I wrote once before in a [post] about the meanings of smoke that I was then in the midst of an attempt to quit — using nicotine patches. That attempt failed. Within days of ceasing use of the patches I was back on the butts. I suppose the patches work for some but, for me, they simply shifted the source of nicotine from smoke to the patch and — even at the lowest available dose — once the patch was discontinued my body still needed a source of the 7mg or so of nicotine it expected daily. It occurred to me that the goal should not be nicotine replacement but nicotine reduction through slow titration — dose reduction — to a point where quitting would be relatively easy. Commercial products, produced at only a few dose levels would not do it.

I was smoking about a half pack of Camel Ultra-lights (approx. 0.4 mg nicotine per cigarette according to [this] FTC source) at the time I began the reduction project = 4 mg. of nicotine per day. Irony – my “normal” daily dose was already about half of what the lowest level of patch provided. No wonder I didn’t quit using the patch — it was actually making me more dependent on nicotine. My goal was to slowly reduce the number of cigarettes I smoked each day until I was down to just 3 or 4 per day — assuming that at a daily dose of only 1 to 2 mg. of nicotine, my dependency would be mostly psychological rather than physiological and easier to quit. I gave myself no time limit and did not rush the process, coaching myself that since it took me a long time to become a half-pack a day smoker it should take awhile to comfortably get back to being a 3 or 4 cigarette a day smoker.

It took a few months to get down to my target of 3 to 4 cigarettes a day (one for each of the major triggers: morning coffee and after meals). And, just as I was debating about how to actually go about quitting, Providence intervened: I got food poisoning from eating a bad hot dog last July 4th. I was sick as a dog for days and, of course, could not smoke at all. After the fourth day it dawned on me that I was completely free of nicotine dependence — since it only takes 4 days to completely get through nicotine withdrawal. Had there been any side effects of the final withdrawal (e.g., stomach cramps, constipation, headaches, etc.) they were completely masked by the far more severe symptoms of food poisoning. I realized I need never smoke another cigarette — I was free.

People have asked me if I found it difficult to quit smoking — and are surprised when I say “no”. The method I hit on — slow reduction of dose dependence and then just wait to get sick (hopefully nothing as dire as food poisoning) so you can get through withdrawal with any symptoms masked by the illness — was really pretty easy. Interestingly, I have also never experienced any cravings since I quit. There were a few behavioral triggers that made me think of smoking sometimes (the strongest: dealing with work stress, which I had adapted to by relying on smoke breaks that got me away from the office for a few blessed minutes…) but they were eventually extinguished.

The takeaway: nicotine is an addiction, but a fairly manageable one using standard dose titration methods and reliance on “masking symptoms” of any transient illness that can help you through the final 4-day withdrawal.

• The Semiotics of Smoke
• February 12, 2044
• Born Too Late…

Last prayer, or fat chance?

Al Gore, having won an Emmy, an Oscar and now the Nobel Peace Prize, is on a roll. There’s just one prize left that many would like to see him claim that has eluded him — one that he came within a hanging chad’s breadth of receiving in 2000. It’s a sign not only of his popularity but also of the rising sense of panic among Democrats that they seem destined for a ticket headed by Hillary Clinton. The [grumblings] in the lefty media about how to stop our gal from Illinois Arkansas New York began about the time that wunderkind Barack Obama started showing [signs of flagging] in his media-fueled race for the nomination. Suddenly [stories] about the nascent Draft Gore movement increased in frequency and, now with the Nobel win, have reached a fevered pace. CNN [reports] on the pressure on him to join the race (including a hilarious quote from Jimmy Carter, who has been badgering him for so long on the issue that Gore finally had to ask Carter to stop calling his house), while the Washington Post [raises questions] about whether he could successfully raise enough money this late in the primary run-up. That would certainly be a significant obstacle to overcome were he to decide to join the race, but I think there’s an even bigger factor weighing against him, so to speak: he’s too fat to be president.

The Presidential Body Mass Index (PBMI)

[Click to view] chart of US presidents ranked according to their Body Mass Index

In these politically correct times it just won’t do to directly address the 800 pound gorilla in the room — let me phrase that another way — to bring up something that we’re all thinking: would a nation of weight-challenged voters elect one of their own to the White House? Or do they prefer to select as their leader someone of leaner mien? Thankfully, we can avoid the political minefields by retreating to the comforting impartiality of mathematics and let the numbers tell us. Starting from a collection of presidential heights and BMIs found [here], I filled in a few gaps and added Mr. Gore to the list. His height is well known to be 6′ 1”, but his weight seems to be a closely-held secret. I guesstimated from photos that he is probably in the neighborhood of 270, which would give him a BMI of 36 — well above the threshold for obesity — and just behind President William Howard Taft, our only president to resemble a small natural satellite. In fact, it places Big Al more than two standard deviations from the mean of 25.8. When I studied statistics in college any datum more than two standard deviations from the mean was considered an “outlier”, not representative of the population under consideration and safely ignored. That’s not good news for the Gore Drafters (Draft Gorers?).

The Goldilocks Effect – Not Too Big, Not Too Little

It isn’t that Americans prefer their presidents to be tiny — on the contrary, the median BMI of 25.4 is quite close to the mean and both numbers hover in the “slightly overweight” range. We are just as unlikely to favor the very diminutive Chief Executive — represented on the chart by the elfin James Madison who, according to presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, presented his State of the Union messages from a mahogany high chair¹ and, on more than one occasion, was seen at state dinners to curl up inside a tea cup and fall fast asleep². No, we like our presidents to be a bit tall and a bit portly — “successful looking” my grandmother would’ve said. It’s not merely coincidental I think that two men who fall very close to the average are Dwight Eisenhower and George Washington — former soldiers who were tall and strong and looked like they were very successful. Good news for John McCain.

All is not lost for the Gore hopefuls, of course. Weight is a variable thing and just because Al is too big now doesn’t mean he’d still be too big by the time the general election rolled around. It’s not too late to hit the gym and the jogging track — the best indicator of whether Gore plans to run for the White House or not may be whether we see him running in sweatpants first.

__________________________________
^1. I totally made this up.
^2. I made this up, too.

• Presidential Body Mass Index: McCain Wins!
• Short bites
• Politics as (un)usual

The Medium is the (wrong) Message
Standing between the impenetrable opaqueness of the scientific academy and the man on the street are the science writers in the mass media who are playing an ever more important role in our society as translators and guides. In the gene piece I wrote I singled out a New York Times writer for contributing to the simplistic genes = culture meme that winds its way through our discourse. Well, over the weekend the NYT published [a story] on new understanding of the complexity of gene effects that implies refutation of some of the more breathless genetic coverage they’ve done in the past. Alas, those implications are not fleshed out in the article — out of scope perhaps. Too bad for readers who look to the Times to provide meaning to what they read. Is it too much to ask that writers for the most important newspaper in the country think about what their own paper has written in the past and place new findings in some context that will help their readers better understand the world?

Why is this man smiling?
Ultimately, the state of scientific literacy is a reflection of public policy priorities and political leadership. During the Cold War, when the Russians were breathing down our necks with a bazillion ICBMs and satellites floating over our heads, science education was a public priority — you better believe it was. One of the untoward outcomes of Cold Peace was the [relaxation] of science education priorities and [redirection of federal funding] from science programs. Coincidentally, conservative politicians came to rely on fundamentalist voting blocs who exert extraordinary influence over social policy. That helps explain the prominence of idiots like Senator Sam Brownback who, in a presidential debate, [brags his ignorance] of evolution theory and somehow doesn’t get laughed out of the building. In his case he probably believes the stupid things he says, other fellow-traveling ignoramuses are more likely pandering to their electorates when they backpedal on rationalist explanations of natural phenomena. And so the cycle of illiteracy is reinforced. Very disheartening, indeed.

• The search for a genetic grail
• Genetic Fundamentalism
• NYT to Google: “That was AMAZING, give me a cigarette!”

Wouldn’t you know! It turns out Pastor Ted Haggard isn’t gay after all — he was just dealing with a particularly stressful period in his life by going down the old dirt road with a gay hooker while tweaked out on crank. Hasn’t this guy heard of Valium? Much easier on the hiney. And then, of course, there’s prayer as a way to relieve stress. Or golf. Oh well, to each his own.

Comic aspects aside (and who doesn’t notice the biologically determined resemblance to Paul Lynde..?) the absurd announcement that after 3 weeks of “counseling” Haggard is now “completely heterosexual” is only the most recent example of the tragic ignorance of sexuality that afflicts this society. Granted, in his case there are extenuating circumstances that require a rapid conversion: this joker was spiritual leader of 30 million evangelicals. The ministry had to do something dramatic to staunch the risk of defection by a disillusioned flock, hence the 3 week miracle. Not too much to ask of people who fiercely believe in miracles. Especially when they want to believe. Poof! (no pun intended), the problem disappears. But the real problem is ignorance.

While this was going on, some researchers into sexuality — this time animal husbandry — announced work on finding the biological causes of apparently homosexual behavior in rams. Looks like some of those animal husbands have been taking a page from Pastor Ted’s hymnal… William Saletan at Slate has written a couple of articles ([here] and [here]), addressing the implications. PETA, in particular, have been virulent in opposing the research because they believe it could be used someday to eradicate gay sheep and some gay people have called for pulling funding for the study because they fear that it’s only a short step from “fixing” sheep to fixing people. Saletan, while defending the scientific intentions of the researchers notes — correctly — that it doesn’t matter much what their intent is, the implications on eugenic social policies at some point in the future cannot be predicted. He lays out the risks:

But killing is the horror scenario. The more likely path is gentler. Science will gradually convince us that sexual orientation is innate, more like the color of your skin than like the content of your character. Condemnation of homosexuality as a sin will subside. Freed from the culture wars, we’ll turn to the biological differences between race and sexual orientation: Homosexuality defies the aspiration to procreate with your mate, and it’s easier to isolate and alter in embryonic development. Resentment will give way to pity. We’ll come to view homosexuality as a kind of infertility—a disability, like deafness. The rhetoric of “acceptance” will shift from liberals to conservatives. We’ll inoculate our offspring against homosexuality out of love, not hate.

I have news for him, homosexuality is already seen as a disability — that’s why people are so obsessed with finding its cause. Saletan, though living far to the left of the Haggards of the world on the political spectrum, displays as much ignorance of sexuality as they do and operates within the same limited paradigm. In a previous post I detailed why a finite [biological cause of human sexual preference] will never be found, hence cannot be eradicated. What is disturbing is that people continue to hunt it down.

• Genetic Fundamentalism
• Utterly Clueless
• Tracing the causes of scientific illiteracy

It’s still here.

Another World AIDS Day passes, in the twenty-fifth year of the plague, and these are the sad facts:

• 40 Million people in the world are infected
• 3 Million people died last year from AIDS
• In the US, to date 529,113 people have died. More than our battlefield casualties in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf war and Iraq combined
• While infection rates worldwide leveled off in the late 90’s there are pockets of resurgence: Uganda, the UK and among young gay men in the US

Fifteen years ago, when the plague was laying waste to a generation of gay men, the question was whether action could be taken in time to build a firewall around the epidemic until a vaccine or drug to eradicate the virus could be developed. Despite the profound and wrenching violence done to bodies, societies and sex itself, people still spoke of cures. We just had to be vigilant until the beast was destroyed. But we underestimated the threat from this pathogen and its infernal genius for destruction — a virus that doesn’t just lurk in the marrow of our bones, but also in the dark places in our brains where our deepest needs and desires are hidden from the earnest instructions of safe sex pamphlets.

The Beast Within

Last year the Washington Post [reported] that, according to a survey by the Rand Corporation, fifty percent of black Americans believed that HIV was man-made and part of a government plot to decimate their communities. It’s tragic that such destructive beliefs persist, though understandable given the cruel history that blacks have endured in this country and the nature of the disease itself. It’s hard to imagine a more perfectly designed killing machine: an invisible agent that depends upon the craving for euphoric abandon — whether via sex or drugs, or both — to transmit itself from body to body, where it goes about its work of slow invisible destruction of the host in a way that guarantees re-transmission to other hosts in a geometric progression. If God existed then this thing, that perverts and exploits the mechanism of reproduction, turning it into a vector of disease and death, would surely be Satan. But there’s no God and no Satan, only natural selection and an organism relentlessly, amorally, exploiting its niche.

Despite billions of dollars and millions of people working for 25 years to thwart it, the virus thrives because it exploits not just an individual’s impulses toward pursuit of pleasure, but also societal resistance to directly manage such pleasure and the economic conditions that put people — such as women in Africa — at risk. It always struck me, back during the crisis of the late 80’s and early 90’s, that the public health response to the epidemic in the gay community was for the most part to pass out free condoms and pamphlets preaching safe sex methods, rather than directly address the epidemic of substance abuse that fueled irrational sexual abandonment. They were trying to treat the proximal cause of infection (transmission of body fluids) with appeals to rational (sober) thought, when the underlying causes could not be reached through rational argument. The infection rate dropped not because of conscious appeals to the forebrain — it was because of stark terror at the possible consequences. Fear, that other deep motivating force, trumps desire. The infection rate seems to be rising among young gay men in the US not just because drug abuse is still rampant but probably because, thanks to anti-retroviral therapy that delays AIDS onset and pharmaceutical marketing that presents infected men as looking healthy and happy, HIV doesn’t seem so scary anymore.

Prognosis

Things have been worse, but, barring a 25-years-too-late magic bullet, it’s hard to see how they’ll get much better. According to the UN, while overall infection rates as a proportion of population have mercifully stabilized, because of general population growth the number of new infections will increase year over year. Political and religious resistence to even the first-line defense of sex education and contraceptive use [continues] after all these years to hamper attempts at prevention. Science and medicine have been effective at slowing the progression of AIDS and improving the quality of life of those infected who can afford treatment, but progress in less technological areas is lacking. How much is the infection rate among women around the world related to poverty and how best to address that? What are the long-term epidemiological consequences of infected people living longer? If infected people — who can infect others — live longer and more effective methods of preventing high-risk behavior aren’t found, is it a net good? Science seems still to be playing catch up with the basic psycho-social factors driving high-risk behavior: see this [announcement] of recent findings that drug use contributes to high-risk sexual behavior. Talk about a day late and a dollar short…

The Way We Live Now. Forever.

You’ve been in my life so long I can’t remember anything else.
- Ripley, Alien³

It’s hard to remember a time when sex was not associated with risk of viral death. The consequences of the pandemic go far beyond the catastrophic health effects on those stricken ill. In the social and political realm it sets up in-group/out-group distinctions among people that makes foreigners more foreign, different people more different. Dangerous. At the level of the person it makes us wary of our own desires, fearful of the impulses that act to bring us into the deepest communion with others, unless it is mediated with petrochemical barriers. But maybe even that isn’t safe, says the little voice inside. We may avoid connection, trying to balance fear of death against a lonelier existence, which in itself is a life sentence of sorts.

And we wait for the physicians, geneticists and bio-engineers to issue a reprieve — a way to kill the virus. Given the inability or unwillingness of social scientists, politicians and religious leaders to face down the messy details of motivation and economic injustice that contribute to people becoming infected, it all depends on finding the magic bullet.

• A cruel irony
• The Male Pill. DOA.
• Life well lived

In a [recent post] I wailed about those who try to reduce complex human characteristics and behaviors to simple genetic factors. Since I wrote, the New York State Court of Appeals [denied rights] to homosexual couples — their decision turning largely on a notion of essential qualities lacking in gay people (namely, ability to procreate and parent), and last week a [particularly bizarre] resurrection of the debate over whether people are born gay lit up the blogs. From hypothesized “God genes”, that give rise to religious experience, to genes that make us engineers or gamblers, the search is on for the keys to our nature. But it is the obsessive debate over genetic determinants of sexual identity, specifically homosexual attitudes and behavior, that is perhaps the most persistent example of the desire to reduce people to a fundamental biological essence. Not since the Nazi obsession with eugenics and its relation to the “Jewish problem” have we seen such obsessive attention to what determines the characteristics of a class of people. The difference is that, this time, it’s the Left that embraces the idea of essential difference — with the attendant risks — and it’s the Right that argues for a more inclusive anti-essentialism.

By inclusive I don’t mean an approving or even charitable acceptance, far from it. Rather, a resistance to cede moral agency to the chromosome. Gays are not a different species; they’re just fallen members of the group we all belong to. Conservatives oppose homosexuality because they believe it is not intrinsic, that young people can be coerced into the lifestyle and thus lose the opportunity for fulfilling lives as heterosexuals. It is chosen behavior and, perforce, immoral. The other side sees homosexuality as fundamental for some, there from birth. Moral agency is no more the issue than it would be over any other intrinsic quality, like eye color. What neither side can imagine is that it’s probably neither intrinsic nor coercive. Not innate. Not chosen.

Popular Science Fiction

The history of the science itself is a rather short story. Back in the early 90’s two gay scientists, Simon LaVey, a specialist in the neuroscience of vision and Dean Hamer, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, strayed from their professional fields of expertise (already a worrisome sign) to engage in research that sought biological correlates of “homosexuality”. With such an obvious agenda and ill-defined purview it is not surprising that they found something. What was surprising was the eagerness with which the public embraced their tentative and suspect findings. As John Horgan, a science writer who has examined the track record of these researchers has [reported], their findings were never replicated and, at least among scientists, have largely faded from consideration. Not surprising given how wrong-headed most if not all of these studies are. Even when the personal and political agenda of the scientists involved is not so glaring, they all fail the most basic requirement of science — careful definition of that which they attempt to explain. Unlike a discrete behavioral syndrome like Tourette’s, which is invariant across cultures and historical epochs, “homosexuality” is highly variable in its expression and meaning across and within cultures and even within individuals at different times in their life. In the February 2006 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Cornell psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams publishes cross-cultural and cross-lifespan data [article copyrighted, can be purchased here] showing that the incidence of “homosexuality” varies from 1% to a whopping 21% depending upon a person’s gender and how and when in their life it is defined. The attempt to discover biological substrates of such variable and diverse phenomena is futile. They’re looking in the wrong place.

Understanding human sexual orientation requires placing individuals within a cultural and interpersonal context that gives their sexual identity meaning — a psychological and sociological project. Something like psychologist Daryl Bem’s “exotic becomes erotic” [theory], which aims to explain both gay and straight orientation, is more fruitful in understanding the complex interplay between male and female gender identity and homosexual and heterosexual orientation within a given culture. Bem’s theory, which posits sexual preference as an emergent property of gender (non-)conformity, sees an individual’s self-perceived gender atypicality as the engine that drives homosexual orientation. What might cause the perceived difference between oneself and the other little boys or girls? Could be anything from traits like level of aggression and novelty avoidance to, perhaps, those arcane differences that the biological reductionists are so curious about. But, significantly, in Bem’s theory none of these factors is determinative. It’s possible that those with perceived difference might not turn out gay. It’s more open-ended, more accommodating to the indeterminate complexity of actual human experience. However, that is not to say that orientation is plastic forever — over time, as behavior and self-image coalesce into a sexual orientation, it becomes less and less likely that change is possible. Here’s a (too) simple analogy: with sufficient motivation someone could learn to walk on their hands and attempt to do so for the rest of their life — but it would not be easy and would never feel “natural”. And, of course, to entreat someone to do such a thing would be cruel. That may be news to the conservative scolds.

The Risks of Genetic Fundamentalism

Even if Bem’s theory is superseded by something better, I think the truth will end up looking very much like it. And very much unlike what currently passes for understanding of human sexual orientation. Does it matter to the culture war combatants? Unlikely. Though the science is bogus, gays and their supporters still embrace it as a given. On the other side, conservatives happily reject the biologically determinant project but also turn a blind eye to the fact that people almost never successfully change the path they are on. Richard Lewontin, a biologist and [critic of reductionism], would say that each side tries to ground their larger political vision in a vision of nature, seen through their own biases. Conservatives, raised in a culture of culpability and redemption, will reject anything that seems to threaten moral agency about matters — sexual behavior and gender identity — so central to human life.

For liberals, the appeal of the biological theory lies in its “face validity” — a theory that says you’re gay or straight from birth feels right when we remember our early childhood personalities and experiences. It also acts as a defense to the charges of unnaturalness from conservatives and, I suspect, not a little internalized homophobia — Don’t blame me for what I am, I was made this way — by Nature! But we know from psychology, like Gilbert’s [work on happiness], that memory is a notoriously unreliable gauge of our past experience and attitudes. And the “I can’t help it” defense is politically regressive because it implicitly accepts that homosexuality is something that one would change if one could. While there are certainly practical downsides to homosexual orientation as it currently exists these are not caused by homosexuality per se, but rather by social intolerance and the concomitant lack of sufficiently robust social structures supporting happy healthy homosexual lifestyles. And that is rooted in fear and loathing of what is perceived as unnaturally different and threatening.

This is the great risk of embracing a biological fundamentalism when it comes to sexual orientation, intelligence or any number of other complex human characteristics — it can backfire badly by fostering rigidity in the definition of what it means to be human and can promote in-group/out-group stereotyping and ghettoization. We’ve seen in Nazi Germany the dire consequences of ghettoization — also in our own country’s struggle with racial segregation and again in the 1980’s with AIDS. The feverish spread of that disease through the gay ghettos was as much a sociological phenomenon as a biological one. What was the radical AIDS political movement of the 1980’s and 90’s but an extraordinary attempt to remind the larger society of the humanity of those in a ghettoized subculture?

We are more than our genes. More even than our brains. Remember that the next time you read an article in a Big Important Newspaper about some nasty old rats.

• On Gay Sheep and Shepherds
• The search for a genetic grail
• Everything old is new again

Behavioral genetics is a relatively new field that, alongside sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, aims to reduce complex human traits to their essential factors — genes and their interplay with the environment. Like any academic undertaking, their project is not without [critics]. There’s nothing new about internecine academic squabbles. What is new is the ready embrace by mainstream media and the public of controversial, unproven — or even entirely false — theories. Why the attention? I would say it’s because people sense that we’re in the midst of a change in worldview about how human nature is defined that will have profound implications for social and political thinking.

A perfect example of how scientific beliefs are diffusing into the public and political sphere can be seen in the June 26 issue of [The New Republic] (registration required). Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a proponent of evolutionary psychology and author of the best-seller [How the Mind Works], presents a recent theory by scientists at the University of Utah that says Ashkenazi Jews enjoy an advantage in intelligence as a result of recent evolutionary selection. The claim is controversial and that is why Pinker presents it. He wants to get your attention. I won’t address the specific truth value of the theory here for two reasons: one, I’m not qualified to assess the value of the claim as science and, two, I am more concerned with the form of Pinker’s argument.

Over a number of pages, he presents the seven hypotheses that underpin the theory. Fully five of the seven require a genetic component to explain the performance on intelligence tests of this group of people compared to the population at large. The presentation of the hypotheses is itself interesting in that he apparently means to break down a theory that depends on subtle genetic detail into a form that is easily digestible by a non-academic readership, but the text is choked with turgid explanations of “genetic drift”, references to homozygotes and heterozygosity, sphingolipids and the BRCA1 gene. It’s hard going for readers who turn to The New Republic for their fix about where the Bush Administration screwed up again. And what is the upshot of their effort? Pinker announces, twenty-four paragraphs into the article, that the Utah theory, as yet untested, “is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken.” A committed reader who has soldiered through the mountain of terminology might well wonder at the point of their effort — if this theory has not been tested, why bring it up? The answer to that question comes in the remaining eight paragraphs of the article.

Pinker spends the rest of the article debating (with himself) the social effects of genetic research, especially the genetics of groups, and the implications of the Utah theory if it turns out to be true: “… the power to uncover genetic and evolutionary roots of group differences in psychological traits is both more likely to materialize and more incendiary in its consequences [than fears of eugenics]“. The implications of a theory that implies that Jews are smarter than others could be profound, given our history and penchant for stereotyping people. Pinker acknowledges this, but is optimistic. Not surprisingly, whenever someone engages in a debate with themselves, they win. We can assume his bias from his conclusion: “In theory, we have the intellectual and moral tools to defuse the dangers.” Having stated that the theory in question is unproven, Pinker goes on to reassure the reader that they can handle it (or others like it) being true. He has stopped being a scientist at this point and is now a propagandist. Through subtle argument and reassurance, he is inventing a Zeitgeist.

Richard Lewontin, an eminent biologist and critic of the overly reductionist project of behavioral genetics, says in his book [Biology as Ideology] that science has replaced religion as the dominant social institution that explains human nature and legitimizes social structures. However, “[science itself] is a supremely social institution, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant values and views of society at each historical epoch.” Pinker, in his 2003 book, [The Blank Slate], which carries the modest subtitle “The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, goes well beyond where Lewontin and others would feel safe by directly addressing socio-political “hot buttons” and expanding on recent findings from the lab and what they say about “human nature”. Not surprisingly, the chapter on Gender is especially charged. His argument is basically that science is finding more and more evidence of differences between the sexes that “explain” (Lewontin would say “justify”) social beliefs in the nature of gender. Pinker holds up a straw man version of feminism to argue that inequality of outcome need not derive from inequality of opportunity, but from essential differences of capacity. He believes that any political theory of equality needs to be grounded in the findings of science… but he’s wrong.

What he fails to see, as he clomps into the political minefields, is that political theory is intellectually independent of scientific findings. There is no reason at all that someone might not demand that human endeavors surpass biology. I wonder what Pinker would make of Simone De Beauvoir’s apothegm that a human is a being whose essence is in not having an essence? People strive to surpass biological limts all the time — it is the engine that drives medicine and, ironically, much of science. Why limit political theory to current understanding of “human nature” that is, itself, colored by ideological biases that reify stereotypes?

In today’s New York Times, a resident science writer, Olivia Judson — herself an evolutionary biologist — [writes] of her bafflement at the taboo on research into genetics of groups. It’s not that hard to understand. Things like blood, incest and stereotypes become taboo because people, rightly, perceive them to be dangerous. Powerfully volatile compounds are often unstable and must be handled carefully. So it is with genetic “explanations” of basic human qualities. Philosophers and political theorists have been grappling for centuries with basic questions of human nature and have amassed a huge and subtle body of work to help us understand what it means to be human. People like Pinker who wade into the political waters without a more complete understanding of that history may find themselves in over their heads.

• Genetic Fundamentalism
• Tracing the causes of scientific illiteracy
• Short Bites

If you stroll through Barnes & Noble you may find his book [Stumbling on Happiness] sitting uncomfortably in the Self Help section. It’s in the wrong place — this isn’t a Deepak Chopra exercise in better living through purple prose. Rather, like Freakonomics, this book belongs to that rare collection of popular science books that are so well-written and go down so easily you may not even realize your understanding of the world has changed profoundly until you finish the last sentence.

First, what this book is not: it’s not an examination of pathology related to happiness, mania or depression. Nor is it an ethical examination of what should make you happy. There is just a brief mention in the Afterword about what science has to say about the utility of identifying pursuit of money with happiness. Instead, given whatever it is that we are seeking in order to be happy, it examines the mental methods we use to make judgments and where they (often) go wrong.

Basically, the tools that evolution has dropped into our laps for making predictions about what will make us happy or not are memory and imagination. For the vast expanse of human history these two have worked well together to help us make decisions and follow courses of action. But they work best when the challenge is relatively simple. For example, Craig the Caveman sees a banana in a tree. He remembers that he once ate a banana and “Banana good.” He imagines what it would be like to retrieve the banana and eat it and the thought generates an emotion in him very much like the one he remembers. It’s a done deal, moments later “Banana still good.” The problem arises when the object of our decision is multifaceted with possible outcomes: Should I attend grad school for Economics? Should I marry Fred? In these situations, our happiness predictor breaks down because it turns out that memory is not a reliable gauge of what happened in the past and imagination is lousy at considering the future.

Through relentless accumulation of experimental evidence, Gilbert shows how memory is influenced too much by present thinking and imagination is unable to consider sufficient possible outcomes. Rather than a photocopy reproduction of past events and moods, memory is a narrative — that is often colored, twisted, filtered and fictionalized to rationalize current needs. Where it does represent the past, it is subject to salience errors — exceptional events from our past loom large in memory, even though, according to the laws of probablility, they should not. For example, you’ve met thousands of friendly dogs in your life — but once, 20 years ago, the dog next door used your ankle as a chew toy and now, every time you think of dogs, there she is again. The reverse happens, as well. Some happy memories are over-weighted when they shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever wondered why your thrice-married neighbor is heading to the altar yet again while you’ve been avoiding dates following that breakup 7 years ago, this helps explain it. Your neighbor is discounting the probability of a bad outcome while you are discounting the probability of a good one. But, interestingly, she may end up happier than you.

One of the more fascinating findings presented in the book is that our brains have a self-defense mechanism designed to keep us on an even keel in the event of bad experience: rationalization. Turns out that people can process negative results of their actions very effectively. What they have trouble doing is processing the regret from action not taken. This explains a story I once read about the writer Scott Turow who, early in his legal career, was struggling with the decision about whether to be a lawyer or writer so much it drove him to a shrink. The shrink didn’t ask him what he wanted more, he asked him what he would regret more if he didn’t choose it. The rest is history.

Gilbert is so effective at demolishing our cherished beliefs in our ability to know ourselves and make rational decisions that near the end of the book I was ready to hang it up and call the Psychic Friends Network to find out what I was having for dinner. But he comes through with some prescriptions for how we can dramatically improve our ability to make right choices. Of course, in the memory department, we can supplement our faulty brains by relying on journals and other peoples’ memories to get a fuller picture of how we experienced past events. And there is one sure-fire method for avoiding the problems of imaginative projection into the future that is remarkably obvious once you know it and, paradoxically, almost impossible for most people to guess. Want me to tell you what it is?

Sorry. I wouldn’t dream of denying you the pleasure of finding out for yourself.

Too cruel? Alright, here’s a hint: as individuals we are not nearly as unique as we think we are. Off you go.

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Apparently nice is the new snark. As described by surprisingly studly study director [Ilan Dar-Nimrod], “Just being nice and friendly and having talent — all the things your mom would love you to be — is the main part of how people perceive coolness now.” Dar-Nimrod sees the origins of the stereotypical cool rebel as arising from disempowered outgroups of the 1950s — blacks and youth — who wanted to resist the culture through personal expression. According to Dar-Nimrod’s colleague Ian Hansen, “open rebellion could get you killed, so a safer way to rebel would be ironic mockery of the dominant culture. Original coolness was a way of feeling like you were resisting oppression without actually doing what was necessary to throw it off.” Kids today are, apparently, not feeling very disgruntled about things and are more than happy to just get along. Exemplars of this trait are “cool”.

Of course, we can chalk a lot of this up to the general conservative vibe in the world and this study was, after all, conducted in Canada (sweet people, those Canadians), but it makes you wonder about who is consuming all the snarky too-ironic-by-half sludge that gets pumped from media outlets. Maybe not the next generation of media consumers. If I was Nick Denton I’d start wondering if I was really on the cutting edge of the next wave in publishing — or just pandering to the aging cynical wheezebags of the last generation.

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Of course some men may very well try this — risks and all. But the ones most likely to adopt it are exactly the ones — well-educated upper middle class liberals — who already enjoy a close to zero fertility rate. If they really wanted this stuff to have a positive effect on society they’d slip it into the beer at Rangers games, cock fights, wrestling matches and Nascar races.

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