Culture
razib | July 2, 2009Nicholas Wade is moderately skeptical of Robert Wright's new book, The Evolution of God:
Robert Wright's new book, "The Evolution of God," has a provocative title. But it's a disappointment from the Darwinian perspective. He doesn't mean real evolution, just the development of ideas about God.
He argues that our morality has improved over the centuries and that maybe the hand of the deity can be discerned in that progression, if one looks hard enough. But he leaves fuzzy the matter of whether he thinks a deity is there for real. There's a moral order in history, he says, which "makes it…
razib | June 30, 2009
A little under 10% of South Africa's population are Cape Coloureds. They speak Afrikaans and generally worship in Reformed Christian churches, but exhibit discernible non-European ancestry, in particular African ancestry. In the United States anyone who manifests African ancestry is coded as "black." Though hypodescent started out as a tool for maintaining white racial purity against colored taint, today it is accepted within black America as the social norm. Barack Obama has obvious mixed ancestry but he is accept as fully black racially by both black and white Americans. In South Africa…
razib | June 29, 2009A friend of mine has a new weblog, Low Carb Art and Science, which some of you might be interested in (or not). I do think it is ironic since this is an individual who presumably is in favor of a diet of red beans & rice. If you want a more eclectic range of posts on diet you might want to check out FuturPundit.
razib | June 29, 2009Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts:
But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested…
razib | June 29, 2009I don't post much on contemporary politics, mostly because I don't have much value-add, but also because so much of it from the blogosphere is simply a critique of the mainstream press. In fact I think the mainstream press is essential and invaluable in many domains. The current crisis in print journalism is going to cause problems because these organizations serve as primary sources for many webloggers on abstruse or specialized topics. Who do you think puts bread on Carl Zimmer's table?
But, I do believe that almost all "political analysis" and "commentary" in the mainstream media can be,…
razib | June 25, 2009I was out and about doing errands when a friend called me to tell me that Michael Jackson had died. My first reaction was to utter an expletive. I wasn't sad, I didn't think this was a false report. I didn't know how to react. It's as if a friend calls you and tells you that the Rocky Mountains had disappeared. The very configuration of the pop culture firmament has shifted before our very eyes. Jackson's music career had long waned in the United States, for most of my lifetime he'd been more of a cultural than musical phenomenon. I didn't think of Michael Jackson very often, but I always…
razib | June 24, 2009I saw the newest Transformers movie today. In terms of the cast, there were really only two who I felt were necessary in any way to the development of the film. Optimus Prime and Megan Fox.*
Slate has a spoiler filled review which hits many of the aspects which I think are relevant. I don't watch many films in the theater, on average about 1 every 6 months. I've loaded up this spring since I saw the Star Trek reboot. I'm not a huge Trekkie, I've seen most of TOS & TNG episodes, but not so much of Voyager or DS9, and hardly any of Enterprise. I also didn't watch many of the films. But I'…
razib | June 24, 2009Mark Gimein defends Google Books over at The Big Money. New technology can be misused, but in general I tend to agree with Gimein. Along with Amazon's Search Inside feature Google Books is an excellent resource to look up and cross-reference obscure facts and data. With the utilization of Google Translate you can even get a good sense of some books in languages you don't know (I generally use this to make sure I understand the legend for a table or figure).
ejohnson | June 23, 2009
A recent NEA survey of the arts revealed a dismaying trend: a consistent decline in public participation across nearly every discipline studied, including music, theater, dance and the fine arts. And while ScienceBlogger Chad Orzel points out that the survey neglected to include rock or pop music, film, or other video art, he also speculates that weakening musical education programs might contribute to the decline in appreciation for "high art"--particularly, classical music. As Scicurious explains on Neurotopia, an ear for classical music might help some scientists listen for subtle…
razib | June 23, 2009Social Competition May Be Reason For Bigger Brain:
"Our findings suggest brain size increases the most in areas with larger populations and this almost certainly increased the intensity of social competition," said David Geary, Curator's Professor and Thomas Jefferson Professor of Psychosocial Sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science. "When humans had to compete for necessities and social status, which allowed better access to these necessities, bigger brains provided an advantage."
The researchers also found some credibility to the climate-change hypothesis, which assumes that global…
razib | June 21, 2009
Over the past week the political events in Iran have saturated the news. But the reality is that Pakistan still has an enormous refugee problem, right next door to Iran in fact. It's striking though that there is little news coverage of this at this moment, at the same time that the public and media's imagination has been captured by the shocking death of Neda Soltai, the young Iranian woman whose death was caught on video.
Below the fold are the number of tweets on #neda vs. #pakistan (currently the #pakistan hash-tag is concerned with a cricket win by their national team).
You can look a…
razib | June 21, 2009
A few weeks ago I commented on Richard Wrangham's discussion with Robert Wright. Though most of the conversation was given over to the arguments in Wrangham's latest book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, I focused on the older Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. One of the main reasons is that the latter was a book I had read. A few days ago I managed to get through Catching Fire. Though the content wasn't particularly surprising or novel, Wrangham has been articulating the general model for years, the details were of interest and at ~200 pages it was a quick…
razib | June 20, 2009Netherlands: Caught in World Wide Web:
Two men who robbed a 14-year-old of cash and a cellphone in September were arrested after the victim spotted them in a photo on Google Maps, the Dutch police said Friday. The victim contacted investigators in Groningen in March after he found a photograph in the mapping site's Street View function showing him and his assailants moments before the robbery. "As the faces were unrecognizable, police made contact with Google in the United States and received the original photograph by mail in June," a police statement said. "An investigator immediately…
razib | June 19, 2009
Regular readers know that hot sauce and chili peppers are important to me. Currently I've taken to using dried habaneros instead of hot sauces, powders or fresh peppers. The last taste the best, but they don't always keep, and sauces are a mess. As for powders, there's always the problem of inhalation. In any case, from The American Journal of Botany, Genetic diversity and structure in semiwild and domesticated chiles (Capsicum annuum; Solanaceae) from Mexico:
The chile of Mesoamerica, Capsicum annuum, is one of five domesticated chiles in the Americas. Among the chiles, it varies the most…
edyong | June 19, 2009Talking with someone comes so naturally that we forget sometimes how skilful it is. Rhythms of conversation and cues of grammar need to be judged so that people can take their turns at talking without cutting off their partner or without leaving pregnant pauses. The former is rude, the latter awkward.
That's certainly how things are usually conducted in English, but a new study suggests that this pattern of turn-taking applies across human cultures. By studying 10 languages from all over the world, Tanya Stivers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics discovered a universally…
ejohnson | June 18, 2009
As scientists often lament, science in the entertainment industry is often ignored or misportrayed outside the realm of science fiction. But two compelling new documentaries have ScienceBloggers hopeful that their messages will have the mass-market appeal of films such as An Inconvenient Truth or Fast Food Nation. The End of the Line, which Darren Naish calls "captivating, charismatic and beautifully filmed," investigates the alarming effects of overfishing and the exploitation of marine resources. Food Inc., co-produced by Fast Food Nation director Eric Schlosser, aims to expose the extent…
razib | June 16, 2009Must see Frontline documentary on the circumstances and aftermath of the Bank of American & Merrill Lynch merger.
razib | June 16, 2009Darwin Killed Off The Werewolf:
From the late 19th century onwards, stories of werewolf encounters tailed away significantly, says Regal. "The spread of the idea of evolution helped kill off the werewolf because a canid-human hybrid makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view," he says. "The ape-human hybrid, however, is not only evolutionarily acceptable, it is the basis of human evolution."
Today, in Darwin's bicentenary year, werewolves have been relegated to films. When it comes to the actual monster scene, it's Bigfoot that now dominates.
This is an interesting thesis. In light of…
razib | June 15, 2009With the Iranian election and the protests there are occasional references to ethnic groups in Iran. For example, Mousavi did not do as well in Azerbaijan as one would expect knowing that he is an ethnic Azeri Turk. The father of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamneini is also an Azeri Turk. So despite the fact that ethnic Persians, who speak Farsi, are the dominant group in Iran and to a large extent define its national identity, minorities have prominent roles. Iran is about 50% Persian and 25% Azeri Turk, with the balance being defined by a host of other groups such as Kurds.
But does this…
ejohnson | June 15, 2009
Earlier this year, 23 international experts in science, media, and policy gathered at a science communication workshop in Washington, D.C. to present a number of guidelines for more effective science communication in the face of changing public perceptions. An article describing the eight steps they outlined appeared last week in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology. ScienceBlogger Matthew Nisbet was among the workshop participants and is one of the paper's two primary authors. The first step in his plan? "Scientists and science organizations should pursue a trust- and dialogue-based…