ASM188 Entropy, Animal Shame, and Christians Fighting Evolution

[transcript automatically generated - please help edit to make it better]

entropy animal shame and christians fighting evolution all that and more on this week's episode of ask [Music] [Applause] i'll talk sciencemike he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life i'm your host mike mccarth known across the internet as science mike and we're here to offer open non-judgmental answers to any and all questions it's a place where curiosity is honored learning is celebrated and nobody is ever shamed for not knowing something yet so let's get it started i've got some really exciting news to share with you for some time we've been trying to figure out how to make the events that the liturgist puts on more accessible to people regardless of income uh we started the liturgists events was things like the liturgist gathering and belong and we tried to make those tickets as cheap as we could but you know they were still you know 80 or more that's a lot of money and so when we put together tabs and wafers we tried to figure out how to drive that cost much much lower and we did you know successfully uh but it's still you know by the time you add fees and all that kind of stuff tabs and wafers can be 40 or 45 dollars and in some markets by the time you add tax you're up close to 50 or more than 50 and that's still a lot of money for people uh and we get that so uh we've been sitting down for some time as a team and talking about ways to make our events more accessible to people regardless of their income people have a lot of medical debt they don't have a lot of student debt a lot of people don't have a lot of free money but they want to come to a liturgist event so we've put together uh something we did the math we figured out what we could do and what we're doing for tabs and wafers is releasing free tickets in every market literally free you pay nothing you just go sign up basically uh and buy a free ticket on our website at the liturgist.com tabs and wafers and uh you get in for free here's what we're asking this is self-assessment you decide whether or not a liturgist tabs and wafers ticket is literally something you can't afford if that's so you know go grab a free ticket we ask that you not abuse that because everyone who can afford a ticket and grabs a free ticket means someone who literally can't afford a ticket can't go so we don't know how to do this other than self-reporting so that's set up that's live right now at the liturgist.com tabs and wafers which also by the way will tell you what the heck tabs and wafers is about we've done several of these now they are a lot of fun people laugh people cry we explore a lot of ideas together we share a lot of experiences so it's a really great event if we're coming anywhere near you you should be there and which by the way in the near future we will do um gosh let's see by the time you hear this minneapolis and chicago will have just happened uh but that means los angeles will be coming up in tempe arizona san francisco dallas houston and austin so a lot more stops for those of you in the northeast if we can add some stops to this tour we will do it the routing fell through when we tried to put the tour together with uh dc and philly and new york which we really did try to make happen uh if it doesn't happen with this tour don't worry we haven't forgotten about all of you friends in the northeast so tabs and wafers tickets are on sale right now i'd love to see you there and if the ticket's problem don't worry it's on us the liturgist.com tabs and wafers [Music] hi science mike thank you for your show and all you do i uh really appreciate um listening to your perspectives and it's really helped me a lot so thank you my question is in regards to animals and whether do we have scientific um evidence that animals experience shame and particularly shame of their bodies sexual shame i'm recently in a season where i'm kind of untangling that whole idea for myself kind of the social conditioning or religious beliefs that i've been given about my body and sexuality and all of that and i'm curious to know if animals experience that same thing i kind of was brought to this question after reading adam and eve and how they partook of the tree of knowledge and good and evil and then experience shame and i almost i've wanted to connect that with kind of just the social conditioning and i need to belong to a tribe kind of thoughts and mentality but i i didn't know if animals experienced that [ \_\_ ] that same shame in that way so thank you for your help um again appreciate all you do and love to hear your thoughts thank you well thank you for such a thoughtful and fun science question i mean i think all the time about the emotional experiences of different animals i'm fascinated with all the different strategies nature has come up with in terms of how intelligence forms and how intelligence happens there's a book i love called other minds which is about you know the ways animal intelligence has happened other than our central nervous system architecture octopi particularly are compelling examples of other brain architectures that result in high experience and i'm really interested as we learn more of the role our bodies play in human emotion the fact that the physiological differences other animals have plays a huge difference in their emotional experiences as well um unfortunately science doesn't definitively know if any non-human animals experience shame uh there just aren't that many studies of animal emotions when compared with human emotions obviously science has been much more concerned with understanding the way that people feel than the way that animals feel in terms of their emotions um that doesn't mean we don't know anything i mean i have seen some brain imaging studies with really small sample sizes that go into the emotional lives of dogs for example those seem to indicate that dogs really do love us which is uh wonderful for a dog lover like me to hear i know that studies in naturalistic observation make us believe that animals grieve that they can feel embarrassment we see cues in natural environments that indicate that those things probably happen we're drawing an inference from behavior there's a rough consensus among biologists that social mammals have access to a very similar set of base emotions as humans you know the classic emotions joy sadness anger fear disgust sexual arousal you know those those uh basic emotions in terms of complex emotions like guilt or shame it's much less clear in science what animals if any experience those things i do know that we think you know when dogs are so good at giving the guilty look you know the the sad eyes and the lowered head and the tucked tail and it makes us think that dogs are guilty about something we've done but that's very possible perhaps even likely that what dogs are actually doing is a display of body language that when they infer through their reading of our body language that we're upset is their way of minimizing our attent our tendency to lash out at them which would would not be a guilt or shame reaction but more of a submissive response so we don't know we don't know if animals experience shame much less body shame or sexual shame the only animal we're sure that experiences those feelings is ours homo sapiens now i think it's interesting that you bring up the creation poem in genesis with adam and eve um the eating from the tree and rebellion against god's commandment and learning about good and evil um actually i think is a really compelling story i mean ancient people were aware in some way that human behavior was pretty wildly divergent from animal behavior and i like that they they put forward this this mythos this mythological framing to help us understand why we behave so differently from other animals in that way i actually find the creation poems in genesis to be remarkably sophisticated for their time in some ways they lay the groundwork for further scientific inquiry thousands of years later i mean that's really cool it's one of the reasons i love the bible but i think at the heart of your question is something deeper than if animals experience shame perhaps like me you're looking into the natural world and into the animal kingdom for some solidarity and some understanding of your own life experiences and in your question i hear that you've suffered i hear that people you care for and communities that you've been a part of and even our society at large has led you to feel shame about your body shame about your sexual desires when we look at human emotion which we understand much better than animal emotion we understand that guilt is often a very helpful emotion for regulating group dynamics and group behavior we feel guilty when we feel that we've done something wrong we violated our moral code or moral code that we share with our community shame however is more fundamentally hurtful we experience shame over our own identities when we experience body shame we believe that our bodies are in some way bad or wrong when we experience sexual shame we have the same response to the very natural and beautiful desire that many people have for sexual contact and intimacy and when i've studied the psychological fallout of shame has far fewer helpful applications when compared to guilt it results in us feeling lonely and thinking less of ourselves of giving ourselves less grace so whether or not animals experience shame you do and in asking your question i think you're making a really important observation it's that that shame that you experience was put on you by someone else and that means it doesn't have to be a part of you that you can do some very difficult and very challenging mental health work to start to push back on the shame that you feel at this stage in my life i believe that all bodies are beautiful that all bodies are worthy of love and acceptance and validation and i believe that there's nothing wrong with sexual desire i believe that there's nothing wrong with sexual relationships i believe that there's nothing wrong with sexual intimacy i believe forming a healthy sexual ethic is important i think when people violate other people's body autonomy when they violate other people's consent when they coerce people or manipulate people into sexual activity those things are very bad and they're wrong but when people support and love each other and sex is involved i think that's always good i don't know if animals experience shame but i'm sure that people do and i'm also sure that the shame that you experience that others have put on you does not belong and i encourage you in every step that you take to finding freedom and liberation from that shame [Music] here's a question that came in via email hey mike i was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum as well as a few other related neurodivergences one was adhd as well as a learning disability to read and retain information when pressed for time when i read slowly and can maintain focus my reading comprehension is quite good another aspect of my diagnosis is that i have what some close friends call an archive brain and i can hyper focus i'm able to store lots of information and recall it well so my long time memory and recall is good but my working memory doesn't retain much especially when i'm overwhelmed or stressed i remember you said you have a learning disability and a teacher taught you how to encode information into your long term memory to help you with reading i was wondering how different kinds of memory work long term short term working memory etc and how you've been able to read quickly and retain information with high fidelity oh gosh no pressure there just answer how human memory works oh my gosh what a question um let's start with the obvious the precise mechanisms of human memory in the brain are not understood by science today we're seeing some remarkable advances in understanding how neurons work together to create our experience of memory i also want to be really clear that there are multiple models in terms of understanding memory in the brain so in order to not make this gosh i don't know i could probably do two hours on human memory um and we just have five to seven minutes for this answer uh so i'm gonna go like with the basics basically when we talk about a memory in the brain uh memory involves three major processes working together and those are encoding storage and retrieval human brains aren't like computers we don't have separate information processing and information storing mechanisms information processing and storing happen in the same structures of our brains use the same kinds of tissues but but the networks of our brain work together to encode store and retrieve information and when i say information i don't just mean uh like text or facts sensory information memories experiences right and as we form memories we could kind of think of maybe three major buckets of memory the first would be sensory memory this is the earliest stage that our memories have and this information is stored in our brains for a very very very short period of time i'm talking like you know a half second to you know maybe maybe five seconds depending on what kind of uh which of your body senses we're talking about then we have short term memory uh that's also called working memory it's also called active memory and this is the information that we're aware of or thinking about right now this is if you're trying to remember a phone number long enough to dial it if any of you are old enough to remember the pre-cell phone world we're trying to remember a phrase long enough to google it our working memory you know that's going to be uh retaining information for up to 30 seconds and then it's it's let go very quickly by the brain and then long-term memory of which there are many types that i will not get into in this answer is the ongoing storage of information that persists beyond 30 seconds we're not aware of our long-term memories until we until we recall them into our working memory right so that's why retrieval is part of memory so you can retrieve something from your long-term memory put it back in your working memory and that's how your brain works with information the way that our memory is organized we tend to have a very cluster oriented approach to memory so similar terms are linked together that's why word association is something our brains excel at it seems strange and chaotic but it's basically your brain stores related things with related attributes uh in in close proximity to each other in your brain so that's maybe the briefest description of how the brain handles memory that i'm capable of uh kudos to you for calling out working memory short-term memory and long-term memory in your question though unfortunately i must have misspoken because your question doesn't convey my life experiences i recall it a teacher never taught me how to encode information to help with reading what happened to me in high school is uh i had terrible grades and my mom took me to a learning specialist to be tested for learning disabilities and boy did they come back with a lot of them i i was not diagnosed as uh autistic at that time uh but i was diagnosed with a number of other things sensory processing disorder uh some issues some severe deficiencies with working memory an auditory processing disability lots of stuff and so what that specialist taught me to do was increase my comprehension of spoken language so i have a really hard time understanding people when they're talking and an even harder time recalling what people have said to me i do a much better job when i create subtitles when people talk i literally imagine in my visual field you know text like closed captions or subtitles of what the person is saying and that helps me remember and understand what people are saying to me if i don't do that my comprehension drops off very very quickly and uh when i get it's fatiguing to do that so i can't maintain it all the way through a conversation so i tend to kind of tune in and tune out as best i'm able and try to derive what people are saying through that process it's pretty messy that same specialist looked at the very large gap between my scores on long-term memory in working memory and looked at the fact that i'm basically able to function throughout the day better than my working memory capacity would recommend or would indicate and she hypothesized that i'd learned to use my long-term memory to compensate for my working memory deficiencies so i was able i'm able to encode things in long-term memory relatively quickly compared to most people and i have severely deficient working memory compared to most people that has nothing to do with reading of course although i do remember what i've read that's nothing i was taught to do i've just got to tell you all in the community again i don't know how i read so fast i've never taken a speed reading course when i was very young i was a remedial reader so i went from being very very much behind everyone to catching up and then passing my peers in reading speed and comprehension pretty quickly and i don't have the same success with audio or video or face-to-face conversations so i know a lot of you listen to podcasts more than i do ironic for a podcaster i know a lot of you love youtube but those means of learning are actually pretty frustrating to me they take a lot more work to get a lot less out of it i'd rather grab a book off the shelf and just burn through the thing right we all learn differently so i think what's interesting is that for those of us with some form of learning disability a part of our life on an ongoing basis is exploring the ways that we can compensate for what we can't do easily that comes more easily to other people that's a project we often have to embark on in order to function in society i do care about helping to create a society that's more accommodating to people with learning disabilities and disabilities of all kinds and i also want an ongoing project to do what i can to overcome a lot of my disabilities and deficiencies and as i do that i look towards new findings and scientific research i listen to the experiences of other disabled people especially those with disabilities similar to my own and i look at advances in technology to assist me more and more over time one of the reasons i love technology is it is strong where i'm weak the computer and my phone always know what time day and month it is they always know when my next appointment is coming they remember all the names that i asked them to remember so i've got a good symbiotic relationship with computers my handwriting is terrible and it's it's very unpleasant bordering on physically painful for me to try to write by hand but typing is awfully easy so the bad news is friend that i don't have the answers to how you can work through your disabilities i only know how i've worked through mine but hopefully if all of us folks with different disabilities share with each other our experiences we can learn and grow together in a way that allows us all to flourish science mike this is mark from michigan uh i'm a former evangelical trying to learn about evolution and i was wondering if you could debunk the top five arguments that creationists make from a scientific standpoint thanks it would be my honor and privilege to help you learn more about evolution and help respond thoughtfully to some of the common arguments against evolution but let's begin by defining what we're discussing because everyone believes in evolution the most ardent creationists in the world believe in evolution evolution just means change the christian church has evolved tremendously over its existence on earth right so let's be particular we're talking about darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection that's a big deal that's that's what the discussion is about not over evolution itself but a spectacular understanding of how the diversity of life on earth came to be darwinian evolution or evolution via natural selection another way of saying darwinian evolution and uh i just off the top of my head tried to think through five of the most common questions i get from creationists about evolution and i will briefly help you understand answers to those and then i'll have links to uh some work from scientific american and biologos in the show notes on ask sciencemike.com if you want to dig deeper into even more objections that people have to evolution and how scientists debunk those question one or or myth number one if humans came from monkeys why are there still monkeys this one's really easy the theory of evolution does not say that humans came from monkeys no one has ever said that humans come from monkeys what the theory of evolution says is that humans and monkeys have a common ancestor that was not human or monkey right so earlier what became humans what became monkeys were a single species that diverged over time as their populations distributed um that means humans and bananas have a common ancestor that was neither human nor banana and humans and bacteria right we share a common ancestor with all life on earth but that doesn't mean that humans are more evolved than other contemporary species all life on earth has been evolving just as long as all other life we aren't more evolved than lobster we just are a different branch of the great tree of life number two evolution can't explain how life appeared on earth that's true evolution doesn't explain how life appeared on earth and in fact can't because evolution doesn't try to the theory of evolution via natural selection is not about how life appeared on earth but how life became so diverse once it appeared saying that the quadratic equation won't tell you how much air pressure belongs in your tires does not render the quadratic equation wrong or useless that's a dumb argument a completely separate field in science called a biogenesis is concerned with where life came from evolution has never been concerned with where life came from merely how there got to be so many different species on earth today number three creationists say evolution is only a theory well great so is gravity in fact we know a lot more about evolution than we know about gravity but i've never seen a creationist jump off their church's steeple to prove that gravity is just a theory even though we don't understand the intricacies of gravity we all see the effects of gravity every day and therefore trust that science's working model of gravity is useful even though it is incomplete so it is with the theory of evolution theory in science is used differently than in daily conversation a theory in science capital t theory is a body of work that is so well supported by evidence that you can base further work on it if you're working on a phd about bacterial reproduction you don't have to re-justify that life evolves on earth you you can peer review a paper with assumptions baked in from the theory of evolution and you'll be fine that doesn't mean evolution is perfectly understood it is not again it is more completely understood than gravity but it you know our understanding of evolution always evolves and should number four nobody has ever seen a new species evolve it is true that speciation is probably quite rare and in many cases could take centuries it's also hard to tell exactly what the criteria is between an old species and a new species right it's not like one day you have a t-rex and then that t-rex has a baby that's a chicken that's not how evolution works the changes of the process of evolution are subtle and slow and only become obvious over vast eras of time that said one of the main criteria we have for understanding species is animals that successfully interbreed with each other and william r rice of the university of new mexico and george w salt of the university of california davis found that if they sorted fruit flies by their preference for different types of environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations which 35 fruit fly generations is quite fast the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a different environment in 35 generations fruit flies are brought to arguably the threshold of creating a new species so that's not a very effective counter argument against darwinian evolution and number five evolution counters the second law of thermodynamics which is conveniently an excellent segue to our next question our last question this week came in via email and it reads mike can you explain how the law of entropy that all things move toward a disordered state and the theory of evolution that organisms can evolve into more orders a more ordered state are typically harmonized in the scientific community they seem at face value to be contradictory forgive my ignorance and perhaps the way i'm asking the question is making too many assumptions or is missing the point of these two topics i've recently started to try and understand more about the theory of evolution after moving away from a more fundamentalist view of the bible i'd love to hear you talk about ideas prompted by a question like this thanks for all you do scott scott the whole reason this podcast exists is so that people can ask genuine questions that is why i'm here that's why i read so many books that's why i do so much research to make sure that the answers i offer you all every week are the best answers i can possibly come up with i love questions and i'm discouraged by the way that our culture seems to increasingly punish people for genuine curiosity i just want to tell you that i wrestled with the same question for years in my life and that you're right on the face of it the second law of thermodynamics and the theory of evolution do seem to be at odds for those of you just catching up at home the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases it means things have to get more chaotic things have to get more disordered as a matter of physics in fact the fundamental understanding of time in modern physics is that entropy increases because otherwise pretty much all the laws of physics are reversible time doesn't seem to have any impact on them whatsoever thermodynamics seems counterintuitive at first but you experience it every day you put your headphones or your earbuds in your pocket neatly coiled and they come out tangled you tie your shoes and they become untied if you take a deck of cards off your desk and toss it in the air why gosh they never land in a perfect stack sorted by suit going from ace to king do they no entropy is actually just something that common sense will illustrate if you think about it order is a smaller set of possibilities than disorder there's only one way to arrange a deck of cards in order right in a in a new deck order which i'm familiar with as a practicing magician but there's lots of ways to sort a deck of cards not in new box order and there's an infinite number of ways to just throw a deck of cards into disarray it's just math there's only one way that your earbuds are neatly coiled but there's tons of ways for them to be tangled so really the second law of thermodynamics is just math being math it's just probability so if any isolated system will always move towards disorder how on earth and i mean literally on this planet do we have life getting more and more complex and creating order in the environment how can that happen well there's a key little phrase in the second law of thermodynamics and it is these four words of any isolated system there's nothing isolated about the earth or the earth's biosphere the earth's biosphere is not a closed system that's the trick life gets a constant source of energy from the sun via photosynthesis but you'd say but mike plants haven't always been around what did life do before plants the earth itself gave off energy in things like hot sulfur vents on the ocean floor there was a chemical soup when life first formed on this planet and that was created by all the dynamic energy from this planet's formation and subsequent cooling so the sun oh gosh it's falling into entropy all the time and releasing enormous energy as it does so and our very earth is doing the same thing and so even though it appears that the earth is getting more ordered if you include the earth's mantle and core i'd imagine that the earth is actually becoming more disordered every day and if you look at the entire solar system it's not close our order is created by the sun's massive movement towards disorder and entropy any decrease in entropy to produce an organism here on earth is more than offset and i would say dramatically more than offset by an overall increase in entropy in our entire solar system we're able to see not just life but stars and planets and asteroids and nebula these these more ordered forms of matter appear simply because the universe itself began in a very ordered state and we've been coasting off that order for the last 13.77 billion years my email signature is peace love entropy i sign my books that way i sign my letters that way entropy is a given but as life we have the opportunity to create something amidst all that chaos i choose to pursue peace and love one of these things is immutable and two of them are created the fact that our universe will always trend towards entropy does not mean that life is meaningless or hopeless we've been given a great gift it's a very big universe and it started with a lot of order and so we have billions and billions and perhaps trillions of years for order to appear from all that chaos it's another week and it's another ask science mic i'd like to thank caitlin hermstead for production support on this episode andrew golucky for pre-production greg nordine for production and sound design and of course my patrons on patreon for literally everything if you'd like to help make this show possible on an ongoing basis just go to sciencemike.com click on the patreon button you can help the questions on the show get early access to my events and greater access to me including what we do sometimes and i enjoy a great deal patron only episodes where all the questions come from patrons i'd like to thank everyone who listens it's a joy talking with you and i can't wait to talk to you again