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on March 9, 2010

Well. There's another paper out discussing science blogs, which is a good thing, I suppose. I just find the conclusion a bit disappointing. Bora has an exhaustive dissection, and both The Panda's Thumb and Cosmic Variance have briefer (they'd have to be! Bora got loquacious) discussions of the topic.

Where the author loses me is with this summary.

To become a tool for non-scientist participation, science blogs need to stabilize as a genre or as a set of subgenres where smaller conversations may facilitate more meaningful participation from members of the public. Science bloggers need to become more aware of their audience, welcome non-scientists, and focus on explanatory, interpretative, and critical modes of communication rather than on reporting and opinionating.

We don't need to 'stabilize' on anything: the virtue of this medium is unfettered diversity. Pharyngula is not to everybody's taste (really!), but is just right for some others — the wonderful part of the science blogosphere is that we have so many different ideas bouncing around out here. Why, there are even people who disagree with me!

I also think I am pretty aware of my audience, and if you look at the comment threads here, they aren't just scientists. This is the gladiatorial arena of the science blogosphere, and we don't restrict attendance to the prissy ol' patricians — everyone likes a good bloody rhetorical battle now and then. I know my readers like it when the bestiarii take on those animals, the creationists, and they also like the gladiatorial competitions between equals. And then we often break into homilies and tutorials. If that isn't appealing to a wide audience, I don't know what is.

I can't help but think that the author had some preconceptions about how a science blog should be (which usually means antiseptic, pure, aloof, esoteric, and technical) and found that they are rarely that way at all. And was a bit disappointed.

What Is Knowledge?

Published

Larry Moran

on March 9, 2010

John Wilkins said something in the comments on his blog [On the need for grownups [Thoughts from Kansas]] that I'd like to discuss.

I do not think, contrary to some, that science exhausts the realm of knowledge, largely because I have a fairly broad and fallibilistic notion of what it is to know something – you can know that it is wrong to eat fish on a Friday, for example, or that one must not abuse children, neither of which are scientific questions. So I have no truck for those who merely assert that knowledge is all and only scientific – you have to argue for it.

I'm one of those naive scientists who don't understand philosophy so forgive me if I make some silly errors in logic.¹

First, John, I wish you'd stop making false claims about those people you disagree with. I don't know anyone who simply ASSERTS that science is the only way of knowing. On the other hand, I do know people (I am one) who adopt it as a working hypothesis.

I'm looking for evidence of other ways of knowing that might provide valid knowledge. So far I haven't found any so my hypothesis hasn't been falsified.

Now, the problem here falls into the realm of epistemology—defined as "the study of knowledge and justified belief" (Epistemology). As with most philosophical issues, the discussions in that field are far too obtuse for most people to follow. Just look at the article I linked to. I imagine that 99% of people who follow that link will not read past the first section on "What Is Knowledge?"

Here's how I think of "knowledge" in the context of this debate. Knowledge, in my mind, is a form of justified belief that can be affirmed as true by all people. In other words, "knowledge" in this sense is something that applies universally and not just to particular individuals. Your definition of "knowledge" is much broader and that means we are talking past each other. I'm surprised you didn't recognize this.

Here are some examples. I think we should "know" that the Earth revolves around the sun, we should "know" that life evolved from a common ancestor, we should "know" that our species was not almost wiped out by a giant flood in 2500 BCE, we should "know" that some humans believe things that aren't true, and we should "know" that humans have a finite life span. These are all examples of the kind of knowledge that I'm referring to.

Note that there's an immediate problem here since clearly not everyone agrees with my statements of knowledge. In other words, they are not really universally accepted. Does that disqualify them from being examples of true knowledge? Perhaps, but I think we can at least agree that they are good candidates for the kind of knowledge I'm talking about. (We can't realistically demand "universal" acceptance since there will always be some kooks who disagree with even the most obvious examples of knowledge.)

Another potential candidate is, "God exists." The tough part is trying to decide which of these potential candidates for knowledge are true and which ones aren't. The ones we reject don't count as knowledge. I claim that the scientific way of knowing is a tried and true approach to arriving at knowledge of this sort, i.e. things that we can universally agree on. I don't see any other ways of knowing that have achieved the objective.

What about statement such as, "I know that it's wrong to eat fish on Friday" or "It's wrong to abuse children"? I don't think either of those qualify as "knowledge" in the sense that I'm concerned with. You may believe that it's wrong to eat fish on Friday and that belief may be justified by your desire to remain a respected member of your Roman Catholic church, but it hardly qualifies as the kind of knowledge that might be universally accepted as true.

The rule that you shouldn't abuse children isn't "knowledge" at all, in my opinion. It's a rule that our society accepts in order to promote peace and harmony and conform to our concepts of rights and respect for fellow humans.

That rule may be informed by evidence and rationality or it may derive from what your pastor tells you about God's perceived will. But no matter how you come to accept these rules of society they don't count as potential examples of universal knowledge. At best, the rule is secondarily derived from such potential universal knowledge that remains to be proven (Universal Moral Laws).

I'm not sure if this makes sense.

One more thing, when John says, "neither of which are scientific questions" it reveals a different version of science than the one I propose. I'm trying to make the case for science as a way of knowing and, if John accepts my definition, then every question about knowledge is potentially a scientific question. One can't just arbitrarily dismiss something as not being a scientific question without explaining why you can't get an answer by applying rationality, evidence, and skepticism. When John dismisses questions arbitrarily it's called "begging the question."

His logic goes like this:
1: Science can address all questions about knowledge.
2: Some questions are not scientific.
3: Therefore, science can't address all questions.

1. John Wilkins says, "First of all I have little confidence that scientists and other science-based critics of the philosophical arguments have a good grasp of what those arguments are."

Abuse scandal-riddled Ratzinger must resign

Published

rmonteux

on March 9, 2010

Dragan Pavlovic – Every officer in charge, politicians and representatives of public responsibility should have to be underwritten for what happens in his house. And if one’s own organization offenses weight as heavily as in the widening scandal around the abuse of children in church-run facilities, there can be no alternative but the resignation of [...]

Kindness and generosity are contagious

Published

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/kindness-spreads/

on March 9, 2010

In findings sure to gladden the heart of anyone who’s ever wondered whether tiny acts of kindness have larger consequences, researchers have shown that generosity is contagious.

Goodness spurs goodness, they found: A single act can influence dozens more.

In a game where selfishness made more sense than cooperation, acts of giving were “tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more,” wrote political scientist James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University.

Their findings, published March 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the latest in a series of studies the pair have conducted on the spread of behaviors through social networks.

In other papers, they’ve described the spread of obesity, loneliness, happiness and smoking. But there was no way to know whether those apparent behavioral contagions were actually just correlations. People who are overweight, for example, might simply tend to befriend other overweight people, or live in an area where high-fat, low-nutrient diets are the norm.

The latest research was designed to identify cause-and-effect links.

“A nasty attempt to coerce Danish newspapers into apologizing for the cartoons of Muhammad”

Published

on March 9, 2010

Christopher Hitchens, for Slate magazine, attacks the lawyers threatening Danish publishers over the Jyllands-Posten cartoons.

I have just finished reading one of the most astoundingly stupid and nasty documents ever to have landed on my desk. It consists of a letter from a law firm in Saudi Arabia, run by a man named Ahmed Zaki Yamani, to a group of newspapers in Scandinavia. I quote directly from its main paragraphs:

Over the past months my law firm has been contacted by several thousand descendants of the Prophet, who have learned about your newspaper’s republication of the drawing, depicting their esteemed ancestor as a terrorist suicide bomber with a bomb in his turban.

As descendants of the Prophet, these individuals feel personally insulted, emotionally distressed and defamed by your newspaper’s re-publication of the drawing. They have therefore retained my law firm and instructed me to approach you …

So that’s the stupid part—the idea that people who claim descent from a seventh-century warlord and preacher have standing to sue for hurt feelings. The nasty bit comes a few paragraphs later:

[I]t is my belief that your newspaper’s fulfillment of the above-mentioned conditions would be perceived as a sign of respect and understanding throughout the Muslim world in general, and your newspaper might thus help resolve the severe conflict, which your re-publication of the drawing has created. As you may be aware, this conflict is still affecting Danish and Arab interests, in particular in the Middle East, where a number of Danish products are still being boycotted.

It is impossible not to notice the element of threat and menace contained in the second extract. It’s not difficult to remind Danes of the organized campaign of hysterical retribution, ranging from the burnings of embassies to the mob-killing of civilians, that followed the first publication of some mild caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in 2005. Only a little further backstory is required: In 2008, it was discovered that a cell of eager murderers was planning to kill those who authored the caricatures, and in solidarity a large number of Danish newspapers reprinted the drawings in order to express their support for freedom of speech. Then, on New Year’s 2009, a Somali fundamentalistchopped his way into the house of 74-year-old cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who was having a sleepover with his granddaughter, and very nearly succeeded in axing them both to death. The apology for all this, however, is supposed to be forthcoming not from the aggressors and inciters but from their victims. Late last month, Copenhagen newspaper Politiken agreed to make a public apology on the terms dictated by the Yamani law firm.

Continues: http://www.slate.com/id/2247256/

95%: the odds that we are causing climate change

Published

on March 9, 2010

The evidence that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

The “fingerprints” of human influence on the climate can be detected not only in rising temperatures but also in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000 sq km a decade.

The study, by senior scientists from the Met Office Hadley Centre, Edinburgh University, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, concluded that there was an “increasingly remote possibility” that the sceptics were right that human activities were having no discernible impact. There was a less than 5 per cent likelihood that natural variations in climate were responsible for the changes.

The study said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had understated mankind’s overall contribution to climate change. The IPCC had said in 2007 that there was no evidence of warming in the Antarctic. However, the panel said that the latest observations showed that man-made emissions were having an impact on even the remotest continent.

Continues: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7050341.ece

The Frog Scientist

Published

on March 9, 2010

I just got my hands on a very interesting book for the younger set: it's aimed at kids in grades 5-8, and it's a description of the life and work of a real live scientist, someone who does both field and lab work, and studies development and the effects of environmental toxins on reproduction. The man is Tyrone Hayes at UC Berkeley, and the book is The Frog Scientist^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, by Pamela Turner. It's excellent stuff — it humanizes the scientist and also does a very good job of letting kids see what scientists actually do in their research, and why they're doing it. If you've got a young one who's thinking about being a scientist when she or he grows up, you might want to grab this book as a little inspiring incentive.

Plus it has lots of fabulous photos of frogs. You can't go wrong.

One other thing: the School Library Journal is having a battle of the books, with a poll to bring a book up into the final round of voting. There's a shortage of science books in the listing: there's The Frog Scientist, and another one about Darwin, Charles and Emma, but otherwise, while the other books may be very good (I have heard good things about The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, and it's not because it has the word "evolution" in the title), there isn't much in the way of kid's books on science. If you're familiar with any of these, vote!

Brian Cox on “the greatest age of discovery our civilization has known”

Published

on March 9, 2010

Professor Brian Cox, who will be delivering the Voltaire Lecture 2010 for the British Humanist Association and the South Place Ethical Society next month, is presenting a new series on BBC2, Wonders of the Solar System. “Science is different to all the other systems of thought, the belief systems that have been practiced in this city for millennia,” he says at one point, “because you don’t need faith in it, you can check that it works.”

Professor Brian Cox visits some of the most stunning locations on earth to describe how the laws of nature have carved natural wonders across the solar system.

In this first episode Brian explores the powerhouse of them all, the sun. In India he witnesses a total solar eclipse – when the link to the light and heat that sustains us is cut off for a few precious minutes.

But heat and light are not the only power of the sun over the solar system. In Norway, Brian watches the battle between the sun’s wind and earth, as the night sky glows with the northern lights.

Beyond earth, the solar wind continues, creating dazzling aurora on other planets. Brian makes contact with Voyager, a probe that has been travelling since its launch 30 years ago. Now 14 billion kilometres away, Voyager has just detected the solar wind is beginning to peter out. But even here we haven’t reached the end of the sun’s rule.

Brian explains how its greatest power, gravity, reaches out for hundreds of billions of kilometres, where the lightest gravitational touch encircles our solar system in a mysterious cloud of comets.

You can watch the first episode on iPlayer until next Sunday.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rf172/Wonders_of_the_Solar_System_Empire_of_the_Sun/

Did Galileo fudge the findings?

Published

on March 9, 2010

Galileo Galilei was right: Earth moves around the Sun, just as Nicolaus Copernicus said it did in 1543. But had Galileo followed the results of his observations to their logical conclusion, he should have backed another system — the Tychonic view that Earth didn’t move, and that everything else circled around it and the Sun, as developed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century.

This is the conclusion that Christopher Graney, a physicist at Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky, came to after reading manuscripts from another astronomer who was active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, at the same time as Galileo.

Graney suggested in 2008 that Galileo’s observations of stars were actually diffraction patterns called Airy disks — patterns of concentric circles that arise when light from a point source, such as a star, passes through a hole. Diffraction hadn’t been discovered in Galileo’s time, so he was unaware of the phenomenon and believed what his eyes, or his telescope, were telling him and used the observations to estimate the size and distance of stars. As a result, he got the distances of the stars too short by a factor of thousands (see ‘Galileo duped by diffraction‘).

Continues: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100305/full/news.2010.105.html

Roy Ashburn outs himself

Published

on March 9, 2010

Roy Ashburn, California legislator, opponent of gay equality, unwilling to even recognize gay rights activists, has admitted at the age of 55 that he is gay.

That is so sad. To live a half-century in denial, to be so steeped in self-loathing that you build a career on stamping down people just like yourself, and to only now wake up and confront the truth…assuming he lives into his 70s, that's an admission that two thirds to three quarters of your life was spent living a lie.

This one life is all you've got, Roy. Live it by being true to yourself.

Bing Discovers Dark Matter!

Published

Bing

on March 9, 2010

I'm already rehearsing the acceptance speech for my Nobel Prize. I figured it out, you see. Scientists have been looking in all the wrong places, you know, like in deep space around galaxies and such. All they needed to do was a little searching on the Internet:

Why the Cultic American Culture Exploits Children

Published

The Avangelism Project

on March 9, 2010

When we’re discussing how the Cultic American Culture exploits children, we have to distinguish mainstream children from those unfortunate enough to be born into fundamentalist families.

The horror stories of outright brainwashing and behavior, psychological, and emotional control used against children in those situations are legion. There’s a lesson there: The further into Christianity a person is drawn, the more overtly cult like their practices and the practices used against them become. That’s largely because cultic practices are derived from the bible itself—Paul was perhaps the first Christian cult leader and his epistles comprise a manual.

We’ll get to those things in due course, but the question today is why are mainstream children indoctrinated into the Cultic American Culture?

The answer is that children grow into the adults that propagate the culture. Recruiting them is vital and children are inculcated with the CAC’s unchallenged assumption: God is. I don’t mean that in an “I am that I am” sense, but as God exists. But the assumption is more than base existence; the assumption is that God exists for me.

“God is” asserts existence and creates the ability to SPAG: God is. . . (That ability will become an important part of the CAC, as we’ll see.)

American children are not necessarily raised devoutly (most aren’t), but they are raised religiously. God is always nearby—watching and willing to help, even if we don’t think much about him—is the typical American’s base assumption: God is. . .

That assumption is what makes adults vulnerable to the exploitive cultic recruitment tactics that Christians and churches employ to gain members, they’re already receptive to the god concept.

If adults were walking around oblivious to what Christians believed, recruiting them would be a lot harder because they would have to process Christianity’s outrageous truth claims as part of deciding whether to join a church. As it is, though, they’ve accepted the outrageous beliefs and simply never acted on them.

A point of crisis isn’t the occasion to suddenly engage in critical thinking.

Most often, they’ve been indoctrinated to the beliefs from childhood. The beliefs keep them attached to the Cultic American Culture until they serve as the connection to draw them into the Christian Machine.

That makes recruiting children paramount to the Cultic American Culture’s propagation. Only children being explicitly trained to skepticism and reason are immunized. Even among the least devout, there are five factors that work to indoctrinate mainstream children into the CAC.

1. Parent’s religion.

2. Cultural religion.

3. Church rites.

4. Christian propaganda aimed at children.

5. Explicit Christian recruitment.

We’ll discuss rites and religion tomorrow and propaganda and recruitment on Thursday.

Tomorrow- Childhood Indoctrinatin: Rites and Religion – Subscribe now.

Sliding into Heresy

Published

Sabio Lantz

on March 9, 2010

I crafted this image to illustrate the kick I get out of Christians chastising other Christians for sliding into heresy. For I imagine these Christians watchdogs as envisioning their sliding colleague as leaving behind angelic clouds and descending blissfully into hell.

But where do the guardians of orthodoxy put the blue-dotted line of damnation? Where on that sliding board do they see their colleague as no longer being a Christian? Certainly heretics like me make it easy to decide — we just start telling you we aren’t Christian. But many Christians slide down the board while all along joyfully still considering themselves to be Christians. They keep claiming to have some sort of relationship with Jesus.

But do Christians really have a relationship with Jesus? When I talk at any length with most of my reasonable Christian acquaintances, they admit that they don’t hear Jesus, touch Jesus, see Jesus, bowl with Jesus or watch TV with him. It doesn’t take long to agree that they don’t have a “personal relationship” with Jesus in any normal sense of the phrase “personal relationship”. But I understand how these Christians have an awe and reverence for God and how they see Jesus as God incarnate and how such imagery helps them to personalize God in their life. I get that. But that is a Jesus made of select gospel stories, Christmas holidays, church dinners and warm fuzzy feelings. So I don’t get how that could be threatened by sliding down the heresy board.

Relatively few Christians really understand their sacred texts. Most Christians could easily be exposed for holding some heretical views even when judged only by the doctrine of their own sect. But they don’t care, for most Christian do not hold together the Jesus-in-their-head with theological propositions. So those Christians who worry about heresy are sort of unique. Yet when I question even these righteous orthodox saints about their relationship with Jesus, inevitably they want to claim it is a real relationship with a person and not just a relationship to ideas in their head. They want to claim that their salvation is based on a personal relationship with the divine. Yet when they do their heresy flag-waving dance they put emphasis on ideas and not a person.

These heresy watchdogs know that their Christian sect is a believist sect — a sect which maintains that correct belief is what wins a person a ticket to heaven. But when accused of being a “believist”, they will try to deny it. Nonetheless, their believist mentality is blatantly obvious when they are patrolling for heretics. The contradictions to me are humorous, if not sad.

Caveat: I understand how bad ideas can have bad consequences. But when you hear what heretic-hounds count as dangerous ideas, they seem rather silly to me. But then, apparently the Christian god made his truths silly to unbelievers. The problem is, he made those truths seem silly to me when I was still a believer. What is that all about?

———-
Related Posts:

Jesus as an Imaginary Friend
In Jesus’ Name: how to make your prayers work better than a Jew’s, a Muslim’s or a Hindu’s prayer.

Tagged: Add new tag, Christian, Christianity, God, Jesus, Salvation

A hero in the Philippines

Published

on March 9, 2010

The Philippines has a problem with a rising number of AIDS cases every year, and members of the government have been promoting a sensible response: Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral has sponsored a program that distributes free condoms, for instance. You can guess who opposes prophylactics, though.

"The condom business is a multimillion dollar industry that heavily targets the adolescent market at the expense of morality and family life," said Bishop Nereo Odchimar, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines. He called fidelity and premarital chastity "the only effective way to curb the spread of AIDS."

The Catholics have informed Cabral that she has "one foot in hell." How sweet. They are also actively campaigning against any politician who promotes birth control.

I'm so sorry that the Philippines is so deeply afflicted with forces for insanity and irrationality, but at least they've got brave people like Esperanza Cabral standing up for what is right.

Hey, Floridans, you aren’t really going to vote for this jerk, are you?

Published

on March 9, 2010

Here's a personal account of how Charlie Crist deals with atheists:

Last night as I was leaving a pizzeria in Downtown St. Pete, I ran into a small group of people around Florida Governor Charlie Crist who was campaigning for a US Senate run. So, I walked over waited a moment to gain his attention and shook his hand. As we were shaking hands I asked him if he really believes that the letters he sent to Jerusalem prevent hurricanes from hitting Florida.
His smile immediately dropped and he replied "Who's more powerful than God." That wasn't really an answer so asked him again to which I got a similar reply. While this was happening one of his people put a "Charlie Crist for US Senate 2010" sticker on me. Then when I told Charlie that I did not believe in God he turned beat red and ripped the sticker off of my chest. He did a 180 to start shaking other peoples hands, and turned to scream over his shoulder that he feels sorry for me.

Do you think there are any 'militant' atheists out there in the leadership of our movement who would react in the same way if a Baptist or a Catholic or a Muslim came up to shake their hands? Not one.