Atheist Alliance International conference, quick version

The Atheist Alliance International convention took place over the weekend, October 2-4, 2009, at the Burbank Airport Marriott hotel, and I took my usual level of notes for the talks I attended. But rather than (or perhaps temporarily in lieu of) giving detailed summaries of each talk over the next several weeks, this will be one post with brief comments on each. If there's demand, I can follow this up with more detailed posts on individual talks of interest.

There were over 700 attendees at the conference, and I believe I heard that last year's conference was about 450. It's not as big as The Amazing Meeting, but if that rate of growth isn't an artifact of say, the fact that this conference was co-sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason and featured an unbelievable set of high-powered speakers, then they'll catch up quickly. The AAI conference participation seemed to be more diverse than TAM, with a higher proportion of women and minorities, though it's still not close to representative of the population--there's still a white male dominance.

The conference talks were divided into "tracks" which were really more just rough categories than a system of tracks that could be followed, which were Science, Advocacy, Heritage, and Development. Events that weren't talks included an optional pre-conference event of attending a live studio taping of a TV show ("100 Questions"), an optional post-conference event of an L.A. bus tour and visit to the La Brea tarpits, a live viewing of "Real Time with Bill Maher" featuring Richard Dawkins (shortly before they both showed up in person), entertainment by Mr. Deity (including live performance and a few of the shows, as well as some personal background from Brian Keith Dalton), a live recording of the Dogma Free America podcast with a panel of speakers, a standup comedy showcase hosted by Comedy Jesus Troy Conrad, a "taste of Camp Quest" for kids, and an Atheist Nexus live music party.

Friday
I arrived a bit later than planned--my expected driving time of just under six hours turned out to take over seven due to a few traffic issues along the way--and I missed three things I had wanted to attend. Those were Rich Orman's panel discussion for his Dogma Free America podcast, with P.Z. Myers, William B. Davis, and Sunsara Taylor; Alpharabius' talk on atheism in the Arab world; and Russell Blackford's talk on attempts to regulate against "defamation of religion." Fortunately, Alpharabius gave me a capsule summary of his talk and I had a few chances to chat with Russell Blackford and Rich Orman, so that partly made up for it.

P.Z. Myers gave an entertaining talk on "Design v. Chance" that began with a parody of a typical intelligent design creationist presentation, argued that ID arguments are at root an "over-extended metaphor" of design accompanied by misrepresentations of science. He showed how the ID claim that Darwin thought cells were mere "balls of protoplasm" is false, and presented evidence that various features thought to be characteristic of multicellular life have been found to be present in choanoflagellate protists. He ended by sharing a couple of useful words, "kipple" (from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," meaning accumulated useless objects) and "granfalloon" (from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle, meaning a label on a group that doesn't really have anything significant in common, like "Hoosier"). For "granfalloon," he quoted the statement from Bokonon in Vonnegut's book, "if you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." Isn't "atheist" a good example of a granfalloon, if all we share is lack of a belief in God? (This ended up being relevant to Brian Parra's talk at the end of the conference.)

After a cocktail and socializing session, the main ballroom showed "Real Time with Bill Maher" on a big screen, featuring his guests Janeane Garofalo, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and Thomas Friedman, then joined by Richard Dawkins. Maher demonstrated the witty and incisive criticism of religion that won him the Dawkins award, though he also made some comments about environmental causes of cancer that have raised controversy about his receiving an award with "science" in its name when he has pseudoscientific opinions about matters such as medicine (as Orac has forcefully argued in a series of posts at his Respectful Insolence blog: one, two, three, four). This was followed by entertainment from Mr. Deity in the form of both live performance and videos, along with some personal history from Brian Keith Dalton. Then Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins entered the room. Dawkins recounted the highlights of Maher's "Religulous" as the reasons for the award, and Maher accepted the award, noting (accurately) that Dawkins summary was better than the movie itself, followed by his routine of reading from Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life which you can find on YouTube. Maher was the least-approachable celebrity at the entire conference; even those sitting at his VIP table were unable to ask him questions, as P.Z. Myers reported firsthand.

Saturday
Ed Buckner gave a talk about how atheist and freethought organizations are learning to cooperate, which I live-tweeted comments on.

Lawrence Krauss gave a talk on "Our Miserable Future" or "Life, the Universe, and Nothing: The Future of Life and Science in an Expanding Universe," in which he argued that the best evidence shows that we are in a flat, rather than an open or closed universe, which means that it will continue expanding towards some limit. He gave a history of cosmology from the discovery of the expansion of the universe to dark matter, and pointed out that we are fortunate to live in a time when the energy density of dark matter vs. ordinary matter in the universe is approximately the same, and the expanding universe is at a point where other galaxies are still visible. The upshot of this is that we are fortunate to live in a time where we have the evidence of Hubble expansion and the Big Bang. Intelligent civilizations of the distant future will be unable to see any galaxies other than their own, or any evidence of the Big Bang, and will conclude that they are in a static and eternal universe based on the best evidence that they have. Such people will be "lonely and ignorant, but dominant," which Krauss said those of us here in the U.S. are already used to. They will have an irreparably wrong picture of the universe from their epistemological blindness due to state of the universe around them. (What similar blindness do we suffer from due to our current place in the universe and observational abilities?)

Carolyn Porco gave a talk which began as a celebration of Galileo's steps towards a scientific method, which she said couldn't be applied to God because no experiment is possible that is relevant to God. (This strikes me as erroneous in a number of ways, since claims about God usually have empirical consequences, it's possible to make philosophical arguments which draw upon scientific data, and her picture of science seemed to be based on an overly simplified Popperian philosophy of science.) She argued that it is "very difficult to prove a negative" (as if "proof" is what science cares about--but at least she didn't make the mistake of saying it's impossible). She claimed that science and religion are "completely different" and are not only not equivalent (certainly true) but are "not intersecting"--apparently advocating something like Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" view, which is falsified by the fact that religions do make empirical claims. She complained about Hollywood's depiction of scientists in a negative light and blamed it for deterring young people from going into science, though she supplied no scientific evidence to support this (though she referred to a survey of science-related films from 1920-1994 by two researchers that concluded depictions were overwhelmingly negative). I think it's unlikely that such depictions have much of a negative effect at all, since polls in the U.S. and other countries about what professions are most trusted put doctors, teachers, and scientists very high compared to most other professions. Businessmen are similarly victims of negative portrayals in Hollywood, and are also less trusted, but that doesn't seem to translate into fewer undergraduates choosing to become business majors. I suspect a better explanation of any reduction in science enrollments (if that's actually happening) would be found in elementary and secondary education, along with the fact that people find science and math difficult. She concluded with a series of fantastic photographs of Saturn and its moon Enceladus from the Cassini mission.

Martin Pera spoke about embryonic stem cells, science and policy, arguing that it will revolutionize medicine by allowing restoration of cell loss through transplantation as well as the development of new methods of research using stem cells. He pointed out various challenges to "regenerative medicine," including rejection, tumor formation, and implanted stem cells developing the same pathologies that they're designed to treat, but observed that these also present new opportunities to learn. On the public policy side, he argued that scientists need to engage more with the public, patient advocacy plays a key role in policy discussions, and careful and thoughtful regulation is preferable to "premature prescriptive regulation." (This ties into a lot of the subject matter in law, science, and technology I'm studying this semester, and Pera's talk had considerable overlap with a talk I attended earlier this year at the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix on embryonic stem cells by Prof. Jane Maienschein of ASU. If I write up a more detailed summary of this talk, I'll bring some of that into it.)

Jerry Coyne gave a summary of his book, Why Evolution is True. He defined five constituents of the theory of evolution and pointed out predictions, retrodictions, and evidence supporting each of them from a variety of scientific disciplines. He book-ended his discussion with the famous chart of rate of acceptance of evolution by country (from a study co-authored by Eugenie Scott) at the start, and a suggestion as to why that pattern of acceptance holds at the end (appealing to Greg Paul's evidence that belief in God is correlated with social dysfunction). He concluded that the real way to increase the effectiveness of teaching of evolution is to build a better, more just society. I'm skeptical--I think there are likely other causes behind the correlation, and that the strength of religious belief in the U.S. may be the result of religious competition due to the lack of an official state religion.

Daniel Dennett gave what I thought was the most interesting talk of the conference, titled "The Evolution of Confusion." His initial premise is that you reverse engineer things by trying to break them, and to reverse engineer religion, you can look for "experiments of nature" in the same way neuroscientists reverse engineer the brain by looking for cases of humans with particular brain lesions or damage due to accidents, and compare them to those without. In the case of religion, the form of pathology he chose to study is preachers who are atheists. Not former preachers who are atheists, but those who are still in the pulpit and in the closet, yet don't believe in God. Working with Linda LaScala, he's found six cases of such preachers (who themselves think there are many others), ages 37-72, one female and five male, three in liberal denominations and three in literalist/fundamentalist denominations. These people have fallen into what he called "the not so tender trap" where they have financial dependence upon their jobs, have lost opportunities for other training, and find it "difficult to say to the rest of the world I have wasted the last 40 years of my life." Half of them, though, he thinks will go public in the near future, while two will probably never do so, because they feel like they will do less harm by living a lie than by coming clean.

Dennett compared these closeted atheist clergy to homosexuals in the 1950's, either having no "gaydar" or being afraid to test it. They'll occasionally resort to the age-old subterfuge of saying things like "I have an uncle who thinks X, what do you think of that" to their colleagues to try to identify other possible atheists by expressing their doubts with a thin veil of plausible deniability.

Each traces the roots of their problems to seminary, because professors of Bible studies tend to tell the truth about the evidence, and the evidence isn't good for the Bible. But they do so with a theological spin that is an attempt to use clever ways of speaking to glide over problems and provide ministers with answers to "What can I say to the parishioners?" which have the features of not being a bare-faced lie, relieving skepticism without arousing curiosity, and seeming to be profound. Dennett introduced the concept of a "deepity"--propositions that seem to be profound, because they are actually logically ill-formed, having one meaning that is trivially true and another which is false but would be earth-shattering if true. A familiar deepity is "Love is just a word." On one reading, it's true--"love" is just a word. On another, it's false--"whatever love is, it isn't a word," he observed, and noted "You can't find love in a dictionary--that's almost a deepity itself." This is an elementary logical mistake, failing to distinguish the use of a word (in the latter case) from a mention of a word (in the former case). If you quote a word to talk about the word itself, that's a mention; if you use the word to convey its meaning, in order to refer to the things described by the word, that's a use. This is a common error in undergraduate philosophy papers, so common that many graders identify it as "UME" -- "use-mention error."

Dennett gave examples of such errors in statements by Karen Armstrong, including in the title of her book, A History of God. It's not a history of God, it's a history of the concept of God. Similarly for Robert Wright's recent The Evolution of God. And he provided some further examples from sociologist of religion Rodney Stark (who seems to me to be using the "symmetry principle" just as sociologists of science do) and from Karen Armstrong, including this answer from the latter in response to the question "Do you believe God exists?" from Terry Gross on NPR: "That's the wrong question. It presupposes that God is the sort of being that could exist or not exit. God is no being at all. God is being itself. God is the God beyond God." Dennett observed that "God is no being at all" is sophisticated theology, while "No being at all is God" is crude atheism, yet those are logically equivalent statements. Theology, Dennett argued, is "like a magician doing a trick where you can see the card up his sleeve."

At dinner, we watched a short three-minute promotional video for the Richard Dawkins Foundation that featured Michael Shermer, P.Z. Myers, and Brian Greene, among others, talking about what is science. Richard Dawkins then spoke, summarizing the last chapter of his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, which has chapter sections related to and titled from the words of the last paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species. One of the more memorable sections was about "The Four Memories" we have--the memory of past successes encoded into our biology and preserved by natural selection, the immune system's memory of diseases we've experienced during our lifetime, the memories accumulated by our brains, and the collective memory of transmitted culture.

Dawkins spent a very, very long time signing books, and looked exhausted when he signed my copy of The Blind Watchmaker near the end of the line.

The evening ended with a live music and karaoke party put on by Atheist Nexus.

Sunday
The first talk of the morning I attended (and live-tweeted) was Gerardo Romero of Ateismo desde Mexico, about atheism in Mexico. His group has been around for about 10 years. It first started on MSN forums but migrated to its own website and forums, and has now begun to migrate into the real world with two atheist marches. The First World Atheist March occurred on September 28, 2008 in Mexico City and Guadalajara in Mexico, as well as in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Colombia. They received newspaper coverage in the Excelsior, a major Mexico City newspaper. A second march was held on September 27, 2009 (Spain did theirs on a different day due to a holiday conflict), with participation also from ArgAtea in Argentina and Ateos from Peru. He talked about ADM's plans for further activism to promote science and critical thinking, separation of church and state, and distribution of condoms. ADM has a podcast, Masa Critica, as well as an electronic magazine, Hidra, published on their website.

Jonathan Kirsch spoke about the "Inquisitorial toolbox," first in the context of the history of the Inquisition and then as applied to more recent events. The main tools he described were the use of torture as punishment for wrong belief (as opposed to wrong action), calling this torture by a different name to conceal the real purpose behind the act, and requiring the "naming of names" as an act of contrition to show the sincerity of a recantation. In practice, this was used to eliminate competition and accumulate wealth, as well as to combat heresy (a word that derives from the Greek word for a free choice). He described the beginnings of the Inquisition as a tool to root out and eliminate the Cathars or Albigensians, whose heresy was to disbelieve in the newly-introduced 13th century doctrine of transsubstantiation. The Cathars reasoned that this doctrine was the opposite of holy belief--if we believe it, we must believe that "when we go to the privy we will piss out the blood of our savior, and excrete the body of our savior." A crusade against them failed to wipe them out, and so the Inquisition was invented to root them out by using informants, the threat and actuality of torture, and the collection of names. The Inquisition was subsequently used to wipe out the Templars and seize their wealth--forfeiture was also a key tool in the toolbox, making the victims pay for the privilege of being tortured.

Kirsch gave more modern examples including the use of "spectral evidence" in the Salem witch trials, the show trials of Stalinist Russia, and Hitler's forcing Jews to wear identifying badges and the identification of Jews in terms of bloodline as elements consciously copied from the Spanish Inquisition. And although the last victim of the Inquisition was executed in 1826 (garroted and placed in a barrel with flames painted on it as a reminder of the glory days of burnings at the stake) and the Inquisition was formally ended in 1834, The Holy Office which was created to run the Inquisition still exists to this day under a different name ("Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith"), headed by the Pope. I was reminded of how the Church of Scientology, after being prosecuted for criminal activity associated with its "Guardian Office," claimed to reform by changing the name of that unit to the "Office of Special Affairs."

Kirsch also observed that the tactics of the McCarthy Era and of the "global war on terror" have also used tools from the Inquisitor's toolbox. I think he could have also pointed out uses of the toolbox in the war on drugs (especially the use of civil forfeiture and "naming of names").

Eugenie Scott gave a talk about intelligent design which focused primarily on the strategies that have been used to try to get it into the public schools. While the direct approach failed in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the latest approach has been with "academic freedom" and "explore alternative evidence" bills and attempts to change state educational standards. She recounted recent events in Texas regarding attempts to put "teach the controversy"-style wording into the Texas Educational Knowledge and Skills document, which started as a requirement to teach "strengths and weaknesses" across all domains, and ended with "all sides of scientific reasoning." She then looked at some 1990's-2000 cases where individual teachers tried to teach creationism and were slapped down (Ray Webster, John Peloza, and Rodney LaVake), and noted that the "academic freedom" bills are essentially an attempt to legislate against such further slapdowns. Such a bill has passed in Louisiana, which allows teachers to bring in supplemental materials to critique biological evolution, global warming, and human cloning. She pointed to a phylogeny of these bills constructed by Anton Mates that showed how they have evolved.

These bills are constructed to try to avoid the possibility of legal challenge. They avoid any mention of religion to avoid establishment clause violations. They stress free speech and academic freedom. They are phrased as protective of a teacher's right to teach alternatives. And they are formulated as permissive rather than directive bills, which means that they have avoided a facial challenge--a judge isn't likely to grant an injunction against them on the vague language of the bill, but only to do so on the basis of an "as applied" challenge if there's a particular case of where a teacher following the bill engages in activity that infringes the constitution and a parent and student with standing can be found to sue.

The final talk of the day I attended was Brian Parra's talk, "All Together Now: Strategies for Growing the Freethought Community." He distinguished identity vs. beliefs, pointing out that the Pew polls on belief are structured by first asking how a person self-identifies, then asking them a series of questions about belief. Only 1.6% of the U.S. population self-identifies as atheist, and it can be daunting to look at 1.6% vs. 98.4% of everybody else. But if you add agnostics, you get another 2.6%, a total of 4.2%, which is a group larger than Jews and Mormons put together. If you add "none"'s, you get another 12.1%, and a total of 16.3%--about the size of the black community. If you add in the "don't know" answerers, and adherents of nontheistic religions, you get up to 18.5%. If you look at not-monotheists, you get 20.1%. And if you look at not-evangelical-Christians, you get 74.3%.

He further noted that if you look at how self-identified Catholics answer the question "Do you believe in God?", you'll find that 25% of them said no. (By the same token, though, if you look at how self-identified atheists answered that question, you'll find that 21% of them said yes.)

He suggested that we define positive aspects of atheism and create coalitions based on common ground, and drew squiggly circles around a diagram that showed all of these groups regarding their answers to the questions, for those who don't believe in God, who believe in a physical universe and natural cause (I believe he meant *only* in, i.e., rejection of the supernatural), who support secular government, humanistic ethics, and have confidence in science and reason. These he identified as the "Big Five" for creating an atheist worldview. Afterward, I asked him what's the difference between his "Big Five" and secular humanism, to which he answered "Nothing." If it is different, it is only in being somewhat more concisely (and vaguely) formulated.

He concluded by saying that a possible model for success is church minus the theology--it's just a community that plans varied activities aimed at different age groups and interests, not just about atheism but in the name of atheism, which stays in touch with constituents via various media, which brings new people into positions of responsibility, and which seeks out "public displays of atheism, not merely for protest and activism, but also to demonstrate that atheists exist and are nice people."

I'm not sure I'm optimistic about that approach. Not only is it already being done by the humanists (including both CFI and AHA), while his initial remarks were about ways to increase the scope and size of coalitions, his "Big Five," by looking at the intersection of those "squigglies" rather than the union, inherently shrinks them. And by far, the one that cuts down the group the most is the first one, nonbelief in Gods. I think this is, to some degree, an advantage that skeptics have over atheists, which is that they put the emphasis on the last item on his list, support for science and critical thinking, rather than the first. I'm inclined to think that the last three of the "Big Five" are far more important things to share in a civil society than the first two.

All in all, it was a great conference, despite a few glitches involving errors in room assignment, last-minute schedule changes, and technology. The most appealing aspects for me were the top-notch speakers on science and the chance to socialize and engage in discussion with many like-minded, intelligent people, even if they are part of a granfalloon.

UPDATE (October 11, 2009): Relevant to Brian Parra's talk is Luke Galen's sociological study of nonbelievers, the Non-Religious Identification Survey, as well as Bruce E. Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer's book Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers, which I just read about in the presentation slides of a talk by Taner Edis of the Secular Outpost.

UPDATE (October 23, 2009): You can find a translation of this summary into Arabic at the Arab Atheists Network website.

UPDATE (November 16, 2009): Daniel Dennett's talk from the AAI conference is online here.

UPDATE (December 27, 2009): Lawrence Krauss's talk, Jerry Coyne's talk, Andy Thomson's talk, Richard Dawkins' talk, P.Z. Myers' talk, and Carolyn Porco's talk are all on YouTube as well.

Other Blogs on the AAI Convention
P.Z. Myers wrote about Russell Blackford's talk on defamation of religion, Toni Marano, Robert Richert's talk on Vietnam, Maurice Bisheff's apparently kooky talk on Thomas Paine, the Dogma Free America panel, the Maher/Dawkins Award ceremony, an exhibit on Evolutionary Genealogy, a gift of a bottle of wine supplied while having dinner with Daniel Dennett, acting in a forthcoming Mr. Deity episode, other gifts of wine and Surly-Ramics jewelry, proof of meeting Mr. Deity and Lucy supplied by your truly, and a challenge regarding the Atheist Nexus.

Paul Fidalgo wrote summaries of the Dogma Free America panel, Lawrence Krauss's talk, Caroline Porco's talk, and the Bill Maher award.

John Crippen describes his AAI convention experience in three posts: one, two, and three.

Surly Amy offers her observations on why "You Don't Have to Be a Skeptic to Be an Atheist," which nicely complements P.Z. Myers' review of Maurice Bisheff's talk. I agree with her, and also note that you don't have to be an atheist to be a skeptic. These two posts illustrate why I prefer to self-identify with skeptics.

Rich Orman interviewed a number of the speakers for his Dogma Free America podcast, including P.Z. Myers, Ed Buckner, Stuart Bechman, Sean Faircloth, Alpharabius, and Brother Richard of AtheistNexus.

If anyone comes across other summaries worthy of mention, note them in the comments or in email and I'll append them here.

(Photo of UFO sighting in Marriott lobby by Reed Esau.)

Mirror neurons and the study of science

Tony Barnhart was kind enough to invite me to a psychology seminar yesterday afternoon that was a discussion of mirror neurons, at least partly inspired by (or inflamed by) Marco Iacoboni's August 27 talk which I attended and summarized.

I found the discussion particularly interesting in light of my current studies, as it touched repeatedly on issues of what's appropriate in science--what does and does not conform to the norms of good science.

The discussion leaders began with quotes from V.S. Ramachandran and Marco Iacoboni:

"The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution…is the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments." (Ramachandran, 2001)

and

"We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These are the tiny miracles that get us through the day. They are at the heart of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally." (Iacoboni, Mirroring People, p. 4)

The immediate objections were to the trumpeting of the importance of mirror neurons prior to the discovery of supporting evidence, as well as to the use of the word "miracle" to describe something that's supposed to be science. These objections ran through the seminar, much of which confronted the issue of whether or not mirror neuron claims are scientific at all.

This first objection is closely related to the first red flag of Robert Park's list of "Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science" (2003)--that a claim is pitched directly to the media (or general public) rather than to scientists, and that specific objection was raised about Iacoboni's talk, that he was making grandiose claims to a general (or "naive") audience. This has been a common issue raised in defining the boundary between science and non-science, traceable at least back to the debate between anatomists and phrenologists in Scotland in the early 19th century, where "anatomists accused phrenologists of relying on popular opinion to validate their theories while ignoring opinions of scientific 'experts'" (to quote sociologist of science Thomas Gieryn's 1983 paper on "Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science," p. 789). While it wasn't stated in this case that mirror neuron advocates are appealing to the general public to the exclusion of scientists, they were explicitly criticized for their appeals to the public in order to raise interest in their work, make it easier to get funding, and so forth, and, in the case of Iacoboni's book, for using different language in his book aimed at a popular audience that eliminated qualifiers and wasn't appropriately skeptical.

In my opinion, Iacoboni shouldn't be faulted for popularization of his work or his generation of excitement and funding from public interest--the former criticism seems a bit like sour grapes--but only for the latter, any cases where he presents arguments without proper supporting evidence, or fails to identify theoretical speculation as such. What should be significant is not the mere fact of public appeal, but the extent of the gap between the scientific evidence and the public description. Note that there will always be a gap between evidence and any scientific theory, even where a theory is firmly established, since scientific theories are always subject to further revision--they're not logical proofs. "Tiny miracles," though--I have to agree that's over the top.

Another objection raised to mirror neurons is the wide variety of human behavior that they've been proposed to explain (from the presenters' slides):

"Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been invoked to explain imitation, speech perception, empathy, autism, morality, the appeal of porn, sports team activities, social cognition, self-awareness, yawning, mind reading, action understanding, altruism, etc."

A list of neuroimaging studies purported to provide evidence for a human mirror neuron system was shown, and the question asked was how many of these studies looked at both observation of an action and execution of an action? The answer was very few, likely because observation is much easier to test in an fMRI machine compared to execution. Of those, which found evidence of activation for both observation and execution? The answer was only a single study (Gazzola, et al., 2007).

Further questions raised for discussion (from slide):

• Is there any conceivable way to falsify MN theories?
• As Iacoboni claimed, MNs are not anatomically-defined, and can fire in response to the same, similar, and opposite observations/actions. The whole brain, therefore, comprises the MN system. How is that useful?
• Many researchers have moved away from hypothesizing about “mirror neurons” to “mirror systems.” Must mirror systems necessarily be composed of mirror neurons?
• If not, are mirror neurons the most parsimonious explanation for [insert favorite behavior here]?
• Can you generalize findings from one species to the next when one of the species possesses cognitive capabilities that have never been demonstrated in the original species? Yes, this is a “monkeys don’t have language, nor do they imitate”-based question.
• Can individual neuron activity logically be used as an explanation for higher-order cognitive abilities?
• How do mirror neurons handle sarcasm?

And, though not on the slide, the following claim was noted:

Similarly, a baseball pitcher’s windup is chock full of similar kinetic clues that can activate the batter's mirror neurons and help him predict the kind of pitch he will get. "This may help explain the fact that a great pitcher, Babe Ruth, was also one of the greatest home run hitters of all time," writes John Milton in Your Brain on Cubs.

and the question was asked--if mirror neurons activation is involved in imitation, rather than a complementary activity in this case, why wouldn't the mirror neuron activation interfere with Babe Ruth's ability to hit, rather than improve it? (The answer, it would seem to me, would be a suggestion that his pitching knowledge would allow him to recognize cues about the type of pitch before it happened, that would produce a benefit in hitting performance--but this is a more abstract description that doesn't necessarily require a mirror neuron explanation--another common theme of the discussion.)

This led to a lively discussion, and it seemed to me that the following were some of the most significant arguments, with my commentary on them:

1. It seems highly implausible that single cells are involved in mediating or controlling this behavior, and neither transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) nor fMRI is capable of isolating individual neurons. It is particularly implausible that single cells are implicated regarding a relationship to an action that is similar in that it's directed to the same goal (i.e., a semantic property). I agree, but I'm not sure why mirror neuron advocates should be taken as insisting that single cells are involved, as opposed to the "mirror neuron systems" described in Iacoboni's talk.

2. If assemblies of cells are involved instead of individual cells, how is this a distinctive or interesting theory? Doesn't it then just become a restatement of "neurons work together in the brain to make things happen?" Several people (including the person who asked that question) noted that it's still potentially interesting if these assemblies participate in both observation and action, and may provide support for theories that implicate motor programs of speech generation in speech perception.

3. Some other evidence for mirror neurons from TMS experiments in speech production. Two parts of the speech motor cortex, one active when people produce labial phonemes, and another part active when they produce dentals, were stimulated with TMS in the form of a double-pulse, which tends to provide a stimulative effect similar to priming. The result was that double-pulsing the region associated with labials facilitated the perception of labials, and double-pulsing the region associated with dentals facilitated the perception of dentals.

4. The inference to mirror neurons from fMRI evidence is choosing a single possible explanation without sufficient discriminatory evidence to exclude other explanations, such as priming. This seems like a quite reasonable objection, but one which doesn't preclude further research both within a mirror neuron framework and from outside--a battle between camps is probably a good way to provoke fruitful experimentation and mutual criticism until discriminatory evidence or arguments are obtained. There was some disagreement in the discussion about whether such discriminatory evidence could ever be obtained, but I'm inclined to think that someone will come along and provide some strong reasons to prefer going down one path rather than another.

5. In the cases where only a single or very few cells are measured, isn't that "a colossal sampling error"? One response was that the single-neuron measurement studies may have recorded from as many as 200 neurons, of which 75 showed mirror properties, of which 2/3 showed mirror properties in general (i.e., they matched individual actions and related actions directed at the same goal) and 1/3 only showed activation in response to the same exact action. I think this still presents a significant sampling issue in that there are likely hundreds of thousands of connections implicated for each neuron; I'm also a bit wary of the claims of mirror properties for related actions, where the relations may be semantic rather than simple associations, as there seems to be a potential for creative interpretation in determining what counts or doesn't count as related. That's independent of the implausibility of such properties at the individual neuron level.

6. The mirror neuron evidence and arguments seem to be like a cartoon version of science being presented to scientists and to the public (a criticism that explicitly excluded the original monkey studies). The use of the term "mirror neuron" seems like "a romantic notion that's taken on a life of its own," even though it is descriptive--you see someone else performing the same action, it's like looking in a mirror.

7. This is an unusual case in which, rather than psychology observing a behavior and theorizing neurological activity, the concept has been derived from observed neurophysiological behavior and "pyramided up," presenting challenges for theory comparison. Other competing theories don't have neural-level predictions. Are mirror neuron theories even falsifiable?

The seminar was closed with another quote from Iacoboni's book, from the end: "Mirroring People also ends on a hopeful note, the hope that science and scientific thinking may play an important role in our society."

I found it a fascinating discussion to observe, especially as issues came up pertaining to the norms of science and the demarcation between science and non-science, where scientists often appeal to criteria such as Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. Most philosophers of science today agree that there is no sharp boundary between science and non-science (though there are certainly things that are clearly science or clearly not science), that the falsifiability criterion doesn't provide such a demarcation (and isn't strictly feasible given the nature of background assumptions and clusters of propositions involved in theory testing), and that the Mertonian norms of science are more of an ideal than reality. Science is a bit messier than that, and it seemed that some of the social aspects of "boundary-work" were in play in the discussion.

UPDATE: I should note that there were two papers of recommended reading for this discussion, which were:

Gregory Hickok, "Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21:7, pp. 1229-1243 (2008).

Giovanni Buccino, Ferdinand Binkofski, and Lucia Riggio, "The mirror neuron system and action recognition," Brain and Language 89 (2004) 370-376.

I didn't get a chance to read those before the seminar, but may update this post with further comments after I do.

UPDATE (September 5, 2013): Alison Gopnik piece on "Cells That Read Minds? What the myth of mirror neurons gets wrong about the brain" on Slate.

ApostAZ podcast #18

The 18th episode of the ApostAZ podcast is available:

Episode 018 Atheism and Free Twizzering in Phoenix! Go to meetup.com/phoenix-atheists for group events! Mark 19? Criticism and analysis. http://arizonacor.org Intro- Immortal Technique- Freedom of Speech from Revolutionary Vol 2. Outro- Greydon Square 'Dream' from the Compton Effect.

Grassroots Skeptics website launched

The grassrootsskeptics.org website officially launches today:

Philadelphia, PA – 9/4/2009: Grassroots Skeptics today announced the official launch of its website, GrassrootsSkeptics.org. The website is the centerpiece of the group's planned outreach and advocacy in the skeptical community.

“There are a lot of passionate advocates and community groups working diligently to advance critical thinking,” said Grassroots Skeptics founder K.O. Myers. “We want to help increase their effectiveness, by making it easier for them to find new members, share resources, and identify methods for getting their message out.”

The group plans to use the site to gather and organize information about skeptical advocacy. At launch, the site will feature an index of local skeptics groups, information on many skeptical blogs and podcasts, discussion forums, and a calendar of skeptical events. The events calendar is a joint project, maintained in collaboration with the prominent skeptical website Skepchick.org.

“There is an amazing amount of information out there that could be helpful for people who want to start or join a skeptical organization,” Myers said. “We want to collect and organize it, to make it more useful for the dedicated individuals who volunteer their time to promote an evidence-based lifestyle.”

“Widespread misinformation about vaccines has lead to a resurgence in preventable illnesses; scam artists posing as 'psychics' prey on the grieving; 'alternative medicine' companies sell billions of dollars of dubious treatments, with almost no government regulation,” said Myers. “Critical thinking is more important than ever, and local skeptics groups are working hard to spread that message. With GrassrootsSkeptics.org, we hope we can make their outreach more effective.”

Future plans for the site include a skeptical speakers' bureau, a searchable map of skeptics groups and skeptic-friendly attractions, and a development kit for skeptics who want to start new groups. “We're excited about this launch,” said Myers, “but we're already looking forward to making GrassrootsSkeptics.org a richer, deeper resource for the organized skeptical community.”

Grassroots Skeptics is a volunteer organization that promotes critical thinking and a reason-centered worldview by helping local skeptics groups to share tools, information and strategies, and connect with skeptical individuals and activists both locally and globally.

You can also follow Grassroots Skeptics on Facebook and Twitter.

Marco Iacoboni on imitation and sociality

Thanks to a tip from Tony Barnhart, I learned this morning of a talk at ASU today relevant to my last post ("Imitation, isolation, and independence") by UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni. Although I wasn't able to stay for the Q&A session, I did get to hear his entire presentation, titled "Imitation and Sociality: The Role of Neural Mirroring." His talk covered the following points (from his initial agenda slide):

• Imitation in human behavior
• Potential neural precursors in primates
• Neural mechanisms of human imitation
• Neural circuitry for imitation and language
• Imitation and empathy

Dr. Iacoboni was introduced by new ASU prof. Art Glenberg, who started right off by pointing out that the existence of mirror neurons is itself controversial, and some "don't think there's much of interest proved about mirror neuron systems." Dr. Iacoboni thanked Prof. Glenberg for beginning with the "elephant in the room," and said that the question has never been raised about the existence of mirror neurons in monkeys, and suggested that some people don't want there to be homologous systems in humans, e.g., for the sake of human exceptionalism or denial of evolution. (Has your blood pressure gone up yet, Tony?)

Imitation in human behavior
He started by briefly discussing the role of imitation in human behavior, citing Andrew Meltzoff's 1977 article in Science ("Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates," (PDF) 198:75-78), noting that Meltzoff is probably the only guy to publish a photograph of himself sticking out his tongue in Science. Imitation, the copying of the behavior of another, is pervasive by humans. People copy body positions and movements, and such imitation promotes liking. (As an aside, he said that he has been interviewed by Glamour (July 2003) about his work, and can have a second career as a consultant to Internet dating services if mirror neurons turn out not to exist.) Imitation facilitates communication and conversation, and people tend to even synchronize the way they talk. (I know I've heard multiple stories of people whose accents have been changed by being around people with different accents.)

Potential neural precursors in primates
Mirror neurons were first discovered in macaque monkeys, in the ventral premotor cortex. It was found that neurons in this area fired when monkeys engaged in grasping behavior, and also fired to a lesser extent when those monkeys observed other monkeys engaged in grasping behavior. (Here, Iacoboni cited Gallese et al., Brain, 1996.)

Neural mechanisms of human imitation
Iacoboni said that the term "mirror" may be good for marketing, but may also be misleading. Mirror neurons are defined physiologically rather than anatomically, by behavior rather than location in the brain. They have motor properties, and are specialized for actions, including sensory attributes of actions, but not mere peceptions. They are not simply "monkey-see, monkey-do" cells--while 1/3 tend to fire for very specific actions, 2/3 fire for other sorts of complementary actions. Mirror neurons have abstract codings for hidden actions, action sounds, and intentions, not just specific actions. Mirror neurons that fire in response to a grasping action of picking up a laser pointer would also fire if the details of the action were obscured by a screen. The sound of tearing paper can fire mirror neurons that fire when observing paper being ripped. And if there are variant actions that achieve the same purpose, such as bringing food to the mouth, the same mirror neurons can fire. Mirror neurons learn and have some degree of plasticity.

Iacoboni's model predicts that observing an action should have the lowest level of activation for mirror neurons, performing a motor task should have a medium level, and imitation--both seeing and doing an action--should have the strongest level of activation. And that is what his research has found.

At UCLA, they've done parallel work with monkeys and humans, and identified apparently homologous brain regions between the two. The specific region where mirror neurons were first discovered, the F5 region, appears to be homologous to the BA44 region of the human brain. The "BA" stands for Brodmann Area, a part of Broca's area associated with language--those with lesions to that area have Broca's aphasia, which reduces language fluency and makes speech slow and difficult. This raises the question of whether the mirroring is effectively covert verbalization in humans.

Experiments with transcranium magnetic stimulation (TMS), where a magnetic copper coil placed against the head creates an electrical flow in the brain, interfering with the underlying electrical activity in the brain--essentially adding noise and causing disruption--have enabled a way to demonstrate causation where functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could only show correlation. Iacoboni called this a shift "from brain mapping to brain zapping." If you zap an area and cause a deficit in a particular behavior or function, you show the causal involvement of that area in the production of that behavior. Doing experiments with TMS of Broca's area vs. a control site, using an imitation task and a control task, show the essential role of Broca's area in imitation. (Here, Iacoboni cited Heiser, et al., Eur. J. of Neuroscience, 2003.)

Iacoboni showed a diagram that he labeled the "core imitation circuit" which involved three locations of the brain--the superior temporal surface (STS), which manages visual input to the system via a visual or pictorial description of an action, which then feeds to the parietal mirror neuron system (MNS), which has the motor details of an action, which then feeds to the frontal MNS, which deals with the goal or intention of an action. (There were two-way arrows between STS and parietal MNS, and between parietal MNS and frontal MNS.)

Neural circuitry for imitation and language
Iacoboni said that an old theory of speech perception which had been abandoned has now been brought back by mirror neurons. That theory is the motor neuron theory, which says that to perceive speech sounds, you simulate the generation of the same speech. Speech perception involves speech simulation. In experiments that compared brain activation of speaking and listening, he suggested that he found evidence to support this. (This must be complicated by the fact that when you speak, you hear yourself. He cited Meister, et al., Current Biology, 2007.)

He discussed hemispheres of the brain and action sounds, where the right and left motor cortexes were subjected to TMS stimulation. I didn't quite get the details of this, but apparently a response was stronger for the left hemisphere, which is dominant for language. (He cited Azir-Zadeh et al., Eur. J. of Neuroscience, 2004.) He also referred to research of somatotopic maps, indicating that even when you read sentences about hand and foot actions (as opposed to seeing them), you get activation of the motor neurons for those areas.

He then spoke about how meaning is encoded in the brain, distinguishing a symbolic approach to "embodied semantics," favoring the latter view. In the embodied view, the meanings of words are grounded in sensorimotor experience and meaning is given by associations with sensorimotor activation.

He described an experiment in how mirror neurons code intentions, where subjects were shown short videos. There were first contexts, such as a set of cookies, a teapot, gnutella, etc., set up as though someone was going to have a snack; contrasted with this was the same items, with just cookie crumbs, and empty cup, and so forth, as though someone had already had a snack. There were contrasting actions--a hand grasping the edge of a cup (as though putting it down or picking it up to serve someone else), vs. a hand grasping the handle of a cup, for the action of drinking. And then there were intention conditions, with each combination of actions embedded in a context. The result was to find a difference in activation between the intention settings, as well as between action and intention; with the act of drinking generating more activation in the inferior frontal gyrus. (Here he cited Iacoboni, PLoS Biology, 2005, "Grasping the intentions of others with one's own mirror neuron system.")

He next showed a diagram of MNS interactions, showing imitative learning and social mirroring (or empathy, or "emotional contagion"). Imitative learning involves the MNS interacting with the pre-motor cortex, while social mirroring involves the MNS interacting with the insula and the limbic system.

Imitation and empathy
He spoke about "the chameleon effect"--some people are more imitative than others, and a tendency to imitate is correlated with a tendency to be more empathetic. He showed two photographs of President Jimmy Carter and his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, at two different times at the same event; in both cases the chief of staff was in the same physical position as Carter, standing next to or slightly behind him.

When feeling what others feel, the mirror neurons simulate facial expressions, which then feed through the insula to the limbic system, where you feel the emotion. He referred to research on imitating and observing facial expressions proposing a neural model of empathy in humans (Carr et al., PNAS, 2003).

We are "wired for empathy," he said, and notes that he used to quote a French phenomenologist on this point, but since that's not popular among U.S. philosophers he needed to find a champion of the analytic school of philosophy. He offered two quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein, one which began "We see emotions. We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features." (From Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, p. 100.) The other began "'I see that the child wants to touch the dog but doesn't dare.' How can I see that? - Is this description of what is seen on the same level as a description of moving shapes and colors? Is an interpretation in question?Well, remember that you may also mimic a human being who would like to touch something, but doesn't dare. And what you mimic is after all a piece of behaviour." (From Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, p. 177.)

He then spoke of experiments with facial expression photos shown to kids and asked to imitate them, where they used fMRI and compared to measures of social competence, number of play dates, number of friends, etc., and found a high correlation between mirror neuron activation and social competence. (He cited Pfeifer et al., NeuroImage, 2008.)

This then led to the issue of autism, which he described with a slide heading titled, "Broken mirrors in autism?" He spoke of observation/imitation tasks with two groups of kids, those with autism spectrum disorder and a control set, which yielded differential activity in motor neurons. (He cited Dapretto et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2006.)

After a quote from Eric Hoffer ("When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other"), he spoke about human single-neuron recordings done with depth electrode readings on epilepsy patients undergoing very invasive methods to identify the focal points of seizures for surgery to remove or destroy minimal amounts of brain tissue to stop the seizures. They have studied about 10 patients per year over the last three years, using modified depth electrodes that each have 9 microwires, extending from them into the brain, one ground, and eight which each record for a single cell. On these patients they've done experiments with observation and execution of a grasping task, and with observation and imitation of facial expressions. They've taken records from the temporal lobe, amygdala, hippocampus, and other parts of the brain, and found that about 8% of cells measured have mirroring properties.

He then described some differences between human and monkey mirror neurons, the key one of which is that in some cases where mirror neurons show an increase in firings from an execution or imitation, a decrease is seen when observing. For monkeys, by contrast, the activations always go up for both observation and execution. He suggested that this may be due to a human differentiation between self and other. Humans have cases where there are excitatory effects, inhibitory effects, and opposite effects between observation and execution. There are mirror responses in humans in areas where they are not found in monkeys, the results appear to be more flexible, and there can be more prolonged responses, perhaps due to greater complexity (e.g., the language and meaning aspect?).

He ended by saying he was proud to say that his work falls within the tradition and support of Darwinian evolution--that his book, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (I think you should always be skeptical of any book with a subtitle that starts with the words "The New Science of ..."), argues that mirror neurons have been selected (naturally) to facilitate social interactions. He asserted that this solves the problem of other minds, and provokes a major revision of long-standing beliefs--that we need to change the idea that we've evolved for self-preservation, and instead we're "wired for involvement and care." He concluded that he is a believer in the importance of neuroscience to society, and that rather than being isolated in an ivory tower, scientists have a responsibility to go to society and communicate their work. (And his book is written for a popular audience.)

Imitation, isolation, and independence

This post is going to be highly speculative, based on a few things that I've coincidentally just read over the last 24 hours and some past wonderings.

Last night, I read an article in the ASU State Press newspaper from Tuesday, August 25 about Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of psychology and marketing who I had been interested in working with in my Ph.D. program because of his fascinating work on the subject of influence and persuasion. (He just "retired," though the article notes he is still working 60 hours a week on his research.) That article noted the phenomenon of "social proof," where people are more likely to do something if they think that other people do it:

Social proof is a simple way for people to decide what actions would be appropriate in a given situation, based off what others like them have done in similar situations, Cialdini said. Those kinds of norms have been very powerful in moving people to conserve energy, recycle and refrain from littering, he said.
...

Cialdini and his colleagues have recently done research on energy conservation in several hotels in the Phoenix area. The hotel managers allowed Cialdini to place different signs inside hotel rooms and depending on what the signs said, the colleagues were able to significantly increase the willingness of people to hang up their bath towels.

By simply stating that the majority of guests who stay in the hotel hang up their towels at least once during their stay, Cialdini and his colleagues were able to get 28 percent more people to follow that suggestion.

This morning, I read the following passage in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (p. 63):

Social psychologists have amply documented that people have a powerful urge to do as their neighbors do. When unwitting subjects are surrounded by confederates of the experimenter who have been paid to do something odd, many or most will go along. They will defy their own eyes and call a long line "short" or vice versa, nonchalantly fill out a questionnaire as smoke pours out of a heating vent, or (in a Candid Camera sketch) suddenly strip down to their underwear for no apparent reason.

Here, Pinker is referring to the Asch conformity experiments. He notes that there are two reasons for this kind of imitative behavior, "to benefit from other people's knowledge and judgment" and "the desire to follow the norms of a community."

A few more data points, and then I will do some speculative dot-connecting. In Pascal Boyer's book, Religion Explained, he devotes chapter 8 to answering the question of its title, "Why doctrines, exclusion, and violence?" He argues (pp. 292-296) that fundamentalism arises as a mechanism to increase the cost of defection from a group, in reaction to the cultural diversity of the modern world:

... the modern world is one of strident cultural diversity, where you are constantly made aware that people live in different circumstances, have different values, worship other gods, have different rituals. ... fundamentalists want to return to a (largely mythical) past when local values and identity were taken for granted, when no one was aware that there were other ways of living. (p. 293)

This could also explain the creation of distinctly Christian media (music, books, clubs and groups arranged around particular interests offered by megachurches) offered as a substitute for their secular counterparts, as a mechanism to insulate believers from contrary ideas. By keeping the believer in a community that is, at least to some extent, isolated from the broader world, the danger is reduced that a believer will be exposed to alternative views and practices which he might be likely to imitate through peer pressure, social proof, or social conformity.

But now to make a greater leap of speculation. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran has argued that "mirror neurons" or "empathy neurons" play a major role in human (and other primate) imitative behavior that drives learning. Those neurons (if they exist, and there is some doubt) are in the inferior frontal and parietal cortex. Caltech neuroscientist John Allman (who spoke at the Skeptics Society conference on mind, brain, and consciousness in 2005) has argued that spindle cells in the anterior cingulate cortex play a role in sensitivity to social cues, and a deficiency of such cells may be a cause of autism. Perhaps there is a neurological explanation for some kinds of independent thinking that involves a lessened degree of sensitivity to social cues, or a lessened drive to imitation and conformity, that yields doubters and skeptics?

Now, this can't be the whole story--it may be more important that there are other positive drivers of independence and willingness to be an outspoken dissenter, and I suspect that leaders of dissenting groups tend to have a very high degree of sensitivity to social cues in order to be successful in persuasion. Further, once you have some dissenters in the population, they themselves can be exemplars to be imitated by people with high sensitivity to social cues. But the speculation it would be interesting to investigate is: are people who are skeptics about commonly held beliefs in the general population about the supernatural and paranormal measurably different in some critical way, psychologically or neurologically, that makes them less susceptible to such social pressures that provoke imitation and internalization of those views? Are the initial participants in such groups different from later joiners? Could this have anything to do with why organizing skeptics and atheists is like herding cats? Or why there's a high percentage of IT professionals in skepticism? Are skeptics and atheists less emotionally engaged and driven than religious believers? Is there a tendency towards Asperger's among skeptics and atheists? (Disclosure: I scored a 32 on this Asperger Test.)

Religious believers sometimes argue that there is a sensus divinitatis, a human faculty for perceiving God, and Dean Hamer has argued that there's a "God gene." It's possible that there's something to this, but that it's a bit simpler and a more of a matter of susceptibility to social conformity.

(Possibly related posts: "Unconscious decision-making," "The Rise of Pentecostalism and the Economist Religion Wars issue"; "An empirical test of the existence of sensus divinitatis in atheists" at the Secular Outpost.)

Joel Garreau on the future of cities

Today I attended a lecture at ASU by Washington Post writer Joel Garreau, author of Edge Cities and Radical Evolution, about the future of cities. What follows is a rough sketch of his talk based on my notes.

He began by saying that he's interested in culture and values, and isn't a "gear-head" about the emerging technologies that he's written about ("GRIN" technologies--genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology).

He currently studies cities--how they are shaped by technology, and how cities shape us.

He started with a slide of an old Spanish map of the New World, which was mostly accurate, except for an oversized Florida and drawing California as an island. Why was California shown as an island? Because explorers in the Seattle area saw a body of water that went very far to the south, and explorers in the Baja California area saw a body of water that went very far to the north, and they just connected the dots. That error took 100 years to correct. Spanish explorers would land in Monterey Bay and carry boats inland, expecting to hit water, and they always commented that the Indians in the area seemed to be friendly. Garreau suggested that they were actually laughing at them for pointlessly carrying boats inland. When the explorers would fail to hit another body of water, they would report back that the map was wrong, only to be told that they must not have been where they thought they were. It finally took a decree from the King of Spain to change the map.

His next slide was of the Los Angeles area, pointing out what he called "edge cities," which he called "the biggest change in 150 years of how we build cities." "Edge cities" are major and new urban centers around old big cities. They have a large amount of office and retail space, lots of jobs, and didn't exist 30-40 years ago. They are popping up everywhere there is major growth. The area around John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, is an edge city--it has 5 million square feet of office space (more than Memphis), 600,000 square feet of retail space. It's not a suburb, or sub-anything. It's not a bedroom community. It has the features of office parks and all traditional city functions. The edge cities in New Jersey in the greater New York area have more jobs than Manhattan.

Phoenix was one of the earliest places to recognize that it was going to have more than one city center--we have major centers downtown, uptown/Central Avenure, Camelback/Biltmore, South Mountain, and Tempe (among others), and these were recognized as centers that would exist by city planners a couple of decades ago.

Paris has La Defense as an edge city, as well as Marne-la-Vallee, where EuroDisney is. When superior locations for growth are first found, the rich people move in first, and tend to go uphill, upwind, and upriver, byt Marne-la-Vallee was a poor area that was planned to be an edge city by selecting it as the location for EuroDisney, and it succeeded.

Boston edge cities include the Burlington Mall area, MIT area, downtown, Quincy/Braintree, and Framingham area.

One major factor that has changed cities are the available modes of transportation. Chicago was formed as a rail town, based around inter- and intra-urban rail. Detroit was formed as an automobile town.

The last industrial age downtown built in North America was Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1914. In 1915, the one millionth Model T Ford came off the assembly line, and ended the old downtowns. The old industrial downtowns were from the 1840s to 1914, and existed because of the necessity of collecting raw materials in one place and having thousands of people there to work on those materials.

Prior to those downtowns, cities were places like Jefferson's Charlottesville, Washington's Alexandria, and Lincoln's Philadelphia. Most people earned a living from the land, and lived outside of cities.

The automobile suddenly made places outside the old industrial cities far more valuable, like Long Island.

Until 1955, the southwestern-most Major League Baseball team was in St. Louis, because movement by train placed constraints on scheduling. The Cardinals were thus the team rooted for by everyone further south and west. Once airplanes came into the picture, baseball could spread, and other cities could become major cities--Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle, Houston.

Garreau asked, if Chicago were leveled, what would you rebuild first--O'Hare, or downtown. O'Hare is more critical today.

But the changes caused by automobiles and airplanes is nothing compared to the networked computer, which is making changes more significant and more rapidly than the automobile.

He showed a photograph of a Kresge's in the Capitol Hill area of D.C., explaining that it was a discount 5 & dime store, the K in K-Mart. He said Kresge's is dead, and K-Mart is dying, but do you think the building is still there, and if so, what is it? The first guess--Starbuck's--was almost correct. It is a coffee shop. He argued that Kresge's and K-Mart has been killed by Wal-Mart, which is really an IT company that happens to sell sneakers. He claimed that when you buy a pair of sneakers at Wal-Mart, a process kicks off at check out that starts to make a replacement pair in Malaysia within 24 hours.

So why are coffee shops popular, and why do people pay $4 for coffee? Is it the free wireless? He argued that it is a social thing, only marginally about the coffee and the wifi. The main factor around the physical environment is that the rare stuff we can't digitize, like face-to-face contact, has much higher relative value than it did before.

Bill Mitchell of the MIT Media Lab, and former head of the architecture department, has catalogued 87 forms of real estate in cities, all being transformed by information technology. One form is super markets. Garreau asked, if you could get hamburger and toilet paper delivered to your home for free, why would you get in your car to go get groceries? To buy produce or meat, was the answer suggested by the audience. He then showed a photo of a Freshfields, a modern farmer's market, and showed a photo of booths with tables inside it--it's also a place to sit and socialize.

Another type of building is a prison. He suggested that we don't need as many prisons if we use GPS anklets or bracelets for nonviolent offenses.

He then argued that Moore's Law will continue to hold for the forseeable future, and we've already seen 32 doublings in processors since 1959. The only thing comparable is railroad capacity doubling, which saw 14.5 doublings before leveling out due to requirements of coal, steel, and land, and being superseded by the automobile. The IT limits are the laws of physics, the marketplace, human ingenuity, and our culture and values, and he argued that only our culture and values set real limits for the forseeable future. (In a class yesterday, one of my professors said that a physics professor speaking at ASU last year said that we've reached the physical limits for silicon chips, and won't see any more doublings, but a subsequent new development has already refuted him with a four-times improvement due to nanotechnology--presumably this.)

Sequencing the human genome was thought nuts, impossible, and/or would cost a fortune, but was done in 2000 at a fraction of the expected cost, far sooner than anyone expected, thanks to Moore's Law.

Garreau suggested that ten years from now, anything you can put in a lab for $1 million will be something you can put in your home for $1,000; anything you can get now for $1,000 will be "pocket lint." He used USB memory fobs as an example of today's "pocket lint."

He showed a photo of students at CMU in a computer lab, and asked, "Is there a future for physical university campuses?" He gave a yes, on the grounds that this is where you "meet your first spouse and friends for a lifetime"--the social aspects. Distance learning has been around for a very long time (Benjamin Franklin did learning-by-mail), but it's always a second choice.

Shopping malls, he said, are turning into entertainment spaces. He cited his friend Jaron Lanier (a virtual reality pioneer), who suggests that the first thing to disappear will be escalators, replaced by rides--so when you go up by ferris wheel and come down by water slide, think of Lanier. He observed that if you go to a mall at 10 a.m., you'll see the senior mall walkers, and if you go in the afternoon, you'll see "drug dealing rugrats." (He didn't note, but I thought of how Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe has turned one space into an indoor miniature golf course.)

Office space--is there any future to it? Again, he argued for the social aspect, and maintained that the accidental casual face-to-face contact is impossible to digitize, yet he finds the random conversation at the printer jam (the modern equivalent of the water cooler) to be his most productive time of day. To this, Prof. Brad Allenby objected that there is casual contact in World of Warcraft and Second Life, and we shouldn't assume that such things can't be digitizable.

Another audience member suggested that because human beings need touch, we need real physical contact. (But that assumes the impossibility of tactile telepresence.) Yet another pointed out that movie theater attendance is up, even though you can watch online or at home cheaper.

Garreau said, supposed you decide face-to-face matters, but only need it two days a week--how would that affect where you live? If you only needed it 3 days a month, then where might you live?

He said some cities will live, if they are good for face-to-face contact. Others will die, if they aren't. We're headed to a profound shift of what is urban/urbane, and cities like Santa Fe are the future. It has 63,000 people, opera, restaurants, second-hand boot stores.

The top fastest-growing metro areas are smaller cities that are like villages with face-to-face spaces and are somewhat dispersed. The top ones are Wenatchee, WA, Provo-Orem, UT, Grand Junction, CO, Gulfport-Biloxi, MS, and Myrtle Beach, SC. The top states for real estate price appreciation are Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Other example cities in this model include the Adams-Morgan area of D.C., Tempe, AZ, and Marrakesh.

He then briefly turned to other technologies. He said that Craig Venter says that by the end of this year he will have an organism that "eats CO2 and poops gasoline." (And his company has just received $600 million in funding from ExxonMobil.) Nanotech may build membranes that purify water. These things will impact where cities become feasible. "Is Darfur the next garden spot?"

He then referred to a book by Leo Marx of MIT, titled The Machine in the Garden. He argued that in the industrial age, we suffered a split--we had to come into the cities and leave nature behind. Now we're trying to put what we like about cities into a garden.

In the final Q&A, he said he has a hidden assumption that we will continue moving forward and not go back to pre-industrial society; he said "no petroleum engineers think we're running out of oil, only cheap oil."

He said that we're seeing a new explosion of religious fervor, and included environmentalism in that, saying that it has its own saints and heretics. He thinks human beings are "hardwired to have faith--even Russia made Marxism into faith," but said that he's "a hardcore rationalist" even though "rationalism doesn't seem to be emotionally satisfying." He said, following Popper, that "science can't tell you what is true, only what is false, but it can changes minds without killing people." (I disagree with his statement that science can't tell you what is true--theories that keep passing tests do at least approximate truth.)

An audience member commented that virtual environments can convey mental and physical aspects, but not emotional and spiritual. Garreau agreed, but I think both (and a few other questioners) were making an unwarranted assumption that virtual environments will not be able to reach a point of being indistinguishable (or very nearly so) from real environments, and thus allowing effective conveyance of body language, subtle gestures, and so forth, perfectly adequate for transmitting emotional information. (As for spiritual properties, I think they're in need of demonstration before we worry about them--and given claims that have been made about them, it's surprising that the questioner thought physical proximity was a limitation.) In a conversation with Prof. Allenby afterward, he also pointed out that we may be better able to make judgments of trust in a virtual environment because we are more alert to the possibility of a partial presentation of a personality and to intentional distortions. There are also some types of cues that are more accurately picked up audibly, while visual information can overwhelm those cues.

Prof. Allenby also noted that major technological changes may turn what we now think of as fundamental truths into contingencies, and that may include some aspects of what we call human nature.

Garreau ended by observing that past predictions of what the future will be like have usually been wrong, becasue things are more complex and more expensive then we think--and then we get blindsided by innovations like the iPhone.

Bob Larson is still around and performing exorcisms

Pierre Stromberg has an entertaining tale of his visit to a performance by former radio broadcaster, self-proclaimed cult expert, and exorcist Bob Larson at his new Paranormal Amerika blog. Larson suffered a significant blow to his career as a result of criticisms from his fellow Coloradoan Ken Smith's "Bob Larson Fan Club." Further damage came from exposure at the hands of Cornerstone magazine, which published carefully investigated exposures of deception, misuse of funds, fabricated biographical events, and so forth. Others exposed by Cornerstone included alleged former Satanist turned Christian comedian Mike Warnke and claimed Satanic ritual abuse victim "Lauren Stratford," author of Satan's Underground.

Larson is, unfortunately, now based here in the Phoenix area, with his "Spiritual Freedom Church of Phoenix" at 9096 E. Bahia Drive in Scottsdale, though for some reason it has a mailing address of a post office box in Denver.

Mexico decriminalizes personal possession of drugs

After at least two prior attempts in 2006 and 2008, Mexico has decriminalized the personal possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and methamphetamine in order to unclog the courts and focus only on heavy trafficking. This will be an interesting experiment in decriminalization that will no doubt also provoke drug tourism to Mexico.

It appears that the new law is similar to the 2006 proposal, which was less radical than it may have originally appeared--it allowed local police as well as federal police to pursue drug crimes (a strengthening of the prosecution of drug crime) and allowed diversion to treatment for possession of small amounts of drugs rather than criminal prosecution. The new law doesn't allow criminal prosecution for personal possession, and mandates treatment diversion on a third offense. So it's not legalization, it's decriminalization.

Skeptical Blog Anthology 2009 seeking nominations

From the Young Australian Skeptics:

Inspired by the annual The Open Laboratory, the Skeptical Blog Anthology is a printed anthology of blog posts voted the very best of 2009, managed by the Young Australian Skeptics in conjunction with the Critical Teaching Education Group (CTEG). The anthology is an attempt to bring a greater awareness of the skeptical content on blog sites and showcase some of the range and diversity in the blogosphere.

With an aim to provide text-​​based resources to classes and readers who may be interested or intrigued by what skepticism has to offer, entries from January 1st to December 1st 2009 are eligible for submission. Both a print and Portable Document Format (pdf) will be made available for purchase via Lulu​.com, with estimated printing early in 2010.

Entries can be self-​​nominated or proposed by readers of skeptical blog sites. The guidelines proposed by the popular Skeptics’ Circle are a fine indicator of the kind of content suitable for the anthology, including urban legends, the paranormal, quackery, pseudoscience, intelligent design, historical revisionism, critical thinking, skeptical parenting/​educating skeptically, superstitions, etc.

There's a submission form at the Young Aus Skeptics website.