Peter Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, is an Emmy Award-winning composer, NY Times best-selling author and noted philanthropist. Currently, he is releasing socially-conscious music and touring his "Concert & Conversation" series in support of his book Life Is What You Make It .
 
 

As I will probably say in many blogs, I’m all too aware that there are people that know way more than I do regarding just about everything I write. Generally, I’m just making observations as a casual but curious (and concerned) bystander. Often I find that my thoughts about a lot of things haven’t changed that much from when I was, say, 4 years old.

So with all that being said. This is what my 4-year-old self thought this week:

I’m surprised that we’re not further along in our development as humans.

We’ve all heard the old, “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t we have ...” (Something like – “shorter lines at the DMV?”)

But seriously, we’ve gone through some ice ages, fought a gazillion wars, built pyramids, and come up with a bunch of math and science and amazing art. We can put a man on the moon.

We can fly thousands of planes around the world safely everyday and build a network of satellites that move ridiculous amounts of data.

So why are we still calling each other names, trying to hoard all the stuff, and shooting each other?

Is this it? Can you really call the last few thousand years progress? If you’ve been reading earlier blogs, you know I’m a fan of indoor plumbing. And refrigeration is handy. There are plenty of things about our march towards the future that are nice to have around. But we’re still treating each other the same way that we have for a really long time.

Now I use “we” pretty generally. There’s no question that there are pockets of cultures and communities that were not constantly beating each other up in some way. But, on balance, I’m not seeing a great improvement in compassion and respect over time. 

What’s the story? I don’t want to believe that this is it—human nature, etc. I want to believe that we have some evolution left in us.

At this moment, we are the custodians of our future. This is a relatively new concept in its totality. Sure, we know most indigenous communities have a deep understanding of how their actions will effect future generations. But let’s face it: it’s easy to have that worldview when you aren’t facing problems on a global scale. Things are different now. So we have to behave differently. And we’re not.

And because we’re not, we’re going to quite possibly kill our children’s children. Does that get the point across? Do you care about your children’s children? Or will it be enough that you’re off the planet and you got yours?

I think that’s pretty much the world we’re living in. And, again, I use “we” generally. There are billions of people that have no real say in the matter. But we’ll probably kill their children’s children, too.

We’ve got some serious story changing to do.

I think some radical shifts in thinking have to occur. The good news is that we probably behaved pretty well in our deeper past. I actually think human nature is a pretty loving and kind nature. It’s culture that gets in the way. A culture is dead when a set of beliefs kills. And we have a lot of killing going on. And sometimes in very subtle ways.

I think placing blame just feeds the beast. That’s pretty obvious. So what do we do? All say “truce,” lay down our arms, cash in our stocks, shake hands, and have a party? Oh right— my 4-year-old voice can only take me so far.

And John Lennon and Yoko Ono thought of that in the '70:

War Is Over
If You Want It.

I hope we get some folks talking back here. Or over at Change Our Story. I’m not the “end of the world” type. But there are all sorts of graphs that show really terrible things happening if we don’t change our behavior quickly. There’s been a long search for unifying theories—it’s a classic quest. Can we find one that works for mankind?

What do you think? Share your story at changeourstory.com . Visit www.peterbuffett.com to learn more and Change Our Story to join the conversation on how we all can become active participants in shaping our future.   

Image courtesy of DaMenace through Uncyclomedia Commons.

This post originally appeared at Chronicle.com.  

When a moth flies at night, it uses the moon and the stars to steer a straight path. Those light sources are fixed and distant, so the rays always strike the moth's multilensed eyes at the same angle, making them reliable for nocturnal navigation. But introduce something else bright—a candle, say, or a campfire—and there will be trouble. The light radiates outward, confusing the moth and causing it to spiral ever closer to the blaze until the insect meets a fiery end.

For years Richard Dawkins has used the self-immolation of moths to explain religion. The example can be found in his 2006 best seller, The God Delusion, and it's been repeated in speeches and debates, interviews and blog posts. Moths didn't evolve to commit suicide; that's an unfortunate byproduct of other adaptations. In much the same way, the thinking goes, human beings embrace religion for unrelated cognitive reasons. We evolved to search for patterns in nature, so perhaps that's why we imagine patterns in religious texts. Instead of being guided by the light, we fly into the flames.

The implication—that religion is basically malevolent, that it "poisons everything," in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens—is a standard assertion of the New Atheists. Their argument isn't just that there probably is no God, or that intelligent design is laughable bunk, or that the Bible is far from inerrant. It's that religion is obviously bad for human beings, condemning them to ignorance, subservience, and endless conflict, and we would be better off without it.

But would we?

Before you can know for sure, you have to figure out what religion does for us in the first place. That's exactly what a loosely affiliated group of scholars in fields including biology, anthropology, and psychology are working on. They're applying evolutionary theory to the study of religion in order to discover whether or not it strengthens societies, makes them more successful, more cooperative, kinder. The scholars, many of them atheists themselves, generally look askance at the rise of New Atheism, calling its proponents ignorant, fundamentalist, and worst of all, unscientific. Dawkins and company have been no more charitable in return.

While the field is still young and fairly small—those involved haven't settled on a name yet, though "evolutionary religious studies" gets thrown around—its findings could reshape a very old debate. Maybe we should stop asking whether God exists and start asking whether it's useful to believe that he does.

Let's say someone gives you $10. Not a king's ransom, but enough for lunch. You're then told that you can share your modest wealth with a stranger, if you like, or keep it. You're assured that your identity will be protected, so there's no need to worry about being thought miserly. How much would you give?

If you're like most people who play the so-called dictator game, which has been used in numerous experiments, you will keep most of the money. In a recent study from a paper with the ominous title "God Is Watching You," the average subject gave $1.84. Meanwhile, another group of subjects was presented with the same choice but was first asked to unscramble a sentence that contained words like "divine," "spirit," and "sacred."

The second group of subjects gave an average of $4.22, with a solid majority (64 percent) giving more than five bucks. A heavenly reminder seemed to make subjects significantly more magnanimous. In another study, researchers found that prompting subjects with the same vocabulary made some more likely to volunteer for community projects. Intriguingly, not all of them: Only those who had a specific dopamine receptor variant volunteered more, raising the possibility that religion doesn't work for everybody.

A similar experiment was conducted on two Israeli kibbutzes. The scenario was more complicated: Subjects were shown an envelope containing 100 shekels (currently about $25). They were told that they could choose to keep as much of the money as they wished, but that another member of the kibbutz was being given the identical option. If the total requested by the participants (who were kept separated) exceeded 100 shekels, they walked away with nothing. If the total was less than or equal to 100, they were given the money plus a bonus based on what was left over.

The kicker is that one of the kibbutzes was secular and one was religious. Turns out, the more-devout members of the religious kibbutz, as measured by synagogue attendance, requested significantly fewer shekels and expected others to do the same. The researchers, Richard Sosis and Bradley Ruffle, ventured that "collective ritual has a significant impact on cooperative decisions."

See also a study that found that religious people were, in some instances, more likely to treat strangers fairly. Or the multiple studies suggesting that people who were prompted to think about an all-seeing supernatural agent were less likely to cheat. Or the study of 300 young adults in Belgium that found that those who were religious were considered more empathetic by their friends.

The results of other studies are less straightforward. A Harvard Business School researcher discovered that religious people were more likely to give to charity, but only on the days they worshiped, a phenomenon he dubbed the "Sunday Effect." Then there's the survey of how belief in the afterlife affected crime rates in 67 countries. Researchers determined that countries with high rates of belief in hell had less crime, while in those where the belief in hell was low and the belief in heaven high, there was more crime. A vengeful deity is better for public safety than a merciful one.

None of that research settles the value of belief, and much of it is based on assuming that certain correlations are meaningful or that particular techniques (like the one used in the dictator-game study) actually prime what researchers think they prime. And questions remain: How effective is religious belief, really, if it needs to be prompted with certain words? And is the only thing stopping you from robbing a liquor store really the prospect of eternal hellfire?

Still, a growing body of research suggests that religion or religious ideas, in certain circumstances, in some people, can elicit the kind of behavior that is generally good for society: fairness, generosity, honesty. At the very least, when you read the literature, it becomes difficult to confidently assert that religion, despite the undeniable evil it has sometimes inspired, is entirely toxic.

Visit Chronicle.com to read the rest.  

Image by Vinoth Chandar, licensed under Creative Commons.  

History has shown the evolutionary costs of inbreeding, creating royal families with high rates of hemophilia and other diseases. In some cases, however, researchers have found that mating with kin can have evolutionary benefits, Ewen Callaway reports for Science News. Yes, diseases can be more easily passed down through generations, but beneficial adaptations are more likely to be passed down, too. In fact, to avoid some of the negative connotations of the word “inbreeding,” Cornell University ecologist Kelly Zamudio has coined a euphemism: “genetic complementation.” George Michael Bluth would be proud.

—Bennett Gordon

From the people who brought you the Creation Museum, the newest, peer-reviewed, creationist research journal has just gone live. It’s called Answers Research Journal, published by the organization Answers in Genesis. So far the journal has tackled some tough questions, including: How do germs fit into the story of Adam and Eve?

For a different take on the birth of the universe, LiveScience has a list of the top ten creation myths. The question posed is: Did Norse bulls create the earth, or was it the work of Chinese cosmic eggs?

—Bennett Gordon