I think I evolved and am hardwired to bang my head against the wall when I read this stuff

Did you know that women might have been driven by evolution to be “bitchy”, that is, aggressive, competitive, and insulting towards other women? An article in The Atlantic presents a couple of evo-psych studies — the usual stuff, Western college students given culturally specific choices, and then makes absurd universal conclusions about human nature and evolution. I hated it.

But at least, buried in the middle of the article, are a couple of paragraphs that state the rational response to the succession of maddening EP bullshit.

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Why did it have to be physics?

Tom Levenson has a new book, The Hunt for Vulcan:…And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, and it’s getting interesting and positive reviews. I’ve also got two flights coming up at the end of this week, so I need something tasty to read.

But it’s physics. There are a heck of a lot of good physics books coming out all the time — one of my colleagues here at UMM, Chrissy Kolaya, also has a new book, Charmed Particles: A Novel, also about physics, wouldn’t you know it. I’ll have to read both, I think.

But people! Don’t you know that developmental biology is the most interesting subject in the universe?

“Food” does not “cleanse” “toxins”

acitvated-lemonade

Aaargh. In an article about an organic food store, I get lots of buttons pushed: food fads, weird notions about nutrition, Gwyneth-Paltrow-style airy BS about purging oneself of toxins, all that kind of crap:

As a downtown crowd of artists and models balanced long nights of extreme revelry with long days of extreme diet and fitness, Organic Avenue became more of a destination, opening its first street-level shop in 2006 on Stanton Street and offering, among à la carte items, juice cleanse programs that might entail forgoing solid food for anywhere from one to five days in favor of concoctions made from blue-green algae, beets and the like.

If you’re going in for a colonoscopy, you’ll be told to go on a low-fiber liquid diet for a day or two, to clear out your colon for inspection. But this nonsense about “juice cleanses” is absurd. In fact, just run away if anyone uses the word “cleanse” in reference to your diet.

But it saves the best for last. There’s a new fad going around among the excessively wealthy right now.

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FtBCon4: call for proposals

We’re going to have another FtBCon on 22-24 January 2016, and we’re beginning to assemble a program. Your friendly bloggers here have some plans and ideas, but one of the virtues of having a conference entirely online, besides the fact that you all get to watch, no matter where you are, is that we can open it up to suggestions for talks and panels from you, the readership. If you are interested in putting your face and voice online, talking about freethought, science, social justice, video games, whatever, we have an online form for you to fill out. It’s easy!

A few important points: only fill out the form if you want to host a session. Don’t nominate others: you might want to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson (so would I), but we don’t need you telling us that you want us to draft him to speak. If Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to address our little con, on the other hand, he should fill out the form. We’ll probably accept his proposal.

You can propose talks, where you all by your lonesome talk at your computer’s camera, or panels, where you get together a small group (keep it to 4 or fewer, please: big groups don’t work well) and have a round table discussion. It’s all good. Again, don’t tell us you want to host a panel and ask us to fill up all the seats: you find your co-panelists first.

This form is for proposals. They won’t automatically be accepted. Make it enticing so we want to accept it.

Do tell us when you’d be available that weekend, and when you’d prefer to have the panel. We also love to have people outside US time zones participate, so it’s great when we’ve got panels/talks at times convenient for Europe or Australia.

Trolls: don’t bother. Submissions from this form will not be displayed publicly — we’ll just screen them first, and we’re quick on the delete key. If you think you can lie your way into getting on the schedule and then switch topics on us at the last minute…won’t work. All talks and panels will be sponsored by an FtB member, who will be able to pull the plug on you. So don’t waste your time or ours.

Minnesota nice

I tell you, there are wretched hateful people everywhere, even in the Empire of Nice that we call Minnesota. A woman of apparently, from her name, German extraction (“Burchard-Risch” — how totally un-American) got so irate at a woman speaking Swahili (“Asma Jama”. Is that less American than “Burchard-Risch”? Shouldn’t only people with good Lakota names like “Winona” or “Wasechun Tashunka” have the right to complain?*) in an Applebee’s that she got up and smashed a glass beer mug across her face, lacerating her horribly.

Asma Jama was there with her children having an ordinary conversation, when Burchard-Risch irrationally lost her temper at hearing a conversation that she had no part in, in a language she didn’t understand, and thought that was sufficient to cuss out the Jama family, throw a drink at them, and then violently strike her. Unbelievable. How can people have that degree of xenophobia? I wonder if Burchard-Risch is a Trump supporter.

There is now a fundraiser to cover Jama’s medical expenses. Be warned: front and center at that link is a photo of Jama’s seriously cut up face.

*Except, of course, that the Lakota culture of courtesy would mean they wouldn’t get up to smack around someone for the crime of speaking that foreign tongue, English. Or excuse me, American.

Religion makes you selfish

mytoys

You can read this new paper in Current Biology titled The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World and see for yourself — religiosity is not a good thing for fostering generosity, it seems. The authors are a truly international group who tested children from Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, USA, and South Africa with a set of games, and got a set of results that showed a statistically significant difference in the degree of altruism for different religions, or lack thereof. Here’s how the results look:

altruism_religion

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Anti-Caturday post

I haven’t done one of these in a while, largely because a) that Caturday nonsense has faded, and b) everyone now knows that cats are both wicked and full of derp, so it’s redundant. But this morning I stumbled across a fine collection of photos of cats the slaves to toxoplasmosis won’t enjoy, so I thought I’d share an example.

wetcat

I laughed and laughed. I thought about showing it to our cat, but I was afraid I’d get clawed.

Don’t tell our cat I mentioned this. Please don’t. Help us. She’s in our house right now. Gotta go. She’s watching me.

Copulins?

Over on We Hunted the Mammoth, there’s a discussion of this odd post by one of those Men Going Their Own Way about copulins — which are apparently sex pheromones secreted by the vagina. This was the first I ever heard of them, which gave me a moment’s panic. I am a biology professor, and I do teach human physiology, and here was this phenomenon I’d never encountered before? Worrisome. But only for a moment. There are a lot of details I know nothing about, so maybe this was an opportunity to learn something new.

I’ve got a small collection of physiology and neuroscience texts, so I checked there first. Nope, unheard of term, nowhere in any of their indices.

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Online Gender Workshop: Detour, Social Construction Ahead edition

Online Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

To understand gender, it is vital to understand how it comes about. While the etiology of individual gender identities is very much in doubt, the etiology of gender as a framework, as a concept, that is not in doubt: Gender, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is a social construct.

Few feminists would dispute that. However, when I taught courses on gender-related topics to people who already espoused the idea that gender is a social construct, it frequently, even typically, became clear that they didn’t understand the statement at all. So while many might not dispute it, the statement itself is not helping us. Indeed, it appears to be hurting us. So let’s add to the discussion another statement, more commonly disputed among feminists: Sex is a social construct.

There. That should make all the rest easy.

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