By Michael De Dora
* “Belief in obvious nonsense is not a harmless indulgence,” writes Barry Fagin. The second comment could not be any better: “The great thing about America is that we can go right on believing whatever we want, no matter how nonsensical …”
* The health insurance reform package passed earlier this year requires insurers to cover so-called alternative medicine, which has Derek Araujo asking: “where was the scientific community?”
* Fifty-three percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, but 66 percent say the document requires a clear separation of church and state, according to a new survey that illustrates Americans’ mixed views on church and state.
* Do your political leanings result from your social environment or your genetic predisposition? A new study suggests the answer is “both.”
* Nearly one in four sun-like stars should host an Earth-mass planet, argues a new paper in Science. Wired.com calls the finding “the first quantitative measurement of the frequency of planets of various masses in the galaxy.”
* A short feature piece in The New York Times on preachers in the NYC subway system. In summary: they preach, everyone else ignores.
* Ever wonder where anti-abortion protesters get those grisly photos? Slate.com has the answer.
The health insurance reform package passed earlier this year requires insurers to cover so-called alternative medicine
ReplyDeleteArgh. But that is definitely not an American problem only.
Fifty-three percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, but 66 percent say the document requires a clear separation of church and state
That means at least 19% must be fairly confused about this issue...
Another De Dora abortion pick. What's your point Michael?
ReplyDeleteIf this, "Selling access to an operating room is unheard of in the United States, so it's very likely that the center's images were all taken abroad," was your point, that's kind of sad, even for you.
Or is it that dumpsters are invalid places to find "evidence" for an ethical debate, or invalid places to find anything?
Is political ideology derived from a person's social environment or is it a result of genetic predisposition?
ReplyDeleteHaving recently engaged in a lengthy political argument on this blog with other commenters, I find this report particularly amusing.
Apparently, some people believe that their political ideology (if they are willing to admit that they have one) is purely rational, or uninfluenced by personal traits (be they innate, acquired, or a mixture of both) that were not necessarily conscious choices. (Alternatively, I suppose that one might believe that one is naturally more perceptive than others, such that one's political views are more "correct" than those of others, even if one acquired them in a largely non-rational way. I suppose that's possible, albeit difficult to prove, and most arrogant, in any case.)
I, for one, can accept that my political leanings are not products of pure reason (if such a process even exists). After all, I've long found plausible Hume's famous saying that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." - especially after reading books on neuroscience (like those of Antonio Damasio), which lend it support (or at least to the "is" part) in the form of evidence for the related hypothesis that rationality requires emotional input.
Of course, such a recognition does not erase the differences between a calm, rational discourse and, say, shouting insults at one another. My point here is that (if this view is correct, then), beneath the surface of any rational discourse resides a complex of non-rational forces, using rational techniques to compete (or deliberate), internally and externally.
That said, the stuff in the report about the specific genetic marker and the number of friends during youth are fascinating (however provisional).
>That means at least 19% must be fairly confused about this issue...
ReplyDeleteThat means that 53% felt familiarity and vague positive affect when they heard the phrase "Christian nation," and then 66% felt familiarity and vague positive affect when they heard the phrase "separation of church and state."
The survey used recognizable slogans in its questions, which engenders a tendency to answer those questions in the affirmative.
>Nearly one in four sun-like stars should host an Earth-mass planet, argues a new paper in Science.
Which begs the question, why the cosmic silence?
@Harry,
ReplyDeleteI wasn't aware I had to have a "point." It was just an interesting link I came across in the past week or so.
Well, why was it interesting enough for your picks?
ReplyDelete> Which begs the question, why the cosmic silence?
ReplyDeleteInteresting topic with lots of proposed answers, but probably beyond the scope of this blog...
Some biologists argue, like PZ Myers does, that many of the steps leading up to us may be extremely unlikely. You would find many planets with bacteria, but very few with eukaryotes; and among those you would find many with higher animals but very few with a sapient species. I consider that argument bollocks. Of course we cannot really know with only one data point, but to me, the prevalence of parallel evolution in combination with deep time seems to shoot that argument completely out of the water.
My guess is more along these lines:
* Bridging deep space in a sufficiently short time for any life form to survive the journey - even in hibernation - may well be technically impossible no matter how far your technology progresses.
* Some sapient species may never build up an industrial civilization because while they have the intelligence, they lack suitable crop plants and/or the right soil and climate conditions to develop sustainable agriculture. This would mean they could never build up sufficient population densities with sufficient division of labour. See also Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel".
* Industrial civilizations with sufficient population density and technological may not be long-enough-term sustainable to get to colonizing space under any conditions whatsoever. Even if we now managed to switch to 100% solar energy, we would still be mining non-replenishing resources ranging from phosphate to rare earth elements, lowering our ground water levels from the US Midwest to China, and salinizing, sterilizing and eroding our best soils all over the planet, while world population is still growing happily.
And then there is the being dumb enough to kill themselves off in a nuclear war scenario, but who has not heard of that, so it hardly bears mention.