Science of Good and Evil

Cited in Timothy Ferris, Red Limit (New York: Random House, 1996).

I went so far as to elevate Darwin’s observation to a dictum in my first column in my monthly series in Scientific American, April 2001, entitled “Colorful Pebbles and Darwin’s Dictum.”

Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstitions, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997; 2nd ed., New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2002).

Michael Shermer, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1999; 2nd ed., New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2003).

Thomas H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1894), p. 238.

R. Sloan, E. Bagiella, and T. Powell, The Lancet, vol. 353 (February 20, 1999), pp. 664—67. See also: Skeptic, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 8. Article reviews recent studies on prayer and healing, noting a number of serious methodological flaws in the studies, including: (1) Lack of control of intervening variables (for example, most of these studies did not control for age, sex, education, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, marital status, and degree of religiosity or religious devotion, all of which can influence outcomes); (2) Failure to control for multiple comparisons (for example, in one study twenty-nine outcome variables were measured but only six were significantly altered by prayer, and in other studies different outcome variables were found to be significant, so there was no consistency across studies).

1: Transcendent Morality

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 371.

See Paul Edwards, “Socrates,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 7:482.

Ibid.

E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 238—65. For a concise summary, see also E. O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 281, no. 4 (1998), pp. 53—70.

This section was originally composed as an exercise in preparation for media interviews during the book tour planned for the publication of this book. These tours are arduous voyages across the cultural landscape of information dissemination. Early morning radio and television talk shows are followed by print interviews during lunch, afternoon signings at retail bookstores, a talk show or two tossed into the schedule in the late afternoon, followed by an evening lecture and signing, then a mad dash to the airport to get to the next city in order to do it all again the next day. It is déjà vu all over again until all cities come to look alike. Lights out is after midnight with a wake-up call before five the next morning. I have embarked on two such voyages, so I have learned to do what politicians on the campaign trail call “staying on message.” What they mean is that no matter what question is asked or how many distractions are encountered, deliver the message you brought—quickly and succinctly. To an author in the modern world of sound-bite briefness, this entails distilling hundreds of pages of text into a handful of bulleted points and condensing thousands of hours of research into a five-minute summation. The exercise, however, is not a fruitless one because it forces the author to think through the theory carefully and sort out what is necessary and what is superfluous. In the end both author and reader profit.

Michael Novak, “Skeptical Inquirer,” review of How We Believe, by Michael Shermer, Washington Post, February 13, 2000, p. 7.

2. Why We Are Moral

. Barry H. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner’s, 1978).

Gerald S. Wilkinson, “Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat,” Nature, vol. 308 (1984), pp. 181—84. See also Lisa K. DeNault and Donald A. McFarlane, “Reciprocal Altruism Between Male Vampire Bats, Desmodus rotundus,” Animal Behaviour, vol. 49 (1995), pp. 855—56.

Frans B. de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 60—61; see also Frans B. de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

De Waal, Good Natured, p. 77.

In Michael Shermer, “The Pundit of Primate Politics: An Interview with Frans de Waal,” Skeptic, vol. 8, no. 2 (2000), pp. 29—35.

Cited in de Waal, Good Natured, p. 42.

Cynthia Moss, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988).

Two outstanding sources of both include Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Viking, 1997).

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Jared Diamond, “The Religious Story,” review of Darwin’s Cathedral, by David Sloan Wilson, New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002.

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Alison Jolly, Lucy’s Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Frans B. de Waal, ed., Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Steven A. LeBlanc, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

Neil Roberts, The Holocene: An Environmental History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

For a more in-depth analysis of this relationship between politics and religion, see Jared Diamond, “The Religious Story,” and Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality.”

Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Stark and Bainbridge, Religion, Deviance, and Social Control (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Diamond, “The Religious Story.” See also the summary and analysis of hunter-gatherer social behavior and the propensity for violence against out-group members in all primate species, including and especially our hominid ancestors, in LeBlanc, Constant Battles.

For an evolutionary interpretation of the Old Testament and Talmud, see John Hartung, “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality,” Skeptic, vol. 3, no. 4 (1995), pp. 86—99. Although I am using these examples to support a group selection model of evolution, Hartung rejects group selection; his interpretation is based strictly on individual, organismal selection.

Georges R. Tamarin, “The Influence of Ethnic and Religious Prejudice on Moral Judgment,” New Outlook, vol. 9, no. 1 (1966), pp. 49—58, and Tamarin, The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Rotterdam University Press, 1973).

It should be noted that many rabbis reject this in-group evolutionary interpretation of the Old Testament and the Talmud. They point to passages such as Deut. 10:19, in which God commands: “Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” And Exod. 22:21: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” In Skeptic (vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 24—31), John Hartung and Rabbi Israel Chait, of Yeshiva B’Nei Torah in Far Rockaway, New York, exchanged views, with the latter defending Judaism as an inclusive and tolerant religion; the many in-group moral values found in the Old Testament, particularly in the Torah (the five books of Moses), are rare, taken out of context, or mistranslated from the original Hebrew, he argues. Neighbors, he says, also refers to non-Israelites. Hartung counters, however, that the original language of the Bible, even with these caveats, still makes a sharp distinction between those people who are in the group and those people who are out of the group. When the moral commandment is given to treat “strangers,” “sojourners,” and “sojourning strangers” with kindness, the references are to Israelites who were guests in another Israelite tribe, not non-Israelites who were in most circumstances to be dealt with rather harshly.

Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree (New York: Harper & Bros., 1937).

Robert L. Bettinger, Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory (New York: Plenum Press, 1991), p. 158.

Napoleon A. Chagnon. Ya

nomamö, 4th ed. (New York: HBJ, 1992.), pp. 80—86.

Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 61—79.

Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, p. 77.

Jerome H. Barkow, “Beneath New Culture is Old Psychology: Gossip and Social Stratification,” in The Adapted Mind, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.), pp. 627—28.

Personal correspondence, May 2000. There exists an impressive literature on the study of gossip. Here are a few references provided to me by Kari Konkola: Robin Dunbar , “The Chattering Classes (Have you heard the latest? Gossip, it seems, is what separates us from the animals. Far from being idle, it is vital for our safety—and even our survival),” Times London Magazine, February 5, 1994, pp. 28—29. M. Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology, vol. 4 (1967), pp. 307—16. S. A. Hellweg, “Organizational Grapevines,” in Progress in Communication Sciences, vol. 8, ed. Brenda Dervin and Melvin J. Voigt (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1987). William A. Henry, III, “Pssst … Did You Hear About?” Time, vol. 135, no. 10 (March 5, 1990), p. 46. Blythe Holbrooke, Gossip: How to Get It Before It Gets You and Other Suggestions for Social Survival (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). Nicholas Lemann, “Gossip, The Inside Scoop: A History of American Hearsay,” The New Republic (November 5, 1990). Jack Levin and Arnold Arluke, Gossip: The Inside Scoop (New York: Plenum Press, 1987). S. E. Merry, “Rethinking Gossip and Scandal,” in Toward a General Theory of Social Control, vol. 1: Fundamentals, ed. Donald Black (New York: Academic Press, 1984), pp. 271—302. L. Morrow, “The Morals of Gossip,” The Economist (October 26, 1991), p. 64. Ralph L. Rosnow and G. A. Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (New York: Elesevier Scientific, 1976). Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Charles K. West, The Social and Psychological Distortion of Information (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981).

I defend this statement in greater depth in my book How We Believe (see chapters 4 and 7 in particular).

E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).

Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), and Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1987). F. Miele, “The (Im)moral Animal: A Quick and Dirty Guide to Evolutionary Psychology and the Nature of Human Nature,” Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 1, (1996), pp. 42—49.

E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), 1163.

Ibid., p. 166. Although this is indeed what we would today call group selection, we must be careful not to hold up Darwin as an unalloyed champion of group selection. He turned to group selection only as a last resort after his attempts to explicate morality through individual selection had failed. Even as he apparently argued for group selection, Darwin proposed what we today would call reciprocal altruism, which is fully explained through individual selection: “As the reasoning powers and foresight of the members became improved, each man would soon learn from experience that if he aided his fellow-men, he would commonly receive aid in return. From this low motive he might acquire the habit of aiding his fellows” (The Descent of Man, 1163).

If anyone had the motivation to employ Darwin in the service of defending group selection, it was Stephen Jay Gould, yet it was Gould who discovered Darwin’s reluctance to be a group selectionist because “in permitting a true exception to organismal selection, Darwin’s primary attitude exudes extreme reluctance—restriction to minimal groupiness, provision of other explanations in the ordinary organismal mode, limitation to a unique circumstance in a single species (human consciousness for the spread of an idea against the force of organismal selection), and placement within a more general argument for sexual selection, the strongest form of the orthodox mode.” In an interesting deduction from this historical nugget, however, Gould argued that this bodes well for group selection: “The recognition that Darwin, despite such strong reluctance, could not avoid some role for species selection, builds a strong historical argument for the ineluctability of a hierarchical theory of selection.” (Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002], pp. 135—36.)

Michael T. Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 247.

Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 27,92.

W. D. Hamilton, “Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: An Approach From Evolutionary Genetics,” in Biosocial Anthropology, ed. Robin Fox (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), pp. 133—35.

David Sloan Wilson, “Nonzero and Nonsense: Group Selection, Nonzerosumness, and the Human Gaia Hypothesis,” Skeptic, vol. 8, no. 1 (2000), p. 85. See also his elaboration on this model in David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

For a critique of Wilson’s theory, see Michael Ruse, “Can Selection Explain the Presbyterians?” Science, vol. 297 (August 30, 2002), p. 1479, in which he answers his title question thusly: “I want hard figures on birth patterns before and after Calvin, and I want to know who had kids and who did not. I want these figures correlated with religious practice and belief. Then and only then will I start to feel comfortable.”

I asked MIT linguist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker’s opinion of group selection theory: “I must admit to being skeptical about D. S. Wilson’s new group selection. For one thing, in many cases Wilson seems to bend himself into a pretzel to redescribe gene selection as a kind of group selection (as when he calls an ant colony a group, or a pair of reciprocal altruists as a group). In those cases he’s not wrong, but he doesn’t add anything; the predictions are pretty much the same, and he just seems on a crusade to revive the concept. In other cases (such as individual sacrifice to benefit the group) it just doesn’t seem to fit terribly well with the psychology. If humans were group-selected, life would be very different—we wouldn’t have emotions directed at other individuals like anger, guilt, and jealousy; we wouldn’t have affairs, compete for status, hoard when we can get away with it, lie and cheat, etc. Sure, people risk their lives for the group in warfare, but generally when the risk is probabilistic (so they’re not sure to die), when they are rewarded with status (or in the old days, women), or when they are suckered by promises of 72 virgins in an afterlife.” (Personal correspondence, September 27, 2002.)

Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral, p. 1.

Ibid., p. 21.

Signe Howell, Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaya (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage, and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003).

There is a sizable body of literature on game theory and cooperation. Here are several excellent resources:

Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Robert Axelrod and W. D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science, vol. 211 (1981), pp. 1390–96. Robert H. Frank, Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). Douglas R. Hofstadter, “Metamagical Themas: Computer Tournaments of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Suggest How Cooperation Evolves,” Scientific American, vol. 248, no. 5 (1983), pp. 16–26. John Keith Murnighan, Bargaining Games (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992.). Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1996). Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 46 (1971), pp. 35–57. John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). On the Internet: Google search “prisoner’s dilemma” will lead to thousands of sites, computer simulations, chat rooms, discussions, bibliographies, and so on, such as http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PRISDIL.html.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) p. xi.

MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/brown).

Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), p. 142.

Ibid., p. 143.

3. Why We Are Immoral

Aaron Sorkin, A Few Good Men (New York: Samuel French, June 1990).

See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/e/epicur.htm, or the Aphorisms of Epicurus, online at http://www.ag.wastholm.net/author/Epicurus.

The defense of God’s goodness in spite of the obvious existence of evil is called theodicy, a word coined by German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Theodicy became an especially contentious philosophical issue after a November 1755 earthquake leveled the city of Lisbon. In response, the atheist French philosopher Voltaire wrote a bitter poem inquiring of Christians, where was God in Lisbon? Jean-Jacques Rousseau penned a sharp rejoinder to Voltaire, arguing that so-called natural disasters like earthquakes were not acts of God, but natural acts that affected people in unnatural ways because we live in unnatural conditions, like crowded cities.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–34), ed. by Frank Brady (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1997). Also available online at http:/hvww.library.utoronto.ca/utellrp/poems/pope10.html .

Mary Neubauer, “For McCaugheys, a Day to Be Thankful in Many Ways,” Athens Banner-Herald, November 28, 1997. Online at http://www.athensnewspapers.com/1997/112897/1128.a3septuplets.html.

See my essay “Only God Can Do That?” in Michael Shermer, The Borderlands of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 66–79.

Misty Bernall, She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall (New York: Plough Publishing House, 1999). There is some dispute about whether Cassie Bernall actually said “yes” to the question about her belief. See http://www.geocities.com/me2kangaru/CassiesYes.html for a dissenting view.

Random House College Dictionary usages of evil include, as adjectives, “morally wrong; immoral; wicked: characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate”; and as nouns, in addition to those quoted, “that which is evil; evil quality; intention, or conduct; a disease, as king’s evil; in an evil manner.”

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 14.

Max Frankel, “Willing Executioners?” New York Times Book Review, August 9, 1998.

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper, 1969). See also Hans Askenasy, Are We All Nazis? (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1978).

Philip Zimbardo, “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1969, ed. W. J. Arnold and D. Levine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). See also Philip Zimbardo, The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence (New York: McGrawHill, 1991).

In Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Co., 1947).

Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 116.

Carol Tavris and C. Wade, Psychology in Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman /Addison Wesley, 1995), p. 332.

Cited in Y. Bachler, “Document: A Preparatory Document for the Wannsee ‘Conference,’” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, (spring 1995), pp. 121–29.

I first coined the phrase “the evil of banality” in Michael Shermer and A. Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House, 1998), p. xxv.

Ibid., p. xxi.

Ibid., p. xii.

C. Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” American Imago, vol. 48, no. 4, (1991), pp. 473–95.

Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997).

Quoted in Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), p. 204.

Baumeister, Evil, p. 14.

Ibid., pp. 73–74.

Ibid., pp. 95–96.

Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Engineering (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992.).

Armchair philosophical ponderings like the blueness of the sky are not the only applications of fuzzy logic. There are now a host of fuzzy machines, such as a fuzzy washing machine that assigns a fractional number to the “dirtiness” of the water (say .8 dirty), then injects the appropriate amount of soap. Or a fuzzy video camera that automatically adjusts the shutter opening to the amount of light, or a “stabilization” device that adjusts to the motion of the video camera operator Cruise missiles are fuzzy weapons that adjust their speed and trajectory according to the changing terrain that is compared to an onboard map. Japanese firms have rejected Aristotle and committed themselves to fuzzy logic, designing fuzzy fuel injectors, fuzzy film, fuzzy computers, fuzzy automatic transmissions, fuzzy dishwashers, fuzzy dryers, fuzzy copy machines, and even a fuzzy golf swing diagnostic system.

Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (New York: Hyperion, 1993), p. 250.

Carol Tavris, “All Bad or All Good? Neither,” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1998, p. M5.

Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach,” in Moral Development and Behavior, ed. T. Lickona (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976), and Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, vol. 2: The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984).

Kurt Bergling, Moral Development: The Validity of Kohlberg’s Theory (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1981).

R. L. Gorsuch and S. McFarland, “Single vs. Multiple-item Scales for Measuring Religious Values,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 13 (1972), pp. 281–307. S. Selig and G. Teller, “The Moral Development of Children in Three Different School Settings,” Religious Education, vol. 70 (1975), pp. 406–15.

L. Nucci and E. Turiel, “God’s Word, Religious Rules, and Their Relation to Christian and Jewish Children’s Concepts of Morality,” Child Development, vol. 64 (1993), pp. 1475–91. D. Ernsberger and G. Manaster, “Moral Development, Intrinsic/Extrinsic Religious Orientation and Denominational Teachings,” Genetic Psychology Monographs, vol. 104 (1981), pp. 23–41.

S. Sanderson, Religion, Politics, and Morality: An Approach to Religion and Political Belief Systems and Their Relation Through Kohlberg’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory of Moral Judgment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Dissertation Abstracts International 346259B, 1974).

Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). For a literature review of Kohlberg’s theory and his critics, see J. M. Darley and T. R. Shultz, “Moral Rules: Their Content and Acquisition,” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 41 (1990), pp. 525–56.

Tavris, “All Bad or All Good? Neither.”

Told to Skeptic senior editor Frank Miele, who was in attendance. Personal correspondence with Frank Miele, November 20, 2000. My interview with Patrick Tierney was on Monday, November 20, 2000, for the science edition of NPR affiliate KPCC’s Airtalk.

Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 15. Kenneth Good, Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). Jacques Lizot, Tales of the Yanomami: Daily Life in the Venezuelan Forest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado, pp. 132–33.

Margot Roosevelt, “Yanomami: What Have We Done to Them?” Time, vol. 156, no. 14 (October 2, 2000), pp. 77-78.

Since evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker published a letter in defense of Chagnon in the New York Times Book Review (in response to John Horgan’s surprisingly uncritical review of Tierney’s book there), I queried him about some of the specific charges. “The idea that Chagnon caused the Yanomamö to fight is preposterous and contradicted by every account of the Yanomamö and other non-state societies. Tierney is a zealot and a character assassin, and all his serious claims crumble upon scrutiny.” What about the charge of ethical breaches? “There are, of course, serious issues about ethics in ethnography, and I don’t doubt that some of Chagnon’s practices, especially in the 1960s, were questionable (as were the practices in most fields, such as my own—for example, the Milgram studies). But the idea that the problems of Native Americans are caused by anthropologists is crazy. In the issues that matter to us—skepticism, scientific objectivity, classic liberalism, etc.—Chagnon is on the right side.” Personal correspondence with Steven Pinker, December 1, 2000.

Derek Freeman, “Paradigms in Collision: Margaret Mead’s Mistake and What It Has Done to Anthropology,” Skeptic, vol. 5, no. 3 (1997), pp. 66-73.

Ibid. Freeman added this comment about the politics of science: “About this extraordinary action, which is based on the notion that the scientific status of propositions can be settled politically, Sir Karl Popper wrote me: ‘Many sociologists and almost all sociologists of science believe in a relativist theory of truth. That is, truth is what the experts believe, or what the majority of the participants in a culture believe. Holding a view like this your opponents could not admit you were right. How could you be, when all their colleagues thought like they did? In fact, they could prove that you were wrong simply by taking a vote at a meeting of experts. That settled it. And your facts? They meant nothing if sufficiently many experts ignored them, or distorted them, or misinterpreted them.’” Subsequently, Freeman received a personal letter from philosopher Peter Munz, who cut to the core of what lies behind the anthropology wars: “I was so excited, when the scales fell from my eyes that I felt I had to write to you and say what a splendid book. I hope its importance will not get buried in controversies about the emotional attitudes of young Samoans. Its importance reaches far beyond this particular problem. The debate, at heart, is about evolution.”

Napoleon Chagnon, Ya

nomamö (New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1992), pp. xii-xiii.

Ibid., p. 7.

Ibid., p. 10.

In 1995 Chagnon told Scientific American that because male aggression is esteemed in Ya

nomamö culture, aggression as a human trait is highly malleable and culturally influenced, an observation that might have been made by Stephen Jay Gould, considered by most sociobiologists to be Satan incarnate. “Steve Gould and I probably agree on a lot of things,” Chagnon surprisingly concluded. (John Horgan, “The New Social Darwinists,” Scientific American [October 1995], pp. 150–57.)

Napoleon Chagnon, “The Myth of the Noble Savage: Lessons From the Yanomamö People of the Amazon,” paper presented at the Skeptics Society Conference on Evolutionary Psychology and Humanistic Ethics, March 30, 1996.

Ibid. In light of his data on warriors who are rewarded with more wives, one questioner wondered what happens to the men who get no wives, and if this means that the Ya

nomamö are polygamous. Chagnon explained that, indeed, some Ya

nomamö men have no wives and that it is often they who are the causes of violence as they either resort to rape or stir up trouble with men who have more than one wife. But he added an important proviso that indicates, once again, Chagnon’s sensitivity to the nuances and complexities within all cultures, and the danger of gross generalizations based on binary logic: “Anthropologists tend to pigeonhole societies as monogamous or polygamous or polyandrous, as if these are three different kinds of societies. In fact, you have to look at marriage as a life-historical process in all societies. There are, for example, cases of monogamy in Ya

nomamö society. In fact, monogamy is the most common type of marriage. But there are also polyandrous families where one woman marries two men, who tend to be brothers. There are, in fact, examples of all three types of marriage arrangements in Ya

nomamö culture.”

Interview with Kenneth Good, December 5, 2000. Columbia Pictures bought the rights to produce a dramatic film based on the book, and Good even received a phone call from actor Richard Gere, who was interested in playing him. That deal has since fallen through and others have shown interest in a film deal, but nothing has come of it to date.

Good, Into the Heart, p. 115.

Ibid., p. 116.

Ibid.

Chagnon,

Yanomamö, p. 1.

Interview with Jared Diamond, November 27, 2000.

Shermer, The Borderlands of Science, pp. 241–61.

B. S. Low, “Behavioral Ecology of Conservation in Traditional Societies,” Human Nature, vol. 7, no. 4 (1996), pp. 353–79. On the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, see G. P. Murdock and D. White, “Standard Cross-Cultural Sample,” Ethnology, vol. 8 (1969), pp. 329–69.

Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992.).

Shepard Krech, III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

On the overhunting hypothesis and debate, see G. S. Krantz, “Human Activities and Megafaunal Extinctions,” American Scientist, vol. 58 (1970), pp. 164–70; P. S. Martin and R. G. Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984); C. A. Reed, “Extinction of Mammalian Megafauna in the Old World Late Quaternary,” BioScience, vol. 20 (1970), pp. 284–88.

The alternative explanation for the mass faunal extinction—that dramatic environmental changes at the end of the last ice age killed or weakened the herds—makes no sense in the larger context. The weather got warmer, not colder, and ice ages have come and gone before without triggering such mass die-offs. Why now? Overhunting remains the best explanation.

Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 530.

Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Arther Ferrill, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).

Keeley, War Before Civilization, pp. 64, 19, 50.

LeBlanc, Constant Battles. The list of peaceful societies is not long: Copper Eskimo, Ingalik Eskimo, the Gebusi of lowland New Guinea, the African !Kung bushmen, the Mbuti Pygmies of Central Africa, the Semang of peninsular Malaysia, the South American Siriono of Amazonia, the Yahgan of Tierra del Fuego, the Warrau of the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela, and the Aborigines who lived along the west coast of Tasmania. However, LeBlanc notes that “some of these same ‘peaceful’ societies have extremely high homicide rates. Among the Copper Eskimo and the New Guinea Gebusi, for example, a third of all adult deaths were from homicide … . Which killing is considered a homicide and which killing is an act of warfare? Such questions and answers become somewhat fuzzy. So some of this so-called peacefulness is more dependent on the definition of homicide and warfare than on reality” (p. 202).

Ibid., p. 125.

Steven A. LeBlanc, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), p. 124.

LeBlanc, Constant Battles, pp. 224–28.

R. Cassels, “Faunal Extinction and Prehistoric Man in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands,” in Quaternary Extinctions, ed. P. S. Martin and R. G. Klein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), pp. 741–67. Alfred W. Crosby, Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

See http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/grapeswrath/ for an excellent synopsis of the book with extensive commentary.

Image from http://www.planetwaves.net/pogo.html.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literacy Investigation, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974–78).

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, c. 430 B.C.E. Online at http://classics.mit.edu/Aeschylus/prometheus.html.

4. Master of My Fate

See http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hinckleytrial.html for a remarkably thorough analysis of the Hinckley case, including court documents from the trial, testimonies and depositions by Hinckley and the psychiatrists for both the defense and prosecution, and the judge’s decision.

Tormenta: The Execution of Robert Francois Damiens, 1757. Available online at http://www.perno.com/european/docs/tormenta.htm.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Macmillan, 1963). See also the moving film Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins as C. S. Lewis and Debra Winger as his wife, Joy.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (trans. J. Veitch), Part I (London: Dent, 1649), p. 41.

C. S. Lewis, Beyond Personality (New York: Macmillan, 1945).

The complete story can be found online at http://www.ksu.edu/english/baker/english320/Maugham-AS.htm.

Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814) (New York: Dover, 1951).

Pope, An Essay on Man.

See http://www.law.umke.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hinckleytrial.html. All quotes and facts discussed within the section of this chapter on the Hinckley case are from this Web page. Additional citations are included in note 11.

For additional information on the Hinckley case, see Lincoln Caplan, The Insanity Defense and Trial of John W Hinckley, Jr. (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1984); James W. Clarke, On Being Mad or Merely Angry: John W Hinckley, Jr., and Other Dangerous People (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Jack and Jo Ann Hinckley, Breaking Points (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Chosen Books, c. 1985); Peter Low, The Trial of John W Hinckley, Jr. (New York: Foundation Press, 1985); Professional Educational Group, Classics of the Courtroom: Vincent Fuller’s Summation in United States v. John Hinckley (1990); Rita J. Simon and David E. Aaronson, The Insanity Defense: A Critical Assessment of Law and Policy in the Post-Hinckley Era (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1988); Henry J. Steadman, Before and After Hinckley: Evaluating Insanity Defense Reform (New York: Guilford Press, 1993).

See Martin Gardner’s excellent discussion of this issue in my interview of him. Michael Shermer, “The Annotated Gardner: An Interview with Martin Gardner—Founder of the Modern Skeptical Movement,” Skeptic, vol. 4, no. 1 (1997), pp. 56–60.

Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (New York: William Morrow, 1983), pp. 272–75.

Ibid., p. 115.

Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 126–27.

Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994). The strongest case for the indeterminism argument was made by physicist Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Law of Physics (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).

Roy F. Baumeister and Sara R. Wotman, Breaking Hearts: The Two Sides of Unrequited Love (New York: Guilford Press, 1992).

G. Kreiman, 1. Fried, and C. Koch, “Single Neuron Correlates of Subjective Vision in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, no. 99 (2002), pp. 8378–83.

Michael Shermer, “Demon-Haunted Brain,” Scientific American (March 2003), p. 32.

Michael A. Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (New York: Praeger, 1987), and Persinger, “Paranormal and Religious Beliefs May Be Mediated Differently by Subcortical and Cortical Phenomenological Processes of the Temporal (Limbic) Lobes,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 76 (1993), pp. 247-51.

Olaf S. Blanke, T. Ortigue, T. Landis, and M. Seeck, “Neuropsychology: Stimulating Illusory Own-body Perceptions,” Nature, vol. 419 (September 19, 2002), pp. 269-70.

Andrew Newberg, Eugene D‘Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001).

Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham, The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self (New York: Harmony Books, 2003).

Ibid., pp. 224-26.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 175.

Per-Olof Astrand and Kaare Rodahl, Textbook of Work Physiology (New York: McGrawHill, 1986).

Only half in jest I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a metagene gene—a gene that causes people to think that everything is in our genes. Here’s an evolutionary just-so story that critics of evolutionary psychology could have a field day with: people tend to view behavior as genetically caused because back in the Paleolithic era, those individuals who were more inclined to view behavior as genetically determined won more copulations and thus passed on their metagene genes through more offspring. Of course, Paleolithic cave persons knew nothing about genes, so we might postulate that they tended to view the actions of others as either largely capricious or largely determined. The latter would be high in metagene genes, and they, of course, would be better adapted and more successful because believing one lives in a deterministic world better allows one to determine cause and effect relationships, and that is what leads to enhanced survival and the propagation of one’s genes, including one’s metagenes.

Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking. 2003).

Ibid., p. 238.

Ibid., p. 251.

Michael Shermer, “The Chaos of History: On a Chaotic Model That Represents the Role of Contingency and Necessity in Historical Sequences,” Nonlinear Science Today, vol. 2, no. 4 (1993), pp. 1-13; Shermer, “Exorcising LaPlace’s Demon: Chaos and Antichaos, History and Metahistory,” History and Theory, vol. 34, no. 1 (1995), pp. 59-83; Shermer, “The Crooked Timber of History,” Complexity, vol. 2, no. 6 (1997), pp. 23-29.

Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality (New York: Doubleday, 1994).

William Ernest Henley, “Invictus,” in Modern British Poetry, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920). Also available online at http://www.bartleby.com/103/7.html.

5. Can We Be Good Without God?

Quoted in an Associated Press release, 1999. Available online at http://zanazl.tripod.com/Columbine/Articles/KipKinkel.html.

Janelle Brown, “Doom, Quake and Mass Murder: Gamers Search Their Souls After Discovering the Littleton Killers Were Part of Their Clan,” Salon.com (April 23, 1999). Online at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/04/23/gamers/.

Julian Whitaker, “Health & Healing,” 1999. Online at http://www.drwhitaker.com/wit_abouthh.php.

Quoted in B. A. Robinson, “Why Did the Columbine Shooting Happen?” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 1999; updated December 3, 2001. Online at http://www.religioustolerance.org/sch_viox.htm.

Quoted in an Associated Press release, 1999. Available online at http://zanazl.tripod.com/Columbine/Articles/KipKinkel.html. .

See L. Chibbaro, Jr., “Young Gays Traumatized by Shooting,” Washington Blade, May 7, 1999.

Quoted in Robinson, “Why Did the Columbine Shooting Happen?”

Ibid.

Ibid..

Quoted in Jacob Weisberg, “What Do You Mean by ‘Violence’?” Slate.com (May 15, 1999). Online at http://slate.msn.corn/default.aspx?id=28168.

The letter/speech is online at http://majoritywhip.house.gov/news.asp?formmode=SingleRelease&gcid=123.

Quoted in a review of the PBS series Evolution, in which much was made of blaming the theory for human tragedies like Columbine, by Julie Salamon, “A Stark Explanation for Mankind from an Unlikely Rebel,” New York Times, September 24, 2001.

Quoted in Andrea Szalanski, “Columbine Report to Vindicate Nonbelievers,” Secular Humanist Bulletin, vol. 16, no 2 (2000). Online at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/shb/szalanski_16_2.htm.

Wendy Murray Zoba, “Church, State, and Columbine,” Excerpted from Day of Reckoning (Brazos Press), Christianity Today, vol. 45, no. 5 (April 2, 2001), p. 54. Online at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/005/3.54.html.

L. Stammer, “Anglican Leader Visits L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1996, pp. B1-3.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 132.

Ibid.

In John Hick, The Existence of God (New York: Collier Books, 1964).

J. Wiscombe, “‘I Don’t Do Therapy.’ Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the Country’s Top Female Radio Personality, Calls Herself a Prophet,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, January 18, 1998, p. 11.

Laura Schlessinger, editorial, The Calgary Sun, September 9, 1997, p. 22.

Laura Schlessinger, How Could You Do That?!: The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 9.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925) (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943), pp. 267-68.

Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (New York: Longman, 1981).

Louis L. Snyder, ed., Hitler’s Third Reich: A Documentary History (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1981), p. 167.

Ibid., p. 168.

D. B. Barrett, G. T. Kurian, and T. M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

6. How We Are Moral

Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of The Metaphysic of Morals (1785), translated by T. K. Abbott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).

Francis A. Schaeffer, How Then Should We Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1976).

Barrett, Kurian, and Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia. (Barrett is head of the Global Evangelization Movement, making one wonder if all this data is being collected to calibrate how long it will take to reduce this rich religious diversity to one cosmo-macromega Christian religion.)

Robert Goodwin Olson, An Introduction to Existentialism (New York: Dover Publishers, 1961). Robert C. Solomon, ed., Existentialism (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1974). See also Existentialism: A Primer online at www.tameri.com/csw/exist/.

Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 80.

Ibid., p. 30.

Ibid.

Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 25.

Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic (New York: Hyperion, 1993), p. 250.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1965).

For example, Marilyn vos Savant was bombarded with angry letters when she revealed the correct solution in her weekly column in Parade magazine. Marilyn vos Savant, “Ask Marilyn,” Parade, September 9, 1990, February 17, 1991, and July 7, 1991. You can actually play the three-door game online at http://utstat.toronto.edu/david/MH.html#r. And on other Web sites you can find computer programs that have run hundreds of thousands of simulations of the game, proving that in the long run it is better to switch doors. See also Leonard Gillman, “The Car and the Goats,” American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 99, no. 1 (January 1992), pp. 3-7.

Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences,” Cognitive Psychology, vol. 17 (1985), pp. 295-314. Since we are dealing with professional basketball players instead of coins, adjustments have to be made. If a player’s shooting percentage is 60 percent, for example, we would expect, by chance, that he will sink six baskets in a row once for every twenty sequences of six shots attempted.

Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

Ibid.

Ibid., p. 123.

Ibid., p. 167.

Ibid..

Stardate: 1672.1 Earthdate: October 6, 1966. Star Trek, episode 5, “The Enemy Within,” produced by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Leo Penn, written by Richard Matheson.

First presented as a principle in Michael Shermer, “The Captain Kirk Principle,” Scientific American (December 2002), p. 32.

David G. Myers, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 1.

Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 3 (1992), pp. 256-74, and Ambady and Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 64, pp. 431-41.

J. A. Krosnick et al., “Subliminal Conditioning of Attitudes,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 18 (1992), pp. 152-62.

Myers, Intuition, p. 119.

Ibid., pp. 36-37.

Ibid., pp. 174-76.

Ibid., pp. 44-45.

Ibid., pp. 46-47.

Ibid., pp. 46-49. See also Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003).

Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review, vol. 108 (2001), pp. 814-34; Haidt, “The Positive Emotion of Elevation,” Prevention and Treatment 3, article 3 (2000); Haidt, “The Moral Emotions,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. R. J. Davidson, K. Scherer, and H. H. Goldschmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

J. Greene et al., “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,” Science, vol. 293 (2001), pp. 2105-08.

Steven N. Brenner and Earl A. Molander, “Is the Ethics of Business Changing?” Harvard Business Review (January-February 1977), pp. 57-71.

P. A. M. Van Lange, T. W Taris, and R. Vonk, “Dilemmas of Academic Practice: Perceptions of Superiority Among Social Psychologists,” European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 27 (1997), pp. 675-85.

“Oprah: A Heavenly Body? Survey Finds Talk-Show Host a Celestial Shoo-in,” U.S. News and World Report (March 31, 1997), p. 18.

J. A. White and S. Plous, “Self-Enhancement and Social Responsibility: On Caring More, but Doing Less, Than Others,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology. vol. 25 (1995), pp. 1297-1318.

J. Kruger, “Personal Beliefs and Cultural Stereotypes About Racial Characteristics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 71 (1996), pp. 536-48.

Brad J. Sagarin, Kelton V. L. Rhoads, and Robert B. Cialdini, “Deceiver’s Distrust: Denigration as a Consequence of Undiscovered Deception,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 24 (1998), pp. 1167-76.

7. How We Are Immoral

David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: Free Press, 2002).

J. Stuart Snelson, Win-Win Theory for Win-Win Success: Science, Theory, and Strategy of Win-Win Success for Family and Business, Community and Nation (forthcoming).

Gottfried Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1826), translated by G. R. Montgomery (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1992).

Jonathan D. Glater, “Adultery May Be a Sin, but It’s a Crime No More,” New York Times, April 17, 2003, p. A12.

Buss, The Dangerous Passion, p. 103.

D. H. Lawrence, Pornography and So On (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). Stewart statement rendered in case judgment Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964. 378 U.S. 184.

Anaïs Nin, Little Birds (New York: Harcourt, 1963), p. 123.

D. Henson and H. Rubin, “Voluntary Control of Eroticism,” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, vol. 4 (1971), pp. 37-44. K. Kelley and D. Byrne, “Assessment of Sexual Responding: Arousal, Affect, and Behavior,” in Social Psychophysiology, ed. John Cacioppo and Richard Petty (New York: Guilford, 1983). D. Przbyla and D. Byrne, “The Mediating Role of Cognitive Process in Self Reported Sexual Arousal,” Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 18 (1984), pp. 54-63. M. Zuckerman, “Physiological Measures of Sexual Arousal in the Human,” in Technical Reports on the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, vol. 1. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971).

Catharine MacKinnon, “Pornography: A Feminist Perspective,” position paper presented to the Minneapolis City Council, 1983. Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone (New York: Dutton, 1988).

Berl Kutchinsky, “The Effect of Easy Availability of Pornography on the Incidence of Sex Crimes: The Danish Experience,” in Pornography and Censorship, ed. David Copp and Susan Wendell (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1983), p. 307.

Fred R. Berger, “Pornography, Sex, and Censorship,” in Pornography and Sexual Deviance, ed. Michael Joseph Goldstein and Harold S. Kant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

Luis T. Garcia, “Exposure to Pornography and Attitudes About Women and Rape; A Correlational Study,” Journal of Sex Research, vol. 22 (1986), pp. 378-85. Cynthia S. Gentry, “Pornography and Rape: An Empirical Analysis,” Deviant Behavior, vol. 12. (1991), pp. 277-88. Berl Kutchinsky, “Pornography and Rape: Theory and Practice?” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 14 (1991), pp. 47-64.

Paul Abramson and Haruo Hayashi, “Pornography in Japan: Cross-Cultural and Theoretical Considerations,” in Pornography and Sexual Aggression, ed. Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984). Berl Kutchinsky, “Pornography and its Effects in Denmark and the United States: A Rejoinder and Beyond,” Comparative Social Research: An Annual, vol. 8 (1985), pp. 301-30.

Edward Donnerstein and Leonard Berkowitz, “Victims’ Reactions in Aggressive Erotic Films as a Factor in Violence Against Women,” in Malamuth and Donnerstein, Pornography and Sexual Aggression.

Edward Donnerstein, “Erotica and Human Aggression,” in Aggression: Theoretical and Empirical Review, vol. 2, ed. Russell Geen and Edward Donnerstein (New York: Academic Press, 1983).

W A. Fisher and D. Byrne, “Individual Differences in Affective, Evaluative and Behavioral Responses to an Erotic Film,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology (August 1978), pp. 355-65.

Neil Malamuth and James Check, “The Effects of Aggressive Pornography on Beliefs of Rape Myths: Individual Differences,” Journal of Research in Personality, vol. 19 (1985), pp. 299-320.

Goldstein and Kant, eds., Pornography and Sexual Deviance.

Naomi Wolf, “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” The New Republic (October 16, 1995). In this article for The New Republic, feminist author Naomi Wolf shocked the pro-choice movement by claiming that the fetus at all stages is a human individual and therefore abortion is immoral (although she still supports free choice). In Wolf’s 6,700-word essay, however, there is not a single scientific fact presented in support of her claim for fetal human individuality. Instead, we get emotional references to “lapel pins with the little feet,” “framed sonogram photos,” and “detailed drawings of the fetus” from the popular pregnancy book What to Expect When You’re Expecting. With similar shortcomings, in a 1995 PBS Firing Line debate, Arianna Huffington claimed that scientists have proven that life begins at conception, yet no facts were offered in support of this claim.

Roy Rivenburg, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, succinctly summarized the pro-choice and pro-life positions: Roy Rivenburg, “A Decision Between a Woman and God,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1996.

The Supreme Court’s decision is posted all over the Internet. A Google search generates 141,000 hits; see, for example, http://members.aol.com/abtrbng/410b1.htm or www2.law.cornell.edu.

See, for example, the Amici Curiae Brief in Support of Appellees, William L. Webster et al., Appellants v. Reproductive Health Services et al., Appellees, 1988.

B. L. Koops, L.J. Morgan, and E C. Battaglia, “Neonatal Mortality Risk in Relation to Birth Weight and Gestational Age: Update,” Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 101 (1982), pp. 969-77. Milner and Beard, “Limit of Fetal Viability,” Lancet, vol. 1, 1984, p. 1079. Pleasure, Dhand, and Kaur, “What Is the Lower Limit of Viability?” American Journal of Diseases of Children, vol. 138 (1984), p. 783.

I. R. Beddis et al., “New Technique for Servo-Control of Arterial Oxygen Tension in Preterm Infants,” Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol. 54 (1979), pp. 278-80.

Michael Flower, “Neuromaturation and the Moral Status of Human Fetal Life,” in Abortion Rights and Fetal Personhood, ed. Edd Doerr and James W. Prescott (Long Beach, Calif.: Centerline Press, 1989). M. E. Molliver, I. Kostovic, and H. Van Der Loos, “The Development of Synapses in Cerebral Cortex of the Human Fetus,” Brain Research, vol. 50 (1973), pp. 403-7. D. P. Purpura, “Morphogenesis of Visual Cortex in the Preterm Infant,” in Growth and Development of the Brain, ed. Mary A. B. Brazier (New York: Raven Press, 1975).

For a good general discussion of the terms of this debate, see Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (New York: Random House, 1992).

Claudia Kalb, “Treating the Tiniest Patients,” Newsweek (June 9, 2003 pp. 48-51.

Debra Rosenberg, “The War Over Fetal Rights,” Newsweek (June 9, 2003), pp. 40-47.

John-Thor Dahlburg, “Firm Says It Created First Human Clone,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2002, p. A13.

Quoted in Jeffrey Kluger, “Will We Follow the Sheep?” Time (March 10, 1997), pp. 67-70, 72.

Quoted in Cloning Human Beings: Report and Recommendations (Rockville, Md.: National Bioethics Advisory Commission, 1997).

See Nancy L. Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Dutton, 1999). Segal convincingly shows that genes influence our behavior and personality in innumerable ways that cannot be ignored. Comparing identical twins reared apart with identical twins reared together, fraternal (nonidentical) twins reared together, siblings reared together, and pseudotwins (genetically different adopted children) reared together, identical twins reared apart are more alike on almost all measures than the comparison groups, including a number of striking similarities between identicals reared apart—from the sublime, such as Harold Shapiro (head of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission charged by President Clinton to pass a moral ruling on cloning) and his twin both growing up to become university presidents, to the ridiculous, such as a preference for a rare Swedish toothpaste called Vademecum. Despite these similarities, identical twins can be surprisingly different. Even for such characteristics as height and weight, which have a heritability of over 90 percent, it is striking how different many of these identical twins turned out to be (photographs appear throughout Segal’s book). And when we consider traits that show heritabilities in the 50 percent range, it is clear how much environment counts. Segal and her colleagues who study twins have revealed that heredity counts a great deal more than it was recently fashionable to believe, and their science is solid. See also Michael Shermer, “I, Clone,” Scientific American, vol. 288, no. 4 (April 2003).

Quoted in Dahlburg, “Firm Says It Created First Human Clone.”

Quoted in Kluger, “Will We Follow the Sheep?,” p. 72.

Ibid., 71.

Quoted in M. L. Rantala and Arthur J. Milgram, eds., Cloning: For and Against (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), p. 157. This theme has been circulating for decades, from Ted Howard and Jeremy Rifkin’s 1977 Who Should Play God?: The Artificial Creation of Life and What it Means for the Future of the Human Race (New York: Delacorte Press) to Ted Peters’s 1997 Playing God?: Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom (New York: Routledge), to a flurry of godly warnings following the brouhaha over Dolly the cloned sheep, such as this one from Kenneth Woodward, opining in Newsweek: “Perhaps the message of Dolly is that society should reconsider its casual ethical slide toward assuming mastery over human life. Do we really want to play God?” (Kenneth L. Woodward, “Today the Sheep … Tomorrow the Shepherd?” Newsweek [March 10, 1997]).

Quoted in Dahlburg, “Firm Says It Created First Human Clone.”

Associated Press, “Clerics Denounce Cloned Baby Claim,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2002, p. A15.

Isaac Asimov,I, Robot (New York: Random House, 1950). In Robots and Empire, Asimov presented the “Zeroth Law” as a prequel to the three laws of robotics: “o. A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” Asimov explained: “Unlike the Three Laws, however, the Zeroth Law is not a fundamental part of positronic robotic engineering, is not part of all positronic robots, and, in fact, requires a very sophisticated robot to even accept it.” Asimov claimed that the Three Laws originated on December 23, 1940, from a conversation he had with the science fiction publisher John W. Campbell. The Three Laws did not appear in Asimov’s first two robot stories, “Robbie” and “Reason,” but the First Law was stated in Asimov’s third robot story “Liar!” The first story to explicitly state the Three Laws was “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. They were finally codified in I, Robot in 1950.

These barriers, and others, are outlined in Steven M. Wise, Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Boston: Perseus Books, 2002).

Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Cow Parts,” Discover (August 2001), pp. 53—62.

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).

Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

David Brion Davis, “The Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory,” New York Times, August 26, 2001, section 4, p. 1. See also Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 273. Mayr notes that the “‘actual vs. potential’ distinction is unnecessary since ‘reproductively isolated’ refers to the possession of isolating mechanisms, and it is irrelevant for species status whether or not they are challenged at a given moment.” Mayr offers these “more descriptive” definitions: “A species is a reproductive community of populations (reproductively isolated from others) that occupies a specific niche in nature.” And: “Species are the real units of evolution, as the temporary incarnation of harmonious, wellintegrated gene complexities” (Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963]).

Vercors (Jean Bruller), You Shall Know Them, translated by R. Barisse (New York: Pocket Books, 1955).

Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Wise, Science and the Case for Animal Rights. See also Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Boston, Mass.: Perseus, 2000). Before reading Wise’s book, I was unconvinced by the arguments of animal rights’ activists who, it seemed to me, did not appear to understand Aristotle’s moral guideline of “all things in moderation.” By setting a goal of achieving all rights for all mammals right now, they have, de facto, procured no rights for any animals ever. That’s not strictly correct, of course. There have been many legal victories, particularly with regard to protecting animals from cruelty. But for most of us in the sciences, the animal rights movement has been too political, too extreme, and too ignorant of science. Wise’s book does not suffer from these shortcomings.

See, for example, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995).

Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Marian Stamp Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only: The Search for Animal Consciousness (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1993). Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Marc Hauser, Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). Sue Taylor Parker and M. L. McKinney, eds., Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Irene Pepperberg, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Parrots (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Richard D. Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Toward Speciesism (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origin of the Western Debate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).

John D. Bonvillian and Francine G. P. Patterson, “Sign Language Acquisition and the Development of Meaning in a Lowland Gorilla,” in C. Mandell and A. McCabe, eds., The Problem of Meaning: Behavioral and Cognitive Perspectives (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1997). Francine G. P. Patterson and Wendy Gordon, “The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas,” in The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, ed. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). Francine G. P. Patterson and Eugene Linden, The Education of Koko (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981). Richard Byrne, The Thinking Ape: Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Sue Taylor Parker, Robert W. Mitchell, and H. Lyn Miles, eds., The Mentalities of Gorillas and Orangutans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Birute M. F. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995). H. Lyn Miles, “Simon Says: The Development of Imitation in an Encultured Orangutan,” in Reaching Into Thought: The Minds of the Great Apes, ed. Anne E. Russon et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Miles, “ME CHANTEK: The Development of Self-Awareness in a Signing Orangutan,” in Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives, ed. Sue Taylor Parker et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Lesley J. Rogers, Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998).

Diana Reiss and Lori Marino, “Mirror Self-Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 8, 2001, pp. 5937—42. Marc Bekoff, ed., The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions (New York: Crown Books, 2000). Karen Pryor and Kenneth S. Norris, eds., Dolphin Societies: Discoveries and Puzzles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Louis M. Herman and Palmer Morrel-Samuels, “Knowledge Acquisition and Asymmetry Between Language Comprehension and Production: Dolphins and Apes as General Models for Animals,” in Interpretation and Explanation in the Study of Animal Behavior, eds. Marc Bekoff and Dale Jamieson (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990). Lori Marino, “A Comparison of Encephalization Between Odontocete Cetaceans and Anthropoid Primates,” Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, vol. 51 (1988), p. 230. Sam H. Ridgway, “Physiological Observations on Dolphin Brains,” in Dolphin Cognition and Behavior: A Comparative Approach, ed. Ronald J. Schusterman et al. (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), PP. 32—33.

8. Rise Above

See David Gerrold, The World of “Star Trek” (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979); and Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek” (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee.

Michael Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999).

Brian Hare, Michelle Brown, Christina Williamson, and Michael Tomasello, “The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs,” Science, vol. 298 (November 22, 2002), pp. 1634—36. Jennifer A. Leonard et al., “Ancient DNA Evidence for Old World Origin of New World Dogs,” Science, vol. 298 (November 22, 2002), pp. 1613—15. Peter Savolainen et al., “Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs,” Science, vol. 298 (November 22, 2002), pp. 1610—12.

Lyudmila N. Trut, “Domestication of the Fox: Roots and Effects,” Scientifur, vol. 19 (1995), pp. 11—18. Lyudmila N. Trut, “Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment,” American Scientist (March/April 1999).

Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). The area 13 work is described in: Katerina Semendeferi et al., “Limbic Frontal Cortex in Hominoids: A Comparative Study of Area 13,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 106 (1998), pp. 129—55. In this paper the authors discuss how area 13 was shown in rhesus monkeys to be involved in the disinhibition of emotional responses.

Robert Sapolsky explained that the reason for his skepticism is threefold:

I. The levels of serotonin in synapses, or in whole brain regions may be quite different in closely related species, simply reflecting different nuts and bolts aspects of the synthesis and breakdown of serotonin, rather than something like, “Species X, which is more aggressive, has less serotonin than Species Y.” One example, new world monkeys, have vastly higher levels of corticosteroids than do old world monkeys—about an order of magnitude difference. Scientists have concocted all sorts of elaborate stories about how life is so much more stressful for a new world monkey … until it was discovered that the order of magnitude increase in corticosteroid levels is accompanied by an order of magnitude decrease in sensitivity of corticosteroid receptors.

2. Body size. There is a strange but convincing literature showing that body size is a confound in serotonin studies. What’s that about? Serotonin is taken from a lumbar tap. The taller the person, the further serotonin has to travel from the brain to the bottom of the spine, thus being diluted. So low serotonin (taken from the spine) could just reflect body size. Correct for that and some of the serotonin/behavior findings disappear. So, there’s big body size differences in different primate species, making direct cross-species comparisons difficult.

3. Finally, the social meaning of aggression can be dramatically different in different species. Is aggression for real or symbolic? Is it something that is needed in a bottom up or a top down hierarchical system? Does aggression increase the likelihood of dominance (most old world monkeys), or decrease it (male vervet monkeys)? And so on. So amid there not being any data on direct comparisons of serotonin among the apes, including us, I don’t think such a comparison would be terribly meaningful. (Personal correspondence, June 5, 2003.)

Richard Wrangham responded to this critique as follows: “Sapolslcy’s caution is fair and the issue is moot because of the shortage of data. But I would bet that he’s wrong. That is, I predict that there will prove to be a recognizable and consistent species correlation with impulsive aggression, based on what has happened to serotonin levels in domesticated species compared to wild (good data from foxes, mink and rats). The only way to get serotonin from bonobos and chimps, in practice, is to get it from autopsies, and I’ve asked Joe Erwin about doing so and he has agreed, pending my providing something in writing which I have yet to do. So that’s where I’m at … .” (Personal correspondence, June 5, 2003.) Paul J. Zak, “Trust,” Journal of Financial Transformation (CAPCO Institute) 7, 18—24.

Richard Wrangham and David Pilbeam, “Apes as Time Machines,” in African Apes, vol. I: All Apes Great and Small, ed. Birute M. F. Galdikas et al. (New York: Kluwer Academic /Plenum Publishers, 2002), pp. 5—18. Richard Wrangham, “Is Military Incompetence Adaptive?” Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 20 (1999), pp. 3—17. See also Craig B. Stanford, The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

My shift from a religious to a scientific way of thinking took several years. If there was a moment that could be called defining, it came on the day I removed the silver ichthus from around my neck. Recall the now-embarrassing fashions of the 1970s that included—in addition to bell-bottom pants and puffy shirts—gold and silver necklaces. The ichthus is the famous Jesus “fish” embossed with Greek letters roughly translated as “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior” that has since found itself embroiled in a bumper-sticker war with Darwin “fish” of various species—with and without feet, with a wrench, mounting a Christian fish, a Christian fish devouring a Darwin fish, and so forth.

See http://www.holysmoke.org/skhok/aaom.htm.

Reported in the September/October 1997 issue of Freedom Writer, published by the Institute for First Amendment Studies; survey conducted by the Gliss Institute of the University of Ohio (1,200 contacted, 600 responses, representing a cross section of between 200,000 and 400,000 Americans). Additional findings included: 86 percent believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible and affirm that Satan is real and Jesus is the only way to salvation; 60 percent believe the world will end in Armageddon; 95 percent favored the outlawing of abortion; 93 percent support school vouchers; and 69 percent agreed that “environmental protection laws have gone too far and should be reversed.” Of those who called themselves “conservative Christians,” 71 percent identified themselves as evangelical Protestant.

Clay F. Naff, commentary on Metanexus Discussion Web page, 2002. FUTURES@LISTSERV.METANEXUS.NET or claynaff@yahoo.com.

Ibid.

Salman Rushdie, “Religion, As Ever, Is the Poison in India’s Blood,” The Guardian, March 9, 2002. Online at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/o,6000,664342,00.html.

Quoted in Nicholas D. Kristof, “All-American Osamas,” New York Times, June 7, 2002, p. A27.

Ibid.

Kristof, “All-American Osama.” Michael Isikoff, “Flushed From the Woods,” Newsweek (June 9, 2003), p. 35.

A. N. Franzblau, “Religious Belief and Character Among Jewish Adolescents,” Teachers College Contributions to Education, no. 634 (1934).

Murray G. Ross, Religious Beliefs of Youth (New York: Association Press, 1950).

Travis Hirschi and Rodney Stark, “Hellfire and Delinquency,” Social Problems, vol. 17(1969), pp. 202—13.

R. E. Smith, G. Wheeler, and E. Diener, “Faith Without Works: Jesus People, Resistance to Temptation, and Altruism,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 5 (1975), pp. 320—30.

David M. Wulff, Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Views (New York: Wiley, 1991), pp. 219—20.

George Barna, Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators, 1996 and 2001. Survey data available online at www.barna.org in the Research Archives files. Barna defines a “born again” Christian as one who answers yes to two questions: “Have you ever made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today?” and “When I die, I will go to Heaven because I have confessed my sins and have accepted Jesus Christ as my savior.” As for divorce rates among religious denominations, Barna found, “surprisingly,” that “the Christian denomination whose adherents have the highest likelihood of getting divorced are Baptists.” Twenty-nine percent of Baptists have been to divorce court, although nondenominational Christians (small sects and independents) show an even higher rate of 34 percent. Catholics and Lutherans have the lowest percentage of divorces at 21 percent. Mainline Protestants “experience divorce on par with the national average (25 percent).” Mormons—“renowned for their emphasis upon strong families”—come in at an indistinguishable divorce rate of 24 percent.

J. A. Adande, “The World According to Reverend Reggie,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1998, p. 3.

Quoted in Carl Sagan, Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 430.

Edwin S. Gaustad, Philip L. Barlow, and Richard Dishno, eds., New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 ).

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 56.

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. ix.

Ayn Rand, “Introducing Objectivism,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1962.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957).

Nathaniel Branden, Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), pp. 255—256. With later irony Branden added that since he was declared by Rand to be her “intellectual heir” and “an ideal exponent of her philosophy, he is to be accorded only marginally less reverence than Ayn Rand herself.”

Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. 227.

Milton Friedman, “Say ‘No’ to Intolerance,” Liberty (July 18, 1991).

Murray N. Rothbard, The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult (monograph) (Port Townsend, Wash.: Liberty Publishing, 1987).

Ayn Rand, “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 91. For Rand’s pronouncements on hundreds of subjects, see Harry Binswanger, The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism From A to Z (New York: New American Library, 1986).

See The Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 7, pp. 324—26, for a lengthy discussion of this issue.

Ayn Rand, from John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, reprinted in For the New Intellectual (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 216.

Cornelia V. Christenson, Kinsey: A Biography (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1971), pp. 126—27.

Ibid., p. 4.

Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), p. 20.

Ibid., pp. 638—47.

Ibid., p. 639.

Quoted in Christenson, Kinsey, p. 5.

Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 678.

Quoted in Christenson, Kinsey, pp. 8—9.

Ibid., p. 223.

Ibid., p. 213.

Ibid., pp. 163—66.

I am aware of the controversy surrounding Kinsey’s data, and the accusations against him regarding the validity of his data collection techniques and the frequencies of certain sexual behaviors he reported in his publications (which critics claim are greatly exaggerated). My concern here, however, is not with Kinsey’s data per se, but with his methodology, and how methodological individualism leads to a greater understanding of the diversity of human behavior. Kinsey’s use of enormous sample sizes for both wasps and humans is sound, regardless of whether specific findings turn out to be corroborated or not.

Quoted in Christenson, Kinsey, p. 6.

Ibid., pp. 6—7.

The quote, and slight variations on it, is always attributed to Bastiat, although I have been unable to track down the source. Bastiat certainly could have (or would have) said it, as he was a champion of free trade. See, for example, his most classic work “The Law” in Selected Essays on Political Economy, ed. George B. de Huszar (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Economic Education, 1995).

Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992). For an excellent treatise on the evolutionary history of violence and aggression see: Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man.

Napoleon Chagnon, Y

nomamö, p. 162. See also: Ronald M. Berndt, “The Walmadjeri and Gugadja” in Hunters and Gatherers Today, ed. M. G. Bicchieri (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, Inc., 1988). In his study of two Australian aboriginal tribes, the Walmadjeri and Gugadja, Berndt says of trade: “Trade goods are passed, so to speak, from one interactory zone to the next. When large ceremonies and rituals are held, some of the participants come from places a great distance apart; they provide, therefore, an ideal opportunity for bartering. Trade takes place within the context of ritual and often is not seen as being something separate” (p. 188).

Clive Gamble, Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization (London: Alan Sutton, 1993 ). T. Douglas Price and James A. Brown, eds., Prehistoric Hunter-Gatberers: The Emergence of Cultural Complexity (San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 1985).

Shepard Krech, III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 152.

V. C. L. Hutson and G. T. Vickers, “The Spatial Struggle of Tit-for-Tat and Defect,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 348 (1995), PP. 393—404. Kenneth Binmore, Game Theory and the Social Contract. Volume 1: Playing Fair (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

Bruce Bower, “Getting Out from Number One: Selfishness May Not Dominate Human Behavior,” Science News, vol. 137, no. 17 (1990), pp. 266—67.

Robyn M. Dawes, Alphons van de Kragt, and John M. Orbell, “Cooperation for the Benefit of Us—Not Me, or My Conscience,” in Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Jane Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 97—110.

James K. Rilling et al., “A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation,” Neuron, vol. 35 (July 18, 2002), pp. 395—404. See also: Kimberly A. Wade-Benzoni et al., “Cognitions and Behavior in Asymmetric Social Dilemmas: A Comparison of Two Cultures,” Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 87, no. 1 (2002), pp. 87—95. Robyn M. Dawes and D. M. Messick, “Social Dilemmas,” International Journal of Psychology, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 111—16.

Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals about How We Become Who We Are (New York: William Morrow, 2002).

Ralph Adolphs, “Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Social Behavior,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 4 (March 2003), pp. 165—70. R. J. Dolan, “Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior,” Science, vol. 298 (November 8, 2002), pp. 1191—94.

Jorge R. Moll et al., “The Neural Correlates of Moral Sensitivity: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of Basic and Moral Emotions,” Journal of Neuroscience , vol. 22, no. 7 (April 1, 2002), pp. 2730—36.

Kevin McCabe et. al., “A Functional Imaging Study of Cooperation in Two-Person Reciprocal Exchange,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, vol. 98, no. 20 (September 25, 2001), pp. 11832—35.

Katerina Semendeferi et al., “Prefrontal Cortex in Humans and Apes: A Comparative Study of Area 10,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 114 (2001), pp. 224—41.

Uta Frith and Chris Frith, “The Biological Basis of Social Interaction,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 10, no. 5 (October 2001), pp. 151—55.

Paul J. Zak, “Trust,” Journal of Financial Transformation (CAPCO Institute), vol. 7 (2oo2), pp. 18—24. For general discussions on cooperation and trust see also: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York: Pantheon, 1999). Shelley E. Taylor, The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential to Who We Are and How We Live (New York: Times Books, 2oo2).

Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

LeBlanc, Constant Battles, p. 207.

Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 96—116.

At the April 2003 annual conference of the Atheist Alliance International, at which I spoke and discussed the labeling problem, a new label was proposed by Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell of Sacramento, California, who note that, by analogy, homosexuals used to suffer a similar labeling problem when they were called homos, queers, fruits, fags, and fairies. Their solution was to change the label to a more neutral term—gay. Over the past couple of decades, gays have won significant liberties for themselves, starting with gay pride and gay marches that have led to gay rights. Analogously, instead of calling ourselves nonbelievers, nontheists, atheists, and the like, it was suggested that we call ourselves Brights. “A Bright is a person whose worldview is naturalistic—free of supernatural and mystical elements. Brights base their ethics and actions on a naturalistic worldview.” “Bright” is a good word, meaning “cheerful and lively,” “showing an ability to think, learn, or respond quickly,” and “reflecting or giving off strong light.” Thus, it is a positive word, and myself, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the magician and paranormal investigator James Randi all signed up to be Brights (the Brights is not an organization; it is a constituency which, if it grows large enough, may one day be capable of wielding political influence; for more information go to www.the-brights.net). Unfortunately the brand name Bright was never market-tested on those who might want to use it. When I announced to the 25,000 readers of our electronic e-skeptic newsletter that I was a Bright, I received hundreds of e-mails, roughly 95 percent of which were emphatically negative about the term and indicated that in no uncertain terms would they call themselves Brights. The primary reason given was that the word sounds elitist, especially since the natural antonym is “Dims.” Subsequently, I organized a focus group of a dozen people unaffiliated with skeptics or atheists in which ten out of the twelve rejected the term outright as being too snobby and off-puttting. Nevertheless, the Brights Web page continues to log new members, already numbering in the thousands in seventy-five countries, so it remains to be seen whether the Brights as a new meme will take hold. For more information write Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell at P.O. Box 163418, Sacramento, CA 95816, e-mail: TheBrightsNet@aol.com.

Robert Ingersoll, Ingersoll’s Greatest Lectures (New York: The Freethought Press Association, 1944).

Appendix I

Cited in Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965). See also Richard Hardison, Upon the Shoulders of Giants (Baltimore, Md.: University Press of America, 1988). Astronomer and historian of science John Gribbon is convinced that Newton intended the comment to be read sarcastically in an attempt to attenuate any credit being given to one of his arch rivals, Robert Hooke. See John Gribbon, “On the Shoulders of Midgets?” Skeptic, vol. 10, no. 1(2003), pp. 36—39.

Quoted in Paul H. Barrett, ed., Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind: Early Writings of Charles Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 57, 63.

This term was coined by Larry Arnhart in his book of the same title. As Arnhart explained: “When morality is thus understood as part of human nature, moral conduct does not require religious belief or any belief in transcendent moral norms. Morality is important to us because as social animals who try to act in the light of past experience and future expectations, we need norms of right and wrong conduct to secure the social cooperation required to satisfy our natural desires” (Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998 p. 34).

See, for example, my analysis of religious beliefs and attitudes in Shermer, How We Believe.

Darwin. The Descent of Man, pp. 71-72.

Ibid., pp. 165-66.

Alfred R. Wallace, “Evolution and Character,” Fortnightly Review, vol. 83 (1908), pp. I—24.

Alfred R. Wallace, “The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man,” in Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 391-392.

Ibid.

Alfred R. Wallace, “The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of ‘Natural Selection,’” J. ASL, vol. 2 (1864), p. 173.

Ibid., p. 174.

Ibid., pp. 177—78.

Ibid., pp. 185—86.

Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, vol. I (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1893), p. 31.

David Duncan, ed., Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1968).

Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; or The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1851), pp. 29, 93, 121.

Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton, 1891), p. x.

Huxley, Evolution and Ethics.

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), p. 38.

Thomas H. Huxley and Julian S. Huxley, Touchstone for Ethics 1893—1943 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), p. 136.

Ibid., p. 137.

E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 562.

Ibid., p. 563.

Ibid., p. 564.

Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Recounted in detail in Shermer and Grobman, Denying History.

Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth.

Wilson, On Human Nature, p. 7.

Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), and Alexander, The Biology of Moral Systems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1987). Axelrod, The Evolution of Co-operation. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. De Waal, Good Natured. Paul Lawrence Farber, The Temptations of Evolutionary Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, vol. I: Evolution of Social Behaviour (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1996). Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). John Maynard Smith, Did Darwin Get it Right? (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1992). Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Donald Symons, The Evolution of‘Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Paul Thompson, Issues in Evolutionary Ethics (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995). Robert Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, Calif.: Benjamin/ Cummings, 1985). James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993). Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Random House, 1994).

Wilson, Consilience, pp. 238—65. For a concise summary, see also Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality,” pp. 53—70.

Ibid., p. 241.

Wilson, “Nonzero and Nonsense,” pp. 84—89.

Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral. Sober and Wilson, Unto Others.

Ernst Mayr, “Where Are We?” Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology, vol. 24 (1959), pp. 409—40. Reprinted in Ernst Mayr, Evolution and Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, p. 595; Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 79; Mayr, This Is Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 202.

Michael Shermer and Frank Sulloway, “The Grand Old Man of Evolution. An Interview with Evolutionary Biologist Ernst Mayr,” Skeptic, vol. 8, no. 1 (2000), pp. 76—83.

Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Ibid., p. 73.

Some of those critiques, however, have been aimed not at Darwin’s Duomo, but at Gould’s Pinnacles. To his credit, Gould unhesitatingly allows his critics to speak, but the price they pay is facing the buzz saw of his rhetorical brilliance and literary erudition, as in this maximally insulting cut of one critic—the philosopher Dan Dennett who penned a fiftypage critique of Gould—when he quotes Schiller: “Mit Dummheit kampfen die Götter selbst vergebens”—“even the gods cannot fight with stupidity” (Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, p. 1009). One persistent misunderstanding about Gould’s remodeling of Darwin’s Duomo stems from what I call the “paradigm paradox” (Michael Shermer, The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], p. 98).

Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, pp. 71, 652.