Social Sciences
sb admin | December 15, 2006Earlier this week, the Bush Administration released its semi-annual regulatory plan (71 Federal Register 72725, Dec 11, 2006). The 473-page document describes the Presidentâs regulatory priorities, with the âaim of implementing an effective and results-oriented regulatory system.â The document, prepared by the Office of Management and Budgetâs (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), provides plenty of fodder for the blogosphere, but Iâll focus here on just one absurd statement in the Department of Laborâs section (beginning on page 72828) describing its 19 high-priority…
jrosenhouse | December 15, 2006Writing for The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby offers a typically muddled argument against atheism. The column's title: “Atheism's Bleak Alternative”. Most of the column describes various atrocities perpetrated by secularists against religious people, particularly in England. But it's the last three paragraphs that really merit a response:
What is at stake in all this isn't just angels on Christmas cards. What society loses when it discards Judeo-Christian faith and belief in God is something far more difficult to replace: the value system most likely to promote ethical behavior and sustain a…
razib | December 14, 2006Bryan Caplan reviews a survey which suggests that women are more religious cross-culturally than men. If you've been involved in the Freethought movement this won't surprise you. Here's an important point:
Once people admit that this gender gap exists, the most popular explanation is that women are "socialized" to be more religious. Stark and Miller put this theory to the test. If the socialization hypothesis is true, they reason, then the gender gap should be larger in more traditional societies where socialization pressure is more intense. Make sense to me.
Survey says: Dead wrong.…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2006Chris at Mixing Memory has a couple of interesting posts on religious cognition. They inspired me to present my own hypothesis about the origins of religion, and in particular individual gods...
My own view, which is mine (*ahem*), is pretty simple. While there are benefits to religion in terms of social altruism, cooperation, and the like, these accounts of religion fail to explain why there is a Mars, or Thor, or Zeus, of Shiva. In short, they explain the domain, but not the details.
My own view of religion is that it is a side effect of social dominance behaviour in a particular ape (i.e…
mixingmemory | December 13, 2006Here are two pretty lengthy passages from two Ortega y Gasset essays, both published in History as a System (one of my favorite books), and translated by Helene Weyl. I'm posting them because I think they're relevant to our recent discussion on religion and science. Specifically, I think they're relevant to the attitude towards science that some atheists take. The essays were written in the 1930s (most of them during the Spanish Civil War), but as is often the case with Ortega y Gasset, they're infused with a prescience that insures that they're still relevant today, and will continue to be…
bushwells | December 13, 2006Ever the provocateur, Christopher Hitchens tells us Why Women Aren't Funny in the January 2007 Vanity Fair.
Mr. Hitchens believes that humor in men serves as an attractant to women, sort of a laff riot version of the male peacock's tail:
Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An…
drorzel | December 12, 2006A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration:
Dave Winer's got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: "Where is the Bronx Science for adults?" He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school "was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my own age." It's harder to find this in adulthood, he observes, even as a fellow at the Berkman Center, where Dave and I met four years ago.
I empathize with Dave - the experience of being surrounded by smart people working on the same kinds of problems is one of the most…
pharyngula | December 10, 2006They never rest, and you know the creationists are constantly probing, trying to find the next likely inroad into the schools. Sahotra Sarkar offers some concerns about what's coming next in creationism—these seem like quite probable strategies to me.
As the physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger noted in the Skeptical Briefs newsletter last September, The Privileged Planet represents a new wedge in the creationists' arsenal. Equally importantly, the Smithsonian episode shows how this new physics-based version of creationism is being propagated with unusual stealth. Biologists may now feel…
hrynyshyn | December 9, 2006One of the best things about the Science Blogs collective is that so little of what gets posted concerns the mundane and prosaic details of the authors' lives. We write substantial, serious stuff, posts that deal with public figures and weighty issues. No what-I-had-for-breakfast claptrap for us, no siree.
So I didn't think twice when my wife and I set up a separate blog to detail, for the benefit of our friends and family, her pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our first child. Neither did I give any thought to the ethical implications of another incarnation of that blog, one dedicated to…
integrityofscience | December 8, 2006The "Green Room," a BBC News environmental opinion series, threw the gauntlet down to skeptics last week. In his column "Skeptics: Cards on the table please!" Richard Black issued a challenge to skeptics claiming that science is biased in favor of research confirming man-made climate change:
If you have evidence of research grants turned down because of a clash with the prevailing consensus, of instances where journals or conference organisers or consensus bodies have rejected "inconvenient" findings, please send it to us; my email address is at the bottom of this article.
With the…
dmunger | December 8, 2006Tomorrow I'll be running my first-ever (and possibly my last) half-marathon. I've been an amateur runner since high school, but the longest race I'd run in previously was a 10K race, less than half this distance, nearly 20 years ago. I haven't run competitively since college, but I have consistently run around three miles a day for nearly that entire span. It was just this summer that I decided to go for the half-marathon, and I've upped my training regimen to include runs as long as 12 miles. But tomorrow's 13.1 mile race will be the longest I've ever run. What can I look forward to?
How…
thescian | December 7, 2006Go read this at 3 Quarks Daily and come back because I have more.
The hand wringing by religious apologists has gotten desperate in the past weeks. Militant atheism is the name given and it is frowned upon. The fundamental reason boils down to what Dawkins has repeatedly pointed out. Religion has a special place in the society. While we will question and rigorously debate an economic or a political point we will not do the same for religious theologies. That, dear reader, is intellectually dishonest, to put mildly.
The real question you must ponder about if you are the intellectually honest…
cortex | December 6, 2006After the rapture, when the aliens start to colonize our desolate planet, they will be endlessly fascinated by documents like this. Yes, I'm talking about the world's longest diary, composed by Robert Shields of Dayton, Washington, which clocks in at a Talmudic 35 million words. The entries are so banal, they are almost interesting. Almost.
3:30-3:45 I was at the keyboard of the IBM Wheelwriter making entries for the diary.
6:50-7:30 I ate the Stouffer's macaroni and cheese.
7:30-7:35 We changed the light over the back stoop since the bulb had burnt out.
And if these aliens wanted to know…
razib | December 6, 2006A few years ago the developmental geneticist Armand Leroi burst on to the scene with the engaging book, Mutants, and a controversial op-ed where he attempted to rehabilitate the concept of race. Leroi's op-ed spawned a rebuttal website which brought together a variety of scholars from disparate disciplines to refute his arguments.
Never one to shy away from controversy Armand has published a new essay, The future of neo-eugenics, where he lays out what is happening, and will possibly happen, from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. The great thing about Armand's work is that he…
evolvingthoughts | December 5, 2006
A recent report on the songs of the eponymous "great tit", a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops of milk bottles in the 1950s, shows that they independently acquire a deeper song when in urban environments than when in forest environments. As the writer at ScienceNOW tells it, in forests they sound like Barry White, and in cities like Michael Jackson.
Passerine songs are usually adapted to the acoustics of their usual environment. Birds in denser vegetation will, I am told, end their songs on a rising sharp note, because there is more absorption of sound than in…
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006I posted these long ago on the old blog, but I was reading Studies in Pessimism, and when I came across them, I decided to post them again. The parables are all from the last chapter of the book. At the end is one of his "Psychological Observations," which is from the fifth chapter.
A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered…
revere | December 5, 2006After all this time and no small amount of heated argument, we are still unsure how H5N1 is making its way around the world in birds. The commercial movements the poultry trade, smuggling of exotic birds or poultry by-products and the migrations of wild birds over long distances have all been blamed. Bird conservationists are fearful that pinning the virus's travel on migrating wild birds will result in destruction of their habitats and crucial stops on their flyways, while the public health community has tended to be more concerned, as has the commercial poultry industry.
The bird folks have…
clock | December 1, 2006An oldie but goodie for the connoisseurs of my long political rants (May 11, 2005):
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I am not an economist. Actually, I have no background in economics at all, if one ignores "Capitalism for Beginners" and "Marx for Beginners".
Like all Yugoslavs of my generation, I suffered through a couple of years of "Marxism" classes back in high school and college - classes that both teachers and students hated and did the absolute minimum. My high-school teacher gave us not-so-subtle hints about what she thought about it. When it was time for Marxism class,…
thusspakezuska | November 29, 2006Penny Richards wrote via email to tell me that Saturday, November 25 was Kate Gleason's birthday.
Gleason (1865-1933) was the first woman admitted to full membership in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in the 1910s (she represented ASME at an international conference in Germany in 1930). She was also the daughter of Irish immigrants, a bank president, an executive at her family's gear-planing company, and a lifelong suffragist. At Rochester Institute of Technology, the Kate Gleason College of Engineering is named in her honor, and displays a bust of Gleason at its entrance.…
scientificactivist | November 29, 2006In this week's edition of PNAS, crop scientists at Texas A&M University report the engineering of cotton strains with edible seeds. Now, when I think of cotton, I generally think of clothes, especially the kind that really seem to like getting wrinkled in the drier. Not counting the unrelated--but still delicious--exception of cotton candy, food generally doesn't come to mind. However, the new PNAS paper from the lab of Keerti Rathore may mean that it's time to think outside of the (clothes) box when it comes to cotton, especially in addressing world hunger.
According to the paper, for…