Feminism, skepticism and boobies

What, being hawt whilst also brainy? Can't have that!

I was honestly expecting a big ol’ shitstorm over this post, wherein I defended the Boobie Wednesday Twitter campaign despite, I thought, the obvious feminist objections against showing breasts (whether male or female) to raise awareness about cancer. I believed people would crawl out of the woodwork to shout me down over considering acceptable the objectification of women, the “sexification” of breast cancer, and that I was going to be accused of merely wanting to save “my playthings” rather than people’s lives. You see, because I’m a guy — a heteronormative guy, at that — and boobies are therefore obviously far more important to me than the brains situated a foot and a half above them.

I was surprised that no such outrage happened. And I have to suspect that it’s because it merely wasn’t widely read enough, considering the sudden and strange attack on Skepchick over at Greg Laden’s blog.

Continue reading “Feminism, skepticism and boobies”

Feminism, skepticism and boobies
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Some interesting newsbites on evolution

This is just a small link round-up on some interesting stuff that I’ve read about evolution in recent weeks.

Researchers at UNC Chapel Hill have discovered that some bacteria’s motility is entirely controlled by a single calcium atom, insofar as when a single spot on Pseudomonas aeruginosa (a soil, water and skin flora bacterium that is an opportunistic pathogen in humans) is blocked, it becomes completely immobile. Without this ability, it could not infect its host — so this discovery could lead to new forms of treatment. That a bacterium’s proteins involved in motility can be stopped up by a single atom gives us the ability to infer that these properties are emergent properties from simple genetic variation. While these bacteria are every bit as evolved as us (having the benefit of the same length of time to be subjected to natural selection), in bacteria, it seems as though the simpler the emergent property, the better, since their small size means they use less energy to carry on living.

An endogenous retrovirus (ERV) that still exists today, Bornavirus, has apparently been piggybacking in mammalian DNA for about 40 million years. This includes our own DNA. In other words, every species that has this specific DNA marker shares a common ancestor who, while in gamete form, was originally infected by this virus, which then managed to stably insert itself into its DNA. These ERV markers (and this is by far Edit: far from the only one!) are among the stronger proofs of common descent. There’s more over at Wired, including a sweet 3D rendering of a Bornavirus.

Also, speciation has been directly observed in our lifetime a number of times, but since that requires accepting new bacteria species as something other than “microevolution” by those with a vested interest in denying the mountain of evidence before them, this is another excellent example: in the White Sands of New Mexico, where gypsum dunes formed a scant 6000 years ago, white lizards have evolved to camouflage themselves against the background to avoid predators. Not only that, but other lizards in the area have selected for those same adaptations to the point where they’ve speciated in an absurdly short (geological) time frame. Now, I understand these lizards didn’t evolve suddenly into dogs or elephants or crocoducks, but honestly, if they had, you’d have evidence for a creator, not common descent.

And finally, studies have shown that while acceptance of evolution has some weak correlation with intelligence (e.g. more intelligent = higher likelihood of understanding that it is well-evidenced science, as opposed to accepting it dogmatically), there’s actually a higher correlation with political ideology. The more-intelligent right-wingers’ views skew closer to the middle-intelligence left-wingers, so they’re more likely to accept evolution even if they don’t outright reject the religious dogma. There’s also indicators that it depends heavily on trust — e.g. whether you trust scientists and the scientific method, or whether you trust certain charismatic politicians and/or clergymen who tell you that evolution can’t possibly be true because it conflicts with their own teachings.

Some interesting newsbites on evolution

Cognitive Daily closes up shop

Wow. Cognitive Daily, a cognitive psychology blog over at ScienceBlogs that has run actual honest-to-goodness content daily for five years, is ending its long, wholly successful run. I’m sure there’s a psychological term for the emotional pang I feel over the loss of a blog whose content I may have only read 0.01%, if that, especially since the blog itself will probably stay up as long as Seed Media does, but that’s neither here nor there.

While we won’t be here, we’ve seen a number of exceptional psychology blogs join us in sharing the science of psychology with the world, and we encourage you to visit them. Rather than single any of these blogs out, we ask that you visit Dave’s ongoing project, ResearchBlogging.org. There, by clicking on the “Psychology” and “Neuroscience” channels, you can find nearly 100 blogs that regularly discuss peer-reviewed research in the same fields we’ve been covering here. You can also follow dedicated psychology and neuroscience RSS feeds, or the @researchblogs twitter feed, to get an even broader view of what’s going on in the world of science.

I’ve been at this blog for a mere two-ish years, most of which I’ve spent prodding bees’ nests, pissing off friends and family alike, and I’d be loath to walk away from this blog at this stage of its life cycle. I can’t imagine walking away from five years of deep conversation and well-researched content. Greta and Dave Munger’s moving on will leave a hole in the blogosphere that will be assuredly difficult to fill.

Cognitive Daily closes up shop

More Formspring philosophy

More Formspring questions and answers. Enjoy!

Are you happy to be a skeptic?

I’m very happy with my worldview, and I think being skeptical provides me with an appropriate filter with which to examine claims about how this world works. It has freed me from all manner of superstition, ignorance, fear and undue hatred, and provided a clarity of understanding of the universe’s true mechanics unparalleled by unscientific hypotheses, and of the duplicity of humans who claim to understand *everything* about it and who provide pat answers.

Would I be happier if I believed I had more control over the universe than I do, via magical thinking or delusions of a connection with some higher power? Perhaps. But it would be a false sort of happiness, an unfulfilled and mistaken sense of peace.

why r u an atheist?

Straight question. Here’s a straight answer: I’ve never seen any reason to believe in any specific god or gods.

Once I got away from the reinforcement of being told there is definitely a god (named “God”), I figured out that I believed what others were telling me with absolutely no evidence and that I might as well believe in fairies or unicorns for all the proof I have. Or for all the proof anyone offered. When all you have to base your belief is one book and a whole lot of people that believe wholeheartedly that it’s true, you might as well worship Harry Potter for all the evidence you’ve been presented.

More Formspring philosophy

Kino and Stilgar

I’ve been trying to figure out Kino: a movie editor for Linux. It’s a bit hard to get used to, but here is a quick little video of Stilgar exploring around my wedding stuff on the table. At the very least we figured out how to get music to play over the video.

Isn’t he teh cutes? 🙂

I’ve got some clips of my drive to work back when the leaves were starting to change, I think I’m going to work on that one today.

Kino and Stilgar

In defense of my “meaning of life”

A better question: what is the meaning of ice cube LEGO?

A while back, someone thought they would be smart and take on my Formspring challenge, wherein I said, “go ahead, try and stump me. I dare you.” They asked, “what is the meaning of life?”

I actually had an answer for them, one I thought was pretty good and pretty explicit in declaring the question itself as a category error — a question along the lines of asking “what does the sound of a train whistle smell like?” or “what shape is love?” Life is a state classified as a grouping of biochemical reactions acting in a self-perpetuating manner, and doesn’t have a “deeper meaning,” any more than “what’s the meaning of ice?” or “what’s the meaning of stars?”. It’s a mangled question, one that actually conflates a few similar questions into one seemingly sensible question, one for which most religions claim to have an answer. That theists generally have a better answer for an incorrectly formulated question is no big surprise, but I decided to take a stab at it anyway. Here’s what I answered.

What is the meaning of life?

THAT’S the kind of nigh-unanswerable question I was hoping for! Good for you!

It’s also a bit of a mangled question, which no matter how often it’s repeated I still can’t parse. It seems to be asking “why is there life”, but it’s actually not — it’s sort of presupposing an agency and a purpose to our existence specifically. At the same time, it’s asking what reason we have for living our individual lives the way we do. So let’s break the question down.

*rustle rustle*

Life itself has no meaning, any more than purple has a taste (unless you’re synaesthetic). Life on Earth is the culmination of a very long series of cause-and-effects starting when the quantum foam first fluctuated and kicked off the Big Bang. We don’t know how many universes or how many shots at this particular universe there has been, so we don’t know how likely or unlikely life is. We do know that we wouldn’t be around to think about it if it wasn’t possible (thus the anthropic principle), but there’s no specific agency to it that we can detect (despite people suspecting as much, since we’re evolved to detect agency in every rustling bush).

So, that covers “why is there life”. On to “what meaning can we impart onto our own lives, to give us reason to go on existing”, which is a smaller, and more personal, question. My life has meaning in finding comfort and happiness, and increasing the comfort and happiness of those around me. I also like rooting for human progress, and have a fascination with just how far we’ve come as a species in a mere ten-to-twenty-thousand years.

Of course, if this doesn’t answer your question, feel free to narrow it down some more.

Last week, this answer was used in a sermon by a Southern preacher by the name of Steve Davis. I’ve been following him on Twitter for some time — I had started following when we had a brief but civil exchange on theology, and he seemed like a fairly reasonable and sensible person whom I might want to converse with again in the future. In his sermon this past week, Steve referenced an abridged form of my answer to compare/contrast a theist’s “meaning of life” with an atheist’s.

Continue reading “In defense of my “meaning of life””

In defense of my “meaning of life”