A Partial Explanation for a Genuine Mystery

A recent post posited a genuine mystery: Why would evolution design a brain with capacities as useless as, for example, performing higher mathematics? This post attempts to offer a partial answer: The human brain, far from being an efficient and elegant design, is a bit of a bodge job.

Human Sacrifice at the University

The author traces his ancestry mostly to the Swedish town of Uppsala, near Stockholm. Uppsala is famous mainly for two things: its university and human sacrifice. These two facts are not unrelated.

A Genuine Mystery

Update October 3, 2015: See A Partial Explanation for a Genuine Mystery.

Perhaps the greatest mystery in the world is based on the following set of observations:

• The human brain is a device evolved to optimize the long-term reproductive success of the associated genes in the environment of the African Savannah.
• Yet, in at least some instances it has developed the capacity to come up with ideas like Curry-Howard Correspondence.
• However, this capacity could in no conceivable way have aided reproductive success in the African Savannah.
• Moreover, at least to judge from historical anecdote, this capacity, if anything, impedes reproductive success.

The author has never run across a fully satisfactory explanation for this set of facts. It is almost enough to make one reconsider certain propositions one would otherwise (and previously had) happily and confidently Occam-razored away.

Primitive Christianity

I happened across this passage in my recent reading and, while it is well-known, the events of Fifth Century Alexandria bring to mind recent events in the history of another major Abrahamic religion and it bears quoting:

Ground Zero Mosque and Fred Phelps

One wonders where all the new Free Speech, Freedom of Religion and Property Rights absolutists—and, by the way, come right in and welcome to the party!—who have turned up to defend the Ground Zero Mosque and heap contempt on its opponents were when Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church were not only criticized, but criminally prosecuted for demonstrating against U.S. policies contrary to their deeply held religious beliefs.

Or... what is that? Wrong religion to have? Wrong opinions to express? Wrong policies to criticize? Ah, clearly the First Amendment has no application there.