Evolutionary Psychology
I was honored to be able to be give the April presentation at the North Texas Skeptics.

I wanted to discuss something that was a legitimately debated topic in science, so I covered evolutionary psychology.

Darwin's theory of evolution is not considered controversial in science. But its implications on the development of the human mind over time are considered controversial by many legitimate critics.

To recap, evolution by natural selection is essentially the process by which organisms change over many generations. In principle, when a trait allows an organism to maximize its offspring it gets passed down.

Evolutionary psychologists say that this process has to have built significant aspects of the current human mind.

There a lot of claims made in the name of evolutionary psychology. Some more controversial than others.

In the article Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature (Miller & Kanazawa, 2007) the claim is made that evolutionary psychology explains why most suicide bombers are Muslim. I, personally, consider this claim to be absurd.

The beautiful thing about studying a field like evolutionary psychology is that one can remain skeptical and yet still be surprised by the truth revealed in this burgeoning field.

I discussed The Evolution of Desire (2003) by David M. Buss. David Buss is a well respected evolutionary psychologist who has shown through cross cultural surveying that men and women's mating strategies follow a pattern which was initially predicted according to evolutionary psychology. The finding, at the risk of oversimplifying, is that women like resources and men like the appearance of fertility.

I also discussed Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate (2002) which is not so much about evolutionary psychology per se as a discussion of the implications of genetics to psychology, and beyond that to its implications for society. Pinker discussed evidence for all matter of controversial findings for the power of genetics in making both the mind and human society. I tend to think of Stephen Pinker as the Carl Sagan of evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology is generally considered controversial because of a sordid past of science making claims about the heredity of mental phenomena. Most notable is the ideas behind eugenics, and its disastrous consequences in Nazi germany.

Yet the critiques go beyond merely saying that evolutionary psychology is a slippery slope.

There a good reasons to tread carefully with any scientific debate, including this one.

The most famous critic of evolutionary psychology is probably the famous paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. I discussed his book The Mismeasure of Man (1981). This book does not attack evolutionary psychology per se, but it does discuss its implications and the specific notion of the hereditability of intellect.

The idea that intellect is genetic is a proposition of deep political consequence. It has implications for human potential, and the American Dream itself. I would argue: how can people rise beyond their status in life if their status is the by product of genetic inheritance.

Gould's critique does not attack the basic premise of evolutionary psychology. Essentially both sides agree that evolution has to have shaped our minds over time. But Gould, and those who share his opposition, say that we should be cautios and that we over step the predictive power of evolutionary psychology.

Gould begins the book with a long and extensive study of racist ideas in behavioral science. He provides many examples of how well meaning scientists had misguided assumptions about race that were prominent in their time in history. The research is wrought with confirmation bias, and in some cases basic statistical error.

Gould also discusses I.Q. at great length, which could easily be the topic of its own presentation. The take home message for our discussion here is that to think of I.Q. trends as evidence for hereditary intellect would be a stretch at best. Gould shows this by discussing the history of the I.Q. test itself and its limitations, in conjunction with weaknesses in trying to study the hereditability of mental traits.

Good evolutionary psychologists are aware of these limitations and critiques and take them into consideration for their own research.

Personally I find evolutionary psychology to be an exciting field which has already produced compelling findings with a bright future. It is also a hot new science with plenty of good opportunities for even the seasoned skeptic to practice their critical thinking skills.

So today my life took a very interesting turn.

I just graduated college in December and had a few months of misadventure in New York City.

I have been back in the Dallas area since the end of February. I made two career moves, I got a night job at 7-11 and applied for a teaching certification program.

The program I applied to accepted me.

If all goes according to plan I will be teaching this fall, after some harrowing unpaid training this summer.

The prospect of teaching fascinates me on a lot of levels.

My own political world view hinges to a great extent about things I believe about education.

Like most people my own political views have developed throughout the experiences of my life. My life has given me many inputs for my perspective, but one of those is that since I left my parents house at the age of 16 I have yo-yoed in and out of the middle class.
My own experiences have included having using food stamps and living without medical insurance, and a few years later driving a relatively new car while living in a nice Dallas apartment with a guard at the entrance.

I believe that one of the major factors in american poverty is a lack of education among our citizenry.

Many studies have revealed that the average American's academic knowledge is down right shameful. Things like not knowing the Sun revolves around the Earth or being unable to name more than 2 or 3 American presidents.

I believe that education emancipates people from poverty. It has done so for me.

I am a highschool drop out.

I worked odd jobs and had some failed attempts to start my own business from ages 16 to 25. When I was 25, 4 years ago, I enrolled in college.

I should add, with the lowest ACT score that my first school would accept.

I quickly hammered out a good GPA and got myself into an HHMI (which is a major science funding organization) undergraduate research program and into an Honors College.

I transferred to UT Dallas and finished a degree in Neuroscience there. I continued doing undergraduate research which included a fellowship with the SURF program at UT Southwestern, which is a graduate school which hosts something like 4 nobel laureates in Biology.

What am I doing now?

Working nights at 7-11 but my education has given me both the credentials and wherewithall to land a job as a teacher, which pays a little more than 4 times what my job at 7-11 pays.

There are a lot of factors to consider in this. I could be getting work because society has developed to much restriction for living wage pay based on college diplomas. That may be, but thats all the more reason to make sure as many people as can get one.

I will be working as a Bilingual Generalist grades: 4-8. I don't know what I will be teaching exactly with that title. But I do know I will be working with Hispanic kids.

I think this is fantastic.

I will be dealing with a marginalized population which depends very deeply on the Catholic Church for its social services.

I am going to be a Latino Secular Humanist in the position of trying to educate these kids.

I have no idea what I'm in for, but one thing is for sure it will be intense for me because of all my deep beliefs about society. I will be on the frontlines of so many issues I care about, integrity in teaching, populist desires for education equality, immigration issues. I will be right there.

Which is exactly the kind of thing I want from a job.

I have a lot of goals for the work I want to do in the Dallas area. Including some lofty goals for establishing a Center for Inquiry here.

Check out their website at http://centerforinquiry.net

If teaching becomes too much of a hinderance for those goals I may reconsider my career decision. But it seems to me that all careers worth doing come with severe time demands and to be prudish about that is to condemn oneself to a life of meaningless toil.

I have to have a job.

I would like it to be one I love.

Stream of Consciousness
I have always juggled with the idea of writing about my personal life.

In general I am opposed on the grounds that I should reveal to much about my own personal drama and look weak.

Believe me, I have done it before.

But I also don't want to be impersonal.

I am a naturalist, I live my life, every moment observant of the collisions of causality that bind our existence.

I am hanging out with my roomate.

I just graduated college.

Our house is full of plants, undergoing photosynthesis with all the roaring vitality of a symphony.

But a real german symphony, with the glorious sound that the romantics would make when they yearned for utopia.

The sun is feeding them well today, with all of its atomic glory.

The Sun can be thought of as a forest of atom bombs, singing silently in the sky.

This atomic bomb forest has all the powers we have ever attributed to a God, big or little "g".

Yet it has no consciousness, like all celestial bodies, it moves only by the mindless will of gravity as it plays its role in at least 4 dimensions.

No, but around me there are nervous systems abounding, just as verdantly as the plants.

My roomate has a kid, she has better bones than me, they are flexible. She moves like a creature with rubber bones. The nervous system accommodates the potential of this machine. Like the plant it seeks energy, preferably in the form of the energy released from the breaking of bonds made when one consumes polysaccharides.

This reaction is called exothermic, in that it produces energy.

I am listening to the molecular patterns formed in the air, it sounds like Beethoven, which is what my computer tells me is playing.

My computer. My beloved computer.

Everyone should name their computer. My computer is named Excalibur, because she was pulled from a stone by me to make me a King.

My other computer is named Donkey. She is slow, stubborn, but can still carry a load.

These are machines.

Little, sleek, beautiful thinking machines.

Some day as we approximate the sublime aspects of our nervous system, these little machines may think as we do.

This is nature.

Beloved nature.

She dances cooly like a ballerina looking beyond you with nothing but the dance to her mind.

To see intelligence between the lines of vast emptiness that seperate us between other worlds, or intelligence between the lines in the synapse, or orbitals of atoms, is to shit all over this majesty.

It took me a long time to become pleased about the vast, but uncoscious, universe.

I used to need a mind there.

Then I realized that embracing life for its own sake was far more true. For me truth is like the flame that attracts the moth. It may kill us, but we must run to it.

I can not even define this madness that is love for the truth.

But for me the truth has been kind.

When you see that the only minds that nature makes are survivors of the subtle deletion war which is evolution.

These minds are so precious.

This vast cold universe, with its mindless electromagnetic tug of war in the valleys of gravity, rarely makes minds.

For the exponential millions of cubic miles of the universe we can see, the only minds like our own we can find are ours.

Our precious minds, which by the tide flow of synapses gives us the gift of kindness.

Humans are not alone in their ability for kindness.

The neurons of housepets like cats and dogs have a tendency towards kindess as well, given appropriate nurturing.

Kindness is natures gift to us, in us.

Our sentient minds make her dance of molecules give us the joy of happiness.

Happiness is produced in the limbic system. The sub-organ within the brain responsable is most likely the nucleus accumbens for its role in a brain circuit named casually "the reward pathway."

Its collisions like billiard balls in a gelatinous web beneath your skin which make you feel joy.

Deepest, most beautiful joy.

This is a good way to sit and see life in its tumble.

This is Sam Harris, my favorite writer. I promote his work on my podcast.

Beware Secular Humanism!

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Move Over Evolution

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Science Advocacy

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When I arrived, I was nervous, excited, and unsure of what to expect.

I saw countless nervous people, and to my amusement in hindsight, Max Jackson (who had one of the most bombastic personalities at the conference) was in total isolation reading a book.

When I saw Max, I though to myself, "Oh crap! This is going to be a nerd-fest where no one has any grasp of the real world...AT ALL!"

Then cat-herder extraordinaire Dan Riley, made all of us break out of our awkwardness by having us report who the hell we where and why were worth a damn.

It did not take me long to be impressed.

Particularly by Lucia Guatney and the other highschool students.

We all also quickly learned that our assumptions about Canada in the U.S. have been wrong all these long years. Canada is now an international superpower in my eyes, at least for the things that matter most to me.

From our Canadian comrades I saw a beautiful, well-organized, and harmonized effort to make strides in their country. It made me want the student groups in the U.S. to parallel them, and join their chorus of progress.

By that night we were all becoming friends, and I met my new hetero-life mate, Chris Ray.

Barry Greenstein and Oren had everyone playing weird theaters games.
I think Oren was wearing nothing but a bathrobe. It was pretty freaking funny.

It was also at this point that I realized Roy was not a human being but a force of nature.

The John Shook lecture the next morning got my brain firing at an appropriate maximum for what it could do. And while as my sleep per night declined in the conference and my brain suffered, I still had my brain pushing as hard as it could the whole time.

Barry, Chris Ray, myself, and others followed Robert M. Price like we were a bunch of teenage ladies in the 60s and Bob was somehow a blend of both Paul McCartney and John Lennon. The highlight for me, was to be able to go see Batman with Bob, who has often likened religion to comic books, which are both areas of expertise for Bob.

After much workshopping, and learning of Shalini's, Katie Kish's, Lucia's, and Tyler's exploits as The Course of Reason was recorded, I began to become convinced that the world is ours.

As a long time Reasonable Doubts listener I was so honored to finally meet Jeff Seaver and Dave Fletcher. Dave was such a soothing and funny bastard, I think if Bob had not been around he would have been my John Lennon.

When the conference finally came to a close, I did not want leave.

Plain and simple.

I wanted us to set up tents around CFI Transnational like some post-apocalyptic tribe ala The Road Warrior.

I was so happy around all of you awesome, brilliant people, and I want nothing more than the world in general to look more and more like this conference.

A world in which free inquiry is the norm.

A world in which people are passionate about the truth, and don't take subjectivity beyond its place.

A world where humanistic ethics triumphs, and is the common bond among much spirited disagreement as we seek to sharpen ourselves and each other in learning.

It was beautiful.

Bankruptcy

So here is another post in my series on personal finance.

A brief recap (and to my non-myspace readers, this is the first time you're hearing this) I will be writing about personal finance, my own life, and science in that order each blog.

At least until I flake out on that plan.

But I plan on doing it this way for a while.

I have become obsessed with my personal finance, I love writing autobiographically, and I also want to write more about science (since that is what I've been working on doing for a living for the last 3.5 years).

But this is one on finance for the cycle.

Why bankruptcy?

Well, its because I'm writing from where I am.

I would love to write about Roth IRAs and 401Ks and mutual funds and money market accounts, but those are concerns for people who have money.

Allow me to emphasize now, just so no one misunderstands, the point is to get to a position where Roth IRAs, 401Ks , mutual funds, etc. are my primary concern because I have become so good at saving money that the time has come to invest it.

Instead I am in a position where the most important factors in personal finance for me are budgeting, controlling my own spending, saving, getting out of debt, and things that affect people who, like me, have just pulled their heads out of their asses and decided that the time has come to take their money seriously. To not see it as a necessary evil, but rather as the tool that it is, and take proper control of it.

With all that said, lets talk about bankruptcy, since I am a lot closer to bankrupt than I am to having a healthy mutual fund.

I am not close enough to bankruptcy to take it seriously for myself however, and the reason for this is because when I wanted one, I could not get a credit card with any decent limit on it.

I got a credit card with about a $100 limit on it, and it nearly killed me. I paid it in full, and threw it in a camp fire in my early 20s.

My total debt outside of student loans is less than $5000, a lot less actually, and student loan debt is not bankruptable.

I wouldnt bankrupt it even if I could though.

Bankruptcy is a legal tool to escape ridiculously high levels of debt. There are other definitions but this is the one that I like.

When you are extremely deep in the hole, there is no chance of you getting out in this lifetime, and you absolutely need a fresh start you declare bankruptcy.

Does that sound tempting?

It shouldn't. All of the authors I've read on the subject make it sound a little like  a cross between being subjected to water boarding, and getting a root canal. Dave Ramsey likes to compare it to divorce.

The number 1 cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical debt.

There are lots of different kinds of bankruptcy.

But for people in my end of the financial world, meaning that you are not considering bankruptcy because your television network or your international chain of stores did not do so well, or to try to prevent a hostile takeover of your company, etc. etc. then you only need to consider chapter 7 and chapter 13.

What are these. Well chapter 7 is you loose all your debt except for anything owed to the IRS, child support,  and student loans (neither of these threekinds of debt are bankruptable). And then you get ass fucked without lube!

What I mean with the "ass-fucking" statement is much of your property can be siezed to give the creditors some of what you owe. And your credit is ruined for the next 10 years.

Here is a good opportunity for us to learn a personal finance term, that term is "lien."

Sometimes you hear these finance guys talk about leaning on a house.
Well clean your ears out numbnuts! they are saying "lien."

(when I make jokes like this its only because I misunderstood the term myself so many times.)

A lien is a security interest granted over an item of property to secure the payment of a debt.  This means if you dont pay for something you owe they can take your shit, usually your house.

I bring this up, to say that some kinds of liens will survive a chapter 7 bankruptcy. This varies from state to state.

Ass-fucking with lube is Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Chapter 13, you agree to pay your creditors back in a period of 3-5 years, but they dont get to take any of your stuff.

Your credit is still shot for 10 years.

I think bankruptcy is generally not necessary.

Most people who are in debt, are in debt because of simple money mismanagement.

And having crappy medical insurance is a form of money mismanagement.

I know, I know, I'm hurting some of your feelings here, but as someone who has a certain amount of specialization in biology allow me to assure you:


YOU WILL ALWAYS GET SICK!!!!!!!

Get medical insurance, decent medical insurance.

For everyone else, there are some terms you need to know.

Cash Flow: the amount of money you have at the end of the month after you pay your bills.

Net Worth: The amount of your debt minus your assets.

I have a negative net worth. I reckon most of my readers do, if not, then I am shocked and am not  reaching people in my age bracket.

(which would be interesting to know)

If you have zero or negative cash flow, you have a financial emergency, but the answer is probably not bankruptcy, it is probably that you need to get a new job and get rid of some of your bills (eg. cable, cell phone, Ford F-150).

If you have a negative net worth you need to start to respect your money, be more frugal, and come up with a plan to achieve a positive net worth.

If you declare bankruptcy you will still have to follow the above advice, eventually.

Respecting your money, being more frugal, and having long term plans for our money is something we must all eventually deal with.

We may deal with it when we're 67, eating Alpo at the homeless shelter, trying to get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart, but we must all learn it sometime. Lest death bring us its cruel mercy before we do.

It is better to do so now.

If you are in your 20s or 30s, you could have total control of your money in a timely fashion and with a good plan be investing wisely for your retirement.

This is not a pipe dream, or even that difficult.

One of the most mind-boggling things I've learned about personal finance is its sheer simplicity.

If you want to get into day trading, and individual stocks, and that stuff, its interesting and do as you wish.

But just being smart with your money, and retiring wealthy, is well within the reach of everyone in their 20s and 30s who lives in the US.

Now I am not doing any better than any of you, but I do have a plan, and a budget, and am willing to share my thoughts with any and all of you.

Especially those of you who want to get control of your money and can admit that control is yours to be had.

In psychology there is a personality theory which states that people fall in a continuum of having either more of an external or internal locus of control.

Those who tend towards an external locus of control and everything happens to them. They live their lives waiting for something to happen to them or for them, and they do not believe that there is much they can do.

I wish them luck, but not believing in luck I believe this attitude is a recipe for an unhappy life.

Since I do not believe in an afterlife, I believe screwing up this life is losing in the worst possible way.

People with an internal locus of control realize that there is always something they can do, that they always have some level of personal power in the situations life throws at them.

If this is you, it is you I'm trying to talk to.