Defending Reason, Attacking Faith

This video by Richard Dawkins (hat tip pharyngula) is pretty interesting and does a good job I think of bringing home just how ridiculous most faith-based/superstitious beliefs are. This isn't to say those beliefs are wrong, it's just to say that if the holy spirit descends and inspires you to believe that Jesus was the only son of God and that he was born of a virgin, well... you should be aware that your belief are going to seem silly to those who don't share them.

What struck me as really interesting was the way Dawkins frames the battle between science and unreason. He views his struggle as a defense one:

...Reason and a respect for evidence are precious commodities, the source of human progress and our safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth.

Yet, today, society appears to be retreating from reason.

Apparently harmless but utterly irrational belief systems from astrology to New Age mysticism, clairvoyance to alternative health remedies are booming.

The emphasis is mine. Though I respect the project Dawkins has devoted himself too I think the idea that "New Atheism" is just a response to new attacks from unreason is pretty far-fetched. If anything it's a new offensive by atheists which overtly breaks the old truce between science and religion that gave each their own Nonoverlapping Magisteria. Dawkins refusal to politely respect religious beliefs destroy this pact just as surely as a Federation Cloaking Device.

Granted, this truce is being attacked from the other side too. The view that the revealed truth of God can over-rule testable hypotheses is not confined to the New Age faith-healers.

Here's another theory of what's happening. Most people who hold these unscientific positions aren't stupid or gullible, they've just been raised with beliefs that humans are all too prone to accepting. The religious community has always herded it's friendly non-threatening casual believers with hard-core uncompromising evangelists/bishops/imams. Could it be that the atheist community has only recently gained enough adherents to support their own version of the uncompromising take-it-to-the-logical-conclusion type leader that has been the staple of religion for thousands of years?

Thoughts on the singularity

In his 1993 essay"The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" Vernor Vinge predicted that once humans invented intelligent machines (or other super-intelligences) superior to humans we'd enter a post-human era where the key players where not man but machine. Part of his argument is that even if we wanted to prevent super-intelligences from taking over the economic incentives to creating one would be so great that sooner or later some one would build a machine capable of taking over everything.

I think the main flaw in this is the idea is that it's not necessarily the case that anything smart enough to take over man's fate would desire to do so. Presumably the super-intelligences would only desire to do what we programmed them to desire. And it's not clear that the desire to propagate and spread is something you'd accidentally end up instilling in your creation.

Though the stray death-cult might create a machine willing to multiply itself endlessly across the universe, you'd assume that most organizations would confine themselves to creating machines that focused on, you know, figuring stuff out for us. The only real danger is that a poorly configured machine would accidentally desire to propagate itself. Presumably it would be contained by all the other super intelligent computers that would probably be instilled with a desire to avoid having computers take over the universe.

Scientific tactics

Inspired by Paul's post below I started listening to the other Beyond Belief lectures which are actually quite good so long as you ignore the crazy quantum-consciousness people who always seem to be able to trick their way into these kinds of events.

Lawrence Krauss gives a talk in the first webisode where he articulates a common argument that in the debate between science and religion which faults scientists for being too "hoity-toity". His argument is basically that accusing people of being dumb is no way to convince them of your position.

On one level this is an intuitive argument. However, I think it's useful for scientists to observe the tactics being used by the other side. Put simply, the other side has no problem with accusing people of being dumb. Nothing is more condescending than being told that you will burn in hell for all eternity because you don't agree with me. And more specifically the argument that ties religiosity to morality is very common.

I suppose the fact that the religious side of the debate doesn't really address the question of whether they are effective, but it is instructive. More broadly, I think scientists have to take a wider view of why people take on religious beliefs (focusing specifically on how people come to believe things which impede science) and try to emulate the best parts. There's a whole lot of social programs used to sell religion that could just as easily be used to sell science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

On these long weekends I get to sit around and take the time to work through a lot of books, movies, or TV programs I don't otherwise have the time to dedicate to. Today I've been watching sessions from last November's Beyond Belief symposium. The best speaker I've seen so far is Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is much better here than he is on PBS, since he's got the room to improvise and riff on his preferred variations on the theme of the relationship between science and religion. It's more history than science or religion, and he's really very watchable.


If you don't have the patience or time for the full 40 minutes, at least watch his 5 minute tirade about "Stupid Design":



Update: Also cool - though I'll stop embedding - is Stuart Hammeroff's discussion of why he thinks we can be conscious of events as they happen even though it would seem that our brain works too slowly to process the information at the necessary speeds. Apparently quantum information can go backward in time, and if consciousness is an emergent property of quantum phenomena, it would be no trouble to be conscious of things while they happen. I'm ignorant enough that that all sounds plausible to me (it's apparently quite controversial), but I don't get why he thinks that means that Thomas Huxley was wrong to describe us as "conscious automata, helpless spectators"; it's not like we can make some claim to control the quantum phenomena. Whether the illusion of control is constructed as things happen or after the fact, it's still an illusion.

Genetics In Everything

Apropos (sort of) of the John Rawls/Mark Kleiman/Brad DeLong discussion of reciprocity and free trade below, a few days ago R. Ford Denison discussed the evolution of babysitting behaviors, and commented:

Major transitions in evolution have often involved loss of independence, as discussed last week. Most female bees work to increase their mother’s reproduction, rather than laying eggs themselves. Less extreme examples of helping others reproduce are known in some animals. “Kin selection” favors helping relatives, if the cost of helping is less than the benefit to the one helped, times their relatedness to the helper. This is known as Hamilton’s Rule. As Haldane put it, “I would jump into a river to save two brothers or eight cousins.” “Cost” and “benefit” are measured in number of offspring and “relatedness” is relative to one’s usual competitors.

That is all.

Evolution Debate Post-Mortem

Out of a dangerous combination of curiosity and boredom, I got myself into an evolution/creationism debate here. It seems to have winded down, so for my own benefit I decided to go through and try to discern from where the disagreement between the parties was originating. I think I've identified the following misconceptions, each of which may or may not be held by creationists/religious sorts generally. I list them in the order they came up or became clear to me.

• Evolution by natural selection amounts to "time plus chance plus a protein molecule" - This is, of course, a wildly reductive way of describing the relevant theories, and you can't really create this sort of caricature without misrepresenting the ideas being discussed. Certainly, the atheistic view is that evolution by natural selection proceeds without conscious control, which makes it, in some sense, a "random" process. But it also happens as the result of predictable natural processes, a feature that loose firings of the word "random" don't really seem to capture.
  
  
• "Faith" is required to believe in naturalistic explanations - This is a confusion. It's true that science, by and large, does not consist in a priori reasoning, so its conclusions can't be known with complete certainty. However, it does not follow from the fact that we cannot know X with certainty that believing X requires "faith". Rather, appropriate scientific beliefs are held with relative certainty - as they are viewed as more probable than competing alternatives - and are subject to falsification by evidence. To the extent that a belief admits of the possibility of falsification by evidence, it cannot be described as requiring "faith" in the sense that the word is typically used. Articles of religious faith are not fundamentally probabilistic in the same way scientific beliefs are. Personally, I like to think of scientific beliefs, or a posteriori beliefs generally, as operating assumptions. (Later in the thread, I had to explain that science does most of its work through induction not deduction, so the fundamental problem seems to be a failure to distinguish different types of reasoning.)
  
  
• We have lots of reasons to think that the Bible is a reliable historical record - Given the extent to which the Bible is internally inconsistent, it seems odd to put a lot of stock in its consistency with external reality.
  
  
• Various complex biological phenomena are irreducibly complex, in the sense that they couldn't have evolved gradually over time according to prevailing theories - Creationists don't seem to realize that arguments appealing to supposed irreducible complexity are 1) incredibly ambitious and 2) ridiculously arrogant. Ambitious because you have to rule out every possible progression of evolution as incompatible with theories of natural selection, and arrogant because you have to assume that just because you can't think of a way something could have evolved, it must not have been possible by natural means. As I said in the comments, the poverty of a given individual's imagination says nothing about the potential of evolution by natural selection. And all of this completely puts aside the fact that, so far as I know, every single example put forward by creationists as an instance of irreducible complexity has been rebutted with a possible mechanism of evolution in which each individual step is either selectively advantageous or selectively neutral.
  
  
• There's nothing improbable about the theory that God created everything - However improbable our scientific theories are, surely the theory that God exists and also provides all of our scientific evidence is more improbable still. The bottom line is that if you want to theorize God's existence and agency, that theory either demands explanation and justification, or it does not. If it does, then you should provide it. If it does not, then theistic theories are being held to a much lower standard than scientific theories. This is related to another misconception:
  
  
• Supernatural theories have significant explanatory power - As I said over the course of the argument: First, why assume that a supernatural force must be involved rather than wait and see if a natural explanation can be uncovered? Second, if the force in question has all sorts of physical, material, natural influences and effects, in what sense is it supernatural at all? Why don't we just describe it as a natural force? What work is the "supernatural" part doing except letting us wave away the aspects of the question we don't understand?
  
  
• Evolution by natural selection violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - I didn't realize people still believed this, so it's helpful to see that the misconception persists. Anyway, the 2nd law pertains closed systems; organisms are not closed systems, so the 2nd law doesn't apply.

Also interesting, but maybe less satisfying to examine, is the peculiar combination of smugness and defensiveness on the part of my interlocutor. On the one hand, I'm told that as an atheist I get a "free ride" from my Christian countrymen and it's suggested that I must not truly understand theistic arguments. At the same time, I'm told I'm "insulting" his intelligence by suggesting that his reasoning is flawed and I'm "hectoring" him when I request examples or arguments in support of his assertions.

Then there's the troubling bigotry of not only the assertion that atheists are doomed to moral inferiority (because we must be relativists!), but also the implication that specifically Judeo-Christian theism is required for sound moral infrastructure. Besides being a (surprise!) reductive view of the history of Western civilization, it also gives short shrift to the two-thirds of the world's population that doesn't share the peculiar religious beliefs of my opponent.

For me, the point of all of this was getting more of a sense of how a great many people think about these things. I've spent the last seven years or so in the Bay Area, and four of those years I spent studying science. It's easy for me to forget that a great many people haven't had the same good fortune.

Plastic Grocery Bags

Relatives from out-of-state have been asking me about the ban on plastic grocery bags in San Francisco, so here's a little background info on what prompted the ban.

I think one of the biggest things worth noting is that even returning the plastic bags to the grocery store doesn't result in the material ultimately being recycled. Rather, the store just sells them to companies that make Trex, a wood/plastic composite, lumber-like material, which is itself not recyclable.

It's still not completely obvious to me that the bag ban is a net gain for the environment or society generally - I think that depends on what takes the place of polyethylene bags - but the thinking of the city of San Francisco seems pretty clear.

Very Far From Respectable

It seems to me that if you know the argument you're making is "very far from scientific", and yet you still employ it in a strictly scientific debate, the only conclusion the rest of us can draw is that you just don't care about science very much:

I Know It's Very Far from Scientific... [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

...but readers keep pointing out it was snowing in Washington, D.C. and New York, among other places, this week. Makes An Inconvenient Truth on cable a tad unconvincing to the average person. So word harder, Al. Or something.

"Or something" indeed.

Where's Clarence Darrow When You Need Him?

This is an old news story, but it's starting to feel like an even older one. Last month, Frosty Hardison, a father of a high school student in a Seattle suburb, managed to get "An Inconvenient Truth" barred from his daughter's district by writing a letter accusing her teacher of telling just one side of the supposedly multi-sided issue of global warming.

As if to deliberately create an aesthetic, as well as rhetorical, parallel between the creationists and global warming deniers, chew on this tasty treat:

The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

-----

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

Uh. Uh huh. Hardison is also a patriot. Check it:

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardison wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board.

-----

"From what I've seen (of the movie) and what my husband has expressed to me, if (the movie) is going to take the approach of 'bad America, bad America,' I don't think it should be shown at all," [Frosty's wife] Gayle Hardison said. "If you're going to come in and just say America is creating the rotten ruin of the world, I don't think the video should be shown."

Scientists say that Americans, with about 5 percent of the world's population, emit about 25 percent of the globe-warming gases.

Clearly, Al Gore hates America. He's probably emboldening terrorists as we speak.

On a more substantive note, global warming deniers have taken a cue from creationists in insisting that a "balanced" presentation of a "controversial" issue be given to public school students. Why is anyone humoring these people? Why do nincompoops continue to buy into the idea that global warming, like evolution, is "just a theory"? Since when does championing diversity of opinion mean we have to let ignorance reign supreme? Why does superstition keep beating fact? Teaching global warming and evolution already is balanced; in fact, it's better than balanced: it's correct.

Subsequent to these two articles, the Federal Way school board has lifted the ban on the film. But I can't help myself in reprinting this nugget of comedy gold:

In the end, though, the board opted for an abundance of balance.

That means that "An Inconvenient Truth" may be shown only with the written permission of a principal -- and only when it is balanced by alternative views that are approved by both a principal and the superintendent of schools.

Hardison was pleased.

"I am happy they are giving the kids as much information as possible," he said.
His daughter's science teacher, meanwhile, said she is struggling to find authoritative articles to counter the information in the Gore documentary.

"The only thing I have found so far is an article in Newsweek called 'The Cooling World,' " Walls said.

It was written 32 years ago.

Awesome.

Politcal Cartoons: Stupid and Uninformative

My hatred of political cartoons is matched only by my contempt for Marmaduke. Like America's favorite two-dimensional great Dane, political cartoons are repetitive, obvious, unfunny, hyperbolic, and founded in an essentialist understanding of the world. But at least Marmaduke doesn't lie about global warming.

I browsed over a hundred of the "Energy and the Environment" cartoons reprinted by Slate, and I discovered a few themes: different artists tell the exact same jokes (I mean, c'mon), political cartoonists love excessive and bizarrely abstracted labeling, some authors don't get it that cattle wouldn't be so numerous if people didn't eat them, still others can't fathom that science should influence policy, and apparently everybody hates Al Gore (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Most disturbing is that political cartoonists, like most journalists, didn't have to pass a science exam to get their job, which leads to ass-hattery like this cartoon:

Sorry, Glenn McCoy, but no one with even a basic understanding of global warming would claim that the effects of climate change occur in the span of a few years and without anomalous years. If our artist knew anything about science, he'd comprehend that climate change is measured over the span of decades, not months, and that within a trend outliers may exist. This strip demonstrates a similar misconception about global warming, namely that if global warming were a real climatological force then global temperatures would rise consistently across time and that all locations on the planet would experience an equal increase in heat.

I'm also troubled that environmentalists are being portrayed as doomsday prognosticators, easily dismissed alongside nut jobs professing the impending Apocalypse. I don't recall Al Gore saying that ocean levels were going to rise up and swallow Manhattan next summer. Environmental groups, backed by many members of the scientific community, are simply stating that severe climate change and irreversible pollution are eventual outcomes of our current behaviors. I guess that concept is a little too nuanced to convey in a comic strip, though.

You Do the Math

My sweet old grandma (as opposed to my bipolar Vicidan-popping grandma) once said, "I think most people are better than average looking!" Hearing this, even at the age of six, I knew her math was off. But that's because I'm of siginificantly above average intelligence.

I hear a lot of folks complaining that only half of people have an IQ above 100, implying that our species is facing an epidemic that warrants correction. Unfortunately, we can't pull more people above the 100 mark if, by definition, 100 marks the median IQ, and if, by definition, the median marks the 50th percentile rank. Try as we may, half of all people will always below the median of intelligence (and looks, and dancing ability, and fitness, and income, and "Futurama" fast-action recall quoting ability).

Of course when people suggest life would be better if more people had IQs above 100, they don't literally expect the basic principles of statistics to bend to their will. Instead, they're imagining a utopia of an absolute, rather than relative, IQ jump within the population. These critics are treating IQ like fixed-value dollars, like when you see charts comparing skilled labor wages from 1890 to 1990, and in the bottom there's a little note that says "All figures in 1990 dollars." Ideally, the average IQ would go up in fixed "2007 IQ dollars."

But, not surprisingly, the world average IQ is continually going up in fixed 2007 IQ dollars! It's called the Flynn Effect, and its causes are highly logical. It's like inflation for the population's brain. You can tell your kids, "Back when I took the IQ test, a 148 actually meant something. You could take the SAT, solve one of those Sudoku puzzles, buy a pop, and still have 38 IQ points left over to put toward your M.A."

I don't get too worked up when folks talk about IQ in casual terms, either complaining about how stupid everyone is or about how stupid everyone isn't. I do get worked up, however, when the quest for higher fixed-value scores on intelligence measurements negatively affects policy or prompt society to dismiss the value of entire groups of citizens. The IQ test is a severely flawed measurement of individuals' intelligence--it's riddled with cultural biases that favor wealthy white males--and neither the IQ test nor any other single measurement tool should sway policy.

This op-ed in the Wall Street Journal disappointed me in its conclusions. The author, unlike many, displays a proper understanding of the math behind IQ distribution (what a relief!), but he persists in treating IQs as a reliable measurement of individuals' base educational potential:

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

He ultimately falls for the abysmal "you're poor because you're dumb" argument so popular among many conservatives.

It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

If this were true, as fixed-value IQs increased, fixed-value wealth would also increase, which simply isn't happening. We're damned to live in a world where, for any given population, half of all members will sit below the median level of wealth, just as they do for intelligence. And even my sweet old grandma isn't stupid enough to say that being dumb makes you poor.

Idiocracy and Dysgenics

I watched Idiocracy and it disturbed me more than most dystopian visions have. In the film, stupid people were said to reproduced more than smart people leading too a general dumbing down of the population to the point that - when the protagonist is defrosted in the year 2500 - humanity finds itself in a food crisis when they try to grow crops with Gatorade. That's good old fashioned Dysgenics which you might remember from such books as The Marching Morons.

Upon researching the topic I've become a lot less worried about any such effect but I wanted to describe some weakness in the theory I saw off the top of my head:

• People with low IQs might have more babies but they die young more often, so it's a wash
  
• People with high IQs don't necessarily have to reproduce more just so long as they recruit more. IE, they support progressive policies that help uplift others and make them reach their intellectual potential.
• As we gain more knowledge about genetics we draw closer to the end of evolution as we know it. IE, in the future if you think your baby is going to be dumb you'll just go to a doctor and have them fix it.
• If the effect were ever to become manifest it's highly improbable that it would effect the whole world equally. One society would figure out a way around it and would end up invading and taking over the rest.
  

Gay Sheep

I'm a little bit late to the game, but there are some researchers in Oregon trying to see if they can manipulate the sexual preferences of sheep by tinkering with their physiologies. The moral issues involved have gotten a little muddled, thanks to the combined efforts of PETA and Martina Navratilova, but I think I understand the form of the objections from liberal quarters. In particular, I think Navratilova's big objection is that the implication of working to figure out how to manipulate sexual preference seems to be that we would want to manipulate sexual preference. That would further imply, presumably, that certain sexual preferences are more desirable than, and thus superior to, others.

First, let me say that I think Navratilova mischaracterizes the research being done in Oregon; I think a fairer way of describing things is to say that researchers feel that the ability to manipulate sexual preference is a major test of our knowledge of the mechanisms involved.

Second, I want to just briefly mention one of my pet issues, which is that the distinction between genetics and choice in discussions of sexual preference acquisition is more apparent than real. It just doesn't make sense to talk about people choosing what they like and don't like. When people choose, all they're really doing is taking one course of action instead of the alternatives, but they do so on the basis of their previously-existing preferences. That is, what is a choice supposed to be if it's not an expression of preferences? The most charitable thing you can say about the whole thing is that you can't explain preference acquisition in terms of choice without falling into an infinite regress. Really, though, I think you can file this under "it's not even wrong". Actually, I'll do just that.

Update: To clarify, the only thing, here, I really consider "not even wrong" is the argument that people choose their sexual preferences. That particular position just doesn't make any kind of sense.

The concerns that Navratilova brings up are another matter. Those are coherent beliefs about the issues, they're just wrong or misapplied for various reasons. I don't think that the research should stop, nor am I especially worried about its implications, but I can at least understand what her objections are supposed to be.

Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map

If the Internet were a person, her achievements would be myriad: community-based knowledge creation, an expansive index of fetish pornography, instant access to a world of current events, free real-time communication with anyone one the planet, and universal access to massive libraries of publicly-funded data reserves! The World Wide Web, coupled with her sister Geospatial Data, brings you the National Atlas, a two-dimensional gold mine of place-based information about the United States.

Yes! Geospatial data! That's up there with Lego in my nerdly pleasure hierarchy.

The National Atlas has many awesome features - printable maps of every presidential election result since 1789, dynamic maps of monthly vegetation growth in America, downloadable raw data on which the maps are based - but the coolest way to impress your friends is with the National Atlas Map Maker. Go ahead, indulge in a few hours of exploration. Each layer is a tasty little nugget of data visually describing our country's energy use, geology, economic health, or some other nifty construct. Most data are disaggregated by county, which is neat when trying to illustrate, for example, how different San Francisco is from, say, Inyo County.

Not only are the maps a fun and easy way to absorb information about your United States, they're also a handy tool in political debates. Is your racist Midwestern uncle claiming that Mexicans are taking his job? Go ahead and show him that his county is less than 3% Hispanic, then let him observe the apparent lack of correlation between Hispanic population and jobs per capita and unemployment rates! You'll be the life of the party.

Or show all your cheese-eating in-laws that colon cancer rates are highly concentrated in the upper Midwest, then illustrate that the American West enjoys lower cancer rates than everyone else. Everyone likes a know-it-all.

Or, less argumentatively, simply peruse cool information like vegetable harvesting acreage or fertility rates among women over 40 or the location and magnitude of earthquakes since the late 16th century. (California leads the pack in all three categories.)

A caveat: Raw number data in the same category might not be easily compared across time periods due to varied distribution of color codes from one map to the next. For example, in the map of "Percent of Population: White" for 2000, the bright yellow indicates a percentage range of 0.1 to 33.1; in the 1980 map of the same variable, the bright yellow represents 6.332 to 38.928 percentage points. This distribution is based on a formula I learned about in my brief ArcGIS training; I forgot the name of the formula, but it distributes ranges in a more informative way than a simple linear distribution would.

Hopefully USGS will include a map illustrating climate change over the centuries and degades once it's available. I look forward to the depressing news.

Happy mapmaking!

It's not an endorsement; it's just cowardace

I'm both an atheist and an avid user of and advocate for the National Park Service, so I feel kinda caught in the middle of this debate. The long and short of it, though, is that NPS is being cowardly and disloyal to its mission. However, there are two distinct debates occurring simultaneously, and it's important not to conflate the two.

Debate One: Should the National Park Service permit non-scientific beliefs to influence their educational materials and official statements? Not in a million years! (Or 6,000 years, if that's your game.) If what the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility say is true, and "Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature," then I'm outraged. As a governmental entity (and as an organization statedly devoted to education about the natural world), it's legally and ethically wrong for NPS to bow to religion in the face of scientific fact. Boo, National Park System!

Debate Two: Should the National Park Service allow a religious-themed publication to be sold in its bookstore? Sure, why not? As Paul pointed out, there are plenty of books sold in the Grand Canyon bookstore describing the spiritual (and geologically inaccurate) beliefs of American Indians, and permitting Christian creationist texts is no different. The bookstore and giftshop is a clearinghouse for Grand Canyon-themed items, not a library of fact and endorsements. (They also sell Grand Canyon shot glasses in the giftshop. I wouldn't interpret that as a government endorsement to drink.) It's important to note that few, if any, items sold in the bookstore are published or produced by the National Park Service; they are created by private or non-profit groups and sold on NPS property. Insisting that the Grand Canyon bookstore only sell items devoid of religious content is like demanding that public libraries not carry The Holy Bible, lest doing so be interpreted as an endorsement of Christianity. The NPS is permitting a venue in which all voices (no matter how crazy) are heard. Hooray, National Park Service!

If I were to take issue with anything NPS does, I'd complain about their pro-Manifest Destiny video presentation at Mount Rushmore National Monument. Blech.

Sloppy Metaphysics

Ugh...

Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future.

Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government’s chief scientist. The paper covering robots’ rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.

“If we make conscious robots they would want to have rights and they probably should,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Centre of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Sure, but so what? We're not 50 years away from conscious robots. We might be 50 years away from robots that seem to all outward appearances to be conscious, but that's not the same thing.

It's not even that consciousness couldn't be artificially created. If, for instance, consciousness is just an emergent property of brains set up and functioning like our own, then there's no reason, in principle, that we couldn't replicate the necessary conditions to give rise to consciousness artificially. That's not the way robots or artificial intelligence work, though. And why should they? It seems pointlessly complicated to try to create a robot that functions mechanically the way we do, since all we're really after in a robot is the functionality of responding in the desired way to stimuli we provide.

In fact, the prospect of artificially inducing consciousness seems like an awfully good incentive not to take the consciousness-inducing strategy with a robot, since then you get into precisely those sorts of thorny ethical issues.

Wait, THAT'S the REAL reason he hasn't proposed yet

Ladies, it's not that your marriage-phobic boyfriend is boycotting the institution until same-sex couples can also enjoy the rights of matrimony. Nope, it's that all the tofu he sucks down is making him question opposite-sex couples to begin with. Soy makes you gay, apparently.

Don't believe me? Just ask this guy.

Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you're a woman, you're flooding your system with a substance it can't handle in surplus. If you're a man, you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your "female side," physically and mentally.

In fetal development, the default is being female. All humans (even in old age) tend toward femininity. The main thing that keeps men from diverging into the female pattern is testosterone, and testosterone is suppressed by an excess of estrogen.

See, he's using almost real science (soy contains phytoestrogens that mimic estrogen; estrogen is the primary female sex hormone) and applying it to theoretically and empirically unfounded statements (soy makes you feminine). Clever. This is a dismissable (dare I say bat shit crazy) application of the real-science-plus-fake-conclusions tactic that's especially popular among people who foster anti-scientific thinking.

But there are many who employ the methods of scientists and researchers, then twist these methods beyond recognition into a mangled clump of speculation, superstition, and prejudice, but still have their ideas taken seriously! Take the Intelligent Design team or anti-feminists, for example.

All this talk about soy-based estrogens got met thinking, though. Given that about two-thirds of soybeans grown in America are fed to livestock, and given that a cow's diet is as much soybean as anything else, maybe beef is to blame for the gay epidemic. I feel so sorry for those millions of beef steers who have to spend their entire two years on the planet questioning their own bovine sexuality.

By the way, could there be a more hilarious headline than "A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals"? That wins.

What Our Children Isn't Learning

In response to the rising importance to school administration of math and language arts test scores, many schools are requiring students to take two periods each of those "core" classes. Of course, the school day is only so long and something's got to give - schools aren't just adding two periods to the day.

Sure enough, as this AP article discusses, many schools are dropping electives for their students:

Havenscourt Middle School in Oakland, Calif., decided to require two class periods of the core subjects for all students. The change left no time for electives and forced the school to drop wood shop, art, music and Spanish. Now, those electives and others are offered before and after school as extras.

Now, depending on the particular elective in question, I might be more or less bothered by its removal from the regular school day. And the article mentions the standard, abstract objections to narrowing the curriculum so severely. What the article fails to mention, however, is a phenomenon that is occurring in some middle schools: the removal of science and history classes to make room for additional math and reading. (I do not know for sure, though I guess, that this phenomenon is somewhat less common in high schools, which, I assume, have more of an eye toward university entrance requirements.) Indeed, the words "science" and "history" do not even appear in the article.

It probably goes without saying why this development is unfortunate - just off the top of my head, much of the reason we teach math and language arts in the first place is that we ultimately want to facilitate the learning of science and history, and one has a hard time imagining why 12-year-olds would care as much about math or reading if they didn't have science or history to apply their skills to - and it's definitely noteworthy, so I'd hope to read more about it in the papers.

Update: Oh man. It's like the world conspires to provide me with convenient illustrations to fill out and expand upon my blog-points:

A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower.

Among the factors contributing to America's low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say.

"American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close," said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University.

...

The study found that over the past 20 years:

• The percentage of U.S. adults who accept evolution declined from 45 to 40 percent.
  
• The percentage overtly rejecting evolution declined from 48 to 39 percent, however.
  
• And the percentage of adults who were unsure increased, from 7 to 21 percent.

So while the survey doesn't deal directly with the practice of double-blocking math and English at the expense of science, it is evidence of increasing disregard for science in general in American society.

The liberal instinct might be to blame this all on religious conservatives muddying the waters with quackery like "intelligent design" theory, but we shouldn't neglect entirely the impact of the rise of standardized testing. The emphasis of such tests is almost always predominately - if not exclusively - on math and language arts. Problem is, big chunks of those subjects aren't terribly useful unless you can apply them to science or history. It would be a shame if we managed to boost our kids' math and reading scores only at the net expense of their bag of useful skills.

Relativism Run Amok

Since when did libertarians get so wishy-washy?

Creationists, after all, are just as sure that they are right about Darwin as evolutionists think themselves to be.

Of course, in education, Darwin is just the beginning: Is phonics-based instruction the right or wrong way to teach reading? Should American history be taught in a “traditional” way that focuses on the nation’s great achievements, or is it right to focus on the country’s flaws? What amount of time should students spend studying fine art instead of, say, physics? Is it wrong for a student newspaper to run an article critical of the school’s principal? And so on…

Clearly, when it comes to countless disputes in education, what is truly right or truly wrong is very difficult to know. With that in mind, we must answer the question: Is it better that government impose one idea of what’s right on all children, or that parents be able to seek freely what they think is right for their own kids?

Phonics-based instruction is controversial because the data are mixed. Evolution is controversial because some people reject the fundamental premises of scientific inquiry.

Now, parents can, if they so choose, pull their children out of the public school system and impose upon them any manner of ridiculous notions by sticking them in alternative educational environments. The government, however, has no obligation to subsidize such behavior. This is particularly true in the case of the evolution controversy, as the only reasons to reject evolution are religious.

But really, it's the relativism that's the problem - you just can't take it seriously. I, after all, am just as sure that I am right about school choice as libertarians think themselves to be. Is it better that the government impose one idea of what's right - in this case, school choice - on all children? It cuts both ways.

Well, actually, it doesn't cut at all.

P.S. - Why all these references to Darwin? The debate isn't about Darwin, it's about evolution. Darwin was a man; evolution is a set of ideas. Darwin contributed many of those ideas, but the only reason I can think of to frame the debate as about him is that you don't want to engage the actual ideas.

In which I (Partially) Agree with PZ Myers

PZ Myers had a post yesterday that I thought took a good point and went too far with it. Plus, my objection ties in very conveniently with something I was trying to express in the comments to this post from Kevin.

Myers wants to "dash some cold water on any sense of triumphalism on the pro-science side" that might result from creationists losing their majority on the Kansas State Board of Education. Myers says:

Elections and courts are stop-gaps. They are ways to temporarily block trends from becoming entrenched in our social institutions, but as I tell everyone, all we have to do is lose one and we're screwed. We are on the losing side as long as our response consists of throwing up more and more sandbags in the face of a rising flood—we need to get to the source of our problems and work there, and if we put all our efforts into these legalisms and desperately close elections, we're being distracted from the work that's really essential.

But then Myers conspicuously fails to describe what, exactly, the "really essential" work is, except to say that

[I]n the long term, the elections don't matter. What counts are the thoughts of 15 year old kids right now, and how their minds are being shaped, and I guarantee you that there are damn few of them who even knew there was a school board election going on. What are they reading? What are they being taught in school? What are their parents telling them, and what will they tell their kids 10-20 years from now? How will they vote when they're franchised in a few years?

My concern here is that when you say that the important thing isn't political victory, but winning over hearts and minds, it's easy to forget that political victories are good ways to win over hearts and minds. After all, how do you convince the 15-year-olds of today to reject bad science in the future if not by teaching them to embrace sound science now? And how do you teach them sound science now? One of the first steps I can think of is to make sure that people who appreciate sound science are the ones making decisions about large-scale education policy.

It's absolutely true, of course, that people's beliefs and convictions influence the way they impact public policy, but the causation works in both directions.

My guess is that there's some tendency to think of politics as somehow inherently cynical or dirty; the worlds of ideas or hands-on intervention are more admirable because they're closer to being "really essential". That's a topic for another post, maybe.

Update: At the Panda's Thumb, Reed Cartwright has an example of what I mean.