashore. Humanists would refer to his membership in a family that migrated from Ireland to America in the nineteenth century, his nostalgia for summer when the November trees are bare, and the blend of powerlessness and melancholy that pierces consciousness when he reflects simultaneously on his aging father and Dylan Thomas’s line, “Do not go gently into that good night.” None of these three descriptions can be translated into one of the others without losing some meaning. The first cohort of economists treated the physicists’ meaning of capacity in the sentence, “Energy is the capacity to do work” as similar to its meaning in “Money is the capacity to purchase goods.” As a result, they assumed that the equations of thermodynamics might be appropriate in mathematical models of the economy. They failed to appreciate that many predicates assume different meanings when they are joined to different nouns because the validity of every declaration rests with a full sentence rather than with a single word. The predicate fall, for example, has four distinct meanings in each of the four expressions: “Temperatures fall,” “Prices fall,” “Apples fall,” and “Spirits fall.”

8

The Three Cultures

Even some terms in the vocabulary of natural scientists have different meanings. The meanings of mass, space, and time in Newton’s equations are not synonymous with the meanings that Einstein understood. Nonetheless, Newton’s concepts work well for an apple falling from a tree and Einstein’s terms explain the energy emitted from a fissionable uranium atom. Acceptance of relativity theory and quantum mechanics during the last century, which altered the traditional meanings of time, space, and objects, allowed both philosophers and scientists to appreciate that the meaning and validity of every proposition are restricted to the language system to which it belongs, and might not be valid in another system. A tolerance toward multiple meanings for words belonging to distinct language systems allows us to believe, simultaneously, that physicists writing in the mathematical language of quantum mechanics are correct when they declare that there are no stable objects in the world, and psychologists are correct when they state that the world consists of solid objects like cups, that can be touched, moved, and filled with liquid. We accept both statements as true without the disturbing feeling of cognitive dissonance that accompanies logically contradictory ideas because they belong to separate language systems. This principle allows neuroscientists to use the word fear to describe a pattern of neuronal activity and psychologists to use the same word to describe a person’s judgment of his or her subjective experience, even though the term fear has different meanings in these two language networks.3 Unfortunately, many scientists experience more cognitive dissonance in this instance than they do in the case of the reality of cups. The evidence gathered by biologists and psychologists awards different meanings to the term aroused. Most adults report that the color red induces a feeling of arousal or excitement, whereas blue reduces the intensity of subjective arousal. However, the brain wave profiles that are indicative of enhanced arousal of cortical neurons occur to blue rather than red. Thus, neuroscientists should not equate the arousal


9

that is defined by a pattern of cortical activity with the psychological experience of arousal.4 This same argument applies to memory. A group of Chinese adults who had been exposed to Chinese during early childhood, but had consciously forgotten their first language after learning English as a second language, indicated whether the second word in a sequence of two English words was or was not semantically related to the first; for example, dog and cat are related but dog and crayon are not. The neurons of the temporal lobe generate a distinctive wave form in the electroencephalogram when a second word is semantically unrelated to the first about three-tenths of a second before consciousness recognizes that the second term is incongruent.5 The bilingual Chinese who were convinced that they lost their childhood knowledge of Chinese showed a smaller than expected wave form when a second word was unrelated to the first in English, but happened to share a Chinese character. The English words train and ham are unrelated, but share the Chinese character huo. Thus, when the word ham appeared after train, the bilingual Chinese person showed a smaller wave form to ham than did monolingual English speakers, even though they were totally unaware of the fact that their brains had responded to a shared meaning that was unavailable to their consciousness.6 This fact implies that their brains had preserved some feature of the meanings of the Chinese characters and, therefore, the terms memory and remember have different meanings when a brain response or conscious detection of meaning supplies the evidence. Psychologists invented the concept of implicit memory to account for this fact. The term count provides a third example of the conceptual confusion that occurs when neuroscientists use brain profiles to define a concept that is essentially psychological. Although this term was invented originally to represent the ability to arrange the cardinal numbers in an ordinal sequence, two neuroscientists concluded that brains can count because the profiles of activation were different for

10

The Three Cultures

displays of 20 compared with 30 dark circles.7 However, the brain was responding to the perceptual difference in the spatial distribution of distinctly contoured elements and not to their number. A person gazing at a shelf containing eighteen books sees an array of objects varying in height, width, and color, not eighteen objects. Infants see the protuberances on their hands; it will be several years before they learn that each hand has five fingers. The blood flow patterns that are normally activated when people are counting were dissimilar to two displays of three objects in different spatial arrangements (one array grouped two of the objects close together and the other did not). If the neurons in this area were counting, the blood flow patterns should have been the same because both arrays had exactly the same number of objects.8 Moreover, the areas that are active when people are looking at arrays of discrete objects are different from the areas that are active when people are reading numbers.9 The brain would respond differently to clocks set at 6:00 and 3:00 o’clock, but that does not mean that the activated neurons were responding to the concept of time. Number and time are acquired concepts imposed on experiences, and appreciation of their meanings relies on circuits involving distinct brain sites. Most living forms, including algae, display a regular twenty-fourto twenty-five-hour cycle of metabolic activity, but biologists do not suggest that algae are “counting” the passing minutes of each day. Neither are foraging bees, whose dance on returning from a bed of flowers to their hive varies as a function of distance between the hive and the flowers, counting the meters between the two places. It turns out that their nervous system is registering the amount of contour they fly over on their visit to the flowers and the accompanying variation in neural activity determines the quality of the dance.10 Bees also scatter the pollen of the plants they visit, but that fact does not mean that they are altruistic or “good Samaritans.” The hair cells on the basilar membrane of the inner ear respond differentially to sounds of varying frequencies, because of the inherent variation in


11

their structure, but these tiny sensory receptors are not “counting” the frequencies in the incoming stimulation. The ability of neuronal clusters to react differentially to varied numbers of objects within the first one-fifth of a second is an intriguing phenomenon worthy of study, but this fact does not mean that neurons or brains are “counting.” The neurons of the primary auditory cortex of the ferret respond as humans do to sounds that represent varied English phonemes, but it would be a semantic error to say that the ferret is responding to the components of human speech.11 A study of brain development in a large, representative sample of American children and adolescents from many cities and varied social class backgrounds reveals the stubborn fact that the meaning and validity of an inference referring to a psychological state always depend on the source of evidence. The scientists gathered information on changes in the human brain across more than a decade of development. One surprising finding was the absence of dramatic differences in patterns of brain growth among children who were members of families from divergent social classes.12 This observation is puzzling because social class is, far and away, the best predictor of a child’s IQ score, vocabulary, grades in school, the probability of mental illness, gang membership, violent aggression, and a criminal record in every society that has been studied.13 If investigators had to predict the vocabulary, academic achievements, number of arrests for criminal activity, and number of bouts of depression in 500 adults, and could choose either the educational level and vocation of their family of rearing or measurements of their brain, those who selected the person’s social class would be more accurate.14

The Cascade of Events The critical point is that the vocabulary biologists use to describe the brain’s properties does not, at least at present, correspond closely in meaning to the vocabularies used by social scientists and humanists.

12

The Three Cultures

The latter two disciplines describe the late phases of a cascade that begins in a series of brief neuronal events and ends in a perception, thought, feeling, or behavior that lasts for a longer time.15 That is, an intention to get up and go to the refrigerator to find food lasts much longer than any of the brain states that occur during the time that transpired between the original idea and opening the refrigerator. Different metrics apply to the phases of a cascade that began with the response of a single neuron and proceeded to the activity of a cluster of neurons, a circuit, a network of circuits, and, finally, to a psychological outcome. The activity of a single neuron is usually measured in terms of the frequency of spike potentials (i.e., firing of the cell). The metric for a cluster of neurons is usually the number or proportion firing at the same frequency. The metric for a circuit is usually coherence (meaning the correspondence between the frequency spectra at two different sites), and the metric for a network of circuits is the probability of co-activation. The metrics for psychological outcomes include the frequency, speed, or accuracy of a response; the duration of a perception, emotion, or thought; the clarity of a representation; and the valence and intensity of a feeling. These metrics cannot be translated into any of the preceding ones. A documented illustration of this principle involves the unexpected discovery that young rat pups separated from their mothers for a brief interval become adults that cope with certain stressors better than those that did not experience the separation. At least three phases intervene between the separation and the adult behavior. The first phase refers to the consequences of the fact that rat mothers are likely to lick and groom a separated infant, whose skin is cooler, with more vigor than they display with a pup that was not separated. The more vigorous licking affects the pup’s genome by preventing the methylation of a specific nucleotide in the promoter region of the gene responsible for a class of receptors in the hippocampus that is activated by the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis). Because methylation usually leads to less efficient


13

expression of the gene, the gene in the licked infants is more fully expressed than in the pups that were licked less vigorously. The phenomena of this initial phase are described with terms referring to the four nucleotides that comprise DNA, the process of methylating one of them, and the degree of expression of that gene. The words for the second phase refer to the protein receptors located on select neurons in the hippocampus. The possession of a dense set of receptors means that there will be feedback to the neurons of the HPA axis that results in a dampening of HPA activity and, therefore, modulation in the secretion of the molecules that lead to behavioral signs of a state of stress. The words for this third phase refer to feedback mechanisms, the molecule corticosterone, and states of stress. Thus, we need three distinct vocabularies to explain why a separated rat pup becomes an adult that is less avoidant and less “fearful” of challenge and novel environments. (It is intriguing to wonder whether there might be a comparable process in human infants; for example, do human mothers who caress their infants a great deal provoke an analogous phenomenon in the brains of their children?) The important point is that the vocabulary that describes each of the phases in any cascade that begins with a genetic or brain event and ends with a behavior has some degree of autonomy. Even a behavior as serious as an adolescent’s suicide is influenced, at least in America, by the individual’s social class (more common among the poor), region of the country (more common in less densely populated areas in the western states), time of year (more prevalent in spring and summer), and day of the week (suicides are most common on Monday).16 Thus, neuroscientists do not add much clarity to the psychological concept of self when they suggest that it is a pattern of coherence in neural activity.17 One cannot see a forest while inside it. One cannot understand the psychological state of a depressed person who describes her inner world as dark, devoid of energy, and hungering for a silence that is free of the noise of crowds by remaining within a vocabulary that refers only to biological processes.

1 4

The Three Cultures

The critical point in this discussion is that the concepts in the social sciences and the humanities refer to emergent phenomena that cannot be described with the vocabulary used by natural scientists. The timbre of a violin sonata cannot be translated into the physicist’s terms for frequency, intensity, and time; the balance in a Monet painting cannot be translated into sentences referring to color, contour, or shape; and, as noted, the meaning psychologists attribute to the terms remember, count, or fear cannot be replaced with statements referring only to brain states or structures. Put simply, the phenomena that humanists and social scientists describe represent special combinations of events that require their own vocabulary. Physicists confront a similar problem. The world of quantum processes is probabilistic and discontinuous, whereas the masses of several stones and their accelerations when struck with a known force are certain and continuous. There is a fuzzy boundary between these two worlds, which require different vocabularies, and physicists do not yet understand how objects and their functions emerge from a quantum world. Neuroscientists do not yet understand how perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions emerge from the activity of neurons. An explanation is satisfying when investigators can imagine what is happening at each transition in a cascade and cannot think of another way to account for the transitions.18 An understanding of the relations between phases has been most successful when scientists concentrated on contiguous phases (e.g., the relation between genes and neurochemistry or between brain chemistry and moods), and less successful when they skipped phases and tried to understand the relations between genes and particular moods because variations in life history influence the emotional profiles of individuals with the same gene. Biological and social scientists focus on different phases, or halfway houses, in the complete cascade that defines an observed phenomenon. Therefore, the three cultures think about the same event in different ways. Their perspectives are analogous to the incompatible


15

perceptions of a drawing that can represent either a young or old woman as a function of where viewers focus their attention. Each perspective has consistency and coherence within each of the language communities, but not always across communities. This suggestion would not bother mathematicians, who understand that a mathematical idea, like infinity, can assume different meanings in different mathematical arguments. Similarly, the meaning of population density in the United States depends on whether one computes the ratio of the total population to the total geographical area or the ratio of the number of individuals living in areas where most Americans live over that more restricted area. The first estimate of 70 people per square mile implies a low population density; the second ratio of 3,000 per square mile evokes a different image.19

Tropes There is one more reason for the ambiguity that surrounds the meanings of words. Humans have an automatic tendency to relate two or more networks for different concepts and detecting, with minimal effort, a single semantic node that is shared between or among them. When the shared node awards a nonliteral meaning to the concept, as in the metaphor “humans are gorillas,” it is called a trope. The features of concepts vary in their essentialness or defining property. For example, the ability to fly is a defining property of birds, whereas the ability to catch fish is a secondary property. Most tropes, or metaphors, are satisfying when a defining property of the second term is a secondary property of the first term. Hence, the metaphor “Humans are gorillas” is acceptable because the capacity for aggression is a primary feature of gorillas but a secondary feature of humans. Hence, the statement “Gorillas are humans” is not a satisfying metaphor. Tropes can be categorized as satisfying or unsatisfying, coherent or incoherent, but cannot be evaluated as true or false. Only novelists and poets are permitted to describe April as cruel or jealousy as the

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The Three Cultures

green emotion. Most Americans have acquired the semantic nodes helpless, weak, and uncontrolled as defining features for the network baby. Hence, an American adult who was called a baby is likely to feel insulted because the features helpless, weak, and uncontrolled are inconsistent with the nodes representing the literal understanding of adult. The node for beast is primary in the Japanese network for monkey, but not in the network possessed by most Americans.20 Thus, a Japanese person who is called a monkey is more likely than an American to become angry. Scientists often treat a novel scientific advance as a fruitful trope, or metaphor, for body, brain, or mind. For example, Descartes regarded the machine as a metaphor for bodily function; Freud exploited the metaphor of energy for emotional processes; twentieth-century scientists were friendly to a computer metaphor for thought; and contemporary investigators, awed by the recent advances in neuroscience and genetics, treat modularity as a metaphor for psychological functions. Each of these metaphors is misleading, for neither clocks, steam engines, computers, nor genes provide accurate models for the nature of brain processes or psychological activity. Although metaphors can be initially helpful crutches for creativity, scientists must remain eternally vigilant to the dangers of their seductive appeal. The languages of the social sciences and humanities acknowledge the influence of tropes, but natural scientists typically ignore nonliteral meanings because they often include a perceptual representation and a feeling that resist accurate measurement and cannot be classified as true or false. Sentences that are interpreted literally are accompanied by patterns of brain activity that differ from the profiles accompanying a metaphorical reading of the same sentences because perceptual representations preferentially activate the right hemisphere. When individuals are interpreting sentences literally the left hemisphere is more active and there is less right hemisphere involvement.21 Many neuroscientists measuring the brain’s reaction to pictures of infants or monkeys assume that all the participants


17

perceived and interpreted the scenes in the same literal way. Because they do not, there is extraordinary variation in the brain profiles provoked by most incentives. Natural scientists prefer to assign the cause of this variation to material differences in the brains of the participants, rather than to the meanings of the tropes they might have imposed on the stimuli. A Brief Summary Every concept has multiple features and these features can change with time. Therefore, the validity of any claim that two concepts are similar, or closely related, depends on the specific features that are presumed to be similar. An investigator should not treat one concept as equivalent to another if only a small number of all the possible features are the same. If a scientist writes that fatigue renders a person vulnerable to illness, readers need to know whether the primary feature for fatigue was the state caused by insomnia or excessive exercise, and whether the seminal feature for illness was a bacterial infection or a torn hamstring muscle. This issue is especially relevant for the scientists who write computer programs simulating cognitive processes, an effort called artificial intelligence or AI. These programs typically consist of symbols for words without schematic representations of bodily states or the products of perception. As a result, these programs would represent the concept animal by listing the primary semantic features of this category, including reproduction, respiration, digestion, locomotion, growth, and death, but would fail to include perceptual schemata for a shark’s attack on a person or a dog’s obedience to a command and the feelings these schemata evoke. Yet, these representations are part of the average person’s representation of the concept animal. Many scientists studying the relation between brain and psychological states fail to honor this principle. For example, some write that activation of the amygdala in adults expecting a brief electric shock

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to their fingers means that the individuals are fearful. The problem with this conclusion is that scientists do not restrict the truth value of this claim to amygdalar activation in this specific situation, but imply that any time the amygdala is activated by any event that could be construed as “threatening” the person is in a state of fear. Even if adults deny feeling any fear in response to a still photograph of a face with a fearful expression, many neuroscientists assume that they are in a state of fear because their amygdala was activated. This inference ignores the equally reliable fact that the amygdala is also activated whenever a person encounters any event he or she did not expect, whether a sign of danger or a signal for food or sex. Most individuals do not encounter people walking around with fearful facial expressions; hence, it is reasonable to argue that their psychological state should be described as surprise or uncertainty, rather than fear. Moreover, the amygdala consists of several neuronal clusters with different evolutionary histories and different connections to the rest of the brain. Each of the amygdala’s separate neuronal clusters displays a distinct profile of activation to different kinds of threat (e.g., a tone signaling electric shock and the smell of a natural predator produce different profiles in animals).22 Hence, there is more than one type of “fear.” It is also odd that, after puberty, men have a larger amygdala than women, but males are less, not more, likely to develop phobias and anxiety disorders.23 We have a long way to go before we understand the relations between the sentences that describe brain function and those descriptive of psychological phenomena. I borrow an example from the late Thomas Kuhn to make the critical point that many words used by natural and social scientists belong to different semantic networks and, therefore, are not equivalent in meaning. The French word doux (or douce) refers to the taste of honey, a soft touch, bland tasting soup, a tender memory, or a gentle breeze. The English word sweet also refers to the taste of honey, but, in addition, to a victory, a beloved, and the middle strings of a tennis racquet, but not to bland soup. Because meaning derives


19

from the total network of related terms the French word doux and the English term sweet do not have identical meanings. The same conclusion applies to terms like fear, aroused, and count in the vocabularies of neuroscientists and psychologists and for the same reason.

The Influence of History The balance between inquiries guided by a search for generalizations that transcend the current historical moment and those seriously influenced by the temporary conditions historical events created differentiates the three cultures. The present moment is part of two sequences that have never occurred before and will not be repeated. The oldest narrative began several billion years ago with the first living things. Although physicists believe that the nature of, and relations among, the constituents of matter present right after the Big Bang were different from those operative today, and biologists recognize that the genomes of humans who lived 100,000 years ago were both different from and less variable than those of contemporary humans, most of the problems natural scientists pursue are affected less seriously by the vicissitudes of time than those posed by social scientists and humanists. The later sequence began about 10,000 years ago when human populations began to increase in size and to leave some record of their social organization, experiences, and skills. This narrative is characterized by changes in beliefs, sources of uncertainty, and social organizations. Although many social scientists seek to understand the universal human phenomena of perception, memory, language, emotion, learning, group formation, and affiliation with principles that are not restricted to the current historical moment, an equally large group probes phenomena more seriously influenced by current societal conditions. The most important changes in Europe and America during the hundred years from 1760 to 1860 were the emergence of

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industrialization, capitalist economies, and a serious rise in the sizes of cities and the number of urban poor. The popular explanation of the latter fact emphasized social conditions. Hence, proposals for reform centered either on voluntary changes in political and economic structures or on the more radical revolutionary agenda of Karl Marx and his disciples. Because most citizens recognized the difficulty of creating more benign settings they were eager for an alternative interpretation that might mute the uncomfortable feeling produced by the violation of their sense of social justice. Darwin’s concept of natural selection supplied the needed therapy and the advocates of evolutionary ideas began to argue, especially after 1880, that the marginalized poor, as well as the insane, alcoholics, prostitutes, and criminals, were biologically less fit. This rationalization, which gained in persuasive power over the next 30 years, lost its appeal in America after a small but vocal group of eugenicists proposed sterilization of the insane and severe restrictions on immigration. The hopes of liberal Americans searching for a rational challenge to the eugenics movement were answered by Ivan Pavlov, the American behaviorists, and Freud’s disciples. These scholars resurrected an earlier emphasis on social experience as an alternative explanation of the unwanted psychological consequences of a laissez-faire economics supported by the assumption that social Darwinism was loyal to nature’s intentions. American social science emerged in universities toward the end of the nineteenth-century under the umbrella of Darwinian ideas and only a few decades after scientists had discovered relations between the site of an experimental lesion of an animal’s brain and the nature of the subsequent compromise in its behavior. These scholars had a choice between looking inward to the individual psychological functions that emerged from brain activity and might be inherited, or outward to the changing environmental and social forces that required new forms of adaptation. Not surprisingly, most selected the former problem. The initial cohort of German psychologists, many of whom had mentored the first American professors, also had chosen the


21

former theme in their studies of the nature of human consciousness, especially the state created when a person detected a change in the stimulus surround, and assumed that this process was lawfully related to patterns of brain activity they were unable to measure. Although asking adults sitting in a quiet room to say whether they detected a change in the loudness of a sound or the brightness of a light is relatively easy to do, the child’s development of motor coordination and language, memory for past events, and quality of reasoning are also amenable to laboratory inquiry. I suspect that conscious awareness of a change in sensation was the favored topic because it could be related to the physical metrics of intensity of sound and light and could be regarded as a direct product of brain processes. Thus, this phenomenon satisfied the natural scientists’ criteria for a legitimate target of inquiry. However, the next generation of Americans had more pragmatic interests and were able to honor the stance of objectivity demanded by the natural scientists by studying the learning of new habits through acquiring associations between stimuli and responses. This turn allowed investigators to follow Ivan Pavlov and to design experiments with animals that could not be implemented with humans. The focus on learning also satisfied the nation’s need to believe that education would hasten the assimilation of the large numbers of European immigrants. This movement, called behaviorism, lasted until the 1960s, when its inability to explain many human cognitive processes could no longer be suppressed, and it was replaced with a return to the study of human mental functions. But this time the research strategy avoided subjective phenomenology by using analytic probes of perception, memory, and decision making. By the 1970s scientists could take advantage of technological advances denied to William James and many decided that discovering the correlations between psychological processes and brain activity would illuminate the former. The interval between the first psychological experiments and current reports contained three important ideological changes.

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Physical stimuli became psychological information; the concept of human will, along with understanding and emotion, was parsed into the separate functions of perception, attention, planning, regulation, and anticipation; and the initially controversial assumption of minimal differences between animals and humans in complex psychological properties became dogma. A significant change in world view occurred during the interval from 1890 to 1920 when scientists and the educated public began to accept the idea that uncertainty and probabilistic outcomes were nature’s plan and the traditional belief in determinism a naïve idealistic vision. The changing probabilities of rare events provide a persuasive example of the effects of historical change. The probability that a group of terrorists living in cities thousands of miles from a planned target of attack could successfully coordinate their efforts, as they did on September 11, 2001, was greater in 2001 than it would have been 100 years earlier because of the availability of airplanes, the Internet, and cell phones. These inventions allowed Osama Bin Laden and his accomplices to accomplish their goal. A principle in a formal model called network theory, which refers to the pattern of connections among a set of nodes, states that when the ratio of the number of connections between nodes over the number of nodes reaches 0.5 or greater, a new structure is formed and novel phenomena emerge. The planes, the Internet, and cell phones generated new social phenomena. Conversely, some events became less probable because of the increase in communication networks. Because the world’s governmental organizations concerned with health are more interconnected today than they were in 1918, the probability of a pandemic influenza killing many thousands of Americans is less likely today than it was during the flu epidemic of 1918. The effects of history on the research themes of social scientists are seen in the changing popularity of topics in academic journals. At the end of the nineteenth century, some British physicians and


23

psychologists believed that any form of contraception was injurious to health. Bertrand Russell was given this warning when he married and took it seriously. Many sociology papers published at the end of the nineteenth century discussed the undesirable consequences of industrialization; whereas, papers of the 1930s dealt more often with miscegenation between members of the Black and White races. Two decades later, before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, social scientists studied the ethnic identity of Black children by showing them black and white dolls and asking them which one they would prefer to be; contemporary psychologists measure the unconscious prejudices of the majority toward minority groups. Freud’s bold predictions of the dangers of a frustrated oral stage prompted research on the later consequences of nursing compared with bottle feeding of infants and he would have disapproved of contemporary psychiatrists replacing his Oedipal complex with the concept of ethnic identity in order to understand ego development. Contemporary child psychologists who know little about the Puritans write that harsh punishment of young children is always harmful. If they had studied the memoirs of Puritan parents, and the descriptions of the development of their children, they would have realized that the effects of harsh socialization practices always depend on the child’s interpretation of the reasons for the parental strictness and that interpretation varies across time and culture. If a child interprets parental punishment as reflecting the parents’ affectionate wish that they develop good character, rather than as a sign of an angry or hateful attitude, the consequences need not be malevolent. The early themes, like clothes that are out of fashion, have been replaced with investigations of subjective well-being, the implications of a secure or insecure infant attachment to a caretaker, mental illness, and the effectiveness of interventions designed to alleviate the distress of psychiatric symptoms. The recent increase in the number of papers on a homosexual life style reflects the influence of historical change on a psychological function as fundamental as sexuality.

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Unlike a gay orientation in men, the increase in close, same-sex friendships between women was aided by changes in the economy that placed large numbers of working women together in cooperative work settings that occasionally led to emotional relationships that developed into sexually intimate affairs.24 I cannot imagine a paper in any nineteenth century social science journal that described the personalities and life histories of women who had been sexually assaulted by a gang of young men, although articles on this theme appear in contemporary journals. The interests of philosophers do not escape the historical moment. If European merchants had not wanted to be free of the ethical demands Christianity imposed and intellectuals had not wished to reject John Locke’s emphasis on knowledge as sensory based, Kant might not have constructed a rational system in which freedom was a keystone resting on a vault of reason. Few philosophers writing 500 years ago would have accepted the contemporary beliefs that there are neither absolutely evil acts nor absolute truths; all humans are entitled to equal dignity; human will is fragile; and there is no determinism in nature, only a range of probabilities. A survey of papers in the British journal Mind, a technical publication read by philosophers and psychologists founded in 1876 to bring philosophy closer to the physiological psychology that was in ascendance, revealed that ethics, aesthetics, truth, and phenomenal consciousness dominated the early issues. However, soon after physicists announced their discoveries in quantum mechanics and relativity, papers on reductionism, time, and space became more popular. Twenty-five years later, when psychological ideas were ascendant, articles on Freud, memory, and the relation between brain activity and psychological events appeared. Some papers relied on evidence from adults playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, rather than on a philosophical argument, to defend the desirability of promoting the common good. Unfortunately, before any of these problems was solved, the next cohort of scholars turned


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their attention to a new source of angst or controversy that history had created. The problems probed and solutions offered by social scientists and humanists are more constrained by their historical moment than those of the natural sciences. If late nineteenth-century Europeans had held a more permissive attitude toward sexuality, Freud might not have written that repression of sexual urges was the primary cause of all neuroses. If the next generation of Europeans had not been rendered despondent by the shattering of illusions at the end of World War I and the reduction of mind to a set of mechanical parts, few would have questioned the possibility of attaining ideal states and Jung might not have argued that a spiritual outlook was needed to attain a form of Nirvana. If large numbers of American men raised in working-class families who served in World War II did not have the opportunity to attend college, Erik Erikson’s suggestion that all persons must solve the difficult problem of “finding their identity” would have been met with a puzzling, or lukewarm, reception. Had working mothers and divorce rates not increased dramatically in the twentieth century, John Bowlby’s theory of attachment might not have gained popularity. Each of these original ideas required history to arrange a special constellation of conditions. Although a new apparatus often leads to significant observations and new concepts in the natural sciences, social conditions that alter the existing arrangements of people and their motives, beliefs, emotions, and actions are more important sources of fresh ideas in both the social sciences and the humanities.

Patterns or Features Scientists, like everyone else, are biologically prepared to categorize experience in terms of the features or functions of “things” and to describe these objects with nouns modified by adjectives, adverbs, or predicates; for example, large molecules, predatory animals, or anxious adults. However, a molecule can also be described as a

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pattern of features that include its mass, melting point, and ease of combining with other substances. A single muscle strand in the hand can participate in patterns of motor action as different as reaching for a cup, communicating to another to stop, or waving to a friend.25 The terms dog and cat are intended to name two different patterns of organs, physiologies, genes, and usual behaviors and, therefore, represent two distinct categories. An investigator who described only the separate features or functions referring to visual acuity, size of visceral organs, proportion of shared genes, and degree of sociability with humans would be tempted to suggest that dogs and cats are only quantitatively different and can be placed on a common scale. But two species with similar average values for visual acuity or size of the stomach could differ in the total pattern of features each possessed. Scientists who study the relation between brain activity and psychological events have a choice between emphasizing the average activity in single neurons, or in a localized cluster of neurons, on the one hand, or the patterns of synchronized activity involving many millions of interconnected neurons in different locations. The latter strategy is likely to prove more fruitful in studies of the relation between brain and mental states because all psychological properties are the product of patterns of reciprocal activations and inhibitions of neuronal clusters in varied sites. The task of judging which of two Arabic numbers was numerically larger, brighter in illumination, or printed in a larger font size provoked three different patterns of activation and the activation of any single site did not discriminate among the three task assignments. Even the odors of cats and foxes, which are signals of danger for rats, evoke different patterns of brain activation.26 Most neuroscientists recording the wave forms in the electroencephalogram usually compare the response to different events or the reactions of different people by computing the average magnitude of a single waveform rather than the pattern of magnitudes for the four or five waveforms generated during the first second. The human brain is


27

prepared to react to both features and patterns. One set of neurons in the visual cortex is responsive to the edges of objects; another selectively responds to colors; another to movement, and another to the pattern of the object. Thus, it makes no sense to ask whether the contour of the nose or the pattern of the face is more fundamental. The auditory cortex is also prepared to process patterns, for example, the ratio of the fundamental frequencies of two musical notes heard simultaneously. If the ratio of the higher to the lower frequency is 3:2, the sound is perceived as pleasant; if the ratio is 16:15, the sound is dissonant and unpleasant. Economists like to compare nations on the single feature of gross domestic product rather than on a pattern that includes form of government, freedom of expression, life span, and ethnic diversity. Psychologists, too, usually compare genders, ethnic groups, or psychiatric diagnoses on single features, such as a particular gene, hormone level, heart rate, or brain state, instead of patterns of genes and hormone levels. The pattern of change in the stress hormone cortisol over the course of the day, for example, is a more sensitive index of its heritability than a single measure of cortisol level in the early morning or late afternoon. When objects or events have different histories, it is usually more profitable to compare their patterns; when they share the same origin it is often more useful to attend to their features. Frogs and monkeys have two eyes and four limbs, but because their embryological developments are different, few biologists compare the limb lengths or eye diameters of the two species. Natural scientists prefer to measure separate features because they are more easily described by numerical scales that lend themselves to elegant mathematical tools. One can arrange a triangle, rectangle, and circle on a single numerical scale of area, or treat the three as distinct patterns constructed in different ways. Unfortunately, there are too few metrics for many important biological and psychological patterns and it has proven difficult to invent a set of instructions that a computer program could use to

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generate these patterns. That is one reason why the evolutionary biologists of the last century preferred to look for the separate genes that contributed to an adult phenotype rather than the genetics controlling the emergent patterning of the embryo. These latter genes differ from those that contribute to the adult traits. Biologists like to write that humans and flies share a large proportion of the same genes, rather than note that the arrangements of these shared genes are different in the two species. Even the biological category male contains two different patterns. One class of estrogen receptor mediates the development of masculine features in the male fetus, especially the testes and penis, and a second class of receptor prevents the development of feminine features in the unborn boy.27 Thus, there are two biological categories of men: one is high on male features and low on female traits; whereas, the other type is high on both male and female features (e.g.) a male genital combined with the more feminine properties of a round rather than a square face, a less prominent chin, less body hair, and slightly thicker lips). There is not one continuous scale of maleness. Social scientists and humanists study many phenomena that are best described as patterns. Historians who write about the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe or the classic period in lowland Mayan culture in the eighth century understand that these terms refer to unique arrangements of ideas, symbols, institutions, and practices with a special history in a particular place. Japan, England, and the United States share many political and institutional features, but sociologists treat these societies as patterns because they have different histories. When the writers Czeslaw Milosz and Witold Gombrowicz confessed to feeling ashamed of their nationalities (Milosz was Lithuanian and Gombrowicz was Polish) readers understood that their emotions were the historical products of distinct arrangements of thoughts and feelings and should not be regarded as similar to the shame felt by an adolescent who had been caught shoplifting. Types of personality and pathology are also patterns.


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Patients who experience both anxiety and depression are less likely to be helped by therapeutic interventions than those who only experience depression. Although adolescents arrested for a crime share a single feature, they should be assigned to different categories based on their ethnicity, life history, and impulsivity.28 A rigid reliance on either single features or patterns is accompanied by distinct explanations and methods of inquiry. The former strategy, preferred by many natural scientists, renders flies and humans only quantitatively different; the second, preferred by humanists and social scientists, implies that the two forms are qualitatively different. The problem of interest and the web of ideas that is its theoretical home determine whether a vocabulary of features or patterns is employed. Scientists often search for a particular phenomenon or living form that is a perfect model for a diverse set of events on the assumption that the essential features of the model are shared by a large number of related objects. Biologists chose the bacterium E. coli, the fruit fly Drosophila, and the worm C. elegans as models for genetic processes applicable to humans. Social scientists selected the Prisoner’s Dilemma game as the model for economic transactions and the decisions of the political leaders of America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Anthropologists had thought that the baboon was the perfect model for human social behavior. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth were convinced that behavior in the Strange Situation was a good model for an infant’s emotional attachment to its caretaker, and Freud believed that the case history of Little Hans was representative of the mechanisms that mediated all phobias. In all of these cases, investigators eventually learned that each phenomenon had unique features that were not shared with other more complex events they wanted to understand. However, some models have advantageous consequences because later research with the model leads to unexpected methodological advances. For example, study of E. coli and Drosophila resulted in discoveries that allowed cloning of the sheep “Dolly.” Thus, picking a

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model organism or procedure can be useful, even if the original hope is not fulfilled. The task is to figure out which features of a model are shared with other phenomena one wishes to understand and which are restricted to the animal, process, or procedure chosen. The answer to this puzzle is rarely obvious when inquiry begins.

The Mental Tools Scholars vary in their reliance on three types of mental structures when they describe or explain a phenomenon: mathematical concepts and equations, semantic networks, and perceptually based schematic representations. The original meaning of the √2 in ancient Greece contained a perceptual feature, for it referred to the length of the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle with sides of unit length. Most contemporary students of mathematics understand the √2 to represent the abstract concept of an irrational number without a schematic element. Rosalind Franklin’s antipathy toward the construction of mechanical models may have been one reason why Crick and Watson, and not she, discovered the structure of DNA. The imaginations of the two men were enhanced when they could see the possible spatial relations among the four bases and think about them in schematic form.29 The terms concrete and abstract, which describe types of semantic concepts, should be replaced with a description of the differential proportion of semantic and schematic representations of an event. That is, the networks called concrete always contain schemata (e.g., the perceptual representation of an apple is usually part of the network for fruit). The network for abstract concepts like metaphysical have few if any perceptual schemata. A schematic feature was added to the concept gene when Crick and Watson drew its structure in their famous 1953 paper. The addition of a schematic node did not make the concept gene more concrete and less abstract; rather, it added a schema to what had been an abstract semantic network.


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Semantic and schematic representations have different organizations. One salient difference between them, at least for English speakers, is that the representation of the usual context in which an object is encountered is associated with the schema for the event. The schema for a bird, for example, is likely to be linked to schemata for trees, lawns, and the sky. By contrast, the organization of semantic networks emphasizes conceptual hierarchies, antonyms, and the features of concepts. Hence the word bird is more closely associated with semantic nodes for robin, animal, and wings than to nodes for trees, lawns, and the sky. Schemata do not have opposites – the schema for a sweet taste is not linked to one for sour – and they do not nest into hierarchies. Moreover, a schematic prototype, for example, for a friend’s face, makes it difficult to discriminate between subtle alterations in the friend’s facial expressions because the agent attends to the whole face rather than to the separate parts. By contrast, a woman’s semantic network for a friend, which includes name and many traits, does not imply that she cannot distinguish among the moods of the friend. During early childhood, schemata for perceptual experiences are often established before semantic forms. One-year-olds have schemata for the pair of eyes and single nose of the face before they learn the semantic forms for the cardinal numbers. Moreover, schemata often influence related semantic networks, but the opposite is less common. That is, the schemata for a class of experiences is less likely to be influenced by semantic forms. This asymmetry finds support in adult estimates of the time that lines of varied length remained on the screen of a monitor (the durations ranged from 1 to 5 seconds). The semantic estimates of time on the screen were influenced by the length of the line – the longer the line the larger the time estimate. But the estimates of the line lengths were not affected by how long the line remained on the screen.30 This observation implies that the semantic concept time is linked to schemata for the length of a line or the distance between two locations, but the schemata for length or

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distance are less often influenced by the semantic concept for time. Although Einstein’s equations in the theory of general relativity combined space and time in a “space–time warp,” most minds keep these two ideas separate. Most three-year olds who can recite the numbers from one to ten do not yet understand that the word “ten” refers to a larger quantity than the word “five”, and their schemata for ten or for five cookies on a plate would not be affected by hearing someone speak the words ten or five while they were staring at the cookies. Thus, the young child’s schema for five cookies on a plate does not mean that he possesses a concept for number. The recitation of the numbers from one to ten resembles the child’s ability to recite the names of the notes of the musical scale. Both are the result of the rote learning of a sequence without semantic meaning. However, the schemata for varied quantities does help children learn the meanings of the cardinal numbers during the preschool years. Humans learn associations between the schema for the top of a tree and the semantic networks for the future and the Divine, and between the schema for the bottom of a tree and the semantic networks referring to the past and the devil. The schemata for the sensory states that accompany a sweet food or the warmth of a fire are part of the semantic network for good; a bitter taste and pain are components of the semantic network for bad. It is likely that the feeling of distress produced by the acts of an aggressor toward the self or another person participate in the semantic network for fairness and justice. Put plainly, perceptual representations of experience, which develop first, are often exploited as scaffolding to amplify the meanings of abstract semantic terms. College students who are not professional neuroscientists are somewhat more likely to believe the conclusion of a technical report if it contains a picture of a brain than if it only presents the data. Jurors, too, are vulnerable to classifying a person on trial for a serious crime as mentally ill, and therefore not fully responsible, if the defense lawyer presents a picture of the defendant’s


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brain and points out that it deviates from the brains of the majority. Perhaps that is why string theorists writing for a general audience add a drawing of what a string might look like, even though the authors know it is impossible to illustrate the mathematical equations that represent strings. As an adolescent I believed the verbal and mathematical arguments declaring that the Earth was round, but suspect that I could have been persuaded to change my mind if new evidence led scientists to alter their opinion. But after I saw the picture of our planet taken from a spacecraft my commitment to its round shape became irreversible. Pictures are indeed worth a thousand words. Mathematical Concepts The differential explanatory power of the three types of mental tools was articulated in Europe in the seventeenth century after the mathematical propositions of Descartes and Newton proved so successful. Natural philosophers began to claim that, whenever possible, equations should replace illustrations and semantic descriptions. Mathematical forms have proven extremely powerful in physics and chemistry. Werner Heisenberg’s creative use of algebraic matrices allowed him to discover the famous uncertainty principle. Many physicists, including Einstein, initially resisted Heisenberg’s argument because it denied strict determinism, was difficult to imagine, and there were no words that described accurately the physical events the matrices represented. Niels Bohr, Heisenberg’s mentor, preferred combinations of semantic concepts and schemata of electrons orbiting an atom’s nucleus of protons and neutrons. Surprisingly, Bohr’s research notebooks contained only pictures and words and no mathematical calculations. When Bohr first learned of the fission of the uranium atom in 1939, he attempted to understand this surprising event by imagining a spherical drop of water (representing the atom’s nucleus) being deformed by bombarding neutrons into the shape of a peanut. Bohr’s insight into the relation between the spectral

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lines emitted by a heated atom and the energy of its orbiting electrons was the product of an intuition rather than the manipulation of equations. A comment by Paul Dirac, a British physicist who also thought in mathematical terms, reveals the contrast between the tools preferred by Heisenberg compared with Bohr. Dirac, who had visited Bohr in Copenhagen in 1926, was frustrated by Bohr’s insistence on using arguments based on qualitative semantic concepts, rather than the less ambiguous mathematical equations that the British scientist found easier to manipulate mentally and far more satisfying. While visiting an art exhibition with Bohr, Dirac noticed a dark gray, ambiguous spot of paint that Manet had placed near a boat in one of his paintings, and remarked, “This spot is not admissible.”31 George Gamow, a physicist who conceived of DNA as a code before Crick and Watson described its structure, provided a persuasive example of how a scientist’s preferred tools of thought can interfere with a discovery. Because symmetry (meaning a mathematical operation that does not change the form of an object) is a seminal concept in physics, Gamow assumed that it made no difference whether messenger RNA read the DNA molecule from left to right or right to left. However, DNA has a polarity and messenger RNA reads the DNA code in only one direction. Thus, Gamow failed to infer the correct molecular structure of this molecule. Eugene Wigner, another physicist who thought in mathematical structures, argued that his analyses implied the absolute impossibility of life forms emerging from chemical elements. Lord Kelvin, arguably the nineteenth century’s most respected natural scientist, intimidated Darwin by suggesting that his mathematical analyses proved that the Earth could not be old enough to support Darwin’s theoretical claims. Some children have great difficulty separating mathematical representations from the more familiar representations for words. Carl Jung, who provided an example of this psychological block, recalled his profound inability to accept the argument: If a = b and b = c then


35

a = c because he always replaced the letter symbols with semantic concepts and rebelled against the possibility that if cats = pets and pets = dogs then cats = dogs. “My intellectual morality fought against these whimsical inconsistencies, which have forever debarred me from understanding mathematics.”32 Jung’s difficulty is understandable. The notion that a letter in an equation can represent a range of numerical values for any class of events is only 12 centuries old. Moreover, some languages assign different names to equivalent quantities of different kinds of objects. Residents of the eastern Fiji islands, for example, award different number names to 100 canoes (bola) and 100 coconuts (kora).33 I take the late emergence of algebra in human history as implying that, unlike the manipulation of semantic or schematic representations, reasoning with abstract mathematical concepts is not a biologically prepared competence that comes easily to human intuition. Remember, geometry preceded algebra by many centuries. Bertrand Russell’s experience of falling in love with mathematics at age eleven after he read Euclid for the first time is uncommon. Not all events or relations between observations are amenable to a mathematical description. The relation between the composition of the wooden cask in which a wine is aging and the bouquet and taste of the wine is one example. Furthermore, a mathematical relation between or among concepts does not explain the relation. Consider an apple on a branch six feet above the ground falling to the earth. One can film this event, describe it in words, or write the mathematical equation s = ½ gt2 indicating that the distance the apple traversed equals one-half the product of the gravitational force and the square of the time falling. None of the three descriptions explains why the apple fell the way it did; physicists do not yet understand the nature of the gravitational force. However, the mathematical model has the advantage of greater clarity and the promise of being applicable on all occasions when an object falls to the ground. Thus, most scientists agree that mathematical statements are always preferable to the other two forms. Unfortunately, many observations in the biological

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and social sciences cannot meet the conditions required for faithful adherence to the imperative for mathematical statements. It is important to distinguish between a mathematical statement that attempts to describe a rich set of evidence, on the one hand, and a mathematical model that contains a priori concepts invented to explain an old or to predict a new phenomenon, on the other. Kepler’s equations were intended to describe an extensive set of observations on the orbit of Mars. By contrast, the equations of string theorists contain the a priori notion of packets of energy oscillating in ten dimensions that have not been observed. A mathematical model for a class of events is more fruitful when it accommodates the evidence, does not make too many assumptions that violate known facts, and defines its concepts intrinsically rather than by outcomes or consequences. For example, the physical concepts of time and distance in Newton’s equations for a falling apple have fixed definitions that are independent of the outcome of the falling object, as well as the distances and times for other apples falling from the same tree. These requirements may seem obvious, but unfortunately many mathematical models in evolutionary biology and economics, two fields that rely on formal models, fail to meet them. For example, some models in evolutionary theory assume infinitely large breeding populations and no mutually interactive influences among an animal’s genes (called epistasis). Both assumptions violate what is known to be true. One evolutionary model, which is presumed to stipulate an animal’s optimal behavioral strategy, contains five concepts: “the cost of fighting” a competitor for “a resource” (food or niche) compared with “fleeing,” the “value” of the resource, and the implications of each behavioral strategy for the animal’s “inclusive fitness.”34 Each of these concepts is defined functionally rather than intrinsically. A biologist observing two hawks approaching the same prey from a distance cannot state, before the two birds meet, the cost to fitness of fighting versus retreating, or the change in each hawk’s fitness


37

following a decision to fight or to flee. Moreover, if the resource were a niche for nesting rather than food, the value, cost, and fitness magnitudes in the equation would change. Yet, surprisingly, evolutionary biologists ignore these details in their abstract models. The failure to specify whether what is gained or lost is food, access to a mating partner, or a nesting site renders the equations ambiguous and questions their generality. Similar problems compromise the value of many economists’ models. Although I consider this issue in detail in Chapter 4, an example might be helpful here. On the first warm June day after a cold spring millions of workers will need to choose between taking the day off or honoring their obligations to an employer. Economists rely on the concept of preference in these situations. The workers have to choose between two different utilities that can be measured only after each worker has acted. Economists first need to find out the proportion of workers who did or did not go to work on that day, and, after the fact, invent a mathematical model for the situation. This limitation is reminiscent of the frustration of the behaviorists of the last century who relied on the concept of reward, but did not have an intrinsic definition that permitted them to know ahead of time which events possessed this special property. Psychologists had to wait and see what stimuli or situations animals worked to obtain and, after the fact, call them rewards. Consider what is admittedly a caricature of the economists’ models. Investigators could measure in a sample of 1,000 men over the course of a year the proportion of occasions when each argued with or accommodated to the requests of a wife, employer, or close friend. Suppose that the evidence indicated that, on average, the men argued more often than they accommodated when with their wife, accommodated more with their employer, but showed no preference with a friend. It would be an error to write a general model stating that the utility of accommodating outweighed the cost of arguing, or that the utility of arguing was an average of the proportion of occasions

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they chose that strategy with all three targets. Rather, the preference for one strategy over another varied with the specific social context. This level of specificity is missing from the models in economics and biology. Many economists ignore fruitful explanations that are not presented as formal models, preferably mathematical in structure, because they believe that “economics isn’t defined by its subject matter, but by its way of thinking.”35 Robert Lucas, a Nobel laureate in economics, is more dogmatic on this issue, “Economic theory is mathematical analysis. Everything else is just pictures and talk.”36 Equally important, the models of biologists and economists assume that the arithmetic rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are legitimate operations on the numbers assigned to measures of their concepts. However, this assumption can be questioned. The physical concept mass meets the mathematical criteria that allow scientists to add the masses of two different objects (say a log and a stone) to arrive at a new value. These criteria include the presumption of ratio scales (e.g., a mass of 10 kg is twice that of 5 kg and a mass of 200 kg is twice that of 100 kg). However, it is less obvious that the economists’ concept of utility meets these requirements. Economists treat the arbitrary scale of numbers measuring a utility as if it had the properties of mass when they, for example, implicitly add the utility a father anticipates from purchase of a new car for weekends and holidays to the utility assigned to the father’s intention of letting his daughter use the car to commute to work. Because these utilities are psychologically different it is not obvious that the sum of the two values is proportional to the values of each utility, which is true for mass. It is possible that the father’s belief that his daughter will use the car five days a week reduces the utility he anticipated from using it on weekends. No concept in the formal models of economists or evolutionary biologists has the mathematical properties possessed by the physicists’ concept of mass.


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Semantic and Schematic Forms Humanists and social scientists rely mainly on networks of semantic and schematic forms, rather than on mathematical concepts, when they brood about a problem and propose a solution. The networks for concepts such as ideal, Enlightenment, society, identity, and conflict are not amenable to mathematical treatment. Semantic and schematic networks have the advantage of inviting scholars to think in terms of patterns of elements; mathematical equations tempt investigators to think in terms of continuous functions for separate features. Most rare events are discrete patterns resulting from a combination of several low-probability conditions occurring simultaneously, not unlike perfect storms. However, at some point during a solution process most members from all three groups are likely to activate some perceptual representations of the events that their equations and semantic concepts are intended to describe. Even string theorists, who rely on mathematical statements, draw pictures to illustrate their understanding of a string. All three mental forms are useful; the trick is to know when to use each one and to avoid using the wrong tool at an inappropriate time. Tolerance for Ambiguity Mathematical, semantic, and schematic representations vary in the ambiguity of the knowledge they convey. The intellectual disciplines can be arranged on a continuum representing the ambiguity of their descriptions and conclusions, with mathematics and physics at one end, the social sciences in the middle, and the humanities at the opposite end. Because individuals differ in their tolerance for ambiguity, it is likely that both personality traits and culture affect the domain chosen for a scholarly career. Some youth inherit a biology that renders them especially vulnerable to an uncomfortable feeling of tension when they are uncertain over the future and there is ambiguity

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surrounding the best behavior to display when they have a choice. Many adults with this personality trait were unusually shy as young children.37 Bertrand Russell, a shy youth who suffered from nightmares, devoted his career to removing ambiguity from philosophy.

The Meanings of Truth The distinctions among the three mental tools and the level of ambiguity in evidence and conclusions bear a relation to the concept truth and the related notions correct, valid, coherent, and right. Every scholar wants his or her intellectual products to meet the criteria for at least one of these terms. Rather than offer definitions, which will certainly provoke controversy, it is more useful to focus on the referent. That is, what do natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists point to when they claim they are communicating a true idea? The four usual referents are: a consensual observation of an event outside the self that can be affirmed by others (e.g., the moon is or is not present in the sky); the consistency of a logical or mathematical argument (e.g., if velocity equals the ratio of distance over time then distance equal the product of velocity and time); the meaning coherence among the semantic networks of a narrative (e.g., a historian’s suggestion at the end of a narrative of World War II that Churchill did not attend Roosevelt’s funeral because of his lingering anger over being embarrassed by Roosevelt during their meetings with Stalin has a claim to truth if this idea strikes most readers as coherent with the complete text); or a compelling feeling (e.g., the feeling accompanying the thought that parental sacrifice for a child is right and abuse is abhorrent). The members of the three cultures differ in the frequency with which they rely on one or more of these four referents. Most natural scientists trust only the first two; social scientists the first and third; humanists rely on the last two. Although correspondence between an idea and evidence is a criterion for both natural and social scientists,


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the objectivity of their evidence often separates the two groups. Natural scientists worry about the subjective bias a human observer imposes on an event and demand that a machine record the events of interest, even though each machine’s structure imposes a special set of biases. Social scientists are more often concerned with the meanings of verbal statements or actions. Because machines cannot record meanings, social scientists rely on consensual agreement among trained experts as a way to protect against the biased perspective of a single observer. However, the introduction of powerful machines that expose properties lying deep beneath the surface of a phenomenon, which linear accelerators, space telescopes, and brain scanners do, has created a problem for the natural scientists committed to objectivity. Nineteenth-century scientists had assumed that the observations that all reasonable judges could agree upon were the foundation of a science. Everyone with normal vision would agree with Newton’s observation that light passing through a prism splits into a rainbow of colors. No special expertise was required for this perception. However, interpreting the extraordinary complex corpus of data resulting from smashing protons into one another at speeds approaching the velocity of light requires special training, and all scientists do not detect the same evidence or agree on its meaning. As a result, physicists have been forced to accept a consensus among many experts interpreting what is meaningful in a corpus of data produced by a machine. This practice means that the differences between natural and social scientists in the definition of objectivity have become smaller than they used to be and the meaning of a concept has become more dependent on the theory that is its home.38 This section should not end without some reference to the influential writings of the German social scientist Jürgen Habermas, who is more concerned with the meaning of rationality than with the definition of truth, valid, coherent, or right. Habermas holds out the promise of an unborn social science that mediates between, and

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The Three Cultures

synthesizes, the positivism of the natural sciences and the semantic hermeneutics of the humanities.39 However, his definition of rational refers to the degree of agreement within a community over the validity of a belief, rather than the logical consistency of an argument. Habermas has been criticized for trying to unite the two distinct traditions of American pragmatism with Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the importance of consensual understanding. Put plainly, according to Habermas, a person is said to have a rational idea when he or she can communicate it effectively to at least one other person. The problem with this definition is that it means that Einstein might not have had a rational idea the moment he thought about a moving massive body altering the space–time warp if he were unable to communicate this concept to a colleague, but the seventeenth-century residents of Salem, Massachusetts did possess a rational concept when they talked about the reality of witches. The writings of anthropologists and historians reveal that many consensual beliefs that were judged as rational turned out to be empirically false. It will prove more worthwhile, therefore, to argue over the definitions of true, valid, coherent, correct, and ethically right than to worry over which ideas are rational. Moreover, rather than quarrel over which intellectual group has a privileged access to any of these concepts, we should acknowledge the different meanings these abstract ideas can assume.

What to Study? Long before science became a possible career for youths, most scientists chose to probe phenomena that appeared to be regular, amenable to measurement, and inexplicably mysterious. The changing locations of the stars and planets, falling objects, magnetism, blood flow, and disease were consistent targets of inquiry because they met these criteria. Human behavior was not a popular subject because it lacked predictability and ease of measurement. Scholars can pursue an inordinately large number of questions and the ones selected depend on


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many conditions that change over time, including a dominant theoretical view, cultural setting, a new technology, or a social crisis. Life scientists tend to select one of two targets of concern. One group wants to understand the most fundamental, or ultimate, factors that contribute to an outcome. The second is more interested in understanding the cascade of intermediate processes leading to an outcome, and assumes it is influenced by the specific contexts in which each phase of a cascade occurs. This tension is present in the contrast between the biologists who are concerned with the genetic differences among the adult members of a species and those who believe that understanding the adult form requires study of how genes, in combination with other conditions, produced each animal’s form during the stages of embryological growth. Psychologists are divided between those who search for the genes that contribute to specific psychological traits and those who believe it is necessary to know each person’s history because most genomes lead to different outcomes in individuals with different histories. The two groups ask different questions, perform different experiments, and rely on different explanatory concepts. A judge who asked the bank robber Willie Sutton, “Why do you rob banks?” wanted to know why he robbed banks rather than work at a lawful job. When Sutton answered, “Because that’s where the money is,” he assumed the question was, “Why do you rob banks rather than grocery stores?” The ideal incentive for intellectual work is an inability to understand an observed phenomenon, an inconsistency between theory and observation, or a paradox in mathematics. An important difference between natural and social scientists is that the former are more likely to brood over why the results of an experiment failed to support a theoretical prediction. Their subsequent attempts to explain the failure often lead to an important discovery. Max Planck posited the quantum in 1900 because he wished to understand why the measured energy frequencies emitted from a heated vessel, called a black body, were not in accord with the popular theory of the time.

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However, there are so many reasons why an experiment in the social sciences might fail, most social scientists react to a failure of prediction by moving on to another question. For example, when the cumulative evidence indicated that a person’s interpretations of ink blots did not predict their conflict over sexuality or hostility the psychologists who conducted this work did not try to understand why, perhaps by probing the relation between the interpretations offered and some other aspect of the person, but abandoned this method to pursue another question. Had they persevered they might have learned that the responses to the ink blots reflected the individual’s preferred perceptual style which, in turn, was related to the personality profiles of introversion and extraversion. Young scientists feel a palpable pressure to pursue the problems that the politically powerful members of their discipline have classified as having precedence. Conformity to the biases of these respected elders is more likely to lead to promotion and tenure than pursuing an unpopular question. Charles Townes was a rare exception, for he continued to work on the maser despite discouraging comments from senior colleagues who told him he was pursuing a useless problem. American natural scientists award priority to problems that are technically challenging, amenable to accurate measurement, require mastery of a new technology, and are likely to yield evidence that can be summarized with mathematical propositions. Investigators who conform to these criteria can demonstrate their intellectual brilliance to colleagues and superiors. Unfortunately, these criteria often compete with the complexity or mystery of a phenomenon as a basis for problem selection. Lee Smolin, a particle physicist critical of string theory, wrote, “Achievements requiring nothing more than cleverness and hard work are valued more highly than probing thought or imagination.”40 Michael Faraday, who had little training in mathematics, was celebrated by his natural science colleagues because of his astute observations and creative suggestion that magnetism and electricity were


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related. A contemporary Faraday would have a harder time gaining recognition because of his inability to describe the phenomena in mathematical terms, which James Clerk Maxwell did a few years later. The current emphasis on a scientist’s “brilliance” means that an investigator who uses mathematics has an edge over one who uses words because mastery of the former implies a keener mind. The aesthetic feeling generated by reading about a novel observation, even though it is not yet understood (e.g., the first descriptions of the patterns of blood flow emanating from the heart or the discovery of X-rays), differs from the feeling evoked by the admiration for an astute mind. Even though a mind is the origin of every discovery and explanation, we are usually moved more by the beauty of a photograph of a sunset than by the photographer’s talent with a camera. Nineteenth-century European society had a fairly rigid class structure consisting of a small aristocracy and large groups of middle-class professionals, merchants, and laborers. Youths planning a career in the natural sciences were sensitive to the problems their community believed should be probed and the answers that would appeal to those with status in the society.41 The upper-middle-class German community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was attracted to complex ideas that involved whole phenomena, especially the relation between an entity and its context, and was hostile to the analyses of elementary parts isolated from their setting. Hence, early German geneticists were not attracted to the study of isolated genes or chromosomes and investigated the role of the cytoplasm and the development of the embryo. American scientists working during the same era held the opposite set of biases. They celebrated hard facts that could be affirmed with certainty and made important discoveries with the fruit fly Drosophila. Even though later history proved the German intuition right, the required methods were not invented until late in the twentieth century, and the discoveries these methods made possible created the exciting new domain called “evo-devo.” The early cohorts of academic psychologists, also German, could have studied

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the acquisition of conditioned reflexes, but chose the more complex theme of consciousness instead. The pragmatic American psychologists, who appreciated that consciousness was not amenable to rigorous inquiry, selected the former problem. The swelling in the number of scientists seeking promotion to the small number of professorships has tempted many junior investigators to become pragmatic and to pursue problems that would produce publishable results quickly. A resume listing many papers in high-prestige journals was a sign of a talented mind. Young scientists recognized, however, that significant discoveries usually required perseverance over long periods of time, without any guarantee that the prolonged effort would be successful. The more rational strategy was to conduct experiments that could be completed quickly and were likely to yield clear results. Gregor Mendel, who persevered in his studies of plant inheritance, and did not publish many papers, was fortunate. Gottlob Frege, one of the most respected logicians and philosophers of the late nineteenth-century, was not. Frege labored for decades on the logical nature of the concept of number but failed to solve the problem. Georg von Békésy, who received the 1961 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of traveling waves on the basilar membrane of the inner ear, noted in his acceptance speech that he had initially laid out a research program that he thought would take at least fifteen years to complete. It has become more difficult to find a von Békésy in the contemporary research university because the current ambience invites the adoption of a risk-averse strategy that promises many short-term gains. A recent survey by the National Science Foundation of more than 24,000 active scientists, many of whom review research proposals in the natural sciences, revealed a discouraging picture. Only 25 percent of the proposals were regarded as likely to produce an original, transformative idea; the vast majority were judged as minimally creative because the supplicant scientists worried more about anonymous referees rejecting experiments exploring an original idea than about


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making a discovery of theoretical importance.42 Mario Capecchi, one of the winners of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his contribution to the development of mice with deleted genes (called knockout mice), submitted a request to the National Institutes of Health in the 1980s to pursue this hypothesis. The committee reviewing the proposal rejected the experiments designed to alter specific genes in mice and advised Capecchi to forget his “wild” idea. Most scientists are aware of the poor agreement among three reviewers of a research proposal and appreciate that the more original the ideas proposed, the poorer the degree of agreement. It is no wonder then that most scientists are reluctant to initiate research that deviates too far from what is currently popular and prefer to propose a clever variation on experiments that are safe and likely to lead to a publishable result. Both the reputation of scientists and the public good would be served by restoring an earlier balance between rewarding cleverness qua cleverness and cleverness exploited in the service of a significant insight. Lao-Tzu, the Chinese philosopher of the third century BCE, reflected his culture’s greater reverence for wisdom over technical expertise when he wrote, “Great cleverness resembles clumsiness.”43

Types of Scientists It is difficult to separate the content of a discipline from the types of people who select it for a career. Youth who chose sociology or art history would be unlikely to pursue a career in molecular biology or particle physics. When economics became heavily mathematical, after 1950, college seniors who enjoyed mathematics, but were uncertain over whether they would be able to make an original contribution to formal mathematics, often selected economics because this domain allowed them to use their talents, and not necessarily because they were vitally interested in understanding the economies of nations.

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It is possible to detect at least four different motivational patterns among scientists, independent of the presence of a curiosity about some aspect of nature that all four types share. Similar categories can be found in other professions. The most prevalent type in the technically demanding natural sciences tries to demonstrate his or her intellectual potency by solving a difficult problem colleagues regard as theoretically important or technically demanding with an answer that appears to be free of ambiguity. The specific content of the problem is often irrelevant because the primary goal is to demonstrate that one possesses an intelligence that deserves respect. That is one reason why many physicists who had made important discoveries early in the last century abandoned their original field for biology after reading Erwin Schrödinger’s book, What Is Life?. Francis Crick’s mentor, M. F. Perutz, was a member of this group. Schrödinger persuaded many physicists that the odds of making a brilliant discovery had become greater in biology than in physics. This goal is accomplished more easily through study of simpler, rather than more complex, forms. Hence, many biologists study bacteria and fruit flies rather than monkeys and humans and many psychologists interested in human cognitive abilities write computer programs simulating perception or reasoning that do not include perceptual representations or emotions because it is difficult to incorporate these processes in statements containing only symbols. Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, who won a Nobel Prize for her studies of embryological development, chose to study physics initially because of an interest in its phenomena. But she shifted the target of her curiosity to biology when she found mathematics too demanding because, presumably, she wanted to be able to demonstrate her talents. Most natural scientists, therefore, resemble big game hunters whose primary motive is to track and kill an animal that is difficult to find, and often do not care if the quarry is a snow leopard, lion, or tiger. The joy comes from using one’s skills and energy to solve a difficult problem, any difficult problem, that promises a minimally ambiguous


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answer. Charles Darwin did not know what he would discover on the Beagle voyage and noted in his autobiography that his primary ambition was, “to take a fair place among scientific men.”44 Darwin might have felt just as gratified had he stayed at home and, by poring over archival evidence, discovered continental drift. The Nobel laureate biochemist Albert Szent-Györgi announced the hunter’s credo when he remarked that any student who “comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egoists who seek pleasure … in solving the puzzles of nature.”45 The second type, more frequent among social scientists, is characterized by a deep desire to understand a particular class of phenomena, whether the behavior of infants or gorillas, or the causes of crime, schizophrenia, or racism. These scholars care passionately about a particular target of inquiry, and would be unhappy if forced to abandon the question that attracted them to science simply because the problem was too complicated and the explanation penetrated with ambiguity. These scientists resemble devoted bird watchers who have a passionate curiosity about the specific animal they are tracking. It is hard to imagine the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz abandoning the study of cultures for molecular biology or the sociologist William Julius Wilson giving up his research on minority groups to study the brain. The attitude toward ambiguity, which is often apparent in childhood, separates these two classes of scholars. The hunters shun ambiguity or, put more positively, derive maximal satisfaction from solutions that promise certainty. The bird watchers are more tolerant of ambiguity because their pleasure comes from observing and brooding about a very specific class of phenomena. The other two types, although less frequent, are not rare. One group, with a strong motive for public celebrity, experiences a special satisfaction when they know that large numbers of strangers recognize their name and think about them as famous. The domain chosen depends on their judgment of where their talent is greatest. Young

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adults with this motive who select science are likely to pick a problem in which the public has a deep interest. Because most citizens are vitally concerned with the human condition, many with this personality choose the social sciences. The fourth type enjoys carrying out the routines of the laboratory: setting up an experiment, building the apparatus, gathering the data, and analyzing the observations with the most elegant analytic technique. This group feels satisfied when they implement the rituals of the scientific domain they selected. Fortunately, natural science requires cooperation from teams with diverse talents and profits from these workers in the vineyard. Although most scientists possess all four motives, these desires form a hierarchy with one usually dominating the others. Taste, which is always affected by personality, historical era, and culture, exerts a considerable influence on the discipline chosen for a career as well as the target selected for inquiry.

2 The Natural Sciences

The public is justifiably awed by the natural scientists’ ability to explain so many mysterious phenomena and grateful for the research products that have reduced disease burdens, prolonged life, lightened manual labor, eased communication and travel, and contributed to national economies. The natural sciences enjoy such a high status that psychologists like to add the suffix science to a specialty domain in order to announce membership in a highly respected community. The study of perception, memory, and thought was named cognitive science; research on social phenomena that used biological measures was called social neuroscience. I suspect that the American Psychological Society changed its name to the Association for Psychological Science so that no one would confuse its members, many of whom do research, with those in the American Psychological Association, which is dominated by clinical psychologists. E. O. Wilson reiterated the views of Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, when he urged all social scientists who wanted to make progress to relate their phenomena to biological processes.1 This mood of certainty, shared by other natural scientists, has so intimidated the other two cultures and the public that all three communities are slowly accommodating to the meanings understood by natural scientists, not unlike the barbarians who accepted the imposition of Latin by conquering Romans while privately remaining bilingual. The journalist writing in The Economist who ended a review of a biological scientist’s book on morality by suggesting that social 51

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scientists and humanists interested in the human moral sense should throw away their copies of Hume and Kant and start reading Darwin failed to understand that the concept “moral” has different meanings in the language systems of the three cultures. Another writer for the same magazine considered it perfectly legitimate to use the term “adultery” to describe the sexual behavior of a female rodent from a monogamous species that mated with many males, even though this word cannot be applied to a species that does not marry. The attraction to the biological causes of mental illness has been especially troublesome in psychiatry. Only fifty years ago, most psychiatrists used psychological concepts, some derivative of Freudian ideas, and relied on psychological therapies with their patients. Today, a majority of clinical psychiatrists have returned to the late nineteenth-century views of the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, who claimed that insanity, alcoholism, and prostitution were signs of a degenerate heredity. As a result, most clinicians rely almost exclusively on pharmacological therapies, and psychiatrists engaged in research are more likely to look for the genetic foundations and neurobiological correlates of a mental illness than for experiential contributions to the symptoms. However, every one of the symptom patterns psychiatrists call an anxiety or depressive disorder rests on more than one profile of genes and personal histories. Because each disorder has a heterogeneous etiology, it is not surprising that the available evidence fails to reveal any consistent link between a gene (or set of genes) and most cat egories of mental illness, even though it remains true that if a person has one of these symptom sets the probability that a parent or sibling will also have the same or a similar symptom is greater than expected by chance. However, parents and children also share the same social class and some aspects of personal history, and it has proven difficult to separate the contribution of these two causal forces because most of the time the symptoms require both a specific genome and an equally specific sequence of life events. If physicians had combined

The Natural Sciences

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all the patients with headaches into one illness category they would have failed to find the varied causes of this symptom which includes chronic stress, brain tumor, infection, bleeding within the skull, and excessive alcohol consumption. One advantage to restricting the focus of concern to genetic factors is that this strategy minimizes the stigma of mental illness by removing much of the blame from the patient for being unable to cope with the demands of life and from the family for engaging in negligent child- rearing practices. The disadvantage of this bias is that it leads American psychiatrists to prescribe drugs as the major form of therapy, even though many medicines have uncomfortable side effects that include nausea, insomnia, weight gain, fatigue, headache, stomach bleeding, stroke, heart problems, and suicidal ideation. Perhaps that is why about one in four patients stop taking the drug after filling the first prescription.2 Moreover, nondrug interventions, including psychotherapy and regular exercise, reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression in a proportion of patients.3 For reasons that are not obvious, British psychiatrists retain an interest in the psychological and sociological correlates of mental illness and have resisted a narrow biological perspective more e ffectively than their American counterparts. The unreflective commitment to a biological foundation for all deviant emotional profiles has persuaded an ingenuous public that a prolonged bout of sadness precipitated by economic disadvantage, loss of a job, a spouse’s infidelity, a friend’s disloyalty, chronic illness, or a bad investment might mean they have a depressive disorder and should consult a psychiatrist. The failure to discriminate between episodes of sadness and apathy brought on by the realistic frustrations of poverty or a stroke and a diagnosis of major depression due to a genetic vulnerability has allowed the media to worry the public unnecessarily by reporting an alarming increase in depressive disorder over the past two decades.4 The journalists fail to appreciate that sadness is as natural a reaction to loss or disability as sexual arousal is to the sight of an attractive

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partner. Psychiatrists do not claim that the increase in adolescent sexual activity is a sign of an alarming rise in sexual arousal disorder. Instead, youth are advised to use contraceptives or practice abstention, but they do not have to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. Menopause, too, is a natural event all women experience and it should not be described as a “disease” that can be prevented or cured with hormone treatments. The sharp rise in diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children and youth provides another example of the attraction to assuming inherited biological bases for all deviant mental states. Adult bipolar disorder, which is under some genetic control, is characterized by alternating cycles of manic excitement and depression, but children given this diagnosis do not display such mood cycles. Rather, their symptoms are impulsive bursts of aggression and exaggerated disobedience, which occur more frequently in boys than in girls and have diverse causes, especially extremely permissive child rearing. Because the child’s behaviors do not fit the criteria for adult bipolar disorder, diagnosing a young child as bipolar reflects the psychiatrists’ zeal to classify as many syndromes as possible as genetically mediated diseases. The political power of the major pharmaceutical companies is one reason for the current obsession with the biological bases for all deviant behaviors or unwanted moods. These corporations spend about $25 billion a year on advertising and marketing and support more Washington lobbyists than there are elected representatives. A second reason is that attributing anxiety or depression to a person’s inherited biology removes some of the responsibility from the victim or the family for his or her unhappy state. Of course, there are individuals suffering from chronic, intense depression or anxiety who require professional help because of a combination of a biological vulnerability and stressful life experiences. But too many Americans have been persuaded that all bouts of intense sadness or worry are abnormal and need professional attention. Even the authors of the Old Testament understood that a vulnerability to guilt, depression,


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and anxiety were universal burdens God inflicted on Adam, Eve, and their progeny for violating His prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

Awe and a Little Skepticism The public’s current attitude toward physics, chemistry, and biology is more ambivalent than it was a century earlier for at least three reasons. First, the average citizen has difficulty comprehending many of their concepts and methods. Most adults with twelve years of formal education would have understood the ideas in the writings of Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, and Pasteur because the discoveries referred to experiences most readers could imagine. New technologies have uncovered exotic phenomena requiring concepts such as gluon, dark energy, methylation, and retroviruses that are harder to comprehend or to imagine. Even sophisticated college graduates do not understand how cosmologists arrived at the conclusion that the newborn universe doubled and redoubled in size 100 times in an interval as brief as a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. The mathematical propositions of string theory, which promise to explain all physical phenomena by positing energies oscillating at different frequencies in ten dimensions, are not even accessible to natural scientists who have not had extensive mathematical training. These compromises in understanding prevent the public from appreciating the beauty of these discoveries and sharing vicariously in the special joy the victorious scientist experienced. I. I. Rabi reported a powerful emotion the moment he realized that he was the first person to observe the unique spin of the sodium atom, a concept that is obscure to the average citizen. I also suspect that the public shares Goethe’s dislike of the scientists’ habit of analyzing all experiences into tiny pieces that destroy the whole. Although this strategy has been successful, there is an understandable resistance to

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the claim made by some particle physicists that my conviction that the pen I am holding is a solid object is an illusion.5 A second reason for the dimming of the natural scientists’ halo is that citizens regard physicists and chemists as indirectly responsible for the increased pollution of air and water, global warming, the threat of catastrophic climate change, toxic nuclear waste, weapons of mass destruction, and dirty bombs. Of course, the scientists, too, deplore these unwanted consequences of research. Wolfgang Panofsky, the first director of the linear accelerator at Stanford University, told an interviewer that scientists share responsibility for creating conditions in which “more people can be harmed and fewer and fewer people can harm more and more people.”6 Bertrand Russell, eight decades earlier, accused natural scientists of depriving humans of their urge to be kind and threatening to destroy what was good about civilization. At a subtler level, the advances that permitted a software program to defeat a chess master and a surgeon to insert a computer chip in the motor cortex of a paralyzed patient which allowed some coordinated movement compromise the traditional meaning of human agency. It is easy to imagine a future time when the lecture halls of our colleges will be free of all life. Each seat in the auditorium will hold the student’s camera-recorder registering in vivid color the professor’s lecture delivered by another machine resting on the platform of the room. No questions are allowed. Biologists have not escaped their share of criticism. Investigators trying to clone humans from embryonic stem cells, inserting new genes into plants or animals, and perfecting procedures that allow a donor’s ovum to be penetrated by the sperm of a stranger in a Petri dish and then implanted in the uterus of a surrogate mother who will surrender the newborn infant to any pair of parents who can afford the steep fee threaten the traditional ethical premises of a sizeable number of Americans and Europeans. The public also worries that some scientists working for drug companies might suppress evidence suggesting that a drug had serious side effects. The premature licensing of


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the drug thalidomide in the 1950s, which reduced morning sickness in pregnant women, led to almost 8,000 deformed newborn infants. Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University who sensed the ethical issues raised by cooperative financial arrangements between faculty members and industry, urged more explicit discussion of ethical issues in the classroom and at faculty meetings.7 The media’s regular dissemination of senseless human violence around the world is troubling to many citizens, and some seek relief by demanding that scientists limit the imposition of any unnecessary pain on the animals used in health research. It was inevitable that scientists conducting this work would be labeled “heartless,” or concerned only with their careers, no matter how benevolent their motives. Public concern over this issue, as well as the media’s dissemination of ethically indefensible experiments performed in the 1930s, prompted the U.S. Congress to pass legislation in 1974 requiring universities to establish review boards charged with evaluating the ethical implications of all federally supported research and with the power to prevent a scientist from conducting any study they judged as questionable. The suggestion that any scientist might be indifferent to the community’s ethical standards would have been treated as an insult only thirty years earlier. The current cohort accepts this monitoring of their consciences. They grumble over the increasingly restrictive decisions of these boards, but realize that they no longer have the moral authority to demand their abolition. The public, threatened by the secular power and occasional arrogance of natural scientists, is trying to “lop off the tall poppies.”

The Fundamental Assumptions The premises of the natural sciences are a third reason for suspicion because some are inconsistent with the intuitions or ethical beliefs of a sizeable proportion of the population. The three seminal assumptions are: (1) no scientific explanation is permanently true; hence, a rational

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person should remain skeptical of all interpretations of nature; (2) all phenomena are the final products of a sequence of material processes that can be predicted with reasonable, but not perfect, confidence; and (3) there are no ethical values in natural phenomena; hence, to rephrase the distinguished biologist Francisco Ayala, no scientist can conclude anything about human values or the meaning of existence from natural events Twentieth-century biologists added a fourth premise, stating that the primary urge for every animal, including humans, is to maximize the organism’s fitness. This assumption implies that each person is programmed by his or her biology to award precedence to actions that increase the reproductive potential and health of the self and self ’s relatives before considering the welfare of others. No Permanent Truths It is worth noting that the skepticism inherent in the first assumption is an important reason why European scientists made more dramatic advances after the fourteenth century than their counterparts in Arab countries or China. Although the latter two societies had made important discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, and optics, they were far more hierarchical, centralized, and resisted granting autonomy to their institutions. It is difficult to imagine a Kepler or Galileo emerging in these cultures. The combination of an atomistic conception of nature, celebration of reason, separation of church and state, the Christian emphasis on private conscience, and the autonomy enjoyed by European colleges allowed the West to leap ahead of its neighbors in the natural sciences. Determinism The premise of material determinism also generates an incompletely articulated mood of disquiet. Citizens are told that brain activity, the origin of all psychological phenomena, is governed by


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lawful biological, chemical, and physical principles. It follows that each person’s acts, feelings, and ideas are determined, to a nontrivial degree, by his inherited biological properties and the products of experience stored permanently in the synapses of his brain. The implication is that every human choice is seriously influenced by processes that the individual cannot control. Freud was friendly to this philosophy for he insisted that every action, whether a slip of the tongue or fiddling with a wedding ring, was caused by an unconscious wish that only careful analysis could reveal. However, this principle slams against the powerful subjective conviction that each person does decide whether to stand up or sit down, to continue working or stop to rest, to think about dinner or the evening’s recreation. The stubborn intuition that we retain some freedom of choice explains why B. F. Skinner was subjected to unusually hostile attacks in 1971, the year he wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, when he challenged the validity of personal agency and the compelling sense that each of us does have a semblance of control over what we decide to do, believe, or desire.8 A more accurate way to view the influence of biological processes on psychological functions is to treat the former as narrowing, or restricting, the range of possible psychological outcomes, but not determining them. The presence of two X chromosomes imposes a severe restriction on the infant’s genital anatomy. However, high levels of circulating cortisol in the fetus, or inheriting a gene that influences the neurochemistry of the brain, are far less restrictive and permit a relatively large number of possible physical and psychological traits because there is an inherent unpredictability in the expression of every gene. A gene that affects a brain state associated with a psychological property rarely accounts for more than 10 percent of the variation in the psychological trait. Measurements of the brain are affected by three different conditions: the sensory input (often called the bottom-up influence), thoughts (top-down influence), and metabolic or physiological

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changes that are neither detected by consciousness nor provoked by thought. A sweet tasting food, anticipation of a desired experience, and ingestion of a high-calorie, but tasteless, food can be followed by an increase in dopamine in select brain sites. But scientists recording only dopamine levels at these sites cannot know the reason for the higher dopamine level or predict the behavior that might occur.9 There are suggestive links between each of fifty genes and an increased risk for a dozen diseases. But every one of the fifty genes exerts a relatively small effect on any of the diseases because of the idiosyncratic events that mark each person’s history. For example, a childhood viral infection, such as mumps, can increase slightly the risk of schizophrenia in individuals with a genetic vulnerability. Surprisingly, it is not even possible to predict with high levels of the level of activity of a brain molecule from the presence of the gene that is its origin, or predict whether stimulation of a set of neurons in the isolated nervous system of the leech will result in a swimming or a crawling movement.10 The more neuroscientists study the motor cortex of monkeys and humans, the less certain they are of the nature of the relation between a profile of neural activity and a class of motor actions because local conditions alter the relation.11 Although the connectivity of the brain increases with age, due in large measure to myelination of fiber tracts connecting separated sites, the total volume of myelinated fibers in some healthy sevenyear-olds is greater than the volume in some equally healthy twentyfive-year olds. But it would be unusual, perhaps impossible, to find any seven-year-old whose motor coordination and speed of reaction was superior to that of any twenty-five-year old, even though the myelination evidence implies that such an observation was possible. It is rare for any gene or brain state to produce the same outcome in all individuals or on all occasions. Nonetheless, most neuroscientists assume that specific patterns of brain activity “determine” particular psychological processes. One problem with this premise is that most psychological outcomes are


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the product of the coordinated activities of neurons in many sites. It is worth remembering that if a behavior or thought required the coordination of 32 neuronal clusters, and each one responded reliably 999/1,000 times, 3 percent of the time the coordination of all 32 sites would fail. Although the number of atoms in the human brain is estimated to be 10 to the 27th power, the estimated number of possible thoughts is 10 to the 70 trillionth power. The Meaning of Blood Flow The most popular measure of human brain activity is the pattern of blood flow to varied locations. However, there are at least nine problems surrounding the inferences based on this measure. First, blood flow is primarily an index of the amount of neural input to a particular location, but a less sensitive index of the amount of output activity from the same site. Neurons receiving increased blood flow are usually the target of information from many sites. However, that fact does not necessarily mean that these neurons are sending information to many other locations because inhibitory forces, which are less highly correlated with blood flow changes, continually moderate the excitability of every neuron. Second, because about 20 percent of cortical neurons are inhibitory, the relation between amount of blood flow to a location and the amount of neural activity in that site is not linear.12 The physiology of heart rate supplies an analogy. A person’s heart rate at any moment is a function of both excitatory sympathetic and inhibitory parasympathetic influences; hence, the prediction of a person’s heart rate would be poor if only the former were measured. Every thought, feeling, and action is a function of a balance between excitatory and inhibitory circuits. If blood flow reflects mainly the former, there will not be a close correspondence between blood flow and a psychological outcome. An increase in blood flow to the amygdala is usually recorded when a person expects to receive a mild electric shock because neurons

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in many sites send information to the amygdala. But the amygdala is under continuous modulation from the prefrontal cortex, which typically inhibits output from the amygdala to targets in the autonomic nervous system whose activity leads to conscious feelings of fear. Hence, a person showing increased blood flow to the amygdala might not experience any feeling of fear. Consider a pitcher preparing to throw balls at a batter. The speed of the ball should correlate with the recruitment of excitatory neurons in the motor cortex and, therefore, with blood flow to this site. But the accuracy of a pitch is influenced in a major way by inhibitory neurons. Thus, there should not be a good relation between blood flow to the motor cortex and the proportion of pitches that fall in the strike zone. Third, the magnitude of change in blood flow, which varies with how long the incentive was presented,13 is usually not detected until five or six seconds after an incentive appeared. Therefore, this measure might not reflect early, brief changes in conscious thought or feeling that occurred during the first second or two. Adults become conscious of an object in their perceptual field within the first quarter of a second following its appearance.14 It is bit tortuous to assume that a psychological process that occurs within a second after a picture appears is reflected in brain activity occurring six seconds later. Fourth, blood flow would not be a faithful index of activity in neurons located in an area without a rich blood supply. Fifth, the degree to which an event is or is not expected always affects blood flow. For example, the blood flow pattern in regular cocaine users in response to the administration of cocaine depended on whether the drug was unexpected or expected.15 The unexpected sound of a whistle was followed by increased blood flow to twenty-four different brain areas ;16 if the whistle had been expected the pattern would have been different. Even when scientists have complete control of the measurement situation, the relation between a behavioral response and the


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accompanying profile of brain activity is modest. For example, two monkeys, previously acclimated to lying quietly in a magnetic scanner, saw pictures of familiar and unfamiliar objects on a screen. The monkeys looked more often and longer at the unfamiliar scenes which, by definition, were unexpected. Human infants behave the same way. And, as anticipated, blood flow to the amygdala, which is usually responsive to unexpected events, was greater to the unfamiliar pictures. However, the degree of correspondence between the behavioral and brain measures (as indexed by the correlation between looking time and blood flow) was modest. The brain measure accounted for only 25 percent of the variation in the behavioral index of attention.17 By contrast, height accounts for 65 percent of the variation in weight. Sixth, different methods of assessing brain activity often invite different conclusions.18 For example, more powerful magnets reveal blood flow to locations that were silent when less powerful magnets were used, and blood flow evidence does not always correlate with evidence from the magnetic fields generated by neuronal clusters. Seventh, areas receiving increased blood flow may not be necessary for the psychological process engaged by the event. This means that scientists cannot assume that a brain site receiving increased blood flow was necessary for or mediated the psychological process. My sweat glands are more active when I play tennis than when I am reading, but the sweat gland activity is not needed for the planning or execution of the motor movements involved in striking a tennis ball. Eighth, blood flow to an event is always influenced by the instruction the scientist gives individuals and is usually greater when the participants must be attentive or engage in mental effort rather than remain passive.19 Hence, a person who has less firm knowledge about a domain, or finds a task difficult, would show greater blood flow to relevant brain sites than one with a deeper understanding of the same domain or one who finds the task easier. A person with a sparse

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vocabulary asked to detect the similarity in the meaning between the words fly and tree would show greater blood flow in the temporal lobe than one with a richer vocabulary. Accordingly, scientists can misinterpret increased blood flow in individuals looking at unpleasant pictures of bloodied soldiers, angry faces, and knives as due to the feelings evoked by the pictures when, in fact, it might be the result of deciding how to rate the emotional content of the pictures. The enhanced blood flow could have occurred because the subjects found the assignment difficult, and not because the pictures generated anxiety or fear. Finally, the brain’s reaction to every event is influenced by its physical properties, which include size, color, motion, illumination, contour, curvature, and the sharpness of angles in the visual modality.20 Thus, the blood flow profile induced by photos of faces reflects both the reactivity of posterior parts of the brain to the physical features of the stimuli, as well as the responsiveness of the anterior parts of brain reflecting attentiveness and attempts to categorize the event. Because anterior and posterior sites communicate with each other it can be difficult to identify the separate contribution of these different processes to the blood flow pattern. Although scientists are usually interested in the person’s emotional reaction to pictures of daggers dripping red blood, compared with yellow roses, the blood flow patterns are affected by both the physical features of the stimulus and the person’s thoughts and emotional reactions to blood stained daggers. Simply increasing the diameter of the pupils in the faces of attractive women by 1 millimeter produced increased blood flow to the amygdala.21 The idiosyncratic element in measures of blood flow was revealed in the patterns of eight-year-old twins watching a series of video clips designed to evoke feelings of sadness as each child lay in a magnetic scanner. Even though most of the children reported feeling sad, the blood flow patterns to the frontal lobe were not the same in identical twins.22 Even though most individuals report disliking a sequence of


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musical notes that are perceived as dissonant there was no difference in the pattern of blood flow to a dissonant piano melody and one in a major key that adults regard as pleasing. These facts imply that there will always be a sliver of indeterminism between brain events, no matter how accurately they are measured, and psychological phenomena. Our compelling sense of free will rests securely in this niche. Despite these problems, many scientists hope that blood flow measures will reveal the places in the brain that represent particular types of knowledge, such as the representations of numbers or faces, as if semantic, schematic, and motor networks were library books with an assigned location. Although an area in the lateral occipital and inferior temporal cortex is active when people are looking at objects, and therefore might be the site where an object category was detected, the blood flow patterns to pictures of chairs and teapots were only distinctively different about 60 percent of the time.23 The tenuous nature of some inferences from blood flow is illustrated in a report that concluded that a woman’s depth of love for her male partner was mediated by a site in the brain called the angular gyrus. The basis for this startling suggestion was the increased blood flow to this site when the women were reporting the intensity of their love for a partner. The potential flaw in this conclusion is the fact that blood flow to this area could be due to many different causes, including the recall of prior conversations or the locations of weekend holidays.24 Consider the psychological state of a person who accidentally closed the door of the home and realized at that instant that he was locked outside without a key. This psychological state requires a circuit connecting at least four spatially distinct sites, and absence of activity in any one site would prevent or alter the psychological state. Scientists can say that a particular psychological experience requires a certain location or circuit, but cannot say that the experience is localized in a particular place. The perception of a spring rose requires the contribution of the visual cortex, but the perception is not localized

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in that site, even though Francis Crick once speculated that free will was located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus. The hope that an intention, thought, emotion, or cognitive talent could be “localized” in a particular place in the brain is not abandoned easily. Two leaders of European neurology in the 1870s – David Ferrier and John Hughlings Jackson – also tried to find the restricted locations in the brain where select psychological properties resided. Despite their failure, later generations persisted, not unlike baseball fans muttering, “Wait till next year.” Once scientists had access to finer electrodes, more powerful amplifiers, and magnetic scanners they continued the search enthusiastically. Some neuroscientists believe that a small area in the posterior part of the right hemisphere, called the fusiform area, is biologically prepared to process faces. There are at least two problems with this bold suggestion. First, faces are among the most frequent patterned events that humans encounter. Therefore, this site might also be the place where all frequently encountered objects that have internal details are processed. Dog experts show activation of the fusiform area when viewing pictures of dogs, and an area in the monkey brain that is reliably activated by faces is also activated by clocks, which, like faces, are round and contain internal elements.25 It is also relevant that humans automatically try to classify the faces they see as they lie in magnetic scanners – is the face familiar or unfamiliar, male or female, angry or happy, young or old? – and the increased blood flow could reflect this cognitive process. An unfamiliar face typically evokes more blood flow than a familiar face or one seen recently. Finally, faces evoke a pattern of activity in both fusiform and frontal cortex within one-tenth of a second and in three additional sites within the first four-tenths of a second after the face has appeared. All of these facts imply that we still do not know whether the neurons of the fusiform area are biologically prepared to process only faces.26 The heart of the debate centers on whether the evolution of the human brain was accompanied by the assignment of general or


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specific functions to a particular site. That is, is the fusiform area programmed to process all frequently encountered events with a pattern of internal elements or is it programmed to process faces only? If we take language as an analogy, the former is more likely. Neurons in the temporal cortex are programmed to process a variety of symbolic utterances in more than 6,000 spoken languages, as well as the hand movements of sign languages. There is always a temptation when an area of inquiry is young to attribute an absolute property, or essence, to an object or event. Eighteenth-century scientists assumed that a metal that felt warm to the touch possessed a substance called vis viva. Objects that retained heat for a longer time had more vis viva than those that lost heat quickly. At the moment, the assumption that the representation of a psychological category is restricted to one place remains only a possibility. Looking for a particular place in the brain where a particular perception, thought, or emotion is located may be as fruitless as asking where the group is when twelve people are discussing the next presidential election.27 This conclusion does not preclude the possibility that future technologies might reveal closer relations between brain and psychological phenomena and dilute the severity of this skeptical summary. Ethical Values The third natural science premise, which denies any ethical implications to natural events, separates the social sciences and humanities, on the one hand, from the natural sciences, on the other. Although the study of matter is devoid of any moral implications, it is difficult to ignore the intrusion of values into most human behaviors, beliefs, moods, and intentions. Descartes appreciated this stubborn fact when he erected the partition between soul and body. A favorable evaluation of self is as necessary for humans as gills are for fish. Psychologists who study eye–hand coordination in infants can

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remain loyal to the natural scientists’ wish to avoid all moral judgments. But the biologists who study the brain profiles evoked when a person imagines he is deceiving a friend have to consider the moral connotation of the request to the participants. Scientists trying to prolong human life into the ninth and tenth decades are likely to assert that they are working to achieve an ethically “good” outcome. However, the judgment that living to age ninety, rather than seventy, is a desirable outcome is an ethical position and neither a fact of nature inferred from evidence nor a valid deduction from biological theory. All societies possess the contrasting concepts “good–bad,” “right– wrong,” and “fair–unjust” and most individuals want to believe that some acts, intentions, ideas, and personal qualities are permanently good or bad, wish to possess good qualities, and have the capacity to be empathic with those in distress and to feel guilty over indifference to human suffering. These phenomena are the consequences of the evolution of the human brain. If natural phenomena are free of these constraints, perhaps those who believe in some absolute moral imperatives are violating a natural law and should question whether any of their moral standards deserves continued loyalty. Natural scientists are trying to understand why the evolution of our species was accompanied by the universal human demand for imposing moral judgments when nature has no ethical preferences. The suggestion that no act can be condemned as absolutely wrong because nature has no ethical values and humans are products of nature troubles many Americans who insist that a commitment to the sanctity of life is absolute. The Supreme Court’s ruling against partial birth abortions satisfied their need for minimal restoration of some faith in the imperative that forbids willful harming of human life. Many Americans bridle when evolutionary biologists declare that because all animals are programmed to maximize their inclusive fitness a person who displayed altruistic or cooperative behaviors


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toward a stranger who could not reciprocate the kindness was not acting in accord with natural law. If an adult male chimpanzee’s biological fitness is enhanced when he kills a newborn infant in order to mate with its mother, and a famine-starved mother in a rural village is behaving adaptively when she kills one of her newborn twins because she cannot nurse both infants, it may be irrational to feel moral revulsion over these actions. If the collection of Americans is regarded as a biological collective, torture of prisoners bent on harming America serves survival and is defensible. If, however, the concept American is regarded as a social category with which citizens identify torture becomes a moral transgression that generates shame. The Bush administration’s denial of using torture in Iraq means that they recognized that a majority treat American as a social and not a biological category. This example illustrates the important differences between a biological and psychological perspective on the same event. An orthodox interpretation of evolutionary theory implies that no individual should do anything that is psychologically or biologically costly if it does not contribute to their inclusive fitness. Because most humans engage in altruistic and cooperative actions during a lifetime, biologists are trying to explain why anyone would expend energy or resources to help strangers who do not share their genetic profile when there was minimal probability of being punished for indifference, no possibility of being repaid, and no obvious contribution to their fitness. The initial arguments explaining why altruism and cooperation might aid fitness ignored the fact that human evolution was accompanied by the abilities to infer the private states of others, conscious awareness of a “self ” that the individual wishes to regard as worthy, and the capacities for empathy, shame, and guilt. Humans are programmed by their biology to develop a conscience and therefore will aid a stranded motorist or donate money to help the victims of an earthquake, even though they know they will not be punished for

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ignoring the victims’ distress. Young children will spontaneously retrieve a ball that had rolled far from where a group of children had been playing even though the cooperative child had no fear of reprisal for failing to be helpful. It is difficult, therefore, to understand why some evolutionary biologists continue to deny this component of the human moral sense and write, “In the absence of punishment, defection wins.”28 Perhaps these scholars should spend more time on playgrounds and less in the library. Fourth-century Athens did not have a high crime rate, even though the police force consisted of only 300 slaves who rarely arrested anyone. Darwin recognized that his arguments for the evolution of humans from apes were less convincing than he wished. He had accepted the fact that the human moral sense was universal, but was unable to discern the adaptive value of the moral impulse and was unwilling to award humans the unique properties of empathy, guilt, and inference of another’s state. He thought he solved this knotty problem by arguing that human morality evolved from the social behaviors of monkeys and chimpanzees. Frans de Waal, a sophisticated observer of chimpanzees, has seen some of these social acts.29 Apes often react to the obvious distress or need of another animal with an action that appears to be helpful and might be accompanied by an empathic appreciation of the other’s state. A chimpanzee that puts an arm around another in distress seems to be motivated by an appreciation of the psychological state of the other. However, de Waal adds, wisely, that it is not necessary to assume that the behavior was motivated by a desire to be helpful. Although there is a superficial similarity between the behaviors of chimpanzees and humans, it is not clear that the chimpanzees go one step further, as humans do, and infer a private state of distress in another. What remains controversial, therefore, is Darwin’s intuition that human altruism and cooperation are evolutionary derivatives of the social behaviors of chimpanzees. Female rats that have just birthed a litter will retrieve a newborn pup issuing distress vocalizations, but


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it is not obvious that the mother is empathizing with the state of her offspring. It is unlikely that there are human genes for altruistic or cooperative behaviors, but highly probable that many genes contribute to the universal competences for inference, empathy, self-awareness, construction of the symbolic categories “good” and “bad,” and the emotions of shame and guilt. Biologists continue to search for the genetic foundations of altruism because this concept refers to behaviors that can be counted, whereas the psychological processes of inference, empathy, guilt, and shame are, at the moment, less amenable to objective quantification. It is difficult to measure the thoughts and emotions of an American-born woman whose mother had been a victim of the Holocaust, although we can measure the fact that her emotional identification with the mother increased her risk for developing serious anxiety and depression.30 It remains possible that the animal behaviors called altruistic are not mediated by the same processes that provoke altruistic acts in humans. When a behavior in two species appears similar but is mediated by different mechanisms it is called a phenocopy. Both birds and bees fly, but the mechanisms and evolutionary origins of the capacity for flight are different. Thomas Insel, a distinguished biologist and current director of the National Institute of Mental Health, notes that too many scientists assume “that a mouse is a small rat, a rat is a small monkey, a monkey is a small human, and that all of these are ‘models’ for studying abnormal behavior … the failure to attend to species differences not only ignores the opportunity for understanding mechanisms of diversity, it will doom anyone who wants to make facile comparisons.”31 Insel’s warning is supported by observations indicating that rats, monkeys, and humans inherit different profiles for the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine that affect emotional states.32 A small number of younger biologists, who apparently sympathize with Insel’s view, are challenging the popular view that most

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of the biological and psychological characteristics preserved across species, or across generations within a species, were shaped by natural selection and serve inclusive fitness.33 Indeed, because fecundity need not be correlated with adaptation to a niche, some biologists are suggesting that fitness should be defined as the potential competence to reproduce many offspring, rather than by the number actually produced. This notion changes the meaning of fitness in a major way. Furthermore, natural selection is only one process mediating the evolution of the traits that define a species; mutation, recombination, gene regulation by promoters and enhancers, and genetic drift, which are equally influential, do not guarantee that all the preserved features of a species contribute to its fitness. The genetic variation among humans is attributable primarily to differences in the genes that control the expression of the small number of genes responsible for proteins as well as genetic drift. The latter mechanism reduces the variability in the genomes of a population and often results in less fit organisms.34 Unpredictable changes in the local environments of two species of finch living on one of the Galápagos Islands were responsible for the inherited sizes of both bodies and bills in ways that could not have been anticipated by any present theory.35 It is neither foolish nor illogical for a person to decide to have no children in order to pursue a career or education, to give valuable resources to strangers one will never see, to insist that loyalty to friends is an absolute moral imperative, or to believe in God. The fact that Americans who did not attend college are more likely to be religious than college graduates, who typically have higher incomes and more challenging jobs, implies that their religious faith may serve a psychologically healing function in a society in which wealth and occupational status have become primary signs of virtue. A religious faith enhances the health of older women, especially widows, and provides protection against suicide, depression, and social anxiety.36 Women between seventy and eighty years of age who attended religious services at least once a week were less obese and possessed


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fewer signs of a compromised physiology than women who rarely attended religious services.37 The benevolent psychological and biological outcomes of a spiritual faith are components of the many evolutionary changes that also allowed physicists to estimate the age of the universe. The human moral sense is not a metaphysical, philosophical invention, but a collection of inherited biological propensities that is absent in all other animals. Only humans have a fear of being “contaminated” by sputum, feces, dirt, mice, or cockroaches. Chimpanzees avoid objects that are unfamiliar or have unpleasant odors or tastes, but they do not add the symbolic evaluation “contaminating” or “polluting” to these events. Even a person blind from birth can acquire a phobia of spiders if told that spiders are dirty.38 Human infants resemble chimpanzees, but by five years of age some children have become excessively concerned with the correctness of events. These children must have their favorite toys arranged in the same order on a shelf or demand that the sequence of activities at bedtime be preserved. Their parents regard them as perfectionists and many will become adults who worry over being contaminated. Preoccupations with correctness and contamination are unique features of our species and among the first standards that families socialize.

Human Uniqueness Many species possess a small number of unique properties. The queen bee in a hive, the thousands of male penguins hovering over fertilized eggs in subzero temperature for several months, and the spontaneous death of the male spider (of one species) the moment he inserts his genital into the female39 represent only a few examples of phenomena restricted to certain animals. Only 3 percent of all mammals pair bond to a mate; humans are members of this uncommon category. Biologists accept the discontinuity between birds and the reptiles from whom they evolved with respect to the ability to fly, and are not

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trying to find primitive signs of flying in snakes, turtles, and lizards. But whenever a social scientist claims that humans possess a small number of unique products of evolution shared with no other species – a symbolic language, the ability to infer another’s thoughts, to apply a rule across diverse settings, and to honor moral commands that provoke shame or guilt when violated – some biologists protest and look for some sign of these qualities in chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, or even rats. Chimpanzees and orangutans appear to perform like 2½-year-old children on relatively simple perceptual and memory tasks (e.g., remembering where an object was hidden, discriminating two from four objects), but the apes are far inferior to children on tasks that require inferences of another’s intentions.40 Although the inferential skills of apes and humans seem to share one or two components, it is easy to find a feature that is common to qualitatively different animals, objects, or events. Both moss and humans have cells; worms and apes have eyes; and the sun and light bulbs emit heat. A single feature shared by two forms rarely means that they have the same origin or share other important traits. Both the humans who migrated to Tibet around 25,000 years ago and those who arrived in the Andes mountains 14,000 years later had to adapt to living at high altitudes. But each group evolved different physiological mechanisms to deal with the same challenge. During the first half of the last century many psychologists nurtured the hope that they could compare the performances of different species on a small number of procedures and arrange all the animals on a scale of intelligence or insight. This wish was never gratified because each species has a special set of biological and behavioral properties that allow it to adapt to its ecology. But this view does not die easily. For example, some scientists are studying genetic profiles in mice in order to illuminate the causes of depression or anxiety in humans. The problem with this strategy is that neither depression nor anxiety is a unitary phenomenon and some causes of these states occur only in humans. Mice do not worry about the possibility of


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dying of cancer or become depressed when one of their infants dies. Frank Beach, a prominent student of animal behavior when I was a student in the 1950s, was troubled by the popular practice of basing broad conclusions about human behavior on experiments with white rats from a pedigree especially bred for laboratory research. He gave a talk at a convention titled “The Snark was a Boojum” that borrowed from Lewis Carroll’s story “The Hunting of the Snark.” Although most snarks are harmless and edible, a few snarks are boojums and boojums can destroy any hunter who shoots at it. Beach’s intention was to warn the psychologists who hoped to make significant discoveries about human nature by studying one strain of white rats that they should be vigilant lest they waste their careers on a fruitless quest. We should not be surprised by the presence of qualitative differences between chimpanzees and humans. These species separated from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago (about 400,000 generations) and the human genome differs from that of the chimp in about 4 percent of the total genome (about 45 million nucleotide sequences and many more differences due to deletions or insertions of genes). Hence, the two groups possess different brain structures and functions. Humans have a higher ratio of glia to neurons (some glia provide energy to neurons), greater connectivity among cortical sites, a less sensitive olfactory system, and an amygdala that is smaller than expected given the total volume of the human brain.41 This last fact has an interesting implication because the amygdala is hyperresponsive to unfamiliar events that are not immediately understood and, when activated, provokes behavioral signs of avoidance and vigilance. The smaller human amygdala may explain why children are far less fearful of strangers than apes are of unfamiliar members of their species and why humans were not afraid to migrate to distant places. These observations may clarify a long-standing puzzle. Both chimps and humans display a similar pattern of change in the muscles

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of the mouth after encountering an unexpected event. Biologists assume that the human response was inherited from their primate ancestor. We call the human motor response a smile and assume it is accompanied by a pleasant feeling state. Because chimpanzees are more easily frightened by unexpected events, the response of their mouth muscles, called a grimace, might reflect a state of uncertainty rather than pleasure. One of the most significant differences between the two species is the much larger number of connections among cortical neurons in the human brain: almost twice as many as in chimpanzees.42 The greater interconnectedness permits the generation of unique patterns of coherence among neurons. According to network theory, special phenomena emerge when the ratio of the number of connections among a set of nodes and the number of nodes approaches the critical value of 0.5. These differences between the brains of humans and apes, along with the emergence of symbolic speech, bipedal locomotion, little body hair, an enhanced immune response to antigens, a bowl-shaped pelvis, a vagina tipped forward, large female breasts, smaller canine teeth, shorter fingers, and a flattened face, imply that, for some properties, apes and humans should be regarded as qualitatively distinct species. Because social behavior is a salient trait in humans, apes, and monkeys, some scientists have argued that the primate brain expanded to support the ability to live in large social groups. But the evolution of the human brain was accompanied by many unique talents, including a symbolic language, the ability to worry about dangers in the distant future and to plan for these possibilities, to retrieve the distant past, infer the feelings and thoughts of others, experience shame or guilt over violations of norms, run at fast speeds without overheating, and to exploit special eye–hand motor skills needed to make small tools for hunting. It is not obvious, given this long list of competences, that sociability was the most significant dividend of, or reason for, our larger brain.


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Every argument for a qualitative difference in a psychological property between humans and another mammalian species stirs strong passions among natural scientists because of its pragmatic implications. If some important human cognitive and emotional qualities are seriously discontinuous with those of mice, rats, and apes, many brilliant hard-working scientists might lose funding for their research. There is also a metaphysical reason. The recent rise in the popularity of creationism and intelligent design promises a return of Descartes’s unfortunate division between body and soul and the specter of an unbridgeable gap between the mechanisms controlling body and mind. This idea is anathema to all scientists, even those resisting a strong form of biological determinism, and, therefore, natural scientists are eager to prove that there are no unbridgeable breaches between the psychological properties of mice, monkeys, or chimpanzees, on the one hand, and humans, on the other. Insistence on loyalty to the premise of a close continuity between rats or apes and humans, and the equally seminal assumption that animals are always self-interested, led the distinguished natural scientist Donald Pfaff of Rockefeller University to suggest that perhaps an act of altruism was the result of an error in brain function. Pfaff argued that the moment a person helped another he or she confused self with the victim in distress. A man who tried to save the life of a child who fell in front of a subway train presumably acted altruistically because his brain blurred the difference between self and the child, and “achieved an identity between self-image and the image of the victim who fell in front of the subway train.”43 Fortunately, Pfaff ’s capacity for critical analysis prevented him from taking the next step and suggesting that callous psychopaths have better organized brains and are able to maintain a clearer distinction between themselves and those they kill, maim, or rape. If, as is likely, the psychological processes that are the foundation of human altruism are qualitatively different from any apparently similar property in apes, then scientists interested in human

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morality who ignored the human capacities for inference, empathy, shame, and guilt will not make substantial progress in understanding human altruism. A cell biologist who ignored the nucleus, a geneticist who ignored recombination, and a neuroscientist studying memory for the locations of objects who ignored the hippocampus would be equally frustrated by their failure to understand the phenomena they were probing. Humans have the capacity to be selfish and generous, aloof and empathic, hateful and loving, dishonest and honest, disloyal and loyal, cruel and kind, and arrogant and humble. Most feel a little guilt over excessive display of the first member of these seven pairs. The resulting emotion is uncomfortable and they are eager to have someone ameliorate its intensity. Confession or psychotherapy is effective for some. Others feel better when they read that their less social urges are natural consequences of their animal origins and, therefore, difficult to control. The currently high status of the natural sciences has made it possible for biologists to serve as therapists to their community. The primatologist Dario Maestripieri, writing for a general audience, declared that rhesus monkeys are primarily motivated by desires for food, sex, and power, are naturally despotic and nepotistic, and humans dominate the planet because they inherited these biological urges from their simian ancestors.44 I suspect that naïve readers of his book might actually believe the last conclusion and, as a result, feel good about their narcissism and lusts for revenge, frequent sex, and power. The documentary television programs dealing with animal behavior contribute to the public’s receptivity to Maestripieri’s ideas. About 90 percent of the time the scenes depict one animal pursuing, killing, and then eating some prey, leaving little time to illustrate birth, nurture of the young, social play, or even reproductive behavior. The message is clear: killing others and remaining vigilant to attack dominate every animal’s day. Maestripieri failed to tell his readers that rhesus monkey infants taken from their mothers early in life and placed with an inanimate


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wire object became juveniles who sat crouched in a corner far from their peers. This observation means that the capacity for the unusual behavior is also inherent in the monkey genome, but it requires extremely unnatural rearing conditions. Hence, it is relevant to ask whether the current prevalence of guilt-free self-interest among many living in capitalistic democracies is analogous to being reared under “unnatural rearing conditions,” and this posture must overcome a biologically stronger urge to be a loyal, cooperative, and trusting agent in a community of non-kin. The 300 million Americans who reported that they would never trust a stranger probably would have preferred a more trusting posture. A cartoon in a 2007 issue of The New Yorker reflected a mood that should trouble those who have accepted Maestripieri’s diagnosis of human nature. A secretary reading her boss his telephone messages says, “And your wife called to remind you not to have sex with anyone on your way home.” Readers of this magazine born in 1920 rather than 1970 would have been offended by the implication that marital loyalties were that fragile because of the irrepressible sexual impulses we inherited from monkeys. Many educated citizens look to science for guidance on the conduct of their lives and legislation because, at the moment, they are convinced either that this is the best place to look or there is nowhere else. But it is important to appreciate the difference, which Aristotle understood, between ultimate and proximal causes. Biologists might be right when they claim that the urge to maximize fitness is the ultimate cause of many human behaviors. However, among humans, this force often yields to the stronger proximal motive for dignity, a sense of virtue, the cultivation of a special talent, and the assurance that one is leading a worthy life. The nineteenth-century German ideal of Bildung is distinct from the motive to maximize the self ’s material comfort and fecundity. The desire to perfect the self is one reason why the number of children in a family is not a good predictor of the number of children that the daughters will have when they become adults.45

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Furthermore, the premise that animals cannot help but maximize their inclusive fitness is vulnerable to critique because it is usually not possible to know ahead of time which individual properties, among a set of alternatives, contribute to fitness. A dark coat color in a Scottish sheep breed, which can result from inheriting a single copy of a gene, is associated with a larger body size and greater reproductive fitness. But sheep that inherit both alleles of this gene controlling coat color, rather than only one of them, are vulnerable to disease and a shorter life span, even though both types have the same dark coat color. Thus, coat color in this species has an uncertain fitness value.46 Both dinosaurs and the classic Mayan civilization vanished, even though neither group had violated the biological requirements for fitness in their ecology, simply because unpredictable things happened. Fitness, as a property of an individual or a species, depends on the features of a particular environment and, unlike eye color, is not solely a feature of the animal. The usual climate and changes in climate are always important. For example, the variation in climate in the Galápagos Islands altered the nature of the food supply and created ecologies that selected finches with small or large beaks depending on the size and hardness of the available seeds. The very cold temperatures in northern Europe led to changes in the human body type, and the minimal amount of sunlight during the winter made lightly pigmented skin adaptive. Imagine a cylinder, opened only at the top and bottom, containing a hidden shelf with holes one-quarter inch in diameter. On an earlier occasion a person had dropped into the opening at the top some brown balls with diameters of one inch, red balls with diameters of one-half inch, and green balls with diameters less than one-quarter inch. Observers who are unaware of the invisible shelf and see only the green balls at the bottom will be tempted to assume that only green balls can fall through the cylinder. The shelf is analogous to the ecological features of the environments in which varied species live.


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A number of biologists award equivalent validity to the assumption that humans are programmed to maximize their self-interest and the claim that humans are programmed to survive. However, the former conflates the biological urges to survive and to reproduce with psychological motivations. The biological mechanisms that mediate seeking of food when hungry, self-defense when attacked, and mating when sexually aroused do not require humans to put the self ’s psychological interests ahead of the welfare of others all of the time. Put plainly, the biological foundations of the desire to regard the self as virtuous and worthy are qualitatively different from the biological foundations of the motives for physical survival and sexual reproduction. A decrease in blood levels of glucose and lipids, which provokes the biological state of hunger, is not synonymous with a psychological appetite for Caesar salad at lunch. The influence of biology on human psychological functions is extensive, but not unlimited. Evolutionary psychologists like to write that genes keep cultures “on a leash.” However, a culture, like a large, powerful dog, can pull the person holding the leash in new, unplanned directions. The genetic programs that monitor brain development guarantee that individuals will be able to perceive and manipulate objects, acquire a symbolic language, and feel uncertain about the future. But the reach of biological forces stops at this point, for these processes cannot dictate what specific objects will be perceived, what motor manipulations will be learned, what languages will be mastered, or what events will provoke uncertainty. The brains of 1,000 persons, like 1,000 urns constructed of clay from the same pit, have the same material composition, but their similar appearance does not reveal whether they contain oil, grain, wine, or ashes.

Truth: Empirical Fact or Faith? Most natural scientists instinctively avoid any concept whose critical features cannot, in principle, be measured with objectivity and

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accuracy. As a result, at the present time, some biological scientists treat many psychological states as falling outside the boundaries of legitimate inquiry. Honoring the rule to ignore ideas that are not yet amenable to accurate measurement has the important advantage of protecting scientists from wasting time exploring hypotheses that are not ready for systematic investigation, even though they might be potentially fruitful in the future. However, it is critical that scientists avoid taking the next step and presume that a phenomenon that cannot be measured now does not exist. Most natural scientists hold a condescending view toward social scientists whose evidence is based on human judgments, for example, judges’ ratings of the meaning of a behavior or a verbal report. But, as noted earlier, particle physicists often rely on the consensual judgments of experts poring over the evidence produced by a linear accelerator. Thus, the nineteenth-century distinction between objectively and subjectively based evidence has become somewhat fuzzier in modern physics laboratories. Each recording device, whether a human or a machine, registers different information, and the evidence from either device often requires consensual agreement among experts to determine meaning and validity. Bohr was not a narrow-minded prig when he wrote that all scientists can ever know with certainty is what they observe, but he did not ban from consideration ideas referring to events that might be observable in the future. A drop of black ink stirred in a vessel filled with glycerine soon becomes invisible to the eye. Before chemists could assess the molecular composition of a substance they would have concluded that the clear glycerine did not contain any black ink. Science often lags behind some of the fruitful intuitions of social scientists, humanists, and insightful members of the public. It took more than a decade for biologists to verify the astute observation of a nurse who noted that the jaundiced infants whose beds were near a window in a hospital had the fastest recoveries. The nurse did not know that the sunlight destroys a


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molecule in the bloodstream, called bilirubin, that is the cause of the jaundice. Richard Dawkins, who writes with the hubris of a Medieval archbishop, insists that the only beliefs deserving loyalty are those that correspond to empirically validated facts.47 All other ideas, and especially a belief in God, are dangerous, irrational illusions. Because Dawkins should have known that there was no evidence to support the belief that his writings would persuade deeply religious persons to change their minds, his decision to spend time composing books on this theme violated the imperative he was advocating. Dawkins also failed to mention that some eminent natural scientists hold deep spiritual beliefs. Charles Townes, who won a Nobel Prize for research that led to the laser, confessed that he feels the presence of God and doubts that science can explain all the facts of the universe. And the retired British philosopher, Anthony Flew, who had been a committed atheist for more than forty years, changed his mind when he was eighty years old on rational grounds because he could not answer three questions. Why are there lawful relations in nature? How could life arise from matter by chance alone? How did the universe originate? Flew decided that assuming the presence of a God was no less rational an answer than denying a transcendent being.48 The celebration of rationality by many economists’ is equally suspect. For example, the models used by a number of economists, including Nobel laureates, assume that a family’s decision to have a child, which requires incurring expenses for food, clothes, medical care, and education, is equivalent to the decision to go on a Lindblad safari to African game parks because both are acts of consumption motivated by a desire for pleasure.49 This logic, which ignores the type of pleasure sought and any ethical component, fails to differentiate between spending a thousand dollars for a birthday gift for an aging parent who is ill and writing a check for the same amount for a washer and dryer. According to economists, both are acts of

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consumption that yield a feeling of well-being. Although I do not believe in a metaphysical force, my atheism is no more rational, or free of unproven premises than the beliefs of Townes and Flew that a spiritual force made some contribution to life on Earth. A belief in God or the conviction that one has high status in a community allows individuals to feel psychologically more secure and potent even though both beliefs are private constructions that need not have empirical validity. The friends and relatives of a person who thought he had high status might not regard him as particularly praiseworthy. Hence, a feeling of enhanced security, whether due to a faith in God or a presumed position of power, does not have to be based on the empirical facts that Dawkins celebrates. Many of the experimental drugs given to cancer patients have not been fully validated by a clinical trial and some will be ineffective. But those who believe in their effectiveness are likely to experience brief periods of reduced pain and distress, often due to the release of endogenous opioids.50 Would Dawkins advise these patients, who were told that they had six months to live, to wait until scientists had proven their curative powers? Some adults experience an objective change in brain activity and psychological state when they believe that a drug will have a beneficial effect, even though they had swallowed a placebo.51 The probability that any one of the many thousands of scientists working today will make a significant discovery and arrive at an interpretation that remains valid for ten years is very small. If these investigators had been rational, and acted only in accord with the facts, they would have remained at home and missed the special pleasure that comes from exerting continued effort directed at an improbable but highly desirable goal. Should social scientists make sure that all parents who want their children to become celebrated scientists, writers, or artists, and spend hours reading to them; taking them to museums; and paying for piano, art, or dance lessons, understand that the probability of their wish being gratified is extremely low? The


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song “Happy Talk” in the musical South Pacific asserts the homely truth that without a dream the joy that accompanies a wished for, but improbable, experience is impossible. Religious Faith It is odd that Dawkins, who treats evolutionary theory as his bible, ignored Darwin’s confession that the highest pleasure on Earth follows the implementation of actions that are good for others and a belief in a personal God.52 Even American psychiatrists have come to realize the benevolent effects of a spiritual outlook on the states of their patients.53 Many who followed Dawkins’s advice would require psychiatric help because humans require illusions in order to bring vitality and hope to their daily responsibilities. The religious Israelis who were exposed to large-scale terrorist attacks in 2003 and 2004 reported feeling less stress than those without any religious faith.54 One reason more Americans than Europeans attend religious services is the greater economic competitiveness, more extensive geographic mobility, larger income range, compromised social harmony, and less secure “safety net” for the economically stressed in the United States compared with the populations in most of Europe. The sense of being part of a collective is somewhat stronger in France, Scandinavia, and Germany than in contemporary America. A spiritual affiliation with a religious group satisfies a hunger for social contact with, and an affirmation of one’s worth by, others who reject both a completely permissive tolerance of all ethical systems and an ultrarationalist approach to daily life. Most individuals want to be loyal to a particular code of values because this posture protects them from considering the possibility that their existence might have no special meaning. There is a good reason why the proportions of the world’s populations who have become affiliated with a Christian or Muslim religious group have increased from 10 to 53 percent during the past 100 years.

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The unexpected increase in recruits to evangelical Protestantism, which the wisest commentators on America in 1960 did not predict, includes two groups distinguished by education, vocation, and to a lesser degree place of residence. The larger group, called Fundamentalist because they advocate a literal interpretation of the bible, are more often poor or working class and likely to live in rural areas. These groups share features with those who settled the lands west of Pennsylvania during the first half of the nineteenth century and affiliated with Methodist congregations in rural areas and small towns. The somewhat smaller group of neo-Evangelicals are often middle-class college graduate professionals living in urban areas holding more liberal views.55 Both groups are rebelling against the increased permissiveness toward female sexuality, gender roles, abortion, gay marriage, and homosexuality promoted by the secular segment of the population and, in addition, feel a need for social contact with like-minded others. Twice as many Americans in 2003 replied affirmatively to a survey question asking if they believed in God (90%) than did so in 1916.56 The Fundamentalists have an additional motive. The poorest quartile of Americans perceive their religious community as providing psychological and material supports that are more reliable than the services delivered by public agencies charged with the same responsibility.57 America has more than 1,200 megachurches with congregations larger than 2,000 members that provide recreations, cafes, day care facilities for young children, and residences for the elderly. These institutions resemble the parish churches in the villages of sixteenthcentury Europe that functioned as schoolhouses, storehouses, arsenals, fire stations, sources of local news, playgrounds, and welfare offices.58 But these megachurches are more than working class country clubs because, like the parish churches, they provide the reassurance that each member has a measure of dignity and a reason for hope. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Chinese living in poor rural areas far from the coastal cities formed religious congregations,


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called “White Lotus Societies,” whose belief in the coming reincarnation of the Buddha made their marginalized position a little more bearable. Philip Kitcher noted, wisely, that “For many Americans, their churches, not only provide a sense of hope, illusory to be sure, but also offer other mechanisms of comfort. … places in which there is real community, places in which people come to matter to one another …. Without such places, what is left?”59 If the extended family had not been decimated by economic forces that created lonely adults far from their childhood homes and friends, and the courts not ruled in favor of a woman’s right to abortion, civil unions between adults of the same gender, and against school prayer the dogmatic zeal of the “religious right” might not have developed. Only 80 years ago, following the failure of the legislative prohibition on alcohol, the verdict in the Scopes trial of 1925, and Sinclair Lewis’s portrayal of a charlatan preacher in the novel Elmer Gantry, this movement had lost the appeal it held for earlier Americans. Some adults simply find it too difficult to conduct a life with a world view which assumes that the desire for hedonic pleasures, enhanced status, an unfettered personal autonomy, the self as an archbishop with the authority to decide which actions are right or wrong, and actualization of one’s talents always have priority over loyalty to others. This ethical profile is a historical novelty that first emerged in the eighteenth century and was not the catechism chanted by Plato or St. Augustine. The sad fact is that not everyone can fully exploit the unbounded freedom an egalitarian, democratic, capitalist society offers. For those who cannot, loyalty to the church’s philosophy eases the uncertainty by placing limits on the permissible liberation from convention and providing an escape from the burden of an unobstructed personal freedom. Readers who celebrate the openness of American society, as I do, may not appreciate that some members of our collective find it hard to accept the premise that “anything goes.”

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Even egalitarian societies require individuals to assume some responsibility for life’s frustrations and forbid them from placing all the blame on others or on fate. Thus, the religious sermons and gentle affiliations with like-minded others ease the pain of blaming the self for not attaining the education, occupation, and material comforts that filled adolescent dreams and are probably more effective protection against civil unrest, depression, and suicide than any known psychotherapy or pharmacological agent. Humans may be the most adaptive species, but they are not infinitely adaptive. Human biology limits the degree to which individuals can adjust to chronic loneliness, ethical confusion, and a feeling of marginalization. When the biological limit is reached they look for help, and a commitment to a religious ideology has been one of the more popular sources of that assistance. The dramatic growth of Christianity in Europe during the third to the sixth centuries, and in Mexico following the Spanish invasions in the sixteenth century, were due, in large measure, to the epidemics of smallpox and measles that had killed a large proportion of Europeans and an equally large proportion of Indians who had no immunity against the infectious agents brought by the Spanish armies.60 Both populations, feeling anxious and helpless, needed to believe in some ideas that might cure or prevent their afflictions. Christianity provided that illusion of hope by supplying rituals embedded in a coherent rationale for their practice. The belief that abiding faith in a spiritual force can protect one from illness is a far more adaptive frame of mind than assuming one is totally impotent and there is nothing to do but lie down and wait to die. The increased religiosity of Americans is even motivating some scientists to spend time and money evaluating whether a spiritual outlook can prolong life in patients who have cancer or suffered a stroke or heart attack. Such investigations, which were rare fifty years earlier, imply that the hypothesis that a religious commitment might affect bodily processes has moved from the attic to the rooms where


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biological scientists brood about possible experiments. Evolution was exceptionally kind to our species when, to balance some of the disadvantages of a large frontal lobe, it gave us the capacity for illusions that could mute the angst that originates in not knowing what to do as well as the apathy that is a consequence of believing that there is nothing one can do to cope with a threat. The success of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot during the Cold War was due, in large measure, to its power to capture the delicate balance between hope and despair that permeated European society. Eighteenth-century audiences might not have understood this play; contemporary audiences might treat the script as cliché.

Four Philosophies Because Dawkins had already chosen a satisfying personal ideology, he failed to appreciate that each person actually has a choice of four philosophies to guide the day’s decisions. One can follow Dawkins by swearing loyalty to a rational, factually based perspective that urges its adherents to select a course with the closest correspondence to what is believed to be empirically correct. The concept rational has two meanings. The definition understood by logicians and mathematicians refers to a logically consistent conclusion from an argument based on the application of particular rules. For example, if one assumes that all bananas are manufactured, it is rational to conclude that the banana on my plate was manufactured. However, Dawkins’s definition refers to beliefs that a majority in a particular community regard as true. The fifteenth-century belief held by many Europeans that witches existed and the eighteenth-century belief among chemists that phlogiston was a real substance were rational, although both turned out to be incorrect. Second, one can accept the assumptions and imperatives associated with one of the formal religions. A third possibility is to choose a coherent set of beliefs from a list that includes honesty, loyalty,

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kindness, civility, love, friendships, achievement, wisdom, sensory pleasures, a devoted family, justified revenge, sexual conquests, martyrdom, power, celebrity, or material wealth. The fourth alternative, requiring rejection of the above trio as arbitrary constructions that cannot be defended on rational, ethical, or aesthetic grounds, is rarely chosen because it invites a passivity that can be honored only by withdrawal from a world demanding choices. This form of nihilism is difficult to maintain as a life philosophy because it is opposed by a powerful biologically based demand for meaning. As a result, most persons select one of the first three ideologies based on a plurality of factors that are not well understood. Choosing is easy because parental and cultural values establish preferences that are difficult to overcome; they are like the unconscious neural traces of the Chinese characters that bilingual Chinese-Americans possessed years after they stopped speaking Chinese. What is more difficult is to suppress a moral arrogance which asserts that the set of premises self selected is wiser, purer, or more reasonable than those chosen by others. The poet Wallace Stevens captured the human condition: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”61 A cartoon in The New Yorker illustrates a sign with the word “truth” pointing to the right, an old man with a serious face walking to the right, but a clown, who is laughing, walking in the opposite direction. Every contemporary twenty-year-old in North America and Europe, but obviously not in all societies, has a choice between two divergent paths that rarely meet. The more frequently trod path accepts the rational assumptions of natural science and the evidence indicating that the appearance of humans was an evolutionary accident accompanied by a strong desire to establish some hierarchy of values. The local historical era and culture determine the content of the values and their position in a hierarchy. Thus, each agent, as Wallace Stevens understood, has to “make it up” in order to be able to


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confront each day with a shield that effectively wards off the paralyzing effects of chronic doubt. Those following the other path reject this arbitrariness, are sure they possess the truest values, and insist that the misguided individuals trekking the more crowded trail should be informed of their error, for it is never too late to turn back. Maintaining loyalty to a few unquestioned premises has the advantage of requiring a set of rituals to be performed during the waking hours. Abdellah Hammoudi, an anthropologist at Princeton University, a Muslim, and a citizen of Morocco and the United States, was intellectually curious about the hajj but was not a religious Muslim. Hammoudi went to Mecca as a pilgrim in 1999, was transformed by the experience, and ended his narrative of the journey by noting that, “Ritual transforms the subject by giving him or her a world to inhabit that is shifted away from the empirical, social, and pragmatic world – hence also shifted vis-à-vis the world of conscious or unconscious rationality.”62 Humans require rituals, be they the routines of the workplace, shopping, caring for children, weekend recreations, prayers, writing books, checking the stock prices, attending conferences, or conversations with one’s immediate family at dinner or with the extended family on holidays. None can claim a rational foundation that is more secure than the others, but each dilutes the threat posed by uncertainty and imposes a form on what would otherwise be perceived as a shapeless and endlessly flat expanse of time. We can hoist Dawkins a trifle higher on the scaffold he defends so confidently. Astrophysicists tell us that our sun has a limited life and, in five to six billion years, will have lost so much energy that it will wander into the far reaches of the universe, leaving our planet ice cold and lifeless. If we accept the validity of this scenario, which fits the known facts, whatever progress humans had created will evaporate. Finally, if our genes are as selfish as Dawkins contends, he must confront a paradox reminiscent of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. The behaviors of the last ten generations of humans, presumably under the partial control of their selfish genes, appear

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to have contributed to changes in the Earth’s ecology in ways that respected climate scientists predict will compromise the fitness of future generations. These facts should provoke us to question the notion that self-interest is the most rational strategy to pursue during each generation’s tiny slice of time.

The Price of Parsimony Natural scientists honor the maxim that simpler explanations are to be preferred to more complex ones. This principle, called parsimony, has always been more popular among American than European scientists. Conformity to this imperative satisfies an aesthetic motive and, in addition, makes it easier to prove an explanation wrong and to detect an observation that violates current understanding. Many important discoveries in the natural sciences occurred because an experiment produced an unexpected observation that challenged consensual theory. The problem with parsimony, however, is that nature often prefers complexity, especially in the biological and social sciences. During the decade following Crick and Watson’s description of the DNA molecule, a majority of molecular biologists assumed they would soon be able to predict each animal’s anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology from knowledge of its genes, without the need to take either embryological development or environmental events into account. That optimistic hope proved to be wildly incorrect. Even though identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins in many traits, the activity levels of identical twin fetuses are different as early as in the second trimester of pregnancy.63 Other facts have forced biologists to acknowledge the significant contribution of preand postnatal experiences, especially varying ecological conditions, to the functioning of the genome. It appears that diet, pollutants, and stressful experiences can alter the activity of genes and, under some conditions, induce changes in sperm or ova that have heritable


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effects in offspring (called epigenetic inheritance). These surprising, but important, discoveries are reminiscent of Hippocrates’s successful defense of a white princess married to a white husband who was accused of adultery because she gave birth to a black infant. The ancient Greek physician argued that the pregnant mother had not been unfaithful; rather, her uterine physiology had been influenced by the portrait of a Moor hanging above her bed.64 Because the diet or life style of a grandparent can, in some instances, affect the vulnerability to a disease or psychological trait in a grandchild, we have to rethink the traditional understanding of the heritability of physical and psychological traits. Sophisticated readers will recognize that these facts require a new way to conceptualize the influences of genes and environment on a phenotype. Membership in an economically compromised group is associated with a less adequate diet; more frequent illness; greater exposure to pollutants; and chronic worry over money, status, and the future. If these conditions, alone or together, can alter the genetic profiles that are associated with physiological disturbances, cognitive talents, mental illness, or a particular personality type, it makes no sense to ask whether a trait is mainly genetic or environmental in origin. The usual way behavioral geneticists compute the heritability of a trait is by adding three numbers: the amount of variance attributable to genes, the amount attributable to the environment, and the amount due to the interaction of genes and experience. It now appears that the “causes” of a trait cannot be treated as if they were weights added to a scale. Every outcome is the result of a cascade of processes involving a tapestry of conditions. To ask whether social class or genes makes the greater contribution to the onset of a bout of depression is as frivolous as asking whether a cold temperature or a high level of humidity is the more important cause of snowstorms. Some biologists have forgotten what earlier generations had discovered, namely, that the effect of any biological process on

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a phenotypic feature depends on the larger context in which it operates. Biologists working during the late 1920s demonstrated that a single gene rarely had a significant effect on most features because the phenotype was a function of the complete genome in which it was only an element. Adult height is controlled by genes located on six different chromosomes.65 Nonetheless, some biologists continue to search for the gene, or the small number of genes, that produce diseases such as autism, asthma, and bipolar disorder, independent of the family, class, and cultural settings in which these individuals developed. One reason why the search for single-gene causes of complex outcomes is usually misguided is that seriously compromised environments can create symptoms that resemble, or are identical with, those resulting from particular genes. A depressed mood is an example. Chronic poverty, illness, or living in a society in which men dominate women can produce symptoms of depression in women. As a result, the heritability of depression is low if one includes all depressed individuals across varied societies. If, however, scientists restrict the sample to those living with comfortable families in egalitarian societies that promote greater equity between the sexes the effects of genes are detected more easily because the nongenetic influences have been eliminated.66 The same conclusion holds for the magnitude of increase in the stress hormone cortisol following a stressful experience. The size of the increase in cortisol was heritable for young children living in comfortable, middle-class families but not for children growing up with poorer families suffering from many adversities.67 IQ scores conform to this principle. The heritability of IQ is low among children growing up in families with economic and educational disadvantage because these settings fail to provide the experiences required for understanding and solving the questions on the test; hence, the effects of experience swamp the potential influence of genes. The heritability of IQ is reasonably high among middle-class


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children who receive the needed stimulation and encouragement because, under these conditions, the effects of the environment are controlled to some degree and genetic processes can be detected more easily. The same situation applies to many infectious diseases. The prevalence of tuberculosis is primarily a function of the environmental conditions in societies where many individuals have no potable water, no waste disposal system, and reside in crowded conditions. In economically developed, industrialized states, where these conditions are absent, the likelihood of contracting tuberculosis is mainly a function of a genetic vulnerability to this infectious disease. A belief in the devil among religious members of medieval European villages would not be heritable; the same belief in today’s secular villagers would be heritable. It is rare for any behavior, ideology, or emotion to be heritable independent of the historical era and culture in which it appears. It is true that without genes we would be nothing, but it is equally true that we would be nothing if we were only genes.68 No fetus can develop without water but no genes code for the synthesis of water. The German geneticists of a century earlier were correct when they insisted on the significant role of the cell’s cytoplasm in embryological development. Unfortunately, they did not possess the technology necessary to trace the fate of cell clusters in the developing embryo that would have proven their nonparsimonious intuitions. The bases of the DNA molecule that the mitochondria use to construct amino acids provide still another violation of parsimony. If nature were parsimonious, each of the 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, would be a unique combination of three bases. However, most amino acids can be synthesized by more than one combination of three bases. The “caps” on the ends of each chromosome, called telomeres, become smaller with age as a result of the many cell divisions that occur over time. Not surprisingly, the variation in the length of the telomeres is partially inherited, but scientists did not expect to discover that only the length of

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the father’s telomeres, not that of the mother’s, was related to the telomere lengths of their children.69 Although every biologist working a century ago recognized their inability to explain why some cells became muscle and some neurons, even though all the cells in an animal’s body had the same genes, no one thought that the answer to the puzzle lay with the promoter and enhancer regions of genes that control the expression of the genes that are responsible for the proteins in each bodily site. Furthermore, when biologists discovered that one of the X chromosomes in each bodily cell in the female was inactivated they assumed that this was true for all the genes on the inactive chromosome. It turns out, however, that about 15 percent of the genes on the silenced X chromosome are active. These facts would have been regarded as a serious violation of the requirement for parsimony.70 The availability of inexpensive contraceptive techniques, combined with economic and social changes, have created a situation in which the average reproductive fitness of white Europeans has decreased dramatically because many well educated women in France, Germany, and Italy have decided to have few or no children at all. Future research will probably affirm what is at present only a hypothesis: namely, the local setting determines whether genes, phenotypic features, organisms, species, or all four are the targets of natural selection during a particular era in a particular place.71 Nature’s attraction to complexity and reluctance to be understood too easily will not be thwarted. I suspect we will have to wait about twenty-five or thirty years before biological scientists appreciate that the effects of most genes on psychological properties depend on the environments in which the individuals live and their personal constructions of those environments. That is why identical twins do not have identical feelings and beliefs. When that conclusion becomes consensual, social scientists will be asked to develop sensitive methods to assess these experiential conditions and a new wave of enthusiasm for social science will be realized. Biologists have not yet struck this wall


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and, therefore, continue to believe they can discover robust relations between the features of a genome and a psychological symptom or cognitive talent without worrying about the details in the ecologies of development.

Challenges to the Authority of Natural Science The dissonance produced by the natural scientists’ premises leaves each citizen with two alternatives. Acceptance of the scientists’ ideology implies that the rationale most adults rely on for actions, thoughts, and intuitions is flawed. Because this conclusion is both threatening and counterintuitive, some have decided that perhaps the scientists are wrong. However, if they were incorrect in this instance, there is the possibility that other scientific announcements contain errors. This chink in the reputation of natural scientists has allowed a large number of Americans to challenge evolutionary theory by advocating the ideas of creationism or intelligent design, which had been dormant since the Scopes trial of 1925 in which William Jennings Bryan argued for the dismissal of a high school teacher who had been promoting evolutionary theory. The rise in the popularity of unproven therapies for diseases, and Internet communities of parents of autistic children challenging the scientists’ assurances that the mercury preservative in the vaccines given to infants was not the cause of their child’s symptoms, could occur only if some citizens were questioning the scientific foundations of modern medicine. Even some well trained surgeons admit that they do not always follow the procedures that have been scientifically validated.72 The arcane language, environmental degradation, troubling premises, and the media’s dissemination of instances of scientific fraud or collusion with drug companies or defense contractors have tarnished the spotless status that scientists, along with all other

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professions, enjoyed just 100 years ago when scientific research was regarded as essential for America’s progress and scientists were the final arbiters of truth.73 In only one generation, from 1895 to 1920, physicists discovered X-rays, electrons, radioactivity, and affirmed Einstein’s relativity theory. When rapid industrialization during the final decades of the nineteenth century produced a disturbing contrast between the densely crowded urban ghettos of poor immigrants and a small oligarchy owning more than 80 percent of the nation’s wealth, Americans turned to scientists, not to philosophers, clergy, or their elected representatives, to repair the frayed social fabric. The pragmatic philosophies of James, Peirce, and Dewey argued that a rational analysis of scientific facts would suggest the reforms needed to restore social order and justice. Fifty years later, when physicists were praised for developing the atom bomb that ended World War II, Americans were exploring space, and biologists were applauded for discovering antibiotics and the polio vaccine, natural scientists were the recipients of an unprecedented degree of public respect that they had been denied a century earlier and have not enjoyed since. The zenith may have occurred in 1959, the year Snow wrote his essay, when the Sabin vaccine for polio became available, and the government believed scientists could control the weather. Natural scientists had become the magicians of the modern world, satisfying the public’s need to believe there were a few unusual people in their midst with special forms of knowledge that could be exploited in times of crisis. As a result, the average individual was willing to accept the scientists’ conclusions on faith, even if he or she did not always understand how they arrived at their proposed solutions. However, just two years later Dwight Eisenhower, one of America’s more popular presidents, noted in his farewell address, “We must … be alert to the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”74 A generation later university administrators became concerned over the close ties between some


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members of their natural science faculty and industry. The latter were demanding, in return for large amounts of research funds given to discover practical products, increased secrecy among scientists working on the same problem and proprietary ownership of any patented products. This problem, which was especially serious in the biomedical sciences, led to accusations that the university was for sale to any corporation willing to pay for elegant laboratories and generous funding of their scientists.75 This cozy relation raised ethical concerns because, in many cases, the scientists were also the recipients of federal research grants. There was something unjust about public taxes providing private profits for companies benefiting from publicly supported scientific discoveries. The 1966 Congress, exasperated by the scientists’ rising estimates of the cost of drilling a deep hole in the ocean floor to learn more about the Earth’s crust, anticipated no public outcry when they cancelled a project that had been initiated eight years earlier. Almost 40 years later the Congress stopped all work on a multibillion-dollar accelerator in Texas for a similar reason, and, again, with no protest from the general public, or even from a few physicists who also questioned the likelihood that the machine would discover significant new facts. The student rebellions of the late 1960s were marked by harsh attacks that blamed scientists for many of society’s ills. A 1971 poll of Americans revealed that only 37 percent, not the 80 percent of earlier generations, held a very favorable attitude toward science. A vulnerability to be the scapegoat when troubles arise is the price that has to be paid for becoming the premier symbol of authority. Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, writing in the middle of the economic depression of the 1930s, placed some of the responsibility on scientists who, he asserted, had lost sight of humanistic values. Almost seventy-five years later Anthony Kronman, a former dean at Yale Law School, vented his frustration at the absence of any challenge to the idea that research was the only defensible ethic in the

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modern university.76 Kronman urged the humanities faculty to take back the birthright they abandoned by provoking undergraduates to discuss, under their guidance, the relative advantages and disadvantages of democracy, justice, egalitarianism, empathy, and cultivation of one’s paideia. The public’s untarnished admiration of scientists, which shared features with their feelings about unusually talented athletes and exceptionally beautiful movie stars, lasted for about 50 years. The new perception of scientists as self-serving entrepreneurs who criticize traditional beliefs concerning causality, reproduction, altruism, and human uniqueness resembles the view Europeans held toward Galileo and the other natural philosophers who challenged the veracity of the Bible. The poet John Donne captured this perspective in lines composed in 1611: And new philosophy calls all in doubt ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; Prince, Subject, Father, Son are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a Phoenix

(The Phoenix was a mythical bird with elegant plumage that rose from its own pyre to live again in a form that rejected its prior existence.) I am differentiating between the feeling of gratitude to scientists for their practical gifts to daily life and a respect for the minds that made these products possible, on the one hand, and the degree to which all the premises of natural sciences are accepted as valid criteria for private beliefs, on the other. Many high school seniors with A grades in all their science courses who endorse evolutionary theory also believe that a spiritual force made some small contribution to the creation of the universe and life forms. The apparent inconsistency is not uncommon; most attitudes are composed of elements that do not form a logistically consistent set.


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Science as a Career The varied bases for ambivalence toward the natural sciences, albeit subtle and directed at all individuals or institutions that claim special authority, are not the only reasons why these disciplines have become a less attractive vocational choice for American youth than they were a half-century earlier. American adolescents are socialized by their family and the media to combine their talents with perseverance in the service of accomplishments that are supposed to be rewarded with financial security and, if luck cooperates, public accolade. However, the natural scientists’ growing dependence on complex technologies has made it necessary for many to work collaboratively as members of large teams of specialists. The proportion of papers in natural science and engineering authored by a team rose from 50 percent, when Snow wrote his essay, to almost 80 percent in the year 2000, mirroring a rise from 7 to 34 percent in the proportion of white-collar workers employed by bureaucratic organizations.77 There was no comparable trend in the humanities, and only 40 percent of social science reports published in the year 2000 were authored by a team.78 Galileo’s discovery of the relation between the acceleration of a ball rolling down an inclined alley and time falling, William Harvey’s discovery of the closed circulatory system, and Newton’s insight into the nature of light were solitary efforts requiring no special equipment. Aristotle or Leonardo da Vinci could have made all three. The dozen or so scientists credited with the invention of quantum mechanics in the 1920s usually worked alone, but knew each other, met often, and, like the siblings in a large family, competed with each other for intellectual dominance. These scientists can be likened to the Medieval and Renaissance artisans who made clocks, violins, lenses, or jewelry while working alone, or with a small number of apprentices, often family members. But these master craftsmen monitored the creation of the product and could experience the pride that accompanies the completion of a work of quality.

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This emotion is muted in workers on an assembly line who are responsible for one part of a whole. Analogously, research projects at the European Hadron Collider, the laboratories of the Human Genome Project, and NASA sites require many hundreds of scientists who do not know all the members of the team working on specialized aspects of a project under a bureaucratically appointed leader. The pride that follows success in these enterprises must be shared with the entire group. However, the personality traits that are maximally adaptive in collaborations can be inconsistent with the qualities that allow solitary scientists to be successful. The biographies of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Curie, Rutherford, Pauli, Dirac, Crick, Watson, and Franklin suggest that they would not have been easy collaborators. Some might have been marginalized by team members because of their extreme introversion (Paul Dirac), brusque persona (Wolfgang Pauli), or prickly personality (Rosalind Franklin). Francis Crick once told an interviewer that he preferred to work with no more than one collaborator, and never as a member of a team. Two physicists who had won their Nobel Prizes before the increase in team research abandoned this field because the new style of research required them to be cooperative members of a large group. Donald Glaser complained about having to work with too many people and waiting too long for impersonal committees to approve one of his proposed experiments. James Cronin confessed that he wanted all the glory for himself and was unwilling to share either celebrity or prizes with others.79 This image of working conditions in contemporary natural science bothers some young adults thinking about a research career because they have accepted Polonius’s advice to his son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “To thy own self be true.” American youth regard the individualistic film personas of Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood, and the intellectual independence of Darwin and Einstein, who stubbornly defended unpopular hypotheses, as the models to emulate. The celebration of individual achievement persists even though


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the bureaucracy of the modern work place has eroded the earlier belief that a single person could effect major changes in the society.80 Hence, bright Caucasian-American twenty-year-olds borrow money to start new companies, whereas Chinese-American youth, who are more consistently socialized for cooperation with others, are biased to choose one of the natural sciences for a career. It took less than 200 years, only seven generations, to transform America from a society of small-town farmers who valued self-determination to an urban, bureaucratic, fragmented, ethnically diverse, but far more tolerant, nation holding a compromised sense of personal agency and a readiness to place the blame for their economic or social condition on external forces rather than on their personal contribution to moments of unhappiness. It took less than sixty years, only two generations, to transform some domains of natural science from a solitary effort to a corporate activity.

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The social science communities – psychologists, linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and economists – can be divided, albeit roughly, between those allied with the natural sciences who prefer to study qualities with biological origins or correlates and those more interested in the characteristics that are established and changed by social conditions. Although the latter are reluctant to acknowledge the influences of biology, one senior American demographer confessed regret over his past indifference to the biological side of human nature.1 Anthropologists, the primary source of information on human nature in the nineteenth century, now represent a bridge to both the other social sciences and biology, for they study both the evolution as well as the cultural variation in values, rituals, practices, languages, and myths. I devote two chapters to the social sciences because their assumptions and claims are more controversial than those of the natural sciences. This chapter considers the investigators who study the individual or small groups; the next chapter deals with the political scientists and economists who study relations among institutions, societies, and nations.

Symbols and Culture Symbol and culture are two central concepts for those who study human behavior, thought, belief, and emotion, as fundamental as mass and energy in physics, atom and molecule in chemistry, gene 104

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and cell in biology. A symbol is any event – a color, design, spatial location, animal, object, or word – whose physical features bear no relation to the idea it represents. For example in fifth-century France the pig was a symbol for a Jewish infant.2 This definition of symbol must be distinguished from the two related notions of icons and learned associations between two events that occurred together in experience. Iconic symbols share a feature with the event they stand for, for example, an arrow pointing upward at an ascending airport escalator. An example of a learned association is the smell of a skunk, evoking the idea that this animal is nearby. There are many symbols for gender and nature. Young American children regard the objects found in classrooms (e.g., blackboards, books, pages of arithmetic problems) as symbolic of femaleness because women usually teach the early grades in American schools.3 A lion stalking and killing a gazelle symbolizes nature for contemporary Americans, but a lactating woman was the symbol for fifteenth-century Europeans who held a gentler conception of nature. A nineteenth-century sculptor symbolized nature as a beautiful woman, full breasts exposed, with a veil covering her head and a gown over her lower torso.4 Darwinian ideas, aided by industrialization, transformed Rousseau’s feminine conception of nature as beautiful, mysterious, and healing into a more masculine image penetrated with ideas of competitiveness and cruelty. Over the past century Europeans and North Americans began to replace their symbolic evaluation of the related concepts of maleness, bigness, certainty, rationality, and confidence in self ’s values as “good” properties with a celebration of femaleness, smallness, chance, feeling, and tolerance.5 Many cultures, past and present, symbolize the “female” as physically and psychologically weaker than the “male.” This idea assumed a special form among nineteenth-century American Protestants who believed that the female’s weakness implied an unusual sensitivity to the distress of others and, therefore, a greater willingness and capacity to help victims. This assumption was supported by the observation

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that women seemed to suffer more than men when they were worried or ill. Because Protestants believed that those who endured pain were better able to identify with Christ’s suffering and were more virtuous, it was natural to presume that women had a special power to restore sick bodies and redeem broken spirits.6 It is not a coincidence that a woman founded the Christian Science movement a year after the bloody Civil War ended. The idealization of women by Christian writers may have made it easier for men to share vicariously in the good qualities of their beloved and to feel enhanced by a love relationship with a woman. When a culture fails to celebrate women for more than their beauty and capacity to provide sexual pleasure, the state of “being in love,” which European and American literature used to treat as sacred, is diluted. Even first names have symbolic connections to gender. Americans are prone to assume that men with longer first names, such as Alexander or Frederick, are more empathic and sensitive, and therefore less “masculine,” than men with short names, like Mark or Carl, and American parents more often select one-syllable names for their sons but two- or three-syllable names for their daughters.7 Colors are common symbols for emotions. American and European adults agree that red and yellow symbolize the high arousal states of fear, anger, joy, and sexuality; black symbolizes sadness; blue a sad, relaxed, or emotionally vulnerable state; and lighter, compared with darker, shades of the same color symbolize more desired states.8 Almost every figure portrayed as evil, aggressive, or relatively invulnerable to stress (the Evil Queen, Grumpy, Captain Hook, and Cinderella’s stepsisters) in Walt Disney’s seven famous full-length cartoon films was given dark eyes. By contrast, more than one-half of the characters who were emotionally vulnerable (Dopey, Cinderella, Pinocchio, Geppetto) were drawn with blue eyes. However, the valence of a color, that is, whether it is regarded as good or bad, can vary with the context in which it appears. When a person believes his or her intellectual ability is being tested, red is symbolic of the red-penciled marks teachers

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make when they note errors on an exam or correct an essay. When a booklet containing difficult anagram problems had either a red, green, or black identification number on each page the students whose booklets had a red number made a few more errors than those who had a green or black number.9 Red identification numbers on an IQ test induce a brain wave pattern often seen in patients with anxiety disorders (namely, greater activation of the right compared with the left frontal lobe). Seraglios might have red walls and valentines red hearts, but classrooms are never painted red. Many symbols combine a schema (e.g., a perceptual representation of a pig, lion, woman, or color) with a semantic representation (e.g., Jew, nature, weak, or sadness). Because only semantic forms have antonyms, some symbols are established by default. For example, the right hand and the right side of a spatial array are symbolic of the future because most people point to a distant location with their right hand (and English speakers read from left to right). Few persons point to a past moment with the left hand, but because right and left are antonyms, left becomes a symbol for the past by default. Similarly, because sunlight is pleasant, the lighter of two shades of green is usually symbolic of a desired state and the darker hue of a less desired state. Because pleasant and unpleasant are antonyms the darker shade is symbolic of an unpleasant state by default, even though few individuals have experienced more unpleasant states in association with dark compared with light green.

Coherence and Culture A useful definition of a culture is a community of persons who share the same symbolic meanings for its myths, religion, art, history, and the actions and beliefs classified as right or wrong.10 The members of classic Chinese culture, from about 1000 BCE to the sixteenth century, shared a number of correlated symbolic understandings. These included the celebration of written texts over observations of nature,

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an aversion to abstract ideas and empirical science, the importance of avoiding error, the assumption that complementary energies represented the foundation of nature, the belief in cyclical rather than linear time, the attribution of ethical properties to nature, a preference for conformity to authority, preservation of social harmony over personal autonomy and diversity, denigration of the artisan, and sociability as the cardinal feature defining humanity.11 The last assumption was also prominent in medieval Japan, where two people leaning toward each other was the symbol for human. Japanese poets usually sat together when they composed a poem because the social interaction was part of the aesthetic experience, and their poems centered on social harmony, rather than on war, guilt, anxiety, or misery.12 A critical difference between the Chinese and European symbolic networks for self is that the latter, following the Delphic oracle’s imperative “Know thyself,” made each person’s beliefs, values, and skills the primary features of an identity. The emphasis on the solitary individual, and especially his mind, was aided by the dominance of Christian philosophy which made each person’s private state of faith an essential feature of piety. As a result, a person who was uncertain over his or her values or talents became vulnerable to uncertainty and a compromised sense of potency. By contrast, the Chinese made each person’s collection of social roles and associated obligations to others the core of self. Because almost everyone had some social role, as parent, child, spouse, employee, or employer, each person had some guides for action and was protected from doubt over the self ’s integrity that was more characteristic of Europeans. Few Chinese novelists or playwrights invented a hero or heroine who asked, “Who am I?” The habit of thinking about self in terms of social relationships remains salient in contemporary Asian-American college students. Andrew Delbanco13 speculated in his biography of Herman Melville that the author of Moby Dick, who must have been brooding on the tensions surrounding slavery in America during the 1850s, intended Ahab to be a symbol for the strident, anti-abolitionist John

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Calhoun, Moby Dick a symbol for the abolition of slavery, and the ship the Pequod a symbol of American society. Most contemporary readers would not guess these meanings. If the degree of agreement on the meanings of a large number of symbols, especially those referring to values, is treated as an index of the coherence of a society America would be less coherent today than it was 200 years earlier; whereas, Russia is probably more coherent. The loss of coherence is attributable to the presence of many ethnic groups with diverse values and judicial decisions that pleased only some members of the society. The coherence of early twentieth-century American society, which wanted to assimilate large numbers of European immigrants, may have been helped by the movies that became a popular recreation after 1910. It is possible that being a member of an audience of 100 strangers laughing or growing quiet to the same scene on the screen created a sense of shared humanity. Contemporary Americans have become more dependent on popular television programs, films, and the Internet, rather than on town holidays, bridge clubs, and group picnics, to unite the society. The Super Bowl, The Sopranos, the movie of the month, and chat groups with special interests have replaced the July 4th parade, the local high school football game, the bowling league, and the weekly bridge or poker game as sources of shared understandings. Because shared symbols are more critical than location as a definition of culture, adults living on the same nation can belong to more than one culture. Many Mexican-American immigrants who have resided in the United States for a decade or longer belong to at least two cultures. The Internet unites strangers who share the same dog breed, hobby, or illness, and millions of Muslims residing in countries separated by thousands of miles into a cultural group. The popularity of Freud’s ideas, from 1900 to about 1960, was aided by a symbolism shared by a small group of well-educated, wealthy Europeans and Americans who were receptive to Freud’s intuitions on sexuality and the toxic consequences of repression of

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desire. Despite little scientific evidence in support of these ideas, this select collective was convinced that Freud had arrived at a profound insight into human nature, when, in fact, the attractiveness of his concepts required a cultural and historical context in which sexual thoughts, feelings, and actions evoked strong shame, guilt, or anxiety and freedom from arbitrary cultural constraints was a political ideal. That is why intellectuals in Asia, India, Latin America, and Africa during the same era were relatively indifferent to Freud’s theory. We still do not completely understand why a small cult on the fringe of European society created a broad and influential intellectual movement, which dominated psychiatry and psychology, without the advantage of empirical data to support most of its core concepts and principles. I suspect that the Puritanical attitude toward sexuality and the celebration of the individual seeking freedom from limitations on self-actualization, especially among educated women seeking gender equality, were important bases for the attractiveness of psychoanalytic ideas. Although Freud’s emphasis on sexual conflict as the cause of all neurosis has lost its persuasive power, social scientists have retained, in modified form, aspects of four ideas: (1) unconscious processes can affect behavior, thought, and emotion; (2) some dreams symbolize unconscious wishes; (3) states of anxiety can lead to the somatic or psychological symptoms that psychiatrists regard as signs of mental illness; and (4) childhood experiences, but not the ones Freud imagined, influence the course of development. Some of Freud’s basic intuitions turned out to be insightful, but he invented the wrong concepts and mechanisms. Some anthropologists have claimed that chimpanzees have a “culture” because spatially separated groups display unique behaviors.14 But laboratory rats born and reared in cages do not behave like wild rats from the same species; pigeons in urban parks are less avoidant of humans than wild pigeons; and bears in zoos acquire behaviors not seen among those living in the wild. The desire to find some minimal sign of culture in animals is motivated by the natural

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scientists’ worry that humans might possess some unique features. To avoid this disturbing conclusion, some have asserted that any species that exchanges social information has a culture.15 This permissive definition awards culture to ants. Here is another clear example of a word having different meanings for two groups of scientists. Social anthropologists contend that shared meanings and ethical beliefs are the essential features of a culture. That is why two groups of Sunni Muslims separated by thousands of miles are more representative of a culture than the adults who greet and chat with each other each day in a large insurance office.

Is Culture a Legitimate Concept? Earlier generations of European and American sociologists and anthropologists engaged in a heated debate over whether the concepts culture, society, group, or community were natural kinds and, therefore, legitimate objects of study. The uncertainty grew out of the tacit assumption that the individual was the fundamental unit. Hence, the average value of a property measured across many individuals had the feel of an artifact. This odd intuition can be understood by remembering that Darwin’s ideas dominated the intellectual landscape when the social sciences were established in American universities at the end of the nineteenth century. It would have been almost impossible for a scholar in the biological or social sciences to resist its seminal premise insisting that the individual was the basic entity. Furthermore, because each individual’s psychological properties presumably rested on, and emerged from, a biological foundation, each person was a material entity and a real object. The properties of a group or culture were less clear; hence, there was the possibility that societies were artifacts. That is one reason why George Herbert Mead, a philosopher who influenced the first generation of sociologists, defined a society as the aggregate of all the interactions among the individuals in a collective.

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I suspect that the social scientists who were suspicious of culture as a natural kind assumed, as most Western natural scientists did, that all human phenomena rested, ultimately, on the material structures and processes of individual brains. The average brain profile across many individuals fails to describe the state of any one individual, and, therefore, seems to be an invention. If Western social scientists had not been wedded to the twin premises that the individual is always the fundamental unit, and the brain the foundation of all individual reactions, they might have realized that group phenomena, such as a status hierarchy or judicial system, are emergent properties and they would have worried less about the legitimacy of culture as a construct. The traditional attitude toward collectives would surprise physicists who treat the temperature of a closed vessel of air, which represents the average number of collisions among billions of individual air molecules, as a legitimate natural phenomenon. A culture or society is a pattern of shared features but, as noted earlier, societies with different histories can share some features. China and Estonia are equally secular but differ in their history.16 British and American adults speak the same language and agree on the value of democracy, liberty, and the profit motive, but disagree on the acceptability of homosexuality and the desirability of reducing taxes on the poor. The values parents hold for their children even vary among three northern European, Protestant societies with different histories. Swedish mothers say they want their young children to become happy, selfactualized adults who are trustworthy and creative but care less about material success or loyalty to a work ethic. Finnish and Estonian mothers, by contrast, regard a willingness to work hard as a primary value and want their children to become adults who have gained the respect of their community.17 It is impossible to understand the murders of large numbers of innocents in Sparta, Rome, Spain, Russia, France, England, Japan, Germany, Rwanda, Serbia, Vietnam, and Sudan; a crowd’s boisterous

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enthusiasm at a world soccer championship; why Norwegian women are three times more likely than women in other European nations to serve on the boards of major companies; and why the suicide rate in Japan is twice that of the United States, without acknowledging that collectives are natural phenomena with features that are not derivatives of the features of individuals. The public schools of North America and Europe confront the serious problem, exacerbated after the 1960s, of mixed loyalties among students from ethnically diverse families. A century earlier these nations assumed that, at least in an educational context, children and adolescents should treat their national identity as having priority over their ethnic or religious category. However, the increased ethnic and religious diversity has threatened this premise. American schools responded by awarding priority to the cultural backgrounds of their pupils. France, by contrast, is resisting this pressure and insisting that each child is French first and then a Muslim, Catholic, Jew, or Algerian.18 Finding a balance between these opposing loyalties is difficult, but important, because a swing to either extreme is dangerous. A complete surrender to the values of every ethnic and religious group weakens the fabric of the larger national collective and the pride in nation that is needed in times of war or catastrophe. On the other hand, total suppression of ethnic or religious identities foments anger toward and alienation from the larger collective. The “religious fervor” of a million pilgrims in Mecca throwing pebbles at a stone pillar symbolic of Satan is a property of a collective that requires a measurement different from the average of the individual emotional states of each pilgrim. The children born to Arab Palestinian mothers suffering from depression adapted better to their cultural setting than children born to depressed Israeli mothers because the Palestinian parents lived close to relatives and enjoyed greater social support. Mexican Americans who spent their childhoods in Mexico and emigrated to the United States were less likely to develop serious depression or become addicted to alcohol or drugs

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than Mexican Americans born in the United States.19 The remarkable adult accomplishments of large numbers of central European Jewish children who emigrated to America between 1933 and 1940, many without their parents, would not have been realized if their privileged, upper-middle class parents had not instilled values for high levels of achievement and the demand to preserve the ethic of their class-ethnic category. One such successful adult told an interviewer, “There were well-defined family pressures that left the responsibility to recover the standing of our family.”20 The blind spot that prevented the first cohort of social scientists from recognizing that culture and society were legitimate concepts was the failure to recognize that each individual possesses a large number of properties. Some refer to symbolic meanings shared by members of the groups to which the individual belongs. Hence each person assumes novel properties when studied as part of a collective, even though many personal properties are preserved when the individual is a member of a group. Karl Marx went too far when he argued that a person’s consciousness was determined completely by his social class and mode of work. Nonetheless, distinct contexts can generate unique properties. A word assumes varied meanings in different sentences; the spatial location of an embryo’s cell determines its fate; the ecological setting of a species affects its survival over generations; a child’s class position influences his or her future. Business consultants have always understood that location is critical. Natural scientists acknowledge this principle. Although water retains its arrangement of two hydrogen and one oxygen atom in all contexts, a collection of water molecules can assume unique properties in different settings. Water contains hemoglobin when in the bloodstream, dust pollutants in the clouds over a large city, and pesticides in a river near a farm. The relation between an individual and the cultural groups to which he/she belongs is analogous, therefore, to the relation between a gene and its genome, a tree and its forest,

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or a chimpanzee and its setting, whether with a dozen other apes in a zoo, in the Gombe Reserve, or an isolated forest in the Congo.

Status Hierarchies Variation in power, status, wealth, or privilege within a community is a significant feature of societies that is not easily derived from biology.21 Individuals who believe that they have less privilege, or occupy a lower status, often experience self-doubt, anxiety, envy, anger, or a combination of these emotions. Family income has become a sensitive index of status in contemporary industrialized societies. Because family income is associated with the academic achievements of their children, and level of education has become the most important way to maintain or improve one’s status, those with less than twelve years of formal education are vulnerable to feelings of envy and anger. The greater the range of academic achievement among youth in democratic societies, the greater the frequency of violence (rape, murder, and armed robbery) among the underachievers. America is characterized by high values on both the range of academic achievement and frequency of violence; Japan is very low.22 The prevalence of mental disorders, too, is more closely related to the degree of income inequality than to the average income in different parts of Britain.23 The relation between income and the prevalence of both varied illnesses and longevity is linear in societies with a broad range of income. Individuals who make $60,000 a year contract more illnesses and die a little earlier than those who make $120,000 annually. This observation implies that social conditions at work, in school, and in the neighborhood, which remind each person of his or her relative rank and degree of autonomy in these settings, can affect physical and mental health. Adults from lower class families usually have more supervisors in the workplace, and this condition is associated with reports of poorer physical health.24

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During earlier centuries or in other cultures, nobles, clergy, warriors, tribal chiefs, and even philosophers held positions of privilege. The objective index of social status in a majority of contemporary, industrialized societies is based on type of work (especially the distinction between mental and physical), years of formal education, and accumulated wealth. Each person adds a subjective element to these objective features that is based on the vocation, education, and wealth of their parents and, in some instances, the status of their grandparents or great-grandparents. Some individuals possess inconsistent features; for example, a wealthy bank manager who did not attend college and had a father who was a dock worker, or a parttime carpenter with a Ph.D. in literature whose father was a lawyer and mother a physician. A sudden loss of status generates uncertainty and an urge to challenge the person or group ascending in power in order to restore the perceived loss of privilege. When statuses are fixed over long periods of time, and those in the lower ranks accept the popular rationale for their position, the level of uncertainty is muted, even though they may feel envy. A loss of status assumed a special form and set of consequences in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts when the traditional residents of old Salem village, who were loyal to Puritan ethics and had enjoyed social dominance, were challenged by a group of self-interested entrepreneurs in Salem town who were ascending in status. As a defense, the former accused the latter of witchcraft. Johann Kepler’s mother was accused of being a witch almost a century earlier because her son’s heretical ideas threatened the belief system of German Catholics whose status was being undermined by the spread of Luther’s new religion.25 Lower status groups are often punitive toward higher status individuals who violate an ethical norm, whereas members of high-status groups are often harsher with those in their own class category who have committed the same violation.26 The emergence of new status inequalities contributed to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Enlightenment

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of the eighteenth, and the demand for a socialist state in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Protestant reform was provoked by a merchant and artisan class, concentrated in the towns of northern Europe, who challenged the landed elites in the countryside allied with the Catholic hierarchy. The former used Luther’s attack on the Catholic church to advance their secular power. Two centuries later, when more nation states had been established, universities were more prevalent, and more citizens literate, the increased numbers of educated bureaucrats, scientists, lawyers, and intellectuals sought more freedom from the ruling class, and used John Locke’s writings as a rationale for their demands. Only 100 years later, when industrialization in England had created several cities with large numbers of poor in densely crowded urban ghettoes desperate for greater dignity, Marx’s disciples provided these workers with the will to demand an enhanced status and some basis for hoping that a socialist society would repair the evils of unrestrained capitalism. In less than 350 years the position of the entrepreneurial merchant changed from challenger to the target of challenge. Most commentators suspect that the next major challenge to the dominant position of North Americans and Europeans will come from one or more of the nations in the developing world. The introduction of global communication networks that penetrate the most isolated communities has created new perceptions of inequality and moods of envy and anger that were absent or muted only fifty years earlier. Most early nineteenth-century Americans were not well-educated and harbored hostility to the small elite on the East Coast who had attended college, worked with their minds, and read European literature. The former group exploited the emergence of the natural sciences to level the playing field by demanding that the scientific fact that all humans possessed similar physiologies replace the idealistic notion that class differences should be based on education and life style. A Harvard graduate living in Boston’s Back Bay who summered in France could not claim he was fundamentally different from a

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poor farmer in Vermont. Many Americans who settled the Midwest between 1790 and 1830 were less well educated adults who wished to escape a gnawing feeling of social inferiority. A keen observer of academic politics at Cambridge and Oxford universities suggested that Snow’s acerbic critique of the humanities was motivated, in part, by his modest class origin compared with the more elite pedigrees of most of his humanist colleagues.27 Leavis’s harsh critique of Snow, who had attained eminence in British society, shared elements with the accusations of witchcraft the residents of old Salem village leveled against the ascending citizens of Salem town. All living forms are sensitive to differences. Rats are alerted by a change in illumination, baboons by a change in the dominance hierarchy in their group. In one species of tropical fish a male dominates a number of females who form a dominance hierarchy. If the male dies the female who had been the most dominant changes her biological sex and behaves like a male.28 Humans are especially sensitive to differences in the features symbolic of variation in status and cannot suppress the habit of continually comparing their status with that of others in their community and using that information to infer their potency and virtue. However, it is the relative difference between persons or groups, not the absolute values on the symbolic resources, that generates the corrosive feelings. A younger brother with excellent school grades and many close friends will feel envy and self-doubt if his older brother has even better grades and more friends. On occasion the culture’s theory of the origin of status differences exerts a modulating force. The working and peasant classes in eighteenth-century England viewed their compromised status as a historical accident rather than a sign of a tainted pedigree. The same groups in France were vulnerable to a more serious threat to their personhood because the nobles believed they were inherently superior to the peasants. Perhaps that is one reason

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why England was saved from the explosive violence of the French Revolution. Thus, each person’s interpretation of his or her social conditions, not the view recorded by a camera or witnessed by an impartial observer, is the effective cause of his or her psychological outlook. The British construction laborers who were proud of their physical endurance and continual loyalty to peers harbored minimal anger toward their apparently weaker, self-interested supervisors who wore jackets and ties. However, other laborers on the same job site were angry at the supervisors who reminded them of their compromised position.29 The children forced to flee Hitler’s Europe developed different adult reactions to the same oobjective childhood trauma. Some were crippled with feelings of chronic anxiety and alienation; others experienced guilt over being a survivor; others were unable to exorcize their continued anger and desire for revenge; and some decided to devote their lives to making the world a better place. The reasons for these varied responses to what seems to be similar circumstances remain mysterious. Although a person’s objective social status influences his or her frame of mind and coping strategies, nonetheless, there is considerable variation in world view among those who share the same social class background.30 A small proportion who grew up in poor families, but achieved middle-class status and a professional vocation, experience a tension that one man described as “being in limbo.”31 These upwardly mobile adults occasionally interpreted their new status as implying disloyalty to the values of their less advantaged families and friends. A few became vulnerable to a form of self-hatred if they become members of the privileged group they disliked intensely when they were adolescents. A writer who grew up in anti-Semitic Poland during the 1960s was plunged into unremitting episodes of anxiety, depression, and self-doubt when she learned that her mother, whom she thought was Catholic, was Jewish.

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An identification with a group that is viewed as less desirable can have similar consequences. The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz confessed that his identification with his nation contributed to moments of self-doubt because he regarded Polish culture as less sophisticated than the cosmopolitan societies of Western Europe.32 If a majority of working-class Germans in 1918 had been less strongly identified with their nation, they would have been protected from profound humiliation after Germany’s defeat in World War I and might not have needed the boost in national pride that Hitler promised. The histories of many cultures are marked by at least one event that its members interpret as a stain and cause for shame. The stigma for Americans was slavery; for Spaniards, it was Franco’s defeat of the nascent democratic movement; for Germans and Italians the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini; and for many Arab societies the military defeats by Europeans in the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. The themes of the novelists, poets, playwrights, and screenwriters in these societies continue to return to these events as a tongue reflexively moves to a rough spot on a tooth.

The Demand for Measurement There has always been a tension between the social scientists attracted to theoretical syntheses, often based on historical or ethnographic evidence, and those wary of straying too far from empirical facts that can be replicated. The former group was marginalized when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) were established in the middle of the last century. Social scientists who wished to be recipients of this government largesse had to follow the rules of natural science and assign numbers to objectively gathered observations, implement elegant statistical analyses of data, and refrain from explanations that could not be supported by quantitative evidence. As a result, scholars probing the effects of historical sequences, seeking insights from case histories, or

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brooding on human morality, which are measured less easily, began to be excluded from positions of power and tenured chairs, allowing those loyal to quantitative measurements on large samples to become dominant. A research proposal submitted to NIH promising to administer a questionnaire to 1,000 adults who had recovered from a depression was more likely to be approved than a plan to interview three former depressives for thirteen hours on four occasions. Yet William Styron’s book-length description of his prior bout of depression is far more illuminating than any collection of answers to 30 questions by 1,000 informants. Robert Wuthnow’s narrative summary of the varied contributions to the Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, and emergence of socialism in Europe provides a more coherent explanation of these reform movements than an analysis restricted to quantitative data on gross national product, population sizes, and amount of trade.33 The establishment of NIH and NSF, and their demands for quantitative research, can be likened to a typhoon that wiped out one species and allowed another group to occupy the niche. The research of behavioral and psychiatric geneticists illustrates the problems that trail the reasonable demand for elegant measurement when the most fruitful concepts are not yet amenable to accurate quantification. Most social scientists recognize that each person’s interpretations of his or her experiences are more significant causes of their behaviors and moods than the objectively observed features of the environments. However, current methods are not sensitive enough to permit accurate measurement of these private understandings. As a result, behavioral geneticists select the features that can be measured reliably as indexes of the environmental contribution to traits. These features include family income, education, ethnicity, diagnosed mental or physical illnesses in the parents, and the genders and ages of siblings. When environments are defined this way, rather than as a pattern of private interpretations, scientists usually discover that the home environments of twins or siblings have little

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effect on their psychological profiles, leading unsophisticated readers to conclude that genes must be far more important than family experience. However, this inference ignores the important consequences of a child perceiving that she is not valued by a parent, or believing she has less talent than a sibling in a skill that the parents value. These idiosyncratic perceptions are rarely measured and, therefore, are excluded from the equations that estimate the heritability of a psychological trait or psychiatric illness, even though twins raised in the same family do not always agree in their perception of the “cohesion of the family” or the “expressiveness of the parents.”34 This is not an idle criticism of current estimates of heritability of cognitive abilities, personality, or mental illness. A person’s subjective understanding of his or her social class is a better predictor of his or her health than the easily measured dimensions of income, education, and vocation. The objective features of the peasant classes of eighteenth-century England and France were similar, but because the former perceived their compromised status as less fixed by forces that could not be changed the two societies followed different histories. Continuous Magnitudes or Patterns The demand for quantification of all constructs posed a problem for social scientists because the natural science community understood that not all phenomena can be assigned numbers that permit the use of advanced mathematics. Any set of forty objects can be divided into two mathematically equivalent groups of twenty objects. However, when we descend from this abstraction to a set of specific objects the equivalence can be lost. If forty people were divided into two groups of twenty the two groups might not be equal with respect to gender, ethnicity, health, and age, and might not react similarly to the same intrusion or challenge. One of the respected founders of economics, William Stanley Jevons, wrote in the 1870s that economics

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had to be a mathematical science because it dealt with quantities. But Jevons failed to appreciate that many economic concepts do not satisfy all the requirements mathematics demands; for example, equals added to equals yield equal sums. The facts of the world determine whether the numbers assigned to a phenomenon can be manipulated in the same way physicists manipulate the concepts of mass, energy, velocity, and distance. Physicists and chemists assume that the ideal measurement is a numerical scale whose values are additive, often called a ratio scale, because such scales permit the application of powerful mathematical operations. The numbers assigned to the concept velocity form a ratio scale. A velocity of 100 km/h is twice as fast as one of 50 km/h, as is the relation between velocities of 10 and 5 km/h. Notice, however, that the meaning of this statement within the physicist’s language system is not the meaning implied by a psychological vocabulary. Few people would report that they felt their car was moving twice as fast at 10 compared with 5 km/h, compared with the difference between 100 and 50 km/h. Unfortunately, the social sciences do not have many theoretically important concepts that form ratio scales. Most of the time the best social scientists can do is to claim that one value is greater or less than another, called an ordinal scale, and the values are arbitrary. A person with a score of 4 on a 6-point scale of “subjective happiness” is not twice as happy as one with a score of 2. Initially, natural scientists were derisive of ordinal scales; some even declared that they should not be regarded as legitimate quantitative measurements. The social scientists who believed they were doing natural science, troubled by this accusation, replied that because all numerical scales were human inventions ratio scales could not be God’s preferred metric. Ordinal scales were as legitimate for their domains as ratio scales were for the quantification of matter. The position of the logical positivists, popular from the 1930s to the 1950s, which demanded only that every theoreticalterm have a measurable referent, supported the

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social scientists’ defense of their practices. Nonetheless, the natural scientists’ premise that understanding is limited if one cannot assign to a phenomenon numbers that allow the use of elegant mathematical equations continues to intimidate some social scientists. Most social science constructs are patterns of values on ordinal scales. For example, the psychological construct extroversion is usually measured with a questionnaire that asks people to describe their social behavior, desire for external sources of excitement, and absence of anxiety with strangers. A person is classified as an extrovert if the frequency of social encounters is greater than the frequency of solitary activities; the frequency of seeking external stimulation is greater than the frequency of seeking quiet repose; and the frequency of emotionally relaxed interactions with strangers is greater than the frequency with which uncertainty and anxiety occur. Biologists confront the same problem because many of their constructs, for example species are patterns.35 Neither do the values for inclusive fitness form ratio scales. That is, biologists do not assume that an animal whose probability of surviving to maturity was 0.50 is twice as fit as one whose probability of survival was 0.25. The obsession with inventing continuous numerical scales for all concepts forces social scientists to aggregate very different phenomena. The advantage of this practice is that one can compute values for a mean and a standard deviation and exploit statistical techniques that permit an estimate of the probability that the observation was not a chance event. The disadvantage is that different phenomenon are often aggregated. The concepts of IQ, insecure attachment, and gross domestic product are examples of concepts composed of events with different origins. For example, intellectual abilities, such as vocabulary size, the perception of subtle details in a drawing, shortterm memory for numbers, detecting analogies, solving spatial problems, and speed of motor response are not highly correlated in large samples of children. The decision to average the scores on these differ ent talents in order to compute the single dimension of IQ distorts

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nature in a serious way. No biologist would average the integrity of the gastrointestinal, respiratory, genital, and cardiovascular systems to create a continuous index called “health.” If, as is likely, the primary symptoms of the category called autism represent a dozen or more qualitatively different causal conditions, the popular idea of “an autism spectrum,” which implies a continuum of impairment of one disease, is obstructing progress. A team of scientists announced in 2008 that they had discovered a gene that was more frequent in autistic individuals than in the normal population. However, the gene was present in only 1 percent of the autistic group; therefore, this very small group represents a distinctive disease category. Biologists would not have discovered the separate causes of Parkinson’s disease, polio, arthritis, or cerebral palsy if they had posited a spectrum of “motor impairment” and looked for a single cause. Suppose fifteenth-century Europeans averaged, across six countries for each of ten years, the number of stillbirths, premature deaths, and individuals accused of being witches and called this aggregate a measure of the “sinfulness of a community.” Although the mean values would show lawful changes over time, that fact does not mean that sinfulness is a natural phenomenon. Contemporary economists estimating gross domestic product (GDP) include only exchanges that can be measured in a currency. Hence, the money a family paid to a person hired to care for an infant would be included in the index of GDP. But if a parent remained home to perform exactly the same function that work would not be included in the index of GDP. The economists’ concept of human capital, which refers to the skills of a labor force, includes the costs of school systems and colleges, but ignores the many hours that parents spend reading to children and motivating a work ethic because they cannot put a dollar figure on that effort. A quantitative measurement that is based on faulty or false assumptions can be mischievous. A sign in Einstein’s office in Princeton read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

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Although measuring a theoretically important property with a numerical scale is always desirable, a qualitative description can be useful, even if it is temporary, if the scientist believes that the phenomenon has theoretical implications. Many years ago, the directors of American Telephone and Telegraph wanted to select the most talented college seniors for training to become district managers. Professional staff brought a large number of applicants to a central location, administered many questionnaires, and computed many average scores. At the end of the week of testing, the interviewer asked each candidate a single final question: “How many years do you think it will be before you will be a district manager?” The qualitative answer to that simple question turned out to be a better predictor of the criterion than the average scores on the many questionnaires gathered during the prior five days. The Range of Values The goal in most investigations is to discover a relation between two observations that can be explained with a theoretical concept that applies to many contexts. This victory requires measuring the referents for an explanatory concept across a broad, rather than a restricted, range of values. Natural scientists are more likely than social scientists to honor this principle. For example, when biologists varied the ambient temperature under which turtle eggs developed, they discovered that the heritability of the ratio of males to females was zero under most temperatures, but rose to 0.8 when the temperature fell between the narrow range of 28 to 30 degrees Centigrade. A scientist who suspected that the relation between family income and the average height of its members was not linear would gather evidence across a broad range of incomes, rather than select only extreme values. If the average height of individuals from families making less than $30,000 a year was significantly smaller than those

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making at least $100,000, it would be an error to conclude that there was an inverse relation between income and height if it turned out that there was no relation between income and height for the many families with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000. Indeed, most of the time the correlation between two different psychological measures, or between a psychological and a biological measure, is less than 0.40. For example, the correlation between college grades and job performance after graduation is only 0.16; between smoking and lung cancer only 0.08.36 These modest correlations are produced by a small proportion of the sample who have very high or low values. There is a serious difference in meaning between the following two sentences: (1) There is a linear relation between family income and the height of its members, and (2) for families with incomes less than $30,000 or greater than $100,000 there is a difference in the heights of family members, but no relation for families with incomes between these values. Reports of psychological differences between gender, ethnic, or class groups usually do not tell readers the range of values for which the difference is valid. I recall reading a paper claiming that ten Chinese adults who happened to have migrated to a particular American city represented the cultural and biological category Chinese. One team of scientists who suggested that Blacks have a less robust physiological reaction to psychological stress than other ethnic groups based this bold conclusion on assessments of only nineteen Black adults between eighteen and thirty years of age living in Baltimore.37 Adolescent males perform better than females only on very difficult tests of spatial reasoning. Boys and girls, as well as men and women, have similar average scores on most tests of scientific and mathematical achievement, but scores that fall in the top 2 percent of the distribution are usually achieved only by males. This fact may be partially due to the higher levels of circulating testosterone in males that affect the brain areas that contribute to the solution of problems requiring the mental rotation of geometric shapes.38

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The Loss of Confidence With the possible exception of economists, social scientists have lost much of the confidence and public esteem they enjoyed during the first sixty years of the last century when many believed they were close to understanding criminality, personality development, and psychiatric illness. The earlier hope, held mainly by psychologists who believed that a synthesis of the principles of behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory would explain the essence of human nature and its variations, proved to be wildly optimistic. As a result, the next generation became suspicious of, and resistant to, high-flying theory. The earlier cohort resembled the soldier in Stravinsky’s narrative orchestral piece, The Soldier’s Tale, who lost many years of his life and his childhood sweetheart because he allowed the devil to tempt him with the promise of riches if the soldier accompanied him “for awhile” to teach him how to play the violin the soldier had traded for the devil’s secrets of the marketplace. There are many reasons for the current malaise among social scientists. First, the social sciences as formal empirical disciplines are only about 125 years old. The interval from the first microscope to the discovery that the chromosomes carried the elements of heredity to the description of the structure of DNA covered a period of 300 years. Second, social scientists too often begin their work by assuming the validity of an a priori idea and design their studies to affirm the utility of that concept. Concepts such as attachment, anxiety, emotion regulation, and consciousness are examples of popular ideas that name a family of phenomena and do not refer to a unitary process. Natural scientists are more often motivated by a desire to understand a puzzling or unexpected observation. The nuclear bombs that ended the war with Japan in 1945 were made possible because a group of physicists did not understand why bombarding uranium with neutrons produced the element barium. The subsequent attempts to solve that puzzling fact had profound consequences. Of course, there

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has to be a balance between trying to understand an observed fact and trying to prove the validity of an idea because unguided observation without any prior conceptual bias rarely yields a discovery. But I believe that too many social scientists work at one end of this seesaw and prefer to prove the truth of a favored concept rather than explore the conditions that mediate a robust fact. A related mistake is the habit of assuming that a new term that was invented to describe a particular observation applies to a broad set of events. The concept of attachment to a caretaker is illustrative. John Bowlby invented this term to explain the cries of infants in an unfamiliar place when no familiar caretaker was present. Unfortunately, some psychologists apply this concept to the relation between marriage partners or between older children and their families and assume its meaning does not change. Too many social science concepts, whether a priori inventions or inferences derived from a single procedure, are assumed to be general properties displayed in diverse settings. For example, some child psychologists want to know if young children have the ability to use a landmark to orient themselves in a room or playground. The psychologists who tested young children in a small, windowless room with one blue wall as a landmark found that young children did not use the blue wall to find a hidden toy and concluded that young children cannot use landmarks. But children of the same age will use the same landmark if the room is larger and has windows.39 Most natural scientists appreciate that every phenomenon occurs under a restricted set of conditions; for example, the pressure and temperature of a solution and the concentrations of relevant molecules. Social scientists should also conceptualize a trait or competence in terms of the number of distinct settings in which it is displayed. To return to the ability to use landmarks, psychologists should have varied the size and familiarity of the rooms in which varied objects were hidden with distinctively different landmarks and determine the proportion of settings in which young children used a landmark. One

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reason this strategy is not practiced more often is that psychologists do not have a theory that names the fundamental types of settings. Hence, they often fail to specify a type of setting, such as its familiarity or social structure. Third, social scientists tried, but failed, to invent a large number of powerful methods to measure human psychological states and were forced to rely heavily on a person’s verbal descriptions of his or her psychological states. As a result, Dr. Phil interviewing troubled individuals on his television programs represents the average citizen’s understanding of psychology. Finally, when blaming victims for making a contribution to their problems became politically incorrect after the 1960s, funding agencies became resistant to supporting research that might reveal the contribution of the rearing practices of poor, less well-educated parents to their child’s academic and social problems. It is less controversial to attribute these problems to genes, for which no one is to blame, than to award influence to the behaviors of less conscientious or less well informed parents. The latter interpretation implies that the parents committed a moral mistake. A cartoon in The New Yorker illustrated three deer – one stag with an elegant set of antlers, a second stag with small, plain antlers, and a doe reminding the latter, “It’s not you – it’s natural selection.” As a result, the proportion of government funds supporting social science research has been reduced over the past twenty-five years and talented youths who chose one of the social sciences two generations earlier are now attracted to one of the natural sciences. In addition, many natural scientists do not regard the research of psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists as “science” because some of the constructs that attribute the variation in belief, mood, and action to family experience, culture, class, or historical era are colored by tacit, ethical preferences. For example, many American psychologists assume that autonomy, loyalty to a private conscience, freedom from anxiety over social acceptance or the opinions of others, and minimal guilt over failure to honor the obligations of one’s social categories are

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naturally healthier than a posture of mutual interdependence with others, conformity to group demands in order to maintain harmony, and occasionally placing the requests of family, friends, and employers above one’s self-interest. The assumption that all childhood anxiety or guilt is toxic is preventing working mothers from properly socializing serious disobedience because parents are reluctant to induce mild anxiety or shame in their children, even if the child has violated a reasonable norm on civil behavior. Many of these mothers, intimidated by media experts declaring that raising children is a complex task requiring technical knowledge, are paying consultants $200 a day for advice on how to get their three-year-old to do what he is told. Mothers have been socializing children for over 100,000 years and it is puzzling that one of the best educated generations of women doubts its ability to accomplish this quintessentially human assignment. Perhaps we need a modern Luther to inform parents that it is not necessary to pay an indulgence in order to be released from the purgatory an uncontrollable child can generate.

Sources of Evidence Social scientists who study humans rely on three sources of evidence, ranked in accord with how frequently they are used: verbal statements, observed behaviors (spontaneous or provoked in a laboratory), and biological measures. All three sources of evidence meet the criterion of truth defined by correspondence between ideas and observations. However, the validity of an inference based on only one of these sources of information is not always affirmed with another source of evidence because each reflects a different aspect of the concept the scientist is probing.40 Consider, as an example, the ability to discriminate the physical differences between two visual stimuli: can infants discriminate between a circle that encloses two horizontally placed small black circles and one enclosing two black squares? If the

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investigators measured time looking at each of the stimuli they would discover that infants behaved as if they could not tell the difference between the two forms. But if they recorded event related potentials they would have concluded that the infants’ brains did differentiate between these stimuli. And if they asked ten-year-olds if the two forms were different, those who treated the entire pattern as symbolic of a face might have said “no,” but those who attended to the discrete features would have replied in the affirmative. Thus, the truth of a declaration stating that infants are able to discriminate between the above two forms depends on the source of the data. A resistance to acknowledging the seminal truth that no conclusion is independent of its source of evidence is one of the most serious problems facing the social sciences. Natural scientists are less resistant to this restriction. The consequences of beaming electrons at a surface with two slits depend on the experimental arrangement and whether the scientists try to measure the path of any electron. This radical view, which Einstein rejected, implied that when a scientist was measuring one feature of an event it was not always possible to measure any other. This position is certainly true when scientists measure brain activity in a person lying perfectly still in a magnetic scanner, asked to think about what he might do if attacked by a robber. It is impossible to know the person’s actual behavior or the intensity of emotion he would experience if that event had actually occurred on city streets. That is why the titles of journals in the most advanced domains of the natural sciences often limit publication to research that relies on a particular method. For example, Human Brain Mapping, Cerebral Cortex, and the Journal of Neurophysiology are journals that typically publish studies that gather data on brain function with a limited number of methods. By contrast, the titles of most of the social science journals refer to a broad content area. The American Journal of Sociology, American Anthropologist, and Child Development contain papers that rely on different methods to explore the same concept.

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The scientists trying to discover a relation between a psycho logical and a biological state rely most often on eleven biological measures. The four most direct indexes of brain activity are variation in blood flow, glucose metabolism, event related waveforms, and power bands in the electroencephalogram. Seven indirect biological measures of brain state are changes in muscle tension, skin conductance, heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure, cortisol level and genetic alleles. Unfortunately these measures do not correlate highly with each other and often require different conclusions. For example, some adults show large and some small increases in the stress hormone cortisol when they have to give a speech in front of strangers. But the individuals with large increases in cortisol do not report feeling more anxious than those who show minimal increases. Furthermore, girls with an anxiety disorder who showed the largest increase in cortisol during the first thirty minutes after awakening denied feeling anxious on a questionnaire. Similarly, adult twins who reported being afraid of many animals and situations showed smaller, not larger, increases in skin conductance to a signal for electric shock than those reporting few fears. Hence, as noted in Chapter 1, fear has one meaning when referring to a person’s report of their conscious feelings, but a different meaning when based on a biological reaction to an imminent event that is unpleasant.41 Event-related potentials in the electroencephalogram and changes in blood flow to the posterior cortex were recorded simultaneously while adults looked at pictures symbolizing pleasant, unpleasant, or emotionally neutral scenes. But there was no relation between these two measures of brain activity and each required a different inference.42 No current measure of brain activity has a consistent relation with a psychological measurement across people and settings. For example, patients with posttraumatic stress disorder do not always display the same profiles on three popular measures of brain activation. There is not even a reasonable level of correspondence between

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a person’s judgment of his or her skin temperature, heart rate, and degree of perspiration, on the one hand, and objective measures of the same reactions, on the other.43 One reason for this frustration is that the relations among the biological measures, or between them and psychological assessments, vary with the class, ethnicity, gender, age, physical fitness, and complete genomes of the participants. Because most investigators do not control for these factors they have been unable to discover robust relations between a biological index and a psychological state across different laboratories or across humans from varied social groups. Several years ago my colleagues and I gathered all three classes of evidence in an attempt to evaluate the concept of “anxiety” in more than 200 eleven-year-olds. We asked the youths to tell us how often they worried about making mistakes, confronting unfamiliar situations, and the opinions of friends, and had their mothers make similar judgments of their child. We also observed each eleven-year-old interacting with an unfamiliar adult in a laboratory. Finally, we evaluated eight biological reactions that most scientists believe accompany states of anxiety. Sadly, there were minimal relations among the three different sources of evidence, implying that the meaning of “variation in anxiety” in eleven-year-olds depends seriously on the source of evidence.44 Although the reports of fifthgrade children describing their level of anxiety were predicted by the reports they gave four years later, when they were in the first grade, the parents’ and teachers’ assessments of the anxiety level in the fifth-graders were not related to the children’s own reports of how anxious they felt.45 Imagine a social scientist evaluating the quality and intensity of a conscious feeling of fear in individuals with a snake phobia who were looking at pictures of poisonous snakes. Reliance on a verbal report, which taps the person’s semantic networks for words like “tense,” “afraid,” or “anxious,” cannot capture the nuanced variation in conscious body sensations, or unconscious brain profiles, that the

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pictures evoke. Similarly, the reply “sad” to the query “How do you feel?” spoken by a person who just learned of the death of a close relative does not reflect the intensity and quality of the mourner’s felt emotion. Despite the increase over the last century in the proportion of the population with incomes that permit home ownership, two cars, European vacations, and private school tuitions, there has been little change in subjective judgments of how secure people feel about their economic situation.46 Brain-damaged patients are as accurate as healthy individuals when they describe the emotions of persons in emotionally charged pictures, despite the fact that the patients cannot experience the bodily reactions that healthy persons use to decide about emotional states. Questionnaires Despite these problems, social scientists interested in personality or mental illness continue to rely on questionnaires or interviews as the primary source of evidence and assume that the answers to these instruments are an accurate reflection of the person’s actual behaviors, motives, emotions, and brain states. There are many reasons why this belief is overly optimistic. First, questionnaire replies reflect the respondent’s network of semantic relations for the words in the questions. But these networks are influenced by the schemata associated with the words. Individuals who have suffered from depression, poverty, or chronic worry possess schemata for these experiences which, in turn, generate semantic networks that differ from those who have not had these experiences. As a result, a soldier who had felt the fear of combat is likely to minimize the intensity of his concern over meeting strangers or losing his job, even though he is worried over these possibilities. Second, individuals are reluctant to admit to a trait that might embarrass them. Between 30 and 70 percent of individuals who tested positive for cocaine or opiates denied this fact when asked; 20 percent

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of registered voters who did not cast a vote reported that they did so.47 African Americans are more likely than Whites to say that they worry over being contaminated by touching money, garbage, public telephones, or animals, but there is no evidence that these replies are a sensitive index of their emotions when they actually experience these events.48 Most interviews designed to diagnose a mental illness follow a standard format and the interviewer does not have much freedom to stray from the standard form of asking the questions, even if he or she wants to accommodate to the personality or emotional state of the person being interviewed. This practice assumes that the psychological relation between the patient and the interviewer is relatively similar across all dyads and all interviewees interpret the questions in a similar way. This assumption is probably invalid. Individuals who wish to avoid being embarrassed over admitting to a symptom with one interviewer might acknowledge the problem with an interviewer of a different gender, age, or personality. The current strategy assumes that the interviewer is analogous to a machine, the interviewee to a metal surface, and the question to a beam of electrons intended to detect flaws in the metal’s surface. No relationship between two people meets these robotic criteria. A third factor is that replies to questions asking individuals what they prefer usually reflect the individual’s understanding of what they, or the majority in their society, believe they are supposed to prefer and do not always correspond to the choices they actually make. College age men reported on a questionnaire, for example, that they preferred to date women who were physically attractive. However, their choices for a date after interacting with a number of college-age women did not correspond to their earlier reports on the questionnaire affirming the importance of physical attractiveness.49 Put plainly, what people say is not necessarily what they do. The unique and restrictive meaning of questionnaire measures of personality traits is revealed in the answers of respondents from

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fifty-five countries to a survey of five popular personality traits: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new ideas, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The differences between the replies of men and women were larger in the richer, secular, more egalitarian societies, such as the United States, than in the poorer, more traditional societies, such as Indonesia. However, observations of the behaviors of men and women in these two regions would invite exactly the opposite conclusion.50 It should be obvious that a person’s self-descriptions on questionnaires are a poor index of their actual behavior and emotions in particular settings because each culture presents a different profile of challenges and opportunities. Many Indonesians are economically stressed and, therefore, both men and women are likely to report equal amounts of anxiety over their health and ability to support their families. Hence, sex differences in the personality trait called neuroticism were smaller in Indonesia than in the United States. As indicated earlier, it is a serious mistake to assume that individuals from different cultures interpret a question in the same way, or that similar replies to questionnaires by individuals from different cultures have the same meaning. Fourth, the wording of a question has a serious effect on the answer. For example, most informants are biased to select the middle value when given a scale of choices and to avoid affirming the extremes. Hence, if a question inquiring about amount of time spent watching television each day had 2½ hours or more as the highest value that could be checked, only 16 percent chose that value. But when 2½ hours or more was the second of six alternatives, 37 percent said they watched television for at least that long.51 Thus, rather than assume that a person’s answers to questions reflect a stable knowledge network, the more proper frame of mind is, “What was the question that produced that answer?” Simply altering the procedure used to gather verbal answers can lead to a different inference. Many studies that ask respondents to select the two emotional terms from a trio that are most similar

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report that most people use the two dimensions of desirability and arousal level when making their judgments. However, informants from three European countries rating the likelihood that each of 144 features was an element in each of 22 emotion words used four dimensions, not two. Although the desirability of the emotion remained significant, the other three dimensions referred to the unpredictability of the emotion, the tendency to withdraw or to be passive, and the intensity of bodily feelings that usually accompany sympathetic activation.52 Fifth, most scientists who study emotions work in Europe or North America and, therefore, rely on vocabularies for emotional states that do not specify the class of agent, the cause of the emotion, the target of an emotional reaction, or blends of several emotions. Words like anger, fear, guilty, and depressed fail to specify the age or gender of the person, the conditions that provoked the state, and the person or object to whom an emotional response is directed. Other languages do differentiate between the state of “anger” provoked by an agent’s error (losing one’s keys) and the state evoked when the agent is insulted or frustrated by another person. Even local healers in the highlands of Ecuador treating illiterate peasants complaining of somatic discomfort and bouts of depression or anxiety assign distinct diagnoses depending on their estimate of the reason for the symptoms; for example, did the patient lose a spouse, have an argument with a neighbor, or does he or she have a parasitic infection? A large proportion of American and European patients complaining of a depressed mood are physically ill with ulcers, an allergy, osteoarthritis, hypertension, or thyroid dysfunction. American psychiatrists, who often ignore the effect of these physical compromises on mood, rely primarily on the patients’ report of their emotional state when they diagnose them as depressed and are indifferent to the likely cause. There are very few English words for the emotion that combines anger at a neighbor with guilt over that feeling, or the blend of anxiety over meeting people with the depression provoked

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by this compromise in social skill. It is odd that the highland healers with no formal training have different terms for patterns of mental symptoms with different causes, whereas American psychiatrists use the clumsy phrase “anxiety co-morbid with depression” for patients reporting both emotions. English is a poor vehicle to describe human emotions, but a majority of the journals that publish technical papers on emotion and mental illness require the use of English. Thus, it is surprising that American investigators are reluctant to invent new words to accommodate the many forms that emotions can assume. This state of affairs is analogous to carpenters who want to build houses but have only hoes and rakes but no hammers or saws. Sixth, individuals have no conscious access to many of their biological states and implicit knowledge networks. Recall that students’ performances on cognitive tests were influenced by the color of the identification number on the test booklet, even though they were unaware of this relation. Most parents are not conscious of the fact that they are biased to choose two or three syllable names for their daughters and one syllable names for their sons. More important, many respondents are unable to describe feelings that are close to consciousness because of the lack of an appropriate vocabulary. Psychological states are rapidly changing phenomena. Words, like the still photograph of a dancing woman, transform these inherently dynamic events into categories frozen in time and space. The moment after a woman announces that she feels happy because she read a letter informing her of a promotion, her biological and psychological states have already begun to change. This skeptical conclusion does not mean that investigators should ignore what people say, only that they should appreciate the special and limited meaning of the evidence. The Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz, who came to appreciate the danger of believing in the truth of abstract concepts in his later years, described a childhood passion to demarcate and to define experience

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with “concepts more powerful than reality, a hunger which armed some with swords, cast others into dungeons, and led the faithful on to holy wars.” This enthusiasm faded during his mature years when he “demolished the paper castle where beauties had resided behind a lattice of words.”53 Evidence and Truth Natural scientists, too, deal with the frustration that trails the fact that the meanings of all concepts depend on the source of evidence. Crocodiles and turtles are regarded as phylogenetically distant species when anatomy supplies the information, but are classified as less distant when their evolutionary histories and genes are the evidence.54 The current theory of atomic particles makes predictions about the number of neutrinos emitted from the sun that should strike the Earth (neutrinos are particles with no charge). Physicists using four different methods to measure the number of neutrinos arriving at our planet discovered that the number detected was always smaller than the number predicted, and that each method yielded a different number. Not surprisingly, each team of scientists blamed the insensitivity of the method used by another group for the mismatch between prediction and observation.55 Ten observers standing in different places staring at a rainbow would perceive a different spatial location for this event and provide ten different descriptions of what is presumably the same rainbow. Estimates of when humans began to wear clothes provide a final example of the intimate link between method and inference. A team studying the DNA sequences of head and body lice discovered that the latter species, which live inside body garments, first emerged between 30,000 and 110,000 years ago. Hence, they concluded that humans first put on clothing during this time interval. I suspect that some archaeologists would not be persuaded by this argument.56 These examples illustrate what Bohr meant when he wrote

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that a phenomenon of interest and the method used to measure its properties form an indivisible whole that cannot be separated into components. Social scientists have been tardy in incorporating this truth into their epistemology. Remember, humans can see only a small portion of the visible wavelength spectrum. Humans are denied the possibility of ever knowing Reality; they invent a reality composed of the two ground states of matter and mind, “neither one of which is more basic than the other one.”57 A curtain with many small openings provides a useful metaphor to capture the lack of correspondence among different measures purported to index the same concept. Imagine that a phenomenon of interest lies behind a thick curtain punctuated with a large number of tiny holes. The view from each small opening in the curtain, analogous to the information provided by one method, does not allow a complete perception of the whole event. Scientists must invent that understanding by combining the views gained by peering through the many holes in the curtain. This issue is part of a controversy between two groups of scientists. The realists, like Einstein, believe there is one true description of a natural phenomenon; hence, following extensive research, it is possible to know its exact form. A second group, in greater agreement with Bohr, insists that all investigators can ever know with certainty is what they observe. Because scientists can never observe the “whole” as it exists in its natural state, all descriptions are necessarily incomplete summaries of a reality they can never fully comprehend because each source of evidence distorts the form that nature intended. My perceptions of the lamp and book in front of me are qualitatively discrete. However, if I were shown these two objects as I lay in a magnetic scanner the blood flow patterns would imply serious overlap in my perception of these objects and the possibility that I might confuse them. Scientists work in an infinitely large labyrinth of small rooms separated by walls. Each advance in understanding removes a wall and

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allows investigators to move one room closer to a center space they never reach where truth rests serenely on a silk couch. Listen to the contemporary physicist Anton Zellinger: “The distinction between reality and our knowledge of reality. … cannot be made. There is no way to refer to reality without using the information we have about it. Our choice of measurement apparatus decides which … quantities can become reality in the experiment.”58

Contributions of the Social Sciences Despite their many burdens, social scientists studying individuals or small groups have corrected a number of mistaken, but popular, beliefs held by both biologists and humanists. Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and anthropologist, noted how the “study of anthropology liberated my thinking from the narrow conceptual framework of biomedicine and helped me to rethink illness and healing from a rather different perspective.”59 First, as noted earlier, psychologists reminded biologists that, although all psychological processes emerge from brain reactions, perception, memory, thought, feeling, and action must be described with a psychological vocabulary. Some neurons are biologically prepared to process an elliptical boundary enclosing two horizontal, circular elements lying above a protuberance which, in turn, lies above a single opening. Humans call this pattern a face but this semantic category is not inherent in brain activity. Neither a face, number, time, or happiness is equivalent to a brain process. Rather each is a symbolic category that humans impose on events. The many attempts to predict a person’s subjective psychological state from his or her brain profile have revealed the indeterminacy in the relation between these two bodies of information. Although the administration of the male sex hormone testosterone altered blood pressure and blood cell counts, fewer than 10 percent of the men receiving the hormone reported any change in conscious mood or thoughts.60

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Context An appreciation of the significance of the species, or developmental stage of the agent, as well as the context of observation on the inferences extracted is a second social science victory. Until recently, many psychological concepts were naked predicates naming processes that were presumed to apply equally well to rats and humans, or infants and adults. The advocates of behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and later cognitive science were friendly to abstract functions, such as conditioned fear, oral stage, learning, and executive functions, as if each were a Platonic essence whose meaning remained unchanged across agents and settings. The conditioning mechanism that explained why a rat learned to strike a lever to receive food was applied to children learning new words; the attachment bond between an infant and its mother was presumed to be present in the love relation between married partners. Although this fondness for general processes has not been completely tamed, an increasing number of social scientists are recognizing that the characteristics of the agent and the detailed features of a procedure and setting affect the validity and meaning of every inference. A change in the smallest detail of a procedure often produces a distinctive outcome. For example, adults regard neutral faces as unpleasant when they are seen along with happy facial expressions, but they do not do so if there are no happy faces in the series.61 More than 90 percent of the reports on the brain’s reaction to human faces present photographs of still faces without a body or background, even though the initial brain response to a real face on a body in a setting differs from the reaction to a photograph. Whether four-year-olds treat a circular shaped cookie as “more similar” to a coin or to a square piece of chocolate depends on whether the cookie, coin, and chocolate are illustrated without a background context, or the three objects are part of an ecologically natural scene.62 The quality of a woman’s performance on tests of spatial reasoning is better when she is mentally

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manipulating human figures than meaningless blocks.63 Scores on tests of mathematical skills even vary with culture. After reading a brief essay stating that females were less proficient at mathematics than males, American women had more impaired performances than Swedish women because a stereotyped belief in inherent sex differences is stronger in the United States.64 The social context always limits the actions that are most likely to occur. The aggressive behavior Jane Goodall observed in the chimpanzees at the Gombe Reserve was exacerbated because each day her staff put out food for the animals in an area near the camp. As a result, baboons and chimpanzees came together in dense groups that do not usually form in the natural ecology of the forest. This unusual social situation provoked the exaggerated aggression.65 Chimps are not the only animals affected by the social context. Young male elephants display periodic surges in aggressive behavior, called musth, prompted by the secretion of testosterone that can last as long as six months if no adult males are present. But if an older male is introduced into a group of wild young males the duration of the musth episode is reduced and the bursts of aggression soon disappear.66 Youth from poor minority groups commit more aggression but are less likely to commit suicide if they live in large cities than in small towns. Body immobility and flight are two behaviors that rats display to signs of danger, such as the smell of fox feces in the air they are breathing. A pair of scientists who wanted to condition a state of fear to a particular location first placed rats in a distinctive compartment suffused with the smell, and later put the animals back in the compartment with the smell absent. The rats that had been exposed to the smell and tested in a single compartment showed no behavioral signs of fear, but the animals that had been exposed and tested in an apparatus consisting of two connected, but distinct, compartments did show the behavioral signs of fear. Simply changing the context from one to two compartments yielded evidence requiring different

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conclusions.67 The subtle variation in temperature, light, noise level, and form of handling of animals across different laboratories can produce different behaviors in genetically identical mice administered exactly the same procedures. It is not clear why members of Asian societies are more sensitive to the context of an observation than Europeans and North Americans. There is no single word for leader in Japanese because a person is a leader of a particular group and someone who was an effective leader with one group might be less effective with another. Japanese films are far more likely than Hollywood movies to contain many scenes in which the actors and actresses are just-discernable in a background context that is the dominant feature. Japanese judging the emotion of a particular person are more likely than Americans to be influenced by the emotions of the other people in the same context. Many human qualities that Americans and Europeans treat as “inside the individual,” such as intelligence, creativity, anxiety, honesty, happiness, or anger, are more properly viewed as “qualities tied to particular settings.” An adolescent is honest with a close friend but not with his teachers; creative with words but not numbers; anxious in school but not in an airplane. The Form of Representation The nature of the information being processed, or the solution required, is a third advance that bears some relation to the one just considered. I noted that the human mind contains three distinct forms of knowledge: perceptual schemata for events and feelings, semantic networks, and programs for motor actions. Each knowledge domain conforms to special principles governing its acquisition, manipulation, and display and recruits different brain circuits. Recognizing a cup and selecting an action toward it involve distinct circuits. Other contrasts include the difference between comprehending speech and speaking, or between perceiving a change in bodily feeling and

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interpreting it. The important point is that mental activity consists of a large number of unrelated processes and talents. Older adults are more likely to forget the names of friends than forget their voices or faces. Kurt Godel was perfectly logical when he was working on mathematical problems in his study at the Institute for Advanced Study, but he had his wife taste the food first when he was at home for he was certain that his food was being poisoned. As Beethoven approached his fiftieth birthday he was stone deaf, irrational in his interactions with his servants and sister-in-law, and unaware of a number of seriously paranoid beliefs. Yet music critics regard some of the music he wrote over the next few years as among his most magnificent compositions. The concept of “general intellectual capacity” or IQ is flawed because each person possesses a number of different abilities that are not highly correlated with each other and have different heritability coefficients.68 Thus, it is more accurate to describe a person’s talents on a number of competences. The suggestion that intellectual talents should be viewed as a profile of separate abilities is especially clear for memory, which involves at least four distinct processes: the conscious remembering of a fact, remembering the time and place of an earlier experience, unconscious recognition of a prior experience that cannot be consciously remembered, and the retrieval of an acquired motor habit. That is why Henry Roediger, a leading investigator in this domain, began a review of the concept of memory with, “For 120 years, cognitive psychologists have sought general laws of learning and memory. … none has stood the test of time.”69 If this specificity is true for memory it is probably true for all intellectual abilities. At least three independent processes are involved when humans, and presumably animals too, are learning which behaviors are most adaptive and individuals vary in their proficiency at each of them. Some adults are good at detecting the differential likelihood of each of a number of desired outcomes in a given situation, for example, appreciating the advantage of making a comment that might contribute

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to a discussion or impress others. Other individuals are better at detecting that a comment might provoke hostility and, therefore, it is best to remain quiet. Finally, people vary in the ability to alter an unsuccessful strategy, for example, to realize one has been talking too much and to become quiet. The variation in these three skills is influenced to some degree by three distinct neurochemical mechanisms.70 Put plainly, people vary in their urge to act, the ability to suppress an act, and the capacity to shift strategies when appropriate. These facts, and others, help to explain why Howard Gardner’s 1983 book, Frames of Mind received broad acclaim. However, the political climate in America aided the favorable reception of Gardner’s idea. Many Americans were bothered by the fact that more children of poor, minority families, often African American, had lower IQ scores than middle-class white children. Acceptance of a genetic interpretation of this observation threatened the egalitarian ethos of the majority; hence, they felt better when an expert told them that the idea of IQ was flawed and teachers should evaluate every child on a number of cognitive abilities that form a profile of talents. Conditioning The limits of conditioning is a fourth contribution. No one questions the profound influence of Pavlov’s experiments on the burgeoning of behaviorism and the discovery of the many environmental events that become conditioned stimuli for enduring behaviors. However, it is also true that humans and animals are born with a number of biologically prepared perceptual biases and behaviors that are not conditioned reactions. About ninety years ago Leonard Carmichael placed the larvae of frogs and salamanders in an anesthetic that prevented any motor reactions in the maturing larvae. Nonetheless, after being removed from the anesthetic the animals swam less than a half-hour later, at an age close to the time that normal larvae growing under natural conditions begin to move. Because the

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anesthetized larvae could not implement any muscle movements, the later display of coordinated swimming could not be attributed to prior conditioning.71 It is very difficult to condition a rat to avoid drinking a liquid that is followed by illness if the signal of the liquid’s toxicity is a distinct color, but easy to do so if the conditioned signal is a distinct taste. The universal phases in the development of children’s cognitive and emotional properties are dependent on lawful stages of brain maturation. Important changes occur in the middle of the first year, during the latter half of the second year, the interval between five and eight years, and at puberty. One-year-olds cannot experience guilt; fiveyear-olds cannot reason logically about hypothetical conditions that violate their experiences. Thus, it is not possible to teach anything to anyone at any time because each agent’s biology limits the ease or difficulty of acquiring a new property. Biological Variation The power of each person’s unique biology to create initial psychological biases, which the ancients recognized but behaviorists denied, is a fifth advance. Patterns of brain structure or neurochemistry, which can be inherited or induced by season of conception, maternal diet, or illness during the pregnancy, can produce temperamentally based tendencies that favor the intrusion of more frequent or more intense feelings which, in turn, lead to specific behavior.72 Israeli mothers with very high levels of oxytocin (a molecule that facilitates emotional bonding) during and right after their pregnancy touched, gazed, and talked more often to their one-month-old infants than mothers who had very low concentrations of this molecule.73 Children born with a temperament that rendered them especially vulnerable to a brief, but detectable, surge of uncomfortable feelings when they encountered an unfamiliar or unexpected event – a stranger, crowd, or uncommon animal – can become hypersensitive to all unfamiliar events,

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no matter how subtle. The repetition of an uncomfortable feeling following repeated exposures to unfamiliarity can change synapses in certain brain sites and enhance the person’s sensitivity to all discrepancies. Although particular genes are often proposed as the reasons for the variation in brain function and subsequent emotion or behavior, some variation is not primarily the result of genes. For example, fetuses conceived during the spring or fall months, when the hours of daylight are changing maximally, are exposed to decreasing or increasing levels of maternal melatonin during their prenatal development, as well as to varying amounts of daylight during the days immediately following birth. The first condition affects the development of the brain; the second entrains the newborn’s circadian clock to either a long or short period of light. As a result, children and adults in the Northern Hemisphere who were conceived during the spring and born during the winter months, December through February, or conceived in the early fall and born during the spring months, March through May, differ from others in personality traits, vulnerability to depression, and anatomical features.74 Maternal infection or severe stress during a pregnancy, which provokes the mother’s immune system to produce specific molecules (cytokines or antibodies), can disturb the developing brain of vulnerable embryos and lead to psychological problems later in life. Mothers who came down with the flu during the second trimester of their pregnancy had a slightly higher probability of having a child who later developed schizophrenia.75 Even the risk of developing the symptoms of autism was slightly greater in the children of mothers who experienced a severe hurricane or tropical storm when they were in the fifth or sixth month of their pregnancy, a time when the six layers of the cortex are differentiating, myelin is being laid down, and important neurotransmitters are emerging.76 There is even the possibility that the hormones secreted by each fetus in a male and female twin pair increase the male’s risk for developing anorexia later in life.77

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The populations of North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia were reproductively isolated for about 2,000 generations, until rail, ship, and plane travel made migration easier. It took only about 1,000 generations of isolation to evolve the domestic cat from the aggressive wildcat, or the dog from the wolf, and the tame species differ from the wild forms on many anatomical and physiological features.78 Reproductively isolated human groups differ from each other in many places in the genome, some of which contribute between 5 and 10 percent of the observed variation in temperamental biases. Africans differ from Caucasians and Asians in many sites on the X chromosome. Americans with a European-Caucasian pedigree differ from Asian Americans in at least 25 percent of the alleles that influence the activity level of neurotransmitters that affect mood and behavior.79 The promoter region of the gene for a molecule that modulates the level of serotonin in the synapse has two alleles defined by the length of a DNA string. Caucasian adults with the shorter string are more likely to possess a highly reactive amygdala and a vulnerability to more intense emotion if their life histories and current settings are stressful. A majority of Japanese and Chinese have the short allele; most Africans have the long one; Caucasians are divided between those with short and long alleles. The different genetic profiles of Chinese and Caucasians may help to explain why four-month old Chinese infants are calmer – they show less motor movement and less crying – than Caucasian infants when presented with unfamiliar visual and auditory stimulation.80 This behavioral difference seen during infancy may be related to the fact that more Chinese than Caucasian adults prefer a calm to an aroused state. The Chinese who use illicit drugs usually abuse opiates, which induce relaxation; Caucasians prefer cocaine and amphetamine, which generate higher states of arousal.81 Adults from Caucasian, Hispanic, and African pedigrees who report depressive moods usually have minimally variable heart rates but depressed Chinese adults are unlikely to display this trait.82

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However, the local environment and the culture, like potters shaping clays of varying malleability, sculpt each child’s temperamental biases into distinct patterns of personality traits. A boy born with a temperament that favored a fearless approach to novel, challenging situations could become a test pilot, trial lawyer, or criminal depending on his life circumstances. For example, young adolescent boys with high levels of the male sex hormone testosterone experimented with drugs or played truant only if the friends they had chosen engaged in these behaviors. If their friends did not engage in these risky actions their high levels of testosterone did not increase the probability of these behaviors.83 A boy born with a bias to avoid unfamiliar people and situations has a higher probability of choosing a vocation that will allow him to limit the likelihood of sudden, unexpected challenges, but could become a writer, computer programmer, librarian, forest ranger, or recluse. Ludwig Wittgenstein was probably born with this temperament, and his privileged family background, access to good schools, and special intellectual talents shaped an interest in the solitary life of the philosopher.84 A boy with the same temperament born into a poor, uneducated family living in an isolated rural area would have followed a different life itinerary. Thus, knowledge of an infant’s temperament is an insufficient basis for predicting the exact nature of the later personality profile. It is necessary to have some information on later experiences. Adults born with the short allele in the promoter region of the gene that affects the concentration of serotonin in the synapse were exposed to the eyes of several hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004. However, only those with this allele who also had been deprived of social support developed posttraumatic stress disorder. Adults possessing exactly the same allele who enjoyed social support did not develop these symptoms.85 Female monkeys with the short allele display submissive behavior if they occupy a subordinate rank but are aggressive if they enjoy a dominant rank.

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It should not be surprising that temperamental biases make a modest contribution to a chronically optimistic or pessimistic mood. About one-third of adults who were told that the injection of a drug would dull the pain of a stimulus about to be administered reported feeling less pain, even though they had received a placebo. These are the optimists. Those who fail to show the expected dulling of pain are the pessimists.86 John Calvin was a temperamental pessimist who felt continually anxious and melancholic. “Freedom from fear, from the torment and anxiety of every care, is the most desirable of all goods.”87 So, too, was Wittgenstein who, at age forty-four, wrote in his diary, “My unhappiness is so complex …. I have suffered much, but I am apparently incapable of learning from my life. I suffer still just as I did many years ago. I have not become any stronger or wiser.”84 A combination of pessimism and introversion even contributes to a more rapid decline in health among adults with the HIV virus; those who are optimistic and extraverted show a slower deterioration in health.88 Gender and Temperament Men and women vary in a select number of temperamental biases. Most women extract less pleasure than men from the high-risk activities of drag racing, high-stakes gambling, and sport parachuting. This gender difference might be influenced partly by variation in dopamine activity because dopamine activation of particular neurons contributes to the “high” that accompanies such recreations.89 Male brains, compared with those of females, contain more dopamine receptors that are available for activation, due partly to lower tonic levels of dopamine within the space surrounding the synapses. This difference implies that males will have a larger phasic increase in activation of dopamine-sensitive neurons following an exciting event, especially if it was unexpected. Hence, boys and men may experience a more intense “high” when they engage in high-risk activities. It is even

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possible that variation in brain chemistry can explain why a proportion of very young boys, but few girls, show a more intense interest in cars, trains, and other inanimate objects.90 Variation in the concentrations of oxytocin and vasopressin also contributes to some of the traits that distinguish men from women. Oxytocin activity in the brain, which is associated with affiliation and bonding in animals, is greater in females. When British adults were asked to rank a number of social categories in accord with their personal significance (e.g., gender, ethnicity, class, religion, parent, nationality), twice as many women as men ranked the role of parent, which involves nurturing others, as their most defining feature. The men, who were more concerned with their status, nominated their social class as most defining their identity.91 European and American men are more threatened by an act of sexual infidelity by the women with whom they have a relationship than by the woman’s diluted affection for them because the infidelity implies that they have lost their power to sexually gratify a woman. Women are more threatened by emotional infidelity because it implies that they have lost the capacity to retain the affection of their partner.92 The sex hormones, and appropriate receptors, affect the anatomy of the brain. Male fetuses secrete a large burst of androgen, females do not, and this leads to sex differences in brain organization. Males and females, humans as well as animals, differ in the size of many brain sites, including those that participate in spatial memory, control of emotion, rough-and-tumble play in juveniles, aggression, and of course sexual behavior. After puberty, differences in the levels of androgen and estrogen contribute to variation in many physical and psychological features.93 If Simone de Beauvoir had known these facts in 1949 she might not have written that the category woman (or man) is a social construction with no contribution from biology. Segments of the public have become more receptive to the nineteenth-century belief that males and females differ in traits with a biological foundation for there is an early trend to separate boys and girls in public

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schools: there were forty-nine sex-segregated schools in 2007. The return of this premise, a partial heir of the popularization of the concepts of sociobiology, has the unfortunate consequence of persuading the public that males cannot control their sexual and aggressive urges and perhaps should be punished lightly or forgiven for date rapes or sexual affairs with female clients in a therapeutic relationship. This is a dangerous notion that nineteenth-century students of human nature rejected because they understood that humans also possessed a will that was capable of controlling the expression of strong desire. Adult men with high levels of testosterone have deeper voices than other men94 due to differences in the secretion of male hormone during the fetal period as well as at puberty. The ratio of the length of the index to the ring finger, called the 2D:4D ratio, is a rough measure of the amount of male hormone secreted during the fetal period. Although only male fetuses secrete testosterone (in the testis), the adrenal glands of both sexes secrete a molecule similar to the male hormone. Males generally have a slightly smaller index than ring finger (average ratio hovering around 0.98); whereas, females tend to have more similar lengths for both fingers (average ratio of 0.99) About two-thirds of adult men but only about one-third of women have a smaller index than ring finger. The ratio of the two fingers is moderately heritable and correlates with a variety of physical and psychological qualities in children and adults.95 For example, females with a more feminine ratio are somewhat more likely to suffer from anxiety and depressive disorders and are at a slightly greater risk for cervical cancer. Adolescent females with a masculine ratio have their first menstrual period later than other girls do. Men with a feminine ratio are more likely to be gay, express a desire to be a woman, and report being less dominating and less sexually excitable than men with a masculine ratio. However, they possess some protection against the development of osteoarthritis.96 Adolescent males with a masculine ratio have a slightly greater risk of being hyperactive and inattentive and adult men with an extremely

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masculine ratio have a broader face and more prominent chin than men with a less masculine or feminine ratio. These facial features are more attractive to women, especially when they are secreting higher levels of estradiol during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.97 These facial features confer an advantage in elections because of the importance of political advertising on television by candidates whose views and voting record may not be well known. The male candidate for election to the U.S. Senate in 2004 who had a broader face and more prominent chin more often defeated his male rival because Americans tend to attribute greater “competence” to unfamiliar male faces with the former profile.98 George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who were elected president twice, have broader faces and more prominent chins than the average male. College students looking at faces of men and women with neutral facial expressions showed increased blood flow to the amygdala to faces that judges had rated earlier as low on “trustworthiness.” Apparently, humans have an automatic brain reaction to strangers whose facial features imply that they cannot be trusted.99 The important point, however, is that these biases do not determine a particular personality profile. Rather they limit the envelope of possible outcomes. The probability that a thousand infants born with a temperament that rendered their brains hypersensitive to unfamiliarity will become quiet, introverted adults who avoid crowds is relatively low. However, the probability that these children will not become extremely social, exuberant adults who relish high-risk recreations is much higher.44 The game of “20 Questions” provides an analogy. Thousands of possible answers are eliminated when a player knows that the secret object is an animal and not a vegetable or mineral, but any one of a large number of animals remains a possibly correct answer. The biography of T. S. Eliot suggests that he inherited a temperamental bias favoring a timid, anxious approach to the world. But a team of wise scientists trying to predict his adult vocation from his boyhood personality would be more accurate if they predicted

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that he would not be a professional soldier, trial lawyer, or investment banker than if they predicted he would become a writer. Preparation and selection are two overarching principles in all the sciences. The genome each species inherits prepares its members to adapt to a limited range of niches and renders it susceptible to a select number of mutations affecting the phenotype. A mutation that prolonged the duration of human gestation by two additional months would not be viable because the woman’s reproductive canal cannot deliver an infant that large. The brain of the human newborn is better prepared to process different textures than varied shapes; the right hemisphere is better prepared than the left to process subtle variations in melodies; and ten-month-old infants are better prepared to imitate a human adult than a stuffed animal modeling an action.100 The biology of the visual system prepares all humans to differentiate between the colors with longer wavelengths – red, orange, and yellow often called the warm colors – and those with shorter wavelengths – green, blue, and purple often called the cool colors. All persons with adequate color vision can discriminate among the wavelengths that in English are called red, yellow, green, and blue. However, cultures select the colors they choose to name with words. Only a minority of languages have specific terms for orange or distinct names for the light blue of the sky compared with the darker blue of lake water or blueberries. Infant monkeys are prepared to look longer at pictures of faces, humans or monkeys, than at photos of trains, cars, or houses. Thus, monkeys in a special setting in which they saw neither monkey nor human faces looked equally long at both types. However, after being exposed to either monkeys or humans when they were six months old the animals attended longer to the faces of the species they had experienced. Their environment selected the target that recruited prolonged attention. The race horse Seabiscuit was biologically prepared to pull a plough, run wild, or become a winning thoroughbred, but the latter outcome required a host of special conditions that

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were not present when this animal was born. A benign climate, large supplies of coal, and invention of the steam engine prepared England for industrialization ahead of other nations, but the society’s values and social structure were necessary for the actualization of this economic outcome. Humans are prepared by their biology to develop a conscious awareness of self by the third birthday. The values of the local society determine the balance between defining self primarily in terms of personal characteristics, such as education, wealth, or accomplishments, or with respect to one’s social roles and obligations to others. European societies chose the former; Asian cultures selected the latter. Judgments of beauty seem to conform to this principle. Although there are powerful cultural influences on the objects and events regarded as aesthetically satisfying, the brain is prepared to treat symmetrical arrays as more aesthetic. Not only did adults judge symmetrical, but meaningless, geometric designs as more beautiful than asymmetric ones, they also showed different patterns of blood flow to the designs judged as beautiful compared with those rated as less beautiful.101 There are even more and less aesthetic proportions of the human form. The length of the head and chest area in a number of classical and Renaissance sculptures hovered around a value of 62 percent of the total height of the statue. Adults who were unfamiliar with these sculptures and naïve to the writings of art critics were asked to look at photos of these statues along with photographs that had modified the body proportions in subtle ways. They displayed distinctive blood flow profiles to the sculptures that retained the artists’ original proportions and were judged as more aesthetic.102 Although the biology of the brain contributes to the probability that an artistic product will be regarded as aesthetically satisfying, experience and culture can abrogate this initial preparedness. Many visitors to art museums prefer Picasso’s cubist portraits of women to those of Titian and some fans of classical music would rather listen to the dissonant chords in a Webern symphony, which make infants

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frown, than the consonant melodies of Mozart. The brain prefers the quiet and predictable sounds of a small village to the noise and cacophony of a large city, but each year large numbers of villagers migrate to large cities. The human brain shares its power with the potency of the culture in which it developed. Early Experience Refutation of the popular belief held by nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychologists and psychoanalysts that the experiences of the early years established some traits that could not be changed is a sixth dividend of social science research. The Freudian speculation that abrupt weaning of an infant could produce a paranoid who thought he was Napoleon is now regarded as a bad joke. The tireless efforts of a small number of social scientists who studied lives developing over time have revealed that a determinism between infancy and adulthood was far too strong. The intellectual and behavioral profiles of eleven-year-old children who had spent a portion of their first three years in extremely depriving institutions in Romania, before being adopted by caring, educated, British families, represent the most recent affirmation of this claim. Although the infants who were adopted after six months of age were more impaired than those who left the institution earlier, the investigators concluded that, “A substantial proportion of children exposed to profoundly depriving institutionalized conditions do function normally at age 11.”103 This finding would have surprised most of Freud’s disciples. Although some novelists and historians writing during the last century exploited Freudian ideas in their narratives, few contemporary biographers would attribute Richard Cheney’s personality to the rearing practices of his mother during his first three years. Animal research provides a persuasive example of the powerful influences of later environments. I noted earlier

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that rat pups that had received a great deal of licking and grooming from their mothers were not only different from those who received less licking, but their offspring displayed unique behaviors, implying a heritable trait. The behavioral variation was due to an alteration in a specific nucleotide in a particular gene that affected the brain’s neurochemistry. However, when the rat pups were raised in enriched environments, rather than the usual austere laboratory cages, the differences in behavior between animals that had received high versus low amounts of licking and grooming vanished.104 If the post-infant environments can have such a profound effect on rats, it is reasonable to assume that the same conclusion holds for humans. It has proven difficult to predict the intellectual talents or personality traits of most adolescents or adults from the behavior or physiology they displayed during the first three years of life, as long as the children grew up in homes from the same social class. Almost 80 percent of a group of older adolescents with a criminal arrest record did not show obvious signs of psychiatric disorder when they were school-age children.105 I noted earlier that a child’s social class, which represents a continuing context of development, is a better predictor of the adult profile of intellectual and emotional traits than either the events of the first three years or the child’s genome.106 Linguistics The research of linguists represents a seventh source of pride among social scientists. Linguists have the advantage of a reasonable consensus on the significant questions to ask as they study the properties of the speech sounds, grammars, and vocabularies of the more than 6,000 known human languages. They have illuminated how children acquire language, the relation between thought and language, the influence of the social context on speech, and the possible evolutionary origins of language.

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One critical issue centers on the degree to which the abilities to perceive, comprehend, and to speak a language rest on more general competences exploited in several domains, or whether there is an additional, specialized set of talents that is unique to language. Although most individuals acquire language by hearing others speak and through use of their vocal apparatus to express words, deaf individuals who possess a sign language cannot perceive sounds and do not use their vocal anatomy to communicate ideas. This fact implies that at least four more critical talents are needed for communicating with others. They are the abilities to: (1) hold a sequence of ideas in working memory for at least 10 seconds, (2) think symbolically, (3) infer the mental state of others, and (4) master the grammatical rules specifying how to form words and arrange them in the correct order in sentences. The early human groups who tracked the movements of an animal they were hunting had to rely on a working memory capacity and had to infer what each member of their group might be thinking. Early humans who drew schematic animals on cave walls, sculpted women with large breasts, and made ornaments of jade or onyx between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago were displaying a symbolic capacity. Linguists believe that mastery of the syntax of a language represents a unique intellectual ability and often cite as support the fact that most speakers can understand sentences containing several clauses. For example, most speakers of English will infer the correct meaning of the sentence, “The boy who was wearing a baseball cap knew that the boy who had blonde hair wanted him to eat the last cookie.” A driver caught in a three-mile traffic jam in a familiar neighborhood also mentally manipulates a number of alternative routes he might take to escape from the line of cars. And a person constructing a radio from many small parts is exploiting a skill resembling the one speakers use when they arrange a series of words to communicate a meaningful thought. Although all languages build on a set of cognitive competences that are exploited in many domains of human

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functioning, linguists are trying to determine whether there are additional skills that are restricted to, or specialized for, understanding and expressing sentences. This possibility is reasonable because the ability to draw a variety of objects and people with fidelity, a skill that is compromised in my repertoire, does require a specialized set of talents that are unique to this domain. Hence, the majority opinion at the present time is that some additional cognitive capacities, unique to humans, are specialized for the understanding and expression of language. Because human languages are qualitatively different from the communication systems of apes and monkeys, most linguists agree that the structure of the human brain must restrict the number of grammars and sound sequences that can be realized. The fact that there are far less than 6,000 grammars across the world’s languages means that the brain must favor a limited number of ways to construct and to understand sentences. About three-fourths of human languages place the subject before the verb and the verb before the object. However, Japanese and Turkish usually place the verb at the end of a sentence, a few languages place the verb in the initial position, and about 2 percent of languages place the subject at the end of the sentence.107 Young children learning a language begin with three biases that seem to be universal. They assume initially that a word spoken in the presence of an object probably refers to the whole object rather than a part, names a category of similar objects rather than only a particular object, and each distinctive object category has only one name.108 The influence of the ecology or culture on the vocabulary of a language is another node of inquiry. When a domain has emotional salience for a society its members are apt to invent more than one term to name the variations in the domain. For example, sugar cane, coconuts, and yams are significant sources of food and barter in Polynesian societies, and one Polynesian language uses different words to name equal numbers of each class of objects.

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Because male and female are salient categories in all societies most languages have several words that differentiate types of men and women (e.g., man, guy, jock, brute, woman, dame, gal, bitch). All languages have words for about 60 core ideas. These include concepts for people, kinship relations, body parts, seeing, hearing, doing, thinking, feeling, eating, sleeping, wanting, the sun, moon, rain, plants, animals, the small numbers 1 and 2, when and where an event occurred, causality, and the categories good and bad. However, not all languages have distinct terms for the English concepts mind and personal agency. Although all linguists acknowledge that language serves communication, the importance of language for private thoughts that are not communicated remains a puzzle. Some thoughts, for example, recalling a sensuous hike in a Vermont forest in October or imagining the self walking across a rainbow, are not easily expressed in words. Moreover, one-year-olds without any language make a limited number of inferences that require some thought. Fourth, languages differ with respect to the number of terms that can name the separate properties of an event. The color words provide an example. English has many terms for colors that are independent of the objects with which they are normally associated. However, the color words in other languages include a reference to the object they modify: the blue of the sky or the green of grass. Only Western scientists would think it perfectly natural to show informants from varied cultures a paint chip of a particular color and ask them to name it. The members of some language communities are puzzled by this request because in their culture color names are restricted to particular objects. Weight is a property of every object, but few scientists would place a variety of amorphously shaped objects with different weights in the hands of blindfolded subjects and ask them to name the sensory experience. A fifth node of active inquiry asks whether language is a uniquely human ability or one with an origin in the gestures or vocalizations

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of apes. Although this remains unresolved, it is likely that the gestures of apes are a more relevant origin than their very limited set of vocal sounds. This question is closely related to a final controversy, which emerged during the last fifty years, that pits a large number of empiricists trying to figure out the grammar and vocabulary of a language by studying how the members of a group communicate against a smaller group of theorists who believe there is a set of universal rules that applies to sentence construction in all languages. Noam Chomsky, who promoted the latter view in 1957, argued that tedious analyses of what people say cannot reveal the fundamental features of syntax that he believes all languages share. Chomsky invented a set of rules, called a universal grammar, that represented his conception of the “ideal” linguistic competence.109 An early form of the theory stated that the mind stored elementary sentences, such as “The boy fed the dog.” Listeners hearing “The dog was fed by the boy” automatically transformed the elementary form into the one they heard in order to understand the communication. The image of a mind manipulating a small number of elementary grammatical forms to comprehend and produce an extraordinary variety of utterances resembles the strategy of chemists who combine a small number of elements to synthesize a very large number of compounds. The properties shared by all vertebrates is analogous to the claim that all languages share certain features. Although the external anatomy of rats, snakes, birds, and monkeys are different, all three species share a vertebral column, eyes, and a bilateral body symmetry. Analogously, Chomsky argues that, despite the extraordinary variation in the syntax of the sentences spoken across the world’s languages, all possess a set of features, called a universal grammar, that is the product of inherited brain structures unique to humans. This idea has the advantage of bringing linguistics into closer contact with psychology and neuroscience. One reason why Chomsky’s claim for a universal grammar remains controversial is that he made the ability to know whether a sentence was or was not grammatical, rather

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than the ability to speak correctly, the seminal feature of linguistic competence. This decision resembles replacing the ability to play tennis with a semantic understanding of how to play obtained by reading and watching others play. The authors of cookbooks are not always the best chefs. Although Chomsky initially ignored the importance of meaning in learning the syntax of a language, he has been forced by evidence to acknowledge the influence of semantics. A speaker must know the meanings of words in order to appreciate that “The dog raced past the barn fell” is grammatically incorrect but “The dog housed in the barn barked” is, even though both sentences honor the rules of English syntax. Furthermore, because Chomsky believed that language served thought he was reluctant to consider the possibility that some thoughts rested on schemata, rather than propositions. Hence, he assumed that the active form of the sentence “The hammer struck the crystal glass” had the exactly the same meaning as the passive form “The crystal glass was struck by the hammer.” However, the former sentence might bias some listeners to imagine the motion of the hammer, whereas the latter might evoke an image of a shattering glass. Under these conditions the two sentences do not have identical meanings. A final, controversial question centers on the origins of the world’s languages and the reasons for the changes that occurred in each over time. The British anthropologist David Anthony suggested that most of the languages spoken today in Europe originated in an area around the Black and Caspian seas around 7,000 years ago. When humans migrated, either southeast or northwest, after the wagon and the domestication of horses around 3500 BCE, this original proto-language split into two lines. One led to early Greek, Italic, and Celtic; the other to German and Slavic as a result of four types of changes in the original language, and by inference, in all languages. One change involved replacing one phoneme with another; for example the word for king was rex in Italic, rix in Celtic, and raj in Old Indic. A second

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alteration replaced the initial hard consonants k and g with the softer sounds s or sh so that kera became cera. The addition or deletion of a phoneme were two other changes. Modern speakers of English add the phoneme uh when they pronounce the word athlete, and “will not” was reduced to “won’t.” The fourth change involved generalizing a phoneme that originally had been restricted to a small number of words; for example, s became a common way to indicate the plural. It is estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of the words in a language undergo one or more of these changes every 1,000 years. Thus, after 5,000 years about one-half of the words in a language might have a different sound and the original speakers would not understand those speaking the later forms. The Germanic language that emerged around 200 CE would be unintelligible to speakers of Old Indic 2,000 years earlier, even though both were derived from the same Proto-Indo-European language that emerged 7,000 years ago. In less than 1,000 years the sentence, “Faeder ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama gehalgod,” from the Old English version of the Lord’s Prayer spoken around 1000 CE, became “Our Father, who art in heaven, blessed be Your name.” A final victory belongs to the anthropologists who contributed to a legitimization of the values, daily practices, and rituals of nonEuropean cultures by removing the undesirable connotations of words like savage, primitive, and inferior that nineteenth-century ethnographers had imposed. Contemporary anthropologists award dignity to all value systems. A good reason for this ethic, independent of any a priori philosophical defense, is the fact that populations in democratic, technological, ethnically diverse societies with extensive specialization of necessary functions have become interdependent. Plumbers, masons, electricians, appliance and automobile repair specialists, postal carriers, physicians, lawyers, bankers, janitors, refuse workers, government clerks, grocers, bus drivers, pilots, teachers, and professors need each other if daily life is to remain comfortable. It is adaptive, therefore, to minimize resentments among all citizens,

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no matter what their religious values, skin color, ethnic pedigree, or sexual preference. Social scientists have served their society by removing evaluative language from their observations of exotic peoples, and their writings, in turn, have contributed to our egalitarian ethos. The only possible cost of this ethical neutrality was a nontrivial loss of moral certainty among those who reflected on the anthropologists’ evidence. Infanticide, abandoning older relatives with serious illnesses, stoning a woman who violated a prohibition on adultery, circumcision of pubescent girls, polyandry, permissive preadolescent sexuality, and acts of ritual fellatio by young boys servicing older adolescents because the former believed they were born sterile and had to acquire semen to father a child, are some examples of behaviors found in particular human societies that bother some Americans. When famine, plague, and economic depression spread across Europe in the thirteenth century many poor parents abandoned or sold their young children, without being punished or branded as seriously immoral.110 Jean-Jacques Rousseau deposited five of his children in foundling homes because he thought this act was in their best interest. This practice had been common earlier. Clement of Alexandria, a third century theologian, worried that a man visiting a brothel might unwittingly have sexual relations with a daughter he had abandoned as an infant. If these practices were neither irrational oddities nor perversions, but legitimate, adaptive practices in their respective settings, it is hard to escape the implication that the values held by contemporary North Americans and Europeans cannot be regarded as superior, but rather as just another collection of ethical choices selected from a large set of equally reasonable alternatives. Acceptance of this perspective can dilute each person’s emotional commitment to a spouse, child, employer, government, or life style, leaving each individual with a measure of ambivalence over each day’s responsibilities and a gnawing uncertainty over the ethical code that must be honored. Chronic

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uncertainty over the moral imperatives individuals must maintain under all circumstances makes it difficult for many to use their daily actions or intentions as evidence that they are leading a virtuous life. As a result, many are forced to rely on external symbols, especially material possessions, number of friendships, and personal achievements, to decide whether the day’s assignments, or the conduct of a life, were “well done.” When personal or historical events erode a deep faith in all ideals, the emotion that had been attached to them is usually invested in the self. The difference between “making love” and “having sex” captures this contrast. Lest readers misunderstand, I declare here my unequivocal support for an egalitarian society that awards dignity and tolerance to all value systems as long as they do not promote maliciousness. But it is worth noting that most ancient civilizations that survived for many centuries were rigidly hierarchical, intolerant, nonegalitarian, and certain that some values were inherently superior. Even the American colonists assumed that some in their midst were inherently wiser, more talented, or more responsible than others and therefore were entitled to greater political power and privilege. The contemporary rebellion against any elite philosophy that celebrates a particular ethical code has many advantages in a diverse society. I hope it does not exact too serious a cost.

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Political science is a relatively recent addition to university departments, attracting scholars whose interests range from philosophical theorizing to surveys of public opinion. However, their shared aim is to understand the sources of, and constraints on, power relationships among institutions, social groups, and nation states, where power is defined as the ability to force or persuade others to accept beliefs or practice behaviors they would not otherwise adopt.1 The discipline contains three types of scholars. The largest group conceives its mission to be the conduct of ethically neutral empirical science. A second group, which also tries to avoid taking an ethical position, relies on the formal models of rational choice theory to describe power relationships. The members of both groups, who assume that their task is to discover how societies might create an optimal balance between each person’s liberty and dignity, resemble the Spanish Jews who during the Inquisition converted to Catholicism but behind closed doors and shuttered windows lit Sabbath candles. The third group remains loyal to the ethical concerns of ancient and Enlightenment philosophers because its members understand the impossibility of cleansing power relations of a moral evaluation. One cannot describe the Third Reich in ethically neutral language as “a society that chose to dominate one sector of its population in the service of restoring national confidence” in order to maintain the value neutral posture of the natural sciences. 168

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The rational choice scholars have been the target of the most strident criticism because the abstruse qualities of their assumptions are easy to detect. A popular definition of a rational decision asserts that it is the best means of gratifying a wish based on a conclusion derived from the gathering of an optimal amount of information. This abstract definition fails to stipulate the best means of gratifying a desire or the meaning of gathering an optimal amount of information. This definition of rational is so permissive it would be difficult for most persons to decide whether going to graduate school to study political science was more or less rational than taking a high-paying government job, or for a city council to decide whether building a new library was more rational than constructing a new high school. I noted earlier that one definition of a rational belief is an opinion that a majority in a collective regards as correct. The problem is that the members of a society do not always agree on the correctness of a belief. Most Americans hold three seminal beliefs about criminality. All individuals want acceptance and respect from others, wish to avoid the shame that follows arrest or accusation of a crime, and do not want to be confined in a prison. But many homeless men without job skills do not share these beliefs and, therefore, robbing a grocery store is not an irrational act. These marginalized adults care little about social acceptance and the food and warmth of a prison cell in winter are preferable to sleeping on the sidewalk. There is even less agreement across societies. Palestinian suicide bombers in the middle-east know they will die when they trigger the explosives on their bodies, but they regard the decision to kill themselves as rational because they know that they will be regarded as martyrs, their families will be celebrated, and they will enjoy the pleasures of Paradise. The distinguished political scientist Robert Keohane2 quotes from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to capture the unwarranted confidence of those who insist that rational choice theory brings

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clarity and understanding to the complexity of human decision making. Man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, As makes the angels weep.

The Persistence of Values The moral hollowness of research by political scientists who avoid assuming an ethical stance is one reason why so many social scientists and philosophers, who understood the impossibility of comprehending power relationships free of moral issues, praised John Rawls’s 1971 book, A Theory of Justice. Rawls, a philosopher, brought the ethical concepts of fairness, equality, justice, and concern for the disadvantaged back to a community of scholars hungry for ideas that were missing from ethically neutral inquiry. Rawls recognized that empirical truth has no special relation to what is ethically good or conducive to freedom.3 It is worth remembering that Plato had Socrates shame Callicles for declaring that everyone should be selfinterested by reminding him that each person’s truest self-interest was in doing what was good. To act otherwise was to infect the soul with a disease, and no rational person would choose illness over health. Seventeenth-century Europeans selected reason, not empathy, guilt, shame, or pride, as the property that distinguished humans from animals because they thought that reason was the most effective protection against the excessive aggression and sexuality that threatened the harmony of their societies. However, most persons suppress the urge to burn down the home of a stranger who has frustrated them because they want to regard the self as ethically praiseworthy. The first signs of a moral sense and some

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ability to regulate behavior appear before the third birthday, when the capacity for reason is still nascent. The absence of murder or robbery on most city streets is not explained by human reasoning capacities. The suicide bomber’s killing of innocent diners at a restaurant is a product of reason. Rawls’s theory rested on three propositions. First, justice, which was defined by minimal economic and status inequality rather than fair treatment in a court of law, should be a primary goal for all societies. Second, no one who either inherited or acquired a special talent was entitled to its benefits and those with a talent were obligated to share their gains with others. The third, seminal premise held that if no one knew his or her family’s status or wealth, and had to choose the social arrangement to live under, most would vote for a society with maximal equality of opportunity for all because in a good society citizens are free of envy.4 The empirically minded social scientists criticized Rawls because he cited no evidence to support his arguments and the three assumptions were inconsistent with select biological and psychological observations. Bertrand Russell offered an example of how easy it is to arrive at an invalid conclusion if one begins with a single false assumption: Assume 3 = 2. Subtract 1 from each side so that 2 = 1. The Pope and Russell are two entities. But because 2 = 1, the Pope and Russell are one individual. Therefore, Russell was the Pope.

Despite critiques by distinguished political scientists, Rawls’s book was translated into more than twenty-five languages because many intellectuals were eager for repair of the increasing economic inequality between the poor and the privileged and the political inequalities between the sexes and between minority and majority groups. I suspect that if Rawls had written the same treatise in 1776 few individuals would have celebrated its theses. Rawls’s timing was

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perfect, affirming the importance of the historical moment on the themes social scientists pursue and their audiences applaud. Because fairness is a component of every attempt by one group to impose its will on another, political scientists cannot escape the demand to announce their ethical preferences. And the moment they do, they violate a key premise of the natural sciences, for the ideas of liberty, dignity, justice, and fairness are irrelevant to the functions of atoms, genes, and brains. The universal human desire to regard the self as virtuous, which is missing from the mini-theories that rely only on a balance between self-interest and fear of punishment, is gratified, in part, by remaining loyal to the obligations of each person’s social categories. This motive helps explain a woman’s continued loyalty to her abusive, alcoholic husband, the acceptance of painful foot-binding by centuries of Chinese girls, and the votes of many working-class Evangelicals who acted against their economic interests when they cast their ballot for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. We can understand these behaviors only by noting that these individuals were trying to honor the values linked to their social categories. Yet a fair proportion of political scientists, not all, resist acknowledging the intrusion of normative elements into the questions they pose and the answers they seek. The receptivity to Rawls’s message was also helped by its anti-elitist sentiment. Rawls, who had once considered becoming a minister, played the role of “hit man” by challenging the political scientists who insisted that ethically neutral inquiry was possible. Immanuel Kant performed a similar function when he rejected John Locke’s restriction of all knowledge to sensory experience. Thomas Kuhn lifted the spirits of the discouraged social scientists when he suggested that paradigm shifts in the natural sciences meant that even physicists altered their version of truth. The wish to be treated with the respect awarded to natural scientists was so strong that many political scientists were willing to deny a seminal trait of the species they were studying. If evolutionary

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biologists could declare that physically weak members of a species must die and poorly adapted ones must vanish, it seemed perfectly reasonable for political scientists to write equally unsentimental sentences. Social scientists can remain ethically neutral by restricting their probes to the periphery of their territory, but they will not solve the most important problems if they disregard this biologically based moral sense that emerged when Homo sapiens evolved. Not all social scientists find an ethically neutral perspective troubling; some even reject the influences of history. Indeed, graduate students in political science, as in social science departments, are required to master statistics, but need not take any courses in history or the ethical premises of their culture or discipline.5 Some have argued that field studies and surveys should be replaced with laboratory experiments that manipulate the balance between self-interest and the demand to reciprocate a benevolent action of another.6 I noted earlier that one cannot understand either past or present differences between England and France by remaining indifferent to the longer tradition of egalitarianism in the former society. King John’s signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 gave the English nobles more freedom than their counterparts in France enjoyed. Comprehension of the current state of the lower castes in India requires knowledge of their origin and the recent economic and political changes in this new democracy.7 Nor can social scientists understand the unexpected rise in the activism of Muslim religious groups in Europe if they ignore the historical events that created dense urban centers of migrants whose feelings of disenfranchisement in their alien setting fueled a resistance to the secular values of modern, capitalist societies. The indifference to the history of a group or society because this information is difficult to ascertain with certainty is a serious problem in some, but not all, areas of political science. Although the pace of historical change is considerably slower in biology, a biologist given a thousand Petri dishes, each containing a colony of bacteria with a distinct genome, could not guess that, thousands of generations earlier, all of these

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bacteria had been members of a genetically homogeneous colony. Thus, social scientists who try to escape history because they do not wish to be classified as humanists who can never be certain of their inferences are fleeing from the places where the richest treasures are buried.

Economics Most economists also swear primary loyalty to one of three missions. One group analyzes quantitative evidence on the production of goods and services, consumption, employment, labor skills, wages, inflation, incomes, and capital investments and provides mathematical summaries of the data. A somewhat larger group advising the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, or the President’s Council of Economic Advisors uses the findings of the first to effect public policy. The third group, which at the moment dominates many leading departments of economics, consists of theorists who invent abstract mathematical models intended to explain past and present economic trends and to predict the future. However, these models have been likened to toys manufactured in a toy economy because they make unrealistic assumptions, and the bridge that connects these models with the facts of an economy is weak.8 Nonetheless, most economists are entitled to a degree of public gratitude for the analyses that facilitated new institutions and rules that reduced the probability of serious depressions, severe unemployment, and rampant inflation, and contributed to the robust economic health North Americans and Europeans had enjoyed for more than forty years until the economic crisis of 2007. However, economists held a less elite status at the end of the nineteenth century when their writings were regarded as heavily influenced by local politics and corporate pressures. Indeed, the leaders of large businesses often brought legal suits against economists who advocated a measure that frustrated their financial interests.9

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Because the most serious sources of discontent center on the dominant intellectual position of the formal theorists, and this book is concerned with the basic premises of the three cultures, the remainder of this section concentrates on their assumptions along with critiques by economists who suspect that the models have strayed too far from reality. In order to understand how the current state of affairs developed it is useful to begin with some history.

A Brief History Although economics emerged as a formal academic discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, European scholars had been writing economic treatises almost two centuries earlier. David Hume and Adam Smith, born during the second decade of the eighteenth century, are regarded as the parents of this new domain. It is more accurate to describe them as the first social philosophers who recognized that historical changes in the modes of production and material exchange within their society were exerting an important effect on individual actions, values, and motives. Adam Smith was responsive to his conscience for he worried about the abject state of the large number of working poor who were fearful, superstitious, and unable to improve their condition because of restrictive government regulations and excessive taxation. Smith thought that releasing every citizen from these restraints would raise everyone’s living standards, erode the forces maintaining a static relation between a person’s family pedigree and their adult status, and permit greater social mobility.10 John Rawls, who worried about the same problem, prescribed a different cure two-and-a-half centuries later. Adam Smith’s suggestion that everyone would benefit if each perosn pursued his economic self-interest would have disturbed the quiet reflections of Bacon, Descartes, or Montaigne because the Christian philosophy that dominated their communities several centuries earlier was inconsistent with the celebration of wealth accumulation

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through the competitive indulgence of self-interest. St. Augustine was perfectly clear when he named the lusts for sex, power, and money as the three principal evils. Albert Hirschman,11 in a classic book, suggested that Smith may have been influenced by Montesquieu’s 1748 essay arguing that a desire to make money might weaken the strength of the passions that lead to violence and carnality. This idea, which Spinoza had anticipated in 1677, fit well with the older Galenic notion that the changing balance among the body humors was the foundation of a person’s emotional profile. Freud borrowed the heart of Spinoza’s hypothesis when he wrote that creative work was a sublimation of the sexualized energy of the libido. However, Smith was too sophisticated to favor a hydraulic model of motivation, and had written earlier that vanity was the primary spur to ambition. Everyone, Smith assumed, wanted to be admired and honored by their neighbors. Cultures vary in the personal properties that earn this prize and wealth was becoming a popular way to attract community admiration in eighteenth-century England. Hence, economic self-interest seemed to be a proper strategy to promote. Smith was not ingenuous about the cost of this philosophy and speculated that the social dividends of competitive commercial activity were balanced by a loss of the martial courage needed in war, increased effeminacy, and a diluted intellectual curiosity. It is also relevant that, although Britain had enjoyed a prolonged interval of civil serenity during the Middle Ages, the rise in strife after 1400 led some scholars to suggest that a new ideology was needed to replace the religious piety that presumably had restrained excessive aggression and sexuality. A preoccupation with making money seemed to be a good substitute for the fear of purgatory because it should motivate citizens to curb their anger and lust in order to advance their economic interests. It is not a coincidence that Smith (who was a Scot), as well as Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill (who were English), lived in an

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increasingly secular society of small entrepreneurs who had replaced salvation as the prize for a virtuous life with small, but regular, bouts of personal happiness, and awarded merchants a more respected position in the society. These first economists replaced faith in God, hope for salvation, and charity toward those in need with faith in progress, hope of monetary gain, and reciprocal cooperation with others as the way to satisfy one’s desires.12 Both sets of beliefs are essentially value preferences, although Smith and his intellectual heirs may have thought they had discovered natural laws. The declaration that a failure to put self ’s interest first is irrational is neither an empirically proven fact nor a valid deduction from reasonable premises, but a historically contingent, ethical position that derives its appeal from the individualistic, competitive philosophy of the West that was supported by Darwinian theory, and more recently by the biologists who attribute “selfishness” to genes. The fact that capitalist economies have existed for only about 0.4 percent of the total time humans have occupied this planet suggests that, like 99 percent of all the species that have ever lived, this economic philosophy will eventually be replaced. Joseph Schumpeter, anticipating the rise in bureaucratic institutions and socialist governments, made this prediction in 1942 and would not have been surprised by the American Congress approving in 2008 a federal stake in our financial institutions.13 Three Questions The history of economics over the past 250 years motivates three seminal questions. The first two ask why a disproportionate number of the first students of economics lived in England or Scotland and why they composed their treatises during the eighteenth century. Human societies are curious about the essential properties of nature, the divine, and humanity. A society more concerned with the latter than with the first two ideas should have bred intellectuals likely to brood on the psychological states of the poor and the wealthy and wonder

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whether the unequal possession of land and specialized work skills, which appeared to be the causes of the psychological inequality, were malleable. England and Scotland in the middle of the eighteenth century were the most secular, individualistic, egalitarian regions in Europe. England was the first Christian state to pass a law, in 1689, that forbade punishment for failure to attend church.14 Furthermore, English nobles did not regard commercial activity as compromising their dignity, and the average citizen, who was more intensely identified with their nation than their counterparts in Holland and Italy, interpreted England’s economic growth as a sign of its superiority over its commercial competitors.15 King Charles II went so far as to call England’s merchants the nation’s only gentry. In addition, England had a benign climate, lots of coal, the first steam power for textile machines, and had granted considerable autonomy to its cities and academic institutions. China, also a well organized society, was less individualistic, had little respect for the entrepreneurial artisan and merchant, was subject to more frequent flood and drought, maintained central control over its institutions, and its peasant class was so large it was difficult to conceive of a social change that would alter this condition. Thus, England was a likely place to grow scholars motivated to probe the relation between the economy of a society and the state of its citizens. It may not be a coincidence that England and America were more receptive than other societies to Freud’s ideas at the turn of the last century. Psychoanalytic theory urged each individual to rebel against the conventional rules of the local community, throw off the yoke of repressed desires, and yield to wishes for more sensory pleasures. The Declaration of Independence celebrates the pursuit of personal happiness, not the vitality or integrity of one’s nation, town, guild, or religious group. Fraternity, one of the mottoes of the French revolution, awards significance to the collective. Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published the year of the signing of the Declaration of

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Independence, was received with such acclaim it was inevitable that some bright, ambitious twenty-year-olds looking for a career might follow Smith’s path. The fact that many did invites our third question: why did the next cohort decide that mathematics was the preferred analytic tool? After all, Adam Smith had relied on semantic forms, not equations. Once again, reflection on the historical context is helpful. Physics was unequivocally the discipline enjoying the highest respect, mathematics was its preferred language, and Isaac Newton was England’s intellectual saint. Hence, bright adults, such as David Ricardo, who had chosen this immature field a generation after Smith, should have been tempted to adopt the tools of the more respected domain in order to gain a status they had not yet earned and make economics synonymous with social physics. If biology had been the queen of the sciences in 1790, and Carolus Linnaeus the high priest, Ricardo might have selected the strategies and semantic narratives of the biologist. Most economists can be likened to the hunters I described earlier who are eager for a clean kill that can be mounted as a trophy for others to admire, rather than bird watchers hoping for a private moment when they catch a brief glimpse of a beautiful but rare object of nature. Nineteenth-century economists, mimicking the physics of the era, assumed, ingenuously, that the concepts of energy and equilibrium might be appropriate for economics and adopted the mathematics that physicists used to describe these ideas. Pre-Darwinian British biologists, who were equally admiring of physics, conflated the energy in a fire with the energy of body and brain and assumed that each person had a fixed amount of this resource. It followed that any energy used in sexual reproduction necessarily depleted the available reservoir. Masturbation therefore compromised the body’s ability to repair itself when ill, and females, who had to burn up considerable energy to make ova, placentas, and breast milk, had less available for intellectual work.16

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When quantum theory rejected Newtonian ideas and its mathematics, twentieth-century economists confessed publicly that they were no longer using physics as their model, although many continued to use variants of the same equations when they wrote about utility.17 When economists became dissatisfied with the ambiguity of the concept of utility because it was too psychological, Paul Samuelson replaced it with the notion of “revealed preference” inferred from aggregate data on actual consumption. The problem is that acts of consumption do not always reveal what people prefer because of realistic constraints on their true desires. Many poor adults prefer fresh croissants for breakfast but settle for day-old white bread.

The Economists’ Models Economists and psychologists are the most intellectually ambitious social scientists because both strive to explain broad areas of human variation. However, the two disciplines have divergent explanatory goals. Psychologists probe the joint effects of personal experience and biology on individual achievement, personality, and mental illness. Economists study the influence of institutions, technology, populations, and natural and human resources on aggregated indexes of wealth and productivity that are presumably correlated with the material comforts and health of the largest number. However, economists enjoy greater respect from governments and the public because they have the advantage of the consensual metric of money, which permits them to make reasonable predictions of the relations between the prices of goods and the balance between supply and demand. In addition, their reliance on mathematical models, which is not well understood by the public or their clients, has the advantage of persuading audiences that their conclusions have the certainty associated with equally obscure equations in physics. The authority of a physician’s prescription is enhanced when written in Latin.

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It is important, however, to differentiate between finding a mathematical description for a rich corpus of data and positing formal models based on a priori assumptions that either have not been validated, or are inconsistent with the evidence. The former strategy is the admirable goal of all scientists. Kepler, Newton, and Planck invented powerful equations that described reliable observations that could not be explained with the theories of the time. The Nobel economist Simon Kuznets,18 who also fit mathematical propositions to rich corpora of data, was suspicious of the validity of formal models. However, the economists who advocate formal models based on the debatable premise that individuals always try to maximize their economic self-interest by making rational decisions uninfluenced by the actions or economic position of others resemble string theorists because both models contain variables that either have not been measured or, at the moment, are not even measurable. Philip Mirowski,19 an economic historian, has argued that the invention of the computer and the prolonged Cold War motivated some twentieth-century economists to replace their traditional interest in the optimal allocation of scarce resources with the processing of information between competitors in a game-like setting. American generals hungered for a rational solution to the worrisome problem of a possible Soviet first strike and the Pentagon poured money into research that utilized models of games simulating the relation between the two superpowers. The economists were not troubled by the fact that the study of game-like situations in which one hypothetical agent processed information about another hypothetical agent was analogous to substituting the sixty minutes of Super Bowl play with a printout of the thoughts of the two coaches. Humans inherited the combination of an ability to recognize a number of alternative actions to cope with a challenge and an inability to tolerate the uncertainty this awareness generates. So we insist that there must be some ideology somewhere that rationalizes the best action and dilutes this uncomfortable state. A belief in gods or

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astrologers had been effective in the past. Economic theorists who rely on the formal models of game theories played this role for the generals, and continue to do so for corporate executives and portfolio managers, even though history, laboratory evidence, and personal experience affirm the presence of nonrational elements in all human decisions. Hence, it is reasonable to ask why so many economists refuse to accommodate to this truth. Their resistance reminds me of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder who cannot tolerate “not knowing” whether a storm will happen tomorrow. The economists who are troubled by this critique retreat occasionally and declare that a formal model does not have to represent what is actually happening in the economy and all the concepts do not have to be measured accurately. As long as the model appears to explain an economic fact, or predict a phenomenon better than chance, these economists are willing to defend its utility. However, physicists would be dissatisfied with this argument. The equations of quantum theory contain a mathematical concept, called the Higgs boson, that predicts experimental phenomena very well. Nonetheless, physicists persuaded European governments to spend more than 8 billion dollars to build the Hadron Collider so they could determine whether this hypothetical concept did indeed “exist” in nature. Natural scientists care deeply about the realistic nature of their models and economists should also care. Perhaps they should be reminded that Ptolemy’s model for the cosmos did as well as Newton’s in predicting many heavenly events, but this second-century model assumed that the sun revolved around the Earth. The economists who invent formal models mimic the physicists’ mathematical forms, but they fail to honor the more important demand that the models accommodate to the known facts. Although the formal mathematical models make economists appear similar to physicists, a mathematical equation purporting to describe a set of facts does not explain how or why the events occurred. Recall that the equation stating that the distance an object will fall is

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one-half the product of the force of gravity and the square of the time falling fails to explain the nature of the gravitational force. Second, the physicist’s equations do not specify the context or the exact nature of the outcome. The Newtonian equation f = ma (force equals the product of mass and acceleration) does not specify the masses or the objects the resulting force acts upon. The observed phenomena are different for a fist striking a table, a hammer hitting a glass, and a knife plunged into a body. A model with only three variables – the education of each parent and the family income – provides a good prediction of the future educational level, vocation, and income of the children in the family, but it does not explain why this is so. It does not tell us the relative importance of the parents’ behaviors, the children’s identification with their class, the quality of schools attended, or the values of peers in the neighborhood.20 Many economists want to eliminate each person’s psychology and his or her cognitive constructions of the concepts in their equations. Hence, they treat concepts like the expected utility of a preference in an objective mode, even though the subjective and objective indexes of this concept are not the same. The utility of food and clothing, which are necessary for life, differs from the utility of a cherrypaneled study that satisfies a desire for higher status. Remember, the elements in these models are symbols, not feelings. There are no conflicts, guilts, or lapses of consciousness in these models. For example, the models ignore the possibility that some individuals might feel that they are not entitled to an ascent in status because of their personal history or ethnicity. Some who grew up poor developed a strong anger at the rich and, therefore, becoming wealthy implied that one had become a member of the hated group. Still others restrain efforts to rise from a disadvantaged position because they do not want to be disloyal to the values of family and friends. These conflicts, which can block a persistent effort to make a great deal of money or ascend in status, are missing from the economists’ models.

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Readers unfamiliar with the writings of neoclassical economists may be surprised to learn that some regard the decision to have a child as no different from the decision to purchase a pet dog because both are acts of consumption motivated by the anticipation of future happiness. However, most mothers decide to have a child because they regard the experience as one of the obligations of being a woman, but that is not why one buys a dog. One economist estimated that a middle-income American family with two children will spend more than $300,000 over the first eighteen years of their lives.21 A couple who had invested that money at 5 percent for thirty-five years would have accumulated more than one-and-a-half million dollars. An economist who thought it was rational to compare the feeling of well-being generated by raising children with the feeling accompanying reflection on a large savings account should be asked if he prefers dinner or watching a foreign movie. The mass of a pile of ten quarters is a physical property whose value can be placed on a ratio scale. But the monetary value of the pile of coins is a symbolic property that has different utilities for different people. A pound of lead shot and a pound of feathers enclosed in identical cardboard boxes have exactly the same masses, but humans perceive the box of lead as heavier because of the different distributions of the weights of the two substances.22 Economists also rely on concepts whose meaning varies with the source of evidence. For example, the estimate of national income depends on whether consumer spending, tax statements, or the appreciation of houses, jewelry, and paintings is included in the index. Further, economists regard the way an income was earned as unimportant, whether the salary of a bank clerk, the fees of a surgeon, or the royalties paid to an actress in a pornographic film. They seem to ignore the fact that there are many ways to arrive at the same value. The number “4” can be the result of 2 + 2, 3 + 1, 2 × 2, 5 − 1, and the cube root of 64. Thus, Robert Lucas’s insistence that all economic theory should be mathematical in form is unusual among most biologists. Few biochemists or ecologists would make a similar

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declaration. All cognitive psychologists do not argue that computer programs simulating cognitive processes are the only legitimate bases for theory construction, even though some believe that the computer is still the best metaphor for mind.23 To rephrase Shakespeare, it appears that Robert Lucas doth protest too much. Many important discoveries in the natural sciences were unexpected empirical observations described with semantic or schematic forms, rather than formal models. Darwin’s evolutionary hypotheses, recognition of the helical structure of DNA, and the realization that some viruses, called retroviruses, can go from RNA to DNA are examples. None is described primarily with formal models whose abstract concepts aggregate diverse phenomena. The economists’ premise that mathematical tools invented to describe inanimate matter, or to explain a paradox in formal mathematics, should be applicable to economic decisions made under conditions created by history is just that – a premise based on faith, rather than on a persuasive argument or empirical evidence. Paul Samuelson advocated mathematical forms in his early, influential monograph on economic analysis because he had been influenced by an older Harvard physicist studying thermodynamics.24 The young Samuelson assumed that the success of mathematical formulations in explaining changes in physical energies should be equally powerful in accounting for economic decisions. He ignored the fact, noted earlier, that the physical concepts have fixed definitions that do not change with locale or time, whereas human preferences and expectations change over the course of a life and vary with historical era, culture, gender, ethnicity, and class. That is why a respected minority of economists, following John Maynard Keynes’s position almost a century ago, is not as confident in the utility of mathematical models as Samuelson or Lucas. Partha Dasgupta, who teaches economics at Keynes’s alma mater, Cambridge University, emphasized psychological concepts, such as trust, cooperation, and the values of a community, not formal models, in his primer on economics.25

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One reason for the increased popularity of mathematical descriptions of economic data after World War II was the decision by many twentieth-century governments to collect a great deal of statistical information on their nations and their economies. The availability of large corpora of data motivated mathematically talented scholars to invent equations that might account for the plethora of numbers, and by the 1970s economists began to favor formal models that rested on the canonical trio of greed, rationality, and equilibrium. It is worth noting that Chomsky’s formal syntactic model for linguistics, artificial intelligence models for reasoning, and mathematical models of brain functioning, which also made strong a priori assumptions, were written at about the same time because the introduction of computers allowed scholars who favored formal theories to simulate some of their phenomena. Unfortunately they, too, eventually had to acknowledge that their formal models did not fit the phenomena as well as they had hoped because they ignored metaphorical meanings and emotions. A number of economists, especially Europeans, have challenged the dominance of the formalists. Some, persuaded by the arguments of Kahneman and Tversky,26 questioned the usefulness of the predictions or explanations that were based on abstract models resting on questionable assumptions about the rationality of human choice that ignored the detailed features of the economy they were modeling or the local contexts in which agents made decisions. Jerry Fodor offered a particularly pessimistic evaluation when he wrote that our attempt to explain human cognitive processes with formal or computational models was “no farther advanced than we were in the darkest days of behaviorism.”27 Economists who study communication networks among investors, managers, and consumers provide an example of the unfortunate consequences of simplifying conditions that distort reality so that a formal mathematical model can be used. Economists who apply the most popular models for communication networks assume that the

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links between any two people are always of the same strength, and only one link can exist between any two individuals.28 Both assumptions violate what is known to be true. The strength of a twenty-year friendship between an investor and a portfolio manager who is his brother, compared with one between a new investor and the same manager who is a stranger, is not only stronger but, in addition, is composed of two different kinds of links: the roles of investor and sibling. Wasily Leontief, another Nobel laureate in economics, wrote more than twenty-five years ago that American departments of economics, which prefer to hire faculty with mathematical talents, resemble the Marine sergeants who maintain discipline on Parris Island.29 The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw told an interviewer that it was difficult to justify the millions of tax dollars spent on economic research utilizing mathematical models that were not leading to substantial progress.30 This sentiment is shared: “Too large a proportion of recent mathematical economics are mere concoctions as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the authors to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretensions and unhelpful symbols.”31 The price exacted by the clarity of the models is a loss of fidelity to the actual events.

Game Theory It took almost fifty years for the formal arguments in John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s game theory, which were viewed as irrelevant to economics when introduced in 1944, to attain a position of respect among economists. One reason is that the theory assumed that humans always try to maximize the same utility and have stable preferences that generalize across contexts. However, as Kahneman and Tversky32 demonstrated, humans consistently violate these assumptions. Most adults faced with a decision are usually riskaverse and prefer avoiding a loss to the possibility of a gain when both

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outcomes are equally probable. Moreover, most decisions are affected primarily by the relative gain or loss anticipated, rather than by the absolute amount that is gained or lost. That is, the receipt of two dollars is treated as superior to a gain of one dollar, but the difference between thirty and twenty-nine dollars is regarded as unimportant. Finally, human decisions are always affected by the specific details in the context in which a choice is made. Kahneman and Tversky administered the following two problems to adults. Problem 1: Imagine that you have decided to see a play and paid the admission price of $10 per ticket. As you enter the theatre, you discover that you have lost the ticket. The seat was not marked and the ticket cannot be recovered. Would you pay $10 for another ticket? Problem 2: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where admission is $10 per ticket. As you enter the theatre, you discover that you have lost a ten-dollar bill. Would you still pay $10 for a ticket for the play? Although the hypothetical individual in these problems suffers the same loss of $10 in both instances, only 46 percent of respondents given the first problem said they would pay $10 for another ticket, whereas 88 percent given the second problem said they would spend the money to buy the ticket. Recall that humans perceive a pound of lead as heavier than a pound of feathers. Some economists use a laboratory procedure called the ultimatum game which is played by two anonymous persons to learn about the urge to be fair in economic transactions. One player is assigned the role of proposer; the other is the responder. The proposer, who has been given a sum of money by the experimenter, has to decide how to divide the money between the two players. If the responder accepts the offer, each player receives the stated amount. But if the responder refuses the offer both players receive nothing. When this game is played in a laboratory setting the usual result is that proposers offer between 40 and 50 percent of the amount they were given and responders reject any offer less than 20 percent of that amount.

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Economists interpret this evidence as indicating that humans are sensitive to the fairness of a division of money.33 However, rather than acknowledge that this observation is limited to strangers acting in a game-like context exchanging small sums of money, they write as if it reflected a general law that held for all offers of money from a giver to a receiver. American taxpayers give the federal government money that will be dispensed to state officials and individuals in need of help. I suspect that few governors or victims of disaster would refuse whatever amount was offered , even if it were perceived as stingy. If an economist asked the National Science Foundation for $100,000 to fund a research project and was sent a check for only $5,000, it is unlikely he would return the money. Pairs of chimpanzees playing an ape version of the ultimatum game accept any offer of raisins a proposer offers.34 John Nash, the central figure in the movie A Beautiful Mind and a Nobel laureate in economics, invented a model that predicted the optimal strategy in a multi-player game. However, his model made four assumptions that are completely unrealistic: All players are (1) capable of evaluating their motives accurately, (2) possess equivalent bargaining skill, (3) have full knowledge of the preferences of the other players, and (4) cannot communicate with each other during the game. These requirements render each player similar to a deaf and mute robot playing a virtual reality game on a computer console. If Lao-Tzu had read the reports that used the ultimatum game or Nash model as ways to gain deep insight into human economic behavior he would have regarded them as perfect examples of what he meant when he wrote that cleverness resembles clumsiness. Leonid Hurwicz, one of the Nobel laureates in economics in 2007, had praised von Neumann and Morgenstern’s game theory when he was a younger scholar. The model assumes that players make their decisions under one of four conditions created by crossing the availability of information with the influence of chance. In the game of Monopoly all players have the same information available on the

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board, but chance is operative. In chess, too, the players have perfect information, but chance plays no role. Individuals playing “Matching Pennies” lack perfect information and chance does not operate. Finally, poker players must make decisions with both imperfect information and the influence of chance. The axioms of game theory are less able to predict behavior in games like poker compared with Monopoly, but these are the conditions most individuals face when they make a decision to buy a used car or old house, to send a deposit to an unknown firm for a holiday cruise, to leave one job to take another in a distant location, or to buy stock in a mutual fund. Despite the problems accompanying the imperative that economists restrict their explanations to those that can be modeled, Paul Krugman, a recent Nobel economist who also writes for the media, defended this limiting perspective in lectures given over a decade ago.35 Krugman acknowledged the disadvantages of ignoring important problems simply because they could not be modeled, but insisted that, by making simplifying assumptions, economists were able to detect significant causal conditions. This is not a silly defense. The behaviorists of the 1940s made advances by studying phenomena that could only be explained with the principles of conditioning theory. But the next cohort of psychologists recognized that this rigid attitude was frustrating those who wanted to study the interesting qualities of humans, especially language, reasoning, and memory. And so the cognitive revolution was born. There has to be a balance between studying the phenomena that are ripe for elegant measurement and formal models and those on the edge of the ice that promise seminal insights, even though they are not yet amenable to the concepts, procedures, or models that happen to dominate the Zeitgeist. The economists who refuse to abandon the logical beauty of their formal models should loosen up a bit and adopt a more tolerant perspective. Even John von Neumann, who was friendly to game theory, was aware of the danger of allowing mathematical formalisms to stray too far from the

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facts and degenerate into a disorganized mass of details. Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics, agreed. “The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to the power … if they are to imitate … modern physics and not its mere appearances, a mathematical economics must begin with a critical account of these quantitative notions.”36 The economists who refuse to question the validity of their equations in order to “look like” physicists resemble adolescents who aspired to play in the World Series but settled for being members of a group of weekend joggers. The Flaw in Equilibria Kenneth Boulding,37 who prefers the metaphor of evolution as a model for economic change, suggested that finding a state of equilibrium in an economy became the dominant ideology among Western economists because it was amenable to mathematical treatment. An equilibrium model establishes a particular, a priori, ideal goal to attain; hence, economists can know when their equations have arrived at a satisfying solution. An equilibrium model, for example, assumes that a combination of supply and demand, supplemented by governmental intervention when this mechanism fails, could produce optimal economic well-being for the largest number. There is no equally obvious goal in an evolutionary model of the economy, only continual cycles of change that mathematical models can explain after the fact but are less effective in predicting future changes in the economy. The history of economic theory is a narrative of sequential replacements of one set of mathematical models with another in order to deal with a new problem history had created. Thus, the historical sequence of different economic models can be likened to a 250-year-old brick colonial to which rooms constructed in novel architectural styles were added every 20 to 30 years.

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The exaggerated idealism of the equilibrium view ignores the effects of new ideas, novel technologies, wars, national catastrophes, the influx of new immigrants, or legislative and judicial decisions that alter the structure of an economy. Keynes’s prediction that imposing too heavy a burden of war reparations on Germany after World War I would lead to chaos, which was ignored even though it was correct, was based on wise intuitions about human conduct, not a mathematical model. A. W. Phillips gained fame fifty years ago by arguing, from economic data in England during the 1950s, that as unemployment increased inflation decreased; this function is the celebrated Phillips curve. But only fifteen years later, as a result of the unexpected oil crisis in the 1970s, the predicted relation between unemployment and inflation was invalidated because conditions had changed. America’s public schools have suffered a dramatic erosion in quality of teaching because talented women can now choose any occupation they desire and are not restricted to teaching and nursing. Although Alan Greenspan38 argued that the market is the best determinant of salaries in a capitalist economy, the political power of teacher unions blocks the efficient operation of this mechanism. The society desperately needs more qualified teachers of science and mathematics but is deprived of this resource because the unions insist that these teachers cannot be paid a higher salary than others. There is no union of computer programmers and the market mechanism works as predicted for this group.

Perception of Inequality Boulding prefers quality of life, rather than income per capita, as a criterion of economic progress. Quality of life, however, has two different components. One refers to material comforts, health, and longevity; the other, which is more deeply psychological and far more difficult to measure, refers to the psychological states of the members of a society. The models that contain the related concepts of utility,

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value, or preference (these are defined somewhat differently) fail to award significance to the fact that humans wish to satisfy two qualitatively distinct desires. Most people want more material comforts and better health, but also strive for affirmation of their virtue and dignity. The relative position of these two motives at any one time depends on the values and social conditions in the local community, especially those dictating how money is to be made, how much wealth a person should accumulate, and the preferred sources of gratification. Thus, economists should invent scales for these distinct preferences and not treat them as values that can be added. The economists who assume that material comforts have precedence over other goals when consumers make a choice have not read John Stuart Mill’s confession that a state of tranquil contemplation, not material goods, gave him maximal satisfaction. The feeling generated in individuals who believe they are deprived of the symbolic signs of status and dignity with respect to a self-selected comparison group is a seminal human state. The perception of psychological inequality usually provokes varied blends of envy and anger that disturb the serenity that consciousness seeks, and, on a few occasions, provokes crime or violent rebellion. Less frequent reactions include either a paralyzing passivity or an attempt to erase the taint through hard work and accomplishments that reverse the earlier implication of self ’s inferiority. The latter strategy is more likely if the person assumes that his or her compromised status as an adolescent was a product of chance, rather than an inherent personal defect. Why only some youth arrive at this important insight remains a mystery. John Rawls’s theory of justice exploited the fact that no child can pick his or her grandparents. The concept of social fitness, a complement to the biologists’ concept of inclusive fitness, is measured by the degree of power and privilege the individual and his or her family enjoy in a particular society. In developed nations this concept correlates with the wealth and education of the family of rearing, quality of schools attended,

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and possession of the intellectual skills these societies require. It is unlikely that the genes that contribute to inclusive fitness are identical to the alleles that contribute to social fitness. Class position always exerts an influence on the goods that are preferred. American adults who grew up in working class families are biased to make purchases that are similar to those of their friends, whereas middle-class adults more often select items that render them distinctive.39 A journalist who grew up in a working class home noted that loyalty to peers and fellow workers was a shared ethic among many blue collar laborers; many middle-class professionals regard their colleagues as rivals in a fierce competition for advancement.40 Advertising agencies are aware of this class difference. Their ads for automobiles in magazines read primarily by the working class emphasize the satisfaction of buying the same car bought by friends and, therefore, solidifying one’s membership in a social group. The ads addressed to middle-class consumers emphasize the sense of being different from the majority by owning a less common, more expensive product.39 For example, the ad in an upscale magazine for the Infiniti automobile reads, “Ordinary is: seeing behind you. Extraordinary is: seeing around you.” Although the world’s populations have enjoyed improved health and material comforts over the past three centuries, an equivalent reduction in the level of status inequality has not been realized. Indeed, the difference in economic advantage between individuals in the top, compared with the bottom, 25 percent in wealth may be larger today in most nations than it was before industrialization. This situation is not limited to North America and Europe. Israel’s dependence on an economy concentrated in sophisticated technology has marginalized a large number of Israelis whose low skill level prevents them from participating in this sector. Because the global economy forced Japanese executives to become more competitive, the lifetime job security that employees used to enjoy is evaporating. These changes imply that an evaluation of “progress” over the last 300 years

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requires choosing between the social fitness of the small proportion of privileged, about 15 to 20 percent of the world’s population, and the social fitness of the majority. The economists’ habit of awarding more importance to the absolute value for gross national product than to the magnitude of income inequality in a community is a potentially serious flaw in their inferences. Most humans are happy when they know they have more of a desired resource than a particular group of others or believe they are improving their psychological state. This stubborn fact can be captured in the laboratory. An area of the brain called the ventral striatum is usually activated when a person receives an unexpected reward. Pairs of adults lying in adjacent magnetic scanners estimating the number of dots on a screen received either the same or different payments for being correct. Activation of the ventral striatum was greatest when one member of the pair received a larger payment than his partner, independent of the absolute amount of payment.41 The critical determinant of activation was knowing that self received more than the other person. Income inequality is far greater in America than in Japan, Germany, France, England, and Sweden and is surpassed only by Brazil, Nepal, and China. About 20 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of America’s wealth. Three-quarters of the students at America’s top 146 colleges came from families whose wealth was in the top 25 percent of the population, compared with 3 percent who came from families in the lowest quartile.42 Extreme levels of economic inequality existed in America from 1816 to 1856 and between 1899 and 1916. Following a reduction in inequality that lasted for more than fifty years, it began to increase again after 1970 and in 2000, 10 percent of American families held about two-thirds of the nation’s total wealth.43 The historical changes in income distribution are due in large measure, but not completely, to changes in the nature of the economy created by new technologies that altered the profile of skills that a labor force had to possess.

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Economists usually measure inequality by computing a Gini coefficient based on the proportion of total national income shared by each of the five quintiles of the population. The Gini coefficient correlates highly with a simpler ratio; namely, the income earned by the top 5 percent divided by the income of those in the bottom 5 percent. When there is no inequality, the coefficient is zero and all families earn an equal share of the national income. However, when a small proportion of families earn a large proportion of the national income, the coefficient is larger, with maximal inequality represented by a coefficient of 1.0. The Gini coefficient for America in 2000 was 0.40; for Denmark it was only 0.22. The Americans whose accumulated wealth placed them in the top 20 percent of the population had a net worth of about $1.2 million, whereas the bottom 20 percent had a net worth of only $4,100. The current situation is dangerous because it has been accompanied by a serious reduction in upward social mobility, due in part to the failure of the public schools serving the children of economically compromised families. Economists are fond of a graph illustrating the rise in income and material comforts in England following the Industrial Revolution and suggest that when all nations enjoy high economic productivity the world will resemble the Garden of Eden. They ignore the real possibility that an unfettered capitalism that creates serious disparities in wealth, among or within societies, can generate a mood in the less advantaged that occasionally explodes in civic unrest (political assassinations, coups, and violence).44 Such a scenario occurred in China in the 1940s and is being replayed today as an entrepreneurial Chinese society moves toward a disparity between urban and rural regions rivaling the one that provoked the civil war that led to the Peoples Republic of China. Newton’s insight that for every physical reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction can apply to societies.

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In most societies there is a positive correlation among six properties: a participatory democracy, a minimally corrupted judiciary, citizen respect for the law, a free press, free public education through the twelfth grade, and economic growth. Many economists would like to think that the last factor is the major cause of the other five conditions. But it is easy to argue that combinations of the first five are usually the cause of higher national incomes. When an unrestrained capitalism dominated the American economy at the end of the nineteenth century, American voters elected representatives who corrected the imbalance in wealth. When the use of pesticides to improve farm profits threatened the safety of groundwater, the press disseminated the message in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Congress passed clean water and air legislation. Saudi Arabia enjoys enormous wealth because of its oil exports, but the ruling oligarchy has not promoted secular schooling for all children, democratic institutions, or an uncensored press. America in 1800 had democratic institutions, a reasonably impartial judiciary, and an uncensored press many years before it enjoyed the economic advances of the nineteenth century. Thus, on balance, it would seem that economic growth is usually the result of the first five factors rather than their cause. The economists’ assumption that economic growth is at the center of a historical sequence around which greater democracy, justice, and freedom orbit shares features with the pre-Copernican premise that the Earth was the center of a universe around which the sun moved.

Values The absence of consensus among North Americans and Europeans on a fundamental set of values, other than accumulated wealth, has the unfortunate consequence of allowing the economists’ cost–benefit analyses to become a primary guide for decisions affecting the entire

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society. This criterion appears to be rational, rather than sentimental, and can be quantified. Because economists can measure GDP more easily than the value coherence of a community, some have suggested that home ownership increases the unemployment rate because families are reluctant to move when their town loses jobs. The implication is that the ambience of a community is less significant than the unemployment rate. Each person making a decision must find a balance between sentimental criteria, which emphasize fairness, social bonds, and a feeling of roots in a town or city, and rational criteria that presumably increase income. Most decisions made by and about family members are sentimental; those involving strangers are more often designed to enhance self ’s status or economic position. Governments and businesses are threatened by the temptation to rely on any criterion that appears to be sentimental and cannot be defended rationally, even though these decision makers would be embarrassed if asked to define rationality. The need to be certain in a world that is essentially uncertain is forcing many societies to fit into a box that is too small to contain them. Because the therapeutic gains of combining drug treatment for depression with some form of psychotherapy were evident only for a small proportion of adolescents, investigators argued that it was not cost effective to prescribe the psychotherapeutic component of the treatment plan.45 This advice was based on the assumption that the likelihood that a few adolescents might gain from the combination of drugs and psychotherapy was less important, and harder to quantify, than the money that would be saved by eliminating the psychological component of treatment. If our society applied a similar cost–benefit logic to all decisions, which it does not, we would not permit insurance companies or Medicare to pay for brain surgery on a malignant tumor on anyone older than eighty years and would not use taxes to pay tuitions of $50,000 or more to residential institutions housing severely brain damaged children who will make no contribution to

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society. The public supports these payments because of sentimental, not rational, considerations. The impossibility of relying on a cost–benefit rationale for many outcomes influencing the human condition is particularly clear if we ask, “What is the monetary value of a human life?” When the United States Air Force killed a number of individuals in 1999, after bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, our government paid about $150,000 for each victim. But when a United States gunship strafed a village in Afghanistan in 2003, killing sixty individuals, the Karzai regime paid only $200 for each victim. And when an American marine jet struck an aerial tramway in 1998, killing a group of Italians, the Congress awarded about 2 million dollars to the family of each victim. The piece de resistance is contained in the report of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which valued an American at fifteen times the monetary value of a Bangladeshi.46 The proportion of GDP America spent on health increased by 300 percent, from 5 to 15 percent, between 1958 and 2000. However, the gain in longevity was only about 14 percent, from sixty-eight to seventy-seven years. Hence, each additional year of life after age sixty-eight cost about 100 billion dollars. There is no rational way to decide whether this was a reasonable cost–benefit tradeoff. One might just as well ask if it is more rational to wash one’s hands, have a good night’s sleep, or eat a fine dinner. There is no commensurability between the metric for money expended and the psychological state accompanying an extra year of life. Only a confused mind would think it possible to resolve this conundrum by an appeal to reason. The eight eminent economists attending a meeting in Copenhagen in 2004 who were asked what problems they would attack first if they had access to 50 billion dollars did not award high priority to slowing climate change because their formal analyses indicated that such efforts were not cost effective.25 The same issue was discussed by a panel at the 2008 meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations that many leading economists attend. Although British economists were

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friendly to including our ethical responsibility to future generations when discussing global warming, most of the American academics refused to add this element to the argument, insisting that only market forces were relevant. The fear of letting any sentimental or ethical value intrude into the “rational” advice given to legislatures and corporate boards is crucifying the world’s societies on a cross of gold. The actors in industrialized societies seem to be unwilling to question their assumptions, despite potential threats to their well-being and that of future generations. There is an old joke about a priest in a small town located on a river that was overflowing after four days of rain who was warned by the mayor that he should leave his church to seek shelter. The priest replied that he had never faltered in his faith in God and was certain that God would not let him drown. Two days later, with the rain still falling, the mayor came by in a rowboat to ask the priest to come with him to safe ground. The priest repeated his earlier rationale for staying. When the rain continued for another day, forcing the priest to seek safety by clinging to the steeple, the mayor returned in a helicopter to tell the cleric this was his last chance for survival. He refused again and drowned that evening. The priest was angry when he arrived in heaven and asked for an audience with God. When the request was granted he complained that he had always been faithful to God and His imperatives and did not understand why his life was taken. After a brief pause, God explained, “I gave you three chances.” Signs of Change Because the economists’ premises are often violated by the facts, a few younger theorists are including a person’s values as an element in the utility function. For example, most people prefer to receive a $500 bonus over a $500 refund from the Internal Revenue Service because the former has the additional gratification of implying the employer’s favorable attitude. Economists loyal to rational choice models are

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usually concerned only with the outcome of a decision; that is, the fact that the gain of $500 was the same in both instances. Fortunately, some scholars differentiate between the pleasure of “pure altruism,” knowing one’s taxes support services for the poor, and “warm glow” altruism, which is the feeling associated with giving personal funds to someone in need. Most people feel happy when they give a gift to another.47 However, including ethical preferences in the economists’ models raises other problems. First, individuals in the same society do not share the same values. A survey of the attitudes of Europeans from twenty-two countries varying in economic productivity revealed clear differences in attitudes toward religion, abortion, immigration, and equality between the sexes. Moreover, within each country, years of education correlated with more secular and egalitarian views, and the richer the country, the greater the effect of education on the liberality of the attitudes.48 More important, no one freely chooses his or her deepest moral standards. These beliefs, and their associated emotions, are usually established early in life and are neither fully conscious, nor easily discarded, even if the person wished to do so. Scientists had assumed that people preferred sweet-tasting foods because of the pleasant, conscious sensory state they created. However, Ivan de Araujo and colleagues discovered that hungry mice that had been genetically altered so they could not detect sweet tastes nonetheless preferred drinking sweet liquid over plain water because the calories in the former produced a physiological reaction resembling the one generated by sweet tastes. Hence the consequences of a desirable event can operate beneath consciousness. Because most individuals are not always aware of why they honor some of their moral beliefs they cannot be regarded as free agents who choose certain actions. Therefore a rational choice model is inappropriate. Moreover, many choices made in conformity to a moral code are not the ones the person would have preferred to have made. The decision to postpone

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a holiday plane trip because it would add to the carbon dioxide burden in the atmosphere is one example. Scientists belonging to the Ecological Society of America are being advised by their leadership to avoid attending scientific meetings they judge to be less relevant, even though they would have enjoyed the trip. Thus, individuals must find a balance between two different goals; one promises material satisfactions and a long life; the other is the feeling that accompanies a sense of virtue for remaining loyal to one’s ethical code. Economists who ignore this distinction assume there is only one continuous utility or preference function. This error, like the proverbial mixing of apples and oranges, resembles the mistake made by the psychologists of the last century who assumed a single dimension of arousal independent of the different origins of this state. Contemporary biologists now recognize the importance of distinguishing between cancers with a strong hereditary bias, which usually appear before age fifty, and tumors emerging later in life resulting from accumulated changes in genes that are more often a function of exposure to carcinogens and mutations that are the inevitable accompaniment of aging. Economists would profit from adopting the biologists’ sensitivity to origins when they talk about utility.

Happiness Some younger economists who recognize these problems are replacing income and GDP as the primary measure of the health of an economy in developed nations, with the more slippery concept of “subjective happiness.” There are at least two problems with this new criterion. First, assessments of subjective happiness are far less stable than income and are affected by age, weather, illness, social class, equity between the sexes, the time interval chosen as referent when a person compares past and present moods, the specific properties selected for the comparison, and the degree of status inequality in the society. A woman asked to judge her happiness requires a comparison

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moment. Should she use her feeling on the prior day, month, year, or the average level of happiness during her childhood years as the basis for a comparison of past with present?49 A person could use her feeling tone, the degree to which she was meeting her obligations to others, financial security, or status in society when making a happiness judgment. Apparently, most individuals rely on their current life circumstances because, across many societies, the average level of subjective happiness is lowest during the fourth and fifth decades, when job stress, worry over supporting a family of growing children, and coming to terms with frustrated adolescent dreams are maximal. Reports of a depressed mood are also high during this interval. Every report of happiness is penetrated with ambiguity if there is no specification of the age, gender, and social class of the respondent and the reason for the judgment. There is not even agreement on the meaning of happiness among those living in similar societies. Swedish mothers believe that a happy child laughs frequently; Finnish mothers require the child to be satisfied with his or her character traits before being entitled to feel happy. Laughter is insufficient.50 A second, equally serious problem is that the relation between income and happiness, across societies, is not linear. Among citizens who have very low or moderately high incomes there is no relation between GDP and the answer given to the embarrassingly simple question: “Today, taking all things together, are you very happy, quite happy, or not happy?” The small segment of the population experiencing a rise in income is most likely to report a high level of happiness. Adam Smith should be smiling, for he anticipated Kahneman and Tversky32 by more than 200 years when he suggested that people are happiest when they or their society are improving, and are less happy when there is stasis. Most individuals experience increased secretion of the neurotransmitter dopamine when they anticipate a holiday, a raise in salary, or a promotion, and the brain state that accompanies this chemical event contributes to a happy mood.51

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The results of a Gallup poll of 130 countries are not easily interpreted if economic status is supposed to be closely tied to happiness. Although the United States, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe had the highest average happiness values, so did Mexico and Brazil, which have lower mean incomes. The happiness values for China, which is experiencing a dramatic surge in productivity but serious inequality of incomes, were among the lowest, equal to those of Peru, Zimbabwe, and Nepal. The joint contribution of wealth and minimal inequality to reports of happiness was revealed in a survey of 15,000 Europeans from 16 countries. The two nations with the highest average satisfaction – Denmark and Sweden – have high GDP together with minimal inequality (small gini coefficients). The two countries with the lowest happiness values – Greece and Portugal – have a smaller GDP combined with much greater inequality.52 More than 118,000 respondents from 96 countries, many outside Europe, were asked: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days”? Those enjoying the highest incomes said they were moderately satisfied; whereas, the most satisfied adults had lower incomes but more stable social relationships.53 When humans have sufficient food and shelter, there is only a modest relation between income and happiness, in part because the judgment is rarely based on absolute wealth, but on a comparison of self ’s resources with those of others.

Problems with the Economists’ Models The major problem with the economists’ models can be stated succinctly. Economists seek to understand and predict the relations between a large number of causal conditions and a small number of outcomes. The former include available capital, natural resources, new ideas and their resulting technologies, transportation, communication, labor force skills, climate, wars, disease, population changes, government restraints, and always the culture’s values. The

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primary outcomes are prices, family income, GDP, and less often the proportion of dependent poor and degree of income inequality. However, the relations between the causal forces, considered as a set, and any outcome (as well as the relations within the causes and outcomes) change across historical eras and vary across societies. Remember the invalidation of the Phillips curve during the oil crisis. The depression of the 1930s, the availability of computers, and the increased productivity in China and India, are examples of recent events that altered economic conditions and required a new model or a revised version of an old one. Most formal models contain open variables, called parameters, whose exact values depend on conditions in a local economy. Thus, the values assigned to these variables in a model usually apply to a particular economy in a particular society at a particular time. Eight-word sentences with three open slots that can be filled with any word can assume many different meanings. The evidence on the incidence of varied cancers across the life span in many nations is more accurate than the information economists possess. Nonetheless, a cancer expert concluded that because the mathematical models for cancer have too many open variables different models fit the evidence equally well. “The limited role of mathematics … in much of biology follows from a fatal attraction to fitting complex models.”54 The economies of England, France, and Germany leapt ahead of China and Japan after the fourteenth century, but it is difficult to quantify the separate contributions of a more benign climate, the Protestant reformation, technological advances, the autonomy of institutions, a challenging posture toward authority, and a celebration of private states of pleasure to this historical fact. If any one of these six conditions were absent the historical sequence might have been different. Thus, when the society, historical era, or both change a formal model that had been successful often fails. The proportion of poor families in nineteenth-century America was much less than the proportion in China, where peasants

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represented about 90 percent of the population. As a result, it was easier for Americans to regard the accumulation of wealth as a primary goal that seemed attainable. The Chinese chose accumulation of obligations of others to the self, achieved through acts of kindness and cooperation, as a primary goal. It is possible that the difference in the salience of an ethic of cooperation between Americans and Chinese is due, in part, to this demographic fact. The historical changes in the United States during the past century, which include a sharp decline in the number living in villages or small towns (from 50 percent in 1900 to 2 percent in 2000), a global information technology, plane travel, worldwide financial markets, oil-rich countries purchasing United States Treasury bonds, and a large number of technically trained adults have produced a unique economic arrangement. Because the number of connections between banks and financial institutions has increased more than the number of such institutions during the past fifty years, novel economic structures have formed. If these new structures are governed by different rules the models that worked well in 1950 will be less appropriate today. A concrete example is seen in the current volatility in the stock market and the credit crunch as a result of banks and investment firms selling novel securities comprised of parts of many risky mortgage loans to low income buyers. This scenario would have been less likely 150 years ago when the local independent bank was the usual source of funds for purchasing homes and there were no national banks or hedge funds that could buy these mortgages, package them together, and tempt lenders and investors to believe that the risk of default was minimal. It is a sad, some might say inexcusable, fact that many economists who were advisors to banks and hedge funds did not completely understand the new form of security being sold to investors who had an even murkier understanding. As a result, very few economists predicted the serious economic consequences that developed after May 2007, despite the fact that they were aware of some features that should have raised a red flag. These included an excess of global

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liquid capital, high government debt, an imbalance in trade with other nations, low interest rates, investors seeking maximal interest with apparent risk, permissive credit practices, and the complex relations among global financial institutions. Thus, the crisis of 2007– 2008, like three previous economic crises in America over the past four decades, is analogous to an earthquake that our wisest experts were unable to predict. This failure of economic models compares unfavorably with the ability of astrophysicists to predict exactly when the next eclipse of the sun will occur. To repeat, a serious problem with the economists’ models is that they contain too many open, or arbitrary, parameters whose values vary with local conditions. When Freeman Dyson was a young theoretical physicist he brought Enrico Fermi a set of calculations he believed explained Fermi’s empirical measurements of the scatter of mesons by protons. When Fermi asked how many arbitrary parameters Dyson had used, the younger man answered that his equations had four open variables, to which Fermi replied, “Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters, I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”55 A technical paper in a high-prestige economics journal illustrates the problem. An economist working for the International Monetary Fund in Washington analyzed the changing relation between prices and wages to variation in demand for goods in twelve countries over a forty-year interval. However, her concepts were abstract aggregates; for example, the average consumer price index for a diverse list of goods and industrial outputs, and the countries varied with in the existence of institutions that modulate prices, wages, and interest rates. Thus, it is not surprising that the weights assigned to the concepts in the equations varied with the country, and the equations did not provide equally valid explanations across all of the communities.56 It would be wonderful if the phenomena studied by economists conformed to the simplicity of Newton’s equation f = ma, which is valid whether the mass is an apple falling from a tree, a car hitting

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a telephone pole, or an asteroid striking the Earth. Unfortunately, there are no equally powerful equations in any of the social sciences because there are important modulating processes within societies and individuals that modulate societal, psychological, and biological events when they exceed certain values. The relations among social, psychological, and biological phenomena are extraordinarily complex and most of the economists’ models strip away so much of the complexity they become inappropriate for the phenomena they are trying to explain. Rather than trust a psychologist’s opinion of the validity of this skeptical claim, listen to a distinguished European economic theorist who devoted many years to a deep analysis of this discipline. “Economic theory, as it has evolved over the last three-hundred years, consists of pieces of pure logic, often expressible in the form of mathematics. The notion that these pieces … are supposed to be a representation … of economic reality is patently absurd …. The ultimate test of cumulative progress … is practical applicability and usefulness. A considerable part of recent theory has not passed this test yet; it is still an investment for the future.”13 All the social sciences, including economics, are in an early phase of growth, still gathering a corpus of facts that specify local conditions and the range of values for which any equation is valid. A biologist who, mimicking Newton, invented an equation stating that the aggregate health of a nation was a computable function based on the proportion of the population that had been vaccinated against common diseases and drank chlorinated water, the total amount of money spent on medical care, and the percentage of personal income spent on purchasing foods with high protein content would be satirized by colleagues. Such an equation might have some applicability in Sudan but would not work in North America or Europe because these countries have a large aging population beginning to suffer from the diseases of old age, even though a majority were vaccinated, drank potable water, saw their doctor regularly, and ate a lot of protein.

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The economists’ indifference to the specific details of an economy, which frustrates policy makers, is captured by a joke attributed to Paul Volcker, a former head of the Federal Reserve. A squirrel who liked fish went to a wise owl for advice. The owl told the squirrel to imagine that he was a kingfisher. The squirrel scampered up a tree, tried to implement the advice, but failed. So he returned to the owl and complained that the suggestion did not work. The owl replied, with some irritation, that the squirrel had come to him with a problem and he gave him a sound policy suggestion; the rest was operational detail. An old Jewish joke contains the same message. The rabbi of Krakow interrupted his praying to tell the congregation that moments earlier he had a vision that the rabbi of Warsaw had just died. The congregation was duly impressed with their rabbi’s extraordinary vision. Several weeks later some residents of Krakow visiting Warsaw saw that the rabbi there was very much alive. After they returned home and told their friends this fact, many began to snicker about their rabbi’s inaccurate prediction. But a few friends loyal to the Krakow rabbi came to his defense by noting, “His prophecy may have been wrong, but wasn’t it a marvelous vision”? Unfortunately, most economics textbooks continue to assert, as if it were a basic empirical truth rather than an unproven assumption, that individuals make rational economic choices, uninfluenced by the behavior or economic position of others, based on the multiplicative product of their expectation of a particular outcome and the subjective value of that outcome. These two assumptions make it easier to construct formal mathematical models, even though consumers are influenced by the preferences of others, are not always rational, and, as noted, vary in the experiences they desire and their expectations of satisfying them.26 Simply having an obese person as a close friend increased the probability that an individual would consume more food and become obese.57 Because economists do not have sensitive methods to measure either the variation in desired goals, or expectations of attaining

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them, they are tempted to disregard the less rational, emotional, and ethical influences on economic choice. As a result, they are unable to predict, with a high level of certainty, what a particular group will do before they have done it. The economists’ understanding resembles the position of a biologist recording which of two separate food sources each of a large number of ants approaches. After the first ant had chosen one source all succeeding ants selected the same place until an unpredictable moment when the next ant, for no discernible reason, chose to go to the other source of food.58 Role of History Despite strong denials, historical conditions and cultural values have as profound an influence on the questions economists ask and the answers they provide as they do for sociologists. When eighteenthcentury England had many small entrepreneurs Adam Smith urged a laissez-faire strategy of free markets. After industrialization had created large, unfettered corporations and an exploited labor force living under harsh conditions, economists urged more governmental intervention. When the external constraints proved to be excessive, and the centralized economies of the Soviet Union and China were failing, economists like Milton Friedman advised a return to a freer market. The moral is obvious: the policy implications of any model, like the owl’s advice to the squirrel, depend on the details on the ground. That is why economists are continually forced to invent new models to keep up with the historical changes in the goods, labor force, technology, and value system of the society. Philosophers detect historical alterations in the meaning of a popular semantic concept; economists detect changes in social conditions that affect the economy of a community. Economists should take historians and biologists, not physicists, as the models to emulate. There is not one example of a biologist making a major contribution to the understanding of a phenomenon

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who did not gather or have access to a rich corpus of evidence. The neuroscientist Charles Gross noted, “the great theoreticians in biology were above all empiricists who steeped their working days and nights in observing, collecting, experimenting.”23 Most humans have to find a balance among the urges to avoid criticism from family, neighbors, and friends; seek the approval of others; attain wealth and a higher status; and remain loyal to the obligations linked to their social categories and moral standards. Each culture determines the relative strengths of each of these wishes. Some hierarchies are conducive and others are less favorable to a capitalist economy. Because early Americans valued personal happiness over the integrity of their collective, an ascent in status attained through the wealth that work promised took precedence. The Boston minister Cotton Mather told his congregations in the early 1700s that each person’s first obligation was not to pray, but to become skilled at some trade. “If the Lord Jesus Christ might find thee in thy storehouse, in thy shop, in thy ship, or in thy field, or where thy business lies, who knows what blessings He might bestow upon thee?”15 The meaning of heretic changed over several centuries from one who was not a practicing Christian to one who was poor and unskilled. After Americans adopted a social Darwinian view of society, successful entrepreneurs claimed that they were biologically more fit than the less successful and, therefore, the division between the rich and poor was in accord with nature. This argument has become politically incorrect. An American cannot use his or her education, occupation, family pedigree, religion, race, or ethnicity as a defense of self ’s superiority. Hence, the accumulation of wealth has become one of the few ways to satisfy a wish for dignity and status. Many parts of the contemporary world are marked by capitalist economies, extraordinary inequalities in material comforts, communities interconnected by electronics and commerce, and an acute consciousness of the recent failures of collective societies. Nonetheless, few scholars are prepared to predict with confidence what the world

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will be like in 2060 – only two generations from now – because too many scripts are possible. No economist in 1948 predicted that the invention of the transistor would eventually lead to the proliferation of computers in business and an increase in efficiency and productivity that made the 1990s a period of growth. Had there been economists in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, their advice would have been different from that offered by contemporary economists or those who worked in Mao’s China.59 History has altered the primary beneficiaries of economic change from kings and emperors to small entrepreneurs to large corporations. The mantle of responsibility for being an agent of change has passed from landowners to artisans to merchants to governments to global businesses.

Behavioral Economics Some younger economists who recognize the flaws in the claim that “economics is a hard science totally divorced from such related subjects as politics, psychology, and sociology”60 are collaborating with psychologists to create a new field called behavioral economics. This group is applying the concepts of traditional operant conditioning theory to the decisions of individuals, rather than governments, businesses, or institutions. For example, a typical experiment in behavioral economics varies the price of some desired resource (say, alcohol or marijuana), the availability of other desired states, and the delay imposed before the resource can be enjoyed, and determines how these factors influence each person’s choices. The advantage of this work is that it focuses on the psychology of the agent and acknowledges the specific context in which a choice is made. These are admirable gains. However, the basic theoretical assumptions remain those of the twentieth-century behaviorists, with the concept of utility replacing the concept of reinforcement and price replacing effort. Unfortunately, these assumptions, almost a hundred years old, are now regarded as having some, but limited, explanatory power because

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the meaning of reinforcement remains an enigma. For example, rats that have learned that if they enter one compartment they will receive cocaine, but will encounter a novel object if they choose a different compartment, often chose the latter.61 The psychological and biological consequences of cocaine and an unfamiliar object are very different. The same conclusion holds for the experiences that economists regard as having utility. Some behavioral economists have added the concept of reciprocal trust between or among the members of a collective as a significant correlate of economic growth. However, they fail to differentiate between trust in the actions of another because the agent knows the other will benefit by being trustworthy (the plumber who says he will be at your home on Tuesday) and trusting another because the agent knows that being trustworthy is a seminal ethical standard that the other holds dear (the trust in a parent or close friend). An even smaller group of economists, in collaboration with neuroscientists, hope that brain profiles can predict a person’s financial decisions.62 The problem with this bold claim is that the subjects in these experiments are usually university students lying in a scanner making decisions in make-believe environments. They are not portfolio managers or individual investors deciding how to invest three million dollars of their own money. That is why some economists have noted that behavior in an artificial laboratory setting does not always generalize to a real-life setting.63 Moreover, many brain locations are usually activated, and the brain profiles of 100 investors making a decision in a real rather than an artificial environment would be very different. At the moment, therefore, we cannot be certain of a specific relation between a specific pattern of brain activity and an economic decision. However, economic knowledge is so central to modern societies that it was inevitable that economists would be placed in the role of Delphic oracle, offering advice to individuals, corporations, and governments, even though the degree to which any of the recommended actions

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exerts a great deal of control over economies remains controversial. Alan Greenspan’s38 descriptions of his experiences as head of the Federal Reserve Bank suggest that the relation between economists and the national economy resembles the relation between a child and the motions of a kite held in a strong, unpredictable wind. The child can react to every strong puff of wind by trying to minimize the wild gyrations of the kite, but he can neither control the kite’s motions nor predict its long-term movements with much certainty.

New Methods and Better Theory Natural scientists made extraordinary progress over the past few centuries because they tried to understand reliable phenomena, such as the regularity in the changing positions of the moon and planets, the anatomical similarities among different species, and the features of varied illnesses. Their research led to preliminary, but satisfying, answers that relied on concepts that have retained a measure of validity. Some comparable phenomena in the social sciences include the lawful changes during the first fifteen years of development in cognitive abilities and the regulation of emotion; the relation between a child’s social class and the probability of school success or failure; and the rise in religious affiliations over the past quarter-century. However, social scientists have not arrived at satisfying explanations of these phenomena, and they continue to be frustrated by a lack of consensus on concepts and research priorities, weak methods for assessing private psychological states, and the habit of abandoning a problem prematurely. Many social scientists resemble impatient tourists at an exotic bazaar, skipping from one stall to another, continually distracted by a more attractive artifact at another location. They fail to heed the lines of the Danish writer Piet Hein: “Problems worthy of attack, prove their worth by hitting back.” As a result, social scientists often replace one explanation of a phenomenon with another without

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a cumulative advance in understanding. Consider, as an example, the concept of social anxiety. Twentieth-century psychologists replaced the nineteenth-century biological explanation of the tension some people experience with strangers with either a Freudian or behavioral interpretation that emphasized the effects of experience. The current cohort has returned to biology in the form of particular genes that are supposed to render select brain sites vulnerable to activation. But few investigators have been willing to acknowledge that “social anxiety” has different etiologies, with only some patients possessing an inherited susceptibility to the activation of limbic sites when they are in an unfamiliar social situation. The absence of agreement on a unifying theoretical perspective that sorts research efforts in accord with their theoretical importance is a major reason for the current unhappy state of the social sciences. A half-century earlier, when psychoanalytic theory still enjoyed some measure of respect, developmental psychologists studied the psychological consequences of bottle feeding, compared with nursing infants, because the evidence would either support or refute Freudian ideas. When I was a graduate student at Yale in the 1950s, Neal Miller had proposed a bold solution to the conundrum of the essential properties of the events called rewards that strengthened associations. Miller suggested that the defining feature of a rewarding event was its ability to reduce the total amount of stimulation an animal received after making a response. Any experiment that could evaluate that idea had obvious priority and I chose this problem for my thesis. Would male rats learn the correct turn in a simple maze if the reward for making the correct response was the increased genital stimulation that accompanied mounting and rubbing the penis against the fur of a receptive female without the subsequent decrease in stimulation that follows ejaculation? The evidence was unambiguous; the rats learned to make the correct turn. The experiment was regarded as “significant,” rather than a silly waste of time, because it evaluated a theoretical idea. Common sense dictates that animals,

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like humans, enjoy being sexually aroused, at least temporarily, and no one would conduct this experiment today. The social scientists’ preference for concepts that can be imagined easily is another reason for the absence of strong theory. Freud’s suggestion that premature weaning of the infant from the breast would generate strong emotion was easy to imagine for everyone has been frustrated. The stimulus–response reflex in behavioral theory is even easier to visualize. The basic idea is a mechanical connection between two things – plumbers soldering two pipes together. The concept of an emotional bond of attachment to another also meets this criterion. However, many of the most fruitful concepts in physics and biology, such as dark matter and retroviruses, are not easily imagined. One reason why Darwin’s hypotheses provoked initial resistance, and still do among advocates of intelligent design, is that the mind finds it difficult to imagine the extraordinarily large number of intermediate evolutionary steps that occurred between the single cell amoeba, formed several billion years ago, and a human infant. For the same reason, Alfred Wegener’s 1912 proposal that the continents were moving apart slowly encountered serious resistance.64 If the most advanced scientific disciplines are a useful guide for the social sciences, the capacity to be imagined may be a mischievous criterion for validity. Try to imagine what happened at the moment of the Big Bang or when a gene in a bone marrow cell mutates to create a line of immature white blood cells that will eventually become leukemia. If, as is likely, each person’s profile of psychological traits is due, in part, to the effects of unconscious interpretations of experience on an inherited biology, it is difficult to imagine the concepts that will explain this profile. A small number of individuals in all cultures experience combinations of insomnia, muscle pain, irritability, depressed mood, fatigue, nervous tension, and headache. Nineteenth-century European physicians awarded priority to the feelings of fatigue and called the syndrome neurasthenia. Contemporary psychiatrists emphasize the depressed mood. However, some of these patients

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have a disturbed immune system, due to excessive production of cytokines, that is responsible for the conscious feelings.65 It is hard to imagine how the cytokines could cause feelings of fatigue and sadness. I noted earlier that neuroscientists insert pictures of brain activation in their papers in order to persuade readers of the validity of their conclusions. Social scientists cannot take pictures of psychological states. The absence of strong theory in the social sciences allows a thousand flowers to bloom. This permissive atmosphere would be less of a problem if most good ideas received research support. However, a very small proportion of creative proposals receive adequate funds in the current political climate. Hence, the rigor of the investigators’ methods, rather than the theoretical significance of the investigation, has become the more important criterion when impartial judges evaluate research proposals. Most reviewers wish to be fair to all applicants and it is easier to detect a methodological flaw in a proposed study than to evaluate its theoretical significance. As a result, experiments that permit maximal control of conditions and are free of the taint of subjective judgments are most often supported, at the expense of the rejection of potentially original ideas. Robert Millikan sensed in 1907 that measuring the charge on the electron was theoretically important. However, his laboratory notes revealed the influence of a subjective bias for Millikan was so certain that the charge had to be an integral number he rejected all other measurements as artifacts. Fortunately, he was right and was eventually rewarded with a Nobel Prize, even though his experiments lacked the objectivity that natural scientists admire. The photographs of the sky that Edwin Hubble studied in order to arrive at his fruitful concept of receding galaxies resembled blurred pictures taken with a camera out of focus and left considerable room for subjective interpretations. I suspect that many astronomers given Hubble’s photographic plates would not have come up with his insight. Neither a page of numbers nor a set of photographs reveals any truth. A room full of data is a quiet place.

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Neglect of Method Development The lack of strong theory means that social scientists scatter in one of two directions. They either maximize rigor or probe the socially relevant issues of mental illness, divorce, crime, surrogate care of infants, or ethnic conflicts. Although illumination of these social problems is important, these social scientists lack methods powerful enough to provide persuasive answers. It is a cruel paradox, then, that both government and private agencies funding research in the social sciences resist supporting investigators who are willing to invest the time and effort needed to develop better methods. This blind spot is difficult to understand in light of the fact that some of the most dramatic advances in the natural sciences were made possible by the perseverance of those who spent years, or careers, perfecting a new way to quantify important phenomena or to measure theoretically fundamental entities. The electron microscope, Hubble space telescope, X-ray crystallography, plasmid vectors for genes, knockout mice, and magnetic resonance scanners provided more sensitive ways to measure important phenomena that eventually led to theoretical insights. If scientists had not devoted years to developing X-ray crystallography, the discovery of the structure of DNA would have been delayed. Major insights into embryological development occurred because Viktor Hamburger decided, in 1934, to invent procedures permitting study of the chick embryo, which was a more fruitful specimen than frog larvae. The absence of major methodological progress in the social sciences has frustrated those trying to answer three fundamental questions. The first refers to the relation between brain states and a psychological event, be it a perception, feeling, thought, or intention to act. The second is the nature of the relation between schematic and semantic representations. The third puzzle centers on the variation in personal histories that create a family of phenotypes in persons with a similar biology. Social scientists must improve their ability to

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quantify perceptual and semantic networks, emotions, intentions, values, and the depth of identification with gender, class, ethnic, religious, or national categories in order to answer these and other questions. Until they do they will remain dependent on the same procedures their mentors used a generation earlier; namely, interviews, questionnaires, behaviors, or, less often, reaction times and errors on laboratory tasks. Consider just a few examples of some new methods that show promise. New Methods The multidimensional scaling of judgments of the similarities in trios of words illustrates the advances that can follow the introduction of a novel procedure. Most educated adults asked to describe their conceptual organization of the animal world would rely on the biologists’ categories of worms, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. However, if the same adults were given several hundred trios of terms for animals and selected the two they regarded as most similar, a multidimensional scaling analysis would reveal that they also possessed semantic networks that classified animals into one of four groups: large and dangerous, small and dangerous, large and domesticated, or small and domesticated. In this structure gerbils and lions, although both mammals, are not in the same category. This fact means that the mind contains several different organizations of the same concepts. Social scientists who wanted to know if race or ethnicity were a significant basis for students’ classifications of their peers in a classroom, or on a college campus, might give informants trios of names of well-known persons from various vocational categories, but of different ethnicities, and have them sort the trios into the pairs that were most similar. Given the trio of Michael Jackson, Andy Roddick, and Barack Obama, informants who put the two athletes together could be regarded as less concerned with ethnicity than those who

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paired Jackson with Obama. Political scientists could obtain valuable information on the attitudes of Americans toward other nations, politicians, or professions by asking them to sort trios referring to these categories into similar pairs. The event-related waveforms in the EEG might clarify the structure of semantic networks. An important fact, first discovered more than twenty-five years ago, is that the brain produces a waveform between 200 and 500 milliseconds to a word that is semantically inconsistent with the one that preceded it, and the more inconsistent the second word, the larger the waveform. This fact could illuminate the structures of semantic networks. For example, social scientists interested in the semantic network for the concept “politician” would first present exemplars of the concept (e.g., senator, congressman, governor, mayor, vice president, as well as a number of famous politicians) and follow each with a word describing a personality trait, such as honest, courageous, corrupt, or selfish. Informants who viewed politicians in an undesirable light should have a larger waveform to a desirable trait than those who held a favorable conception. This method might also allow contribute to more accurate measures of a person’s identification with a social category. For example, women with a strong identification with their Evangelical congregation should show a larger waveform to the word “irrational” following the word “Pentecostal” than those with a diluted identification with this category. It is even possible that this procedure might reveal information on each individual’s conception of his or her personal traits. A man who regarded self as rebellious should show a larger waveform to the word “conforming” following his name than one who perceived himself as a conformist. The availability of inexpensive laptop computers provides a final example of the gains that can accompany the use of a new apparatus. Computers allow investigators to present one stimulus on the right and the other on the left side of the person’s direct gaze for intervals so brief the person can perceive only one of the events. The stimulus

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on the right side is processed by the left hemisphere, and the one on the left by the right hemisphere. Studies using this technique reveal that pictures of scenes are perceived more effectively by the right hemisphere; whereas, words are perceived more efficiently by the left hemisphere, suggesting that the elaboration of schemata and semantic forms proceeds asymmetrically in the brain. When viewers watch an emotionally unpleasant film, such as depicting a bloody medical procedure, with either their left or the right hemisphere, only the latter showed biological signs of arousal. This finding implies that the right hemisphere makes a greater contribution than the left to the emotions judged as unpleasant and might explain why older patients who suffer a stroke in the right hemisphere report a diminution in felt anxiety, an observation that clinical neurologists had not understood. Humanists might exploit this asymmetry in the processing of scenes and words to understand why the representational paintings of European artists from 1600 to 1900 more often illustrated the source of light originating on the left rather than the right side of the canvas, and why college students judge paintings suggestive of motion as more aesthetic if the implied movement is from left to right rather than in the opposite direction These biases imply that the artists may have been relying more on their right hemisphere than their left as they imagined the final scene.66 Funding agencies should be more friendly to supporting method development in the social sciences, and scientists should reward colleagues willing to work on new techniques to measure psychological states. A. N. Whitehead noted in 1928 that the physicists who developed quantum mechanics were not smarter than those who labored a generation earlier. They simply had better machines, which, like a visit to a new country, uncovered novel observations that challenged old ideas and, in so doing, led to a deeper understanding.

5 The Humanities

Philosophers, scholars of literature, and historians differ from natural and social scientists in many of the dimensions listed in Chapter 1. Most work alone, are not highly dependent on grant support from government agencies, and rely primarily on semantic texts as a source of evidence (that is why I classified historians with humanists rather than with social scientists). Novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, and composers belong to a special category because most are not associated with academic institutions and their creative products are intended to serve aesthetic motives, rather than meet the scientists’ demand for a close correspondence between an idea and an observation. The humanists lost a great deal of the authority they enjoyed a few centuries earlier when professors of philosophy and theology commanded far more respect than the small cohort of natural philosophers. Beethoven claimed some of the moral authority that nineteenth-century Europeans attributed to poets by regarding himself as a tone poet. Humanists lost substantially more confidence than social scientists following the ascent of the natural sciences. This erosion of status was especially strong among Americans, who have always restricted their praise and admiration to intellectual work that had pragmatic consequences. That is why Benjamin Franklin, not Herman Melville or Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a national hero, why the Congress of the young democracy chose to build the patent office, rather than a church, museum, symphony hall, or library, 222

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on a prominent location on the mall, and why Henry Ford snarled, “History is bunk.” This long-standing suspicion of the “intellectual” concerned with knowing, rather than doing, is maintained by many conditions. One element is the desire to support an egalitarian society. Eighteenth-century Americans wanted to differentiate themselves from the effete Europeans quoting Keats; the nineteenth-century citizens who settled the lands west of Philadelphia wished to be free of the snobbery of the better educated New Englanders. Americans insist that status should not be based on differences in abstract knowledge that has no practical consequences. The selftaught Franklin and Lincoln are our heroes, not the presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson who was called a “nerd,” and Bob Dylan is lionized as America’s John Keats. America’s founders were not totally unreceptive to the possibility that novelists and philosophers might occasionally provide insights into society and human nature. The correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams reveals the breadth of their reading in history, philosophy, and literature, although Jefferson believed that a farmer would bring more wisdom to a moral dilemma than a professor. Earlier cohorts of natural scientists were friendlier to the musings of philosophers than contemporary investigators. For example, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger lectured on the relation between the assumptions of the classic Greek philosophers and those of modern physicists. Roald Hoffmann is an unusual member of his natural science cohort for he is Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University, a poet, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry who is troubled by the mind-numbing monotony of the scientific papers describing discoveries of great beauty that reduce “the miracle of the living world to a set of cold, hard facts gained by the logic of dissection.”1 However, whatever faith remained in the hope that some enduring bit of wisdom was hiding in the works of humanists was eroded

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after a vocal band of twentieth-century scholars, partly motivated by the demands of women and minority groups for greater dignity, announced that the presumed truths in the works of White European males, such as Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Kant, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gibbon, or Tolstoy, were local to the prejudices of their gender, time, and place and were “social constructions.” These critics, often called postmodernists, argued that no value system or interpretation of text was inherently more valid than any other. The group that happened to be dominant promoted their values, methods, concepts, and explanations in order to retain power over those honoring a different ethical code. Although the members of a faculty or professional guild have always competed for positions of power, the postmodernists chose to make all intellectual effort political. Soon after, the humanities fragmented into sects studying categories of people – women, Muslims, Hispanics, gays – rather than categories of ideas. The catechism of the postmodernists, or deconstructionists, who claimed Nietzsche and Heidegger as their grandparents and Derrida and Foucault as their parents, maintained that no writer had any special access to truth because there was no relation between a semantic description and reality. The meaning of every word depended on the other words in the sentence, and the meaning of every sentence depended on the other sentences in the narrative. Every scholar was caught in an infinite regress within a labyrinth of words that could never capture reality accurately. Words, as Joyce Appleby notes, were to be compared to balls careening wildly in a pinball machine rather than jewels in a safe deposit box. On reflection, this skeptical view is not as radical as it appears on the surface for its fundamental thesis is traceable to Francis Bacon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Virginia Woolf. The essential idea, noted earlier, is that every sentence has an envelope of possible meanings, and no meaning has a privileged status or unchanging referent. Hence, the relation between language and reality is always ambiguous.

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Although some aspects of the deconstructionists’ message were valid, they were less revolutionary than they or their followers thought. However, they became so zealous in their semantic housecleaning they began to break some precious crystal goblets. The excessively harsh attacks on the correspondence meaning of truth, their caricature of scientific claims, and criticism of the belief that some mental symptoms were legitimate illnesses were motivated, in part, by the humanists’ loss of status to the scientists who had become the preferred targets of affection, generosity, and attention from college deans and the media. Recall that when the residents of New Salem town began to threaten the traditional citizens in Old Salem the latter accused the former of witchcraft. If the meanings of all sentences are inherently ambiguous, the belief that any text could reveal the truth about anything is illusory. Because natural scientists believed they were discovering valid facts about nature, the postmodernists’ attack on historians, philosophers, and literary critics was also a challenge to the scientists who claimed to possess a special purchase on truths about nature. However, the reason why physicists rejected the ether as a medium through which light traveled is not to be equated with the reason why Jacques Derrida insisted that uncertainty penetrated every narrative. Although investigators can only know what they observe, and can never know the events as they actually happen in nature; nonetheless, scientists continue to make important discoveries that contribute to their critics’ health and welfare. The deconstructionists seemed to be declaring that if they cannot have it all, they want nothing. This movement retained some vitality from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, but began to lose adherents because doing nothing, which is an impossible posture, was the obvious implication of its arguments. The few postmodern claims that were valid were assimilated and the extravagant announcements that strayed far beyond the bounds of reasonableness were cast aside. The contemporary generation of

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students and faculty, who escaped this moment of enthusiasm, watch NOVA, Nature, and Charlie Rose interviews with Nobel Laureates in science, and read Richard Dawkins and Malcolm Gladwell, not Dostoevsky, Gibbon, or Whitehead, to learn the “real” truths about the human condition.

Loss of Confidence At least four relatively independent events contributed to the humanists’ fall from grace. The changing membership in the humanities was one factor because the status of an activity cannot be separated from the symbolic meanings attached to the people who engage in it. Gynecology is not regarded as a profession of perverts because of the lengthy training and benevolent intentions of its practitioners. Europeans used to treat careers in business as a less desirable way to make a living because this activity had been dominated by Jews in earlier centuries. Commerce was cleansed of taint after bureaucratic businesses, corporations, banks, supermarkets, franchises, and investment firms, which attracted adults from all religious and ethnic groups, replaced the owners of small shops. When women and minorities began to join White middle- and upper-middle-class males in English and history departments, especially after 1950, these disciplines began to lose some of the prestige they had enjoyed. Second, many nineteenth-century Americans spent most of their lives in the same region or town and few traveled regularly to new places. Hence, the vivid descriptions of unfamiliar peoples, events, and ideas in literature and history were welcome novelties that incited the imagination during long, quiet, winter evenings. Twentyfour-hour television and theaters with wide screens spreading vivid pictures of exotic places that could not have been imagined a century earlier can excite the imagination as effectively as books. H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds pales beside the Star Trek films, and Saving Private Ryan provides a more graphic picture of the gory

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details of war than All Quiet on the Western Front. Although Virginia Woolf denigrated films as an art form in 1926, more Americans have seen the movie version of Mrs. Dalloway than have read the novel, and television news programs devote more time to new films than to recent novels. The enhanced position of film in modern life is signaled by Harvard University’s approval in 2008 of a Ph.D. program in “Film Studies.” Virginia Woolf would have been shocked. Third, humanists lost some of their sense of professionalism when postmodern critics argued that anyone could write a history, biography, or novel, often citing as the rationale T. S. Eliot’s reply, “Poetry,” when asked, “What does a poet need to know?”2 Natural scientists policed their members more effectively by maintaining strict rules as to who could call themselves physicists, chemists, or biologists. Finally, scientists began to invade the humanists’ territory. Most humanists writing before the ascent of the natural and social sciences regarded an enhanced understanding of human morality, thought, language, perception, emotion, learning, and forms of social organization as their primary assignments. Social scientists began to claim these themes at the end of the nineteenth century by arguing that the time had come for empirical facts, rather than intuition or analyses of sentences, to reveal the deep truths about these matters. Neuroscientists claimed parts of the same territory two generations later, declaring that brain profiles, not behaviors or verbal reports, were the “true” measures of perception, memory, thought, and emotion. This imperious attitude threatened the social scientists who regarded psychological phenomena as emergent events not reducible to descriptions of brain activity. A few even resurrected the nineteenth-century interest in phenomenological experience, which celebrates the idiosyncratic quality of consciousness, in order to challenge the biologists with statements like, “If you think you’re so smart, try to explain why I see a blend of objects with varying shades of greens as I stand in midsummer on the top of a mountain peering at the valley below and you see hundreds of spruce trees.”

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The scientists’ intrusions into the philosophers’ territory, which robbed the latter of part of their mission, forced them to find another assignment and many selected analyses of the coherence of the scientists’ semantic texts. This enterprise is useful because the meanings of many words do change with history. The meaning of “emotion” for Aristotle was a conscious appraisal of a change in bodily feeling; for the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio an emotion is a brain state. Hume understood that the word “causality” referred to a mental representation of the reason for a sequence of events. Renee Baillargeon, a developmental psychologist, awards infants a belief in causality if they display a prolonged stare when a motionless small ball moves one second after a large moving block stops one inch before contacting the small ball. Baillargeon argues that the infant knows that the small ball’s motion has to be caused by a force inherent in being struck by another object. The infant stares because he or she is surprised by what happened. All of these forces came together at about the same time to plunge the humanities into a crisis of confidence, not unlike the sudden irrelevance of whale oil to provide light when electricity became available.

Historians Historians have defended the claim that their writings bear some correspondence to reality, and might contain generalizations that applied to sequences other than the one they described. However, each life, war, crime, and political crisis occurs in a unique setting and the sequence of events might have been altered if the era, culture, or actors changed. It is not clear, therefore, whether any history of the American Revolution is a source of insights that could be applied to other domestic rebellions. Similarly, the setting, problem pursued, and personalities of Rosalind Franklin, whose photographs of the DNA molecule allowed Crick and Watson to discover the structure of DNA, and those of Nobel biologist Rita Levi-Montalcini were sufficiently

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different it is not obvious that readers could extract a broad generalization about the lives of female scientists. The most serious problem is that historians cannot avoid imposing a biased construction on the events they synthesize because more than one coherent narrative can be written from the same historical evidence. Tory and Whig scholars reflecting on the same set of “facts” wrote distinctive histories of England. Simon Schama has even defended the practice of inventing a few facts in order to render a narrative more interesting and was not embarrassed by confessing that he writes “historical novellas.” The skeptical historian Hayden White3 captured this problem in sharp prose by noting that historians wish to “have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary …. Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see the end in every beginning?” Kurt Vonnegut endorsed White’s views in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. The fact that sentences are the most important, though not the only, source of evidence in historical scholarship poses difficulties because, as noted earlier, the meanings of words often change over time. A. N. Whitehead understood this problem. “Language … foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverances of experience. The result is that we imagine that we have immediate experience of a world with perfectly defined objects implicated in perfectly defined events … This world is a world of ideas and the elucidation of the precise connections between this world and the feelings of actual experiences is a fundamental question of scientific philosophy.”4 Nonetheless, historians’ documentation of the geographic mobility of Americans helps explain why nineteenth-century Americans were more individualistic than Europeans. The population of Boston grew by a factor of eight between 1830 and 1890 and one in five residents remained in the city for less than five years before moving to

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another place.5 Identification with a community is difficult when adults reside in a city or neighborhood for only a few years. As a result, primary loyalty remains with the self and the self ’s family, and a mistrust of strangers becomes more prevalent. Only 7 percent of a random sample of almost 3,000 contemporary Americans reported a great deal of trust in the replies or actions of strangers; whereas, more than 35 million Americans – more than 10 percent – had absolutely no trust in any stranger.6 The historians’ strategies resemble those of biologists studying the evolution of a single species. However, the biologists have the advantage of being able to exploit evidence gathered by other natural scientists, for example, DNA profiles of extinct species and information on past climate changes or asteroid impacts. This information allows the biologists to invent a more persuasive account. If historians had access to the psychological states of the deceased agents they describe they, too, would be able to construct more coherent narratives. Nonetheless, art historians with a hunch about the authenticity of a particular painting are as passionate and respectful of evidence as natural scientists and enjoy an equally intense emotional high when they confirm an intuition that no one else had entertained. Thus, the mood of historians working on a problem that has seized their curiosity resembles that of scientists, even though they cannot alter conditions in order to evaluate the validity of a preliminary explanation, and must remain satisfied with uncertain syntheses of scattered pieces of evidence. However, they should take comfort from the fact that astrophysicists describing the beginning of the universe, and biologists probing the conditions that existed when the first living forms emerged, are in a similar position.

The Humanists’ Contributions Many contemporary humanists would answer the question, “What are the functions of humanistic scholarship?” with “To provide

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divergent perspectives on the human condition and to create objects of beauty”. These praiseworthy goals are far less ambitious than those of Plato, Dante, Bacon, Montaigne, Hume, Kant, or Toynbee who thought they were communicating profound insights about human nature that should be incorporated into ethical positions, political actions, or daily rituals. A large number of contemporary humanists fear that they would be classified as narrow-minded bigots if they suggested that anyone ought to think or act in a particular way. Anthony Kronman mourns this timidity and, with the fervor of King Harry at the battle of Agincourt, pleads with these scholars to return to their earlier role as secular humanists inviting students to brood more deeply on the causes of the ethical void in modern society lest they become “a laughingstock both within the academy and outside it.”7 Despite the problems, humanists perform several critical functions. They remind the society of its contradictions, articulate salient emotional states, detect changing cultural premises, confront their culture’s deepest moral dilemmas, and document the unpredictable events that punctuate a life or historical era. The books, poems, plays, and films that contain these ideas help the public find a balance between the benevolent and self-destructive consequences of their illusions so that hopefully each can create an ideal worthy of effort. Humanists writing during the last half of the nineteenth century captured the inchoate blend of thoughts and moods provoked by Darwin’s suggestion that the gap between animals and humans was only quantitative, the anonymity that followed mass migrations to large cities, the confident announcements by positivists that free will was a fiction, and the erosion of religious belief. Walt Whitman, like the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, united the spheres of body and mind that natural scientists had separated. George Eliot reminded readers rendered despondent by the positivists’ arrogant brief for determinism of the role of chance in every life.8 C. S. Lewis’s narrative of his epiphany at age 31, when a belief in God suddenly replaced a

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long-standing atheism, diffused some of the intimidating power of a scientific frame of mind that frustrated those who wanted to believe in a spiritual force. European writers and artists at the end of World War I helped the public appreciate the revolution in ideas brought on by the war and the economic crises it spawned in the 1930s. Oswald Spengler detected the effects of mechanization of the work place on the laborer’s sense of agency and in his gloomy 1922 book, The Decline of the West, prophesied some of the tragic narrative that followed Hitler’s assumption of power. The films of Vittorio De Sica in the years following the end of World War II captured the Italians’ desire to treat the suffering of the poor as a mark of virtue. The main figures in his two classic films, The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D, are desperately poor, but free of corrosive hate and fundamentally loyal, loving, and trying to preserve their flimsy veil of dignity. This idealistic view of poverty may be uniquely Italian for this bias is absent in critically acclaimed films made in Germany, France, England, and Sweden during the same era. The primary source of human distress in Ingmar Bergman’s films is reflective brooding, not social conditions in the society. In the 1957 film, The Seventh Seal the educated knight who has returned from the Crusades suffers because he has begun to doubt God and cannot find meaning in life. The uneducated clown and his wife, free of the anguish that doubt generates, are happy with each other and their young infant. Western literature during most of the twentieth century tried to capture each person’s attempt to escape the local conventions that limited personal freedom, promoted a tolerance toward groups with deviant ideologies and cast women in the role of “savior.”9 Robert Anderson’s play, Tea and Sympathy, which opened in 1953, confronted two conventional beliefs that were beginning to assume a distinct shape in the American psyche. The first promoted tolerance toward those with different life styles, in this case sexual preference. The second,

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which dominates contemporary films and television dramas, awards a woman’s love a magical ability to cure men of their confusions, worries, and discouragements. The mantra of the 1960s, “Make love, not war,” was nascent in an essay in The Atlantic during the first decade of that century that suggested that American women were feeling an enhanced personal power they were eager to exploit in order to purify, or at least reform, the male character. Greer Garson, in the popular 1942 film, Random Harvest, impulsively abandoned her job after accidentally meetingt Ronald Colman, a soldier suffering from amnesia as a result of a trauma during World War I, because she believed her affection would be curative. In the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film, L’Avventura, Claudia forgives her carelessly disloyal lover, tempting viewers to presume that her love might reform his errant character. There are few examples of such heroines in Shakespeare’s plays. Lady Macbeth corrupts her husband, Hamlet’s mother is unfaithful, Ophelia becomes mad after her father’s death, Portia is clever but uncaring, and Desdemona is impotent against Othello’s jealous rage. Males, whether chimps or humans, thrive in hierarchical social structures and contemporary writers understand that men become confused when their world renders social relationships horizontal and need the healing love of women to restore their vitality. Chinese writers probed different themes during the early decades of the nineteenth-century before Western intrusion. Confucian philosophy, with its emphasis on obligations to others, supplied the primary rationale for daily rituals. The Chinese were less friendly to abstract ethical ideas, the unrestrained accumulation of wealth, or John Rawls’s notion of social justice. The Chinese had little faith in the possibility of economic and status equality among the members of a society with so many poor peasants. Life was a zero-sum game in which one person’s gain had to be another’s loss. Only a century later, after Western influence had eroded faith in these assumptions, the Chinese began to consider the possibility that life was absurd. The resulting spiritual vacuum made Mao’s idealism

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appealing to a majority. However, his reform movement lasted for only one generation because it violated the sanctity of the family and did not bring the comforts it promised. Contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese writers, following Sartre and Beckett, have turned up the gain on Wallace Stevens’s suggestion that no ideology has any special claim to wisdom; hence each person has to construct their own list of commandments.10 Complex Emotional Blends The humanists’ rich descriptions of emotional blends that are not yet amenable to scientific study should motivate scientists to invent procedures that might assess these states more accurately. Abdellah Hammoudi,11 the Muslim anthropologist mentioned earlier who was identified with the ethos of Islam but rejected its religious premises, described feeling a “fake” as he planned his hajj to Mecca. The troubling intuition that one is “inauthentic” is a potent, and not uncommon, human state. Read the memoirs of the literary critic Frank Kermode, the novelists John Widemann and John Updike, and the statesman George Kennan. The latter confessed that he felt like a Midwestern rube among his sophisticated, East Coast establishment classmates at Princeton early in the last century. Some of the Jewish children who managed to escape Hitler’s Germany to become successful professionals in American society and respected citizens in their communities failed to conquer the feeling of the inauthentic outsider. One confessed, “After 60 years in the U.S., I still do not feel at home.”12 Not one of the hundreds of essays and books on human emotions written by social scientists or neurobiologists over the past century regarded this feeling as a significant emotional state. Novels, autobiographies, and films also capture the state of individuals who believe they are undeserving of pleasure, praise, success, or love. One of the consequences of this usually unconscious idea is a profound inability to be enhanced by the love of another, as

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if the unconscious recites the mantra: “Since I am not deserving of anyone’s admiration or love, your affection for me cannot improve my mood and, therefore, you cannot be a source of pleasure I must possess.” The young hero in the film Into the Wild is an example of this personality type. Biographies and memoirs articulate the differences between those driven to their career by emotions they could not deny and those who made the same vocational choice more freely. The contrast between Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford is an example. Other writers help us understand how an individual might productively exploit traits that had led to marginalization. The young Samuel Beckett needed money, was incompetent as an instructor, bored by his teaching duties at Trinity College in Dublin, and an ambitious writer with no successes. However, Beckett persuaded himself that he was better read, less hypocritical, and concerned with deeper issues than the Irish citizens and scholars around him. This private belief in his superiority, which created a morally arrogant rebelliousness, rendered his plays and poetry sufficiently original to warrant later receipt of the Nobel Prize.13 Although born into a peasant family, Mao Zedong’s talents and ambition motivated him to leave home to matriculate in a school attended mainly by children of wealthy families who ridiculed the language and crude habits he brought from his rural setting. These embarrassing experiences probably created a permanent anger toward the privileged class that he satisfied after he assumed power in 1949.14 John Updike’s critics have praised his dazzling prose but complained of his inability or reluctance to probe the depths of his characters. Updike resolved their puzzlement by explaining that his avoidant temperamental style, psoriasis, asthma, fear of insects, and shame over his family’s marginal class position during childhood and adolescence shaped a personality that hid behind a thick barrier separating his feelings from the world, a place to hide that was “out of harm’s way.”15

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Humanists often portray characters with unique combinations of temperament and life history who find it difficult to violate their standards on honesty because of a need to maintain a conception of self as a moral agent, even if the ethical violation would have served the self ’s interests. Stephen Daedalus, the hero in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, refused to attend Easter mass, even though he knew it would have pleased his mother, because that act would have been inconsistent with his loss of faith and he was unable to be a hypocrite. Thomas More paid a heavy price for honoring his conscience and not consenting to Henry VIII’s request to approve his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit archaeologist who in 1929 discovered the 500,000-year-old fossil called Peking man (later recognized as Homo erectus), could not abandon his religious vows prohibiting a sexual relation with the woman he loved, despite the church’s insistence that he renounce his views on evolution and dogmatic refusal to approve publication of his scientific writings. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lifelong need to remain “pure” of motive appears to have been the result of a chronically dysphoric temperament and a gnawing doubt of his authenticity because of his father’s deliberate suppression of a Jewish relative in the family pedigree.16 Sometimes an unbending loyalty to a moral imperative can induce an episode of seriously disturbed affect. Stuart Sutherland, a British psychologist, described his severe mental breakdown when he violated a private standard demanding control of jealousy and irrational behavior. Sutherland could not forgive himself for being unable to control a surge of wild emotions and impulsive actions when he learned of his wife’s sexual infidelity with a mutual friend.17 These are only a few examples of a personality type familiar to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists that biographers and novelists have described so well. Psychologists who wish to understand the full emotional patina that humans can experience have to choose between trying to

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measure the emotional blends that humanists describe or honoring the rules of natural science that call for parsimony and amenability to accurate measurement. Most psychologists, understandingly, have remained loyal to the rules of natural science. As a result, the current generation of social scientists would explain the emotion of Stephen Daedalus as a derivative of the abstract concepts of fear and sadness, which happen to be two of the ten emotions most psychologists endorse as basic. Asking psychologists to explain the emotions of Hammoudi, More, or Sutherland from the small set of so-called basic states is like asking a biochemist to derive all the proteins from ten rather than the full complement of twenty amino acids. Humanists recognize uncertainty as a prevalent human emotion, or for some a chronic mood. Humans are uncomfortable when they cannot understand a feeling, confront an inconsistency in their deepest beliefs, or must choose one behavior from several possibilities. Alexis de Tocqueville, the young French aristocrat who toured America in 1831–1832, confessed that, after illness and death, doubt was the third worst human misery. A middle-aged woman raised as a girl, but born with a chromosomal anomaly that rendered her partially a biological male, provides an example of the therapeutic value of having a source of uncertainty resolved. The woman’s intense distress over her failure to understand her subjective feelings and attraction to women was reduced after her psychiatrist, who had examined her unusual genome, explained the biological bases for her emotions.18 Biological explanations of an unwanted psychological state are attractive because they remove some of the responsibility from the person and the family of rearing. Attributing misfortune to bad luck is always preferred over possession by the devil for a past sin. Humanists appreciate, however, that the exact form of the uncertainty depends on its source and target. This emotion has at least three important components. One refers to the specific “other” who is evaluating self, whether the local community, the family, a love object, the self ’s private evaluation, or God. The second element is

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temporal: whether the uncertainty surrounds failure or loss in the past or the future. The third specifies the qualities that self or others are evaluating, which can include a talent, power, piety, honesty, close friendships, or satisfying love relationships. Humans are always vulnerable to uncertainty; what changes with time and culture are the presumed origins of this feeling. I suspect, but cannot prove, that the frequency of gnawing uncertainty felt by Medieval Europeans wondering whether they will end their earthly existence in purgatory shares some, but not all, features with the states of contemporary Americans and Europeans worrying over job failure, social rejection, or the values they must always honor. A mood of uncertainty, which can become contagious when a society is threatened by war, epidemic, flood, or economic stagnation, often provokes a new habit or coping strategy during the stressful period. Large numbers of French parents pressured their late-adolescent daughters to enter convents during the brief interval from 1630 to 1650 to protect them from the plague and to escape the demand on the family for an expensive dowry. When the plague receded and dowry prices fell to usual levels the number of applicants to the convents dropped dramatically.

The Significance of the Setting Humanists also remind readers of the extraordinary particularity of the events in every narrative. The historians studying witchcraft in early modern Europe documented the many factors that had to be present before a person was accused of being a witch. Although older unmarried or widowed women were at the highest risk, the majority of these women escaped this taint because other qualities, especially an aggressive, excessively self-interested personality and a reputation for possessing the potential to become a witch, were also required.19 The same degree of particularity applies to a criminal act, a bout of depression, and a civil war. The historians’ documentation

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of the uniqueness of each narrative reminds us that a social context represents only a heightened preparedness for an outcome. A specific incentive must occur if the events of interest are to be actualized. Historians of science help readers appreciate why many novel ideas required a combination of particular historical conditions. Peter Galison’s20 wonderful book, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps, did this for special relativity. Einstein’s insight required reflection on the meaning of “simultaneity,” a word that became ambiguous following the introduction of railroads connecting European cities. Officials worried about the coordination of local times across railway stations separated by long distances; if it was 9 AM in Bern, what time was it in Paris? This new uncertainty motivated clockmakers to invent more accurate ways to measure time and Einstein, sitting in the Bern patent office, was responsible for reviewing the many proposals coming across his desk. This experience probably turned his mind to brooding about the meaning of time and simultaneity, and eventually to special relativity. Jack Repcheck21 did for Nicolaus Copernicus what Galison did for Einstein. Copernicus was twenty years old when Columbus returned to Lisbon after his historic voyage and twenty-three when Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Both events affirmed that the earth was not flat. In addition, Copernicus enjoyed the leisure of being a canon in the Catholic church with time to pursue his interest in astronomy and, thanks to his father’s wealth, was able to attend universities in Krakow, Bologna, and Padua at a time of intellectual ferment and a growing rebellion against the corrupt indulgences that Martin Luther protested in his list of ninety-five theses. But, unlike Einstein, Copernicus waited thirty years before allowing official publication of his heliocentric theory in 1543, the year that he died, because, like Darwin, he worried over how this idea would be received by those whose acceptance he courted. Copernicus’s concern was realistic because clerics in the church hierarchy knew that he continued to violate his celibacy vows by maintaining a long-term

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sexual relationship with his housekeeper. These narratives persuade readers that a creative product is not only a property of a person, but requires a particular historical setting and an audience prepared to receive the novel idea. Creativity shares more features with heroism than with eye color. No one can be a hero or heroine unless he or she has the opportunity to display a trait that some members of the community regard as courageous, beautiful, or insightful.

Tacit Understandings Each historical era in a society is characterized by layers of understanding that slip by each other as complementary conceptions, not unlike the negative print of a scene. Consider, as an example, North America and most of Europe in 1958, when these nations were at peace and enjoying economic prosperity. In addition, the natural scientists were aglow with pride for contributing to the victory over the Axis powers and anticipating the manufacture of the vaccine against the polio virus, and social scientists were nurturing the illusion that they were close to understanding society’s major ills. The surface gleamed with optimism. But 1958 was also the year of the first stage performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, whose opening scene depicted an old, disheveled, despondent man slipping on a banana peel. It was also the year that John Kenneth Galbraith lamented the self-interested consumerism of Americans stripped of any concern for the integrity of their society, and the time when Americans were discussing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which evoked nostalgia for a simpler era before interstate highways when most of the town turned out for the annual July 4 parade and band concert, and Rhett Butler, played by Clark Gable in the movie version of Gone With the Wind, was the model for young men wondering how to behave with their dates on Saturday evening. The audiences of 1958 were listening to John Cage’s anarchic music which celebrated novelty for the sake of novelty. In

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the piece titled “4’33’’ a pianist sits perfectly still at a keyboard for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, producing only silence. In less than 150 years, Western musical compositions had been transformed from Brahms’s adherence to the rules of harmony and counterpoint to the atonality of Arnold Schoenberg in 1910, to the loss of predictability in the works of John Cage. A few years later critics praised Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which portrayed an undisguised mood of mutual destructiveness between the marital couple Martha and George, and young listeners cheered Bob Dylan’s vocal reply to a woman longing for a man to nurture her in times of distress, “No, no, no, it ain’t me babe, it ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.” An inconsistency between the surface mood of a society and the less conscious state lying beneath the surface is possible because a feeling of vitality usually requires either faith in some ideal goal individuals believe they can attain, a meaningful challenge to conquer, a catastrophe to avoid, or a disturbing ideology to oppose. Absence of any one of these conditions can provoke an ennui that drains passion from each day’s plans. The cohort of Americans that came to maturity at the end of the nineteenth century was troubled by the social consequences of unbridled capitalism, but they had the advantage of believing that socialism might cure society’s ills. The cohort of 1958 was more seriously apathetic because the horrors of World War II made it impossible to deny the dangerously thin veneer separating civility from senseless killing and the failing communist regimes in the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China deprived them of any reason to hope for a more benevolent political arrangement. As a result, privileged college youth, who worried over being drafted into the Vietnam war and felt some guilt over a comfortable life style they had not earned, searched for some ethical ideal that deserved an emotional commitment. Some members of this group initiated a reform movement in the 1960s that combined protest against the war with a demand for racial justice and gender equality. To the

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surprise of many “experts,” the movement lasted less than a dozen years because the war ended and the minority groups that were the intended recipients of the student protests rejected their benefactors’ efforts as condescending. The current cohort of twenty-year-olds faces two problems. First, they find it difficult to honor an ethic demanding empathic concern for needy others because of the media’s dissemination of the assumptions of evolutionary psychologists and economists declaring that self-interest is the only rational life strategy. Second, the imperative to be tolerant of all values denies them an alien morality requiring energetic opposition. Humanists are usually the first to detect the early signs of these pessimistic states and their insights help the public sculpt a more consciously coherent representation of the historical period in which they are trapped. Humans need some basis for hope, even if it is illusory. Recall that patients with Parkinson’s disease given a drug they believed would help them, even though it was only a placebo, secreted the neurotransmitter that normally relieves the symptoms because this molecule is released when humans are expecting an infrequent, but desired, event.22 The uncertainty and cynicism that characterize the current historical moment cry out to the next cohort of humanists to initiate a crusade. The doubt and ambivalence that surround the commitment to, and pursuit of, some ideal goal, beside the sex, celebrity, and wealth that are prominent gratifications among Americans and Europeans, is reflected in the pages of The New Yorker magazine. The nonfictional essays celebrate fame, erotic appeal, and an unfettered ego while its cartoons satirize these same qualities. The combination of an eventual loss of oil as a source of energy, climate change that might leave large regions with a serious water shortage or flooded harbors, and a growing Muslim community giving voice to an anger they believe is morally justified could represent the initial stage of a perfect storm that, in time, could cripple the industrialized nations.

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The current confusion over which moral standards deserve a resolute commitment, combined with a skeptical view of the utility of honoring the traditional standards for honesty, justice, and loyalty, have created an ethical vacuum. The humanists writing during the early decades of the nineteenth century, sensing the troubled consciences of enlightened Americans, spoke in almost one voice in their demand for the abolition of slavery. One of the earliest sound films, The Jazz Singer, made in 1927 dealt with three ethical themes: the assimilation of Jewish immigrants into American life, the level of loyalty a son owed to his dying father, and the contribution of the music of African Americans to the larger culture. The lack of consensus among contemporary Americans and Europeans has forced humanists to adopt a more timid posture and to supress the impulse to rouse the public to demand change, whether a serious reduction in class privilege, the gap in academic achievement between the children of the poor and the privileged, or less violence on television. Only the economists feel confident in their recommendation that a guilt-free self-interest is the only rational way to conduct a life. The modern world desperately needs a Swift, Kant, Goya, Shaw, Beckett, or Eliot to provoke a passive population, adrift in a ship without a confident direction, chatting about the last episode of The Sopranos or Talking of Michelangelo to choose a moral position that demands a deeper empathic concern with the social and natural settings into which each generation is born and to communicate it to a desperate public. The mood that emerged in Europe after World War I, which T. S. Eliot captured in The Wasteland, is gradually engulfing more of the world’s populations and creating conditions in which a species, whose biology demands a meaningful reason for acting usually found in ethical values, finds itself deprived of this necessary resource, not unlike bees who cannot find their home hive. Pleasant sensations and material comforts are unsatisfactory substitutes for this need. So, like lost bees, Americans and Europeans wander

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in circles till their time is up, wishing perhaps that Eve had not eaten that apple. Czeslaw Milosz provides some basis for hope in his refusal to yield to the grotesque cruelty and dispiriting meaninglessness of modern life. Surrender, which characterizes the oppressed, robs humans of the prize they value most – their dignity. Milosz urges a similar resistance on all of us in a memory of an afternoon when, while walking in a Polish village, he saw some ducks splashing in a dirty puddle. The sight struck him as odd because nearby was a lovely stream flowing through an alder wood. When he asked a peasant why the ducks ignored the stream the old man’s terse reply was, “If only they knew.”23

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C. P. Snow would not have to alter the essential claims in his 1959 essay and would not have been surprised by the even broader gulf that exists between natural scientists and humanists. However, he might not have anticipated the strident rejection of evolutionary theory by advocates of creation ideology and a public less willing to regard the rationally based conclusions of natural scientists as the soundest bases for all decisions. The status hierarchy among the intellectual disciplines remains as it was fifty years ago generating a force field resembling our solar system in which the gravitational pull on each planet is proportional to its distance from the sun. In this analogy, physics is the sun and mathematics is its core. That is why a sculpture of Einstein, not Darwin, graces the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, DC. Chemistry and biology are the near planets and, in increasingly distant orbits, lie economics, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science. Even though history and philosophy lie in appreciably more distant orbits, they are not completely free of this force field. Historians are celebrated if they weave their narratives around quantified events, such as the economic output of antebellum plantations, or posit a biological contribution to the variation in national economies. One scholar has suggested, despite slim evidence, that genetic factors were partially responsible for the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in England rather than Germany, China, or Japan.1 245

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At the far edge of this hypothetical universe are the arts and literature, but they, too, are subject to this force field. Galen’s theory of the body humors and advances in the geometry of vision were popular topics of discussion when the sixteenth-century artist Albrecht Durer painted the Four Apostles. Durer’s understanding of the new ideas in geometry and Galen’s concepts are reflected in his mastery of perspective and depiction of St. John as sanguine, St. Peter phlegmatic, St. Mark choleric, and St. Paul melancholic.2 The author of Frankenstein, published in 1816, was inspired by the widely discussed research of Luigi Galvani, who had suggested twenty years earlier that muscle movements were mediated by electricity. Van Gogh purposely incorporated some the discoveries of physiologists studying color vision. Sometimes the contribution of science is not completely conscious. Because the right hemisphere controls the muscles on the left side of the face, emotional expressions are a bit more intense on this side and observers judging the intensity of emotion on photos of faces usually regard the left side as more expressive than the right.3 When photographs are manipulated to create faces with a smile on either the left or right side and a neutral expression on the other, most adults report that the face with the smile on the left side of the face is happier. The portraits painted by European artists were more likely (across 1,474 paintings) to have the model facing slightly to the right so that the left side of the face was more prominent.4 This asymmetry was especially striking for female models. It is not clear whether these artists had noticed that faces were a bit more expressive on the left side, or their private feeling state was more salient when they painted their subjects facing slightly to the right. In either case, the right hemisphere of the artists and viewers would be more activated by smiles or frowns on the left side of the model’s face. James Joyce was probably thinking of the rapidly changing, disconnected scenes in the new medium of silent movies when he was planning his radical novel Ulysses. One contemporary composer has written a computer program that synthesizes sounds in accord

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with the chemical composition of the ice core at Antarctica and, surprisingly, the music has a modern style and some aesthetic appeal. Both Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds exploited the popular scientific ideas of their era. The cafes and salons of Paris in 1907 were buzzing with the new discoveries in physics, Einstein’s revolutionary claims, and especially Henri Poincare’s argument for four dimensions when the twenty-six-year-old Pablo Picasso broke with tradition and used geometric shapes to represent five prostitutes in the famous painting, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”5 The concept of four dimensions, which implies one can view a scene from different perspectives, is captured by imagining a small transparent cube inside a larger cube with lines from the vertices of the smaller cube connected to the vertices of the larger one. Each cube has the three standard dimensions of length (or depth), width, and height; the combination of the two cubes creates the fourth dimension. Although Paul Cézanne’s artistic style at the end of the nineteenth century provided the major incentive for Picasso’s use of cubist forms, it is relevant that Picasso had read technical books on the geometry of four dimensions and his actuary Maurice Princet, a close friend, lectured on Poincaré’s concepts and probably helped him understand this novel idea. Hence, it is not unreasonable to speculate that, in addition to Cézanne’s obvious influence, the broad public interest in Poincaré’s ideas motivated the young artist to paint his conception of varied perspectives in order to announce to the world that this poor, unknown artist was intellectually sophisticated. If the conversations in the Parisian cafes had centered on the new discoveries in genetics or Freud’s theories, Picasso might have chosen a different style to impress the world with his talent and breadth of knowledge. Barbara Stafford,6 a contemporary commentator on art, appears to have fallen victim to the message in the popular books exaggeratingthe significance of the advances in neuroscience. She suggests that visitors

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to galleries would have a richer aesthetic experience if they paid attention to the new discoveries on brain function. For example, viewers would enjoy a more intense aesthetic moment if they knew that their feeling of empathy for the frightened man about to be shot in Goya’s The Fifth of May was due to the activation of mirror neurons in their cortex. I suspect that Stafford had not thought deeply enough about the neuroscientists’ evidence and failed to heed the warning I memorized in high school: “Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.” I do not believe that my aesthetic experience while standing in front of a Turner painting of a blood-red sunset over a roiling sea is enriched by knowing that neurons in my visual cortex are tingling to the shapes and colors in the scene. Some viewers with the same brain reactions are not moved by the same painting. Nothing known about the brain can explain why Marcel Duchamp placed a moustache and a small beard on the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or why Rene Magritte painted a woman’s face with breasts for the eyes and a hairy mons for the mouth. Robert Solso’s more sophisticated analysis argues that, although the brain constrains what colors, shapes, and perspectives might be preferred, these constraints are loose enough to allow an extraordinary variety of events to generate a particular aesthetic experience, depending on the knowledge the person brings to the artistic creation. Knowledge of the brain is probably more useful in predicting the art forms that will be disliked than in predicting those that will be judged beautiful. If this claim were not true, the same viewers would not enjoy the art of Breughel, Titian, Monet, Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, and Pollack. The neurons of the auditory system do constrain the chords, melodies, and rhythms that will be judged as pleasant or unpleasant. Consonant and dissonant chords evoke distinct brain reactions, and young infants frown and turn away from the source of dissonant melodies. Although listeners at the premier of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, almost 100 years ago, found its dissonance annoying, contemporary audiences find it satisfying.

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Thus, the same listeners take pleasure from the consonant music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven as well as the more dissonant compo sitions of Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartok because experience can persuade the brain to suppress its initial biases. All infants dislike the bitter taste of gin but many adults have learned to enjoy a martini. Solso understands that although every psychological event is dependent on neural activity, feelings of pleasure or satisfaction emerge from the alterations in original brain states made possible by experience. Hence, a mind lies at the center of the relations between brain processes and the psychological responses to an artistic product.7

Physics or Biology as Model Although the public may treat all the natural sciences as a unitary category, there is a profound difference between physics and chemistry, on the one hand, and biology, on the other. The electrons, atoms, and molecules that are the basic entities in physics and chemistry resist change (some of the oxygen that Plato breathed is being inspired today), are amenable to mathematical analyses, and, most of the time, investigators can control their initial state when they conduct an experiment. By contrast, genes, cells, organs, and organisms change over time, most of their functions resist mathematical treatment, and it is difficult to control the initial biological state of a living agent before an experimental intrusion. In addition, physical events are much less variable than biological ones. The differences in the times recorded when a one pound stone falls from a height of 12 feet would be close to zero across 100 occurrences. By contrast, the variation in the times recorded when a highly motivated adult pressed a key as fast as possible to the onset of a red light would be far greater across 100 trials. And the variation among ten adults pressing the key 100 times would be greater than the variation in the falling times of ten one-pound stones.

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The ease with which animals discriminate among stimuli provides an example of the qualitatively distinct predictions that each discipline would make. Physicists expect that the degree of difference in the physical features of two events should correlate with the ease of discriminating between them. However, biologists would argue that each species will be especially good at discriminating among the events that are relevant to its adaptation in a particular ecology. Karl von Frisch, who is famous for discovering the dance that bees perform when they return to the hive after visiting a meadow of flowers, supported the biological view. Moreover, bees can tell the difference between two similar flower patterns, but cannot discriminate between a black–white checkerboard and alternating black–white horizontal lines, even though the latter pair of stimuli are physically more distinctive than the two flower shapes. Physicists hunger for a unified theory with the smallest number of concepts that will explain light, electricity, gravity, and the weak and strong forces in atoms. But the assumption that one set of equations will explain all of these phenomena is just that – an idealistic assumption that is no more reasonable than the premise that more than one set of equations will be needed. When Werner Heisenberg claimed he had a unified theory (he admitted later that it lacked technical details), a critical Wolfgang Pauli sent a letter to friends that consisted of a single blank rectangle and a note that read, “This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian. Only technical details are missing.”8 Biologists have no unifying theory for all life phenomena, are not looking for one at least at present, and are reminded each day of the specificity and contextualized constraints that accompany every inference from observations. Two distinct brain profiles accompany the state of a person expecting to be touched, compared with being engaged in thought; hence, the concept consciousness has a minimum of two biological foundations that should be given different

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names.9 As physicists move centrifugally toward greater abstraction and fewer concepts in the service of theoretical tidiness, biologists move centripetally toward specificity, the proliferation of new concepts, and greater complexity. Georg von Békésy, the biologist who studied the basilar membrane, confessed that he took Leonardo da Vinci as his model because he wanted to learn from nature, rather than outdo her. Social scientists have a choice between the research strategies of physics and biology, and remain divided with respect to which philosophy to follow. Economists and some evolutionary biologists find the formal models of physics more attractive. A majority of social scientists orient to biology and accept the serious limits each context imposes on an observation and the importance of the agent’s history. One group of college-age men interacted with an attractive, flirtatious woman; others talked with another male or sat alone. Some men in the first group showed increases in the male sex hormone testosterone, but only if they were extroverts and were tested in the afternoon. Thus, time of day and the student’s personality made an important contribution to the relation between the secretion of male hormone and being in a sexually provocative situation.10 It should be abundantly clear by now that, with the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, I side with those who insist that biology, not physics, is the better model for all social scientists. Social structures, languages, talents, personality traits, beliefs, and genes have a history and are always vulnerable to change. Languages replace phonemes; genomes add nucleotides, individuals alter their beliefs and lose schemata for past events that were not reexperienced. By contrast, the structure of oxygen, the velocity of light, and the charge on the electron have not changed over billions of years. It seems more rational for social scientists to choose a frame of reference that assumes dynamic changes in the contextual constraints on all relations in nature, rather than assume that an inference from one observation using one method generalizes broadly.

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Four Corrections A deeper appreciation of four ideas might repair the public’s current misunderstanding of the three cultures. First, citizens, as well as their elected representatives, need not feel embarrassed by defending decisions that are inconsistent with scientific facts, if those facts violate the person’s or the community’s fundamental standards. Most male primates are sexually promiscuous, but it is perfectly rational for communities to insist that a husband’s adultery is a crime. Boys in every culture are more aggressive than girls, but voters who defeated a referendum stating that teachers should be permitted to punish such actions more severely in males should not be accused of flouting rationality. Although millions of dollars have been spent on the Human Genome Project, the U.S. Congress passed a law in 2008 making it illegal for an insurance company or employer to use this genetic information to make a decision about a person’s insurance premiums or employment because that practice would violate our ethical principles on privacy. This generation of Americans would not approve legislation requiring adults with a heritable disease to be sterilized because they hold a more egalitarian ethic than those born at the end of the nineteenth century who favored eugenic sterilization. Second, the public should understand that symbolic meanings, not the events captured on film by a camera, comprise the primary information humans rely on as they conduct their day’s responsibilities. These meanings are influenced, in a major way, by the specific referents the word intends. Every concept must specify its referents clearly, even though no concept guarantees a permanently faithful description of the event as it occurs in nature – this view is unavailable to human eyes, ears, or minds. Third, media reports of scientific advances should acknowledge that most human acts, beliefs, and emotions emerge from an extraordinarily complex cascade of processes that, although originating in a material brain, cannot be described with the vocabularies of

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natural science. Most psychological outcomes cannot be predicted from biological measurements at confidence levels that have practical implications because of the large number of psychological and sociological conditions that influence every act, thought, and emotion. Not even genetically identical humans or animals are exactly the same in every feature because of unpredictable events that occur between conception and birth.11 The words “rowboat” and “rat” have unique psychological meanings for me and no team of neuroscientists poring over the profile of neural activity in my brain to pictures of rowboats and white rats would be able to discern the reasons for the recordings. Each person has a permanently private set of understandings that cannot be inferred from measures of their brains. Israeli adolescents whose grandparents were Holocaust victims sixty years earlier know that members of their family had been treated with brutality. But it is not obvious that current measures of their brains could detect that knowledge.12 Physicists, who accept quantum mechanics as the most accurate description of matter, live with the frustration that they cannot know ahead of time whether a cat, enclosed in a box in which the release of a photon leads to the emission of a deadly poison that will kill the cat, is dead or alive. Scientists have to open the box to find out. The Perception of Agency Perhaps the most critical need is to help the public understand the balance between the constraints on free will and each person’s freedom to choose and to accept the responsibility of the choice. The ancient Greeks assumed that the gods had considerable power over human actions. Athena manipulated events to allow Odysseus to return to Ithaka. Hippocrates awarded power to both the four bodily humors and diet and climate with respect to the moods of happiness, anger, melancholy, or apathy. But the Greeks also assumed that each

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person retained the freedom to decide to do good and to perfect the self. Socrates freely decided to oppose the majority, knowing that this decision might lead to his death. Although the breakaway Calvinist theology that was heir to Luther’s Protestant reformation damned every infant at birth, the main body of Protestant thought that developed later gave each person more control over, and responsibility for, their salvation. New England Puritans acknowledged this premise by punishing an act of slander, over which willful control was possible, with a larger fine than the one imposed on an impulsive act of aggression, provoked by a sudden rush of anger, that actually harmed a victim. They also differentiated between “being possessed by Satan” because of willful commission of a sin and “being bewitched by another” for which the victim was blameless.13 This conception dominated European society, and the nascent North American community, until industrialization and increased migration to cities created urban ghettoes of poor, minimally skilled workers who, in the eyes of the privileged, seemed to be victims of social forces they could not oppose. This sequence was the first in a quartet of events that challenged the premise that humans had complete freedom of choice. The second, which appeared during the opening decades of the last century in the writings of behaviorists and psychoanalysts, was the belief that the experiences of the opening years, over which infants had no control, established psychological biases that could not be abrogated. An overprotected child was doomed to remain dependent on others no matter how hard he or she tried to free self of this motive. The third historical change was bureaucratization of the workplace. As institutions, scientific projects, and businesses grew in size and degree of specialization the tasks required for reaching a goal were parsed and assigned to different agents. As a result, each actor was relieved of major responsibility for any failure. No single person can be blamed for the economic crisis of 2008. If a serious accident

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occurs when the Hadron Collider is operating at capacity, it will be impossible to hold any single scientist responsible. The media dissemination of discoveries in genetics suggesting that chronic worry, apathy, restlessness, and an easy access to strong anger or aggressive behavior were the inevitable consequences of a heredity that chance dropped on hapless individuals is the final member of our quartet. This information persuaded many born after 1960 that most chronically unhappy, restless, maladjusted, or aggressive adults were not totally responsible for their traits. The rapidity with which this perspective permeated our society was helped by the fact that this idea also served the egalitarian ethos that enjoyed a dramatic boost after the civil rights protests of the 1960s. Only a prejudiced mind would insist that the higher rates of academic failure, criminality, and drug addiction among poor, ethnic minorities were influenced by the inappropriate rearing practices of their families or an inherently weak will. The insidious consequences of externalizing blame for amoral acts is revealed in the report of a blue-ribbon committee of full professors at Harvard Medical School who were commissioned in the 1970s to investigate a case of scientific fraud by a postdoctoral fellow working in a biological laboratory. This distinguished panel concluded that an intensely competitive atmosphere in a laboratory could force a young scientist with high intelligence and no mental illness to cheat. This judgment resembles the claim by an adolescent accused of attacking a homeless man that he watched too much television violence or ate too much candy. I confess to a sharp feeling of surprise when a young resident in psychiatry told me recently that a physician who engaged in sex with a patient was not totally responsible for the failure of willful control because sexual urges can, under some conditions, be too strong to resist! Apparently he had accepted the deterministic hypotheses of sociobiology as proven facts. Readers are reminded that Eliot Spitzer, the former Governor of New York, who had paid a prostitution ring

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several thousand dollars in exchange for a few hours with an attractive call girl, declared in his public resignation in March 2008 that he was personally responsible for his action. I was also troubled by the absence of widespread public protest following the media report in 2007 that some recruiters for the U.S. Army, who had not met their monthly quota of qualified recruits, had paid talented youth to take the tests required for enlistment and attributed the scores to the young men they were trying to recruit. The public silence implies a confusion over the acts that should provoke moral outrage. Recent ordinances prohibiting schools from having machines that dispense soda, or restaurants from using trans-fats, signal a loss of confidence in the human capacity to choose. We have disturbed the balance between the legitimate constraints on choice that preserve social harmony, on the one hand, and the personal freedom that remains outside these limitations, on the other, and have moved too close to a philosophy that renders each person a passive pawn of genes, hormones, intense desires, or social conditions and, therefore, impotent and perhaps blameless. A half-century ago an adolescent who had too many beers before or during a high-school dance and, as a result, injured a friend in a reckless car accident was regarded as totally responsible for the event. Today, school authorities and friends share the blame for allowing the person to drink to intoxication and then drive a car. A feeling of powerlessness, like the state of seventeenth-century Salem residents fearing bewitchment, is sufficiently threatening to some Americans they search for any action that might dilute this corrosive mood. The demand for laws prohibiting smoking in all public buildings (a California city is considering an ordinance banning smoking in one’s home) reassures citizens that they are not totally incapable of coping with at least one of the overpowering problems in their society. Frederick Douglas, John Hope Franklin, Frank Kermode, Sherwin Nuland, and thousands of others who grew up poor, marginalized, or victims of bigotry represent a clear disproof

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of an extreme form of externalization that paralyzes each ego. It is time to restore the earlier balance and acknowledge that despite a particular genome, brain state, family, or neighborhood most adults have the ability to choose how to behave and, therefore, make a willed contribution to their circumstances. Some threads in this more balanced view of a life are apparent in the recent shift to conservative governments in Europe and North America. It is as if voters recognize that if free will does not exist there can be no heroes or heroines. Harry Truman opposed public opinion when he fired Douglas MacArthur; Thomas More chose to oppose his king; Archibald Cox quit his high post rather than conform to Richard Nixon’s request that he violate his conscience. Neither their biology nor childhood histories “made” them act in ways that exacted the personal price of public criticism, their life, or loss of privilege. A false ideology can create the community George Orwell described in the novel 1984 without any help from a despotic leader. Blamelessness is too expensive a price to pay for promoting the ideal of tolerance toward the less privileged or disenfranchised when they violate a community’s ethical imperatives. Even The New Yorker magazine is being caught by this new wave. A cartoon illustrated two disheveled men sitting on a sidewalk with whiskey bottles beside them and one remarking, “Then, I thought, hey, hold on a minute – maybe failure is an option.”

A Trio of Problems An erosion in the depth of identification scholars have with their institutions, the unabashed pursuit of celebrity among a smaller number, and the extreme degree of specialization are three troubling developments in the academy. Many eighteenth-century faculty at elite universities were emotionally identified with their institution. A government minister who visited the University of Gottingen in 1789 wrote, “Nowhere did I find among professors so much preference

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for their university as here …. Everyone is … drunk with the proud sense of their merits, partly real but partly pretended or imagined. Several professors assured me … that the most famous scholars, when they leave Gottingen for another place, lose a significant part not only of their celebrity but even also of their usefulness.”14 Faculty at contemporary universities are perfectly willing to consider an appointment at another institution if it offers a higher salary, lighter teaching load, or better research facilities. We seem to have cycled back to the fifteenth century when there were no academic institutions and individual scholars wandered between Bologna, Paris, and Oxford announcing their wares to customers willing to pay for their knowledge. A majority of scientists in antebellum America had professional fathers and, like Charles Darwin, were gentleman scientists. Under these conditions, it was adaptive to remain loyal to local professional groups and to worry about collegial gossip accusing one of breaking the community’s “blue law” on the undisguised courting of public acclaim. It is rumored that one of Einstein’s relatives assumed he would be embarrassed over being the subject of newspaper headlines announcing Arthur Eddington’s discovery of evidence from an eclipse of the sun that affirmed relativity theory. The desire to remain in good standing with colleagues, which Adam Smith believed was universal, had been an effective curb on the impulse to make bold provocative claims, even if they were true, in order to be recognized by a wider audience. Some readers might be surprised by the imperative the president of Harvard gave to the first members of the prestigious Society of Fellows in 1927, “Your aim will be knowledge and wisdom, not the reflected glamour of fame.”15 This was the view of America’s founding fathers, who favored a posture of humility and concern with retaining the good opinion of others. However, the expansion of the university and the availability of large research grants, after the establishment of the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, were followed by an

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erosion of collegial bonds, intense competition among large numbers of junior faculty for a small number of tenured positions, and the emergence of academic stars who, like talented athletes in the NFL or NBA, shifted their loyalty from the institution to the self without excessive worry over criticism of their vaulting ambition. A contemporary Alfred Wallace would not have shared his insight with a contemporary Darwin and waited for the latter’s comment before submitting it for publication. Cicero would have been troubled by this new breed of scholar who has not only lost the virtues of magnanimity and moderation, but has allowed a psychological separation from colleagues to transform reasonable ambition into “uncouth ferocity.” I know some scientists who would rather be mentioned by the New York Times than congratulated for an important discovery. Social scientists may experience this conflict more acutely than mathematicians and physicists because their research is of greater interest to the public. Ambitious scholars have to find a balance between the desire to be respected for valid conclusions based on careful measurements and the wish to study phenomena that satisfy the public’s curiosity. The latter usually resist careful measurement but promise more provocative conclusions. The choice is usually influenced by the scholar’s personality, skills, and the delicate balance between wanting enhanced status with colleagues, which satisfies a motive for power, and the desire for the headiness of fame. The president of the American Economic Society enjoys high status with his fellow economists, but is anonymous to the vast majority of Americans. The late John Kenneth Galbraith enjoyed public celebrity, but had a compromised status with his peers in economics departments. The extraordinary increase in the number of scientists laboring in highly specialized disciplines with restrictive professional requirements has exacerbated tensions that have always existed. First, these changes created a large number of small scientific sects that established strict rules declaring which classes of evidence were legitimate and protected their constituencies by ignoring those who failed to

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use the proper vocabulary and methods of proof. The psychologists who claim human personality as their territory ignore those who do not base their arguments on the standard questionnaires which have an official blessing. The neuroscientists who measure blood flow in a magnetic scanner are making it difficult for psychologists who study memory or emotion with behavioral methods to have the influence they had earlier. The large numbers of younger faculty competing for a professorship feel forced to specialize in a narrow area of their discipline and to publish as many papers as possible during the five to eight years before a tenure decision is made. Unfortunately, most of the facts in these reports have neither practical utility nor theoretical sig nificance; they are tiny stones looking for a place in a cathedral. The majority of “empirical facts” in the social sciences have a half-life of about ten years. This is not because the problems probed earlier were solved, but because they were abandoned. Fewer than 20 percent of the topics in papers published in two major social science journals in 2007 (Psychological Bulletin and the American Journal of Sociology) had been themes in these journals in 1977 or 1987. Moreover, most scientists feel no embarrassment over their lack of interest in the philosophy or history of their discipline. This indifference to the foundations of a domain, which runs deep in America, seems to follow from the premise that if there are no permanent truths, it is a waste of time to worry too much about meta-matters. One should simply get on with the work because renewal of one’s grant and gaining promotion require productivity. This problem is a trifle less serious in the natural sciences because their richer factual foundation and accumulation of theoretically nested ideas allow most physicists, chemists, and biologists to avoid wasting time working on a problem that might not yield a definitive answer. Peter Medawar, a Nobel laureate in biology, advised young scientists to restrict their efforts to solvable problems that were likely to lead to a robust fact. This advice has some value, but the world is lucky that Faraday,

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Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Curie, Einstein, McClintock, Franklin, and Levi-Montalcini had been unaware of this bit of British wisdom. University administrators must share some blame for this narrative. Presidents, provosts, and deans did not try to slow the new values or procedures because their institution shared vicariously in the public acclaim of their stars and welcomed the generous overhead on the research grants the government and private foundations added to their working budgets. In addition, the extreme specialization makes it difficult for scholars outside a narrow specialty area to judge the contribution of a scholar’s corpus of work. A third problem was that deans and provosts surrendered to excessive worry over a new feature in academic politics; namely, a legal claim of discrimination by a junior faculty member with an ethical or unpopular ideology who was rejected for a tenured appointment. Concern with being accused of ideological, gender, or ethnic prejudice rationalized a tendency to weigh a scholar’s published work rather than quarrel over its premises, beauty, validity, or implications. This combination of independent factors has been accompanied by a diminution in the sacredness awarded to simply understanding a novel phenomenon. The dramatic increase in the number of scientists has led, inevitably, to an accelerated pace of change in explanations and facts that had been assumed to be correct. This development, combined with the enhanced economic implications of scientific research, have had the unfortunate consequence of replacing the satisfaction that Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Darwin, and Mendel experienced with the very different feelings that accompany the anticipation of a large grant or shares in a new company. The allure of understanding loses some of its appeal when it is compared with these concrete rewards. The members of the three cultures are fortunate to have found a life activity that allows them a feeling of vitality, purpose, and self-actualization. We are grateful when any one of their ideas or products helps others, but that benevolent outcome, which is uncommon, is an unpredictable dividend of the creative effort.

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What Are the Missions? A growing confusion over the primary missions of contemporary colleges and universities adds a final element to this story. An important reason for the expansion of postsecondary education in America after the Civil War was the need to select responsible, intelligent adults who could be counted on to display wise judgment, care, and honesty in their later work. Anyone who did their homework regularly, turned in required papers on time, and studied for examinations for sixteen to twenty years displayed evidence of the qualities the society needed in an industrial age. Remember, the knowledge required for most vocations is learned on the job. Nineteenth-century faculty assumed they had two responsibilities: to persuade youth they were entitled to assume positions of power and responsibility once they had demonstrated perseverance and talent in acquiring a little of their society’s culture, history, and values and to guarantee that the next generation of technically skilled professionals was ready to replace the one retiring. No society can know the crises that might arise in the future; hence, it has to prepare a small cadre of specialists who will be ready to deal with any problem, not unlike the reason for the public support of fire departments. No guru peering into a crystal ball in 1959 would have guessed that AIDS, high rates of obesity and drug addiction, climate change, and an excessive number of teenage pregnancies would be critical problems in 2009. Fortunately, our society has trained scientists who can suggest possible solutions to these problems. The accelerated push for a completely egalitarian community by the middle of the last century tarnished the first responsibility. The preparation of elite gentlemen had no place in an egalitarian society. Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth American president, provides an example of the pride felt by ordinary citizens when one of them accomplished something important. Grant had been an abject failure at every venture he tried and would have died as anonymous as the

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other members of his family had he not reenlisted as an officer soon after the Civil War began. Unlike most Union officers, who came from elite families, Grant was a commoner and Northern newspapers usually described Grant’s military victories on the front page but the victories of other Union generals on the back pages. The rise in ethnic diversity during the last century was accompanied by a demand that Western values and history were not entitled to special treatment. Moreover, a college diploma had become a requirement for a well-paying job in an economy needing technically trained workers and a sign of virtue in a society that bridled against status distinctions based on any feature other than accomplishment. Thus, the educational mission became more thoroughly pragmatic. The introductory paragraphs in the British government’s white paper in 2003 on the future of higher education stated that the primary purpose of an undergraduate degree was to meet the needs of the British economy by training youth to become scientists and engineers who would produce ideas ready for technology transfer. Any progress toward those goals would allow a scientist access to the quiet voice that whispers at the end of the day, “Well done.” New ideas just beginning to spread through a community can, in a short time, permeate the entire society in a sociological version of what Stephen Gould called punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution. Such a phenomenon occurred in America between 1960 and 1980 when the egalitarian ethos that had applied primarily to minority groups and women expanded its sphere of influence to include all persons, roles, and bodies of knowledge. No individual was entitled to any position of privilege because of their occupation, ethnicity, religion, education, family pedigree, or moral values, and no human creation or ethic was inherently more virtuous or beautiful than any other. All scholarship was entitled to equal respect. A course on the history of the shopping mall or the banjo was entitled to the same credit as a course on the history of the major religions or the physical sciences.

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This new attitude generated a skeptical posture toward the traditional assumption that the activities of students and faculty during the undergraduate years had a sacredness that was missing in law firms, banks, corporations, and governmental agencies. An ethnography written in the year 2008 that described a society in which students and faculty believed they were participants in rituals that bestowed a symbolic blessing on both groups would be regarded as an example of an exotic culture ridden with myth and superstition. Too often the undergraduate years resemble a bus tour through a beautiful countryside where the purpose is not to admire the scenery but to keep the tour on schedule. The new understanding was that college students were hotel guests choosing from a variety of intellectual diversions with no purpose other than career preparation directed by a diverse faculty of reasonably well-treated employees. When college deans required faculty to account for their time away from campus and to report the number of research papers and books they had written during the academic year, and the Harvard Business School asked eminent scholars teaching for the first time to attend three days of instruction on the most effective way to present their information, any distinction between the Hyatt Hotel Corporation and a temple was obliterated. This sad conclusion finds support in the recent trend to compensate some university presidents with salary and bonus packages totaling more than a million dollars; twelve private universities did so in 2005–06. This new practice, which would have been regarded as outrageous thirty years ago, tempts the public to treat colleges and universities as corporations that hire powerful executives to enhance the prestige and endowment of the institution. Alfred North Whitehead, who would have been disappointed with the current ambience, believed that the only justification for the university was to unite the young and the old in an “imaginative consideration of learning” that would instill in the young a zest for life. Whitehead did not think that the dissemination of information in PowerPoint illustrations

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delivered by graduate students or part-time faculty in need of extra money was the primary purpose of a university. One result of these historical changes is that both students and faculty are deprived of the feeling that accompanies the illusion that they have participated in a mission that transcends the ordinary rituals of daily life. Some administrators and faculty are aware of their collusion in compromising the traditional norms that called for loyalty to the institution, devotion to undergraduates, a reason able level of humility, and rewarding only scholarship of the highest quality. The abandonment of these values eroded their moral authority and rendered their institutions more dependent on external signs of worth, such as magazine rankings of departments based, in part, on the number of Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners on the faculty.

The Functions of the Three Cultures Snow did not dwell on the useful social functions of the trio of intellectual communities. Each culture, like the branches of American government, represents a potential source of restraint when one, in a move to dominate the others, advocates ideological excesses that stray too far from evidence or violates the community’s ethical sense. Edward Gibbon, the author of the magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, noted that philosophers and historians contributed to their societies by eradicating the deadly principle of fanaticism. The natural sciences contribute to our material comforts and health and clarify puzzling natural phenomena. The humanities articulate changes in the public mood produced by historical change and implicitly defend an ethical posture that seems appropriate for their society during a historical era. The social sciences try to evaluate the claims of both groups. Every democracy requires an opposition party to prevent the one temporarily in power from becoming despotic. And every society

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needs a cohort of intellectuals to check the dominance of a single perspective when its ideological hand becomes too heavy. The first cohort of natural scientists, especially Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, assumed this responsibility when Christian philosophy dominated European thought and their work catalyzed the ideology of the Enlightenment era. However, following three centuries of increasing secular power, natural scientists have become members of the entrenched establishment. This new arrangement leaves writers, poets, philosophers, historians, and social scientists as the loyal opposition against a materialistic determinism that exaggerates the influence of genes and neurochemistry on human behavior and emotion, while minimizing the influence of culture, values, and the historical moment on the meanings of words, sources of uncertainty, and each person’s attempt to render their life coherent. The obvious need for greater mutuality of understanding among the members of the three cultures could be partially met through collaborations, both in and out of the academy, and college courses co-taught and books co-authored by representatives from two or all three groups. David Edwards, a member of the applied sciences faculty at Harvard, made a passionate plea to scientists, humanists, and artists to break out of the cocoons of premises that separate them. An undergraduate offering called “Nineteenth-Century Europe,” taught by a natural scientist who described the discoveries of Boltzmann, Mendel, and Pasteur; a social scientist who presented the cultural settings of these discoveries and the backgrounds of the scientists; and a historian who placed these events in the context of the industrialization of wealthy democracies and the optimistic mood of progress could weave the separateness of the scientific events into a coherent tapestry. Indeed, it may be time to combine all the social scientists into one department, as Harvard University did about sixty years ago but had to disband after one generation because the members of the separate disciplines demanded more autonomy and sovereignty.

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A Final Query There is a broad consensus among most adults, especially those living in economically developed, industrialized nations, that the products of the natural sciences have been responsible for at least five highly desirable consequences. Most people live longer, possess better health, are more literate, know more about the world, and have mechanical devices that lighten the burden of manual labor. But these significant advantages have exacted some costs. The pollution of air and water and massive deforestation have compromised the integrity of the environment and pose the threat of serious climate change. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has generated a vague sense of unease. Three years after the terrorist attack of September 11 a number of Americans were still reporting symptoms of heart dysfunction and worry over a future attack.16 A global awareness of the increased income and material inequality, made possible by television and the internet, has created a corrosive blend of envy and anger among the 75 percent of the world’s population living in undeveloped or developing nations. The number of households headed by one adult, transient residence in large urban areas, and a diluted identification with one’s town, region, or country have created feelings of anonymity and loneliness that were less common in earlier times. Finally, the assumptions of natural science have generated some confusion over the ethical standards that warrant unquestioned loyalty. To borrow the language of the economist, the utilities gained are qualitatively different from the utilities lost. It may be a useful exercise, therefore, to take 1807 as a referent, before industrialization, medicines that alleviate or cure disease, chlorinated water, radical surgical techniques, electricity, television, telephone, cars, planes, computers, and centrally heated homes, and ask if the state of the world today is better than it was 200 years earlier. I chose the beginning of the nineteenth century as a buoy because of a wish to separate science’s contribution to a deeper understanding

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of natural phenomena from the material products of research that altered nature. The latter became more obvious toward the end of that century. Nature may not mind being understood, but might not like being manipulated in ways that distort her favored shapes. Galileo, Kepler, and Newton challenged the assumptionsof Christian philosophy that sustained a personal faith in God; their discoveries did not threaten human survival. Obviously, we have to select a specific beneficiary in order to answer this question. We could select those who live in the wealthy democracies, all humans, all living creatures, or the integrity of the planet. Many species, cultures, and individuals are not better off today than they were 200 years earlier. Most animal species have been harmed, many cultures and their languages have vanished, densely crowded urban neighborhoods of strangers have replaced the villages and towns of the countryside, and the earth’s air and water have become seriously polluted. The number of Africans living in abject poverty, without access to the basic resources necessary for life, is close to the total population of the United States. The discussion is apt to be more interesting if we adopt an egocentric bias and base our judgment on the restricted perspectives of the privileged citizens living in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, even though these groups represent less than 25 percent of the world’s population. The scientific discoveries that prolonged human life by about four decades have also produced a growing population of older citizens who make a minimal contribution to their society, spend most of the public funds allocated for health, and are becoming a serious economic burden on a shrinking number of workers whose taxes and social security payments must support the aging adults. It is estimated that by 2050 one of every three adults in developed countries will be older than sixty years and there will be only two or three active workers contributing to the support of one older recipient of public funds. This ratio is not sustainable. It is useful to remember that the median life span remained relatively constant at thirty-five to

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f orty-five years for thousands of years and only began to rise at the end of the nineteenth century following the availability of vaccinations, chlorinated water, refrigerated foods, and greater awareness of the practices that reduce infectious diseases. The dramatic reduction in infant mortality made possible by medical technology is balanced by the decision of many couples to have only one or two children. The birth rate in America in 1965 was 22 per 1000; in 2005 it was 14 per 1000. Similar trends are present in Europe and Japan where family size is smaller today than it was in 1807. The elegant techniques that maintain life in three-pound newborn infants save some children with serious brain or bodily compromises who would have died of natural causes in 1800. Because they lived, public taxes are needed to care for them indefinitely in specialized institutions. The ease of travel to distant places has made it possible for many to establish homes far from their biological families and childhood friends and, as a result, reduced the number of extended families living in the same community and diluted the emotional satisfactions such social arrangements generate. The advantages of plane travel and communication by internet and cell phone are as helpful to terrorists, pedophiles, and drug dealers as they are to law-abiding citizens, business executives, and scientists. The pleasures of twenty-four-hour multichannel television are balanced by an increased restlessness and a decreased willingness or desire to be alone for several hours reading a book, writing letters, knitting, mending a fence, tending a rose garden, or simply watching a blood-red sunset slowly disappear over the horizon. The relentless planning of trips to new places may reflect a wish to escape from a confrontation with the present, and its lack of an ideal dream, into a distracting tomorrow. The most radical psychological changes over this interval are, as noted, the greater uncertainty over the values that deserve unquestioned loyalty and the envy generated among the large numbers of less advantaged who are aware of the income and material inequality

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across the world’s societies.17 In absolute terms, more humans live in dire poverty today (about 2½ billion) than did in 1809. About 80 percent of this deprived group live in economically underdeveloped regions, but the difference in population size between the developed and less developed areas did not begin to increase until 1900. In 1809 the earth had about 1 billion people, not the 6.5 billion alive today. By the year 2010 the populations of Tokyo, Mexico City, Delhi, Sao Paulo, and Jakarta will have increased almost six times in only two generations, from 17 to 104 million, a phenomenon associated with increasing child mortality among the poorer residents of these cities. Although it is impossible to know the subjective psychological states of the adults 200 years ago, who were alive 1807, it is possible to argue that their average feeling of “well-being” would not be seriously different from the judgments provided by the current cohort. Although the absolute income of individuals in most societies has risen, the current range is much larger, leaving those who believe they cannot better their situation vulnerable to depression and anger. More important, the individuals alive in 1809 were more certain about the acts that were ethically inappropriate and, at least in America and Europe, were more confident that their communities were progressing. Fulton’s steamboat took its maiden voyage up the Hudson, London’s Pall Mall was lit with gaslight, and both the American Congress and the British Parliament had abolished the slave trade during the first decade of the nineteenth-century. These conditions are no less relevant as determinants of a population’s mood as knowing one might celebrate an eightieth birthday, flying to a distant place for a holiday, or calling a friend on a cell phone. On the one hand, humans are happy when their lives are improving and they believe they can cope with their sources of uncertainty and gratifytheir desires if they make the effort. On the other hand, if deprived of all of these conditions they are unhappy.

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It is reasonable, therefore, to ask whether more adults from our contemporary sample fall into the former or the latter category. The answer is not clear. A professor at St. John’s University in New York City, who enjoys a materially comfortable life style, described his mood in 2007: “We live in a tragic world. … we are surrounded by poverty and human misery, by inequality and injustice, by greed and materialism. … a dark hole in which we find ourselves, slipping downward as a nation and people.”18 This mood is probably one reason for the increased number of attempted or successful adolescent suicides over the past 20 years; 8 percent of American high school students (more than 1 million) tried to commit suicide in 2004 and 1,700 were successful. A New Yorker cartoon reflects the dissatisfaction over the inability to understand why, despite sufficient material comforts , a sustained state of joy seems unattainable. The scene is a living room with a woman, cat, and a man saying,” It’s odd that you’re so dull and I’m so boring, and our cat is, for all we know, plaster of Paris.” This ennui, due partly to confusion over which events and experiences are vital and which superficial, is not restricted to Americans. The movie Goodbye, Dragon Inn by the Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, which was acclaimed a masterpiece by many critics, captures in haunting scenes of a near empty movie house on its last night of operation the passive, quiet apathy of contemporary Taiwanese (a state local psychologists call “floating”) who long for the passion of a collective mission they imagine existed in China’s past. Of course, not all was sweetness and light. America two centuries earlier had a population of about 5½ million (1 million were slaves) and a poorly developed infrastructure that made travel and communication difficult and expensive. It took three days to travel from Boston to New York and a twenty-mile journey cost about $20, which was close to 5 percent of the average laborers’ annual income. Livestock roamed free on unlit city streets and outbreaks of yellow fever were frequent. European crowds watched criminals being burned alive or

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having their bodies torn apart on a wheel, and commentators were bemoaning the dismal state of the world. Despite these dismal material conditions, income inequalities in the United States were much smaller in 1807. Most families owned a house, land, and livestock, had sufficient food, and could count on a net worth of about $2,500. Equally important, a majoritybelieved that a better life was possible and progress inevitable. Although a million Americans suffered the terrible indignity of slavery, about 30 million contemporary Americans live in extreme poverty, some homeless, with little hope of a secure life. Moreover, the America of 1809 did not have 5 million drug addicts (close to the total populationof the United States in 1809), rival gangs roaming every large city, a murder rate of 7.4 per 100,000, school shootings, 1.6 million incarcerated adults, almost 5 million reported rapes of women, several million adolescent girls performing oral sex on a boy with whom they had no close relationship, and 2 million youth between 14 and 22 years confessing to be fatalists who believed they had no future and were anticipating suicide.19 This is not the America de Tocqueville saw in 1831. If a gain in subjective happiness is the ultimate rationale for scientific research and the economic growth it spawns, and I acknowledge that some commentators might reject this criterion, a conservative conclusion, recognized by the ancients, is that the human condition cycles and does not ascend on a bright path to a more perfect state for all humanity. The destitute families and homeless children wandering city streets have replaced the peasants of feudal Europe; the two million people who died of AIDS last year have replaced those who suffered from smallpox and tuberculosis; and the women trapped into lives of prostitution in foreign countries have replaced the concubines confined to the harems of Ottoman sultans. I confess, with some sadness, to a nod of agreement with Garrett Hardin’s critique of the hubris of experts who are confident that human ingenuity can defeat the combined forces of nature and

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history.20 Wealthy nations, in a mood of generosity, sent food during the 1950s to the starving Nepalese who were dying before reaching reproductive maturity. As a result of the benevolent altruism many thousands survived to adulthood and, needing lumber for housing, cut down large portions of healthy forests. The serious land erosion that followed was a major reason for the devastation caused by the 1974 flood that killed almost a half-million in Bangladesh. Nature claimed her 500,000 souls; they happened to live in Bangladesh rather than Nepal. However, nature and history are free of ethnic and national prejudice and, working together, change on an unpredictable schedule the locations of the privileged, who have good reasons to be optimistic, and the poor, who must cope with daily desperation. The four horsemen of the apocalypse in Durer’s fifteenth-century drawing – pestilence, war, famine, and death – are still with us, only the locations of the victims have changed. Finally, the account would seem to be balanced if we reject humans and their psychological states as the primary beneficiaries of scientific research and adopt the impersonal perspective of evolution which demands only improved fitness. Although the populations in North America, Europe, and Japan have not increased as much as those in India, Africa, Indonesia, and China, nature has no preference for the fitness of Americans over Chinese, or humans over monkeys, manatees, or mosquitoes. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suggest that the respondents who celebrated the practical benefits of the natural sciences in our hypothetical survey were displaying the universal tendency of any minority that happens to enjoy more material privileges than others to regard the present as an improvement on the past, to deny the less desirable features of their lives, and to attribute their advantages to some force, group, or institution. Athenians in 400 BCE, first-century Romans, eighth-century Mayan residents of Tikal, sixteenth-century Venetians, and eighteenth-century Londoners would probably have reported that their historical era was better than that of their grandparents. If Thomas Jefferson were

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as familiar with today’s America as he was with the nation he knew, following the Louisiana Purchase, the mood of optimism, and the young country’s desire to honor ethical demands for suppression of greed and fiscal moderation, and had to choose one of these eras for his life itinerary, I am not certain which historical period he would have selected. Surely, Jefferson would have been troubled by the burdens the past few generations are passing on to those not yet born. In a letter to James Madison dated September 6, 1789, our American statesman in Paris wrote that no contemporary generation has a right to encumber the next with the debts they have accrued.21 For a few moments, then, I ask readers to imagine they are members of a hypothetical new species that is sentient, long-lived, omnipotent, and resting comfortably 100 miles above the Earth reflecting on the events of the past 200 years. As they brooded over the fact that modern humans, who have only been around for 150,000 years, have killed more living things, consumed more biomass, destroyed more forests, polluted more water supplies, and added more toxins, soot, and carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than all their primate relatives who have been roaming the Earth for many millions of years, they might wonder about the dangers humans pose for the integrity of the planet. As a result, this new species might decide that Homo sapiens had become such a serious threat to all forms of life it was time to have this animal restrained, culled, or, perhaps, eliminated. That is what a panel of wise humans would decide if a species of poisonous snake had become so prevalent it posed a danger to human life. It is useful to remember that about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago climate change in northern Europe had so decimated the usual supplies of meat protein that the size and density of human populations plummeted.22 This occurred without any human contribution; if humans are contributing to current climate change, the pace is likely to be more rapid. Although the script that produced this moment cannot be rewritten, we should try to improve the current arrangements in many

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domains of modern life. One admittedly tiny action that might have benevolent effects in the academy is to acknowledge that the scholars working in all domains of inquiry have something to contribute to a deeper understanding of the human condition. The natural scientist J. D. Barrow wrote: “There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For to see through everything would leave us seeing nothing.”23 It is time for the members of the three cultures to adopt a posture of greater humility for, like tigers, sharks, and hawks, each group is potent in its own territory but impotent in the territory of the other.

Notes

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Index

Index note: entries followed by a lower case f refer to information contained in figures. Adams, John, 223 aesthetics, and biology of brain, 157–58, 246–49. See also art agency, and public’s misunderstanding of three cultures, 253–57 Ainsworth, Mary, 29 Albee, Edward, 241 alleles, and biological variation, 150, 151. See also genetics Allied Social Science Associations, 199 altruism, debate on role of in evolution, 69–73, 77 ambiguity: in mathematical, semantic, and schematic representations, 39–40; and meanings of words in three cultures, 15–17; in relation between language and reality, 225. See also ethics; uncertainty American Economic Society, 259 American Psychological Association, 51; amygdala: activation of, 18–19; and human uniqueness, 75 analytic tools, and defining dimensions of three cultures, 3–5. See also methodology Anderson, Robert, 232 Anthony, David, 164–65 anthropology: and concepts of “culture,” 110; and ethical neutrality, 165–67;

and natural sciences, 104. See also social sciences Antonioni, Michelangelo, 233 anxiety: evaluation of concept, 134; “social” in economics, 215 Appleby, Joyce, 224 Araujo, Ivan de, 201 Aristotle, 79, 101, 228 art: film as form of, 227; knowledge of brain as predictor of forms, 247–49. See also aesthetics Association for Psychological Science, 51 astronomy, 55, 217 Augustine, St., 176 autism, 149 L’ Avventura (film), 233 Ayala, Francisco, 58 Bacon, Francis, 224 Baillargeon, Renee, 228 Barrow, J. D., 275 Beach, Frank, 75 Beautiful Mind, A (film), 189 Beckett, Samuel, 89, 235, 240 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 146, 222 behavioral economics, 212–14 behaviorism, 21, 37, 143 Bergman, Ingmar, 232 Bicycle Thief, The (film), 232

301

302

Index

Bildung, nineteenth-century German ideal of, 79 biographies, and descriptions of emotions, 235–37 biology: and economics in nineteenth century, 179; and ethical concerns of public, 56; influence of on psychological functions, 59–61, 81, 133–34, 148–52; and meaning of terms in language networks, 8–9, 10–11; as model for natural sciences, 249–51; models in evolutionary, 36–8; and patterns, 28. See also evolution and evolutionary theory; genetics; natural sciences bipolar disorder, 54 blood flow, and human brain activity, 61–67 Bohr, Niels, x, 33–34, 82, 140–41 Bok, Derek, 57 Boulding, Kenneth, 191, 192 Bowlby, John, 25, 29, 129 brain. See amygdala; neuroscience Bryan, William Jennings, 97 Cage, John, 240–41 Calhoun, John, 108–09 Calvin, John, 152 Calvinism, and concept of agency, 254 Capecchi, Mario, 47 Carmichael, Leonard, 147–48 Carroll, Lewis, 75 Carson, Rachel, 197 cascade of events, and defining dimentions of three cultures, 11–15 Cézanne, Paul, 247 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, 236 chemistry: and ratio scale, 123 status of in natural sciences, 245 China: and genetic factors in infant behavior, 150; and genetic influences on responses to drugs, 150; and income inequality, 196, 205–06; literature and philosophy in

nineteenth- and twentieth-century, 233–34; and symbolic networks, 107, 108 Chomsky, Noam, 163–64, 186 Christianity, growth of in Europe during third to sixth centuries, 88 class, social: and perception of inequality in economics, 194; and status hierarchies in social sciences, 115–20 Clement of Alexandria, 166 cognitive dissonance, and language networks, 8 coherence: and concept of truth, 40–42; and definition of culture in social sciences, 107–11 Cold War, 182 colors: and languages, 162; and symbols for emotions, 106–07 communication networks, in economics, 186–87 concepts: and defining dimensions of three cultures, 3–5, 17–19; and vocabularies of three cultures, 6 conditioning, limits of and contributions of social sciences, 147–48 consciousness, biological foundations of concept, 250–51 context: and contributions of social sciences, 143–45; of game theory in economics, 187–88 cooperation, debate on evolution and, 69–73 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 239–40 correctness, and concept of truth, 40–42 cost-benefit analysis, and values in economics, 198–99 Cox, Archibald, 257 creationism, 77, 97, 245 Crichton, Michael, 247 Crick, Francis, 30, 66, 102 Cronin, James, 102

Index

culture: and biological variation, 151; concepts of in social sciences, 107–15; and vocabulary of language, 161. See also three cultures Damasio, Antonio, 228 Darwin, Charles, 20, 34, 49, 70, 216, 231 Darwin, Erasmus, 51 Dasgupta, Partha, 185 Dawkins, Richard, 83, 84, 85, 89, 91 de Beauvoir, Simone, 153 deconstructionism, influence of on humanities, 224, 225 Delbanco, Andrew, 108 demographics, recent changes in patterns of, 268–70 Derrida, Jacques, x, 224, 225 Descartes, Rene, 16, 33, 67, 77 De Sica, Vittorio, 232 determinism: and concept of agency, 255; and fundamental assumptions in natural sciences, 58–61 de Waal, Frans, 70 Dewey, John, 98 Dirac, Paul, 34, 102 Disney, Walt, 106 Donne, John, 100 Duchamp, Marcel, 248 Durer, Albrecht, 246, 273 Dylan, Bob, 223, 241 Dyson, Freeman, 207 Ecological Society of America, 202 ecology, influence on vocabulary of language, 160. See also environment economics: and demand for quantification, 125; and game theory, 187–92; and happiness, 202–04; history of, 175–80; and income inequality, 192–97; influence of history on, 210–12; methodology and theory in, 214–21; and patterns, 27; and rationality, 83–84, 200–02; and

303

use of models, 36–38, 174, 180–187, 204–12; and values, 197–202; and vocabulary, 7. See also behavioral economics; social sciences Economist, The (journal), 51–52 Eddington, Arthur, 258 education: and expansion of higher education in twentieth century, 1–2; problem of national and ethnic identities in public, 113. See also universities Edwards, David, 266 Einstein, Albert, 8, 32, 33, 42, 125, 132, 141, 239, 247, 258 Eisenhower, Dwight, 98 electroencephalogram (EEG), and structure of semantic networks, 222 Eliot, T. S., 6–7, 155, 227, 231, 243 emotions: colors as symbols for, 106–07; descriptions of blends in humanities, 234–38 England, and history of economics, 178 environment, and biological variation, 151. See also ecology equilibrium, concept of in economics, 191–92 Erikson, Erik, 25 ethics: and fundamental assumptions of natural sciences, 67–73; and neutrality in social sciences, 165–67; and public views of natural sciences, 56–57; and rational choice theory in political science, 168–70, 172. See also values Europe: growth of Christianity during third to sixth centuries in, 88; and symbolic networks for self, 108. See also England; Hadron Collider; Scotland evidence, sources of in social sciences, 131–42 “evo-devo” theory, 45

304

Index

evolution and evolutionary theory: and biological variation, 150; and debates on altruism and cooperation, 69–73, 77; and metaphors in economics, 191; and social behavior, 76. See also biology experience, influence of early on intellectual and behavioral development, 158–59 faces: and physiology of brain, 64, 65; as semantic category, 142 Faraday, Michael, 44–45 fear: evaluation of in social sciences, 134–35; meaning of in different language networks, 6–7, 8, 133 Fermi, Enrico, 207 Ferrier, David, 66 film, as art form, 227 finger ratio, 154–55 fitness, evolutionary theory and inclusive, 77. See also social fitness Flew, Anthony, 83 Fodor, Jerry, 186 Ford, Gerald, 235 Ford, Henry, 223 Foucault, Michel, x, 224 Franklin, Benjamin, 222, 223 Franklin, Rosalind, 30, 102, 228 Frege, Gottlob, 46 Freud, Sigmund, 16, 20, 23, 25, 52, 59, 109–10, 158, 176, 178, 215, 216. See also psychoanalysis Friedman, Milton, 210 Frisch, Karl von, 250 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 240, 259 Galen, 246 Galileo, 100, 101, 268 Galison, Peter, 239 Galvani, Luigi, 246 game theory, in economics, 187–92 Gamow, George, 34 Gardner, Howard, 147

Geertz, Clifford, 49 gender: symbols for, 105–06; and temperamental biases, 152–58 genetics: of altruism, 71; and biological variation, 149; and concept of agency, 255; and determinism, 60; measurement in research on behavioral and psychiatric, 121–22; and principles of parsimony, 93–7 Gibbon, Edward, 265 Gini coefficient, and inequality in economics, 196 Glaser, Donald, 102 Godel, Kurt, 146 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 55 Gombrowicz, Witold, 28, 120 Gone With the Wind (film), 240 Goodall, Jane, 144 Goodbye, Dragon Inn (film), 271 Gould, Stephen, 263 government, and support for social science research, 130 Goya, Francisco de, 248 grammatical rules, and human languages, 160, 161 Grant, Ulysses S., 262–63 Greenspan, Alan, 192, 214 Gross, Charles, 211 Habermas, Jürgen, 41–42 Hammoudi, Abdellah, 91, 234, 237 Hardin, Garrett, 91–92, 272 Hadron Collider, 102, 182, 255 Hamburger, Viktor, 218 happiness: problem of in economics, 202–04; and recent societal changes, 272 Harvard Medical School, 255 Harvard University, 266 Harvey, William, 101 health care, advances in, 268–69 Heidegger, Martin, 224 Hein, Piet, 214 Heisenberg, Werner, 33, 250

Index

Hippocrates, 93, 253 Hirschman, Albert, 176 history: and current status of humanities, 228–30; and economics, 175–80, 210–12; influence of on three cultures, 4f, 19–25; and patterns, 28; and political science, 173–74; of science, 239; tacit understandings of societies in eras of, 240–44. See also humanities Hoffmann, Roald, 223 Hubble, Edwin, 217 human(s), uniqueness of: and culture, 110–11; debate on in natural sciences, 73–81; and language, 162–64 Human Genome Project, 102, 252 humanities: and cascade of events, 11–15; contributions of, 230–38; and dimensions defining three cultures, 2–5, 17–19; influence of history on, 4f, 19–25; and meaning of truth, 40–2; and mental structures, 30–40; and patterns, 25–30; and postmodernism, x; public loss of confidence in, 222–28; and significance of setting, 238–40; and subjects of study, 42–7; and tacit understandings in historical eras, 240–44; tropes and ambiguity of meanings of words in three cultures, 15–17; and types of scientists, 47–50; and vocabularies of three cultures, 4f, 5–11. See also art; history; literature; music; philosophy; three cultures Hume, David, 175, 228 Hurwicz, Leonid, 189 Hutchins, Robert, 99 iconic symbols, 105 identification: problem of national and ethnic in public education, 113; of scholars with institutions, 257; status hierarchies and group, 120

305

income inequality: increase in for U.S., 272; perception of in economics, 192–97 industrialization, importance of as social phenomena, 19–20 Insel, Thomas, 71–72 intellectual, public suspicion of, 223; intelligence quotient (IQ): flaws in concept of, 146; and genetics, 94–95; and methods of measurement, 124 intelligent design, 77, 97, 216 International Monetary Fund, 207 Into the Wild (film), 235 Jackson, John Hughlings, 66 James, William, 21, 98 Japan: and context of emotions, 145; and genetic influences on responses to drugs, 150; and grammatical rules, 161 Jazz Singer, The (film), 243 Jefferson, Thomas, 223, 274 Jevons, William Stanley, 122–23 journals: and influence of history on research in social science, 22–23; titles of in natural sciences versus social sciences, 132; topics of papers in social science, 260 Joyce, James, 236, 246 Jung, Carl, 25, 34–35 Kahneman, D., 186, 187, 188, 203 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 172 Keats, John, 223 Kelvin, Lord, 34 Kennan, George, 234 Keohane, Robert, 169–70 Kepler, Johann, 36, 116, 181, 268 Kermode, Frank, 234 Kerouac, Jack, 240 Keynes, John Maynard, 185, 192 Kitcher, Philip, 87 Kleinman, Arthur, 142 Kronman, Anthony, 99–100, 231 Krugman, Paul, 190

306 Kuhn, Thomas, 18, 172 Kuznets, Simon, 181 language: and deconstructionism, 225; meaning of fear in different networks of, 6–7, 8; three cultures as communities of, 6; tropes and ambiguity of meanings of words in three cultures, 15–17; and use of terms concrete and abstract as types of semantic concepts, 30. See also linguistics; vocabularies Lao-Tzu, 47 Leavis, F. R., 1, 118 Leonardo da Vinci, 101, 248 Leontief, Wasily, 187 Levi-Montalcini, Rita, 228 Lewis, C. S., 231–32 Lewis, Sinclair, 87 Lincoln, Abraham, 223 linguistics, and contributions of social sciences, 159–165. See also language Linnaeus, Carolus, 179 literature: nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Chinese, 233–34; Western during twentieth century, 232–33 Locke, John, 24, 117, 172 Lucas, Robert, 38, 184–85 Maestripieri, Dario, 78–79 Malthus, Thomas, 176 Mankiw, Greg, 187 Mao T’se-Tung, 233–34, 235 Margitte, Rene, 248 Marx, Karl, 20, 114, 117 mathematical concepts: and mental structures in three cultures, 33–38; and models in economics, 185–86 Mather, Cotton, 211 Maudsley, Henry, 52 Maxwell, James Clerk, 45 Mayr, Ernst, 251 Mead, George Herbert, 111

Index measurement, demand for in social sciences, 120–27 Medawar, Peter, 260 Melville, Herman, 108–09 memoirs, and descriptions of emotions, 235–37 memory, meaning of in different language networks, 9 Mendel, Gregor, 46 mental structures, and differences in three cultures, 30–40 metaphors, and tropes in three cultures, 15–17 methodology: and measurement in social sciences, 122–27; neglect of development in social sciences, 218–19; new strategies in social sciences, 219–21; and theory in economics, 214–21; and titles of journals in natural sciences, 132; and use of questionnaires in social sciences, 135–140. See also analytic tools; research metrics, and phases of cascade of events, 12 Mexico, growth of Christianity in sixteenth-century, 88 Miller, Neal, 215 Millikan, Robert, 217 Mills, John Stuart, 176, 193 Milosz, Czeslaw, 28, 139–40, 244 Mind (journal), 24 Mirowski, Philip, 181 Moby Dick (Melville), 108–09 models: mathematical in evolutionary biology and economics, 36–38, 185; and role of physics and biology in natural sciences, 249–51; scientists and search for perfect forms of, 29–30; and trends in economics, 174, 180–87, 204–12 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat (Baron), 176 More, Thomas, 236, 237, 257 Morgenstern, Oskar, 187

Index

motivational patterns, and types of scientists, 48 music, and brain functions, 248–49 multidimensional scaling, 219 names, and symbolic connections to gender, 106 NASA, 102 Nash, John, 189 National Academy of Sciences, 245 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 47, 120, 121, 258 National Science Foundation (NSF), 46–47, 120, 121, 258 natural sciences: and cascade of events, 11–15; challenges to authority of, 97–100; and dimensions defining three cultures, 2–5, 17–19; four philosophies of, 89–92; fundamental assumptions in, 57–73; and human uniqueness, 73–81; influence of history on, 4f, 19–25; and meaning of truth, 40–42, 58, 81–9; and mental structures, 30–40; methodology and titles of journals, 132; and models, 182; and patterns, 25–30; physics and biology as models for, 249–51; and price of parsimony, 92–97; public views of, 51–57; and science as career, 101–03; and subjects of study, 42–47; tropes and ambiguity of meanings of words in three cultures, 15–17; and types of scientists, 47–50; and vocabularies of three cultures, 4f, 5–11. See also astronomy; biology; chemistry; physics; three cultures nature, symbols for, 105 natural selection, and evolution, 72 neoclassical theory, in economics, 184 network theory, 22, 76, 103 neuroscience: and brain function as predictor of art forms, 247–49; and cascade of events, 11–15; and genetic determinism, 60–61; human brain activity and meaning of blood

307

flow, 61–67; and meaning of terms in different language networks, 8–11; and patterns in wave forms of electroencephalograms, 26–27; tropes and ambiguity in meanings of words in, 16–17. See also psychology Newton, Isaac, 8, 33, 36, 41, 101, 179, 181, 182, 196, 207–08, 268 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 224 nihilism, and concepts of rationality, 90 Nixon, Richard, 235 Nusslein-Volhard, Christiane, 48 objectivity, definitions of in natural and social sciences, 41, 82–3 ordinal scales, and measurement in social sciences, 123–24 Orwell, George, 257 oxytocin, and biological variation, 148, 153 Panofsky, Wolfgang, 56 parameters, of economic models, 208 parsimony, natural sciences and principle of, 92–97 patterns: and demand for quantification in social sciences, 122–26; and differences in three cultures, 25–30 Pauli, Wolfgang, 102, 250 Pavlov, Ivan, 20, 21, 147 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 98 Pfaff, Donald, 77 pharmaceutical industry, and psychiatry, 54 Phillips, A. W., 192 philosophy: Chinese in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 233–34; forms of in natural sciences, 89–92; and physiological psychology, 24–5 physics: and concept of mass, 38; and economics in nineteenth century, 179; and mathematical models, 182–83; and meaning of capacity, 7; and ratio scale, 123 Picasso, Pablo, 247

308

Index

Planck, Max, 43, 181 plate tectonics, 216 Plato, 170 Poincaré, Henri, 247 political science: and history, 173–74; and rational choice theory, 168–70, 172 population density, meaning of in context of U.S., 15. See also demographics Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The (Joyce), 236 postmodernism: impact of on humanities, x; and values in humanities, 224–26 preference, concept of in economics, 37 premises, and defining dimensions of three cultures, 3–5 Princet, Maurice, 247 professionalism, and humanities, 227 Protestant Reformation, and status inequalities, 116–17 psychiatry: and biological causes of mental illness, 52–55; as model for natural sciences, 249–51; and standard format of interviews, 136; psychoanalysis: and context, 143; and unifying theoretical perspectives, 215; vocabulary of, 6 psychology: and behavioral economics, 212–14; biological influences on processes of, 59–61, 81, 133–34, 148–52; and concept of extroversion, 124; and concept of self, 13; and correlations between measurements, 127; and economic models, 183; and human uniqueness, 74–75; ideological changes over time in, 21–22; and influence of gender on temperament, 152–58; and meaning of terms in different language networks, 8–9, 11, 17–18; and philosophy, 24–25; and selection of study topics, 43; and

standard format of interviews, 136. See also behaviorism; neuroscience Ptolemy, 182 public: confidence in and esteem for social sciences, 128–31; four corrections in current misunderstanding of three cultures, 252–57; loss of confidence in humanities, 222–28; and views of natural sciences, 51–57 questionnaires, and methodology of social sciences, 135–40 Rabi, I. I., 55 Random Harvest (film), 233 rational choice theory: in economics, 200–02; in political science, 168–70 rationality: concept of in natural sciences, 89; definition of in humanities, 42; definition of in political science, 169; and economics, 83–84 ratio scale, and measurement in natural sciences, 123 Rawls, John, 170, 171–72, 175 reality: ambiguity of relation between language and, 225; and sources of evidence in social sciences, 141–42 religious faith, and fundamental assumptions of natural sciences, 85–89. See also Calvinism; Christianity; Protestant Reformation Repcheck, Jack, 239–40 representation, forms of in social sciences, 145–47 research: and government funding of social sciences, 130; and measurement in behavioral and psychiatric genetics, 121–22; strategies of physics and biology as models for social sciences, 251; subjects of and

Index

differences in three cultures, 42–47. See also analytic tools; methodology responsibility, and functions of three cultures, 265–66, 267 rewards: concept of in behaviorism, 37; and unifying theoretical perspectives in research, 215 Ricardo, David, 179 rightness, and concept of truth, 40–42 rituals, and concepts of rational, 91 Roediger, Henry, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 105, 166 Russell, Bertrand, 23, 35, 40, 56, 171 St. John’s University, 271 Samuelson, Paul, 180, 185 scales, and measurement in social sciences, 123–24. See also multidimensional scaling Schama, Simon, 229 schematic representations: and mental structures in three cultures, 31–33, 39–40; and nature of information in social sciences, 145–47; and symbols, 107 schizophrenia, 149 Schoenberg, Arnold, 241 Schrödinger, Erwin, 48, 223 Schumpeter, Joseph, 177 science, history of, 239. See also natural sciences; scientists; social sciences scientists: and careers in natural sciences, 101–03; types of and differences in three cultures, 47–50 Scopes trial (1925), 97 Scotland, and history of economics, 178 self: Chinese and European symbolic networks for, 108; neuroscience and psychological concept of, 13 semantic representations: and mental structures in three cultures, 31–33, 39–40; and nature of information

30 9

in social sciences, 145–47; and symbols, 107 Seventh Seal, The (film), 232 Shakespeare, William, 233 Shelley, Mary, 246 Silent Spring (Carson), 197 Skinner, B. F., 59 Smith, Adam, 175–77, 178–79, 203, 210, 258 Smolin, Lee, 44 Snow, C. P., vii, ix, 1, 118, 245, 265 social anxiety, 215 social context, of research in social sciences, 144 social darwinism, 211 social fitness, concept of in economics, 193–95 social sciences: and cascade of events, 11–15; and concepts of culture, 107–15; contributions of, 142–67; and demand for measurement, 120–127; and dimensions defining three cultures, 2–5, 17–19; ethical neutrality in, 165–67; influence of history on, 4f, 19–25; and meaning of truth, 40–42; and mental structures, 30–40; neglect of method development in, 218–19; new methodologies in, 219–21; and patterns, 25–30; and persistence of values, 170–74; public confidence in and esteem for, 128–31; research strategies of physics and biology as models for, 251; and sources of evidence, 131–42; and status hierarchies, 115–20; and subjects of study, 42–47; and symbols, 104–07; and topics of papers in journals, 260; tropes and ambiguity of meanings of words in three cultures, 15–17; and types of scientists, 47–50; and vocabularies of three cultures, 4f, 5–11. See also anthropology; economics; political science; psychology; three cultures

310

Index

society: and concept of culture in social sciences, 111, 114; tacit understandings in historical eras of, 240–44 Solso, Robert, 248, 249 specialization, and current status of university system, 260–61 Spengler, Oswald, 232 Spinoza, Baruch, 176 Spitzer, Eliot, 255–56 Stafford, Barbara, 247–48 status, hierarchies of, 115–120. See also class Stevens, Wallace, 90, 234 Stevenson, Adlai, 223 Stravinsky, Igor, 128, 248 string theory, 55 Styron, William, 121 subjectivity. See happiness; objectivity Sutherland, Stuart, 236, 237 symbols: as central concepts in social sciences, 104–07; and definition of culture, 107–11; and development of language, 160; and Judaism in fifthcentury France, 105; and relation of gender to nature, 105 Szent-Györgi, Albert, 49 temperament: and biological variation, 149–52; and gender, 152–58 testosterone, 151, 154 Thomas, Dylan, 7 three cultures: and cascade of events, 11–15; and confusion over primary missions of universities, 262–65; dimensions defining, 2–5, 17–19; four corrections and public’s current misunderstanding of, 252–57; functions and contributions of, 265–75; influence of history on, 4f, 19–25; and meanings of truth, 40–2; and mental structures, 30–40; and patterns, 25–30; and problems with university system, 257–61; and

status hierarchy among disciplines, 245–49; and subjects of study, 42–47; tropes and use of language in, 15–17; and types of scientists, 47–50; vocabularies of, 4f, 5–11. See also humanities; natural sciences; social sciences time, semantic and schematic concepts of, 31–32 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 237 Townes, Charles, 44, 83 Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin), 91–92 tropes, and defining dimensions of three cultures, 15–17 Truman, Harry, 257 trust, of strangers in contemporary U.S., 230 truth: and evidence in social sciences, 140–42; and fundamental assumptions in natural sciences, 58, 81–89; meanings of in three cultures, 40–42 Tsai Ming-Liang, 271 Turner, J. M. W., 248 Tversky, A., 186, 187, 188, 203 Ulysses (Joyce), 246 Umberto D (film), 232 uncertainty: in current historical moment, 242; recognition of in humanities, 237–238. See also ambiguity; ethics unified theory, in physics, 250–51 universal grammar, Chomsky’s theory of, 163–64 universities: confusion over primary missions of, 262–65; and expansion in higher education in twentieth century, 1–2; and legislation requiring ethical review boards, 57; three cultures and problems with, 257–61 University of Gottingen, 257–58

Index

Updike, John, 234, 235 utility, economic concept of, 37–38 validity, and concept of truth, 40–42 values: and economics, 197–202; and ethical neutrality in social sciences, 166–67; and influence of postmodernism on humanities, 224–26; and measurement in social sciences, 126–27; social sciences and persistence of, 170–74. See also ethics Van Gogh, Vincent, 246 vasopressin, 153 vocabularies: cascade of events in social sciences and humanities compared to those in natural sciences, 14; and defining dimensions of three cultures, 4f, 5–11, 18–19; and questionnaires, 137–139. See also language Volcker, Paul, 209 von Békésy, Georg, 46, 251 von Neumann, John, 187, 190–91 Vonnegut, Kurt, 229

311

Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 89 Wasteland, The (Eliot), 243 Watson, James, 30 Wegener, Alfred, 216 Weiner, Norbert, 191 Wells, H. G., 226, 247 White, Hayden, 229 Whitehead, Alfred North, 221, 229, 264–65 Whitman, Walt, 231 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), 241 Widemann, John, 234 Wigner, Eugene, 34 Wilson, E. O., 51 Wilson, William Julius, 49 witchcraft, 238 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 42, 151, 152, 224, 236 Woolf, Virginia, 224, 227 world view, significant changes in from 1890 to 1920, 22 Wuthnow, Robert, 121 Zellinger, Anton, 142

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