Absolutely brilliant point, Saurabh. Biological education today is a ridiculous jumble of memorization of a some bizarrely constructed subset of the currently understood structures of molecular biology along with the features of a a warped taxonomy that’s half way between Linnaeus’s classical work and modernized phylogeny. Very little effort has been put into organizing biological pedagogy in any deep and principles-based way, and I think it leads to a continuous problem in critical thinking at all levels. People forget that great science often happens as a result of having to teach it–it was no accident that modern research rose out of teaching institutions. Biology needs its Feynman’s lectures. Principles and a strong understanding of experiment and logical deduction are sorely lacking. Personally I blame the intense pressure put on biological education by our insane medical system.

Some scientists working in Europe, Anglo-America and Japan found that the landscape paintings that end up in museum tend to show just wilderness during broad daylight and often show a home in the evening, suggesting an evolutionary urge to explore during the day and retreat home in the evening. Which all makes sense until you go to China and find that landscape paintings without buildings aren’t considered complete; people always want a building in the picture. Take the word “evolutionary” out of the story and it’s a nice little art-crit article, but requiring a few culturally related (if not 100% homogenous) curators to become accurate and complete projectors of our genome onto gallery walls is a bit much.

And no, it doesn’t end there. There’s another cross-cultural survey of why people don’t like snakes that again relies on evolutionary “reasoning” with very little evidence. The problem isn’t that I know they’re wrong, it’s that they aren’t doing much to defend themselves against, say, a Jungian, who would say that universal life experiences like time in the womb, the birth canal and puberty govern our fear of the autonomous phallus. Or of course against the Jew or Christian who sees in the snake a creature associated with evil. So while trying to explain away this myth, the article does a bad job of escaping its own myth.

Which is the heart of the problem. Once you’re inside a cultural frame, whether it’s creationism, evolutionism, anarchism, or whatever, you tend to absorb bits of information that support your ideology and forget or ignore those that don’t. Perhaps ideology or the more general notion of “story” is an (evolutionary?) method of increasing recall by giving us mental boxes in which to store facts. And like all characteristics it may suffer from the flaw that when you get good at one thing you often get worse at another, in this case at remembering things that are outside your story.

Does creative intelligence appear more often among people who are forced to keep multiple stories running at once because they are, say, both religious and atheist, residents of multiple cultures, multi-lingual, or whatever? That would be a fun experiment to try and design. No pitfalls at all in trying to define creativity or intelligence or to decide which multiple narratives to include — subjects of child abuse and rape for example tend to live multiple lives, does that make them smarter? How about schizophrenics?

Which brings up the other problem — sociobiology sounds great in theory but in practice the experiments are very very hard. First you need to prove that all people, or all but the mutants, are a certain way which is hard enough. Then you need to show an evolutionary link — not a cute if illogical wildebeest story, but evidence of a change in the past, or something in the genome today, that controls that trait. Clearly biophilia isn’t universal. There are still those who torture frogs. Do these people lack some gene? Lotsa luck looking into that. I’m sure the Bethesda Naval Hospital will help.