Anti-smirk spells

Most of you probably know the name of Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceuticals executive who became notorious for raising the price of an anti-HIV drug his company manufactures from $13.50 per tablet to $750.  Once caught, he was completely unrepentant, claiming that the price hike resulted in cash that could be put into additional research, which would be "a great thing for society."  Not so great a thing for people who are HIV-positive, of course, but he doesn't seem unduly bothered by that.  Morals don't seem to be Shkreli's strong suit; besides his dubiously ethical practice of jacking up drug prices so as to squeeze the maximum profit from the ill, he was also arrested for securities fraud last year and is currently out on bail pending trial.

He is also notable for having a cocky, self-satisfied smirk so infuriating that it would probably induce the Dalai Lama to punch him in the jaw.

The trouble is, his arrest and upcoming trial have nothing to do with his practice of pricing life-saving drugs out of the reach of all but the very rich.  Worse, he's certainly not the only one in the pharmaceuticals industry doing this, he's just the most visible (and irritating) face of the problem.  Whatever happens apropos of his trial for securities fraud, Shkreli and his profit-above-everything-else motive are going to be difficult to eradicate, given that it's not illegal to sell products at an exorbitant rate in a capitalist society, however unethical it might be.

Which is why a group of Brooklyn witches have taken matters into their own hands, and put a curse on Shkreli.

The spokeswitch for the group, who goes by the name  "Howl," said that she doesn't hex people lightly.  "If I do go to this extreme, it’s to ensure that someone who is doing wrong is held accountable and pays for their wrongdoing, rather than because I just don’t like someone," Howl said in an interview with The Daily Dot.  "Like, this person will get away with doing so much harm.  And I can’t do anything in a financial way, the systems of capitalism alienate the poor from any measure of justice or assertion of voice and power, so what can I do?  And this is one method."

Howl and her friends aren't messing around, either.  They made a wax statue of Shkreli, and then let each of the witches take a shot at hexing it.  "We sent the effigy around the circle and each person anointed a different part of the effigy and expressed their desire for the type of hex they’d like to enact,” Howl explained.  "For example, someone anoints the head and says they hope the ego dies, that Martin Shkreli gets over his ego and realizes the damage that he’s done and makes amends.  Or they’d hex where you’d keep your wallet and says they hope he pays financially for the financial damage he’s done to other people."

Me, I'd like to see a spell that would freeze his facial muscles into a permanent scowl, so I'd never have to see him smirking at federal prosecutors again.  Others have suggested that it might be more appropriate to magically teleport HIV into his bloodstream, and then charge him $750 per tablet for his medication.

Unfortunately, I don't think any of this will work, for as Tim Minchin put it, "Throughout history, every mystery that has ever been solved has turned out to be... not magic."  But I have to say, skeptic though I am, if it comes to a choice between Howl and Martin Shkreli, I'm siding with Howl.  However ineffective her methods almost certainly are, her heart is in the right place.  "Some folks I know live with AIDS, and others rely on the medication, so that price tag is absolutely uncalled for and ridiculous," she said.  "I know systemically it’s not only him.  But he is a very visible part of this."

Which is it exactly.  So as far as the Brooklyn witches go, my response is: carry on.  I'd also encourage the Dalai Lama to take a crack at Shkreli, if he's feeling up to it.

Rings, Rome, and relics

In our ongoing effort to consider weird things people believe, today we have: the veneration of Jesus's foreskin.

If you've never heard of this before, you'll probably think I'm making this up, but I'm not.  In Wikipedia's article on the topic, we find out that "At various points in history, a number of churches in Europe have claimed to possess Jesus's foreskin, sometimes at the same time," which raises the awkward question of how many foreskins he had.

The first recorded mention of the relic was all the way back in the year 800 C.E., when the Emperor Charlemagne presented it to Pope Leo III and told him that an angel had delivered it to him while he was praying at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.  And for you doubtful types, allow me to mention that its authenticity was later confirmed in a vision by Saint Bridget of Sweden, so I think we can all agree that the claim is pretty well proven.

Unfortunately, the "holy prepuce" (as the relic is called) was stolen by a German soldier during the Sack of Rome in 1537, but he was captured in the Italian town of Calcata shortly thereafter and thrown into prison.  Somehow he snuck the jeweled reliquary into prison with him (you'd think the guards would have noticed), and no one knew what was going on until miraculous "perfumed fog" repeatedly appeared over the town.  At that point, the game was over, because what other explanation for fog could there be other than there being a preserved piece of Jesus's penis somewhere in town?  So it was recovered from the imprisoned soldier, and afterwards housed in the church in Calcata, which then became a major pilgrimage site.

Things only got more complicated from then.  At some point, foreskins showed up at the Cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay, Santiago de Compostela, the city of Antwerp, Coulombs in the diocese of Chartres, Chartres Cathedral itself, and churches in Besançon, Metz, Hildesheim, Charroux, Conques, Langres, Fécamp, Stoke-on-Trent, and two in Auvergne.  Which even if you accept that they weren't actually from Jesus, still brings up the troubling question of where they were getting all of these foreskins.  Guys are generally only equipped with one each, so that's a lot of people circumcising their sons, and worse, deciding afterwards that it would be a good idea to save the cut-off bit and give it to the church in a box.

Which I find a tad creepy.

But we're not nearly done with the creepy parts of the story.  Once again turning to the Wikipedia article, we find out that the one in Antwerp was sent there after being purchased by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem following his success in taking back the Holy Land from the Muslims during the First Crusade.  And I'm thinking, "How do you go about buying something like this?"  Did he just cast about for people who were selling random holy body parts until he found one he wanted?  Did he go to Foreskins-"R"-Us?  Or did a relic salesman go up to him and say, "Hey, your majesty, I bet you've never seen anything like this before?"  In any case, Baldwin bought it, and sent it back to Antwerp, where it resided until it mysteriously disappeared in 1566.

But no worries, there were plenty of others to take its place.  And the arguments over which one was the real item were still going on as late as the 1850s, when the Holy Prepuce of Charroux went head-to-head (rimshot) with the aforementioned Holy Prepuce of Calcata, leading to a "theological clash" that was resolved in 1900 by a decree from the Vatican that said that anyone speaking or writing about the foreskin of Jesus would be summarily excommunicated.  (Which after writing this post would put me in an awkward position, vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic Church, if I weren't already there for about fifty other reasons.)

Be that as it may, making a big deal out of the alleged relic persisted well into the 20th century despite the church's injunction.  In 1983, on the Feast of the Circumcision, the jeweled box with the Holy Prepuce of Calcata was taken out and paraded down the street, where a thief stole it.  Contents and all.  It hasn't been recovered, and my impression is that the Vatican isn't really too upset by this.  They seem to be kind of embarrassed by the whole thing, which is certainly understandable.

But by far the oddest claim, and actually the reason I thought about writing this post in the first place, is the one by 17th century theologian Leo Allatius, who thought that all of the relics were fake, because the actual foreskin of Jesus was taken into heaven with him when he ascended, where it became the rings of Saturn.

Once again, I swear I'm not making this up.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Anyhow, that's today's adventure in bizarre beliefs.  I'm not sure what else I could add in the way of commentary, other than to thank the loyal reader of Skeptophilia who ran across the Leo Allatius article, and gave me the tip-off.

So to speak.

Tower of power

When I read woo-woo conspiracy nonsense, one of the first things I often do is to shout at the computer, "Learn some damn science, will you?"

Not that it accomplishes anything.  The writers can't hear me, and my computer has a stress gauge on it that measures my irritation levels and uses that data to decide when would be the optimal time to malfunction so as to get the maximum possible freak-out.  So cluing it in that I'm already frustrated is probably a bad idea, a little like acting scared in front of a potentially vicious dog.

This all comes up because of a post over at the dubiously sane website Nutbarfactor.com, called "Why are WEAPONIZED Cell Towers Popping Up All Over the Country?"  This article raised a number of questions, the first of which is to ask whether the website is "Nut Bar Factor" or "Nut Barf Actor."  Because clearly those aren't the same thing.

Be that as it may, we hear right from the get-go about why you should worry if you live near a cell tower:

WHY DO CELL TOWERS REQUIRE MULTIPLE 300,000 WATT ELECTRIC CABLES? 

SHORT ANSWER?  THEY ARE NOT CELL TOWERS!

Apparently, one of the bad effects is that they cause your computer's caps lock to get stuck on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it's worse than that, as he goes on to tell us:

(A) communications satellite uses 2,400 watts of power (about the same as used by 2 hair dryers).  A microwave oven uses 1,000 watts (1 kilowatt) of energy.  The satellite gets the energy from solar panels and the microwave gets it from your electric utility (the electrical power grid)...  (T)he cables leading into a typical cell phone tower, which he describes as “A giant microwave oven on a stick,” capable of releasing 3,000,000 watts (3 megawatts) of output power to the tower’s magnetron – or even more megawatts, if there is an amplifier at the top.

So why would they have such a power capacity?  Surely it can't have anything to do with power transmission intensity dropping off as a function of the inverse square of the distance, or the necessity of broadcasting over a long range, right?

Of course not.

These megawatts of extra power are NOT for data transfer – nothing close to that amount of energy is required for data transfer – which is an important point, because this suggests to him that cell phone towers are easily capable of being switched to Weaponized Mode. 

That cell phone towers are wired with the capability to release millions of watts of microwave radiation makes them veritable of “towers of death”, the perfect weapons against an “invasion” – or the mega-slaughter of the domestic population... (I)f whoever we elect turns out to be so crazy, batshit evil, that they could fake a reason to turn on the ‘Last Line of Defense,’ the ‘Anti-Foreign Invasion’, ‘Anti-Zombie Apocalypse Network’ to cook the entire population within the city limits within an hour, in the middle of the night, with robot armies to mop up the people living in the countryside.

Sure they will.  Because what does government exist for, if not to cook us all like reheating yesterday's leftover pork roast?

Anyway.  Let's look at what people who actually understand physics have to say about the danger.  From an article by Elliott Drucker in Wireless Week, we have the following:

As a worst-case scenario in terms of exposure to RF radiation, consider a cell tower located only 30 meters (about 100 feet) away, and transmitting a total of 500W effective radiated power (ERP).  Of course, if you are only 30 meters from the transmitting antennas, you also are likely well below their horizontal beam centers even if severe downtilt is used. But for the sake of our worst-case analysis, let's assume that the full 500W is aimed right at you.  In that case, the RF power density where you are standing would be 4.4 microwatts per square centimeter.  For comparison, the FCC's mandated power density limits for continuous uncontrolled RF exposure by the general public are 600 and 1,000 microwatts per square centimeter for 900 and 1900 MHz signals, respectively.  Even in our highly unlikely worst-case scenario, RF exposure levels would be well under 1 percent of the maximum deemed safe by the FCC.

Put another way, by a physicist friend of mine, "A common number given for the power output of a cellphone tower is 100 watts.  So in terms of its power output, the tower would be as dangerous as a 100 watt light bulb."

What about his claim that there is a 3 megawatt power consumption rate by cell towers?  Besides the fact that he apparently pulls this number out of thin air, there's the problem that the input power of the cell tower isn't only used for broadcasting the cell signal, it's used for other things -- like lighting.  Most of the lights on cell towers are high-wattage incandescents.  According to my physicist pal, "I'd have to do the math to be certain of this, but my guess is that a significant fraction of the input energy of a cell tower is actually going into peripherals like lighting.  The output signal runs at a surprisingly low wattage."

So unfortunately for the conspiracy-minded, the likelihood that the government is planning on microwaving us all to death is completely unfounded.  It's a pity, especially given that one of the uses that the guy at Nut Barf Actor came up with was as an "Anti-Zombie Apocalypse Network."  Which I have to admit to being a good idea.  You have to wonder how well zombies would deal with being microwaved until they were piping hot on the inside.

A fight over decals

One of my guiding principles in life is "Don't be a dick."

I don't mind taking on battles when I need to, or when I think the outcome is sufficiently important; but I truly don't understand people who do choose to do things solely to piss others off.  What are they getting out of this?  At the end of the day, I do not judge how good a day I had, or how happy I am, based on the number of total strangers whose cages I rattled.

But to me, that seems like the only possible reason for the recent rash of police and fire departments slapping decals with crosses and "In God We Trust" all over their vehicles.  It's happened in Baytown, Texas; Youngsville, Louisiana; Covington, Louisiana; Cedartown, Georgia; Bay County, Florida; and Stone County, Missouri.

And those are only the ones in the last couple of months.  It's spreading like wildfire, and has generated more than one lawsuit by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the most recent in Brewster County, Texas.

Most of the arguments you hear against the practice are that the decals imply two things.  First, that the decals are a sly way of hinting that anyone who is an agnostic or atheist (or a practitioner of another faith; no one's in any doubt about which god the slogan's referring to) is liable not to receive the same police protection as Christians do.  The second is to ask how non-Christian police officers might feel about having to ride around in a squad car with a Christian religious slogan on the side.  These are government-owned vehicles, and therefore paid for by taxpayers, Christian and non-Christian alike.  The idea that these vehicles are emblazoned with a decal promoting religion -- worse, one particular religion -- is an unfortunate reminder about policies regarding inclusion, tolerance, and equality.

[image from the Hutchinson County, Texas Sheriff's Department Facebook page]

And I certainly agree with all of that.  But the question no one seems to ask is why these decals should be on the vehicles in the first place.  What is the argument for why they're necessary?  If you claim that without the decal, god wouldn't protect the cops in the car, then all I can say is that you have a pretty odd conception of how a benevolent deity might be expected to behave.  If it's patriotism, there are many other patriotic slogans you could choose.  So what purpose do they serve?

What purpose, in fact, does "one nation, under god" in the Pledge of Allegiance serve?  Or "In God We Trust" printed on our money?  No one's saying you can't paint bible quotes on the roof of your privately-owned house if you want.  Or, like a farmer who lives near me, post signs with cheerful slogans like "The Wages Of Sin Are Death" along the highway.  But these are government-sponsored, government-endorsed declarations of religion.  Why do the religious feel compelled to promote religion on the sides of police cars and fire engines -- and on our money?  Why is it moral to require students in every public school in America to recite a Pledge every morning that forces non-Christian students either to refuse to say it (sometimes at the cost of punishment and humiliation), or to lie publicly about their beliefs?

The only good answer I've been able to come up with to this question is: the Christian majority, i.e. the people who make the laws in this country, do it simply because they can.  If it pisses people off -- well, that's just too bad.  In fact, some of the most vocal proponents of the religious decals on police cars seem to be happy that they're making people mad.  Take, for example, Police Chief Adrian Garcia of Childress, Texas, who was told he risked a lawsuit from the FFRF for his decision to put big decals saying "In God We Trust" on the backs of his squad cars.

"They can go fly a kite," Garcia said.

So it boils down to people who really don't care if what they do excludes, devalues, or angers other American citizens, doing something because they're in a position of power so formidable that no one can stop them.  Further evidence that the much-talked-about-on-Fox-News "war on Christianity" in the United States is complete horseshit.

But it's a position I really don't get.  Like anything, political correctness can get out of hand, and there will always be people who will get their knickers in a twist over nothing.  But deliberately setting out to marginalize a significant percentage of Americans for no good reason, at the public expense?

That is called "being a dick."

Environmental witch hunt

Out of consideration for my readers, I try not to ring changes on the same topics too often, especially in rapid succession.  But today I have to write again about climate change, even though it was the topic of yesterday's post, because of a completely different idiotic thing that one of our elected officials is doing.

In this case, it's a Skeptophilia frequent flier Representative Lamar Smith of Texas.  Smith's virulently anti-science stance has been the topic of more than one post here, so it should come as no particular surprise that he's at it again.  This time, it's an expansion of his witch hunt against people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to locate and censure any employee who even mentions anthropogenic climate change.

Last year, Smith issued a subpoena for any internal documents that contained the words "global temperature," "climate study," "hiatus," and "haitus."  He presumably included the last one not only to catch accidental misspellings, but to catch people who deliberately misspelled words so as to avoid getting caught in his word search, a technique often used by people on social media to avoid obscenity filters, as in the phrase "Lamar Smith is kind of a dcik."  But this week, Smith apparently decided that he wasn't snaring enough malefactors, because he expanded his search parameters, as follows:

In addition to the search terms originally selected by NOAA, please include the following additional terms: "Karl," "buoy," "night marine air temperature," "temperature," "climate," "change," "Paris," "U.N.," "United Nations," "clean power plan," "regulations," "Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)," "President," "Obama," "White House," and "Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)."  In order to capture all documents responsive to the Committee's subpoena, please provide any documents responsive to these additional search terms from custodians that have previously been searched.

So you're going to take an agency that studies weather and climate, and subpoena every document that mentions "temperature" and "climate?"  Seems like Lamar is going to go from not catching enough evil climate change documents to catching everything.  I'd love to see what happens when his subpoena results in the capture of 139,452 documents, all of which his committee then has to go through.

("Karl," by the way, is a search parameter because Thomas Karl is one of the scientists whose climate research Smith and his cronies are targeting.)

How, precisely, can this be labeled as anything but harassment?  This smacks of Joseph McCarthy's sifting through people's correspondence looking for any hint of communism lurking therein.  Worse, actually; because communism isn't fact, it's an ideology, and there was justification for considering what the Soviets were doing as dangerous.  Here, we're talking about science, for cryin' in the sink.  And as I mentioned yesterday, nature doesn't really give a flying fuck what your political stance is.  You can't spin data.

What Smith et al. are doing amounts to suppressing hard evidence, akin to the spokespeople for Big Tobacco covering up evidence of the connection between smoking and lung cancer, which they did successfully for decades.  People like this have no respect for the truth; they only care about furthering their own agenda, whatever the cost.

Representative Lamar Smith of Texas [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What is most appalling is that in both the House and the Senate, the committees that oversee scientific research and the environment are run by anti-science ideologues of the worst sort -- not only Smith, but people like Dana Rohrabacher (who once called climate change "liberal claptrap") and James Inhofe (who brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate to prove that the world isn't warming up).

So their solution to having scientific findings that fly in the face of the way they'd like the world to work is to persecute the scientists.  Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work.  As we've established all too often, the universe doesn't care if you're happy or not.  Put a different way, we have the trenchant quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson: "The nice thing about science is that it works whether you believe in it or not."

Ignoring Vesuvius

I'm sure I have my fair share of cognitive biases, but I have understood from a tender age that the universe is under no particular obligation to operate in such a way as to conform to my desires.

This is why the tendency of many politicians to claim that climate change isn't happening because it doesn't fit with their jurisdiction's economic goals strikes me as bizarre.  I can understand being dismayed to find out that fossil fuel use is screwing with the climate.  I can understand the no-win situation communities are in when their entire economic base depends on coal, oil, or gas.  I can even understand why an elected official would be reluctant to bring such bad news to his or her constituency.

What I cannot understand is what is to be gained by pretending that because it's bad news, it doesn't exist.

[image courtesy of NASA/NOAA]

This is a point that apparently has slipped right past policymakers in West Virginia, who voted last Friday to block new public school science standards because they require teaching the causes, effects, and predicted outcomes of anthropogenic climate change.

In a statement to the Charleston Gazette-Mail that should go down in the Annals of Bullshit, Delegate Jim Butler said, "In an energy-producing state, it’s a concern to me that we are teaching our kids potentially that we are doing immoral things here in order to make a living in our state."

I just have one question for you, Mr. Butler: why do you think that the universe gives a rat's ass about whether you live in an "energy-producing state?"  Neither hard data nor the laws of science (nor, for that matter, standards of ethics and morality) are obliged to conform to your state's economic needs.  But then Butler went on to add, "We need to make sure our science standards are actually teaching science and not pushing a political agenda."

I suppose that refusing to teach public-school students what the scientists are actually saying, because you live in an "energy-producing state," doesn't constitute "a political agenda."

Delegate Frank Deem, however, concurred with his colleague. "There’s nothing that upsets me more than the idea that it’s a proven fact that climate change is man made," he said.

Because apparently, science is only valid if it doesn't make Delegate Frank Deem upset.

The bill now goes to the West Virginia Senate, which evidently also believes that research should be ignored if it hurts Deem's and Butler's feelings.  The Senate Chair of the Education Committee, Dave Sypolt, said, "As it stands right now, I have no problems with it at all.  I’m going to work it and send it right through."

Look, I know that in a state like West Virginia, where the economy has long been based on coal production, the scientific findings are seriously bad news.  And it is entirely unclear what solutions could be found that won't leave whole communities without jobs or sources of income.  But what they're doing right now is tantamount to a guy in Pompeii in August of the year 79 C. E. saying, "Okay, yeah, I see that the volcano is smoking.  But you know, that could mean anything.  The scientists don't all agree that Mount Vesuvius is going to erupt.  We've been living here for decades and nothing has happened but some minor earthquakes and plumes of steam.  The idea of moving everyone just because of a possible threat is really upsetting to me.  Anyone who says so must have a political agenda to destroy Pompeii's economy."

And outside, the crazy weather continues.  Maryland has been repeatedly clobbered by snowstorms, while hundreds of miles north in upstate New York we basically had no winter -- we had a couple of quick cold spells, but I went running in shorts and a tank top several times in January.  The Arctic sea ice has never been this low at this time of year since measurements were first taken. Globally,  2015 was the hottest year on record, breaking the previous record that was set in 2014, which broke the previous record set in 2013, and so on and so forth.

As James Burke puts it, "You don't need a Ph.D."  But I shouldn't mention that, because it will probably would wound Delegate Frank Deem's feelings again.

So the bottom line is: the science is sound, whether or not you choose to teach public school students about it.  We can discuss what measures can and/or should be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change.  In order to be effective, such measures would have an undeniable human cost, and would undoubtedly cause economic havoc in many places.  But what is also certain is that sitting on our hands is going to cause havoc, too -- havoc of a much more devastating, global, and permanent kind than anything the West Virginia legislature can conceive.

The origins of moral outrage

Here in the United States, we're in the middle of an increasingly nasty presidential race, which means that besides political posturing, we're seeing a lot of another facet of human behavior:

Moral outrage.

We all tend to feel some level of disbelief that there are people who don't believe in the same standards of morality and ethics that we do.  As Kathryn Schulz points out, in her wonderful TED talk "On Being Wrong," "We walk around in a little bubble of feeling right about everything...  We all accept that we can be wrong in the abstract.  Of course we could be wrong.  But when we try to think of one single thing we're wrong about, here and now, we can't do it."

So what this does is to drive us to some really ugly assumptions about our fellow humans.  If they disagree with us, they must be (check all that apply): deluded, misguided, uninformed, ignorant, immoral, or plain old stupid.

[image courtesy of photographer Joost J. Bakker and the Wikimedia Commons]

But a recent paper in Nature shows that we have another, and darker, driver for moral outrage than our inability to conceive of the existence of people who disagree with us.  Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom, and David G. Rand, in a collaboration between the Departments of Psychology at Harvard and Yale, released the results of a fairly grim study in "Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness," in which we find out that those who call out (or otherwise punish) bad behavior or negative actions do so in part because afterwards, they are perceived as more trustworthy themselves.

In the words of the researchers:

Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers punish selfishness, promotes cooperation by deterring defection.  But why should individuals choose to bear the costs of punishing?  We present a game theoretic model of TPP as a costly signal of trustworthiness.  Our model is based on individual differences in the costs and/or benefits of being trustworthy.  We argue that individuals for whom trustworthiness is payoff-maximizing will find TPP to be less net costly (for example, because mechanisms that incentivize some individuals to be trustworthy also create benefits for deterring selfishness via TPP).  We show that because of this relationship, it can be advantageous for individuals to punish selfishness in order to signal that they are not selfish themselves... 

We show that TPP is indeed a signal of trustworthiness: third-party punishers are trusted more, and actually behave in a more trustworthy way, than non-punishers.  Furthermore, as predicted by our model, introducing a more informative signal—the opportunity to help directly—attenuates these signalling effects.  When potential punishers have the chance to help, they are less likely to punish, and punishment is perceived as, and actually is, a weaker signal of trustworthiness.  Costly helping, in contrast, is a strong and highly used signal even when TPP is also possible.  Together, our model and experiments provide a formal reputational account of TPP, and demonstrate how the costs of punishing may be recouped by the long-run benefits of signalling one’s trustworthiness.

Calling out people who transgress not only makes the transgression less likely to happen again; it also strengthens the position of the one who called out the transgressor.  It's unlikely that people do this consciously, but Jordan et al. have shown that punishing selfishness isn't necessarily selfless itself.

All of which makes the whole group dynamics thing a little scary.  As social primates, we have a strong innate vested interest in remaining part of the in-group, and this sometimes casts a veneer of high morality over actions that are actually far more complex.  As Philip Zimbardo showed in his infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment," we will do a great deal both to conform to the expectations of the group we belong to, and to exclude and vilify those in an opposing group.  And now the study by Jordan et al. has showed that we do this not only to eradicate behaviors we consider immoral, but to appear more moral to our fellow group members.

Which leaves me wondering how we can tease apart morality from the sketchier side of human behavior.  Probably we can't.  It will, however, make me a great deal more careful to be sure I'm on solid ground before I call someone else out on matters of belief.  I'm nowhere near sure enough of the purity of my own motives most of the time to be at all confident, much less self-righteous, about proclaiming to the world what I think is right and wrong.