Tuesday, I started teaching a course called War and Human Nature: Why We Fight and How We Can Stop. This is a topic that’s become an obsession since 9/11, although I try to make it sound appropriately academic in my syllabus:

“Only the dead have seen the end of war,” the philosopher George Santayana once said (although the quote was attributed to Plato in the film Black Hawk Down and elsewhere). How valid is this fatalistic sentiment? Is war inevitable, or are peace and even universal disarmament possible? This course will explore these urgent questions by examining how a wide range of philosophers, scientists and other scholars have viewed war and aggression. War scholars can be divided into two camps: “doves,” who see human nature as basically peaceful and believe that war and militarism can be abolished; and “hawks,” who view war as an expression of deep-rooted human drives that may be controlled but never eradicated. We will examine this debate by considering the views of such seminal thinkers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, William James and Freud. We will also explore more recent scientific investigations—from neuroscience, genetics, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology and other fields—on the roots of aggression and warfare. Finally, we will weigh proposals for promoting peace, which include encouraging the spread of democracy, creating a powerful global government, giving women more political power and even altering human physiology.

Sixteen students showed up, most of them, to my surprise, women, even though only about 20 or so percent of all Stevens undergrads are female. I asked whether they thought war would ever end, once and for all. Five said yes, eleven no. I professed my belief that we can end war, acknowledged it might be more of a hope or faith than belief, but insisted that there are good reasons to have such faith, it is not empirically unsupportable. Men—and let’s face it, overwhelmingly men wage war–embrace peace given half a chance; we are not innately warlike. I said I hoped to bring more of them around to my dovish point of view by semester’s end. The skeptics looked skeptical.

Took the train home, walked in the house, found my 13-year-old son Mac in the living room gleefully assembling a brand-new-just-arrived-by-Fed-Ex sniper bb rifle with superscope.

Must amend the record re my attitude toward rocks. One of my odder and more enjoyable writing assignments of late involved riffing on rock cross-sections photographed and gathered into a book, Within the Stone, by Bill Atkinson, a Mac-designer-turned-art-photographer. Other contributors included Diane Ackerman (a Stevens Greatest Science Books author); the sci-fi fantasist David Zindell; the British science writer Philip Ball; and the ecologist Tyler Volk. I contributed 10 mini-essays on 10 different rocks. Here’s one, titled “Synesthesia,” inspired by a spooky slice of Matrix Opal found in Australia’s Warrego District. (The linkage of synesthesia and metaphor-making, by the way, was borrowed from one of my favorite scientists, V.S. Ramachandran.)

In Desert Solitaire, nature-loving curmudgeon Edward Abbey demands that we see mesas, cacti, clouds not as signs denoting something else but solely as themselves. This is mystical vision, in which our cognitive filters fall away and things shine in their naked glory. Supposedly. But our brains persist in thwarting pure perception. Our neural circuits are so tightly packed and interwoven that even the simplest percepts reverberate throughout our lobes, evoking memories, metaphors, analogies–whether or not we want them. Synesthesia is a particularly literal outcome of short-circuiting between sensory pathways: you see the opalescence of your lover’s sigh, hear her scent as a distant flute, feel her gaze feather your belly. Bereft of neural crosstalk, we would also lack language, art, music, mathematics—all our modes of making meaning and sense, and of imagining. We would be trapped in the point-like prison of the here and now. Shouldn’t we celebrate—rather than suppressing–the innate flightiness that propels our minds back and forth through space and time? And isn’t seeing one thing in another–thou art that, and so on–a mystic trait too?

Great responses to my cranky previous post denigrating rocks, planets, etc. (although I should mention that I still think geodes are really cool). As a reward, I’m posting the most intelligent commentary I’ve found thus far on the Pluto-planet brouhaha. It’s by Andy Borowitz,author of the highly authoritative Borowitz Report. Here it is:

Pluto Demoted, But Not Rumsfeld

Scientists Baffled By Defense Secretary’s Staying Power

Scientists who gathered in Prague last week to strip Pluto of its planet status said today that they were “baffled” that Pluto had been demoted but that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld still clung to his position of power.

Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke of the University of Tokyo was one of many scientists who favored the demotion of Pluto but thought that Secretary Rumsfeld should be stripped of his status as well.

“It seems counterintuitive to me that we should say Pluto is no longer a planet, yet Donald Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense,” Dr. Kyosuke said. “After all, Pluto has done no harm.”

Scientists studying Secretary Rumsfeld have for some time believed that he is not worthy of the Secretary of Defense designation and should be demoted to some lesser position, such as Postmaster General.

Still others believe that some new definition should be invented to characterize Mr. Rumsfeld, such as Dwarf Secretary of Defense.

“At the very least, the language he speaks should be demoted from English to gibberish,” Dr. Kyosuke said.

Other experts, however, such as the University of Minnesota’s Davis Logsdon, said that while there is “no rational explanation” for why Secretary Rumsfeld has remained in power, his longevity must be classified as one of many cosmic mysteries that science has yet to understand.

“The fact is, the more we learn about Donald Rumsfeld, the more we realize just how little we understand about him,” Dr. Logsdon said.

At a recent gathering, a perfectly nice person sought to engage the science geek—that would be me—in conversation by asking what I thought about the possibility that Pluto might no longer be considered a planet. My interlocutor’s eager, anticipatory smile faded as I started ranting along these lines: “I’ve done my best to avoid reading about this stupid what’s-a-planet-brouhaha, but it’s hard when the Times and other media keep flogging it. I can’t think of a bigger non-story (Is that a contradiction in terms? So be it). When a field starts dithering over terminology, you know it’s really hitting the wall. Who cares if Pluto is or isn’t a planet???!!! Astronomers should tell us something new and interesting about nature or shut up!” Or words to that effect.

Confession: When I was a kid, I loved rocks, collected and bought them from the Museum of Natural History and mail-order catalogues, had a cabinet filled with painstakingly labeled chunks of beryl, tourmaline, galenite. When I was 11 or so, I wanted to be a mineralogist when I grew up. This passion waned in my early teens and never returned. Now I find rocks—by which I mean not only rocks per se, the sort you can kick, but also the earth’s crust and mantle, planets, planetoids, asteroids, moons—boring. I couldn’t care less about geophysics, geology, planetary science except insofar as they shed light on the origin and history of life. This is no doubt a moral failing–I should cherish each and every object in creation for its own sake and not because it bears on some big abstract humanoid principle–but there it is.

I go on vacation, and scitech issues follow me. Yesterday my family and I were taking a ferry from Nantucket Island to Hyannis, and I was idly gazing southward toward Martha’s Vineyard when I noticed a spire, shaped like the Eiffel Tower, on the horizon. A crewman confirmed that this is a test version of one of the wind turbines that some authorities have proposed could supply the islands with cheap, renewable power.

Opponents, notably the Kennedys, who have a compound in Hyannis, have fought the 400-foot wind turbines because they will mar their seaside view. Others, notably my wife, worry about the impact on birds.

As I was staring at the needle, wondering what a good environmentalist is supposed to think, I fell into conversation with a white-haired gent who turned out to be a retired utilities-industry consultant. He knew quite a bit about wind turbines, as it turned out. He said they still aren’t very economical; they need subsidies to be competitive with coal. He was worried about the bird issue, too, and possible leakage of lubrication chemicals from underwater transformers. He thought it made much more sense to put wind farms in low-population, high-wind areas, like the southwest or midwest. He was tough-minded, fair-minded, knowledgable without being overbearing, with no discernable axe to grind—just what you want in an expert.

This morning, I found more solid info on wind farms—and lots of other energy alternatives–in the September Scientific American, a special issue on “Energy’s Future: Beyond Carbon.” The article on nuclear power was a bit too positive for my tastes, but it was hardly a polemic, and it was packed with info. All the authors seem to be experts like the gentleman I ran into on the Nantucket ferry. This is the kind of scitech journalism that used to make me proud to work at Sci Am: authoritative, lucid, thorough, balanced, timely, important. Well done, guys.

Some readers have responded skeptically to my suggestion in the last post that mathematics might be outrunning our cognitive capacities, so I thought I’d follow up with the cheapest trick in journalism, an appeal to authority. But what an authority!

In 1994, I traveled to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to talk to the mathematician Andre Weil. The string theorist Ed Witten had demanded that I profile several mathematicians as penance for having written favorably about the truth-undermining philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, and Weil was at the top of Witten’s list. Ed Witten is a very smart man, and so I took his advice.

Weil was known as the last of the “universal mathematicians,” who could claim to have mastered all realms of mathematics. (Hilbert, I suppose, would also have merited this moniker.) The brother of the mystical French philosopher Simone Weil, Andre Weil was a founding member of Bourbaki, the legendary, semi-secret band of French mathematicians who sought to make their field more rigorous and cohesive in the 1930s. Weil’s work, some of which he completed while imprisoned as a suspected spy just before World War II, laid the foundations for advances such as Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem in 1993.

Weil was 88 years old when I spoke to him, but he was still formidably keen of mind. He opined that no one could become a universal mathematician any more, because mathematics had become much too complex. “When I was much younger, I thought there was a danger that mathematics might be stifled by the abundance of mediocre mathematics being produced. And now I am inclined to think that its greatest danger is that too much good mathematics is being produced. Things are going too fast. Nobody can keep up with it all.”

Thus sayeth the last universal mathematician.

At its best, writings about advanced mathematics describe it as a mysterious, magical realm, tangentially linked to the world in which we live. Only a few strange, obsessive souls have the wherewithal to gain entrance to this realm, and even fewer return bearing with them a precious truth. Or purportive truth, because the vast majority of us—and even a majority of trained mathematicians–must take these claims of mathematical revelation on faith.

These thoughts are brought to mind by “Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery” an article by Dennis Overbye in the Science Times. Overbye reports that a reclusive Russian geometer, Grigory Perelman, may have solved one of the great problems in mathematics, Poincare’s conjecture, a radical proposal about topology posed by Henri Poincare in 1904. Perelman posted his tentative proof on the internet in 2002, came to the U.S. to lecture on it and then vanished back into Russia, where no one can seem to find him.

Overbye’s article mentions that Perelman’s expertise is in differential geometry, which is “essential to, among other things, relativity and string theory.” Could Perelman’s mathematical work help theoretical physicists seeking a unified theory of nature break out of their current impasse, as Peter Woit predicts in his book Not Even Wrong?

Perhaps. Several experts have amplified Perelman’s rather short, cryptic writings into 1,000 pages of detailed argumentation, which other mathematicians are trying to evaluate. Is the proof proven? No one can say for sure yet. We must await the verdict of the cognoscenti.

This episode bolsters my conviction that mathematics is outrunning the cognitive capacities of ordinary and even extraordinary humans. “We’re not very well adapted for thinking about the space-time continuum or the Riemann hypothesis,” the mathematician Ronald Graham once told me. “We’re designed for picking berries or avoiding being eaten.”

A pat for Philip E. Ross, whose article in the August Scientific American, “The Expert Mind,” states that the “preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.”

Ross’s article focuses on chess, called “the Drosophila of cognitive science” because it serves as a testbed for theories of cognition. Phil has written a lot about chess; as his bio points out, he plays himself, and his teenage daughter Laura is “a master who outranks him by 199 points.” The article presents evidence that motivation and hard work more than innate ability explain success in chess as well as in other fields, such as music, mathematics and sports.

The article seems to contradict The Bell Curve, which I’ve been thrashing lately. “The Expert Mind” also presents a counterpoint to a May 1998 Scientific American article, with the deceptively bland title “The Genetics of Cognitive Abilities and Disabilities” The authors, geneticists Robert Plomin and John C. DeFries, present evidence for “a substantial role for heredity in molding the components of intellect” and argue that scientists should seek specific genes for cognitive ability. In fact, Plomin claims to have found genes correlated with high IQ, feeding speculation that one day parents will be able to order supersmart “designer babies.” To the best of my knowledge, Plomin’s fndings remain uncorroborated.

Now editor of IEEE Spectrum Online, Phil Ross is an old friend, with whom I worked at Scientific American in the 1990s. And so of course I had to put him on the spot by asking him if he thinks the research he presented in “Expert Mind” contradicts the view of intelligence set forth in Plomin’s article and The Bell Curve.

Phil answered:

It’s true that most “expertise experts” are like Henry Higgins: they think they could turn just about anyone into just about kind of expert, so long as no insurmountable organic defect got in the way.
But such research, by itself, can’t disprove the argument of The Bell Curve, which (as I recall) was that intrinsic intellectual ability varies and that the variance affects prospects for success in life. First, expertise isn’t quite the same as intelligence, because it’s specific to a field; second, expertise doesn’t necessarily breed success. There are a lot of pretty-good singers and actors waiting tables in New York City, and most chess grandmasters would eat better if they waited tables, too.
One more thing: these studies test how people master knowledge, not how they add to it. Most experts–including doctors, lawyers, even garden-variety scientists–have never made a meaningful discovery in their lives. For all we know, the intellectual pioneers really do have that thing called talent.

I responded: Just a couple more questions: Do you think geneticists will ever find a “chess gene”? And if such a gene exists, do you think Laura might have it?

Phil responded:

If she has it, then I must conclude that its expression begins to diminish slowly at puberty and ends oh, about now. She hasn’t played a competitive game since winning $6000 at the U.S. Championship, back in February. Last week she bought a guitar, and since then, she’s been plinking away at it nonstop.
But wait! That provides a genetic explanation why so many chess masters have been good at music:
* Philidor, first master of modern times, was also a famous composer in his day, and his bust still stands in the Paris Opera
* Smyslov, World Champion 1957-58, was forced by the Commies to go into chess instead of opera singing, which is what he really wanted to do
* Taimanov, best known now for losing to Fischer 6-0, was one of the leading four-handed pianists in the world (he lost that string to his bow when the other two hands divorced him).

In the post More Templeton Bashing,  I raised fundamental questions about the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which was created with funds from the Templeton Foundation and supports literally far-out research on where the universe came from and so on. I received the following response from Anthony Aguirre, associate scientific director of FQXi and assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who “has worked on a wide variety of topics in theoretical cosmology, ranging from intergalactic dust to galaxy formation to gravity physics to the large-scale structure of inflationary universes and the arrow of time.”

Your posting makes several points worthy of comment, both in terms of my own opinions, and some clarifications with regard to FQXi, of which I am associate scientific director (but alas, not yet  a “big name”.)

A key assertion is that scientists should be on their guard against a challenge from religious fundamentalists that seek to undermine science in support of some religious/political agenda.  I (and I speak here for the leadership of FQXi as well) could not agree more.  I think we can also all agree that an organization should be judged by a combination of what they say, and what they do, rather than what motives we assume/guess/assert are behind their words and actions.  Interested parties should make these assessments for themselves with an open, careful and critical mind.

In terms of FQXi as a case in point, JTF has been very generous not just financially, but in helping us to set up FQXi just as we wanted — as an independent institution making its own scientific decisions, and seeking to grow from its seed funding from JTF by gaining new donors.  We have worked hard to be transparent about all of this, and it is spelled out in detail on the FQXI FAQ .  The results of the first FQXi RFP will also make clear that FQXi is, as we state, an organization devoted to scientific research on foundational questions.  These questions have wide implications, including for philosophy, spirituality, and theology — just as important scientific research always does.  But it is not part of FQXi mission to “reconcile science and religion”, as some articles mistakenly imply.

You make another point that “Particle physics and cosmology in particular have lost much of their credibility because of their fascination with… unconfirmable, metaphysical phenomena.”  This has nothing to do with your other concerns about JTF, as far as I can see, but is a possible criticism of FQXi.  But calling superstrings, for example, “metaphysical phenomena” is just plain wrong.  Something described by a scientific theory, but not yet observed or confirmed, has a name: a “prediction”. It is what scientific theories do.  Now, it is true, and frustrating, that physics and cosmology have been so spectacularly successful that easily testable new theories are very, very hard to come by.  What we have instead are interesting theories that are extremely difficult to test.  This is not a reason to give up, and I and most scientists interested in big questions refuse to do so.  We hope FQXi will help the story to go on.

Anthony, thanks for your gracious, articulate response, and good luck figuring out the riddle of existence. I’d like to know the answer too. I just don’t think there is one.

A couple of comments on responses to my previous post.

Colin raises good points about McClintock. The feminist view of McClintock purveyed by Keller in Feeling has been challenged by other scholars, as the following excerpt from McClintock’s entry in Wikipedia notes: “Since her death, McClintock has been the subject of the biographical work by science historian Nathaniel C. Comfort, in The tangled field : Barbara McClintock’s search for the patterns of genetic control. Comfort’s biography contests some claims about McClintock, described as the ‘McClintock Myth’, which he claims was perpetuated by the earlier biography by Keller. Keller’s thesis was that McClintock was long ignored because she was a woman working in the sciences, while Comfort notes that McClintock was well regarded by her professional peers, even in the early years of her career. While Comfort argues that McClintock was not a victim of sex discrimination, she has been widely written about in the context of women’s studies, and most recent biographical works on women in science feature accounts of her experience. She is held up as a role model for girls in such works of children’s literature as Edith Hope Fine’s Barbara McClintock, Nobel Prize geneticist, Deborah Heiligman’s Barbara McClintock: alone in her field and Mary Kittredge’s Barbara McClintock.”

As for Markk’s suggestion about books on geology, I was leaning toward putting John McPhee’s classic Basin and Range on the list.

Below are 10 additions to “The Stevens 100 Greatest Science Books,” the first 30 of which I posted in May on this blog and which are now archived separately on this website (with new comments). As I said when we introduced the list, these are books that stand out because of their subject matter, their rhetorical style and their impact on science and the rest of culture.

Since one intended outcome of this list is to encourage people to read the books, they must be available from Amazon or other retailers, even if they are not currently in print (although almost all are). As we stated previously, the list is restricted to books published since 1900, and it includes only one book per author.

Speaking of which, I’m substituting The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins for The Blind Watchmaker, which was on the first list. Watchmaker, as several respondents to our first list pointed out, is really just the popular version of the Selfish Gene, which introduced the seminal (sorry, but is any adjective more apt for Dawkins’s work?) term/concept of the title as well as “meme” (the cultural equivalent of genes). It doesn’t hurt that 2006 is the 30^th anniversary of The Selfish Gene, which has been reissued in a special edition and honored in several public events.

These 10 new additions should make it even more obvious that this list is personal, idiosyncratic, arbitrary, not the result of the kind of systematic, scholarly analysis of an entire corpus that, say, the critic Harold Bloom would undertake (although his lists are quirky too). The selections are heavily slanted toward books I’ve actually read–usually while researching an article or book or because I was asked to review them–rather than the much larger group of books that I know through excerpt or reputation.

One respondent objects to the “cheeky” comments on some books and asks, Is the annotation necessary? The answer is: Yes, it is. That’s part of the fun for me. But feel free to object to my remarks. Give us feedback, negative, positive, informational; berate us for sins of commision and omission; pass this list to others and ask them to do the same. There are 60 books to go, and we’re listening.

1. Ackerman, Dianne, A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage, 1991. A lush, lyrical, scholarly, intimate, exuberant exploration of our five sensory portals to reality by the gifted poet and nature writer Ackerman. Like Oliver Sacks, Ackerman uses science to help us rediscover the mystery of our selves.

2. Austin, James, Zen and the Brain, MIT Press, 1998. Too long (844 pages), fragmented and freighted with detail, this book, by a Harvard-trained neurologist and Zen practitioner, contradicts its own dictum that wisdom lies in simplification. Zen and the Brain nonetheless represents one of the best efforts since James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (another Greatest Book) to comprehend mystical experiences both subjectively and objectively, sympathetically and scientifically.

3. Blackmore, Susan, In Search of the Light, Prometheus, 1986. A spectacular marijuana-enhanced out-of-body experience during her college days at Oxford propelled Blackmore into a career as a parapsychology believer and researcher. This memoir tells the story of how the British psychologist gradually, painfully, reluctantly became a psi skeptic—albeit one who still seeks out and finds meaning in altered states, whether induced by meditation or DMT.

4. Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 1962. The chemical industry and its government allies were still attacking Carson as a deluded alarmist when she died in 1964, just two years after the release of her prophetic warning about the devastating consequences of pesticides on birds, fish and other creatures. Her book nonetheless led to a ban on DDT and helped launch the modern environmental movement.

5. Hofstadter, Douglas, Godel, Escher, Bach, Basic Books, 1979. This wildly inventive exploration of recursion, self-referentiality, human and machine minds and all manner of other metatopics by Martin Gardner’s successor as a columnist for Scientific American (Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas was an anagram of Gardner’s Mathematical Games) still exudes an aura of underground cultish geek chic. Hofstadter’s playful style, and especially his dialogues between mythical creatures, spawned many cute copycats (see Stewart, Ian), but none rivals the original.

6. Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Harper & Row, 1954. The British novelist, essayist and seeker helped usher in the psychedelic and New Age eras with this account of his encounter with mescaline, which he claimed revealed “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation, the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” Kids in the sixties read passages like this and thought, How do I get this stuff!

7. Keller, Evelyn Fox, A Feeling for the Organism, Times Books, 1984. The philosopher Keller’s biography of the Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock not only profiles a true original of modern biology and tells the gripping tale of her discovery of “jumping genes”; it also exposes how science ignores findings and ideas outside of the mainstream, particularly when they come from a woman.

8. Minsky, Marvin, The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1985. The legendary eccentric and co-founder of artificial intelligence argues that there will be no single solution for understanding the mind, because it consists of many different components that cooperate and sometimes clash as they try to solve different problems. Reflecting its theme, the book consists not of a continuous, conventional narrative but of one-page essays with titles like “The Causal Now,” “The Power of Negative Thinking” and “Self-Knowledge Is Dangerous.” Like Freud, one of his favorite scientists, Minsky is really offering a theory of his own mind, which doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

9. Teihard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Harper & Row, 1959. Today, the notion that the internet and wi-fi and cell phones and brain chips are bearing us toward some sort of “Omega Point’ in which we collectively achieve meta-cosmic-consciousness is old hat. But the legendary Catholic monk and biologist said it first in this truly strange, visionary work, which fuses evolutionary theory with Christian escatology.

10. Valenstein, Elliott, Great and Desperate Cures, Basic Books, New York, 1986. Lobotomies, insulin-injection, fever inoculation, shock treatments, barbiturates, sleep deprivation, tooth extraction—these are some of the “cures” that psychiatrists used to inflict on hapless victims of mental illness, as the neuroscientist and historian Valenstein reveals in this thorough, well-told history. The Scientologists must love this book, but it’s all too true–and, now that shock treatments and lobotomies are making a comeback, all too relevant.

The influence of the Templeton Foundation, which seeks the reconciliation of science and religion (although it has recently tried to soft-peddle this mission by excising the word “religion” from most of its materials), continues to grow. The Foundation contributed $6 million to create the Foundational Questions Institute (whose acronym is FQXi) to explore cosmic questions that would have difficulty gaining conventional support.

The Foundation’s board and advisory committee includes some big names in physics, including Lee Smolin, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin, and Martin Rees, who all insist that the Templeton money has no strings (no pun intended) attached. The Foundation just issued its first round of grants, for a total of just over $2 million.

An article in Inside Higher Ed titled “Separation of Church and State” quotes the physicist Sean Carroll, who has been quite critical of the Templeton Foundation, saying “as long as the Templeton Foundation doesn’t start trumpeting the [Foundational Questions Institute] as their creation, he wouldn’t have a problem applying for a grant.” Say it ain’t so, Sean!

As I stated in my post “The Templeton Effect,” I’ve taken Templeton moola, and my experience exacerbated my concerns about its influence on science. Particle physics and cosmology in particular have lost much of their credibility because of their fascination with parallel universes, superstrings, wormholes, higher dimensions, the anthropic principle (which I like to call cosmology’s version of creationism) and other unconfirmable, metaphysical phenomena. In fact, Lee Smolin frets in his new book “The Trouble With Physics” that physics “has lost its way” and is “hitting the wall.” Do he, Wilczek, Tegmark, Rees, Guth and the other scientists associated with the institute really think they and their colleagues will benefit from hitching themselves to a pro-religion group run by an evangelical conservative Christian—especially in an era when science is increasingly being challenged by religious fundamentalists, including President Bush?

First, a correction:

I’ve written about the 2005 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion both on this blog and in two articles, one for Scientific American and the other for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In both articles I said that during the fellowship another journalist began to doubt his Christian faith because of his exposure to the ideas of Richard Dawkins, one of the fellowship’s speakers.

That journalist—whom I like and respect, although our views on ultimate matters are radically different–recently informed me that I misunderstood him; his doubts really stemmed from an ongoing internal process and had nothing to do with reading or listening to Dawkins. In an email, the journalist said: “I find [Dawkins] to be completely unconvincing in terms of argument, because his initial standpoint is so harshly fundamentalist as to strip his points of all merit.”

“I’m afraid that other people’s arguments generally fail to change my mind about things,” he added. “But I am able to change my own mind given space and time.”

These remarks came to mind as I read “Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables” by Cornelia Dean in last week’s Science Times about a flood of new books by scientists on the relationship of science versus religion.

The books by believers, all Christians, include The Language of God by Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project; God’s Universe by Owen Gingerich, an astronomer (and speaker at the Templeton fellowship last summer); and Evolution and Christian Faith, by Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist.

Books taking the agnostic, skeptical position include Breaking the Spell by the philosopher Daniel Dennett; Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by the biologist Lewis Wolpert (who once became so infuriated with me over my book The End of Science that I thought he was going to punch me); and The God Delusion by Dawkins (how does this man write so fast? Could it be that he has made a pact with SATAN??!!).

The more these books appear, the more I wonder what purpose they serve, beyond supplying ammo for people already entrenched in their positions.

My last book, Rational Mysticism, represents my best attempt to figure out where I stand on the science-religion debate. As far as I can tell, my book didn’t change any minds. It appeals to readers who are skeptical seekers, like me. They write and say, “Thanks John for expressing the doubts I had about enlightened gurus!” Or nirvana, or astral projection, etc. The book doesn’t seem to have budged the belief of any adamant worshippers of Jesus or Buddha, heaven or enlightenment, ESP or TM. Believers who bother to read my book and comment on it generally tell me I’m blinded by arrogance and ignorance and so on.

My book kept me usefully occupied for a few years, put some cash in my pocket, gave me an excuse to meet some crazy characters and to relive the sixties a bit, and helped me think through my views more clearly. I have no regrets.

But do any of these books on science versus religion actually change minds?

A followup to my last post:

The British magazine Prospect just sent me its August issue, which contains my review of Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong. Coincidentally, the issue has a cover story titled “Born to Be Bad: Is There a Criminal Personality?” The headline is superimposed over a half-shadowed, malevolent male face.

The article notes that a small percentage of males commit a large percentage of crime, and a group led by Terrie Moffitt of London’s Institute for Psychiatry has linked male criminality—or more broadly antisocial behavior–to a variant of a gene that produces the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, which regulates neurotransmitter levels in the brain. The variant of the MAOA gene produces lower-than-average levels of the enzyme. The linkage is particularly strong for males abused in childhood. Three other groups have supposedly confirmed this finding.

Moffitt and others have suggested that children should be tested for this low-MAOA gene; both the children who test positive and their parents could receive training aimed at reducing the childrens’ antisociality. These at-risk males might also receive drugs that counteract the effects of their low MAOA levels (although no such drug exists yet).

Moffitt and others studying the genetics of crime have been accused of “genetic fundamentalism” by other scientists. The author of “Born to Be Bad,” David Rose, a journalist for The Observor, notes that when he gave a talk on these findings to a group of lawyers, the response was “viscerally critical.”

My criticism is rational, not visceral. The track record of this sort of research has been awful. In 1993 I was working on an article on behavioral genetics for Scientific American when by chance I saw an ad for the old Phil Donahue talk show, introduced with the teaser “How to Tell If Your Child’s a Serial Killer!” On the show, “experts” recommended testing kids for an extra Y chromosome, which could supposedly turn them into cold-blooded murderers. This belief was based on studies done in the 1960s suggesting that males with two Y chromosomes are “hyperaggressive” and at risk of becoming violent criminals. But followup studies found no significant correlation between double-Y syndrome and violent behavior.

Scientists claiming to have found the genetic basis for crime have never been right before, so why should we believe them now?