Someone I know recently shared with me their experience in applying for a job at the State Department. I’m interested because I thought it might cast light on why the State Department, in spite of being filled with such bright folks, hasn’t accomplished anything useful for at least the past four years. And it does.

First, the testing process. You start off by taking the Written Examination, which about 20% of the applicants pass. Next, you take the Oral Assessment, which sounds like they are checking out your teeth. It’s an all day interview and role-playing exercise, also with a low pass ratio.

My friend failed the test, although she did pass one of the three components—the so-called “Case Management” part, where you are given a situation in the form of a bunch of materials to read, analyze, think about, and then come up with recommendations in the form of a written memo.

This was the component where some doubts began to arise in her mind: why, in order to join the elite Foreign Service of the United States, are applicants given a problem involving re-orging a five-person department at the embassy in a fictional Arab country that can’t seem to get its visas issued? Managing the janitorial crew at the local Wal-mart would probably be more challenging, involve at least as many cross-cultural issues (at least here in LA), and could well pay as much, although I’m sure State’s dental plan is better.

But her main problem was the so-called “Structured Interview” part of the day, one of the two components (the other being the “Group Exercise”) she didn’t pass.

The lead-off question was why she wanted to work at State. Now, everyone knows this is coming, and everyone has an answer ready, but guess what: you have to really know why you want to get this job. It’s not enough to say I like foreign countries, or I think it would be cool to live in SOUTH KANUBISTAN, or I love the idea of sitting in a little booth all day stamping visas in the Kanubis’ passports, or the $400 per month in hazardous duty pay sounds great when all I have do to get it is get shot at occasionally. You have to have a real reason. This is harder than it sounds because, in actuality, there are not very many good reasons to want to work at State.

Forty years ago, oh my, were these people at the top of the heap—sort of like a diplomatic version of those glamorous stewardesses who, can you imagine, got to travel to other countries, including ones with weird names on exotic continents! Turns out that in 2005, State employees are still like stewardesses: grossly overworked, horrifically underpaid, challenged only by the masses of unwashed screaming customers below and clueless bureaucrats above.

But wait: some Foreign Service officers may rise to the exalted level of ambassadorship, right? Not really, if it’s an important country—in that case, like in Japan recently, Bush will appoint one of his fund-raiser cronies, while your job is to fetch him a glass of water. Even if you did become ambassador to some little third-world country, your job is basically reading the memos that come from DC and managing other sad American souls like yourself who responded to the siren call of a life in the “diplomatic corps”, and then made the mistake of actually passing the Oral Assessment. Or, you might become one of the Examiners administering the “Assessment” yourself! My friend reports, though, that the ones examining her did not look especially pleased with their lot in life; one told her that this exact same daily grind, looking at loser after loser day after day, was going to continue until the end of March.

You might also get a job organizing parties at the embassy! This was the topic of one of the “hypothetical questions” that form part of the structured interview. Such complex questions quite likely account for the high failure rate—only really savvy party folks are going to be entitled to bear the mantle of planning America’s parties in distant lands.

All in all, though, or so my friend opines, the Oral Assessment process seems to have functioned well. She and State looked at each other and decided they didn’t want to work together, and the feeling was entirely mutual.

All the guys at State are real smart and I’m sure there are good reasons for why they put together this kind of test. The results of decades of la creme de la creme passing through this eye of the needle is that the State Department is now staffed with the absolute best and brightest. But unfortunately, over the last four years at least, they have been, at best, mere bystanders in the process of American diplomacy; the real decisions were made by the neocon hawks. Smart guys at State counseled against going into Iraq and urged more planning at a minimum, but were essentially told to go bork themselves. State has basically ended up cleaning up Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s mess, and will continue to do so for many years to come. The State people knew that we should continue to engage North Korea; Bush thought he knew better. The State people knew that we should continue exercising our good offices in the conflict in the Middle East; Bush thought that was too “Clintonian” and our entire diplomatic involvement in the Middle East was essentially terminated for the first three years of his term while the problem festered. Meanwhile, ignored and isolated, Colin Powell’s exemplary integrity did not quite extend to doing the obvious, namely resigning; instead, he let himself be manipulated into giving the ridiculous dog and pony show at the UN where he repeated in front of the world the fabricated intelligence about WMDs in Iraq. Now, should you be lucky enough to pass through the golden gates of State, your boss will be the person who herself helped create those fabrications, and amazingly, reiterated at her confirmation hearings that everything went great in Iraq and she wouldn’t do a single thing differently.

But have no fear: through thick and thin, the brave men and women of State will continue valiantly to stamp visas and plan parties.

Michael Spivey (pictured) and his collaborators at Cornell did a cute little study, where they tracked the movement of the subject’s mouse as they tried to move it toward a picture on the computer screen corresponding to the word they had just heard. When the two pictures were of items whose lexical representations are “close” (think “candy” vs. “candle”) the mouse darted tentatively toward one before converging on the correct one. As the authors say in the abstract, “competition between partially active lexical representations are revealed in the shape of the movement trajectories”.

This seems like a useful thing to do, while hardly qualifying as a breakthrough.

But does Spivey really believe the stuff they quote him as saying in the brain-damaged press release put out by Cornell? He supposedly said

For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols—like a digital computer.”

No they didn’t. That was one, discredited, easily refuted model. He goes on:

In [our new] model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties—like a biological organism.

Well, gee whiz. Maybe that’s because it is.

PS. It does not seem altogether irrelevant that Spivey is apparently the inventor of the Spivey Test, where instead of computers trying to act like humans, humans try to act like computers.

Dr. Deepak Chopra’s (picture) (Wikipedia) 26th book is How to Know God. With no knowledge of Chopra (I thought he was a diet guru), I approached this book with anticipation, it having been highly recommended. And it comes with six full pages of recommendations at the beginning—from luminaries including the Dalai Lama (“a wonderful book”) and Ken Wilber.

My conclusion: Chopra is one crafty guy, with a careful strategy for raising mankind’s spiritual level, albeit one not everyone would agree with. At first glance, much of what is in his book appears to be simply off the deep end. For instance, he presents, as definitive proof that all humankind is connected by a shared mind, the fact that sometimes you meet someone with the same birthday as yours. A man in Canada won the lottery two years in a row. The author once found himself sitting next to a tea wholesaler on a plane right after he had had another discussion about tea. Sometimes you feel like someone is watching you behind your back and it turns out they actually are! A woman came home and found that her boyfriend had cleaned out the closet, just like she had imagined! Twins often think alike!

Nor are these mere coincidences, he says: such phenomena take us beyond our present knowledge of the brain into the regions of the “mind field” that area closest to God. The brain is a receiver of mind, like a radio and quantum reality—the zone of miracles—is a place very nearby. At work here is an invisible organizing principle, a field of awareness, the quantum level, a universal shared mind, a cosmic intelligence.

As if this were not enough to put me off, in one of the very same kinds of synchronous occurrences that Chopra discusses in this book, after my friend had sent it to me but before it arrived I happened to run into Chopra’s ruminations about Intelligent Design (actually I was alerted to this post by Carl Zimmer’s excellent Loom site), where he (Chopra, not Zimmer) makes a series of outlandish claims about evolution which even I could immediate detect were hogwash. Examples: Why doesn’t the fossil record show any adaptive failures? (Answer: they were failures, so they died.) How could the same organism take multiple evolutionary paths? And my favorite: If design doesn’t imply intelligence, why are we so intelligent? Also: Why do forms (such as spirals) replicate themselves without apparent need? Or how about this: What invisible change causes oxygen to acquire intelligence the instant it contacts life? In what way is a bee stinging a survival mechanism, given that the bee doesn’t survive at all?

It would seem that young Deepak skipped tenth grade biology class.

He then followed up this post, unbowed by howls of protest in the comments to his blog entry, with one even more ludicrous. Beginning by attacking his detractors as “emotional”, and literally comparing himself to Einstein and other geniuses unrecognized in their own time, he then proceeds to demonstrate that he played hooky from high school physics as well as biology. A flavor: Until physics can explain apparent design and why entropy developed evolution as its enemy when there was no need to, biology is helpless to explain life, since there is no such thing as Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ among atoms. He then posits that consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe, and that using these as working principles we might make tremendous progress in explaining the missing gaps in evolutionary theory. Not all the gaps, one notes, just the missing ones.

To people acquainted with the issues, nothing could be more muddled.

So where, then, is Chopra going with all this? I think he has set himself an audacious goal—to raise the spiritual level of mankind—and paired it with a well-thought out strategy for getting there. With the overwhelming majority of humans on our earth stuck in lives of quiet desperation and mired in simplistic, sterile concepts of the spiritual, Chopra realizes that he must take one step at a time, bringing his target audience along with him gently and gradually. An excellent way to do that is to appeal to people’s beloved “folk religion”, which involves weird things and mysterious realms. He is like a 19th century missionary in Africa who raises the appeal of his teachings by syncretistically and opportunistically incorporating native beliefs in ghosts into Christianity. His statements in favor of Intelligent Design can be seen as another element of this strategy—to establish his credentials among the “heathen” and gain their trust.

Reading Wilber’s recommendation of the book more carefully, we can see that Ken realizes this as well: “Deepak Chopra has introduced literally millions of people to the spiritual path, and for this we should all be profoundly grateful. In How to Know God, Deepak continues his pioneering outreach.”

Chopra begins to coax his readers out of their fundamentalist rut by presenting an unthreatening hierarchy of levels of development, seven in his model, ranging from the visceral, to the reactive, the restful, the intuitive, the creative, the visionary, and the sacred. He walks through these stages in a friendly way, throwing in cute (if sometimes irrelevant) stories along the way, together with vaguely uplifiting assertions along the lines of God exists in a quantum zone on the other side of a transition zone which lies between our material world and Him, the zone where energy turns into matter. Before you know it, he has the Bible-thumping red-staters thinking that total immersion in the One sounds real cool, since after all, Deepak says, that’s what Jesus our Lord and Savior taught anyway. And also buying his herbal teas.

Chopra carefully avoids any discussions of specific practices or efforts which might be necessary to move ourselves along the path he outlines—that’s not what his audience wants to hear right now. And he lays important groundwork for a more biological appoach to spirituality—something we should welcome as students of neurotheology—with constant references to the the brain as a biological mechanism: Your brain is hard-wired to find God. Every image of God was designed in tissue that appears to be a mass of congested nerves. God’s most cherished secrets are hidden within the human skull . Only the brain can deliver this vast range of deities .

All in all, then, this is not a book that would be of any interest to the advanced seeker, other than in the sense of appreciating Chopra’s crafty strategy for advancing the spiritual welfare of the masses. He presents spirituality as something akin to getting a good backrub, or having a nice glass of wine. Anyone can enjoy that.

We humans owe a debt of gratitude to fish—after all, it’s a little bump that developed in their spines that is believed to be the precursor to the human brain. All the more reason to be concerned about preserving the salmon. In my childhood memoir, I recount the plight of these noble fish as they try to carry out their life’s mission, travelling up and down the Columbia across the dams (p. 93):

The young fish heading out to the ocean end up in a pipe called a “penstock,” filled with highly pressurized, fast-moving water, which hurtles them into a turbine rotating at 120rpm. Although it sounds like they ought to be chopped to bits, actually around ninety percent of the youngsters survive. Remember, though, that they have to make their way through not just one, but more than half-a-dozen dams before reaching the ocean. No more than fifty to sixty percent manage that.

Some dams also have a “juvenile fish bypass system” which is basically some screens in front of the turbines which deflect the fish into pipes which either dump them downstream, or in some case, into a holding pool from which they are carried downstream in a truck. The number of fish successfully deflected is called the “fish guidance efficiency,” and it ranges from thirty to eighty percent depending on the season and type of fish. Another concept is simply to spill water around the times of the migrations, with the fish getting an exhilarating ride over the dam.

Unfortunately, my description of “spilling water” over the dams was incorrect. In fact, the approach is to let the fish cross the dam under the spillways, through a high-pressure pipe whose entrance is sixty feet below the surface of the dam. This requires the salmon to make a harrowing dive to find the entrace, before being shot through the tunnel into the pool below the dam—where some are so disoriented they perish on the spot.

Now a new approach has been developed: the removable spillway weir, which requires the juveniles to dive just fifteen feet. They pass through under lower “veclocities” and “pressures”. The new weir, costing a cool $20 million, is said to improve survivability by several percentage points—which may not seem like much, until you consider that the salmon are navigating a half dozen dams or more, so the percentages add up. It weighs over 2 million pounds, and is 115 feet tall and 83 feet wide. The “removable” part of the name indicates that the entire device can be dropped to the bottom in flood situations. This device also supposedly “wastes” only 1/4 as much water per fish as existing approaches. It’s been installed on a trial basis at a dam on the Snake River.

But sorry, folks, you are still killing salmon. You’ve got to tear down the dams and let the salmon come and go as they wish.

I still remember the first time I saw and held a sea cucumber. These preternaturally squishy, elongated, leathery life forms evoke a combination of repulsion and wonder.

Sea cucumbers are of the genus holothuroidea, and thus are sometimes called holothurians; other names include beche-de-mer and trepang. These bottom dwellers are found across the Pacific Ocean, their home of 400 million years, in an amazing 1400 varieties: brilliantly colored or dull gray, smooth or spiked. (They are one of the six species in the phylum Echinodermata, or echinoderms, which also includes starfish and sea urchins.)

For those interested in neurobiology, I note that the sea cucumber has no brain whatsoever, not even the start of a ganglia. I guess it doesn’t need a brain since it has other ways to satisfy all its basic needs: to reproduce, for instance, it just shoots eggs and sperm out into the water. What intelligence it has is built into its body parts. For instance, it defends itself by ejecting certain body parts from its anus, whereupon they grow long and sticky, entangling the poor crab who thought he had found his dinner.

A particularly succulent part of the sea cucumber is its intestines. The Pacific Islanders have developed a technique for plucking out them out—squeezing a finger into the underside usually does the trick—taking advantage of the fact that the animal auto-eviscerates in response to rough handling, a defensive mechanism against predators. They then throw the animal back in the ocean where, miraculously, it regenerates its own intestines overnight or within a few days (all echinoderms can do this). The Islanders prefer the guts of the curryfish variety of sea cucumber, S. variegatus, which they eat fresh, cooked, or pickled in lime juice.

In Japan, the marine beasts, known as namako, genus Stichopus japonicus, are valued for their chewy, almost tasteless flesh (body wall), often eaten as sunomono (in vinegar sauce)—but then Japan has a distinguished history of preferring foods for their texture, not taste, tofu being the obvious example, fugu (globefish) another. Records dating back to the 1600s record the export from Japan of sea cucumber flesh, mainly to China, where it plays a key role in the cuisine.

But the Japanese also did not overlook the entrails, which they extract, salt, and cure (see picture). The result: konowata (æµ·é¼ è…¸), considered one of the three major chinmi (delicacies) of Japan.

Specifically, the Japanese take sea cucumbers, extract the visceral mass (alimentary canal and reproductive organs) wash it, drain it in a bamboo basket, salt it, then ferment it for one week. The result is marketed in bottles that for top-class Hokkaido product can be surprisingly expensive, up to $50, although our sushi chef told us he got some konowata from Aichi Prefecture, said to be the top producer at present, which cost only $20, even with konoko dried sea cucumber ovaries mixed in. These ovaries, a delicacy in themselves, are also known as hoshiko, kuchiko, or bachiko.

So what does konowata taste like, anyway? Whether or not you believe in qualia, describing the taste of konowata is simple: it’s the taste of the sea, or more specifically, the taste of the iso. Iso is a uniquely Japanese concept, not present in English. It’s often translated as beach or seashore, but actually it’s that area of a rocky shore where land meets sea: the surf washing in and out over the rocks, crabs and tiny fish and water insects darting around and under them. Think of the smell of the iso and you have described the taste of konowata precisely.

“Intelligent Design” assumes we humans can distinguish between things which were “intelligently” designed and things which were not. Well, what about this?

This is from the website of Graham Hancock, an amateur marine archaeologist, journalist, and author of controversial books including Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age and Fingerprints of the Gods. The picture shows “the stone circles, or ‘labyrinths’ of Kerama [about 30-40km west of Naha, the capital of Okinawa], at depths between 27 and 33 metres. It has not yet been determined whether these are natural phenomena or structures that were worked by some ancient people when this land was last above sea-level about 10,000 years ago.”

Even more noteworthy is the nearby “monument” at Yonaguni (Wikipedia), 100 feet underwater at the very southern tip of Okinawa near Taiwan. Some people think its ledges, circular openings, and “pathways” are the result of natural forces, while others see the capital of the fabled “Mu” civilization of yore.

With a title like The Sacred Neuron, and the subtitle “Extraordinary new discoveries linking science and religion”, this book would seem to be of potentially crucial importance for our nascent field of neurotheology.

This book does indeed deserve a prize: for the most misleading packaging of the year. The brain is discussed on no more than half-a-dozen pages, and at that is just warmed-over basics from Ledoux, Damasio, and Rolls. Looking up “neuron”, the alleged subject of the book, in the index yields a mere five entries. Bowker’s knowledge of neuroscience could have been obtained from browsing this blog for about five minutes—basic stuff about dual pathways and the amygdala. There are no “extraordinary new discoveries” presented.

What the book does do is something some people might be interested in—to adopt a religious perspective in asking why humans form ethical and aesthetic judgments, or why they fight wars. Apprently, it began life as a lecture series given by the author at Oxford on the theme “The Appeal to History as an Integral Part of Christian Apologetic.” Gives you a flavor.

No doubt there is a much larger market for a book on neurons and religion than on English-style musings on ethics and values and history and religion. But that is no excuse for engaging in such gross mislabeling of a book. Shame on the publisher, who presumably suggested this, and the author, who must have agreed with it.

AtomicArchive.com was kind enough to publish a review of Bobby. This is a site focused on the history of the development of the A-bomb. Here’s the review:

For those looking for a scholarly analysis of family life of those who worked at one of the nuclear weapon facilities, this book is not that. Instead, we are given a light and enjoyable tale of a little boy whose father is a Ph. D. physicist at Hanford nuclear facility. Bob Myers presents Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory: Growing up on the Banks of the Columbia. This book is a personal account of how Myers’ father attempted to balance his duties as father, husband, scientist and church member. The book also interconnects his accounts with the surrounding Indian culture and the simple point of view of a child. Overall the book was a light and enjoyable read.

A 1998 Purdue Univeristy study found a statistically significant correlation between obesity and religiosity. Sort of confirms what we suspected. Non-Christian believers, including Buddhists, were the least overweight, however.

The author of this study inexplicably fails to offer any hypotheses for this phenomenon, other than to mention that churches fail to teach restraint, and that they may be overly accepting of fatties.

It may or may not be relevant that the estimates of the heritability of a tendency toward obesity range around the 0.5 mark, remarkably close to the estimates for the heritability of religiosity.

Perhaps the same semi-addictive tendencies that lie behind some cases of obesity may also be work in cases of religiosity.

Or, research proves that people eat more when they dine with others while religious behavior has been shown to be related to socialization drives. So perhaps religious people eat more often with other people, getting fat in the process.

Such correlates of religiosity may be easier to deal with than with religiosity itself, and as such are attractive routes of inquiry, since such correlations may be based on common underlying neurological mechanisms.

Reference: Nature Neuroscience focus on neurobiology of obesity.

Religion contributes to a more stable, healthy, prosperous society. Right?

A recent study paints a dramatically different picture. Published in the Journal of Religion and Society, it pulls together existing studies about the statistical relationship between religious belief at the societal level and metrics of social health. Although it reaches some interesting conclusions, it raises more questions than it answers.

• In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

Fascinating, but what is the mechanism at work? Are the people getting gonorrhea the same ones that believe in God, are they the believers’ kids, or are they people way over on the other side of town? Is the mechanism at work here something as simple as zealots preventing sex education in the schools, or is there something about the American style of belief in God that actually promotes unprotected sex and suicide?

• The U.S. is…the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health.

Doubtlessly true, but what evidence is there that this is correlated with the high index of religiosity? It could be a parallel American personality trait, albeit one correlated with religious orientation, causing this: a deep-rooted tendency towards shooting from the hip, ignoring problems until it’s too late, and living with messiness.

• There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.

Ah, yes. The graphic above shows gonorrhea incidence by region in the US; notice how “red” the “red” states are.

The author is a dinosaur researcher, author, and illustrator. In this study he unquestionably has an agenda related to the evolution vs. intelligent design tiff. His findings include, unsurprisingly, the fact that the advanced secular democracies such as Japan, which do better than the US on the social measures, also share strong belief in evolution. By showing this, he hopes to defang the arguments of those like newly-indicted Congressional leader Tom Delay, who once stated

…high crime rates and tragedies like the Columbine assault will continue as long schools teach children “that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud.

What is the neurotheological, or religiobiological, connection? Possibly none, since here we are in the realm of socioreligion. One could hypothesize, however, that the same biological mechanism which predisposes people to theist beliefs also make them more promiscuous. One starting point would be to analyze the sexual behavior of mentally ill people with religious delusions.

Links:

• Original study: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies
• Author Gregory S. Paul
• Times Online article
• Earlier Numenware post on World Values Survey