Social evolution

The antigay marriage measures in Arizona and Florida passed, and it looks like the Californian one will also pass. I cannot see how anyone can justify refusing a large minority the rights afforded the majority. There's a name for that. I reiterate my modest proposal.
In my recent talk on secularism, I declared that there will always be religion, and a secularist ought to get used to that fact. Secularists have assumed that a secular society will cause religion to wither away and die, but this seems to me a foolish thing to believe. Every society known has had a religion or six, and although, as PZ recently noted, some religion is on the decline and more people are declaring themselves to be non-religious (which is not the same has having no religious beliefs, by the way), this doesn't license the easy induction that religion is on the way out. These…
... those weeds won't ever go away. The inimitable Siris notes the problem with the myth that the US Electoral College is a restraint upon democracy (when it makes presidential elections possible where previously they weren't, so how can it be a restraint?). The article in the New Yorker he links to also notes that it was an Australian, no even a Victorian (my home state's) innovation to have the state produce the electoral ballots. Yay us! Siris also notes what I should have realised: that before Descartes, philosophers thought animals had the rudiments of cognition. Given the Great…
As I recall it, Australian history was deadly dull. Most of it could have been taught in a single half-year, with time to cover the second world war to spare. That's what happens when a very few individuals live on a continent for (at that time) less than two centuries, most of which is tied up with much larger colonial and imperial matters. But nascent cultures and countries have to establish themselves, and the prevailing nationalisms of the past 50 years in Australia have meant that school students were force fed this material over and over. I always wanted to know about Europe and…
I get so tired of comments like this: The Grim Reaper is taking a rest, and inherited differences in the ability to withstand cold, starvation or disease no longer power Darwin's machine. Those who die from such killers do so when they are so old that natural selection has lost interest. Right. Tell the folk in Darfur that. Tell those in Bangladesh after a cyclone. Tell folks in New Orleans, or Indonesia, or native populations in Nunavit, Australia, New Zealand, the Amazon, South Africa and Tierra del Fuego. Tell those whose access to health care is patchy at best. Even in the UK that is…
Readers know I think religion is post-agricultural, which raises some difficulties if we find evidence of organised religious behaviours before the onset of agriculture. The case in point here being Göbeli Tepe. Now a recent model of the process of cereal domestication has set back the beginnings of agriculture some ten thousand years earlier than the c10kya version, the "rapid onset" model, in favour of a "protracted transition" model. Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog has a very nice roundup of the issues, and there is a summary at Science Daily. The crucial question resolved by this…
It all began with Larry Arnhart giving a "Darwinian" account of the case for financial bailouts. Then David Sloan Wilson rejected the argument from the Invisible Hand. Then Massimo Pigliucci entered the fray. What's at issue? There are two basic extremes in economics: laissez faire and command economies. The former suppose, with the overextrapolation of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, that a truly unbiased and free market will generate goods better than any other economic system. The latter is socialism, and supposes that a central planner, usually the State, will control economies reducing…
Some threat display has publicly occurred between two primates vying for the alpha male position of a large troop of feral, introduced, great apes in north America. It is examined here. Apparently one of the contenders failed to make eye contact, which is a dead giveaway of probable loss to the other male, or perhaps an inability to avoid giving the Primate Threat Stare without the ability to follow it up by exposing his canines. Clearly that monkey is less confident than the other one (yes, folks, all great apes are monkeys, or Old World Monkeys at any rate). When the fur and teeth are…
Science blogging is a relatively new phenomenon, the impact of which is slowly becoming clear. Gone are the days when an albino silverback philosopher was a top ranking science blogger (I am quite happy to be a philosophy of science blogger, and not take credit for anything I didn't earn). I recently had a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on the topic, which was more an analysis of how they functions for those used to the older publishing trajectories. Now Sciblings Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara Smith have an advocacy paper in PLoS Biology, in which they seek to legitimate…
I'm supposed to be marking essays, but the reaction to Thony's recent guest articles has triggered in me a conditioned reflex: the uses and abuses of history by scientists. Historians have a certain way to pursue their profession - it involves massive use of documentary evidence, a care taken to avoid naming heroes and villains, and in general a strong devotion to the minutae and detail of history, instead of the now-old-fashioned grand sweeps of a Toynbee or Marx. Sure, they disagree how to interpret things, including mindsets of agents in another time, but overall when a historian gives…
For my sins, I was once a public relations guy, for an educational institution, and I held positions roughly in that domain (e.g., as public communications manager for a medical research institute, although I managed the means not the message) for the bulk of my professional life until I finally took up a position as an academic philosopher four years ago. It was not my vocation, I hasten to add, but the way I supported my book habit and fondness for eating and feeding my family. I have been asked to address a science communication class on the failure of science to communicate to the…
Certain nations who shall remain nameless have been doing a fair bit of skiting about how well they've done. So I thought I'd do a bit of number crunching. Of course it isn't completed (or is it?) but using the Wikipedia population figures and the official medal tally, I plotted gold medals per million population and medals overall per million population... Look below the fold for the surprising results Blue is Gold medals per million of population. Green is medals overall per million of population. Download PDF version The US was 32th, China was 47th. The outstanding Olympic nation is…
In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment: Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to sell you, but because I can learn from the past and make inferences, and so can you. Jim Goetz, who I find to be a balanced and sensible sort of Christian, asked in the comments for some backing to this apparently outrageous claim. It's a fair cop, so here is my argument... As someone who does not believe in moral absolutes, and yet wants to ground moral claims in the real…
One of my claims is that religion proper arose along with the settlement in sedentary townships made possible by agriculture. The reason why this is religion, and not, say, the shamanic "religions" of nomadic tribes, in my view, is that in the latter, people are all related closely enough to be sure to whom to offer assistance in hard times with the expectation of mutual support later. The crucial role of religion proper, I think, is to mark out those who one can expect aid from, because they have demonstrated the "costly signaling" religion requires (a view of Richard Sosis and colleagues…
It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another explanation for religion, based on the correlation between tropics and diseases, and the variety of religions in the tropics. Their argument, it appears, is to note that controlling for other factors you get higher numbers of religions in more tropical regions. Promoting within-group solidarity therefore is a way to prevent the spread of diseases, to prevent contagion. As…
Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of the advantage of cooperation in the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to, and their differences from, human society are alike instructive. [T . H. Huxley, Prolegomena to Evolution and Ethics, IX.] Just because John Lynch mentioned that work...
For a while now, and in particular since I read Robert Bannister's Social Darwinism and then actually read Herbert Spencer's own work, I have been unable to reconcile the mythology about social Darwinism with the actual writings of Spencer himself. Supposedly the founder of the justification for robber baron capitalism, Spencer actually proposes feminism, liberal protection of the poor and weak, and other ideas that are more redolent of Mill than Malthus (who is also the subject of similar demonisation, as Flew showed). Now someone has affirmed my unease: Damon Root, writing in Reason…
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society? These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing of a communion wafer from a Catholic church. As a result, he got death threats, attempts to have him fired from his university position, and general abuse while the correspondents were simultaneously affirming the niceness of Catholics [see here, here and here for example]. Meanwhile, the Catholic Cardinal of Sydney, George Pell, appears not to have learned…
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with Discover magazine. Carl points out John van Whye's paper that showed that Darwin didn't "sit on the theory for 20 years" but rather followed a preplanned sequence for backing up his ideas. However, when Charles planned this research, he greatly underestimated the time it would take him (the Cirripedia…
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason. There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution - Problems with Science for more. Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn't make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at…