Natural selection: Darwin's God killer

It's been 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, yet public acceptance of natural selection seems as elusive as ever. A recent poll in the United States, for example, revealed that most Americans don't believe in evolution; 51% of respondents still believe that God created humans in present form while 30% think that humans evolved, but that God guided the process.

The fact that the majority of Americans reject evolution outright is likely due to the generally weak understanding of scientific principles and the ongoing devotion to biblical literalism in that country. But the explanation as to why 30% believe that God 'guided the process' is a bit more involved, one that speaks directly to the larger problem.

There's a definite 'want to have my cake and eat it, too' aspect to this position. It's often voiced by the statement, 'You can believe in evolution and still believe in God -- there's room for both.'

But what this position flatly ignores is the ultimate power of Darwin's 'dangerous' idea, that natural selection is a stand-alone process that does not require the intervention of a higher power. Consequently, it has become the fuel that powers scientific naturalism -- the conviction that all phenomenon, whether biological or physical, can be explained by autonomous processes.

Since time immemorial, religions of all sorts have offered their creation stories. It was Darwin, however, who finally explained how we really got here. And his explanation -- that we're descended from animals -- was particularly upsetting to Christian sensibilities. No longer a creature positioned between God and the animals, Darwin reduced humanity to nature. The notion that humans were just another animal in the forest was -- and still is -- a very difficult pill to swallow.

This is ultimately why evolution remains largely rejected to this very day. Human arrogance has gotten in the way and many of us fear the implications. If we lack that 'divine spark,' and if God doesn't really exist, what's to prevent us from brutalizing each other? Are humans subject to the laws of nature rather than the laws of God? And what does it even mean to speak of 'human nature?' Is that as seemingly malleable as our physical form?

These may be challenging and provocative questions, but it's in response to the truth. Without it and our devotion to reason we live in a state of confusion and fumble in the dark.

Given the evidence in support of natural selection, and given that sensible people can no longer withhold reasonable consent on the matter, the cognitive dissonance created in the minds of the faithful must pound like a migraine. Their prescription has become this fatuous and pathetic attempt to reconcile religion and science -- the suggestion that God is somehow still in charge and directing traffic. It's delusion as comfort food.

I'd like to end this article by suggesting that we'll eventually get over it, and that someday we'll all accept natural selection as truth. But given that 150 years have passed and we're still largely in denial, it's an open question as to whether or not the greater public will ever come to accept Darwin's creation story and our place in the Universe.

Thinking faster by altering your perception of time - A SentDev Classic

This article from April 3, 2006 was inspired by the work of David Eagleman who will be guest blogging here next week.

People who undergo extreme short-term psychological stress often claim that time slowed down for them during the experience. Traumatic events like car accidents or lengthy falls often appear in slow motion to the person experiencing it.

Is this just a recall error? Or are people literally experiencing these events at an altered subjective time rate? If so, how could such a psychological phenomenon be accounted for? Obviously, time is not really slowing down -- but something is happening to the psychological interpretation of time.

One possible answer is to compare the human brain's "clockspeed" to that of a computer's. Some scientists now suspect that slowed time elapsement is an evolved defence mechanism similar to our fight-or-flight response. When time appears to have slowed down, we have more subjective time in which to deal with a crisis situation. Put another way, extreme stress helps us to think faster.

One scientist looking into this phenomenon is David Eagleman from the University of Texas at Houston. At his 'Laboratory for Perception and Action' Eagleman is attempting to understand the neural mechanisms of time perception. His team combines psychophysical, behavioural, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals.

At the experimental level, Eagleman is engaged in exploring temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. Ultimately, he hopes to use this data to explore how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world.

In one of his experiments, Eagleman had volunteers perform a backwards bungee jump freefall while he transmitted a rapid succession of numbers to an LED on their wrists. He found that during the fall they were successfully able to read the numbers, which under normal conditions would have appeared too fast. [I have to say, that is one of the most interesting and original experiments I've heard of in quite time some]

Thinking about Eagleman's research at a practical level, it is thought that a better understanding of these mechanisms will result in interventions that will help people process information at higher rates. This kind of 'think faster' augmentation would slow time down in a subjective sense, which would enable an individual to operate at a higher level of cognitive efficiency.

This theme has been explored in a number of science fiction stories. In Frank Herbert's Chapterhouse: Dune, the ghola Miles Teg was able to engage in extremely fast physical combat due to his ability to rapidly process information. Teg was able to subjectively experience time in extreme slow motion. Similarly, Neo in The Matrix was able to dodge bullets by altering his perception of time elapsement. And in Greg Egan's Diaspora, uploaded posthumans had to drastically slow down their internal clockspeeds when conversing with biological humans; clockspeeds in the real world varied dramatically from the clockspeed utilized in supercomputer 'polises.' Also in Diaspora, a group of posthumans altered their perception of time to such a slow rate that they could perceive the rising and fallings of geological structures such as mountains.

Here in the real world, such neural enhancements are rare, but not entirely impossible. It is thought, for example, that hockey ultrastar Wayne Gretzky was able to perceive the flow of the game at a slower pace than his competitors, giving him more subjective time to plan his attack. This may in fact be the case. At the height of his career, Gretzky was not just a 'little better' than other players, he was dominating to a degree never before seen in sport, breaking records by extreme margins. And this from a player who was physically unremarkable--in fact, below average.

Just what kinds of interventions could enable humans to 'warp time' is a topic of some speculation. A recent Discover article titled "The Mind in Overdrive" offers some possible solutions. Psychotropic substances are one possible answer, as drugs like cocaine and amphetamines have been known to alter subjective time for users. Also, meditating Buddhist monks claim to be able to perceive time differently; through their mental discipline, they may be recreating the same effect that Eagleman is documenting.

I'm certainly hoping that something like this will eventually become accessible. It will be interesting to see how much more productive and "aware" one might be with the benefit of these sorts of interventions. It may even create an alternative sense of subjective reality.

And it would surely come in handy the next time you need to dodge bullets.