Uh-oh, we’re everywhere. On 4 May, you’ll find Greta Christina, Matt Dillahunty, and me at the Freethought Alliance Annual Conference in Anaheim … there will be some other speakers there, but you know us — we shall assimilate everything.
Come join us. We need more brains to absorb.
There is no accounting for taste or credulity. Universal Pictures is planning to make Eben Alexander’s book into a movie. You remember Alexander; the Proof of Heaven guy, the surgeon who ‘died’ on the operating table and claimed to have visited heaven?
It might be interesting to see the effort. The whole tone of Alexander’s fantasy is one of vagueness, ineffableness, incomprehending awe — he talks about seeing indescribable beings like birds or angels that he can’t do justice to in words, for instance…I don’t think crisp CGI is exactly going to work in his favor.
My students are also blogging here:
My students get a full exposure to the Sean Carroll perspective in his book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and I’m generally pro-evo devo throughout my course. I do try to make them aware of the bigger picture, though, so today we had an in-class discussion/’debate’ (nothing so formal as a debate, and it was more a tool to make them think about the arguments than to actually resolve a question). Fortunately, there’s one really easy exercise we can do in developmental biology, because some big names in the field have already clearly laid out their positions in a couple of relatively succinct papers, so I had a shortcut to bring the students up to speed on the issues. I split the class on Monday, having half read a paper by Hoekstra and Coyne on “The locus of evolution: evo devo and the genetics of adaptation” (pdf), which argues for the importance of trans-acting mutations in evolution, and another by Wray on “The evolutionary significance of cis-regulatory mutations” (pdf), which argues for the importance of developmental changes through changes in cis regulatory regions.
I drew this little cartoon on the board to illustrate the situation: that changes in the coding regions of genes produce mutations that can have broader effects throughout the cell (trans: they can affect other genes not on the same chromosome), while changes in regulatory DNA will have discrete effects on just the gene on the same strand of DNA they are (cis).
Then I asked them put together an argument as a group advocating for the significance to evolution of their ‘side’, cis or trans, which they then delivered to their opponent, with opportunities for rebuttal and counter-rebuttal.
Ah, pitting the students against one another…always the fun part of teaching.
There was good friendly discussion. Both sides had to dig into their respective papers to find the arguments, and then restate them to make their point, both of which are good exercises. The battle waged to and fro, and then our hour was up and I asked them to vote for who ‘won’, in the subjective sense of making a good argument and persuasively advancing their position. The results:
Which position do you think makes the best case for the significance of their phenomenon in evolution?
Team trans: 1
Team cis: 0
Both positions are important: 8
Minnesota mildness for the win!
I did think one student comment was perceptive and exposed the whole argument for a sham. If they were to go off to graduate school in developmental biology, they wouldn’t be picking Team trans or Team cis: they’d be pursuing a phenotype or a pattern of interest, and then analyzing how it worked and came to be, and they’d simply accept the evidence, cis or trans or both, however it turned out. Follow the data, always.
Now that’s a healthy attitude.
Here’s another one. A few Australian political leaders are taking a cue from the Americans and following a piecemeal approach to destroy abortion rights. You know how this works: the majority of the population favors those rights (and gay rights, and marijuana decriminialization, and so many other reasonable positions), so the haters get into office and start nibbling around the edges. They start choking off funding here and there, they throw money at propaganda, they make it increasingly difficult to get a basic medical procedure, and before you know it, abortion doctors are marginalized, people who get abortions are treated as pariahs, and public opinion starts to shift, because ignorance is a fairly potent lobbying group.
So the Australians have been doing the same thing. At least some people are noticing and beginning to speak up.
Yes 43%
No 54%
Not sure 3%
There was one other little bit that I wanted to comment on.
On Wednesday, Senator Madigan will introduce a motion in the Senate aimed at stopping the public funding of abortions that are used purely to select boys or girls.
He told my colleague Lenore Taylor that he had ”seen data that abortion on the basis of gender selection is happening overseas and that means it is likely to be happening here”.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but if we’re going to be consistent and regard fetuses as undeserving of the rights of full adult humans, and if we’re going to respect the woman’s right to choose her own reproductive future, we can’t be in the business of telling women what good reasons they’re allowed to use. Elective abortions to select the sex of their child are perfectly reasonable, rational decisions. They should be allowed, and we shouldn’t be horrified if women elect to do them.
There is a problem that many people devalue girls so much that they could skew the sex ratio. But that’s a completely different issue — the institutionalizing of patriarchal values — and it isn’t addressed by dictating the choices women may make with their own bodies.
I also find it ironic that it is the same people who unthinkingly promote those patriarchal values who are horrified that they lead to women opting to abort more female fetuses. I’m not impressed that you insist on the right of girls to be brought to term so you can treat them as disposable once they reach reproductive age.
Netroots Nation is the big progressive political conference sponsored by the gang at the Daily Kos. It’s being held in San Jose this year, at the end of June. They are opening the doors to their exhibition hall and giving 6 organizations free booth space — and among those vying for a slot is American Atheists. I would have thought they’d just give AA the space because progressives and atheists are such a natural match for each other…but no. They’ve decided that the way to determine who should get this space is by…an open, public, online poll.
Oh, we’ve got this.
Go take a look at the list of candidates for the free booth space. American Atheists is a natural, but I’ve got to say…there are a lot of worthy possibilities there. Wrestle with your conscience for a bit and vote for the one you like best.
Oooh, maybe we don’t have this. You people are always exercising your brains and thinking about your choices, and you might go haring off and voting with your mind rather than your shriveled little obedience gland.
I just got back from this evening’s Cafe Scientifique — where were you guys? — and I got to see lots of pretty pictures of halos and sundogs and light pillars. One of the nice things about living in Morris is that we actually get a lot of that weird atmospheric phenomena here, because we have lots of the raw material for them here: ice crystals. Vast drifting clouds of hexagonal crystals, flat and columnar, of various proportions, floating in the sky at various orientations to both refract and reflect light into our eyes.
I won’t go into all the details, since you weren’t there. And since most of you live in a less blessed place than the cold crisp upper midwest in the wintertime, you won’t get to see them, because your wicked heat melts all those sharp edged crystals into sludgy droopy droplets. Sorry. But I wanted to pass along one tip.
There’s some free software called Halosim that lets you do simulations of ice crystal distributions in the atmosphere. You specify their sizes and proportions and shapes, and then it traces the paths of light rays and produces an idealized image of what you should be able to see.
It’s very cool. You can tinker and see that to make dramatic sundogs, for instance, you need lots of flat hexagonal platelets floating in a mostly horizontal orientation, and presto, you’ll get a pair of virtual suns 22° to either side of the real one.
Well, maybe you can do that. It’s PC only, so I can’t run any of the simulations on my home computers myself. I’ll have to settle for looking at the real thing, darn it.
Savage is the new Humanist of the Year! I think that means we have to give each other a hug if ever we meet.
He’s going to be at the American Humanist Association Annual Conference in San Diego on 30 May-3 June, along with those and many other interesting people. I wish I could be there—I’ll be landing back in the US around then, after a long week in Romania, but I think I’ll need time to recover and get back to work.
But to all of you who’ve been exasperated with the refractoriness of certain elements of the atheist movement…check out the humanists. That stuff so many fight against bitterly is simply taken for granted in the humanist community.
Whatever you do, don’t think too hard about where its spine would go. That way lies madness. Which is exactly how the Hummonite gets you.
(via TONMO)
Philosophers are still grumbling about Lawrence Krauss, who openly dissed philosophy (word to the philosophers reading this: he recanted, so you can put down the thumbscrews and hot irons for now). This is one of those areas where I’m very much a middle-of-the-road person: I am not a philosopher, at least I’m definitely not as committed to the discipline as someone like Massimo Pigliucci, but I do think philosophy is an essential part of our intellectual toolkit — you can only dismiss it if you haven’t thought much about it, i.e., aren’t using philosophy at all.
So I’m pretty much in agreement with this post about the complementarity of philosophy and science. In fact, I’ll emphatically agree with this bit:
Scientists and mathematicians are really doing philosophy. It’s just that they’ve specialised in a particular branch, and they’re employing the carefully honed tools of their specific shard just for that particular job. So specialised, and so established is that toolkit, that they don’t consider them philosophers any more.
I’ll also agree with the flip side, where he defines philosophy:
Philosophy’s method is bounded only by the finite capacities of human thought. To the extent that something can be reckoned, philosophy can get there. As such, philosophy will never stop asking “why”.
But then I start to quibble (oh, no! I must be infected with philosophy!).
So what this is really saying is that science is a bounded domain of philosophy, while philosophy is unlimited, which sounds like philosophy has the better deal. But I’d argue otherwise: what’s missing in philosophy is that anvil of reality — that something to push against that allows us to test our conclusions against something other than internal consistency. It means philosophy is excellent at solving imaginary problems (which may be essential for understanding more mundane concerns), while science is excellent at solving the narrower domain of real problems. Science has something philosophy lacks: a solid foundation in empiricism. That’s a strength, not a weakness.
I think that’s where philosophers begin to annoy us, when they try to pass judgment using inappropriate referents — which is also how scientists like Krauss can annoy philosophers. And philosophers are so good at rationalizing disagreement away while carping on others. For instance…
Because scientists have a rather poor track record when it comes to doing philosophy.
Sam Harris’s attempt to provide a scientific basis for morality springs to mind, where he poo poos metaethics only to tread squarely in a metaethical dilemma. Or Richard Dawkins and his dismissal of religion as a false belief system, meanwhile dismissing the rather significant psychological and cultural functional roles it has played throughout human history, and may still play today.
Or Krauss, who without a hint of irony, suggests that good philosophers are really just bad scientists, when in fact he’s a good scientist doing philosophy badly. His definition of “nothing” comes not from within science, but is a grope in the dark for a definition that conforms with his particular theoretical predilections. That’s not how one defines things in polite (philosophical) circles, as David Albert pointed out.
After stating that scientists are philosophers and that science is a branch of philosophy, we’re now told that scientists do philosophy poorly. So is he saying that scientists must do science poorly? I know who’s not going to get invited to my next cotillion, that’s for sure.
Rather, scientists do their brand of philosophy very, very well — philosophers seem to be playing a two-faced game here of wanting to claim science as one of their own when they like what it accomplishes, but washing their hands of it when they don’t like it. Nuh-uh, people, you want to call us philosophers, you have to live with the stinking chemicals and the high energy discharges and the reeking cadavers now too.
His examples aren’t persuasive. I’ll skip over Harris, I’m not particularly fond of his efforts to explain morality, but the Dawkins complaint is weird. He does not disregard the immense psychological and cultural roles of religion: in fact, those are reasons why he and I both detest religion, because we’re aware of all the harm it does and has done. That we think the physical and psychological harm is enough that we should change it is not a sign that we’re doing bad philosophy at all; it’s a sign that we scientifical philosophers consider reality and empiricism to be extremely important factors in our thinking…apparently to a greater degree than many non-scientifical philosophers.
As for Krauss, I thought the Albert review was awful — typical unbounded philosophy with no anchor to the truth. Krauss’s definition of “nothing” was not just a grope in the dark. It was a definition built on empirical and theoretical knowledge of what “nothing” is like. Krauss is describing the nothing we have, Albert is describing the nothing he thinks we ought to have. Krauss is being the scientist, Albert is being the philosopher, and the conflict is driven because the philosopher is unable to recognize the prerequisites to doing science well.
I think that appreciating the boundaries of both disciplines as well as their strengths is important for getting along. Krauss may not have appreciated what philosophy has to offer, but a substantial reason for the friction is the smugness of philosophers who disrespect the functional constraints required for doing good science. Scientists don’t get to be “bounded only by the finite capacities of human thought”. We also have to honor the physical nature of reality.
In my head I have the capacity to flap my arms and fly. In the real working world…not so much.
I was up early this morning and just got off the radio, where I told you the whole story. Were you listening? KKOK/KMRS out of Morris, Minnesota? You get it every day with the weather and the farm report?
Oh, OK, I’ll repeat myself. Tonight, Tuesday the 26th of February, at 6pm in the Common Cup Coffeehouse, Sylke Boyd will be talking about “Sundogs and Halos and Pillars—oh my”. This is an informal, casual conversation about science — she’ll talk about what causes these strange atmospheric phenomena, and also be showing lots of lovely pictures of the strange skies above Morris, Minnesota.
Come on down, everyone!
