Know This

by Mr. John Brockman

  Here, CBTp can have several ancillary benefits. First, the therapy can improve insight and thereby adherence. Second, if a patient refuses to take medication but is willing to engage in CBTp, she will do better than with no treatment at all. Finally, people receiving CBTp might ultimately require lower doses of antipsychotic medication, diminishing its toxicity and, again, increasing adherence.

  The utility of CBTp shouldn’t be news, as evidence of its efficacy has been replicated over and again, but it remains so, sadly even in the mental health community, especially in the United States. While CBTp is a first-line treatment for psychosis in the U.K., you would be hard-pressed to find a U.S. psychiatrist who could describe how it’s practiced. Good luck finding a mental-health practitioner trained to do it. But the good news is that the news is spreading. However slowly, more clinicians are becoming aware, being trained, and practicing CBTp. More practitioners will become available to more patients, who will then receive better care (optimally, along with other well-established psychosocial interventions, like family therapy and supported employment), and we will see improved medical outcomes.

  If this news sticks—and I think it will—it will have a great humanizing effect in the way society views people suffering from psychosis. After all, while there are psychotic aspects in all of our minds, it is assuredly just as true that there are healthy parts of even the most stricken.

  Theodiversity

  Ara Norenzayan

  Professor of psychology, University of British Columbia; author, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict

  Theodiversity is to religion what biodiversity is to life. There are, by some accounts, more than 10,000 religious traditions in the world. Every day, somewhere in the world, a new religious movement is in the making. But this theodiversity—a term I borrow from Toby Lester—is not evenly distributed in human populations, any more than biodiversity is evenly distributed on the planet.

  The overwhelming majority of religious movements throughout history are failed social experiments. Most never take hold; those that do, don’t last for long, and of those that last for a while, most stay small. Then there are the “world religions.” Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam especially, have been growing at a brisk pace. Buddhism is much smaller and not growing much but is still a sizable presence on the world stage. We are at a point in time when just a few religious traditions have gone global, making up the vast majority of believers in the world.

  This fact is detailed in a landmark Pew Research Center report, released on April 2, 2015. It’s the most comprehensive and empirically derived set of projections based on data, age, fertility, mortality, migration, and religious conversion/de-conversion for multiple religious groups around the world. Barring unforeseen shocks, if current demographic and social trends keep up, by 2050:

  Possibly for the first time in history, there will be as many Muslims as Christians in the world. Together, these two faiths will represent more than 60 percent of the world’s projected population of 9.5 billion.

  40 percent of the Christians will live in sub-Saharan Africa (which will have the largest share of Christians), compared with 15 percent in Europe—so the epicenter of Christianity will have finally shifted from Europe to Africa.

  India, while maintaining a Hindu majority, will have the largest Muslim population in the world, surpassing Indonesia and Pakistan.

  All the folk religions of the world combined will comprise less than 5 percent of the world’s population.

  1.3 billion people, or 13.5 percent of the world’s population in 2050, will be non-religious.

  One might think that religious denominations that have most successfully adapted to secular modernity are the ones thriving the most. But the evidence gleaned from the Pew report and other studies points in the opposite direction. Moderate denominations are falling behind in the cultural marketplace. They are the losers, caught between secular modernity and the fundamentalist strains of the major world religions—strains that are gaining steam as a result of conversion, higher fertility rates, or both.

  There are different types and intensities of disbelief. That’s why the non-religious are another big ingredient of the world’s dynamically changing theodiversity. Combined, they would be the fourth largest “world religion.” There are the atheists, but many nonbelievers are instead apatheists—indifferent toward and not opposed to religion. And there is a rising demographic tide of people who see themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” This do-it-yourself, custom-made spirituality is filling the void that the retreat of organized religion has created in the secularizing countries. You can find it in yoga studios, meditation centers, the holistic health movement, and eco-spirituality.

  Theodiversity once was the exclusive subject matter of the humanities. But it is now a focal point of a budding science/humanities collaboration. The religious diversification of humankind in historical time poses fascinating questions and challenges for the new science of cultural evolution. These are times of renewed anxiety about (real or imagined) cultural conflict between religions and conflict between religions and secular modernity. Quantifiable, evidence-based, and nuanced understanding of the complexities of theodiversity is important now more than ever.

  Modernity Is Winning

  Gregory Paul

  Independent researcher; author, The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

  Having long been interested in the probability that cyberintelligence will soon replace humanity, I could cite frequent news coverage of efforts to produce advanced artificial intelligence as the most important news. But that’s an obvious subject, so I won’t.

  Instead, I will discuss a much more obscure science-news item of potentially great long-term import. It’s how some privately funded, commercial fusion-power projects are being initiated. The intent is to produce the unlimited cheap power that government-backed projects have failed to deliver.

  What few recognize is how the fusion news is tied to a much more prominent story. A lately released major Pew analysis projects a rise in theism in many developing nations in coming decades. This follows a major Pew survey showing a rapid rise of non-theism in the United States. The common opinion is that while religion is continuing to sink in the Western democracies, it’s making a comeback in less stable and prosperous nations, in a historical rebuff to modernity. The resulting reactionary theism is often adopting a virulent form that afflicts the secular democracies and threatens the future of modern civilization.

  What does the news on fusion power have to do with the news about reactionary religion? To see the connection, we’ll start with Arthur C. Clarke.

  The SciFi Channel recently presented their version of Clarke’s classic novel Childhood’s End. Written in the early 1950s, CE is like many of Clarke’s futurist fictional works, in which he repeatedly predicted that in the late 1900s and into the 2000s the world community would become increasingly secular, progressive, and pacific, forming a modernist planetary demi-utopia. This rested on a science-based hope. The technologist Clarke presumed that fusion energy was a readily solvable science and engineering problem, and that hydrogen-to-helium reactors would be providing the entire world with all the power we could use by the turn of the 21st century. The resulting universal prosperity would elevate everyone into at least the secure middle-class affluence that studies show result in strongly atheistic, liberal, lower-violence societies at the expense of (often dysfunctional) tribalistic religion.

  That hasn’t happened. Fission is easy to achieve—so easy that when uranium was more highly enriched back in the Precambrian, reactors spontaneously formed in uranium ores. Sustained fusion thermonuclear reactions so far occur only in the extreme pressure-temperature conditions at the centers of stars, and getting them to work elsewhere has proved highly difficult. Lacking fusion reactors, we have had to continue to rely mainly on fossil fuels.

  Had fusion power come online decades ago, the Saudis would not have had loads of oil-generated cas
h to fund the virulent and widespread Wahhabist mosques and schools that have helped spread hyperviolent forms of Islam. Without cheap fusion power, much of the world remains mired in the lack of economic opportunity that breeds supernaturalistic extremism. Since the end of the Cold War reduced mass lethal violence from atheistic communists, a few million have died in war-level conflicts that share a strong religious component. Muslims are causing the most trouble. But so are Christians in sub-Saharan Africa and in Russia, where the Orthodox Church backs Putin. Even the Buddhism that Clarke saw as peaceful has gone noxious in parts of Asia, as have many Hindus in India.

  But as bad as the situation is, it is not as bad as it may seem. The Pew projections are based on a set of dubious assumptions, including that the faith people are born into is the most critical factor in predicting future patterns because the pious tend to reproduce more rapidly than the secular. But trends measured by the World Values Survey indicate that religiosity is declining in most of the world. That’s because conversion from theism to secularism is trumping reproduction, and that in turn is because the global middle class is on the rise, leading to retreat from religion (note that religion is not a big problem in South America or most of eastern Asia because secularism is waxing in those regions).

  So why has a portion of modern religion become so venomous? In part, it’s a classic counterreaction to the success of secularization. But as troublesome as they often are, such reactionary movements tend to be temporary—remember how gay-bashing was once a major sociopolitical tool of the American right? Toxic theism is a symptom of a power-hungry world.

  Clarke may well have been right that fusion-power production would have helped produce a much better 21st-century world. Where he was over-optimistic was in thinking that fusion reactors would be up and running decades ago. Clarke lived long enough to be distressed when his power dream remained unfulfilled and the unpleasant social consequences became all too clear. Whether efficient hydrogen-fusing plants can be made practical in the near future is open to question; even if they can, we will have had to put up with decades of brutal strife fueled by too much religion.

  That’s big news. But the more important (mostly unacknowledged) news is that modernity is winning as theism retracts in the face of the prosperity made possible by modern science and technology.

  Religious Morality Is Mostly Below the Belt

  Michael McCullough

  Director, Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory, University of Miami; author, Beyond Revenge

  In most facets of life, people are perfectly content to let other people act in accordance with their tastes, even when those tastes differ from their own. The supertasters of the world, for instance—that 15-or-so percent of us whose tongues are so densely packed with taste buds that they find the flavors of many common foods and drinks too rich or too bitter to enjoy—have never taken to the streets to demand global bans on cabbage or coffee. And the world’s normal tasters, who clearly have a numerical advantage over the supertasters, have never tried to force the supertasters into eating and drinking things they don’t like.

  Religion sits at the other end of the “Vive la différence” spectrum. The world’s major religions, practiced by five of every seven people on the planet today, all teach people to concern themselves with other people’s behavior—and not just the behavior of fellow believers. They often teach their adherents to take an interest in outsiders’ behavior as well. Why? Recent scientific work is helping to solve this puzzle—and it has yielded a discovery that Freud would have loved.

  There are two popular families of theory that seek to explain why religion causes people to praise some behaviors and condemn others. According to the first, people espouse religious beliefs—particularly a belief in an all-seeing sky god who watches human behavior and metes out rewards and punishments (in this life or the next)—because it motivates them (and others) to be more trusting, generous, and honest than they otherwise would be.

  But a newer line of theorizing, called reproductive-religiosity theory, proposes that religious morality is not fundamentally about encouraging cooperation. Instead, people primarily use religion to make their social worlds more conducive to their own preferred approaches to sex, marriage, and reproduction. For most of the world’s religions over the past several millennia (which have historically thrived in state societies whose primary economic driver is agricultural production), the preferred sexual strategy has involved monogamy, sexual modesty, and the stigmatization of extramarital sex (arguably because it helps to ensure paternity, thereby reducing conflict over heritable property). Reproductive-religiosity theory has a lot to commend it: In a recent cross-cultural study involving over 16,000 participants from fifty-six nations, researchers found that religious young people (from every region of the world and every conceivable religious background) were more averse to casual and promiscuous sex than were their less religious counterparts. (Tellingly, in most regions religion appeared to regulate sexuality more strongly for women than for men.)

  Both theories predict that highly religious people will espouse stricter moral standards than less religious people will—and virtually every survey ever conducted supports this prediction. Religious belief seemingly influences people’s views on topics as varied as government spending, immigration, social inequality, the death penalty, and euthanasia, not to mention homosexuality, same-sex marriage, abortion, pornography, and the role of women in society. But for most of the issues not explicitly related to sex, marriage, and reproduction, religion’s influence appears slight. For the sex-related issues, religion’s apparent influence is much stronger.

  Reproductive-religiosity theory, positing as it does that religion is mostly about sex, makes an even bolder prediction: After you have statistically accounted for the fact that highly religious people have stricter sexual morals than the less religious (for instance, they are more disapproving of homosexuality, sexual infidelity, abortion, premarital sex, and women in the workplace), then they will appear not to care much more than the nonreligious about violations involving dishonesty and broken trust (transgressions such as stealing, fare dodging, tax dodging, and driving under the influence, for example).

  This bolder prediction has now been supported resoundingly, and not only among Americans but also in a study involving 300,000 respondents from roughly ninety countries. Highly religious people around the world espouse stricter moral attitudes regarding both prosociality and sex, but their stern moral attitudes toward honesty-related infractions seem, from a statistical point of view, to be mostly along for the ride. It is sex, marriage, and reproduction—and not trust, honesty, and generosity—that lie at the core of moralization for most practitioners of the world religions.

  As I mentioned earlier, Freud would have loved these results, but perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that religion’s most potent effects on morality relate to sex, marriage, and reproduction. After all, sex is close to the engine of natural selection, so it is not unlikely that evolution has left us highly motivated to seek out any tool we can—even rhetorical ones of the sort that religion provides—to make the world more conducive to our own approaches to love and marriage. Even so, the intimate link between religion and sexual morality is a particularly important element of certain recent geopolitical developments, so we need to understand it better than we do now.

  Over the past several years, Islamic extremists in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa have been systematically perpetrating sexual atrocities against girls and women, and as they have done so, they have drawn explicitly on the moral support of their religious traditions. Make no mistake: War rape is nothing new, all of it is appalling, and none of it is acceptable. But to understand what is happening right now—at a time when Boko Haram fighters capture and then seek to impregnate hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls, at a time when ISIS fighters capture thousands of Yazidi girls and women and consign them to lives of unceasing sexual terror—we need to figure out how sets of religious belief
s ordinarily bolstered to support monogamy and “family values” can transform gang rape and sexual slavery into religious obligations, not to mention the perquisites of having God on your side.

  A Science of the Consequences

  Luca De Biase

  Journalist; editor, Nòva24, of Il Sole 24 Ore

  Can something that didn’t happen be news? Can something that didn’t happen be interesting and important? To answer, one needs to add duration to the notion of news. The answer cannot be about events in a particular moment in time, but it can very well be about news that will stay news—news that has consequences.

  “Big news” is news that succeeds in framing the debate, news that is often controversial. It is always interesting and only sometimes important. “News that will stay news” is different: It can be underreported but it will last for a long time. Rather than news about facts, it is a story with a lasting effect on many facts—a story that makes history. It is a narrative that guides human choices in building the future. Rarely do we find news about the emergence of a new narrative; newspapers are not made to do that. One reads that kind of emergence not in the news but between the lines of the news.

  Notions such as “climate change,” “gene-editing,” and “nanotechnology” have branded a set of important research paths that otherwise would have appeared less interesting and may have gone unnoticed or even been misunderstood. But the convergence of science and communication is not enough to deal with the great transformation the world is facing—which needs aware audiences but, even more, informed citizens. The very notion of “science-based policy” needs improvement. A simple version of this notion has led to better-informed decisions in fields such as health and education, but it is still differently understood in political and cultural contexts, particularly those in which ideology and religion figure in the decision-making process. Global matters need a common understanding of problems and possible solutions.