February 2009 Archives

US may boycott racism conference   BBC News

The US is likely to boycott a UN racism conference, reports suggest, saying a text drawn up for the event criticises Israel and restricts freedom of speech.

...In 2001, US and Israeli delegates walked out of a similar conference in Durban, South Africa, when a draft document likened Zionism to racism.

The 2001 draft expressed "deep concern" at the "increase of racist practices of Zionism and anti-Semitism".

It talked of the emergence of "movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas, in particular the Zionist movement, which is based on racial superiority".
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...US officials say they are also concerned that some sections of the draft - which call for restrictions on the defamation of religions - could threaten free speech.

via videosift.com

'Philosophy's great experiment' by Edmonds and Warburton ~ Prospect Magazine

Katja Wiech is a cheerful young German researcher who is fascinated by pain. She's discovered many things--for example, when devout Catholics are given electric shocks while looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary they feel less pain than atheists do when administered the same unpleasant treatment....

Wiech is a neurologist. But here's the strange thing: she is working with philosophers. The caricature of a philosopher is of an otherworldly professor sitting in a comfy armchair in an Oxbridge college, speculating on the nature of reality using only his or her intellect and a few books. This has some basis in reality. Chemistry requires test tubes, history needs documents. In recent years, the main tool of the philosopher has been grey matter. The subject's evolution can be painfully slow, tiptoeing forward from footnote to footnote. But not always. Every so often a new movement overturns the orthodoxies of received opinion. We might just be entering one of those phases.

Link here to the TED site to access this video of Barry Schwartz  and related discussions.

Scientists Should Not Study Race and IQ  --Nature

In the first of two opposing commentaries, Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good. In the second, Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue that such research is both morally defensible and important for the pursuit of truth...

Scientists Should Study Race and IQ -- Nature

In this, the second of two opposing commentaries, Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams argue that such research is both morally defensible and important for the pursuit of truth. In the first, Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good.

Woman blinded by acid wants same fate for attacker - CNN.com

Ameneh Bahrami is certain that one day she'll meet someone, fall in love and get married. But when her wedding day comes, her husband won't see her eyes, and she won't see her husband. Bahrami is blind, the victim of an acid attack by a spurned suitor. Ameneh Bahrami said her attacker pestered her with marriage demands. Ameneh Bahrami said her attacker pestered her with marriage demands.

If she gets her way, her attacker will suffer the same fate. The 31-year-old Iranian is demanding the ancient punishment of "an eye for an eye," and, in accordance with Islamic law, she wants to blind Majid Movahedi, the man who blinded her.

The Gospel According to Darwin: Richard Dawkins Times Online

Just as you entrust your travel to a Boeing 747 rather than a magic carpet or a broomstick; just as you take your tumour to the best surgeon available, rather than a shaman or a mundu mugu, so you will find that the scientific version of truth works. You can use it to navigate through the real world. Science predicts, with complete certainty unless the end of the world intervenes, that the city of Shanghai will experience a total eclipse of the sun on July 22, 2009. Theories about the moon god devouring the sun god may be poetic, and they may cohere with other aspects of a tribe's world view, but they won't predict the date, time and place of an eclipse. Science will, and with an accuracy you could set your watch by. Science gets you to the moon and back.

Even if we bend over backwards to concede that scientific truth is no more than that which enables you to pilot your way reliably, safely and predictably around the real universe, it is in exactly this sense that - at the very least - evolution is true.

The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief - New Scientist

SCIENCE has allowed us to smooth over many of the natural ups and downs of human existence. We have predictable harvests, food on supermarket shelves, savings and pensions that will help us get through difficult times, and economies that provide most people with what they need to survive. Alongside these developments a rational, scientific world view has become the dominant mode of thought.

Take the comforts away, however, and the rationality often evaporates too. When human beings lose control over their lives, they become more prone to superstition, spiritual searchings and conspiracy theories.

 Natural-Born Dualists -- Edge.org

For the last few years I have been interested in common sense dualism, which is the notion that people have two ways of looking at the world. We see the world in terms of material bodies, including our own bodies, and in terms of immaterial souls. And we are dualists; we see bodies and souls as distinct.

Our dualistic conception isn't an airy intellectual thing; it is common sense, and rooted in a phenomenological experience. We do not feel that we are material things, physical bodies. The notion that we are machines made of meat, as Marvin Minsky once put it, is unintuitive and unnatural. Instead, we feel as if we occupy our bodies. We possess them. We own them. Because of this, we talk about my brain, or my body, using the same language of possession that we use when we talk about my car, or my child. These are things that we possess, that we are intimately related to--but not what we are.

Born believers: How Your Brain Creates God - New Scientist

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation...

An alternative [theory] being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

MMR Doctor Andrew Wakefield Fixed Data on Autism - Times Online

The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

The DNA of Politics by James Q. Wilson, City Journal Winter 2009

Three political science professors--John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing--have studied political attitudes among a large number of twins in America and Australia. They measured the attitudes with something called the Wilson-Patterson Scale (I am not the Wilson after whom it was named), which asks whether a respondent agrees or disagrees with 28 words or phrases, such as "death penalty," "school prayer," "pacifism," or "gay rights." They then compared the similarity of the responses among identical twins with the similarity among fraternal twins. They found that, for all 28 taken together, the identical twins did indeed agree with each other more often than the fraternal ones did--and that genes accounted for about 40 percent of the difference between the two groups.