Fire-walking gone awry

The main shtick of so-called motivational speakers is to persuade people that if only they think positively enough, they can achieve great things. One such speaker named Tony Robbins provides a practical demonstration of this principle by borrowing a practice that is fairly common in India and Sri Lanka during Hindu and Buddhist religious festivals, and that is ‘fire-walking’ which involves people walking across a bed of coal embers to show their devotion to their gods whom they believe will protect them from burns. [Read more…]

Carl Zimmer has fun with creationists

Human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes but our closest cousins the chimpanzees have 24 pairs. This was at one time a puzzle because if, as the theory of evolution says, both species share a common ancestor, how could it be that in the relatively short time after the human and chimp lines separated about six million years ago, humans could have lost an entire chromosome, with all the genetic information it contained, and yet survived as a species? [Read more…]

Where are you on the global fat scale?

Americans tend to be obsessed about how they look, especially their weight. Now there is a tool to further feed that obsession for those who may have wondered how they might compare if they happened to live in another country. When you insert your personal data into this global body mass index calculator, it returns your own BMI along with the ranges of BMI for 177 other countries in the world,

It turns out that the US is sixth in average BMI, being beaten by Micronesia, Tonga, Croatia, Samoa, and Argentina. I was wondering what it might be about these small Pacific islands that might cause three of them (rank 176, 178, and 173 respectively out of 193 countries in terms of population) to rank in the top four.

I have not been to any of these countries and so have no first hand experience but my wife who has been to Argentina says that she would never have guessed that they ranked above the US because she saw hardly any overweight people there, unlike what she sees here. This should serve as a warning that using our personal impressions (which are always based on small and usually unrepresentative samples) to infer the characteristics of entire populations can lead to wildly erroneous conclusions.

E. O. Wilson’s views on science and religion

When the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson visited our university in 2009 to give a lecture, a small group of people was invited to meet with him privately for a discussion. Some of the people in the group tried to ask him his views on science and religion but he responded with some vague noncommittal generalities. It was clear to me that he did not want to get into it. Wilson’s deep passion has been to try and get as many people as possible to realize the danger that the Earth is in and the need to take steps to protect it. He had just published The Future of Life (2008) and I felt that he avoided this touchy issue to avoid alienating potential religious allies in his environmental cause. [Read more…]