Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

When the police arrived at Bradley Waldroup's trailer home in the mountains of Tennessee, they found a war zone. There was blood on the walls, blood on the carpet, blood on the truck outside, even blood on the Bible that Waldroup had been reading before all hell broke loose.

Assistant District Attorney Drew Robinson says that on Oct. 16, 2006, Waldroup was waiting for his estranged wife to arrive with their four kids for the weekend. He had been drinking, and when his wife said she was leaving with her friend, Leslie Bradshaw, they began to fight. Soon, Waldroup had shot Bradshaw eight times and sliced her head open with a sharp object. When Waldroup was finished with her, he chased after his wife, Penny, with a machete, chopping off her finger and cutting her over and over.

"There are murders and then there are ... hacking to death, trails of blood," says prosecutor Cynthia Lecroy-Schemel. "I have not seen one like this. And I have done a lot." Prosecutors charged Waldroup with the felony murder of Bradshaw, which carries the death penalty, and attempted first-degree murder of his wife. It seemed clear to them that Waldroup's actions were intentional and premeditated.

"There were numerous things he did around the crime scene that were conscious choices," Lecroy-Schemel says. "One of them was [that] he told his children to 'come tell your mama goodbye,' because he was going to kill her. And he had the gun, and he had the machete." It was a pretty straightforward case. Even Waldroup said so during his trial last year. He said on the murderous night, he just "snapped," and he admitted that he killed Leslie Bradshaw and attacked his wife. "I'm not proud of none of it," Waldroup said.

"It wasn't a who done it?" says defense attorney Wylie Richardson. "It was a why done it?"

Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.

Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.

"The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile."

"Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.

Kiehl with the brain scanner he uses at prisons. He has scanned the brains of more than 1,100 inmates, about 20 percent of whom are psychopaths.(Barbara Bradley Hagerty)

In a videotaped interview with Kiehl, Dugan describes how he only meant to rob the Nicaricos' home. But then he saw the little girl inside.

"She came to the door and ... I clicked," Dugan says in a flat, emotionless voice. "I turned into Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll."

On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal -- until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart -- his IQ is over 140 -- but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse.

"And I have empathy, too -- but it's like it just stops," he says. "I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don't know what it is."

Kiehl says he's heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.

Who killed John Lennon?

Mark David Chapman, a psychotic, pulled the trigger, assassinating the musician/peace activist in December 1980.

So who killed Lennon, the person or the brain?

That's the kind of question neuroscientists, lawyers and judges are wrestling with today, says Michael Gazzaniga professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and head of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind.

He's leading a project examining brain studies and the law -- the norms of society that are the basis of our rules. Gazzaniga "What is the brain for? It's there to make decisions," he said at a seminar on neuroscience and morality, sponsored by Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion where I'm attending lectures and scooping up sources this weekend.

He mused about whether brain scans be accepted in court. What's the veracity of eyewitness testimony? Do we need to revisit the 166-year-old definition of the insanity defense, given what we're learning now about free will and culpability?

After all, most people with brain diseases and conditions, from schizophrenia to people afflicted with tumors and lesions, do not commit crimes and are able to grasp and follow social rules, he says.

However, the brain acquires information and makes decisions well before we are consciously forming choices. Gazzaniga says, "We're all on a little bit of taped delay between unconsciousness and awareness. But none of us believe it. We think we are in charge."

Our social networks and where we sit in them set the course for much of what happens in our lives, say Nicholas A. Christakis, a doctor and sociology professor at Harvard, and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego.

In their book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives’’ they argue that our social networks actually comprise a “super-organism.’’ Our lives take shape not just via those we know, our friends and relations, but through their friends and relations, even if we never meet those people.

You might wonder whether too much time on Facebook has addled their brains. But online social networks have little to do with their theory, and human history offers much to support it. They start the book by looking at feud-driven violence, like revenge killings of extended family members and friends in 19th century Corsica, showing how simply knowing someone can put us in harm’s way.

They then take us on a pleasant walk through interesting research in anthropology, archeology, history, politics, psychology, medicine, and sociometry (the study of social networks). We learn what it means that we evolved primarily in groups of about 150 members, how a social network brought the Medicis to power in Florence and ultimately opened the modern world to democracy, and how Barack Obama’s use of social networking made him president.

They also cite their own 2007 paper arguing that obesity is contagious across social networks. While the authors say their study has been confirmed several times over, even they feel compelled to note that “social network effects are not the only explanation for the obesity epidemic,’’ listing eight others.

The four black refrigerator-sized boxes in a basement of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland bear very little resemblance to a human brain. Each box contains some 2,000 microchips lined up on shelves, rather than the grey matter found inside our heads. However, biologist Henry Markram and colleagues in Lausanne believe that a more powerful version of this computer can simulate the workings of the brain. They say they will be able to create such a simulation within 10 years, that this artificial brain should show the hallmarks of intelligence – such as speech, planning and learning – and that it will simulate emotions and maybe even consciousness. Claims that thinking machines are just round the corner are nothing new. The computer HAL 9000 in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on predictions by leading scientists about how real-life computers would actually evolve by the turn of the millennium. Indeed, in 1965, artificial intelligence expert Herbert Simon predicted that within 20 years, machines would be capable of "doing any work a man can do".

Of course, such predictions have proved to be woefully wide of the mark, and artificial intelligence, or AI, researchers have suffered frequent funding cuts from skeptical governments. Some predictions have come to pass, such as the forecast that machines would eventually outstrip humans at chess, with IBM's Deep Blue computer beating grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. This success of Deep Blue is, however, not particularly significant in the wider picture. It had no idea of strategy and for each move simply calculated vast numbers of permutations using pre-defined algorithms. It certainly wasn't thinking like a human.

Markram's group says that it differs from previous efforts to mimic human intelligence by simulating the actual biology of the brain. Usually, AI researchers focus on logical structures rather than worrying about messy biology. Artificial neural networks, for example, consist of entities that function like the nervous cells, or neurons, in a brain, in that each receives electrical inputs from a number of

If John Gray did not exist, it would be necessary, as with Voltaire's God, to invent him. But, as with Voltaire's God, we might not always like what we get. That's because Gray is a philosophical maverick, a pricker of bubbles, a deflater of balloons, a true iconoclast for whom our chief competing accounts of existence – the religious and the humanist – are both fatally flawed. With disastrous consequences.

Gray's Anatomy (not a great title: Gray's Autopsy would be more appropriate) is a collection of 30 of the British thinker's essays over the past 30 years, on topics ranging from the death of liberalism, which endeared him to Thatcherites for a time, to his assaults on all things neo – neo-atheism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, even neo-Platonism gets a rap – to his apparent evolution toward a kind of wittily despairing Gaian environmentalism.

But any volte-faces are merely apparent. Gray has consistently stuck to his pessimistic guns: Our faith in progress (moral and social, not technical and scientific) is delusional, as is our belief in human uniqueness and the human ability to command our common fates.

The latter view is fully on display in Straw Dogs: Humans and Other Animals (2003), an acerbic attack on humanism as a secular variant of the religious ideologies it displaces and, even more, on our destructive relationship with the natural world. Gray

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to

Riding the train down to london last summer, after a two-week fellowship session on science and religion at the University of Cambridge, I noticed an article in the Independent newspaper about a new book which reinforced that notion of an increasingly irreligious Europe. It is true that outward signs of faith—apart from biblical passages emblazoned on London's famed red double-decker buses by jesussaid.org—are difficult to come by.

But I found deeply felt Christianity alive and well in an unlikely setting: the academy's scientific community. To many, this may seem counterintuitive. The evangelical theologian Alister McGrath told us he once believed that "science was the ally of atheism." Yet among our other lecturers at the Templeton-Cambridge program were major figures in science, from cosmologists to biologists to particle physicists, who pronounced themselves believers. Of course, given the interests of the late Sir John Templeton, who endowed the fellowships, in the relationship between science and religion, this should not have been surprising.

Still, these towering figures—Simon Conway Morris, John Polkinghorne, Sir Brian Heap, Sir John Houghton—characterized themselves as evangelicals as well. Polkinghorne, author of Science and Theology, preaches at a Cambridge church on weekends. To be sure, these are evangelicals of a particular sort. By and large, they reject creationism and intelligent design, embracing the concept of "theistic evolution," a God-created, billions-years-old universe. None numbered themselves among any of the apocalyptic American evangelical tribes of arrogant dominionists or fanciful premillennial dispensationalists of the "Left Behind" stripe.

Much of the modern dialogue between science and religion deals with the origin of the universe and the development of life on earth—surrogate discussions over the existence of God and the divine role in life. In my relatively brief time at Cambridge, a day did not pass without some mention of Charles Darwin—an alumnus—and Richard Dawkins, the best-selling Oxford atheist. Yet to me, these exchanges have become tiresome, repetitive, and unenlightening.

There have been similar debates among scientists of faith over the morality of stem cell research and end-of-life issues. But a more recent (and intriguing, to me) subset of the science and religion dialogue has emerged among evangelical scientists over climate change. Books arguing the religious case for curbing global warming seem to appear every week with titles like A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming and Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back, which asks, "Was Jesus Green?" In A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming, Michael Northcott asserts that "Christ is present among those suffering already from climate change."

'Tis the season for family, faith, fellowship — and fat.

As families gather around buffet tables smothered with food on Thanksgiving, religious diet groups caution us God might not approve of that second piece of pie. Yes, that's right. The omnipresent world of wonder diets and slim-down regimes now has a foothold in the world of the omnipotent.

Faith-based weight loss groups have been a quietly growing presence for more than three decades. Organizations such as First Place 4 Health, a Texas-based group with chapters in more than 12,000 churches nationwide, and the Weigh Down Workshop,which offers in-person and online Bible-based weight-loss plans, boast that participants have lost the pounds (and kept them off) by placing more faith in God, and less in Ben & Jerry's.

Previously the realm of fundamentalists, bringing a higher power into dieting has gone mainstream. Today, it's not only Christians who see fat as a spiritual issue. According to Buddhist teachings — the latest religion to join the fray of pop faith-based dieting — it's all about moderation and mindfulness.

In a country in which two-thirds of Americans are overweight and nearly a third are obese, it's no surprise that in addition to tapping Jenny Craig or Robert Atkins, people are turning to the real Big Guy. The pounds are piling up, and shedding them is fraught with problems: Approximately half of women and one-third of men in the U.S. are on a diet at any given moment, and within a year, most people regain two-thirds of their lost weight.

Enter religion — the ultimate trump card of many behavior modification programs. For a believer, fear of offending your creator is a powerful force in overcoming the urge to make the shortsighted choice of a burger and fries instead of that leafy salad with light dressing. To underscore the consequences of overeating, the Weigh Down Workshop — one of the most hard-line Christian diet groups — tells participants that God will destroy those who abuse their bodies by overeating. Our bodies are God's temples and, quoting

"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense." —Thomas Carlyle

Rarely has it been thought that the way to show you deserve to be the most powerful person on earth is to demonstrate you're also the touchiest. This presidential campaign has been an offense fest. From the indignation over a fashion writer's observation about Hillary Clinton's cleavage, to the outraged response to the infamous Obama New Yorker cover, to the histrionics over "lipstick on a pig," taking offense has been a political leitmotif. Slate's John Dickerson observed that umbrage is this year's hottest campaign tactic. And we can assume it will reach an operatic crescendo in these final weeks before Election Day.

Feeling affronted has global implications: Islamic organizations and countries seek to ban speech anywhere they decide is insulting to Islam, asserting that a perceived insult can justify a deadly response.

Study the topic of "taking offense" and you realize people are like tuning forks, ready to vibrate with indignation

It's often the pettiest–seeming things that drive people mad. Or worse. Jostling our way through the world can have violent consequences. A significant percentage of murders occur between acquaintances with the flash point being a trivial insult. Sometimes it seems we live in a culture devoted to retribution on behalf of the thin–skinned –just think of university speech codes. Comedian Larry David even celebrates his skill at giving and taking offense on his television show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Feeling affronted has global implications: Islamic organizations and countries seek to ban speech anywhere they decide is insulting to

In an upstairs classroom at Stanford University, 35 men and women from the surrounding community silently focus on their breathing, learning the rudimentary steps of meditation as part of an evening continuing-education class on forgiveness.

Fred Luskin, co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project in Palo Alto, has abandoned the research laboratory for another calling. Instead of studying the effects of forgiveness, Luskin now devotes much of his time to teaching people how to forgive. He works in classrooms and businesses, nationally and internationally.

It is a new frontier for a new science: how to actually teach forgiveness. Don't look for a national curriculum anytime soon. Even in the growing library of self-help books, there is a wide array of approaches. Most settle on a process generally ranging from acknowledging the hurt, trying to understand it, perhaps feeling some compassion and then letting go and moving on. Some experts suggest journaling throughout the process; many suggest a group setting or one-to-one coaching to work through it.

In “Oryx and Crake,” Margaret Atwood’s novel about humanity’s final days on earth, a boy named Jimmy becomes obsessed with Alex, an African gray parrot with extraordinary cognitive and linguistic skills. Hiding out in the library, Jimmy watches historical TV documentaries in which the bird deftly distinguishes between blue triangles and yellow squares and invents a perfect new word for almond: cork-nut.

But what Jimmy finds most endearing is Alex’s bad attitude. As bored with the experiments as Jimmy is with school, the parrot would abruptly squawk, “I’m going away now,” then refuse to cooperate further.

Except for the part about Jimmy and the imminent apocalypse (still, fingers crossed, a few decades away), all of the above is true. Until he was found dead 10 days ago in his cage at a Brandeis University psych lab, Alex was the subject of 30 years of experiments challenging the most basic assumptions about animal intelligence.

He is survived by his trainer, Irene Pepperberg, a prominent comparative psychologist, and a scientific community divided over whether creatures other than human are more than automatons, enjoying some kind of inner life.

Skeptics have long dismissed Dr. Pepperberg’s successes with Alex as a subtle form of conditioning — no deeper philosophically than teaching a pigeon to peck at a moving spot by bribing it with grain. But the radical behaviorists once said the same thing about people: that what we take for thinking, hoping, even theorizing, is all just stimulus and response.

…each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom

W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

Do we have free will or not?

A huge question, not to be dismissed. There’s a reason people have worried it so. Our default belief that we are not compelled in our choices, that we are freely responsible for our lives—this belief is central to our sense of self, of the universe, our sense (if we have one) of the purpose of life.

Experiments in neuroscience seem (to some) to threaten all that. And a recent surge of books and articles has frothed the waters. Most visible, perhaps, was New York Times columnist Dennis Overbye’s column in January titled “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t”. Overbye largely accepts that free will—at least, as it’s often and traditionally defined—is an illusion. An invigorating and necessary debate.

Will free will survive? As we forge into the future and encounter more and more new, hard dilemmas, what we think of human choice and responsibility could affect public policy. Suppose it’s determined we really are not in control. That might change our notions of justice, human rights, reward and punishment. And much else.

How far can spirituality help alcoholics stay sober? In Health Check this week Tracey Logan looks at two non-medical approaches which use spiritual growth to combat alcoholism.

Alcoholics Anonymous is the world's biggest self-help group with meetings in 85 different countries.

Research has shown that it helps more people than conventional treatments and counselling.

It was originally inspired by a form of evangelical Christianity in 1930s America, and its 12-step programme emphasises a God or Higher Power, as well as taking responsibility and helping others.

But AA is very flexible, and its Higher Power isn't fixed, which means the group has flourished among non-Christians and atheists.

Chance is one thing, necessity another. That’s what they say.

Right?

Chance is what happens for no reason. It just happens to happen. It’s happenstance. Coincidence.

Necessity happens for a reason. It’s cause and effect. It’s consequence.

But what if these distinctions really don’t hold up?

What if chance and necessity aren’t that different? What if they are so intimately knotted we can’t undo them?

What if—yikes—what if they’re just about the same thing?

When I look at my children, all these questions come bubbling up. I think: How’d they get here? It seems impossible, a miracle. But I know the story, and I start retelling it in my head: My wife and I met… but first her parents and my parents had to meet… and their parents…

Many of the things we think are coincidences aren’t that coincidental. My friend and favorite mathematician, John Allen Paulos of Temple University has written this great book called Innumeracy, in which he tells us that many of the things we think are just amazing coincidences aren’t all that.

If there are 23 people in a room, chosen from all the world’s people absolutely at random, what is the probability that two of them have the same birthday? One chance in two. It’s not an amazing coincidence but actually pretty likely. How

Scott Atran knows a thing or two about fundamentalists, and as far as he's concerned, they are nice people. "I certainly find very little hatred; they act out of love," he says. "These people are very compassionate." Atran, who studies group dynamics at the University of Michigan, is talking about suicide bombers, extremists by anyone's standards and not representative of fundamentalist ideology in general (New Scientist, 23 July, page 18). But surprisingly, much of what Atran has discovered about suicide bombers helps to explain the psychology of all fundamentalist movements.

Ideas about the nature of fundamentalist belief initially drew heavily on work from the 1950s, when psychologists were trying to explain why some people were drawn to authoritarian ideologies such as Nazism. Guided by that research, psychologists focused on individuals, looking for personality traits, modes of thinking and even psychological flaws that might mark fundamentalists out from other people. The conclusion they came to was that there is no real difference between fundamentalists and everybody else. "The fundamentalist mentality is part of human nature," writes Stuart Sim, a cultural theorist at the University of Sunderland in the UK. "All of us are capable of exhibiting this kind of behaviour."

Attention has now turned away from individual psychology to focus on the power of the group. "We evolved to have close and intimate group contacts: we cooperate to compete," says Atran. The psychology of fundamentalism is, literally, more than the sum of its parts; taken individually, fundamentalists are rather unremarkable. "The notion that you might be able to find something in a fundamentalist's brain scan is a non-starter," says John Brooke, a professor of science and religion at the University of Oxford.