Virtuous Circles

by Gary Berg-Cross

Thanksgiving is certainly family and togetherness time that is an opportunity for a bit of reflection on values and internalities as grand as gratitude and as considered as kindness.  It is a time to graciously take what we have with gratitude rather than to take good things for granted. And as Richard Dawkins suggest it is a nice opportunity to “teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”

It seems a bit odd, though that the day after Thanksgiving much is taken for granted and some may be grateful that the local Box Store opens early to allow the externality of charitable shopping that pre-ritualizes the winter present season of gifting.  

Our market system has found a way to take some inward feelings of kindness and the generous impulse to give more than we have and expresses these as ritualized, wrapped presents.  It’s probably not the largely solitary behavior without expression of thanks that William Arthur Ward was thinking of when he said:

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

Nor is it the connection that Henry Van Dyke made between the kindness-gratitude-thanksgiving trilogy when he hypothesized that:

Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.

Family and friends set around the table are a nice way to spark action on feelings received kindness. It affords an opportunity to rekindle each

others kindness flames and reflect on those who in the past have contributed to our kindness flames. Such virtuous circles can parent many good things and well on the wise path to the Confucian practice that:

To practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

All the more reason then in today’s times to think a bit more broadly and inclusively about thoughtful generosity reflecting kin kindness. To paraphrase Tom Stoppard, the generosity between kin can apply not only

to our extended family but inclusively to our neighbors, our village and globally beyond. After all we are the beneficiaries of exceptional American resources and its people's historical, collective generosity. With a global view we can hope, if not expect, some inclusive generosity like immigration reform and the virtuous fires it sparks for those who were not born here but seek its kindness.

There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity.

Nathaniel Branden

Notes and Observations from a Religion vs. Atheism “Debate”

by Gary Berg-Cross

On Dec. 7^th, 2013 Perry King, Deacon of the Universalist National Memorial Church and  Don Wharton, Organizer of the DC Region Atheists participated in a 2-person debate called: Religious Faith versus Atheism.

It was well attended with a mix of people, one of whom was Mathew Goldstein who wrote a to-the-point, well reasoned &  skeptical blog called Protestant Universalists as activism allies on it.  I was there too and had some thoughts similar to Matt’s but took some notes on other aspects as well such as the ebb and flow of issues, tactics and emotions. I hope these annotated notes help recreate the flavor of what I experienced. You can see an early part of the debate here and get a sense of the speakers demeanor.

As debates of this kind go this was as polite as it probably gets. Certainly there fewer pyrotechnics as with the brothers Chris and Peter Hitchens debate or one of Dawkin's debates. Here the speakers were not kin, but still familiar with each other from past conversations. They showed a degree of respect for each other in the midst of a congenial audience made up of people are both sides of the issue, but liberal minded.  Indeed at times the most heat came from intense efforts by assigned moderators to keep the 2 speakers to 5 minute time constraints. Still, it wasn't as intentionally humorous as a religion-atheist debate among comics Jamie Kilstein &  John Fugelsang on "Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell."

The event started with each side explaining their organizations and what they stand for and who they were allied with. Perry could point to the UU values from the Enlightenment - “Freedom, Reason and Tolerance.”  Don Wharton faced with a liberal stance took a clever tactic of emphasizing secular, humanist & scientific positions and alliances such as the AHA and DC Coalition of Reason, rather than starting with atheist ones. Indeed for most of the early debate it might have been termed Religion vs. Secularism.

In the 2^nd round each side staked out some additional territory.  King expanded from the Enlightenment to what he at times called a Modern or Post-Modern Religion.  He used relativism to jumps over the hard search for truth with a string of statements that- “absolute truth does not exist". Realities are instead multiple, they are subjective and dependent on an individual's worldview of framework (Drat we should have never spent the time trying to convert those Indians). The Deacon could gesture to this idea and rattle off some thinkers but his main thrusts came with statements like:

Religion asks the question of meaning.  It’s been around a long time…Religion is not so much a set of beliefs as a set of language and symbols about what is unknown or transcendent.

This idea of religion knowing something about the unknown might have generated calls for explanation, but we weren't in the Q& A so the conversation moved on from this very sticky foundational point. It’s the type of thinking that is hard to make progress against at time limited debates.  You can choose to address 3-4 of the arguments made but if you try to pick up this one it will consume all your time.  It’s a very asymmetrical situation and I give Don high marks for navigating these obstacles. Faced with this choice when he had the floor he countered King with a simple question of:

 “what is real? and ‘this is self delusion’, ‘let’s define what is real.” 

(See my blog on myths for some discussion of delusions. Rational analysis for the masses, alas, remains an unfulfilled Enlightenment goal.)

Perry’s response was to cede the floor a bit and retreat from knowing.

“Can any of us know what is real?”  “How did it all begin?”

Not a great response from an “Enlightenment fan” but such stances postponed the issue till later in the debate when there was more time for the important issues on the human capacity to know. If you draw on thinkers of the past I like for example, Heraclitus 500 BCE whose stance on how human understand reality included (Paraphrased by John Sowa, 2003):

“Everything is in flux. But what gives that flux its form is the logos; the words or signs that enable us to perceive patterns in the flux, remember them, talk about them, and take action upon them even while we ourselves are part of the flux we are acting in and on.”

These rhetorical questions can be taken on with a gesture to that part of Science that studies human cognition.  What aspects of Science do you believe in and what limits do you set and why?  Is continental drift “real”?  Doesn't seem likely, but it now seems pretty certain along with mass extinctions, comets that hit the earth, supernova and quarks. I prefer knowing the knowable, rather than faithfully “knowing” the permanently mysterious unknown.

If Deacon King could wave at being compatible with Science, Don could ask “What does that mean?” And he could point to Epicurus and the problem of evil which provides it own big discussion area that is hard to take on. Each side had some of their favorite zingers.  Probably Deacon King had more such as:

“There is no conflict between Religion and Evolution….but Dawkins knows nothing about Religion!” or

“UU stands for the underdevelopment of arrogant atheists who are intolerant of Religion.”

“What do I mean by faith?  It’s personal.” (Ah, I guess not subject to scientific study? Calling doctor Freud......)

It’s mean to tell kids there’s no Santa Claus.”

The Deacon did have a host of easy to believe and popular wisdoms to throw into the debate and could bring the sides together with a cheery:

 “The enemy is dogma in any form.”

While agreeing on many issues of social tolerance points of real disagreement were to be found as the conversation continued.  Don argued that Religions convince people that they are members of a moral tribe and neuroscience supports this maximization of tribalism, which has its downsides. See Us Against Them: How Tribalism Affects the Way We Think .

Don threw in ideas relating religion and the idea of purity and authority figures from Jonathan Haidt's studies of intuitive, moral underpinning as political attitudes:

This moral foundation, which involves having compassion and feeling empathy for the suffering of others, is measured by asking people how much considerations of "whether someone cared for someone weak and vulnerable" and "whether or not someone suffered emotionally" factor into their decisions about what is right and wrong. As you can see, liberals score considerably higher on such questions. But now consider another foundation, "purity," which is measured by asking people how much their moral judgments involve "whether or not someone did something disgusting" and "whether or not someone violated standards of purity or decency." Conservatives score dramatically higher on this foundation.

But as we veered onto social science these too were subjects that did not land as conversational topics for any length of time. The impression I got was that Don’s atheist-secular side was grabbing more of the space of the argument.  If this were a chess game the early openings had been played and Don had major pieces deployed. 

Deacon Perry was playing a different game though and chose not to get into evidence from social and neuroscience.  

“Never say “delusions” when talking to a faith-based community,”

A good line enjoyed by the audience. I guess a comeback might be:

 “Don’t say ‘take it on faith’ when talking to an empirical science audience.”

Before we knew it the Deacon was on a different tactic.  He ceded the territory of being critical of the Bible, but within faith.  To him the Bible is a pre-modern document, but it is the source of divine inspiration (take it on faith, I guess).  As Christians we should only look at the “good stuff.”: I should note here that Deacon King seems to talk about the Bible mostly in terms of the New Testament.

OK, I’ve heard this inspiration talk before and the question that comes up in my mind is that there are separate criteria to judge what is “good” in this or any other book.  We don’t need religious criteria for this. We've golden an silver rules for quite a while.  We might agree to call the criteria “humanistic.”  That would be good to agree on or even discuss.

What was discussed was Don’s point about beliefs from groups like Christian Scientists. How do we confront the absurdity of their truth claims? Perry said “we are trying to liberalize them.”  He again fell back on the claim that there is important truth in the Bible.

Don’s chess game advanced a notch again and moved to the claim of life after death, “It’s a problem.”  Group leaders use this promise to impose their interests and notions of ethics on the community. It’s a delusion and akin to people deluding themselves about climate change. Perry responded, “It has great value.”

This exchange opened the doors a bit to the societal value of Religion and the related issue of who do we blame more for what has gone wrong (e.g. cultural conflicts, war etc.). One thinks of Paul Kurtz observation that:

“All the great religions have grown by attacking those about them. 

To the request that we need a more secular society the Deacon could only suggest that Norway has more suicides than the US (not true it turns out to be true – Norway has about the same rate.  There is an effect for the absence of sun in winter which shows up in many countries so Finland has a higher rate than the US).

Which cultures are happiest?  Don suggested the secular, Scandinavian ones. Again this is supported by UN survey studies based on not only longevity and prosperity but also the belief you can count in others in times of trouble, perception or corruption, generosity etc. There were many of these statistical skirmishes throughout but Don was clearly in better command of the facts and supported conclusions. Take the issue of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot all being “atheists.”  Don was ready with refutations on Hitler’s Catholic background, Stalin’s Russian Orthodox upbringing and Pol Pot’s training in a Buddhist monastery.  It was quite something to see vague claims swatted down by Don’s knowledge. One might have added the inconvenient observation that George Bush was “born again” and his wars killed hundreds of thousands.

It was equally interesting to see emotion-laden topics dealt with.

When the idea of Hell was introduced as based on human experience Don could parry that, yes, hellish experiences are real and we learn from them but there is no supernatural Hell.

More difficult was the topic of secular accommodationism of Religion  vs confrontation or Religion by the New Atheists (“confrontationisst” include  bloggers like PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, Eric Macdonald and Jason Rosenhouse. Also authors like Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Ayan Hirsi Aliand Richard Dawkins. – Some trending elements of secular accommodation disturb and trouble Don. Paul Kurtz might fall into the accommodationist category if only because he worried that New Atheism confrontation was an unproductive strategy. Don’s counter (and Mathew Goldstein’s position) is to “stand firm on truth claims.”  One of Don’s memorable lines in this debate concerning how confrontation hurts people’s feelings was to pivot from people to ideas –  – “Ideas don’t have feelings.”  And he added that secularists are comfortable in their feelings at the end of life.”

Modernity (Perry cited an atheist Freud and others here, well they aren't up to data but I guess were considered modern) and post modern ideas on religion was a topic at times included the limitations of science – it doesn't have final answers. One like look to A.C. Grayling on this idea of certainty and knowledge. Yes, Science’s mindset is always in progress and prepared to un-set and revise, but that mentality is a strength rather than cock sure certainly that is fixed. Both Perry and Don cited the value of critical thinking, but Perry urged that we not try to wipe out all of tradition and world views found in myths.  They have a special truth one supposes and we should be informed by people who came before us.  Well yes, remember those old natural religions that had thunder gods and credible displays of religious devotion, such as:

fasts, food taboos, self-scarification, extravagant rituals and other “hard-to-fake” behaviors.

It is part of reliably transmitted religious demonstration showing a believers’ sincere faith to observers and potential converts.  I could see some of this behavior at the debate.  Perry would occasionally invite Don to come to service – we hope to convert you yet. Not all of us have Don’s ability to groan or sigh away these entreaties in a persuasive way. A good example of this was Don's reaction to Perry's appeal to thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a source of modern wisdom.  Don had actually read Chardin and groaned noting that that Chardin had his own brand of confusion.

As a culture generating species, we humans assimilate key information from our groups, and therefore human brains probably have built in cultural learning biases that enable us to quickly pick up the culture around us (language too). But a pre-conscious tendency to learn from others makes us vulnerable to being misinformed if not duped. This has been called the “evil teacher problem” but remember preaches are teachers). Evolutionary Psychologists speculate that we have developed a defense.  Human cognition is equipped with something called epistemic vigilance. It’s a suite of skills and preferences that guard against such manipulation by smooth talkers among us.  Better to be converted by truth and not tolerate manipulation. And so on to the question of what should be tolerated.

Perry did ask pointedly, “Can you respect my mother who goes to church on Sunday?

Don’s response was a re-post.  Religions have more control over women. And by the way should a LGBT person respect a homophobe?  There are limits.

At this point there was time for Q & A from the audience. One of the first ones was whether Don say religion going away and what would replace it.  Don pointed to Sunday Assembly as an alternative. Perry thought that we were in a Post-Christian age and needed to redefine Religion but that it would always be with us. But a thoughtful UU member asked Don if he would be happy in effect with nothing by their total capitulation to the atheist idea.  

Another question concerned the possibility of an alliance between secularists and liberal religions like the UUs. We might ally around climate change, peace and civil rights.

A question is whether we can cooperate on these, while ideas of God and Religion are enshrined in laws. It's still a good question and yet this was a good, liberal minded debate.

Another Pastafarian Sighting

by Gary Berg-Cross

Two years ago we faithfully reported that the "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM)" had gone viral. That was a story out of Austria about Niko, a self-proclaimed atheist, who applying for a new driver's  license wearing a strainer as 

"religious headgear. "

Well it has happened again in 2013.  This time its been reported that a  Czech freethiker named Lukas Novy who received legal permission to wear a colander on his head as part of an identification photo.

He made the reasonable argument that he was a devout "Pastafarian" and the past  bowl was a religious garment per his belief.

As reported in the Prague Daily Monitor:

"Czech officials ruled that rejecting his request would be a breach of the country’s religious equality laws, and have subsequently turned the other cheek as the 28 year old, from Brno, updated his ID card with the controversial image."

They also note that the  Church of the Spaghetti Monster first emerged in the USA in 2005 as a mockery of organised religion. 

"Now the thousands of online followers insist that 'Pastafarianism' is a genuine religion, and refer to their almighty as 'His Noodliness'".

Let noodliness reign.

Ontologists Discuss the God Meme & Its Arguments

By Gary Berg-Cross

The ontolog-forum can be a fun thing to read about semantic topics and our understanding of reality. 

It can also generate off-topic discussion thread and a recent one concerned Dennett’s God meme ("an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.) as the primary application of memes that seems to interest both Dawkins and Dennett.

Memes were already being discussed when someone through in a reference to Giussani's "The Religious Sense" 

some reflection of an driving need for truth, goodness, and beauty. Giussani is the founder the lay Catholic ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation (CL), similar to the Neo-Catechumenal Way, Foculare, and Opus Dei. He writes popular books to spread memes, I guess, and in "The Religious Sense" his pushes the idea that values of truth and beauty constitutes the fabric of the religious sense, which is evident in every human being everywhere and in all times.

Ontologists on the forum are not shy about taking shabby arguments to task. I thought that 

readers of this Blog be interested in here some of the argument and exchange.

Polymath John Sowa responded briskly, and tongue in cheek, as it were:

I'm willing to grant that all arguments for the existence of God are unscientific. 

But I also believe that all arguments *against*  the existence

of God are equally unscientific.  It's actually harderto develop

a solid proof that something does *not* exist.   

That's why I recommended that any exploration of the "god meme"

should be based on a study of gods such as Zeus, which don't

seem to be tied up with much emotion, either pro or con.   

An equally deep and insightful Pat Hayes added to the put down with an appeal to the flying spaghetti monster. 

The basic scientific argument against the existence of God is that there is 

absolutely no observational evidence for the existence of a God,  nor any reason  to hypothesize such an entity in order to explain anything that is observable.  A very straightforward application of Occam's principle then suffices. Of  course this is not a *proof*, but it is a sound *scientific* argument. Proofs   are irrelevant here. There is no proof that the flying spaghetti monster does  not exist, but that does not shake the faith of the true Pastafarian.   

Matthew West picked up in the proof idea to add:

All one can say scientifically is that the existence of God is a hypothesis that it is unlikely that we will ever be able to prove or disprove scientifically, because there is no experiment that we can conduct (or at least I cannot think of any) that would prove or disprove the hypothesis. (Of course you can always set up God hypotheses that you can disprove, but they are not generally ones the "faithful" actually believe in).   

As to Pat’s There is no proof that the flying spaghetti monster does not exist, but that does not shake the faith of the  true Pastafarian.  

Matthew added:

And that is the essence. It is a matter of faith, not science. So any

scientific argument is irrelevant. Irritating though that may be to those

who believe only in science.    

Pat disagreed a bit here saying

No, this makes the situation seem symmetrical. But science is not symmetrical
in this way: one only has a burden to show something that is hypothesized in
order to explain something else. God does not explain anything that cannot be
explained better without using that hypothesis. Every attempt throughout
history to offer an argument for the existence of God (e.g. to explain the
cosmos, to explain life, to explain morality) has turned out to be wrong. Every
one, without exception. I would say that this was pretty convincing argument, myself.
As for experiments, how about the recent empirical tests of the efficacy of prayer? (In sum: it has zero effect.)

Oh brave freethinking people out there.

Images

 

God Meme: http://www.memecenter.com/fun/830699/troll-god

John Sowa: http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/

Pat Hayes: http://www.ihmc.us/groups/phayes/

 

Simple Summaries of Things to Know -Not so Simple

By Gary Berg-Cross

I don’t trust (by definition) oversimplifications, but as an aid to a longer journey of understanding I can enjoy a wise, clever and well informed mind’s pithy summarizations.  A case in point is Richard Feynman (fierce & avowed atheist even as a young man and evidenced by his family battles to opt out of Jewish celebrations):

At almost thirteen I dropped out of Sunday school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but mainly because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were learning, of a marvelous and talented people surrounded by dull and evil strangers was far from the truth. ‘

                       Richard P. Feynman to Tina Levitan, February 7, 1967

He expressed a new affirmative stance this way:

"I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted (by miracle stories). And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion."

What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

Well that’s not the generalization I’m thinking of, valuable as it is as background.  It more in the realm of Physics as published in his famous Lectures on Physics, including the layman accessible material re-published as Six Easy Pieces.  There he argued that the most important scientific knowledge - from physics to biology - is the simple fact that all things are made of atoms. Here is how he phrased it:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied...
(Six Easy Pieces, p.4) 

Everything made of small units like atoms is a key idea to understanding the world and it plays out in more than Physics. Feynman sees it in biology too – 

“everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.”

Well I might not agree entirely here, but a physics point of view explains much and it took, as RF notes :

“some experimenting and theorizing to suggest this hypothesis, but now it is accepted, and it is the most useful theory for producing new ideas in the field of biology.”  (Six Easy Pieces, p.20) 

A temping simplification, but perhaps we need to be cautious of this as the most useful basis for our understanding. I think that you can argue, as Biologist Ernst Mayr has, for the importance of biology/evolutionary biology as an independent science, different from chemistry/physics and deserving of its own, distinct philosophy. Reductionist “understanding” of reality, I would argue, is too naive a jump and doesn’t get us to fuller explanations. In the diagram below you can see this view and how it gets extended form the molecular level to a meso-view of Biology and then on to Psychological realm of things like knowing and belief followed by populations of people.  Gee, maybe I can explain why some populations believe in God.  

Not so fast.  It gets complicated, so we need to qualify things as we move on from small grain atoms to meso- and psych-social phenomena.

It seems to me that basic unit frame is misleading for biology, since lower level functions cannot explain the functions of more complex organization of matter as are always found in living things. As I have in the diagram we have emergence.

It is even more misleading at higher scaled phenomena. Still there is much that can be imported from a Physics and Chemistry view into biology.  I’m thinking here is biology as physical networks. In the 1930s, physiologist Max Kleiber, put a number on this general idea. He showed that an animal's metabolic rate is proportional to its body mass raised to the power of 3/4 .  This relationship has been found to hold across the living world from bacteria to blue whales and giant redwoods, over more than 20 orders of magnitude difference in size.

Scaling laws based on exponents in which the denominator is a multiple of four apply to a host of other biological variables, such as lifespan.  In the 90s West, G. B., Brown, J. H. & Enquist(1)  found an explanation for the scaling laws in the dynamics of organisms‘ internal transport of nutrients and other resources

"There's maybe 200 scaling laws that have quarter powers in them," says West.

OK, so there is that.  But my candidate for a key idea is Evolution. Evolution unifies Biology and as Richard Dawkins said, nothing in Biology makes sense without evolution. That’s a highly informative propositions up there with matter is composed of units. One might also put it as a theory that the world is steadily changing, so organisms transform over time and this takes place via natural selection.   Daniel Dennett provides the importance of the idea more elaborately:

'in a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.’

I like this appeal to unifying key ideas across scientific domains. Call it consillience if you like as E. O. Wilson does. And, not surprisingly, evolution also plays a key role in evolution, although that is a more recent development of note.

Human, cognitive evolution, is one of those candidate areas to provide a pithy insight.  I would make a start on a summary in the somewhat simply in the Feynman and Dawkins sentence style:

The capacity for human cognition is the result of evolutionary processes and is manifest in such processes as cognitive biases and reasoning.

Of course we may throw in some units that are involved in evolution.  Genes, RDA and DNA come to mind but they work as part of a system and so does natural selection.  Things seems a bit more complicated.  I’ll come back to that.

Various branches of Psychology including the recent thrusts in evolutionary psychology and decision science are the advanced outposts of experimentation and theorizing to investigate this idea framed as a hypothesis.  The WASH MDC chapter’s January lecture by Elizabeth Cornwell on “The Evolution of Sex” was a tour de force excursion in this realm.  By connecting the topic to “Why God is so Concerned with Sex” Dr. Cornwell takes a first step towards what might be some things to consider in the connection of evolution to issues of Religion.

But to get closer to that topic we might step back to the idea of atoms and such.  I didn’t provide a key sentence for Chemistry and that stands between Physics and Bio.  One thought is that we might put forward the Periodic Table as listing the chemical units. But many, many things of interest are molecular and thus higher units. We might suggest as a key thing to help understanding this constructed chemical world something about the chemical bond and how units get put together.  And it is this varying ways of composting structures from units that gets increasingly interesting and complicates things.  By the time we get to Biological organisms we are into a multitude of relations and many of then like individual development and specie’s variations are contingent.  Here history matters in ways it doesn’t to an atom and that makes stating a laws for biology a bit more difficult.

In physics, laws are intended to be universal.  In evolution, such laws seem hard to come by.  Even the "law" that acquired characters are not inherited has exceptions, because not all heredity depends on the sequence of bases in nucleic acids (something noted by John Maynard Smith) So Evolutionary theory is NOT a “law” derived as things are in Physics from mathematics. It’s not that we can’t make summary statements, but that the steps to go from there to some well understood and somewhat complete explanation gets pretty drawn out.

Think of gas atoms colliding to produce gross phenomena like pressure. Sure we have a PV=NRT equation that lets us figure some things out.  There is no such simple, closed law for evolution.  It matters what the history of atoms of bio -species and genes has been.  Our Bio candidate of evolution is not a "law" in the mathematical sense of the term. One’s tendency to be chubby gets partially explained by genetics but it is dynamic and interacts with many factors life. As part of the biological part we might have integrate the networks of Biology from neural networks, genetic and metabolic networks or patterns of protein interaction.  It’s all important and part of interlocking systems that have evolved over time.  And then it gets to interact in humans with culture.

For all these reasons of contingency and varied relations one is drawn into saying more about what seems a simple thing to begin with.  And perhaps it is these summaries of the interactions that are involved that should be part of what we need to know and would pass along as wisdom to a post apocalyptic world. That and advice to be skeptical. As Feynman put it:

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”

Image Credits

Simple Explanations http://digitalsplashmedia.com/

Richard Feynman: http://www.spaceandmotion.com/quantum-mechanics-richard-feynman-quotes.htm

Is evolution a theory?: http://openparachute.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/evolution-a-theory-or-a-fact/

 Periodic Table: http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atom

Reductionism Diagram:  by Gary Berg-Cross from a talk to the Evolutionary Society, “Arguing for Biological Autonomy” &  Biological Reality, Discussions of E.Mayr’s 25th book, What Makes Biology Unique?:Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline