emjohnson | October 2, 2009
I had the opportunity to see this live in April. I had never heard of Lawrence Lessig prior to this presentation, but I haven't been able to forget it. I'm so pleased to have found it online.
emjohnson | October 1, 2009The Carnival of Evolution #16: The [find modest synonym for outstanding] edition is now up at Pleiotropy. Head on over and thank Bjørn for another great edition.
emjohnson | September 30, 2009Over the years anthropologists have had a good deal to say about notions of power and inequality. For example, the late CUNY anthropologist Eric R. Wolf took his early experiences working with peasants in Puerto Rico to explore these larger questions in the global system. In the opening to his book Envisioning Power he wrote:
We stand at the end of a century marked by colonial expansion, world wars, revolutions, and conflicts over religion that have occasioned great social suffering and cost millions of lives. These upheavals have entailed massive plays and displays of power, but ideas…
emjohnson | September 28, 2009SUNY-Binghampton evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson currently has a response to my review "Survival of the Kindest" up at Seedmagazine.com. In his response he suggests that Dawkinsian critics such as Frans de Waal and Joan Roughgarden have adopted a group selection perspective in all but name:
Rejecting group selection was wrong.
The rejection of group selection as an important evolutionary force in the 1960s was one of the biggest blunders in the history of evolutionary thought. The extremely simple idea--I was just able to describe in just a few lines--was branded as so wrong that…
emjohnson | September 24, 2009Seed magazine has just posted my review of Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. I wanted to use this opportunity to thank Nikki, Evan, Bora and everyone else that helped in developing this piece. For posts on related topics please see Misunderstanding Dawkins, The Sacrifice of Admetus, Bonobos "Red in Tooth and Claw", The Evolution of Morality and Laboratory Evidence for the Breakdown of the Selfish Gene.
In a fitting metaphor, the most recent experiment with social darwinism resulted in mass extinction. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling claimed he was…
emjohnson | September 23, 2009Author's Note: This piece is a continuation of my article "Survival of the Kindest" that appeared in Seed magazine.
As an undergraduate in biology and anthropology I read every one of Dawkins' books voraciously and would get into heated debates with my close friends about the Dawkins-Gould rivalry. He was one of the primary voices that taught me to love science and want to devote my life to the pursuit of natural knowledge. So before you read anything else, go out and read Dawkins' work. It's worth your time. This post will still be here when you come back.
The problem that I've found as…
emjohnson | September 22, 2009Scientia Pro Publica, the biweekly blog carnival of science, is now up at The Lab Rat. Rats and primates haven't always gotten along, but I appreciate the interspecies support in the inclusion of my recent piece. Thanks for another great edition.
emjohnson | September 22, 2009Fair and balanced ain't what it used to. The Huffington Post has published video of FOXNews producer Heidi Noonan encouraging protesters at the 9/12 event to be loud and boisterous while Griff Jenkins "reported" on their outrage. Noonan is seen motioning to the crowd periodically while speaking to an unknown individual on her cell phone. At one point she attempts to hide from the camera that has her in the shot.
Here is the video released at HuffPo:
Now here is the "objective" reporting that viewers at home saw (via Media Matters):
Notice how Jenkins and Beck both claim that this…
emjohnson | September 21, 2009Heracles battles Death for generosity's sake / Frederic Lord Leighton (1869-71)
Whereas great scientific theories stand the test of time when they accurately predict the natural world through repeated empirical trials, great literature transcends the ages when it speaks to universal qualities of human experience. Such inspirational works can also, without the authors realizing at the time, reveal the sublime beauty and tragedy of our evolutionary drama. Few classical authors have tapped into this zeitgeist of biological experience as the Greek tragedian Euripides. The conflict between…
emjohnson | September 20, 2009In fitting in with the recent sightings of conspiracy minded Stormtroopers here at ScienceBlogs I thought I would add my own contribution to the remix. Here Derrick Jensen tells the story of the little known early version of the film before it was optioned to an unknown director named George Lucas (starts off slow, but give it 30 seconds).
To read more by Jensen see his piece in Orion Magazine.
emjohnson | September 20, 2009
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the third of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
In my earlier pieces "Bonobo (Re)Visions" as well as "Bonobos and the Politics of Human Nature" I pointed out how conservative pundits were eager to jump on any criticism of this species because it fit their ideology of nature as "red in tooth and claw" (to use the line from Tennyson). In his response in eSkeptic Frans de Waal…
emjohnson | September 19, 2009Buffalo News / Adam Zyglis
"As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth."
- William Hazlitt, "On Patronage and Puffing", 1822
emjohnson | September 19, 2009Bonobos often adopt a "missionary" posture during copulation (photograph by Frans de Waal).
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the second of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As I wrote earlier in Bonobo (Re)Visions, Ian Parker's "exposé" in The New Yorker was beautifully written but wrong on many levels. Now the straw man who Parker claims to have torn down, primatologist Frans de Waal, answers his…
emjohnson | September 18, 2009
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the first of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As expected, the apologists for unreason who promote Intelligent Design have jumped on the recent article in The New Yorker about bonobos. This inspired me to write at more length about the article since this is a species I've studied closely for the last two years. Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent uses the article to proudly…
emjohnson | September 17, 2009
Darwin evicts a Social Darwinist and Eugenicist from his house / Northwestern Univ.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, author of such classic works as Chimpanzee Politics, Peacemaking Among Primates, Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape is now coming out with his new book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. My review of this work will be out early next week to mark the book's national release on September 22. Today and in the next few days I will be reposting pieces I've written over the years on the…
emjohnson | September 15, 2009Apparently so. It turns out that in nine states and Washington, D.C. insurance companies are not prohibited from dropping coverage for patients with a history of domestic abuse. The Women's Law Project documented this in detail in their 2002 Supplement Report entitled "Insurance Discrimination Against Victims of Domestic Violence" (pdf here) and in their 2008 report "Nowhere to Turn: How the Individual Health Insurance Market Fails Women" (pdf here).
According to WLP's 2002 Supplement:
Since 1994, 41 states have adopted some form of legislation prohibiting insurance discrimination against…
emjohnson | September 14, 2009My previous post on a potential problem for the selfish gene theory in explaining cooperative behavior resulted in a fair amount of heated discussion. However, there are quite a few misconceptions regarding the controversy surrounding the selfish gene, group selection, multilevel selection, generalized reciprocity, etc. that need to be clarified. When Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976 it was an instant classic and has been championed for the past three decades as the final answer on how natural selection operates. What has been tremendously useful about the theory, as in…
emjohnson | September 7, 2009Unicolonial ants, such as these Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), are genetically unrelated but will cooperate to defeat a much larger adversary.
Source: Alex Wild / Live Science
It has been a mainstay of evolutionary theory since the 1970s. Natural selection acts purely on the level of the individual and any cooperation observed between organisms merely hides a selfish genetic motive. There have been two pioneering theories to explain cooperation in the natural world given this framework: the first was William Hamilton's (1964) theory of kin selection and the second was Robert Trivers…
emjohnson | September 3, 2009
Inexplicably, a UFO appears over one of Earth's remote cities. Hovering a few hundred meters above the terrified citizens, a government mission to board the craft is executed only to find the strange beings living in disease and desperation. A decision is made to save their lives and relocate the aliens to the city's outskirts. In that moment, what seemed to be a compassionate action develops into an outdoor prison reminiscent of the worst crimes of colonialism. Imprisoned, literally in the shanty town that is created for them and figuratively within a society that shuns them, the…