Deconstructing David Graeber's and David Wengrow's new book

If late friend Leo Lincourt, a lover of Graeber, were still alive, he'd surely disagree with me.

But, from what I first read on the Atlantic's review, and now at the Guardian excerpt?

I think it's oversold.

That starts and ends with the title and subtitle: "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity."

It's overarching, and oversold.

I've read multiple books that have already touched on how the old archaeological and anthropological paradigm of a straight,  permanent, line from hunter-gathering  to farming is wrong. Against the Grain covered this four years ago. Five years ago, John Wathey offered up new ideas on the development of early religion and spirituality, which this pair don't appear to cover at all.

Note: I have now given it a MUCH more thorough deconstruction at Goodreads, with a 2-star review.

Or, via Academia.edu, while not discussing the early "civilizations" of Southwest Asia, here's a paper FROM 1998 about the Fremont culture of today's Utah, discussing a mix of part-time foragers/part-time farmers, full-time foragers, full-time farmers, farmers who flipped to foraging and foragers who became farmers. (Unlike in the Old World, pastoral nomadism wasn't an option in most the New World before Columbian contact, due to lack of domesticated livestock.

So, the pair aren't saying anything new, they're building on others, and right there, it's not a new history, and it's not complete, so not "everything."

It also smacks of me of trying to build on the reputation of Graeber, who died in the last year. Now, he could have been a great capitalist within his anarchism; anarcho-capitalism is a thing, complete with its own Wiki page. But, from what I know of Graeber on my own and via Leo? Uh, no. He would have shuddered to be in the same breath (I think) as Murray Rothbard. (Per the Guardian extract, that's why it's funny for the duo to talk about capitalists talking about social connections at Christmas WITH the implication that they're doing that INSTEAD OF capitalism rather than as a marketing adjunct.)

Update, Nov. 5: At the New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Krous also appears to give it a fluffy review.

Now, to some specifics, via a trio of (unanswered, Twitter, natch, low signal to noise ratio) Tweets to the author of the Atlantic review.

First, I noted the pair were by no means alone, per the above.

An interesting review of David Graeber's posthumous book. That said, Graeber is nowhere near alone in research & writing challenging the "conventional narrative" of human origins, agriculture, etc. 1/x .@WDeresiewicz https://t.co/0brHaL7Z8j

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 21, 2021

Second, I noted that the HIGHLY sympathetic reviewer, William Deresciewicz, undercut himself in links in his piece, one in particular, in the claim that "towns" existed long before a permanent shift to agriculture (note that I also tagged Wengrow, also unresponsive):

2nd, if sites like Nebelivka weren't inhabited year-round, or in many cases even close, arguably anachronistic at best 4 Graeber & .@davidwengrow (& others to call them cities, or to present the case 4 what they were as "settled"; the review link itself says "up in the air" 2/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 21, 2021

Finally, I said that, at least per what the review says and more importantly, doesn't say, it's NOT about "everything."

3rd, the review says nothing about new considerations on the development & cultural evolution of religion & metaphysics, that go hand in hand with new ideas on agro-humanity etc., or whether David Graber and David Wengrow tackle that issue. 3/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 21, 2021

OK,

Now, off to the Guardian excerpt, since I saw that later.

First, the pair are right that just about all of us, including our African Homo sapiens ancestors before leaving Africa, have DNA and mitochondrial DNA from other species within us. Nonetheless, that's yet more dilute than the bits of Neanderthal and / or Denisovan DNA that the typical non-African has. Ergo, the concept of "DNA Adam" and "mitochondrial DNA Eve" is still a good working theory and Graber-Wengrow come close to strawmanning. (The pair actually had a chance of tackling residual racial bias in human population genetics, that said, but at least here, appear to take a pass.)

Second, since cultural evolution is not evolution, unless the pair are slaves to evolutionary psychology, this is largely irrelevant to cultural evolution, contra their claims. So, without reading the full book? Lost a star.

Third, they do next admit previous recent study of places like Göbekli Tepe, so a kudo of sorts back. That said, I see it as like Pueblo Bonito and the whole Chaco Canyon structures. We still don't know for sure what THAT was — permanent settlement, religious site with sparse permanent inhabitation, some mix of that, or something else.

Fourth, it may be true that inequalities of various sorts were actually worse before a permanent transition to agriculture and a permanent transition to settled cities. Or it may not be. Right now, there's just not enough evidence to say that. We do have enough evidence to say we should get rid of old paradigms, but not enough to create new ones. Contra cheap versions of hot takes on Thomas Kuhn, paradigm shifts as in not just abandoning an old one but immediately replacing it with a new one, just aren't that common.

Update: On to a New Yorker fellation of Graeber and the book by Molly Fischer. Fischer does remind me of Graeber not only being the "intellectual voice" behind Occupy, but a supporter of Black Bloc types, including their property destruction, which this leftist of some sort has long rejected. It also reminds me of the lies told about Occupy in general and Occupy New York in particular being "leaderless," which it was not. Fischer starts with New York City's Direct Action Network, a predecessor of Occupy NY that got a new round of prominence after the Black Bloc destructiveness at the Seattle WTO event in 1998. 

I should note that this is why, other than what I've called the pretentiousness of the name, I don't identify with the so-called "antifa": their Black Bloc roots.

With that, per Fischer's piece, I wonder if Graeber, with the Malagasy and others of his anthropology work, while being right on them being anarchist in not having formal governments, nonetheless had leadership structures that he either flat missed, or ignored by de-emphasis, or else willfully turned a blind eye to. I say that because of his claim that Occupy "worked," a claim rejected by many people who, like him, were involved with it.

Re what I said above about their work, the Graeber-Wengrow for the book, not being new? Fischer reports that professional colleagues said at first, on their first journal submission, that it was insufficiently new. They should have stuck with that.

Via Fischer leading me to a Brad DeLong Tweet, I see The Nation has some skepticism about the book, too. Daniel Immerwahr nails it, which is why DeLong Tweeted the link:

(H)e was better known for being interesting than right, and he would gleefully make pronouncements that either couldn’t be confirmed (the Iraq War was retribution for Saddam Hussein’s insistence that Iraqi oil exports be paid for in euros) or were never meant to be (“White-collar workers don’t actually do anything”).

Yep.

Just before that, Immerwahr noted a tendentious reading of Mayan ruins by the pair.

The latter third of the review raises a big-ticket item. Accepting that late Neolithic humans did indeed "experiment" with sedentary farming, state structures, etc., for 2-3 millennia or more, at some point, they "locked in" and we became "stuck." This is definitely true in most of Eurasia plus North Africa, and also true, albeit at a lower level of hierarchy and without firm territories, in the Americas and much of sub-Saharan Africa pre-Columbian contact. And, Immerwahr says they never answer why this happened, at least not in satisfactory fashion. 

Since they can't construct an overarching narrative for that? He says that makes the book a "scrapbook" as much as anything.

==

Update: My Goodreads review is now up; it's a 2-star. He's actually not bad on some American Indian things, the Maya aside. But, he doesn't even discuss the Puebloans, or their Anasazi ancestors. And, there are lots of "shoulds," as well as, yes, a fair amount of strawmanning. And, the book desperately needed an editor. And, for someone(s) who present as having studied ancient cultures, there's lots of ignorance. Also, discussions of colonialism and imperialism are often Eurocentric. It's like China doesn't even exist.

No, chimps aren't religious

I've seen shorter versions of this claim made before by James Harrod, but with a longer paper on Academia, wanted to take a few minutes to refute it.

First, my rough-and-ready definition of religion is:

"A communal focus on engagement with believed metaphysical personages or entities involving communal rituals and actions to align the community with believed personages or entities."

I've rephrased that elsewhere as

Religion is about:

Metaphysical matters of ultimate concern, within a social group setting; and 

How one orients oneself within that group to a better relationship to these metaphysical matters of ultimate concern.

First, note that "metaphysical" shows we're clearly into philosophy. It means something that "transcendence" does not.

First of all, this definition is written to include something like Theravada Buddhism, by noting "entities," not just "personages." Theravada believes in an incarnation of a metaphysical life force, even if it doesn't believe in a personal soul, let alone a personal deity. And it believes that laws of karma govern that reincarnation. I have discussed in detail before the fact that Buddhism is a religion, and had a follow-up. I have also noted karma is as offensive as original sin, and maybe worse in Theravada with its rejection of an individual soul. I've also noted how reincarnation and karma has other problems, mainly based in a "progress" mindset that's as wrong there as in misframings of evolutionary theory. OK, so with all that about Buddhism, we move on.

Second, religion is communal, and part of that alignment includes addressing things like "sin." In many religions, the focus is first on sins against a god or gods, but still includes communal sins as well. And, even sins against a god are only visible within the light of a community.

Third, the "rituals and actions" notes that all religions have elements of orthopraxis. They all also have elements of orthodoxy. I've covered this recently.

Now, let's dig in.

Do chimpanzees have compassion? Yes. And even, perhaps, something like compassion for the memory of dead fellow chimps? Yes, I think. So do elephants, cetaceans and a few other non-human animals.

Do chimps have metaphysics? Highly, highly unlikely. In other words, chimps, IMO, don't believe in chimp souls, chimp karma, or a chimp god. Nor do gorillas, neither in the 1970s nor this past decade:



Sorry, James.

And, unlike Caesar/Andy Serkis, chimpanzees, and other primates don't have the speech to organize a community to focus on abstract ideas. And, contra Harrod, who is letting other scholars and thinkers be his mouthpiece, it's tempting to overread what communication chimps have. Well, tempting to him and them, but not to me.

Cetaceans might. But, if they do, they don't have hands with opposable thumbs and can't really engage in metaphysically related actions.

A rich emotion life and symbolic play also prove nothing about chimpanzees possibly conceiving metaphysical concepts. Nor does it at all address the difficulty of communicating such concepts without language. The fact that chimps have neural substrate systems similar to something like Broca's in humans only proves that evolutionary biology is real and is a conservative workman.

And, a first-order theory of mind? Given the complexity of judging human actions that might be called sins against a community, that's not enough. But, let’s get to Harrod’s nutgrafs — his transspecific definition of religion. Here goes:
• Reverence (showing devotion, intense love, deep respect), which may involve a hush;
• Careful observance, which may involve a calling-out announcement or remark;
• Experiencing or expressing emotion of dread (awe in its terror or astonishment aspect) before that which overwhelms the subject by its magnitude, grandeur, beneficence, or lethality; mysterium tremendum
• Experiencing or expressing emotion of wonder (awe in its fascination, curiosity, or desire-to-know-more aspect) with respect to a phenomenon (especially a movement) which is surprising, non-ordinary, extraordinary, special, or ‘miraculous’; mysterium fascinans
• Binding individuals together or back together in empathic intimacy or communion with respect to experiences of aliveness and animacy, including other living beings or things that appear to be alive, which may secondarily involve the witnessing of this by a collective social group.

OK, first observation? He's clearly smoking some Rudolf Otto high-grade drugs. And the "mysterium tremendum" as a key to "religious experience" is by no means widely accepted. As the likes of Susan Blackmore note, psychadelic drugs or deep meditative experiences can induce this "mysterium" in the non-religious. Ditto for near-death experiences.

Harrod goes on to make clear that he is indeed adapting an Ottonian framework to animals.

He ignores entirely ideas of sin, guilt, and metaphysical entities.

As for his five actual points?
• I can love either a girlfriend or a bottle of whisky. I don't worship either one, even if I shout "oh my god" during sex.
• Careful observance? Chimps, like us, evolved to stay safe from snakes and predators, as well as to identify a variety of ripe foods. Careful observance is part of not being dead. It's also, in we humans, what's behind overuse of agency imputation and pattern detection in non-savannah civilized live.
• Mysterium tremendum? Since chimps don't have abstract language, no way I see for them to communicate that, let alone for us to see that they're trying to do so.
• Wonder? Many scientists still have great degrees of wonder for the facts of evolutionary biology, cosmology and many things in between, and they're not religious. Indeed, Aeon has a new piece about the role of awe in scientific work.
• Empathy for life? I have that, too, and again, I'm not religious.

What Harrod is missing is that, in reality, at some point in human CULTURAL evolution, some point AFTER the evolution of some degree of language in all likelihood, these five points were adapted for what developed into religion. Some of the adaptation, per my notes on point 2 above, may well have been non-conscious.

Should chimpanzees have an evolutionary twig that offshoots into a new species, that follows a similar bath, Harrod can contact me back in a couple of million years.

And with that, I've wasted enough time on him.

D.S. Wilson tries to extend group selection to cultural evolution

This looks to be a howler.

Wilson, who along with non-relative E.O. Wilson, tried to turd-polish group selection in evolutionary biology by linking it with traditional genetic selection under the moniker of multi-level selection, is now trying to apply it to cultural evolution.

The biological evolution of individual humans itself is less a driver of cultural evolution than are non-biological changes in human societies. To the degree that group selection on the biological side has some small bit of reality, it obviously would be a small bit of the minority half of biological influences on cultural evolution.

But, apparently DS has a new book to sell. That's all about this.

At least, that appears to be the case in a recent exchange of online letters between him and Massimo Pigliucci, which starts with Massimo's response to Wilson's original, which is above it. Massimo politely torpedoes him.

And I snarkily piled on, on Massimo's Facebook page.

 I didn't know that D.S. Wilson had been trying to apply group selection aka multi-level selection to cultural evolution. And, of COURSE there's a new book attached to it. 

Second snarky comment. Is putting "evolutionary" in front of all sorts of ideas and fields kind of like doing the same with "neuro-"? 

And I smell a blog post coming on ... :) 

I think it's going to be about multi-level evolutionary neurobiology. 

And, does Wilson have any algorithms for this?

(Had to throw Dennett under the bus, too.)

More seriously, Wilson does sound like the neuro-faddists.

Wilson is a kind of odd duck in other ways. He rejects most of the Tooby-Cosmides central theorums of evolutionary psychology while still apparently believing in something like it.

That said, OTOH, I think I accept that evolutionary biology has more influence on average human psychological traits than Massimo does, albeit less than Wilson does.

Because of this, and contra his hint that Tooby-Cosmides might be a minority view, while I'll use the more clunky "evolutionary-biology based psychological development" or something like that, the phrase "evolutionary psychology" is poisoned fruit. So is "sociobiology," again contra D.S. — and E.O.

As for Wilson touting his ideas of the evolutionary development of religion? No soap. I'll take Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran ahead of you any day.

And, that leads us back to the original.

Pace Massimo, the claim that one can find different group levels to study in exegesis of history is laughable.

Or tohu wevohu, per Genesis 1.

Or empty and cognitively meaningless, per logical positivism.

I mean, there are different schools of history, like Great Man, economic, etc., but ...

BUT ...

First, most of them aren't that exclusive; they cross-pollinate and aren't separately selected for.

Second, Wilson doesn't even explain what group selection would be like in cultural evolution, at least not from what he writes Massimo. That's the cognitively meaningless part.

Third, as Massimo points out, Wilson offers no explanatory power, nor testable hypotheses.

Saplosky's 'Behave' doesn't fully do so

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A 3.5 star "magnum opus" needs some philosophy in general and Hume in particular

The book is not horrible, but it's not all that it could be or that some reviewers crack it up to be. Content, lack of content, and lack of editorial connectivity are all problems.

One biggie on the good side is about dopamine. Sapolsky, with all the latest on that, shows just how much dopamine can NOT be the "addiction neurotransmitter." (There are still plenty of the uninformed who think it is.)

1. On dopamine, at one point it becomes about rewarding anticipation of an actuality, not the actuality
2. Neurons have at least 5 dopamine receptors. D4 is the most studied … the DRD4 gene controlling for it has at least 10 different variants. The 7R form, with seven repeats of one stretch of the gene, is associated w/novelty seeking, addiction, promiscuity, risk taking etc. BUT the risk taking can be for good causes.
3. A particular variant has at most 3-4 percent effect on novelty seeking.
4. What constitutes ‘novelty seeking’ still varies from person to person.
5. In addition, the DAT (dopamine reuptake) gene also comes in different varieties.
6. Even an anticipation of a lessening of an electric shock of a Pavlovian operant conditioning type will raise dopamine

Then, I love this footnote:

Footnote, page 66: Dopaminergic responses to sexually arousing visual stimuli are greater in men than in women. Remarkably, this difference isn’t specific to humans. Male rhesus monkeys will forgo the chance to drink water when thirsty in order to see pictures of — I’m not quite sure how else to say this — crotch shots of female rhesus monkeys (while not being interested in other rhesus-y pictures).

Sapolsky has a fair amount to say about cultural evolution. No blinding light info, but generally solid.

He pretty much crushes Steve Pinker's "Better Angels" claims about our mega-violent past. (Pinker isn't totally alone in such claims, and he and fellow travelers like creating straw people out of anthropologists.) The reality, Sapolsky notes, and with which many anthropologists agree, is that primitive hunter-gatherers weren't violence-free, but they weren't totally Hobbsian. That said, Sapolsky only briefly references controversy over whether or not Pinker et al cheat by not counting internal violence by the modern state against its own citizens.

Surprisingly, after that kicking of Pinker, Sapolsky is generally accepting of sociobiology and its offspring, ev psych. He's also surprisingly at least halfway accepting of D.S. Wilson's neo-version of group selection. And, with that, for now, the book goes back to 4 stars.

Chapter on morals gets dicey. Gets close to scientism. Says he’ll talk more about virtue ethics later, but doesn’t, not in that chapter. Doesn’t recognize that many serious philosophers don’t consider the trolley problem to be serious philosophy.

And, speaking of, his last chapter, on the justice system, could use a lot of philosophy. And has none. Philosophy is missing elsewhere, too.

He uses Hume to introduce Damasio's idea of "emotional reasoning," which includes modeling hypothetical situations to feel potential emotional affect. But, he doesn't reference Damasio that much after that and doesn't mention Hume at all. Of course, Hume's famous "Is ≠ ought" is VERY pertinent in the justice system chapter, if no place else. The whole emphasis on "neuro-" in this last chapter comes close to scientism, and Sapolsky could use some help on matters of volition, which, rather than "free will," is the preferred terminology among many philosophers.

Then there's an occasional WTF. Here's the biggest, on 486:

In one such study, Michael Tomasello (a frequent critic of de Waal — stay tuned) ....

Stay tuned for WHAT? Per the index, and my reading, that's the only reference to Tomasello (who IS an insightful person) in the whole book.

Similarly, after promising, in the first few pages after that Hume reference, to talk more about Damasio later on, he really doesn't. There's only two brief references to him after the first 100 pages.

In short, although it's been several years since Sapolsky has had a tome, and I've liked his previous work this baby came off in some ways as looking like a rush job which needed a better editor as well as a philosopher to be among its readers.

I'd heard good stuff about it, but, because it's at 4.5 stars, my 3.5 star rating and the non-allowance of half-stars mean I bump it downward.


View all my reviews

Moral realism, moral non-realism, moral naturalism

In this post at Footnotes to Plato, Massimo Pigliucci talks about morals and not participating in the "Big Four" of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon ever more dominating large chunks of the online world. The post is based on a new book about that.

A back-and-forth about moral framing issues between Massimo and Dan Kaufman in comments, with me largely agreeing with Massimo, led to me hinting that Dan is strawmanning Massimo on this issue (I still think he is, despite his denial), led to this last comment by Massimo:

“Massimo is also a moral anti-realist, as you know, as he’s said so here” 

It would be more correct to say that I’m a moral naturalist, as I think morality is a human invention (thus not “real”), but constrained by human nature, desires, and limitations (thus partially factual).

(His quote is of a previous comment by me.)

I told him in an email that with that explanation, I agree, and that it's why I think something like "ev psych done right," or a relabeled, start-from-scratch, the "evolutionary biology of psychology and sociology" is real — as long as said field includes gene-culture co-evolution.

That said, let me note a comment of mine there, not too much earlier, the one from which Massimo quoted:

Dan, you choose not to see any type of argument, especially if you don’t see “specialness” in something like trashing the entire planet’s climate. To further riff on Isaiah, I don’t try to reason forever where and when it’s a waste of time. 

Massimo is also a moral anti-realist, as you know, as he’s said so here. I’m a semi-anti-realist. Being a moral anti-realist is irrelevant here, other than the issue of language, and you choosing to make your division of where the word “moral” falls …
And others disagreeing 

IF one wants to fully go down that road, and also be a moral anti-realist, every person in the universe can hive off by one’s moral self. If one takes it far enough, we can introduce Mr. Wittgenstein to Mr. Hobbes. 

That said, this is why I’m only a semi-anti-realist. Per the evolutionary development of human nature, I think we can find some moral values partially influenced by our human backgrounds. 

And, as for Mr. Wittgenstein meeting Mr. Hobbes? Based on the paragraph above, homey can either not play that game, or else play it in deliberately contrarian way, usually based on Cynic ideas.

I can do exactly that. I can call a person like Dan immoral, if I think he or she is for willfully narrowing their "moral arc," per Martin Luther King.

And I do think exactly that. Per the Markan explainer (reduplicated by Q with the Parable of the Talents) of the moral of certain parables, that, "to him who has much, more will be given," and even more, per the Lukan different explainer on a different parable cycle, that, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded," and that virtue ethics morals, based on Massimo's moral naturalism, is somewhat of a sociological project (Massimo talks about writing and exemplifying) I think it is realistic to say that we as a society should expect a broader moral arc from people with higher intellectual gifts, especially if they have a more prominent social standing with it.

That said, whether it's "don't want to" or "can't," at times, Dan's psychological arc isn't highly expanded. He's said more than once that he just doesn't "get" families with less than a fairly high degree of cohesion, let alone families where blood is certainly not thicker than water. Taking it charitably as "can't" within his current psyche, and knowing of some of his gifts, I hope that both on that in particular and moral arcs in general, his arc does expand in the future.

Do I think Dan is as immoral as a person who drowns cats, let alone a suicide bomber? Of course not.

But, yes, and seriously — not just to play Wittgensteinian linguistic schadenfreude — I do think it's a moral failing of a small degree to not expand one's arc further, especially if part of that is willfully wanting to not expand one's arc.

#SciAm has a culturo-centric fail on music

A recent blog post at Scientific American talked about the "sad" feeling of minor keys vs. the "happy" feeling of major keys, and how the author wanted to do some more specific investigation of this issue.

Several historically or culturally relevant items were missing from the piece, though.

That includes, but is not limited to:

1. The major and minor scales of modern Western music (more on that below) did not become the only two regularly used scales until the Renaissance, and even then, not really so until the later part of the Renaissance.

2. They evolved from two of the several church modes of the medieval modal system, which in turn had involved from older classical Greek modal scales.

3. Even when the Western musical world focused on the major and minor scales, they didn't all sound the same until the adoption of even or mean tuning in the 1700s, pushed by people like Johann Sebastian Bach in his two volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Before then, instruments generally had to be tuned to sound best in one or two major or minor keys. Keys that were harmonically "distant" from them had certain intervals that basically sounded ... bad at least. Perfect fourths and fifths, in the most distant keys, might instead sound halfway like the infamous "devil's tritone," the augmented fourth or diminished fifth.

4. Since Debussy's work with whole-tone scales in the late 19th century, followed by Arnold Schoenberg's serialism, Western classical music has become more loosely connected to the major-minor system.

5. Much non-Western traditional music is based on non-12 tone scales. These include India's classical 22-tone scale, the pentatonic scale of stereotypical East Asian music and more.

6. Some modern Western music has also rejected 12-tone scales, not just the major/minor system within 12-tone scales. Harry Partch is known for his work with microtonal music.

Basically, the post (I'm not going to bother hunting up the link) came off sounding like someone halfway through grad school in science program but without a single class in music theory or history spouting forth personal ideas on happy/sad and major/minor, plus tapping into modern pop Western musical preconceptions.

Blackmore shows ignorance of both memes and religion

Susan Blackmore admits that religion isn’t a “virus of the mind.”

Are religions viruses of the mind? I would have replied with an unequivocal "yes" until a few days ago when some shocking data suggested I am wrong.

Why?
From a conference on “Explaining religion,” she cites the following reasons.

1. Religious activity correlates with more children.

And, no others.

Yep, that’s it.

First, despite her noting her previous mea culpa over believing in the reality of paranormal phenomena, it shows Blackmore might still lack intellectual rigor in some areas.

This is a prime example. She didn’t even look for additional information, like average lifespan of children from religious vs. nonreligious families.

Nor did she take a look at a single datum of cultural evolution that might be connected.

Nor did she acknowledge this might be an issue of cultural evolution trumping genetic evolution.

Shoddy, shoddy.

Beyond that, she didn’t even ask the most pertinent question:

Shouldn’t this put another nail in the coffin of “strong” theories of memes, at least?

Answer? Yes.

Meanwhile, I can't wait for the Christian version of a Pop Ev Psycher to actually cite this column.