This year's Brown Symposium at Southwestern University in Texas will focus on "Science and Religion: Conflict or Convergence?" Developed by Ben Pierce, a professor of biology at the school, the symposium will focus on the "engagement model" of science and religion—the idea that, by acting as partners, both fields can benefit from understanding the thinking and findings of the other field.
The two-day event, February 5 and 6, is free and open to the public, and regular readers of this blog will recognize many of the participating scholars, which include Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania; paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris of the University of Cambridge; Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-founder and co-director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology; and David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University. —Heather Wax

Check out Steven Johnson's latest book, The Invention of Air, which is now on the shelves. The book tells the story of Joseph Priestly, the British chemist who discovered oxygen and, in 1771, the fact that it is created by plants and used up by animals. But Priestly, a pioneer in science, was a radical when it came to religion. A "heretic" of "unshakable faith," writes Johnson, Priestly, who staunchly believed in God yet rejected the divinity of Jesus, helped establish the first Unitarian Church in England and "considered half of modern Christianity to be a bunch of Pagan hocus-pocus." Persecuted for his beliefs—after he wrote a treatise on the "corrupts of Christianity," a mob torched his house—he fled to America, where he impacted both theological and political thinking. In essence, says Johnson, the theme of the book is "how innovative ideas emerge and spread in a society."

Costly punishment—in which one person punishes another at a cost to himself—rarely pays off, according to a new study by Harvard University mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak and his colleagues Hisashi Ohtsuki and Yoh Iwasa that appears in last week's edition of the journal Nature. In fact, Nowak says, "efficient cooperation cannot be based on punishment. This is a very positive result."
To study cooperation and punishment, the scientists created a computer simulation of a population in which each interaction leads to either a good or bad reputation; cooperation leads to a good reputation, while not cooperating leads to a bad one. Players could then choose whether to cooperate, punish, or opt out of interactions with another player—based on their observations of the other person and information about the person's past decisions with other players. "Our behavior toward other people depends not only on what they have done to us but also on what they have done to others. Indirect reciprocity works through reputation," the researchers write.
When asked if they want to donate money to another person, for example, the "experiment shows that people base their decisions on what the recipient has done before. Generous people are more likely to receive donations," writes Nowak in an essay that appeared in an earlier edition of Nature. Because we spend most of our lives in a relatively small population in which we interact with the same people over and over again, we continually monitor and interpret how others act toward us and others. "When deciding how to act, we take into account—often subconsciously—the possible consequences for our own reputation," Nowak says. "Moreover, our own observations are often not enough; we want to learn from the experiences of others."
Punishment, the researchers found, is only a successful strategy when our assessment of other people's reputations—and what others say about them—is reliable; in real life, however, perception and gossip can often lead to errors. In most cases, then, a population does better by not using punishment; instead, the best strategy is to withhold help from someone you think has a poor reputation or has made unfavorable decisions in the past. —Heather Wax

Out of Oklahoma comes news of another "academic freedom" bill, which has been pre-filed in the Senate. Like the bills that have popped up in half a dozen other states (and died in all but Louisiana), the "Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act" labels "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning" as subjects that "can cause controversy" and would require that state educational authorities help teachers "find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies. Toward this end, teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught." (Keep in mind that evolution is not a point of controversy or debate in the scientific community.) The act would also prevent students from being penalized in any way because they "subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories." Last month, two representatives from Oklahoma City filed the "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act," which they said was meant to protect students who express religious viewpoints in the classroom or assignments from such penalizations.
Obviously, many people see the new act for what it is: part of the latest strategy to undercut the teaching of evolution and sneak religious theories like creationism and "intelligent design" into the science classroom (even though the bill itself claims not to promote any religious doctrine). As Glenn Branch and Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education write in the December issue of Scientific American, "academic freedom"—which on the surface seems innocuous, desirable even—replaced "teach the controversy" and "critical analysis" as the "creationist catchphrase of choice in 2008."
The new bill is scheduled for a first reading on February 2. —Heather Wax

"I have experiences where the person next to me on a plane asks what I do. I say I'm an astronomer. I can do two things when they tell me they're fundamentalist. I can have my back up and say, 'How can you believe those crazy things?' or I can show them that science has incredible power to reveal the mechanisms by which the world came to be and has a place for their feelings of rapture, awe, and wonder," University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank says in a Q&A with the Rochester City Newspaper.
Frank, who recently wrote The Constant Fire, a book about the science and religion debate, says that if "you look at what mystics were doing, they weren't looking for easy answers and they weren't necessarily describing the world. They were interested in going inward and having this internal exploration of their experience. They described a sense of unity, a fundamental oneness. That aspect of religion is often not looked at. We tend to see its social control side. The debate can't focus on the stories about the physical world that individual religions make up. We have to go beyond it and below it and before it to see where the roots of both science and religion emanated from. That's why mythology is so important."

More than half of teenagers—54 percent—mention high-risk behaviors on their MySpace pages, according to a new study from the Seattle Children's Research Institute that appears in the January issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Researchers, led by Dr. Megan Moreno (now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, looked at 500 randomly chosen profiles written by 18-year-olds and found that 41 percent referenced substance abuse, 24 percent referenced sexual behavior, and 14 referenced violence. Yet, the study also found that profiles that mentioned church or religious involvement—as well as profiles that indicated participation in sports or hobbies–were less likely than the others to mention the risky behaviors. —Heather Wax

"If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous," biologist E.O. Wilson, who recently released his latest book, The Superorganism, tells Esquire magazine. "The intelligent-design folks say, 'You haven't explained everything.' What they don't appreciate is that that's what biologists do for a living. And, one by one, the things that can't be explained are explained."
Religion, Wilson adds, is a "manifestation of deep emotion that will [come] out, one way or the other. Either in an atheistic political ideology or an excessive fierceness in being secular. Or the Red Sox. In other words, we constantly seek a tribe that we feel is innately superior and has the great truths, and we want to identify with them. We shouldn't deny that."
Yet, he says, we "have to get an entirely new mentality. Getting set for a long haul into the future. In which we grow. Not in numbers—we'll probably shrink in numbers—but we grow. In our understanding, in our happiness, in our harmony. Because we realize that there's no other way to survive as a species."