ASM023 Mental Illness, Gay Stereotypes, and Turning Birds Into Dinosaurs

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mental illness gay stereotypes and turning birds back into dinosaurs all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this week i had the honor of hanging out with a bunch of people in atlanta at an event called belong and it was great to get to know you and hear your stories and understand where you're going in your walk of faith and incorporate science we're going to do more of those in the future so keep your ears peeled but for now let's get it started [Music] hey science bike so i don't think there's gonna be a lot of scientific evidence on this one but um i'd just love to hear some thoughts and theories on the whole thing so my question is uh how much did god shape evolution so um you know was he just like i'm just gonna do a little big bang and see what happens and then when humans came around was like oh cool or was it all a plan where it was all right amoebas dinosaurs asteroid and humans you know what i mean so let me know hi mike uh i'm tim from england and i've got a question about evolution i don't have an issue with all the stuff to do with connecting the genesis creation accounts to evolution i've managed to resolve all that in my mind but my issue is more to do with what evolution says about the character of god now in my mind it's pretty clear that uh the bible reveals ultimately that god is love and we see that most clearly in jesus and that god is for the weak he's for the vulnerable he's for the marginalized he's for the poor and jesus said to me at one point that it's the meek and the poor and the merciful the peacemakers they're the ones who'll inherit the kingdom it seems to me though that that stands in stark contrast to the process of evolution which says that it's the fittest the strongest the most powerful they're the ones who will survive they're actually the ones who are inheriting the world and we see that in nature but we see it culturally as well don't mean the richest the most successful the most beautiful most powerful they're the ones that are dominating society now i know as as humans we can transcend those evolutionary instincts but what does it say about a god who came up with that means of creating us in the first place so i hope that question makes sense mike i'd love to hear what your thoughts are keep up the good work brother it's much needed and greatly appreciated well the first thing i'd like to say is that there is no authoritative answer on specifically how much god shaped evolution and here's why there is no authoritative answer on exactly who god is it depends on who you ask for example if you were to ask an atheist how much did god shape evolution an atheist is going to say none at all because there is no god right whereas if you asked a pantheist someone who believes that the universe is god how much did god shape evolution you know a pantheist is going to say well evolution is simply a part of god in the same way that a metabolism is part of you if you were asked a panonthist that's someone who believes that the universe is god but that god is also more than the universe a paninthius might say that god is you know directing evolution as a nature of god's being if you were to ask an open theist that someone who believes in a god much like a traditional theist but also believes that that god is not binding the future and therefore not traditionally omniscient this is an idea of god that people use to try to clear up some logical contradictions to traditional theism well that person might say that god created a universe that continues creating more and that's part of how god designed the universe and that's an interesting idea if you look at the way that the big bang sort of led to matter and hydrogen and helium and then how gravity sort of led to stars and galaxies and as those stars exploded and created heavier elements led to solar systems with planets and ultimately to life through a biogenesis and evolution if you were to ask a theist who believes in evolution and they might call themselves a theistic evolutionist or an evolutionary creationist kind of depending on where they lie on a spectrum and how much they care about pr and to whom well that person would say that you know if evolution is true then it is the work of god in its entirety it depends on who you ask if you're asking me i will tell you i don't know i don't know how much god shaped evolution because i don't actually know very much about god and we'll talk more about that in the next question about oh why god is so mysterious but you know i don't know if if god has what we would call traditional will or consciousness or agency because those are very limiting very human terms they speak of our reference frame is god you know sort of a deistic god that created the universe and and just lets it keep running is god intimately involved all the time well the second question points to some problems with believing that god has an ongoing role in creation now i'm not saying this undermines that idea merely these are things we need to consider and in that question what does the character of god look like if he's involved in evolution where for example many animals can only survive by killing and eating other animals or being parasites on other animals a common quit from atheists refuting the idea of god is to look at particular types of worms that can only live in the eyes of humans and specifically human children what does that say about god well the first thing i'd like to kind of say is this idea of survival of the fittest versus the meek and there's there's a belief among people that the fittest organism is the strongest and that's not true in evolutionary theory the fittest animal is the one or the fittest organism is the one most suited to its environment if strength is an advantage in the environment then natural selection will favor it but if it's not natural selection will actually weed it out for example if calories are extraordinarily scarce and the energy required to be strong is more than you can get from food items strength is going to be weeded out pretty quickly and to that measure we see that traditional power is not as dominating evolutionarily as you might think look at the wealthiest people in society they also have fewer children there's less copies of their genes reproduced and in the event of some absolute social calamity societal breakdown their genes might be the least likely to be passed on and then in that case quite literally the meek would inherit the earth that's not where i plan to go with that but so you know it doesn't just come down to power or strength or domination altruism cooperation those are things that are often favored in terms of evolution if you can imagine early hominids and early humans there were probably more isolated and less social hominids and they were defeated by their more altruistic relatives the hominids that chose to form tribes and ultimately form societies and civilization it's it's our ability to cooperate that makes humans so dominant on this planet i think if we go to my opinion and the way i am today spiritually evolution reflects on the larger character of the universe and that nothing is self-creating or self-sustaining we all rely on something else all life on this planet requires of the constant sacrifice of the sun to collapse its own matter and release energy in the form of photons that gives this planet the energy to produce life and that energy enters our ecosystem through plants and then it is stolen from plants by animals plants die so that animals may live and then some of those animals are eaten by other animals they die so that other animals may live that there is some pattern of sacrifice and renewal on the very fabric of the universe stars explode their guts are scattered across the sky but ultimately those guts coalesce into a new nebula and even a star on this planet matter that was life becomes food but then continues to be life that speaks somehow to a connectedness and an interdependency which i find sacred and then this ultimate picture of what does it look like to be successful well somehow we find peace and happiness when we transcend our individual desire for dominance and power and surrender to the goods of the group when we help others when we cooperate our brains reward that our brains reward that because evolution has rewarded that too i've heard some theologians describe the universe describe creation as an ongoing process in which we are drawn toward god and that the value of our experiences lies in that movement toward god over time that's not a scientific idea but it's certainly a poetic and beautiful one to my ears i think the danger in trying to judge god through the lens of evolution is one we tend to make far too many assumptions about god and two we tend to look at our existence from too limited a perspective we tend to view our lives as symphonies in and of themselves as as narratives of tremendous value and they are but from some other perspective my life is merely one note in one chord in a symphony i'm a fleeting moment of expression that will continue far after i am gone and the symphony began far before i arrived and i find it helpful to look at the overall arc of not just humanity but of life and even the universe when i try to understand and contextualize the character of god [Applause] our next question comes from the email inbox and it reads hey mike there hasn't been much talk on dinosaurs which is a shame because they're so awesome and ruled this world for so long two questions if dinosaurs evolved into birds is it possible for birds to evolve back into dinosaurs in millions of years and two what's your favorite dinosaur evolution will favor organisms most suited to the environment and so if you had a set of mutations that made birds more dinosaur-like again over time and that was favored by the environment sure and you actually do see this in the fossil records some animals getting bigger and then getting smaller again or or oscillating between prey and predator herbivore and omnivore that is precedented in the fossil record now what you don't have is one species call it species a turning into species b and then turning back into an exact copy of species a so it is extraordinarily unlikely i don't want to say impossible though for birds to turn exactly back into their ancestral dinosaurs that'd be very unlikely now one thing that's sort of interesting our dna contains some record of our forebears we have proteins and dna which are switched on and switched off and some of those inactive genes appear to be genes that were used in some of our ancestors and so scientists have used this in some very recent very limited experiments to block proteins and create dinosaur or reptile like features in birds for example you block a protein that creates a beak and you get a chicken with a snout a sort of alligator-like snout you can block some more proteins and see different bones that develop more and more increasingly like what we understand to be the ancestors of dinosaurs and so some scientists theorized that this process could be used to literally with intentionality transform birds back into dinosaurs that is nowhere near scientific consensus there are some scientists who believe it's possible and a few scientists are even doing experiments again trying to understand evolution uh with gene expression uh if it's possible it would be a lot of work and it would be very difficult to know exactly when you have a true quote dinosaur unquote because you're just flipping switches in dna and looking at the outcome and so even if you ended up with something that had like an identical skeleton to some ancestral dinosaurs how would you know the soft tissues and other features of the animal were the same as before you wouldn't you'd have no way to know so you could get something dinosaur like which may be interesting for study um but i find it very unlikely that you could actually replicate a true dinosaur now the second part of the question my favorite dinosaur are the sauropods those massive herbivores that you know are the most dramatic sights if you watch jurassic park or i'm guessing they're in jurassic world i haven't seen it yet that's because i'm prone to superlatives they were the biggest land animals that ever lived and i would really just like to hear one walk you know you're talking about an animal that was the size of a herd of elephants and moved along the ground now you know they may not be feasible even if we could get the dna or we could somehow magically teleport one to now the earth is different than it was in those days it is colder we are in an ice age even in uh our climate change towards a warming uh planet we are still in an ice age and you know things like the level of oxygen in the air is actually lower than it was in the days of the dinosaur so they may have trouble uh functioning in our modern atmosphere but they still remain my favorites i could look at those bones for hours and imagine what such a mighty creature was like truly truly stunning [Music] hey science mike i'm so extremely grateful for your work you've legitimized most of the doubts i've been struggling with for years because of you those major roadblocks in my faith have finally been obliterated and i've never grown more exponentially towards and with god however there's still one major roadblock i can't reconcile what's the situation of people with mental or learning disabilities my brother was born with mental retardation but from a science perspective can the minds of people with special needs comprehend god to a degree that ultimately saves them like how god talks about how much consciousness is needed to acknowledge and appreciate god like how god asks for similarly how about people with disorders like dissociative identity disorder who consists of multiple personalities or people with psychosis who are completely different people with different sets of belief depending if they're on or off their medication they're still the same person so is one version of them saved while the other isn't thanks for your help mike in my younger and more evangelical days in my walk of faith i will wrestle with an idea called the age of accountability now this is a way of understanding god's salvation of man and basically the idea is imagine young children and imagine that the only way that people can be saved is to understand that they are sinners and that faith in jesus can rescue them from that sin right in that model there's a logical problem there's potentially a moral problem and that if an infant dies well infants are too small too undeveloped in their consciousness to be aware of sin or god or for that matter really language and if your view is that the only way that people can be saved is through faith in jesus then inevitably you believe that infants who die go to hell unless you lean into an idea called the age of accountability meaning that it's a theological construct that posits that god understands who is able to understand salvation messages or not and because of god's justice and god's mercy then either lets people into heaven or not and in different points of my life i was either very much for the age of accountability or against it because it wasn't biblical there were there wasn't sufficient support for it in scripture to my eyes now this is not at all how i view salvation anymore the age of accountability and wrestling with these ideas of who has the capacity to be saved and who does not comes down to any view of salvation that is transactional that god offers a salvation in some form and then we turn around and accept it or in the case of you know five-point calvinism god chooses us to accept salvation and we can't resist it kind of wild calvinist and determinists end up thinking some what similar things about the universe but come to opposite conclusions because they have opposite ideas about where that determinism comes from that's an aside in terms of your question i don't look at salvation transactionally i lean towards the the greek orthodox view of salvation that god draws us to the divine to the state of shalom to peace of wholeness and that we are healed in the process of moving toward god and by looking at that as a movement instead of a pendulum who's in who's out who's saved who's not it's a matter of who's in the process of being saved who is moving toward god who is being drawn toward god now i tend to be a little bit of a universalist i think that if anyone can be saved probably everyone is but in you know my typical way most of my theology is is very very loose because i freely admit i have no idea what i'm talking about but you know if if we think specifically about people let's start with reduced mental capacity because of disability some of the people i know that have the most inhibited cognitive facilities are also the most joyful the most giving and the most loving they are in fact some of the most christ-like people i know so do i see them being drawn towards god do i see them responding with grace and forgiveness absolutely absolutely i do let's talk about people who have some form of mental illness dissociative disorder those sorts of things psychosis those people have health problems can someone with cancer be drawn towards god even though they suffer absolutely in the same way i don't think that psychosis or dissociative states eliminate someone's ability to be drawn towards god especially through grace and community and healing it's all about our perspective a mysterious god we are drawn toward now an interesting point in the christian faith is jesus what fascinates me about the incarnation is we take a mysterious and unfathomable god and we put a human face on it god becomes a man who tells stories who cooks breakfast who teaches in parables and the mystery becomes relatable and so in the christian faith of which i'm a part of the way we understand god and the way we pursue this salvation this wholeness this completion is to follow after jesus to follow his teachings and to be a part of his church now this gets me way out of evangelical land i'm probably leaning a little bit more towards catholicism in the orthodox church and how i'm describing this process i'm certainly i think well in line with uh the methodist church of which i'm a part of so i think in your faith if you're struggling with how can these people be a part of god or or how could god reject these people i would encourage you to to hold loosely to your ideas about salvation and look at the broader church and some of the other ideas about how sanctification and how holiness and how reconciliation happen and you may find that you are more encouraged i know that i have been moving away from the sinner's prayer for example which is never found in scripture as as a moment when people are saved more towards people being drawn towards god makes a lot of the weird and troubling things about our universe seem less troubling now my atheist friends would say what i'm doing here is simply an enjoyable delusion maybe but as i understand god to be this expression this this animating force this source of all life and source of all love and source of all peace the only thing that can make sense to me in that great mystery is that we are drawn to this god through the christ the universal reconciling force that we knew in name by jesus [Music] our last question comes from the email inbox and it reads hi science mike thank you for your podcast it really matters to me here's my question as a gay man in his 40s i'm curious about the science of stereotypes specifically why was i as a 12 year old boy riding my bicycle to the library to pick up barbra streisand records why did i love broadway cast albums so much and this is long before i knew about the stereotypes before i knew gay boys were supposed to love barbra streisand and show tunes does science have anything to say about this it's a great question and one of the things i love about this question is i it's singular i don't have you know 20 variations of this question uh sitting in the in the science mic show file but i would challenge part of the question by asking this question why did i as a 12 year old boy like to play with action figures now that was a strangely difficult question for me to come up with because i was trying to think about things in my childhood that were stereotypically straight that were not directly related to being attracted to females i loved action figures i'd see ads for action figures and i wanted to play with action figures i still have my teenage mutant ninja turtles in the attic and they are some of my most prized possessions and they're just about as stereotypically adolescent straight as you get now you may say well you liked action figures because you saw other boys playing with action figures and this comes down to how we make decisions about what we like and how we sound and how we move our bodies we are social organisms and social identity really comes into play in how we do things my voice you could call it stereotypically straight i'm i'm not particularly melodic in my speech i favor the lower registers of my voice not just for good podcasting but uh that's just the way i talk i do lots of stereotypically straight things and so i notice in your question you start to highlight the ways in which you differed from the heteronormative standard now this idea of heteronormative is that we as a society look at people who are straight and then call that normal in any deviation abnormal but what makes that normal to begin with this is a bias that people have where we take the dominant or largest groups and just say that's normal anything else is different but we all use social identity to shape behavior you may find that people who self-identify as atheists have some traits that seem to be common across them or people who identify as football fans have traits that are common across them for example i never wear special color jerseys on special days because people somewhere are going to go into a stadium that's not part of my experience but people who identify as football fans that is part of their experience and so you can imagine that what we call these gay stereotypes you know manners of speech manners of uh ways that they um hold their bodies or or make gestures and their interests in barbra streisand or broadway are social identity markers that are probably born or emerged from a desire to be more feminine in many cases gay men are attracted to or drawn towards femininity not in the way that straight men are i like femininity i like being around femininity because i'm attracted to it but somehow at least for gay men i've talked to they don't want to just be around feminine people they want to be more feminine and this may be linked to some of the biological differences between straight men and gay men there's no slam dunk science on that believe me i've looked here's the thing broadway creative industries these have been strongholds safe places for gay men even when society was much less safe than it is today so is it any wonder that as on some level by 12 you know you're you're uh pubescent pre-adolescent sexuality is becoming an increasing part of your identity on some level you probably knew your orientation wasn't socially safe um and you know artists like madonna were vocal early supporters of lgbtq persons even before we had those terms and their art became a safe place to be known to be heard to identify but here's the thing these markers working in creative fields you you know speaking in quote unquote gay lisp whatever they are statistically significant meaning they they do show uh if you do a study and you have people who self-identify straight and people self-identify as gay these attributes will be more common but they are by no means universal or even majority so while stereotypes really do help us cope with the complexity of reality and they can really be helpful tools in moving and working in the world we should never box an individual into a group stereotype and we should always try to consciously discard our preconceptions about other people based on the stereotypes of the boxes the categories we put them in humans are natural pattern finders we're natural boxers we like to put things in boxes and have it be clean and neat but the fact is real life doesn't reflect that i'm a straight man who hates football i can't stand it i don't know well now i have an academic understanding of why people like football but in terms of like relating to that it makes no sense to me so someone just assumes i like football because i'm a straight male from the south they're not getting to know me they're not understanding who i really am in the same way that if i meet a gay man and assumes he likes barbra streisand i'm not getting to know that person this comes in all things gender orientation race economic background ethnicity it's vital to get to know humans as individuals and not as stereotypical labels it not only improves their life experience it proves your own as well well that puts another episode of ask science mike in the books and it has been a lot of fun for me to record this one because there's daylight outside it's like early in the afternoon i'm not physically exhausted because this is my work now uh it's very exciting speaking of my work i'm coming hopefully to a town near you in the future i'm going to be in north carolina at the wild goose festival in july if just google wild goose festival or go to my website you can learn all about it with the liturgists we'll be doing our lost and found liturgy it's really amazing i'd love for you to see that be a part of it and i'm going to be giving a talk called the science of peacemaking where we go into how to be people of peace based on insights from science really remarkable stuff i'm excited about it also in july we're heading to the redlands church in redlands california to talk about cosmology and creation and in the fall for those of you who missed belong we're going to do more of those we're thinking our next two are going to be los angeles and london so if you're on the west coast or across the pond watch out the liturgists are coming your way of course later in the year i'll be in texas and new york and doing online events and all kinds of stuff and i would love to come to your city if you are at a church or a college or putting on a conference and you'd like someone to come talk about the intersection of science and faith brain science cosmology doubt all the things you hear me talk about i absolutely love it it is my favorite thing in the world so if you go to ask sciencemike.com and look in the upper right hand corner there's a button that says book mic you click that and my booking firm can get me there and it would be a lot of fun to see you seeing people in person is my favorite thing we need your questions on the show the show doesn't happen unless people put questions in and you guys are great about it we have hundreds of questions in the pipeline but keep them coming there's always interesting and exciting new questions we look at the earliest and the most recent questions every single week so your your chance you've always got a chance to be on the show you can use ask sciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube or you can go to asksciencemike.com and just drop a question in we've got a form there you can type a question even a system where you can record a question and send it in of course ask science mike is listener supported this is how i feed my family so uh if you'd like to be a part of keeping this conversation going go to asksciencemike.com click the patreon link and understand every single dollar helps you can give a dollar a month i appreciate it five dollars a month that's great if money is tight you can change or cancel pledges at any time now people who give to the show get some perks they get to hear the show early they get to pick the questions that come on the program they even get to add their own questions or be an executive producer those are all possibilities and now that i'm doing this full time i'm going to be working a lot more with my patrons to figure out what perks work how the show should unfold what we do in the future these are the people that are going to help me decide where we go over time our show is pre-produced by hayley hyde she's great we appreciate her work our production is done by greg nordin and of course the song is by jeff botiford uh my bear like bff who is a very talented uh studio man and musician and songwriter so he's great at making custom music if you need that done you can find him greg and haley as well as resources for every single question that's ever been asked on the show at asksciencemike.com thanks for listening guys and i can't wait to see you next week [Music]