2 x the difference between humans and chimpanzees

Neil deGrasse Tyson points out that the human genome overlaps 99% with the genome of chimpanzees. We're only 1% different, but consider how much we can do that chimps cannot do. Consider de Grasse Tyson's suggestion: Cognitive Scientist Andy Clark has also recognized the biological similarity between chimpanzees and humans, and asked how we accomplish so much more with such a meager difference. He suggests that our trick is that we have become proficient at off-loading and making use of information out into the environment. He argues that "self" extends beyond skin and skull.

[W]e create and maintain a variety of special external structures (symbolic and social-institutional). These external structures function so as to complement our individual cognitive profiles and to diffuse human reason across wider and wider social and physical networks whose collective computations exhibit their own special dynamics and properties.

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Santorum In Defense of the Family

This is an unscientific response to a ridiculous claim.  Rick Santorum, who wishes to be the next Bishop In Charge of America (or whatever prelate his church might recognize) recently made the claim that Gay couples are going to destabilize the family in America in order to accommodate their lifestyle. We’ve all been hearing this claim now for, oh, since gays stopped sitting by and letting cops beat them up on Saturday nights without fighting back.  Ever since Gay Pride.  Even on my own FaceBook page I had someone telling me I was blinded by the “Gay Agenda” and that the country was doomed—that because of the Gay Agenda little children were being taught how to use condoms in school and this—this—would bring us all to ruin. So….okay.  How? If we collectively allow homosexuals to marry each other, how does that do anything to American families that’s not already being done by a hundred other factors? I’ll tell you what destablilizes families.  And I’m not genius here with a brilliant insight, this is just what anyone can see if they look around and think a little bit. Families are destabilized over money.  [More . . . ]

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“Retard” and other disability-insults.

The word "retard" possessed dual meanings for a long time. First used as a term for intellectual disability in 1788, the word took on a pejorative sense in the 1970s. For thirty years the two meanings curiously co-existed. Universities had "Mental Retardation and Developmental Disability" Departments and students who drunkenly called one another 'retards' for lobbing bad beer-pong balls, and the two existed in tandem. But once medical and social service experts finally disavowed the word 'retard', it vanished from official usage with amazing swiftness. The Special Olympics ceased using the 'r-word' in 2004, initiating the trend. In 2006, the (former) American Association of Mental Retardation changed its name to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. By 2008, Special Olympics turned the abolishment of 'retard' into a full-time effort and launched R-word.org. The site protested the derogatory use of 'retard' (including a protest campaign against the 2008 film Tropic Thunder, which featured a lengthy discussion on 'retard' roles in film). Special Olympics and R-word.org also pushed for their fellow disability-service organizations to drop the term. In 2010, 'retard' was legally banished from the professional lexicon. On October 5 of last year, Obama signed "Rosa's Law", which banned the use of "retard" in all federal health, education, and labor policy. "Intellectual disability" and "developmental disability" became the approved nomenclature. Non-federal organizations followed hastily: in Ohio, Google directs you to the "Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities", but the website itself has already been scrubbed of the R-word(even if the url still has the dreaded 'r' in it). It's official: 'retard' has no place in formal usage. Once a medical term for someone with an intellectual disability, it lives now only as an insult. One that means, roughly, unintelligent. Like moron, which began as medical terminology for one with a mental age of 8 to 12. Or imbecile, which meant 'a mental age of 6 to 9'.

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Read more about the article Makeup is the new girdle.
Original photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Makeup is the new girdle.

I stopped wearing cosmetics a few months ago, after about half a year of using the stuff only sparingly. I started weaning myself off makeup because I had come to hate the hassle of applying it, and because I hated fretting about my appearance. I was also beginning to think of makeup as old-fashioned, an antiquated 'modesty' that inspires shame in one's true appearance. The longer I go without a cosmetic product on my face, the more I believe that makeup needs to go the way of the girdle. The restrictive, uncomfortable, needless, obsolete girdle. How many undergarments are you wearing right now? I'm guessing two at most. Likewise, I only wear two small undergarments below my clothes, even on the most formal occasions. Interview? Presentation? Class? Wedding? A bra and underwear are always adequate. Since I've never had to wear more than two undergarments, I find it staggering that women used to wear massive bras, high-waisted underwear, girdles, pantyhose or stockings, garter belts, slips, and camisoles. I often wear less than that as a full outfit. Anyone who knows me in real life can confirm that I regularly step out in leggings and a t-shirt (plus two small undergarments beneath). I don't say this to titilate, just to illustrate, because I suspect my bare-bones attire is quickly becoming the norm. I've spent a lot of time on college campuses- big and small, public and private, Jesuit and blessedly godless. Everywhere I've seen legions of women and girls decked out in equal or greater states of undress than my own. Gone are the girdles. [More . . . ]

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