Statistagasm: The Statistics of Fate

Let big data read the palms of individuals....

Can you predict your own future? The question sounds horribly sawed and straight out of a poorly written prophetic guide. But, let’s rephrase it in a more specific way, “Where would you think you would be in a five years’ time?” And most important, what should follow is “Can you predict it, or know something about it in reality?” There are a few common responses to this question, which say something about how people, in general, view fate or the course of events in their lives. Some of them which I get frequently, depending on the type of person, are “No, future is not predictable”, “Yes, if you believe in your dreams, you can be there" or if you are religious “Yes, only God knows it”. A more interesting segment, however awaits when you ask them “Can you predict how many people would give the same answer as yours, beside the other ones?”

Well, as it unfolds, this might not be a very difficult task. In that, we can reasonably estimate how different people are going to respond to the first part. The response obviously relies on many facets such as the amount of control one might feel one has at a given time. But more important, it falls onto larger scaled phenomenon, such as culture and socioeconomics. A person sitting in West, where the cultural focus is on individual effort and ‘chasing your dreams’, is likely to think that future is predictable while someone, who happens to be born in a country plagued by poor governance would rather believe that outcomes in life are unpredictable.  It is not a random occurring that someone has chosen to respond one way or the other to the questions above, but instead it is embedded in a meta-statistical structure. Of course there are outliers, and of course there is a margin of error, which is precisely what differentiates statistics from prophecies, which can vary from a lot to negligible depending upon what it is which we trying to predict. If you are digging in to predict the response of a single individual, given that you know what is there to know about that person, then the margin of error would be very high. But if you are engaging to know the response of a particular group, or population, the predictability would sharply jump. In this matter, the lives of humans closely resemble the natural world, which, as you go at the smaller levels, become more and more unpredictable, and as you slide towards larger levels, let’s say at the Newtonian level, you begin to decipher patterns and laws.

So where will you be in a five years’ time? Or, how much will you be making at your job? Which life partner would you have? And how much happy would you think you would be with them? These are no questions for palm readers or crystal gazer, their answers clearly lay with good statistics and good philosophy. For example, dating patterns show that the US millennials are getting into relationships earlier than their ancestors were and are likely to go through an average of two long-term relationships and several mismatched dates and heartbreaks before arriving at “the one”. So, it should not come as a surprise that some would feel their relationship history is un-normal, when that is what most people are playing  around like. More interestingly however, on online dating platforms, people are more likely to hit those who belong to the same race, despite answering “it does not matter” in their response boxes, and to opposite sex, despite describing "bi-sexual" as their sexual orientation. It is easier and more useful to analyze online dating data than to take surveys and responses from people in the field, because the online dating show clicking and email patterns which reveal what is really going on, instead of merely asking a sample which often results in inaccurate responses. It seems like, that the fate happens to be rigged while arranging partners because it somehow always manages to set dates with those who fall near your class bracket, and also somehow with those who share your skin color.   

The performance in education and the amount one makes at his job are other facets of the larger scheme of things, which too seem to be rigged. This has been repeatedly shown, when we see that middle-classers outperform lower-classers in schools consistently no matter which country or culture. In South-Asian societies, the cultural focus in academic achievement is primarily ‘the more you hard-work, the more pleasant your grades will be’, something which is both disastrous and wrong from the view of policy-making. Differences in income of the households has profound impact on educational performance of the children in those households, translated from cumulative factors which seem minor to ordinary people. For example, research shows that lightening and temperature at the place of study influences concentration and therefore learning. Proper lightening and study place is recommended during focused study hours. Apart from that, getting someone to monitor your performance significantly reduces procrastination and improves lacking. Middle-class children are likely to have educated parents who keep track of their children’s performance, visit schools often, meet teachers, and are likely to hire coaches if their children underperform. They are also, likely to closely guard their children’s television time, computer games time, and are likely to encourage them to study beyond the scope of the syllabus. It seems like the “hard-work” phenomenon does not work quite well, when you have a noisy household, where you are interrupted every few minutes to do the house chores and where you don’t have any authoritative agency to keep you motivated. There is no co-incidence that the sprawling majority of the top colleges and universities are the middle and upper-classers. The drumming whole of the values of hard-work which are constantly bombarded into the popular ears, would work fine if everyone played by the same rules.

There were just some of the major superficial factors which contribute to educational performance, scratching the surface would uncover more significant variables, for example psychological and cultural ones. In households, where partners are in emotionally stable relationships, children are likely to perform better in the educational pursuits than in households with less stable partnerships. Children raised by single mothers who most often belong to lower rungs of society or adoption homes, are not only going to significantly underperform in schools, but have a high dropout rate and are also very likely to engage in criminal activities, such as drugs, violence and abuse. This has important implications for policies concerning abortion and birth control. The Donohue–Levitt hypothesis, shows the impact of legalized abortion on reduction in crime rates. People who repeat the ‘let the fate decide’ mantra should very well look at the probability of someone from an economically meek and psychologically unhealthy surroundings ‘making it’ around. What they don’t realize is that the fate which they so earnestly assert, is basically the structural forces which decide the life outcomes of individuals to a very large degree. This continues itself into the work lives, and an even greater gap in the incomes of individuals.

But these were the ultra bolded lines on a map, which many would feel are obvious to highlight (even though that’s not the case). What about the thin lines or subdivisions? In other words, how come inter-class, inter-group factors lead to differences in the incomes earned? Well, as it might unweave, these too are not that random. HBR often publishes studies showing salary differences between managers in the same occupation, in the same industry and even with same qualifications. There is of course, a whole complex web of factors feeding into one and another, but they are not non-traceable.  On individual level, for example, person-job fit can be an important factor in one’s job success which is the fit of personality traits of an individual with the requirements of the job. Now, whose fault is this that your genes happened to express themselves in a certain way to make your personality fit or unfit for the job you happened to find. You cannot possibly trace the genetic and phenotypical characteristics of individuals to predict whether they have the ability to smile most of the time, if they chose to be frontline managers. It might seem absurd, as it bears witness to a previous analogy, that on smaller scales such as at individual level, things become very unpredictable. There is still, however, a probability which determines the chance that your genes happened to be arranged in a certain way, to make up your personality traits both naturally and by training, which happened to be suitable for your job, and which now earns you way above mean of your industry, occupation and geography, but it would be ridiculously difficult to calculate.

Gleaning at the big picture, the crime and health statistics, in a similar way, help us look at the wider inferences. For example, measuring and comparing weight patterns across the world show that obesity has a high incidence rate in developed and developing countries. But this is not the end of story. In rich nations, people who are poor financially and socially, are more likely to be obese. Not only that, but weight is also found to be unevenly distributed among sexes, with women typically being more obese than men. There is also a correlation between higher gender inequalities with higher obesity of females. Now, all of this does not quite fit into the over-consumption of food theory because there is a stark difference between the quality of food consumed by different brackets of society. Lurking beneath are the high levels of stress, which cause hormonal disturbance which affect fat storage and metabolism. The incidence of diseases or crimes for that matter, are not population variant but also, more important, historic and structural. The incidence of violence and terrorism, as is now popular knowledge, a characteristic of poor and ill developed societies, but it is too unevenly distributed among areas and groups. The likelihood of violence is a lot more, within the same country, in areas historically disputed. Those areas are also likely to be least well off than the rest of country. Now, the cause and effect can work both ways, whether poverty leads to violence or violence perpetuate poverty, but the overall message is that no problem is isolated, one problem intricately feeds into the other creating a vicious cycle of all-time misery.

 

Now, let’s dissect the portion which this post is originally about. The statistics of fate. The probability hits which, many would say, you cannot control such as being born in a particular nationhood, race, or bracket, which is supposed to ‘just happen’. Well, by control, one should mean that an individual cannot control these occurrences, because when one wear telescopic glasses and affords a bird eye of view of the statistical terrain, the ‘controllable’ deem obvious. The probability of you being born in a country which are ranked high on development index, is basically the children born in those countries every year over the children born all around the world every year. And since, high ranked countries have low reproduction rates, the probability would be quite low. This might be an inaccurate measure because children being born are not equal to children who survive, and in countries who rank low on development index, the mortality rates are high but the population growth rates too are high despite more children dying, so there is more likelihood of being born in medium and low ranked countries. 

As you might have already guessed, this probability depends on the sprawling global inequality. In a world with more equal distribution of wealth, the probability of a child being born in downcast surroundings would be droopingly low. Yes, it is not the child’s fault in where he or she happens to be born, but it is very much the fault of the larger world dynamics which clearly determines the happens-to’s.  Of course, it does not end there, there are numerous systematic gaps which pronounce the decision of one fate over the other. Subsequently, it trickles down to thinner and less visible lines of the map, as the class, race, status, gender and ethnic gaps are bridged on. However, many would throw the query that what about the incidences which are not apparently the result of structural gaps, such as earthquakes or tsunamis, which are totally unpredictable and thus out of control. Well, of course that is true, but that is not how we are looking at the statistics. The problem does not lie in how many disasters hit the population, but actually how they impact it. The disasters are likely to do more damage in resource stricken areas because their rehabilitation take much longer, and sometimes is never initiated. The trick here, is not to never expect bad things, but to have a strong coping mechanism against those occurrences.

The underlying power of statistics is truly unthinkable, and touch the secluded grooves of information where ordinary eye cannot intrude. Maybe one day, we get to the position of predicting the unpredictable, as both the sources and quality of data improves. A time when big data is used to read and predict the fates of masses, a juncture where science does replace prophecy.  The whole anagram of ‘fate’, as some veiled plan, has consistently been used as excuses against bad governance, bad policies, bad economics, bad socials and most important, bad information and bad philosophy.

Between Hell and Heritage

The ingenious way how cultures trademark their intellectual heritage

Photo by Sam@Carlton School

Around the twelfth century, amidst the brooding courts-men of the Spanish Caliphate, a meekly figured man with a kind regard for both Aristotelian philosophy and popular ideals of his time, spoke on the vulnerability of the nature of truth. This, however did not earn him much respect, instead he was disdainfully thrown out of the court, and his philosophy labelled as impure and corrupt. That man, which is today hailed as Averroes did struggle quiet, in his time, to avoid problems with the Islamic authorities, moreover this was his unlucky moment.

A sophisticated view of the past would reveal that there is a plethora of similar instances, when the intellectual minority of a community or civilization got into screeching friction with the mass populace. This is not confined to only philosophy or the study of the natural world, but also art, poetry and music. Some of it, do make itself into the popular consciousness, but some of the more non-digestible forms remain seated on the shelves, yellowing and rotting with time, and only occasionally discussed in the academic squares.

Averroes, or more precisely, Ibn-Rushd was not alone in the staggering ‘clash of the philosophies’, there were many who were received and seen with contempt by the larger population in their own times, and even in times today. Amongst them, the more famous or rather infamous were Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi, who were considered “too deviant” that some scholars discussed their status as Muslims. Ibn al-Qayyim (1292- 1350) and other Islamic scholars, clearly declared them as extreme and disbelieving.

The history of intellectual developments, is not simply the history of the people. It is the history of class, caste, economics, and politics. To say that Egyptians made the pyramids, Indians wrote the Kamasutra, Westerners drafted democracy and freedom of thought, and Muslims made algebra would be an exceedingly immature and unsavory assessment of the past. Today, many Christians in the West would proudly boast about the “civilized” modes of thinking possessed by the westerners but they would surely not like to talk about how historically those civilized modes of thinking, which they take for so much granted came about in the first place. And they assuredly would not like to mention the incalculable exiles, torments and blood sheds of the free-thinkers and rationalist who gave and perpetuated the modern ideals by putting the Church’s teachings under scrutiny. But the way cultural trademarks rulebook works, the “credit goes to the whole Western civilization! Big round of applause, everyone”

The Kamasutra and other pieces of writings from the Gupta and subsequent periods, popularly regarded as the golden age of Hindu civilization too divulges a similar picture. The philosophical and sensual writings were the product by and for the elitist rulers and courtesans. The clergy and religious perception of the wider population resembled nowhere close to it. Indians did not write the Kamasutra, the people who had leisure, time in vain and tax money in their pockets did. The masses simply ploughed land, sowed seeds, prayed to gods and harvested food, only to give it away in the taxes.

                                                                                                                                        We don’t know how many Averroes were expelled or scorned at, and how many got into serious troubles, but it is vehemently celebrated as the “golden age of Islamic civilization”. Only a few however, will ever bother to dig and know, for example what al-Razi, whose contributions in chemistry and medicine were unmatchable at the time, thought about miracles and revelation.  And what his “heretical” works such as The Prophet’s fraudulent tricks, or On the refutation of revealed religion undertake about the wider orthodox conceptions.

This takes us back to the ingenious way how cultures mark their intellectual territories through panoramic generalizations and uniformity, throwing the scrupulous contextualization of history, politics, economics and socials far off in the reality dustbin, never to be hunted and picked out again.

The Extremism Dilemma

 Is our current counter-extremism policy effective enough to do what its supposed to do? 




Suppose you had to re-make the world order from scratch. After humans have discovered the rudimentary natural processes, they settle into loosely knit agricultural societies. They have the arrays of culture, of art, and of organized religion, which determines most aspects of people's lives, including political boundaries, law and socioeconomics. Soon, the scientific revolution hits, and there are drastic changes in the ways of life of people in terms of technology, heath and food. Science is starting to gain credibility and impact production and economics, but the political and social spheres are still largely dictated by Divine orders. On surface, the lives of people have changed, but they will still mercilessly execute anyone, who deviated from the orthodox route or who happened to be born in a household following a religion, different from that of the State's. Scientific revolution was not enough. What needed was a philosophical revolution, which could meticulously reflect upon the strands of culture, politics and theological teachings. What needed was an Enlightenment Movement, which could convincingly answer and argue questions such as "Why it is not right to execute people who happen to believe in a God, other than your own?" or that "why the State should be separate from Church?'

Today, many might take the liberal values of freedom and democracy for granted but back there it was a great challenge to convince someone about the sanctity of human life being more sacred than the Divine law, or that humans possess certain rights, which need to be respected. "Human rights" is a concept of modern thinking. It does not have a physical existence, you cannot touch or see rights, but it is a concept legitimated by a piece of paper called the constitution. One needs to put faith in the constitution to take human rights seriously. But the human rights are not only legitimated by the constitution, rather it is entrenched into the conscience of millions of people, who deeply believe in it with sincerity. The Enlightenment was not, then, the withdrawal of faith, rather replacement of faith from the Divine order to human capacity to do well and organize themselves. In other words, it was a shift from faith in faith to faith in reason. It was an announcement that some faiths are better than the others, and that some can genuinely improve human condition while others lead to hatred and dogmas. Even though faith in reason is faith but it is a very philosophically informed faith, which has a good argumentative basis.

Fast-forward to twenty first century in the Muslim world, which is plagued by fundamentalist ideologies and witnessing some of the horrendous examples of violence and hatred. A lot of literature has been expend on contemplating its causes and nature, and much confusion still surrounds the discussion. Some earnestly assert that it is political, concerned with land and wealth, while sweeping it aside that in puritanical forms of faith, politics is very much the business of religion. It is not facile to sketch a line on where politics starts and religion ends. As I mentioned earlier, people coming from a Western paradigm tend to take the separation between politics and religion for granted and therefore expect the same from the other side of the world.

Even though the Muslims are divided into modern nation states today, the tinges of democracy have seldom stepped in their national corridors, often frowned upon like some "uninvited guest". Although many had attempted to devise marriage between Islam and democracy, those 'many' were either seen largely with contempt, or their ideals conveniently molded to be digestible for the masses. But the groups harboring fanatical thinking, refuse to even stare at the exported ideas from "the land of the infidel" which indiscriminately puts the Christians, the atheists and the not-very-orthodox Muslims on the same plate. The Muslim liberals turn out to be largely ineffective in dealing with such out-of-hand ideologies. The West continues to mindlessly shell bombs on the 'whackos' and spend copiously on defense in the hopes that it will magically do something, while fulfilling the predictions of the fanatics and making them gain more support "Oh look! Were we not right? These crusaders will always remain the crusaders".

What the West is doing, is adopting an easy way out of the murk, more of a temporary fix, and while, comforting its own self that it has it under control. And the liberals just want the fanatics to simply "get it" as if, it was enough to convince them. The truth is, that the doors of discussions are mostly closed for the larger part of the Muslim world. It is easy to have a dialogue with the moderates, but nobody would want to 'sit and chat' with the puritans, for the fear of offending them, not even the moderates. How would you, for example, convince a Sunni supremacist who asks for the killing of those Muslims, who happen to differ from him theologically, given that he was raised since childhood to believe in his self-righteousness and a totalitarian view of Islam?

It presents as a great challenge to us, not only to the Westerners but more importantly to Muslim liberals and thinkers. It is not a political challenge, but a philosophical one. A trial, I would say, even tougher than that faced by the Enlightenment thinkers. How do you think the shift from faith in faith to faith in reason can happen? How do you convince someone, that dialogue is a better way than violence? How do you tell someone that his God's right cannot supersede the right of any human to live? It’s the hard problem, debating on such basic tenets which many deem as obvious. A person who is convinced that the Divine authority has ordained on him, the task of protecting His throne on earth, would not find it obvious to hold regard for the very life, whom his God warned against. Or a person who dismisses every argument on the grounds that it is a Judeo-Christian construct, would not be much fond of a civilized dialogue. One could start with challenging the fundamentals of the faith itself, but only if one remains alive to do that. How should we then, begin to address this problem? And how do we know that debating is a solution at all, why cannot we simply do away with military action? Because it is an ideological strife, a meme competing to take root, if one group gets defeated, another will rise.

This is not a 21th century, post-modern fundamentalism problem, this is history repeating itself, just with deadly weapons of modern origins and new organizational strategies, as if fanatical ideologies have found an outlet they were longing for. This is not to say, that fundamentalist faith was evenly prevalent throughout history, but that it is easier to politicize a religion and legitimize it using scripture than it is to de-politicize it. One such example, among many others is that of Zia’s reign in Pakistan, which successfully drummed puritanical fringes of faith using institutional means into masses, but decades forward, no one has been able to reverse the changes. The rule is not the same for both sides of the affairs. It is very easy to capitalize on the religious doctrines while turning the clocks back, but takes broken spines and slit tongues to overhaul it. 

Our current policy standing on counter extremism is based on fractured assumptions and bad theory. Even though the evidence is inconclusive, but the dilemma which lay before us require to make educated drafts on the thin films of evidence that we have. The enlightenment method might be humiliating, require oodles of patience and optimism or might not even work, but if you were to re-make the world, it is exactly how you make the philosophical jump. 

Is the universe God?

Since the time humans begun to look at their environment and ponder over its workings, they have imagined and dreamed of agencies beyond the physical macrocosm. Our ideas about God have evolved probably more than any other philosophy, from the naturalistic gods, to more elegantly engineered conceptions of dualistic God. The diversity in the supermarket of Gods is staggering, of all shapes, sizes and pretexts. Among them is the pantheistic divinity, which many trace back to Spinoza in his “The Ethics Concerning God”, but which in fact is as old as any other notion of God, pluming its roots in ancient Eastern philosophy. But Spinoza’s ideas were more atheistic rather than pantheistic, despite that, many continue to propose similar divine packages. The New Age enthusiasts, among others, assert fancy philosophical ideas, which plays on the argument of ignorance, to economize the gaps in our scientific understanding. Similar musings do creep up in science as well, because hey, science does not always get the brutal scrutiny it should.

The compartments of “consciousness” has much fuzziness surrounding it, which could easily be filled with conjecture and poorly founded conclusions. One such example is bio-centrism by Robert Lanza whose misinterpretation of quantum mechanics and fad philosophy “Is the apple still there, if you don’t look at it?” is appalling. It is basically the Chopda’s version of “the moon is not there until you look at it”. Yes, the color does not exist, but the light waves which produce that color do. Yes, the passage of time is an illusion but time itself is a fundamental property of universe. To make such a naive claim that the “universe out there does not exist, and is a figment of our thought” just regressively plays out logic. Where did the thought come from? It’s a dug hole with no end.

And here is the trap, God is too vague a term to even bring down to a narrow set of meaning. Natural laws are natural laws, choosing to call it God, would just be you having a hard time getting over it. What people often mean by God is “Anything that created the universe and us”, Oh, okay then, physical laws are God, whatever soothes your heart. Or maybe they mean “everything which we cannot control” in that, there is a higher structure that determines the outcome of events at a human scale. Things which are unpredictable and whose outcome cannot be known and which requires you to invoke a structure in order to make sense of them. But that ‘structure’ is basically the statistical probabilities in a certain range of outcomes, which many adore to call God. Then, some would ask “What’s the harm in naming God?” Well, nothing, just that you do not want to spell out the faculties of the world, and simply want them to linger in mystery for a bit more longer. 

Can homosexuality and Darwin be in one boat?

How does evolution make sense of seemingly anti-evolution behavior like homosexuality?

In his book, “The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex”, Darwin proposed a bombastic idea. Known as the theory of sexual selection, it could explain several traits and characteristics of a specie, in terms of their role in reproductive success. It famously includes the bright and decorative feathers of a peacock, which it uses to attract the female mate which is bland and dull. And it led to the now popular conclusion, that probably, art, poetry and music, were the tools of sexual selection to attract women, ending up in hot encounter in bed. Nevertheless, Darwin was right as far as the peacocks, and the pheasants and the guppies, and species who only have sex for reproduction were concerned.

But much has changed in our understanding of sexual behaviors in humans and other animals. Humans, as we know today, are hypersexual mammals who possess far more sexual capacity than is needed for reproduction. The human male has the biggest gonads in all primates, and the human female can have sex in non-ovulation periods and during pregnancy. Apart from this, humans engage in all sorts of non-reproductive sexual practices, including sodomy, oral sex, self-pleasure, genital rubbing and homosexuality.  This should raise an important “Why?”

But before that, let’s ask another question “What went wrong?” Well, the answer lies in the cultural context of the Victorian era, whose “straight, monogamous, puritanical sex” picture had impacted Darwin’s judgement about human sexuality. Also, we happened to meet the chimpanzees first, who are not only aggressive, but non-cooperative in their social arrangements and usually have sex for reproduction. It was later, that primatologists and ethologists came across other primates, whose social dynamics were starkly different than that of chimpanzees. And soon we begun to find other mammals, both primates and non-primates who engage in similar sexual behaviors.

So, how can evolution explain that?

The mammals wasting their time in sex with no reproductive outcome, and which should seemingly reduce their chances of survival because it does not leave them offspring. Right?

Well, wrong. This arises out of a heinous misconception about evolution that the individuals have to struggle for survival and carry their lineage. It’s the genes, not the individuals, which need to survive and get carried on. And the seeming “paradox of homosexuality” does not really exist, because the homosexuals are still reproductively fit and can produce offspring. But this takes us back to discussion above, why do humans, like bonobos and other primates, engage in non-reproductive sex?

According to E.O Wilson, human sexuality and that of other primates, can be well described as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands. Humans, which are highly social beings, sexually promiscuous and who engage in sex for pleasure. The bonding maintains cooperation and mutuality between the groups, and increases the chances of gene propagation. The gene is still selfish, even though the individuals can form cooperative arrangements, and hold remarkable qualities of altruism.

Homosexuality did not serve any specific evolutionary function, as some in evolutionary psychology propose, in that men used to cuddle in winter and that is why you have gays, or that gays were better guardians of women and children when the men used to go out for hunt. These musings are based on questionable assumptions about human sexuality, mostly the Victorian ones, which simply compresses the staggering diversity of sexual practices in human cultures into one tiny gob, on which many of the hypothesis and theories in the social sciences and humanities today stand upon. Instead, homosexuality and other non-reproductive forms of sex can be seen as an evolutionary result of our high drive and social inclinations, as species, who enjoy sex for pleasure rather than reproduction. It reminds me of the female orgasm, which does not make any sense from a reproductive standpoint, even though many researchers had attempted to find an evolutionary reason, they failed miserably. Except that we know, that the orgasm is also an expression of pleasure which strengthens bond making and mutuality.

Before any plausible theory on this is to take birth, it is important to re-examine, and accordingly re-shape our picture of human sexuality. You cannot simply ignore, the “odd” sexual behaviors, and the supposedly rare practices of different cultures and arrangements. Once we have an accurate and representative picture of human sexuality and that of other primates, the puzzle joints should neatly fit in.

Portrait showing homosexual behavior in ancient Greece

Further Explore

Mota, Paulo  "Darwin's Sexual Selection Theory-A Forgotten idea"

http://www.uc.pt/en/cia/publica/AP_artigos/AP26.27.10_paulomota

Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethá "Sex at Dawn". June 2010.

Wilson, Edward. "Sociobiology". 1975. 

The Bookgasms: A Reading List Suggestion

From the moors of science and nature, to the boggling insights into culture, morality and religion, these book suggestions ought to be on the list of every informed reader who seeks to understand and piece together the fringes of universe. Drawing from some of the classical texts and contemporary researches in areas which should concern a thinking human society. These are suggestions by me, and are nowhere near exhaustive or perfect.

1) The Blind Watchmaker 

It explains some of underlying processes going on in evolution, which as the title suggests is "a blind watchmaker", with no eyes to foresee the future. Contrary to popular ideas about evolution and natural selection, Dawkins describes how evolution creates and designs, which is not necessarily the "best" design.

2) The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe itself

You just cannot ignore physics, no matter how wild and fancy your imagination gets in the philosophical realms such as nature of reality, life and the universe. Sean Carroll explains what our current understandings about the natural world are and what plausible inferences we can draw from it. To the fine-tuners, the bio-centrists and the woo woo hoods, bad news for you all.

3) Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and other Animals

Why are we moral? Why do we have remarkable capacities of altruism, cooperation and mutuality? 

This interdisciplinary voyage seeks to answer questions which have long been at the discretion of philosophy and religion. 

4) Thinking Fast and Slow

It is the holy grail for any one trying to grasp the complexities of human behavior, cognition and psychology. Comprehensive and understandable for an ordinary creature. (No, you won't be able to control people after reading this, but you surely will be able to see, how vulnerable our thought and perception is)

5) The Age of Reason

This is one of the classic Enlightenment texts which throw light at the philosophical loopholes in theology and religious doctrines. If a God was all-powerful, it would not need the aid of revelation or prophets, or any agency and would be accessible to every man alike without any barrier of tradition, culture and language. 

6) Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality 

It traces the evolution of human sexuality, while challenging some of the assumptions about sexual nature of humans and the cultural pretexts in the social sciences and the evolutionary psychology. The "hyper-driven male and the reluctant female" picture, which have been at the heart of most sociological and anthropological literature is a vestige of Victorian era, which have crept into our present-day ideals of marriage, monogamy and sex. 

7) Why People Believe Weird Things?

From psychic mediums, to alternative medicines, ancient astronauts, and to the elusive conspiracy theories, weird things are everywhere, which continue to attract so many people and the drive million dollar industry of pseudo-science and quackery. Why do smart people believe weird things? 

8) Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

How do religions do it? which keep billions of people on their feet, and some are even ready to go at far fetched lengths for it. It seeks to vacuum some of the fog which surrounds the origins of religion, its practice and its evolution. 

9) Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind

How did humans become the dominant species of the planet? From small herd of foragers to vast civilizations of glamour and technology. It is a story about us, and our success which will leave you thinking for long. 

10)  The Mind of the terrorist: The psychology of terrorism from IRA to Al-Qaeda

No, the terrorists are not the "psychopathic" mind wretched creatures you once have thought. They are perfectly normal people who know what they are doing, Before we step into the political dimension of countering terrorism, it is important to understand them first, from a closer and detached point of view.

11) The Second Sex 

Its one of the central pieces of feminist literature. Oh, the horror of the F word. From biology, to history and to culture, it sheds light on some of the ideological nicks, which an ordinary eye presumably fails to catch. 

12) The Origins of Species 

Even though we know about evolution a lot more than Darwin did, it is still a beautiful and mind sparking read. 

Opiniongasms

"No, I will not respect your opinion. I will only respect your right to hold that opinion" 

 We stand at the juncture of society which does not put much work into discerning an informed opinion from an ‘opinion’. The credit goes to the post-modernist commodification of knowledge, a world of ‘alternatives’ and ‘perspectives’ which hold the same amount of water. These attitudes have even crept up in the academic spheres, which have stalled our progress in some of the crucial areas. One such example, which has lingered quite long is that of consciousness and human brain, as many in philosophy and psychology fear the 'biologizing' of mind.

Opinions are not created equal. It is a futile business, or rather a ludicrous one. It’s true that knowledge is uncertain, but some ideas are obviously more well-grounded in research and based on educated lines of thinking. The whole scheme of “open-mindedness”, which put in other words, implies that the opinion of a streetwalker and that of an academician counts as equal, is probably the most preposterous and even harmful proposition someone has ever made.

Of course, you are entitled to your opinion. No one can stop you from thinking or expressing, but to expect that your opinion holds weight and is to be taken seriously in matters of sophisticated discussions is a different realm altogether. People often confuse entitlement to an opinion with the opinion itself, which stems from their inability to understand critical thinking and dialectical reasoning.

In learning and intelligence theories of psychology, we know this phenomenon as the ‘reflective’ scale, with people moving on from the I-just-know-what-I-know stage to the all-opinions-counts-equal ladder, and further higher up at the “I know it because of conclusive evidence and informed guesses” as they sharpen their tools of thinking.

This witty depiction, made by SMBC probably hits the nail. 

The consequences of "open-mindedness" under the disguise of tolerating people's opinions no matter how outdated, or ill-supported they are, manifests itself in terms of popular quackery, pseudo-science and religious debates which basically presents the scientific opinion as a mere "opinion", just one in the alternatives' sea. And, its one of the reasons, why liberals have failed to counter fanatics of their religion which continue to find asylum behind the "respect-my-opinion" wall and gain support. So, this obviously has serious and practical implications for how our conversations turn out and how we progress as a society. So, no, I will not respect your opinion. I will only respect your educated opinion. 

The "All Religions" sorry game

The phrase "But all religions" has become the ultimate armor to deflect genuine criticism 


If you have ever been in a serious political discussion with the puritans or the theists, chances are that the phrase "But All Religions" will come up almost every time you are in the middle of scrutinizing theological underpinnings. The argument started off in the atheistic literature but is now being used rigorously by the apologists and the regressive leftists, or probably those who have little time re-assessing what they are saying, without realizing its implications.

Whenever any solemn debate with the Islamic theologians and scholars, on matters of women, homosexuals, rights of non-Muslims, and the hated apostates, come along, it is inevitable that "All religions" is going to be smacked hard at your face. End of discussion. This becomes a gigantic barricade for any one wanting to have an informed discussion about the topic and trying to challenge the obviously problematic parts in Islamic law and theology, which are always avoided in the Islamic world.

So, let's try to deconstruct the very argument. Are all religions equal? If you think yes, you either are poorly educated on the matter, or you are just being intellectually dishonest, because its not true. There are some theological aspects unique to Islam, which are inherently problematic, like the widely accepted killing of the apostates (people who leave Islam). No serious attempt to challenge it, among the theologians and the scholars has taken place so far. Its true that in the pre-Enlightenment West, the Church's teachings and the dogmas of Christianity revolved around the same notions of blasphemy, but there has been a history of political and social struggle, and oodles of external criticism hammered by philosophers and free-thinkers which shaped much of the liberal West we witness today. The fundamentalists of organized religions might come under the same category. But, you don't have to run for your life, if you left Jainism or Sikhism.

The "All religions" argument is the height of dishonesty and cheap apologia. Many liberals in the West, and even some atheists continue to use the same argument, without discerning what this entails, and how it is corrosive to our progress.

Looking back at the Orgasm

A brief glimpse at the female pleasure's set

Image from Google pictures

From the Plato’s Timaeus, to the Chinese Jade Chambers and to the Freudian’s sexology, the O game has journeyed a long path of speculations, cultural fringes and fancy mythologizing. There have been fragments in the pasts, with democratized sexual pleasure for women, and also junctures of repressive mores, mutilation, and taboo. Humans’ attempts to understand female sexuality had been sleazy, and even if, occasionally, it happens to be studied, the drawings rarely reach public thought.

Today, after our neuron clusters are capable of contemplating the workings of universe and making sophisticated technology, we still understand little about our bodies. Many had sought to explain, female orgasm in terms of evolutionary functionality and later, adaptation, but this arose from inaccurate conceptions about the female orgasm, which we know today, is difficult to reach vaginally, and thus divorces itself from serving any particular evolutionary catch.

Then the sensationalized G-spot and nitty-gritty of ejaculation, arousal, and attitudes. The internet is squashing with information, often, wrong and unsupported. There are meter long “How To’s” self-help quack, all kinds of it, which thrive; “How to make her orgasm quickly”. “How to revive your sexual energy”, “10 Things you need to know about Os”. They do, because of the lack of decisiveness of science on these matters, which provide the food for a wide variety of woo to feed on.

It is true that any serious scholarship in this domain, faces barricades of culture and politics. 

But, we have a long way to go. Because, the oodles of media, literature and pornography still relies on outdated ideas about female sexuality and orgasms, which have long been discredited (in the scientific spheres). The fogginess which surrounds the topic manifests itself in a million households with unhappy paramours, poor sex education in schools and appalling practices of some cultures. Sometimes, science needs to step in, when issues with deeper political and social consequences are concerned. 

The Arrogant Atheists

They are cold. They are cynical. They are godlessly haughty. 

Somewhere between the towering heap of names and connotations, which are associated with us, vanity is the most popular and probably the oldest charge on the dubious. "Why atheists seem so arrogant?" is a query I get hounded with often whenever I try to put my fingers and dither the threads of religious thought and dogma.

Many in the past, had been stamped by similar accusations. The literature is enormous by the free-thinkers and the philosophers who had sought to defend their 'non-arrogance', throughout history. And many, continue to face the same rubric today.

So why are atheists so arrogant?

Well, because..they are not. They 'look' arrogant because our cultural conditioning has taught us that 'disobedience' to God is vanity. Disregard for the sacred is surrounded by taboo and voodoo. Its the same discourse of 'atheists being little nefarious satans', which some of us are already tired of. The whole 'godlessly haughty' wrangle stems from the same mores which maintain that goodness or good morality can only come from religion, of which obedience or submission to the divine is a major chunk. We 'look' arrogant or cold, because of the presupposition deeply rooted in our culture, that 'denying God' implies man taking control of his life, an ideal that is at the heart of religious doctrines. When Iblees was made Satan, when he refused to bow before God, was charged with conceit in the Islamic theology. But, he was 'conceited' not because he denied the existence of God, but because he considered himself God.

This reflects a preposterous misunderstanding which the religious have about atheists. They don't consider themselves God or think that they control everything. They simply think that its highly unlikely that such a being exists.

The problem is not with the atheists. It is with the tenets of our cultural upbringing which 'otherize' them, making them look like horned brutes breathing fire.

Why is sex such a taboo?

The shhh moments probe our lives every day, when we are bombarded with cues of inappropriateness and discrepancy. Some will just shrug their shoulders, melding into the “ought to be this way” narrative which is constantly hammered by cultural mores and social institutions into us since we were dumb blobs of flesh in our cradles. But some restless creatures of our kind, would like to scratch their heads and ask “Why did that happen?”

How come, sex, which our species is undeniably obsessed with, became such a “behind the covers” and often times, a “dirty” business. In other words, why is sex such a taboo? Let’s take a foot back, and ask “what do we exactly mean by that?”. Does this means sex outside marriage or practices like incest, on which large volumes of thought and literature has been expend. No, that is not what I mean. By, sex, I mean the very act of sex, which is supposed to be done behind closed doors, or possibly bushes in ancient times, without announcing it out loud or talking about it. 

But before answering that, it is important to muse another question. “Has sex always been a taboo?” If yes, then why. Did it serve any particular purpose? Humans have the tendency to look at their surroundings and think that things have always been the way they are now.

This is one of the spheres, where you find the most diverse and even contradictory schemes of theorizing. Because it’s like asking, why the word ‘fuck’ became so popular in language? Is there any particular reason for it besides that so many people started using it at once?

Culture and obviously, religion has a big hand in fencing taboo around the act, just like it does arbitrarily in matters of food and clothing. But, let’s dissect the ‘standard narrative’ which is often given in answer to this question, which goes something like this

“Sexual taboos are natural, it is a mechanism by which nature controlled whose offspring is who, so that men and women could work in functional units”

It does look quite good, and seems to make sense, but it is not quite true. Because, we know, that humans at least around pre-historic times were highly promiscuous and lived in shared societal structures, sharing food, resources and well..women. This kind of dynamics and practice, did not only exist in pre-historic times, but practiced in primitive forms of societies even later.  Surprisingly, some of these practices were sanctioned by religion, which vary a great deal on their position about sex and sexuality. This does not necessarily mean that taboo on sex was nearly absent, but that it did not exist in forms like it does today, with masturbation, nudity, sex talk, female sexuality being surrounded by contempt.

However with the advent of agriculture and changing cultural constrains, the standard narrative does hold some water, but taboo on sex was not ‘nature’s planning’ but rather a social adaption in response to religion and possibly, changing societal dynamics. When it comes to planning, nature is the worst entity. It is blind. Many people think it’s something useful that comes out of their sweet Motherly nature, which almost always has to serve some purpose.

We, coming from Abrahamic paradigms which spread and soon merged in and affected other cultures, have the tendency to fill our voids of knowledge, with pre-existing assumptions of today. It’s not that our ancestors sat around and carefully discussed what benefits would doing it behind the bushes would serve. It’s just that the ideal of ‘being civilized’ and therefore ‘unlike animals’, which has been at the very heart of our cultural conditioning. You can say, that humans did not want to look back at their animalistic past, and that sex out in open, reminds them of their primitive instincts, which culture has dictated to be embarrassing and something to get disgusted about.

 
Further Explore

Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethá “Sex at Dawn: The Pre-historic Origins of Modern Sexuality”

Dening, Sarah. The Mythology of Sex. Macmillian 1996, ISBN 978-0-02-861207-2

Patton, Michael S. (June 1985). "Masturbation from Judaism to Victorianism"

Art is not subjective

Throughout history, art has enjoyed a special place in almost all human cultures and often seen as an ‘out of the world’, imaginative and an increasingly subjective endeavor. Whether its lore, mythology, visual art, music or literature, it has been seen as employing some deeper or ‘higher’ forms of conscious reach. But as we put the scientific goggles to stare at the world and the humans living in that world, we might want to shrug our shoulders and say Hmm! What if something else going on?

So, what does the seemingly conclusive heading above actually mean? When I say, art is not subjective, do I mean that everyone has to like the same art and art forms. It would be cool if each person on the planet would listen to the same songs, or read the same books, but that is not what I mean. Then, does it mean that art in human societies serves specific evolutionary functions which in popular thought, is deemed as a way “to attract mates and pass on genes”. That is not quite true, nevertheless, that is not what I mean either.

When I talk about art, I am basically talking about aesthetics and beauty, principles of which are not so subjective or beyond this world, as previously thought to be. There are predictable patterns which manifests themselves across human cultures and even across species, and they can be studied in a scientific way. There are some cognitive and emotional modules, shaped by evolution which explains why some arts find their way in museums, buildings and even worshiped as gods in temples while others don’t quite make it. In a particular cultural tradition, some aesthetic forms continue to get replicated over and over across generations and across geography which can be traced historically such as deliberately enhanced features of iconography in Hindu art.

The all-time creative world of art is subject to cognitive and cerebral laws formulated by billions of years of evolution. What those laws are which invoke awe and ahas in us have remained the domain of artists and craftsmen, who had learned to capitalize on them through trial and experimentation. In other words, they take advantage of our perception and emotional processing systems to charm ‘magic’ on us.

So, how do we know this?  Well, the findings arose from completely unrelated areas of science. Mainly perception and neuroscience. We don’t see how we think we see. There are some ‘perception shortcuts’ which evolution had wired in us during millennia of our struggle with environment. The evidence comes from visual and cognitive illusions which easily trick our brains, even if we know that we are being deceived. But, more important insights come from ethology, the study of animals. Jewel beetles, which are found in Australia were noted to go extinct because they were seen having sex with beer bottles. Well, Jewel beetles are brown and glossy and so are the beer bottles, which humans have the habit of throwing around in the environment. The beetles saw “anything that is brown and glossy, that is our hotie”.

Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel prize winner ethologist, did an experiment with seagulls, whose beaks have a red dot, which they use to feed their infants. Tinbergen took an isolated beak, with no seagull attached and swayed it in front of the infants who showed the exact same response when they were about to get food even though there was no seagull. Then, Tinbergen, took a wooden stick and painted it with red dot, much brighter and bigger than that of a seagull’s beak. And, the infants pecked even vigorously and grew crazy for food. Vilayanur Ramachandran had remarked on this “If those seagulls were to build a museum and pay millions of dollars for an artifact, then that would most probably be the painted wooden stick”.

This new way of looking at art through the lens of neuroscience was coined by Semir Zeki  according to whom art is governed by the laws of the brain which just means that you cannot ignore biology while doing culture. For many years, humanities and the social sciences have shown contempt on 'biologizing' of social and cultural phenomenon which according to them are complex, and cannot be underpinned. 'Reductionist' is the favorite and probably the most common word in the humanities and social sciences which is equivalent to being a baby-eater. 

Nevertheless, findings from different areas continue to shake us and make us re-evaluate our standings. Margaret Livingstone, had pointed to several perceptual tricks which artists and impressionists use to make us clap by manipulating our visual systems. Art reveals how we see, at the back end in processing of our brains. That makes scientists the theorists, and artists the experimentalists. In her documentary video, The Neuroscience of Art, she explains the use of contrast and detail in several paintings. She also shows drawings made by people with brain damages and perception impairments who have difficulty locating distance and spatial network as shown below. 

All of this tells us an important story about our own selves and how we see. Cultures, throughout history, have tried to figure out ways in which we perceive and absorb reality, whether it is auditory systems in sounds and music or visual organization in pictorial or illustrative art forms which enchant us and make us coming for more.  

Further Explore

Huang, Mengfei. "The Neuroscience of Art"
http://web.stanford.edu/group/co-sign/Huang.pdf

Vilayanur, Ramachandran. "Aesthetic Universals and Neurology of Hindu Art". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZTvHqM-_jE

The Scientist. "Neuroaesthetics"

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39802/title/Neuroaesthetics/