Getting Science Under Control

After the election of 2008, we fans of the rational and provable had high hopes that government may give as much credence to the scientific process and conclusions as to the disproved aspects of philosophies promulgated by churches and industry shills. We watched with waning hope as a series of attempts to honor that ideal got watered down. But at least it was an improvement. But the 2010 election quickly reveals a backlash. Those whose cherished misunderstandings had been disrespected for the last couple of years now will have their day. As Phil Plait says, Energy and science in America are in big, big trouble. He begins,

"With the elections last week, the Republicans took over the House once again. The list of things this means is long and troubling, but the most troubling to me come in the forms of two Texas far-right Republicans: Congressmen Ralph Hall and Joe Barton."

He goes on to explain why. It comes down to them being proven representatives for Young Earth and fossil fuel interests, doing whatever they can to scuttle actual science by any means necessary. Especially where the science contradicts their pet ideas. Barton has published articles supporting climate change denialism. His main contributors are the extraction industries. Hall has used parliamentary tricks to attempt to scuttle funding for basic research. The Democrats offered to compromised by cutting funding, and he refused in hopes that the whole bill would fail. It passed. Then Hall publicly called Democrats on the carpet for using tricks to fatten the bill by the amount that they offered to cut. The Proxmire spirit lives on.

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David Attenborough meets Richard Dawkins

This is a delightful and engaging conversation between these two extraordinary thinkers (audio only). Natural selection is the focus, but there is a lot more, including scientific revolutions and fractal animals. Here's an excerpt from the 18-minute conversation:

Can you remember the moment you decided to become a scientist? RD: I only became fired up in my second year of a science degree. Unlike you, I was never a boy naturalist, to my regret. It was more the intellectual, philosophical questions that interested me. DA: I am a naturalist rather than a scientist. Simply looking at a flower or a frog has always seemed to me to be just about the most interesting thing there is. Others say human beings are pretty interesting, which they are, but as a child you're not interested in Auntie Flo's psychology; you're interested in how a dragonfly larva turns into a dragonfly. RD: Yes, it's carrying inside it two entirely separate blueprints, two different programmes. DA: I couldn't believe it! I remember asking an adult, "What goes on inside a cocoon?" and he said, "The caterpillar is totally broken down into a kind of soup. And then it starts again." And I remember saying, "That can't be right." As a procedure, you can't imagine how it evolved.
If you stay around until the end of the discussion, you'll get to hear Attenborough imitating Ernst Mayr.

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The strength of new atheism

Caspar Melville is often "bored" by new atheism and finds that the attacks of new atheists are overbroad (e.g., the suggestion bringing up a child in any religion is tantamount to child abuse), but in the U.K. Guardian he admits that new atheism does have its uses:

Hundreds of column inches have been generated by New Atheism and responses to it – not least in my magazine – and, if at times the debate has all the subtlety of It's A Knockout, it has also been educative, instructive and popular, in the important sense that it has been conducted in a language that most people can understand. It's sold a lot of books, too. New Atheism is also good at answering back to particular kinds of arguments. The origins of the New Atheists' impulse, according to philosopher Richard Norman, lie in 9/11 and the reappearance of a particularly aggressive strain of Christian religious fundamentalism. If, as Norman also argues, New Atheism can be over-generalising and crude in its response to religion, this is because it is a response to crude and nonspecific articulations of religiosity – what could be less specific than bombing a skyscraper, or cruder than Biblical creationism? In the light of this, irascible, rhetorically florid, sweeping, intellectually arrogant New Atheism certainly has its place – some arguments are just asking for it.

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Susan Blackmore: religion is not a virus

Susan Blackmore recently announced that evidence regarding the higher birth rates among religious believers has convinced her that religion is not a virus.

Data from 82 countries showed almost a straight line plot of the number of children against the frequency of religious worship, with those who worship more than once a week averaging 2.5 children and those who never worship only 1.7 – again below replacement rate.
Blackmore has thus renounced her previous view that religions are maladaptive:
All this suggests that religious memes are adaptive rather than viral from the point of view of human genes, but could they still be viral from our individual or societal point of view? Apparently not, given data suggesting that religious people are happier and possibly even healthier than secularists. . . . So it seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as "viruses of the mind" may have had its day . . . unless we twist the concept of a "virus" to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply.

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