Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Our social networks and where we sit in them set the course for much of what happens in our lives, say Nicholas A. Christakis, a doctor and sociology professor at Harvard, and James H. Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego.

In their book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives’’ they argue that our social networks actually comprise a “super-organism.’’ Our lives take shape not just via those we know, our friends and relations, but through their friends and relations, even if we never meet those people.

You might wonder whether too much time on Facebook has addled their brains. But online social networks have little to do with their theory, and human history offers much to support it. They start the book by looking at feud-driven violence, like revenge killings of extended family members and friends in 19th century Corsica, showing how simply knowing someone can put us in harm’s way.

They then take us on a pleasant walk through interesting research in anthropology, archeology, history, politics, psychology, medicine, and sociometry (the study of social networks). We learn what it means that we evolved primarily in groups of about 150 members, how a social network brought the Medicis to power in Florence and ultimately opened the modern world to democracy, and how Barack Obama’s use of social networking made him president.

They also cite their own 2007 paper arguing that obesity is contagious across social networks. While the authors say their study has been confirmed several times over, even they feel compelled to note that “social network effects are not the only explanation for the obesity epidemic,’’ listing eight others.

The book of Genesis forms a cultural cornerstone for a large mass of humanity. Even people who have never opened a Bible know its stories - Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Noah’s ark, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is Genesis that introduces Abraham, the patriarch of Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. It contains the creation story that fundamentalists use to deny evolution; it also tells the story of Joseph, which became an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

For all of its familiarity, and its sacred aura, Genesis is a quirky work of literature, less a well-organized narrative than an outline for an epic that leaves out heaps of important details. Along to fill them in for the 21st century comes John Coats. In his book “Original Sinners,” he unpacks the first book of the Bible, story by story, mining it for very modern psychological insights. We see Noah’s family, post-Flood, slipping into a kind of madness straight out of “Apocalypse Now”; we see Joseph’s bedazzling coat hiding the fact that he was a snot-nosed brat we’d all love to hate. God pops up here and there, an omnipotent Jehovah-in-the-box who twists the plot in some impossible direction while the characters try to wrestle him back down.

Coats, a former Episcopalian priest, is also a management consultant and a motivational speaker. He wrote his book as an argument that Genesis should be read not just a religious text, but as a human allegory relevant to us all, believer or not. He spoke with Ideas by phone from his home in Houston.

IDEAS: Reinterpreting the book of Genesis has a long history - way back in the fourth century, the theologian St. Augustine said those who took the words of Genesis literally were like little children. What’s new about your approach?

COATS: My approach is not a religious approach. I’m trying to get the reader to see that these stories belong to you whether you’re religious or not religious or sort of religious. Because they’re human stories, and also because they’re foundational stories in our civilization.

Mark Hostetter occupies an unusual perch in the financial world: he is both CEO of Vinik Asset Management, a $5 billion Boston hedge fund, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.

As an executive, he manages a firm that handles money in eye-popping quantities. As a minister, one of several associate pastors at the First Presbyterian Church of New York, he organizes seminars at New York’s Auburn Theological Seminary where CEOs discuss how they can embody personal and societal values, including secular ones, in their working lives. Hostetter, 50, walks a tricky line - we expect ministers to occupy the moral high ground, while money managers are paid to deliver profits first.

Despite anger nationally about the behavior of hedge funds and the rest of the finance industry, where a single-minded focus on high returns helped destabilize the economy, Hostetter says he rarely encounters people in his business who lack personal integrity - though he concedes that most know he’s also a minister and he may get people on their best behavior.

The system-shaking excesses of the last decade have Hostetter calling for a more moral capitalism, one in which people put the stability of the entire system above their own personal gain. He spoke with Ideas by phone from his office in Boston.

Ideas: Doesn’t the Book of Matthew say you cannot serve God and mammon?

MH: If you take traditional Christian theology, the economic system is part of God’s plan. In the parable of the talents, the servant that is rewarded is the one who utilizes that money - who isn’t scared of the money, isn’t paralyzed by it, but sees it just like anything else, as a tool to be utilized in promoting whatever God’s goals are in the particular context. There may be a preference for the poor

We continue exploring the relationship between religious beliefs and economies. We just heard about possible links between the prosperity gospel and risky behaviors that led to the housing bubble and subsequent crash. Now, we ask whether belief in eternal damnation might help economies grow.

Education, access to technology, the rule of law and trade policy all influence economies. But a pair of Harvard researchers has sifted through 40 years worth of data from dozens of countries, and conclude that religious beliefs have a measurable effect on developing economies – especially the fear of hell.

For more we’re joined by Michael Fitzgerald. He wrote about this topic for The Boston Globe Ideas Section. He researched the article while a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow.

What makes economies grow? It’s a question that has occupied thinkers for centuries. Most of us would tick off things like education levels, openness to trade, natural resources, and political systems.

Here’s one you might not have considered: hell.

A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies - and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.

That hell could matter to economic growth might seem surprising, since you can’t prove it exists, let alone quantify it. It stands as one of the more intriguing findings in a growing body of recent research exploring how religion might influence the wealth and prosperity of societies. In recent years, Italian economists have presented findings that religion can boost GDP by increasing trust within a society; researchers in the United States showed that religion reduces corruption and increases respect for law in ways that boost overall economic growth. A number of researchers have documented how merchants used religious backgrounds to establish one another’s reliability.

The notion that religion influences economies has a long history, but the specifics have been vexingly difficult to pin down. Today, as researchers start to answer the question more definitively with the tools of modern economics, what’s emerging is a clearer picture of

Ordained an Anglican priest after a career as one of the world's top quantum physicists (his work helped lead to the discovery of the quark, a basic element of matter), John Polkinghorne vigorously argues that science and religion are not at odds. He served as the first president of the International Society for Science and Religion and helped organize the Society of Ordained Scientists. He delivered the 1993-1994 Gifford Lectures (which became the book The Faith of a Physicist) and in 2002 received the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities.

Polkinghorne has written more than 15 books, including The Quantum World (1985) and Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2002). His books on science and religion include The Faith of a Physicist (1996), Belief in God in an Age of Science (1999) and, most recently, From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography (published in the United Kingdom in October).

Do you ever have any regrets about having left the discipline of physics?

No, I think I left at the right time. One reason is that you don't get better at these things as you get older. You probably do your best work in physics before you are 45. The other reason is that the subject has changed. All the time I was in physics, the field was driven by experimentation. There were lots of very clever theorists around, but the experimentalists provided the motivation. Since then the subject has become very speculative, with little empirical input. That's actually not good for physics, and in that respect I'm not sorry to have left the game.

Do you think you would have a similar view if the field were biology?

Biology is different. Accumulated experience is important in biology in a way that isn't the case with mathematical physics. Also, biologists see a different slice of reality from the physicists. Physicists are deeply impressed with the wonderful order of the world, so "mind of God" language comes quite naturally to them, whereas biologists see the much more ambiguous process of life—extinctions

The third section of Creating a World Without Poverty details Muhammad Yunus' vision for creating social businesses and how they will eliminate poverty.

Yunus recaps some of the hoops that had to be jumped through before Grameen Danone could start making high-nutrition, low-cost yogurt in Bangladesh. Capital markets and regulators aren't set up to finance social businesses or to tax them (or exempt them from taxes, as may be the case), and Group Danone had to do yeoman's work with shareholders and regulators, including creating a social mutual fund that did not promise to maximize returns first and foremost. His goal is to expand market capitalism by making the unconventional conventional, working in an idea for a Social Dow Jones Index, Social MBAs and other ideas for increasing the visibility – and viability — of such businesses.

He also has high expectations for turning information technology as an engine for eliminating poverty. His experiences in Bangladesh suggest that the digital divide is not inevitable, and where it exists it does not need to be permanent. He cites the One Laptop Per Child and Intel Classmate PC projects as examples, and throws out a few other ideas that he hopes someone will pursue.

Yunus' vision will either inspire or irritate, because it is an outsized vision – a world with no poverty, a capitalism that doesn't weigh only profits – that stands outside today's reality. It will make many business people uncomfortable, and many others disdainful. By the end of the book, when he discusses the consumer society and whether it can and should be sustained, and says not in its current form, he will be preaching to a choir, and also to converts.

Grameen Bank is an improbable business worth study. In the second section of Creating a World Without Poverty, Muhammad Yunus details the ongoing evolution of what he calls “The Grameen Experiment.” Yunus was an economist, not a banker, and he needed to invent his bank for the poor, ignoring naysayers and regulatory obstacles at almost every step. It's a classic example of how someone who does not realize that what he intends to do is impossible is thus able to achieve it.

Economists may find themselves frowning in this section of the book. Yunus tweaks his former colleagues for their blind spots and their refusal to look at people except in abstract terms like “labor.” His is another voice in favor of 'experimental' economics, the part of the field that tries to look at human behavior as it is, rather than as economists say it should be.

That kind of anthropological economics resulted in many useful business practices at Grameen, and Yunus is generous in discussing what has worked and what has needed revising. For instance, it found that the wisdom of crowds works among the very poor: it has learned to lend to people in groups of five, and they all have to vouch for the person receiving the loan. It's also learned that lending to women has a bigger potential for getting families out of poverty than lending to men.

In “Creating a World Without Poverty,” Muhammad Yunus has written a dangerous book. Not so much for his goal – that's merely outlandish, since most people expect the poor will always be. Besides, Yunus knows how to make audacious ideas real – he created Grameen Bank to bring financial services to the poor, and proved that microfinance can be profitable and powerful. Doing so earned Yunus and Grameen the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize (arguably it should have been the Economics Prize).

What's dangerous are his questions. Like, if capitalism is so effective, why must 60 percent of the world's population squeak by on six percent of its income? Why is it that China's remarkable economic growth is ruining its environment? Why is poverty on the rise in the United States, even as its overall wealth skyrockets?

These questions skewer conventional economic wisdom that our current model of capitalism is the be-all and end-all for global economics. Yunus dares to say that market capitalism is both underdeveloped and, in its current form, bad for most of us. He echoes J.A. Hobson, the early 20th century critic of capitalism whose 1902 book Imperialism skewered British capitalists, accusing them of being economic parasites. (He also echoes Adam Smith himself, who wrote in the Wealth of Nations about inequities in the system that reduced competition and the flow of labor). Yunus is not so vituperative as Hobson, but he does call out business leaders, saying bluntly that “capitalism is a half-developed structure” and that modern economics is guilty of

…assuming that people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with the pursuit of maximum profit…. We've created a one-dimensional human being to play the role of business leader, the so-called entrepreneur. We've insulated him from the rest of life, the religious, emotional, political and social. He is dedicated to one mission only – maximize profit. He is supported by other one-dimensional human beings who give him their investment money to achieve that mission. To quote Oscar Wilde, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Yunus believes that governments, nonprofit organizations, international organizations like the World Bank and attempts at corporate social responsibility all have failed to address the problems of modern

Daniel Ross walks through a garden in South Holyoke with plants straight out of Puerto Rico, chicharos and jabaneros. This was the first of what are now 10 jardines comunitarios -- community gardens -- located throughout low-income neighborhoods in the area, and it sits about a half block from the blighted Main Street shopping district, a place where vacant buildings and overgrown lots seem to outnumber functioning businesses. "Hey, Carmelo," he calls to a man working a plot in midmorning. It's Carmelo Ortiz, a retiree who emigrated from Puerto Rico to Holyoke decades ago and helped found this garden back in 1991, working with local volunteers to reclaim a lot made vacant when a church burned down.

These seemingly humble gardens are part of a local success story with national significance. They've blossomed because of the nonprofit agency Nuestras Raices -- Our Roots -- which has received numerous honors for its model of using urban agriculture to spur economic development, enrich a community through cultural pride, and improve nutrition for youth and the community in general.

The gardens are cooperatively maintained but are overseen by Nuestras Raices, which helps people get access to the lots. The gardeners use the food for their own households, share it with neighbors, or sell it at farmers' markets.

The nonprofit also has a 30-acre farm site where it teaches people who were farmers in Puerto Rico or other countries how to be commercial farmers in Massachusetts.

IT'S THE BRAIN THAT SETS US APART

from other creatures. That's why its decline fills us with dread - it foreshadows not just death, but also a shuffling toward being something less than human. We fear devolution. * My brain is my bond to the baby boom, to which I belong only demographically. I was born in 1964, the last year of the boom, so I feel like a Generation Xer. But I'm a boomer about my brain. * Baby boomers like to try to stave off the inevitable - inventor Ray Kurzweil even thinks he can beat death. So why should my brain slip? I regularly play Brain Age or Big Brain Academy, games that claim to keep my neurons firing. I try to drive different routes, to keep my brain from falling into a routine (it's never boring to get lost). I force myself to read things like Paradise Lost (a better exercise when my brain was younger). And, recently, I attended One Day University - after all, what could be better for my brain than a little schooling?

One Day U offers sessions in various cities throughout the year, with each featuring four lectures on diverse topics, given by gifted teachers from top schools. The day I go, the profs come from Brown, Harvard, Syracuse, and Dartmouth. It's open to anyone (a cadre of high school students from Boston regularly attend), but it's clearly targeted at boomers, and we make up most of the class. We sit though four lectures of about 70 minutes each, including time for questions at the end.

The program, based in Northampton, bills itself as "the most stimulating day of college available anywhere." Sprinkle some salt on that: One Day U's cofounder and director, Steve Schragis, bankrolled Spy magazine back in the day. Schragis tells the several hundred of us gathered in our "classroom," an auditorium at Babson College in Wellesley, that "there is no homework, no exams, you can't fail, and you've already earned an A." Today's classes will be political science, psychology, history, and cosmology. I know something about all these things, and in two of them, I think I know quite a bit. But the only thing I care about is, will I feel brainier at the end of the day?

SINCE 2001, Lee Zimmerman's Evergreen Lodge has helped almost 60 low-income young adults get their lives on track, while consistently paying 9 percent back to investors backing his business. Pura Vida Coffee, of which John Sage was a co-founder in 1997, has generated $2.7 million in cash and resources for health and education programs for children and their families.

Both companies deserve praise for their good deeds. But what might be more remarkable about the founders of Pura Vida and Evergreen Lodge is the way they raised capital to build businesses that have two bottom lines: one financial and one social.

Such business models are becoming increasingly popular among philanthropists and foundations, which like the idea of self-sustaining charities. They also want their investments to have the same kind of social impact as their donations, an idea called mission-related, or program-related, investing. A study released earlier this year by FSG Social Impact Advisors, a consultancy founded by Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, and Mark Kramer, a former venture capitalist, calculated that mission-related investing has grown by 16.2 percent a year over the last five years.

William Hurlbut, a physician and ethicist, is best known as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. Though he has spoken out against the destruction of embryos for research purposes, he is nonetheless a supporter of embryonic-stem-cell research. He avoids what would otherwise be a terminal paradox through a proposal that he calls "altered nuclear transfer," or ANT. His goal: to create embryonic stem cells without destroying human embryos.

One of the most promising methods for creating embryonic stem cells is cloning: the nucleus of an egg cell is replaced by the nucleus of an adult cell, a process called somatic-cell nuclear transfer. The egg is then induced to divide, and the stem cells harvested from the resulting embryo are pluripotent, meaning they can form any sort of tissue in the body. But harvesting the stem cells destroys the embryo. By contrast, ANT (which has been shown to work in mice, if not humans) switches off vital genes--through alteration of the somatic-cell nucleus, the cytoplasm of the egg, or both--before the transfer takes place. Hurlbut says the resulting cell mass could not become an embryo but could produce pluripotent stem cells.

Hurlbut recently spoke with Michael Fitzgerald about ANT.

MF:

What compelled you to come up with altered nuclear transfer?

William Hurlbut: When the President's Council met [to debate the ethics of stem-cell research, in 2002], it was clear that both sides of this debate are promoting important positive goods: that on the one hand you have people trying to defend human dignity from its earliest stages, and on the other hand you have people trying to promote advances in science and medicine. And as I sat there and listened to this debate, I thought, "Isn't there an answer to this? Isn't there some third option, some way that both of these goals can be achieved?"

I thought of dermoid cysts, benign ovarian tumors that produce all the cell types, tissues, and partial organs of the human body. Clearly something like embryonic stem cells is being produced in those tumors. And I thought to myself, "If nature can do this, we can do it. There must be simple technological alterations we could use in concert with nuclear transfer such that we produced embryonic-type, pluripotent stem cells, but without producing the unitary organism that is a human embryo."

Global warming is by nature a big-enough problem to create the kind of necessity that could be mother, father and midwife to invention. And plenty of big ideas are out there to address it, some that may even lead to substantial enterprises much as our military needs have.

But the ideas being backed in the United States are things like biofuels and carbon-emissions trading. These are good approaches, but they may not hold much potential for actually staving off climate change. James E. Lovelock, a British scientist whose 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia, argued that most of humankind is doomed, does not think much of renewable energy.

At a panel on climate change at the University of Cambridge this summer, Mr. Lovelock was asked what would be the most effective action people could take. Because humans and their pets and livestock produce about a quarter of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he said, “just stop breathing.”

Now there’s a fine idea.

But even a gloom-and-doomer like Mr. Lovelock thinks that all is not lost. He supports replacing coal-powered utilities with nuclear power, but he also extols largely untested processes, like shooting particles into the atmosphere to deflect the sun’s rays. He also endorses sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky and burying it, a process known as carbon equestration.

These are big ideas, and all of them aim directly at global warming, but they are too costly for individual inventors or even companies to pursue.

Howard J. Herzog at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a proponent of carbon sequestration, which you might call creating carbon landfills. The basic technologies are already used in the energy business. For example, oil companies pump carbon dioxide into old fields to force out more oil.

But we don’t know if it can be done on a scale that will let us keep up with the growth in coal-fired power plants, for instance, or if the carbon dioxide will stay put. To find out, Mr. Herzog estimates that it will take $1 billion a year over the next 8 to 10 years to build a