Are we genetically inclined for superstition or just fearful of the truth?

From secret societies to faked moon landings, one thing that humanity seems to have an endless supply of is conspiracy theories. In this compilation, physicist Michio Kaku, science communicator Bill Nye, psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh, skeptic Michael Shermer, and actor and playwright John Cameron Mitchell consider the nature of truth and why some groups believe the things they do.

• I think there’s a gene for superstition, a gene for hearsay, a gene for magic, a gene for magical thinking,” argues Kaku. The theoretical physicist says that science goes against “natural thinking,” and that the superstition gene persists because, one out of ten times, it actually worked and saved us.
• Other theories shared include the idea of cognitive dissonance, the dangerous power of fear to inhibit critical thinking, and Hollywood’s romanticization of conspiracies. Because conspiracy theories are so diverse and multifaceted, combating them has not been an easy task for science.

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(Worth reading article on historic perspective of police and why police acts like an occupying army-f.sheikh)

The police were first created to suppress labor militancy and the Left, before becoming a tool to bludgeon the most marginalized in society, particularly poor black people. We must dismantle this brutal instrument of social control.

The police are out of control. They murder unarmed, poor, disproportionately nonwhite people with near total impunity. They provoke protests, antagonize protesters, arrest journalists, and violate civil liberties. They torture detainees and run black sites for interrogations. Their unions protect them from accountability, demand special legal protection, and undermine the political authority of any mayor, governor, or public figure that even mildly criticizes them. They refuse to collect and share national data on how often, when, and against whom they mete out violence while on the beat. They reject the minimal requirements of a democratic society to know how they operate.

The police have become an independent, organized body that relates to the public more or less the way an occupying army relates to the native population. How did they get like this?

Excellent work has shown how the police preserve racial hierarchies, in part by using force disproportionately against minorities, especially black people. The police were central to W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of how the ruling class used racial ideology to divide workers who shared economic interests. As recent protests have awakened the public to this “social control” function of the police, they have also opened up the space to ask a basic question: why are there police in the first place? What interests do they serve, and why have they become so militarized?

As it turns out, the institution emerged to police allpeople whose freedom the ruling class feared. In the United States, as in other countries, the police were created to manage the social problems of a capitalist society — poverty, crime, and class conflict — while suppressing radical challenges to that society. As those challenges became more serious, the police became more militarized. The institution that in the United States has been directed with special force and ferocity against black people is, today, the most visible and violent part of an all-purpose apparatus of discipline and control. Once we grasp the origins of the police and why they militarized, we can recognize why all workers share an interest in transforming the police.

This history is also a reminder that there will be no full reckoning with the police without confronting the social interests that oppose serious social transformation. There are many, including the biggest names in corporate America, who are ready to proclaim the police intolerable in their current, totally unhinged form. But they have not objected to, and never will challenge, the basic social control function of the police. As the question of what to do moves forward, it is worth taking a hard look backward for where to draw the lines.

The Early Days of American Policing

The police are a recent invention. In the early American republic, formally constituted police forces were essentially unknown. Law enforcement took the form of posses and irregular patrols, comprised of citizens who temporarily came together under the color of law to apprehend specific individuals. Cities did not have regularly appointed police, fully and formally employed by the state, with special legal authority to use violence against the population.

The introduction of police forces was a response to a modern problem: social disorder created by the working class. The free urban poor unnerved the American ruling class. Unlike slaves and indentured servants, they were under no particular individual’s juridical authority, and they possessed civil, and sometimes political, liberties, which they were free to use as they saw fit. “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, who preferred slavery and small property holders to wage laborers. That way citizen militias would be sufficient; no police or standing armies necessary.

First formed in the United States (and England) in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the police enjoyed broad discretion to arrest anyone who could not give a socially accepted account of themselves. As Sam Mitrani observes in his history of the Chicago Police Department, the city council’s Committee on Police, tasked in the 1850s with establishing a modern police force, stated that the police should have wide latitude, since “matters not criminal in particulars, but which if permitted to go unchecked in a dense population like ours, would result very injuriously to the city.” So too in the major cities of the South. A quotation from Charleston in 1845 makes the point clearly:

Over the sparsely populated country, where gangs of negros are restricted within settled plantations under immediate control and discipline of their respective owners, slaves were not permitted to idle and roam about in pursuit of mischief. … The mere occasional riding about and general supervision of a patrol may be sufficient. But, some more energetic and scrutinizing system is absolutely necessary in cities, where from the very denseness of population and closely contiguous settlements there must be need of closer and more careful circumspection.

As Alex Vitale has noted, slave patrols were predominantly “rural and nonprofessional,” functioning only to police slaves that managed to escape the normal juridical authority and physical violence of the slaveowner and his overseers. But in cities, slaves acquired de facto if not de jure civil liberties and mixed with the free workers who also spooked ruling elites: “They [slaves] could congregate with others, frequent illicit underground taverns and even establish religious and benevolent associations, often in conjunction with free blacks, which produced tremendous social anxiety among whites.” These cities, Vitale notes, set up formal police forces, sometimes called “city guards,” who were permanent, professional, round-the-clock regulators of “social peace.”

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“Several studies have found that, on average, there’s some physical similarity between one’s parent and one’s partner. That is, your girlfriend might well look a little bit like your mother. This physical similarity is apparent whether you ask strangers to compare facial photos of partners and parents, or whether you assess things such as parent and partner height, hair or eye colour, ethnicity, or even body hair.”

Why? Familiar things are attractive. So long as something isn’t initially aversive, and you’re not over-exposed, then in general something will become more appealing the more you encounter it. Part of the attraction to parental features could be attributed to this familiarity effect. Yet familiarity doesn’t account for the whole phenomenon. First, people’s partners seem to be more likely to resemble the parent of the corresponding gender: girlfriends match mothers, and boyfriends match fathers, irrespective of whether they’re in a heterosexual or homosexual relationship. Second, emotional closeness to a parent increases the likelihood that your partnerwill resemble your parent.

Another possible reason is that, biologically speaking, prime reproductive partners sometimes look a little like our parents. Of course, incest itself is a different game: reproduction between close relatives can lead to dangerous recessive genetic disorders. And yet, some genes work well together, so a partner with subtle resemblance to family members might actually be one whose genetic material contains some of that useful overlap. A wonderful study of all known couples in Iceland across a 165-year period found that those with the most grandchildren were related at about the level of third or fourth cousin – no more, no less. So it seems there is some evolutionary advantage to finding traces of parental features attractive.

But what about sibling appearance? My research team and I realised that explanations for the appeal of parental features would also tend to apply to sibling features. Indeed, in historical high-fertility populations, siblings might have been more frequent and therefore more familiar playmates than parents. So, in our latest study, instead of looking at the similarities between partners and parents, we turned our focus onto brothers. We collected together facial photographs of the brothers and male partners of 56 women. Some of the women were volunteers whom we contacted directly, and some were people whom we didn’t know personally, but who had a sufficient public profile that we could identify their brother and boyfriend. We then asked female volunteers to compare each photo of a woman’s brother against four other men, one of whom was that woman’s partner. The volunteers did not know that the men they saw were the brothers and partners of specific women. The volunteers ranked every group of four partners according to how much they looked like the brother.

If there was no similarity at all between a woman’s brother and partner, then we’d expect the volunteers to pick randomly, selecting each of the four pictures one quarter of the time. When we looked just at the raw numbers, we found that nearly one third of the raters’ choices were for the ‘correct’ brother-boyfriend pair as looking most similar. However, these raw numbers are only indicative, and we wanted to know how we might extrapolate the data to the population at large. We used a statistical model to predict this, which indicated that if we generalised beyond our dataset, people would select the correct brother-boyfriend pair as most similar 27 per cent of the time, and as first or second most similar a combined 59 per cent of the time (instead of 50 per cent). The model predicted that people would say that a woman’s boyfriend and her brother looked least alike just 16 per cent of the time.

Of course, not every woman in our study had a partner who looked like her brother, and that is true of women in the world at large. But when we compared our data to the data from previous studies, it appeared that people’s boyfriends resemble their brothers about as much as people’s partners resemble their parents. Since siblings resemble their parents, it’s possible that brother-boyfriend resemblance is merely an essential corollary of parent-partner resemblance, or even vice versa.

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posted by f.sheikh