The Limits of Reason

The antipathy with which fundamentalists hold science and reason is difficult to understand. The emotional backlash, more storm than counter argument, often surprises. A simple statement can bring about the most strident denunciations, the pitch and timbre of the debate oscillating out of proportion to the content being discussed. Or so it seems. In the course of debating the truth, validity, utility, or relevance of certain topics, the nondogmatic must come to a point of fatigue by the seeming impossibility of finding common ground. At which time the debate either fizzles, the rationalist yields out of frustration, or the fundamentalist (of whatever stripe, on whatever topic) is ignored and bypassed. This last leads to a situation wherein the argument festers like an infection. It does not go away, often to the dismay of those watching and certainly to those who thought it without merit. You can flip this on its head and make the same claim in the other direction. At least, up to a point.

Consider the following statements:
  • (1) I am not descended from a monkey.
  • (2) God gave us dominion over the earth.
  • (3) Homosexuality is an abomination.
  • (4) The earth is only 6000 years old.
  • (5) The Bible is the inerrant word of God.
What is the one common, salient feature of each one of these statements? They are each one unqualified and utterly emotional statements. They are statements made in reference to personal belief, without reference to any external corroborative evidence or comparative context. They are, with the single exception of the Earth’s age, unanswerable in any reasonable way. Taken one at a time, therefore: (1) Of course you aren’t. It’s obvious. You’re descended from earlier generations of homo sapiens sapiens.

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Intelligence versus attractiveness; is there a correlation?

Intriguing post by Satoshi Kanazawa at Psychology Today. He points out research that purports to show that intelligence correlates positively with attractiveness. This research does dispel the notion that very attractive woman are less intelligent than average-looking woman; according to this research, very attractive woman are in the most intelligent group. I'm mulling over these findings; I don't quite know what to think of this yet. I do know that I'm highly suspicious of any sort of simplistic IQ-based characterization of "intelligence" (I recently made that point here). Kanazawa began this post pointing out the rampant prejudice that attractive people are more intelligent, but then argues that "virtually all stereotypes are empirically true." I suspect that there is some truth driving many stereotypes, but I think his conclusion (that "virturally all stereotypes are empirically true") is dangerous in its vagueness. Social feedback loops can cause stereotypes come true; if we mistreat people from stigmatized social groups, this makes it more likely that they will not do as well as social groups that have no such disadvantages. And even if it were true that there is some overall basis for most stereotypes, this doesn't begin to suggest that we ought to make presumptions about any particular individuals.

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Fundies really do say the darndest things

It's enough to make Jesus depressed. I just learned of a site called Fundies Say the Darndest Things. This is your one-stop shop for finding "an archive of the most hilarious, bizarre, ignorant, bigoted, and terrifying quotes from fundies all over the internet." The bad science is reason enough to visit the site, at least until you are sufficiently depressed at hearing such nonsense. It's pretty amazing stuff. Consider, too, the 100 all-time most ignorant and offensive fundamentalist quotes. Each on of them is taken from a fundie website and includes the link to the original (consider Rapture Ready, for example). Consider watching FSTDT's reenactment of some of the quotes at youtube (warning: some coarse language). All of this will leave you shaking your head wondering how people can be so pompously ignorant.

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Jim Webb’s heroic speech on the need for prison reform

In reading Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon, I learned the extent to which Senator Jim Webb has heroically spoken out on the need for prison reform. Webb certainly hits the nail on the head. Our current prison system is dehumanizing and it drains the public treasury. We can do much much better. Here are Webb's words:

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Greenwald picks up where Webb's quote (above) stops. This is a critical issue that needs immediate attention, for all of our good. We can do a lot better than arguing to lock up all the "bad" guys but then defining the "bad" guys simplistically and then making it all worse with the way we treat those "bad" guys.

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Charles Darwin’s exceedingly dangerous idea

In Darwin's dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel Dennett describes Darwin's idea as the "best idea anyone has ever had."

In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and a physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea.

What exactly was Darwin's dangerous idea? According to Dennett, it was "not the idea of evolution, but the idea of evolution by natural selection, an idea he himself could never formulate with sufficient rigor and detail to prove, though he presented a brilliant case for it." (42) Dennett considers Darwin's idea to be "dangerous" because it has so many fruitful applications in so many fields above and beyond biology. When Dennett was a schoolboy, he and some of his friends imagined that there was such a thing as "universal acid,"

a liquid "so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? With the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea-Darwin's idea-bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks are still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

(63) Darwin's idea is powerful, indeed. Many people see it as having the power to ruin the meaning of life.

People fear that once this universal acid has passed through the monuments we cherish, they will cease to exist, dissolved in an unrecognizable and unlovable puddle of scientific destruction.

Dennett characterizes this fear is unwarranted:

We might learn some surprising or even shocking things about these treasures, but unless our valuing these things was based all long on confusion or mistaken identity, how could increase understanding of them diminish their value in our eyes? (82)

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