Social Sciences
stcynic | October 28, 2006Jim Chen, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, has a powerful essay comparing prohibitions on interracial marriage to prohibitions on gay marriage. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold:
Among life's challenges, none is more difficult to undertake, and none is more rewarding when achieved, than the mission of finding one person to love above all others, and persuading that person to love you in return. The law has no legitimate basis for regulating this quest on the basis of the race or sex of one's beloved.
The most obvious analogy supporting legal recognition is Loving v.…
stcynic | October 27, 2006One of the law professors on the ReligionLaw listserv posted a link to a journal article on SSRN by George Dent of Case Western Reserve University. The article, entitled Civil Rights for Whom? Gay Rights Versus Religious Freedom, reminded me of Dorothy Parker's famous one line book review - "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force." It is, quite simply, one of the worst attempts at legal scholarship I have ever come across, beginning with the very first paragraph:
Disapproval of homosexuality is widespread, deep-rooted and of long standing.…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2006There's a fair bit of to-and-fro going on with the Sciblings about Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion, which, being at the edge of empire, I haven't yet seen. When I do, I will read it and comment, of course.
But I want to ask a general question - is religion in itself a malign influence on society? For example, any number of Islamic Imams, including the leader of Australia's Muslim community, think that women who don't dress "modestly" (which can mean anything from wearing a long sleeved top to the burka) are to blame for being raped.
And attacks on the moral influence of…
revere | October 25, 2006As the October 31 date for the resumption of the trial of the Tripoli 6 looms, the world scientific community is weighing in. From the ScienceNow section of the journal Science:
U.S. scientists are adding their voices to mounting international pressure on Libya to release six foreign medical workers who could face execution within weeks. A letter published online today by Science--written by virologist Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-discoverer of HIV, and signed by 43 other scientists--accuses the Libyan government of using the medics…
ddobbs | October 24, 2006
Stroke damage in a human brain
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Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of Milan discovery that blocking a certain cell-wall gate in the hour after stroke (in a lab rat) could prevent almost all damage.
Check it out at Scientific American.
thusspakezuska | October 24, 2006Back in early August, I wrote about the Karpova-Tonegawa controversy at MIT, and about Rollins College president Lewis Duncan's comments on the topic in the Boston Globe.
More on the Karpova-Toadygawa story. This may be the best part of all. Because you see, Zuskateers, it isn't just Toadygawa who's had his true colors exposed. Consider this quote from the Boston Globe:
If the accusations are deemed true, [MIT president] Hockfield will face the task of standing up to one of MIT's greatest luminaries, someone who brings in tens of millions of dollars of research funding. "This may…
cortex | October 24, 2006George Eliot famously declared that "If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, then it does nothing." Eliot would be glad to know that she was right: reading novels really does make us nicer. As the British Psychological Society Digest notes:
The more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have and the better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite association. That's according to Raymond Mar and colleagues who say their finding could have implications for educating children and adults about…
purepedantry | October 24, 2006New Scientist is reporting on a movement among some scientists to replace the word "cloning" with "somatic cell nuclear transfer":
Don't say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of "therapeutic cloning" to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being.
But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000…
stcynic | October 23, 2006James Wolcott has another post on Dinesh D'Souza's appalling argument that we should become more like the Taliban in order to make them hate us less. He includes a few quotes from the book that are so stupid they leave your mouth agape as you read them. For instance:
"The left doesn't blame America for undermining the shah of Iran, getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos, or imposing sanctions against South Africa."
As Wolcott rightly points out, it was the left that argued for imposing sanctions against South Africa and the right that fought against them. Our beloved VP, Dick Cheney, not only voted…
razib | October 22, 2006Hsien-Hsien Lei points me to another story about black and white twins. First, the "black" twin is clearly mixed race, her skin color is between the modal complexion of Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans on the von Luschan scale. The "white" twin on the other hand does seem to exhibit the color of someone of European descent. What's going on here? This is somewhat different than the other case of black and white twins, in that case both parents were mixed-race, in this case the father is white (German) and the mother is mixed-race (Jamaican & English). The two cases are different even…
razib | October 21, 2006The comments below about Muslims in Europe have continued to come in, so I figured I would put a new post up and allow further comments here on the front page. On my other blog I have another post on the veil. Two points:
1) It seems like "New Labor" has decided to drop the PC-veil, so to speak, and take a hard line on Islamic separatism. This is somewhat rich since the government itself in the 90s helped give succor to "community groups" like the Muslim Council of Britain which were retarding the process of assimilation (in fact, they had an interest to perpetuate separation since it…
jstemwedel | October 20, 2006It's the time of year when the mailbox starts filling up with catalogues. At the Free-Ride house, many of these are catalogues featuring "educational" toys and games. Now, some of these toys and games are actually pretty cool. Others, to my mind, are worse than mere wastes of money.
For your consideration, three "science" kits targeted at girls:
Archimedes got scientific insight from a bathtub, but he wasn't required to wear eye-makeup to do it.
Spa Science
The kit offers itself as a way "to cultivate a girl's interest in science" through the making of "beauty products like an oatmeal…
tfk | October 19, 2006Or rather, why can't they just be honest about what they don't like?
This is the summary of a new ad running against the Missouri stem cell research amendment:
The ad features a woman talking about her daughter, who needed money for college. She “sold her eggs to a fertility clinic,” the woman says. “The surgery was painful. They give you powerful hormones to produce more eggs. And now, she may never have children.” The ad ends with the warning that Amendment 2 will increase the need for human eggs for research.
As the KC Star's Election Central (linked above) notes,
the ad never claims that…
pharyngula | October 18, 2006Human X (left) and Y (right) chromosomes
Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it's gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can't believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week's worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.
What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,
William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly…
bushwells | October 18, 2006I, like, really want to be one of the cool kids here on Science Blogs so I am reading The God Delusion by that Oxford don Dawkins. I ventured into what passes as campus town here in Einsteinville, and bought the last copy on the shelf at a proudly independent and somewhat self-congratulatory bookstore. After reading Dawkins' thesis that religion should not be accorded special respect, I remembered my stash of old National Lampoons (circa 1972-1977ish) mouldering away in the basement. Those NatLamPoo boys respected nothing, and I vaguely recalled that they certainly did not spare religion…
evolvingthoughts | October 17, 2006There's a really really dumb article getting a lot of attention in the media about the future of human evolution. Razib has a deprecating post about it, but I thought I'd add my two Australian cents (=0.006 US cents) worth.
Let's look at the major claim: that humans will subspeciate. I can't think of anything less likely among a species that has major gene flow between all its populations on a scale of thousands of generations. Species aren't formed by selection for differing adaptive traits within a population, but by the interruption of the gene flow that is caused by migration or invasion…
drorzel | October 17, 2006For some reason, I was forwarded a link to an old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how to give a scholarly lecture. (It's a time-limited email link, so look quickly.)
As with roughly 90% of all Chronicle pieces, it's aimed squarely at the humanities types. The advice given thus ranges from pretty good advice even for science types ("Remember that people who show up to hear you want to believe that you're smart, interesting, and a good speaker"; "Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Then stop"; and "Prepare yourself in advance for questions.") to horror-show glimpses of how the…
stcynic | October 17, 2006Came across these links while surfing and I have to say I'm very disappointed in a person and an organization I've respected in the past for their indefensible position on the issue. The first is Gary Trudeau, who is taken to task by Rogier van Bakel, and rightly so, for his recent comments on the matter. He was asked the following question:
What did you make of the Danish cartoon mess? I understand that you said you would never play with the image of Allah. But did you feel you should have done so out of a sense of professional solidarity, or to make a statement about freedom of speech?
And…
stcynic | October 17, 2006Yesterday was yet another of those frequent religious right "conferences" - really just a series of ridiculous speeches to fire up the base with rhetorical red meat to get them out to vote in November. This one was disingenuously called Liberty Sunday, following on the heels of the equally misnamed Justice Sunday earlier this year. There are several reports on what was said, all of which was predictable and much of it patently absurd. In keeping with their theme, they used a picture of Boston's famous Old North Church, indicating their metaphor that, like Paul Revere, they were bravely riding…
grrlscientist | October 15, 2006Wealth accumulated by First World countries is largely based on riches taken from Third World countries. For example, the destruction of India's textile industry, the takeover of the spice trade, the genocide of native American tribes, and African slavery all served to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Below the fold is an interesting article that discusses the links between the accumulation of wealth concomitant with the over-exploitation of nature and how they cause poverty.
I am interested to read your reactions to this article, dear readers.
Two of the great economic myths of our time…