ASM025 Fractals, War, and the Science of Inside Out

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fractals war and the science of inside out all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life listen a lot of travel coming up a lot of events i'm going to be at the wild goose festival along with the liturgists this week in hot springs north carolina in redlands california next week in new york city the week after that tons of stuff head to mikemakark.com events to learn more but for now let's get it started hey mike very appreciative of you and anybody who helps you on this podcast it has been a tremendous help to me in my walk with god and my relationships with others i am a deconstructing christian currently dating an agnostic girl we have theological discussion often which can range from invigorating to frustrating as you might imagine some people are thrilled and some people are not thrilled i was wondering what the science is behind being unequally yoked what that phrase actually means to you and if you have any other advice on the issue thank you very much mike really appreciate it you know this is a question that gets sent into the show constantly it's been a recorded question many times it's been a question that people type even more than that unequally yoked everybody's really concerned about it uh what's the deal this is specifically a phrase used in the new testament in a couple different contexts one is unequally yoked is another another is mixing light and dark modern christians interpret to mean that christians shouldn't date non-christians and i actually think that's a a reasonable interpretation of that text well excuse me not date people didn't date in biblical times but they shouldn't be you know involved with in serious or intimate relationships and some could even interpret that to mean uh partnerships as well as in business partnerships um but the the metaphor here is an agricultural one a yoke is something you put on an animal typically over its shoulders in order to use that animal for work specifically pulling work and to unequally yoke would be to yoke an ox to a horse for example and those two animals have different characteristics in the work they're able to do an ox can pull harder longer than a horse but a horse can of course move faster than an ox so they're not going to be able to pull a plow straight if you unequally yoke them and that's the metaphor we're using but what does that mean in terms of science what's the science behind being unequally yoked well that's interesting many studies and surveys do show that interfaith marriages are a bit more likely to end in divorce than marriages between people of the same faith tradition or faith heritage and furthermore that the more difference there is between the faith of the members of the marriage the more likely it is that's going to create marital strife or divorce you can imagine that the difference between you know a southern baptist and a non-denominational evangelical marriage would be a lot different than a muslim mormon marriage for example there's great differences in the faith traditions of the latter than there is in the former interestingly enough even marriages between people of the same faith have different success rates for example statistically marriages between atheists are the least likely to end in divorce and some studies show that people who self-identify as born-again christians are the most likely to have a marriage that ends in divorce now a lot of people pick that data apart especially with something i call the no true scotsman fallacy basically those aren't real christians is the defense regardless what we're talking about is the labels that people assign to themselves and so people are self-identified atheists in a marriage more likely to stay together than people who are self-identified born again christians but oddly enough it's not theological issues or discussions that drive these difficulties in marriage it's very practical are we going to have a christmas tree are our kids going to be baptized it's those ways that faith intersects every day living that causes interfaith marriages to have some trouble now i don't think people from different faith traditions marrying is some death sentence for a marriage i think there is some wisdom in this passage that it's an easier way to keep a marriage together if people have similar religious backgrounds but if people hold their faith in humility with a bit of openness this doesn't have to be something that is damaging to marriage and in fact we're talking about a couple percentage points here uh this is one factor it's not a it's not an automatic you know divorce if you marry someone from a different faith tradition i would say that the more different your backgrounds are the more you're going to have to be intentional about compromise and communication but any marriage is made better when you talk more and you compromise on important issues i've been married 15 years very happily and compromising communication is a huge huge part of marital success interfaith or not our next question came in via email from my buddy lanny donahoe he asks i have done some study and know a bit about the amazing concepts of three things that i think are all related basically patterns in the universe i would love to hear you talk about fibonacci numbers fractals and spirals it would be great to hear you give examples of what all these are and then to see if you have thoughts about how these patterns might affect us in our daily lives our thought processes our relationships etc i've heard recently that even the stock market can be predicted to a degree based on fibonacci numbers but i am wondering if these things exist in unique ways inside our brains and in our bodies and even in our relationships there you go well the first thing and this is critical on this question is i'm not a math whiz and when you're talking about fractals and the fibonacci sequence and the spirals you can produce in either you're talking about pure mathematics and even a form of mathematics that uh is halfway computer science it's not possible to execute these equations without a lot of computational power and so i'm going to speak by synthesizing what i've studied mathematicians talk about i spent a long time researching this question more than i've spent on any question in the history of the program and i'm still sure there's some problems with this answer i bet a math phd or two that listens to the program is going to email me and i'll have a correction in a future episode so i've got to start with a disclaimer we are going deep deep into math here now the fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers where each sequential digit is the sum of the prior two numbers so if i were to read some of the numbers in that sequence they would go 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 etcetera etcetera and the way that works is zero plus one is one one plus one is two one plus two is three two plus three is five three plus five is eight and so forth and so forth you're adding the series on top of itself now the fibonacci sequence or fibonacci numbers are related to another concept which is fractals fractals are non-linear equations that generate a repeating pattern as they scale so it's a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set either one that when you graph it displays a pattern at every scale the mandelbrot set or set i don't really know how to pronounce it uh people on youtube did both when you zoom in or zoom out you see a similar pattern of circles with smaller circles off of it or in nature if you look at a tree the way branches branch off a trunk branch off to sub-branches branch off to leaves and then leaves actually branch out inside their own structure those all kind of look like the whole tree that's a fractal in nature the golden ratio on the other hand is uh is a ratio that is derived from the fibonacci sequence and other number sequences and honestly go to the show notes at asksciencemike.com i'll have links it's way easier to understand visually it's basically 1.618 i think and it's aspect ratio you know if you think of 16 divided by 9 is the aspect ratio of an hdtv right this is an aspect ratio of a particular rectangle so what we're talking about a ratio between two things and what's funny about the golden ratio is it's not actually a ratio because it's not a rational number it repeats indefinitely and that means there's nothing in nature that actually has the golden ratio a little piece of trivia for you all that will make more sense if you go to the show notes now when you repeat the fibonacci sequence using geometric figures that are squares of the fibonacci numbers so for example one would be a square with one unit of length on each side two would be a square whose sides were twice as long and his area was more than twice as long because that's how squares work three it you keep going up you're lengthening the size of these squares and you stack them together to make triangles the more you repeat that process the closer you get to a rectangle whose proportions are the golden ratio and it's kind of a fractal and if you draw a spiral that starts in the corner of 1 1 through this triangle you get something that looks like a nautilus shale shale man it is southern science mike today a nautilus shell sometimes the accent just comes out and i like more than usual and i don't know why i love my left temporal lobe anyway so all these things we see in nature and plants and animals and the formations of stars and galaxies here on earth bee reproduction is perfectly represented by the fibonacci sequence because male bees only have one parent and female bees always have two pine cones the spirals on the bottom of pine cones will usually add up to fibonacci numbers and flower petals tend to be a fibonacci number lots of things in the natural world tend to not exclusively but very very frequently show up as numbers in the fibonacci sequence now more generally fractals appear in nature all the time and fractals are basically an algorithm an algorithm something in a computer is nothing but taking the same step and repeating it over and over okay so when you have a fractal these steps create a feedback loop and trends emerge regardless of scale so if you look at the stock market a graph of the stock market for a day a week a month and a year and you take the labels off they are all going to have similar trends and similar movements it would be hard for you to pick which was which trees typically are defined by a fractal equation as well so if you look at the branch of a tree the branch of the tree is kind of shaped like the entire tree and different species of tree have different equations that kind of govern the way they grow which is one way we make video games and generate trees using fractal equations now fractals and the fibonacci sequence is not good at making specific predictions but is instead good at helping you understand the behavior of a large data set in probabilistic terms so about how likely is a particular stock to rise or fall tomorrow or the entire market is it likely to go up or down in a year and by how much and how likely is that the more data you have and the less specific the inquiry the better fractals are at helping you understand your data set now the people who spend the most energy using math to trade stocks are also the most secretive about their math because today stock trading is largely done on specialized supercomputers that execute unknown math this is top secret math institutional traders don't share it they don't get to publish their work because that's how they make the most money is by tweaking their algorithms to best predict the stock market now math is great at describing reality that's the underpinning of science really and fractals help us deal with data sets that are unpredictable to more traditional form of mathematics because of their unbalanced non-linear irrational nature but fractals and the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio and even the spirals derived from them are more interesting in pure mathematics than broad application in the natural world the importance of these sequences tends to be overstated in pop culture so in the design world for example you'll hear that architecture is most beautiful when centered around the golden ratio or you'll hear that art is most beautiful when certain around the golden ratio but studies have actually failed to demonstrate that when you show people different pieces of architecture or art that ascribes more or less close to the golden ratio people show no additional favorability towards things with golden ratio and when you talk about the proportions of the human body when people look at the golden ratio they tend to pick really arbitrary starting and end points in order to have the human body conform to the golden ratio for example they'll go from the toes to the navel instead of the toes to the top of the head which is kind of an arbitrary choice right and this happens because humans always search for meaning we are designed by our genes by our nature some would say by god to look for patterns and meaning and so when something as interesting as the fibonacci sequence has so many applications in the real world we tend to look at it as some secret behind how the universe works to try to find meaning which is one of the most fundamental human endeavors it's tons of fun mathematically i'm not sure how really significant it is as some universal constant behind physics or biology or neurology there do seem to be gene expression that happens in accordance with the fibonacci sequence but that is probably just based on the additive nature of the sequence so if you look at the way organisms grow like a nautilus for example that's exactly how nautilus grows is to keep adding these cells that are the size of the previous cells combined so the animal can grow right so i think pop culture blows it out of proportion uh if you think i'm wrong let me know on twitter let me know on facebook i'd love to get feedback on this answer my confidence level on this question is much lower than usual which is saying something because sometimes i'm just better than even odds on answering the question at all so look forward to the feedback on this one if you're not a math nut no more math on this episode keep listening [Music] [Applause] hi mike this is kylie from columbus ohio my question is this what is the science behind war and do you think the concept of world peace is at all possible if not how close do you think we can come will human beings ever stop killing each other thanks so i didn't realize that it was tough questions week on ask science mike but uh this is two in a row that i really had to research i know a lot about human violence um but i i had to organize my thoughts on war and the research i've done to come with something cohesive and i hope this helps answer the question the science behind war is ironically actually this wouldn't be irony at all never mind that was like alanis morissette irony there's a lot of conflict behind the science of war because scientists don't agree when war entered the human drama some scientists say humans were much more prone to war before civilization stephen pinker would be in that camp other scientists say war didn't exist in any significant capacity among hunter-gatherers in ancient times largely because it doesn't exist in any significant capacity among hunter-gatherers on the planet now there are still hunter-gatherer human tribes on earth today now i look at chimpanzees our closest genetic relative and i think that the truth is somewhere in the middle uh pre-civilization humans were probably prone to go to war when one tribe had a significant numerical or technological advantage and i say that because chimps chimpanzees only go to war when one side has an overwhelming advantage if the sides are evenly matched they'll avoid each other or even attempt reconciliation now even if pre-civilization humans didn't go to war if they didn't wage war they were certainly violent within their tribes disputes over mates and resources anthropology tells us and and even human fossils show us that humans are violent animals unfortunately now it is clear that once civilization was born war became the normal course of human society the very early civilizations on this planet went to war with each other and it didn't stop throughout human history war has been remarkably common uh even european history modern european history is fraught with war and that war escalated intensity once we hit industrialization world war ii had the highest death toll by far of any conflict in human history it's terrifying how many people military and civilians were killed in world war ii now what's interesting is after world war ii interstate war is in war between different nations has been on the decline and has even declined precipitously uh in in its place intra-state wars like civil wars wars within a nation-state increased but started to decline in the 80s so in the current geopolitical context war is fading and as infrequent as it's ever been since we've had civilization and this factors in the data from groups like isis and conflicts in the middle east violence is also in global decline not just war but violence now there's a lot of theories as to why that is we have very large nation states with nuclear deterrence we have more nations with stable legal systems elected democracies and police forces than any other time in history and i'm not going to get into police brutality that's a real thing but in the data set uh a police society so far is less violent even factoring in police violence than societies with smaller police forces and i mean uh like corrupt police forces anyway so i'm gonna get some email on that one but i can't i can't chase that rabbit trail or this is gonna be a three-hour episode [Laughter] anyway regardless is when you factor in the total amount of violence on the planet it is in decline that doesn't mean war is gone climate change could bring war back with a vengeance because of the mechanisms that drive war let's talk about that because talking about the mechanisms of war is the way to talk about avoiding war first of all wars generally require two groups with some defining difference in identity that can be racial identity it can be ethnic identity it can be religious identity it can be as simple as national identity but you take pride in social identity be it racial ethnic religious or national and it creates an in-group out-group dynamic and that's an ingredient for war in europe protestant versus catholic has fueled war look at northern ireland in the middle east arab versus jew in a modern context as well ethnicity am i ukraine am i ukrainian or am i russian in ethnicity and now you get this conflict between these groups because you have people who identify as ethnically ukrainian and ethnically russian living in the same area and waging war now once you have an in-group out group dynamic it lowers empathetic responses in the human brain toward the out group meaning if i have a lot of national pride or a lot of religious pride in being a protestant and i begin to view catholics as the out group because of social identity i no longer feel empathy towards catholics that's huge because i don't feel empathy towards someone i view them as less than human and i don't mind if they're killed or harmed or even if i actively do something that hurts them so one piece of you know eliminating war is avoiding intense tribalism and social identity this is this is rooted in the human brain's tendency towards tribalism we can't let our social classifications become tribes we can't do it that means we have to reduce the emphasis on pride and social identity but not at the expense of oppressed groups sometimes pride in your identity is what keeps you going if you're oppressed look at black americans if you go back to when slavery was legal or when segregation was the law of the land you had to take pride in your black identity to have the meaning to continue to function and even today i fully believe and i think the data supports me that people of color in america don't have the same experience as white americans and so they need some social pride in order to function and face that adversity but ultimately if every group trumps into that if then the response to that is for the culturally dominant group white americans to invest in their pride as well guess what we're creating an in-group out-group dynamic and a race war becomes more likely right empathy is the antidote to in-group out-group dynamics now here's another problem wars generally involve a pursuit of wealth or power or revenge they are cold and calculating is how wars originate the people who wage war are generals and political leaders so how do we subvert that well america has become much less likely to go to war because the american public has less patience for it and so the american leadership has more difficulty mobilizing troops for any amount of time because of war fatigue also making sure that resources are distributed equitably between nations is essential in avoiding war climate change will increase scarcity of some natural resources including water if we're not careful about how water gets shared on this planet thirsty people will be ready to fight i promise you so i'm not making some you know macro economic statement here about redistribution of wealth i'm saying to avoid war resources have to be distributed equitably finally we're finding economic interdependence prevents war the european union is made up of countries that have historically been foes uh germany and france have fought a lot of wars for example but today their economies are intertwined and for all the hand-wringing of the us and china those countries are very unlikely to go to war because they essentially share a single economy uh it would be like conjoined twins going to war it's difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins we are more peaceful than we've ever been i worry that we can't become much more peaceful than we are though without re-examining the way we do society sometimes i see a decline in empathy today sometimes i see a trend away from equitable resource distribution economic interdependence is certainly going well social identity seems to get more fractured the only way forward the only way to move towards a world peace is to focus on empathy and fairness and to reduce us versus them this is why when people say why are you a christian this is a big part of it because when i read the gospels that's what i see jesus talking about is letting go of us versus them of caring for fellow man of taking care of those who have less all those things create peace or shalom and that's why i'm a christian as i believe the gospel can help make a more peaceful world when it's used as a balm of healing and not a sword of division our next question came from the email inbox all the way from australia and i will not attempt to read it in an australian accent it's so bad as to be offensive here we go i've just seen the movie inside out by pixar hopefully you've seen it it's set inside a child's brain and is a very clever movie my question is this how might faith have changed the landscape of riley's brain so the first thing i want to say is although there will not be spoilers in this answer themes from the movie inside out will be involved so if you haven't seen the film and are concerned about having minor insight into the thematic pieces of the story go ahead and hit pause and come back after you see the film okay so riley is the main setting she's not really a character in inside out the main characters are her emotions fear anger disgust sadness and joy and in riley's brain joy is the leader now this is based on real psychology which i really appreciated but pixar did leave out two basic emotions there are seven basic human emotions in most psychological theory and the other two are contempt and surprise and also they're in this control room in the brain and it shows that emotions constantly run the brain and i didn't like that because your brain is actually run by your prefrontal cortex most of the time and it doesn't have feelings and there's there's a tug of war kind of between your limbic system and your feelings and your prefrontal cortex and that really wasn't depicted in the film but i love the way it did show competing impulses the way these different feelings were in charge of the brain at different times uh if they would have included another control room maybe with a computer i don't know that would have made the movie more neurologically accurate but probably less fun to watch but i do love that they accurately showed that human consciousness is not some cohesive unified whole but a competition between different impulses and feelings i also love the visual of personality islands the idea that our experiences and memories shape our personalities you know if you think about goofball island as a social strategy riley learned as a child that you know making monkey noises with their parents would disarm them and create a sense of unity and so this goofball became a part of our personality and that's how we work loved that i loved how the story illustrated the complementary aspects of different emotions that as we mature our emotions become more complicated and that's a good thing not a bad thing now if i think about this landscape of riley's brain in the film we have a control room with emotions you have personality islands you have long-term memory and all these other parts of the the brain that do different things what would be changed if riley was a person of faith it depends on her faith of course now most people of faith if they're serious about it at all would have a faith island a part of their personality that it incorporated additional types of interaction with others and uh different types of seeing the world okay so church language church culture worship style all those things would be a part of her faith island in her brain now depending on how riley saw god it would affect what it did to the control room if riley believed in a vindictive or angry god then you would see anger and fear at her controls more often she would see disgust enter the picture and team up with anger any time she viewed someone who was an outsider who is not part of her faith tradition and this harkens back to our last answer about war deeply held angry god-based faiths tend to be afraid of outsiders now people who see god as mainly loving of course would actually see joy and sadness share the controls most of the time anger would be much less likely to get a seat at the control console but when you combine joy and sadness you get an emotion we call empathy this warmth towards another a feeling of what they feel that requires combining what we consider to opposite feelings and people who believe in a loving god of course are people who are more empathetic and less angry when they deeply believe and regularly contemplate god's love that does cause changes in the brain so if we look at the inside out landscape that's what i see you've got a faith island and depending on whether she worshipped a angry god or a loving god either anger and fear would run the console most of the time or joy and sadness and that is the brain science of inside out gotta be one of my favorite questions i've ever gotten on the show thank you [Music] well that does it for another episode of ask science mike um i do want to tell you i am doing more events than i've ever done in addition to wild goose this week at north carolina next week i'll be in redlands california at redlands church talking about cosmology and creation i'll be in new york after that a little bit later i'm going to be in fort worth at collective church i'll go for front church in new york city i'm doing something called the sandbox collective online you can see all this stuff by going to ask sciencemike.com and clicking on events i keep that page updated as we get closer to events of course they're more likely to be on the page slash have more information i'd love to see you at anything i've got coming up and i'll mention whatever's coming up on the show so you know you can just listen and you'll know when i'm going to be near you but i do want to say this 2015 for me is almost completely booked out so if i'm not coming anywhere near you and you'd like me to or you've been thinking about booking me but haven't done it yet if you want to be this year you're just about out of time like probably only going to take two or three more bookings for the rest of the year so if you're interested in having me come talk about science and faith or doubt or atheism or any of the things you hear on the show or even doing a live ask science mic in your community be it a church a conference a college whatever just go to ask science mike and click on bookmike and i'd love to come see you that's absolutely my favorite thing the show is fun i love hearing from the listeners but boy do i love to see people face to face it just completely makes my day keep your questions coming you can put a question in by going to ask sciencemike.com there's a button you can record a question and send it to me or you can type a question that's a great way to send me anonymous questions your questions make the show possible that's why it's your show and this is my living now so if you'd like to help me make a living doing ask science mike you can go to our patreon page and participate and you know offer me a couple bucks a month and keep the show on the air i appreciate all of you that do that it blows me away i do want to remind you you can cancel or change a pledge at any time i see that happening all the time don't feel guilty about that if you lower your pledge don't feel guilty about that if you cancel your pledge don't feel guilty about that never ever feel coerced into donating to this show and those of you that have increased your pledges i really appreciate that just make sure you're not blowing your budget on my show i do want to thank hailey hyde who picked all the questions this week greg nordin who makes the show sound great he's our producer and of course my bff jeff motifer for writing the show's theme song and segways if you need original music done for your podcast or musical or whatever jeb can write he can perform he can record he's a one-stop shop thanks a lot for listening guys and i'll see you next week