Social Sciences
stcynic |
Sometimes I give away a Robert O'Brien Trophy to some mouth-breathing imbecile only to find, a few days later, an even more ridiculous example of human stupidity. And I'm afraid it's happened again. And frankly, I can't imagine finding anything any dumber than this column by Craig Smith at the Worldnutdaily. Who is Craig Smith? Well, his little bio at the end of the article announces him as "an author, commentator and popular media guest because he instantly engages audiences with his common-sense analyses of local, national and global trends." And then it says he wrote a book claiming that…
cortex |
If the polls are accurate, Senator Rick Santorum is about to lose his re-election bid. That's a good thing. Santorum is a bad cliche of the culture wars, a powerful politician who actually believes that the earth is 6,000 years old, that abortion is tantamount to murder and the Catholic church scandal began in Massachusetts because Boston is a "liberal bastion". In recent months, he's also gotten rather deranged on the topic of foreign policy, arguing that what we need is more pre-ememptive action against Iran, because our aggressive war in Iraq worked out so well.
And yet, when Rick Santorum…
Courtesy of Mixing Memory comes the announcement of a conference at AlphaPsy on methodology and the social sciences, which raises an interesting thought. Is the use of scientific methodology and the naturalising of the social sciences a threat to those disciplines?
This is an old debate, though. It has been claimed for yonks that the human sciences have their own special methodology, usually called "hermeneutics", in which knowledge of the meaning of human institutions and mindsets is irreducible to physical, psychological and biological causes that might be investigated using the standard…
stcynic |
Jim Chen, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, has a powerful essay comparing prohibitions on interracial marriage to prohibitions on gay marriage. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold:
Among life's challenges, none is more difficult to undertake, and none is more rewarding when achieved, than the mission of finding one person to love above all others, and persuading that person to love you in return. The law has no legitimate basis for regulating this quest on the basis of the race or sex of one's beloved.
The most obvious analogy supporting legal recognition is Loving v.…
stcynic |
One of the law professors on the ReligionLaw listserv posted a link to a journal article on SSRN by George Dent of Case Western Reserve University. The article, entitled Civil Rights for Whom? Gay Rights Versus Religious Freedom, reminded me of Dorothy Parker's famous one line book review - "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force." It is, quite simply, one of the worst attempts at legal scholarship I have ever come across, beginning with the very first paragraph:
Disapproval of homosexuality is widespread, deep-rooted and of long standing.…
There's a fair bit of to-and-fro going on with the Sciblings about Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion, which, being at the edge of empire, I haven't yet seen. When I do, I will read it and comment, of course.
But I want to ask a general question - is religion in itself a malign influence on society? For example, any number of Islamic Imams, including the leader of Australia's Muslim community, think that women who don't dress "modestly" (which can mean anything from wearing a long sleeved top to the burka) are to blame for being raped.
And attacks on the moral influence of…
revere |
As the October 31 date for the resumption of the trial of the Tripoli 6 looms, the world scientific community is weighing in. From the ScienceNow section of the journal Science:
U.S. scientists are adding their voices to mounting international pressure on Libya to release six foreign medical workers who could face execution within weeks. A letter published online today by Science--written by virologist Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-discoverer of HIV, and signed by 43 other scientists--accuses the Libyan government of using the medics…
ddobbs |
Stroke damage in a human brain
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Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of Milan discovery that blocking a certain cell-wall gate in the hour after stroke (in a lab rat) could prevent almost all damage.
Check it out at Scientific American.
Back in early August, I wrote about the Karpova-Tonegawa controversy at MIT, and about Rollins College president Lewis Duncan's comments on the topic in the Boston Globe.
More on the Karpova-Toadygawa story. This may be the best part of all. Because you see, Zuskateers, it isn't just Toadygawa who's had his true colors exposed. Consider this quote from the Boston Globe:
If the accusations are deemed true, [MIT president] Hockfield will face the task of standing up to one of MIT's greatest luminaries, someone who brings in tens of millions of dollars of research funding. "This may…
cortex |
George Eliot famously declared that "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, then it does nothing." Eliot would be glad to know that she was right: reading novels really does make us nicer. As the British Psychological Society Digest notes:
The more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite association. That's according to Raymond Mar and colleagues who say their finding could have implications for educating children and adults about…
New Scientist is reporting on a movement among some scientists to replace the word "cloning" with "somatic cell nuclear transfer":
Don't say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of "therapeutic cloning" to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being.
But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000…
stcynic |
James Wolcott has another post on Dinesh D'Souza's appalling argument that we should become more like the Taliban in order to make them hate us less. He includes a few quotes from the book that are so stupid they leave your mouth agape as you read them. For instance:
"The left doesn't blame America for undermining the shah of Iran, getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos, or imposing sanctions against South Africa."
As Wolcott rightly points out, it was the left that argued for imposing sanctions against South Africa and the right that fought against them. Our beloved VP, Dick Cheney, not only voted…
razib |
Hsien-Hsien Lei points me to another story about black and white twins. First, the "black" twin is clearly mixed race, her skin color is between the modal complexion of Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans on the von Luschan scale. The "white" twin on the other hand does seem to exhibit the color of someone of European descent. What's going on here? This is somewhat different than the other case of black and white twins, in that case both parents were mixed-race, in this case the father is white (German) and the mother is mixed-race (Jamaican & English). The two cases are different even…
razib |
The comments below about Muslims in Europe have continued to come in, so I figured I would put a new post up and allow further comments here on the front page. On my other blog I have another post on the veil. Two points:
1) It seems like "New Labor" has decided to drop the PC-veil, so to speak, and take a hard line on Islamic separatism. This is somewhat rich since the government itself in the 90s helped give succor to "community groups" like the Muslim Council of Britain which were retarding the process of assimilation (in fact, they had an interest to perpetuate separation since it…
It's the time of year when the mailbox starts filling up with catalogues. At the Free-Ride house, many of these are catalogues featuring "educational" toys and games. Now, some of these toys and games are actually pretty cool. Others, to my mind, are worse than mere wastes of money.
For your consideration, three "science" kits targeted at girls:
Archimedes got scientific insight from a bathtub, but he wasn't required to wear eye-makeup to do it.
Spa Science
The kit offers itself as a way "to cultivate a girl's interest in science" through the making of "beauty products like an oatmeal…
tfk |
Or rather, why can't they just be honest about what they don't like?
This is the summary of a new ad running against the Missouri stem cell research amendment:
The ad features a woman talking about her daughter, who needed money for college. She “sold her eggs to a fertility clinic,” the woman says. “The surgery was painful. They give you powerful hormones to produce more eggs. And now, she may never have children.” The ad ends with the warning that Amendment 2 will increase the need for human eggs for research.
As the KC Star's Election Central (linked above) notes,
the ad never claims that…
Human X (left) and Y (right) chromosomes
Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it's gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can't believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week's worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.
What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,
William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly…
I, like, really want to be one of the cool kids here on Science Blogs so I am reading The God Delusion by that Oxford don Dawkins. I ventured into what passes as campus town here in Einsteinville, and bought the last copy on the shelf at a proudly independent and somewhat self-congratulatory bookstore. After reading Dawkins' thesis that religion should not be accorded special respect, I remembered my stash of old National Lampoons (circa 1972-1977ish) mouldering away in the basement. Those NatLamPoo boys respected nothing, and I vaguely recalled that they certainly did not spare religion…
There's a really really dumb article getting a lot of attention in the media about the future of human evolution. Razib has a deprecating post about it, but I thought I'd add my two Australian cents (=0.006 US cents) worth.
Let's look at the major claim: that humans will subspeciate. I can't think of anything less likely among a species that has major gene flow between all its populations on a scale of thousands of generations. Species aren't formed by selection for differing adaptive traits within a population, but by the interruption of the gene flow that is caused by migration or invasion…
drorzel |
For some reason, I was forwarded a link to an old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how to give a scholarly lecture. (It's a time-limited email link, so look quickly.)
As with roughly 90% of all Chronicle pieces, it's aimed squarely at the humanities types. The advice given thus ranges from pretty good advice even for science types ("Remember that people who show up to hear you want to believe that you're smart, interesting, and a good speaker"; "Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Then stop"; and "Prepare yourself in advance for questions.") to horror-show glimpses of how the…