I’ve been puttering away on my talk for CFI LA on 15 February — it’s all about how bad adapationist thinking corrupts good science. This is going to be easy, because examples just keep falling into my lap, all the time. Here’s one from just yesterday.
You may recall that sad comment by Scott Aaronson on his blog, Shtetl-Optimized, in which he deplored the way no respect is given to men’s biological imperative to have sex with all the women. Or more recently, Paul Elam’s bizarre appeal to badly interpreted biology and duck rape to justify MRA entitlement. It’s all of a piece, and it’s annoying: it’s reductive nonsense, in which people see a well-established set of scientific principles, and see their own complex situation, and imagine out of whole cloth a clear, simple path from one to the other. And suddenly, they’ve portrayed their messy life as the outcome of a purely determined, clockwork series of inevitable interactions, and they find refuge in the lowest common denominator of possible explanations. “It’s not my fault,” they can say, because of the way electrons interact, because biochemistry and thermodynamics, because genes, because everything follows from astronomical impacts and geology and Chicxlub at the end of the Cretaceous.
As it turns out, that’s what Scott Aaronson (with seemingly little comprehension on his part) was discussing in that notoroious comment section, in part, with someone named Amy. What started as a discussion about a grab-ass professor losing his job evolved into a lot of denial and defensiveness, and of course whenever a lot of nerds try to defend the status quo, they ultimately try to bring up Human Nature and Behavioral Science and This Is How We Evolved. I struggle myself to avoid falling into that trap, and sometimes I do anyway, but a whole gang of male nerds tends to inevitably drift into gross reductionism. Because of thermodynamics, I think, or maybe van der Waals forces.
Anyway, the provocateur behind all that argument, Amy, has now beautiful essay on all the phenomena in the middle that get ignored.
As he heads into his final few years as president, Obama seems to be finally taking a stand on a few things. He is going to veto the Keystone XL Pipeline. Hooray!
After learning that some media are practicing “cultural sensitivity” and being delicate about portrayals of animals that certain religious groups found offensive, Mary suggested that today’s metazoan should be a pretty pink pig. A good idea, I thought, but you know me — I can’t just stop there. So I read Leviticus.
Boy, Leviticus doesn’t just despise pigs…it detests just about everything. All these dirty, filthy animals (except the ones their tribe happens to raise for food and milk and fur, of course) that are disgusting and unclean. They are not only unfit to be sacrificed to the Lord, and not to ever, under any circumstances, be eaten, but if you touch them, alive or dead, you are befouled; if they touch any object it is unclean and must be destroyed. This is like the anti-biology chapter of the Bible.
So, for your edification, I’ve put the complete text of Leviticus 11 below the fold, along with a sampling of examples of the animals the Bible frowns upon. You know, it’s not just pigs — the Bible really loathes birds, and all invertebrates except 4 species.
It has been brought to my attention that way too many Americans have no idea what the Infinite Monkey Cage is, and that I have to enlighten you. It is Brian Cox and Robin Ince and a few other guests talking about science and comedy.
There. Job’s done.
It turns out that it’s not as simple as going “eww, ick” at that breastfeeding scene on Game of Thrones. Katie Hinde explains the science of weaning — there’s lots of solid information there, but the bottom line is this:
So proscriptive attitudes about what women should and shouldn’t do with their bodies can suck it.
His “Crash Course in Astronomy” is pretty good — the first part of this talk is universally (see what I did there?) applicable, since it’s a solid general description of science and how it works.
