ASM044 Listening to God, Axioms, and Dinosaur Intelligence

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listening to god axioms and dinosaur intelligence all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the podcast where i say exactly the same thing to start off the show uh it's the post thanksgiving stuff full of turkey in my stomach edition of the show i've been traveling a lot had kind of a weird a couple of months in terms of personal emergencies and crises but the show is back on schedule now i'm not traveling for weeks and weeks so let's do a podcast and get it started hi mike this is kat from michigan my question today is about dinosaurs they lived on this earth for over 100 million years yet never developed intelligent life meanwhile placental mammals have only been around some 65 million years and here we are discussing god and science what makes us capable of developing quickly into the intelligent creatures that we are and dinosaurs not also a bonus question if dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out and mammals hadn't taken over would they have eventually developed intelligent life of their own thanks mike it does seem curious that humans are intelligent in a seemingly much faster time frame than dinosaurs but i think when we look at evolution in that way we make a common mistake and that is to view evolution as having some inevitable outcome and we understand the theory of evolution doesn't have any predictable direction or preferred solutions now we do see things like evolutionary convergence which we've talked about in previous episodes of this program but it's important to understand that evolution's only goal is to create adaptations to the environment for example humans are no more evolved than chimpanzees or alligators or bacteria all life on the planet today has been facing the pressures of natural selection and is the result of a relentless optimization process that rewards forms of life that can roll with the changes that is thrown at them via the natural landscape and other animals attempting to survive we tend to serve ecological niches and if you look at the dinosaurs at one point in history they filled almost all of the ecological niches which today are filled with mammals now if you look at the way evolution created life on this planet life actually took a long time to appear at all the earth was vacant of life for billions of years of its four and a half billion your life and once life did appear it took a very long time to turn into complex multi-cellular life and we think that's likely related to oxygen levels in the atmosphere most evolutionary biologists think that cyanobacteria pave the way for more complex life by creating larger amounts of oxygen as a percentage of our atmosphere and also some evolutionary biologists suspect that a sun in its middle ages that is is not a new star but uh getting a little older might produce you know more stability for planets in that habitable zone that golden distance from a sun where life is possible because liquid water can exist now also interesting is that earth's evolutionary timetable shows these really long periods of relative stasis that have little spurts of rapid development in it and so the fact that the dinosaurs existed for a long time they also had a longer period of stasis than placental mammals and we don't actually understand why that happens and many scientists think that that's not something intrinsic to evolution but is earth-specific but it's it's not a solved problem in the sciences nobody can tell you with great confidence why you have these periods of stasis so first of all it's not inevitable to think that intelligence is some preferred solution that evolution is moving toward we intuitively think that but it's reasonable to imagine that on other planets that are similar to earth evolution never appeared and never will appear because there are other solutions that do a perfectly suitable job of filling ecological niches in fact you can make an argument that evolution or intelligence isn't that great a solution because large brains are so expensive metabolically and because they create these really elongated periods of helplessness for infants and even create risk for the birthing process in the case of placental mammals uh our big heads are hard to get through our mother's hips and so there's there's a reasonable argument to make that intelligence uh takes a while to pay off and it therefore might be tough to be rewarded by evolution and even once we had large brains we didn't create uh culture and art and tool use and radio telescopes for most of the period that we were anatomically modern now all that aside believe it or not dinosaurs do appear as if they were moving towards greater levels of intelligence over their time of dominance on this planet there's something called the encephalization quotient the eq which is a way of looking at brain to body mass ratios relative to body size and predictable outcomes compared to other animals of your body size it's a better predictor of intelligence than a simple uh brain mass to body mass ratio and when we look at eq we see a family of dinosaurs called the troodons who were avian dinosaurs who had an eq like six times that of contemporary dinosaurs something that we would see similar in birds today and if you look at birds today gray parrots for example you see animals that are remarkably intelligent you see humans don't have some exclusive market to intelligence or sentience on the planet we're just fortunate that in addition to large brains we also have an upright bipedal posture and we have hands that are good at manipulating the environment so other animals that reach similar levels of intelligence the to us don't have those same tools to then utilize that intelligence you know octopi are very intelligent but they're short-lived uh gray parrots and other birds can be very intelligent but they can only manipulate the environment with beaks and with relatively less dexterous uh feet chimpanzees of course are relatively intelligent but their hands aren't nearly as dexterous as ours and they aren't as intelligent elephants are very intelligent their trunk has limited dexterity as well we've reached kind of a golden balance uh that allows us to utilize our intelligence in interesting and useful ways and of course we also attach that to a pretty remarkable ability to create vocalizations and therefore language and so maybe part of the question is is why are humans special would something like us appear maybe we do also know that mammals were moving towards larger eq ratios but they were smaller on average than even the avian dinosaurs of the period so when you have extinction events and eco-catastrophes survival tends to favor the small they need less resources to survive they tend to have shorter life spans and therefore can respond more rapidly through mutation and reproduction to new and dynamic environments and if you had a small intelligent animal in a large intelligent animal you know after an eco catastrophe the small animal probably had an edge and that's why our rat like our rodent-like ancestors were so successful after the most recent extinction event on this planet we can imagine on other worlds there could be human-like intelligences we can imagine that possibly the troodons are a sign that eventually there would have been sentient intelligent civilization producing animals on this planet but the fact is we don't actually know those things in science when there is an absence of evidence there's also an absence of conclusion and so when we talk about human level intelligence in non-human animals at this point in history all we can do is imagine and conjecture and look for answers today in the stars [Music] occasionally i let good friends get a question on the show they have to submit them just like you do but when i see them i'll pull them out of the queue and i'll be honest this is one of those times where somebody gets unfair access to skip to the front of the line this question is from madison and she's my oldest daughter so you're about to get a sneak peek into my home life with this question and the question is how do i listen to god i've heard from god so many times in my life when i was seven i heard god telling me i needed to accept jesus just as clearly as i'd heard someone talking to me only this voice came from somewhere inside of me but it didn't seem to be me it seemed to be someone else and i heard that voice as god other times in my life i've heard god tell me to pray for people even ask people if i could pray with them and i've done that i once sat in church and heard god telling me i should go to guatemala to meet people there and i did as i got older i started to wonder if all those times i'd heard from god were just things that were happening in my own head and for a while i believed that that there was no god at all and everything that i thought was god was just my brain sometime later i heard from god again and it confused me because i didn't think that god was real at all and this time i heard from god more powerfully than i'd ever heard from god before and as i've grown older i've realized that there's a problem of thinking about god in this way that god is somewhere else and sometimes we listen and hear and other times we don't i've grown to understand that god is everywhere all the time it's less about listening to god and more about becoming aware of god's presence all the time i don't try to hear god tell me something specific as much anymore or listen to god speak in words but instead become aware of the way that god is around me all the time the way that god is making life possible and the universe possible so here's how i listen to god today one i pray every day i talk to god every day and in my time of prayer i spend some time in silent contemplation silent listening silent awareness that i didn't bring myself into the world but instead god brought me into the world that i did not do anything to create the air that i breathe and instead that air is just a gift that every moment i am sustained by something else and i call that god when we talk to god that's called prayer but it's not the only way that we can pray there are other forms of prayer we call meditation that involve mostly quiet and stillness and a growing awareness that god is everywhere i also read the bible now i stopped doing that for a while because it confused me but these days i read the scriptures again as the stories of people who like me have wondered what god's like and what god wants with the world and in those stories i find a reflection of myself i find people who want to serve god but are often confused about how to do so of course another way i listen to god is by going to church and being around people who love me and love god now church can be difficult i've learned that different churches are comfortable with different ideas and that not every church is for every person and the reason we have so many churches and so many ways of approaching god is so that everyone can find some group of people who will both love them as they are and invite them to become who they can be by doing that what we hear god i hear god when i listen to pastor betsy preach from our pulpit at church and i hear god in the love and encouragement that all these people share for each other when they pray for each other when they show up to the hospital to care for one another god speaks in that time of course i also find god in science when i study how things work i see the ways that god moves in the world just as clearly as i do at church or in the scripture i find god in nature when i walk through the woods i become aware of the complexity and intricacy of life on this planet and i see myself as part of a larger drama unfolding all around me all the time in a way i can't hear sitting in my house or in the middle of a city and yet sometimes in crowded cities i also find god on subways or airplanes when i see people moving through their lives and doing their best to do good to be honest most of all i find god here at home with your mom and with you and macy because when i'm with you i feel a love so powerful that i cannot explain it i don't have any words to explain how much i love you and i love my family and i'm really good with words and in those moments when i sit with you and your sister and hold your hand when i walk across a parking lot where we say our prayers i hear god most powerfully that this is why there is a world that this is why we are here to express love and caring and compassion in a universe that is otherwise fairly cold we are in our own way a light a reflection of god's creative spark and so i do most of my listening to god by loving my family i'm so proud of you thank you for sending a question hi mike my name is kelsey i really love your show and i just want to thank you for giving people like us a space just ask these questions about faith and life and science and my question is about spiritual warfare uh you hear christians talk about it all the time it's just a constant discussion of oh like either people don't believe in it at all or it's like there's a devil behind every bush i'm personally in a very ambiguous place in life and so i just kind of wanted to ask a question about it uh part one of my question is is there any science behind why people believe in spiritual warfare is there anything that compels people to believe in it besides a purely scriptural just bible-based belief and the second part of my question is do you have an axiom for spiritual warfare i found your axioms on the bible and god and jesus and prayer to be extremely helpful to me and i was just wondering if there's anything useful about believing in spiritual warfare or even concepts that relate to it so i was just wondering if you had an axiom for that and yeah thanks for listening to my question i get a lot of questions every week about spiritual warfare and i've answered it once or twice on the program but you definitely intrigued me with a spiritual warfare axiom which i didn't have one before this question i took a shot at one that i'll give at the end of this answer thereby creating a story gap and encouraging people to listen to the rest of the answer so uh one spiritual dualism is a completely natural human behavior no question that this is documented it's almost universal in anthropology every culture goes through a phase at which point things we see in the world are explained by some unseen dualistic narrative now part of that may be something that oxford found is that humans have a bias to believe purpose-based explanations we don't like to feel like we're the victims of random chance we don't want to believe that the hurricane comes simply because of differences in temperature on the earth's surface right that's not a very satisfying explanation for why your house was blown down and so when early humans developed language we believe they started to look at the reigns and and look at events through the lens of the movement of spirits of demons of gods shamans entered culture this is pretty well understood anthropologically so yeah it's a completely normal thing even trained scientists if they're presented with multiple explanations for a problem they tend to pick the purpose-based explanation even if it less accurately describes the phenomenon so for example if you were to ask people why polar bears are white most people say they're white because they need to blend in with the snow not because random mutation favored a random mutation right it's just a it's a natural bias now when we talk about you know are they useful i've got to be honest i tend to look at spiritual warfare narratives with very critical lens because i see the ways they can so easily be used for harm for example telling people that they're suffering because they've done something and angered god or that god is letting them be tested by these dark forces i just don't think that's a helpful thing to say to someone who's suffering and i would say to the person who says that how do you know that you know god is punishing you but this can even be um more benign with intent and still malignant with impact um everything happens for a reason i don't know that that's the best thing to tell someone who's just faced a crippling loss in their life who is going through tremendous suffering i mean you can say everything happens for a reason in physics determinism but that's not comforting at all and to include every single event as some grand narrative some a piece of architecture and design i just think it can be it hurts people now on the other hand spiritual warfare narratives can be helpful because they can create a situation where one feels empowered against incredibly difficult circumstances in the wake of natural disasters for example people's faith leads them to believe that god will redeem them and then they work toward that redemption right so they have this embattled disempowered state and their belief that they can appeal to higher authorities gives them the courage to act so from a completely non-religious perspective which my axioms don't make any religious assumptions that's how they're built there can be a positive spin on spiritual warfare narratives now that would mean uh we have to be conditional spiritual warfare narratives are beneficial when they're used for empowerment but are harmful anytime they are used to justify suffering or judge people's life circumstance and attach it to unseen forces working against them i'm sure i'll get pushed back on that i've only given it about five minutes thought so i'm sure someone out there has got better thoughts on the subject with that said i gave a shot at a spiritual warfare axiom for you this is uh definitely beta but i sort of looked at it this way spiritual warfare is at least a way of understanding the rhythm of triumph and suffering in our lives both from human interaction with other humans and human interaction with the natural world now i don't have an even if yet because i haven't really figured out how to tease apart when spiritual warfare is beneficial and when it's detrimental so i might work on that later and update my axioms but there you go a brand new axiom for spiritual warfare and uh keep them coming i mean this this is obviously something that's pressing to a lot of people because i i get at least a dozen questions about spiritual warfare every week uh in the ask science mike inbox [Music] our last question comes from the email inbox and it reads hi science mike i'm your biggest fan giant grand slash winkyface my husband and i have been listening to your podcast for a few months now and like most people we binge listened at first because we find your views so refreshing we both grew up conservative evangelical and have been moving away from those traditions in the last few years one of our biggest moves has been away from traditional gender roles and more toward egalitarianism in doing so we've both become feminists yay that's me saying yay nothing as feminists we've noticed how pervasive soft sexism is in our society one example of this sexism is addressing groups of people as guys yesterday my husband listened to episode six and called me afterwards he relayed that it was a great episode and wanted me to listen to it but he ended the conversation by saying mandy mike says you guys in this episode and others you should really write him and ask him to stop saying you guys so here it is and there's a letter within a letter i love it dear science mike while i do not believe that your purposely contributing to patriarchy your use of you guys is when addressing a mixed gendered group you're actually perpetuating soft sexism by referring to all people as guys this is easily proof by switching it out to you girls in places you would have normally said you guys try it out and you'll see how blatantly the sexism is when switched the use of you guys could easily be switched to you listeners or you people or you all i know you'd like that one because you're such an awesome advocate i don't doubt that you will take this into consideration peace out mandy and tony i hope everyone's still with me so one of the things that happens with this program is the listenership is diverse in every way possible it is gender diverse it is racially diverse it is ethnically diverse and it is ideologically diverse so we have very progressive and very conservative listeners and you can spend that politically theologically any way you want to there's a lot of different views so sometimes when i get into feminism or or racial equality or issues like that some of my listeners get frustrated and so some of you would hear that message and you would call it um language police or politically correct policing and so i want to name that and i want to say that if you hold that view i understand your motivation for that at the same time it's my show and i tend to be very empathetic to the cries of traditionally oppressed people groups and that includes women and that's also mandy i have to tell you i agree ever since episode 6 i've been trying to stop saying you guys and yet i do it all the time there's another little quirk in my speech where when i'm vamping for the next thing to say i will use the two words sort of and it drives me nuts so there's two things i want to say first of all i agree that soft sexism is a problem totally unequivocally full stop and here's the other thing even without awareness i still participate in it unknowingly often and so there's there's a there's a rhythm we have to become aware of in social change one is that change is necessary and two is that change takes time so i've been trying to stop using gender specific pronouns when addressing mixed gender groups for a long time and i fail because language isn't completely intentional so much of what we speak is habitual is historical and is is really deep neurological and conditioning and changing patterns of usage is tough and that's especially for me tough for me because i tend to be somewhat gender blind for example it doesn't help me to swap out you girls for you guys because if someone said you girls to a group of of uh mixed gender people i wouldn't bat an eye or even notice uh i think that's because i'm relatively obtuse so all i can do is try to condition myself to do this less over time uh and believe me every time i listen to the podcast and i hear the words you guys or sort of i flinch a little bit i and when i'm on stage i flinch even as i say it i occasionally remember to correct myself the fact is human brains for all of their plasticity and all their remarkable flexibility also gets stuck in ruts and i face this problem all the time i try to avoid gender specific language for god and yet i call god him all the time it's just a matter of reconditioning over time so i hope you can understand that i'm completely sympathetic to your email that i agree with you completely and you will probably hear me say you guys again and in doing so contribute to soft sexism and that is the paradox of humanity we're not consistent logical rational actors we're a messy competing set of neural feedback loops working with an imperfect memory system to move and act in the world with a very limited model of reality and that's why i tend to be both an advocate and someone who works for the social economic and political liberation of oppressed people groups and someone who is remarkably patient with folks who are behind the curve ball socially because i understand that change takes time and that it's incredibly difficult for human brains and i understand that because of how difficult it is for me well there's another episode of ask science mike um i'm not traveling for a few weeks while i finish up my book and so i'm going to get back to a better rhythm of the program of working with my patrons to pick questions for the show if you'd like to be involved with that go to ask sciencemike.com and click on the patreon button because the show needs your support to survive i do this for a living and if you enjoy the show i could really use a buck a month or three bucks a month or even five bucks a month to help uh not only pay for the expense of the show but help me have the time to do the show instead of uh holding a feed me sign out on the street corner so if you love the program uh every dollar helps patrons make the show possible also i really love doing ask science mike live and i want to do more of them i think the show is better live and i also think it's really incredible what happens when i show up in a city because i usually partner with a church and any church that would bring me in tends to kind of be of a certain mentality a certain openness and because of that when people in that city show up who just really don't do church or haven't done church in a long time there's this remarkable serendipity of people who've been searching for a community finding one so if that sounds interesting to you and you're with a church or other religious institution and you'd like to bring ass science mike live to your city i'd like to come and we have a special thing going on there where it's it's less expensive than bringing me just for a traditional talk and so if you're interested in that just go to ask sciencemike.com click on the book mic button in the upper right hand corner and fill out a form and mention you'd like to bring ask science mike live and that'll put you kind of in a different path than than people that bring me in to speak that said i also love coming to give talks i give a talk where i i tell my story i talk about the science of doubt i talk about uh even things you want me to talk about if you have a specific topic you'd like me to cover through the lenses of science and faith i i do custom talk same thing just go to sciencemike.com click on the book mic button in the upper right hand corner now lots of questions have been coming in and really really good questions so there's a pretty big backlog of questions right now i'm trying to work through but new questions are always welcome you can do that on the website at sciencemike.com uh or you can use the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube and i'll find those it's really good to be back i'm i'm excited as much as i love traveling with everything that's been going on in my life with injuries illness and death and the frequent travel schedule it's good to be back in my native soil for at least a few weeks uh thanks for listening everybody and i will see you next week [Music]