Freethought Association of West Michigan
Meeting Minutes for March 8, 2000; #64.
A chat room has been added to the FAOWM website @
http://my.voyager.net/freethought. Check this site for times. This
site also provides links, scheduled events, and other items of
interest as well as a means to sign up for meeting minutes,
freethought news, our member directory and to ask questions or give
comments.
There will be two opportunities to hear guest lecturer Michael Shermer
in April. He will be speaking @ the GRCC Science Bldg., in downtown GR
on April 11; and on April 12 @ the L1 lecture hall @ the Dow Science
Center on the Alma College Campus. At both locations he will be
speaking on "Why People Believe Weird Things" which is the name of one
of his books (W.H.Freeman). He also authored the newly-released How We
Believe; The Search for God in an Age of Science (W.H.Freeman). Dr,
Shermer is host and consulting producer for the Fox Family Channel
television series "Exploring the Unknown," publisher of Skeptic
Magazine, the director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of the
Skeptics lecture series @ Caltech. He additionally hosts "Science
Talk" on radio station KPCC (89.3--an NPR affiliate for Southern
Cal.). The Shermer lecture will take the place of our regular 1st
meeting for April.
We are scheduled to meet for the Adopt-A-Highway program @ Plainfield
& 5 Mile on April 30 @ 10AM. This clean-up work will be done under our
group identity and will provide positive community exposure. We are
additionally scheduled for July 16 and Sept. 17 for this work. Help
out if you can!
The Michigan Atheists Convention will be held October 15, 2000 in
Lansing, MI.
Our calendar for the next 5 meeting topics is as follows:
* "EVOLUTION of HUMAN SEXUALITY" moderated by Dr. Carl Bajema; March
22nd.
* "THE LIFE & TIMES of CLARENCE DARROW" moderated by Marshall Grate;
April 26th.
* "THE ETHICS of PRE-MARITAL SEX" moderated by Rob Adamczyk on May
10th.
* "RELIGIOUS DISPLAYS ON PUBLIC PROPERTY" moderated by Frank Bacon;
May 24.
* "ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS & RELIGION" moderated by Jill Pinkerton on
June 14th.
--All meetings will be held @ the Calkins Science Center of the Grand
Rapids Community College; Conference Rm. #127, @ 7PM.
This meeting was our 1st in the pleasant and accomodating GRCC Science
Bldg. location. We had an exceptionally large turn- out and we welcome
first timers and hope to see them again.
Some of us headed over to One Trick Pony after the meeting for
informal talk and beverages.
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Dr. Greg Miklashek moderated our meeting on "Evolutionary Psychology."
He is a psychiatrist who has done work for Pine Rest Christian
Hospital and Forest View Psych. Hospital, specializing in addiction
psychology and childhood trauma. He quipped about how wary peers @
Pine Rest are when they learn of his thoughts on mental illnesses
being evolutionary adaptations.
Dr. Miklashek noted that we tend to see these illnesses in a
reductionist manner that precludes our overview of the big picture of
psychiatric conditions and their relationship to the environment over
time. Miklashek mentioned the book Beyond Reductionism for a more
detailed examination into the matters he was addressing to our group.
He explored with us how schizophrenia and even homosexuality may serve
some adaptive group function. Among the posited functions is that it
draws affective tension out of the family- by redirecting the focus
away from other concerns.
He also compared those with dementia praecox and other debilitating
mental disorders with the eusocial insects that divide up into castes
containing a worker group that is non-reproductive. The mammalian
naked mole rat also belongs to this social structure. In both cases,
there is a typically non-reproducing group that enhances the survival
and health of other group members containing much of the same genetic
make-up.
Dr. Miklashek, in speaking of brain structure, evolutionary
development and drives, called our attention to the book by Paul Mc
Clean, The Triune Brain. It was noted that the most recently developed
layer of the brain spends a great deal of its energy in inhibatory
activity, which is why people who have suffered trauma to this region
have great difficulty in social inhibition.
A major theme of our moderator's topic was about the connection that
he saw between population growth and density, and mental health
issues. He showed on a blackboard how human population is doubling
every 40 years and predicted a cataclysmic population crash if
regulatory mechanisms did not kick in before then. Based on our
current growth trend, he prognosticated that we would be @ 12 billion
people by the year 2040. Furthermore, he believes that at this
population density there be massive endocrine failure for those least
isolated from this level of density, due to the enormity of stresses
placed upon them. With this in mind, we compared and contrasted
different extant past and present human groups, their environment and
how they regarded other groups, as well as the environments they lived
in. We also discussed how we have moved from real space into
conceptual space, with satellites and the Internet and other
insulation/isolation factors. It has been shown that groups containing
about 150 people who are known to each other have a healthy
inter-relating society but as this figure increases, more stresses are
introduced. Dr. Miklashek believes that we all have the gene for
schizophrenia, etc. as a regulatory function but that these are not
manifested in the larger population until environmental stresses
trigger them because of chemical levels becoming too high or low.
We discussed theconflict between our tendency toward bigger and more
being better and the ensuing problems resulting from unchecked growth.
Our speaker talked about how we have become our own worst enemy by
being too successful, thereby backing ourselves into a niche, where
naturally- occurring controls upon population growth no longer have
muchg effect on us. We are only recently long-lived, beyond the age
required to pass our genes along, and with higher survival rates for
offspring. But with increased longevity comes more age-related
diseases. We talked about even farming populations, surrounded by more
land, are not immune to pop. growth-related stress, due to demand,
competition, an increasing, burgeoning population to feed and cost-
to- revenue ratios. Related to this, it was mentioned how our farming
technology is so dependent upon foreign oil for us to utilize the
machinery necessary to produce the abundance of products required at
our population size. Those who use low-tech means to farm, produce
less for fewer people but are not as much at the mercy of others. We
also prepare for disasterous contingencies in a myopic fashion as to
shortages of food and supplies, making us more vulnerable to sudden
societal collapse or large scale natural disaster.
Dr. Miklashek drew a pyramidal picture, depicting hierarchies of
humanity and the connection of powerlessness and depression as well as
differing access to resources @ different levels and the dynamics
involved of status and response to the level of empowerment. He stated
that emotions evoloved to help us deal with these group selective
hierarchies. Stress rises as the different strata achieve maximum load
densities due to population increases.
Additionally, we discussed the role of altruism as it relates to
genetic predispositions, borrowing in part from ideas presented by
Maynard Smith and others. And Miklashek reintroduced how homosexuality
and schizophrenia within the family structure relate to how the
family integrates the dynamics presented, shifts focus and de-powers
the threatening Oedipal figure/symbol.
We thank Dr. Miklashek for a fascinating discussion.
