Leiter Reports has become a group blog. I hope the new guys have been thoroughly instructed in how to maintain the standards—I don’t want to see that uncompromising irascibility diluted!
Another new group blog has formed, Minvolved, focusing on Minnesota politics.
Alas, my daughter and I are big fans of Vonnegut’s writing, but he’s showing signs of losing it. He sounds terribly unhealthy on the radio, and his performance on the Daily Show a while back was depressing. This morning, Vonnegut was on NPR, and said scientists were defending evolution because of “tribalism”, and that “my body and your body are miracles of design”, and that “natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.” Please, please remind me to stop blogging when my mind deteriorates that far, OK?
To call the body a “miracle of design” is begging the question, while denying the possibility of evolution is the argument from incredulity. Neither is at all persuasive. I would like to know if Vonnegut thinks all those scientists who insist that the Earth is roughly spherical are also arguing for tribal dogma, or whether he suspects that they might actually be relying on this little thing called evidence…and why he thinks biologists fall in the former category and not the latter.
Out of respect for his past writing career, though, I will refrain from cutting him up with a razor here. There were some signs in his interview that he hasn’t drunk deep of the ID kool-ade, but overall it was a sadly muddled exercise in sloppy reasoning, spoken without the sharpness and clarity I’ve expected from Vonnegut.
Carnival of the Godless #32 is available for reading. Once you’ve read through all that, there’s also a somewhat interesting theistic point of view to consider. The author quotes Pascal:
Let the skeptics first learn what religion is before attacking it. If religion boasted that it offered a clear vision of God, and if it asserted that there was ample evidence of his existence, then the skeptic could simply argue that the evidence is not conclusive. But religion says the opposite. It recognizes that people are in darkness, remote from God, that God is hidden from their understanding. Yet it proclaims that God has given signs for those who truly seek him with their hearts. Thus the skeptics could only successfully attack Christianity if they themselves had sincerely sought God, and failed to find any signs.
He takes the claim that God is remote and difficult to know in a curious direction…as an indictment of the so-called ‘spiritual’ leaders who offer simplistic recipes derived from their religious absolutism.
For the fact is, most of those who set themselves up as religious or spiritual authorities in that country [the US], especially in the Christian religion, are just quacks. Fundamentalists are to real spiritual leaders as creationists are to real scientists—in fact, that’s why fundamentalists and creationists overlap so profoundly. They’re a big happy coterie of quackery.
I agree (no one is surprised, I’m sure). But I don’t think the author goes far enough. If gods are murky and nearly unknowable, with no clear evidence for them, why believe in them at all? We shouldn’t trust the charlatans who define Christian behavior so sharply, but why then should we trust any assertion about the nature of any gods, including the claim that there is no “clear vision” of them? Throw out the whole business of god-belief, I say.
As for that concluding bit that says that skeptics who claim to have sought gods and failed to find them had not sought them “sincerely”, well, that’s simply the old No True Scotsman fallacy. Why is it that everything I’ve read of Pascal’s theology suggests that it was painfully simple-minded (I could bring up Pascal’s Wager, the worst argument for gods ever, but I’ll spare you)? The CotG is much more satisfying.
The Koufax Award nominations are beginning to trickle out. The first ones up are the nominations for Best New Blog of 2005, and oh my, but there is a long, long list. You don’t get to vote yet, though—they are wisely suggesting that you should take a little time to browse and make an informed selection (which is an excellent idea…one of the pitfalls of these weblog award thingies is that they tend to fall towards all the obvious choices, and “most widely known” is treated as a synonym for “best”.)
One unfortunate side effect of our recent jump to scienceblogs.com is that a couple of my colleagues here are listed under their old urls: Aetiology and Adventures in Ethics and Science are in new locations. I hope that doesn’t confuse any of the voters.
It’s also a great category, and there are a whole bunch of my favorites in there: Buridan’s Ass, By Neddie Jingo, Cosmic Variance, Dharma Bums, Evolving Thoughts, firedoglake, I Blame The Patriarchy, The Next Hurrah, Olduvai George…and then there are all those others I have yet to scan. And we’re only supposed to vote for one? Yikes.
I hate those commercials on cable TV for Enz*te, that fake “male enhancement” product that promises a “boost of confidence” for all the guys who take their little pill. I don’t believe it, of course—it’s probably a concoction of sawdust and rat droppings. But the phenomenon of male confidence as a function of the size of their physical attributes might just have some validity.
AL Basolo, who did some well-known work on mate preference in swordtails a few years ago (short answer: lady swordtails prefer males with longer swords), has a couple of new papers on the subject. She has looked at competition between males—the fishy equivalent of checking out the other guy’s equipment in the lockerroom—and found that the length of the sword makes a big difference in the struggle between males, even with no females involved.
Xiphophorus helleri is a common aquarium fish with a distinctive feature: that long sword on its tail. The males have competitive interactions with each other that are fairly easy to assess: dominant males chase away inferiors, and inferiors avoid the winners, so you just have to record who is chasing who to sort out who thinks they are in charge. Usually, it’s the fish that is bigger overall that wins. The investigators suspected that the size of the sword might also be a deciding factor. Observations of pairs of fish matched for body size, but with natural differences in sword length, did not bear this out, however, showing little correlation. That suggests, as one might expect, that there are multiple factors that influence competitions.
To simplify those factors, they carried out what sounds to me like a very cruel experiment. Pairs of fish matched for body size were anesthetized, their swords chopped off, and replaced with transparent plastic swords of identical size. The difference, though, was that different length swords were painted on the transparent plastic—one lucky fish got a new painted sword roughly the same length as the old one, while the other got a sword half the length.
After recovering from their implant surgery, they were put together in a tank…and the truncated male consistently lost all competitions. I guess size matters, after all.
Without the gross surgical modifications, however, size wasn’t such a clear indicator of victory, so other factors must also play a role. A companion paper looked at stripes on the sword, and how they affected female interests. This work modified the tails digitally; a video recording of a hunky male was made, and then edited to either remove the stripes from its entire length, to remove them from the proximal half or the distal half, or left intact. The video was played back to a female, and the length of time she paid attention to it measured (longer is better).
The lessons are clear. Having a long sword will help you intimidate and beat up your competition, and painting stripes along its length (or at least at the tip) will win you the admiration of females.
If you’re a fish, that is.
There is no necessary expectation that it will help at all if you’re a hairless ape, but if anyone tries it, let me know how it turns out.
Benson KE, Basolo AL (2006) Maleâmale competition and the sword in male swordtails, Xiphophorus helleri. Animal Behaviour 71(1):129-134.
Trainor BC, Basolo AL (2006) Location, location, location: stripe position effects on female sword preference. Animal Behaviour 71(1):135-140.
It’s true—Ken Ham has a whole team of expert fabricators working for him. We knew that all along, of course.
I have been informed of the existence of this device.
Do not be fooled. It transforms an inelegant tube-shaped dense paste of chopped chordate parts into a crude, inaccurate semblance of that pinnacle of molluscan evolution, the cephalopod. What next? Will Steven Spielberg take a mound of hamburger, call it George Clooney, and give it a starring role in his next movie? Shall I put a pot of alphabet soup on the stove and call it lyric poetry?
It is blasphemy. When the Great Old Ones come, I know who will be eaten first.
When she’s not making up stories about me, I’ve dragged Grrlscientist out to do some traditional midwestern things…like bowling. She has an interesting style—the fling-and-butt-flop, caught here on camera.
You can see the position of the ball. It doesn’t look like a strike to me.
I do have more photos.
