The Tipsy Hero   By Alexander Nazaryan    - NYTimes.com

A student in one of my English classes recently asked about the endless references to drinking wine in "The Odyssey." The question, which had nothing to do with my lesson, was a good one. Wine has a constant presence in the epic poem, whose most famous image is probably Homer's evocation of the "wine-dark sea" that Odysseus sails in search of his native Ithaka. Sometimes it is mere tonic on an impossibly long journey home from the Trojan War, but on occasion wine is more powerful than the sword, as when Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops by getting him drunk. Homer may have been blind, but his taste buds were alive to wine, and he reserved his richest adjectives for it: heady, mellow, ruddy, shining, glowing, seasoned, hearty, honeyed, glistening, heart-warming, and, of course, irresistible.

Do You Believe in Free Will?  --PsyBlog

This debate about free will is so interesting - and knotted - that philosophers can't keep away from it; but psychologists, on the other hand, perhaps sensing no end to the argument, can't help their minds wandering away to more practical points. They have focused more on how beliefs in free will might affect our behaviour and whether, more generally, there might be some reason why we seem predisposed to think we have it.

In new research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Baumeister, Masicampo and DeWall (2009) theorise that a belief in free will may be partly what oils the wheels of society, what encourages us to treat each other respectfully. They explore this theory with three studies, two on helping behaviours and one on aggression.

Scientists Find that Low Self-Esteem & Materialism Goes Hand -- DailyGalaxy

The paradox that findings such as these bring up, is that consumerism is good for the economy but bad for the individual. In the short run, it's good for the economy when young people believe they need to buy an entirely new wardrobe every year, for example. But the hidden cost is much higher than the dollar amount. There are costs in happiness when people believe that their value is extrinsic. There are also environmental costs associated with widespread materialism.

In the book "Happiness: Lessons From a New Science", Richard Layard exposes a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most of us want more income so we can consume more. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe and Japan.

Women On Faith -- washingtonpost.com

I have several friends who have died of cancer over the years. Two of them gave their husbands permission to have sexual relations with someone else when they became unable to meet their husband's needs. They asked only that they not be told about it and that their husbands be discreet. Both husbands did have affairs, which did not last but which made it easier for them to care for their wives. I also had a woman friend whose husband had cancer. She tried to ask him about making the same arrangement, but he couldn't deal with it. She had sex with someone else anyway, she was very discreet, and said it was the only way she managed to get through the terrible years of watching her husband die. Is this moral?. Is it more moral if you have a spouse's permission? Is it worse for a woman to have sex with someone else when her husband is dying?

The Virtues of Godlessness - ChronicleReview.com

What are societies like when faith in God is minimal, church attendance is drastically low, and religion is a distinctly muted and marginal aspect of everyday life?

Many people assume that religion is what keeps people moral, that a society without God would be hell on earth: rampant with immorality, full of evil, and teeming with depravity. But that doesn't seem to be the case for Scandinavians in those two countries. Although they may have relatively high rates of petty crime and burglary, and although these crime rates have been on the rise in recent decades, their overall rates of violent crime -- including murder, aggravated assault, and rape -- are among the lowest on earth. Yet the majority of Danes and Swedes do not believe that God is "up there," keeping diligent tabs on their behavior, slating the good for heaven and the wicked for hell. Most Danes and Swedes don't believe that sin permeates the world, and that only Jesus, the Son of God, who died for their sins, can serve as a remedy. In fact, most Danes and Swedes don't even believe in the notion of "sin."

Seeing and Believing  -- Jerry A. Coyne, The New Republic

And so the culture wars continue between science and religion. On one side we have a scientific establishment and a court system determined to let children learn evolution rather than religious mythology, and on the other side the many Americans who passionately resist those efforts. It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors. Just one in eight of us think that evolution should be taught in the biology classroom without including a creationist alternative. Among thirty-four Western countries surveyed for the acceptance of evolution, the United States ranked a dismal thirty-third, just above Turkey. Throughout our country, school boards are trying to water down the teaching of evolution or sneak creationism in beside it. And the opponents of Darwinism are not limited to snake-handlers from the Bible Belt; they include some people you know. As Karl Giberson notes in Saving Darwin, "Most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the Earth is ten thousand years old."

Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy By DENNIS OVERBYE    - NYTimes.com

To be honest, the restoration of science was the least of it, but when Barack Obama proclaimed during his Inaugural Address that he would "restore science to its rightful place," you could feel a dark cloud lifting like a sigh from the shoulders of the scientific community in this country.

When the new president went on vowing to harness the sun, the wind and the soil, and to "wield technology's wonders," I felt the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares.

Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't - New York Times

A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control. As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.

"Is it an illusion? That's the question," said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.

"If people freak at evolution, etc.," he wrote in an e-mail message, "how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?"

Exploring Consciousness through the Study of Bees -- Scientific American

Although these experiments do not tell us that bees are conscious, they caution us that we have no principled reason at this point to reject this assertion. Bees are highly adaptive and sophisticated creatures with a bit fewer than one million neurons, which are interconnected in ways that are beyond our current understanding, jammed into less than one cubic millimeter of brain tissue. The neural density in the bee's brain is about 10 times higher than that in a mammalian ce­rebral cortex, which most of us take to be the pinnacle of evolu­tion on this planet. In humans, widespread loss of cerebral cortex, as in the vegetative patient Terri Schiavo, leads to an irreversible loss of con­scious­ness. That is not to say that a cerebral cortex is necessary for consciousness in creatures with a different evolutionary heritage.

Is Quantum Mechanics Controlling Your Thoughts? --| Discover Magazine

It is in this faster-than-light subatomic communication, Hameroff says, that consciousness is born. Anesthetics get in the way of the dancing electrons and stop the gyration at its quantum-mechanical core; that is how they are able to switch consciousness off.

It is still a long way from Hameroff's hypo­thetical (and experimentally unproven) quantum neurons to a sentient, conscious human brain. But many human experiences, Hameroff says, from dreams to subconscious emotions to fuzzy memory, seem closer to the Alice in Wonderland rules governing the quantum world than to the cut-and-dried reality that classical physics suggests. Discovering a quantum portal within every neuron in your head might be the ultimate trip through the looking glass.

Atheist Bus Adverts  -- Telegraph.co.uk 

Officials at the Advertising Standards Authority are now considering whether to tackle the question that has taxed the minds of the world's greatest thinkers for centuries.

 

The First True Scientist -- BBC News

But just because Western Europe languished in the Dark Ages, does not mean there was stagnation elsewhere. Indeed, the period between the 9th and 13th Centuries marked the Golden Age of Arabic science. Great advances were made in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, physics, chemistry and philosophy. Among the many geniuses of that period Ibn al-Haytham stands taller than all the others.

Ibn al-Haytham is regarded as the father of the modern scientific method.

As commonly defined, this is the approach to investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge, based on the gathering of data through observation and measurement, followed by the formulation and testing of hypotheses to explain the data.

Atheists Have Moral Reflections Too  | Sue Blackmore | guardian.co.uk

An online petition is hoping to persuade BBC editors to open up Thought for the Day to non-believers I've always enjoyed Thought for the Day (TFTD), that two-minute spot in the middle of Radio 4's Today programme, which seems to be a brief respite from the hard news, and a chance for someone to give moral or ethical reflections on current events. The trouble is that only religious speakers are invited. Rabbis, priests, imams, chaplains, and monks are there, but never humanists, agnostics, or atheists.

Why not? Wouldn't it be better if they were? Morality is not the sole prerogative of the religious - there are even reasons to think that the irreligious are more moral. So why shouldn't we be invited to speak on TFTD?

Evolutionary gems  -- Scienceblogs.com

This week, Nature magazine published a short list of recent important developments in evolutionary biology that support the theory of evolution, as a tool to help explain that evolution is definitely a dynamic and useful theory in our field and to demonstrate that the evidence is still growing. Here's a short summary of the 15 stories the editors picked out, but you should also read the freely available article, 15 Evolutionary Gems [pdf].  Teachers, put this in your classroom!

Americans Believe Religion is Losing Clout --Gallup.com

Two-thirds of U.S. adults today perceive that the influence of religion in American life is waning, while just 27% believe it is rising. This represents a sharp decline in the image of religion compared with only three years ago, when 50% thought its influence was on an upswing, and marks one of the weakest readings on the influence of religion in Gallup's five-decade history of asking the question.