do the right thing

In the 1970s and 1980s, Kohlberg argued that moral reasoning is based on explicit rules and concepts, like conscious logical problem-solving; over the course of an individual’s development, the rules and concepts that he or she uses to solve moral problems unfold in a well-defined, universal sequence of stages. These stages are biologically determined but socially supported. In early stages, moral reasoning is strongly influenced by external authority; in later stages, moral reasoning appeals first to internalized convention, and then to general principles of neutrality, egalitarianism, and universal rights. It may be that what makes one culture, one sex, or one individual different from another is just how high and how fast it manages to climb the moral ladder.

...

The psychologist Carol Gilligan, for example, argued that women justify their moral choices differently from men, but with equal sophistication. Men, she claimed, tend to reason about morality in terms of justice, and women in terms of care: “While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality—that everyone should be treated the same—an ethic of care rests on the premise of non-violence—that no one should be hurt.” Similar arguments were made for non-Western cultures—that they emphasize social roles and obligations rather than individual rights and justice.

...

The current theorists take as their model for moral reasoning not conscious problem-solving, as Kohlberg did, but the human language faculty. That is, rather than “moral reasoning,” human beings are understood to be endowed with a “moral instinct” that enables them to categorize and judge actions as right or wrong the way native speakers intuitively recognize sentences as grammatical or ungrammatical.

....

The psychologist Elliott Turiel has proposed that the moral rules a person espouses have a special psychological status that distinguishes them from other rules—like local conventions—that guide behavior. One of the clearest indicators of this so-called moral–conventional distinction is the role of local authority.

We understand that the rules of etiquette—whether it is permissible to leave food on your plate, to belch at the table, or to speak without first raising your hand—are subject to context, convention, and authority. If a friend told you before your first dinner at her parents’ house that in her family, belching at the table after dinner is a gesture of appreciation and gratitude, you would not think your friend’s father was immoral or wrong or even rude when he leaned back after dinner and belched—whether or not you could bring yourself to join in.

Moral judgments, in contrast, are conceived (by hypothesis) as not subject to the control of local authority. If your friend told you that in her family a man beating his wife after dinner is a gesture of appreciation and gratitude, your assessment of that act would presumably not be swayed. Even three-year-old children already distinguish between moral and conventional transgressions. They allow that if the teacher said so, it might be okay to talk during nap, or to stand up during snack time, or to wear pajamas to school. But they also assert that a teacher couldn’t make it okay to pull another child’s hair or to steal her backpack. Similarly, children growing up in deeply religious Mennonite communities distinguish between rules that apply because they are written in the Bible (e.g., that Sunday is the day of Sabbath, or that a man must uncover his head to pray) and rules that would still apply even if they weren’t actually written in the Bible (including rules against personal and material harm).

There is one exception, though. James Blair, of the National Institutes of Health, has found that children classified as psychopaths (partly because they exhibit persistent aggressive behavior toward others) do not make the normal moral–conventional distinction. These children know which behaviors are not allowed at school, and they can even rate the relative seriousness of different offences; but they fail when asked which offences would still be wrong to commit even if the teacher suspended the rules. For children with psychopathic tendencies (and for psychopathic adults, too, though not for those Blair calls “normal murderers”), rules are all a matter of local authority. In its absence, anything is permissible.

Turiel’s thesis, then, is that healthy individuals in all cultures respect the distinction between conventional violations, which depend on local authorities, and moral violations, which do not.

...

Jacobson-Widding argues that the Manyika do not separate moral behavior from good manners. Lying, farting, and stealing are all equally violations of tsika. And if manners and morals cannot be differentiated, the whole study of moral universals is in trouble, because how—as Jacobson-Widding herself asks—can we study the similarities and differences in moral reasoning across cultures “when the concept of morality does not exist?” From the perspective of cognitive science, this dispute over the origins of the moral–conventional distinction is an empirical question, and one that might be resolvable with the new techniques of infant developmental psychology.

One possibility is that children first distinguish “wrong” actions in their third year of life, as they begin to recognize the thoughts, feelings, and desires of other people. If this is true, the special status of moral reasoning would be tied to another special domain in human cognition: theory of mind, or our ability to make rich and specific inferences about the contents of other people’s thoughts. Although this link is plausible, there is some evidence that distinguishing moral right from wrong is a more primitive part of cognition than theory of mind, and can exist independently. Unlike psychopathic children, who have impaired moral reasoning in the presence of intact theory of mind, autistic children who struggle to infer other people’s thoughts are nevertheless able to make the normal moral–conventional distinction.

Another hypothesis is that children acquire the notion of “wrong” actions in their second year, once they are old enough to hurt others and experience firsthand the distress of the victim. Blair, for example, has proposed that human beings and social species like canines have developed a hard-wired “violence-inhibition mechanism” to restrain aggression against members of the same species. This mechanism is activated by a victim’s signals of distress and submission (like a dog rolling over onto its back) and produces a withdrawal response. When this mechanism is activated in an attacker, withdrawal means that the violence stops. The class of “wrong” actions, those that cause the victim’s distress, might be learned first for one’s own actions and then extended derivatively to others’ actions.

multiplication of wants

Gandhi's belief that "civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants."

food immunization

And the study raises similar ethical questions to the idea of vaccinating children against drugs. Supposing a vaccination against cocaine or nicotine becomes available, should parents have their children immunised? Should some people be allowed to impose their ideas on food onto others, even if it is for their own good?

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7770&feedId=online-news_rss20

And the study raises similar ethical questions to the idea of vaccinating children against drugs. Supposing a vaccination against cocaine or nicotine becomes available, should parents have their children immunised? Should some people be allowed to impose their ideas on food onto others, even if it is for their own good?

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7770&feedId=online-news_rss20

smell of success

from

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4149493

The upshot of the trial was that women did, indeed, find the odour of dominants sexier than that of wimps—but only in special circumstances. These circumstances were first that the woman was already in a relationship and second that she was in the most fertile phase of her cycle. In other words, dominant males' scent was only more attractive at the point where a woman could both conceive and cuckold her mate.

from NYtimes

Watching New Love as It Sears the Brain

By BENEDICT CAREY

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.

"When you're in the throes of this romantic love it's overwhelming, you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day - why? Because she's there," said Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis. "And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."

Brain imaging technology cannot read people's minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional M.R.I.

Still, said Dr. Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital, "I distrust about 95 percent of the M.R.I. literature and I would give this study an 'A'; it really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love."

He added: "The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs."

In the study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at a picture of their beloved while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at picture of an acquaintance.

Functional M.R.I. technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.

In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit.

These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates actively when people desire or anticipate a reward. In studies of gamblers, cocaine users and even people playing computer games for small amounts of money, these dopamine sites become extremely active as people score or win, neuroscientists say.

Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.

This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, "is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don't think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized," Dr. Brown said.

The intoxication of new love mellows with time, of course, and the brain scan findings reflect some evidence of this change, Dr. Fisher said.

In an earlier functional M.R.I. study of romance, published in 2000, researchers at University College London monitored brain activity in young men and women who had been in relationships for about two years. The brain images, also taken while participants looked at photos of their beloved, showed activation in many of the same areas found in the new study - but significantly less so, in the region correlated with passionate love, she said.

In the new study, the researchers also saw individual differences in their group of smitten lovers, based on how long the participants had been in the relationships. Compared with the students who were in the first weeks of a new love, those who had been paired off for a year or more showed significantly more activity in an area of the brain linked to long-term commitment.

Last summer, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta reported that injecting a ratlike animal called a vole with a single gene turned promiscuous males into stay-at-home dads - by activating precisely the same area of the brain where researchers in the new study found increased activity over time.

"This is very suggestive of attachment processes taking place," Dr. Brown said. "You can almost imagine a time where instead of going to Match.com you could have a test to find out whether you're an attachment type or not."

One reason new love is so heart-stopping is the possibility, the ever-present fear, that the feeling may not be entirely requited, that the dream could suddenly end.

In a follow-up experiment, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Aron and Dr. Brown have carried out brain scans on 17 other young men and women who recently were dumped by their lovers. As in the new love study, the researchers compared two sets of images, one taken when the participants were looking at a photo of a friend, the other when looking at a picture of their ex.

Although they are still sorting through the images, the investigators have noticed one preliminary finding: increased activation in an area of the brain related to the region associated with passionate love. "It seems to suggest what the psychological literature, poetry and people have long noticed: that being dumped actually does heighten romantic love, a phenomenon I call frustration-attraction," Dr. Fisher said in an e-mail message.

One volunteer in the study was Suzanna Katz, 22, of New York, who suffered through a breakup with her boyfriend three years ago. Ms. Katz said she became hyperactive to distract herself after the split, but said she also had moments of almost physical withdrawal, as if weaning herself from a drug.

"It had little to do with him, but more with the fact that there was something there, inside myself, a hope, a knowledge that there's someone out there for you, and that you're capable of feeling this way, and suddenly I felt like that was being lost," she said in an interview.

And no wonder. In a series of studies, researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one's own. "The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us," said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.

To lose all that, all at once, while still in love, plays havoc with the emotional, cognitive and deeper reward-driven areas of the brain. But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say - intact and capable in time of flaring to life with someone new.

Of Two Minds - New York Times

Of Two Minds - New York Times: "One recent discovery to confront is that the human brain can readily change its structure -- a phenomenon scientists call neuroplasticity. A few years ago, brain scans of London cabbies showed that the detailed mental maps they had built up in the course of navigating their city's complicated streets were apparent in their brains. Not only was the posterior hippocampus -- one area of the brain where spatial representations are stored -- larger in the drivers; the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been on the job.

It may not come as a great surprise that interaction with the environment can alter our mental architecture. But there is also accumulating evidence that the brain can change autonomously, in response to its own internal signals. Last year, Tibetan Buddhist monks, with the encouragement of the Dalai Lama, submitted to functional magnetic resonance imaging as they practiced ''compassion meditation,'' which is aimed at achieving a mental state of pure loving kindness toward all beings. The brain scans showed only a slight effect in novice meditators. But for monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation, the differences in brain function were striking. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex, the locus of joy, overwhelmed activity in the right prefrontal cortex, the locus of anxiety."

Of Two Minds - New York Times

Of Two Minds - New York Times: "Damage to the right frontal lobe, for example, sometimes led to a heightened interest in high cuisine, a condition dubbed gourmand syndrome. (One European political journalist, upon recovering from a stroke affecting this part of the brain, profited from the misfortune by becoming a food columnist.)"

Freud and His Discontents - The New York Times - New York Times

Freud and His Discontents - The New York Times - New York Times: "Freud's essay rests on three arguments that are impossible to prove: the development of civilization recapitulates the development of the individual; civilization's central purpose of repressing the aggressive instinct exacts unbearable suffering; the individual is torn between the desire to live (Eros) and the wish to die (Thanatos)."

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "They took their video camera to a maternity ward to examine the preferences of babies that were only one day old. The infants saw either the friendly face of a live female student or a mobile that matched the color, size and shape of the student's face and included a scrambled mix of her facial features. To avoid any bias, the experimenters were unaware of each baby's sex during testing. When they watched the tapes, they found that the girls spent more time looking at the student, whereas the boys spent more time looking at the mechanical object. This difference in social interest was evident on day one of life--implying again that we come out of the womb with some cognitive sex differences built in."

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the 'masculine' toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys."

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain

Scientific American: His Brain, Her Brain: "Such anatomical diversity may be caused in large part by the activity of the sex hormones that bathe the fetal brain. These steroids help to direct the organization and wiring of the brain during development and influence the structure and neuronal density of various regions. Interestingly, the brain areas that Goldstein found to differ between men and women are ones that in animals contain the highest number of sex hormone receptors during development. This correlation between brain region size in adults and sex steroid action in utero suggests that at least some sex differences in cognitive function do not result from cultural influences or the hormonal changes associated with puberty--they are there from birth."

Language Log: Trees spring eternal

Language Log: Trees spring eternal: "'things are trees' idea over many millenia of hominid inquiry into nature. A believer in evolutionary psychology might even suppose that our brains have learned to think that things are trees, genetically as well as memetically."

Untitled Document

Untitled Document: "The world - David Hume writes - is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died' ('Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', V. 1779"

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview: "The people working on the Semantic Web greatly overestimate the value of deductive reasoning (a persistent theme in Artificial Intelligence projects generally.) The great popularizer of this error was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories have done more damage to people's understanding of human intelligence than anyone other than Rene Descartes. Doyle has convinced generations of readers that what seriously smart people do when they think is to arrive at inevitable conclusions by linking antecedent facts. As Holmes famously put it 'when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

This sentiment is attractive precisely because it describes a world simpler than our own. In the real world, we are usually operating with partial, inconclusive or context-sensitive information. When we have to make a decision based on this information, we guess, extrapolate, intuit, we do what we did last time, we do what we think our friends would do or what Jesus or Joan Jett would have done, we do all of those things and more, but we almost never use actual deductive logic."

Linguistics 001 -- Communication: a Biological Perspective

Linguistics 001 -- Communication: a Biological Perspective: "In a word, the answer is ritual. Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic 'education' in modern human societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbol discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of token-token relationships to the fore, a high degree of redundancy is important. This was demonstrated in the experiments with the chimpanzees Sherman and Austin. It was found that getting them to repeat by rote a large number of errorless trials in combining lexigrams enabled them to make the transition from explicit and concrete sign-object associations to implicit sign-sign associations. Repetition of the same set of actions with the same set of objects over and over again in a ritual performance is often used for a similar purpose in modern human societies. Repetition can render the individual details for some performance automatic and minimally conscious, while at the same time the emotional intensity induced by group participation can help focus attention on other aspects of the objects and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light."

Feminist Ethics

Feminist Ethics: "Kohlberg claimed that moral development is a six-stage process. Stage One is the punishment and obedience orientation. To avoid the 'stick' of punishment and/or to receive the 'carrot' of a reward, children do as they are told. Stage Two is 'the instrumental relativist orientation.' Based on a limited principle of reciprocity — You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours — children meet others' needs only if others meet their needs. Stage Three is the 'good boy-nice girl' orientation. Adolescents conform to prevailing norms to secure others' approval and love. Stage Four is the law and order orientation. Adolescents begin to do their duty, show respect for authority, and maintain the given social order to secure others' admiration and respect for them as honorable, law abiding citizens. Stage Five is the social-contract legalistic orientation. Adults adopt an essentially utilitarian moral point of view according to which individuals are permitted to do as they please, provided they refrain from harming other people in the process. Stage Six is the universal ethical principle orientation. Adults adopt an essentially Kantian moral perspective that seeks to transcend and judge all conventional moralities. Adults are no longer ruled by self-interest, the opinion of others, or the fear of legal punishment, but by self-legislated and self-imposed universal principles such as those of justice, reciprocity, and respect for the dignity of human persons (Kohlberg in Mischel, ed., Cognitive Development and Epistemology, 1971)."

Economist.com | America's intelligence reforms

Economist.com | America's intelligence reforms

Economist.com | Synaesthesia

Economist.com | Synaesthesia: "In ES's case, that happens too. Individual tones have their own colours: C is red, F-sharp is violet. But her perception of intervals as flavours, reported in this week's Nature by Gian Beeli and his colleagues at the University of Zurich, is a phenomenon recorded only once before."

Mangiare Bene - Rules for cooking Pasta

Mangiare Bene - Rules for cooking Pasta: "The quantity of salt to water should be 1/2 tablespoon per litre"

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books: "terror of boredom"

Economist.com | Animal behaviour

Economist.com | Animal behaviour

The New York Times > Technology > For Local Searchers, Amazon Adds Photos to Yellow Pages

The New York Times > Technology > For Local Searchers, Amazon Adds Photos to Yellow Pages:

"To achieve this, A9 sent out a sport utility vehicle equipped with a digital video camera. In Manhattan, for example, a driver spent more than a week cruising down streets, capturing images and cataloging the location of each business using a global positioning system receiver."

current issue

current issue:

'Pink tea,' originally meaning a highly fashionable (and exclusive) tea party, is an American invention dating back to the late 19th century. The use of 'pink' to mean 'fashionable' or 'exclusive' harks back to the very old sense of 'pink' meaning 'the peak or finest example' of something, a use dating back to the 16th century, probably ultimately derived from the pinkish complexion of a Caucasian person in good health ('in the pink'). By the 17th century, 'pink' was being used both as a noun meaning 'one of the elite' and an adjective meaning 'exquisite' or 'exclusive.'

Entrez PubMed

Entrez PubMed: "Temporal lobe abnormalities in semantic processing by criminal psychopaths as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging."

Note, find thisarticle.

The democracy that hates you...

"The democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator that loves you."

From The Case for Democracy Natan Sharansky (p95).

My Sharansky - Bush's favorite book doesn't always endorse his policies. By Chris Suellentrop:

Reason: Stigmatizing Fathers: Dads lose both ways in adoption cases

Reason: Stigmatizing Fathers: Dads lose both ways in adoption cases: "In the end, our society sends men quite a mixed message. If your partner gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby, you're liable for 18 years of child support, whether or not you want to be a father. If she doesn't want to be a mother, she can give your child to strangers and there isn't much you can do. Then we complain that men don't take parenthood seriously enough."

Chinks in the alliance

The New York Times > Washington > Backers of Gay Marriage Ban Use Social Security as Cudgel:

"WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - A coalition of major conservative Christian groups is threatening to withhold support for President Bush's plans to remake Social Security unless Mr. Bush vigorously champions a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage."

The New York Times > Science > Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically

The New York Times > Science > Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically:

For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius.

Who is this guy! I love him. I've been pointing that out too - being born a male, that's no guarantee of success. We may see more males at the very top of success than females but we need to take into account all those males who fail utterly, those in jail, those with mental illnesses, those who die in war or crime. That is, there is selection bias in saying men have advantages over women. Only those who survived have it better than women.

One comparison is to polygamy (legally having more than one wife). Is it good for males or bad? The initial response is: sure, it's good for males because they can have a harem (salacious laughter). But look at it more closely. It's not the case that a polygamous society would instantaneously have more girls be born. No, there would still be a 1:1, male:female ratio (more accurately, it's 105:100 ratio in the US, at birth; and it declines every second after that). If some man has three wives that means there are two men out there unable to find a wife. On average it would be the same as a strictly monogamous society. But that's on average. It may still be better to be born a female in such a society. Why? Because it's safer. There's more insurance for a woman. She can always find a mate, even if she has to share him with other women. That's not the case with men. They have a higher chance of having multiple mates but also a higher chance of having no mates at all. In this society, males and females may average the same number of mates, but males have a larger Bell curve (compare high risk investment options).


(It should be pointed out that a society such as the US, where there are no legal penalties for having a mistress, is partially polygamous. A status-rich man can have as many women as he can provide status for.)

The New York Times > Science > Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically

The New York Times > Science > Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically: "Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers.

Among college-bound seniors who took the math SAT's in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong."

That's what I've been saying for years. One can't just compare the tops, because the variability could be larger for men.

Dubium fiat!

Dubium fiat! What creationists want to do is to use intelligent design (ID) to drive a wedge of uncertainty into the theory of evolution. Or rather, there's already a crack of uncertainty in all scientific theories; and ID proponents want to widen that crack to a full-blown fissure.

However, if the goal is to make the creationism alternative more credible, they are using the wrong tool to do so. Doubt, once engaged, will easily be turned against ID as well. This is a point that both pro- and anti-ID people don't get: doubt is good for science but bad for religion. So science teachers should welcome doubt into their classrooms. See what happens when doubt and scientific thinking are applied to ID itself.

If ID is taught in school science class, it could follow along these lines:

1. biological complexity exists and:
• on average, biological complexity has increased over time (possibly from zero)
• there is biological complexity in all organisms, thought the change may have been different for different species/environments.
• changes in biological complexity have applied throughout time, possibly at different rates
2. to explain (A), either

1. there's no biological complexity-creating agent - ie, theory of evolution

2. there are biological complexity-creating agent(s) - ie, ID
This view branches:

1. There is one agent for all biological complexity. We can call this agent the god of evolution. We don't know if this god can do other things besides create biological complexity. We don't know whether there are other gods for other 'intelligent' or complex effects (that is, a god of geology). If there is only one such agent and that agent can only create biological complexity, we can make this statement of equivalency God = Evolution (call this evotheism).
2. There are numerous agents.
1. One agent per function. That is, one agent for the creation of eyes, another for the creation of legs, another, of wings, etc.,.
2. One agent per species. That is, one agent for muskrats, another agent presiding over clover. A species agent is born when the species arrives (a somewhat fuzzy concept), gives birth to new agents when the species branches, and dies when the species becomes extinct. There could also be competition among the species agents for resources and an evolution of species agents (a notion that Stephen Jay Gould called species selection).
3. Some other partition of biological complexity-creating duties. By time: an agent for the Cambrian period, one for the Triassic period, etc. By location: an agent for land animals, one for marine plants, etc.

As you see, ID leads to a number of interesting branches. Most ID proponents don't want the branching to be taught in school. Why? Because their goal is to put doubt into evolution and to follow up that doubt by creationistic, ie, biblical, teaching (a subset of (2a)) in churches. But once they open ID for discussion, why should we stop with a statement of doubt? We should follow ID to its implications: a multitude of agent-oriented theologies.

ID is valuable for science. It brings doubt back into the picture. And doubt is a wonderful creator of new thoughts. Maybe there is an agent of uncertainty which spawns new thinking; we could call it the god of doubt. Or maybe there's one God that said, Dubium fiat (Let there be doubt) and it was good.

Literalness

Philip Glass on NPR: "We stop playing (being children) when we take the world too literally."

fresh shrift

How cold is it? (from NPR)

... brain freeze without ice cream.
... brass monkeys leaving.
... boogers can freeze.
... smoke stands still.
... colder than yenti's balls.
... freeze the ticks off a moose.
... colder than a witch's tit.

Philosophy Now

Philosophy Now: "One of his main arguments in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is that people can understand the moral law without the aid of organised religion. It is simply redundant as a moral aid. He goes even further: There is an inherent tension between morality and religion because there is a danger that people may act morally not because it is the right thing to do but because their religion prescribes it. This would take away the value of a good act: Kant is convinced that we can do the right thing for the wrong reasons, which would be devoid of moral merit. Achieving desirable outcomes is not enough; moral merit lies in the right intentions that are freely willed. Freedom is the necessary ground for the existence of the moral law."

Economist.com | The economics of happiness

Economist.com | The economics of happiness: "Among many things, the behaviourists have found that it is relative, not absolute wealth, that matters most to people. Mr Layard cites as evidence a study in which Harvard University students claimed to prefer earning $50,000 a year when their peers are on only $25,000 to a world in which they earn $100,000 while their peers get more than double that amount."

This seems obvious too. You are comparing yourself to people as close to you as possible, in order to gage whether your choices and innateness is what has given you success. A Harvard student does recognize that their fair competitor is another Harvard student, not an orphan from genocide in Rwanda. Their school counterparts are versions of themselves, that is, parallel lives, and the Harvard student is in a competition with the choices they could have made.

Likewise, neighbors who compare the greenness of each other's lawns are in competition with what else they could have done (after all they can't blame the weather - it was the same for their neighbor). The comparison of lawns is fair. Which is why so many hire designated hitters, the gardening services.

Economist.com | The economics of happiness

Economist.com | The economics of happiness: "Lord Layard devotes a good portion of the book to a summary of what is known about how to be happy. Much of it will appear self-evident: cultivate friendships, be involved in a community, try for a good marriage. But his big idea is controversial. It is that a zero-sum game of competition for money and status has gripped rich societies, and that this rat race is a big source of unhappiness."

Why would this be controversial? It seems perfectly obvious, and probably supported by psychoneurology too. After fufilling basic needs, we move up in Maslow's pyramid to achievement. That's where we bump into all those other people trying to achieve too. In fact I believe that's people join bowling and billiard leagues - to give themselves an area for success (outside of work). We can't all be boss, but some of us have a great softball pitch.

City Journal Autumn 2004 | The Frivolity of Evil by Theodore Dalrymple

City Journal Autumn 2004 | The Frivolity of Evil by Theodore Dalrymple: "Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct."

Economist.com | Human evolution

Economist.com | Human evolution

This is a typical example of the sort of game that economists investigating game theory revel in, and both theory and practice suggests that a player can take one of three approaches in such a game: co-operate with his opponents to maximise group benefits (but at the risk of being suckered), free-ride (ie, try to sucker co-operators) or reciprocate (ie, co-operate with those who show signs of being co-operative, but not with free-riders).


And the three strategies did, indeed, have the same average pay-offs to the individuals who played them—though only 13% were co-operators, 20% free-riders and 63% reciprocators.

levirate. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

levirate. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.: "The practice of marrying the widow of one's childless brother to maintain his line, as required by ancient Hebrew law."

opsonin. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

opsonin. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.: "Latin opsnre, to buy provisions (from Greek opsnein, from opson, condiment, delicacy; see epi- in Appendix I) + –in."