If God is not an idiot...

I recently had the extreme misfortune of taking part in a debate over evolution. I don't know why I even bother.

Religious deniers of evolution... (sigh)... have certain commonplace objections to it, and they tend to be really kind of exotic. They sometimes attack the accuracy of carbon dating (as if the theory relied on carbon dating!), or they attack the very idea of biogenesis - of life emerging from non-life, as if that is some huge insurmountable gap to be crossed that even an infinite amount of compositional variation and selection could never give rise to... (a bit of a red herring, since all current scientific theories of biogenesis are provisional anyhow - this subject area is still in its early days)...

Other favored tactics involve asking what came "before" the big-bang (which displays a total ignorance of how spacetime dimensionality is best understood), or showing that random variation could never lead to complex organs like eyes (which in fact are not so complex and which have emerged many times along different species lineages, in several different designs - if this seems hard to digest, start with the fact that pigments react to light, whether they are in an organism or just lying around, but the ones in organisms thus come to carry info about the outside world as a simple result of responding to light...)

Most religious argumentation against evolution betrays a failure of the imagination as well, specifically a failure to imagine scale - the scale of cosmological/evolutionary time, and the incredible power of combinatorial processes...

But look... Evolution-deniers really don't have to get so fancy to disprove evolutionary theory. It would be extraordinarily easy to disprove evolutionary theory. All you have to do is find one single population of organisms. That's it. The population has to have certain characteristics, of course, but once you find it, evolutionary theory as we know it will be forced to its knees.

You can challenge or disprove evolution if you can find a population of organisms where:

1) There are different (inheritable) traits across organisms;

2) The different traits lead to some organisms having more reproductive success than others, and these traits are inherited by their children who thus also have more reproductive success (i.e. more grandchildren per parent down the successful lineage;

3) Yet somehow, mysteriously, when you look at the genetic composition of each subsequent generation, most of the organisms are genetically related to the *less* reproductively successful ancestors, i.e. the grandparents that had the *fewest* (as few as zero) grandchildren.

Finding this population of organisms would refute evolutionary theory, or at least give it pause. Explaining this pattern of inheritance would force us to posit a new mechanism of inheritance not yet framed by science. For as long as no new mechanism (e.g genetic quantum tunneling?) were found, evolutionary theory would have to be provisionally considered incomplete. During that time period, people might speculate that perhaps certain lineages in these "inheritance without descent" species were "favoured by God", so that even though a "favoured" organism might have have the fewest descendants by way of reproduction, they have the most descendants via this favour - God puts the DNA of His favored organisms into subsequent generations, in violation of evolutionary principles... or something.

A very strong case of such a finding would be a population where *all* organisms do not demonstrate reproductive fitness, but rather eagerly get themselves eaten by predators as soon as possible, before reproducing. (They would be "manna", essentially...) Nevertheless, the species persists and thrives, growing with each generation. Finding a single such population would displace evolutionary theory as an acceptable general framework for biology (for the period of time within which no reproductive mechanism was understood).

Of course, find such species sounds like an impossible task, but only if we accept the scientific worldview of cause and effect. On a religious worldview, there is no reason why God could not intervene in the causal order of nature, and reshape future generations of a population as He saw fit, to give that population the characteristics noted above. Most emphatically, if He had any interest at all in disproving evolutionary theory, He could do it very easily by creating and maintaining such a population. The whole scientific/materialist worldview would be shaken by such a discovery.

If He thinks he can challenge the scientific worldview by making an image of the Virgin Mary appear in a grilled-cheese sandwich, or writing "Allah" on the side of a fish, (no offense and of course I say this for effect...) He's pretty dumb. The scientific worldview is *based* on ideas like the power of combinatorics and coincidence to produce patterns that may fortuitously be able to play a role in the context of some other system...

If God is not an idiot, and he wants to demonstrate his existence in the face of scientific skepticism or evolutionary reasoning, all he has to do is support *one* of the kinds of populations I have described above.

If religious people are serious about rebutting evolution, all they have to do is find it.

When you Hate the Job you Always Wanted

Okay, I finally found that article I was looking for in the first ever post to this blog. It's Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science Volume 15—Number 11: 787-793. They wanted to see how compensation effected the effort people put into a task. Standard economic wisdom suggests that they more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words:

A long history of research has demonstrated that rewards can decrease motivation and attitudes (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), alter self-perception (Bem, 1965), increase overjustification (Lepper et al., 1973), and turn feelings of competence into feelings of being controlled (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The debate over these findings (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000) has generally shifted to the question of what specific circumstances give rise to these counterintuitive effects.

Their proposal is that there are two kinds of markets: monetary markets and social markets. Different kinds of goods and services may be associated with each market, but more to the point, the form of compensation offered differs as well. When you offer to pay someone, you signal that you want to situate the transaction in the economic modality. If you offer to pay friends for helping you move apartments, they may get royally and truly offended! However, stocking your new fridge full of beer and ordering in pizzas will be gladly accepted - unless you mention the price! If you do that, you are trying to put a money-value on the asset of having friends who will help you. You will, in a sense, be rejecting them from the social market, driven by reciprocal altruism, esteem, social standing/reputation, social network position, and all the rest.

They continue:

[This h]ypothesis...1 also predicts a distinction between exchanges in which payment is not mentioned (‘‘not paying at all’’) and those in which individuals are told explicitly that they will not be paid (‘‘paying nothing’’). Whereas not mentioning payment is likely to cause individuals to consider themselves to be in a social-market relationship, telling individuals explicitly that they are not getting paid is likely to cause them to consider themselves to be in a money-market relationship. Our framework predicts that not paying at all in the context of social market relationships can create higher levels of incentives than low levels of compensation in the context of money-market relationships, a prediction that is shared by many other accounts (Bem, 1965; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Festinger, 1957; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000b; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973).

This means, they point out, that "Effort in exchange for no payment can be higher than effort in exchange for low monetary payment." Strictly economic rationality would not predict this, but strictly economic rationality has been slow to pick up on the impact of social exchange behavior on economic exchange behavior. I remember when I was in Fiji for awhile, and in some of the marketplaces where native Fijian businesses were predominant, there were signs all over the place telling vendors not to sell good on verbal credit! (I.e., a vague promise to repay the vendor later, somehow.) In the traditional Fijian village economy, the social exchange market dominates material exchange, and so a lot of the culture gives expression to social exchange values. In a modern cash economy, however, people had to learn to insist that business be business, and that payment be made.

I think some of us are biologically more sensitive to different kinds of signals of gain or loss. I for one basically don't notice money, don't think of it, would rather not think of it, etc. I care what my salary is, but mainly as an indicator of social status, and of how valuable my employer considers me as a resource. I love doing a good job, though. I love the recognition that comes from it, but I would far rather professionalize my work. I prefer to make my salary a background indicator of my social standing and status, and to then ignore it. When I do good work, I want it to be for intrinsic reasons - because I value good work, and because I have a will to constantly improve things, etc. I want to present my work to others, to discuss it with them, to gain recognition and to thereby gain social sanction to continue my apparently valuable work. However, getting paid for every product I deliver is profoundly de-motivating. I'd almost rather not work at all.

Weird but true.