Author: Andrew Sullivan

Always God's work.

Ryan Sager maps the connections:

[W]hat do we find from large-scale, international surveys of life satisfaction? According to two new working papers from John Helliwell and Christopher Barrington-Leigh, economists at the University of British Columbia, we find that money matters to happiness — but not entirely in the way one might think. Money does matter quite a bit when it comes to the difference between poverty and Western levels of prosperity. The difference in happiness between Denmark and Zimbabwe is large, and it’s mostly (though not entirely) explained by per capita income.

But once you’ve reached a level of prosperity such as that in the developed world, income starts to pay diminishing returns. For instance, in Ireland, according to Gallup, 97.5% of people report having a network of friends they can count on; in France, this number is a bit lower, at 93.9%. The difference that living in a country with an Irish level of having friends makes in happiness, though, as calculated by Helliwell and Barrington-Leigh, is equivalent to roughly a 20% boost in income. Similarly, they’ve found by looking at data from the Canadian General Social Survey, feeling like one “belongs” to one’s community, province, or country can have a much bigger impact on happiness than variations in one’s income.

A reader writes:

This is why I love your blog.  You start by relating an anecdote about an angry Sarah Palin, and by the end of the discussion, you have me buying Robert Frost collections on Amazon.  The input from readers around the world with incredible knowledge and perspective give every subject such complexity and richness.  And the curated emails are 1000% better than any strand of repetitive, anonymous comments. 

Please stick with this format forever!

We will. It's simple really. Instead of a computer algorithm and message boards, we have emails and we read them and edit them and try to make it all connect together. This has evolved as the Dish has grown and matured. And with each improvisation, we find new challenges. One thing we hope to do soon is to find a place on the page where you can easily read entire threads from beginning to end. We're very close to adding new staffers to help us do this.

What it really means is that this is your blog as much as ours. From Window Views to personal tales and theological and spiritual discussion, the content on this blog is now increasingly generated by you and filtered through the pre-frontal cortex of me and the sous-chefs.

Vaughan Bell describes an experiment in the 1950s where psychologist Milton Rokeach "gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change." They didn't:

These tales are surprising because delusions, in the medical sense, are not simply a case of being mistaken. They are considered to be pathological beliefs, reflecting a warped or broken understanding that is not, by definition, amenable to being reshaped by reality. One of most striking examples is the Cotard delusion, under which a patient believes she is dead; surely there can be no clearer demonstration that simple and constant contradiction offers no lasting remedy. Rokeach, aware of this, did not expect a miraculous cure. Instead, he was drawing a parallel between the baseless nature of delusion and the flimsy foundations we use to construct our own identities. If tomorrow everyone treats me as if I have an electronic device in my head, there are ways and means I could use to demonstrate they are wrong and establish the facts of the matter—a visit to the hospital perhaps. But what if everyone treats me as if my core self were fundamentally different than I believed it to be? Let's say they thought I was an undercover agent—what could I show them to prove otherwise? From my perspective, the best evidence is the strength of my conviction. My belief is my identity.

David Sloan Wilson runs the Evolution Institute, a public policy think tank. From a candid Nature interview:

As we speak, we are establishing our first consulting relationship with a religious congregation in Binghamton to explore their religion and spirituality and to help them be more effective as an organization [by using evolutionary tools]. I think the benefits we provide will be so great that we will be sought after by other congregations.

…I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist. One of the things that infuriates me about the newest crop of angry atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, is their denial of the beneficial aspects of religion. Their beef is not just that there is no evidence for God. They also insist that religion "poisons everything", as Christopher Hitchens subtitled his book. They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.

Berlin, Germany, 2.37 pm

Bailey tries to quell concerns over man-made organisms:

No one is talking about releasing synthetic organisms into the environment at this stage. The Venter team “watermarked” the synthetic cells with unique genetic sequences to distinguish them from natural cells so that they could keep track of them. And before getting too worked up over the potential dangers of escaped synthetic microbes, keep in mind that humans have been moving thousands of exotic microbial species across continents and oceans for centuries. Surely, some have had deleterious effects, but the world has not come to an end.

In any case, many lab-crafted creatures would likely be obliterated by competing organisms honed by billions of years of evolution in the wild. In the future, synthetic organisms could be equipped with suicide genes where their survival is dependent on some chemical that is only available in the lab. For example, if synthetic microbes are created to treat some kind of pollution, they would be supplied with the chemical onsite and once their work was done, they would be starved of it. In addition, future synthetic lifeforms should be “watermarked” like Venter’s new microbe so that their creators can be held accountable for them.