About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Podcast teaser: second open mic with Julia & Massimo

Believe it or not, we have already taped 19 episodes of the Rationally Speaking podcast, 18 of which have been released on our web site and via iTunes. So for the upcoming episode 20 we are going to do our Julia & Massimo open mic again!
The idea, as you might recall from the last time, is to open our microphones, so to speak, to our listeners. Beginning now and for several days you can ask Julia and me any question that tickles your skeptical bones, and we'll do our best to answer them in the course of the podcast. Questions can be posed directly in response to this blog post, of course, or — if you like the additional challenge — you can call New York City Skeptics' hot line (212-529-3393) and leave a spoken message.
This is, needless to say, our continuing experiment in hubris, as there very well might be questions we have no competence whatsoever answering or commenting upon. We promise we'll stay clear of those, and perhaps use them as suggestions for future shows, featuring guests who actually know what they are talking about.
Still, the range of possibilities is pretty wide, from "core" skepticism (you know, ufology, paranormal, the whole shebang), to atheism and secular humanism, to the many-faceted relationship between science and philosophy — a favorite sparring intellectual territory for Julia and me. We can't wait to hear from you...

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Massimo’s Picks

By Massimo Pigliucci

* David Sloan Wilson slams Richard Dawkins for the latter's “pre-1975” understanding of theoretical evolutionary biology. Ouch. (And yes, I think Wilson is largely correct.)
* Episode 18 of the Rationally Speaking podcast is out! Julia and I chat about evolutionary psychology.
* The Obama administration apparently has no qualms wiretapping the internet in the name of “security.” And I thought I had voted against that kind of crap.
* Christine O’Donnell, the Delaware Republican / Tea Party candidate for the Senate, doesn’t believe in evolution and thinks that scientists are genetically engineering human-mice hybrids that might take over the world.
* Jerry Coyne slams CFI for declaring war on atheism. The substance of his post is actually mostly on target, but given the rhetoric, methinks the guy needs a large dose of valerian...
* The Founding Fathers were nothing like what the Tea Party thinks they were. Read up on the history of your own precious country, busters!
* Why college athletics is a bad, bad idea.
* The GOP’s Pledge to America is a cynical political maneuver, not sound policy, and even less anything approaching economic good sense.
* I have been featured on American Scientist’s “Scientists’ Nightstand.” Check out my reading suggestions.
* Jon Stewart on the Pledge on America. Precious, brilliant.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Honest and Decent Humans Should Oppose This Pope

By Michael De Dora
For the past couple of months, a number of prominent secularists – including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris – have lead public protests of Pope Benedict XVI, even exploring the possibility of his arrest, for his involvement in the cover-up of sexual abuse. I have, for the most part, considered their campaign a distraction from more important issues, and more divisive than not.
No longer. I have changed my mind. That the public sees these protests as unimportant or divisive is not necessarily a problem with the protesters. Rather, it is a problem of lack of general appreciation of just how damning the evidence is for the claim that the Pope has acted immorally and illegally.
There are three main reasons for this change of mind on my part. The first is a deeper and fuller consideration of what the Pope has said and done. There is ever-mounting, yet already crystal clear, evidence that the Pope played a role in covering up sexual abuse of young boys within the Catholic Church. Initially I thought, “well, sexual abuse happens elsewhere.” Well, maybe. But rarely is its cover-up so systematic and calculated. Johann Hari has written one of the better recent commentaries on this situation. In his essay, he outlines a few cases where we know the Pope was directly involved. Here is an extensive quote:
“In Germany in the early 1980s, Father Peter Hullermann was moved to a diocese run by Ratzinger. He had already been accused of raping three boys. Ratzinger didn't go to the police, instead Hullermann was referred for ‘counseling.’ The psychiatrist who saw him, Werner Huth, told the Church unequivocally that he was ‘untreatable [and] must never be allowed to work with children again.’ Yet he kept being moved from parish to parish, even after a sex crime conviction in 1986. He was last accused of sexual abuse in 1998.

In the U.S. in 1985, a group of American bishops wrote to Ratzinger begging him to defrock a priest called Father Stephen Kiesle, who had tied up and molested two young boys in a rectory. Ratzinger refused for years, explaining that he was thinking of the ‘good of the universal Church’ and of the ‘detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke among the community of Christ's faithful, particularly considering the young age of the priest involved. He was 38. He went on to rape many more children. Think about what Ratzinger's statement reveals. Ratzinger thinks the ‘good of the universal Church’ – your church – lies not in protecting your children from being raped, but in protecting the rapists from punishment.
In 1996, the Archbishop of Milwaukee appealed to Ratzinger to defrock Father Lawrence C. Murphy, who had raped and tortured up to 200 deaf and mute children at a Catholic boarding school. His rapes often began in the confessional. Ratzinger never replied. Eight months later, there was a secret canonical ‘trial’ – but Murphy wrote to Ratzinger saying he was ill, so it was cancelled. Ratzinger advised him to take a ‘spiritual retreat.’ He died years later, unpunished.”
These episodes should disgust you. It should further disgust you that these are but a few examples. It should absolutely enrage you that the Pope and his “administration,” who knowingly covered up sexual abuse, have blamed everyone but themselves (to name a few supposed culprits: secularism, homosexuality, and The New York Times). And it should confound you that the Vatican does not respect the law and justice, as evidenced by their keeping the entire process in-house, evading investigators at all turns.
But the outrage does not end with the actions taken in the sexual abuse cover-up. Consider the Pope’s public statements and positions on an array of topics.
There’s his position not just that condom use is immoral, but that it actually make AIDS worse. Or, take his statements that gay marriage is an “insidious and dangerous” threat, or the Vatican’s position that homosexuality ought not be decriminalized. Or, recall the case of the nine-year-old girl who was pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. Doctors predicted that she would die during childbirth, so they performed an abortion. Brazil’s Catholic Church excommunicated the girl’s mother and the doctors – but not the stepfather. The Vatican supported the decision.
The Pope has also stated that atheism has led to “the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" and has blamed atheists for the destruction of the environment. During his recent tour of Britain, he continued this line of thought, both warning against secularism, calling it a “dictatorship of relativism” (that’s obviously false, but one must wonder if a dictatorship of the Pope’s sort of morality would be better); and claiming Nazism was a result of atheism (full transcript here). Richard Dawkins has handled this well, and P.Z. Myers has done us all a service by posting a list of Hitler quotes that show the Nazi leader was anything but an atheist. Again, these are just a few bits of information. If you can stomach it, I urge you to use Google to search for more.
Now consider, as the second reason for changing my mind, that the Pope is not just any ordinary man. He is the religious and spiritual leader, and more importantly public representative, of one billion people on this Earth. He is the face and voice of Catholicism. The combination of his powerful role and the aforementioned evidence makes the entire situation even more disturbing. Thus, it is extremely important to have critical public discussion about his actions and views, more than any other Catholic we can think of. This is similar to the reasoning I have used in an article about Glenn Beck and his arguments.
The third reason for my change of mind is that many people still have not come around to the above facts – especially Catholics, who in America still support the Pope at relatively high levels. I know many Catholics, and when pushed, they do not support any of the above – from sexual abuse cover-up, to backwards policy on condoms and gays, to the painting of non-Catholics as immoral and evil. It would seem, then, that the challenge for those who already agree with the arguments above is to help the one billion Catholics in the world realize that the Pope, currently a revered public figure, is in fact an appalling excuse for their public leader. The combination of the evidence mentioned and the Pope’s powerful role is enough to to cause concern among secularists. But it should be even more reason for Catholics to care. Of course, the Pope is not the only person responsible for immorality or corruption within the Catholic Church. But he was directly involved in much of the recent immorality and corruption. Catholics should care because, at bottom, the man and those he is protecting should face both social and legal scrutiny for their actions.
Perhaps this is why it is so confusing and maddening to find people, including Catholics, who are apathetic to the situation. It is not just that they have sidestepped the facts; they seem not to understand what the facts say about Catholicism and its public image. Say what you will about Dawkins and Hitchens, and the approach they've taken, but the fact that many atheists criticize their method as unnecessarily aggressive – even if wrong – means they care about the public face of atheism. One ought to expect the same care from Catholics about their religious tradition.
Some Catholics have told me that protesting the Pope is but a waste of time, for the Pope will not step down. Probably not. Yet he is 83, and is likely to die soon. Catholic voices can influence the next pick. More importantly, opposition sends a general message that you do not stand with corruption and lies, but with decency, honesty, and humanity. Consider, for example, the following statement by Barbara Blaine (transcribed here by Ophelia Benson) at recent protests during the Pope’s visit to Britain. Blaine is a survivor of priestly sexual abuse:
“When we were children, and the priests were raping us, and sodomizing us, and sexually abusing us, we thought we were all alone – and we felt very alone, guilty, and ashamed. And over these past years, and even more recently over these past months, many of us as victims have found each other, and we have learned that we’re not alone. And I must tell each and every one of you: thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the victims, because today we recognize that you too care about the victims.”
Opposing the protests of the Pope is not about defending Catholicism from anti-Catholic attacks, as the Vatican and other Catholics have framed the debate. It is about defending Catholicism from ruin from within its own ranks. More importantly, it is about standing up for basic human goodness regardless of one’s ideological allegiance. There is no dogma requiring Catholics to follow their Pope to all ends. Theologians often state in debates with philosophers that God would not demand people to do immoral acts. Why does this rule not apply now?
This is not a situation where the facts are unclear and one can shrug his or her shoulders and say “I don’t know where I stand.” The mountain of evidence does not look different from different angles. It looks enormous and hideous from all angles. You need only look to admit that. Caring – and opposition – should follow naturally.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

New Rationally Speaking contributor: Welcome Tunç Iyriboz!

The Rationally Speaking family expands again! I am pleased to welcome my friend Tunç Iyriboz as our fourth writer on the block, together with Julia Galef, Michael De Dora and myself, always aided by the capable and steady (when he hasn’t had too many martinis) editorial hand of Phil Pollack.
Tunç is Associate Attending Radiologist and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Associate Clinical Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. Formerly, he was Associate Professor at Penn State University College of Medicine and Medical Center. He holds an MD degree from Hacettepe University, and received postgraduate and postdoctoral training at the University of Paris V (René Descartes) and at Penn State University.
He is one of the founding members and coordinators of Reasonable New York, a coalition of secular, humanist, skeptic, and reason-based organizations in New York City. His special interests beyond current clinical practice include bioethics, philosophy of science, mind and language, and medical informatics. He is dedicated to helping promote rational, critical and skeptical thought, democracy and freedom.  
Tunç traveled and lived extensively abroad. He is fluent in English, French and Turkish. He now calls New York City home, but he chronically longs for the long wine-laden lunches of Paris (sans the Cartesian dualism, I’m told) and the sweet lull of the Mediterranean (sans the irrational faith).

Friday, September 24, 2010

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Bayes and science: what?

By Massimo Pigliucci

It is no secret that my already normally skeptical baloney detector now jumps to deep orange alert any time I hear the word “singularity.” I was not too impressed with David Chalmers’ lecture about it at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and I debated singularitarian guru Eliezer Yudkowsky on BloggingHeadsTV on the same topic. My later encounters with that particular group of techno-optimists and futurists have not improved my opinion of the whole shebang a bit.
Still, in the spirit of open inquiry and of keeping myself on my own toes, I devoted about an hour to reading three not-so-recent posts by Yudkowsky on the theme of quantum mechanics, science and Bayesianism (the philosophy of science related to Bayesian statistics). It may not have been the most productive hour of my life, but I’d like to share it with you.
I actually intended to read only one of Yudkowsky’s posts, intriguingly entitled “The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?” with its implied promise to provide an (novel? stunning?) argument for why Bayesianism is opposed to scientific practice, instead of being a very successful model of the practice of science, as many philosophers of science think.
But I was disappointed. The rather rambling piece presents no argument at all in favor of a novel thesis to answer the bold question of the title. Instead, Yudkowsky embarks on a passionate defense of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and a vilification of the classical Copenhagen interpretation.
Bearing in mind the wise words of Richard Feynman to the effect that if one thinks he understands quantum mechanics (I don’t) one most likely does not understand quantum mechanics, let’s take a quick look at what is to be argued about. Both interpretations attempt to resolve the notorious problem with quantum mechanics that gave headaches to Einstein: the universe seems to follow rules at the microscopic (quantum mechanical) level that do not translate to the macroscopic level. The Copenhagen interpretation has been the standard for many decades, and it apparently still is the majoritarian position among quantum physicists. It essentially says that the wavefunction — the probabilistic distribution that describes the state of a given particle — “collapses” to a definite value any time a measurement is carried out. Which is why macroscopic objects are rather more definite in appearance than a probability function (not so electrons, for instance, until they are measured). The Copenhagen interpretation is due to the foundational work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who were active in the Danish capital in the 1920s (hence the name of the theory).
Even Bohr and Heisenberg were quite a bit disturbed by the implications of the idea of a wavefunction collapse for our understanding of macroscopic reality, particularly its nasty tendency to originate all sorts of paradoxes (like Schrödinger's cat). This eventually led to a different, competing interpretation known as many-worlds, originally formulated by Hugh Everett in 1957 (it is now one of many types of multiverse theories, which is a term interestingly coined by philosopher and psychologist William James). The basic idea is that the collapse of the wavefunction is only apparent, and that what happens “in reality” is that the universe keeps splitting into more and more parallel versions, comprising all the possible variants of every single event — we just happen to observe the particular variant that remains attached to our own universe. (Incidentally, whenever you read about these things, you will hear much talk of “quantum decoherence,” so you may want to read up about it.)
Now, I should hasten to say that I don’t really have a dog in this fight. To me both interpretations seem somewhat unsatisfactory, largely because they are interpretations. Call me old school, but I don’t like it when scientific theories need to be interpreted (it reminds me too much of different “interpretations” of the Bible). I’m not alone in this, as several physicists subscribe to what is informally known as the “shut up and calculate” school of quantum mechanics: the theory works in the sense that it predicts the results of experiments to a high degree of precision, no interpretation required. Nonetheless, I do think that science isn’t just about calculating and predicting, it is about understanding the world as it really is, as much as our limited brains can handle. I just don’t feel any particular allegiance to either many-worlds or Copenhagen, chiefly for the reason that neither of them can be tested empirically (they are both equally compatible with the data, as far as I can tell — or they wouldn’t be interpretations).
Now, what does any of this have to do with Bayesianism and the nature of science? Bayesianism is a type of philosophy of science that maintains that one can use Bayes’ theorem about conditional probabilities as a model for how science itself works. Bayesian statistics has become increasingly popular in a variety of fields, from medical research to decision making theory, from phylogenetic analyses in evolutionary biology to a variety of applications in the social sciences. It is based on a beautifully simple equation that relates two important quantities: so-called priors and posteriors. The priors represent the (subjective or objective, depending on the application) probability of a given hypothesis being correct. The posteriors are an estimate of how much said priors should go up or down when new evidence comes in. In other words, Bayes’ theorem provides a formal way to capture the idea that our belief in one theory or another ought to be proportional to the evidence in favor or against said theory (skeptics of course know this as Hume’s dictum — as in “extraordinary evidence” etc.).
(It is interesting to note that Bayes’ theorem also explains under what circumstances people don’t change their minds, regardless of the evidence: if your priors about a given hypothesis are zero — no belief at all, or one — a hundred percent belief, than the equation shows that no matter what the evidence is, your priors ain’t gonna change. In other words, you entered the realm of faith.)
I am very sympathetic both to Bayesian analysis (I have used it in my own research) and to its implications for philosophy of science (though there are some interesting objections that can be raised to it as a model of science tout court — see for example the chapter in Bayesianism here). Which is why the title of Yudkowsky’s column surprised the hell out of me! Alas, as I said, he provides no argument in that post for his suggestion that Bayesianism favors a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or for the further claim that somehow this goes against scientific practice because the currently favored interpretation is the Copenhagen one.
But then I noticed that the post was a follow up to two more, one entitled “If many-worlds had come first,” the other “The failures of Eld science.” Oh crap, now I had to go back and read those before figuring out what Yudkowsky was up to. (And before you ask, yes, those posts too linked to previous ones, but by then I had had enough.)
Except that that didn’t help either. Both posts are rather bizarre, if somewhat amusing, fictional dialogues, one of which doesn’t even mention the word “Bayes” (the other refers to it tangentially a couple of times), and that certainly constitute no sustained argument at all. (Indeed, “The failures of Eld science” sounds a lot like the sort of narrative you find in Atlas Shrugged, and you know that’s not a compliment coming from me.)
Don’t get me wrong, I do get the gist of what Yudkowsky is trying to say, and I sure appreciate the millennia-old practice of writing dialogues to make a philosophical point (think Plato!). But the dispute between many-worlds and Copenhagen can’t be settled (or even advanced) that way, and in fact I suspect can’t be settled at all within a Bayesian framework precisely because the data doesn’t help to move the priors.
I take it that a major point made by Yudkowsky is that the entire course of fundamental physics may have been very different in an alternate universe (ah!) where Everett had published his paper before Bohr and Heisenberg. Perhaps, but that point has been made much more thoroughly and convincingly by Andrew Pickering in his highly thought provoking Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. Of course it will take you a bit more than an hour to wade through the 475 pages of that book, but I suspect you’ll get much more out of it than I did while perusing the “lesswrong” blog over at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. My opinion, mind you.
So, what was Yudkowsky trying to do, exactly? My most charitable interpretation is that he is arguing for some version of the following:
a) The order in which scientists arrive at their theories, matters.
b) Many-worlds is favored on non-empirical grounds, like simplicity, beauty, etc.
c) Point (b) is in agreement with Bayes’ theorem.
d) (Most) Scientists insist that theory choice has to be settled empirically.
e) Therefore most scientists follow a path opposed by Bayesianism.
f) The non-empirical path is superior, scientific practice needs to be revised.
Of course, I may be wrong about my interpretation of Yudkowsky, largely because his argument is, well, indirect to say the least. However, if the above is a reasonable understanding of what he is saying, then:
1) Thesis (a) is probably true in the short term, but should not matter in the long term (at least if you are a scientific realist).
2) Thesis (b) remains to be argued in detail, and my hunch is that it is going to be very difficult to do so. And even a convincing argument along those lines simply wouldn’t settle the matter.
3) Thesis (c) I think reflects a misunderstanding of Bayesianism, of science, or of both.
4) Thesis (d) is trivially true. Most philosophers of science would agree with said scientists.
5) Thesis (e) is not true because of (3) above.
6) Thesis (f) is fundamentally flawed: if science is anything, both as a historical practice and following our understanding of the philosophy of science, it is a search for empirical confirmation or disconfirmation of theories about the reality of the world. Criteria like simplicity and beauty are sometimes invoked, but they are extra-empirical, cannot be justified easily on philosophical grounds (especially aesthetic appeals), and more importantly have been shown often enough to favor the wrong hypothesis in actual historical cases (for several recent and not-so-recent examples of this in fundamental physics see this).
So there.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Julia’s Picks

By Julia Galef
* Does the language you speak shape the way you think? Not in the way we originally believed, but there's still more than a grain of truth to the old chestnut. New York Times magazine elaborates.

* This post does a nice job of explaining why scientists are loath to accept the Many Worlds Hypothesis, and about a deep underlying tension between Bayesian reasoning and the scientific method.

* Crows are going to take over the world.

* Ergo, the card game about logic in which you try to disprove your opponent's existence. Not sure what gameplay’s like, but I love the idea. Instructions here.

* Can it really be this hard to find a scientific rebuttal of cryonics?

* A brilliant example of presenting data viscerally: housing prices, 1890-2007, graphed as a simulated roller coaster ride.
* This is a letter which has been cut out of paper and folded once. It is not L. What is it?

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Michael’s Picks

By Michael De Dora
* Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will hold “opposing” rallies in Washington, DC, this Oct. 30: the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and the rally to “Keep Fear Alive.” I hope to be there.
* Another well-done article from The Onion: “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.”
* An interesting feature piece in The Wall Street Journal on a U.S. military chaplain in Afghanistan and his soldier guard – who is an atheist.
* John Shook has caused a bit of a stir in the secular community with an essay on The Huffington Post in which he asks, “How did know-nothing atheism and lazy theology grab the spotlight?”
* A five-minute clip from a recent debate I attended between Peter Singer and Dinesh D’Souza, over whether morality does, or even can, come from God.
* Former Sen. Al D’Amato (R-NY), stood up to what he called “racist bullsh*t” on a recent FOX News appearance.
* Can science tell us right from wrong? Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Patricia Churchland, Lawrence Krauss, Simon Blackburn, and Peter Singer will discuss this question at Arizona State University this Nov. 6.
* Do graphic warning labels on cigarette packages really deter people from lighting up? Karen Schrock investigates in Scientific American Mind. (The magazine also recently ran an unrelated but equally thought-provoking article on the mind of a psychopath).

Friday, September 17, 2010

Podcast Teaser: Brendan Nyhan, on False Beliefs that Refuse to Die

By Julia Galef
Ever notice how some beliefs only seem to become stronger, even as they're repeatedly debunked? For example, the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim is held by at least 10 percent of the population, despite having been repeatedly denied and debunked for months in the national news.
Brendan Nyhan is a political scientist and blogger at the University of Michigan who has been investigating why this happens, and how people process media information that contradicts what they already think. So why aren't they swayed by hearing that Obama is not a Muslim? "The 'not' seems to fade away," Nyhan said on a recent On The Media appearance. "The canonical example in politics is Richard Nixon saying, I'm not a crook, and after a while people started associating “Nixon” and “crook.”"
This issue is especially relevant to skeptics, who often find themselves in the tricky position of deciding whether or not to publicly debunk bogus claims like the vaccine-autism link or the efficacy of homeopathic remedies. Will the coverage clear up misconceptions? Or will it backfire, calling public attention to the claims and actually reinforcing belief in them?
On episode 19 of Rationally Speaking, we'll be talking to Nyhan about what he's learned from his research studies and his experience maintaining Spinsanity, a watchdog blog monitoring political misinformation. Is there any hope of clearing up false beliefs if denials simply make the problem worse? Leave comments and questions for Nyhan below.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

GUEST POST: Turkey's Choice, An Islamic Trojan Horse?

By Tunç Iyriboz

On September 12, with an impressive 73% turnout hailed by President Obama as democratic "vibrancy," more than 38 million Turkish citizens voted in a referendum on important constitutional amendments. The 58% "Yes" outcome was unexpectedly higher than predicted by recent polls.

From one point of view, the results can be interpreted as highly positive for improving the country's democratic record. The proposed set of amendments modify the 1982 constitution, a byproduct of modern Turkey's most recent interruption of democratic continuity — the 1980 military coup d'état. The referendum, symbolically scheduled on the coup's 30th anniversary, introduces key constitutional amendments improving the rights of the individual, strengthening gender equality, eliminating discrimination against children, elderly, the disabled and veteran, and enhancing rights to privacy. These changes are considered universally noncontroversial, and are supported both by the secular opposition (traditionally left-leaning), and the sponsoring political party in power, the controversially Islamic-leaning AKP, with its increasingly powerful leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The amendments were also required to support Turkey's accession to the European Union.

According to another point of view, bitterly voiced by the opposing secular establishment — including the military, the proposed modifications actually represent an Islamic Trojan Horse: the democratic amendments were used to camouflage other clauses that radically alter the way the judicial and military entities function, permanently disrupting a delicate balance between these traditionally separated powers, and putting them under increasing control of the ruling party. These include clauses that empower civilian courts to try military personnel, leading the way to prosecution of past and future coup organizers, members of the so called "deep state." On the judicial front, included are increases to the number of justices on the Constitutional Court, and to the number of members on the Judges and Prosecutors Higher Board, some of which would be appointed by the parliament. The changes can be expected to bring a composition shift to the traditionally secular judicial branch. The secular opposition claims Erdoğan plans to use this to fill the courts with Islamists, pushing the country to the edge of a quiet Islamic coup. AKP maintains that its political stance is no different than European Christian democratic parties, in a Muslim flavor.

For some, this marks the end of Kemalism, further weakening the political power of the country's military, already eroded by the AKP administration's recent investigations. The military was traditionally seen as the protector of the secular state, along with the judicial branch. Turkey has been a secular democracy since the 1920s, and represents one of the most successful attempts to implement a working modern democracy with an overwhelmingly Muslim constituency. This unusual accomplishment has not been easy: The democratic history has been interrupted by military coups d'état in 1960,1971, and 1980, and a couple of more recent soft coups — military memoranda, in 1997 and 2007. Most of these political turning points included some justification to keep religiously motivated political movements under control and preserve the strongly secular quality of the state. They have introduced periods of democratic regression, which have become obstacles on the country's path to become the modern European state Mustafa Kemal intended.

It has become increasingly inappropriate and implausible for secular Turkey to fall back to such totalitarian methods in the 21st century, particularly as the prospect of European Union membership intensifies. Recent developments, leading to this referendum, actually make another military coup or memorandum highly unlikely to ever happen again. If the Trojan Horse claim is true, the regime in Turkey will find itself under increasing religious influence. However, the constitution remains staunchly secular, and the democracy increasingly vibrant. With this referendum, Turkey may have made of itself the perfect laboratory to test whether Islam today has reached the potential of behaving as Christianity has in Western democracies. Turkey's current choice appears to give that explosive mixture a full chance, and challenges non-repressed Islam to prove it can do well under secular rule.

If Turkey fails this test, that is, if the Islamic penetration of the other branches of the government reaches a turning point that leads to an Islamic constitution and law, one can expect the political landscape of the Middle East to change significantly in the next few decades. For the worse, needless to say. Such a transformation could lead to an extremely unstable Middle East, not unlikely to facilitate the next World War. If it wins, that is, if Turkey maintains its secular definition of state, while allowing a diverse, fair and uninterrupted Western style democracy to thrive, we will have reason to be optimistic about the future of the rest of the Muslim world. Sam Harris' thesis that there is a certain "je ne sais quoi" about Islam that makes such cohabitation impossible would be proven wrong. We should actually all hope and root for that.

Now, I don't mean, of course, root for Islam. What I mean is, to change the way we deal with it. Like its older Abrahamic siblings, Islam has proved that it is not easily going away. It is not exactly giving us a choice. In Turkey, of all places, after 90 years of attempts to repress, neutralize and regulate Islam using all kinds of methods, including violent ones, it is back in full power. The approach to it now needs to be different. We should look for ways to better understand it, to make it work with modern western democracies, civilized ways of cohabiting with it as has been possible with the older Abrahamic religions in the "West." Certainly, due to its relatively young age, this religion is still going through its violent adolescence, unlike its more mature and established Abrahamic relatives. Places like Turkey, which have experienced a relatively accelerated path to modernity, may represent the best setting we can hope for in bringing a non-violent coexistence with reason.

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Tunç Iyriboz is a medical doctor, a radiologist. He is associate member, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and associate professor, Cornell Medical College. His interests include linguistics, philosophy of science, medical ethics, philosophy of mind and language.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Bjørn Lomborg was wrong, Lomborg (almost) says

By Massimo Pigliucci
I’ll be darned. Bjørn Lomborg, the author of the infamous The Skeptical Environmentalist, one of the most thoroughly debunked books of the past decade (and one that has given a bad connotation to the word “skeptic”), has just changed his mind! In his new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change, Lomborg says that climate change is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today ... a challenge humanity must confront.”
I could say “I told you so” (for instance in a chapter on global warming in my Nonsense on Stilts), but I’ll refrain — largely because I would be the last on a long list of scientists who have published detailed (negative) reviews of Lomborg’s first book in prestigious outlets such as Scientific American (volume 286, issue 1, 2002), Nature (8 November 2001, pp. 149-150) and Science (9 November 2001, pp. 1285-1286).
No, we need to give credit were credit is due. The man has changed his mind, and has come out publicly to say so. I can’t wait until Fox News has him over for an interview. Indeed, while I have been a harsh critic of Lomborg (largely on the ground that as an economist he really does not have the technical expertise to pronounce about global warming), I think some of the attacks against him were (and still are) ridiculous. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, famously compared Lomborg to Hitler — and you know that when one plays the H-card all rational argument goes out the window. Similarly, in a commentary on the new book, long-time Lomborg critic Howard Friel wrote: “If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money.” Oh, c’mon, so unless one brings lasting peace to the world one cannot be taken seriously?
Still, it is interesting to look at some of the details of Lomborg’s change of heart. He claims it happened once a group of economists was asked what was the best way to spend $50 billion for humanity. Back in 2004 putting money into climate change ranked straight at the bottom of the list, but four years later the issue made it at least half the way through the rankings. Once Lomborg and his colleagues began to consider not just cutting carbon emissions, but a variety of other solutions to the problem, they began to appreciate that something not only had to be done, but could in fact be done.
(Notice, of course, that this is exactly the kind of question for which we need the expertise of economists: not to tell us whether climate change is happening or what its causes are, and not even to advance possible technological solutions, but to provide us with the best risk-benefit analysis in economic terms of an array of proposed solutions. Also notice that Lomborg claims that he didn’t really change his mind, because he has always maintained that climate change was real, just that it wasn’t “the end of the world.” While literally true, this seems a highly disingenuous reading of The Skeptical Environmentalist, and if it were accurate, it would make all the criticism of Lomborg’s early book utterly incomprehensible.)
Lomborg, of course, has not lost his techno-optimism. He thinks that “This is not about ‘we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions.’ It's about technologies, about realizing there’s a vast array of solutions ... Investing $100 billion annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century.” Well, first of all, nobody ever said anything about wearing hair-shirts — I would be against it on aesthetic grounds alone. Second, once again Lomborg is crossing the line between what he has expertise to talk about (economics) to what he probably knows little about (new technologies and their efficacy). One of the recurring problems with techno-optimists is that they subscribe to the magic pill school of life, where if only we put our minds (and out money) to it, we’ll achieve it, whatever “it” is. Seems like a bit more caution and less hubris would not be an altogether bad thing.
Still, some of Lomborg’s suggestions are positively stunning, even for a skeptical economist. He is advising not only to pour money into research and development of cleaner energy sources such as wind, solar and nuclear (duh!), but recommending a global tax on carbon emissions, part of which would go for (gasp!) global healthcare! I wonder what Senator Inhofe would think of that.
And that’s not all. While acknowledging that most economists think that research and development is best done by the private sector (it’s not clear why, since the private sector is perfectly happy to take advantage of pre-development research funded by government agencies like NSF or NIH), he would actually make an exception for climate change related technologies. Lomborg draws a parallel here with government-sponsored research on computers during the 1950s, which laid the groundwork for the commercial version of the internet. But the real question is: can Sarah Palin get behind this obviously socialistic approach?
Seriously, though. Lomborg deserves credit for changing his mind and going public about it. His specific ideas still require critical analysis by a broad community of experts, not just in economics but also in the various technologies that he is advancing as possible solutions to the problem of climate change. Nonetheless, we now have another strong voice that clearly admits that there is a problem, and an urgent one at that. And as we all know, the first step toward a solution is to make that dramatic admission. Oh, and please no more H-comparisons, let’s reserve those for real evil bastards, of which the world will always provide plentiful examples.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Massimo’s Picks

By Massimo Pigliucci
* Oh gosh, NPR now is publishing fuzzy warmy pieces promoting Feng Shui and self-help!
* Study suggests that supernatural belief stems from a category mistake regarding core knowledge.
* In case you missed it, a US Judge rejected the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy of the Military concerning gays. It took some time, now what?
* Insightful essay in The New Yorker about the history of the New Thought movement, of which the book “The Secret” (and its just released follow up, “The Power”) is one of the latest incarnations.
* On the cost and causes of the Iraq war, now that it is (allegedly) over.
* Whewell’s Ghost, a new blog on the history and philosophy of science.
* My National Science Foundation interview on the future of evolutionary theory.
* One more on experimental philosophy. This article defends it, but the main example seems like a good reason to treat it as an oxymoron (or at best as an example of science-informed philosophy; or is it philosophy-informed science?).
* Evolution—The Extended Synthesis is already in its second printing!
* George Williams, one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century, whom I had the pleasure to meet when I was at Stony Brook, just died.

Friday, September 10, 2010

The President and Religion

By Michael De Dora
President Barack Obama’s religious beliefs, like almost everything else about the man and his policies, are under scrutiny. A recent Pew poll found that roughly 20 percent of Americans believe Obama is not a Christian, but a Muslim, while a whopping 43 percent claim to not know Obama’s religion. Soon after this poll, Glenn Beck charged that Obama practices a form a religion that is neither Christian, nor Muslim. The social drama went far enough to prompt the White House to release a rather weird statement asserting that “President Obama is a committed Christian, and his faith is an important part of his daily life. He prays every day, he seeks a small circle of Christian pastors to give him spiritual advice and counseling, he even receives a daily devotional that he uses each morning.”
To be sure, the way in which the public is “discussing” or “critiquing” the president’s religion is not ideal. There is clearly no good evidence that he is a Muslim, and a whole lot of good evidence he is a Christian. His liberal brand of Christianity is surely more widely practiced than Beck’s Mormonism. And the public’s focus on religious affiliation seems shortsighted, as mere affiliation to any religion does not imply anything about the sincerity of one’s belief or the level of one’s religiosity. Consider that both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are Christians. You get the point (or should).
Yet does this mean a conversation about the President – not just Obama, but any President – and religion is worthless? Some people have answered “yes.” Several writers at The Washington Post’s On Faith section argue that the presidency is a secular job, and therefore a president’s religion should not be a matter of discussion. Other commentators have noted that the nation currently faces an enormity of serious challenges that are way more important than Obama’s religion.
Many proponents of the first argument cite the well-known 1960 speech given by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy on his Catholicism, and more generally, church and state separation. In that speech, Kennedy said that, “I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.”
Yet Obama considered this line of thought in his book The Audacity of Hope, and rejected it. In that book, Obama recalled the 2004 race for United States Senator from Illinois, in which he ran against radical Christian rightist Alan Keyes. During his time on the campaign trail, Keyes continually slammed Obama for his liberal religious views, even suggesting that “Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama” because of his record on abortion rights and equality for gays. Obama, winning handily (70 to 27 percent), was advised to ignore Keyes’ remarks. But Obama could not do that. He answered with what he said has come to be “the typically liberal response in such debates – namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can’t impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the minister of Illinois.”
Yet this reply didn’t completely please Obama. He knew the answer “did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.” Obama had religious beliefs, and they influenced the way he interacted with the world – how he created legislation, voted on bills, and treated others. He couldn’t discount this. Obama wasn’t running for a position as a minister, but his religious beliefs did influence how he governed.
With this in mind, I certainly don’t disagree that the Presidency is a secular governmental position – in theory. That is, our lawmakers, judges, and presidents are sworn to serve the secular Constitution and the people, not their own Gods or holy books. But secularists too often forget that things are somewhat different in practice. Secularists might desire religion to be a private matter, but it is currently very public. Religion should not matter, but it does matter, because most Americans are religious (at least the ones being elected), and because any religious belief a person holds will likely influence their actions. As such, it ought not be ignored, but fully discussed.
The second argument is that it is of questionable importance to have a conversation about Obama’s religion because the country faces a range of more serious issues. Some of these more important concerns include: Afghanistan, Iraq, the economy, Wall Street, taxation, immigration, poverty, and gay marriage. For example, as David Schultz wrote, “the official unemployment rate is almost 10%. The real rate is more like 17%. I don't care if the President worships a goat.” What Schultz cares about is the president solving more pressing issues.
Personally, I would care mightily if our President worshiped a goat, but that is not the argument I am trying to make. Instead, two points need be considered.
First, it is hard to separate religious belief and policy, for very often religious belief shapes one’s policy. As Nathan Diament writes at the Post, “A person's faith commitment is a key window into their system of values and beliefs.” That is, a President’s religious beliefs might suggest how he or she will perform, and how dedicated he or she will be to the Constitution. For example, recall former President George W. Bush, while in office, made clear that he was governing the country with divine guidance (or so he thought): “I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job.” I cannot see where the sentiment behind this statement would not impact his policy decisions. Indeed, it was reported that Bush said the following in August 2003, after the United States had invaded Afghanistan and before it invaded Iraq:
“I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And, by God, I'm gonna do it.”
Or remember the Republican presidential candidate debate in 2008. Asked to raise their hands if they did not accept the scientific fact of evolution, four nominees did so. One of the four, Ron Paul, would later state that the question was “inappropriate” because the presidential election should “not be decided on a scientific matter.” Yet it is quite easy to see how one’s rejection of the the fundamental theory of the life sciences, and more generally his related rightist religious beliefs, would impact his policy decisions. Where would he stand on religion in the science classroom? Stem cells? Gay marriage? Abortion? The list goes on. The point is that the problems we face might actually have been largely caused or influenced by religious beliefs. The solution, in part at least, is to have a robust and honest discussion about them, not to push aside their impact.
Many write off Bush as some weird twist of fate, never to be repeated. The same people might also dismiss Paul as having no chance at the presidency. But Bush and Paul are not the exceptions many think them to be. Very often politicians in high-ranking positions publicly declare their religious beliefs in the political realm, defending their politics based on religious beliefs. Even Obama does this, albeit less often than Bush.
Which brings me to the second, related, point. I agree with Schultz that the nation currently faces more important matters than Obama’s religious beliefs. But this is because Obama’s religious beliefs are benign compared to Bush’s. Yes, Obama’s religious beliefs do play a role in his policymaking – his position on gay marriage, for one – and they ought to be discussed. But Obama is not steeped in religiosity like Bush. He is a rather secular, liberal Christian President. I agree there are more important issues to worry about, yet keep in mind that this conversation would be completely different if someone like Bush – or Sarah Palin – were in office. The President’s religion matters insofar as how religious he or she is and the nature of their religiosity.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Podcast Teaser: Evolutionary Psychology

By Massimo Pigliucci
You’ve heard the claims: men are inclined to cheat on women because natural selection favors multiple offspring from multiple mates, especially if you don’t have to pay child support. Even rape has been suggested to be the result of natural selection in favor of “secondary mating strategies” when the primary ones fail. And of course we all know that men prefer the same waist-to-hip ratio across times and cultures because it is the one that is most highly correlated with female fertility, no?
Welcome to evolutionary psychology, a discipline curiously situated at the interface between evolutionary science and pop psychology, where both wild and reasonable claims seem to clash against the wall of an incredible scarcity of pertinent data. It will be the topic of an upcoming Rationally Speaking podcast.
To be fair, most evolutionary psychologists are careful to separate “is” from “ought” — in pure philosophical fashion, one might add — and clearly state that just because rape is natural it doesn’t mean that it is moral. Still, the evolutionary study of human behavior is controversial for a variety of reasons, not just because feminists take exception to the way women are thought of by researchers in the field.
Take for instance, the waist-to-hip ratio hypothesis. The idea was first proposed by Devendra Singh in 1993 and a Google Scholar search easily shows how frequently the claim has been repeated and re-investigated. But the idea that a particular waist-to-hip ratio is a universal indicator of sexual preference by human males across cultures and times is simply false, as several studies have clearly shown (for instance, here and here).
The issue that we will explore in the podcast is not whether it makes sense to apply evolutionary principles to the study of human behavior. Of course it does, human beings are no exception to evolution. But the devil is in the details, and the details deal with the complexities and nuances of how exactly evolutionary biologists test adaptive hypotheses, as well as with the nature of historical science itself.

Monday, September 06, 2010

Michael’s Picks

By Michael De Dora
* At a hotel ballroom just south of Ground Zero, Pastor Bill Keller launched his plans for a nearby 9/11 Christian Center – a direct response to the proposed Islamic community center – “with a fiery sermon targeting Muslims and Mormons as hell-bound followers of false faiths.” 
* On that note, 57 percent of FOXNews.com readers apparently don’t think much of Constitutional rights. 
* A Florida church’s plans to burn Qurans this Sept. 11 “could endanger [American] troops and it could endanger the overall effort” in Afghanistan, according to the top U.S. commander there, Gen. David Petraeus. 
* Two lawyers discuss why it’s not just wrong, but also dangerous to think our Founders sought a Christian nation. 
* Tim Crane parses several differences between science and religion on The New York Times’ philosophy blog.
* Hal Herzog does an interview with Salon.com on the question “why do we get so angry with animal abusers, but eat more animals than ever before?”
* My essay on secular discourse and humanism was published on the On Faith section of The Washington Post’s Web site.
* Michael Joseph Gross looked into Sarah Palin’s life for a couple months, and the result is an extraordinarily interesting, depressing, and maddening essay in Vanity Fair. 
* Schoolteachers in China are being trained with a sex education curriculum created by U.S.-based Evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family. 
* A town outside of Boston denied a store owner’s request for a license to sell beer and wine seemingly because it might be “detrimental to the spiritual and educational activities” of a church in the vicinity.
* The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond.