Social Sciences
revere | November 1, 2007In an Open Letter to the American Chemical Society my Scibling Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, an ACS member, asked several pointed questions about how the Society was running its publications. One of the flagship publications is Chemical & Engineering News, whose editor in chief, Rudy Baum responded to her via email and she posted it, without comment, on her blog. That is right and proper. But I am under no constraint, so I will comment. If I were polite, I'd say Baum's response was disingenuous. But I'm not so polite, so I'll just say I don't believe him.…
evolvingthoughts | October 31, 2007
To summarise: so far we have three general kinds of explanations of religion. There are sociological explanations in terms of the economic, societal and political conditions under which religions develop. There are psychological explanations in terms of experiences, existential dread, need for control and so forth. And there are sociobiological explanations that may or may not incorporate both of these. These latter accounts are founded on some aspect of a shared human nature, but they need not be essentialistic, in the sense that each human shares them, only that any population of humans…
chaoticutopia | October 30, 2007Lately, I've been pondering our use of models to predict the future conditions of our planet. However, it is also nearly Halloween. Together, it seems like a good time to pull out this old post of mine, which asks if a deck of Tarot cards can be a useful tool for modeling a person's life.
Don't get me wrong... I'm not about to attempt to defend some pseudoscience, nor am I going to expose a mass of woo. Instead, this is more an argument between two sides of personality: the battle between the skeptic and the empath.
If you've read some of my [older] fictional entries, such as A Hint of…
neurophilosophy | October 29, 2007I'm very flattered to have been given two Intellectual Blogger Awards (first by Eric and then by Kate; thank you both). Now, after hard deliberation, I can name five other intellectuals upon which the same honour should be bestowed.
All of the bloggers named below have given me inspiration in one way or another, and, I'm sure, will continue to do so.
So, in alphabetical order by surname...
Vaughan Bell is a neuropsychologist who is undergoing clinical training at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He writes about the kind of things that first got me interested in neuroscience, in posts…
j7uy5 | October 27, 2007PZ has already
href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/dont_worry_kids_curry_is_just.php">written
about this, primarily to dismiss it as nonsense. He is
correct, but there is one point (or two) that I want to add.
Oliver
Curry is described in WIkipedia as an evolutionary
theorist as well as a political theorist. He was granted a
Ph.D., on the topic of morality as natural history, by the
Government Department of the London School of Economics.
Apparently, he is fond of saying that humans will divide into
two species, approximately 100,000 years from now.
The article PZ…
retrospectacle | October 26, 2007The Society for Neuroscience meeting is coming up, taking place in San Diego in the midst of all the furor and flames. While I'm not going to the meeting, I was reminded of a funny fake science poster I saw at SFN back in 2004: "Joint Encoding of Motion and Music in a Neuron in the Sea Monkey Artemia Salina - An Evolutionary Antecedent of Trouba Du?" (PDF here) by Kai Schreiber.
Figure 1
Why is this an awesome poster? Check out the abstract:
When we see an unfamiliar person in a parking lot, sporting a guitar and dressed in quaint clothing, we instantly are overcome with an intense feeling…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2007
I now turn to the question of explananda - what is it that explanations of religion are adduced to explain?
Similarly to the general classification I gave before, there are several things that seem to need explaining.
1. The sociological explanandum: the existence of organised religion
Religions are salient objects in modern and historical societies. All of them have social structure, and it is that which calls for explanation. There are basically two approaches here, one tied to Weber's sociology and the other tied to Durkheim's. Weber believed that religion was symbolic, and founded…
pharyngula | October 25, 2007While the Weekly World News may be on the verge of extinction (although it still seems to be surviving online), at least Pravda labors on to deliver the truth…
Recent studies of Australian scientists indicate that Atlanteans, the people who lived on a legendary island first mentioned by Plato, may have been the ancestors of dolphins.
Huh. Like we're supposed to believe a bunch of Australians.
sb admin | October 25, 2007The Council of Science Editors has organized 235 journals from 37 countries are publishing more than 750 articles on poverty and human development this week. For its theme issue, PLoS Medicine asked a variety of commentators from around the world to name the single intervention that they think would improve the health of those living on less than $1 per day. While reading the article, I was struck by three themes that emerged in multiple responses:
Water and sanitation â Several respondents identified improved access to clean water and sanitation as a high-impact intervention. Sanjeev…
jrosenhouse | October 24, 2007Another day, another debate between Christopher Hitchens and a defender of the faith. This time it was Dinesh D'Souza. The video of the procedings can be found here.
It was a frustrating debate. Through most of it I felt D'Souza and Hitchens were talking about different things. Hitchens focused primarily on whether the major claims of Christianity are true, and he was his usual funny and trenchant self in doing so. D'Souza addressed very few of Hitchens' points in this regard, and instead focused on why Christianity is a force for good in society. I think Hitchens won in a rout on the…
denialism | October 24, 2007Or is unintentionally channeling them is my conclusion from reading his latest WaPo Op-Ed entitled, "The Eugenics Temptation". This Watson nonsense has somehow convinced all these conservatives that lurking beneath the surface of every scientist is a seething eugenicist, biting at the bit to escape and kill off all we see who are inferior. I've agreed with Gerson on a thing or two, but this essay is a real stinker.
"If you really are stupid," Watson once contended, "I would call that a disease." What is the name for the disease of a missing conscience?
Watson is not typical of the…
sb admin | October 23, 2007This week, the Salt Lake Tribune is running a must-read series of reports by Loretta Tofani about the human cost of the cheap goods we get from China. Tofani begins with the story of Wei Chaihua, a 44-year-old former farmer who sought factory work in order to give his children education and a better future. Wei didnât know that such a thing as an outdoor gas oven existed until he got a job sanding and polishing steel in a factory that manufactured them, and he didnât know about the disease silicosis until he was diagnosed with it.
Wei is hardly an isolated case, Tofani explains:
With each new…
evolvingthoughts | October 22, 2007
I am attempting to classify the various explanations of the existence of religion, so chime in the comments.
They are:
1. The intentionality explanation
Human beings are agents and highly adapted to social life. As a result, our cognition tends to take what Dennett calls the "intentional stance". That is, we ascribe intentions to non-agent processes. In earlier terminology, this was called "anthropomorphism", or the treating of non-human things as if they were human.
One will often read explanations of religion as the anthropomorphisation of natural processes like spring, rain,…
pharyngula | October 21, 2007Last night, in my talk, I said that I didn't think religion was necessarily a force for evil. Then, this morning, I was sent a link to some convoluted religious sophistry that made my lip curl in revulsion. Maybe I was wrong.
The link will take you to an article by Orson Scott Card in which he complains about homosexuals. That probably tells you all you need to know; Card has this reputation for letting his mormonism hang out in the ugliest ways possible.
Look at these horrible rationalizations for oppression.
One thing is certain: one cannot serve two masters. And when one's life is given…
pharyngula | October 21, 2007We had a good time at St Olaf tonight — it was a small group, I gave a short talk, and we had lots and lots of stimulating conversation afterwards, along with my favorite pizza (jalapeno and pineapple). I've tucked what I sort of said below the fold.
I am here to bring you some good news.
The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus a few hundred million, and the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old. How do we know this? The work of astronomers in measuring cosmological constants, in calculating the age of stars and the size of our universe; the work of physicists on…
pharyngula | October 20, 2007It's another weekend of travel for me. Tonight, I'm off to St Olaf, that fine Lutheran institute of higher learning, to rail against the corruption of science by religion. I'll be speaking at 6 at the Lion's Lair, Buntrock Commons, out there in Northfield, MN (wait…"lion's lair"? Do they mean that literally?)
The really exciting news, though, is that the Minnesota Atheists are hosting a talk by Hector Avalos tomorrow afternoon. This is extremely convenient for me — drive in to give a talk, stay and get to listen to another — so yes, I'll be there, too! It's just fun, fun, fun for this lovely…
thescian | October 19, 2007Read three novels in one week. (Why you ask? So I could nod knowingly tomorrow at a one day lecture course on reading modern fiction. See). Haven't done this sort of a thing since I was a wide-eyed teenager from the railway town Jolarpet who walked into his first proper library in the great city of Chennai. The original rush of youth has now been replaced with all the many layers of meaning that age adds to a reading experience. To the novels now.
'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro
A novel set in an alternate/future world where clones are reared to accept, and in fact, believe, that donating…
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2007
Mats P. Malmer in 1989, holding a miniature replica of a Bronze Age sword. Photograph by Dr Rune Edberg, published with kind permission.
Yesterday, 18 October, was Swedish archaeology professor Mats P. Malmer's 86th birthday. Sadly he passed away on 3 October. I wrote a brief appreciation when I heard the news. Here's a longer one by Anders Andrén and Evert Baudou, both professors of archaeology and members (like Malmer himself) of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. Andrén is the current holder of Malmer's chair in Stockholm, having succeeded the man's successor Åke Hyenstrand. I've…
terrasig | October 19, 2007In a post the other day, we noted that the semi-synthetic natural product, ixabepilone, approved for advanced breast cancer was derived from a soil bacterium. Colleague PharmCanuck reminded us that the soil is not a new source for drugs: the anthracyclines, daunorubicin and doxorubicin, are derived from a strain of Streptomyces found growing on a 13th century castle along the Adriatic Sea (hence the brand name for doxorubicin, Adriamycin). Amazingly, Adriamycin remains a foundation of many breast cancer chemo regimens more than 30 years after its approval.
While we speak here quite often…
sheril | October 18, 2007
'Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.'
- Jane Goodall
On Tuesday, I finally got to listen to one of my heroes, Jane Goodall, speak to all of us about why there is reason for hope. Now I was told by a dear friend beforehand that the audience would be sprinkled with young women who all 'wanted to be like Jane when they were young', so to that I replied I'd be in good company! Indeed, what she discussed was not new... but there is something very special about hearing words that long ago inspired a younger incarnation of myself…