I just had to say that I stepped outside the door a few minutes ago, and it is 60°F! And almost all the snow is gone! And the sky is blue! And there are birds chirping in the trees!
I think aliens kidnapped me while I wasn’t looking and have transported me to a strange and distant world. But the internet still works here!
That Allen MacNeill fella is crazy brave — after trying to approach Intelligent Design seriously as a course subject, now he’s going to teach another controversial summer seminar on whether religion is adaptive. I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt to encourage the participation of the Cornell IDEA club — he basically ended up aiding and abetting a gang of ignorant ideologues, and that’s also the way it got spun in the media, to the creationists’ advantage. I agree that it’s a good idea to engage the counter-culture warriors who are pushing the unscientific glop on the public, but we can’t begin with the premise that ID creationism has some validity; that’s doing the work of the Discovery Institute. Discussion of evolution has to begin with the scientific foundation of modern evolutionary biology, and if anyone wants to wiggle in with their alternatives, they need to do the hard work of providing evidence, first.
I also have to disagree with one of the premises of his course description. After explaining the ubiquity of religious belief, it’s variation, and the existence of people who have no use for religion, he says:
To an evolutionary biologist, such pan-specificity combined with continuous variation strongly suggests that one is dealing with an evolutionary adaptation.
No, it most definitely does not.
I have noticed a lot of students wandering around with these white rectangular objects with cables hooked up to their ears. I’ve also discovered by personal experience with a teenager that these objects are quite precious to their owners, and are practically revered. Yet there are also some students who don’t care at all for them. Do evolutionary biologists look at the iPod and say “A-ha! There is an evolutionary adaptation”? Probably not. Evolutionary psychologists might, but we already know they’re nuts.
I think instead that we ought to determine if there is a hereditary component before talking about its likelihood of having an evolutionary function. Since we see that whole cultures can rapidly, within a few generations, shed much of their religious baggage; since religion seems to be largely a product of indoctrination rather than a built-in product of the brain; and since individuals can exhibit reversals from religiosity to atheism and vice versa within their lifetime, I remain unconvinced that there exists any kind of direct biological predilection for religion. The frequency of a phenomenon is not an indicator of its adaptive value, nor do variations reinforce that notion.
For another example, people in the US largely speak English, with a subset that speak Spanish, and a few other languages represented in scattered groups. That does not mean we should talk about English as an adaptive product of evolution. Language, definitely—there’s clearly a heritable biological element to that ability. Similarly, religion may easily be a consequence of a universal trait like curiosity (we want answers to questions, religion provides them, so it spreads—even if the answers are all wrong) or empathy (we are social animals, we like community activities, religion hijacks that communal urge), but religion itself is but one replaceable instance, an epiphenomenon that too many people mistake for the actual substrate of the behavior.
This week in our regular collection of reader-submitted cephaloweirdness, the theme is “domesticity”.
My opinion of Wired magazine just dropped a couple of notches. They’ve got Gregg Easterbrook pontificating on a science issue, the origin of life. Easterbrook is a sports writer with absolutely no clue about science—I’ve commented on his incompetence a few times before (OK, more than a few times). This time he’s soberly stating that no one has done any research on abiogenesis since Miller/Urey, or what they’ve done is a series of failed experiments, and that there are no hints in nature about the chemical origins of life, therefore, maybe a god did it … while completely oblivious to the fact that no one has ever done any research on gods or higher beings, and that there is no evidence for their existence. The man is an idiot. I am still utterly baffled why anyone consults that twit for his opinion on science.
Well, I don’t need to dirty my hands with the fool this time. Smithers, release the Poor Man Institute!
(By the way, I’ll plug it again: if you’re looking for a good summary of the research in early chemical evolution written for a lay audience, I recommend Hazen’s Genesis. I guarantee you that Easterbrook hasn’t read it, from his comments in that article linked above.)
That phrase is a perfect summary of the influence of the Bush administration. It comes from an article in which a prosecutor explains how the office of the Attorney General undermined the tobacco lawsuit.
Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.
She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.
“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said,” Eubanks said. “And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public.”
The last few years make sense if you see them as a prolonged exercise in treachery at the highest level: a betrayal of the American public to benefit American corporate interests. Gonzales must go. Bush and Cheney must be impeached. Let’s not make the mistake we made with Nixon, letting a corps of criminals escape unscathed, even allowing them to continue their pernicious influence on government for another generation.
New Rule, everyone! Whenever you see Rush Limbaugh, puke on his shoes.
If you’re fortunate enough that you think you’ll never actually be in the physical presence of the revolting tick of the far right, at least write to your local paper and demand that they never run another opinion piece from him. Call up your local AM station and ask that they remove him from the airwaves. I don’t understand how even a conservative can stomach Limbaugh’s contemptible schtick anymore.
What is their religion? I don’t doubt they’re religious people, but, we talked about this. Political people are different than you and I. And, you know, most people when told a family member’s been diagnosed with the kind of cancer Elizabeth Edwards has, they turn to God. The Edwards turned to the campaign.
Their religion is politics and the quest for the White House. And that’s — it’s not just with them, I mean, it’s part and parcel of political people — undergo all this stuff, the media anal all over their private life being made public even by the candidates themselves — it’s all part of the drill.[…] If you’re Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, how do you now attack John Edwards? Not a problem for Hillary, the Clinton [inaudible] will find a way. But Barack, it’s going to be a challenge. […] What the Edwards campaign is going to do here is see what the reaction is within the ranks of Democrat [sic] voters — as far as this announcement is concerned — and then go on from there. If there is not a big jump, if this doesn’t cause a breakout, if this doesn’t cause a big uptick, then, at some point, Senator Edwards will probably have to suspend the campaign.
The pop culture hysteria is getting ridiculous. The movie 300, based on a graphic novel treatment of the sacrifice of the Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae, has become a political palimpsest with everyone trying to find support for their agenda in it—but get serious, it’s a comic book on the big screen. Similarly, a few have tried to see omens in the death of comic book hero Captain America recently. Again, it’s a comic book — superheroes die all the time, and they bounce back like Jesus or get replaced by someone else willing to look ridiculous in public wearing garish Spandex. For the most obvious example of a hyperbolic search for Meaning and Significance in the death of fictitious characters, though, we have to turn to the religious — they’ve got so much practice at it, after all. Ladies and gentlemen, behold Rabbi Marc Gellman, whose thesis is that the Spartans and Captain America died for God.
Do you read the ‘supplementary information’ in science articles? If you’re familiar with the way journal articles work, they publish a traditional and formally formatted article in the print version of the journal, but now they often also have a supplementary information section stored in an online database that contains material that would be impractical or impossible to cram into print: raw data, spreadsheets, multimedia such as movie files. This is important stuff, especially if you want to dig deeper or re-analyze or otherwise rework the information.
Another important function is, I think, preserving data. In a previous life, I moved into an old lab that was piled high with the cluttered debris of the previous tenant’s scientific career; some we boxed up and moved to a storage space (where it is probably moldering, untouched since the early 90s) and the remainder found a resting place in a dumpster. I felt terrible about that, but it was a necessity.
Maybe it won’t always be such a necessity, though. The ‘supplemental information’ section of science papers represents a way to archive data that would otherwise lie in heaps at the bottom of file cabinets until lost. Those sections have their own problems—’supplemental information’ is an amorphous category that can contain anything, is clearly going to require some kind of formal metadata support, and is going to be a storage headache for publishers. We might also wonder whether the big publishing companies are also the appropriate repositories for what ought to be publicly accessible data.
One other possibility is storing raw data on these growing free databases. YouTube is essentially a free database specifically for storing any (almost) video data — I’ve seen some scientific work tucked away there, although it also creates new concerns: resolution is limited, you never know when the YouTube management might decide they dislike you and throw away your work, and a lot of raw scientific data isn’t going to have a large audience and therefore isn’t going to draw in a lot of ad revenue. Another interesting possibility is Google Base. Did you know that Google is providing a free online database in which you can store just about anything? Free storage, public access and searching, a reliable host — it’s a wonderful idea, as long as you don’t mind Google owning all of the information in the world.
The residents of Fargo have had to put up with one of those Ten Commandments monuments for a long time (well, “put up with” may be the wrong phrase—it’s North Dakota, after all). Now in a smart move, the Red River Freethinkers, who have to be especially canny to live in the Dakotas, are proposing a fair alternative to getting rid of the dodgy nonsense of the Ten Commandments: they’re proposing to put up their own monument to secularism.
Once it goes up, we ought to start a betting pool on which one gets vandalized first, and how long it will be.
Some commenters wondered if the Ken Poppe mentioned in the previous story was the same Ken Poppe who wrote a creationist book, Reclaiming Science
from Darwinism. Yes, it is. He’s at Trail Ridge Middle School, a public school in Longmont, CO, and is listed as teaching 6th grade science. He freely admits to teaching creationist crap to his class, and says that the book grew out of his lessons.
