From Salman Hameed of Irtiqa:

I think this is one of best brief justifications for astronomy and space sciences. Yes, it is hard to place a monetary value at tomorrow’s dreams. Enjoy!

From Barbara King of the Friday Animal Blog:

In the mid-2000s, the archaeologist Steven Mithen published a book called The Singing Neanderthals, about the evolutionary origins of music. We all know that music may shift our emotional state. For me, it’s at Springsteen/E Street Band concerts that I become most joyously transformed by music. Mithen reviews the evidence for this music-emotion link, then explores a second key benefit: Music may enhance social cooperation.

To our ancestors living in a harsh hunting-and-gathering world, groups whose individuals shared some kind of music (perhaps playing flutes made from animal bones or chanting and singing in deep caves) might have fared just that one evolutionary iota better. Indeed, Mithen’s argument for why Neanderthals had heightened musical sensitivities compared to our species—not despite but because of the fact that Neanderthals weren’t as fiercely linguistic as we are—is provocative and sets the stage for looking even more widely at music in the natural world.

Our closest living relatives express themselves in musical ways. In captivity, the gorilla Michael (a sign-language-using confederate of the famous Koko) invented guitars for himself using various at-hand materials for the strings, and enjoyed listening to Pavarotti recordings. In the book Kanzi’s Primal Language, researchers write: “The bonobos listen to music every night and enjoy the sound of musical instruments. Kanzi plays the drums and the xylophone, and Panbanisha the synthesizer and the harmonica. It might not satisfy a music teacher, but they enjoy it just as children enjoy creating sounds with musical instruments.”

In the wild, gibbons sing male-female duets, chimpanzees drum on trees and other surfaces, and gorillas too pound out rhythms, including on their own chests. Apes feel deep emotion and, being so group-oriented, benefit from social coordination, so perhaps Mithen’s framework fits here as well.

Questions about animal music sang in my head this week when I came upon an intriguing article by James Barron in The New York Times. A cat named Ketzel had one day in 1996 worked her way across the piano keys—starting at the treble and progressing in an innovate pattern to the bass—belonging to the composer Morris Moshe Cotel, then of the Peabody Conservatory.

Cotel, impressed by what he heard, transcribed the notes. The resultant piece he described as an “exquisite atonal miniature,” and he entered it into a one-minute-music competition. The judges (who did not know they were considering a feline-composed piece) awarded the composition a special mention. After that, the piece was played in concert at the Peabody and also in Europe—and even once in New York, “with the composer in attendance.”

Ketzel may be uniquely cat-composer famous, but other musical cats exist. My friend here in Gloucester County, the writer Nuala Galbari (see especially her wonderful children’s book The Woods of Wicomico) lives with one. Nuala kindly shares a description of her cat Tinky’s musical proclivities:
Read the rest of this entry »

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at UCLA, has come up with a way to measure how fearful nations are. Many surveys ask respondents how worried they are about a range of subjects—war, terrorism, crime, environmental pollution, etc. What Treisman found is that if individuals admit to being worried about one threat, they are also highly likely to say they are worried about the others. In other words, any given individual tends to be generally fearful, or generally unafraid. That means you can construct an “Index of Fear” by averaging the responses to several questions.

Now, the interesting thing is that fear is often not all that closely linked to real danger. There was no relationship between fear of mad cow disease and the actual number of cases, and only a weak relationship between fear of medical errors and the number of medical errors, and between terrorism and the number of terrorist attacks. Fear of bird flu was actually highest in the countries with the fewest cases.

Fear was influenced by all sorts of weird effects. People are less scared if you quiz them in the evenings—Treisman speculates they may have partaken of a few bevvies already! Treisman also found that Catholic countries were more fearful than Protestant countries. Greece, the only Orthodox country analyzed, was more fearful still.

But more important than religious affiliation (or, indeed, virtually anything else) was belief in heaven and hell. Belief in heaven tended to lower fear somewhat, but belief in hell had a dramatic and opposite effect. Those countries where a lot of people believed in hell were more fearful across the range of potential threats. In fact, much of the apparent relationship between religious traditions and fear could be explained by the degree of hell belief. That chimes with some other research showing that British Christians are made less anxious by thoughts of death than are British Muslims, mainly because the Christians are less likely to believe in hell.

Of course, it may be that people living in genuinely scary countries are more likely to believe in hell. But Treisman adjusted for factors that are linked to real danger, like poverty, authoritarian rule, war, and even more touchy-feely factors like educational styles, cultural masculinity, and individualism. And remember, he also found that fear is a social construct, and only loosely related to objective threats.

To me, this looks like good evidence that putting the fear of God into people actually makes them more fearful of everything else—and that, of course, has a number of interesting political and social ramifications.

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Back in 2009, I blogged about some then-unpublished studies by Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. The results suggested that one of the reasons that atheists in the United States are so disliked is because they are distrusted, and that at least part of this distrust was simply because atheists are few and far between—and so they seem strange and unfamiliar. Gervais has a new paper out that covers some of the same territory but extends it in interesting ways.

In particular, he looked at how distrust varies across countries, depending on how numerous atheists were locally. As predicted, people living in countries with more atheists were more likely to be comfortable with the idea of an atheist president. In another study, students were asked to read an essay that either told them that there were very few atheists at their university (only 5 percent of students), or alternatively one that told them atheists were very common (50 percent of students at their university, and the fourth largest religious group in the world). Sure enough, those students who were told that atheists were common also thought that they were more trustworthy. The last study used a cunning test (the implicit association test) to find out whether this shift in attitudes was only superficial, or something deeper.

In this test, the subjects are given pictures of two people—one they are told is an atheist, the other a religious person. They then have to categorize words related to trust/distrust when paired with one or the other person. How long it takes to do this depends on whether the pairings jar with your preconceptions. And, as you can see in the graph, their implicit, subconscious trust of atheists really does seem to have been affected by the simple expedient of making them think that atheists are more common than they realized. (Click on image for larger view.)

So what’s going on here? Well, Gervais outlines all sorts of possible explanations. It might be that if they think that atheists are common, they conclude that some of the people they’ve met around the place must be atheists after all—and they were OK. Alternatively, they might think that if there are a lot of atheists, then a lot of people must think that atheists are OK. There are various other ways in which simply being more numerous can make a group of “others” seem less weird.

Personally, however, I think there is a special feature of atheism that separates it from many other kinds of prejudice—and that’s the fact that atheism is a choice. When there are only very few atheists, then the only people who are going to “come out” as atheists are likely to be those who are a little maverick. If lots of people choose to be atheists, then it’s clearly something that “normal” people do. In other words, distrust of atheists when they are a tiny minority might well be a perfectly rational rule of thumb.