The Republic of Dissent

Evolution, race, and friction

Interesting stuff from Jesse Bering, but I'm just wondering why I have become numb to issues of race or at leas to the unintellectual and stupid way that they are usually presented and discussed :

When it comes to skin color and the societal friction that characterizes race relations, the most plausible evolutionary account is that we consciously or unconsciously exploit this surface cue as a way to rapidly demarcate ingroup and outgroup members. It is abundantly clear that, since time immemorial, human societies have waged wars and been in conflict with other neighboring groups competing for the same limited resources. In the ancestral past, even the slightest physical, behavioral, or linguistic difference between camps would have served as a heuristic to help determine who was “one of us” and who was “one of them.” Again, evolutionarily, people of different skin colors would not have come into contact in the same geographic space (the divergent evolution of melanin-producing cells between human populations meant that, for the vast majority of our ancestral history, our ancestors would have never seen or known of another person with a skin color dramatically different from their own), other signals included accents and dialects, customs, gaits, fashion styles, and so on. In Northern Ireland, racism is subtly exuded by people trying to suss out the Protestant versus Catholic countenance of surnames, neighborhoods, word pronunciations, and facial features. One of the most startling pieces of evidence demonstrating the innateness of ingroup favoritism, reported a few years ago by psychologist Katherine Kinzler of the University of Chicago, is that, regardless of their nationality, ten-month-old infants actually shun adult playmates with foreign accents and prefer to interact with native speakers.
So it’s only in recent centuries, when the human animal found itself rather suddenly face-to-face with those of an entirely different hue, that this especially salient cue triggered our species’ more general pre-existing mechanism for ingroup- and outgroup-member demarcation. Being “color blind” is a beautiful idea, but unfortunately our retinas are sensitive to light of different wavelengths, and our visual systems cannot help but to process the color of people’s skin.

Unknown knowns

The sugary excerpt of the morning from Slavoj Zizek building on a quote from Donald Rumsfeld (it's hard to admit, but I miss Rumny):

When it comes to the risk of ecological catastrophe, we are dealing with "unknown unknowns", to use the terms of the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge. Donald Rumsfeld set out this theory in a bit of amateur philosophising in February 2002, when he was still George W Bush's defence secretary. He said:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.

What Rumsfeld forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns", things we don't know that we know - which is the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself", as Lacan put it. To the assertion that the main dangers in the Iraq war were the "unknown unknowns" - the threats that we did not even suspect existed - we should reply that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the "unknown knowns", the disavowed beliefs and suppositions to which we are not even aware we adhere.

Secularism and anti-enlightenment

Quote of the day is Melanie Phillips :

(...) in certain areas science has overreached itself by trying to play God, and as a result has turned into an ideology. Contrary to popular myth, Western science was not created by Enlightenment secularism. It grew out of the revolutionary claim in the Bible that the universe was the product of a rational Creator, who endowed man with reason so that he could ask questions about the natural world. With the rise of secularism, the striking thing is that people didn’t lose the drive to believe. They stopped having religious faith — but that drive was diverted instead into the creation of a wide variety of secular religions, otherwise known as ideologies. But these are the true enemies of truth and reason.

Free will and antisocial behavior

Fascinating:

One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial.

The essentiality of oral sex

Via Feminist Philosophers, which is a blog that everybody ought to read, I found the following tidbit on oral sex and nature great, but I have absolutely no understanding of my reaction:

Oral sex is surprisingly rare in the animal kingdom. Humans do it, of course. As do bonobos, our close relatives. But now researchers have observed the practice for the first time in a non-primate. During intercourse, female short-nosed fruit bats lick the genitals of their partner, a possible ploy to increase copulation time. The discovery suggests there may be a biological advantage to fellatio.

International justice, politics, and money

Rob Lyons on the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the sole convicted culprit of the Lockerbie bombing, international justice, and politics :

(...) from a political point of view, the release of al-Megrahi in this way seems the best option. The US and UK governments avoid any awkward revelations at an appeal hearing. The Scottish government gets to assert itself as an independent force in world politics, even though it has no foreign policy authority as such, while appearing to be principled and humane. The Libyan government is presenting the release of al-Megrahi as a diplomatic triumph, as yesterday’s welcome party for him shows.
The driving force behind every episode in this case has been the interests of governments, particularly the major Western powers, not the lives of the people unfortunate enough to get caught up in their machinations. Sadly, justice has got nothing to do with it.

I'm only wondering whether al-Megrahi would have been released if Libya was still viewed as a sponsor of international terrorism and if it wasn't an oil-rich nation. I don't think he would have no matter how sick he was.Unfortunately, the lesson of this case is that la raison d'état always prevails over much everything else especially when economical interests are at stake. It is hard not to be impressed over the way Qadaffi has been able to buy himself a new image.What does it say about our world if it is possible to buy respectability without ever fulling atoning or even acknowledging the mistakes of the past?

Religion is a lethal weapon in Africa

Sugary excerpt from Steven Epstein’s review of Helen Epstein’s book on Aids and Africa, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight against Aids:

Perhaps the most frightening stories that Epstein tells about the impact of outsiders concern the practices of the current administration in the US. President George W. Bush has expanded the funding for AIDS prevention in Africa, while promoting abstinence and fidelity. Yet this emphasis has little basis in scientific data. In Uganda, for example, Epstein reports that during the years when the national HIV rate fell by about 70 per cent, the teen pregnancy rate remained essentially unchanged – suggesting that abstinence had little to do with the remarkable reduction in new infections. What such programmes do support, however, is the promotion of God’s work, as understood by Bush’s conservative Christian backers. “AIDS has created an evangelism opportunity for the body of Christ unlike any in history”, according to Ken Isaacs, a spokesperson for the Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse. And while US law supposedly stands in the way of using Federal funds for evangelizing, Epstein reports that “every abstinence event I attended involved much praying and discussion of Jesus”. Sadly, it is precisely in Uganda, Epstein’s success story, where the tide appears to have turned in recent years, and where Epstein now encounters condom burnings in the name of Jesus. Reversing this alarming trend is now among the most crucial steps in supporting the work of Africans who struggle to solve the wrenching problem of AIDS.

I may have an anti-religious bias, but I believe that religion, insofar as it reinforces local beliefs about sex, women, and marriage is lethal in Africa. It encourages people who are suffering and who have no chance to get cured and who are the most exposed to Aids to believe in the unseen and that Aids is solely about sin and evil. In African countries, religion is truly the opiate of the masses because it keeps the people from revolting by pacifying them with the belief that paradise isn’t on earth and that all of the ills that are plaguing them are happening because they are unable to keep themselves pure and to follow God’s sacred rules. The most disturbing thing is that the West that is evangelizing Africa and thus, encouraging dangerous beliefs because it is a fertile terrain. Africans are easy targets, as the poor in the West because they are looking for anything that will make them believe that what is stupidly considered intrinsically African, such as poverty and naivety, is closer to Godliness. Abstinence is dangerous and kills in the African context because it demonizes Aids and its victims who are ostracized and because it encourages the dangerous notion that sex and especially female virginity (for after all a man can profess to be a virgin while a woman’s virginity can be proven with a certain part of her body) are sacred.

Looking for truth in religion

John Polkinghorne reviews John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel, an Angelic Response to The God Delusion and  John Humphrys’s  In God We Doubt, Confession of a Failed Atheist. These two books try to rehabilitate religion by showing that Atheists are damn wrong. Polkinghorne makes the point that missing in this debate is the idea of truth, which makes it pointless because no progress is possible with it. Sugary excerpt:

Religious faith is not a matter of the unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by some overriding authority. Quite the contrary. Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it. Science achieves its success by the modesty of its ambition, only considering impersonal experience open to repetition at will. Personal experience, let alone encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, does not fit within this limited protocol. The concept of reality offered by scientism is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it. Darwin’s angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry. He is said to sound “as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear”.

No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. [emphasis added]

I think the debate between believers and non-believers is pointless if it becomes about who is right or wrong or rather who is more evil than the other. The real issue is what ought to be the place of religion and the reason why atheists are necessary is because they show that secularism is a value that is essential is a democratic and modern society. I resent religion the most when they feel the need to evangelize and to become pervasive. What is worrisome is that the fact that Dawkins and Hitchens have encountered such strong resistance. In my opinion, this resistance shows that the most important for believers isn’t truth, but the necessity to be right absolutely and to crush dissent as if they were sure that they were right, they would be bothered by people professing loudly that they weren’t.

Science as a defense to racism

James Watson offers his defense to the claim that he is a racist for saying that Blacks may be less intelligent because of their genes. He writes that he is a scientist and that as such, he is obligated to explore every hypothesis no matter how despicable and controversial it is. I’m not sure that I’m buying his defense, but here it is:

The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me. But science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the service of knowledge and greater understanding.

[…] We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science.

To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers. It is very likely that at least some 10 to 15 years will pass before we get an adequate understanding for the relative importance of nature versus nurture in the achievement of important human objectives. Until then, we as scientists, wherever we wish to place ourselves in this great debate, should take care in claiming what are unarguable truths without the support of evidence.

I am not buying Science as an excuse for expressing not only disturbing, but also dangerous views. However, I think that we are living in a time where discussion is becoming impossible precisely because increasingly people have stopped to believe that education and that interaction makes a difference. Let’s assume that James Watson is a racist, what should we do with him? Should we ask him to apologize, shame him, and then ban him from society or should we engage him and challenge his views to show that we are the facts on our side and that he doesn’t? The point is that modern societies have ceded to the temptation to believe that there exist the right and the wrong kind of people and that between them, dialogue is meaningless because someone who is born bad or who is a racist will always be bad and will remain a racist no matter what we do. That belief is a coop-out because it enables the rest of society to escape the responsibility that it bears for the least virtuous of its members. Racism isn’t the end of a conversation, it is its beginning. Society can just ostracize and sanctions its racists. It bears the responsibility to attempt to change their views not for their sake, but other people who like Watson share the same views on race and innate stupidity especially those who are younger and less educated.

DNA, immigration, and integration

The New Times has an article about the controversial French amendment (Mariani amendment) to a French immigration law that would it possible for some would-be immigrants take DNA tests before being admitted in France. I think that many French are obsessed with the relation between blood, nationality and identity because too many of them think that many French who weren’t born French or whose parents came from foreign places didn’t integrate because they were “inintégrable” that is impossible to integrate. They believe that the origins , the religion, and the culture of the “new”  French made them unable to “French” themselves even though they have French nationality. Behind the controversy of the Mariani amendment and the specter is the much more complicated question of whether anyone can become French or rather whether some people can never become French no matter how hard the French state tries to integrate them within its society.

Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, and ridicule

This video doesn't make me laugh; it makes me sad. It shows how far some can take the idea that culture is everything and justify the unjustifiable. Let me explain what I mean. The president of Gambia is only able to surmount the ridicule of claiming that he can cure Aids because he and others believe that African culture because it is different from others allows him to make ridicule and debasing claims. What Jammed is saying with his behavior is that he believes that Gambians are simpletons and that he is allowed as their king to dominate without people who don’t share his culture questioning him because they cannot understand. I would be less sad if I could claim that Jammeh was just a fool and that Gambians were just like the people in the fable, that is too scared to tell to the King that he is naked, but I think that there is more here to the story. There is an issue of cultural and of difference and of whether asserting one's difference can ever mean that reason, which is claimed by too many people to be Western should be suspended in front of the prosperous. In other words, can Africans just claimed that Leopold Sédar Senghor can right when he self-righteously proclaims that 'negroes' couldn't be rational because they followed their emotions and enjoy the humorous and even satirical spectacle that Jammeh gives us because he accepts to be a saltimbanque and because ridicule doesn't kill.

Apologists and the battle of sexes

PZ Myers has the best post I’ve read this morning on the battle of the sexes and apologists for gender inequities. It is worth reading especially for this excerpt:

[…] We already know that women experience a cultural wall that limits their ability to excel at the most remunerative endeavors — it seems to me that it's just as reasonable to estimate that female performance at the high end of the scale might be equivalent to male's; I can see where hemizygosity might lead to a greater frequency of aberrant pathologies, but not where it would lead to particular advantages in this situation.

But most of all what bugs me about the stupid speech is that it begins by deploring the idea of a "battle of the sexes", and then justifies many of its excuses with evolution, as if men and women are separately evolving species. It's absurd. Over half my genes come from my mother, and a slightly fewer come from my father. We evolve together, with an obligate mingling of alleles from both sexes at every generation. We both have equal potential, because it is the same potential — the only question is whether we're going to let bogus apologetics for inequities continue to limit the possibilities for half of us.

Deconstructing God

This video (hat tip: Murad Ahmed) is a long one in which Christopher Hitchens discusses his latest book, God is not Great and answers some interesting questions about religion, materialism, Darwinism, and Karl Marx. It is long, but worth watching.

Africa and Western medicine

Harriet Washington has an important article in the International Herald Tribune about Africa and the West. She explains why Africans don’t trust Western medicine. She shows that the ordeal of the Bulgarian nurses in Libya is just an example of the distrust that exists between Africans and Western medical workers. Sugary excerpt:

To Westerners, the repatriation of five nurses and a doctor to Bulgaria last week after more than eight years' imprisonment meant the end of an unsettling ordeal. The medical workers, who in May 2004 were sentenced to death on charges of intentionally infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV, have been freed, and another international incident is averted.

But to many Africans, the accusations, which have been validated by a guilty verdict and a promise to reimburse the families of the infected children with a $426 million payout, seem perfectly plausible. […] Certainly, the vast majority of beneficent Western medical workers in Africa are to be thanked, not censured. But the canon of "silence equals death" applies here: We are ignoring a responsibility to defend the mass of innocent Western doctors against the belief that they are not treating disease, but intentionally spreading it. We should approach Africans' suspicions with respect, realizing that they are born of the acts of a few monsters and of the deadly constraints on medical care in difficult conditions. By continuing to dismiss their reasonable fears, we raise the risk of even more needless illness and death.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to this serious problem. I fear that other countries will be tempted to follow the Libyan example by holding Western medical workers in exchange for an expensive payout. However, I think that another important aspect of the problem is the fact that Africans feel that their continent is being used by the West and its pharmaceutical companies to experiment medicines and that they are being used as Guinea pig. The Constant Gardner, the 2005 movie based on John le Carré's famous novel of the same name, illustrated this problem and no matter how paranoid this fear is, it exists and is based on the larger issue that healthcare is inexistent in most of Africa. No Government’s agencies exist in these countries to ensure the local population that their fears are unfounded and more importantly to protect it from the bad guys and from medical errors.

Spite and Altruism

The New Scientist has an article on research, which concludes that spite is a uniquely human emotion. Researchers found that chimps were incapable of being spiteful, but have also found that spitefulness comes together with the ability to be altruist. In other words, it is the ability to empathize that leads humans to both feel spiteful and be altruistic. Sugary excerpt:

Spite is a common human reaction, says Jensen. "Imagine you're a kid at a birthday party. The mother gives you cake, then takes it away and gives it to another kid. It's not his fault, but you'll still be annoyed with him because of his good fortune. But chimps don't care who's got the cake, just who took it from them," he explains. In other words, chimps fail to see things from another's point of view.

And if a chimp's lack of empathy leaves it unable to feel spite, it may also fail to behave altruistically, says behavioural ecologist Rufus Johnstone of the University of Cambridge in the UK. "There have been experiments that gave chimps the chance to be nice to another at no cost to themselves, but they weren't interested. They didn't have a human propensity to be nice," he says.

[…] In showing that chimps lack spite, the researchers may actually have shown that a set of connected emotions remains unique to humans. "Many differences obviously remain," says Jensen. "Humans actually care about outcomes affecting others. The good side of that is altruism. Spite is the evil twin that can't be separated from it."

German, language, Science, and dumbing down

Sign and Sight has an article on the efforts of Stefan Klein to ensure the future of German as a language of science. The article deals with the dominance of English in science and about its effects on German and German Scientists. Klein's argument is that the issue here is one of democracy and one of excellence because forcing people to speak English makes them less smart than when they were able to express themselves in their mother tongue. Sugary excerpt:

Today, scientists are headed towards a reversal of Pacioli's revolution. But how do they expect to win the sympathy of a public with which they no longer even have language in common? And will we soon reach a point where we no longer can discuss the results of new research in German because we can't find the vocabulary? Society is threatening to split: On one side will be those who employ an elite language, and on the other, all those who miss out on the latest developments. So the issue of whether German remains a language for science is not merely a question of national pride. It has to do with something far more momentous: democracy.
Anyone who only encounters scientific research in a foreign language pays a heavy price, even if he is a master of the idiom. "We are dumber in English" – this was the conclusion that researchers came to in Sweden and the Netherlands, where children were introduced to English on their first day of school. Lectures in English are part of every subject, but nevertheless, the test results are about ten percent lower on average than in courses taught in the mother tongue. In English seminars, students ask and answer fewer questions; they give the overall impression of being somewhat more helpless. Neither students nor teachers are generally aware of the problem, because they all overestimate their expertise in English.

I don’t usually feel sympathetic towards arguments against the use of English, but in this case, it is difficult not to agree with Stefan Klein because the issue is not as much preserving German as to preserving diversity of thought, culture, and communication. Language matters and although I have when people beat up on English, I understand the concerns that many have about uniformity and indeed dumbing down, which can occur by the use and the domination of one language in a profession. Language and diversity should not be sacrificed in the name of practicability for the simple reason that difference whether it is still one of language or of anything else is still one of the best ways that we have to ensure that we don’t become sheep and that we are constantly forced to defend  our ideals and to accept complexity.

Atheism and pretentiousness

Theo Hobson argues that Atheism is pretentious and cowardly in the Guardian’s Comment is Free. However, his arguments to prove his thesis aren’t argument against Atheism, but an angry, petulant, and childish reaction to what he considers intolerable rejections of Faith and of God. Sugary excerpt:

Atheism is pretentious in the sense of claiming to know more than it does. It claims to know what belief in God entails, and what religion, in all its infinite variety, essentially is. And atheism is muddled because it cannot decide on what grounds it ultimately objects to religion. Does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged falsity? Or does it oppose it on the grounds of its alleged harmfulness? Both, the atheists will doubtless reply: religion is false and therefore it is harmful. But this is to make an assumption about the relationship between rationality and moral progress that does not stand up. Atheism is the belief that the demise of religion, and the rise of "rationality", will make the world a better place. Atheism therefore entails an account of history - a story of liberation from a harmful error called "religion". This narrative is jaw-droppingly naive.

Some will quibble with the above definition. Atheism is just the rejection of God, of any supernatural power, they will say, it entails no necessary belief in historical progress. This is disingenuous. The militant atheists have a moral mission: to improve the world by working towards the eradication of religion.

Hobson is in fact arguing that Atheism is a form of religion  because he cannot comprehend anything that does not have a religious form. It is for this reason that he must redefine atheism to be able to counter it by arguing that it is religious-like in the sense that atheists have the hidden agenda to proselyte the world to remake it at their image. Hobson isn’t absolutely wrong in the sense that Atheism can become irrational and take the form of a religion when it stopped to be rational to become solely reactionary. However, this is true of anything taking to extremes and which ignores reality. It is for this reason that religion can be in itself dangerous for it tends to encourage willful blindness to reality and to humanity. Thus, Hobson’s quarrels is not really with Atheism, but with what he considers to be religion without God, which is in his view intolerable. His real quarrel is with religion itself for his argument is really that only God justifies the excesses and the irrationality that come with religion.

Dawkins and belief

Ruth Gledhill wonders whether Dawkins is more than the angry atheist, which he appears to be and whether he is a believer after all. She portrays him as a man who has belief, but who is just unwilling to admit. Sugary excerpt:

“Love is not a rational process and I’m as susceptible to love as anybody else,” he says. “To say God is love, if that is an actual definition, then I believe in God because I believe in love. But God isn’t love, God is something supernatural, and in certain religions, love is supernatural. When you say love is not rational, there are two ways of interpreting that. You could say that love is not intelligible by rational means, and I’m not sure I believe that. As a scientist I believe that love is intelligible on rational grounds. That doesn’t mean that a particular person who is in love can learn anything, gain anything, or understand their own emotions in rational terms. But I do believe that love, like any other manifestation of brain stuff, is intelligible in rational terms, although maybe not in practice.”

So love is merely a biological phenomenon? “Anything to do with life is biological. So, in a way, you haven’t asked me a very big question and I haven’t answered it.”

People of faith make the assumption that people who don’t believe don’t have a soul, are empty and in the dark. I find it interesting that there is much more of a burden put on atheism and non belevers to justify and explain why they don’t believe as if that mere fact is an abnormality and an impossibility. In other words, Atheists and nonbelievers are either people who believe and don’t know it or people who are stubbornly refusing to see the light. However, all of this circular reasonning leads nowhere except to one issue and that is the value of human existence and human beings without God. Is humanity precious in itself or do humans have to tie themselves to God to make their life meaning, valuable? What if Dawkins is exactly what he puports to be, an atheist who thinks that God is delusion, would that make him a sas pitiful little man or a man with the courage to say no and to assume the consequences of his worldview.

DNA and Immigration

The New York Times has a great article on the use of DNA and the role that it is playing in the American immigration process. Increasingly, Immigrants have to use DNA to prove that the people that they seek to bring in the US are really related to them by blood. This had had led to heartbreaking discoveries, which have divided families for DNA tests have proven in some cases that the people whom Immigrants thought were either their children or their parents were not relate to them.

Lying about sex

Julie Sternberg writes about the lies, which she argues are told to American teenagers about sex in order to control their sexual behavior. She argues that the problem that ideologues have hijacked sexual education and have made it difficult to teach teenagers about sex in ways which reflect the world in which they live. Abstinence programs don't work because they aren't based on science, but on ideology and wishful thinking. Sugary excerpt:

If you’re like the majority of Americans, 75 percent to be exact, by the age of 20 you’ve had sex without being married to your partner. […] Yet our government is downright obsessed with abstinence until marriage. In fact, since 1996, the federal government has poured more than a billion dollars into programs that are required to promote abstinence until marriage, and forbidden from teaching about contraception, unless it is to emphasize failure rates. […] It gets worse. Not only are these programs encouraged by the government to teach that condoms fail, but many federally funded curricula exaggerate failure rates. A report released in December of 2004 by a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives detailed the distortion and misinformation found in some of the most widely used federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula. One such curriculum even compared using a condom to playing a game of Russian roulette.

Charlatan, Aids, Africa

Earlier this week, I talked about the dictator of Gambia, President Yahya Jammeh, who is claiming that he can cure Aids so here is a video of the Despot charlatan “curing” a HIV positive patient.

Being a dictator and charlatan

The President of Gambia Yahya Jammeh (Please don't forget his name) is claiming that he is the only person on this earth able to cure aids. This claim would only be laughable if Jammed was a military despot and one of the many African politicians who have a problem taking Aids seriously and not using it to make political gains. First, there was the South African minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang which told South Africans that to cure aids, they should eat garlic and beet roots then there was Jacob Zuma who raped had sex with a rape victim without using protection and argued that he took a shower afterwards so he wouldn't get the HIV virus. I found all of this disturbing because it shows that Aids is still only about sex in Africa and since sex is about power and masculinity, it is easy for it to be used as a way to deny that it is a disease, which requires medical treatment, or to reinforce stereotypes about masculinity, power, and sexuality.

Paying for global warming

Scott Barrett, in an article, examines the question of who is going to pay for Global warming. He argues that part of the solution is for fast developing countries such as China and  India to make it their priority to transition to new technology and that "The industrialized countries, by contrast, should embrace the new technologies gradually, as their installed base of carbon-intensive capital depreciates." Barrett believes that although it may be an unfair approach not to require developed nations to foot the bill, it is more cost effective to choose an approach, which focuses on gradual and more realistic changes.

New rules and cervical cancer

I like Bill Maher very much because I think that his humor is both edgy and intelligent, even though it can be at times inappropriate. I like this video which has an except of his new rules for this week because it makes what I think is a critical point about the cervical cancer vaccine and that is that it has nothing to do with abstinence and sexual education, but everything to do with health. After those who argue that by immunizing girls against cervical cancer, society is encouraging promiscuity are the same who argue that nature is always right and that in fact girls who have sex before marriage deserve to get cervical cancer. Thus the question is uniquely about whether sin bad, inappropriate, reckless behavior according to some people should be always punishable by death or incredible suffering that is whether science should save some people because they sinned or disobey some type of moral code. My answer to that question is a strong and passionate no!

Global warming is all about hollywood's pompousness and superficiality

Here is amusingly distressing quote from Dean Barnett on Gore, Global Warming, and Hollywood:

It’s only natural that Hollywood has so taken to Gore’s predictions of death and destruction. Gore has been unusually solicitous of Hollywood, even for a politician, and there’s nothing celebrities value more than someone who’s willing to pretend that their opinions are actually relevant.

AS REGARDS AL GORE’S PREDICTIONS OF IMMINENT climatic disaster, I must confess that I haven’t made a careful enough study of the matter to have a well-educated opinion. Unlike, say, Leonardo DiCaprio, I just haven’t had the time or the intellectual curiosity to read all the source studies that doubtlessly inform the conclusions of the Hollywood-types who feel the end is nigh.

But Gore’s theories and his proposals, whether they’re eerily prescient or stunningly misguided, leave me asking some questions. For instance, how much will they cost and who will bear the brunt of that cost?

Science, gay sheep and homosexuality

The Guardian has an article on what the impact of the research of gay sheep will add to the homosexuality debate and it will prove that homosexuality can be prevented in sheep and in humans. Sugary excerpt:

Which brings us to the animals whose breeding we really care about: our children. Passing on genes is life's deepest drive. You don't just want kids. You want grandkids. To many parents, "I'm gay, Mom" means "No grandkids."

Roselli offers evidence that human homosexuality is linked to biological conditions, some of them genetic. If he figures out how to manipulate sexual orientation in sheep, will others try to manipulate it in humans? Doctors used to "treat" homosexuality with hormone injections. Some still do. This idea failed miserably in adults, but it might work in foetuses. And if we can't engineer sexual orientation, maybe we can select it. In Asia, millions have used modern tests to identify female foetuses so they could be aborted. If we learn how to recognise gay brains in development, look out.

Debating assisted suicide and euthanaisa

Raymond Tallis reviews Neil Gorsuch's book "The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia" in the London Times. Tallis who is the former College of Physicians Committee on Ethical Issues in Medicine agrees with the assertion made by the author that assisted suicide and euthanasia are going among "among the most hotly debated contemporary legal and public policy questions" of our time both in Europe and in America. While I agree with that assertion, I believe that the debate in both sides of the Atlantic will be very different and that in the US its focus will be mostly on religious issues. 

Messing with Gay sheep

I find this story about Gay sheep and the attempts of a researcher Charles Roselli to mess with them fascinating. The Guardian has a post on that subject on their newsblog.

Abortion and depression

I read the long article in the Sunday Times on Abortion, depression, and the way that some anti-abortion activists are using the possible correlation between the two to argue that it should be outlawed, and I kept asking myself this simple question: If abortion leads in fact to depression does it put into question its legality ? The answer is obviously no. Abortion is a personal choice and whether it causes depression is a matter, which the woman should consider when she makes that choice. Knowledge is also important when making a choice, but the fact that a choice may have negative consequences doesn't mean that it should be forbidden because otherwise that would just be a form of paternalism. After in democratic societies, people have the right to choose things that are bad for health provided that it doesn't affect anybody else, but them. It is for that reason that the emphasis shouldn't be on eliminating the choice, but on dealing with the consequences. Why not invest in helping women who have had abortion deal with their depression if they feel it. After all, I haven't never head anybody argues that women should becoming mothers, because they may experience post partum depression.

Saddam Hussein's hanging is a loss for History and Science

Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) on Saddam Hussein execution:

This was an opportunity to set the world a good example of civilised behaviour in dealing with a barbarically uncivilised man. In any case, revenge is an ignoble motive. The usual arguments against the death penalty in general apply. If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged. But I want to add another and less obvious reason why we should not have executed Saddam Hussein. His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.

[…]Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion. Uniquely privileged evidence on the American government's enthusiastic arming of Saddam before they switched loyalties is now snuffed out at the tug of a rope (no doubt to the relief of Donald Rumsfeld and other guilty parties - it is surely no accident that the trial of Saddam neglected those of his crimes that might - no, would - have implicated them).

Food for thought: the right to know one's parents

“Those of us created with donated sperm won't stay bubbly babies forever. We're all going to grow into adults and form opinions about the decision to bring us into the world in a way that deprives us of the basic right to know where we came from, what our history is and who both our parents are.” Katrina Clark, “My Father was an Anonymous Sperm Donor.”

The video de la nuit: Delusions and religion

I like listening to Richard Dawkins speak. I've started reading his book “The God Delusion’ and I believe that he makes strong points about religion and the negative effects that it has on “modern societies.” He debated David Quinn (columnist with the Irish Independent) on the Ryan Tubridy Show and in my opinion, won the argument. (Hat tip: Jeremy Lott). Anyway, in this video, Dawkins explains his points very clearly and in my opinion very convincingly.

Why is global warming a political issue?

In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal is making arguments about global warming, which are not new, but which are still disturbing because they show that to them global warming isn't about science, but about politics and ideology. The article laments the fact that the Stern review, which was issued in the beginning of this week and which sounded an alarm about global warming got all the press, when a meeting organized by Bjørn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Center, which reached less alarming conclusions didn't get much press. Money quote:

Unlike the Stern report and its patrons, those of us who take a skeptical approach to these doomsday climate scenarios aren't trying to end the discussion. The Earth is warmer now than it was in the recent past, and this may be partly attributable to human behavior. But everything else--from how much warmer, to the extent of mankind's contribution, to the cost of doing something about it--remains very much in dispute.

The problem with the Wall Street Journal's view is that they want global warming, which is about science to become an economic issue. The problem is that when the bottom line is money, it becomes easier to minimize or to dismiss the risks of economic activities because they become an acceptable cost of making a living and of creating wealth for a society. I cannot agree that global warming is an acceptable risk and that the leaders of the world shouldn't do everything to stop it or to decrease it because it would be expensive. Melanie Phillips has a fascinating and partial post on this global warming issue, which shows that ideology and faith can be the enemies of science.

Tabula rasa vs. Innate ideas

The New York Times has an article, which discusses the findings of Marc Hauser, a Harvard biologist, who argues that infants aren't blank slates, but are born with some notions of right and wrong created by evolution, which are part of what he calls, "moral grammar." Money quote:

It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

Jesus responds to Michael J. Fox

This video is why I feel uneasy about celebrities doing political ads because they always obscure the issue. These days, you will always be able to find a celebrity to support any issue or to counter a political point of view made by another celebrity. Politics isn't about that. Although I applaud Michael J. Fox for giving up his time and for fighting for what he believes in, I think that he shouldn't have done the ad and should have just kept on supporting Claire McCaskill by speaking for her and doing other things because nowadays, celebrities can hurt more than help a candidate.

The video du jour: Rush attacks Fox

This video shows Michael J. Fox endorsement of Democratic candidate Claire McCaskill because of her position in favor of Stem Cell Research. He has Parkinson disease and believes that Stem Cell research provide a realistic hope for a cure. Rush Limbaugh attacked him and said he was faking his disease. One can disagree on Stem Cell Research and even question the right of celebrities to weigh in this political debate, but to question their illness is to cross the line.

Mourning Pluto

Well, at least one planet was demoted this week since Pluto is no longer a planet, but something else. What changed since it was agreed that Pluto was a planet? Does it matter anyway? The only thing that Plutogate shows that astronomy is a science, which includes some subjectivity especially when it comes to interpreting evidence. Oh well, I guess I'm going to have to learn to forget what I learn when I was in school. The good news for me is that it isn't going to be difficult. Nevertheless, I feel sad that Pluto is no longer a planet because size shouldn’t be everything. I wonder how much we know about the solar system and how much what we know is true or misinterpreted?

The “wrongness” of creationism

I wonder if it is possible to believe in creationism and to believe in science. I know that it is possible to believe in evolution and to be religious, but I am unable to understand why it has become so important for some people to disprove evolution and to pass creationism as science by using intelligent design so that it can be taught  in schools. I just read a short article, which states that more than 100 millions Americans believe in creationism and my question is why? Why would so many stubbornly believe in something, which is refuted by facts.  I don't think that the answer is simply faith. I don't know what is, but it worries me because it suggests that to a lot of people, reality and facts don't matter and that is dangerous because that is the essence of fanaticism.

Chernobyl, 20 years later

Today is the twentieth of the Chernobyl disaster and I’m stricken by how little more we know about this catastrophe twenty years later.

1. We don’t know how many died and how many suffered from the radiation. The estimates vary between a few thousand and hundred of thousand of victims.
2. We don’t know the extent of the harm that was done not only in Ukraine, but also in the countries surrounding Ukraine and even to countries such as France, which were touched by the radiations.
3. I believe that the Chernobyl disaster showed how disastrous the use of nuclear energy could be when it isn’t used carefully. I wonder if more nations are going to be willing to take the risks of using energy giving the fact that the price of energy. Tony Blair has talked about doing just that and Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace has argued that nuclear energy is the future and that it will be good for the environment. May be they are right, but I have to admit that I don’t want them to be.

Is Nuclear Energy, the way to save the world from its dependence on oil?

Oil prices are peaking due to the Iranian crisis and to the political instability in countries such as Venezuela and Nigeria. It is possible that in spite of the reasonable fear and reluctance that there is about using nuclear energy that it might be the only and most cost-effective way that is available now for countries such as the United States, which are to used the words of President, "addicted to oil."  Patrick Moore, the Co-founder of GreenPeace argue for nuclear energy by stating that "the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2emissions annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our electricity was generated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible environmentalist should support a move in that direction." I am reluctant to agree with him because the facts that he gives in his article in the Washington Post does not calm my fears, but I wonder if he is right, if nuclear energy is the way to go to green and to save the environment.

Race and DNA

Science is playing an incredibly important role in thr discovery of the past, the present and ourselves. The Newyork times has a great article on DNA and Race and on the ways that knowing your DNA makes to your ethnicity. An increasingly number of people are using the fact that their DNA shows that they are a part of a  minority group (11 % African American for example) to claim scholarships and to try to gain some advantage in college applications. These new trends lead to obvious, but difficult questions and it is what is the meaning of race and what factors should be used to determine ethnicity? And of course, the most important question of all is race just about DNA?

Aids, Africa, and information

The Washington post has an article on Aids and Africa, which states that in some countries such as in Rwanda, the numbers of people with Aids were overstated. What should take conclude from this piece of information? Is the conclusion that there is no Aids epidemic in Africa and therefore the attention that is paid to the problem is too great compare to the reality? Or it the conclusion that data and research in Africa is done badly and that in the case of a disease as potent as Aids, it is necessary to have the right data not only to know the extent of the problem, but also to fight it. Information is priceless especially when the consequence of ignorance and of inaction is death.

Should ideology affect science?

Science seems to have become more and more like social science in recent years in the sense that ideology affects it. Whether it is the debate about Darwinism or about global warming, it seems that your views on science depend on your ideology. George Will wrote on Sunday that, “Suppose the Earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest-- must be bad? Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over"?” The question after reading his article is whether science is a matter of point of view. If it is, then it means that ideology bridges a gap between people that is unbridgeable. That is worrisome because if we cannot agree on science, on math and on reality, then togetherness becomes impossible.