Paul comments on blogging, politics and science in response to my interview at Genetics & Health. Some of what Paul says mirrors Chris of Mixing Memory's sentiments in relation to reaching out and engaging in dialogue with those who differ from you.
There is a big topic, and I'm not going to weigh in deeply at this point, but, I will say that there is a balance between accepting differences and dismissing the absurd. Where people draw the line differs. Myself, Creationism is absurd. So is someone who questions the selectionist narrative of adult lactase persistence. There are matters of fact and matters of norms. I tend to have liberal attitudes toward difference in the second category, but am far sharper toward (or likely to speak in an "ex cathedra" voice) in the case of the former.
I suppose you could sum up my attitude by saying that life is short, facts are sacred and politics is sport for wimpy people.
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Quick related question -- I bought several intro textbooks on pop gen, evol gen, quant gen, bla bla. But what about popularizers? Not everyone has the time or interest to read textbooks. I'm thinking something along the lines of an expanded version of EvolGen's good series on detecting natural selection. Something w/ the basic equations, y'know.
can you elaborate what you're saying? i mean, in terms of popularizers, jm smith has written a book about evolution addressed to the lay audience. dawkins' books are pretty good IMO if you take his philosophical grandiloquence with a grain of salt.
I guess I mean something that has equations in it. :) So, instead of the lay reader taking away that "in some situations, such-and-such may happen," they have a way to discriminate alternative hypotheses -- for example, how could the lay reader tell if most Northern Euros have lactose tolerance due to genetic drift vs selection unless they knew that it would take 4Ne generations for the allele to fix, and that this is too long for any reasonable estimate of Ne? That's a handy equation they can then apply to any situation where the need intellectual self-defense.
Same when someone pronounces that X couldn't have or probably didn't evolve by selection -- for self-defense, the reader needs to know how you could check that using D or H statistics, for example. Ditto for breeder's equation, and a few helpful others. They needn't understand the derivations of the equations, as long as they can remember what they are & when to use them.
BTW, what Maynard Smith book are you referring to? If you mean *Evolutionary Genetics*, I'm looking for something below that but above Dawkins, if that makes sense.
well, mebee greg's potential book could be that. you listening greg?
as for n. europe & lactose tolerance, we...it is pretty weird in a cross-mammalian comparative sense. you can infer that its ancestral from that, but another issue is that in africa there is also lactose tolerance, but only among the tribes that habitually drink milk. northern indians are far more lactose tolerant than southies, the former use ghee (butter) and paneer (cheese) more than the southies (coconut oil). and then there is shit like linkage disequilibrium indicative of selective sweep and what not....
as for jm smith, the theory of evolution. but that's too layish for your, and frankly, evolutionary genetics is kind of the baby-steppish as it is....
There are really three separate but interrelated issues at stake here--one is an ethical issue, another a more 'democratic' issue, and the third an issue of truth-seeking. Ethically, you might argue for politeness or even respect of beliefs you do not hold for whatever reason. The democratic issue is of basic tolerance, which is simply to allow others' their differences in beliefs without infringing on their rights. And truth-seeking requires critical analysis of truth claims, regardless whence they come.
The problem we have socially in the United States is that democratic tolerance has morphed into ethical claims for 'respect', often where no respect is merited. Despite this elision, the ethical obligations to respect other individuals' humanity should not extend to their *ideas* or *beliefs*, which must necessarily be subject to scrutiny. I further would argue that democratic tolerance and critical analysis of others' beliefs (and of my own) are not in any way contradictory, and in fact, democratic tolerance sets up a social system wherein the difficult and messy task of truth-seeking can occur without violence to anyone's person.
One of the biggest obstacles to scientific thinking in general in American culture at the moment is the ethical red herrings that get tossed around in the middle of debates and the fundamental misunderstanding of tolerance in the popular mind. It might behoove scientists (and scholaras of all stripes who still think the search for truth a worthwhile endeavor) to become fluent in making these value propositions regarding ethics, tolerance and truth-seeking on the fly, so as to diffuse and control the course of debates, for example, when religious folk think they're being persecuted because scientists make evolutionary truth claims. See this for a more indepth discussion [forgive the shameless self-promotion].