Richard Dawkins (scientist and popular writer) spoke at the Galle Literary Festival. His talk covered evolution, alien life, Buddhism and – of course – organized religion. I think that religion is part of human evolution, like any other trait, not something opposed to it. But anyways, here are a few videos and tweeted quotes from Dawkins presentation before we get into it. He’s damn interesting and the crowd was electric and packed.

I’ve been reading a book by Robert Bellah which defines religion as something of a virtual reality machine, enabling us to connect to and create alternate realities. In that sense, it’s a symbol system. A tree or a pyramid or Stonehenge is like a rudimentary printf statement for God. All as ahead of their time as Babbage’s Difference Engine was ahead of the computer, but I think the concept is sound.

I started this book, Religion In Human Evolution, which has a lot of ideas per page. Here’s one, that history is older than texts, thus older than 5,000 years and mixed with evolutionary biology. This I believe most sincerely to be true, but it’s still a rejection of an established view. Indeed, the time before text is often called pre-history, and many people are happy to let it dwell in mystery or myth.

In Asian or Sri Lankan cooking, we put a lot of diverse ingredients into a dish. Salt, chili, curry leaves, coconut milk, onions, garlic, green chili. That’s just the base for many Sri Lankan recipes, before you start adding distinctive stuff. In western food, by contrast, the base is less, and less diverse. This seems apparent anecdotally, and also now scientifically. A chemical study has shown that Asian dishes incorporate more diverse flavors than western ones.

In this video, Andrew Sullivan (a gay, HIV positive, conservative Catholic blogger) talks about why he started meditating. In his case, it was precipitated by Internet overload and rather scattered thought. For me, each time I restart meditation it’s much the same thing. Not the Internet so much, but if you sit and just listen, there’s a huge amount of cacophony and noise in your head. In mine at least. If you listen long enough, it kinda fades away and you’re left with a stillness. As they say in Eat, Pray, Love, if you leave a vacuum, God can rush in.

What strikes me about old school prophets was how inquisitive and iconoclastic they were. If we had a prophet today I’m sure she would not reject science but fold that reality into something greater, and no not like Scientology. People talk of science destroying wonder or somehow sterilizing what’s natural, and I think nothing could be further from the truth. Science is awesome and inspires awe. For example, outer space.

I was looking thru my logs and I found that a paper I wrote in University was cited in the Cardoza Law Review. One word, but still. The paper is called ‘Fuck’ and it’s by Christopher M. Fairman, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Ohio State University. The (unpublished paper of mine he cited was) ‘Fuck Linguistics’ written for my SocioLinguistics class in 2003.

Booze doesn’t necessarily make people violent or promiscuous. That concept of drunkness is actually a cultural one, it’s not inherent in ethanol. As social anthropologist Kate Fox says, “the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.”

Hans Rosling of Gapminder tweeted this: “Yearly 100 billion intercourses yields 200 million pregnancies resulting in 135 million births of which 127 million kids survive to year 5!”. I found it interesting and made the infographic above. Only additions are to divide everything by 365, giving a daily figure. I somehow find it impossible to comprehend 100 billion intercourses.

I have often wondered this. Now there’s a study in Brain, Behavior and Evolution that says the reaction may be adaptive – our fingers get wrinkly to help us grip in wet conditions. Like tires with tread. Very interesting. Apparently as early as 1935 they discovered that fingers didn’t get pruney if there was nerve damage. Hence, there was some software running here, it wasn’t just a hardware glitch. Still, it was always a mystery to me.