Social Sciences
purepedantry | September 5, 2006Rebecca Saxe of MIT reviews Encounters with Wild Children by Adriana Benzaquen about historical confrontations with so-called wild children -- children raised outside of society without supervision or what the author calls the forbidden experiment. The occurence of wild children has always been a bugaboo of developmental psychologists and philosophers who ask: what is the human nature in its uncorrupted (or unredeemed depending on point of view) state?
However, the review and the book both suggest that historically and most likely categorically, the wild children form an inadequate…
stoat | September 4, 2006John Fleck found a great paper by Karl T. Ulrich on the ultimate energy costs of using bicycles versus cars. The bottom-line argument is that cycling saves energy, but because you live longer your lifetime emissions will be greater. Such fun. However: Those who adopt the bicycle as a means of transportation could potentially develop an increased awareness of the environmental impact of their actions and may over their lifetimes reduce energy consumption substantially in their other, non-transportation activities.
Some tit-bits:
Despite the inefficiencies in the energy conversion processes to…
tfk | September 3, 2006While responding to the foolishness of IDolators has become increasingly dull business, there are occasional opportunities in it. The problem is that they offer nothing essentially new, which is why it isn't science. The advantage is that they give us insights into how they view the world, and by doing so, teach us what the misunderstand, and what other people might not understand either.
This is all by way of introduction to a comment at Billy Dembski's blog in which "BarryA" attempts to explain theology to Jesuit theology professor Father Edward Oakes. Oakes makes some quite sensible…
oracknows | September 3, 2006John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has posted an excellent brief summary of the history of the eugenics movement. In the process, he makes a strong argument that it was genetics far more than evolution that influenced eugenecists and that the entire eugenics movement was based on the concept that evolution was being thwarted by human society and thus needed "help" (a process that is far more like "intelligent design" than natural evolution). Moreover, he gives examples of scientists who pointed out that, for example, weeding out eugenics through selective sterilization was totally…
oracknows | September 2, 2006While I was catching up on some of the stuff that's happened while I was away, I noticed PZ Myer's article about animal rights terrorists who intimidated a neurobiologist at UCLA named Dario Ringach to the point where he decided to stop doing research on primates. Then I saw that Jake and Bora also weighed in on the issue (although for the life of me I can't figure out how on earth Bora came to the conclusion that animal rights is a conservative philosophy at its core--his explanation is tortured, at best). Here's what happened, as reported in Inside Higher Ed:
Ringach's name and home phone…
clock | September 1, 2006There has been a lot of commentary online about the Inside Higher Ed article about an UCLA primate researcher who quit his research due to being terrorised by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and the follow up article about the steps UCLA and other Universities are taking to ensure the safety of their faculty and staff:
The announcement by Abrams follows an upswing in activities in which UCLA professors who work with animals have been targets. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, a researcher who does…
razib | September 1, 2006Inbreeding is bad. At least that is the take home message of my various posts. But biology doesn't have one final answer, it is a serious of approximations which capture part of a given system. My posts on racial hybridization point to this issue. Today in the West we live in an anti-racist age, so the intuitive benefits of hybridization known from agriculture are often tacitly promoted in the discourse, but the reality is more complex. 100 years ago eugenicists set out to prove the inverse because the norms of society demanded it (e.g., Charles Davenport's studies of Jaimaican Mullatoes…
loom | August 31, 2006Before I moved the Loom to this address earlier this year, I got a fair amount of comments on my blogs about evolution from creationists. (See this entry, for example.) They fell off after the move, but now they're back in fine form. Today we are joined by Kevin Anderson, editor-in-chief of the Creation Research Society Quarterly.
Here's a little background: last week I wrote here about stumbling across a radio show put out by the Institute of Creation Research. It claimed that recent research on the human genome supports Young Earth creationism. Dr. Anderson spoke on the program about how…
oracknows | August 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
pharyngula | August 30, 2006Hunters should be allies of conservationists—in the best situations, hunting and wildlife groups have been great advocates of preserving habitat, which is the core issue, I think, in protecting biodiversity. If they're doing it so they can go in and blow away a few big meaty game animals, well, OK…setting aside that acreage also means a richer array of songbirds and arthropods and plants and fish and lizards and amphibians, which normally aren't shot up, have a better chance of survival.
Sometimes, though, short-sightedness and denial and a refusal to deal with a minor inconvenience undercut…
worldsfair | August 30, 2006In AIDS Crisis, Listen to UN's Lewis:CBS News.com / American Prospect, by Ezra Klein
It's become fashionable amongst a certain genus of blustering right-winger to deride the United Nations as sclerotic, weak-willed, mealy-mouthed, and lacking sufficient moral outrage and courage in confronting the injustices and atrocities of the world. So it's perhaps understandable that while watching Stephen Lewis deliver his blistering indictment of the G-8's indefensibly lackluster response to the AIDS epidemic, I seemed nearly incapable of concentrating on his exquisite speech, finding my thoughts…
revere | August 29, 2006It's hard for a lot of us to understand how the rich get richer by giving money away, but here's one way.
Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his relatives have claimed millions of dollars in tax deductions through a type of charitable foundation they created that until recently paid out very little in actual charity, tax records show.
Instead, much of the foundation's money has been invested or lent to the family's business interests and real estate holdings, or contributed to the Leavitt family genealogical society.
The Leavitts used nearly $9 million of their assets to set…
razib | August 28, 2006Last week I pointed you to 10 questions for Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and hinted that there is another 10 Qs for another student of R.A. Fisher. Well, that time has come, today David B. posted his 10 questions for A.W.F. Edwards. I want to follow up last week's theme in regards to population substructure, because A.W.F. Edwards has been the most prominent recent expositer of why phylogeny, clustering of populations, is still possible though we are a genetically young and homogenous species. We asked A.W.F. Edwards on his motivations for writing Lewontin's Fallacy, and I think you'll find…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2006I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is what the unDiscovery Institute wants to implant.
So, what's the real story?
There are several ways in which evolution might have made it possible for the sort of racial eugenics that rationalised (not motivated - the German tradition of anti-Semitism goes back as far as Luther, and to the middle…
pharyngula | August 27, 2006A neurobiologist at UCLA, Dario Ringach, has stopped doing research on primates. The reason?
Colleagues suggested that Ringach, who did not return e-mails seeking comment, was spooked by an attack on a colleague. In June, the Animal Liberation Front took credit for trying to put a Molotov cocktail on the doorstep of Lynn Fairbanks, another UCLA researcher who does experimentation on animals. The explosive was accidentally placed on the doorstep of Fairbanks's elderly neighbor's house, and did not detonate.
Whoa. Incompetence and thuggish violence—what a combination. I love animals and think…
razib | August 26, 2006Like sex, altruism is a great mystery in the life sciences, especially in the case of humans (because of is generous expression). Neither kin selection nor reciprocal altruism seem able to explain the scale of human societies, their cooperativeness, their often unselfish nature. Several years back David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober wrote Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior to offer their own model, which works within a multi-level selection paradigm which suggests that cooperation and altruism are favored at the level of groups, above and apart from their…
razib | August 25, 2006RPM comments on some issues relating to human genetics. First, he points to the article about how conservatives are going to outbreed liberals, etc. etc. etc. The problem with this article is that the Left & the Right have been around since the late 18th century and history marches Leftward even though one assumes the Right has been breeding at a higher clip for the past 8+ generations. What gives?
First, there is a heritable component to political orientation. That is, a proportion (around 0.5) of the variation in of conservatism or liberalism within the population is attributable…
clock | August 25, 2006 You probably know that I am quite interested in the history, current state, evolution and future of the institution of marriage, mainly because it is an important indicator of societal attitudes towards sex and towards gender-relations, which is the key to understanding political ideology. Between May 29, 2005 and February 23, 2006 I frequently mentioned Stephanie Coontz and particularly her latest book - Marriage, A History, e.g., in New History Of Marriage, Stephanie Coontz On Marriage, Op-Ed on the 'End of Marriage', Don't Know Much About History.... and What 'traditional' marriage?.…
clock | August 25, 2006It is great when you write a blog post about somebody, then that somebody shows up in the comments and clarifies his position thus starting an interesting conversation (both in the comments and via e-mail), then you realize that his book-signing tour is bringing that somebody to your town, so you go there and meet that somebody in person and have a great conversation, which inspires you to write yet another blog post - the one under the fold....
It's too late and I am too tired to write a long post on this, but I know I won't have time tomorrow. All dirty, scrungly and unshaven after a day…
razib | August 24, 2006Shellee asks:
"Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty?"
There have been many good answers so far, though I'll leave it to Shellee to sum things up tomorrow.
Short answer:
I am opposed to the death penalty
I am not opposed to war
'
Longer answer:
My opposition to the death penalty is primarily pragmatic at this point. It is too expensive and riddled with problems in terms of the probability of killing someone innocent. Like laws against…