Social Sciences
denialism | July 18, 2007New Scientist has an interesting article by Patrick Leman on the psychology of believing in conspiracy theories.
Belief in conspiracy theories certainly seems to be on the rise, and what little research has been done investigating this question confirms this is so for perhaps the most famous example of all - the claim that a conspiracy lay behind the assassination of JFK in 1963. A survey in 1968 found that about two-thirds of Americans believed the conspiracy theory, while by 1990 that proportion had risen to nine-tenths.
One factor fuelling the general growth of conspiracy beliefs is…
nisbetmc | July 17, 2007As I've argued, one of the reasons I find the New Atheist PR campaign so troubling is that it is has radicalized a movement that feeds on anger and fear and that offers little more than complaints and attacks. New Atheism turns on a binary discourse of us vs. them. In the rhetoric of the New Atheist movement, you're either with us or your against us.
The New Atheists risk alienating moderately religious Americans who otherwise agree with secularists on many important issues. Moreover, the movement lacks any kind of positive message for what it means to live life without religion. Other…
grrlscientist | July 15, 2007tags: global warming, human warfare, politics
Did you know that there is a positive correlation between cold temperatures and warfare? According to a study recently carried out by David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, human warfare increases as temperatures plunge.
Zhang's team looked at the frequency of warfare in eastern China during the previous thousand years and compared it with paleoclimate data. They found that there were 899 wars in eastern China between the years 1000 and 1911 and that nearly all peaks in warfare and dynastic changes coincided with cold phases…
hrynyshyn | July 13, 2007One question keeps rising out of the ScienceBlogosphere muck: Are PZ "Pharyngula" Myers and his ilk doing more harm than good by relentlessly and mercilessly attacking religion? Rob "Galactic Interactions" Knop apparently has had it up to here with Myers's brand of anti-faith rhetoric, and started one of those neverending comment wars on his blog yesterday -- except that he did end it by removing the post. Fortunately, I saved a copy first because the exchange really does get to the heart of the question.
Out of respect for Rob, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt…
oracknows | July 13, 2007Cool cool water.
Yes, that's what I really needed earlier this week, as the temperature almost hit 100° F in my neck of the woods. There's nothing like it after walking through the sauna-like conditions and losing my precious bodily fluids in the form of sweat. After all, I wouldn't want to get dehydrated, would I? And, heck, it's quite possible to die of dehydration. If you believe those nasty "conventional" medical authorities, it takes a healthy person with healthy kidneys a few days, give or take, to become sufficiently dehydrated to endanger his life, and medical science tells us that…
clock | July 11, 2007There is a new piece of information regarding the mammal vs. bird controversy in Chernobyl:
Brightly Colored Birds Most Affected By Chernobyl Radiation:
Brightly coloured birds are among the species most adversely affected by the high levels of radiation around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, ecologists have discovered. The findings -- published online in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology -- help explain why some species are harder hit by ionising radiation than others.
Dr Anders Møller of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and Professor Timothy Mousseau of the…
sb admin | July 9, 2007A couple of weeks ago, EPA proposed a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone (0.07 â 0.075 ppb) that was lower than the current limit (0.08 ppb) but not as protective as the limit many experts suggested (0.06). The agency also announced that it would be taking comments on alternative standards from 0.06 â 0.08 ppb. (Read this post on the announcement for more.) On Wednesday at 10am, this proposed revision will be the subject of a hearing held by the Senate Environment & Public Works Committeeâs Clean Air & Nuclear Safety Subcommittee.
While weâre waiting to hear EPA…
drorzel | July 9, 2007So, you may or may not recall that last week, Matt Nisbet posted about a study purporting to show that religious people were more generous in their charitable giving than atheists. One of his commenters opted to go for the "sour grapes" response, claiming that religious charities were all stupid, and asking rhetorically:
How many religious people will back programs for the poor that include sex education, birth control, access to low-cost abortions, health education, job training, home economics, how to eat better when money is tight, and so on?
This annoyed me, so I asked for…
bcohen | July 9, 2007Author-meets-bloggers I: Michael Egan, on Barry Commoner, science, and environmentalism.
Author-meets-bloggers II: Cyrus Mody on nanotechnology, ethics, and policy.
Below, The World's Fair sits down with Professor Saul Halfon in the first of a two-part conversation about his new book, The Cairo Consensus: Demographic Surveys, Women's Empowerment, and Regime Change in Population Policy (Lexington Books, 2006). Professor Halfon is a science policy scholar and an Assistant Professor of STS at Virginia Tech. He's a respected and sought after teacher and a gifted researcher. He's a good guy…
bushwells | July 7, 2007So last year we had the dreaded 06/06/06, and lo! No apocalyptic beasts appeared in the heavens. This year, it's our lucky day: 07/07/07!
Seven is considered a "lucky number," a prime of a magical, mysterious signficance. So where does the source of this luck derive? Why, from the Bible, of course! At least in part. From LiveScience, 07/07/07: Is This Your Lucky Day?
The number seven is considered lucky due to its frequent and favorable appearance in the Bible, say historians.
"As the number of the days of God's first week, of the levels of heaven...of the numbers of angels and trumpets…
neurophilosophy | July 6, 2007PHINEAS GAGE (1823-1860) is one of the earliest documented cases of severe brain injury. Gage is the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients.
Gage was foreman of a crew of railroad construction workers who were excavating rocks to make way for the railroad track. This involved drilling holes deep into the rock and filling them with dynamite. A fuse was then inserted, and the entrance to the hole plugged with sand, so that the force…
razib | July 5, 2007Many of you have heard of the Ultimatum Game:
The ultimatum game is an experimental economics game in which two parties interact anonymously and only once, so reciprocation is not an issue. The first player proposes how to divide a sum of money with the second party. If the second player rejects this division, neither gets anything. If the second accepts, the first gets his demand and the second gets the rest.
In theory a "rational" player should accept whatever is offered when there isn't a repeated iteration. Reality is different. From The Economist:
...Those results recorded, Dr Burnham…
oracknows | July 5, 2007The other day, I wrote about how several of the suspects arrested in the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow were physicians or in training to be physicians. At the time, I expressed dismay at what I viewed to be a betrayal of the very basis of our profession, that we try to help people and make them better, not kill them. The post engendered a lot of discussion (and the expected amount of doctor-bashing based on my supposed naivete in stating that most physicians go into medicine to help people, a statement that I stand by).
Now, via Kevin, MD (who apparently got this by way of…
evolgen | July 5, 2007Last month's issue of Evolution (aka Evolution Int J Org Evolution, aka Evolution (Lawrence Kansas), aka some other confusing way of referring to the journal published by the Society for the Study of Evolution) contains two articles on teaching evolution. The first is on creating museum exhibitions to showcase evolutionary biology. The article focuses on Explore Evolution, a project in which multiple museums in the midwestern United States put up permanent exhibits about evolution. The exhibits encourage problem solving to understand how evolution works and have multiple examples from diverse…
neurophilosophy | July 4, 2007 Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is arguably the greatest novelist of all time. He cast a long shadow over world literature, and subsequently influenced many great writers, from Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, to Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jack Kerouac.
Dostoyevsky had a profound insight into the human condition. He was much more than a novelist: he was also a psychologist and a philosopher. In his novels, Dostoyevsky explored subjects such as free will, the existence of God, and good and evil. The characters in his novels are most often portrayed as living…
clock | July 4, 2007Stressed-out African Naked Mole-rats May Provide Clues About Human Infertility:
A tiny, blind, hairless subterranean rodent that lives in social colonies in the harsh, semi-arid conditions of Africa could shed light on stress-related infertility in humans, the 23rd annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology will hear.
Glimmer Of Hope For Tahitian Tree Snails' Survival:
Despite the mass extermination of Tahiti's unique species of tree snails in recent decades, much of their original genetic diversity can still be found in remnant populations that survive on the…
worldsfair | July 4, 2007O.K. so, let's design a course.
A course that has a calendar entry as follows:
ASIC 200 (3) Global Issues in the Arts and Sciences: Selected global issues explored through the methodologies and perspectives of both the physical and life sciences and the humanities and social sciences. [3-0-0] Prerequisite: Second year standing in the Faculty of Arts or Faculty of Science.
And a rationale as follows:
The rationale for this course is based on the growing salience of the global issues facing human society and the educational challenge these issues represent. Global issues (such as climate…
oracknows | July 3, 2007One thing that's become obvious to me over the last few years that I've been engaged in dealing with various forms of pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories is that people who are prone to credulity to one form of pseudoscience, the paranormal, or other crankery tend to be prone to credulity towards multiple forms of crankery. For example, Phillip Johnson, one of the "luminaries" of the "intelligent design" creationism movement is also a full-blown HIV denialist who doesn't accept the science that demonstrates that HIV causes AIDS. Another example is Dr. Lorraine Day,…
clock | July 2, 2007In all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate alike, one of the defining features of sleep is the "rebound", i.e., the making up for sleep debt after an acute sleep deprivation event. However, the problem of modern society is a chronic sleep loss in humans - when you loos a couple of hours of needed sleep every day.
Now, a team at Northwestern studied the effects of chronic sleep loss and, lo and behold - bad news! There is no rebound after chronic sleep deprivation.
Chronically sleep deprived? You can't make up for lost sleep:
---------snip-------------
In the study, the researchers kept…
tfk | July 2, 2007Brad surveys the nation (at least the flying public), and writes:
If anything, my point is that it’s sad that we, as a nation, seem to have lost our sense of patriotism — and there could possibly be an inverse relationship of the degree that one is vocal about it and one’s IQ.
I think this sentence is revealing. I agree with the second half, and disagree with the first. I would argue that patriotism is not fundamentally about wearing shirts or pins with flags. It isn't about that frayed flag limply drooping on your porch during a rainstorm, or the magnetic yellow ribbon on your SUV.…