razib | February 23, 2006I've been blogging a lot about "religion" recently, but I haven't reallly spelled out what I mean by religion. The answer is many things. Religion, or religious belief and practice, are a suite of behaviors and concepts which explore a multi-dimensional space. This space is inhabited by a wide range of combinations of traits, some more common than others. One of the problems addressing this topic is that everyone has a different perception of the subject, a perception shaped by their own cognitive and social biases.
Here are a few of the axes which I believe religion explores:
1) The…
razib | February 22, 2006The "standard model" of intellectual history presents the Presocratics as the pioneers of naturalistic explanations of the universe around us. This narrative explains how the messy natural philosophy of the Presocratics gave way to the more metaphysical and ethical schools of the late Classical and Hellenistic and Roman eras. In any case, Socialist Swine asks below:
I know that prior to Darwin people had some notion of evolution though they didn't have a notion of the mechanism involved. Do you have any idea, who might have first suggested that species change over time?
Well, 10 minutes…
razib | February 22, 2006A few science bloggers have referred to Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and the controversy that is erupting around it. I haven't read the book, but this piece in The Boston Globe gives a very quick sketch of the ideas Dennett covers. It seems that Dennett wants to examine religion as just another natural phenomenon, a suite of behaviors and cognitive states characteristic of our species. In short, Dennett seems to be covering three primary modern hypotheses in regards to why religion seems a ubquitous aspect of our cross-cultural phenotypes…
razib | February 22, 2006I have a review of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors coming out in the May/June issue of Science & Spirit magazine. Wade's book covered the intersection of genetics and human evolution, so it was a quick and interesting read.
razib | February 21, 2006Below the fold are the results from a politics quiz I took. Nothing surprising, but just a testament that Seed is politically latitudinarian....
You are a Social Liberal (71% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (68% permissive) You are best described as a:Libertarian
Link: The Politics Test on Ok CupidAlso: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test
razib | February 21, 2006Biology is sloppy. I always say "all parameters held equal" or "all variables controlled" because there are so many factors to consider. I am now reading a classic, The Genetics of Human Poulations, by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and W. F. Bodmer, and here is an interesting bit from the chapter on population structure: consanguineous rates of marriage were extremely low throughout much of Europe up until the 19th century, at which point their frequency rose sharply, before dropping again during the 20th century. What was happening here? The authors note that the 19th century abolition of…
razib | February 21, 2006A few days ago Janet posted on the importance of critical faculties in science in response to a series of posts by PZ and John on how we get the public to understand science (mostly evolution in this case). Critical thinking is obviously important in science, as is experimentation, model building, reproducibility, etc. etc. If you are a fan of Karl Popper or Thoms Kuhn (or other less luminous figures like Imre Lakatos) you have an idea about how science should or does work.
All these thinkers capture essential components of Science, but I think one important point which is often forgotten…
razib | February 21, 2006A story in The Economist, titled the fertility bust (in the "Charlemagne" column), offers this interesting tidbit:
Germany is something of an oddity in this. In most countries with low fertility, young women have their first child late, and stop at one. In Germany, women with children often have two or three. But many have none at all.
In other words, the mean for Germany is low, but reproductive variance (or skew) is high. With a large proportion of the population not reproducing, and another proportion reproducing above replacement, this is basically very close to truncation selection if…
razib | February 21, 2006I've increased the security of comments (required email, etc.). This might cause issues, more here.
razib | February 20, 2006Chad is not happy with my previous post where I consider that we shouldn't expect that everyone should be able to pass algebra conditional upon a deep understanding of the subject. First, let me state that my post was in part operating outside what I will call the "Cohen narrative." Rather, I wanted to interject the opinion that variation is a contingent fact of human history (otherwise, we wouldn't have been shaped by natural selection). I was attempting to offer that the alternatives are not black and white in that everyone should learn algebra or that everyone need not learn algebra.…
razib | February 19, 2006Update: Link fixed.
I have a long post on my other website commenting on Amartya Sen's new piece in The New Republic, Chili and Liberty. First paragraph below:
Amartya Sen has an interesting piece in The New Republic titled Chili and liberty: the uses and abuses of multiculturalism. Sen's piece addresses the paradox in the interpretation of "multiculturalism" in some quarters where it implies separation of distinct cultures into a "plural monoculturalism." That is, a nation where separate ethnic and religious groups live apart within the same polity. A pre-modern form of this system would…
razib | February 19, 2006OK, a question. Imagine that you are the only adult left in the world and everyone else is under the age of 6. Assume helper robots obviate the need to micromanage the lives of the children, toddlers and infants in your care. You can choose one book from each of the disciplines of humanity to educate these children. Ignoring your own field of specialization, which book would you choose for "science"? You have 30 seconds!
My answer: I initially considered The Principia by Isaac Newton, but upon 15 seconds of reflection concluded that that might be too high of a level and the tome might…
razib | February 19, 2006Tim posts on the recent PLOS paper Gene Losses during Human Origins published by the Wang et al. If that gets you all excited, check out The Origin of Subfunctions and Modular Gene Regulation and Preservation of Duplicate Genes by Complementary, Degenerative Mutations. I might lionize the contributions of R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright and J.B.S. Haldane to evolutionary biology, but as I posted before, tools need tasks, and the mass of data being unveiled by genomics is uncovering many surprises. Science isn't about a priori inference, it is about venturing into the wilds, and by the grace of…
razib | February 19, 2006Orac is having technical issues with SB, and on some blogs comments post very slowly. I just wanted to post a notice because the problems are spotty and some of us aren't having issues.
razib | February 18, 2006Janet Stemwedel has a long post which elucidates various angles of the Cohen & algebra story. I agree with many of Janet's points, and I tend to believe that knowing algebra is an important necessary precondition for being a well rounded modern intellect. But I want to emphasize modern, I've mentioned before that John Derbyshire is writing a history of algebra, Unknown Quantity. Derb mentioned to me that though the Greek mathematician Diophantus lurched toward symbolic algebra 2,000 years ago, his work did not lay the seeds for any further developments because a scientific culture did…
razib | February 18, 2006A friend of mine told me that they thought my comment on Richard Cohen's infamous algebra column was pretty lame and lightweight. I had to plead that time was at a premium when I threw that up there, and a lot of the ground had been covered. But, as someone who writes posts titled 8th grade math for the rest us, I figure I should add a bit more, and that bit is this: knowledge of algebra is sufficient to balance the "two sides" to every issue phenomenon. Algebra allows one to swim out of the sea of noise and impute a sense of proportionationality to various alternative defensible…
razib | February 17, 2006A few days ago I saw that Dienekes commented on a recent paper published in The American Journal of Human Genetics where the authors used 10 markers, specifically single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), to discern continental level population differentiation. Dienekes has generated a map which shows the extent of clustering. The authors selected specific SNPs that they assumed would be extremely informative, and so obviated the need to extend their sample of assayed loci into hundreds. They express their results with some caution, and highlight that the inferences need to be judged in…
razib | February 16, 2006Richard Cohen's column dismissing the importance of algebra is so plainly stupid that it beggars the imagination. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that mathematics is important in "practical" contexts because it is a collection of unified techniques which happen to have wide ranging utility in the world around us. But Cohen's point that kids should take more history and English is actually a good one, technique must be married to material, tools without tasks are as worthless as tasks without tools. In other words, more scientists need to be aware of the humanities and more…
razib | February 16, 2006With all the hoopla over Darwin Day (justified in my opinion) I thought I'd point you to this article, Gregor Mendel: The father of genetics. The contemporaneous insights of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel illustrate the beauty of science, nature's gift to us in its underlying unity of form. Darwin looked at the big picture and saw the compelling connection between biological variation across space and time and natural selection. Mendel's experiments elucidated the most atomic and elementary reactions which buttressed the grand arcs of natural history and the flow of selection. Though…