ASM062 Dogs, Hell, and the Top of a Planet

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dogs hell and the top of a planet all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and man i am so sorry about missing last week's time slot i was exhausted after doing the southwestern leg of the one wildlife tour with gunger but back on schedule this week even though travel is intense let's do some questions and get it [Music] started [Music] hi science mike my name is aaron and my question comes to you as kind of a curious one maybe not necessarily one that is founded totally on any scientific evidence that i know of but what is the relationship or the scientific understanding behind why humans and canines bond so well i mean it's common that we hear things like dog is man best friend things like that but what is the science behind that and would love any answer you have thank you well as um scientifically backed answers go this one's relatively easy to support scientifically the relationship between humans and dogs is widely studied recently has had additional insights thanks to neuroscience so let's look at a few things if we look back kind of before dogs are domesticated if we just look at wolves and humans you'll find a lot of similarities both are large social mammals who are so social they have difficulty surviving alone and actually go into a state of stress and separation anxiety when are they separated from their pack or their tribe so dogs and humans start from a very similar reference point where it is essential to their survival to be accepted in their group and that success in life looks like maintaining or achieving status within that group so lower ranking members of a wolf pack or people on the edges of a human tribe are at a higher state of chronic stress than people closer to the top because of that both wolves and humans devote a lot of neurological energy and resources to ascertaining and understanding the mental and emotional states of others around them they also both exist in fiercely loyal groupings that are competitive with other groupings of the same species so wolf packs don't like to overlap their territory with other wolf packs and primitive hominids didn't like to share spaces with other tribes of course let's not act like we're all that superior today national borders are jealously guarded for a reason that is ancient and linked to human brain development so you have two social species now about 30 000 years ago some wolves started to share space with humans wolfpack started to share space with humans and we imagined that some wolves especially wolves that were less successful fitting into the back hierarchy started to hang around the edges of human space and these are typically wolves that would have less desirable species from the aspect of wolves but more desirable appearances or behaviors to humans they'd be more friendly to humans less weary basically more puppy-like and this started a process called artificial selection where humans selectively bred or artificially selected members of the wolf species that were the most palatable to human contact and the most friendly to be around you get floppy ears you get different color coats and you start getting these features that are weeded out in natural selection but encouraged in wolves that share space with human beings before you know it generations later you have dogs now the reason i think this theory has such strong grounds one is dna we can definitely tell that dogs were descended from wolves very directly by their dna we can also see through documented processes that humans can selectively breed dogs and change their appearance behavior temperament all kinds of things but quite recently there's been an experiment done in russia that i'll have a link to on the show notes at asksciencemike.com where they actually created domesticated foxes and the process was really simple they categorized foxes based on how readily the foxes would interact with people and they had three categories three was the least friendly one was the most friendly two was kind of indifferent and when they selectively bred when they focused on letting category one foxes breed in no time very few generations the percentage of overall foxes who were in category one went up dramatically and with that you had these changes in fox's appearance new coat colors and in general they became more puppy-like for their whole life and that's what we see with dogs dogs are basically wolf pups that never grow up they have several unique features compared to other animals they're the only non-primate that will seek and maintain eye contact with human beings even when we raise wolves in domestic environments and train them like dogs they don't try to make eye contact with us they exhibit the same kind of behavioral characteristics that human infants do or toddlers when dogs are afraid they try to seek out they make a beeline to run towards their master and you can compare that for with you know a cat or a livestock and those animals are going to run the other direction but dogs feel safer with us and we've actually brain scan dogs relatively recently we've trained dogs to lay in an fmri scanner and what we found when that happens is dogs associate pleasure with our scent the scent of their owner versus other unfamiliar spells or even the smells of other dogs and they prefer the sound of our voices to other sounds and their brains show characteristic signs of genuine love and affection for their owners in the same way our brains show genuine love and affection for our spouses for example or our parents or our children i have a hard time imagining two species that could get along as well as we do the very large brain capacity of humans that lets us be a real asset to dogs as well as be flexible in our social groupings and dogs are over time have learned to map us into their pack structures and treat us like members of their own family so it's completely science-based there's a reason almost half of homes in america have a dog in it it's because a dog's a great family pet that considers itself part of the family something much more natural by the way or easy to pull off than cats which are naturally isolated species they don't share spaces easily and also haven't been domesticated as long as that's kind of why your cat seems aloof your cat doesn't have the interest or inclination to read and respond to your emotional cues in the same way that your dog does [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads i'm hoping you can clear something up for me that i've been pondering on earth we distinguish direction with labels north south east and west but if we take a step back and view the earth from outer space how do we know which side is the top out of those direction labels north south east and west is there any way to determine which side of our planet is objectively the top or is that just something we arbitrarily chose and named but is ultimately relative thanks so much for everything well that's a great question and uh one i've pondered before as well the short answer is there is no objective top to a planet there's just not when we think of up we're thinking about against the pull of gravity relative to the center of the earth mass north we tend to think of as up but that's just because the way maps have been historically designed which is frankly very north and west centric globally and originally these labels were derived from the movement of the sun and the constellations in the night sky later we found this miraculous occurrence that when we created compasses using magnets they pointed to north and it validated our idea that there was some objective fact to north but what you really have is coordinates mapped to a sphere and so that means longitudinal coordinates you know continue infinitely and latitude moves up towards a point at which point it flips over and comes back because you have poles at the end there now on the earth the poles are the center of the axis of rotation of the earth that also align with the poles of the earth's magnetic field quite well they're very close they're not precise magnetic north and a true rotational north are slightly different positions on both the north and south poles but regardless they're very close to our planet that's not true of all planets in the solar system by the way it's also not true of all planets in the solar system that rotation happens in the same direction compared to orbit around the sun or relative to the position of the sun compared to the planet so there's a lot of variance there earth happens to be a relatively convenient easy planet to create coordinates for now there are standards for how we create coordinates on different planets they haven't been applied universally the earth and the moon and mars have different rules than other heavenly bodies and some heavenly bodies are too irregular to easily apply coordinates too so every time we create cardinal directions on a different planetary mass we're making arbitrary decisions solely for the purpose to be able to locate things on the surface of that object and at larger scales you know that continues there's no objective top to our solar system or our galaxy or the local super cluster because we're in a spatially infinite universe that doesn't actually have any absolute reference points yikes so there's no objective top of the planet and there's nothing farther north than the north pole which is different from a you know a true planar spatial dimension when you consider uh cartesian coordinates uh in an euclidean geometry dimensions are planar meaning that they're flat and they extend infinitely in a given direction that is it does seem to be how the universe is structured but not how planets work because their planes are mapped on top of a sphere i don't know if that was my most accessible answer so give me a tweet and let me know if that one actually helped you understand that or not [Music] and next we have another question that came in via email and it reads hey science mike thanks for your work on this podcast and the liturgist podcast i have a question about neurology and the holy spirit i've never had the kind of supernatural experiences that a lot of others seem to have for example hearing god speak tangibly feeling god's presence feeling god directing me to do something etcetera i suppose i'm even skeptical about claims of such experiences recently a friend of mine told me that the more intellectual a person is the less likely he or she is to experience god in these ways i'm wondering if there's any basis in neuroscience for the claim that intellectualism prevents encounters with god can't wait to hear your thoughts well i don't know if i would agree with your friend on there being an inverse correlation between intellectualism and encounters with god but there is something here as to why some people seem more prone to spiritual experiences and other people are less prone to them early in scientific attempts to quantify spiritual experiences they centered around finding a single genetic trait or single point in the brain that were responsible for these experiences and all that research appears to be oversimplified when you consider someone's ability or propensity to have a spiritual experience it's very much like someone's propensity to be a good runner so some people based on their genetic makeup have a naturally better running ability but everyone can improve their running ability by training and by exercising and by eating the right nutrition so there's this intersection of nature and nurture and behavior that create your capacity to run so you can imagine someone who's naturally genetically extraordinarily athletic but is extremely sedentary in lifestyle who doesn't train at all you can imagine another person who genetically doesn't have the right musculature who doesn't have the right regenerative capacity doesn't have the right ability to take in and process oxygen quickly to be a very fast runner but who trains all the time and works hard at being a runner which one of those two people do you think could run five miles faster well it's probably going to be the person who trains a lot so let's talk a little about experiencing god there are a lot of factors scientists have found that determine how likely someone is to have the kind of spiritual experiences you're describing they're very visceral that feel very ethereal first of all there is a genetic marker called the god gene that has been overblown in the press as being responsible for god experiences but people who have a high expression of the god gene their brain produces a particular molecule a particular chemical that effectively works like a low-grade psychedelic and so people who have an expression the god gene the theory goes are more prone to have spiritual experiences anthropologist tanya lerman in her book when god talks back understanding evangelical america's relationship with the almighty noticed that there was a correlation between a high score on the telogen absorption scale which is a test that was supposed to predict how well you could be hypnotized and reporting spiritual experiences there's this genetic factor there's these psychological factors but a people who pray regularly people who meditate regularly people who participate in faith communities or churches all tend to increase their propensity to have these experiences and in fact the more you pray and the more you meditate and the more you begin to model uh what it's like to communicate with god in your brain the more you prime your brain to have those experiences now one final point when you talk about intellectualism that's not quite right but intellectualizing is a psychological defense mechanism to intellectualize a problem is to think about it analytically and in doing so create emotional distance and that is a function of how brains work your prefrontal cortex is responsible for your analytical capacity as a person and when you analyze things you really kind of turn your emotions off and so if you spend all of your time in religious contemplation in an analytical mode you are actually reducing your brain's ability to have emotional or felt experiences so although i certainly think it's useful and interesting to analyze theological ideas there's a reason contemplation in meditation is more closely associated with spiritual experiences it's the act of being and not knowing that helps you encounter god experientially if that matters to you it would be important to take time to intentionally set aside time every day to be in a more prayerful or contemplative state than an analytical state regarding your faith and that has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence lots of very intelligent people have profound encounters with god but they do it through contemplation and not analysis [Music] [Applause] hi mike i have a question about doubt and fear i went through my deconstruction period a couple years ago and while i'm finally on the other side of what i affectionately call my faith spiral and at a place where i'm much more comfortable with the mysticism and mystery of god one thing i continue to struggle with is thoughts of hell i've come to believe that hell was not a literal place for all people who don't profess faith in christ i believe i could probably be labeled a universalist but every once in a while i'll see or read something that will make me panic and think what if i'm wrong the consequences of being wrong about this one theological point are so drastic and have such implications for my friends family in the whole world that i can start to feel guilty about potentially making the afterlife look like how i want it to look i know that your listeners have varying views on the afterlife as well as who goes where and how but do you have any thoughts or suggestions for folks who have happily come out on the other side of deconstruction but who still every once in a while worry that they've got it all wrong and have made a religion of their own liking thanks as always well first i want to call out something that you mentioned and just get that energy out of the podcast there is a remarkable diversity in beliefs about the afterlife and listeners of this program we have conservative religious folk even conservative evangelicals who listen to the program we have mainline christians we have catholics we have believe it or not some greek orthodox listeners we have christian universalists and very progressive christians post evangelical christians i've gotten some email from buddhists who listen to the show and a very large number of agnostics atheists skeptics free thinkers and spiritually not religious folk who have largely no belief in the afterlife who listen to the show so i'm going to call that out so that we can all agree that the only way this podcast exists is a lot of us have decided there's a value in discussing and hearing perspectives we don't necessarily agree with so uh my goal here is not to upset anyone but merely as always on the show to offer my honest opinion and your story rings really familiar to me if you've heard my story on if you listen to podcast i assume you have i had a moment of existential terror when i just felt god wasn't real anymore because it made me question what i'd understood about the afterlife and one of the things that held me on to belief in god so long was fear of going to hell and i actually read the book love wins by rob bell before i lost my faith and that helped me kind of reframe ideas about the afterlife and about the idea of hell in the first place here's a couple things i would say one scholars generally agree that a fiery place of eternal torment is a hellenic idea it's a greek idea that kind of molded into the christian faith and is dissimilar from what for example jesus would was discussed in the gospels this place of gohan and totally alien to the afterlife as discussed from the perspective of the old testament the only reason i mention those things is to underscore a major point there is no universal agreement about what hell is in the christian church across denominations and there are significant disagreements among people who believe hell is a literal place about how someone ends up there or more specifically how someone avoids going there and and this is an essential point because when you say what if i'm wrong what if you're wrong according to who what if you're wrong according to who according to the faith tradition you grew up in well whatever christian tradition you grew up in some core idea about salvation is heretical to some other christian tradition and this this the splintering of belief is one of the things that led me away from faith to begin with and towards empiricism the epistemology that many consider to underpin science because you evaluate claims based on evidence and there is no hard evidence for anyone's beliefs about hell what they typically point to a scripture and scripture gets interpreted a lot of different ways with a lot of different historical contexts i almost started using seminary language and i try to avoid that people read the bible different ways it creates the you know these kind of conflicting things so when i look at the faith as you have i'm looking for a way for devotion and love for christ to transform my life so that i can transform the world in the ways that christ transformed the world so that i can be reconciled with god that may or may not involve something in the afterlife i'm just not terribly concerned about it my primary motivation for being a christian is a love and devotion for jesus christ in this life the life i'm living right now i have no idea i have no idea what happens when i die i hope for a unification with the source of all my maker but i can't say what that looks like my experience today is is tied innately to 370 trillion bacteria living with 37 trillion human cells controlled by 3 pounds of gray matter with 86 billion neurons which experience space space-time as a linear progression of moments it's a remarkably local and illusionary perspective i can't imagine that anything i have in this life and this experience is relevant to anything that can involve whatever i'm made of my consciousness my energy my pattern existing beyond my body it's unfathomable to me my point is god has not given us a spirit of fear about hell about the afterlife about any of these things the reason we follow christ is not to escape hell whatever that means but to be transformed and renewed and in doing so to transform and renew the world through radical radical love and to me oh that's a good story that's a life worth living that's a faith worth sharing through service and through love [Music] okay i just got done with the one wildlife tour with gunger in the southwest it was a lot of fun it was totally exhausting i'm so glad i'm a podcaster and a speaker and not a rock star because honestly i don't know how they do it wow but there are a lot of events coming up i'd like to tell you about first of all april 8th 9th and 10th i'll be in ventura california for the liminal conference which is exploring the boundaries of science faith mystery and mission with myself and pete ends this is an amazing thing that's happening at ventura vineyard if you're anywhere nearby you should come check it out i can't imagine pete ends and i are going to share billing at a conference very often but i am really really excited about it i'm going to be exhausted i'm coming straight from israel to that conference but i'd love to see you there i'm speaking twice pete's speaking twice and then there'll be an event sunday as well really really great stuff love to see you there and then april 14th i'll be in dallas 15th san antonio 16th waco houston houston texas all of those for the ganger one wildlife tour and then bad news the liturgist gathering in dallas has actually been canceled we opened up ticket sales and just not very many tickets moved so we'll we'll see we'll see what happens with the other ones hopefully they'll sell better and then i'll be in saint paul at first covenant church april 20th and april 21st at woodland hills community church at one of those appearances we'll actually be with greg boyd we're going to talk a little bit about science and open theism which should be fun and then april 23rd i will be in portland oregon at cascade church which is amazing those are some old friends of mine and are really looking forward to reuniting with them a little later i'll be in frisco texas at uh hope fellowship in july i'll be at the wild goose festival so lots of events coming up i'd love to see you around and that's what's going on the events front of course the show is powered by your questions so if you have a question you'd like to ask me just go to asksciencemike.com you can put in a text question or record a voice question and submit to us the show we also check on the hashtag asksciencemike on twitter so feel free to submit a question that way and we'll consider for the show uh the show is kept alive by my patrons who as always picked the questions for this week's show thanks so much that worked really great questions and some of them pretty challenging to answer you can be a part of that for a dollar a month five dollars a month whatever you can keep this conversation going i'm so thankful for those of you who do money's a little tight no big deal just go rate the show on itunes that keeps the rankings really solid and i appreciate everyone who does that of course our show is made possible by a whole village of folks in addition to the patrons andrew golucky handles the pre-production and question selection that goes to the patrons to pick greg nordin does the production and sound design and jeb bodiford wrote performed recorded everything the theme song which it's really funny i love it when people sing the song to me uh and the other thing people start doing lately is when they realize i'm science mike they just say let's get it started it's ridiculous uh but i guess i'd bring that up myself so thanks for listening everybody and i'll see you next week