Could Dr. Mullis Have Been Right?

Dr. Kary Mullis said, in his autobiography, that scientists were the new priests.

"Scientists who speak out strongly about future ecological disaster and promote the notion that humans are responsible for any changes going on are highly suspect. Turn off the TV. Read your elementary science textbooks. You need to know what they are up to. It's every man for himself as usual, and you are on your own. Thank your lucky stars that they didn't bother to change their clothes or their habits. They still wear priestly white robes and they don't do heavy labor. It makes them easier to spot."

Given what he later says in his most recent TED talk , we can assume he has changed his mind about ecological disaster.

 "Our antibiotics are running out. And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now -- streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant -- because we won't be here. But if we are -- (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria."

However,  I still think Dr. Mullis may have had a point. Consider this paper, for instance:


"Academic achievement correlates poorly with clinical performance of physicians, so it is probably more important to select college students for medical school admission who will be superior physicians than to select those who will be excellent medical students."

Basically, the paper states that medical schools are pretty worthless at training doctors. The schools cannot figure out which candidates are going to become good doctors because it is poorly related to the criteria considered in the selection process. So there are two possiblilities:

1) Our educational system is mostly worthless.

2) The paper is wrong.

Having hope that #1 is not the case (although it very well could be), I decided to do some more research. Here is another source:

"Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias."

The conclusion of this paper is that most research only serves to confirm bias. While the paradox of the paper probably being biased will be left alone, it raises an interesting question about the selection criteria paper. Perhaps the result that scores and grades do not predict quality of clinical care is merely a confirmation of prevailing bias that these criteria do not predict quality.

In this case, we will be throwing away perhaps some of the best future doctors on the notion that their credentials should not be believed. Your humble author, for instance, scored a 35 on the MCAT, earned a 3.5 at a top 20 school, volunteered at a hospital, shadowed a physician, worked in a lab, was a teaching assistant in biology, and did not gain entry to medical school, despite having applied -- expensively, mind you -- to 27 different schools. Could my entire experience be the result of a bias in the minds of highly qualified, money-grubbing pseudo-scientists that academic credentials are meaningless predictors of clinical quality?

Of course, the other possibility is that our education system is worthless and that these pseudo-scientists are probably not nearly as good at their jobs as some random janitor no one knows about. Either way, the story is interesting.

Why kill heretics?

Religious people might kill heretics in order to protect genetically related adherents. If those adherents are made conscious of the falsity of their religious memes, they lose their biological fitness. This killing improves biological fitness as a sort of perverted kin-altruism.

Consequences of Ego

As I thought about this model, I could not help but wonder how this increased ego-tism would manifest. Hypothetically, it decreases the emotional intelligence of the population. Such emotional intelligence is not necessary because the behavior generated by the memes substitutes for communal understanding. Another way of visualizing this is that religion could lead to an increased frequency of sociopaths, as sociopaths also do not want to go to hell.

Basically, religion operates as a social technology, anagalous to eye-glasses or anti-biotics. And just like how humans with poor vision or immune systems can survive in a world with glasses or anti-biotics, humans with poor social skills can survive in a world with religion. One might even expect parts of the human social brain being diverted to other tasks, such as finding a way to provide for the billions of people created by religion's general rules of thumb.

Ego as a Source of Denialism

In my last post, I discussed a hypothetical model for the emergence of religion. After having talked to one of my friends about this idea, he came to the conclusion that ego is the source of denial-ism.  According to the model, a genetic propensity to be egotistical evolved or increased in frequency dramatically after the advent of religion. Once the individual has invested in believing the memes, ego causes him or her not to be able to question them. Doing so would be to admit having been wrong, which is a threat to the ego.

Denialism as a Source of Religion

Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene that cultural memes function like genes in that they are subject to natural selection. In The God Delusion Dawkins further argues that because religious truths cannot be questioned, their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses". In such a conception, it is necessary that the individuals who are unable to question their beliefs are more biologically fit than individuals who are capable of questioning their beliefs. Thus, it could be concluded that sacred scriptures or oral traditions created a behavioral pattern that elevated biological fitness for believing individuals. Individuals who were capable of challenging such beliefs, even if the beliefs were enormously improbable, became rarer and rarer in the population. (See denialism.)

Also, any gene that contributes to denialism allows an otherwise preposterous meme to increase in frequency as long as the resulting behavior increases biological fitness. The individual simply denies that the meme is untrue, behaves as if it were, and benefits from the elevated fitness. While general intelligence and denialism are inversely related, the two are not directly related. A highly intelligent individual can become a denier, though this more rarely occurs. ^[15] It is worth noting that while denialism can have a genetic origin, there are other reasons someone might become a denier. For instance, a psychopath may deny climate change because he or she does not care what happens to the world or anyone else in it. However, it is fallacious to assume that all such deniers are psychopaths, and in fact, most of them probably are not. Only about 1 in 25 people in the United States suffer from anti-social personality disorder, and far fewer suffer from this malady in less individualistic cultures, such as those in East Asia. ^[16] One can see how a religious adherence to ideas can be beneficial to the individual by imagining, for instance, the behavioral result of denying overpopulation.^[17]

Ironically, if the world ever became atheist and then if scientific evidence for the existence of God became available, scientists would hypothetically have trouble convincing a mass of deniers. More sadly, violent individuals might then commit acts of terrorism against individuals who do not ascribe to atheism. The point here is that the alternatives to be denied, sometimes referred to as heresy, are not constrained by "objective reality". They are constrained by those ideas that reduce biological fitness or undermine the integrity of the system.

Individualism and Innovation

People who were different created all the greatest innovation in the world. So why are we still bent on checking race boxes when we apply for everything? The idea that there are groups of people who are all the same is anathema for innovation. Why do you need to be a part of a race unless you can't hack it just being human?

Socialism hates everything that is different. Almost all Chinese are Han Chinese. Almost all Japanese are Nippon Japanese. These people think similarly and all get along well together. But they are not as innovative because they reject anything that is not so similar to them. "White" people are all white but are still innovative because you are missing the point. White people are not all white. They are all very different.

I was rejected because I occupied a different mental space. Socialist thinkers gained positions of authority and started to create a world in which differentness is rejected, all the while hypocritically singing the praises of diversity. This was an evil that is directly tied to socialist thinking, and I will not forget my allegiance to the European mind. I am white because I am not white

Monogamy is Prostitution

True love is one of the world's greatest illusions. In every civilized part of the world, people are convinced that marriage is an institution of partnership, homogenized personality, and yes, love. But this is not really what marriage is about. It is about owning someone's sexual access.

The history of monogamy begins with agriculture. As soon as men's work became significantly more valuable than the woman's through the hard work of plowing and harvesting, women became subjected to male domination. No longer did concealed ovulation work as a glue to provide sex and sharing with the whole community. Now men made women into private property. Children were no longer raised in common but were the property of their fathers.

Modern marriage is sold as a life partnership between two people who love each other. Yet, it seems that marriage has not lost its historical root. It is an agreement between two people, and especially for a woman, to limit her sexuality to one person who will provide resources. The whole institution is a kind of hidden prostitution.

Prostitutes sell their sexuality for resources from men with whom they share their sexuality. They use these resources to live, eat, and even raise children. Prostitutes do the very same thing. The only exception is that prostitutes do not barter their sexuality with only one man. In effect, a successful prostitute can gain more from her work than a wife can from hers, especially when a wife's husband does not have many resources to share.

Marriage is a form of prostitution hidden cleverly behind mountains of romance novels. But it is not seen as morally corrupt. It claims to be a relationship based on love, and yet, one can love family or friends without experiencing the concept of "romantic love." So, as moral people, we must make a decision. We can believe that prostitution is as acceptable as marriage. Or we can decouple sexuality from love.

But the second option is not as horrible as it seems. When sexuality and love are intertwined, we can only truly love the person with whom we are having sex. We get this idea that it is impossible to love two people at once. However, when love is something apart from sex, we can love each other all equally, like a mother can love both one of her children and another.